Tag: The Human Condition (Page 1 of 2)

On Culture

24 October 2024 / yuganka

What is culture? How does it come into existence? How does it grow? How does it spread, or sustain?

I would like to draw a distinction between two types of culture – historical culture and experiential culture; and historical culture is merely experiential culture that used to exist at some point in the past but doesn’t anymore. It has receded into the “collective memory” of the society and lives on through stories, legends, oral traditions and, if they are lucky enough, artefacts. Note that if it is still alive through any customs that are followed in the present, it becomes a part of the experiential culture.

Experiential culture is exactly what it sounds like – culture that is experienced – whether through food, clothing, rituals, festivals, music, art, customs, dance forms and so on. It is something that happens in the here and now.

It could be claimed that “historical culture” as laid out above is, in fact, flawed since we are always affected by our past culture even if it may not live on in our daily lives – after all doesn’t it affect our thoughts and behaviour, however subtly, merely by occupying some portion of our consciousness?

Notice, though, that there are a few ways in which we interact with our cultural history. Let’s remember that culture keeps mutating, changing forms or evolving into something different. What, then, really counts as historical?

Certain cultural practices die out with time, for example Sati. For centuries considered as a part of Indian culture where the woman in a marital relationship “always belonged” to her husband, with time new ideas around the autonomy of women arose and swept this ritual aside – it is now a part of our historical culture and not experiential culture.

But notice how we engage with the idea – we certainly think about it in the present, horrified at how the woman had to sit with her husband on his pyre and sacrifice herself, but we take this ritual as a lesson around how society progresses and throws away older systems that impinge upon new ideas that arise in it, in this case that of one particular but important dimension of gender equality. We think of it with some sombreness and even relief but it doesn’t affect our current experiential culture, at least not directly. Its absence lives on in the form of a larger idea of gender equality, but the ritual in itself, and only by itself, doesn’t affect any experiential aspect of our present life. It only lives on in the lesson it taught us.

Let’s now talk about the opposite case, where a cultural element dies not because there was something inherently wrong with it, but simply because other systems arose that replaced it. Well, to be technically correct, we may not always be able to make normative judgements about cultural elements, and even when we may, it will generally be possible to find both positive and negative aspects in it; so, to be clear, what I am referring to is an overall assessment of that element as something that was in net positive or negative, both in its contemporaneous context and in the context of our present.

Let’s take the case of one of the major systems of education in ancient India – the gurukul pratha. Under this system, children from a young age were sent to a residency program under a sage who not only imparted them academic knowledge but also social values and principles. It meant the children were under his tutelage and led a disciplined life from their childhood which held them in good stead later on in their lives. To be accurate, this system hasn’t completely vanished and lives on in how education is imparted in modern Buddhist monasteries.

Did the gurukul pratha fade away as a result of any social backlash on how it wasn’t aligned with new ideas that were arising in medieval India? Absolutely not. Then what happened? Over time, noticeably during the Gupta empire, more institutionalised centres for learning started to come up or get consolidated, including universities like Nalanda . This gradual shift continued for many centuries until the first major impact came from the influence of Islamic systems of education with the rise of the Delhi Sultanate in the early 13th century. This continued during the period of the Mughal empire from 1526 to the middle of the 19th century, by which time the second major, and most devastating, impact came with the introduction of Macaulayism and the Woods Despatch of 1854, which officially ushered in Western education in India.

So cultural elements rise and fade with time, and there can be a complex interaction of a whole range of factors which decides which aspects stay and which disappear.

Let’s switch the prism and instead of looking at the past, turn our glance to the future.

Think of any museum that you have gone to and the objects that you may have looked at. The very fact that you are seeing them now, means someone in the past took the pains to preserve them for future generations. But how did they decide what to save and what to discard? Keep in mind that preserving any kind of artefact over long durations of time (more than a few decades) requires exceptional care and, importantly, finances. Barring cultural artefacts that could make it to the present without human intervention (like partially corroded items from the iron age or bronze age, or a shipwreck that dumped items into the seabed which got preserved due to low oxygen levels), any item that has made it to the present (Egyptian mummies, paintings, sculptures and so on) needed an intentional act at some point in the past. Some person or entity at that point felt it was important enough to be preserved.

