Author: yuganka (Page 2 of 7)

On Triund Trek and My Trip to McLeodganj

27 October 2018 / yuganka

I reached the McLeodganj bus stand around seven in the morning on 29^th September. Owing to the sheer enjoyment I derive from looking out of the window whenever I travel during the night, I could only force myself to sleep around one. I had spent the previous five hours watching the trees rush past, the different segments of the road divider blend into one another, and observing how vehicles had, almost without exception, failed to overtake my bus from the left side. For some reason, observing the night, and its inhabitants – the distant patches of light sprinkled about; deserted roads, some illuminated by streetlights and others shrouded in darkness; closed shops with the occasional truant leaning on its side, smoking; groups of men sitting on a cot and revelling in sharing the details of their day; sleeping dogs coiled into the coziest possible position, and the darkness beyond which hides all the rest of its mysteries from me – provides me some kind of peace. I don’t know why that is, but I allow myself the simpler explanation that it is on account of the promise of the arrival of dawn a few hours later, which holds innumerable possibilities.

This was my second solo trip of the year, as of my life. My hostel was around two kilometers from the bus stand and though my bowels were pleading me for relief, I chose to walk.

I found a couple of good cafes open even at this time. When I approached the owner of one of them who was out on the porch, smoking, and asked him if there was a washroom inside, I received a very short cautious look for half a second, and then he casually said that there wasn’t one. I realised he thought I only wanted to get my morning rituals done when, in fact, I would have loved to sit there for an hour and have a cup of coffee, while browsing through their collection of books which I could clearly see from the outside.

I reached my hostel around eight. After dumping my luggage in the common room, I headed off for a relaxed breakfast at a nearby café.

McLeodganj is famous for the Triund trek. Triund is situated at the foothills of the mighty Dhauladhar range, at an altitude of around 2800m. The seven kilometer trek to this beautiful peak starts from the Galu Devi temple which is a few kilometers above Bhagsu Nag, near McLeodganj. I had four days in this town, so I afforded the luxury of postponing the Triund trek to Monday, in the hope of avoiding the weekend rush.

At the café, I met a fellow solo traveller, Rajat, who had arrived from Bir the previous night. The locals, he said, had suggested him to go for the trek that day itself, since the skies were clear and the trek route was closed as recently as two days ago on account of bad weather. After considering this option for a few minutes, I decided to join him.

We reached Galu Devi temple around one. Here, one has to register at a police check post where the details of your group are noted (including the number of bottles and packets you are carrying), especially if you are going on your own without a guide.

I still wasn’t sure if I was going to spend the night at the top, so I packed all the bare essentials I might need the next morning if I chose to, in my camera bag.

In trekking, there is never a clear answer to the one question that almost anyone who cares to talk to you is most likely to ask – “how much longer to the top?” It could be two hours for experienced trekkers who have trained themselves to push on even in the most tiring stretches, and who have convinced themselves that the scenery from the top will compensate for all those that they had to leave on their way up; and then there is a breed of trekkers like us whose (relative) lack of fitness balances their sudden urges to sit at a point and gaze at the surroundings for extended periods of time.

Around half way to the top, we bumped into a group of two Israelis, Anna and Alexandra. As we started to talk we realized we were moving at about the same speed, so we decided to complete the rest of the trek together as a group.

Around five in the evening, we approached the final stretch of the trek – a particularly steep winding section of around one and a half kilometres, almost like the concluding test of resilience of those who had managed to reach thus far.

We passed this final test in around an hour and found ourselves at the top around six.

It was a beautiful sight. We found a rocky meadow, with a few scattered sections of rocks to the left and right. Towards the northern side stood the imposing, snow-capped peaks of the Dhauladhar, and towards the south we could make out the twin teeming cities of Dharamshala and McLeodganj. It was nearing sunset and, before our very eyes, the Dhauladhars slowly got enveloped in a light purplish hue.

After some time, on Rajat’s suggestion, I went to explore the shacks situated some distance away down a path towards the right, to enquire about tents for the night. It turned out to be a good decision for we got tents for less than half the price that the shacks situated closer to us, towards the left, were charging. I quickly reached an agreement with the owner of a shack and, within twenty minutes, our two tents were set up for the night. The rest of the group then returned to the shack for dinner, but I wasn’t feeling hungry so I chose to stay behind near the tents and absorb the atmosphere.

Even at seven thirty in the evening, there was no light pollution except from the torches of people staying in the roughly dozen or so tents scattered in the immediate vicinity. Towards the left of my tent there was a sloping rocky ledge that could have easily accommodated me twice over, so I lay down upon it, my hands folded at the back of my head, to gaze at the stars above.

It was a splendid view. I could see innumerable stars, a majestic view which my city life had deprived me of. I could almost make out the Milky Way, which is visible as a much denser stretch of stars in the middle, as compared to the rest of the sky.

I felt that same sense of wonder I used to feel during my childhood days when there was lesser pollution. These days, when looking at the skies of New Delhi, I can literally count the number of visible stars on my hands.

I soon realized how ill-equipped I was for spending the night at the top – I was wearing shorts and as the night advanced, I found myself shivering ever the more.

The cold forced me to retire into the tent around ten, where we had been provided with sleeping bags. However, I felt particularly dissatisfied about the arrangement for I could not see the sky at all – the tent had an opaque ceiling. So, I decided to take the mattress and sleeping bag outside and arranged them between the tent and the rocky ledge. I snuggled into the bag and soon fell asleep looking at the stars.

I was woken up around one by the incessant barking of a lonely dog from some distance down the hill towards the left. As I opened the sleeping bag a little, I realised everything I could see was illuminated in a soft blue light. I threw open the zip of the bag and sat up, looking around to confirm if I was dreaming.

I wasn’t.

It was moonlight. In the absence of light pollution, and the presence of very clean air, the moon was really making its presence felt. I was convinced that had it been a full moon light, and had my eyesight been a bit better, I could have even managed to read a few paragraphs in that light.

This also meant that the Milky Way was no longer visible, and it would remain the same way for the rest of the night. I felt good about not having postponed my star-gazing to the later part of the night.

The dog’s barking broke my trance. I do not know what is it with dogs, and what exactly they observe in the dead of the night when they seem to get the most active, but something had caught this chap’s attention and he continued to voice his displeasure.

The elders will often give you some supernatural reason for the same, pointing to the canine’s superior sense of smell and hearing than ours.

Fortunately, there were no elder people around me, so I chose to ascribe the most likely natural, but disconcertedly deadlier, reason to the dog’s restlessness – presence of wild animals.

As I mulled over whether it was a wolf or a leopard, and how much of a reaction time I would have if either of them were to come up near my sleeping bag out in the open, I realised it had been almost half an hour since the dog had started barking.

I finally decided to move inside the tent around 2 am, and soon fell asleep.

