Read. Reflect. Repeat.

Author: yuganka (Page 3 of 7)

On the Fall of the Roman Empire – Three Versions

A friend of mine, some time back, expressed his keen interest in reading about the fall of the Roman Empire, but bemoaned the length of a few of the books that chronicled the fall.

Wringing his hands in despair, so to speak, he asked how could the author possibly fill up 1312 pages on this topic.

I honestly don’t know. If I knew, I would have written that book, isn’t it?

But here are my three cents, in a tongue-in-cheek manner.

Newton’s Classical version

  Page 1 – they started falling

  Page 50 – the acceleration due to gravity was x.yz

  Page 250 – value of g was z.xy at this time

  Page 1000 – they finally touched the ground in their trajectory

  Page 1100 – dust starts to rise due to conservation of momentum

  Page 1312 – dust settles down

Einstein’s Relativistic version

  Page 1 – they had already been falling, relatively, for the previous 200 years

  Page 50 – this was the time when the world could finally see them falling

  Page 250 – this was the time when the Romans themselves realised that others could finally see them falling

  Page 600 – the Romans were falling, relatively, to most other dynasties at the time. But they were rising, relatively, to a few others as whether you rise or fall is dependent on your frame of reference.

  Page 1000 – relatively speaking, the fallen empire was still more powerful than most other standing kingdoms

  Page 1312 – they had finally fallen, according to every frame of reference

Darwin’s Evolutionary Version

  Page 1 – the struggle of existence, for the Roman empire, had been technically going on since eternity

  Page 50 – they had finally realised that they hadn’t adapted as well as they had needed to

  Page 300 – there were plenty of competitors who had slowly come into the areas formerly occupied by the Roman empire

  Page 600 – the Roman empire was not the fittest one, so its survival was at stake

  Page 1000 – in its adamant stance to not change, it allowed other competitors to invade the political niche it had earlier occupied

  Page 1312 – the last surviving member of the Roman empire took his last breath, and the Roman empire was now extinct owing to its inability to adapt to its changing surroundings

The Prey

Tiptoed, she walked,

Her soles barely making any sound

Her breaths controlled,

for that effortless ease which can’t be feigned.

Attentive, alert, with each step measured.

 

Her eyes darted,

From one point to another,

Surveying, for the smallest movement.

 

She chose her path after careful deliberation,

For the world does watch her, even from a distance!

 

She is watched, nay scanned, nay followed, nay dissected

Her every move observed,

She has to be quick, lest they observe her!

From the top of the buildings,

From the safety of the darkness of the bushes clouding the edge of the road,

From left and right, from the front, and from behind,

And from all the vantage points they can find!

 

They keep a track of her routes,

They pick up her scent,

The marks left by her feet,

The sounds that the leaves rustling on the trees around her carry,

Dissolved with the sound of her laboured breathing,

 

It is late,

She must reach home.

Her children must be waiting, hungry,

But these wolves!

 

She admonishes her heart,

And chides her heaving chest,

For being so weak and beating so hard,

For sounds do travel,

And they are heard!

She doesn’t afford to be heard!

 

No, you restless heart!

Calm down.

Get a grip!

Hold on to your nerves!

For silence is her biggest weapon!

 

This dirt, refuse, this filth that surrounds her,

And covers her every pore,  every thought,

Every nook and cranny of her body,

And looms over the smallest crevices of her mind,

She must pass through it, for her kids,

In lonely walks, sometimes in the dead of the night,

Tired, exhausted, drained, and hungry, but alert,

For she must be alert!

 

She walks on,

And in hunger, they too move.

 

She curses her scent,

Wild, innocent, light as the wind

And radiating with it,

If only her wisdom could absorb the vitality of her scent,

For her own sake!

For scents do travel, and are picked up by the wolves.

 

Wolves,

Menacing, terrifying,

she walked,

Alone

While they circled,

At a distance,

In a pack,

Cowards!

 

And then she saw one of them!

Absolute, sheer terror in the eyes!

 

The other wolves howled, one by one

As the moment laboured into the present,

Slowly, in delayed spans of time,

It arrived to a standstill.

 

The fear was palpable,

As the wolf looked at her,

And took a few steps,

And then she sprang!

She threw caution to the wind,

And ran,

as fast as her legs could carry her!

