How about Subjective Patriotism?

The hype and hysteria that has been surrounding India’s world cup campaign since it’s inception a month ago, makes me puke with disgust. With all due respect to the, “free spirited self-proclaimed” patriots, I think what a nation of one billion people are now subscribing to is fervent aggression. Is it really spirited patriotism when you bash another nation under the guise of “being loyal” to yours? Is it really spirited patriotism when you consider Cricket (I could’ve used the term ‘Sport’ but I want to be more specific) as the ultimate measure of supremacy? Does the theory of patriotism instruct us to not respect other nations at all? Does being loyal to a nation mean, disrespecting other nations? Is sport (In and around subcontinent) playing it’s part to exclude rather than include? Or are people reading too much into it?

I want to specifically bring out the India-Pakistan world cup semifinal here. Each nation flew into a kind of rage against each other while the whole media frenzy added fuel to it. And, it was more than a sport that was talked about. Even if it was sport, since when did sport become a measure of asserting supremacy? And, should there be anyone supreme first up? The animosity between these two nations could be traced back to decades ago. We have fought wars and there’s a sense of dualism in the people from both nations. Yet, I thought we came a long way to curb that animosity, to grow as individuals, to co-exist and co-operate with each other. But sadly, it’s not the case. We, the people from both nations, still have those insecurities and deep down we want to prove to the other that we’re superior than them and we’ll grab everything that comes at us in that process. In the disguise of being loyal and being patriotic, we have been advertising pure hatred and disgust towards each other, which is terribly disturbing.

I don’t get the urge to be patriotic during a cricket match. Most people still can’t make out the difference between being loyal and being patriotic and cheering for their nation. As much as sport has been trying to include nations, the nations inherently have been trying to exclude themselves from the rest. One should realize that Sport is just another lieutenant of the King by name ‘Nation’. It matters not, how much integral a Sport is to it’s people, it’ll always have a winner and a loser. And, accepting defeat gracefully and moving on is something the subcontinent nations haven’t been doing for eons now. We crib, we whine, we blame and then surrender to sombre. We care not, about those fellas on the field who give their 100 percent almost all the time irrespective of the win/loss math. We care not, about the other issues that our nation is currently withstanding. We care not, even if our personal lives are at stake. We need our nation to win and all our personal, civil and societal problems shall be put at bay for a while. All though, such loyalty is overwhelming, more than what is required of it, causes disgust, if not anything. I’m not worked up about Sport alone, but nonetheless the above case serves as a perfect testimony to our repugnant attitudes.

Freedom of Speech/Expression and Social reachability – The two things that have been long thought of as the essential ingredients for a nation to be democratic and developed respectively have become more of a bane than a boon. Facebook and Twitter have been the channels to propagate this divide and the expressiveness of free spirited, self proclaimed, patriots is only adding fuel to this emotional disturbance. Should we behold this sentiment any further, it’s only going to separate us even further. Often times, we hear politicians, calling for “nation building”. If we keep having a strong aversion to nations other than ours, we’d keep building our nation but would never live in a nation that has been built convincingly by it’s people.

I’m not advocating people to shut themselves up behind a closed door. What I’d like to propose is a theory – Subjective Patriotism. One that could help us overcome, some of these issues and bypass some of our behavioral troubles as well. It is our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but be one. By subjective patriotism, what I’m getting at is moral equivalence, the feeling of oneness for the mankind, yet standing up for our nation when it needs us. It helps us establish political stability and social cohesion. Avoid identity formation, avoid stereo typing. Unconditional and unreflective identity formation would degrade us even further both as individuals and as a nation. My notion of subjective patriotism is not to feel love for our own nation. It’s about standing up for our nation when it needs us and being tolerant to the rest of the mankind, always. There are always two sets of ideologies, one that we possess within ourself, one that are derived from the society and the environment around us. It is not always that they are coherent. Subscribing to any of these blindly, with little or no thought takes us nowhere. Subscribing to them, keeping in mind the altruistic needs of the society is what, each one of us as an individual must choose to do, should we be living in a place harmoniously. Rather than grabbing every chance to prove to the world around us that we are supreme as a nation, we should try to use these opportunities to show to the world around us that we can spare a thought or two for the whole of mankind. Now is a time to march towards global harmony and while we attempt to do so, these incessant remarks about other nations sure wouldn’t help us in the cause. The strength of a nation is not measured by what it is, but is measured by how it treats those nations that are less fortunate. So is an individual’s strength of character by how they treat the less fortunate ones. Solidarity people, Solidarity!

