Train

"The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw."

Train is strolling across this single track amid absolute silence outside and murmurs of snores inside. The speed is neither too slow not too fast, may be a kilometre in a minute, the "economy" speed even for this snake across the plains.

The tracks are elevated may be 5m above the ground. Hence they cut the world into two. One has to cross the metal to move from one to the other world. Plants build their colonies on both sides in a remarkable similarity give their sad separation. The tracks are essentially a long check dam, a long barrier for water, stopping it from washing the sins of earth in these dry lands.

There are lights now along the tracks. Some lower class houses probably. They made their choice, to live with the buzzing noise of the train for a roof to live under.

There is a road too now, along the tracks. The two travellers met for a short time before they diverge again to chart their own paths in blissfully ignorance.

There are more villages, some far some closer. May the children saw the train early in their life. What did they think about the train when they saw. Were they amazed? Were they scared? Were they find it natural? Only the children of the villages know.

There is a station which this holy train does not care to acknowledge. It passes at the same speed as if it cannot see the lowly station.

Now all the lights have gone by. I don't see a single light as far as I can see. What a wonderful sight in this overcrowded land.

The tracks are still electrified. I am shocked. The guard room at the crossing is more colourful than the surrounding land.

There is a small hill close by. Maybe a heap of soil. Maybe withered remains of a once formidable hill. Or may be mountains.

This land has seen billions of years. While I come and go in less than a century.

Who am I?

I am a minuscule change.

Summer

Summer day is the most distinct thing I can remember from my childhood. I grew up in a village with lot of trees and some wilderness. In summer, only a few trees like neem or tamarind would be alive enough to give enough shade under them. Rest shed all their leaves to survive the summer. It's a bright day with white painted on all sides. I always had a pair of chappals that I rarely lost, unlike my other friends who would loose their chappals once every few months. Without the chappals the earth burns like firepit. Yet I could find the enthusiasm to run on burning earth to nearby houses. One of the things I never did in those summer afternoons was sleeping. Everyone would sleep under some tree's shade. Except me. I always had something to do. Something more interesting than sleeping. It could be making toys from branches or digging earth for water or making compose pits for my urine. Occassionally there would be an aeroplane overhead and I would run behind it with no thoughts on who uses it or why it exists. Aeroplane flying into the sun may have inspired many souls, but not me. For me it was of no consequence. It may be because my mind was always onto something else. Something else more interesting.

I miss the summer noon's heat. I miss the hot winds. I miss the burning feet. They unfreeze the body and activates senses with energy.

I know time is a one way path and I can never go back to my childhood. But I hope one day I roam under the summer heat without sparing any thoughts on the aeroplane overhead.

Perfect order

"One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star."

We now have the opportunity to create the perfect world. We will give birth to a new being, that doesn't need the billions of years of evolution like us. We can think and plan about how to take the world forward. We don't know if there was ever a grand design that brought us into existence. But we do realize that we are staring at the possibility of enforcing such a grand design for future beings.

What do we transmit to our successors, to those next wave of intelligent beings? What do we understand about ourselves and the world around us? It can only be summarized as a collection of bits and pieces all without pointing in any particular direction. Do we have a deeper understanding that transcends our existence? Most people believe we have no existence beyond that which exists in our brain.

There are only a few concepts as well felt and touch us as the order in the existence around us. Our ancestors must have been puzzled by the cycle of day and night, and that of seasons. Unlike everything around us determined in one way or the other way by the one-way road called as time, the seasons are cyclic. What's more fascinating than a cycle, bring it back to the same place by divine ordinance.

The constant quest for discovering the order seems to be the only thing we can teach our successors. Somehow our minds are wired to appreciate order everywhere. Music, mathematics, truth, courage and all the traits we prize are all manifestations of our fascination with the order. It may be because there are only limited things that the mind can comprehend with and the things we can understand are so simple we see an order among them almost always.

Opposites

I'm the midst of winter I found within me an invincible summer.
-- Camus

The tragedy of the opposites surprised many a philosopher. Everything around us has an opposite, a negation that seems to complete the existence of the original. Without heat there is no cold, without darkness there is no light, without death there is no life. The universe is filled with these pairs of opposing states. Universe as it exists today can be defined as the existence of and the interplay between the opposites.

The seeming opposite entities are so closely connected, it's very easy to think of them as the same. One cannot imaging success without going through defeats. One cannot imagine feeling joy without going through the sorrow. This dialectic of the opposites is what produces the enormously complex and rich philosophical landscape within human mind. It has confused so many, that some came to believe in the existence of dualism and the rest came to believe the opposite, non-dualism, or the belief that all is one.

Of all the opposites, being and non-being is of the most profound significance. Plato thought we are born with certain knowledge of some, including the existence of being. We may be the only organisms who can feel the existence of non-being, non-existence of anything.

Germ

There is something hidden deep inside me, that only my soul knows
It tries everyday, every once in a while to purge that abomination off me
Yet, it cannot and I am stuck with suffering and pain

Does this suffering end, without purifying my body, and soul?
How do I purify that which is not pure

The germ in me laughs at my futile attempts
It challenges me if I can persist my fight
What shall I respond when I havent wont a single battle

Belief

I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.
-- Kant

Belief, often without a logical basis, is the foundation for human excellence. If we don't believe the impossible, we would have never achieved the impossible. Impossible is difficult to deduce from reason and evidence, by its very nature. A blind belief is the only source of inspiration to strive to achieve that impossible of yesterday, which has become possible of today. With reason alone, we would have been stuck within the circle within which deductive reasoning rules, from the available evidence, and would have waited for new evidence for achieving the impossible. In most cases, blind belief alone pushes the boundaries of possibility. What we call as human endeavor, human spirit is based on a strong faith in blind belief. Many a times, I do something, because I feel I can do it, without knowing why.
The important question is, how does mind, that deterministic thinking machine, that organic matter thinking via well defined chemical reactions, actually believe something blindly, without a basis in evidence? How does it almost always predict/believe the right thing, when it can blindly believe the opposite too. There lies the mystery of what mind is.
No matter how powerful machines can become, at thinking and inventing, it is doubtful if they can ever learn to believe in the impossible. If they cannot, then can they ever become more achieving than us?

Complexity

How do we characterize complexity? Can we give a formal definition for what we perceive as complexity in systems around us? Can we have a mathematical equation, and a mathematical truth, that can transcend differences in matter, shape, size, and can explain complexity in a system?

For a long time, I thought logarithm of number of independent systems that combine to form a larger system, gives an accurate measure of how complex a system can get. Complexity is directly proportional to the amount of effort needed to answer questions about a system. So it is very important to understand complexity, to solve the problem of finding strategy for solving problems. If what I think, i.e., logarithm of number of independent parts turns about to be correct, then all limited size problems can be solved in limited time. That way, it links space and time so tightly that they will just be treated as minor variations of essentially same thing.