Desire

An austere sage teaches us that desire is the root cause of all evil. But to not to desire is to not to live and we are not interested in dead/suicidal people anyways. The problem needs to have a more granular solution. The problem is not in desiring but in desiring without limits. Man by instinct is such a greedy animal that it desires not one but a host of things in every domain. It's thinking is not simple as that of a animal. Animal just wants freedom, limitless freedom and to be well fed - a forest has everything it wants to live. Man on the other hand is a confused about this, he wants freedom but wants also wants chains that allow him comforts that they provide. There is this whole well-known debate on whether moderization/development is actually helping man but that would be digressing from the theme. So the limitless greed is what we think is the root for all evil. Take for example a popular business family and you will find people with billions of dollars each fighting over - of all stupid things - money. Now that might make some sense if they were poor and lacking in that area. But all they ever want is more, which as I see it is insane. Desire for anything to any amount is not bad till it takes over you. Till it takes control of the way you see, interpret thing and makes you do things you wouldn't want to do were it not for that greed (bad things obviously). It is basically the evil twin of determination. One leads you to achieving your goals in life and the other does the same but at the cost of your principles and morals. Greed and desire are divided by a thin line and the idea is to try and keep to the good side as much as we possibly can.

Under the yoke of mediocrity

Some part of all of us wants to be excellent, the best rather. Determination and hard work can help achieve a lot but still there are never millions of places at the top - only a few. There is a fight for those few places. But sadly the law of numbers prevails and numbers matter more than being the best. The multitude is, as expected, most aptly described as mediocre. This notion of democracy has been extended to mean that even this mediocrity of talent (in whatever field) is a desirable thing. Whatever this large proportion of the audience interested in, is sure to find lots of people fighting to get in providing. Thus we have a lot of mediocre products - be it movies, art, music, food, clothes, educated professionals or anything else for that matter. It is as simple as the business adapting as per the market requirements. Thus we see that a lot of mediocre stuff being pushed in - of these inferior things getting precedence over the better ones. People who actually have an eye for the excellent, the best of them are left out in the cold. Let take a practical example - say there is an exam on some logical subject. This is something where you should have people think over new/original problems - but the exam ends up testing attendance in class instead of logical reasoning, it has all the questions that have been 'taught' earlier. This is done to accommodate the majority of people incapable of coping with an intellectual test. In this way people who mug up achieve higher than people who actually think logically and have an understanding of the course material. This is the way that medicrity of the entire society stifles the better ones.

The reign of mediocrity was beautifully portrayed in Ayn Rand's Fountainhead. It remains one of the best pieces of literary work till date. There is a Howard Roark (the protagonist, defender of excellence in himself) in many of us, just the fact that most don't take up the battle of excellence and mediocrity - for it needs you to risk everything in your life at times. Thus the being who is a bearer of some form of excellence - under the slavery of practicality is forced to hide his talent and live intermingled and tinged with the poisoned of compelled mediocrity. And thus mediocrity begets more mediocrity and even stops the mushrooming of excellence.

But where do we see hope - there is always supposed to be some hope! Well in this case the only hope is going to come from individualistic strength to challenge the promotion of sub-standard things in any walk of our lives.

Why IQ tests are not to be taken seriously

Intelligent Quotient or IQ tests are ingrained in our society to a large extent. Though our society is not a meritocracy but we like to fake it anyhow and give the impression that merit alone is the factor for all appointments. SAT, GRE, CAT, IITJEE are some 'aptitute' tests which millions of people give every year and the toppers are certified to be among the best brains of our time. Given the track record of these over the years, it is hard to say that these tests have failed to bring out the intelligent people from the regular ones. But the problem is that they are not as accurate as their importance necessitates. First of all making a test though theoritically makes sense but as in any real world implementation there are too many assumptions that need to be taken. Things like native language, age, opportunities etc are some of the factors that matter, so that the people with the same score and differing on these factors may have different intellectual capabilities. Another fallous assumption is thinking of the human as a machine. No human has a 'technical specification' or a specific 'mental capacity'. The human brain is more of a moody equipment, an artist you may say. It may or may not fire at a particular time. So the test scores do not seek to reflect the capability of the mental equipment a person has but the capacity at which it was working that particular day. All in all, the IQ test (or apitude test as it is often disguised today) is more of a rough filter and the ranks don't mean as such as they are made out to. For example people with say 90%ile - 99%ile on CAT or say 2000-5000 ranks IITJEE are very likely to be of similar capability and making this as the only basis for selecting the one at a higher ranking is not the best policy.

Theism v/s Satanism (v/s Atheism v/s agnostics) ?