I might have made some strong claims here and some of you might even ridicule these claims to be opinionated beliefs or thoughts. And, I’d not be defending this against any of them. If atleast some of you could see a point in it and do your part towards attaining global harmony, the objective of this post would be met.

The Desperate Act of Overcoming Desperation

The world is a funny place. What makes it doubly funnier is that, it is circular. Snake poison is used to cure a person bitten by a Snake. It’s rather vindictive too. Someone who makes fun of their teachers, will be a teacher and would be made fun of. Jokes aside, I had been told while I was growing up that being desperate for something to happen was a sign of an innovator standing tall in me.

Time has gone by since I’d been told that and gradually I have learned to believe that in times of peace, it’s a natural thing to stay in balance and have a natural harmless disposition to desperation; the kind of desperation to bring a change in the world around you; the kind of desperation to fill the lives around you with joy and elation; the kind of desperation to co-exist with the society around you in harmony. But in times of struggle, war and violence, to maintain that kind of an equilibrium is a daunting task. Subsequently, our dispositions change; Now there’s a different kind of desperation to either overcome the misery caused by struggle or the kind of desperation to pay back to the one[s] who caused the loss. Both of them are pretty meaningful, but what about the kind of desperation where you are helpless but want time to do the talking for you and set things alright?

Some of you might question, where is desperation, when someone is helpless? Is being helpless not a clear enough cue to say that someone’s lost it all and started to live a saint life? Well, not really. This by far is the most dangerous disposition I have seen/read/[heard] in/[about] people. With the former two types, you know that either they are dangerous or they are not. With the latter, they are unpredictable. And, what’s tragic is that all of us are gradually falling prey for it, to become the latter – the kind that does nothing actively but strikes when the time is right. Sure, it sounds so business-ish and how may I deny that we are living in the most ultra-commercial and selfish world possible? No, I can’t. But, this needs to be changed. Changed for the greater common good. If we look at it, the reason for this kind of desperation is grief in some sense. Grieved for not having the girl of your dreams, grieved for not having a dream job, grieved for not being socially accepted, grieved for not being famous – well in different capacities. The root of this problem lies in the act of hoping, or if I might call it – expectation and over assessment of one’s own ability and posture. So how much is too much? Well, as long as we don’t get down to picking on others because they have had what we’d wanted, I think we’re good to be. If we really know what we are, then we would know how desperate we ought to be for something and we would know, how desperate is not too desperate. Plus, if we could curb our urge to be attention seekers, then we’re almost half way there. It’s high time we realized that there are other people on this planet. If anything we ought to be desperate about, it should be in the act of overcoming our desperation. Only then we are gonna make this world a better place to live in, for us and for people around us.

But, what is with that kind who deserved everything they were desperate for but never got it? How do they have to overcome what seems to be insurmountable if the reason and the consciousness do not want to forget? What do these types got to do? True, we face our own limits and don’t have the slightest idea of how to change, how to exist, when the whole thing is ceasing to come your way whilst the true owner of that must have been potentially you. Well before I propose my theory to this, I have two very important fictional mentions.

• Ben Parker, Spiderman – “With great power comes great responsibilities”
• Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter – “It’s your choices that define who you are, more than who you really are”

None of these two might be directly relevant to my theory. But they pretty much form the base of it. It’s eventually upto you to decide how to be and how not to be. Obviously, you knew you were good but you couldn’t hold onto stuff for some reason. So, do you have to be desperate and hope that you get on to it someday? Well, not really. Having the urge to compete to get there is fine, but having an urge to get there somehow is a problem; well a serious one at it. When you can do both, it’s better if you always do the former; compete. Having made this deliberately stark dissection, I resign to this piece by quoting one of the fictional characters, Ted Mosby.

“If you are really serious about what you want from life, it really gives it you. If it dint, you weren’t serious about it in the first place”. Period.