The next morning we had our breakfast around eight thirty. Anna and Alexandra had found an Israeli group which had just returned after spending the night in one of the caves on the snow-capped peaks of the Dhauladhar.

Bidding them adieu, I and Rajat started off on our way back.

The downward journey was exceptionally quick; we were descending at more than twice the rate at which we had trekked upwards. After a little over an hour, we found ourselves at the Mid-Point café, which lives up to its name. We weren’t feeling tired at all, and had only stopped for a drink, and to enjoy the splendid view, for the café was situated in the middle of one of the very few stretches from where one could see both the meadow at the top of Triund, and, turning our heads one hundred eighty degrees, the cities of McLeodganj and Dharamshala.

At this café we bumped into a group of three people who were also on their way down. As we started talking about the trek, and where we had stayed, one man from the group pointed to a distant pink hut at the top of Triund – the place of their stay, and I happened to ask how much it had cost them.

“Rupees fifteen hundred,” he said.

“Per head?” I asked, stunned.

“Yes,” he replied.

“But it cost us just seven hundred rupees,” I blurted.

His countenance deflated instantly. He proceeded to mention how the cost included two meals, and a guide who had accompanied them from the temple, but the damage had been done. I felt a strange mix of sadism and regret and as we started moving again Rajat chided me, laughing. The last thing anyone in the closing stages of a trip wants to know is how much money they could have saved.

As we moved forward we met many people who were on their way up. Whenever anyone would ask me how much further to the top it was, I would simply point to the Mid-Point café, and say “You see that blue structure there? That is the half way mark”.

We stopped for the final time around three-quarters of our way down. We had chosen a unique point, for from here we could see the cities to our right, and both the Mid-Point café and the Triund peak in the same glance towards the left. It provided a good perspective of all the ground we had covered during this trek.

Around an hour later, we found ourselves at the Galu Devi temple. It was a few minutes to one and our hostel was another hour’s walk from there. We took the trail that began towards the left, sloping into a path that would eventually lead to Bhagsu Nag.

Around half an hour had passed, when we realised we were lost. We had been walking on a narrower trail for a few minutes and found ourselves in the small courtyard of a traditional Himachali home. It must have been at least fifty years old, and had a thatched roof covered with what looked like slate. It was surrounded by fields on two sides and a neighbouring house was visible some distance away to its front, hidden by the natural downward slope in that direction.

Nobody seemed to be home, and the trail was all that was linking it to the outside world. We crossed the courtyard, and descended the three steps at its end to continue on the trail.

Ten more minutes passed and we finally found ourselves back at our hostel.

After a bath, I met Rajat again at the same café to have a hearty lunch. He was returning to Delhi the same day by a bus at six, so we decided to walk the two kilometres to the bus stand. I saw him off, bought my own ticket for two days later, and set off on my way back. By now, it was dark.

Hilly roads do not have streetlights and even though the distance between the edges of McLeodganj and Bhagsu Nag is just a little over a kilometre, allowing for the possibility of light pollution from either of those places to even slightly illuminate the way, there were sections where it was absolutely pitch black owing to the natural twists and turns of the road.

I wanted to avoid touching my cell phone to the extent possible, so although I had its torch at my disposal, I opted for the appreciably more exciting alternative – I would look at sections of the road illuminated by the headlights of the cars passing by, remember the contours of the road, as also the objects that dotted it, in my memory and walk that much distance while hoping for some other car to arrive in the meantime and illuminate for me the next section of the road.

Walking on such roads at this time is in itself a refresher on probability of simultaneity of distinct events.

There would be stretches when no vehicle would be visible in either direction for considerable durations of time, and then I would squint my eyes to make out the way. And then, when a particular vehicle would arrive, many more would follow, their lights a wasted opportunity.

I had covered over half the distance when I happened to look towards the sky on my right. It was a beautiful sight as I could see a lot of twinkling stars, and it was only upon closer examination that I could make out the very faint silhouette of a mountain that was dividing the sky into two.

The “twinkling stars” below it were actually houses situated upon the hill, and as I covered the rest of the distance to my hostel, I was lost in thoughts; mesmerised at how one could confuse houses for stars, and how the night had blended the two together into one entity.

On Photography and Living in the Present

4 October 2018 / yuganka

What does it mean to live in the present? It means to embrace the present in all its entirety, absorbing its finest details through all the senses that have come alive in that particular moment.

After millions of years of evolution, humans have developed extraordinary and unparalleled skills to think about and remember the past, and brood over and construct possible futures. This was a natural requirement for the development of the kind of complex societies we live in.

Our individual thoughts, in contrast, can only be concentrated on one thing at a time. The process of thinking is like vision – you can only focus on one thing at a time, and all the rest is hazy and you can only focus on something else after you divert your focus, akin to attention, from the earlier thing.

Now, the present is there all the time, and the wheel of time picks up future events, brings them to the present, after which they slowly recede into the past.

So, we have an interesting situation where the rapid advancement of mental faculties of humans has necessitated the loss of awareness of all “present moments”. In other words, we are evolutionarily programmed to occasionally have thoughts that are not linked with that “present moment”.

Surprisingly, while our culture has so developed as to implicitly “manage” this dissonance, it does this at the cost of blindness to that very process. Take photography for instance.

Photography can be said to be the modern incarnation, a more evolved form, of painting – which is at its core a method of making copies of what we are seeing. This has parallels for the sense of sound (music CDs), the sense of taste (recipes) and so on.

It could be pointed out that painting has also given rise to disciplines like Abstract Expressionism which are far removed from anything we see and are more an expression of feelings and thoughts of the painter. But such developments are natural offshoots of attempts to capture something as rich as our interpretation of what we are seeing, and the related emotions.

Why do we take pictures? They are taken because they are meant to be seen again – either by us, or by someone else. If it was known for certain that nobody was ever going to look at a particular picture, there would be no point in capturing it. Clicking of a picture implies hope, but hope of what? The hope, that someone, someday, will look at it again.

Often, that someone is us.

We take photographs because we don’t want to lose access to something beautiful which we are seeing at that moment. We want to preserve it, so that we could experience it again whenever we wanted to. And yet, in taking a photograph, we are spending the present moment divorced from that very thing.

Consider the following sequence of thoughts.

One, life always consists of present moments.

Two, when taking a photograph, we spend the present moment in making a copy of that moment.

Three, at a “later present moment”, say a month later, we refer back to that photograph to experience that “past present moment” again.

But lo and behold! We had never experienced that scene, that moment, in the first place! So, what do we feel on seeing that photograph? Nothing at all. How many times have you looked at some picture and felt even remotely like what you had actually felt at that particular moment? Very rarely.

I think there are two principal reasons for this.

