Stories My Uncle Tells

My Uncle, circa the 1970s

At Lunch. My uncle Mubarak, dad, aunt and mom are done. I’m just beginning. My uncle; “so how was Knuckles?” I tell him the story. “There are animals there” he says, “leopards etc. Did you see any snakes?” “No”, I say, “but I hear that it houses some of Sri Lanka’s most poisonous snakes”. “That’s right” he agrees.

Needing no further encouragement, my uncle launches into a series of stories. I serve myself more chicken.

The first concerns a religious student from Ulapone who went home one day and on the way he thought he got bitten by a rat, at home his mother applies some ointment but later he wakes up heaving and vomiting. At the hospital they treat him for a rat bite, but he dies the next day. Turns out he was bitten by a snake.

We marvel at the way things work out. He then launches into something he saw on Discovery. In Thailand a snake was cut in half and its blood was poured into six glasses. It’s heart was taken out and, still beating, munched down and washed down with a swig of snake blood. The host then also partakes of an alcoholic cocktail chiefly composed of, wait for it, snake bile. The bile is cut out and squeezed from gland in the snake’s body. Others ferment dead snakes in glass bottles and drink the juice after a nice few days have passed. Yum.

Meanwhile, my brinjals begin to look like cut up pieces of snake flesh, the soft squishy insides relaying a not-so-pleasant sensation via my fingers.

The conversation comes back to Sri Lanka. Did i know that a couple of con men in Maradana sold chicken kebabs for five rupees each but they were actually crow meat? They would bait pieces of food with fishhooks and wait for the crows to swallow them. Then they catch them, chop their heads off, clean them and fry them. Anything can be made to taste like fried chicken with a bit of ajinomoto. They only invoked suspicion because their kebabs seemed ‘too cheap’.

The chicken on my plate is now looking decidedly dodge. But thankfully he switches to a story about a similar group of tricksters who sold dog meat claiming it was wild boar, this time in Kandy.

Soon we are moving on to monkey meat. Back when Appa (my mom’s dad) was alive and still had his police shotgun (he had to turn it in once the JVP troubles started), he used to shoot the monkeys who invaded his grounds (in Nawalapitiya). You might think it cruel, shooting innocent monkeys. But you haven’t seen them like i have. They would come from the jungle, whole swarms of them; big, wild and fearless. Running amock and destroying everything in their path. Us kids and most of the ladies would retreat indoors while Appa took the double barrel out.

Appa and I, circa 1986

He might not look fierce in the picture, but usually the sight of appa and his gun was enough to scare the hordes, but sometimes it just made them angrier. Once I remember a pissed off big languor, must have been about 4 feet tall perched on a tree only a few feet off the ground, facing down Appa, its face a terrible grimace and its fingers clawing the air threateningly,looking like it was about to pounce on him at any moment. I think it got shot. Because another childhood memory brings me the picture of Appa hefting the dead body of a similarly sized male languor over his shoulder.

Anyway, my uncle tells me that nearby lived a Mr. Cooray. Everytime Mr. Cooray heard appa’s shotgun go off, he would come over ‘Ah, Mr. Hamid!’ he would say “ah yes Mr. Cooray, you can take it and go” Appa would reply. The monkey then met with an appetizing end in the stomachs of Cooray and family.

“Monkey meat was very popular with the veddahs no” I venture. “it’s also very popular in a certain East Asian country” says my uncle. He saw a TV show where they fastened live monkeys in holes in the dinner table so that only their heads over above the surface. The cook would then artfully open their skulls and the diners would pick out choice bits of live, vibrating monkey brain with their chopsticks. A later internet search reveals that this story is probably made up to discredit the Chinese.

I am now hurriedly trying to finish the rest of my lunch, my digestive system is giving me markedly dangerous vibes.

The next story again originates in that same East Asian country. They would take a whole dead buffalo, and stuff it in a concrete box. Worms would attack the carcass and become as big as bread loaves. Then they’d eat the worms. The internet has no record of such goings on.

My uncle is never short of a good story to tell, and he knows how to tell them. Countless hours he has regaled us with one story or another, some of them probably at least marginally apocryphal. Thankfully, by this time I am done and my uncle gets distracted by the prospect of dessert. I politely refuse some but soon change my mind, ice cream is ice cream, snake meat, monkey brains or buffalo worms notwithstanding.