The Importance of Closure – 2

In the last post I have talked about getting a closure by ourself and accepting things to move on in life. Of course, a closure for what it is worth would help us to let go of our past and provides us an incentive to look forward. There’s some time where everyone needs an emotional closure, to deal with a break-up, a let off or a “self” let down or anything else, for that matter. No wonder, psychiatrists make a lot of money.

Emotional closure means looking out for someone to help us out or bail us out from our current trauma. If that someone is called “self”, our life is going to be extremely cheerful. If not, there has to be someone to help us retain our lost identity. For simplicity, let’s call that someone, “society”. Of course, it’s no wrong to be expecting it. In fact, we as a part of society should try to bail out someone from their tragedy if it’s in our reach and restore harmony, if we can. That’s exactly what living for the world is like. We don’t really understand it properly. The concept it self is widely misunderstood. For a fact, emotional closure is still an afterthought, not a priority, in our society. Ironic! Most of us generally associate emotional closures to relationships, yes true, not picking on it. Sure there is a need to help those whose relationships have ended, for whatever reason, to transition into interpersonal autonomy. But what about those who never experienced the relationships in the first place, those whose relationships never took off or matured because of the issues they were dealing with that prevented the intimacy that should precede emotional closure to begin with? When does society help those people; I took help from self, but is that “self” always there for individuals, particularly when they’re weird and different and scary and can’t hide it to themselves, can’t “clean up well”, so to speak.

We can’t pick and choose who we help in this society. There will always be individuals who walk around depressed and suicidal, which in effect is the ultimate fallout from not having experienced the satisfaction of emotional closure in fact it is an ongoing lack of closure, that has turned into something else that is rather disturbing. But we all have that responsibility to try, perhaps we can only go so far in helping, perhaps we fail to have the tools to help someone else find closure because we lack it ourselves it could be anything. Any little bit helps to make the world a better place, and attempts at prioritizing emotional closure, as genuine or disingenuous as they may often seem, are but another way in which our collective psyche tries to come to terms with the ways in which post-modern society tries to move about at a pace in which only part of us can truly keep up with. Fortunately, some closures can be really simple. Like, having a cheese-burst pizza 5 hours after ordering it might have an impact on you in giving up pizzas for good.

Also from an individual’s point of view, it’s important to have feet firmly on ground, or shall I say pragmatic? We have gotta stop hallucinating about things and learn to live in a real world where things are more probabilistic than deterministic. For example, aah, to talk the trend –

Falling for someone on a social networking site is sad enough and to seek an emotional closure on top of it when you know that it’s never meant to work out, well, it’s just touching the base of misery. There might not be any perspective there. But how often have we done things correctly upright? It’s exactly the kind that needs help.

Self-help books and counsellings really wont work, what works is clarity and a distinction between what is plausible and what is not. It’s not confusing to draw a line between what is real and what is surreal. It’s only difficult because we tend to fantasize a bit too much. Till we could come out of our fantasies and start being real, we’d go nowhere. That is attaining closure. Learning to be practical, that’s when we can find a closure by ourselves. But always remember, if it’s in your hands to offer closure and help someone move on, by all means do so. You would only make the world a better place to live by restoring harmony in others’ life which otherwise would have been distraught.

With that, I’m off to seeking closure on a couple of things and offer closure to where it is due! I’m not sure if I would be able to nail the former but the latter I’m going to.

The Importance of Closure – 1

The easiest thing to do in life is to put labels on things and call them names and the hardest is to make things better. When we look back and retrospect there are a lot of things that we wish we had done and a lot of them that we wish we hadn’t. I for example, ended up being a technology student. But when I set out, I wanted to be a journalist, an author and a media personality. Nothing stayed except for the freethinker in me, It hasn’t ditched me yet. It’s important to understand what is “feasible” and what isn’t and for what reasons it is or it isn’t. And, it’s also very essential to have a closure on things that we think we wouldn’t pursue or have; be it a career, be it a choice or be it a relationship.