Firstly, a photograph is a two-dimensional dead representation of a moment that was actually three-dimensional and alive. It occupies only a small part of our field of view, while the actual moment was immersive and had completely filled it.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, in the digital age we tend to click pictures indiscriminately. Most of us click pictures in the Auto mode with no control over the aperture, shutter speed and ISO settings of the camera we use. This is very convenient for quickly taking snaps and we rarely give enough time to deciding the composition, the lighting conditions or considering the different angles. The result is that we just aren’t as emotionally invested in the picture as we used to be in the earlier time of films where we thought before clicking each picture as we had only thirty six clicks at our disposal.

It would be an entirely different thing if, for instance, we spent some time absorbed in a splendid view of the city from a hill situated on its outskirts, and then proceeded to take a photograph. In this case, we have lived that present moment, and the photograph will serve as a visual cue to stimulate in us the rise of the particular mix of emotions we had actually experienced at that time. But even in this case the picture won’t capture what you actually see; merely a very close resemblance of it, for nothing is fixed! The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus once said that we cannot step into the same river twice. Innumerable changes occur in the world each second. How can a photograph capture something we experienced a moment ago?

If I further dissect this cultural phenomenon, however, I find it to be inherently pessimistic in nature.

The capturing of a photograph is the act of “saving it”, but from what? From its destruction? But what does it mean for a “visual scene” to be destroyed?

The supposed destruction of a visual scene is nothing but our absence from that scene. For us, only the visuals that we are currently seeing are alive. The capturing of a photograph is our backup. If, on the surface, it seems merely like a method to have constant access to that view even in the future, in essence, it is the pessimistic stand that one will never experience that same thing again. While this resonates with the Heraclitean view, the reasons are very different.

Heraclitus is making a metaphysical claim about how things are. He is trying to make an objective observation. On the other hand, the photographer is taking a deeply personal stand, and is being driven by a strong emotional attachment to the visuals. The visual affects him enough that he thinks he will need it sometime in the future as well.

If we start to live in the present, we will not be so worried about the future. We will take each moment as it comes and enjoy it fully, completely dissolving ourselves in it, rather than subconsciously grieving at the loss we are going to face once we move away from that scene.

Maybe it is true that we will never see that moment again. But maybe, our future is waiting for us with a treasure chest of unique moments to be lived, a profusion of memorable moments, and maybe there are so many of them that we will never have the time to look back with regret and nostalgia.

But for that, we need to throw ourselves into the world, and be completely open and spontaneous. For someone has said that it is insanity to keep doing the same thing again and again, expecting different results.

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (Siddhartha Mukherjee)

11 June 2018 / yuganka

Cancer is not so much a disease as it is a kind of existence

When I picked up The Emperor of All Maladies, I was seeking answers to some very specific questions – what exactly are the physical changes that arise when one has cancer; what is the difference in nature of the different types of cancer, when stripped away from the nature of the affected organ; and how close are we from its cure.

Mukherjee, an oncologist by profession, started toying with the idea for the book around 2004. Six years later, he shared the final drafts of this immensely well-researched book with the publisher. The book would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize.

Admittedly, cancer is not so much a disease as it is a kind of existence. Mukherjee mentions in the book how the clutches of cancer inure one to it, to the extent that a life outside it is not simply difficult to imagine, it sometimes becomes impossible to imagine. This is most vividly brought to the reader’s attention when Mukherjee quotes a cancer patient as saying that living with her disease “is the new normal”.

There are a few foundational reasons for this. I think the most important reason is that very few diseases in human history have remained not simply unexplained, but also without any preventive, palliative or curative solutions for so long – one of the first mentions of cancer, now believed to be that of breast cancer, can be found in the writings of Imhotep in Ancient Egypt nearly five millennia ago.

This long time interval has cloaked the disease with a psychological armor of invincibility, surrounded by an air almost of reverence and, finally, subjugation.

Mukherjee leaves no stone unturned as he charts out this history of cancer. Chapter by chapter, in a brilliant exposition, he carries the reader through the five distinct modern approaches to the cure of cancer, most of them having emerged after the late nineteenth century.

Prior to the nineteenth century, surgery of the afflicted organ was often chosen as one potential cure of cancer. It is only with hindsight that we are able to see how inappropriate this approach was.

Take the example of breast cancer. Not only did mastectomies cause immense pain in the pre-anesthesia times, they also led to severe physical disfigurement. To top it all, the women who had to undergo this harrowing emotional and physical experience, took it in stride as something they were morally obligated to bear. Mukherjee mentions the words of a pre-nineteenth century physician who said he had been so “loathe to disfigure [a patient]”; and of a woman who gave a short speech thanking the doctor after her mastectomy.

As we enter the second half of the nineteenth century, this surgery takes a more radical turn and even larger parts of the human body, especially in breast cancers, are beginning to be excised. As we realise now, this was a blind race and the surgeons were shooting arrows in the dark, incorrectly correlating the volume of organ removed with better chances of cure (this logic holds no water in cancers that have metastasised; and where it hasn’t, even a simple local surgery would have sufficed).

The second stage that followed was the use of radiation to kill off tumor cells.

The third was chemotherapy, which involved the consumption of pharmaceutical drugs by patients. These drugs were not targeted, thereby harming the normal cells as well along with the cancer cells.

The fourth was adjuvant chemotherapy. This was a more rigorous version of chemotherapy that was continued even after all visible signs of cancer were gone – this was to prevent cancer’s relapse (i.e. its return) which often, though not necessarily, happened due to the cancer cells’ ability to metastasise (move to other parts of the body that were not being treated for cancer).

And finally, advancements in genetic and molecular engineering gave rise to targeted therapy, which could kill cancer cells with specificity while not harming the normal cells.

In a parallel arc, he also covers some crucial political, legal and socio-economic developments in the story of cancer, which changed how the disease, and its patients, were perceived; how it led to new preventive strategies (for example, the landmark ruling to label warnings on cigarette packets) and how it precipitated research for its cure.

But, at the same time, it seems that Mukherjee failed to gauge the relevance of certain strands of the scientific and humanistic arcs of cancer, for a reader. In such sections of the book, he becomes a chronicler of history, giving the impression that he is almost obligated to present details on account of propriety.

Most frustratingly, so many scientists, researchers and activists are mentioned by name, that one sometimes misses the woods for the trees. Then again, Mukherjee doesn’t necessarily want us to remember each of them by name, but this profusion inhibits the reader’s ability to keep a track of even the most important characters of the story.

The second issue I had with the book was the slightly excessive focus given to the social and political activism that would understandably be very intrinsically linked with the historical developments of a disease with such a nature as cancer and though I would personally have preferred a book that covered only the scientific principles at work, the political, economic, legal and social biography that was covered may be useful for someone looking for a more comprehensive historical perspective of this dreaded disease. Indeed, I am willing to overlook this dissonance as more on account of my own expectations from the book, than as an indication of any issue with the book’s narrative.

Thankfully, Mukherjee spends the last chapter giving a condensed version of the developments in the search for a cure of cancer and these last few pages manage to contextualise the rest of the pages – thus evoking relief and dismay in equal measure, and each on two counts.

