Redemption of the Darwinian Soul

I got a call yesterday from Balajhi, suggesting that I should keep myself from intruding into the story- "You are getting to be a bore," he told me, "let me read the story by myself, spare me your nudges and winks and asides and brilliant insights and philosophies".

I get his point- reading is supposed to be a lonely activity, and if your privacy is constantly invaded by a blundering author, it does get bothersome.

So, in consideration of your feelings, I will remove myself from this story.

It is all yours now.

---

Vennaimalai felt depressed in a big way. He had just been to a wedding where the revelry and the frivolous self-exhibitionist activity of people, amplified by teh din of glaring bright clothes and false laughter had cumulatively jarred upon his nerves to breaking point.

"This is it", he told himself, "I cannot take this anymore. What is the point..."

What Vennaimalai was bothered about was the meaninglessness of the whole spectrum of life- from the alarmed cry at the intake of the first breath to the exhausted lost sight of irremediable expiration. Vennaimalai had returned helplessly, almost obsessively, to this question: this animated body- in the absence of mind and memory, what sense does its activities make in relation to the ultimate desiccation that awaits its end?

The thought itself was so painful on that particular day. Vennaimalai had by now come to understand that no one was aware of his end, or even of the now-ness of time- and no one could help it- even Vennaimalai himself shared this common fate of random, flaky existence. 

So then, it came as no particular pain, when the spear of the median railing upon which Vennaimalai had flung himself from the moving bus grazed the region of his chest and plunged into his ribs-  his Soul's piercing cry to heavens had all but dulled his senses- his body lay now, like a discarded rag from which a red fluid seeped and formed a thick puddle.

There was then light, and yet everywhere a darkness- a darkness darker than the absence of light, yet it was a door to light: darkness enveloped this light that throbbbed with life, and made a boundary for darkness to be.

And in the silence, pregnant with meaning, a whisper: "Son, do you occupy this body as a man might rent a room, or are you a body that is given a voice, like a bird that had grown wings?"

Vennaimalai, at that instant, realised the truth of his existence, and saw this truth shine forth like a jewel that had been cut and polished in an intricate design of Love.

Vennaimalai awoke to consciusness, his neurons and nervons firing with intense energy.

"What happened, love?", he heard a kindly nurse ask. "How are you now?'

Vennaimalai felt no impulse to talk. He smiled.

"You did not respond to anlything that we did- we had to connect you to the Singularity Centre and reboot your systems. We are happy it worked"

"I am infinitely grateful to you and the Singular One", Vennaimalai replied, "my life will never be the same again. I am a changed man now".

"Oh, yes, some of the patients feel that way after connecting with the Singular One. Can you tell me what happened? I am curious to know", the nurse said.

"I have no way of describing what I know now- I am changed, and not what I was, that is all I can say. It was... ", Vennaimalai fell silent.

"Yes, that is what you all say", the nurse said, and went away with plump satisfaction.

---

Did you enjoy any absence or miss my guiding hand?

If I were there, I could have given you the links to the Dalai Lama's comments that man can be reborn as a computer, the Blu Brain, Singulariy, Raymond Kurzweil at the appropriate points. 

But vain though I am, I know the truth, you didn't miss me much, did you?

The Chronicle of Horrible Experiences- Part I.

I was planning to write a story about a foiled suicide attempt and its consequences- but you know how it is with muses- she is silent, and the fountain of inspiration is dry right now, creative juices all clogged up, so to say.

Anyway, inspired or not, I will tell a story- substituting one uninspired tale for another.

This happened a year ago.

I had gone to a State Government Office with my lawyer-friend, Sudalai. One of his clients had asked for a favour of him, and we went searching for the proper Department to make enquiries about the pending claim.

Now, my friend Sudalai is a diabetic, he has hypertension, and he is overweight. On top of all that, he had a bad case of filaria. If he kept standing or sat down for some time, his feet would swell up with fluid, and it would look all puffy and painful too. The first thing he would do, is to wrap a tight bandage around his ankles. Thanks to his waistline, he needed someone to help him do that, and most of the times, that would be me.

