“Books, Musings et cetera: Confessions of a Catholic Bibliophile”

Long live the gentleman who was divine enough to remark that ignorance is bliss. At all the times I visit a public library, I have this strange intuitive feeling that I’ll die ignoramus, without understanding the world as it was meant to be. Bookstores never make me contemplate so, reason of which I don’t know of. Maybe because I peruse copies of either writers who I read again and again or the ones I’ve read impressive reviews of. Award-winners grab my attention as well, but again I believe that art, you should muse over only to never pass judgments for your eyes, your cognition and your understanding may differ from that of the creator. Art has as many faces as the pair of eyes looking at it. For me, reading is an art not devoid of its complexities. From being a mechanical reader looking for just the narrative details to the one trying to appreciate styles, subtleties and nuances, genres in every literary or non-literary movement, I now am scared to lose my own innate cognition by getting knocked down by the zillions of thoughts accumulated over the years. I try often not to let my mind be some other’s playground, but shades of influence do find neurons. 

The crisis I undergo while re-reading a book are more depressing. Each time I do so, my mind, as if by intention, will indeed find the interpretations and shades which I missed previously as if to make me feel hapless, naïve and prone to pessimism. Now I feel scared to even look at books I read long back. I fear that I no longer possess the same state of mind to interpret them the way I did before. New revelations and new subsequent thought processes will follow and previous readings will seem futile. I started writing for the fear of forgetting and losing my thoughts which are often intermittent in nature that I dread that I’ll not encounter them again. And thus, I started taking notes of them to muse around in times of solitude. Reading them in future will help me make comparisons with the thoughts of then. After all thoughts, opinions and views change faces with time, places, experiences and situations in our lives that we attribute that we cannot understand ourselves, let alone others. 

The second most odious situation I face is making selections from the various genres. While reading Shakespeare in continuum, I realize that I am lagging on Dickens and Tolstoy. While I relish Marquez’s magical realism, I invite Wilde’s and Twain’s wrath. In the midst of Bertrand  Russell, Albert Camus often beckons. Indian scriptures, Greek and Latin classics, Victorian works, European potpourris, Eastern mysticisms; the list never ends. The amount of thoughts accumulated in probably billions of works never ceases to intimidate you. I often bump upon books which stress on the need and art of skipping, but if skipping is an art, than I am a mental-handicap at it. I am unable to accept the fact that I in my lifetime cannot enjoy the luxury of reading one and all. I’ll indeed miss most of the art in literature. I’ll be devoid of the musings those intellects went through while authoring them

But I often dream of having a study of my own with unending shelves filled with hard-covers from all the world’s literature and thinking-movements(I doubt of any such classification though). But having born in an era of Capitalism, I am scared of devoting so much time to something which provides no monetary benefit. I get envious of the Greeks who seem to had had all the time in this world to contemplate and debate over literally everything in this world.  I am at times even advised to read books pertaining to my occupation for they may actually ‘help’. No wonder we find bookstore-selves filled with guides on self-help, career, stock-market, money-management et cetera. Maybe this explains why bookstores don’t fascinate me as much as public libraries where I find books as uncared for as the gray-cells in our minds; books which remind me that the world is a complex place and no matter how many times you look at it, it appears all different at every look. Then I think: Ignorance is a bliss indeed.

©Rakesh 2011

“The Curious Case of GOD, Talent & Perseverance”

Few days ago I was going through a video on youtube in which Harsha Bhogle philosophically went on to describe how talent is one of the most ‘useless’ of all things to possess at higher echelons of corporate. He substantiated his enlightening disclosure by drawing comparisons between Sachin Tendulkar and Vinod Kambli, two childhood pals who strived to make it big in cricket, a sport Bhogle is paid to talk about. While the latter, although much talked of his ethereal hard-hitting skills, vanished from the stage after a series of ephemeral and intermittent success, the former attained the status of God in the sport considered as a religion in a country of a billion people. Bhogle attributed HIS success to the work-ethics HE has for the game. Now maybe HIS work-ethics, HIS love for game, HIS adaptability somewhere down the line overshadowed HIS talent, but one can reasonably argue that Kambli was talented as well, if not as much as Sachin, (though he was touted as the next generation superstar ahead of Sachin in their early days) then certainly more than most of the contemporary cricketers he played with by safe assumption. (Though, I fear that talent can never be quantized and scaled precisely). But still Kambli remained a mortal and Sachin went on to become the most worshipped sport-star ever, if one goes by sheer number of followers. Somewhere, Sachin’s perseverance and work-ethics made up for the lag in talent of his, if any. Louis Pasteur once affirmed that his success solely lied in his tenacity. Einstein declared that the only reason he could come up with the solutions to the mysteries of quantum physics was that he spent more time with the problems.