 

The wolf was now sprinting,

And the chase had begun!

 

They sprinted across roads, and abandoned railway tracks,

The predator in hot pursuit,

Catching and latching on to the faintest whiff of the scent

 

As he came closer,

And she could feel his limbs, just within reach,

She summoned all her energy,

And jumped with all her might!

 

They both were now on the ground.

Panting, heaving, breathing heavily,

They both looked at each other for one final time,

And then, it started….

 

The distant wolves grimly heard the sounds

And the terrifying wails that echoed in the darkness of the night.

Then, they went their own ways,

Safe for another day…

 

For…

She was a tigress,

A mother,

More powerful than all the world’s demons combined.

 

For…

Mankind is dead,

And in this abandoned city, this tigress walks alone,

Searching for food for her children,

And maybe, also for herself.

 

1 – Remembrance of a year past

/* From some time back. Edited as sparingly as was possible – just half a sentence in fact – since I don’t like re-writing history. */

One. Year. Without. Porn.

Well, what an unusual way to begin reflecting over the year past. But anonymity will get the better of most men, or so I would like to believe, and I am no different.

As I sit on this Christmas eve, thinking over the various strands going on in my head, with Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City playing on my earphones, I must go back to the previous Christmas eve.

Admittedly, beginning a confessional with a discussion of one’s thoughts on porn wouldn’t count as too impressive, but I hope that impression changes by the time you reach the end of this.

Humans have various phases in their lives. The period from teenage to the time you reach thirty are your make or break years. Not only are we full of energy, responsive to new ideas and adequately equipped, physically and emotionally, to delve into those ideas and come up with something of our own, but also these periods groom us into who we are. Our personality emerges in this time.

Consequently, our emotions find multiple outlets – some constructive and some not quite so.

I would not say I am a particularly sexually frustrated person – I am as much as those of my age generally are. Yet there have been times when I just didn’t feel in any control whatsoever of my very own body. It seemed to have acquired a mind of its own and I would spend countless hours fighting a mental battle against the surges of hormones going within me. Days would turn into weeks, and weeks into months, and I would feel helpless beyond measure.

I realised how these times were my least productive, and why wouldn’t they be! I was unable to concentrate on anything of importance, things on my to-do list would keep piling up, and I would gravitate towards wallowing in feelings of self-pity, without fail. Ah, what a pity!

The problem with pornography is, that it is not the solution people think it is. It can’t reduce your sexual surges at all – on the contrary, it is pretty much designed to keep it alive. That is why people get addicted to porn – their solution becomes their problem.

An inexplicable phenomena concerning us humans is that, given enough time, we can put the blame of almost anything, upon anything. And we feel convinced with our conclusions, no less. So, our good old friend “ignorance” comes here to take the bullet.

Ignorance can, in many ways, be said to be the root cause of many of the negatives that plague human society – I personally believe that almost the entirety of man-made evil can easily be said to be on account of ignorance.

Ignorance of what a women’s modesty means to her, leads to rape, molestation, eve-teasing and a whole host of related misdemeanours.

Ignorance of the right of each man to equality, and of equal opportunity, leads to corruption, cronyism, nepotism and the like.

Ignorance of the right of each man to live leads to murder.

And so on.

Similarly, ignorance of what is good and bad for us leads to wrong choices which ultimately harm us. This is the realisation that made me determined to spend 2015 away from pornography. On deep reflection, I realised it was harming me as it wasn’t a medium that was helping me in venting out my pent up frustration. It was actually a shackle that was preventing me from lifting that veil of ignorance.

Once this was clear, I found it easier to stay away from it. And, on this Christmas eve, having completed one full year, I am feeling a bit satisfied. One more week and my target would be completed. But I intend to carry this further.

The irony is, I am unable to share this present sense of accomplishment I am feeling (and I am not sure to what extent I should gloat in it) with my friends and my close ones. I am not bold enough to accept being identified as the author of this confessional.

***

I have chosen unconventional battles to fight. Like the one above. This also needed determination, although that is something I would like to believe, and not something that I can objectively declare. It did not seem so difficult to me – there wasn’t a time when I found myself tormented, with shivering hands trying to prevent me from watching porn on the net. Never. I never even felt like watching it. And yet, this is in sharp contrast to the state I used to be before I took the pledge last year. How do I explain this? I can’t. How could I have removed that physical and mental torment without any efforts on my part? Could that one realisation of the reality – that it was harmful for me – have done all the mental work for me? I don’t know.