On the Search for a Home

29 March 2018 / yuganka

Man, the eternal nomad, searches throughout his life for his home. A place where he belongs, a place he can call his own. A place that embraces him with open arms, makes him feel warm, comfortable and at peace. After the long, tiring and frustrating day he spends facing the world, and his own fears reflected in it, his home provides him solace. It is his anchor, the place he falls back upon, the place he returns to.

But what exactly is this home? Is it just a particular configuration of bricks stacked together to give rise to a certain form? Then, wouldn’t the same bricks, when provided to a different architect, have given rise to a completely different home, maybe even one that was diametrically opposite in personality, character and vibes? Did the house have any control over how it was being constructed, and even if it had, did it even know that it could exercise that choice? Maybe its foundations were weak, but not weak enough to emerge on their own? Maybe they needed the intellectual vibrations of an earthquake?

So, it is not the bricks or their form.

What converts a house into a home? It is the people who inhabit it. The people who infuse their own hopes and aspirations, their superstitions, their philosophy into that home. Those fewer chairs in the drawing room, or those extra flower pots on the terrace; the belief that the study room’s cream-coloured walls could be more conducive to the purpose of the room than the existing white ones; or the pleasure from imagining the bedroom walls in splashes of navy blue with a few rivulets of green; or the persistence of the eight-year old to replace the forever creaking metallic door that opens up into the balcony with a wooden one – all of these constitute and create a home.

So, it is not the house that determines the home, but the ones who inhabit it.

Some houses are better than others, or so you would think. An extra parking lot, two extra balconies, a sea-facing view or a private kitchen garden and you are instantly enamoured. Oh how you wish you could have that house for yourself. It is your “dream house” and the place you “have always been looking for”.

But it is so easy to love a house just by viewing it from a distance. It is only when you start living in the house that you realise it has a faulty power supply; that its basement floods during the rainy season; that it provides easy passage to vermin from a broken drainage that is barely accessible. There is no way you can foresee how such things will affect or alter your love of that house; inevitably you will do a cost-benefit analysis to decide whether to stay or take the road again, in search of your next destination.

But how many times can you shift? What if each successive house had some problems or the other. Will you ever find your perfect dream house? Or will you remain the forever nomad, unable to settle for anything lesser than your demands?

If there is an initial favourable inclination, it can only be confirmed or denied by living in the house.

And did you ever ask your house if it also wanted an occupant like you? Did you know that your house gets irritated whenever your pet cat does her daily ritual on its marble flooring, or that its walls whimper whenever your nieces come over to your house, with their stack of crayons? That it is revolted by the stench of the stale food that inhabits your fridge, or that the fans in your room absolutely hate football, and each weekend they go into mourning after missing their tennis matches?

The walls of the house bear the lashings of the rain, the howling of the wind and keep you safe and warm, even while you complain about one small corner of one of the rooms, where a few chips of plaster have fallen off. Did you ever wonder what led to this, and why your walls lost their composure in the first place? Have you noticed the moss that is growing on the southern wall, or the cobwebs that invade your house when you get too busy with your personal life? Have you ever asked yourself why your house gets sick?

Think about it, if given the freedom, will your house have agreed to let you stay in it?

Will your house have chosen you?

On the Epistemology of our Emotional Responses to Dreams

21 March 2018 / yuganka

Nearly two years ago I had a dream which made me think.

I was on a plain, and there were two hills on either side of me. From those yellow hills, huge boulders, three to six meters in diameter, were hurtling towards me. Stuck between these imminent messengers of death, I felt panic. My mind was racing, evaluating my options and, finding none, it was panicking even more. The last thing I remember was the boulders barely a few feet away from me, as I embraced my death-by-sandwiching.

When we experience any feeling, we automatically compare it with our past feelings. As I remembered what I had felt in those moments of terror, I realised I had felt something I had never felt before. The fear of death.

I shook my head. The fear of death? I experienced the fear of death, for the first time, in my dream? But how was that possible? How could my dream supply my mind with information that previously wasn’t there? How could something that never really happened, induce in me a feeling of something new, something I was yet to actually experience in my life?

What was the source of this information? How did this knowledge arise?

I shared this experience with a couple of friends through my preferred mode of communication – email. And then that thread receded into the confines of the past.

This morning, I received a reply on that thread from one of those friends. He had had a terrifying dream, one which he was sorely trying to forget. Towards the end he mentioned ‘…I know now “how will I feel like if I were raped”‘.

I felt a conflicted feeling of solemn amazement. Fear of death is a very generic feeling. We may never have actually felt or even given conscious attention to this fear, but it is something we inherently know and which silently lurks beneath our awareness. The only constant is change, and the only certainty is death.

But rape?

Rape is abhorrent, the most diabolical crime imaginable. Well into our journey into the twenty first century, we are still centuries behind our times when it comes to gender equality. Rape has always been a tool of subjugation, a weapon to subdue. Due to a variety of reasons I won’t go into so as not to digress, the average female lives in a constant fear of violence directed from the opposite gender, both physical and emotional.

My biased mind could not help but see it a bit differently than if a female friend had written about the same thing to me.

Let me clarify.

I contend that the fear of death is a common sub-conscious strand for all people, irrespective of gender.

I then contend that fear of violence from the opposite gender is a similar strand, albeit this time very conscious and palpable, but specifically for females.

So how could a fear that is normally not associated with the male gender, arise in the dream of a man?

Admittedly, what my friend dreamt could have been a result of some experiences of his own life, yet the above question was enough to point me towards, what I think, is a potential solution to the question posed at the beginning of this piece.

The pivotal observation, and something which has also been extensively covered in recent media, including movies like Inception, is that we are unaware of the process of dreaming. Our subjective experience of a dream while in it is indistinguishable from our experience while we are awake.

How does that make a difference?

It implies that if we faced a particular situation for the first time in our real life, which was then deleted from our memory (to prevent it from acting as a benchmark for our reaction the next time) and we were then made to face that same situation again but in a dream, our emotional response in both the cases will be almost the same because, and this is important, our subjective experience in both the cases are identical.

Put simply, our subjective emotional response to a particular situation will remain the same, even if the source (and the very nature of the source) of that experience was changed without our knowledge. This is the same reason why pranks work – you are not aware that it is a prank and take it to be real, in its full intensity.

There is another very important thing to notice here.

My friend had mentioned ‘…I know now “how will I feel like if I were raped”‘ (emphasis mine). The dream had only opened up, or brought into his conscious awareness, his own subjective emotional response to a particular situation i.e. it did not give rise to any new objective piece of information.

In other words, even given that our dreams can supply us new information, they can never be a source of truth, for truth is objective. My friend could never have found out what it feels like to be raped, only how he will feel if it were to happen to him.

