Life Lessons for a 21st Century Living

 Always keep busy. Keep upgrading your knowledge, your skills and keep doing some or other work even if they are household chores.

If you are fortunate enough to be able to contribute, contribute to your society and culture instead of a religious or political organisation.

Keep asking yourself what you really want from life. It will guide you through tough times.

If you are a conscientious person, know that there is an amount of evil present in the world that you can't even fathom, and it thrives on taking advantage of goodness and conscience. Know that your conscience is your own guiding principle and never let others take advantage of it.

Make informed decisions.

If you don't like something about yourself work on improving it and making it better.

Know that the world works on money. Money along with love, fear and sex is a tool of social control. Know that without money you'd have no friends and wellwishers in the long run.

Practice ethics, it might be old fashioned in today's world of shameless consumerism, but it is what gentlemen and ladies do.

Respect elders and teachers as a rule, but know whether they are deserving of respect or not.

Know that family is everything.

Never fear evil, it makes it stronger.

Accept your weaknesses and never stop working on improving them.

Be just and kind.

If you are comfortable with your conscience it doesn't matter what others say, if you do not have a conscience that is ethical, make informed decisions.

Know that if at all there is a God, He or She is atleast as kind and intelligent as you.

The World and God

There are beliefs and then there is a reality. You read the Vedas and it's all about invoking gods, like Indra for protecting us from evil making us strong. People all throughout the world have belief systems and they invoke their gods or God for strength. The reality however is about bullet trains and rockets and about building bridges and skyscrapers. Some people can keep these contradictory thoughts and are able to maintain the balance between their reality and faith. Humans have this thing called hypocrisy in them, some are unknowingly hypocrites and for some hypocrisy is an intentional thing. For some their conscience is capable of aware hypocrisy and some give themselves reasons for their hypocrite behaviour. People have favouritism and double standards too and it is all a part of normal human behaviour. There is one kind of behaviour to show other people and the other kind of behaviour that is actually practised. People invoke gods for selfish reasons, they want money, power and happiness and it is not a bad thing. Humans have been mostly anthropocentric all through our the history. Vikings invoked their gods to give them strength in battles, and the same thing is done today. People derive strength from faith, thinking God is on their side. When it comes to faith, fanaticism always counts above piousness, because the way of piousness is more difficult than fanaticism. It requires sacrifice of pleasures and dedication, while fanaticism requires a victim which you can trample to feel good about your faith. Some people just believe, and do not question the faith, and that's a good way to go about. Some people see what is going on in the world which obviously doesn't seem to be proving existence of a God all loving and merciful and try to know more about path of God. The idea of God is a comforting thought for good people. Belief in God provides strength, but some people are cynical and they compare all the suffering in the world and it is hard for them to get over the visible truth of the society and the world at large, which is not at all comforting. People whose faith is unquestionable, live with considerable peace than the ones who question the existence of God after seeing the suffering in the society.

It's all about belief in the end. The same belief in God may claim lives of innocent people as it has done throughout the human history or at a personal level it may help in your evolution to a spiritual plane. I personally have no idea whether God or gods exist or not. Although I believe in my clan deities as a member of clan and I believe in Mother Goddesses but that doesn't stop me from seeing the world in an agnostic manner. I do not have an anthropocentric worldview, and I try my best to not to be a hypocrite. It's hard to be a good man in a world like this, but one can try.

A Sense of Wonder

I remember reading an old Batman strip in Comic World, a comic magazine published by Diamond Comics in the 90s. Whether it was my childhood imagination or the vintage flavour of the strip, I found that dark and comforting world of Batman very soothing. Similarly with the Phantom comics, again published by Diamond Comics. The way Phantom lived in a plush treehouse in the middle of the jungle gave a very warm feeling. My imagination was vivid back then, not limited by the limitations of the world and the society. Today I know that I am limited by the society, I know that the world functions on predefined physical and social laws and it limits my capacity to appreciate fantasy. I don't get the warm feeling anymore. Now, when I read a graphic novel I appreciate the writer and the artist and the story ofcourse, but that's it. The more you know about the world, the harder the suspension of belief becomes. It is this reason why the so called grown ups start considering things such as comics and movies as childish, forgetting that a childlike outlook is very important to extract pleasure from the world. Grown ups play grown up games, like politics, workplace politics, local politics, and because some indulge in it, others have to indulge in it too to keep themselves safe. There is scope in the world and the universe. Things like quantum physics tell us that even physical entities like time, space and matter are not absolute, there is no need for us as grown ups to get caught up in the net of fixity. Even if the administration and culture limits us, as much as it allows us, we have our imagination. For me personally, the information about quantum physics opened up my horizons. It helped me get out of a fixed mentality of taking laws of physics as absolute entities. I don't know whether they are or they are not, that's best left to physicists but quantum physics tells us one thing that the universe whether created or exploded is not as absolute as it is believed by many. I get fascinated by information such as information about wormholes, a sort of portal connecting two distinct parts of the universe. I will try to tell you my understanding of it. It's like a door in which you enter in Delhi but get out in Mumbai. How cool is that? We make a fixed view of our reality because it makes life easy for us. It makes daily survival easy. We save a lot of brain processing and depending on our personality we start taking the world for granted. The most changeable thing however is our social reality. Our relationships with people keeps changing. Depending on their behaviour or our changing opinion of them, our behaviour towards them changes. Social survival keeps us on our toes and thus we develop a habit of seeing everything except the daily life and social reality as fixed. And it often happens that the more we know about the world the less our sense of wonder about it becomes. Of course that depends on person to person, but if it happens it is because we have made ourselves habituated to see the social reality only. While in fact the world is full of wonders. The plant world, the animal world, the oceans, the universe, there are unlimited things to wonder about. People travel to know different cultures, and cultures are fascinating too, but despite being interested in cultures, I find myself attracted more to the wonders of nature and the universe. People who have studied medicine know that our body which we take for granted is a miracle. Compare all this to the rut of social obligations and office politics. The things that make people lose their child like wonder and become so called mature. Of course, people like Army generals can't spend time wondering about universe and nature, their jobs demand surety, but thousands of depressed people who are trapped in the rut of the daily life can. A sense of wonder makes the world more bearable, and who knows it might bring the warmth in Batman and Phantom comics back.