I have witnessed my friends facing their own battles and demons. And I have seen many of them going on to greater things, or at least greater places and spaces, when they won those battles due to their efforts. Could I have been in a similarly better space if I had chosen my battles more cleverly? But then, what is a better space? Isn’t it one in a line of checkpoints, all occurring on the path that will eventually take you to the place where you will be able to fully realise your potential? But going by that definition, I am also in a better place as I have sort of learnt to control, or at least subdue, my sexual energy (well not really, but at least the worst phases haven’t occurred this year), consequent to which I am not wasting my time fighting those surges anymore, like I had wasted the year before. So I am closer to realising my potential than earlier.

Yet, mentally, I feel I could have fought a few more battles as well. I do not feel satisfied.

***

These chronicles wouldn’t be complete without telling about a new friend I made this year. Well almost(?).

It was the birthday party of a very dear friend of mine, and she was his friend. Although we were meeting and interacting for the first time, she knew about me for the past 4-5 years, through him.

After the treat, the entire group went to a friend’s place and people started retiring one by one. By 3 am, only the two of us were left. And then we spent three hours talking on a wide range of issues – the reasons I write poetry, the joys of gazing at the night sky, what does it actually mean to read something, our favourite authors, the difference between knowing something and experiencing something and so on. I was captivated. She was receptive, intelligent, and there was a mental connection I have rarely found with members of the opposite gender.

Naturally, I was flying high. I wondered what had just happened. I bemoaned why I didn’t meet people like her more often. I lamented the fact that I could not have such conversations on a daily basis. I brooded over the possibilities if I had met her earlier.

That conversation gave me a hangover. It was unlike anything I had felt in a long while – liberated, free, powerful, infinite.

I returned home on Monday morning but only recovered by Thursday. If that can’t convey to you what I was going through, nothing else can.

But then the coupling rod of the steam engine of our daily lives pushed forward, and we were decoupled. Hah! We chatted sometimes in the first month after we met, but have rarely interacted after that. It is easy for me to present a one-sided case by giving my arguments of why it all happened, but that wouldn’t be justified on her.

Anyway. The friendship seems to be dying a slow death. And that is such a shame.

***

What I want from my life, and how far I have moved towards or away ( hopefully not!) from it are questions that plague me every single day. But I won’t go into discussing them here (yes, you can breathe a sigh of relief!) for the simple reason that there is too much I would need to write and bore the reader with. But suffice it to say, there are good days and bad days. The last two days have been good, and that is why I am writing this piece at all. Had I tried a little earlier, or a little later, these words may never have had a physical manifestation, except as thoughts arising organically from the universe of neurons in my head.

Wish all of you a very happy 2016 ahead, and I hope you aim high, battle hard, and succeed.

On Travelling and Connecting With a Place (Hampi)

My fifteen hour single day trip to Hampi was memorable. Having taken an overnight bus from Bangalore, located over three hundred kilometres away, I reached Kamalapur, the nearest town from Hampi, at around five thirty in the morning, and then walked the remaining five kilometres to the ruins of this abandoned city.

In that hour long walk which commenced in complete darkness and concluded inside a small café for breakfast, I could notice the gradual emergence of certain thoughts in my head, catalysed and notably reinforced by the combined beauty of the twilight of the orange moon on one side of the road and the rising sun on the other, and the few small Protected monuments that dotted the road along the way.

By the time I had ordered my first cup of coffee, these thoughts had taken a concrete form. In fact, they form a recurring theme and arise whenever I travel, especially to places with historical, architectural, archaeological or natural beauty – how do I connect with this place?

I remember a sentence once uttered by my English teacher when we were reading Ode to the West Wind. She said the poet “…felt one with nature…”.

What a beautiful sentence.

When do you feel one with something? What does the phrase even mean?

You feel one with something when you perceive no difference between yourself and that other entity. When the duality of your existence as opposed to that of the other, of the segmentation of your thoughts between “I” and “not I” blurs out and eventually dissolves. You feel you know everything you wanted to know about that entity. Lest these words get lost in the streams of abstraction, let me retrace my steps and start again.