All though, we make “rational” choices in life, many of us don’t really seem to understand what rationality really is. Rationality is not an abstract concept, neither is it imaginary nor complex. It’s fairly simple. Life teaches us and the lessons we learn at every point in life would make a person out of us. It might sound a tad bit arrogant but we wouldn’t be what we are today if it were not for our past. That’s exactly what guides us, motivates us and shows us a way forward – our past combined with our intellect. The very art of rationality stems from this very thing. Yes, it is in fact. It’s not science, it’s always been and will always be an art. My notion is that all of us were born with the same level of intellect and all of us are of course gifted. The difference in levels is due to the past, the experiences in life and the motivation. If our life’s always been open ended, there’s no way we’re going to move forward. There has to be a closure for everything, a closure which we have to realize and take it in our stride.

When we set out to do something, we start to associate ourselves with it. That’s what I define as a relationship. The concept of relationship is just not textbook love/marriage/lust. It’s lot more than that and a lot refined. When we seek someone or [to be] something, we inherently set out some ground rules for ourselves about how to act and how not to. When we end up not getting it, do we have to break free from those ground rules that we once laid for ourselves and retain our identity? Or do we have to keep cribbing about it, till we feel we’re done? or do we have to loosely hold on it, hoping things would fall in place at some point and wishing we get a second chance? These questions are rather emotional than philosophical or meta-physical. It’s not important to answer these, but it’s very important to get a perspective or sometimes offer a perspective to someone who needs it.

By closure I don’t mean covering the wound to stop bleeding. I beg to disagree with that notion of closure. I agree that, when confronted with an unsatisfactory situation, one must move on. However, doing so is often, in real life, a matter of accepting the existence of loose ends. The notion of “closure” that’s mostly used (or misused?) of late, seems to me to be akin to the notion that life should be like a story, with oneself as the protagonist. Stories are useful, but they aren’t a good model for all of life. The cult of “closure” often manifests itself as an utterly self-centered demand for attention and gratification from others. Among the most dedicated seekers of closure are all the stalking exes and revenge-bent gangsters (whether inner-city or international) destroying everyone’s peace because they demand that the world stop to serve their desires.

What I mean by closure is to understand that life is not a great “individual” story and you wouldn’t have a stop gate to everything. We have to understand at some point that if we can’t have someone/something that we have (or thought) had before and if we have to let that stuff go by, we have got to accept it and move on. Introspection will help us to not make the same mistake [if we did make any] when confronted with the similar situation again. Looking forward is the correct expression here. We have gotta find closures by ourselves. It’s not every time that the world around us offers closures. More often that not, it doesn’t. People don’t choose to end things, they always love to have a back up or may for emotional reasons, they don’t. Whatever it is, it doesn’t do any good to hold on to something when we know that we are not supposed to. The kind of closures we should look for must be metaphorical yet practical. I know it sounds confusing, but if life were to be easy, we would all be screwing it, instead of it screwing us.

Well, what about emotional closures then? Where and how we find a closure on something when we thought we had it but we haven’t really? Whose fault is it? Is it our imagination that led us to where and what we are? Have we been too optimistic about life? How do we come out of our fantasies to live a good life, if not a fairy tale? I’m gonna reserve my take on this for the next post.

Forget a little, Forgive a little more

This one’s not going to be spectacularly long or flamboyant. And, this certainly is not one of my super weird theories. It’s just something that hit me while I was thinking about society and how various agents in a society behave. In a society with autonomous agents working for their own selfish benefit under the label of rationality, does it really matter to them if the others are at loss? even if it is due to these agents’ behavior that the other agents are at loss? Honestly no. In a selfish world like this, should there be an altruistic norm that would prevent one agent harming the other, either physically or mentally in pursuit of their so called needs/desires?

So, what is the ideal scenario or the scheme of things that the agents will have to adhere to have harmony established in the society they live in or operate? I have talked previously on this space about normative rationality, the obsessive rationality and even the compulsive rationality. I think what’s important or what should ideally solve the problem of one agent not harming the other in spite of working for their own good, is constrained rationality or bounded rationality.  There should be a meta-model or meta-schema for a society and these norms are always to be adhered to, come what may more like the laws of constitution or legal parades and crime except that the punishment of not with-holding the law in case of the society is not constitutional but more meta-physical and causes a greater loss.

