Gaurav's Blog

This can usually be found on Twitter.

Pardon the horrible formatting; I wrote this in Pine. I may or may not fix it up later. With my blog this ugly - sigh! - it really isn't worth the effort. I'll clean it up this weekend. Promise!

My hand hurts like crazy, and I'm in a bad mood (although a friend [http://wearerolling.blogspot.com/] has been nice enough to keep me company), but I just read a really nice post [http://amruta.livejournal.com/56933.html], and just *had* to respond.

I'm typing this out in Pine, so the formatting is going to be lousy, to say nothing about the spellings etc. (I'm not going to start apologizing for the screwed up logic; if I start on *That*, I'm going to go on forever).

To begin with: I haven't seen Khamosh Pani, although it seems watchable, atleast if Amruta's thoughts are anything to go on. The thing which first caught my interest were:

The first thing I thought of while watching it was how we have been consistently lied to/decieved/not told about our own history.

But history's tricky that way, isn't it? Both from the "history is written by the victors" perspective, as well as the "some things are better forgotten" perspective. I wouldn't have known what little I know about Emergency if I hadn't read references to it in Midnight's Children. I wouldn't have known about the horrors of Partition without Freedom of Midnight. And that's just the books I've read with the words "Midnight" in them!

I can't help wondering what it would be like if the son (I forget his name) had been educated, had hopes of future employment, had been brought up in an education system that taught him self-esteem, that made him self-confident and not reliant on the "attention" of others that he so craved for. I can only wonder.

I don't know ... education taught me how to avoid the popular people and be happy by myself, and with my group of friends who were mostly people who were just about as geeky as I. It taught me that I sucked at maths, that you must NEVER get distracted while taking a walk, and that some people are really, really boring, and should be allowed to talk for half an hour on any topic (okay, fine, I exaggerate: my school days were mostly good, with only some tough moments, and most of them WERE important lessons, like if you don't jump in and take part, you'll just have to get used to a boring life, and if you lie, expect to get caught - and quickly - in a complicated web of your own deception).

I learned self-esteem, oddly enough, in college - and there, mostly just by finding people I could look up to and realising, hey, I wasn't so far behind them. I think, most of all, I figured out self esteem by realising that:

1. If I didn't love myself, nobody else would - and that loving yourself is pretty much the only way to have a good time in life anyway.

2. I could get self-esteem only by doing thinks well - and I can only do things well by focussing really, really hard on what I do, and learning how to do it as well as possible.

Okay, it probably seems obvious to you guys, but it took me a LONG time to figure this out. And it's the only reason I have any self-esteem these days. So.

So, I guess my story supports the original point: education does help with the whole self-esteem thing. But then a rather major (and a favourite) point pops right up in the next paragraph:

And this is the story of millions of youngsters today. Being brainwashed, indoctrinated until they reach a state where *nothing else seems to give them a sense of purpose*.

You don't have to look for the indoctrinated for that: I know tons of people who don't really have a 'sense of purpose', and are worried about where they're going, and what they're going to have to do when they get there - me included.

On the other hand, I don't see that as a bad thing: my parent's generation and before didn't *have* the choice, both because of economic reasons as well as a simple lack of options; you know, the old become-a-doctor-lawyer-or-engineer schtick. Choice is good - it means you've got a better chance of figuring out what you want to do ... and then spend the rest of your life doing it. I don't know about you, but that strikes me as being maybe the bestest thing possible. I mean, seriously - being able to do whatever you want? How cool is that?

There used to be a time when survival was its own reward. Now, it's not. It's up to you to pick the yardstick by which you're life will be measured, and nobody's going to tell you what to use.

This is where we fail to realise how public interest IS in our individual interest.

As long as you have a society (it's a ... your interest is inextricably linked to the society's and vice versa. You cannot, simply cannot, run away from that fact.

Well ... I'd argue that your interest is linked to 'the people around you', which is generally your society. Society is really something else, though - just look at animal communities, and you'll see what I mean. Lions have groups of one or a few males, and more females; the males mostly do nothing except (a) have sex with the females, and (b) fight off other males. This is critical, because the first thing a lion (or lions) do on taking over a pride (by scaring off the last males) is to kill every single male cub. It's in his interest to do so, and because he's bigger than the females, nobody can stop him.