Enlighten Your Vaginae

I saw this eyebrow raising advertisement today trying to sell fairness cream for vaginas or, so corrects my spellchecker, vaginae. What will these ingenious Indians think of next? Was going to blog about it but seems Indi has beat me to it. Also, the topic has caused some debate among the more figuratively enlightened as well, refer this hilarious post by Jezebel*.

Anyway, this led me down a train of thought that I’ve often climbed on before, but rarely sat inside until the last stop. Which was ‘Makeup and Fashion’. I heard somewhere that lipstick is mostly red because it mimics the color of a woman’s lips when she is feeling amorous. The same with mascara. And let’s not get started on that dusky affect your eye-shadow is supposed to produce. A lot of the fashion industry is aimed at beautifying a woman’s body, making it more appealing and sexually attractive to men/other women.

Seems to me that these things have accelerated the objectification of women, sexually or otherwise. If so, many women who champion freedom from objectification have failed to recognize their attachment to the very things that chain them. Is it plausible to expect general society to respect you for your intellect and personality when the first thing thrust at them are your aesthetic credentials? The mechanism should belie logic.

If you’re a militant feminist that walks around with no shirt and copious amounts of chest hair, you’re still not proving anything. Surely, a woman can preserve her dignity and grace while still refusing to be judged predominantly by her looks alone, and still progress independently in the world?

Because otherwise, we must all only be sexually charged animals. And fairness cream for ‘vaginae’ the next item in a long line of products (presumably originating in the sex industry) that seek to transform women into socially acceptable porn stars.

Hmmm…

*if the link doesn’t work, you can access the cached page here

Will i vote, wont i vote, will i vote, wont i

Stick it to the uncle (Reuters)

Will i though? That’s highly doubtful. yes i know all you democracy wonks love to vote. You think voting is the highest calling of citizenship. But taking pills is not the epitome of good health, staying fit is, when the body is sick, medicines dont matter, thats not the way to solve a problem. Medicine is for people in denial.

Its funny, i can’t seem to attach so much importance to voting anymore. The medicine i think will no longer work. The body has decided where to go, its sick and the doctors can say whatever the hell they want, its gonna go on doing what its doing. It refuses to take exercise. If democracy is the darling of the modern political aesthetic, then our system is the middle aged uncle dancing the baila in microscopic strokes to a beat hidden deep in the music that only few can hear. He’s obese and happy about it, he is a fat model in a world full of anorexic teenage girls.

This system might work. Old, fat uncles are probably good at many things that teenage girls aren’t. But you can’t put the same moves on both of them. That is assuming you want to put the moves on an uncle in the first place. Right now our system is more old fat uncle than teenage girl. Are you getting this? Am i coming through here? i suppose that’s too much to ask.

But yes, it is crunch time. I was anyway planning on being out of Colombo tomorrow but that might not happen. So there is a very real possibility that i will be within the city but still missing a purple stinky pinky. Oh yes, i’m real bad.

None of the candidates have impressed me really. there’s Moragoda with all his fancy marketing, but he’s tried that before, and Colombo fell into his lap. But then all he turned out to have is good PR. How will that be different this time around? I guess we can wait and see. The UNP, what the UNP is still around?, is barely around.

Instead there are flocks and heaps and herds and masses of career politicians emerging everywhere. They’re crawling out of the wet works. Every Lani, Pani, Ravi and his sister’s estranged husband wants a piece of the cake. You can see the gleam in their eyes. The polished speeches, the rote promises. They’re playing it safe, using the same old methods to dupe the poor people, why fix something that aint broke?

So I’m inclined to suspend judgement. I won’t participate in the process because i am ambivalent. I’m the guy who will go along with what everyone else decides because i plainly can’t see a difference between any of them, and there is no color it is all only gray. So I vote for gray, this better pay.

Obey the Giant and Colombo

Something i saw today got me thinking of Colombo, and does Colombo even have a ‘counter culture’ movement? Does Colombo have meme’s? Do we get taken up with random shizz that don’t mean anything in particular? Of course we do, various teledrama phrases spring to mind like ‘I know the law putha’ anyone remember that? Could that chap be Colombo’s Giant?