About Mind and Intelligence

There have been various classification of mind in different traditions, in Hinduism, in Buddhism, in science of psychology there have been quite a few attempts to classify the mind, like Jung and Freud. I personally subscribe to Freud, because my experiences align with this particular classification. Although one other kind of classification of mind that is very important to keep in mind is of what I call the “experiencing” and the “observer”. In my observations the experiencing part of the consciousness is quick to react, while the observing part knows the stuff from all past experiences. If I relate these classifications to Freudian classifications, the experiencing part will be Id dominant while the observing part will be Ego dominant. Personality is a serendipity as well as a choice. People's personalities are shaped by their environment and culture as well as they shape it themselves by methods such as having idols. What is constant though is their likings. What you like is what you like, and you can only not like it if it is associated by an unsavoury experience later on in your life, or if it begins to cause you anxiety because of some reason. For example, a particular kind of music not being too classy and you stop liking it because you feel it affects your sense of class. In my experience we are born with a taste in things, and acquired tastes remain what they are, acquired. It is because of this reasons people have their favourite kind of music, their favourite kinds of raga, and it tells you a lot about them, like my favourite raga is Hamsadhwani, for example.

There are different levels of intelligence all around us. For my convenience I have divided it into 3 categories. I have my religious beliefs that I subscribe to but when I am thinking scientifically, my views are pretty agnostic.

The first kind of intelligence is cosmic intelligence, though it would be a bit odd to call it intelligence, but then what would you call a bunch of fixed laws that govern the universe and its forces?

The second kind of intelligence is natural intelligence, and I divide it into two parts, evolutionary intelligence and conscious animal intelligence. It is the play of these intelligences that you see an insect eating plant, and birds and animals migrating to large distances, or salmon fish swimming upstream to complete their reproductive cycle. Humans have both these intelligences.

The third kind of intelligence is human intelligence. Though similar to apes we are way more complex than apes and thus we have an intelligence to be able to understand all these other types of intelligences and make aircrafts and spacecrafts and complex socio-cultural structures.

Our life is a play of all the above kinds of intelligences. Ofcourse there is no denying the fact that human perception is limited and we can only see what we are supposed to see for our survival. However scientific we are we can't deny that there might be some intelligence who might have designed these intelligences, and we call Him/Her, God. But then a skeptic will again ask the question, who made/designed Him/Her?

Science and The Natural Intelligence

Humans, tiny humans in the grand scheme of things and yet we believe that we are the centre of the universe. This post is going to be about the space and the universe. When I was little my Baba used to take me to a bookstore and there I would get myself a copy of Vigyan Pragati, a magazine about science. That book used to have a lot of scientific information and one science fiction story. That was my true introduction to science. I was fascinated with two things, depths of the ocean and the vast night sky. I took space for granted, and would often think about the depths of the ocean, not realising that the dark night sky contains much more secrets than the depths of the ocean. When I grew up my fascination continued. In my youth, I wanted a woman with whom I can talk about the mysteries of the universe, that was my idea of romance. My youth went in admiring scientists like Carl Sagan. The idea of extraterrestrial life is not only my fascination but an actual possibility. We don't know much about the universe. We don't know whether it is truly infinite or finite. The narcissistic beings that we are, we are busy satisfying our narcissism on social media, but there is a possibility that in a distant galaxy, on some planet there might be a thriving civilization of sentient beings. You know what is required for world peace? The realisation of how small we are in the grand scheme of things. The whole of humanity is an extremely miniscule blip in space-time. If this realisation doesn't humble us, I don't know what will.