So dreams are like recipes. Ignoring for now the source of what we see in a particular dream, its content still acts as a stimulator which cooks up a realistic scenario, an experience felt in its full lucidity, and then our own life, our memories, our thoughts, biases, prejudices, hopes, dreams, aspirations, fears, phobias and residual consciousness gives rise to our own subjective emotional response, which is as genuine as if we had actually experienced that dream in real life, for one believes it to be real.

So the next time you wake up from a dream experiencing something for the first time, remember that you have been pranked by your own subconscious.

On Love, Strand the First

7 October 2017 / yuganka

It is something special that I feel for them. It is something different, like taking the feeling of love and concentrating it to extract its essence. Something like that.

Just a visual cue is enough to evoke this emotion, and mostly a visual stimuli is all that I have. Separated by distance in space, availability in time and an almost persistent mismatch in particularly those aspects of life that could have bridged the previous two factors, their pictures are all that I have.

But what is this feeling? How do I explain it? Do I want to explain it? Is it possible to explain everything that one feels, or is it a failed venture from the very initiation of such a task?

Explanation does not entail language. I do not need words to explain what I feel, not simply because words will be inadequate in any case, but also because there are other aspects of human interaction that sometimes speak much louder than words. It is the silent language of our body, the posture in which we stand or find ourselves in, the way we move our hands when talking with such a person, and our eyes! They speak so much! A person need only look into another’s eyes, and all the mysteries will fade away. A simple glance could turn into a gaze and information no words could have ever conveyed, flow freely between the people involved. If you cannot read the eyes, you are either indifferent or you don’t want to; for the eyes don’t just carry information, they send a token of responsibility as well. Are you willing to take that responsibility?

Is togetherness a factor? I have to answer in the negative, as far as physical proximity is concerned. These mysteries work beyond the space that you occupy. They are like waves that emanate from you and travel and travel and cover thousands of kilometers till they haven’t found what they had begun their journey for. Only then do they rest.

These waves are not dependent on a medium to propagate, they are themselves complete.

So, physical proximity is not a factor. Emotional proximity is. There are people who spend their entire lives living in the same house, sleeping on the same bed, eating the same food, and going to the same social events; yet they never have that connection of their souls.

And then there are people who spend years away from each other, in distant lands living disjointed lives following disparate dreams, yet harbouring that sacred emotional bond. They are together in their feelings, sharing their joys and sorrows, their manias and depressions, their bouts of pessimism and bursts of optimism; they are separated by space but intimately connected in everything else. It is almost a form of worship.

I find it intriguing and am positively flustered when all cross-gender bonds are invariably seen in the Darwinian imperative of finding a suitable mate. And it also bothers me because Darwinism is, firstly, unconscious in that it has no initial purpose, and it is only assigned in retrospect after observing its results; and secondly it is also subconscious in that it has already worked and driven me towards some action by the time I become consciously aware of what even happened. Is my attraction to every member of the opposite gender simply Darwin working me up; or could there be something else as well? Something subtler, beyond this gross world that we inhabit, for attraction is not always physical.

Love for the mind and love of the mind persists. It believes in giving, and does not want, much less need, anything back though it wouldn’t mind if it does get some company! In itself, this love is complete.

It is when this love is forced to adhere to the traditional notions of love, to be boxed up, compartmentalised and labeled that it really loses its essence, its true nature. Unless this tendency isn’t curtailed at the right time, this inherently sacred feeling will come to be ridiculed, derided, and misunderstood in the basest of ways.

These feelings are my own, with no conditions on them. This bond is my own, with no expectations from them. But whenever I will receive those cues, I will silently smile at the vicissitudes of life; and how these things come to be.

On My Trip to Bhutan

7 September 2017 / yuganka

My recent trip to Bhutan in July of 2017 was the first time I was outside India.

Two of my friends had taken a direct flight to Paro, a city situated around 50 kilometers from Thimphu, and having Bhutan’s sole international airport. From there, they had gone on to the capital city where I was supposed to meet them. My love for bus journeys meant I opted for the considerably longer alternative and found myself at the Bagdogra airport, which is the airbase of this military camp situated near Siliguri in northern West Bengal, around noon on a Tuesday.

There are three entry points by road from India into Bhutan – Phuentsholing, Gelephu and Samdrup Jongkhar. Phuentsholing is the western-most entry point and is around 160 kilometers from Siliguri. I had planned to take a bus to Phuentsholing, hoped to reach there before 5 to complete the immigration formalities, cross the border and take another bus to Thimphu which is an additional 170 kilometers from there. Back in Delhi, I had given free reins to my optimism and somehow convinced myself that it was possible to cover those 330 kilometers from Bagdogra and reach Thimphu that same night, however late. My estimate, I later realised, was off by nearly fifteen hours.

On my bus ride from Bagdogra airport to the bus stand of Siliguri, from where I could take a bus on to Phuentsholing, I met a kind soul by the name of Abhishek. An architect based in Gurgaon but hailing from Jaigaon, the town on the Indian side of the border at Phuentsholing, Abhishek had come to drop off a visitor at the airport. After listening to the questions I was posing to the other passengers regarding the easiest way to reach Phuentsholing, he graciously offered to help.

The railway station of Siliguri is right next to its inter-city bus stand. As we got off the bus and moved towards the station, my rucksack caught the attention of a few taxi drivers and bus conductors who offered to take me to my destination. I declined all the offers with a smile as I and Abhishek snaked through the throng of people and reached the ticket counter.

We bought two tickets to Hasimara, the closest railway station to Jaigaon and situated around 15 kilometers from it. If you ever travel to this part of the globe, take a train. It will save you time, and also afford you the luxury of spectacular natural beauty, considerable parts of which have, thankfully, not yet been invaded by the road network. The three hour train journey was really beautiful as we crossed thick jungles, small villages and railway stations in areas with barely a dozen homes.

As I looked out the window at the pristine hilly forests, untouched and unhindered by human interference, I realized how remarkably different they looked from the ones I had observed in Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh – two states in the far western reaches of the Himalayas – where unplanned construction and deforestation has led to the loosening up of mountain soil, leading to frequent landslides and naked rock faces stretching for miles – how tragically different from these free virgin forests that flourished with abandon!

By this time it was clear I would not be able to complete the immigration formalities on the same day. Abhishek, helpfully, arranged a room in the best hotel in that small town of Jaigaon for me.

Jaigaon shares three gates with Phuentsholing. These include two pedestrian gates, one each for entry and exit which are open from 7 am to 10 pm, and one gate for vehicles.

After having my dinner, I still had about an hour to explore the area so I crossed the gate and found myself in the marketplace of Phuentsholing.

You do not need any permit (in case of SAARC citizens) or a VISA to roam around in Phuentsholing – the gate is open for people of both sides to cross over. The first check point actually comes a few kilometers down the (only) road that connects this border town with the inner reaches of Bhutan. Consequently, had I wanted to, I could have spent my first night in Bhutan even without a permit!

