Search This Blog

Sunday 30 June 2013

Things We Control

Greetings Readers!

I have finally got some feedback on this blog which I have kept top secret. So this piece is dedicated to my first critic. And here I go..

Humans have an inbuilt sense of direction. A direction they want to pursue. A direction they feel is the best. Well this is the inner voice all of us follow. This is "The Voice" (Sucks without Shakira and Adam Levine, doesn't it?) We follow this voice throughout our lives. It takes us to the dizzying highs of success and the chasms of failure but the one constant is that it never deserts you. And hence we feel that we are the ones who control our destiny with our choices and the adhering to of "The Voice"

But are we really in control? Or are we not?

The title of a particular book that has captivated my imagination for a while now (though I have not found the time, neither saved up enough to buy) is "Prisoner by Birth", by Jeffrey Archer. The title has my mind racing with its possible implications and the one that stands out the most is the one I shall share with you today.

We are simply caught up in an illusion of control. We have absolutely no control over our lives from the moment we are born. Our birth itself is more random than a game of Roulette! If we begin our lives with a random event the rest is simply a mixture of time and place.

Imagine the birth of 2 kids at the height of the Cold War on the same day. One is born in the shadow of the United States Capitol Building in Washington and the other in the shadow of the Kremlin in Moscow. They have had their sides picked for them in a war they probably wouldn't have even been a part of in a different time or place! Hell,these two could have been twins!

So basically saying that anything is your birthright is more like saying you won it in a lottery.

A while back I read a book called "The Black Swan" by Nicholas Nassim Taleb.(No, the hot steamy movie with the lesbian scene was not inspired from THIS book) This dude is a Guru of randomness and in the book he talks about how our lives are very minimally affected by our own attempts at control but rather are given direction by 'low-probability yet high impact' events that he refers to as "black swans"(Surprise! Surprise!)
Truly a gem! (sadly I do not understand a lot of the technical stuff but the idea was very clear to me)

So basically my point is that...
"Control is an illusion"
I am reading another one of Mr. Taleb's works entitled "Fooled by Randomness" and I in completing it will gain a little more insight that I can share with you my dear readers at a later point in time.

So till my next post, Cheerio!
Yours Truly, 
  


Saturday 29 June 2013

The Good Guys and The Bad Guys (TGGATBG)

Greetings Dear Readers!

I have finally reached 100 Pageviews! Its very encouraging especially because I didn't expect to get very many. So this has encouraged me to go on. So here I go with another reflection.

Who can adjudicate who is right and who is wrong? I have retained a line in my memory from when I was very little. It was something like,

"We are all supporting actors in someone else's drama of life"
It made me start thinking about life from the eyes of the "other person". Quite often in life we don't notice the grey areas. We are always right. Someone else is always wrong. We don't really care to know the other side, do we?

I often wonder, isn't the villain a hero in the eyes of his followers? Are they not also following what they know to be true and right and correct? And still these people endure the scourge of the "Hero"(and his little minions).

History, as we know it, is a one-sided story. We hear (majority of the times) the side of the victors. The guys "fighting for the good of the Human race". The losing sides do get a mention in the footnotes of History, passing mention on how evil they were and how screwed in the head they were, stuff like that. But is that all such figures in History were? Bad guys sent on earth to be vanquished by "The Good Guys"?

Most of the times The Bad Guys are driven to the action they take. They are reacting to conditions brought about by The Good Guys most of the time (Surprise! Surprise!) I can give you a really pertinent example.

Anybody remember the Nazis? (Yes the Hitler guy and his peeps) The Nazis were not,as you might think, an organization made since time immemorial to destroy the world. They arose from the ashes of a broken Germany. A Germany taken hostage by the Allied Powers after WWI. A generation of Germans paying the price for a war they didn't know much about! A Germany in this state was bound to be the Petri dish in which a world threatening virus was to be born.

The Nazis were despicable, granted. But they truly were driven to it.

The Middle East too. The Indians under British rule. Just name it. All of them will be able to put forth a justifiable cause under which they fought, under which they were willing to die.

I'm not justifying their actions. Only their causes. And not even all of them. I'm only asking you to take note of your uncritical acceptance of what is fed to you. Give it a thought first. I'm not done with this interesting topic so I might get back to this some time in the future! Till later..


Yours Truly,




Monday 3 June 2013

Change

Greetings!

Been away for a while but I'm back with a new topic to have a thought about. And I am a little sad that I have not got a single comment yet. Good, or bad either. Hope I get some, here on in.

My topic for today is Change

What for you is the first thing that comes to mind with the word? Is it the changing seasons? Is it the song,"Man In The Mirror"? Does it bring back memories of the Obama Campaign? What is change to you?

Whenever we think of change, we think of it in terms of very particular occurrences that happen in due course of time that manifests itself either in us being happier or more aggrieved than we were prior to it. NOW what we fail to understand is the very nature of Change (Yes, I like to think of it as an entity. Pretty much like Fate).

Change, as I have come to understand it, is a very volatile and yet constant phenomenon. It is happening very single second and yet it's effects may take a moment to settle in or a lifetime. Change is happening all around us but every person's awareness of these changes is very different. Its like an inbuilt Sixth Sense of sorts. 

The average person has to wait for the actual change to happen for him to notice it. And if he does notice it, he prefers ignoring it because life as he knows it is comfortable enough for him. This average person having a delay in his realization of change is mostly affected by it negatively and hence curses these changes! Some really great people actually need to get kicked in the butt before they accept the change around them.

The really smart individuals who predict changes keeping in mind the current situation are the ones who end up actually profiting from it.  In a way these people either cause the Change itself or are smart enough to adapt to it quickly and take advantage will always be the ones who end up being the really cool, rich powerful guys who run the world.

That's all I have the time for now. I will be back with a new thought next time and I wouldn't be averse to revisiting an old topic if I'm asked to. Till next time have a great time, dear readers.

Yours Truly,