On Nature

Nature recreates itself in every season. History is reenacted in each age, but never repeated. Change is an illusion and a reality at the same time. Over time, nothing repeats, but everything recreates itself. Every hero is reborn every sorrow is revisited and every battle will be fought again. This is the basic principle of existence. There is always a river and there shall always be one, but we can never step into the same river again. There is rain in every rainy season but it shall never be the same water droplets, never the same plants and never the same flood. We are the logical successors to our predecessors and logical predecessors to our successors in this never ending cycle of events.

People of ancient days(Indians most prominently) considered time as a cyclical concept. Nothing could be a possible source for that belief than the the daily drama of the sun and the yearly regeneration of the vegetation. People in those days might have laughed at the word 'development' and the idea that our lives are somehow following a linear trajectory with either an increasing or decreasing level of satisfaction. But today we have outgrown the wisdom of our creator, the sun and the logic of our food, the vegetation. We have conquered the sun by fusing atoms in the dark. And we have conquered vegetation by domesticating it in our fields.

And so, has time became linear from now onwards? Time as a cyclical concept is irrelevant as there is no 'time', but only 'this time'. But time as a linear concept is the only base scale on which everything else in the world is measured. May be it is an indication of the linear time that we use watches every day while people of ancient days may never cared to look at a watch in their whole life. So, will nature ever recreate again, will history ever reenact again, as long as this arrogant bipedal is still existing?

Tom Paine on God

"It is only in the creation that all of our ideas....of God can unite. The creation speaketh an universal language;.... and this word of god reveals to man all that is necessary for man to know of god.
Do we want to contemplate his power? We see it in the immensity of the creation. Do we want to contemplate his wisdom? We see it in the unchangeable order by which the incomprehensible whole is governed. Do we want to contemplate his munificence? We see it in the abandon with which he fills the earth. Do we want to contemplate his mercy? We see it in his not withholding that abundance even from the unthankful. In fine, do we want to know what god is? Search not the book called the scripture....but the scripture called the Creation."

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?

Flying Away

It has been more than six months since I had flown to United States of America. I thought I will become sentimental about India, the moment I leave it. But it didn't happen. I became numb for a long time. May be Will Durant's philosophy has killed all primeval emotions in me :-) (that's just to show that I am a cool philosopher now :-P). I stopped over for a few hours in China, but did not feel that curiosity that I felt while reading about it in Nehru's letters to Indira. Somehow everything looks very mechanical, according to the script, according to Will Durant's script :-).

Will Durant, I have been reading his Story of Civilization for a few months now. I used to think that the most interesting story is the story of man, the rise and fall, the evolution from nothing to something and then to everything. Someday I will cross 7 oceans to see his grave and thank him for all the enlightenment, just like Robespierre did when he made a secret visit to ailing philosopher 200 years ago.

The more, time passes by, the more I feel an unexplainable unrest in me. I feel a philosophical emptiness in this foreign land.