I think there is mass scale sick to deathness with political BS. Its always been there sure, but with the war over poor people are expecting to get richer, this is clearly not happening. I think people need to be woken up, the economics of their situation be made aware to them. I’m not saying the government isn’t trying, but it isn’t trying hard enough. Corruption is there, cronyism is there, Hambantotism is also there.

Andre the Giant Has a Posse was a poster/street art campaign that was started by Shepard Fairy. Was watching Exit through the Gift Shop and finally found the bloody meaning behind the Andre the Giant posters. My earlier suspicions were confirmed, it doesn’t really mean anything.

But it doesn’t have to actually. The fat face with the look of a man trying to size you up for dinner with the word OBEY written in big think lettters is nothing short of Orweillian. The concept behind it is really interesting. Fairy (far as i know that IS his real, not figurative, name) borrowed the picture off some tabloid and stuck the OBEY motif to it and then stuck it on several walls in an around LA. This took for some inexplicaple reason and soon thousands of people were sticker bombing the US with Andre.

To quote Shepard Fairy from the movie

“Even though the Andre the Giant sticker was just an inside joke and i was just having fun, i liked the idea of.. the more stickers that are out there the more important it seems, the more important it seems, the more people wanna know what it is, the more they ask each other and it gains real power from perceived power’.

An A the G movement site has this to say

The Giant project isn’t a sales pitch, it’s an experiment in phenomenology, prodding the collective psyche with something inexplicable, creating an illusion of a secret society…What Fairey hoped to get across was that Giant uses the same propaganda techniques that try to sell you cigarettes, movies and presidents.

Funnily enough, Fairy did use the same skill set to sell a president. And people bought it too. The Obama posters were probably some of the coolest pieces of election campaigning i’d ever seen, but like a lot of people now i think Obama was just same same, with marginally different skin tone.

So why get worked up over nothing? Its a psychological blip. Something constantly in your face that you don’t know the meaning of, that you’re driven by curiosity to get to the bottom of it sort of like one of those itches under the skin your nails can’t get at. Hopefully in the process you end up becoming a little more aware of your surroundings.

“Once you examine it, there’s nothing left but the aesthetics of a process. If people realize, ‘I was manipulated by that,’ then maybe, like the domino effect, they’ll say, ‘What else am I being manipulated by, that I’m not questioning?’”

The message is in the medium. All this is a very novel, surrealistic approach to social activism. You don’t point and shoot, you just sort of create a jarring affect and hope it leads to something.

…say, ‘Question Authority,’ or ‘Stop Racism.’ You just get a pat on the back from the people who agree with you already, and the people who don’t agree with you don’t even think about it. So for me it’s just about creating an individual dialogue process that can expand into people trying to interpret it, and asking someone else, and then there’s two people talking about it. Something just going on that people can’t pigeonhole along with everything else.”

Obey the Giant is a meme that came out of a counter culture movement. The anti corporate, anti commercial, anti paid advertising one. It slowly morphed into a subset of corporate culture anyway vis a vis the Obama posters and Fairy’s ‘Black Market’ graphic design firm.

There may be something there in Colombo for a potential sticker bombing campaign. But i’m thought bouncing I suppose. As the three wheel dudes know; Life is rainbow.

#IndiaHate

Indian students get flak for being Indian

A lot of Sri Lankans proudly profess their hatred for India. Why? i ask. ‘Cause they’re arrogant’ comes back the answer. Pfft like Sri Lankans aren’t? Please. There has to be something else behind this mysterious hatred for our neighbors. Is it the bad English accent? The hot movie stars? The sledging in the cricket field? The economic success?

Wait hold on, you say, economic success? you scoff. Half the population is below the poverty line! you triumphantly espouse. Yes but a lot of them are now above it thanks to their economic policies, i say. India’s corporations are taking over the world. Educated Indians are enjoying better living standards. They are beginning to get some actual respect out there.

Their leadership is not something to envy. But at least their top rung have got their ducks in a row and seem to be leading the country in a direction. It doesnt matter here or now what direction, let it suffice that they have a direction, something that we seem to be lacking.

