Movement

After the 'Arab Spring', we now have the 'Occupy' movements. India has had its 'Lok Pal' movement which looks fizzled out now. Anyway, movements in India never had long lifetimes since we gained independence. It is always difficult to create a sustained mass movement in the country. Fissions are bound to occur and factions develop.

'Occupy' movements, currently running without leaders are reactions of the societies towards imbalances created to disrupt the old equilibrium. Micro changes over the years have resulted in macrotransformation of the society in which the old middle class values are increasingly getting sidelined. The loss of power of the middle class to the upper class is a sign of society in transition. Upper class wielding power is the shortest way to chaos as they tend to use the power to protect themselves from the increasingly vehement lower classes rather than reaching a compromise with them. This causes further imbalance and chaos. I used to believe that democracy would help in avoiding this showdown but it seems that once the political class too is sold out, nothing else really matters.

The 'occupy' movements may either restore the balance in favour of the middle class or they may die out, resulting in the concentration of power in the elite. If the latter condition becomes true, it will be the beginning of the end of the world as we know it now. For, the American elite now have a say in almost all matters that affect the humanity rather than American public alone.

I'm no fan of Marx. But when you see the world rapidly moving towards his worst predictions. You can't help but notice. In fact, Marx's supporters may have actually delayed the coming of the revolution by creating awareness about workers' rights and promoting the role of the state in the economy earlier. With the capitalists warned about the problems that may be caused by the proletariat, they adopted reconciliatory measures. However, as the ownership of capital today has become depersonalised, there may be nobody around to take the real decisions soon. Shareholders being amorphous entities and profit being the only concern, managers are bound to make decisions that are good for their companies but bad for the humanity. Same goes with political parties. With each party appealing only to ideologically polarised groups, the independents have no choice but to adopt an ideology that is closest to their ideas - though they may personally be deadly against many of the party programmes. Thus politics too becomes an insensible, inhuman war without weapons that actually does no good to the majority.

When both economy and polity fail, society too might follow their footsteps. However, since society is composed of much more than economic and political relations, there is a chance that it may react to restore the equilibrium. The intensity of the reaction will depend on the prevalence and strength of non-economic and non-political relations in the society and their orientation towards the change.

For example, in the Arab Spring, the social networking sites increased the number of the non-economic, non-political relations; these were in general, negatively orientd towards the power centres. However, in India, not only are the political and economic relations more prevalent and stronger than NPNE relations, the orientation of the NPNE relations is itself ambiguous.

The West, unlike most of us in the East characterise it, is not a homogeneous entity. Each nation has a culture specific to itself. Hence, whether the 'Occupy' movements will be successful or not is a question that cannot be answered offhand. However, it can be predicted that political parties will try to co-opt these movements, leading to the alienation of many. Most of the objectives of these movements will not be fulfilled. And none of them is going to result in a revolution of the type any of the Arab Spring nations witnessed.

Never underestimate the power of democracy and capitalism to strike back.

Fatalism

The belief means that our lives are predetermined and that no matter what we do, the results have already been decided. So you need not bother about the test tomorrow - if it is destined, you will do well no matter what proportion of the syllabus you actually manage to cover. And vice versa.

Once upon a time, I believed that I could decide what I wanted to do with my life. Now, years later, I find that life is not as simple as that. There are always the factors that you tend to ignore that ruin it at the end. Earlier, those factors used to work for me. For the past decade, my efforts and those factors have clearly been out of phase. I guess most of the humans share my condition too.

That doesn't mean that I'm a fatalist. If I were, I would have been dead by now. For example, if while crossing the road, I decide not to check whether there is any vehicle approaching from either side, you know where I would end up at. Pure fatalism is pure lunacy.

Fatalism arises out of human incapability to account for all the factors that may affect the outcome. Cruelly, the existence of many of the factors is not revealed until the outcome goes against expectations. And we cannot clearly control many factors which may lead to an adverse oucome. As Murphy's law says: If anything can go wrong, it will. And the famous 'engineer's corollary': Even if it can't go wrong, it will. These are simple, heartfelt admissions of the fact that human beings cannot control the increase in entropy of any system for infinite time. Machines fail, screens freeze, empires crumble, we die.

But that doesn't mean that we should stop. True, most of us are sick of our lives. We suck at our jobs, nobody likes us at work, we are clueless in classes and in general, human life is a continuous agony from birth to death with fleeting moments of joy in between. Yet, we have achieved much and may achieve a lot more if we continue, even if cynically, at perfecting what we see around us. Or maybe even creating something new altogether.

After all, the concept of luck was created to account for incomplete information regarding the problem under consideration. Perfect information may not be feasible or even possible, but what is wrong in trying to find out?

Another Morning

Sometimes it is difficult to wake up in the morning when you know that you have nothing meaningful to do the entire day. You get a bit more down when you see people around you running, going about their own lives. We are jealous of others, no matter what they think about themselves. And we defend ourselves at times too, magnifying the boons of our and the the banes of their lives.

