Fighting over Religion - Can we stop it?

Many Pakistani Hindus are seeking refuge in India and none of them wants to go back to Pakistan. They say they had miserable lives in Pakistan. Pakistani government officials say it's not about religion, but just the feudal system in Pakistan which affects the poorest guys most, and that's Hindus. Feudal system may be responsible to a certain extent, but for a nation like Pakistan which came into being purely on religious grounds, it is hard to imagine a secular environment with equal status for people with all faiths.

Religion, which for most of us is a hereditary attribute rather than a chosen belief, is the root cause of most tensions between humans. I was wondering about the possibility of abolishing all the existing religions and starting afresh. I realized that it requires a round of devastation of human civilization at a scale big enough to wipe out all our luxuries and take us to a level of misery such that we lose faith in the existing manifestations of God we believe in or have imagined. If that really happens, and we do indeed start afresh, it is very unlikely that the humans spread all over the globe will develop new concepts of god and religion with consensus. There is bound to be different schools of thought and imagination, and therefore we will most likely end up again with this situation with many religions. If we cannot have one religion, we should somehow have peaceful coexistence of all religions. Is it possible with where we stand right now, with our 2000-3000 years old religions or is there an easier way to achieve it with a new set of religions? If it is possible now itself, what should be done to make it happen?

An Opportunity Wasted...

It is difficult to say whether forming a political party is the right thing to do for team Anna. Sadly this anti-corruption movement by Anna Hazare and his team has come to a point where most people just don't care any more. There was a time when everyone looked up to them with admiration and hope. For once, the public did make them heroes by placing them all on a pedestal. But they wasted it.

I wondered for a moment whether wasted is the right word. Possibly they are honest individuals with genuine concern for the country and they did what they felt was right. If that is true, they should not be blamed for losing an opportunity, coz according to their judgement they were making the best of it. Their fighting against corruption was totally voluntary. So it is not really justified that we blame them for misjudging at a certain point and leading the movement to its doom, coz we did not elect them for the cause. We, the common people, were only going to be beneficiaries if the movement succeeded, i.e., we were there to share all rewards, but not contributors to the movement in any significant way. Of course the public support did give strength to the movement, but the public also left when it got bored.

But the opportunity was indeed wasted by team Anna, thinking from their own point of view, for whatever aspirations they had. May be they indeed want a clean political system. Or may be this whole movement was one huge show to gain publicity and build a reputation, that can lead to a direct and strong entry into politics with possibilities of fastest rise to the top. Or may be it is something else. In any case, they wouldn't be happy about the way things flopped for them after the first two super-hit shows. So much so that they couldn't even motivate themselves to fast for the cause they so much expressed belief in, and ended it all in haste, as if they found it totally useless to do it any further when people didn't care and government didn't bother.

On another note, it is interesting to understand what could be the incentive for someone to launch a movement against corruption and fight for a clean system. At an individual level, the motivations and benefits sought are generally too personal and micro to really justify a mass-movement. Still, we have definitely come across individuals who have died for causes beyond their own. Or did they internally link the cause to something their own and found a personal benefit big enough to justify embracing death? Suicide bombers, army men, social and political fighters who don't fear death - what really drives them?

the pursuits of unhappiness

A few days after Rajesh Khanna's death, we now have lots of articles pouring in which talk about his being just lucky in getting a super star status, his failure to manage his career, his failure as a politician, his fear and hatred of Amitabh Bachchan, how bad he was with relationships and his inability to handle success or failure.