When I visited Hampi, I was visiting the ruins of a city that, at its zenith, was among the most prosperous cities in the world. When it was built over five centuries ago, and in the decades that followed, it was the home of thousands of people, who lived and ate and traded and prospered within the city and its surrounding areas.

As I sat on the stairs of one of these temples, I was physically touching a piece of rock on which other people had walked five hundred years back, which were carried by labourers and sculpted into their present shapes. Who knows, maybe a few cells of one of those labourers were still attached to these stones – as a subtle reminder that time never really passes? As both he and I exist in this moment, at this place, separated merely by a filter of consciousness?

Even today it is possible to find certain places in Hampi where, if you were to stand, you wouldn’t know which year you were living in. And this is the case with almost every historical place. They stand as a testament not so much to the gradual withering away of the glory of the past, as to the absurdity of the present.

The Virupaksha temple is the main shrine in all of Hampi. It is situated very close to the Tungabhadra river on its South bank. Having explored the other side of the river, known for its cafes and the natural beauty of the mountains adorned with huge boulders, it was my turn to experience the architectural, historical and mythological side of Hampi.

As I passed through the temple’s main entrance, crossing from the natural to the human element, my eyes ventured off to the left and planted themselves.

An elephant. Feeding itself sugarcanes and surrounded by a few people.

I spent all the time I had kept for exploring this particular temple, with this beautiful pachyderm. Thrice I offered it a piece of sugarcane and thrice were my offerings irreverently but playfully thrown up into the air. To the elephant’s credit though, I was allowed to pet and caress its trunk.

So I travelled two thousand kilometres to experience a place, and ended up not seeing the main shrine because I got involved with something I could possibly do even in  the city I live in? What just happened?

On an objective scale, it could be argued that I probably didn’t plan my time properly. But everything cannot be measured on a scale of objectivity. There are subjective tendencies and feelings that each of us has.

When I am trying to connect with a place, I let my unconscious take over. I try not to analyse my actions or ask why I am choosing a particular alternative over the other. I just go with the flow, believing that this tendency to “flow” a certain way is driven by certain factors at work within my brain – which is trying to make sense of the place, absorb it all in, and build up some edifice that may reflect the place inside my awareness as coherently as could be expected.

I could have spent hours just sitting beside the elephant and observing it – observing how it was periodically turning towards me and looking me straight into the eye; how it was breaking the sugarcanes into two by twisting them between its mouth and the inside of the upper part of its trunk; how it smashed coconuts into the ground in order to break them and then tried to stretch its trunk and pick up those pieces that had bounced off just a little out of its reach; its hard textured skin and its greying hair; the cool wind that hit my face whenever it flapped its ears and on and on and on.

I do not think that it is simply the paucity of time that prevents us from connecting with the places we travel. Even if we had enough time, there is a certain disposition that is needed to “feel one with nature” – the “nature” of any place, including the human aspect. You need to capture the soul of the place and then see how the visible components reflect that soul, what stories they are trying to tell, and how they are linked with each other. This is no easy task and I can clearly understand what people are getting at when they say “…a lifetime is short to explore [any particular place]…”.

I always return from a trip with that inevitable sense of incompleteness, of having left something in the middle, of not having given it as much time as I wanted or needed to. Maybe this sense of loss at moving away from a place that could have given me so much more, acts as a kind of emotional bookmark which keeps reminding me about the place and what all I have left behind, thus keeping alive that yearning to return to it sometime later? Isn’t travelling, after all, at some level, also a journey where you try to find yourself? When you forget the outside world and sit staring at something for hours, in the hope that a sudden epiphany will answer your questions, that you will find what you have been seeking, and that you will know who you are and what you are meant to be and meant to do?

Those serene moments of silence, in the hope of feeling one with that place, and then finding yourself in that unity.

Looking at Philosophy (Donald Palmer)

I’m so glad Palmer took the initiative of writing Looking at Philosophy.

The journey of philosophy has really been the journey of mankind. Philosophy implores us to question the basic assumptions we have, and thereby attempt to better understand the world we live in.

In the over two and a half thousand years that have passed since the first steps taken by Thales of Miletus, who is generally considered, as Palmer notes, the first true philosopher, we have come a long, long way.

