Going to Golgotha

As I lay in my room and hear the strains of my favourite songs, I jerk into consciousness . T'is is an totally invoulnatary reaction. Very justified when hit by a stimuli , which can start production of certain compounds in my neural network. But, do tell me isn't it a wonder , that certain invisible particles can send a 1 _ _ Pound body ( not telling you my wieght am I !!! ) into motion.

I always used to think

"What happens when an irresistable force meets an immovable object"

Well...I still do think that because neither am I immovable or nor any force in my life irresistable ! But back to my story, As I lay immobile in my bed I was forced to make use of my locomotary organs and open the closed barrier which secluded my enclosure from rest of the habitat ( my room door ).

The offending stimulus was a loud rap on my door by a pair of offending knuckles. I opened the door and got face to face with an entity appearing in an inconsequential election for a post in my place of residence. He was making a very conscious effort of speaking in the Queen's language and telling me why I should cast my vote in favour of him.

POLITICS, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of
principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.

Oh my heart ! my achy breaky heart ! How much will you torment me !!! When will you learn to accept the tiny inconsequential things that people consider important to them ... as significant to your well-being also ??? I don't know . But then I will stay so uncomitted to this mistress and not give into her pleasures. I will not fall prey to her charms. I will not become part of politics.

I have seen to much of her... naked in all her glory and in all her shame... The temptress with the lure of the ultimate pleasure with the public humiliation that is a parcel of her deal.

We are all small people and shouldn't be part of the grand scale of things. Nature never intended us to be more than mere pebbles in the bedrock of time and civilization. But then some of us want to be the boulders over which the stream cascades over and creates a ripple over the surface. It breaks the surface , sometimes as itself, sometimes as the ripples which play over the flow and far far away. And we all laugh like soft gentle children.

Why are we born ? Why are we part of the earth ? What are we here for ? Why did the chicken cross the road ?

The mundaneness to our existence is perhaps the answer the the ultimate question. We are born because we are. We are there because we are supposed to be . We are all complex equations in a simple matrix that encompasses all we can think of and beyond.

Limited by the same thing that supposedly makes us infinite - our imagination we are all slave to the various influences that nature has devised for us to miss the greater picture . The underlying simplicity of complexity. Even behind the greatest of the creations lies some simple quarks , whose quirks make it all go as it goes.

With songs sung blue for me and you , I wonder why we even try bother. If we all are pawns in the multidimensional chess board that is the universe what is the reason for us to be there ?

"If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."

We need to see beyond our own so called limitless ness and realize our vunerability and tiny magnitude. Western societies have undergone a 'precession of simulacra' (the simulacrum being that 'truth which hides the fact there is none'. Thus we find that through the hierarchy of motions the copy has come to replace the original and we are all praying to small gods !!!

So is there no escape , was Gautama wrong when he said that 'Dharamchakra Parbartana " can be stopped ? NO, he was not what he meant was escape form the board by check mating the queen while the white rabbit looks on and the castle smiles.

There have ben some who have check-mated on one board to go merely to another where we have lost their track and accept them to have escaped only to forget that they are stuck on another board in another board in another level beyond which lies another board beyond which lies another board beyond ....

So do we all lay down like lemmings and decide to die . Is there no way out ?

GOLGOTHA by Edward Munch

Hate to Love , Love to Hate

A National Geographic survey on events found that there is only one thing in this world which can be predicted with 100% predictibilty. One thing that can beet any book-keeper's odds at 1 in 1. Surer than the sun rising, the tides, the seasons. Reliabler than the best machines in the world, yet a creation as old as time. As old as the first sensation, the first emotion, the first living thing.

Death !

"Your thoughts reach higher than the air;You dream of wide fields' cultivation.The homes you plan surpass the homesThat men have known, but you do err,Guiding your life afar.But one there is who'll catch the swift,Who goes a way obscured in gloom,And sudden, unseen, overtakesAnd robs us of our distant hopes—Death, mortals' source of many woes."[The actor Neoptólemos. Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 16.92.3]

But ...But..Is there a way out ???

Immortality can be achieved in three ways says coventional research :

1) Physical Immortality : You can torture your body with the latest of gadgets , techniques and then hope that you won't kick the bucket when the grim reaper comes.

***** Special Offer ****

How to beat death ...

1. challenge Grim Reaper to silly games ( worked in the movie Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey ). the sillier you think of, the more is your chance of winning

2. Pretend to be someone else ( pretending to be someone alive works best )

3. Get a really wicked painter to paint a picture of you which does all wierd stuff including coming in movies

4. Divide yourself into tiny bits and put in horcruxes or whatever they are called in Harry Potter. a very good suggestion is to contact your local psychopath and arrange a meeting. Telling him exactlty where in his home , which body part you want will help him give you unexpected service

5. My own original idea, which i will try out when time comes and let you know only if it succeds. ( nobody is dragging my dead body to court for some silly comment I made )

O.K. back to the serious stuff.

2) Spiritual Immortaility : If you follow the concept of reincarnation / karma / whatever you will accept that the soul is wthout end and beginning and is there always. Hence the immortality it will bring along its self. Heavena nd Hell are also two constructs of this

3) Legacy : Andy Warhol had once said that everyone will have their 15 minutes of fame. Stretch it a bit farther, hammer it even thinkly. Extend it in elastic zone, reach the yield point and extend it beyond plastic deformation till you just reach ultimate strain and you may have immortailty by deeds. This is not a forum for morality and hence I will not be debating on issues of those dimensions here but I will say Hitler will be more remembered than Edison. Judas than Moses.

"The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones."

Let this be an understanding of our immortailty and the way to achieve it.

