Poetriture

  I am not equipped to answer a deep a question as this, nor is this a discourse. This is a feeble attempt from a fellow human trying to make sense of this universe and our place in it, if there is one. However, this does not absolve me of a responsibility, a standard I hold for myself very strictly, to be chucked out of the window just because I couldn’t think of a better argument in favour for or against this particular tangle. Nevertheless let’s begin. There is a ritual, which I am sure all Hindus you know of do it. If you are a Hindu yourself, you might have done it yourself. After a Pooja of any kind is done, a coconut is broken, with a single blow to the ground, and the liquid is thrown over everyone present. This is a very auspicious thing to do and, if the coconut is broken in a single blow, it is applauded as it is frankly a difficult thing to get right. Anyway, I sat to wonder what the purpose behind it was. Soon I realised that this line of inquiry led me to answers like...

When we say that India is a great country, we say that in a sense that not only is the size of the country great, which it is, and not even describing the huge variety of landscapes, which we also have, but rather the huge amount of lines on which there is work to be done, the huge amount of people whose welfare is to be seen, the huge amount of brainpower required and is available for the same in the vibrancy and vividness of a gigantic talkative democracy. I invite you to look up a word in the English dictionary called ‘sonder’. It essentially means that every individual we see around us, or the ones we don’t see all have as complex a character and life as we have. Democracy is one of the few government systems which try to uphold this unachievable ideal, most other forms mostly reduce the people mere statistic or workforce.   When the sonder is applied to family, we can grasp it, but when the line of sight is compounded to include the entire nation, the concept just flies o...

Today, in the fury of reading everything there is to know about ISRO, I was struck by a very righteous question and subsequently got hit by the right answer. At the very least I feel that it is right. Also watching the movie “First Man” didn’t hurt either. I learned about the various missions we have undertook and how after facing extreme peril won over them, or won them over. I learned about the feelings of the entire nation after the “95%” success of Chandrayaan 2 as I too was in the flood of feelings when at 2.1 km above the surface of Luna, we lost our Vikram and Pragyan. The constant efforts to establish communications with it will continue till 21/9/2019 after which its lifespan will end. To the curious, that will be because of very little heat protection, the sun will literally fry the wiring in the instruments, rendering it obsolete. After that, as everyone says, we shall move on. We have come a long way from INCOSPAR in 1962, and since the formation of ISRO in 1969, ex...

I was once told that I should not define a teacher as, first of all, we all have an intrinsic sense of what a teacher is and secondly, more importantly, “Who are you to define a teacher, let alone your teacher?” I was told that it was demeaning and misguided, though being well intentioned. So, what I had decided to do was to describe what my teachers have been to me. They were never infallible heroes in capes, or magicians who waved their wands and put stuff into my mind. Even though there have been such people who held the post of my teacher, but were extremely unsuccessful in teaching me a single word. But I don’t consider them my teachers, anyway. They were just people, who could not teach. I might have been a tough student, to them, but I was never afraid to ask questions. I never felt silly or stupid to ask a question on fundamentals, in advanced classes, and such “teachers” never left a chance for me to not feel ashamed of myself. But that is where my teachers shined. They t...

It was just a normal morning stroll. It is the month of August as I write this, right in the center of the months of monsoon. The winds were certainly, particularly volatile that day as all the trees near my house were violently swaying. Dark clouds, all ready to pour down on my little village were curling from the winds. It had rained heavily moments ago, so the ground was wet and the road to the beach, slick. I had unwillingly woken up quite early in the morning, even before the break of dawn, with vain efforts of going back to sleep. After being couped up in the house, behind closed windows, it felt really nice to witness the rain and the subsequent wet atmosphere. My father had also got up, but unlike me he had woken up out of habit. I told him I was going to the beach for a walk. He was busy with whatever he was doing so he just smiled at me. I knew it would rain soon enough. Secretly hoping to get wet, I kept my phone at home. I wore my slippers and ventured into the strong...

Recently, I was having a discussion on this very topic with a dear friend of mine. It was on how it seemed cool to denigrate our culture, our values just for the sake of a few laughs, and that got me thinking how an empty rebellion, with no thought under it, was being flaked as it attracted scores of people behind it. Why did it feel cool to be an atheist? That answer is easy, it just means that you have at least thought about it. You are not sheep following traditions just for the sake of it. You take a scientific temperament or a template rather and apply it to the rituals and the stories told to you by your family. But this is a dangerous phenomenon, because once Occam's Razor is applied to thousands of years old history, it seems impossible to reconcile it with the mindset of today. What is so dangerous in that, you might ask? We'll get to that later, but keep that in mind that, once a framework of not just 'how to act' is replaced by 'what the world is...

