The Madras Mail

I wanted to comment on my friend’s latest blog post, but realized that it would get very long in the comments section.

Firstly, ‘God’ is concept that was invented to maintain order in society and was used as the answer for every question that was unanswerable by Man. So, this means that God changes over time, this is pretty evident. The Vatican has produced the ‘New 7 deadly Sins’, Hinduism, in its extreme birth as the RSS, is training people to be killing machines who deny alcohol but somehow feel that blood is a better fucking substitute and so forth.

I had an interesting conversation about a month ago, what if the present generation completely obliterated the idea of God, destroyed all references to God, and did not pass on the idea of God to the future generation. So, the future generation knows nothing about God. Is this better?

Religion was a way of living and lays down rules for a safe and healthy life. The religions Islam, Christianity and Judaism have the same lineage of God, it’s pretty obvious why. They were born in pretty much the same place. Moses received the 10 Commandments in Egypt and led the tribes to Israel, the Prophet formalized Islam in Mecca, and Jesus pretty much led most of his life in Galilee, Israel. So, it obviously follows that they follow very similar ideas. Newer religions are formed by certain sects of people who reject the religion of their fathers and decide that they would follow their own set of rules loosely based on the religion they were following. Rarely are religions completely lack of anything in common, unless they were separated geographically. They have their own rituals and festivals, which try to be different than the other religions, for the most obvious and important reason. They wanted to be identified as something different and ‘better’ than the existing religions, so it would make complete sense to have newer festivals and newer rituals. But the integral ideas are the same, respect humanity, eat healthy, stay healthy, and lead a ‘good’ life. The Prophet banned alcohol for a very good reason; he could see its effects in the desert, and the complete lack of control it brought about. Religion is very locally defined. For example, in Hinduism, every Veda has reference to the ‘Bharatavarsha’, the kingdom of Bharata, which is the subcontinent. So reciting the Vedas in the USA or Australia is seemingly pointless as it’s expected to be recited in India, and crossing the seas is considered to be a sin. The concept of Heaven and Hell is also very interesting; almost all the major religions have it. For example in Hinduism, the Karma theory says, ‘if you fuck up, you are fucked, irrespective of the saint you’ve been the rest of the time’. The ‘good’ doesn’t balance out with the ‘bad’; you get fucked for the ‘bad’ and get fed grapes by beautiful, naked virgins for the ‘good’. Gujarat does not allow the sale if liquor, because it is not allowed by Hinduism, supposedly. In the ManuSmriti (Manu is the Eastern version of Noah), it is very clearly said that only the Brahmins are not allowed to drink alcohol, the other CAN!!! And even if a Brahmin did drink alcohol, he would just rot in hell; it’s a personal choice really. But the fuckers there don’t seem to think so.

‘God is in the interpretation’, quite an ironic statement really. Lol. Every version of any religion we know is an interpretation of a ‘scholar’ who was purported to be the authority on it. Quite funny. For example, there is a show running on TV, Ramayan, Rama is decked out with half the gold that a small country would have as reserves. It would be impossible to wear so much of gold; it would weigh 100 fucking kilos. Every recording of the past is never completely literal, most of it is filled with figures of speech that are taken literally by the purported scholars and give a completely skewed view of the truth.

My point here, religion and God and blah blah are all good as long as it assures a peaceful existence to humanity and the environment. That is all that is required, I really don’t give a fuck about anything else.

5 words.

Malcolm McDowell is fucking insane.

For a review, read http://sunkster.blogspot.com/2006/06/clock-work-orange.html

Malcolm McDowell is still fucking insane.

Why business?

I’m reading a book, A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, I’ve gone through 10 pages, very interesting. The reason I’m mentioning this book is because it tries to explain the birth of the Universe, the concept of time, space and what would hopefully end in an attempt to explain the reason for ‘existence’. Man by nature is a selfish being, irrespective of what anyone might say. (Here ‘man’ includes both the sexes, I am not by any stretch of imagination a sexist) When the specie Homosapiens came to exist, (I do not want to deal with details that existed before the birth of the ‘intelligent man’, no doubt the evolutionary process helped in transforming a chimp or a gorilla into a being capable of reason), he must have been quite angry. For one, he couldn’t really ‘think’ unless he came up with a language to ‘think’, and to come up with something as complex as language, he definitely needed to ‘think’. I’m an Agnostic person; I really don’t know whether God exists, or even if he did, I couldn’t care less. But the fact that a lump of flesh and blood could come up with something so complex as language, respect, faith, and intelligence in a very short span of time makes me want to believe that God does exist.

