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Showing posts from March, 2017

The Unborn

That was the day when the child in her had died. Literally and figuratively. What she had felt was grief, free of all associations with the rest of the world. "Why me" was not a question that popped up in her mind at all. Because the rest of the world didn't exist in the feeling of void she had felt. That was the day which  had made her feel irreversibly vulnerable to the difficulties of being a grown up. Of being in the real world. That child had lived only for her and only in her. Hidden from the rest of the world for ever. She was the only one who could claim to have ever known it at all. The loss of the unsaid, the could-have-beens had haunted her forever through out her life. Trying to stay afloat while being sucked down to the depths of her sorrow, she realized that the could-have-beens were what created her present and immediately felt free from the phantoms that haunted her. Her present in itself was the consummation of her could-have-beens. In the middl

Parenting

Before deciding to bring a child  into this world, we had quite a number of people "advising" us ON how important it is to have kids. Some talk about how you need to be taken care of in old age, some about how important it is for "society" and some about the unconditional love that they receive from the child.  Jerry Seinfeld talks in his show about how at one point, couples need nobody as their friends as they can create their own people!!  Being a mother for the last 4 years, what I have learnt in parenting and the reasons why I am glad I am a parent are not in the above list. Having a child has been helping me understand myself better. My daughter seems very much like me and when I see her, I am reminded of the struggles one has in growing up, in learning and making sense of this world which by now I had taken for granted. It is almost an out of body experience for me and it has been like watching me grow up. It gives me a peek into my favorite topic of

Time"Line"

Time is a scale whose linear and constant nature is very illusive. The most watched epic serial of the 90's in India- Mahabharat,  was brilliantly narrated by Time, personified. Time is not a constant, it is highly flexible, variable. This experience of time seems to be closely connected with how many experiences your brain can handle.  Time converts to brain power. Whatever happened in the past is all in our memory. That is the only evidence of the past time. Time here essentially becomes memory, brain power. Projecting this theory to future - viewing time non linearly which allows you to "remember" or "see" the future - this prescience makes your Life and Time exactly the same-  all in your brain, all in your memory. It is said and understood that as one travels through space , time changes and the way one experiences it changes too. I took my daughter to the planetarium yesterday and it blew my mind to hear that it takes light a billion years to trav

Parallel Universes

 Unhappiness usually roots from the knowledge of Could-have-beens and What-ifs. There in lies the paradox of choice and free will. Conceived with the seed of a particular choice, a particular word or silence, the parallel universes develop and fill one’s mind presenting one with the endless possibilities of interactions. When one lives multiple universes at the same time, not knowing they are different, that could be what is known as multiple personality syndrome or in some cases, schizophrenia. The only difference here is that they are not aware about these alter selfs in other universes. When schizophrenics "hear" sounds or "see" things, that may be a cross connection transmission from a different universe of theirs which the rest of us do not have access to. Who is to say that it is less "real" than anything else? Could that be a way to counsel schizophrenics? When I was interviewed for my first job, I was asked about my biggest achievements in li

Elephants in the clouds

Finding patterns . That is what human beings do all the time. Finding patterns from past experience and keeping it ready and adding the algorithm for future actions into the wiring. I was reading God Delusion and I realized that if I want an entity called God to be existing, it is because I would like to believe that the things happening to me and around me are not entirely random and chaotic. I would like to see a pattern, a theory with which it works and having an unknown called God is the best way to achieve it. It helps me be optimistic. This in turn helps me dream and want to achieve more. I read the book at a point in my life when I am really practically not a complete believer of God or am agnostic at best. It was nothing but co-incidence that I happened to read "Fooled by randomness" right after this. I was again fooled by the randomness of this coincidence to identify a pattern- a pattern which led me to believe that it is for some reason that I am meeti

Matters of the Mind

 Whether God created Man or Man created God, we are all tiny specks of matter with infinite possibilities. The most futuristic prediction ( or the most interesting sci-fi, depending on your orientation on theism)  that the human race has made is that of the concept of God, a superpower that creates and maybe controls everything.  Man imagined and believed in a power that can create something in its own form.  And then civilizations later, he went ahead and actually did it. At one point if humans get wiped out, one can imagine a world of self-thinking bots contemplating and debating if they believe in the humans that created them or in the machine learning algorithms(like evolution) that created itself and made it better or both. And it would just be like the great God debate of today.          It has been suggested in a few studies that consciousness originally developed in a social context to construct meaningful models of other people’s minds in order to predict their be