But does it all make sense ? Is it worth it ? In Douglas Adams one finds Woebagger, an immortal so disillusioned with having done all that he decides on a quest to personally abuse all living beings in the universe. There is also the story of the flyimg Dutchman doomed to travel the seas for eternity and beyond. There is also the story of Bhisma in Mahabharata who decided to die when he felt that his needs and duties had been fulfilled.

If immortality is the price and not the benefit accrued why do we still pine for it ?

If we are happy to live our meagre life in full proportions and then be willing for the adventure beyond will we ever pine for immortality. Will Gilgamesh still dive deep ?

The answers to these question we do not know but it is possible to know why we fear death.

1. The overwhelming sense of dissapointment that comes when we realize that what we could have done but left unfinished in our lives.

2. The uncertainity of what lies beyond the tangible vision and understanding of the human senses. What is beyond life ?

3. The horrible feeling of the judgement of your life and actions and someone actually knowing what you did with your neighbour's cat when you were 7 years old

4. The horror of suddenly finding out that there is heaven which is not as pearly , peachy as it looks and a hell which is worse than our worse nightmares.

5. To look up on the face of death itself.

Numerous accounts have been written of how one waits the time to see the face of death. How one's life flashes before one's eyes. How detah should be taken as the next step, the greatest adventure. How death is the gretaest equalizer , propagating communism and capitalism in its throes. How the face of death is the chill one gets when one realizes the choices have been made.

Oh ! How does one not take it as the next step !

Oh ! how does one fear to stare into the face of death !

But ...but..

what if death was what we expected her to be ?

[picture courtsey : Neil Gaiman , Sandman Comics ]

Rencontres - Love at first sight

So I did that which I thought was most dignified. I pushed back the crowds, and, passing from the rear, walked down a living avenue of people until I came in front of the semicircle of Arabs, in the front of which stood the white man with the grey beard. As I advanced slowly towards him, I noticed he was pale, looked wearied, had a grey beard, wore a bluish cap with a faded gold band round it, had on a red-sleeved waistcoat and a pair of grey tweed trousers. I would have run to him, only I was a coward in the presence of such a mob---would have embraced him, only he being an Englishman, I did not know how he would receive me; so I did what cowardice and false pride suggested was the best thing---walked deliberately to him, took off my hat, and said:---
"Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"

What happens when you wait for 2 years in the deepest darkest jungle of Africa looking for a lost soul and come up with this ? Pathetic I presume . But they are still inscribed in words of gold in the annals of world history.

How lame I think Stanley must have felt when he must have actually realized what he had said. But meetings are supposed to be liked that. They are supposed be the glances that throw you off balance. Give you the kick in your life , which your coffee cup cannot. Raise you from the slumber and suddenly jerk you out of your reverie.

But true meetings are like that ... Those of the heart that is. Love at first sight is a myth which truly has to be explored in depth before we can actually proceed further on our much anticipated discussion on this topic.

Love at first sight is supposed to be a myth perpetrated

• by those hopeless who suddenly realize that an alternate sex exists other than them
• As a pickup lines for those who have no ability to pick-up
• By horny individuals waiting to get into others' pants asap.

I as an individual feel that it is just a silly concept dreamt up by those driven by the basal feelings to give a respectability to the concept they feel creeping up their brains universally known as lust.

It is a fact universally accepted that a person in need of some procreation rather than rectreation will be using this following argument. Though other studies like one done in Ohio State University on 164 students prove that people decide what kind of relationship they want in the first few minutes, I truly doubt the veracity of the claims. We may be using our percpetory organs to form our first sensations but how much do they fit in with our models of rationality and behavior.

Maybe if you are someone unlike me you may live your life based on the first 30 seconds of that fateful day. Such things are difficult to believe but they do happen... Logic died yesterday.

What does that mean ? After all this rambling can I come to a conclusion of what I want to say ? My answer to it is DOES IT REALLY MATTER ? We can come up with all the studies in the world to prove or disrove any theory.

God Exists... is a logic I frequently use to fight my own logic and turn everything upside down.

See existence of God is a matter of Faith, Hence if you sought proof of god's existence you couldn't have found it as 'faith excludes proof'. However if you found proof God does exist you will not be able to find him as again our axiom holds.

But how is it possible you shout ! Isn't Logic the greatest gift to man by the greeks. You still think it is wine , but you keep quiet in the multitude of voices and show them godel's theorem

For any consistenet formal theory that proves basic arithmetical truths, it is possible to construct an arithmetical statement that is true but not provable in the theory. That is, any consistent theory of a certain expressive strength is incomplete.

For any formal theory T including basic arithmetical truths and also certain truths about formal provability, T includes a statement of its own consistency if and only if T is inconsistent

These are two of godel's theorem known as incompleteness theorem. Though not as celebrated as much as Fermat's theorems I feel that they form very important parts of our undersatnding of life, universe and everything. The implication is that there is no consistent formal system which proves for every question A either "the answer to A is yes" or "the answer to A is no". Hence A may have any answer we want - because we can show that

Any system which is consistent within itself is actually inherently inconsistent.

So looking finally in what we started I figure we have not gone anywhere far except having a meaningless insightful discusssion on anything which caught my fancy. So I finally resolve to make things more meaningful next time and take a more structured approach and try and get some more newer readers. till then

Au Revior .... a bientot ( damn the accnet marks, can't get it anywhere )

[godel's theorem is all very disturbing when you finally think that what I have written is all rubbish and you are damn sure you are right based on your learnings, axioms and systems and Godel just points out that your system is inconsitent and I am brilliant in my writing...the reverse holds but if you think that the first time I will be so delighted I won't argue with you]