All this has nothing to do with this story. I am just adding these details to give you the kind of background that might help you place him in your memory so that my friend Sudalai gets an individuality, and you find him interesting enought to come along with me in this sorry story.

So, my friend Sudalai is a brave man, being a lawyer, but given the circumstances of his health condition, he is cautious. So cautious, he asks me to drive him over to wherever he has to go. But that is not often, and he gets me a generous lunch at Palmgrove Hotel over at Nungambakkam Road, so I am usually more than willing to drive him around.

Okay, on that particular day, it was so hot we decided to drink some coconut water. My friend Sudalai is a villager, so he picked up the right coconut that yielded plenty of water. It was sweet too, we had one more.

I told him, right after drinking that, "Sir, my stomach is full. We should go to the Hotel only after two o'clock"

He weighed this option, and then suggested, "Sir, I have diabetes. My medicine will not wait for lunch. I have to take the pills- so why don't we eat an hour before that?"

That sounded reasonable, so I told him, "Yes, sir. Much of this will evaporate as sweat anyway. For what remains, we will find a toilet..."

But the thing is, when we went to the State Government office, we clean forgot all that.

We had to spend a long time, waiting for the person in charge of the claim to come back to his seat. And then he went searching for the file, and so on. The long and short of it is, we had a dreadful time there.

And then after we had come to a gentleman's agreement with that government official, we got down from that third floor office (I should have told that earlier in passing, sorry I forgot to do that- now I spring this clumsily), in a lift. Soon after we had started to climb down, the power went, and the generator seemed to have some problem- the door of the lift kept opening and closing. We were just three feet above the second floor, but we couldn't get down.

Not that we didn't try. My friend Sudalai went all sweaty and nervous, and made to jump out past the manic lift door, but I was not sure he could time his jump. So, I clamped his shoulder and restrained him from what would have been a mad act.

And then to make things worse, the power went totally. The door shut tight with a final thud, and we were in the dark. Not a sound anywhere, except for the heavy breathing of my friend, and sure enough, he croaked, "I think I am going to faint now".

I didn't know what to do- I kept talking to him, told him a joke or two, tried to sound casual about it (I am a bit claustrophobic myself)- but believe me, those five minutes were like hell to me- I literally kept him alive with my talking.

Now, if there is any justice in this world, what should have happened is that once the electricity was restored, and we got down safely, I should have walked out of the lift looking brave and mighty, and he clinging to my shoulders like a damsel in distress.

But unfortunately, to my eternal shame, mortification, and chagrin, daylight revealed nothing of my courage under fire- all it showed was the evidence of my involuntary micturition, its stain and odour causing people in the corridor to turn and look at me with disgust.

And then, my friend Sudalai laughed- the ungrateful wretch!

Maya

" “I thank thee, gracious Lord, I thank thee,” he gushed. “Because what I formerly believed by thy bounty, I now so understand by thine illumination.” "

- "The Self-Thinking Thought", Nathan Schneider.

I have a story in my head- and it is not working in the telling of it- which should not be the case. We make up stories all the time, don't we, and how casually!

There is such a thing as false memory, for instance. I remember that soon after our marriage, I went with my wife to Kancheepuram. She accuses me to this day that I did not buy her any lunch, she was starving all day. I remember nothing of that sort. In fact, I have a mental picture of us eating, even the tastelessness of the food hastily cooked up at that family-run small-town hotel. Obviously, one of us is wrong. We both believe our version of the incident wholeheartedly and without the least doubt.

Now, let's question this a bit.

What is belief? Is it something you make up, or something you are sure of? Take people like you and me who go to temples and worship many Gods- we believe that there is a God. But because we are not sure about the existence of that God, it goes without saying, our belief is something imaginary, made-up reality. And the faith of Dawkins and his band of merry atheists, they are sure there is no God- they have the science as back up- the fossils, DNA, Darwin and more.