The world is a damn competitive and ruthless place, where struggling for success in everything and maintaining a happy face have to go hand-in-hand. And if they don't lead to tangible achievements, you are simply lost. And if you do achieve success of the magnitude the world envies, you become the object of criticism in whatever you do. And if you are not in control of your emotions, and by controlling we mean suppressing them to an extent that they are practically non-existent, you will die of the immense stress the world subjects you to. So, you are either unhappy or incapable of experiencing any emotion including happiness. Success sucks. Even wanting it sucks. But without it life sucks because of limited resources. We are basically trapped in endless unhappiness or as emotionless dummies. My feeling is that emotionlessness is an impossible situation. At a practical level, what it means is that nothing happening in one's life is able to create any emotional change in the individual, and his/her mind is instead occupied by an endless emotion of sadness. That endless emotion could also have been happiness, but that happens only with spiritually enlightened people who reportedly existed only in 4th century BC and before. So, basically, it's all unhappiness. Only possibilities are the kinds of unhappiness - i.e., unhappiness coz of scarcity and physical pain or unhappiness coz of stress and mental agony or unhappiness coz of emotional suppression. We can choose which one we want to pursue. What we get is again not necessarily what we want. The pursuit of happiness is just a euphemism. We do want to be happy and often consciously indulge in many experiences that make us happy. However the pursuits of life, which we want to believe are pursuits of happiness, are really pursuits of unhappiness.

Intellectual Pursuits and Intellectual Growth

As we go through life, we learn a lot of things - most of them about dealing with human creations and humans. None of us knows where we, as a kind, came from and why we are here. We may be incapable of knowing that, or perhaps we'll know in future (or past if we manage to travel back). The restlessness in our mind arising from the lack of knowledge about our origins and the purpose of our existence is not as great as the instinct to protect our life and the desire to continue living forever without pain. I can imagine why Maslow must have come up with the concept of the hierarchy of needs, which broadly states that humans crave for satisfaction of physiological needs and such, before they seek filling their intellectual voids. However, from my own observation, I feel that human cravings come as multiple threads of parallel processes rather than as stacks of needs approached bottom up. And the intellectual growth of an individual is best derived and achieved out of struggle for what one would technically consider purely physiological needs. One may argue that it is accidental and not intended, and what Maslow is really talking about is the perceived and pursued need of an individual - i.e., a person will not strive for intellectual growth until he feels he has fully satisfied his physiological needs and is in a comfortable position to do that on a continuous basis, as physiological needs need to be satiated on a daily basis.

In a nutshell, I making two points here:

1. Human efforts to fulfill their various kinds of needs are not in a perfect hierarchy as Maslow put it, but are rather in the form of multiple, parallel complex threads of striving for everything. However, this observation still does not refute Maslow's theory, as I am sure Maslow realized the complexity of the human mind, and knew that his overly simplistic hierarchy of needs is really true at a broad level. For example, a man hanging from a window of a building on fire, would not really think about anything else but saving his life. A man whose life is going fine (i.e., enough food and water), would then look at his days more closely and contemplate about people and situations. And so on.
2. Intellectual growth of an individual is of the deepest and highest quality when it is drawn from the real struggles of and for life. All struggles of our lives are to work with and around people to get what we want to make our lives better. We are not born equal and so our struggles to grow also vary. Humans are selfish and self-centered creatures at a very basic level, and it takes immense amount of hard work and persistence to really make our lives work. The fight for resources is never ending. But the inequality, right from the moment we are born, and the greed with which humans want to amass and disproportionately grow and protect the resources they own and control, makes this world a ruthless opponent to fight with. It not only takes all the strength of the individual, especially those who are unfortunate at the start, but also demands that all their mental and intellectual resources be fully focussed on getting the best they can out of this world. And I believe the intellectual ability of the highest order is the understanding of human behavior and the ways of the world. Philosophy and meaning of life are ingrained in this ability, and the stuff in books written by scholars looking out of windows of their cozy cottages in snow is just confusing pieces of interesting literature which entertains and enchants coz it speaks of the ultimate truth, which neither they know nor does anybody. Drawing inferences based on assumptions is like assuming the inferences. It is through dealing with life's hardships that one learns the truth that is relevant to us. Beyond that, it's pure academics, which has huge respect but no utility.

Energy and Blah

I think, on the whole, we have made ourselves too dependent on petroleum. Even our renewable means of energy production require some bit of petroleum input, to be produced and sustained. To really derisk ourselves from this erratic and mad scramble for oil, I think we need to look for ways of energy production that don't have any dependence on petroleum whatsoever.

