Flawsophy tackles the mother of all philosophical questions : "Who are we?" and
"What are we doing on Earth?" using a universal metaphor of the 21st century : SHOPPING.
CHAPTER 1 : PRELUDES AND PREMISES
You know
why life feels pointless. It's because we are pushed into something with very
little introduction. I got no memo on where I am being born, what I am
good at, what I am going to do for a living. ZIP. NONE. Not even a top 10 list
of things that can make me happy. Suddenly, you are dropped into a familial,
societal, political and economic context and your time starts running. By an
adventure of trials and error, you hurriedly start learning about the world
only to figure out that you are not the same as anyone else. That you are a
just a permutation … a mere psychological permutation of desires, passions,
fetishes, talents, and moods, strengths, weaknesses, fads and personal ideas of
fun, beauty, sex, entertainment and so on. And you are asked to react and
improvise to the situations around you. As if you are positioned behind a
musical instrument amidst a grand cosmic orchestra that has started a long time
back. You catch up on the beat and start playing your parts whatever you can
and perhaps if you are lucky enough, there is a tattered sheet music in front
of you and you know what you should do. If you are tired and can't go on
anymore, you retire. Even if you took out the garbage the last day of your life
and you die that very night peacefully, the garbage collector will still show
up the next morning to pick your garbage even though he hates his job. Life on
this planet will continue even after you are gone. The processes you have set
in motion will continue. The legacy lives on. See? How little control we
actually have on all of this? You don't decide anything.
You get to choose nothing. You don't know until mid-life what even makes you
feel good. You don't select the environment in which you operate to try and get
whatever makes your time worthwhile. And you make a splash on this ocean of
life's drama and you are gone. GODDAMN DEAD. Oceanographic scientists have
concluded that nothing happens to the ocean if a bunch of water molecules
evaporate away. GOOD RIDDANCE. The rains and the rivers of life keep flowing
and feeding them. Your story is just a tiny sub-plot in a massive screenplay
that's been unraveling for about 4 billion years during the life of a medium
sized planet at the end of a galaxy formed after when our own universe popped
out of the womb of a heavenly nowhere during the Big Bang. Our existence are
but minor events in a large process. What is
this process? How did it come about? Who set it to motion? Who is setting
the controls for this motion? - Billions of people like us spend their
lives asking these wrong questions. The answers will not improve anything as
the Gods just laugh at your plans and our eyes can't see beyond the expanding
horizons. Pity be showered on our mind's own willful ignorance that
childishly rejects the realization of a cursed finality that there is no
intended role for us and that grand process will outlive itself. You are a
beautiful insignificance, a magnificent non-entity and a ruggedly sexy
triviality. That's what you are.
If so,
what are you doing here ?
YOU ARE
SHOPPING !!!!
Eh?
That's
right, sweetie. The closer I look at life, the more I am convinced that we
spend their entire lives in activities and decisions that stunningly resemble
and remind me of shopping. If you have never shopped for anything in life, you
have come to the right place because I am now going to tell you all you need to
know about shopping. Here's what all of us ding-bats do at any shopping center:
(a) Have
some money so that you can splurge;
(b) Have
an item in mind and sift through the merchandize;
(c)
select the one you like and move on to the next item ;
(d)
repeat (b) and (c) until satisfied and pay using (a)
Now
think about this. Let's say that your genetic, emotional, attitudinal,
behavioral and environmental factors that were handed to you are like the money
or the "personality currency" and your various desires for
hedonistic, social and spiritual happiness are like the products in a shopping
mall called the "universe". These desires or the product-set that we
keep chasing can be of various forms include education, spouse, career, hobby,
entertainment choices and of course, actual products in a real shopping
mall. All we are doing all day every day is sifting through the world and
spending all your "personality currency" in order to scratch this
inexhaustible itch called the "desire". Looked at it this way,
life is just one long, complex exercise in shopping. We use these wallets of
"personality currency" and try to get the best deal, snatch that
great discount, take advantage of the grand sale bonanza, bargain for right
price, bring home the maximum quality product you can manage to afford.
Remember that you probably don't have too much control on how wealthy your
wallet of "personality currency" is. Look closely. Did you ever
decide what should make you happy? Do you think you can make yourself fall in
love with anyone? Do you think you can stop your anger when you find that your
favorite cartoon dog Pluto is no longer a planet. They just happen at an
unconscious or a sub-conscious level in the realm of dreams. A careful consideration
reveals that you control nothing given that you are not one of those Jedi
warriors (if you are a Jedi warrior, will leave a comment on this blog?).
That's constraint # 1 which is: you don't get to decide a lot of what you are.
