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Loneliness is a great teacher.You see things much more clearly ,and the persons within you,now separated from their usually
intermingled mass,interact freely and logically.At times you feel this vacuum,that grows on you like a cancer,(no i am not
stealing ideas from Paul Simon)and to get out of the clutches of this vacuum,you need loneliness.Solitude ,multitude:interchangeable
terms for the wise man- the man who can not people his solitude can not remain alone in a bustling crowd .(Baudlaire said
this long back,I was told of this beautiful quotation by my philosopher uncle).Can you sense a certain degree of Catcher in
the Rye in my writings?
I loved the book.
You know I finished College,and perhaps that's the reason I am feeling this void;a sense of nothingness,a sense of frozen
time;I wish i could get rid of this feeling!!
so much for tonight,I intend to keep this page as a sort of diary;so that i don't have to carry it round.And as far as
privacy is concerned,the stuff I write is nothing confidential;so people will as it is avoid reading it!!
so long then
bhisma,7th May 2001 going onto 8th May
CBT,Delhi
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Hi,
it's nice to be back,and not working.Don't get me wrong,it's not that I am underworked,it's just that I have grown numb
to the pressures of a 'Full term' at Cambridge!So I am just letting off some steam by writing to myself!Steam?
I have been wondering about the wind blowing against the stone structures here:it must have been exactly the same eight
hundred years back,and people would still be wearing those long overcoats,and faces buried deep into upturned collars!Cambridge
gives me too much of an 'advaita' feel,I have never realised (and relished) being a small insignificant part of the whole
so much...it's like the sea(I just can't avoid this imagery,I am haunted by the sea...all the time)...and the cold siberian
winds striking against my face,and i am walking up a long,winding and lonely road,and the background hums with the initial
incantations of Allah Hoo,a meditative surreal atmosphere,and a quest that goes on and on...
so much for now,
bhisma
early hours of 21st November,2001
Trinity College,Cambridge
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Life is pretty strange.
How do we explain intuition?I knew that this website editing would work today.Don't ask me why/for the past three months
I could not operate this feature from the Cambridge network:but today as I opened the site,something told me that it's going
to work.And it did.
Our consciousness thereore perhaps has more than one temporal dimension.As in,it is just not about the present,it is also
about the future and the past.But then intuition would be explained well only when we link the future and the past in a rather
inextricable way.Let's not get confused here.
My first proposition is that consciousness is NOT a 'as-is-where-is' phenomenon.It has a temporal span.
My second proposition is that to include intuition as a supra-conscious construct would involve some form of basic conditioning,e.g.my
last several attempts were unsuccessful in editing the website,so it was the inherent statistical expectation that was rewarded
when I saw the thing working now.OR,as you may argue,everytime I logged in,there were two competing expectations,one that
said 'it will work' an one that said 'it will not'.When I see this working,the rewarding expectation wins,and thereby causes
some form of retrograde modification of working memory(AFTER I see that it is working, I feel that THIS is what I THOUGHT
would be the case):and memory modifications are not uncommon,albeit the studies that I am aware of are all pertaining to long
term memory.
So much for a spirited analysis,which maybe totally off the mark for all I know.
You know better.
bhisma,
11:30pm
the side table in my room
Trinity College, Cambridge
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Well everything does seem perfect.The laptop,the weather,the course (I don't have essays to write...thank God for that),and
in general,everything.Yet there is something wrong,something seriously wrong.Or no, I am just seeing wrong meanings ,trying
to search for meanings where they don't exist:there was this Ottoman Sufi saint called Misri who, in captivity started thinking
that he was the prophet ,and then felt frustrated because people were not acknowledging his prophet-hood.
No,I am not Misri.
