Saturday 14 July 2018

Nothing Really

If you'd ever have cared enough and scrolled down this dumpster I consider "my blog", you'd have found (among other things):
  1. Admiration for childhood idols
  2. Disguised nostalgia
  3. Sheer cynicism
  4. Early attempt at cheap fame (we WERE naive back then)
  5. Hopeless attempt at Urdu poetry
  6. Hangover of a TV series I'd just finished
  7. Anger
  8. A true story
  9. A one-dimensional anatomy of love
  10. Self consolation
  11. Brush with nihilism
  12. Some serious overthinking
  13. and just plain shite!
A blog that was started exactly six years ago by two Nobodys, who were too high one night on an embarrassing concoction of three parts whimsy and one part misguided literary-vainglory, today has 16k hits at an unremarkable-but-noticeable 7 page views per day. The number means literally nothing in this age of virality. But for a web page that bears a name barely designed for recall, and which has virtually nothing pointing to itself in the infinity of cyber space, I often wonder what brings you - the reader - here. Being driven to my office in the rear seat of an Uber on a lousy Monday morning, the obvious next question was the quintessential "why"- why were they written in the first place?

Scrolling down my posts over the past 6 years I saw a list like you see it on top. Although the actual titles aren't half as self explanatory, I could - in the ever so magical experience of retrospective wisdom - see them for what they truly were. And I realized this- despite all the loved ones and closest of relationships one might have, there are things which perhaps no one can truly understand, but one's own future self- a person that doesn't even exist when those thoughts first come to amuse, haunt, annoy or delude you, but a person that slowly but surely emerges out of them. That is because theoretically speaking, anyone else's understanding of our mental state would be defined and limited by two factors-
  1. your own understanding of that emotion or state of mind at that point of time, and
  2. the efficacy of any language as a tool to communicate such a complicated emotion or realization to another individual
There are clear inefficiencies here. Which is why such emotional states are so fleeting in nature- they evaporate before they can be thoughtfully (and at times painfully) distilled into a realization or an understanding. That is essentially all of adolescence- a lot of feeling with little understanding of what anything actually means. Perhaps that is all of life itself- a constant mismatch between what we feel and when we actually become able enough to comprehend what it truly means. And hence, a constant attachment to the past, for it always feels clearer/simpler than the present, which in turn will make more sense some time in the future.

Or maybe it means nothing really. Perhaps, as a species we should spend more time understanding ourselves than anything else in the universe. Or maybe the best of us knew this and accepted the futility of such an endeavor or the sheer existential horror that it would bring. So we created a world and a society that could keep us distracted enough to remain sane.

Why should this blog be any different?

Wednesday 14 March 2018

To Infinity and Beyond

It was in an utterly unremarkable moment that a good friend handed over to me, a petite book in our high school library. The awkward smile of the author was equally unremarkable, as were the large specs that the person had put-on in the photograph on its front cover. What was written on the cover though was interesting enough to spark the curiosity of a 15 year old. Those were words he would stumble across on the Discovery or the National Geographic channel, once in a while when neither Buzz Lightyear nor cricket was on TV-


“From the big bang to black holes”

I barely knew anything about the book or its legendary author. I did not understand much of it back then and years down the line today, I do not understand why it is the-most-widely-owned-but-unread book of all times (shouldn’t the Bible deserve that honor?).

Despite Mr Hawkings' best efforts to make the daunting science of it palatable for the layman (by not including a single equation, except for the famous E=mc2), I was too young to understand A Brief History of Time. But intelligently strewn between a gamut of scientific jargon and abstruse concepts, were some truly fascinating ideas! It was about the most genuine of all human curiosities-

Where did the universe come from?
Why is it the way it is?
What is time?

I still think those are the most important (and uncomfortable) questions before mankind. Dabbling across the treacherous frontiers of science and philosophy, they come to all of us at one time or the other- in moments of profound existential despair or times of drug addled thoughtful inquiry. It is for this reason that I found myself going back to the book over and over again. I am sure I still do not understand bits of it. But I do realize what it is about and why it is important. Along with the likes of Feynman and Sagan, Hawking was among the first members of the scientific community who had endeavored to extend scientific discourse from classrooms to drawing rooms.

He may not have been able to produce testable unification of physics, but in this regard Stephen Hawking did succeed. The sheer number of people talking about him today is evidence of the same. It was unfair- the cards he was dealt by life. The way he played with them though, was nothing short of an inspiration- opting to battle the universe that crippled him for life, by unraveling its deepest, darkest pockets.

And that is the man’s legacy, if not anything else.


Remnants of my 15 year old self hope you’ve just begun your journey to infinity and beyond.

Bon voyage!