What does that mean? Could that person foresee the importance of that thing for future generations? Or did they simply preserve the thing that was most important for them at that point of time? It can be difficult to ascertain, but it was most likely a combination of the two. In that sense, through that very choice, they were moulding a certain part of the future culture of their society.

Could they have known, though, how it would affect the future generations? The answer is no, they were only trying to do something that they felt was important, even necessary, at that point of time.

And so it happens. When we look into the future, it can be difficult, if not impossible, to gauge what will be important for the society at that point. All we can do in the here and the now is to try to preserve the things that we think are important so that it may be possible for our future society to be able to interact with and learn from what we have now. It is our message, our echo into the future.

Culture is not preserved in one day. It takes centuries. But the first act starts in this moment, and if we try to do something now, and build systems with the hope that they can save and sustain those symbols for centuries, then we may be able to bequeath a rich cultural heritage to our future generations.

On Feeling a Word, Rather than Reading It

18 May 2020 / yuganka

In recent months I came to associate a very commonly used pronoun with a certain person. Gradually, the word came to depict the set of feelings I had for her. Over time, a particularly interesting thing happened – the word transcended her and became the feeling itself. And then one day, when I was reading an article, I came across that pronoun and felt, for lack of a better term, a mesmerising cognitive dissonance. My brain’s logical side was interpreting the dictionary definition of the word while, simultaneously, its emotive side was feeling all that I had come to associate with that word and, consequently, her.

I wasn’t really reading the word, but feeling it. I was not imagining what the word represented, but actually feeling what it stood for.

The emergence of this sensation is radically different from when a word conjures up some image in your head, a picture in the Wittgensteinian sense of corresponding to some external entity, like how the word “chair” corresponds to “an object that, mostly, has four legs and is able to provide seating to one person” – where the image of such a chair comes up in our mind.

No, this is very different kind of sensation – a particular mix of feelings rise within you, and it’s not that you feel that the word represents those feelings, but, rather, that the word is that feeling. It would be like reading the word “pain” and actually feeling pain, whether physical or emotional, rather than imagining what pain is like or what are its components.

What do I mean by “feeling” a word?

The visual cue of that word makes me feel a certain way, not by association or by acting as a medium to something which is the actual cause of that feeling; but as the very feeling itself without the need of any intermediary. In this process, somewhat paradoxically, the visual form of the word has transcended the very entity it was meant to refer to, and has become that entity itself; the experience of this appropriation of identity is peculiar in itself; but trying to convey what it feels like is even trickier.

Let us take a step back.

When we first meet someone, we observe them even before we come to assign any tag to them, like a name. This experience cannot be quantified, for human interactions flow like a wave – they are continuous, imbued with countless subtle variations in their flow; and are multi-layered events with varying degrees of depth.

And then we get to know their name. What does this do?

The word (a name in this case), whether in its written form or in the sound that it creates when spoken, is just a symbol which has two different modes of cummunication, but both the modes refer or correspond to the same entity – that person.

What exactly is the symbol doing? It is basically encapsulating a range of impressions and maps that set of impressions on to itself. Over time, we keep adding more impressions to that set but the word remains the same, and that is how the idea of that person in our minds comes to change over time – the name, akin to a tag, serves as the immutable point of reference.

But what exactly is a name? I think before we even try to answer that question, we must answer an even simpler question – what is a word?

Let us start with an example – the word “rose”.

Notice two important things.

Firstly, a word (whether written by hand or printed on a paper) is essentially just a specific combination of lines and curves – only a well-choreographed movement of our pen can give rise to this particular word and it will make sense only as long as the form it takes is within a certain error margin. If you were to, for example, accidentally extend the “o” a bit downwards, the word will become gibberish – it will either become “rpse” or “rqse”, both of which make no sense.

Secondly, a “word” derives its meaning from a language. The set of lines and curves that exist in the visual structure of the word “rose” carries meaning only in the context of English, and certain other related languages that are in the same language family.