For the next three quarters of an hour, I roamed in and around the market area, glancing at shops and observing the people. The roads were deserted at this time of the night, but only of vehicles – I could still see some people out and about. After wandering for some time, I found myself at an intersection from where one road sloped upwards and then veered off to the left about three hundred meters ahead, disappearing from my sight in its quest to reach Thimphu.

As I turned around to look at the center of that intersection, I saw two young females walking on the footpath on the left. Such a sight in New Delhi, at this time of the night and in a relatively deserted area, would have caused me utmost alarm. But, not here.

They walked as if they had nothing to worry about, or fear. The road was deserted, yet they looked safe, as if they were merely exploring a different part of their home. There was no sign of uneasiness, no quickened steps, and not a wrinkle of watchful alertness crowded their jolly faces.

They walked,
In that deserted street at ten in the night,
Hand in hand, word for word,
Gently pushing the pavement with abandon
And revelling in the force with which it pushed them back
For they used it to fly, to soar, in that lonely night
As angels,
Who have lost their way, but don’t want to return
To the confines of their homes,
For this street, empty and abandoned,
Is as warm as their home,
And they are free… to discover it
And gift this beautiful, solemn night,
The bliss of their company…

A solitary policeman was stationed at the intersection even at this time of the night. He was standing at the edge of the road, and as the two ladies approached him, they started to talk. I could not gather who started the conversation, but it continued long enough to convince me that they weren’t simply asking for directions. I nonchalantly glanced around and occasionally looked towards them. Their body language and occasional laughter exuded a sense of mutual trust and respect.

I wouldn’t have expected such a sight in my native city during the day, let alone in the dead of the night. As I walked towards my hotel with the image of the three of them imprinted within my mind, I noticed a few groups of females who were out for a walk on that cool and mildly humid night in the second week of July.

These first impressions were not aberrations. Far from it, they mirrored the Bhutanese society in all its simplicity, bringing out the familial bonding that pervades it, and the importance and respect it gives to its female members. I was to witness these strands again the following day on my way to Thimphu.

I reached the immigration office around eight thirty in the morning, completed the formalities and proceeded towards the taxi stand – a brisk five minute walk.

There are plenty of shared taxis available at this time of the morning, and owing to the distance they only leave once there are four passengers. Consequently I had to wait for nearly an hour and around ten, the car exited the parking lot, took a right and proceeded towards Thimphu.

A couple of kilometers into our journey, the driver of the cab asked for three bottles of water from a roadside stand. As the woman at the stall came and handed the girl sitting to his left the three bottles, he asked for two more as an afterthought. Instinctively, I linked the number of bottles with the number of people in the car, and silently appreciated him for keeping the duration of the upcoming journey in mind. It did not occur to me, at this point, why he had asked for just three in the beginning.

Just a few minutes before the driver had stopped, I had taken out a bulging packet from my bag – my mother had packed matris – kachauris stuffed with gram flour. As I opened the pack, I saw there were eight of them – far too many for me to eat. As the car started moving towards our destination, I offered them to the other passengers and to the driver, all of whom gratefully refused, and then proceeded to eat.

Typically of Indian mothers, there was more food than I could have had in two meals and as I pondered over what to do with the rest of the food, we approached a point where the road was filled with mud – a landslide from the hills on the right had overwhelmed the road. It was enough to require work from a JCB, but not enough to completely block it. As we approached the JCB machine, and the two police officers who were overseeing the work, the driver whipped out one of the bottles of water and handed it to one of them, specifically requesting him to also “share this with the operator” of the vehicle.

I was amazed – such voluntary charity towards strangers is unheard of in India, at least in the national capital region where I live.

A couple of kilometers later, he gave away one more bottle to a female labourer who was repairing the road along with one other woman.

I felt a strong inclination to partake in these moments of social bonding – where complete strangers valued the work someone else was doing for them. Having had my fill, I saw that four matris were still left. I wrapped the food in the aluminium foil I had, and waited.

When the car stopped for the third time, I handed out one matri to the woman labourer who was working on the road, and who accepted my offering with a wide smile on her face. A few minutes later, when we stopped for the fourth time, I handed another piece to a youngster who was walking on the road.

Now, two were left. A couple of kilometres later we approached a point where a group of eight to ten labourers were sitting on the right side of the road. They had probably just completed its re-pavement, which was clear from the difference in colour of a 40-50 meter stretch of road before and after them. As the car slowed down and the driver gave them the last bottle of water he had, I took out my remaining food and handed it to one of them.

It is very likely that I would have never come to know what happened next, but I think I was meant to know so I happened to turn my head and look at the women as our car lurched forward.

The woman opened up the packet excitedly, as two others surrounded her. As soon as she saw what was in the packet, a smile of relief appeared on her face and she moved towards a child standing a few feet away from her. The last thing I saw was the joy on her face as she handed some food to her three year old child, who had stretched his feeble hands toward her.

We have a proverb in Hindi – “daane daane pe likha hai khaane wale ka naam”, meaning on every grain of food is written the name of the person who is destined to eat it. That three year old child of a labourer in Bhutan was meant to eat those grains that were grown in the Gangetic plains of India, and made into matris by my mother, living in the capital of India, and I became the medium of fulfillment of this destiny.

This was one of the most beautiful moments of my trip to Bhutan.

Since out of the four travellers (apart from the driver) three were men, the only woman in the group had occupied the seat in the front, to the left of the driver. She was accompanied by a friend, who had occupied the window seat behind the driver. I had the window seat behind the woman.

Throughout the almost six hour long journey the lady and the driver were engaged in a lively conversation. I could not gather what they were saying as they were speaking in Bhutanese, but they seemed pretty comfortable in each other’s company.

This made me suspect they knew each other, or even that they were somehow related, to such an extent that when the car stopped at a roadside restaurant for lunch around one, I actually asked the lady if she knew the driver from before. She seemed surprised and, with a smile, told me that that wasn’t the case.

As we moved on, I reflected on my observations since the day before.

These voluntary initiatives to help strangers in whatever way one can, valuing each person as an individual, understanding one’s own and the roles of others in society and respecting these roles just the same – were these the reasons the Bhutanese people seemed so happy? These acts of kindness and generosity could act as seeds which could make those strangers then help someone else at a later point. A stranger bought five bottles of water solely to distribute it to people on the road. The society then essentially becomes a huge family, where everyone is looking after each other in whatever way he or she can. Each citizen finds fewer reasons to cheat others, and appreciation, trust and honesty naturally rise in the mutual bonds of the citizens.

These thoughts bubbled in my head, and a sense of peaceful serenity pervaded me. I had had plenty to brood over since my entry into this beautiful country, and that is what I did till our car finally entered Thimphu, around three hours later.

On Beauty, To Own or Not to Own?

20 August 2017 / yuganka

Over the last two years, my mind has been plagued with a wide range of questions, questions to which I have tried to find answers, and have repeatedly realised that merely thinking about them is almost never the solution. I need to write them, I need to bring them out, for only then do they take even a vaguely coherent form and afford me some kind of a legitimate answer.