There is no need to define these norms, to be honest. We have had this told by elders while we were growing up and all that good is a subset of this norms set.  If we adhere to these norms, I think we can make this world a better place to live. This is neither a new theory nor an improved version of any existing theory. This is what we’ve been told for years by greater people around us. Irony that most of us tend to fall pray for greed/ego/[you name it]. High time we realized that we live in a society but not in a forest and the way we are supposed to live is by strictly following the age old saying, “Live and let live”.  We should remember that, Harmony once destroyed is difficult to be re-built. And, it doesn’t harm, hurt or cost to forget a little and forgive a little more.

Altruism – The real spice of life

It’s a nagging mystery how some people are more altruistic than the others and has it got to do with their upbringing alone or is it anything superficial or pretense? Or is it something people develop while growing up in correspondence with the ambiance they are brought up in? Or if it is just a gene that traces from generation to generation? So many questions about a simple sentiment. But it’s a noted point that, sentiments/emotions/behavior are not simple and to measure them or qualify them and determine that they fall into some “classified” genre is very difficult to do so.

I was talking to one of my mentors today and he seems to have a rather philosophical outlook on it – According to him it’s not something we inherently get, it’s something we develop, sometimes without our own knowledge of the whereabouts of development. It’s a simple theory that states that people tend to form groups/coalitions and in the process  if groups with cooperative members out-compete the groups with selfish ones then they spread niceness genes, in a scaled-up version of the process by which genetically favored individuals trump other individuals. But it only answers how altruism could be evolved, but it doesn’t say how to recognize it.

Unlike experiments on markets or mechanisms, experiments on altruism are about an individual motive or intention. Hence it’s a difficult question to answer – when do we see altruism and how do we recognize it when we see? According to the philosophical school of thought, “Altruism really doesn’t mean abject self-sacrifice. but it’s merely a willingness to act in the consideration of the interests of other persons with out the  need for ulterior motives”. Note that there are two parts in the definition. The first part talks about being considerate to others and it may or may not involve self-sacrifice, but it requires that the consequences for someone else affect one’s own choice while the second part signifies that one doesn’t need “ulterior motives” rooted in selfishness to explain altruistic behaviors. Of course, I’m not denying the fact that ulterior motives may exist alongside of altruism but they cannot be the only motives.

Now if that is the traditional school of thought we’re planning on sticking to, our question – how do we realize altruism when we see it is the question. Unfortunately the answer for that is no – No, we don’t realize that. Rather, we realize it when you don’t see it. You can’t capture altruism with a specifically defined ulterior motive. The focus should be on eliminating any possible ulterior motives rooted in selfishness. One of the central motives that potentially confounds altruism is the “art of giving”, that is the utility one gets simply from the act of giving without any concerns of the “interests of others” – also called the warm-glow theory. Of course, the warm glow exists apart from altruism, but it seems more likely that both of them are complements – the stronger our desire to act unselfishly, the greater the personal satisfaction from doing so. Perhaps, the two of them might be inextricably linked.

Even consider the famous games- Say the famous Prisoner’s dilemma game. There have been thousands of studies on this very subject that lead to conclusions such as, under paid incentives cooperation is robust. However, that cooperation need not be caused by altruism. First, inexperience and confusion may cause the agents to cooperate. Second, agents in a finitely repeated version of the game may cooperate if each one of them believes that there is a chance that someone actually is altruistic. It doesn’t require the agents to be altruistic, but they only believe that, they are likely to encounter such an agent.

Now the most important question – Having a personal identity of an altruist, no doubt forces a person to exhibit altruism or precede altruistic acts. How good or bad it is for anyone? Having to maintain that identity irrespective of anything is a problem, of course. So what is the solution? When is the time to be altruistic and when is not the time? Is there anything called “bounded altruism”? Is altruism and feel good factor related? Or is one the consequence of the other? So many questions to ponder over!

I for one, couldn’t even try to offer a perspective on all of them, but some. According to me, the concept of altruism/selfless behavior comes from love. The more you love, the more altruistic  you become. I’m not trying to profess the Dumbledore’s theory of love. However, I’m trying to expose the fact that Love is the reason why altruism is so very existent. If you love someone, all you want for them is to be happy and hence you do stuff that will make them happier, be it parents, friends or that special someone you meet or anyone. If you scale it up, if you love the society around you, the more you would try to create harmony in it, by being an extrovert and by “inclusion mechanisms” and stuff along the similar lines. And if you love the whole world, then you are a saint who preaches the science of altruism or is it the art of altruism?