Having a lot of time in my hands leads me to ponder over one of the most profound questions man has been trying to find an answer to - why do I exist? Of course, religions have tried to answer this question for many, but there is always a silent general consensus that nobody actually knows the answer. Philosophical discussion with oneself, being the most entertaining method to kill time without using any other resource than your time, has been popular among homo sapiens since the beginning of the species. Everyone tries to find the answer in his/her own way.

And as Marx said, the ideas of the ruling become the ruling ideas. So, in general, we calculate the meaningfulness of the life of a person by his contribution to the market. There have been times when spiritual contribution was the one that mattered - that was when religion controlled man. It may seem foolish now but a great number of man-hours and intellectual capital have gone into elucidating the exact structure of heaven and hell and the various places in between that today we mock at. And tomorrow, our children may   mock us for running after bits of paper and electrical signals.

We may or may not believe in our meaningfulness; we may or may not follow the trends and fads of today; those trends and fads may or may not last. Who knows what lies beyond? I cannot say even about today. Or even the next moment. Life is unpredictable. Live it.

Loss and Gain

You never know the worth of anything until you have lost it. Had a chance to go to the place I was born and brought up for my cousin's wedding. The love and affection we received from there made me re-evaluate the kind of life I am leading - far away from most of the people who really know me and whom I know well too.

By the time you pick up some friends and contacts and begin to take root, you find again that it is time to move. And then you leave, leaving behind memories that gradually fade into dull images, occasionally refreshed when you go visiting them - for real, or now virtually, on FB or other networking sites. But mostly it is 'out of sight, out of mind'.

Of course, time smoothens out the rough edges. You tend to forget the little fights and grudges seem to pointless when you are so far away. What remains are sweet memories that smell of roses; forgotten garbage doesn't stink. 

So back we are to the city, where our days are ruled by the digital clocks  and watches, where our time is at least as precious as money and where anonymity is the norm. I do not know my neighbours. Why get to know them when I know they will be gone by next week? Peripheral attachments are the least painful ones when being removed.

Of course, we love the anonymity. It gives us freedom to do what we want without having people around us worrying themselves to death about our 'deviant behaviour'. It makes us all instrumentalists, rational men and women who choose their goals and means rationally rather than emotionally.

And as the politician from Britain said, Gandhi was wrong about villages. The future of this country is in its towns and cities. How much ever you romanticise it, there is not much charm in living in a rural area that kills freedom of thought and action in the name of culture and tradition.

Still water stinks in the long run.

Some things change, some do not.

Having listened to absolutely lame jokes about memory loss and numerical illiteracy by from the Home Minister, we are forced to redefine the meaning of 'Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, it did'.

US Govt's IQ went up finally. They have realised in the end that no matter what you do, how muchever you give, Pakistani army will nourish the terrorists it thinks are good and kill the ones it thinks are bad. 'It', of course refers to the top brass of Pak army and no one else. So better save the money in these hard times.

Palestinians are trying to get their state recognised in the UN General Assembly. Of course, Israel will find some way to thwart it. The rest of the world can just wonder at how such a small country that is barely visible on my mini-globe dictates terms to the whole world. Amazing. Stunning. Moral: Never judge anyone/anything by his/her/its size.

Enjoying a week of peace without fasts and blasts and diesel price hikes in the country. I understand that Congress has no intention of returning to power in the next general election. Or it already has some news that BJP is going to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Or that BJP will lose the election by D-L method. Like our cricket team. It obviously loses the games it plays badly in. But even if it puts up a winning show, rain and D-L do them in.

I am not going to learn the name of the Japanese PM until the day of examination. It is a futile, pointless exercise to learn a difficult name and then to unlearn it when the next one takes charge, even before the year finishes.

It seems EU and Germany have got themselves addicted to 'economic cliffhanging' like the Republicans. The IMF report on global economy of the year is sure gonna read like a best-selling, nail-biting, on-the-edge-of-your-seat, nightmarish thriller. However, movies and books do end.

The climate here is absolutely horrible. I sometimes feel I'm being microwaved. And whenever I read about morons denying climate change, I am reminded about my hobby in seventh standard - I would draw hundreds and thousands of triangles and measure their internal angles in the hope that at least for one of them, the sum of the angles wouldn't be 180 degrees. No, I was a perfectly normal and happy child.

Sometimes I just wonder why our government makes unimplementable laws. After a lot of thinking, I find that it may be doing so, so that the public 'servants' may find their work 'intellectually stimulating' (and financially rewarding).

While reading Indian history, I am just shocked to find how little the government has changed even after independence. We even continue to have the tax on salt that Gandhi protested against in his Dandi march. Not to say of corruption, police excesses, government indiffernce, etc.

So much for our tryst with destiny. I'm feeling miserable.