As the strong gushes after gushes of wind blew across my face with each passing lorry, I cursed the air resistance and imagined how I would have floated smoothly on the glistening highway if it weren't for this unthoughtful wind. Completely unmindful of the abnormally large drops falling all the way from up there, I wouldn't have imagined that if it weren't for this same air resistance, any one of these drops would have been enough to crack my skull into two.

Drenched to my underpants and shivering to my belly, I had just one thought in my mind - to reach the destination. But then was it the destination that mattered ?

I thought so.

And then I thought I was wrong, and I am enjoying the challenge as much as anything. Such a nice politically correct thing to feel. Challenge, eh ? So many people say this, right ? "Enjoying challenges" is a great thing to do, for it displays in no uncertain terms the fibre and strength of your character and personality.

So convenient, because life keeps on throwing challenges, and there possible can not be a dearth of challenges for you to claim that "I'm lovin it..." . But till what point does one cherish challenges, leave aside desire them ?

This question, and obviously the answer to it, is, to my mind, the key to use as an indicator of the "challengeworthiness", if you want to call it that, of any individual.

People respond to challenges in different ways. Some feel scared and some irritated. Some feel frustrated and others esctatic. Some look for an escape route, some diligently try to search for the best available route, and some others smile because they see the possibility of creating a couple of new routes. But interestingly, it is the difficulty level of a challenge which is seemingly the most important parameter in determining how a particular individual responds to a challenge. However, the parameter itself, in this case, is largely unmeasured or measured with a singular lack of objectivity. And so what is the basis of categorising a challenge, and then responding to it, becomes an open question.

Lets say one accepts a challenge gleefully, after somehow determining and evaluating the difficulty of overcoming it . Lets also assume that one is reasonably well equipped, in one's own estimation, to deal with the problems anticipated in overcoming the accepted challenge.

The more difficult part, however, remains.

Execution...

For it is during execution that men fail. It is in the process that after a point people give up. Most of the times the individual who gives up does so with seemingly rational reasons. At different points in the execution period, it does not seem to make sense to go on and continue. As a matter of fact you are likely to be labelled as a fool who cannot take decisions dynamically if you continue to do things in the same direction. And it is one's own guts and self-confidence only that can make one continue amongst all opposition. And this opposition may not just be from the outside world, but even from the people closest to you. But one has to stick it out . And yes, that is easier said than done. And that, to my mind, is at the heart of every challenge.

This post is both - a response to a post at http://vaibhavshintre.blogspot.com/ where ponderings over questions searching for humanity and the abominably difficult to find human spirit ( read dying or dead ) lead to rambling thoughts, and pardon my saying so, scrambled ideas.

Manipulation is a useful word though, I must say. It can be used to invalidate any plan or action very easily, and more importantly, with impeccable logic expressed, ironically, through feelings and perceptions.

And when that is done in response to observations which can in no way be even comprehensive, leave aside complete. Does this seem too mechanical or obscure a way of tackling tricky questions ? Or maybe this answer itself may be labelled as an exercise in manipulation.

Fair enough.

Immeasurability of intentions has often been as a proxy for unreliability. And one can argue that the proxy is as good as any. Its one of those convenient pieces of logic that can not be proved incorrect, though it may not be proved correct as well. So often in today's world do we come across examples of humans behaving in a way which we feel (and sometimes think also) is inhuman.

And human spirit, did someone say ? I was reading a book sometime back where the author has claimed (not suggested) that we have lost passion completely, and goes on to support his extreme opinion with saying that even our lovemaking today has lost passion. I dont blame him, as he is writing a book that must sell. But his assertion, like so many others made today, is one that some people would identify with, to varying degrees, and jump up and say "Oh yes! By Jove he is right!!!", and an exercise in generalisation of a statement which is neither an incomplete truth nor a complete falsehood begins.

One of my friends wrote a piece once, titled "Perceptions are illusions..." , and how aptly his title explains the phenomenon going on here. The danger, however, is that not just as individuals with varying capabilities and inclinations for carrying out logical analyses objectively, but also as groups we so often take the path of least resistance, relying on intuition and allowing it to dictate to us what is and what should be. How many times have new scientific theories, counter-intuitive and going against existing scientific thinking not been proved correct and gone on to become the new truths of the universe ?