आज, 68 साल से लोह पुरुष की अनुपस्थिति, के बावजूद भी उनकी उपस्थिति सच्चे भारतीयों के हृदय में अनुभव होती है. हमारा निराला भारत, जब अंग्रेज छोड़ कर गए तब ऐसी परिस्थिति में था कि मानो किसी ने गोलियों से छलनी कर दिया हो. 562 अलग रजवाड़े, सभी स्वतंत्र होना चाहते थे भारत से, और ऐसी परिस्थिति को सुधारने का बृहतकाय काम केवल एक ही पुरुष को दिया जा सकता था. एक उच्च कोटि के वकील, अति प्रभावी वक्ता, लोह सी इच्छाशक्ति रखने वाले और भारत माता के सबसे समर्पित पुत्र, श्री सरदार वल्लभभाई पटेल, को दिया गया. उन्हे निर्णायक कहा जाता हैं. उनके बारे में केवल पढ़ने से भी उनके लिए सम्मान जागता है. उनके चतुर विचारो और शीघ्र समय में निर्णय लेने की क्षमता के कारण जोधपुर के महाराजा हनवंत, मोहम्मद अली जिन्ना के पाकिस्तान में जुड़ने के ब्लैंक चेक को मना कर सके. वे समझौता करने की कला में इतने निपुण थे कि उन्होने उस राज्य के लोगो को आनेवाला सालो के अत्याचारों से बचा लिया जो पाकिस्तान आज तक पाकिस्तानी हिंदुओं के साथ करता आया है. ऐसीही निपुणता उनकी लोक प्रशासन में भी प्रदर्शित हुई जब वे जूनागढ़ को पाकिस्तान के चं...

Today, even after 68 years of absence of The Iron Man of Bharat, his presence is still felt in the hearts of true Indians. Our wonderful country, when left by the British, was in such a state, that if looked at the map of India, it would look as if someone had shot my India with a machine gun. 562 different states, were all expecting dominion status from Bharat when the British left, and the herculean task of unifying all of them was given to the only man, who could have possibly done it. It was given to an impeccable lawyer, excellent orator, iron willed statesman and the most devoted son of Bharat, Shri. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. He was called the Man of Action, and the Man of Decision. Just by reading about him, we feel proud for him. His quick thinking, and decisions regarding intregration of Jodhpur, made the Maharaja Hanvant Singh to forego the "blank cheque" offer of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, to secede it into Pakistan. The negotiational skills of Sardarji were so p...

Stop glorifying Ravan into a hero. He is not a hero, he is not a victim. He is not a person vs God figure. That self-important fiend was a villain, more cruel than Hitler. Raavan killed numerous innocent people just because he could, to test his might. He spilled urine into yagna kunds and killed the poojaris, he killed the yogis who never hurt a single creature. The egocentric fanatic also broke down so many temples. He raped so many girls and women, unmarried, married, widowed, everyone. He killed children in front of their parents, he killed parents in front of children. He was no hero. He was a sick and egomaniacal monster, who had become so narcissistic towards the end of his life, that he could not even see himself igniting his own funeral pyre. The usual arguments against all this is that he was a yogi, sanyasi, or whatever the word the person chooses to diefy him. He was a brilliant learner, a good astronomy student, and he did refine a few laws in Lanka and in his ini...

"When we think we know, we cease to learn." this idiom is said by a 16 times Nobel Prize nominee for literature, and 11 times Nobel Prize nominee for peace, along with being awarded Bharat Ratna, and a knighthood, holding the title of ex-president, and the first Vice-President of India, Dr. Radhakrishnan Sarvepalli. The westerners awarded Dr. Sarvepalli, because he criticized their philosophy, and did so with so much artistry and proficiency that he was one of the first person viewed from the East, as an authority on the Western philosophy. Though he studied in an evangelical Convent, he was a Hindu to his core. And it was his core beilefs that made him question and subsequently answer the profound questions raised by the Hindu theology, undertaken by him. He could easily breakdown any form of a critique on Hindu, which was a spectacle in his time. He reverted the western thinking, that Hinduism was superstitious and narcissistic, by showing them that their own philosoph...

When you read the letters on a page, you don't find meaning in the individual letters, but in the collection of letters called words. So dissecting a word to find its meaning may seem obtrusive to our aim. The meaning of the letters has now transcended into the words. So now, even if you know the individual letters, you still need to know the meaning of the word as a whole to understand it. This is understood by the society. As this society and culture is the transcendence of meaning from individuals, to a bigger whole. A collective meaning higher than the sum of its individual parts. Similarly an individual, has a bigger meaning than its individual organs, because now are not simply the assembly of organs, but we are also the interactions between them, and it's the personification of those interactions, which is you. Or if we continue on this path, we may reach atoms. Individual atoms, having zero meaning on its own. But when put together, they can study themselves i...

The emptiness that we feel in our lives, the ebb and flow of temporary satisfaction that we get from our routine, and the conformationally biased understanding of reality all propose the same thing that we do not know anything for real. The constant mugging up of the facts, is not even information in its definitive sense. That is just data, unprocessed, meaningless, raw data. The human brain is a far better judge of this concept. We tend to realize this fact, quite early, during our student years, that we don't even know the reason why we are studying the things that, we are studying. We just fall in like sheep, while consciously being painfully aware of our 'sheepness', and still follow a specific protocol of actions, this flawed society has imposed upon us. We are far better than this, and we have had proofs of it. People letting go of conventional education turning out to be absolute masterpieces of their time. They made this world a better place than when they f...