I think (like, you know, off the top of my head at 2am) that society is at a Nash equilibrium for many people living together: everybody tries to get the most out of it they can, but they'll compromise at this point because nobody can improve on it without making things worse for themselves. But I'm just bullshitting here :p.

Times when mankind has stood in the face of a terrifying future. And what has man done in the past? When things got really really bad? He revolted. He fought, and he won. And so we have progressed.

Yes, but remember: history is written by the victors. People have fought, fought long and hard for their principles, beliefs, and rights, and LOST.

The thing that drove all revolutions was faith, hope and a belief that mankind can do better - that we can better our future and we can do it ourselves. All you need is hope.

Well, I'd argue that revolutions were driven by necessity, technology and Bernard Shaw's "unreasonable people" [http://thingspeoplesaid.blogspot.com/2006/08/all-unreasonable-people.html]. The French peasants didn't take down the rich until there was no bread. The Americans broke away from Britain to avoid paying taxes. India took almost a hundred years to break away from Britain, and that was (in my completely uninformed opinion) more because of influential leaders than any other single factor.

This is true of every religion. Of every ideal that started out as noble. Patriotism, too. All of them have been misinterpreted by man.

I hate idealism. I hate patriotism because I *can* - nobody cares enough, and I think the argument against patriotism is compelling: you can't love a piece of earth. That's just stupid. I love India, not as a geopolitical entity, but because of the people there, and because of the beauty of her lands. I love Singapore because of her attitude, and because of the admixtures. I think anything more - to insist that I must love every square inch of India because it's "my country" - is a bit silly. I don't love Chennai - it's got attitudes, in bucketloads, but the weather! And I find Bangalore boring, atleast in comparison to Bombay and Singapore. I don't think I'm emotionally required to love a land just because I was born there, is what I'm saying, or to think it is the greatest place in the world or anything.

I'm not a big fan of religion, either, but in a world where the vast majority believe in it, it's not my place to contradict. But I believe what I believe, which is how I like it.

Another thing that terrifies me is that we've reached a state today where people are not just contradicting your opinion, they're actively trying to stop you from having/propagating your own.

This is why freedom is speech is so incredibly important - in the fight against falsehoods, it's ALL we've got. As for your example: shit happens. People kill people. You can't really stop *that*, you know. The powerful will always silence the weak. The trick is to make sure that, in the beautiful words of the Indian National Motto, "Satyameva Jayate" (let truth prevail). People will die in the effort, but the alternate - to allow the victory of falsehood - is almost too horrible to imagine.

Love simply cannot coexist with hate.

This, more than anything else, is why I had to comment on this post. I firmly believe in the cliche, "The opposite of love isn't hate. The opposite of love is indifference". Atleast for me, if I love or hate someone - I'm being intensely emotionally involved with someone. If I don't like them, I can shout at them, or avoid them, or whatever. But if I hate someone, I will not be able to look at them without getting really angry on the inside. So, my thesis is that love and hate are two interconvertable parts of the same thing: intense emotion for someone.

Actually, maybe that *is* what you meant: if my thesis is correct, you can't love and hate someone at the same time, for much the same reason that you can't have Clarke Kent and Superman in the same room :).

Sometimes I wish I had been born stupid, then I wouldn't have to think about these things.

Haha. I don't suppose there's anybody who thinks otherwise; everybody thinks they're too smart for life. I'm sure there's a single, simple, obvious answer to that. I wish I knew what it was.

As an aside: I've realised I really like being an optimist. It suits me, like working with computers suits me. It just does. It's also fun accepting that humans are strange, sad, violent, angry, angsty, unhappy, dissatisfied, crazy, and - yes - willing to die for their purposes. And then going ahead and rooting for them anyway :). The fun thing is, unlike my usual supporting-the-underdogs, this time the underdogs just might really win after all.

As another aside: the Globe Trekker theme is quite possible the GREATEST piece of music I've ever heard. Or maybe I just like it so much because it's so unlinked: I've got people I think of when I hear such masterpieces as Beethoven's 9th Symphony, Lennon's Jealous Guy, Cohen's Hallelujah or McCartney's Hey Jude; but all I think of when I hear The Theme is: adventure. Excitement. People. People! The stories. The joy of being a part of something bigger than yourself, without forgetting who you are. The joy of living while you're alive. The joy! God, I love that music.

And it's going to have a bit on Singapore, too! Happiness.

This post was posted by Unknown at 2:12 am