Essentially, a language constrains the set of combinations of lines and curves that will be meaningful for the people who know that language. The symbol “chemise” is not a word and is, hence, meaningless in the English language, but it is a word with a well-defined meaning in French – “shirt”.

From among the lexical categories (or parts of speech) of any language, one specific category is particularly interesting from our present perspective – nouns. The word “noun” comes from the Latin word “nomen”, which literally means “name”.

So what is a name? A name is any such combination of lines and curves, a symbol, that refers to some object or concept that exists out there in our shared world. “Rose” is the name of a particular flower, “India” the name of a particular place and so on. Both of these are also nouns.

Notice that technically, not all names are words. Every language has a dictionary, which is nothing but the set of legitimate words of that language. This does not have to be a physical dictionary, but could even be an “in-principle dictionary”. When exactly is a word added to the dictionary? Only when the usage of that word has reached a certain level of widespread use – which is why you may not find the nickname you have given to your cat in a dictionary, unless you named it after something that was already there in the first place.

Now, let us consider a random combination of lines and curves that is not a word in our language – “bfejqgfe”. This symbol is meaningless; it is not a name, and is definitely not a word. The reason I want to start with such an example here, unlike what I had actually personally experienced, is to prevent any already existing meanings of the symbol, if any, to form the basis upon which our subsequent understanding of the symbol grows.

Let us imagine two situations.

In the first case, we assign this symbol as a name to a person. We form a link between a static visual symbol and a dynamic set of qualities that exist in an object, the person, who is out there in the physical world. As we interact with that person, we keep adding, to the initial set of first impressions, bits and pieces of details, opinions, observations, feelings, judgements, biases and a whole range of subjective responses to the idea of that person, and then whenever we see the symbol “bfejqgfe” this person springs up in our imagination with all her traits.

Now let’s imagine another situation. What if, instead, we assign this symbol as a name to a feeling that we have? And what if, over time, we start adding certain other shades of feelings to that same name? What are the implications?

Feelings are inner states of being and do not have a visual form – when we feel a certain way, there is no image that comes up in our minds. So what will happen when I see the symbol “bfejqgfe” somewhere?

Let us consider a word like “car”. I have known this word since I was a child. I did not create this word, so I imbibed its meaning from the different instances in which I was exposed to this word around me – from the newspapers, television, relatives and friends talking about it and so on. In the case of such pre-existing words, I am a part of a bigger set of people all of whom have common knowledge about the word and its concept. Consequently, whenever any member of that set uses that word, the corresponding concepts flood in my brain and I am able to understand what he or she is saying. Even if I read a relatively complex statement about cars in a newspaper, for example “barring the three new models launched last week, this car has the fastest acceleration among all the sedans currently in production in India”, I am able to make sense of what is being said since I share a common undestanding of this concept with a lot of other people.

Here is the interesting part – this particular chain of events leading to a shared understanding will not happen when it comes to words I have created.

Why?

When I created the word “bfejqgfe”, only I was aware of its existence. I had associated this word with a particular feeling of mine. So, it is not possible for anyone else to use that word unless two conditions are fulfilled. First, I will have to convey this word to someone else and second, they will have to understand what exactly I mean by this word. Naturally, the first one will hardly take a few seconds, but accomplishing the second one can be tricky as we will ourselves have to have a clear idea of the set of feelings that we have included in the concept. However, since in this piece my focus is more on our internal experience of a particular word that has risen subject to a specific set of circumstances, I shall limit my consideration to the time in which the word is not mature enough to be properly communicated to other people.

So, since only I am aware of that word, all the instances of that word in the outer physical world (whether written or aural) are my own creation.

Put simply, it is not possible for me to come across novel usages of this word where I could put to use my own understanding of the word. All I will ever come across are my own usages of the word, and since I will always be knowing the context of that particular usage, there will be no spontaneous growth in the concept of that idea, unless I deliberately decide to add something to it.