And Indian people, arrogant? I’m not sure about you but most Indians i have met have turned out to be quite nice. Sure they’re determined, somewhat materialistic and egoistic. But hello, we aren’t much different. We’re determined, mayhaps for the wrong reasons and terribly uptight about our identities. And besides, are the qualities to be hated?

Also isn’t blind hate what brought about the ethnic conflict in the first place? we hate without rhyme or reason, sense or sensibility, pride or prejudice (i had to throw that one in, sorry Jane) its like we’re shifting our angry eyes from the North to something further North. The big hulking neighbor we all fear, and so we all hate. Are we afraid of colonization? that claptrap the JVP sold us as propaganda to spark an ill thought out insurgency in the South?

Think of cricket. A lot of people want India to lose cause the simply ‘don’t like em’. They don’t know why or how. Their dislike is not a dislike that can be articulated. They just hate em. Well, haters gon hate. India is a strong team and if they win against us, I will still respect their win. This is a big moment for cricket in these parts of the world, and if Sanga and his boys pull through, all well and good i will whoop along with the rest of you. But if India wins then it’ll do a world of good to the confidence of a billion people. And that would be something i’d be happy to watch regardless.

I know that you know that you don’t know

How many of us assume too much about what we know? The human race is obsessed with its knowledge. In The Black Swan, Nassim Nocholas Taleb take an example of people laughing at primates in a zoo, looking at their funny impersonations of humans and their primitiveness. But it’d be quite sobering if those people knew that some species far superior to them were looking and laughing at them.

Civilizations have risen and fallen, and what we easily forget is that they all thought they were the bees knees and the primal wolfs howl. We look at them now and we laugh, but a thousand years later (if we last that long) when the internet is a relic, we’ll undoubtedly be laughed at by humans who consider themselves far superior to us.

The Black Swan

This is an even that is 1) completely inconceivable before it happens, 2) causes much chaos when it happens and 3) is explainable retrospectively. Works like this: People imagined all swans to be white. All they could see were white swans and no one had ever seen anything different; so the lack of evidence to prove the existence of a black swan was taken as proof of no evidence of a black swan. All that changed of course, when they discovered the existence of an actual black swan.

Take your pick of latest global/local major events; 9/11, the Financial Crisis, The Asian Tsunami, the end of the EELAM war, the 18th amendment etc. all Black Swans. Taleb’s argument is that the majority of the world’s events rest entirely on these Black Swans. Most of the impact to our world happens because of these unpredictable events. And therefore most models like the Gaussian Bell Curve and Modern Portfolio Theory are redundant when it comes to actually telling us anything about how the world works.

He also underscores the role of luck. And the Casanova syndrome. Casanova was a player (the womanizing variety) who considered himself to be somewhat of a scholar. The problem with Casanova was that he was always in money problems. But, by virtue of his wit, charm and sycophancy he would always find a way to bounce back. Naturally this caused him to speak somewhat boastfully of his innate capabilities and traits that gave him much resilience in the face of difficulty. But Taleb’s argument is that this was all a result of one thing; simple luck.

To illustrate he points to all the other players who would have constantly got into trouble but eventually found that they didn’t have anyone to pull them out of it. They all perished on the way and so, were never heard of again. And since we only heard Casanova’s boastful argument, and don’t really know how many close shaves he may have had in getting there, and how many of his breaks were due to things he actually did, we automatically assume him to be some sort of superman. And lap up his latest book on how to stay out of financial troubles by virtue of one’s wit.

Distorted History

The silent evidence never gets highlighted because historians never look at the graveyard. Only the survivors are present n the history books. We only know the results of history or the forward process, we do not know the  backward process of it.

For example, keep an ice cube on the floor and watch it turn into a puddle of water. Now ask someone who just walked into the room to tell you how that puddle came to exist. He’d come up with all sorts of theories to explain its existence. Some one could have spilled it, the roof may have leaked. Even if he hits upon an ice cube. He’d be hard pressed to tell you the shape of that ice cube. Similarly with history. To quote:

The first direction, from the ice cube to the puddle, is called the forward process. The second direction the backward process, is much much more complicated. The forward process is generally used in physics and engineering the backward process in nonrepeatable, nonexperimental historical approaches.

All we can see when we look back are the outcomes of history. The inputs we decide ourselves by analyzing other factors and creating a narrative that sort of explains the result we see. This is the narrative fallacy.

