round n about

Fear of the unknown

2008-06-01T04:11:00.006+05:30

There are times when we get stuck. Stuck at a point from where we cannot move ahead or think of any solution. We try several times, make the same mistakes over and over again and finally give up excruciated, drained out.

We think: "What wrong am I doing?", "It should work but why it isn't?" and things like these. And when all this happens over and over again, we fear it, avoid it, curse it. What we do not confess to anyone, or even to ourselves, is that the fear is nothing but ignorance, the avoidance hatred, the cursing jealousy. Ignorance of not being able to decipher the code, get the gist of it; hatred of getting accross something like this when everything was going on smoothly; jealousy of people who have got through such situations, who seem to have mastered a trick still unknown to you, and teasing you.

Instead of going haywire, kicking the coffee table and picking up the telephone and throwing it on the ground, what we need to do is sit down and ask yourself one question: "Do I need to learn something new?". These are the times when you have to ascend to a higher level. This is what they call risk management. There was a time when in business people avoided risks, longed to make it more secure than profitable. They feared risks, avoided them. But they saw some people taking risks and still getting away with its dangers. They started envying them. What they did not understand was that when they stopped muttering over their misfortune, that's the moment they'd start thinking of some soultion.

Every good businessman says "Play it safe. Avoid risks". Every great businessman says "Take risks and learn to manage them". It's the fear that makes them stop thinking and start muttering. It's the fear that creates the difference. Those who have the guts to fight it, overcome it, work it out are the haves. Those who can't the have-nots.

Have you ever wondered why a highly skillful batsman like Rahul Dravid is struggling with his form while someone like Dhoni who, many would agree, doesn't possess that technical soundness and finesse, creating waves when many would have thought he wouldn't last even a few years in international cricket. Well, here he is, four years after making a trigger-happy, rash century against Pakistan, which could well have been a fluke, on top of the world being the most valuable player, the best captain and what not! But then how has he managed not just to survive at the big stage but rule it the way Dravid never could?

The key is adapting, acclimatising, changing and more importantly knowing when to change. When to ask youself the question: "Do I need to learn something new?". That's how you can find the answer and jump over the hurdle. That's how you can zoom in and see what you were unable to see. You'll find out what you didn't know, the unknown. The fear will fade away. And you will win it. All you need to do is zoom in into the finer details. Kyunki 'Darr ke aage jeet hai'.

Systems

2007-08-09T03:32:00.000+05:30

Everywhere around us we see systems. Set procedures some people make and others follow. They include a vast range of things like governments, academic disciplines, religions, languages, blah blah blah. I hope you've got what I mean.

The reason for this tendency of man to make and follow systems is that we get caught in inertia. Some people, however, believe that they are a must for the better functioning of the society. I agree with them only partially. I feel, in a way they are both developmental as well as deteriorating for an individual. Developmental because they make the world get organized, function as it is, without hiccups. But what they also do bring with it is a kind of complacency, stagnancy, an innovative halt. This is a general tendency of any system.

The more a system is acceptable to change, the more flexible it is, the better it is. Such systems last longer. I'll give you an example. Sanskrit is undoubtedly one of the most systematic languages in the world. It has great grammar, great phonetics, all scientific. But has anyone wondered why anyone doesn’t speak it today in spite of it being perfect. It's because Sanskrit had always been a strict language, a stubborn language. It hardly left any breathing space for people to innovate, to experiment, to add inputs into it. It was considered throughout its lifetime as a sacred language; a language of scholars, learned people. And these learned men never wanted to spoil its sanctity through the development a lingo or slangs. That's why it never percolated deep enough in the society to be spoken by the masses. And so it happened, it lives mostly as a gnome in our society.

Same is the case with many other systems. It's like a fist full of sand; the more you tighten it, the more it spills out. There was a recent survey by Google which showed that most of its searches for words such as 'sex', 'porn', etc originated from the west and south Asian countries. Topping the list was Pakistan. India was third. These are countries with a conservative society, having strict tacit decrees about sex, or any physical expression for that matter. The bottom spots of the list were occupied by the north European countries. These countries are the ones with a very liberal outlook (which many people will call shameless and profane) towards such things.