Science is a beautiful thing. It's not the science that is calculative, it's its tools. Science is curiosity, it is knowledge. Every culture believes in something higher, something supernatural. Is it a coincidence? Though one more thing that is common with it is that it's all human centric, and though I don't agree on it personally, rightly so, because which other species has made spacecrafts, aircrafts and computers? It's the humans. We think and we make things that propel us into technological advancements. Elon Musk is inserting chips in the brains of pigs to control them. What if that technology already exists and we, the normal people of this world are pigs with chips in the brain of the world government? Exploration of space makes me joyful, even if it is a cold place. One of the reason is that the possibilities are endless. We have explored a miniscule fraction of the space and there can be many civilizations out there in the space. All we know are theories, that too with limited capacity of our brain.

How cool is that the organisms surviving in Mariana Trench have evolved to survive the high pressure and lack of light of that depth. It doesn't tell about God, but it tells of an intelligence, which we can refer to as God. This intelligence doesn't care about life or death but it is sure to provide means to survive. Imagine having the ability to emit light in the depth of ocean. Predators have their method to lure the prey. The ones who are not predators have a method to run away or protect from the predators. The intelligence works in this manner. How frightening is this cosmic apathy, and yet the ability to ultimately develop the means to survive is fascinating as well as indicative of a higher intelligence beyond our understanding.

Intelligence, or The Lack of It

When I was young I used to think of intelligence as a really cool thing. Afterall who was not impressed by James Bond, he got all the cool gadgets and beautiful girls. We think of intelligence as something that protects. The foreign and military intelligence protects the country, and internal intelligence claims to protect the country from internal unrest. It decides the narrative of the country. The same narrative which the modern sensationalist media screams on the top of its lungs on the news channels and makes you feel that Doordarshan times were better. Well I do not contend internal intelligence does not prevent unrests in the country but that's a very idealistic way of thinking. After all intelligence is a dirty business. In olden times in India intelligence for the state was done by sanyasis who wandered from place to place, or traders. There are two types of people ones who are not afraid to die and the others who are so afraid to die that they can kill others, official example of the former are warriors which currently would be the Armed Forces and the example of the latter would be politicians, the intelligence individuals fall somewhere in between. People, the normal janta is dispensable, and when required is used as cannon fodder. The state takes care of everything. So, the intelligence not only does the so called protection but also does the dirty work for the state, which is indirectly politicians. It has many tricks up its sleeve. First step mostly is taking away credibility of the target, the most favourite way of doing that is by using sexuality, or things like framing the person of taking bribes or something of that sort. Most cases get sorted by maligning the reputation, but if they are not, there are other tricks too, like gaslighting the individual and making the victim question their own ideologies and beliefs, social engineering and causing unrest in family of the target, getting people in the family sick by exposure to some infection, getting their children in bad company, blocking their finances, if that doesn't work then comes threatening and intimidation and if that doesn't work then comes murder. Statecraft is a dirty business and tradecraft is a tool to keep this dirty business thriving. If people come to know what really happens in politics no one would join the Armed Forces except the ones who need money, but then they won't be better than mercenaries. I think the goal of education should be that a citizen is completely aware of the political situation in the country and yet gets drafted when war arrives, that is to cultivate love for the country, any which ways, when war arrives people get united for collective survival so that's not really an issue. The ugliest form of intelligence is corporate intelligence because it is done solely for money and it has no ideological basis, the corporate use techniques like gangstalking to harrass the victim and extort valuable information or intelligence. In the upper echelons the difference between corporate and government intelligence becomes non-existent. What remains is profit and power.

Some Eclectic Thoughts On Important Things

Imagine about the gods of Native American tribes, Amazonian tribes and African tribes. There are many fast disappearing cultures in the worlds that were in touch with nature and had shamans until the word of God reached to them. I find tribal and shamanic traditions peaceful and the reason I suppose is because of their being in touch with nature. In India too we have tribes but mostly they are being taken advantage by so called comparatively civilized society of India. Government hunts them down in the jungles of Jharkhand and other such states. The reason, probably they are influenced by communist philosophy. The question is from where does the communist philosophy reach in the jungles of Jharkhand. There is not much to think here, it's just the government assisting capitalist expansion. Because jungles have one thing that is dear to both the government and the capitalists, land. Imagine these scarcely educated “communist” tribals being hunted by the CRPF and getting shot to death and the peddlers of the leftist narrative who incite these poor folks casually sipping wine in Delhi in institutions like JNU.