Take the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war. The end of the war in itself was somewhat of a Black Swan. At the time it was totally unexpected, Its impact was significant on our lives, and it was immediately explainable retrospectively. A lot of talk went around about the specifics of our battle strategy, the integrity of the leadership and the bravery of our soldiers went around. But was that all?

The change in the geopolitical landscape undoubtedly helped. In the emergence of China as a global power interested in engaging in its own brand of neo-colonization, the government found a ready ally to completely aid it in pursuing the LTTE. Unlike the cessationist and inconsistent support of the UN, the US and Western Alliance; countries like Iran, China and India were readily supportive of a quick end to the Sri Lankan conflict so they could move in for their ound of flesh. I’m not saying this is precisely the scenario, but geopolitical change did create a big difference to the levels of freedom Mahinda had. Other reasons could have contributed to the war’s end too. But we may never know all of them.

Knowing that we don’t know

We are generally epstemologically arrogant. That is self satisfied and protective of what we know. This is what makes us carry out engaging conversations at parties and at tea shops. Having an opinion makes use feel good and anything that challenges that opinion we try to fight off tooth and nail. Sometimes it’s better to just have an opinion but be very open to the fact that you may be wrong. Saying ‘I don’t know’ is nothing to be ashamed of. It maybe even intellectually superior to clinging onto some idea for which you don’ have the full facts. Worse, you might not even know that you don’t know and be one of those particularly difficult type of individuals to have a meaningful conversation with.

Press

I can feel the press press push of the oceans surrounding me. I am a landmass pressed upwards by a volcano erupting in my depths, except it is a slow eruption, building up layers upon layers of lava that pressurized and pushed the little island that is me upwards and upwards and upwards. I am an island, this man is an island except i am a man no more.

I miss running. The freedom might be superficial but it is still freedom. In those few fleeting moments when there is acid burning in your veins powering you on, when you thought that you couldn’t run any more but you ran anyway, when your legs seem to move like some otherworldly steam engine is powering them through a dimensional gateway; all links to your pain receptors removed, when your lungs are beyond bursting point, bursting point is a dream. You can go on, but you are afraid that your body will collapse without your knowledge.

In those fleeting moments you live, and you are introduced to something called exhilaration. The Runner’s High.

Mount Beach is lazy with sunset. Kids, mothers, touch rugby players flash past like you are watching some dream sequence in a movie. All you can see is that boat you are aiming for banked on the beach. Like some beast trapped from the smooth mobility that the waters offer, so close yet so far. Your feet hardly touch the ground. You hardly feel the sand. Your face is screwed up probably. Your eyes like a madman’s. Rushing, fuzz, fizz, swoosh.

I need release. I am not built for confinement, I am only miserable in confinement. Man must roam free. Physically, intellectually, emotionally. He  must roam free so that his internal compass can align to that which his soul naturally knows it belongs to. Yet i am afraid. Petty fears plague. I know they  are petty but i know that pettiness creates dependencies. Or dependencies are based on pettiness. I am not being coherent any longer.

Running is about goals, about sacrifice about giving up for beliefs. Its about shrugging off the friction that life gives you with its insignificant distractions, running is about freeing your soul so that it can race home. race to its end, to its beginning. Running. I want to run to my death.

Someone wise said that a poem is never finished, it is only abandoned. This may not be a poem but it feels like one. and even though i could go on. I will abandon this here.

Or wait, i must tell you about the shot. The shot that goes off in your head. A bullet in your brain. You shoot and you are off. The start. The point. The beginning. The initiation of the run. And that my friend, must come from your own will. Your coherent mind must release you into incoherence. Your being must release your soul. And that is where the shot comes in. Ok i’m done.

Kings for Bureaucracy

Looking at Sri Lankan politics and searching for a method to the madness let alone a science is no easy feat, and certainly it is beyond me; a mere armchair based channel flipper loath to immerse myself in everything but the juiciest of political gossip.

But as a representative then, of the vast majority of Sri Lankans I reserve the right to pass comment on our political sphere by virtue of my ignorance of it. That’s a neat little loophole I challenge anyone to disrupt. I am ignorant, therefore I am. Most of us are ignorant save for a few therefore it is us who are and you who are not. Us who are. Who are? Who’re? Whores.