Humanity has gone and human spirit has been crushed ?

Well... I would say go and look at a mother breast-feeding her child... Go and see a boy of seven on the streets carefully covering his sister of five with a torn blanket, himself shivering with cold, and still having eyes shining with hope and satisfaction that his kid sister is warm. Go and see old professors and teachers who, having spent 40 years shaping the thinking of young minds, still getting all excited when a naive youngster points out an apparent flaw in an accepted theory.

I can go on and on... But that is irrelevant here. What is of the essence is that till the day human race is physically wiped off the face of planet earth, ( and assuming they havent settled on some other planet by then ) humanity will always be there, not just mildly present in some dark corner and shrieking for becoming relevant and significant in people's daily lives, but being strongly overpowering... Enough to still make a student guilty when he cheats in exam... only, due to an acceptance of dilution of humanity and human spirit by people without due acknowledgement to the powerful spirit that is there within the critic himself, which actually made him ask the very questions I would have been tempted to answer here, but wont...

But I'll say one thing, in each and every individual I see today, I can definitely see both humanity and spirit, and I refuse to pass judgements on these, not because I have seen everything that is there to see, but because I haven't...

It is said that God watches everything and at the end, truth always triumphs. Well, I ask one simple question – why at the end ? Why not before that ? What kind of incentive system has He set up in which the good and right things are the most difficult to do, and are the most highly disincentivised, and vice versa ? What kind of systems wants the members to do something all the time, and helps them if the do exactly the opposite ? What is more important – Being good, or being smart ?You say something in Gita, Bible, Quran and all your religious books, and the actual world works in exactly the opposite manner ? And You hide from criticism behind the wall of unquestionability of your so-called profound wisdom – to understand which one is first supposed to accept and endorse it, and then, having committed to it, he doesn’t remain your critic or adversary any longer. Very smart, I say – but not right. Not good. And then they say, all good is GOD. Ya, ofcourse no one said God is all good !

Serenity and calmness. Two words to describe my state today. As if all commotion has been magically blocked out. Nothing out of the ordinary has happened since yesterday. But I’ve felt so peaceful since I went to that temple yesterday, and had a nice drive on that deserted 4 km stretch of road, with cool breeze touching my face, stars and moon shining in that clear sky beautifully, and nature revelling undisturbed and unpolluted. Throughout that drive I was almost in a trance, loving every moment, so much so that I was really dissappointed when I reached more civilised parts. And ironically, the temple itself marked the beginning of human encroachment. It felt so good to almost realise again that however the destructive ability of humans may have grown, there are, at least as of now, still vast areas whose stillness and peace has remained undisturbed. How I would have loved to go for a long long walk on that road ! How wonderful those maiden fields looked ! Such a pattern in the seemingly random beauty of nature… such an organisation in the disorganised symbiotism on exhibit. Everything seems to be so much in place, so much belonging where it is. No discordant note anywhere, no sudden disturbances in the waves of the ocean, no unknown odours floating with the aroma of soil. Makes me remember a lot, and crave for a lot more. That is where I was born, that is where I belong, and that is where I’ll meet my end.

Everything is fair in love and war, they say ...

War kills thousands, and thousands live only for love...

But there are wars that gives lives to thousands, and there is love that kills many...

When a war is evaluated, people talk of the ends and the means. Why not in love ? Is love not a war ? And is all war not for something the people waging it love ?

And then they say everyone loses in a war, and everyone gains in love...

Ha!

What do they know of love or of war that of gains or losses think ?
What do they live that for the end live ?

An objective - a process - a desired outcome...

Is that all ?