But for everything, the main reason or foundation is Love which unfortunately has been dying out from our “meticulously materialistic world”. As an individual, it’s our responsibility to see to it that, the unerring force of Love is always around us, thus by enabling us to do great things,  just not for ourselves but for people around us. It’s a joy to be doing something for someone and to see them happier – there’s no significant elation beyond it.  Altruism is the real spice of life. Period.

Being “Rationally” Social

It’s kind of funny how the compulsion of being wise sneaks up on us. One moment we’re 16 and out of school and immediately we’re 19 staring at every hot girl that passes by and then we’re 22, planning the rest of our life, almost ordinarily. In all our continuous efforts to be normal, there is a certain factor that tops “most of” our lists – that is about being social as well as being rational. I say most of our lists because, all of us are not equally social or rational. Some are ‘more’ social than the rest, while some are rather mediocre. Being social, interfered with rationality, might also project you as an imposer and as well cause people to detest you. Of course, we couldn’t care less. But, where is that we draw a line to distinguish between being rationally social and being an imposer or just being mediocre? So basically the question what I’m trying to get at is, how much social is too much social? And, how does rationality come into picture?

First of all, what is being social? Is it as simple as being an extrovert? Perhaps not. Apparently, all of us seem to have a problem in figuring out what it is to be Social. There are so many [mis]conceptions about it and some “inverse” rationalities supporting the same. There are two traditional approaches to it. First approach in defining this is to go with the general accepted standards of the society and spread goodness. That will eventually make people realize that you’re working for a greater good [common or otherwise] and would make you social. Second, is to narrow the field by selecting the standards held by a specific group. For example, a person in a company/fraternity is widely accepted than the rest, so imitate him/her and try to become like them to gain acceptance. Would that mean we’re cheating ourselves by stepping into some shoes that are visibly and understandably foreign? Yea perhaps, we are. But, there’s no malice intended, is there? So, we’re good and playing safe, aren’t we?

When you push the problem a couple of notches further, say to the Internet, there’s a ranging debate about “being positive” on social networking sites diminishing your online reputation. Spreading “goodness” doesn’t seem to work too much on the Social Networking platform. Posting inspirational quotes (plagiarized ones actually), focusing on telling people all good things would actually have a negative impact on an individual’s credibility, meaning – none of us is positive all the time. If we’re thinking that “faking” to be positive on Social networking sites would establish some kind of a good harmony, then we’re on the wrong page. All though the theory looks fabulous on the surface, it just doesn’t hold any water. There’s a huge difference between being optimistic and glossing over the truth. Anyway, in my opinion at least, social networking sites have done more harm than good. I have talked about the negative impacts of Social networking too many times on this blog, so I’m not going to do it again.

What is the socially acceptable sociality then? It has taken eons for me to understand this very thing. I have kinda figured out what it is. But, it’s funny that I can’t adhere to the “society” way of being social for it is on the extreme side of faking. The theory is simple “You’d be labeled social by people if you interact with them choosing a line of speech/argument/action that doesn’t run in parallel to theirs. If your line of action aligns with theirs, then you’re extremely social. If it runs parallel to theirs and if you try to express it (forget about even arriving at a rational conclusion) then you’re an imposer”. It’s simple, being rational is not being social but being an imposer (most of the times), aligning with the society is being social. And if you don’t do either of it and try to play safe without expressing your views (genuine or otherwise), then you’re closed and are an introvert. Funny how, all complex problems have simple answers.

Now, the choice lies with us. How much social do we want to be? Do we want to play good all the time and cheat ourselves to be called “pro” social? Or do we want to be rational and be sectionally social while also being called imposer by some? By sectionally social, I mean being acceptable to some certain sections of the society (which truly appreciates you) while defying the others. Majority of us don’t want to here the truth, most of us tend to “label/claim” whatever we like to hear as truth. I wouldn’t mind people labeling me an imposer for being “rational” and social. It’s better than faking and not having a character of our own. It’s for individuals to decide what to compromise on – Character or Acceptance by seemingly [in]significant sections of the society?