People deserve the politicians they get. This is true. If the people demand salary hikes from an overly bloated government sector completely ignorant of the damage it will do to the country then they will only ultimately elect a person who can deliver what they need. And that person is a politician completely devoid of understanding of how to run a country. It fits nicely: the only thing completely and fatally under a free market mechanism appears to be democracy.

Suppose the people do elect worthy statesman by some luck then what the intelligentsia can hope for is that person be perpetually in power. But the majority is quick to catch on to what the intelligentsia want, mostly because intelligentsia can’t shut up about it, and is also very quick to become suspicious of what the intelligentsia says. The opposition catches on, and fuels this suspicion and takes down said statesman in next election.

So maybe what we really need is a benevolent dictator? Both in tune with the individual man to keep him happy in the present and also in tune with what the nation needs for economic development? History has shown that true development happens when governance is constant. Note that I didn’t say ‘government’ but ‘governance’.

The US changed governments pretty often. But they stuck by strong ideologies that dictated a constant direction to all their activities that they maintain to this day. More recently India: same. I.e., their system had constants that pushed them along. But some countries have hit the big time by more dubious means. By dubious I mean anti-democratic and we only have Churchill’s word that it is the best system discovered yet. China and Singapore for e.g. rose to staggering power through autocracy.

In Sri Lanka we just keep building up and then tearing what we built down to start all over again. As governments change and each pooh-pooh at their predecessor’s achievements. So in the face of a lack of a perpetual ideology/direction to governance, maybe our next best hope to hitting the big time is to have an autocratic leader with no incentive to engage in short-termist crowd pleasing development. Maybe what we really need is a king, of sorts, like a CEO.

But is Mahinda a Lee Kwan You or a Mao? The intelligentsia are not sure, neither are the people. Seems like a good start. Personally, I’d rather he be a Lee Kwan than a Mao, no cultural revolution for me thank you very much; a sound management of the country will do (lest we may all be forced to don amudeys and drive the buffalo along idyllic paddy fields). But as Spiderman will tell you; with great power comes great opportunities to enrich yourself. Or was it something else? Can’t seem to quite pin it down.

The Common Good (and other Fairy Tales)

Following is a brief synopsis of the history of economics as i understand it together with a subjective viewpoint on its inherently oppressive nature. This viewpoint as written below does not necessarily reflect my personal opinion on economics, it is simply a viewpoint, that should stand alone in its own right.

-The Raj

Since industrialization humans have focussed on getting more efficient, becoming more profitable. I shouldn’t say humans in this regard, for it is mostly the capitalists who expound such thought processes into practical application. Economics after all, cannot be taken away from the self interest of its proponents, and when brought into the fray of politics, self interest largely depends on who is in power. And, money being tantamount to nearly everything in entering politics, most modern democracies flout the interests of capitalism over ‘what is good for the masses’. Of course this is cleverly disguised, more so from the politicians themselves, but GDP is not a measure of quality of life. Getting richer as a country, with it’s complete wealth distributed according to the laws of the Pareto Principle, is questionable as a purpose of being. Most modern economies can be highlighted as examples.

The prevailing ‘what is good for the powerful is good for the economy’ philosophy can be easily illustrated with simple look at the history of economics. Initial feudal establishments (which were centered around the absolute power of the landowning class and its default omni-ownership of all capital) crumbled with the increase of trade and the appearance of ‘marketplaces’. This only exacerbated with colonialism and eventually led to the Merchant class surpassing in wealth the landowning overlords of feudalistic society. Eventually, the reign of Merchants was the norm.

Mercantilism

‘Mercantilism’ was their philosophy. Mercanltilists were of the opinion that to prosper, a nation must sell more than it buys. In other words, its exports must exceed its  imports. This kind of thinking will seem absurd in the modern day world with interdependencies among nations causing more deficits than surpluses. A system like that cannot survive, for the simple reason that were every country in the world to follow identical princples, trade would simply halt! leading to eventual collapse of the system. As it happened Mercantilism survived for a long while, primarily due to cheap resources readily available from colonized nations and also by oppression of its own country’s peasant class, and economies in that day were controlled more by guilds of merchants that functioned more like cartels; monopolizing trade and commanding prices. Not very good for the quality of life of your average peasant, I would say.