So, it is easy to comprehend that the stricter a system gets, the more adherent it gets, the more inertia it occupies, more is the itch people feel to break free. That's why we have rave parties; to show ‘the middle finger’ to all one has to do and be all the time and just break free. We try things completely opposite to it. We want to experiment. If this is profanity, I guess I like it.

Sanskrit: a perfect language?

2007-07-06T14:46:00.000+05:30

Most of us know about the classification of languages on the basis of the structure of simple sentences, viz. SOV, SVO, VSO, etc. Here S is the subject, V is the verb and O is the object; the three exhaustive elements of a simple sentence. Hindi and most of the contemporary Indian languages fall in the SOV category. English and most of the European languages on the contrary are of the SVO type. That’s the basics.

Now, here’s the twist (rather my observation). French fits in both the SVO and SOV classifications. This is because when the object is a noun (proper or common or wateva shit!) it follows the SVO structure, like English but when it is a pronoun it follows the SOV structure, like Hindi. I’ll give you an example.

SVO: Je parle à Amit. MEANING: I speak to Amit.
SOV: Je te parle. MEANING: I speak to you.

The first sentence is easy to comprehend (‘à’ means ‘to’). In the second one, the second word ‘te’ denotes the object which is second person singular. Thus, we can see that it is like Hindi (Main tumse bolta hu).

And now, here’s another twist. A big one this time. There is at least one, if not more, language that defies the whole bloody classification. It is Sanskrit. Simple sentences in Sanskrit do not need to follow any specified structure. The reason is simple and as I like to put it, it is: Sanskrit doesn’t have any stray dogs. That in Sanskrit, we do not have the little words like ‘to’, ‘for’, ‘in’, ‘or’, ‘and’, blah blah blah detached and roaming around freely in the sentence. They are attached either to the subject or the object in form of ‘vibhakti’. Thus, in principle, every simple sentence in Sanskrit can be condensed into three distinct words: the subject, the verb and the object. And now, the stray dogs being caged, we can write these three words in any order we want (all 3! =6 ways) and the sentence will bear the same meaning. A unique meaning.

Let me make it clear that this is just a layman’s observation and need not be absolutely correct. But even then, it sounds great, doesn’t it? It might make a sound argument for those who think that Sanskrit is the mother of all languages, but if not anything else, it does give it a unique position.

What are dreams?

2007-06-15T23:48:00.000+05:30

Sometimes I wonder what dreams are. And this question has started troubling me a lot in the recent past; the reason being too much of sound sleep. But I too have carried out a, sort of, research on this. Although it may sound strange but yes, I’ve started experimenting with my dreams.

The findings are a hotchpotch; some quite obvious, some drastically surprising. I’ve come to know that my dreams are colourful (not always figuratively though, but technically). This is contradictory to what some of my friends, the very few with whom I’ve discussed the topic, have told me. According to them, their dreams are black and white. I’ve also noticed that I can feel things in my dreams. I can touch objects, smell odours, think, talk to people (the last one may seem obvious to almost everyone on this planet).

But, the big question that pops up in my mind every now and then is, can we learn something in our dreams? Learn something new, that is. Something that we haven’t known in our real life. This would make dreams look more like reality and less unlike it, at least in this respect. This recursively makes us ask what exactly dreams are. What is it that can make us feel the sensations as if it were real? Of course it is real, one may think. But that’s just what the word “dream” defies, just what it is an antonym of.

If ever I find out, in the course of my experimentation, that we could, or at least I can, learn new things in a dream, what should I infer from it? That dreams are real? Or they are just what they described in The Matrix as the other world; the red pill world? Are we living in two parallel universes? Or are dreams and reality two worlds of the same universe; the universe still unexplored? We just do not know.