Anyone who is aware enough knows that we live in a prison, a belief in God might ease our suffering in the world but I would readily believe in nature than God. I mean a prostitute that stands on a bus stand for ten rupees per person also must be believing in God. The civilized society doesn't want to talk all this because it makes them uncomfortable. They are busy going to temples and offering coconut and Prasad so that nothing bad befalls on them. I personally don't go to North Indian temples. I like South Indian temples because they are old, and that reminds me of the times when people had actual faith. My clan deity from my grandmother's side is Kamakhya, the personification of the vagina of Goddess Shakti. I believe in Mother Goddesses because even though believing in nature I couldn't shake off the idea of mother goddesses, and since she is my clan deity it's about tradition too and I respect traditions. You never will know the prison being constructed around us until it starts closing in on you. Espionage has always existed and since we have an old civilization it is pretty developed in our country too. Not to mention the digital tools and equipments of the corporations since the internet became mainstream in India aid in that. The reason given, state security. Do you know, YouTube has the capacity to gaslight you? I personally don't mind it, but then the politicians should stop bullshitting about truth, freedom and human rights. Politics is a dity game and good people trapped in it generally do not survive. I like China, because it is what it is on the face. People are aware how many rights they have in the country. We have all the technologies of China, we do mass surveillance of our citizens, we allow corporate espionage in our country, we record our citizen’s activities on the internet and then we talk about fundamental rights.

When I was young I thought of many things I wanted to become. In my younger days I wanted to become a scientist or a doctor, science is still one of my loves and hospitals and labs give me relief. In my 12th standard I wanted to become an advertiser, just because I was a creative person, thankfully I did not become become one because even though it is a very creative job it is just lies, deception and manipulation of audience. I started writing because of my need for creativity and because I was under societal pressure. In the second year of my college I really wanted to become a writer, and wanted to write a novel and graphic novels and comics. I am a fan of stories and I love comics. The comic industry in this country has become defunct especially since 2013. It maybe due to change in policy or maybe because comics don't sell, but the popularity of American superheroes in India says otherwise. The media in India since 2013 especially has become progressively vulgar and you know what the funny thing is? Pornography is banned. Observe all the vulgarity in media today and then think about the ban of pornography, doesn't make sense does it, it's basically the same thing, also not that ban on pornography is going to stop it, but everyone that raised voice against the changing environment in the country mysteriously got into a sexual scandal.

I am thankful that I do an actual job. I am a creative person and I need to create and writing is my way of creating though I do not write fiction anymore, but I am thankful that I do a real job and I am not a social media manager for some company. I find doing real jobs manly (or womanly if you are a woman). Still, any job is a job, whatever fills the stomach of your family.

Thoughts On Higher Purpose

Is there a higher purpose of existence? I ponder on this question sometimes. Millions of people in this world suffer with hunger, and when I look at that I am thankful that at least I have food on my table. Maslow's hierarchy plays an important role. When we have all our basics covered we strive for self-actualization. With all our needs fulfilled, we strive for a higher purpose in the life. But does that matter in the world? Both yes and no. My outlook towards humanity is pessimistic, and that is not without a reason, I believe, and it is true that our experiences paint our world view and my experiences with humanity have not been so confidence inspiring. Many people don't see the bigger picture, they are busy spending their life one day at a time, which is not at all bad, but unfortunately I don't do that. I have seen the bigger picture and as humans the amount of control exercised on us by entities other than God is tremendous. I don't define myself by philosophies and ideologies but I can call myself an existentialist. Many a times humans are like crabs in a bucket, pulling each other down in the effort to get out of the bucket. A lot of times they come together like a cohesive whole. It's hard to say what will happen when. I write to give a purpose to myself. Money is not purpose. For business minded people, or for materialists it may be a purpose but not for me, though I know that it is a necessity. Except for air, for everything that is required for human survival you need money, even for drinking water. So, does higher purpose even matter? Self-actualization even matter? In this daily grind, the daily race of survival where there is this crabs in the bucket scenario, some are lucky to have found their oasis, their utopia, where they are connected with others. A majority however is still in the rat race. The dismantling of a cohesive whole doesn't take time in adverse situation. Take an example of Hindu Muslim riots. In a scenario like this the majority will pick their sides according to their religion and as the violence gets worse even the ones reluctant in picking sides will have to pick their side ultimately. There are no prizes for guessing who will pick what. I will give my personal two cents on this scenario before delving deeper into the higher purpose thing. Religion in my opinion is cancer, it is the method by which a common man gets access to spirituality but in its organized form it is a cancer. I believe in God in my own way, I practice my rituals and I follow my culture but I have no doubt in my mind that religion is a cancer. Some people however make their religion, not their God, not their rituals, not their culture, but their religion their higher calling, and it is these people who are easily manipulated by the manipulators of the society. I had made homeopathy and medicine my higher calling, and despite being average in the subjects, I think I know enough to see things I need to see as a homeopath and a medical man. My habit of writing is a way of self-actualization. Mastery in your thing is a way of self-actualization. In western countries many people achieve self-actualization in things we Indians would consider as petty, like motorcycling, or skateboarding. In India majority still believes that self-actualization means politics or money, or some reputable government post (which is technically wrong too by the way). The ones who fail to satisfy the society become social workers to show the society that they are still worth something by arranging things like last rites of unclaimed dead bodies and other such things. I am not saying it is always the case. It may be that they are doing these things for personal satisfaction and pure goodwill (there are innumerable individuals who choose social work because they are passionate about it) but sometimes the social element of this can't really be ignored. This act, though in my opinion is an example a thing worthy of being a higher purpose. Because a dead body isn't going to thank you for arranging last rites for it, and by doing it you are not only showing basic decency but also displaying the best humanity has to offer, that is compassion, even if for social validation.