Stop,why the hell do you want to publish this to the web?Is it all that necessary to share the piled up negatives inside
you?Stop, I say.
bhisma,
in an extreme moment of self-deprecation,
6th March,2002
Trinity
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And yet again.Issues that otherwise don't surface,unless it is a lonely spring night with memories of a wasted day.The
funny thing is that words have started repelling me,I wish I could paint;or upload some of my favourite music in this site.Perhaps
I don't wish anything anymore.
One of the most intriguing analogies given to human mind is that of a handfull of sand.Some say that hold the sand tight
,otherwise the wind will blow it away and it will be dispersed for ever.Others say that the tighter you try to hold the sand,
the more it slips away.Between these two extremes lies my life view.
Some other day,maybe.Some other way ,maybe.
I won't let language rule.
bhisma
7th april,2002
trinity
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Dreams are like imaginary glass houses, which give rise to real glass shards when broken. Shards that hurt,shards that
make you bleed,shards that advise you never to build glass houses in future.
But, in some opportune moment, the Freudian id strikes back, and you start building a glass house all over again...what
a game,and what an irony....you play to lose but you play all the same...
(excerpt from a mail that I once wrote:Thought it satisfies the criterion for being arbit as well)
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I decided to put in a few photographs to this otherwise drab page.I was wondering whether I present a true picture of all
that I say (in words and pictures) in here.Perhaps the answer is not a strict yes or a strict no:it's somewhere in between.The
Sufi says 'chhupte nahin ho saamne aate nahin ho tum' (you don't hide from me,and yet you do not reveal yourself). I have
been wondering of late whether it makes sense to write at all.But I did mention my disillusionment with words earlier,didn't
I? It is high time I started writing something more sensible.
bhisma
24th June,2002
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Last night we were talking about love.The normal,most talked-about man-woman variety.Nothing new, nothing unique, nothing
out of the world. But yet, the ever-elusive explanation of that strange sensation:something that has baffled philosophers,psychologists,
and of late,neuroscientists alike. A quest for an ultimate basis for having it proved futile--- it does not, from any evolutionary
standpoint, make much sense.There is little 'inclusive fitness' and much less of the natural selection logic of maximising
the chance of passing on your genes.In fact,on the contrary,having an emotion like love in the long run might end up reducing
one's chances of maximising the vertical gene flow.A proximate basis is easier to account for:there would always be some 'pleasure
molecules' released at the end of it all,whether from the 'act' of love (whatever it is),or from love per se (conscious reflection
on the emotion/parties involved in the relationship).
Maybe ,we hypothesized, it is a rather fortunate accidental
byproduct of a highly developed 'self' consciousness [the ability to reflect on one's own self,an ability that makes good
evolutionary sense ],in conjunction with 'basic' evolutionary drives like that of courtship.So are we able to love more than
our ancestors?
Do we care?
bhisma
29th July,2002
trinity,with an immortal Lata playing in the background.
Audiogalaxy is dead. Long live Audiogalaxy.
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Musing on human relations is not something
I am doing for the first time these days.Someone asked me today,visibly frustrated with my rather simplistic approach to relationships
(and hence life) ,'ok,so what do I hold on to?'I think this is where the catch is.The need for a skeletal belief system to
hold on to,a skeletal 'bare minimum' set of people you love are something people keep searching for.And repenting,when what
they thought was absolutely basic falls apart. I have seen very very close relatives of mine live broken lives,and die broken
- once their apparently immutable skeleton gave way.The solution lies in turning the question around.Why do we at all need
to hold on to anything?People who want to swim and not float are perhaps swimming because they LIKE to.Hence the hedonistic
argument is not quite out of place :I shall swim if I like to,I shall float if I like to.To sum up in as little words as possible,
one should ask 'why do I need to hold on to something?'It is difficult to avoid taking the philosophical plunge and sermonize
on the concept of the whole world being just an illusion.But I shall try to do so.All I believe,now and here (belief must
always be spatiotemporally defined phenomenon) is that we don't need to believe anything other than our emotions.That
is ,if you are hell bent on 'believing' something!