One can reasonably rationalize that not everyone can be Sachin, Pasteur or Einstein. So does talent help? Before we explore the solution, let’s try to define what talent exactly is. Talent is the innate ability of an individual to perform a task in some field or activity with much more adeptness than most of the populace. So if you can solve a mighty quant problem in the classroom faster than your peers with the same level of preparation and attention received by your mentor with some creative bent of mind, it has got to do with the talent. Now does talent exist? Does nature really discriminate between her children? I’d say talent is not just a state of mind. It exists. Not sure if it is any form of discrimination or not but the aphorism: “We all are born originals but most of us die copies.” can help us explain it better. Nature does not like to make clones. Nor are forces of nature aligned in such a manner that every sibling of her receives same kind of nutrition and organic environment. So, each one of us is indeed endowed with some or other skill-sets which make us naturally adept in certain arenas. We are not always fortunate enough to figure out the arena we are bestowed in. Even if we do, we rarely dare enough to exploit it in the midst of so many systems we are shackled in. Capitalism further creates complications as certain talents get more monetary attention. So we try to ‘create’ talent in ourselves. Can talent be ever created? I’d say no and yes. No matter how hard mankind tries, it can’t emulate nature in terms of excellence. But perseverance pays. Working harder than those naturally-gifted people can give you dividends. It may not ‘create’ talent but certainly builds what we call aptitude.

Now coming to the first question, does talent help? We’d go by the assumption that Kambli was more talented than Sachin as iterated by their guru Ramakanth Achrekar and others. Now Bhogle pointed out that Kambli played his last Test Match at the age of twenty-two. (maybe at 24 or 25, let’s say in his early twenties) He was perplexed by Courtney Walsh and didn’t know what to do because till then talent had opened all doors for him. So did talent prove out to be bane for him? I am too much limited by my knowledge to assume that Kambli’s initial success made him bedazzled by the glamour and attention he received and the subsequent arrogance of his swayed him from doing what he was best at doing. But his talent did not take him far. In stark contrast, Sachin didn’t enjoy much success in his first tour.( To exaggerate, one can visualize Sachin with the bleeding nose.) Also, though the world knew they were watching someone special, he had to wait 69(or maybe 70?) matches for his first one day century. Since then Sachin has enjoyed enviable success in all formats of games but his best have has always come after setbacks, whether it were injuries or plunge in form. Unlike Kambli, he never forgot his work-ethics and stayed as calm as a monk in search of sublime enlightenment. Which champion will not break down by getting booed and plastic-bottles thrown at him by his own home-crowd? (Remember Wankhede when he was going through the most slump-phase of his career?). But amid several dropped-jaws of his fans and criticisms from every corner, Sachin maintained a Zen like calmness and enlivened his craft that would give even the Phoenix a run for his ability to reinvigorate himself. So I assume that talent didn’t help Kambli go places because he didn’t remain a student of the game like Sachin did. Talent made him too rigid and dependent while Sachin adapted the way things changed. You don’t need to be a Darwinist to know how important adaptation is for success. Now I am too illiterate of cricketing terms, but I am told that he completely stopped playing some signature stroke of his after his career-threatening tennis-elbow injury. Can talent let us enjoy such luxury? If you love say Number Theory, can it be easy for you make life out of teaching Shakespeare? Yes it can, but for that you got to be Sachin Tendulkar, or at least possess his single-mindedness and tenacity. Talent will make your life easy initially and will make you lax. It won’t give you the taste of failure and hence when you reach higher echelons, you won’t possess the ex factor which Sachin possesses: the ability to bounce back.

©Rakesh 2011

“You are Right, I am Right”

 
Now I come from the school of thinking which believes that everything in this world can be justified. If it has been done, it can be justified. Otherwise, why was it done at the first place. The greatest misery in this world is that different people look at the same thing with different perceptions. Also these perceptions vary with time. Right and wrong can never be absolute. In fact, if you find anything in this world to be absolute, please enlighten me. 