We learn progressively. If my parents had their way I would have heard of only theism. But I learned atheism, liked it and converted to it as a youngster. Then eventually I came to know of agnosticism and realized that this was more agreeable to what I believed in. I recently came to know of another theory, the theory of Satanism. This is enshrined in 'The Satan's Bible'. The name has a devilish tinge to it and that is what attracts the rebelious amongst us, my interest though was solely academic. Now Satanism is not the worship of devil as the word may sound like to most. It is basically the non existence of inhibitions, restrains that bind you. It talks to freeing the man enslaved by the various conditions of being good put on the behavior of people by the church (satanism for some reason chooses to take a stand mostly to the Christian church). Basically it is the recognition of everyone to seek his fulfillment and to enjoy everything he or she possibly can on this earth without being judged by some moral judge, that no man's salvation should be dependent on his self-denial. They do however respect the fact that such fulfillment should not harm anyone. To me this sounds fair enough. I didn't find the motivation to complete the book as it goes on a somewhat unintelligent attack on the church at times. Reviews though speak of the principals in depth and that made me realize that Satanism is a credible alternate to Theism. I do not think that Satanism is in any way opposed to Agnosticism or Atheism, in fact many Satanists might belong to one of these categories. Satanism didn't seem wrong in it's teaching but didn't really appeal to me either.
My basic point is everyone should be given a choice before being told to follow something or the other. The de-facto way of following your birth religion is not something which helps in the spiritual uplift of a soul !

The seed of religion was something good, the fruit is something else

A religious man is perceived as one who follows the edicts of his religion and in doing so does good. What, may we ask, is the reason for being good, is it not the promise of Valhalla, Paradise or Jannat. Now why is that - the founder of the religion did not mean to entice his followers into following his ideas, and doing what 'He' defines as good, with the lure of an after life of richness and pleasure. The excuse for this is (though not explicitly expressed) the fact that you need some abstractions to capture the mind of the beginner, the somewhat superficial thinking populace. We as children were taught things (even wrong ones) in our primary school for the simple reason that the young/'weak' mind cannot take any learning in it's entirety. For the same reason we have such false notions such as of paradise introduced to take the pupil in the general right direction albeit with a false goal. They were invented to be, I believe, deviations to falsehoods to ultimately reach the truth. The paradise promise is just an example, there are surely many other such deviations from the truth. Perceiving it a different light you can see that running a religion or being its guardian is supposed to be somewhat of an academic profession. But the only problem is that the leader is not physically present and 'His' representatives are not truthful and strong enough to steer in the right direction. So what was supposed to be a deviation has become a more permanent destination for the meek and impressionable followers. This is a thought I read somewhere and I need to quote this -
"The gods of the past have become as their own devils in order to live. Feebly, their ministers play the devil’s game to fill their tabernacles and pay the mortgages on their temples. Alas, too long have they studied “righteousness,” and poor and incompetent devils they make."
Like all things the failure of religion is nothing but a great idea being crushed under the massive forces of reality, a entity of the utopian world developing cracks in when brought to this real world.

The Power of Indifference

Humans as a rule have a natural tendency to comment and criticise on every topic, whether it is beyond their domain of expertise, interest or anything. We comment on stuff which we often know is dumb, that is why we would not venture saying most of them aloud. How do you defend/justify commenting on the accent, dressing sense or what not of a guy who is unknown to you, not interacting with you and thus not affecting you adversely in any way! What gain do we get out of it, nothing beyond a sense of satisfaction. True not all do it regularly but it is a very common tendency and we all do it to some extent. Ya but lets look on the other side. Look towards an alternate way - the power of indifference, if I may call it. Indifference to matters that we know not enough about and which in no ways affect us. The matter which we should really not care about. We do have a responsibility in principal to not turn a blind eye to anything wrong. But with a practical perception there are many things which we would do better leave as they are, in the hands of equally able people who aren't actually helped by our meddling.

Agnosticism yet again

Had a interesting observation today. People may be great in all aspects but not in all and when you see (or at least feel) them a bit behind, is it your responsibility to nudge them forward? What if it is about 'religious' philosphy? As everyone knows agnosticism is not a very well known being a substitute to religion that it is. The reason being that agnostics do not believe in converting others. Almost all religions have elements that have evolved to converting or obliterating people with beliefs contrarian to their own. But then if we believe that such questions are not of such paramount relevance (which is a concise definition of agnostics) we certainly do not want to preach our beliefs. Yes, in a sense it does not appear to be very altruistic but that's the way it is. So what I finally saw as the best option was the middle path. To nudge in the right direction but in an abstracted way, not to bring it out in the open. Just show the formula and let him apply it to other things including 'religious' philosophy.