Experience is the best teacher, they say. There are some things, it is argued, that can at best only be closely approximated in the mind by a process consisting merely of visualisation and fuelled essentially by imagination. Marriage, for example is considered well understood, at least as an institution. And yet, it is supposedly something that those who are either married themselves, or who have had a relatively long exposure of the institution can really understand, leave aside appreciate.
Old sayings, supposed to be the summarised results of centuries of wisdom, should be, at least in theory, be usable effectively as a proxy to self-experience, especially if used in conjunction with, and in addition to an anticipatory framework developed, both syntactically and semantically, on the basis of a logical analysis, and having a causal relationships based structure. In other words, based on a “what causes this ? “ questions as the core mechanism, and then a “what does this translate to ?” question as the mechanism to transfer the insights from the former to a model, giving you a set of things or events to expect or not to expect, as the case may be.
Though analytically sound, the above argument, however, makes some pretty big assumptions. For one, the ability of the model-developer to ask enough and the right kind of questions at both stages is assumed to be adequate, even if the adequacy as a relative evaluation is taken for granted for a moment. This is a dangerous assumption to make, especially if you are to base any decisions on the expectations derived from the model, not just because you may act on incorrect information, but also because most often you will not even realise the same, and therefore any undesired effects of your decisions are unlikely to be attributed to incorrect modelling, even at a latter stage. This means that there is a more than reasonable chance of your getting into a situation where you might keep looking for a problem where none exists, and perenially fail to be effective at all.
But of course, any engineer would immediately point out that there is a systemic design flaw, and in any case, there should have been a definite mechanism for feedback within the model in the first place. The problem with that, ofcourse, is that humans have not, as of now, discovered a way to beat time, and therefore every “feedback” is, really speaking, merely a “feedahead” in temporal terms. In other words, since you cannot use information from any feedback to reverse the effects of a decision you have taken in the past – at least not completely. This argument, in conjunction with the fact that all decision making in the end breaks down to answering a set of yes-no questions, complicates the entire process, because when you answer a yes-no questions incorrectly, the impact is likely to be much larger than that of an error you make in slightly under or overestimating a certain parameter – what I would call a grayscale error.
Another assumption in the suggested theory is even more obvious. It has been assumed that there is no information external to the model and affecting it, which is unknown at the time of answering the questions asked. This is a mammoth assumption, often not given due significance simply because we, in our typical human arrogance, believe that we have understood ourselves entirely, and therefore the combined and accumulated wealth of human knowledge should be enough to correctly answer all the questions asked at both the stages of the model-building process. This, we feel, is almost completely true especially in the case of social sciences, though we may concede some unknowns in the domain of physical sciences. Two major problems exist with this assumption. One is that our understanding of and interpretation of social sciences by itself is highly correlated with the progress we have made in grasping the physical truths of the universe. This is because every social phenomenon, behavioural trait, human characteristic, needs, wants etc. are explained, at the end of the day, using axioms from the physical and natural sciences, the the theory of evolution and the theory of chaos being striking examples of this dependence. Thus any changes in the theories of the physical world may any time shake the very foundations of the social theories, laws and frameworks. The second problem is that even if one accepts that we understand social sciences almost completely, the “almost” means that the entire question of uninhibitedly trusting the answers given on the basis of this knowledge is thrown open.
Exasperated though one may have been by so many problems raised in the preceding discourse, with no hint or intent of talking about a solution at all, I see one way, which, while not perfect by far, comes the closest to it. And to sum up the solution in a sentence, “Only a husband or a wife can truly know what marriage is.” . That is, I go back to feeling things instinctively without a deliberate effort at structure or analytics. Drastic though this may seem, even desperate to some readers, I take refuge in the fact that instinct, firstly, has a very small decision making window in time, i.e. instinctive decisions are taken for a very short future period of time. Simply put, this means that an instinctive decision is essentially only a “what just next ? “ and does not even seek to answer “what after that ? “ . This reduces, to a great degree, the damage that could be done by taking a wrong decision. Also, that makes feedback much more meaningful and relevant, as you can incorporate feedback very fast, sometimes in your very next action, as you are not committed at any point to any particular course of action.
The second justification comes from the fact that while we may not have theorized some of the physical laws at any given point in time, out instinctive feel of the way the physical world works is likely to be much more complete, having conditioned for much longer.
Ofcourse, I understand that there are at least five to six distinct objections to this idea which are well known and articulated. In the next part of this discourse, I am looking at making my stand about, hopefully, each of those and more, clear.