But then, let's think of our brother, the fundamentalist. He is sure there is God, and an afterlife. Where do we place his belief?

---

And what about my friend who saw angels- shimmering bodies of less than a foot in length, flying about without wings as on a wireless trapeze-, he saw them radiant in a railway carriage. He is sure what he saw was real. In fact, this vision was so impressive, its imprint so convincing,- he doubts the existence of this world without its angels.

---

I think I should get on with the story: start at a particular point, go on about something interesting, and find some fulfilling conclusion. That is the theory.

But where should I pick up the thread and weave a tale? Life, as you an I know it, has a way of defeating our purpose, flowing out of the confines of our laboriously constructed mental dam, and irrigating its own fields and harvesting the self-grown crops. Like a tale that runs away from its author, darkening his intentions in the unspelt words, throwing light upon inanticipated passages.

Either our stories have a life of its own, or I am lousy at story-telling- you are the one to tell.

---

I'll have another go at this.

Think of this boy: young and precocious, serious beyond his age, studious with strict morals- when he is free, he relaxes by rolling out his prayer mat and sits down to meditate upon the Universal spirit that animates his Soul and this universe. And he is so irritated by the grasping love of his mother who ceaselessly worries that he will take to sannyas: she weeps with remorse, is insecure about her future, and mindless of the present.

And one day he marries, and one day a son is born to him. Sometime later, one night, he wakes up from a nightmare, his heart palpitating in terror- he has dreamt his son had taken the chalk of rat-poison and gnawed at it with his toothless mouth. He cries aloud, and wakes up to find his son in deep slumber, and dumb to his wife's alarmed exclamations.

And he finds something laugh from within him- not mocking, but indulgent. 

Thinking Hard

I should confess that two things happened today, and this story is about them.


The first is that I read this wonderful article after a long time, "The Self-Thinking Thought." The second is that I talked to a friend of mine, after a long time.


First, the self-thinking thought. It is about Anselm's Ontological Argument, proving the existence of God. Anselm, in 1077 felt extraordinary happiness because he had proof of God.

“The grace of God shone on his heart, the whole matter became clear to his mind, and a great joy and jubilation filled his inmost being,” his friend and biographer Eadmer would later write."

From what I could understand- what made Anselm happy can make you happy, too, because it will show you that God is really there. It goes like this- first, think about something that is greater than anything else. Call it god. Then think of something else, and then something else. Now, since you can think about something, and you have thought of God- the something that is greater than all those somethings, God is proved.


You get it? No?


Then you didn't think hard enough- that is why the something that is greater than anything else- God- is not real to you. Come on, think, think harder, that is the way to do it.


Because, when Anselm got it, Nathan Schneider writes,

“I thank thee, gracious Lord, I thank thee,” he (Anselm) gushed. “Because what I formerly believed by thy bounty, I now so understand by thine illumination.” "

That is the way to do it. If you don't believe in Anselm's proof, Godel made an equation of it- Maths should prove it if words fail:

Now, I can see you wonder where the story is in all this.


The friend that called me, is a doleful kind of person. More or less finished with his life. He wanted me to get him a copy of Avadhutha Gita. His parents were sick, both in their eighties, and he in his forties, unmarried and unloved. He has employed a male nurse to bathe his father, and see to his needs. His mother, in her senility, goes around cursing them all- his life is a misery, and he said he needs something transcendental that would keep him sane.


It is a most unhappy stage of life to a close friend of mine, who once confessed an astonishing experience that happened to him:


He was a boy of seven, who had gone to the Central Railway Station with his father to send off his uncle. As he was walking on the platform, he happened to glance inside a carriage, and what did he see? Tens of foot-length angels flying about the berths! He says they must be angels, because he had seen nothing like that.


This incident left such a strong impression on him, he says, "I could never believe that anything that happens now is real- everything is a dream that will pass away like those angels playing around in the railway carriage".


However much I tried to disabuse him of that notion, I could not convince him otherwise. These things happen- things stick in your head.