Want to Live the Modern Way – Fake It

Ever wondered what technology and modern living has done to us? And the advent of Internet and new social relations, more and more closed worlds – Are they really helping us to improve our emotional quotient? Or, do they act like mere walls of comfort where we can do stuff we like and refute other stuff, perhaps even disgrace and degrade things that we don’t like? At the outset, it might seem as if we’re living in a world where the information flow would be able to bring in bureaucratic changes, institutionalize certain disproportionate things and perhaps even revolutionize the thought process as such. Unfortunately (all though more apparently), the kind of attitude we have to adopt [or sometimes inherit from other gyaan gurus] due to technology is a ‘Fake’.

Business schools teach us about marketing ourself. They teach us, how to sell stuff and for that, they would NOT ask us for innovative ideas, they TEACH us. So basically, we’re asked to “learn from theories” as to how we should market yourself. Innovation is a fake. We don’t do anything, we are ‘re’ doing what someone else has done. Irony, how the concept of conformity comes too close to be true. With all due respect to my detractors, who often try to point out that more often than not, I critique things – I would like to say, I have always tried/[will always henceforth also try] to show a different perspective to the ideology or thought. There’s no fun playing a race where we knew everything in advance. Perhaps, my mind has not been used to being traditional.

Yea, so coming back to where I started. What good has a change of lifestyle done to us? We have a 10 minute interview to clear before we get admitted into schools/colleges/work. As much as the HR people boast that they are psychologically equipped [I bet they can't even spell that], they are not. All that we have to do is fake and get over. Further tragically, even emotions can be faked[supposedly so]. I was in a class the other day where we were explained how to fake emotions to portray an image of aesthetic-ever-pleasing soul and interestingly there, we were told faking emotions actually makes us emotionally intelligent. I do NOT most certainly intend to do a meta-physical dissection on the ground on which that hypothesis was valid, but I beg to differ. I have no theories to prove that faking is sick. There’s only belief. It’s proven that, faking your personal struggles would earn a seat for you or would help you enter into the interviewer’s good books. Surprisingly, statistics show that 7 on 10 times it works. Ad Misericordiam is not as bad as we thought it was.

My worry is not about whether faking is good or bad, it is about how self-obsessed-ambition-driven fakers pass out from colleges and preach people outside how to fake. These Gyan Gurus are ruining the fresh minds out there. Well, looks like I have fallen into the trap of Hasty Generalization fallacy by looking at a handful of specimens whose only desire in life is to fake and teach others how to fake. If the trend continues, there will be horrifying things that would happen to us. We would be living in some kind of a virtual world very isolated from real emotions, where our only intention would be to make ourselves happy. All though, I think we have already reached this wave of “making ourselves happy”, there are at least some people out there who care for others and whose intentions tend to contribute to the altruistic needs of the society.

The whole aspect reminds me of F.R.I.E.N.D.S – the one with all the resolutions. Joey wanting to learning Guitar.

Joey : “Pheobes, I want to learn guitar”
Ross : “Learn Guitar?”
Joey : “Yeah, learn Guitar. You know the special skills I have listed on my resume? I would love it if one of them is true”.

Joey was dumb and intended no malice. But, we are being horrible and might as well act like catalysts in tearing the whole world into pieces. There’s nothing good about it, trust me!

I don’t think there’s any good way to solve it. In fact, I don’t think there’s a way to solve it. Aah, this is when I remember God, when things are out of human control and ‘not’ perceivable to cognitive reality. God, please don’t let the fakers ruin the world for everyone in the guise of Gyan givers.

The Changing Routine of Rationality

What happens in our brain when we make a rational decision: Do we coolly weigh alternatives to discern and act on our ‘NO’ self-interest? Generations have given it the same definition. But, the traditional model of rational person must now be reconciled with the recent discoveries that when we make a decision the areas of our brain associated with emotions are also active.

The above lines are an alternation to a write up in The Dana Foundation Article, which I thought was seemingly close to what I wanted to put across, all though in two different contexts.

Anyway, the questions to ponder over are – Could there be any more rationality when there are emotions and when there is self-interest? How significantly the definition of rationality has changed over the years? And, how do we attain it?