Jargon again.And I admit I am not crystal clear on the issue.But whoever stopped anyone from hypothesising?
bhisma
23rd October, 2002
khansahab,trinity
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My philosopher uncle was travelling down to Oxford from Cambridge the other day and the bus halted at Bedford. Bedford
happens to be the place where I was born, and not unnanturally, my family was based there at that time.My uncle,it was evident
,was struck by nostalgia.
And I wondered, what could it actually mean?
Nostalgia is perhaps an umbrella term used to denote a surge of emotions related to the past.It is strange that often
what is not perhaps a pleasant memory also evokes nostalgia-albeit,it does not hold true for particularly strong images.e.g.usually
you should not see people saying things like 'oh,i am feeling so nostalgic about the way i strangled her to death/the tiger
jumped on me/I fell into a ditch,and likewise.Perhaps another key element is the fact of an extended time period.One
tends to be particularly nostalgic in places where one has 'long ' memories .We can perhaps sort the potential cues for nostalgia
in the following heads:
a) memories of a long placid life,e.g.the neighbourhood where you grew up
b) memories of particular events ,involving emotional arousal ,below a certain, almost objective limit.
Another key feature of this is the fact that nostalgia is more often associated with inanimate objects/places than with
persons.It seems there is a necessity for a definite degree of in-animity required for nostalgia to develop:and this is true
even in case of nostalgia associated with other human beings,e.g.when one feels nostalgic on meeting a long lost friend, it
implies that the friend [or,alternatively,the memory-image of that friend] had undergone some form of in-animification(i.e.transformation
into a non living representation) over the period that one was out of touch.It is difficult to expect feelings of nostalgia
when one is in constant touch (and hence,a witness to the dynamism of the whole relationship) with another.
It is strange to note that nostalgia does not seem to have exact parallels in at least three other languages that I know.The
closest I can come up with is 'sukh-smriti'(pleasant memories,sanskrit/hindi):which does not quite capture the essence of
nostalgia.It would be interesting to find whether nostalgia is a sole prerogative of the latinic-germanic set of
languages!
bhisma
13th november, 2002
trinity
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Ambition, happiness, complacency, dreams.Compatible concepts? A friend suggested an intuitive classification last night.Ambition
kills you, while you live for your dreams.Good, catchy thought.But I feel there is more to it.The boundary is never clear-
where dreams stop and ambitions begin. You may feel really objective and say ambition is a 'practicalised dream', never mind
even if it sounds a bit oxymoron-ic.The answer , I believe,lies in perspectives. The same goal might be a dream to you at
a time ,and an ambition in some other. I refuse to classify an ambition into the more materialistic realm, it certainly deserves
more respect than that. So my idea is that a dream when sufficiently close to achievement becomes more of an ambition. A key
thing to remember is the post-achievement appraisal process: i.e. you might say, "it's always been my dream to climb the Everest",
and you are right, it's a dream, not an ambition. Now look at it from the point when you are at the base camp - about to climb
it.It's more of an ambition, and even if you are alone, it's the impending prospect of an achievement (usually immaterial
whether the 'success' is rated by others or is an essentially selfish one) that eggs you on. Civilisations move on that, so
to brush it aside as a freak of a careerist mind is not wise.
Here comes the question of complacency/happiness.I feel it's much easier to look at the solution than to restate the
well known problem in flowery words. And the solution is not new either. While one needs a goal to DRIVE one
on, one should not view the goal as an object of happiness-instead,happiness must come from the process of achieving
the goal- the very act of climbing Mount Everest should be enough to turn you on, so that you are happy without being complacent.
And I know it's all so simple on paper and words.
But that's how it is- here is celebrating the armchair !
bhisma
8th December, 2002
trinity
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My article in Varsity, the Cambridge newspaper,on Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.Not quite arbit,though...
More arbit stuff: not really worth clicking, unless you have a free internet connection and are royally bored:)
And yet more random stuff, from the wannabe film critic in me
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