When I had read the news about the fastest sedan in the newspaper, it is possible that I was encountering the word “sedan” for the first time. I would have subsequently referred a dictionary to understand what the word meant, and then coalesced that idea to my current understanding of cars. In other words, my concept of a “car” developed due to uncontrolled input from the external world and it was moulded by the ideas of someone else.

This spontaneous growth of a mental concept is not possible in the case of a word I have created – a word like “bfejqgfe”. This word can grow if and only if I deliberately decide to change its concept and what all it should imbibe.

I am in control of what it means. I can give this word any meaning I want, add to it any feelings I may have.

I can imprint this word with signatures of my experience of both the external physical world, and the internal world of emotions, feelings and moods.

In essence, through this private emotional signature, I can create a permanent bookmark for certain feelings of mine. If I use an already existing word, however, then through such cognitive dissonances as I mentioned in the beginning, I allow the possibility of the feelings to get eroded away. Not so when I use a word that I have created.

Interestingly, Ludwig Wittgenstein has given a critique of such “private language”, showing that it cannot exist. Essentially, his argument goes, that since there is no dictionary for such a private language, how can we ever be sure that we are referring to the same concepts (feelings in our case) when we consider the private word across different instances of time.

I hope I can wade into those waters some day, but for today, I’ll let him have the last laugh.

On Knowledge Creation and Propagation

7 April 2020 / yuganka

Imagine a telescope that is tasked with observing a certain distant exoplanet, named 27X. The telescope keeps gathering new data points every minute, and logs them in an internal database which is then studied by the scientists involved in the project.

The telescope can be seen as a primary source of data.

Research institutions around the world, microbiologists peering into their microscopes to study a new behaviour observed in a certain microorganism, sociologists studying cultural responses to a pandemic, mathematicians coming up with new variations of existing formulae to tackle a particularly difficult problem – people and instruments working at the absolute edge of human knowledge – these are all primary sources of data. It is when some new insight is derived from this data that they also become primary sources of information since they are telling the human species things we didn’t already know.

Most research institutions around the world share their research findings with the general public after a certain time gap. Indeed, some institutions share their data sets in real time even before someone from their team may have seen it, let alone extracted any new information from it. This has sometimes led to cases where people not in any way linked with the research team have managed to discover something merely by having access to that data. Primary sources of information, thus, lead to discoveries – mostly from the people immediately involved in the process that creates that information, but also, sometimes, from unrelated individuals who have, firstly, access to that data and, secondly, the ability to extract new information, and consequently new knowledge, from it.

Notice that the transition from data to information will not necessarily be a transition to “useful information”, insofar as their ability to expand our knowledge base is concerned. They shall, however, still be providing us new information in the sense made famous by Edison – they will still be telling us that “this particular thing doesn’t work”.

Distinct from, but complementary to, the set of primary sources of information is the set of information carriers which perform the equally crucial task of spreading the knowledge generated from the primary sources to the masses. These I refer to as the secondary sources of information. The secondary sources can be further sub-divided into many other levels, but we can skip that for the present discussion.

Thus, primary sources of information (for example telescopes), which keep logging new data, become repositories from which someone with expertise can sift through and make discoveries (for example that the rotation period of 27X is eight hours).

This discovery is then shared with the rest of the community through secondary sources of information – journals, conferences, educational videos, interviews and so on. Maybe it leads to the creation of a YouTube video where someone introduces 27X and tells the viewers about its properties. Maybe it leads to the creation of a meme – if you lived on 27X, you could have lived a life three times longer!

One subtle but very relevant difference between the two types of information is that while the repetitive consumption of primary sources of information can lead to the creation of new knowledge, secondary sources only ever provide new knowledge the first few times they are consumed. How?

Imagine I am a researcher looking at the data gathered about 27X. My efforts at gleaning new information from the text are dependent on the kind of knowledge base I already have – I will approach the data with a different mindset if my forte is statistical science, number theory, computer science or something else.

If I am a statistical scientist, I will probably think about plotting the values on a certain kind of graph and derive some information from it. I may even feel that I need a new skill (say, machine learning) to extract information in which case I might learn that new skill and then come back to wrestle with the data, maybe even deriving some new insight in the process!

