Saturday, May 23, 2009

Fate of thought provoking movies

Audience reaction to movies like Donnie Darko, The Fountain, No Smoking, Mullholand Drive etc...


Friday, May 22, 2009

Hope...

“Hope is a good thing..
…maybe the best of things…
…and no good thing ever dies”
This is what Andy Dufresne wrote in a letter to “Red” in “The Shawshank Redemption” with the “hope” that his friend would one day come and read this.
So why am I rambling about hope now? Because I feel sometimes we forget to “hope”, sometimes we just feel like giving in, sometimes we just don’t think its possible to continue anymore, sometimes we feel that we have lost.
Hope is what makes us go on, makes us give another try, makes us feel like we are going to be successful this time. It’s the only driving force which helps a person continue in a path where everything seems to be coming in the opposite direction. Its difficult to start in a direction if one doesn’t hope that she will reach the destination. Every act of life is done with a “hope”.
Yet people abandon hope in situations when its most needed. They think that hope is a dangerous thing, it can drive a man insane because it brings more failures, more pain, more sufferings. When Thomas Edison was questioned after his innumerable successive failures in building a light bulb, he replied “We now know a thousand ways not to build a light bulb”. Had he discontinued after a moment we would have lived in the dark age for a while longer because eventually somebody IS going to invent the bulb, someone who hoped and believed she can make the bulb. The sweetness of success is directly proportional to the number of failures (remember the numerous failed attempts of solving a physics numerical and then finally being able to solve it? And then feeling like you were a Newton yourself?) and that pleasure of achieving it makes the whole effort worthwhile. I believe that if we achieve things very easily we don’t value it also, the mere fact that I had to toil a lot to achieve it makes it dear to me. However just hoping isn’t always enough, it needs to be backed by an honest effort to reach your goal.
The hopes and dreams of an individual is what defines her. Nobody can touch your hope, its inside you and drives you to your destination.

Thursday, May 21, 2009

The Science of Religion

Religion has always been something that grabbed my attention, and I always tried to understand it. It always evokes strong response from believers and non-believers alike. It's like the mysterious concept which is so hard to comprehend that one either follows it blindly with no questions asked or dismisses it without even considering it for a moment. I am more inclined towards the latter, though not completely. I want to believe in it but can't give in without being convinced, so I continue to lie in between the two ends.
Rituals, practices and mythology are an intricate part of a religion. I always thought that if one could understand why such rituals existed then one would be able to define the concept religion. People follow these rituals and practices even without understanding why do they do it. Frankly, no one has the answer as to why do they do it. The question trail always leads to a dead end. All the mythological stories seems to be a figment of imagination and unrealistic. I recently completed reading the Foundation series by Asimov. It offered a line of thought which might be a way to explain the current situation we are in.
Imagine the present technological world that we live in. We use a lot of things in our daily life like computer, oven, refrigerator, cars etc. We never care as to think how these things work as long as they are serving the purpose. Now suppose if we remove the scientists from this world or to make it more realistic the new generation hardly cares to enter the research area and the knowledge doesn’t pass on, such that the knowledge and concepts related to making these things work is not present with anyone. We only have the details about their workings in text books and stories which make use of them. The companies are still able to make these things because they still have the setup intact and may even reproduce the whole thing at other locations. We still have all the utilities of our daily life but gradually the production of these utilities would go down because the companies would become conservation about the quantity they produce because they realize they can’t make any enhancements or keep on reproducing the factories.
This is the stage when there is no technological progress and the world is at a stand still in the technological aspect. Slowly these utilities become a privilege of very few people.
One thing to keep in mind over here is that the changes suggested above are not instant ones i.e. over a couple of decades, I am talking over here changes occurring over a couple of centuries.
These utilities become the privilege of few and when the production of these things stop after some time, these things are passed on as legacy items which only these few people know to operate. For other people these become mysterious objects which are able to perform miracles, and the stories about these things become mythological.
It would be better to picture the whole thing using examples. Suppose we take the electrolysis experiment that we studied in our school, where we could electroplate rods with gold or silver. Now if we carry out the same experiment in front of someone who has never studied science and heard of electrolysis, he would consider the electrolytic cell as a magical object which converts things into gold or silver. If we have books which talk about airplanes now and 2,000 years down the line if technology becomes it own doom and we no longer have airplanes, all such stories would appear to be mythological. A parallel could be drawn here with the Hindu mythological bird Garuda which is considered to be the mount of Vishnu.
So now if we look at all the practices prevalent now, I’ll talk about the Hindu rituals, they may have a history attached to it. For ex: using incense sticks (soothing effect or room freshener?), tulsi leaves (medicinal properties?), fasting on specific days of on week (ancient custom of dieting?). These are a very small set of examples, but a logic may exist for a lot of them because I feel there would be a substantial number of them which exists for without any reason. Even mythological stories may have explanations for example (again from Hindu mythological epics): the classic Lakshman Rekha (highly advanced form of laser ray which allows unidirectional permit), floating rocks which had “Ram” written on it (Rocks undergoing a treatment called “Ram” which makes them floatable or it could entirely be made up of materials which floats on water and having the name of the company which manufactures them i.e. “Ram”?) and so on.
The point I am trying to make here is that if the scientific knowledge ceases to exist, then tales and objects of the scientific age makes up a religion in order to explain the history.