So today, to divert him, I asked him of his sister's son, a spiritual maniac, who wed sometime back, and has had a son born to him about a year ago.


"Oh him," my friend snickered dismissively, "He used to advice my mother to live a detached life, like a lotus-leaf in water, wet but not moist, loving without attachment. But this boy, now that he has a child, shouts out in his sleep to watch out for the child-"Stop him! Stop him! Ajinkya is putting that rat-poison in his mouth!", he cries out in sleep and wakes up sweating!"


We both felt happy about that, and I promised to get him the book and that was that.


Now, where was I? Yes, thinking hard.


Seems to me, Anselm did not need proof of God to believe Him- he wanted words to express what he felt. Because, this is the man who wrote,

"I do not seek to understand so that I can believe,

but I believe so that I may understand;

and what is more,

I believe that unless I do believe, I shall not understand."

You understand this?

Meanings are not given, they are made- or is it the other way round?

The Code

When you read newspapers, especially The Hindu kind, you get the idea that globalisation is not that good- most of our economic and financial newspapers are gung-ho about it, but that is understandable because they need to promote it. But the common man with humane sensibilities is more or less against it for the disparity it creates and the exploitation of poverty and that sort of thing.

But I think there are some positives from it- I will cite the case of Muniyamma, the servant-maid who comes to wash dishes at my aunt's. Her daughter- is doing Engineering, and she expects her to go to US in about three or four years. I think, but for globalisation, Muniyamma's daughter would have to be content with dishwashing. I don't know what you think about this.

But this is not about Muniyamma, of course, or her daughter Ananya. Or about globalisation and its discontents.

This is about Chandrika, her sister, and I am sharing this with you because I just finished seeing the film, A Few Good Men, and I got thinking about her.

See, Chandrika is in her twenties, and as we all know, the poor are not educated. The womenfolk have to go into being servant-maids or construction work if they are to earn anything. If there is any other job opportunity open for them, I am not aware of that.

Anyway, Chandrika was a problem, because she refused to go into either as she felt they were demeaning jobs. Muniyamma used to moan about her a lot, and the result was, my aunt helped her get a work.

The work was at a computer service agency. They didn't do much- all she had to do was attend calls from ten to five and note down the complaints. It was not a demanding job- I think may be she got five or ten calls a day. She whiled away the time there reading magazines and taking quick naps. She got three thousand easy rupees for a work you or I could do on the go with our cellphones.

The agency, for some reason, felt there should be someone in the office attending to the calls full-time, may be, they expect to get busy in the future, I don't know. Anyway, I think they were dumb people to employ a person just to take calls.

But it does not have to be that way- most of us are creatures of habit, and we rarely have any initiative to do anything out of the ordinary. Why, I don't think we even bother to do our job well enough- because if we do, we will all be as good as Floyd Lee is with his Pegasus.

I was talking about Muniyamma the servant maid and Chandrika the status conscious sister who turned up her nose at construction work, didn't I? Well, she was not really fortunate.

She went to her work for about six months, after which, one month she took five days of leave because she was sick.

When she got her pay, she found that five days of pay had been deducted. That didn't bother her, because she knew that's the way it would be.

She was indignant that instead of calculating the pay-cut on the basis of a thirty-day month, the manager of the service centre had divided her pay by twenty-five days. She felt she was working at daily-wages, it was not a proper employment, so she quit and came home. No one could convince her to go back.

Can you believe that?

The Naevus

I met Pramila- let's call her that- during my early days of homeopathy. A patient who had been cured of BIID by my Master brought the young couple, and he asked me to see them.

She was a beautiful young lady, tall, fair- fair in what we describe tomatoish-red sense- and stately, with a well-defined nose and a prominent adam's apple on her throat. She had an air of sadness about her, and she stooped slightly, wrapping herself in a sari round her shoulders that curved inwards like she had made herself a cocoon, and that, to me made her intriguing.