This is because primary sources of information are created as black boxes – we don’t know what we might find in them.

Secondary sources of information, however, are derived from primary sources of information so there is clarity, at least, about what they are trying to convey, even if this process of conveying may lack quality or coherence. It may take me time to understand what they are saying, but once understood, I will not be able to learn anything more from it – they are not black boxes but fully transparent in what they represent. It may send me, and other consumers of that information, into flights of fancy, but then that will not create new knowledge in the species, only in that individual. If I am an astrophysicist, such a secondary source could even provide me ideas to, for example, change the direction in which I have pointed my telescope. So a secondary source could open avenues for creation of primary sources of information, but it cannot itself be a direct source of it.

YouTube has videos on a wide variety of topics. Let’s take, for example, a fairly specific category that has consistently ranked among the top trending categories online – cat videos.

Cat videos may provide us knowledge about cat behaviour, their attention spans, their curiosity, their social life and social structure, their anatomy, and other such things regarding their species, but they are unlikely to directly lead to a new discovery regarding them.

Primary sources of information exist at the absolute edge of human knowledge. Thus, they generally involve significant financial investment, people with deep domain knowledge and the results often take time to crystallise.

Secondary sources of information, on the other hand, exist in the daily lives of the people. It can be something as simple as a video I shoot from my phone or an article (like this) that I write – and which I then publish on my website. Secondary sources of information can be created by anyone, for they are nothing but derived works from the primary sources.

Thus, for an individual, it is far easier to create secondary sources of information than primary ones. You can pick up your smartphone to shoot and share a video and, voila! You have become a secondary source of information.

But if one wants to become a primary source of information, then firstly, one will need to display the talent and skill to be allowed access to both the technological and social machinery that is already involved in doing that work and, secondly, even if one has that talent a multitude of other reasons like financial status, social networking and ease of access could prove to be the deciding factors, either way.

In general, human beings are prone to errors when estimating the effort needed to attain something that is beyond their immediate reach, especially when it comes to something like attaining new skills or learning new things. So these hindrances, if they do arise, should not demotivate us from doing something we really want to do for there are two contrasting results that could happen.

It is possible that we end up spending our entire lives just trying to make that transition from being a secondary source of information to a primary one, but never manage to cross that line despite all our efforts. But in that case, when we are on our deathbed, we will be looking back at our lives not with regret, but with the satisfaction of having tried everything we could. In addition, we will be able to better appreciate the gravity or the difficulty of the problem we had undertaken, and will be able to assess our failures in a more pragmatic fashion. We will know how far we really were from being true sources of primary information.

However, the polar opposite can also happen. We could very well manage to make that transition and give to the world, to our species, and to that mutable fabric of human knowledge, something that wasn’t there before. We would have left our mark.

In either case, if you want to make the transition, the importance of trying cannot be over-emphasised.

So, what would you rather do – create new knowledge, or spread that which already exists?

What would you rather be? A creator, or a propagator?

On Love, Strand the Second – On Finding “The One”

23 January 2020 / yuganka

I sometimes imagine an evening out with my future partner. We are having dinner at a vibrant restaurant playing light music, with the white noise of the general din of the crowd humming in the background.

I, then, driven by some instinctive urge, get up and proceed to the stage. I start to talk – about what I feel for her and what she means to me, and after some time when I reach the denouement, I say, teary eyed and in a choking voice – “all the wait, all the years and months and days and minutes I spent alone, yearning for a company, were worth it, because today I have you. There was meaning in all of that agony, all the loneliness, all the time I believed. Every time it did not work out, it was for this moment. Today, I have crossed the brimming river, and stand on the other side holding your hand. Today, I am with you.”

And then, I am summarily dismissed by my rational mind which laughs, chides me, asks me to get a grip, and diverts me from the beautiful but frail castle I had been building. As I see the castle – the closest resemblance to perfection I could afford – dissolving into the waves, I am comforted by him. It is but natural to behave non-rationally when any question of love is involved, he says.