Generations of philosophers have come, expressed their ideas and gone. Their ideas have both educated and challenged the philosophers that followed them, who took upon the task of improving or replacing those ideas with something that made more sense, thus shaping the discourse of philosophy, and this meandering journey has affected the thoughts of the contemporary people in profound ways.

So why is this book so important?

If you were to pick up the original works of any philosopher, there are good chances you won’t be able to understand many of the ideas, much less all of them, on the first reading. A very notable exception is Plato, some of whose early dialogues are actually the teachings of Socrates.

There is a reason for this. Since these works take upon the task of unravelling our conception of the world, including questioning our assumptions, it takes some preliminary effort to wrest the reader free from his mental mould. Philosophers, influential philosophers in any case, are rigorous in how they approach their written material, precisely because they know this difficulty inherent in the task lying ahead.

Add to this another peculiarity – you take up any philosopher in history and chances are you’ll be able to summarise his ideas in a few simple paragraphs that everyone will be able to at least comprehend (again there could be a few exceptions – Husserl and his phenomenology being a good candidate, for example), even if not fully understand. By that I mean you will be able to understand the “what” of his philosophy, even if you may not understand the “why” and the “how”.

The result is truly interesting. On the one hand, you have the philosophers trying to explain to you very foundational things, yet, on the other hand, those very philosophers have to take such an academic route to explain it, in order to break through the notions we have built since our birth, that it becomes difficult to understand  their ideas.

And here is where Palmer enters the scene. He explains the “why” and “how” of the ideas that make original works so difficult to read. And he does this beautifully.

Palmer wonderfully condenses the ideas of the philosophers he takes up and presents them in a really engaging manner. In addition, his sense of humour and the keen sense of balancing this humour with the difficulty of some of the ideas presented, really pushes up the quality of the material by several notches.

Palmer does not at any point try to oversimplify or trivialise the ideas for the sake of the reader – no, where is the fun in that! The fun is in realising the essential soul of the ideas, putting them into a historical context, and then linking that context with the inevitability of its own rise.

Serious, scholarly philosophy is not suited to all kinds of people. It requires a certain level of patience,  intellect and flexibility. Nevertheless, the lack of such traits should not act as hindrances for the dissemination of such important ideas as have shaped the very course of the human race.

This book is marvellous. It tells you the history of philosophy in all its beauty, in a completely unconventional manner. This is the perfect book for those who want to have a taste of serious philosophy, yet are driven away by the (expected) standards of rigor found in original works.

On Friendship

The movie Dil Chahta Hai came out in the year 2001. It followed the lives of three young people right from their college days, to the time when they each chose a different path in life, got separated, and then, as fate would have it, got reunited, driven on account of the presence of similar forces in their lives. In between, it depicted all the lazy pleasures associated with living and growing up together.

I do not remember when I first saw this movie. In hindsight it seems like a thing that had no beginning, and which gradually emerged as I grew up. It eventually became a part of who I was, and affected my understanding of what human bonds meant. For better or for worse this movie planted the seeds that emerged as the idea of friendship in my mind.

But that was almost fourteen years ago. And today, fourteen years is a lifetime.

Times have changed a lot, even during my (relatively) short life.

The young people of today can only meet during the weekends, they always have pending work which demands their time, their work has instilled in them a sense of value to be given to time that was absent just half a generation ago. This striving for productivity, efficiency, round-the-clock availability and strict deadlines has robbed us of the simple pleasures of life. Each passing day, we are getting more and more alienated from the people we love, from the moments we wish to live, and from the places we yearn to go to.

But the crowning glory of this human calamity has been that those very people have an unquestioning belief that this change is right, that it ought to be right, and that it couldn’t not be right. What worries me is not the validity of this belief, but the validity of this unquestioning attitude. Is a faster life really better for all of us?

Man was never meant to be a machine, so how did it find itself in such a predicament? That question deserves reflection on a line that is slightly tangential to what I wish to talk about here, and which, therefore, should be taken up some other time, for my focus, insofar as this piece is concerned, is on its effects on an individual in general and, somewhat narcissistically, on me in particular.

One of the tragedies of the modern man is that he is born in the twenty first century. Before the apparent tautological nature of the statement makes you miss the wood for the trees, let me clarify.

