Lawrence

Day after day
Night after night
Time goes by
Leaving nothing

Neither the Gods
Nor the fairy tales
Give me an inch of life
When everything is dry

So meaningless
So useless
Is this unwanted experience
In this unwelcoming world

Train Station

Waiting for a train that never stops,
Imagining things that never happen
So easy it is to get lost

Is it the temples of Lagash
Or the kings of Babylon
That can satisfy my curiosity

Imagining Napoleon
Imagining Robespierre
And Imagining me

So easy to get lost
In this ocean of humanity
As a meaningless event

Being a shadow of Myself

Survival of the Weakest

Modern society is defying Darwin's theory of natural selection. There is a gaping hole to his theory of survival of the fittest. Medicine has achieved so many wonders in the last few centuries, so much so that body's vital force is now unanimously understood to be in it's cells and their metabolism, and not in some unknown soul, created, gifted and purified by God. But medicine is making all of us weaker as more and more generations are being fed by it's drugs. Before the advent of medicine, and the myriad of drugs that it now boasts of, very few people used to live longer till their old age. There was a silent process of natural selection, where the bodies which are genetically programmed to be weaker to disease resistance and endurance, are disposed of by nature by some epidemic or some minor disease. That way, nature got rid of the most weakly constituted bodies in their early age before they could inherit their genes to their children. Old people still tell me of the days when women used to give birth to five to ten children expecting only about half of them to survive to adulthood.

But, these days, mortality at early age is very low. Most people in developed countries die in their old age when the organs give up the seventy to eighty years of battle. Developing countries too are moving in that direction. At least most people are secure enough of their life, from most diseases, to plan for their future ten years. There is no natural selection. The weakest never dies(before the old age), and the fittest is born less and less frequently. I see this as nothing but an elimination of the fittest by none other than our wonderful medicine. More and more drugs are replacing body's natural mechanism to defend and evolve in it's fight against disease. And more and more people are living not because their bodies can survive the diseases of nature but because there are all sorts of drugs to fight them. I wonder how many people survive common illness like fever if for some reason the drugs used to treat it suddenly disappear or become unusable.

How long humans will continue this proliferation of the weakest, before nature finally asserts the law of survival of the fittest and eliminates them all in one stroke as not fit for survival on earth? Or have we already conquered and enslaved the nature, in which case, there will be no law of survival of the weakest, but only the law of survival of the human being?