Yesterday, the petrol price increased by a whopping 10%. And over the past couple of years, it has increased many times. Well, it doesn't affect me so much, as I do have some extra money, and it really doesn't matter to me if my monthly expenses increase by a few hundreds or even a few thousands. I won't even come to know if it's just that much, coz I don't really keep track of exactly how much I'm spending (beyond some approximation). And I don't have to support a family. But for the millions of Indians who just manage to make the ends meet, and for those who don't, every rupee rise in petrol price is a new disaster. Not that if we have another powerful and efficient energy source, the problems will end, coz politics will spread its wings to engulf all opportunities for political exploitation at the cost of the common man. But may be having another means will spread and lessen the intensity of the pain. Having said that, I am sure capable people are researching on ways and means of energy production that can replace petrol and other fossil fuels, and are also safe. And I am sure the world will change tremendously in the next 50 years, as the fossils will reach their exhaustion, and human energy needs will keep on increasing.

It's crazy how we discovered an energy source and finished it off in a couple of centuries. And in the process created a human world running on interesting stuff that work with energy controlled, stored, flown, burnt, etc. to give us great lives. And soon we need to find another energy source big enough to keep this going and grow it further.

Probably this post does not bring in any new insights or thoughts or information. Anyway, I had to do something lying down in this beautiful park :-)

Have a great weekend!

Let's live and die

Life is so uncertain, particularly when it comes to the end of it. I feel that more nowadays than ever before. Probably after the death recently of one of my batchmates at IIML. And the thought has been getting reinforced by news of deaths of famous young people.

The realization that all this is going to end soon for me too, and possibly at any moment, and that we all have very limited and short time alive, is so sad and disillusioning. Of what consequence is all that I think, feel and do? What and why is all this going on? Why should anything be given any importance?

Thanks to our design, we all have an internal urge to live, to create, to want, to understand things, apply and demand logic, feel emotions - enough of a recipe to make us do something of our lifetimes. Come out of it, though I guess we can't, our existence is over. Or rather, we are not capable of talking about what we would be if we are not what we are. Is death that state of liberation from the trap of being human? Of life? Or is it just and end of what is, and there is nothing thereafter? We don't know. We can only imagine and write stories of crazy Gods, who are supposed to know everything but never show up. May be we are designed too weak to get into all that. But certainly we do poke our noses into everything that's going on. May be our innocent laws and equations, to explain what is, amuse some infant God, for whom we are metaphorical teddy bears who play when the key is wound, and who stop when it's totally unwound. Rewind and we are in a new life. Perhaps God needs a rechargeable battery for us. Perhaps we'll create one for him some day. Till then, let's live and die.

Tips to an IIML prospect

A couple of days back, a guy called me on the eve of his IIML GD/PI, for some tips. He was one of those high work-ex MBA aspirants, who crack CAT partly by chance and partly coz IIML gives low-percentilers some respect if they have slogged for a few years somewhere after graduating. But he ended up revealing his worries about whether he would get a good job post MBA. I couldn't lie, and told him that high work-ex is a disadvantage at any IIM. But then, there had to be a reason for him to perform the next day. So I tried to convince him that job should not be the sole reason for getting into IIM, and that there are many other things, of a far greater value. For me it was loads of free time, sleep, jogging, booze at insti-parties, books (non-academic), good internet connection, tension-free education loan, Sahara Ganj, Gomti Nagar, Dominos Pizza and the wonderful winters of Lucknow. I couldn't get laid coz a couple of alpha males in our batch dominated that department. I did try Axe and Wild Stone, but I guess it's not just about smell. So, in a nutshell, the best thing about MBA from IIM is the experience. There is not much of any real value otherwise, which you wouldn't have had anyway if you were frustrated enough with life. Of course I did not tell that guy what I actually liked about my MBA at IIM. Instead, I talked about stuff like personal growth, personality development, value addition, contacts, friends, etc. He was not going to be convinced anyway, coz he had a dream job, which he described to me, and nothing else mattered to him. (Dream jobs exist only in dreams. I think I have enough "diversity" in my work-ex to make this statement with a high level of confidence.) I told him many companies come to IIML with such jobs on offer and so he had good opportunities. And, that probably worked. Although, my earlier point of high-work-ex-you-are-doomed-at-IIM point had cast a permanent dent in his mind, I am sure he'd temporarily overcome that with the pre-MBA I-can-do-anything mindset.