Moving on, the rise of capitalism happened when the industrialists got into the game. They were a class of people who believed in the use of capital to control the arena of trade. They would supply capital to small scale artisans and contract merchants to sell them. This practice formed the basis of what would become the modern company.

Capitalism

‘Capitalism’ full blown, had names like the Dutch and British East India Companies as its flag bearers.  They allowed joint stock ownership and modern share markets found their origin here. They used their vast capital and trade monopolies to import cheap and sell dear. Making their owners’ wealth increase to previously unimagined proportions. Along with the emergence of capitalism, the seeds of the destruction of mercantilism were sown. Some advantage was gained to the common man with the abolition of protectionist measures like monopolies. And free market systems ensured competitive prices but along with its advantages the market economy also increased the sense of work ethic. Previously idyllic lives were now to be spent slaving at factories and workplaces eking out a living.

This hasn’t changed much. In the world of globalization and international trade, corporate interest is the main driving force behind ‘growth’. Obama treads lightly with BP because Obama possibly knows who has a fatal but light grip on his balls. The ecosystem and the small people making a living off it are not really significant. And this is not really a one off example. Trade barriers, free markets, international trade agreements, multinationals etc are all ‘good for growth’ but not really good for the increment of the quality of life of the small man. At least, such increment does not make the betterment of the common good its priority. Leading us to question the validity of the whole system, and our perceptions of human nature.

Enter Title Here

I couldn’t think of a title. (pic by indi)

I have often wondered what my purpose is in life. I have no truck with this philosophy of letting things ride. life is not a train ride you find out your destination of only when you arrive at it. When i feel jaded and when i know my intellect is clouded i can only get depressed. If i don’t, the only other alternative is to get lost in ignorance.

We are higher beings than animals, if only because we have the capacity to think. It is a sad thing if we just throw that away to a hedonistic lifestyle and live life without even having an inkling of a greater order of things.

After embarking on my quest for reason, i finally hit upon the very truth that i was born into; Islam. I was born a Muslim and prayed but my faith soon failed its test. In those short years I believed but i didn’t believe; I’d work, get high and yeah, thats pretty much it.

We do not think of the future because we are afraid of it. We are afraid of our plans failing so we do not plan. We are afraid of never achieving our dreams so we abandon them and above all and everything else, we are afraid of death, because that is where everything ends, period. It doesn’t matter if you plan, dream or do the hokey-pokey, when your time comes you got to go.

So therein arises a lifestyle of ignorance and ‘happiness’. By ignoring death, we immortalize ourselves temporarily. We live in the present and ignore the future, for what more do we want than ‘happiness’?

But think about it. We are minute creatures living on a huge mass of land that we call a planet. Except of course, this mass of land is not so huge, it is merely but one of nine other, even huger, masses of land that revolve around a star that is 100 times as big. Pretty big.

Except of course even that star isn’t the biggest thing around, It is only but one of billion in a cluster of suns that are closely amalgamated across billions of light years of space, an unimaginable length and breath of space. Now that’s big.

Except that its not. reversing from the panorama of the milky way, after encountering nothing but the blackness of space, tiny pinpricks of light become visible as the galaxy we know fades. We are now beginning to see the true scale of what we like to call the universe; the biggest thing that human senses can perceive. A humongous collection of galaxies stretching to infinity.

And that is not the end. The nature of the universe has led scientists to theorize of alternative realities, parallel universes, an infinite stretch of universes themselves stretching on and on and on. And beyond that, what?

All this, all this magnificence, all this incomprehensible greatness, how did it come about? Are we not as insignificant as bacteria in the context of the scale of existence? Yet our egos threaten to encompass all of it and more. We continue to live lives focussed on goals like earning more money, becoming more popular, climbing the career ladder etc.

Creation

Modern science tends to imply the belief that the universe came about through an accident. I don’t buy it, but that’s only me. I’m perfectly open to the fact that other people do. Actually, people who do buy it are people who have probably at least thought about it. Too many of us tread blindly through life without thinking. I think a lot of problems of the world wouldn’t exist if more people had a firmer perspective on the greater meaning of life. And thought about how they figure in the whole game of the universe. Because that’s reality. And the raiment of our everyday lives is an easy way of hiding from it.