We hold beliefs with various degrees of justification and the theory of rationality dictates to us that we proportion our belief to the degree of justification. Sometimes the best explanation is not necessarily clear. Often, we tend to believe in things because the reasons to believe in them are emotionally or otherwise compelling – whether or not they’re rational. Interestingly, there’s hope and there’s fear in both paradigms, irrespective of your beliefs being justified emotionally or rationally. For people who could dictate terms to others, the notion of rationality is how to intelligently get their things done. They don’t force others to get things done, they leave options open ended with certain cliches, thus by tampering the mind of others and leaving them with zero or minimum option. For the others, it is to either obey or pay the price for not obeying. How justified is it to call the above mindset rationality? If it was justified, then all the dictators we have ever had, have always been very rational in their own right.

Is rationality relative? Perhaps. What might be rational to you might not be rational to others. The traditional rationality was unbiased and came in handy, in explaining how pros outweighed cons, and further assisting to arrive at a decision that was socially (most of the times, legally as well) justified. Since then, it has undergone a major paradigm shift. While rationality pertained to a Society in good old days, it’s an individualistic thought process now. In the past, being very rational was in direct correlation with being among the elite mob of the city/town/country who were called great thinkers. Today, being rational is either manipulating or adhering to certain phenomenon because it is more closer to us emotionally or we’re left with no other choice. Is it the fault of changing mindsets? Or is it a compulsive-syndrome that we have to adopt to survive in the present day scenario?

We are not there at the worst yet. It’s when we impose our “self-proclaimed” rational thoughts on others compelling them to buy our thoughts, because we are an authority superior to them or we have the reach that more people would listen to us. In short, it’s when we do an “urge to be pseudo rationally obsessive” Indian media that does a metaphysical dissection on matters to sell themselves compromising on goodness. It’s undoubtedly a bad influence and does more harm than good.

To conclude, understanding things would really help, we couldn’t plunge in head along to dictate terms or impose things on others without having a clue about them. Rationality is not bound by any emotional means, but by goodness. It’s for the greater good. It’s not an influence but a consistent effort. It’s something that evolves in us. All that we are required to do now is to spread goodness and virtues like rationality would be attained without any extra effort.

Sweet Grapes turning Sour – The Fear of Failure

Some of the most joyful things  in your life, will suddenly become bleak and you just don’t know whom to blame. Forget it, you wouldn’t even a have a clue as to how you could get over it. It so puts you in a fix that you find it really hard to come out of it, and all attempts you make at retaining the old good odor you once knew will be a failure. If you’re wondering why this soliloquy is all for – there’s an answer and that’s Operating Systems.

Something I loved nearly all my life  has cheated on me. Something I thought I was really good at has abandoned me. I’m a dilapidated at my ability to not being able to cope with the whole scenario. It’s awful for me to think that, I would not do operating systems in my whole life again. I have my reasons. Primarily because, as good as I thought I was with the niceties of it, I have been proven repeatedly that my ability is limited. People who knew ‘cypher’ were crowning the charts while I look at them in humiliation at me, thinking what am I? All that effort I’ve put in and all that I’ve learned about it, is it a sheer waste? Perhaps or perhaps not. To be honest, I don’t have an answer.

I’m not being egocentric, just that I’m not able to take the fact that something I always adored will not be with me anymore. My psychic balance has been affected. I’m in no temper to entertain something break into me with the same intensity as this. It hurts more because I’m in a place where people think that the grades you score determine your ability. And, here I demonstrate an exemplar of failure w.r.t. not being able to be a ‘top grader’. The least I wanted to happen was to live in a conception that, Operating Systems too, chucked me. Well, I was not expecting it and as they define life, that came to me. Yes, Operating Systems chucked me. I might go down to an “F” in Operating Systems. But, who cares? The thing that hurts is, I was once looked upon by people for being a salient performer and now the fear of failure has crept into me. If I will be looked down in the futurity? Only time knows!

An “F” in Operating Systems or whatever, I decided I’m going to have to make some changes in the way I see Post Graduation here. I always thought I had to learn something from this place but I now realize, when 95 % of your peers go gaga about grades and when the Professors here value grades more than ability, there’s no point sticking to my precepts. So this day, I decide, I’m going to do the same thing that others have been doing. It’s stupid – Indeed. But, I’m not alone for all I know we are a class of 150.