The question of beauty is just one small part of that huge puzzle, and hopefully it will nudge the other pieces into my conscious mind, so that the written word may, from there, precipitate them into this outside world where they could be understood.

Before moving forward, I would like to differentiate between active and passive forms of beauty, and bring to notice that we have different reactions to each of them. Passive forms of beauty do not respond to our interactions with them, at least not through an intention driven action. An example would be a rose. Active forms of beauty are those that do, fellow human beings for instance. Thus, the difference between active and passive forms of beauty is consciousness, and not whether it is living or non-living. I do not count the wilting of a flower when it is plucked as an “interaction” because it has no intentionality – it is inevitable.

In this piece, I want to talk about passive forms of beauty, and our instinctive reaction to own them.

We find beauty in all kinds of things – in the fog that drapes the hills during the monsoon, the sea shells we pick up from the sea of sand near those of water, the slow birth of fruits from their flowery parents, in the way a seasoned musician plays that particular note on his instrument, in the minds of the geniuses who have graced our land, in how our favourite athletes waltz through the green turf, in the people we love, and in many other things.

Humans have nearly a dozen different kinds of senses, including the five principle sense organs. These include proprioception (the sense of the relative positioning of different parts of the body), our perception of the passage of time, our perception of temperature, our sense of balance, among many others.

I believe that for each sense we have, there is a corresponding set of beautiful experiences linked with it and with the passage of time, we have created specific words for such experiences linked with those senses – “cosy” blanket, “melodious” song, “delicious” food, “breath-taking” sunset and a “thrilling” bungee-jump are just a few examples.

It is relevant here to observe that we will never call a landscape as visually delicious, a song as aurally cosy and food as gustatorially melodious – yet they all really imply a beautiful experience linked with that particular sense – that feeling on account of a cosy blanket in the middle of a cold winter is beautiful; hearing a song of our favourite artist, or maybe the gurgling sounds made by one’s child, is beautiful; the fragrance of a flower, or that of a perfume your colleague carries, is beautiful; the taste of a dish from a particular cuisine that you really like is beautiful, and so on.

What do I feel when I experience something of beauty? There are a number of associated feelings that do arise, often including, almost instinctively, that of the need to own that thing. But why would I want to own it? It could be because I want my experience of that beauty to last. I am wary of the ephemeral nature of the experience, and sub-consciously want to avoid the inevitable sadness I will feel when I no longer have that beautiful thing with me. This makes me want to stay in that warm cosy blanket for a few more minutes (temperature); have one more spoonful of that delicious pudding (taste); play that melodious song on loop for hours (sound); travel for miles to watch that beautiful sunset (sight) and so on.

It is easy to observe that this need of “ownership”, though, does not arise for all beautiful things. Why is that? I see a few possible reasons for this.

Firstly, not all beautiful things are rare. Take a flower in a plant that is growing in a meadow. Assuming all flowers are beautiful (I am yet to see a flower which I could deem ugly), if it is the only plant of its kind in that area, then its perceived importance will skyrocket and my need of ownership will come to the fore (let me uproot this and take this home and plant this in my garden so I can see it day and night?). If, however, the meadow happens to have many such plants, then this need of ownership is unlikely to arise, as I am assured of the presence of that flower for a considerable distance in all directions from that spot. Here, the constant access to that beautiful thing is consciously concluded based on the evidence provided by our senses.

Secondly, there are certain kinds of beautiful things you can never own. In such cases, the concept of ownership is absurd. You cannot own a sunset, the foggy hills, or the beauty of a full moon night. But what you can do is repeatedly go to that particular place at the right time and experience that beauty again and again. You do not have to ever part with these kinds of beauty, even given that you do not own them. In this case, the “instinct to own” takes on a different form and makes us visit those places or re-create those situations. It may be impossible to own a sunset, but maybe I could build a home near the sunset point?

Thirdly, there are certain kinds of beautiful things you will always own. Think about the good memories you have – time spent with your parents, friends, or your loved one; when you completed that project by foregoing sleep for 3 days; when you completed writing a poem and nobody was around to see the elation on your face and other such important moments of your life. You automatically own all of your memories because you will always have them. They cannot be shared with anyone else because they are ineffable. Here, constant access is unconsciously known, so the need to strive for it doesn’t even arise.

And lastly, there is one case that really brings out the best of human nature. These cases involve things of beauty that are rare, which can be owned, and that you are currently deprived of, and yet, you do not want to own them. This case arises on account of empathy, the ability to see beyond oneself, realising that that beautiful thing is more important for someone or something else – these could be living entities like people and animals, non-living entities like the environment or even intangible entities like our nation, our morals and certain ideas that we value.

In this last case, our love for that external entity, which could take a myriad number of forms, overshadows and overpowers any love we may feel for that beautiful thing. When we refrain from plucking that particularly rare flower in a forest because it is really important for the ecosystem of that region; when we share our delicious food with someone less fortunate who is forced to roam the street and beg; when a mother who doesn’t afford two blankets gives away her blanket to her child in the middle of a cold heartless winter night; when you give away the window seat of the train to your younger sibling even when you want to sit there, too, and this is your first train journey in over a year; when you change your favourite song that was playing on your stereo system and let your loved one play what she wants, and so on. All these cases, and similar ones, are examples when your instinctive response to own (or experience) a beautiful thing takes a backseat.

It is important here to understand that this sense of “ownership” goes much beyond the commercial interpretation of the word. Insofar as our response to beauty is concerned, the word really means “constant access”. You own the things to which you have constant access, that are available to you as per your wishes, as and when you need them.

Our first reaction to anything is instinctive, over which we have no control, for it is Darwin working at full throttle, down in the unconscious and sub-conscious levels of this building of awareness. After this response, comes our conscious response to it, over which we do have control, and where we are able to make choices. Over time, with perseverance and practice, we can also have some control over our unconscious reactions, but that is beyond the scope of this piece.

This conscious response gives us real power – it gives us the power to drive our actions and thoughts into directions into which the baseline Darwinian response may not have driven us.

It is evolutionarily profitable for a person to keep, for example, all “beautifully tasty” food for himself and his own community. So, when he goes to a foreign country, he really derives no benefit from sharing his food with a frail and emaciated beggar when no-one else is watching him do this. But, due to our self-awareness, we are able to reflect on our future course of action after Darwin has fed the “most profitable” path for us. The person may, thus, choose to share his food and give more weightage to his responsibility as a more fortunate member of his species, than to his ability to exploit that very fortune and make things more evolutionarily favourable for himself by not sharing his food and letting that beggar die and thus reducing the (microscopically feeble) competition that that beggar was, to him. Numerous other such cases could be presented.