People achieve mastery in things they do. Like a sweeper does in cleaning the streets. A chef in the kitchen and so on. These regular people, masters in their fields, don't get to show off like a son or daughter of an influential person would do. They have silently achieved self-actualization and are cool about it because it is their job, also because nobody really appreciates them in a normal scenario, again, because it's their job. These silent masters of their crafts are the ones that run this world, while sons and daughters of resourceful people show off their skills in music videos or some other media. Now, let's come back to higher purpose. Is it necessary? Definitely not. I have a higher purpose, but I don't think much about it. I just do what I have to. For a skateboarder mastering his or her sport might be the higher purpose. For a spiritualist union with God might be that. People can live without a higher purpose, but then that doesn't stop them from chasing excellence in whatever they choose to be excellent in. Social work is a thing most people choose as a higher purpose of their life, because they want to give back to the society. I had said above that a thing like arranging last rites of an unclaimed dead body is “worthy” of being a higher purpose, but then that is my conditioning speaking. What if your higher purpose in life is making good embroidery? It really doesn't matter. Giving back to the society is what good people do. It is not a necessity, and atleast in this country from what I have seen, many people do not give back to the society just for the sake of giving, but there are ulterior motives, and I feel that if there are ulterior motives it is better to stick to embroidery or skateboarding atleast ethically. I wish things were not as simple as they are but unfortunately we are governed by ethological principles and higher form of thought and discourse are crushed in this society as soon as they reach a level where they can be a threat to the establishment. When we look around especially in a world connected by the internet, we see everyone tripping on something. I trip on writing and reading. I may sound like a nihilist if I say that we don't need a higher purpose but in a society as cruelly and rigidly controlled as ours, that too on ethological principles, we don't really need to have a higher purpose.

Something About Writers and Writing

Places have their aesthetics, or so to say their “vibe”. A writer is successful if he or she is successful in capturing that vibe in a written form. I deal with a lot of such vibes. I don't know about non-fiction writers but fiction writers should have a sense of aesthetics. Writing should have soul in it and that will only happen when the writer has a soul. Laymen who have not dealt with writing would not have any idea about the hell a writer goes through to preserve his or her soul. There is a lot of soulless writing these days, but what sells is what sells. I am old school as far as reading is concerned. I like writers with a soul and writers with a conscience. This is probably the reason why I like Kafka so much. Only modern writer I like is JK Rowling but then she also fell in the trap of the modern pronoun brigade and decided that Dumbledore is gay. I do not have any opinion on this though, it was her world and she can decide whatever happens in her world but I think writers should be above all this. I like reading fiction but these days writing fiction is difficult because the reality itself has become stranger than fiction. I think it always was but these days due to the internet, it is in your face. I am an escapist, I like to have relief from the so called real world because I don't like how the real world is handled by, well, whoever handles it. Reading was one of my escapes during childhood and it still is. One of my favourite genres is Science Fiction and within it, Philip K. Dick is one of my favourite authors. He was so sure about humanity that even in his space themed stories he wrote about colonization and war, never once thinking that probably if we become advanced enough we may become peaceful. I have my reasons to believe that he was right. One of my other favourites, Lovecraft, invented the genre of cosmic horror. According to him humanity is tiny and can be crushed any day by ancient cosmic deities. His writing style is gothic and I love gothic literature. His stories transport me in a whole different world, a world that I like.

I like many writers but the ones above are some of my absolute favourites. I like the world created by Jules Verne too, and I like stories of Chekhov, O. Henry, Guy de Maupassant and others. I used to write when I was in college. Earlier I used to write fiction because I wanted to become a writer and I wanted to make people feel my writing and to entertain them. Now I write to preserve aesthetics and to educate along with the above stated reasons. I have realised that a writer writes because he or she has no option other than that. For him or her it is survival. I can survive without writing, but I feel better when I write. Yes, there is always the risk of your writing not passing the test of time, or becoming irrelevant, or worse, becoming ridiculous as time passes, but then whatever you write, if it was your truth at the time, it doesn't matter if it looks ridiculous to others.

I have wanted to become a writer with all my heart, not a popular writer, not a money making writer, but just a very good writer. I am a physician, and during college, inspired by Chekhov, I moulded myself as a physician writer. I don't want to be a popular writer but the least I want to do is preserve the vibes I love, through my writing.