Today, the difference in the worlds that a modern human lives in during his childhood, his adolescence and his adulthood is too great. When I was in class three, nobody I knew had a mobile phone, and today, in just eighteen years, I do not know anyone who doesn’t have a mobile phone. This change isn’t just about the penetration of mobile devices, in fact it is symptomatic of something far wider in scope – the technological revolution.

I haven’t checked the facts, but I am sure at no other point in the history of mankind has one generation witnessed so much change, and I am not even necessarily referring to technological changes here.

But I am digressing. And yet I am not!

The ideas I grew up cherishing had already become out-dated by the time I entered my mid-twenties. I would have laughed them off otherwise, and maybe that is the only option I have, but the irony isn’t lost on me.

Today, people don’t have time to sit and talk, don’t have time to share your silences, don’t have time to really immerse themselves in something, for they already have something else in their minds – maybe an upcoming meeting, or an incomplete presentation, or a client’s call and what not. They have adapted and learnt to live in these changing times, sometimes driven by a sense of duty to their work and sometimes by choice. But I ask them, what is your duty towards yourself, towards the voice within you?

The choices people make reflect the priorities they give to different things in their life. Even among your friends, you will find all kinds of people, each with a different life journey. Then what binds them to you? That is a very difficult question, but an answer to which may be found, I am sure, in the realm of feelings and thoughts.

I may spend years trying to find a reflection of Dil Chahta Hai in my life, and never find it. But should this fact disappoint me?

Well, we all have our share of disappointments. And in these times, a fashionable solution has emerged – a solution as brilliant as it is misleading. “Stop expecting”. It is brilliant because it makes us genuinely believe that we have found the solution, and misleading because it doesn’t tell us the price we have unwittingly paid for this solution.

Here is the actual answer you needed to know.

Your expectations from a person have to be a function of the person’s personality and his life journey. For example, you may expect, with success, that a friend who likes art will accompany you to an art gallery. Or that a friend who is an avid reader will go to the Lit Fest in your city. But you’ll be damned if you switch these expectations, and then you will end up accepting some stranger’s words on the internet who will say, sagaciously, that you should “stop expecting”. And lo and behold, you will have robbed yourself of all the things which you had a right to expect, and the somewhat assured possibility of actually living and experiencing. Sigh.

By all means, expect. And expect more. But remember that this right to expect demands a duty to give understanding. Give understanding that their life journey and personality could be very different from yours.  And this understanding will, in turn, provide you with wisdom – of what to expect, and from whom.

I will wait for my friends. Till the time I either find a reflection of Dil Chahta Hai in my life, or I understand what their Dil Chahta Hai is, what their heart really desires. What do they really want, when they are all disrobed from their worldly cloaks. When I can talk to them in complete honesty. When I can know them and really feel one with them.

Till the time these feelings don’t come out in the form of verses, these few words shall remain my ode to friendship.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Thomas Kuhn)

A paradigm shift in the way we look at science

Thomas Kuhn was one of the foremost philosophers of science of the twentieth century. In 1962, he came out with The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a book that heralded one of the most important moments in the history of science, and gave us a fresh new perspective on the functioning of the scientific community.

The question that drove Kuhn to write this magnificent book was this. Why are there certain fields of human endeavour where it is very difficult to find a consensus as to what the right answers to the traditional questions posed in that field are? Principal among these fields were the social sciences, and sometimes economics.

Kuhn observed considerable fragmentation and even contradictions in the views held by different social scientists and he realised they hardly ever reached a consensus on the answer to any question, much less on the principles they used to find those answers.

And then, when Kuhn looked at the scientific community, he saw a remarkable contrast. In any given field of science, the scientific community almost always had a consensus on the principles they were following, the kind of questions that they considered legitimate, the nature of the questions they were trying to answer, the kind of answers that were expected and accepted, and even whether certain types of answers could be considered correct or not.

What was the reason? Surely there was something fundamentally different between the so called “exact science” and the “inexact sciences”, terms which, it must be mentioned, he did not actually use.