But then she opened up and I could see it- a birthmark on her right arm which marred her and made her life terrible- it looked more like a scar, an unsightly messed-up brownish map that petered out in several direction. She had to wear long sleeves to cover it, and she naturally felt quite conscious of it and most of the time she hated herself for having it. She wanted to rid of it immediately.

Taking note of her mental symptoms, I prescribed a medicine for her in high potency, and gave her an oinment to be applied externally. I have no confidence in the potency of homeopathic oinments, but people with skin problems won't be satisfied without something of the sort.

It did not cure her for the six months she was under my treatment, but it made her husband happy. I came to know of that when he confided in me on one of his visits for the oinments after his wife stopped coming.

I had told him, "My medicines, they don't seem to work. You might as well try Siddha or Ayurveda."

He looked faintly sheepish, and then said, "Doctor, we have tried them. They smell quite strongly and they are oily. But this oinment that you give, it is fragrant, and to tell you the truth, it is I who apply it on her birthmark late in the evening, and this has become something of a ritual between us".

I understood what he meant- I told him where he could get the oinment, and he stopped coming.

Sometime after that, I got married and my study of homeopathy got me into trouble with my wife. There was always someone or two who would drop in on me in the evening after I had come home from office, and a hour or two everyday would be spent that way. And then, I would sit up late into the night studying up the repertories and the materia medica- my wife did not appreciate the effort I was putting into this.

Homeopathy was my passion those days, I enjoyed listening to the stories that my patients told me and I would go round thinking how it would feel to be in their skin, with their life-histories, and think their thoughts: Homeopathy was my window to alternate universes.

Anyway, it got between me and my wife, and I had to put it away after a bitter struggle. what decided the issue was the birth of my son, and actually, taking care of him, the late hours, the disturbed sleep- it put my life out of joint, and then I got a new job with more responsibilities. I had to move on.

I don't regret that I don't do Homeopathy nowadays, but the stories I miss. And when something like what happened yesterday happens- which is what brings this post to you-, then it is as if I was in a gateway and the gate closed on me.

I saw Pramila, the girl with the birthmark, yesterday when I was coming home with Siva. We were returning from Tiruttani, and since it was late at night, we decided to eat out in a hotel, and went into Sangeetha near Koyambedu Bus Stand.

It was quite a shock to me when I saw her. She was as beautiful as ever, but she looked more happy- and she was wearing sleeveless, her scald-scar birthmark on her arm blazing away in its full glory. I could not take my eyes off it.

But luckily for me, she recognised me, and came over and we had a chat, during which I chanced to ask her (I couldn't resist it), "That birthmark. Aren't you sensitive about it anymore?"

She laughed at that and replied, "Oh, no doctor. I hardly ever feel it there. Sometimes, when people stare at it, I am conscious of it, but then, I don't know why, I get a kick out of that".

She looked at her husband and he smiled in response.

I controlled my smile, because that would have let them know that I was in on what went between them, and doctors, even phony ones like me, we maintain strict confidentiality.

So I bid them good night, and returned to address the half-cooked, dried-out Fried Rice on my plate.

How to be sticky: Keep it short, get to the point

I don't know how long I will be doing this, trying out another new thing.

Much of the posts that I make here are non-serious, provisional stuff. If I delete them tomorrow, no one will miss it.

Sometime back, I took up Google Notebook (it is closed for new accounts, unfortunately- I think sooner or later, they will bring a better version of it: because, this is getting indispensable for me these days- there should be more people like me who find it a fantastic feature).

I used it off and on, and now I am finding some new uses for this, and this is one of them: why don't I use it to pass on interesting stuff that I find, interesting but not of permanent value- instead of blogging about that, I might put it in the note-book, share it with you, and delete it later and get on with it:

Looks a good idea, right?

so I made one of my notebooks public: here it is-

Interesting Stuff for the Reader

And this is my first entry: it looks clean, no frills- neat and delicate.

Interesting Stuff for the Reader via kwout

Hope you like the idea, because I think of blogs as note-books, and I have opened and deleted more than twenty blogs, entries and all. So Google-notebook is the way to go, for me.

8/15/09