The Unending Game

It's 2022, and common citizens should understand that politics is all about money, that and power. Religion is a medium to access spirituality for the common man (or woman) but to the people in power it's a tool to control the population. My personal favourite religion is Buddhism. I have a dislike for some religious philosophies, especially the ones which try to convert other religions, but the world doesn't work on my likes and dislikes, does it? Some religions can be weaponized easily and Hinduism was not one of them but in present day India we can see that it's possible too. More the religion in a country and less the science, the easier it is to manipulate a population. Every religion has a concept of Heaven and Hell, and to reach Heaven you have to go through Hell on Earth in most cases. We actually don't know what happens after death so that's always going to remain a big mystery and religion thrives on this mystery. Hinduism has thrived on oppressing lower castes. There is a rigid social hierarchy and lower castes have faced a lot of oppression. Dr. Ambedkar changed his religion to Buddhism, an indigenous and probably and arguably the most peaceful religion in the world. That was his genius. I wonder why the oppressed classes don't follow suit. In Hinduism theoretically we preach the Bhagavad Gita but practice Manusmriti, but then that's how social structure is preserved. I'll get back to my point. The common man should know it's all about money. How? I'll explain.

Every state does propaganda, the media you watch is mostly state propaganda, meant to keep you occupied. The present government in this country however is not experienced and does not know how to create propaganda, because to be a good propagandist first you have to be a good artist. That's why you see that leftist propaganda in this country is finer and upper class people of this country easily fall for it. Because leftists, not a thumb rule, are good propagandists, mostly because they are good artists and are well connected. The right in this country targets its propaganda to the lower class and lower middle class votebank, and their method is so poor that it fails to convince the cool upper class kids. There is a saying that says "nationalism is the last refuge of a scoundrel", I personally do not agree with this saying. Things are not absolute. They are not black or white. Me, for example, I would consider myself a hundred percent patriot and around thirty percent nationalist. Nationalism is required in some cases, and it is necessary for a national identity. People in India simply vote for their caste and religion, there is no rocket science behind it. Lower class Muslims go for Muslim supporting parties and upper class Muslims become leftists (at least till the Caliphate is established, just kidding). There is a lot of cash inflow from various sources, for Christianity from white countries, for Islam from Arab countries, for communism from countries like Russia and China, and this cash inflow creates mouthpieces and propagandists, who are loyal to their source of income. Also, the world has not become so bad yet, some of them are foolish enough to do such work for ideological reasons too. The common man however becomes the cannon fodder. Now, what is behind all this, and for what? Money. Things are actually as simple as this. We all know it in some form or the other but then what does a common man has to do with geopolitics and tradecraft. Not much. I prefer religion as a means of solace, and for spiritual satisfaction, that's what it means to me, but to different people it can mean different things. For some it may be a ladder to power. Politics of ideology is dead, now they are just collecting money by showing people its cadaver. We are actually being ruled by multinational corporations, which might be a good thing or bad thing. All we can hope is at least our roads are good, our health services in reach and there is good content on television. 

Something About Children's Media

 I was lucky to be born in a time when I got to read quality literature and watch quality cartoons. The children of today can't understand that because they grow up watching subpar children shows by people who are not passionate about what they do. The media establishment decided that shows should be Indian, made by Indians, but they forgot that it requires a skill set. I grew up watching Cartoon Network, shows like Batman: The Animated Series, Johnny Quest, Dandare, Dexter's Lab, Courage the Cowardly Dog, The Mask were some of my favourites. Today's children on the other hand grow up with cartoons which are not Indian despite being Indian and their plots, plot devices and techniques, everything is lifted from the west. We Indians copy the west a lot. It is clear in our movies, in Bollywood too. Suddenly they have started making remakes of Hollywood films as if there is a dearth of stories in India.

The trick is doing things for passion instead of "roti", and this is the only thing we Indians failed to copy from the west. I have read a lot of quality literature in my childhood, and there was this era of comics too back then due to which I am a fan of comics and graphic novels even today. Chandamama, an awesome magazine of my childhood era is defunct today and the quality of other children magazines, I would take one name, Balhans among others, has reduced drastically in content. I did not take the name of Balhans because it is the worst of the lot, but because it was one of the best children's magazines at one time along with Chandamama. Children today are thrown into the furnace of society from a very young age, you have online coding classes, guitar classes and God knows what all, and I think it is natural, the competition is high, my personal thinking is that the child should know at least one vocational skill such as carpentry, bike or car repairing/mechanic skills, pottery or cooking etc. Coding skills can be useful too, but not everyone is going to be Linus Torvalds or Mark Zuckerberg and the education system does provide basic coding skills to understand the concepts. But in the end it's all up to the parents to decide, to each their own. 