So, in addition to using money to “buy” and thus have constant access to (ergo, owning) beautiful things like paintings and clothes and furniture and cars (and all kinds of materialistic things which seem beautiful to you), you also own a number of other beautiful things. Just like you own the “tasty” mangoes that grow on the tree in your garden, the beautiful flowers that blossom below that tree, the “melodious” birds that come for the nectar of those flowers, and so on, you also “own” the morally righteous actions that you do, for they also represent a kind of beauty – beauty of the soul and mind.

It could be argued, regarding the tree and flower example, that those kinds of beauty are fundamentally different from the other type (of moral actions) – in that you bought that land using money.

But money only bought you the land! It was something, again, fundamentally different from (merely) money – your love for the plant – that created the right conditions for the plant to grow; and your hard work, perseverance and dedication that helped it to prosper on that land for many years. Even that home near the sunset point, required efforts on your part – someone had to bring the construction materials and furniture and mattresses and other amenities to that spot!

Money may buy you beautiful things, but it cannot make that beauty last. Your own efforts, ethical choices and feelings of empathy and kindness, on the other hand, can assure you of constant access to a beautiful thing, for at least as long as you can enjoy its company.

Therefore, the right kind of response to beauty, or in any case the more peaceful kind both for one’s own mind in particular and for the rest of the cosmos in general, is the middle path – partly driven by instinctive reactions and partly by reflective ones. The very existence of a beautiful thing is its gift, and it is not always measurable in human terms. Do you think the thirty rupees you paid for (so as to “own”) that fully blossomed rose is its actual value? Or is its actual value better measured by the number of bees it attracted before withering away? Why do people keep parrots in cages at their homes – it is to have constant access to their visual beauty and the beauty of their voice. But is this constant access really giving happiness to the both of you? Wouldn’t it be better if you put in some effort to develop a friendship with that parrot so that he would genuinely want to stay with you? In that case, the parrot would have had his freedom and flown around the house and maybe even played with a few of the kids in the neighbourhood, and then returned to you.

By putting chains on beautiful things, by dictating its boundaries, we reduce that thing of beauty to a mere commodity, a slave.

Beauty is meant to soar, to live freely.

Beauty exists for its own sake.

The Cobweb

2 July 2017 / yuganka

The scenes that unfold before his eyes
Have played out a million times before
The same path, that they always take,
They will again, he has no control.

These pictures countless times has he seen
And the notes are ugly and stale
The past and the present merge, from them
Emerge those strands of tales.

Tales that follow that memorized script
He knows too well what’ll transpire,
Such dreariness sends his senses adrift
A new course his mind does desire

For he is appalled and horror-stricken
At the slow rot consuming his substance
His limbs move in suspended animation
And the words he utters are redundant.

All that he manages is a discerning smile
All he can do is sigh in pain,
All he can hope is that the next time
Is the last time his emotions are slain.

On Work, and Bringing about a Change

30 June 2017 / yuganka

What is work?

Scientifically, one of the more simpler formula to calculate work is –

W = F.d

where, ‘F’ is the force applied, and ‘d’ is the distance moved.

In the middle of ‘F’ and ‘d’ you see a small, almost insignificant, dot.

That dot operator is the soul of the concept of work. It means that work is only done in the direction of application of force. So, for example, if I am pushing (hence applying a force to) a rock towards the north, then I will only have done work if the rock also moves in the northern direction, even if by the smallest amount. If the movement of the rock is exactly tangential to my force, towards the east or west, then I have not done any work. Additionally, if the rock moves, even slightly, towards the south, then it would mean the rock has done work on me. Realise that the rock cannot be moving both towards the north and the south, implying that, at any given instant of time, it is impossible for two objects to mutually do non-zero work on each other.

But what about thinking of work from a deeper perspective? What does it mean to really do work?

Work is any action that changes the existing tendencies of how the world is playing out.

Let’s think about this.

Imagine a flowing river. I then put an object, for example a log of wood, into the river. What will happen?

The river will carry away the log in its current, and the log will have joined the tendency of the river to flow. Some change happened – now there is one more thing flowing in the river than there was earlier, but the tendency of the river to flow hasn’t diminished. On the contrary, it has increased. Now, the momentum of the log, in addition to the momentum of the drops of the river, will also play a role in coaxing any new object that may fall in the river to move along with the river’s flow.

So, the log did not do any work. It simply placed itself in the existing tendencies of the world, in this case the river, and then the flow of the river did all the work and carried it away (yes, the river did some work, as the log which was earlier stationary is now going as fast as the river).

Understand what happened here. On account of laziness, lack of will or motivation, or maybe the absence of any aim of his own, the log let himself be used by the river and is now doing what the river asks it to do, namely, drag other similar elements into the current and make them go in the direction the river is doing. The river has strengthened itself, and the log has lost his existence. He has now become a sheep.

Let’s take another example.

We have all experienced the force of wind during a storm. Even on a small scale, when you blow air at a feather lying on the table, it gently flies away. The force exerted by the air on that feather did work on it, and moved it. It did some work.

I remember one special case that we studied back in high school in our lectures on work and its relation to energy. Our teacher explained to us that free expansion of gas into vacuum did no work.

Think about this.

When we open a bottle of soft drink, it produces fizz, which is nothing but the gas carbon di-oxide. As this gas, present at a higher pressure inside the bottle, comes outside, it meets the atmospheric mixture of gases which are at a lower pressure. It essentially pushes against that gas, doing work in the process.

In vacuum, when pressurised gas is given free rein to expand, it meets no resistive force – the entire space is empty and the gas can expand however it feels like.

Work implies some effort, some action against something that is opposing your tendency to do that work. We do work when we push a stone on the ground as we are opposing the friction that the ground offers, as well as the initial tendency of the stone to stay in a state of rest.

It may be useful to re-interpret the work that we humans do in this light.

If you are joining the existing structures, whether social, political, economic, cultural or any other, without asking yourself why, or without weighing the implications of both that action and the thought leading to that action, then you are not doing anything on your own. You are taking your place in the existing scheme of things. You have made no difference.

If you want to make a difference, bring about some change, then you will need to ask certain questions, reflect on the foundations of those systems, engage with it and find out why it is not amenable to your conception of that system, if that is the case.

Realise that work in the human sphere, unlike the world of physics, can be said to be done even if you go with the flow, in the direction of where the system is going, as long as you have valid reasons for doing so, and this choice is the result of critical, honest and rational thinking on your part.

If you try to change something that has existed for some time, there will be resistance both from tangible entities like people, and also intangible entities like the system created by those people, on account of inertia to change as also the amount of time it takes for such systems to reflect the changes done within them, and for the effects of those changes to rise and come out macroscopically.

There cannot be change without resistance. And there cannot be work, useful work in any case, without it calling into question the existing frameworks, even if at a conceptual level.

If you blindly accept how the world is, and then let your actions be moulded by it, then you are a spiritually dead person, like a rock. You have no free will but live in the illusion that you do.

An attitude to question is a necessity for being alive.

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