When Men started living in society, certain acts came to be regarded as Right for the ease of large. These lumps of righteous acts later became morality and morality gave birth to obligations. This is how pillars of society came into existence. To protect the interests of the general, freedom of all was curbed to some or more extent. Those who did not abide were termed as outlaws and extirpated from society in general. The justice system adopted later in the civilized world, heavily borrowed from these general accepted norms of a society. Hence ‘Right’ was defined. This was necessary for the smooth functioning of the society. Right was often the child of our interests. What worked out for us, we called it Right and what didn’t, wrong. Now people started having rigid notion of Right. The notion that everything can be justified from both the ends and Right may not be Right for all became blurred. Right became absolute and proper and seldom prone to arguments and debates. The reason in wrong got overshadowed by the might of Right. 

So does this notion of Right work? Yes, most of the time, at societal hierarchy at least. Contrary to popular perception, we are not free people. We started living in society to protect our properties and we often pay the price for the same. So the trade-off is working well. The problem becomes perceivable at personal level. Misunderstandings between individuals are often due to rigid notion of Right. 

We mold this Right more or less all the time for our good. Morality, which differs at cultural hierarchies, does its best to complicate things. So we dislike certain kinds of people who do certain kinds of acts. We become biased and prejudiced. At higher hierarchical levels, this makes us racists. If we understand the fact that Right is not something which is absolute but which is defaced, raped, forged and shaped as per the needs of individual and society, by religion and culture and in modern times by media and politics, may be this will help us understand the miseries of this world and the people we live with, in a more profound manner. 

©Rakesh 2011

“On Darwinism: How Darwinism Opposed the Advent of Darwinism”

When Charles Darwin propounded his work in the path breaking “The Origin of Species” in the year 1859, most and Clergy understandably, could not relate to the musings he underwent on his trip around the globe on HMS Beagle. I blame them not, for our interpretation of truth and right is limited by our understandings and the cognition we build unknowingly by the culture and societal background we come from. We often tend to resist anything which is novel and alien. It has got to do more with the nature. As Newton would’ve said to it: A body in rest or motion will continue to be so and will always resist the application of external force on it. Our blood cells will always resist and assail anything which is foreign. We are often so much brainwashed since our childhood by the nearby agents that any doctrine which says no to conventions and mundaneness is resisted as vehemently as possible by our cognition. Change, in fact, needs continuous application to become accepted. Hence we always require efforts to get out of our comfort zones. Also, a sufficient amount of time is required before this change becomes mundane. When Galileo came up with his heliocentric theory, he was again so much chided by the Church that he had to revert back to his statement to escape what we now call the capital punishment. Today it sounds very obvious because this is what has been seeded  into our cognition since childhood. 

To put it simply, change of any form, although is inevitable, is always opposed and require a certain timeline to get accepted. The magnitude of this timeline is directly proportional to the intensity of change. Now if the timeline is small, the change will create devastation with certitude. This is what happened to the giant reptiles called dinosaurs which ruled our planet in the Mesozoic era. If everything is in sync, this change brings another greater change which Darwin mentioned as ‘adaptation’. Adaptation will then be observed in forthcoming generations and will slowly penetrate into a greater scale. The survival of species depends a lot on its ability to adapt. The ability to adapt to various external factors and to get in the groove of change by casting off our inherent dogmas and sometimes our physical and biological attributes will define with how much success will one survive in the Capitalist era of today. Laws of nature stand the test of time. Darwin brought forward which was very much in the essence of nature but unobserved. The flaws in the theory just point out to the observations we haven’t made yet.

Now try applying Darwin’s theory to the proposition of the theory itself. At prima facie, it was resisted as intensely as possible by the cognition of the common and more intensely by the cognition of the clergy (their cognition was/is less susceptible to change ) because it was trying to make changes which were at radical level and which were cent per cent contrary and opposite. Also the timescale of change was very minute. As the timescale has extended to over fifty and a hundred years, the resistance of our cognition has diminished and the theory is being mused over by a large scale of intelligentsia and with a lot less scepticism. To textbook educated populace, it will appear as obvious as the heliocentric theory. Change we always resist, may be that is why, Men love history and cling to dogmas and cultural aspects of the past. This is why exactly we hate iconoclasts and revolutionists. Both bring change. Darwin brought change. 

©Rakesh 2011