A Little About My Kind of Literature

When I was little, my grandfather used to take me to the bookstore and get me children's magazines. I developed a habit of reading very early in my life and it helped me a lot during my life. The downside of the habit of reading is that you become too idealistic and when the real world hits you it hits you hard, but then due to the same habit you are well equipped when it happens. Read good authors, not that anything is going to help you when "the sky falls down" but writings by good authors are a consolation. When I was a kid I used to read a lot of comics. Comics are a beautiful way of unlocking the imagination of children. I read a lot of literature, both Hindi and English. Like many children of the 90s I love Harry Potter, it's a beautiful book. I still like it and I think it's one of the best children's novels. I read authors like Khushwant Singh and Taslima Nasreen and many others. When I was in college I used to do a lot of poetry and story writing. Grammar has never been my thing but I write for the sake of creativity, expression and aesthetics. I read a lot of short story writers, like Chekhov, O. Henry and many others. I started reading classics in college and read Conan Doyle, Tolstoy, William James and many others. I have been a fan of Kafka since my early youth and I like existential literature. I like noir for the style it has. And as the world opened up to me I started liking transgressive fiction and cosmic horror. At present my favourite genres are science fiction and cosmic horror. I have a lot of appreciation for Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick. Back during my younger years I used to like transgressive fiction, but then there is so much transgression in the world itself that that fiction is almost reality. I also enjoy dark humour a lot. Dark humour is not everyone's cup of tea but then it doesn't have to be. 

Literature is the mirror of society and also the mirror of the mind of the individual who writes it. When I was in college I used to write satire and existential literature. Some of the stories that I wrote were dark and dealt with things like revenge, others were romantic and idealistic kinds. I like revenge stories, because I have appreciation for justice and I have always wanted to write a noir story with a lot of stylized violence. But I am not into writing fiction anymore, still I will give an excerpt of a stylized noir (and a bit transgressive) fantasy that I had written:

"She was so beautiful, his mother, and that's why a deva from the heavens made love to her when she was asleep. A minor deva, he was infamous among the apsaras for his ways, they called him accidental deva, thought of him as a lustful asura, and he was lustful, and so his mother got pregnant with him. She died a lonely death, just after his birth, because that's how the Indian society is to a single mother, and she couldn't explain how she became pregnant, she couldn't explain even to herself. He was a beautiful boy, and the government took him in as a baby, along with others for Project 1347. That's what was happening to all orphaned babies at that time. They were taken in by the government for Project 1347 and mothers were assigned to them. A lab situated deep in the jungles of Himachal Pradesh directly under the department of defence was tasked with Project 1347. He was assigned a name, Vikram, and a codename, 077.

Vikram was sitting in the car waiting for Tanya. He lit a cigarette and changed the radio channel to news. Matoshree (Mother) was directly overseeing the mission. Tanya was inside the hotel having sex with Prateek Goel, Indian head of an American technology company, the camera on her handbag recording everything going on on the bed. Prateek is fucked, Vikram thought to himself. Maatoshree would now blackmail him to give secrets of the cutting edge technology his company was researching on, and of course the Indian government would then sell it to the Indian corporates who were just too lazy to develop their own authentic technologies. Tanya was Matoshree's go to for jobs like these, she was extremely beautiful and good with conversations, as far as skills go, everyone who was a part of Project 1347 was skilled. Skills were a dime here, what was important were their roles."

Evolution of The Internet

There were times of Yahoo Messenger, when you could make any chat id and get into a chatroom of your interest. I used to be in the Harry Potter chatroom a lot. Only the ones who have played Age of Empires on a dialup lan would understand the sheer fun of it. The internet was a whole different beast back then. There should be two things clear though, there is nothing that is private on the internet, and the government records all your activities on the internet. The illusion of privacy on the internet may sell VPNs and anti-virus software but it's just a way of helping the software economy. When 3G mobile data came to India, the internet started becoming mainstream, and now, with classes being held online during the pandemic we can safely say that it has become mainstream. Data is the most important commodity these days. Big Data and Big Tech control the world now. And who controls Big Data and Big Tech? Guys (not girls) who would probably be bullied in school in a world where there was no technology. Of course they are overseen by individuals not necessarily facing the same issue.

Is there a problem with today's internet compared to Yahoo Messenger days? That depends on your point of view. When the internet was new, people wanted to connect, share interests, make friends, but with the internet boom came information boom, and now we face issues like a patient "knowing more about his medical condition than the doctor". The expression "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch" can't be truer in the case of the internet. You do searches, accept cookies, fill in your personal details, and these things are then used for targeted ads. To assume that Big Tech and Big Data would follow ethical practices will be a far cry. Businesses have only one ethic generally, profit, and we can only hope that they follow ethics, which is highly unlikely given the amount of spam we receive in our inbox. But that's not the only problem. Advertisements are fine, because we use the internet for free, what we pay for is the data connection, so it's simple give and take, even if we get the ads of what we were talking about just another day, on our insta feed, or an ad of something we searched about on Google, on a totally unrelated app. You see, the problem of the internet is not here. The problem is that it is swallowing the very basic things that make us human. Everything on the internet is permanent. What you are doing now, will be seen by your children and after that your children's children. We can't do much about it. The main issue here is commercialism and narcissism becoming a way of life, but then who doesn't want to make money? And the internet lets you do that from the comfort of your home. You just need to be able to attract the attention of people. Let's talk about journalism now. It's not about news or good writing anymore, it's about clickbaits and keywords. Good journalism in the present day is the journalism that makes good use of SEO, that's all there is to it. And the real culture of our ancient civilization is starting to show in the facebook comments. Now, let's see the dangers of the internet. You can be easily psychologically profiled by the kind of content you watch on the internet, by the government and the corporate equally. Your internet activity can be used to blackmail you, again by the government and corporate equally. Ethics is just for books and good people, and according to Murphy's law, things are not looking good in this respect. 