Goal Of Life

Since time immemorial pursuit of your dreams is the noblest of endeavors there is. Whether it was the warrior ready to shed his blood to fight his enemies, a sage immersed in finding eternal peace or artist drowned in their worship of their art; men have given all and staked all to protect their country, their families their passion. Today the situation is not so dramatic anymore, the life has the same challenges but masked in a more subtle way. The race now is more brutal I would say and it is towards education, trade, money and relationships to name a few. The intent of men has now evolved towards inching out others to get yourself a place on the pyramid and as high a place as possible. It is not about you, it is about your position with respect to others. The reason for running in this race is just because the society says so. The goal of life cannot be just trying to fit in with the society, it has to be more than that otherwise the existence of the human race server no purpose and makes no sense. The funny part is that while men pride themselves for achieving goals they very often do not even want it. I have of course never lived in any other age but from my perception it seems the people were more friendly, accomodating and less brutal towards competition. Competition was about the best and not who wins by any means. That is why I have always longed to live in those times. Yes the facilities today have improved but I would say the cost is too dear if you lose your gentle soul to get a bigger car than your neighbour etc..I cannot say that you can be isolated from this and be a saint amongst the evil.. this evolution of man and society is beyond any one to change. All we can do is save ourselves and be one amongst the few who are still resisting the evolution and be considerate and sensitive to others - run the race but the one you want and with your principles intact.

Windows 7

I have tried to keep my geekiness out of this space but I will make an exception this time. So widows 7. It has not been released as yet but microsoft has given out a pre released evaluation version to academia. So first question - is window any good. I would say yes quite. It offers not much in terms of features over and above vista as such but it cures most of vista's annoying fuck ups. Also they recognize that the hardware today is fast enough to warrant some cool snappy graphics and the overall aero themes and theme management and setup etc are way cooler than the xp ones. My grouse with vista was that it also had some graphical improvement over xp but that came with a cost in performance, not in the case of win7 though. Thats what makes me give a thumbs up to it. The vista version was actually not a preplanned release, the initial plan was to go for win7 directly from xp but with several events and economic considertions microsoft made a detour by way of vista.

Another thing really cool was that the upgrade from vista is auto driven and comprehsive. So I just pop in the disc (a virtual disc actually!) and just click upgrade on autorun. I come back after 3 hours and everything is done. No files/settings lost and everything on my desktop preserved (even my browser session and my stickies which I always forget to backup). Only thing in disarray was the taskbar.

So question is will win7 be a success, I doubt it. The reason being people would try to compare it to vista as paying customers should. Plus they have recently made a shift and with the economy as it is they wont be too happy making a seemingly non-essential IT expenditure. In terms of hardware its requirements are somewhat lower than that of vista (thats a hunch cuz it runs faster on the same machine.)

So all in all if you get a free copy dump vista as soon as you can, might even consider buying.

Corporaticracy

The point I want to discuss is the taking over of the world and it's people, its resources and everything else there exist through control of economy by the privileged few best described by the neology corporaticracy. I won't say that I figured it out myself, there are a lot of documentaries out there that tell you this, but the problem with them is constraint. They tend to not control their ideas and this makes their interpretations incredulous, but yeah we can see that there is some truth in the conspiracy theories. Have you heard of the saying that the biggest deception of the devil is making people doubt his existence.

Well the thing is that the reason a man worked in age of prehistory was to feed himself and perhaps his family. It's the same for animals. They didnt have any comforts of transport, accomodation, entertainment, food, medical care etc but they didnt have to work unless required. Compare this to the modern state of affairs. We are slaves to an invisible entity. This entity is the corporates and the people in control are what I call corporaticracy. These are the people who with limitless wealth generated and power generated wealth are pulling strings of every thing that effect us. We feel that now we are free and live in a democratic world, but none but a 5 year old will believe it to be true. Democracy is just the form of government election we have, but ultimately it is all a big show. The banking system that we have is not something that any independent group of leaders would have let take form. Taking for instance the recent recession/depression, the reason was no doubt the greed of these bankers. The credit market was stretched out and loans given like false cheques (ultimately that's what they turned out to be, given that bankers didn't have to pay for them) and then getting humungous amounts of money from the governments as support to prevent these greedy corporates from falling. True that at the position the economic world is/was the role of these corporates was too important to allow them to be diluted, but the question is why were they even allowed to assume such a role when they clearly lacked the credibility and responsibility that was expected from them. The reason is obvious that the government heads are (if not a marionette in their hands) very much associated with their shady operations. These can of course never be proved though all reason points to this.