The way we meet new people in our lives is inherently non-deterministic in nature since our volition is involved – we may, of our own accord, choose to initiate conversations with any one of several people we meet on any given day. And then, as the days and months pass and we meet more people, forge new bonds, and as the existing ones stengthen or weaken, our life emerges and takes shape. Over time, we are able to discern noticeable changes and realise how different our life has become driven by our past choices.

In chaos theory, a particularly interesting phrase is used to define chaotic systems – they are defined as “deterministic systems that have a sensitive dependence on initial conditions”, implying that in such a system, it is possible to calculate the future state of the system if we know its present state, but even the slightest error in defining the present state will lead to huge discrepancies in the future predicted state. A good example would be the rolling of a dice.

Our current scientific knowledge is enough to predict the outcome of a roll of dice provided we are able to precisely define its initial state when it is falling – something which is inherently very difficult, not least because the dice has pointed corners and the surface on which it falls is never perfectly smooth.

Although our life is not, in strict terms, chaotic because our free will makes it a non-deterministic system, as a metaphor it does imbibe the beauty of chaos theory in that the smallest change at one stage of our life can lead to a completely different life progression over the years.

So how and where I shall end up meeting my future partner cannot be predicted, for all it needs is the firing of one arbitrary neuron in my brain at any arbitrary point on any given day to change my life path from the default state – maybe I take a different route to office that day, or travel in a different bus, or maybe I just decide to walk; maybe I visit a new restaurant for lunch, or take part in a workshop with people from all over the city; maybe I travel to a nearby city on the weekend and stay in a hostel, or maybe I visit my parent’s house and it just so happens that I end up making eye contact with someone across the street who is visiting her relatives.

It may even happen that I am strictly following my daily routine, but a rogue neuron in my future partner’s brain sends her day into a different trajectory that comes and intersects with mine.

Or it could even be that both of us are following our usual routines, taking the usual route to office in the metro, and we just happen to raise our heads and look at each other and smile. Let me look around, maybe that lady sitting a few rows away from me is my future partner?

The possibilities are endless and our lives exemplify the butterfly effect in practice, uniquely imprinting everything, and tearing and pulling down any pretences at predictability – every action, every decision we make is a potential catalyst that could bring the two of us together. It is not written, for it cannot be written. Your fate could, at least in theory, set you up with any person in the world provided a certain set of circumstances arise; and no set of circumstances, as far as bringing two people in contact are concerned, are impossible – some are merely more probable than others.

So, in reality, my future partner is not going to be that “special someone” because the chaotic nature of a human life betrays any sense of purpose – it is non-teleological. It cannot, so to speak, “work towards bringing to reality a certain chain of events”.

But then how does one reconcile one’s feeling of “having found the one” in the face of such non-determinism? How do we end up finding someone who is “perfectly suited for us”?

It is nothing but our naive human nature at work, which only needs to feel the slightest sensation of butterflies in the stomach to start ascribing all kinds of emotions and rationales and reasons to why the given person entered our life, including the feeling that “the entire universe has conspired to make the two of us meet”, that it was “written”, that you had been “waiting for her for all your life”, that you had “known it all along” and so on. This is basically a catharsis coming in the clothing of hindsight bias.

To be fair to our human nature, though, we should concede that the agonising gut instinct that we will “never again meet someone like them” is actually a fairly well-placed fear, for even if there were other people who were better suited for us, the chances of their lives intersecting with ours to such an extent that it leads to a conversation, are minuscule.

I will end by taking a detour into the world of science, and from where I can find a striking parallel.

In the year 1925, Erwin Schrodinger, a quantum physicist, came up with an equation called the “Schrodinger Wave Equation”. Very simply put, it describes the wave equation for any given object and tells us what is the probability of finding that object at any given point in space.

When such a wave is observed, it is said to “collapse” and the object ends up occupying a particular point in space where we can see it. Yes, quantum physics is weird.

I think there is a similar “Schrodinger Love Equation” – there is a wave of uncertainty about who is “the one” for us, and it is only when we “observe” a given person and choose her and take steps towards her that the uncertainty breaks down, the Love Equation collapses and, out of all of the millions of women out there, this particular lady becomes our “the one”.

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.

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.

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