The internet which used to be a rendezvous point to meet new friends with shared interests is now a warzone for propaganda peddlers and is turning into a permanent prison for common man, which he is not even aware of. Still, it has given rise to a whole new economy and the ones who took advantage of this economy and got rich wouldn't be complaining. This new economy allows you to monetize your talents, whether it be dancing, acting, comedy, cooking or something else. We are more connected than we ever were, we can video call people, still, loneliness remains. You can do payments and banking from your phone, do trading, invest, apply for jobs, do reservations, order products and services. Everything now is at our fingertips. Our collective psychology is going to get affected by these major changes and it would be curious to see how society evolves in coming years. Some of us miss the old internet, when it was just a source of knowledge and a way to meet new friends with similar interests. But there aren't a lot of us.

A Personal Take On God

As we grow up we may start to question the world, the more adaptive ones may not but the idealistic ones who have been brought up in a certain way may do that. I have seen sickness on a personal level and it made me more empathetic as a doctor and as a person but it also opened my eyes to the amount of suffering in the world. The society says that there is a God, and yet when we see the world in its full scope He or She is nowhere to be seen. I know God is a personal matter. Religion is not only opiate of the masses as Marx said, it can also be a medium of personal fulfillment, like many things in the world it also has two sides to it. It can be a control mechanism for masses for the administration and the elite, but it is also the medium through which the common man experiences spirituality. Faith heals, and it has been proven more than often in human experience and religion does the same, it provides faith to the common man. Praying is a form of meditation that allows us to connect to a higher consciousness, connect to something much higher and bigger than ourselves. Personally, I lost my faith in God after my suffering, actually not, the real reason was my sickness opening my eyes to the amount of suffering in the world. It's hard to believe in what I call "the societal God" after that. Believers may say that my faith or belief was weak and I accept that, but I have never been a proponent of blind belief and I think my father being a scientist has something to do with that. My personal belief however is that of a Charvaka, but it is not bounded by strict rules of this philosophy, I also believe in Purusha and Prakriti, and the concept of Shiva and Shakti, the masculine and the feminine and mother goddesses because I think a mother's love is the purest form of energy that there is. I feel that when a faithful person loses faith he searches for it and that's what happened with me. One can believe in a Supreme Being, Parameshwara or God, but often people just believe in Him or Her because they are afraid, which is not a bad thing, one needs faith for emotional support. It's just that our belief of God is way too narcissistic. Just watch Animal Planet and you'd realise that a deer who eats grass and is benign is hunted by a lion. In human society too this analogy can be seen. I would like to believe in the "societal god" but I just don't have enough evidence for it. What I have is evidence for energy, in different forms, an energy that tries to preserve itself, in nature and in humanity. A deer tries to save itself, the lion tries to save itself from hunger, the body tries to save itself from diseases and trauma. As humans we have energy states, I tend to believe gods and goddesses of Indian mythology as energy states too. For example, the Goddess Kali is an energy state of motherly love and wrath, Lord Ram is an energy state of idealism and duty. In homeopathy there is a concept of miasms, the fundamental cause of disease, it portrays three states, disruption in function, creation or accumulation and destruction, although pathological in nature, the concept bears a striking similarity with the Indic trinity of Vishnu, Brahma and Shiva, energy states of function, creation and destruction. I personally don't think that God will tell us how to bathe and what clothes we should wear but then tradition, culture and rituals are also important things. A society should preserve its culture, traditions and rituals and thus these things become important. 

I am a scientific minded individual, and so evidence matters to me. But I also know that science is an ongoing process and it will always be an ongoing process. I may go to hell for not believing in the "societal god" but I can take that risk for the sake of truth and science. I don't like going to temples much but there are some places that provide me peace, like the Golden Temple in Amritsar and old South Indian temples, especially in Tamil Nadu. When I say to others "bhagwan/uparwale pe bharosa rakhiye”, I mean the preserving energy that I believe in and hope that uparwala really exists. Despite the philosophy I have spouted above, I am a simple work hard and party hard kind of a person who doesn't think about God much. What I know though, is that truth and love are godly qualities and they have the capacity to elevate us.