Fast forward a few thousand years, now man could communicate in probably grunts and squeals, he figured out that he had to stick his ‘extra finger’ into dark places to make more of him (How Man became capable of that particular idea is something to think about), and figured out that food was required to stay alive, sabre-tooth tigers wouldn’t make good pets, et cetera. Most of what we learn is by observation, and it must have been the same story with Mr. & Mrs. Flintstone. ‘Business’ is just making sure that you stay alive at the cost of something else. There is never a detached occurrence in the Universe, everything is bound inextricably with everything else, and so for Man to stay alive, he had to make sure that anything that was a danger to his existence had to be obliterated. The concept of business possibly had its roots in the basic human feelings of gratitude and respect. There can be no one point in history that can be labelled as the birth of the idea of ‘business’. It arose out of the creation of certain very basic tendencies in Man. Sustenance was of paramount importance. If by a twist of fate, one Mr. X decided to kill a dinosaur that was about to kill Mr. Y and did kill it, how would Mr. Y feel? This was probably when the idea of respect was born. And in fact, the root of most ideas is ‘power’. From power arises respect, and from respect comes faith, and so forth. Power was very apparent to Man in nature. He knew that when the earth shook or there were bright flashes of light from the sky, he had to run for cover. Knowledge is built on assumptions, and later the assumptions are verified and knowledge is adapted to the available truth and future knowledge is built on this. Knowledge is power, it isn’t just a bunch of words, and these words have their roots in centuries of existence of Man. For Man to gain ‘power’ over nature, he had to be able to protect himself against the furies of nature, and for that he required mastery over the elements that caused all the damage.

What I’m trying to say here is this, ‘business’ is just a concept that exemplifies the basic feelings in Man. For survival, Man required mastery over forces that were out to kill him, and clearly define a hierarchy of respect, so that power was concentrated and more power signified more respect. This is very interesting because this idea hasn’t changed for centuries. For a system of business to evolve from a very rudimentary barter system to a complex, electronic chaos that it is today is something truly remarkable.

The idea of ‘business’ still exists today, most importantly because it helps to maintain an order in society, an extremely unfair one in many ways. Power can be inherited, and that is probably why business has persisted for so long. Business or the amount of money each person has decides his societal status and his power over other less fortunate humans. As the gap between those who are privileged with power and those who aren’t keeps increasing, the objective of business is being defeated. Order, the sacred concept by which humans are bound together, is increasingly becoming more and more unstable. It will not be long before the unprivileged decide that it has gone far enough and revolt, and when that happens, the idea of business will still prevail, the only change being the redistribution of power. This was apparent in the Russian Revolution, the French Revolution, and various wars of independence that were fought all over the world.

‘Business’ was devised to make humanity prosper as a whole, by decreasing the communication gap, share resources, to co-exist peacefully, and reduce carnage and genocide by sharing ideas rather than crossing swords.

That idea, I sadly say, has completely failed.

I’m sprawled on my bed right now listening to ‘The Way I Are’, it’s 0045hrs on the 13th of April, a small but very useful widget on the right hand side of my desktop affirms me of that fact. I bought a new laptop by the way, and am not over the ‘wow’ factor of having a laptop yet, it still kinda makes me feel special. Lolz. Life has sort of become very monotonous now, I’ve sort of settled into a routine. Wake up around 12, lounge around till the night, sleep by 3 or 4. I’ll be going through this for about 2 more months, classes begin on the 14th of June, and I guess am leaving sometime early June, have to go and get the loan finalized. Am heading out to Kerala on the 17th, will be spending a very relaxing 12 days there.

The most discussed issue now seems to be over the verdict of the Supreme Court alloting 27% of the seats for OBC/SC/ST et cetera, am not really aware of what is going on, except what people are telling me. Being born into a Tamil Brahmin family, I, like so many of my other friends, strongly believe that a reservation of some sort is required. I think it’s more of the being-socially-conscious bit that is coming into play here, if you condemn reservation and happen to be a rich ‘General’ category guy, you would be the mean son-of-a-bitch (or daughter, as applicable). On the other hand, as ‘General’ category person, who supports reservation, but knows that it will adversely affect him, he comes out smelling like roses. Okay, I know that am taking a very narrow view of the whole situation here, it’s just that am quite irritated now, don’t know why.

I’ve been thinking about this, everyone knows that a lion cannot be domesticated, it’s in his nature to tear the guts out of other animals and feast on it. On the other hand, humans believe in second chances, a person who is born from a family of gangsters can still turn out to be a saint. Here, the Nature vs. Nurture argument works out different for humans, Nurture wins out. Weird?

The movie Before Sunrise would easily figure in my best-movies-ever list. There is a poem by a poet/tramp in the movie.

Daydream delusion, limousine eyelash
Oh baby with your pretty face
Drop a tear in my wineglass
Look at those big eyes
See what you mean to me
Sweet-cakes and milkshakes
I’m a delusion angel
I’m a fantasy parade
I want you to know what I think
Don’t want you to guess anymore
You have no idea where I came from
We have no idea where we’re going
Lodged in life
Like branches in a river
Flowing downstream
Caught in the current
I carry you
You’ll carry me
That’s how it could be
Don’t you know me?
Don’t you know me by now?

Umm … I have no idea what it means, but it’s great nonetheless.