What follows is an incredibly systematic deconstruction of the scientific edifice, where he starts with a discussion on the nature of science and on what it means to practice science. This leads him to the answer that at any given point of time, most of the scientific community practices science based on a specific, almost universally, accepted foundation that includes a scientific theory believed at that time to be true and as reasonably complete as could be expected, and also the instrumentations and pedagogy associated with that theory, including how the next generation of scientists are familiarised with these aspects. Just to be clear, “theory” is a very restrictive term to characterise the foundation Kuhn is talking about. So, he used another word with far wider implications. Paradigm.

What does the existence of a paradigm entail? How does it come into being and how does it succeed so well at being accepted, albeit gradually but eventually, by a considerable majority of the scientific community? These are some of the questions that he picks up till he is finally confronted by the inevitable question – how do paradigms change? Is it a linear process of accumulation of scientific knowledge, or is it something completely different?

The phrase “paradigm shift”, as understood today, originated in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn noted the very crucial differences in the periods and situations in which a science is practiced as a “normal science”, which is a way of “solving puzzles” put forth by the natural conception of the prevalent scientific paradigm, and the moments of crisis that arise, both in terms of the kinds of questions asked, and the kind of anomalous observations made when strictly following the paradigmatic framework, which lead to a search for possible alternate explanations and theories and, ultimately, to a kind of intellectual gestalt switch – where you find a completely new way of looking at the same information. Yours truly, the paradigm shift, has occurred. Kuhn gives the famous example of the duck-rabbit sketch as a ridiculously simplified analogy.

This book was a delight to read and I realised one crucial reason was the vocation of the author.

Many scientists write books, but there is something different about those of them who are astutely aware of the ins and outs of their enterprise. Science isn’t simply a way of documenting, labelling and understanding the world. It is a way of life and the rigor which such scientists, Kuhn in this case, follow in their vocation naturally rubs off on the way they write as well.

With time, the idea of paradigm shift has been applied to other fields as well, fields for which the idea wasn’t originally suited as developed by Kuhn in this book, and towards which he expresses a slight surprise in the Afterword of the book, written seven years after the book was published.

There is beauty, simplicity and profundity in the writing of this book.

The Murder of Feelings

The words will need to be short and sweet
For I do not have much time
With head in the heavens, on earth my feet
My summons have come from the divine!

So goodbye, my lovely friend,
So gracious for gracing my life
If the short stay was all that was meant
I have relished each moment while alive!

And goodbye, my thoughtful friend,
For being the mirror of my mind,
Reflecting, these years were joyfully spent,
In flashes of epiphanetic insight!

And goodbye, my innocent friend,
Those hours of delightful company
I cherished with you, are going to end,
But not our lonesome memories!

And goodbye, my oblivious friend,
Those words still shatter my heart
Our paths diverged, at that fateful bend,
The closest grew so apart!

Some others I remember, and some I forget,
Pardon I seek for these sudden farewells
With the minutes ticking by, I can hardly be blamed
A lifetime of feelings, and all going to drain!

The seconds are too
Few to release
That flow of feelings,
The stuff of dreams!
The perfect moment, never meant to thrive,
Forsaken to the future that never did arrive!

And now my thoughts are going to die,
Without me, how can they possibly survive!
For no pens, nor pages or keys of any kind,
Know about them, and nor does any mind!

My time has come, I have to go,
As those dying thoughts inside me echo
Screaming to be let out, for they are waves,
Which once uttered, forever remain!

Know

In the beginning, concealed,
In your field of view
Silently awaiting
A recognition due

Your observing gaze
Over it stood
Thence conveying
You understood

What went on inside
Your brooding threw
The masquerade aside
And then you knew

Different thoughts, but feelings combine
Divided the bodies, united the minds
You recognised, then understood and finally knew
The garden where the experiences grew!

One for the Friends

Times, as these, are scarcely found
A moment ago, was smoothness abound
But this instant,
Sans resistance
Has resignedly embraced the turbulent sound!

Oh motley crew, don’t be alarmed,
You have the fire, you aren’t unarmed!
The divergent streams
Of disparate dreams
And ebullient eddies are yours to command!

Face and conquer your darkest fears
Smile even when moved to tears
So fate is rendered
Redundant, and yer
Mettle shall make your sorrows disappear!

To the answer of life, ignorance I plead
As for the poetry, it’s charming indeed
But such concerns
Are yours to discern
For words are a sham when feelings do bleed…

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2024 Yuganka Sharan

Theme by Anders NorénUp ↑