This constraint is the fountainhead of life's pain. Now, if you ask a Buddhist,
he would tell you that the corner of your brain that constantly springs forth
all the desires is the root of all problems. Since, I can't be a mind-ninja or
a Zen monk who can control the Department of Desire's annual budget, I blame it
on the finiteness of my wallet of "personality currency". Supply-side or Demand-side? What side are you on ? Anyway, let's delve deeper into this shopping metaphor …
CHAPTER 2 : FLASHBACK
Let me
tell you the story of how I became a computational scientist. When I was 7
years old, all I wanted to be was to bowl the final over in the world cup
cricket final versus Pakistan which needs 6 runs to win with one wicket
in hand. So, I would be walking on a dusty, broken road in my small south
Indian town on a hot summer morning. I spot a small broken brick lying on the
side of this deserted road. I look around to see if there is a suitable cement
concrete electrical pole rising out of wild grass. I vividly remember how my
mind undergoes this marvelous transformation, from the sluggish mood like that
of a caterpillar, it flies away like a beautiful butterfly transcending into a
plane of simulated wonderment. Suddenly, the broken brick becomes the cricket
ball and the electric pole becomes the wickets. I would imagine that I am
getting ready to take the run-up as a fast bowler. I am standing in the middle
of this grand stadium with thousands of spectators suspended in an animation of
nervous cheering and wavering tension. I notice that my heart-beat is
thumping with all the country's expectations in my very hands. My mind
wavers as to what the commentator Tony Greig must be saying about me at this
point of time. I feel the beads of sweat on my brow and my eyes softly focus
onto the wickets. I take the run-up small strides at first and slowly
increasing the strides, I leap at the crease and deliver the ball and it just
takes off the middle stump with the tail-ender batsman standing clueless. I
become ecstatic and start celebrating only to be interrupted by the cacophonous
hawking of an ongoing vegetable vendor. Only then, I was painfully reminded
that I just took a broken stone, started suddenly running wildly and hurled the
stone like a cricket bowler at an electric pole that is standing on the side of
the road minding it's own business of transmitting electricity. The point is I
was a dreamy kid and the whole cricket thing never worked out. Then, a few
years later, I saw the Terminator 2 movie. Arnold Schwarzenegger as the brawny
dude with cool shades riding on this kick-ass motorcycle wielding a machine gun
who shoots in the goddamn head of this stone-faced villainy cop made of mercury
sounded like a good career option at the time. It didn't take me much time
to realize that a lean south Indian kid from a vegetarian household
weren't usually cut out for such stuff. Basically, that’s how I spent my
childhood reading super-hero comics, playing road-side cricket, enjoying Telugu
comedy movies and growing alongside a kid brother who wanted to grow up
to be "The Mask" character from that Jim Carry movie. He was weird
too. But, I was good at a couple of subjects - math and sciences and did enjoy
reading short-stories in my English class. I sucked at pretty much everything
as showcased by my just described cricketing and terminating skills.
Based on
my proficiency in math /sciences and being not very good at cracking
engineering entrance exams , I managed to get admitted into a bachelor's degree
program in civil engineering … yada … yada … yada … the 4 years went by. I got
my degree and took a job at a construction company. I was in the middle of a
construction site laying a 4 lane highway. There were many broken stones on
that empty road being built. There were electrical poles too. But, I am no
longer of the age or the mood to practice cricket bowling. The job was a cruel
limbo comprising of lethal levels of dust, grilling heat, greasy construction machinery
roaring and clanging with irritating colleagues who angered me because they
can't spend even a minute thinking about me and my basic problem of how I am a
total misfit for the job with an engineering degree from a top institution. It
was very lonely and worse than the hell for humans, perhaps more like a hell
for earthworms or something. It was also the time when India was in the middle
of the massive boom for the software sector with all my college friends sitting
at computer desks, sipping free fountain soda, wearing neckties and writing
code to somehow ensure that my debit transactions for my bank account connected
to the salary account of my lame job can be done over the internet. I was
unabashedly jealous of the fact that they could sit in the AC all day while
having fun on the weekends. I, being naturally a person who hates challenges
decided to make peace with wearing neckties and try to get one of those jobs in
the first 3 months. I kept on trying to be a software engineer, an intellectual
property expert, business analyst anything that will make me sit in the AC with
a computer. I could never crack the interviews because no employer would
appreciate my real reason for wanting to get the job which was to get out of
that hot, humid, irritating construction site. The employers were all
nuts, anyway. Screw them and their big ego for shamelessly demanding a career
plan from a clueless 21-year old, I hope they are forced to work after death in
the construction industry of hell, designing and carrying giant cauldrons of
boiling oil and digging canals in the lake of fire. I even tried to become an
MBA graduate - I thank God for not bestowing me enough talent and time to
prepare and crack an entrance exam. Then one day it hit upon me , if all I
wanted was to sit in the AC with a computer, with ardent love for math, let's try
applying to grad school. When I got admitted, I decided that I will not leave until get all
possible degrees until it is impossible for any academic institution in the world to let me
study anymore. Doing things I was naturally passionate about rather than struggling to manage a crew of construction workers, the PhD turned out fine and that's
how I became a researcher in computational sciences applied to engineering
problems. Of course, this won't be the story I am going to retell in a
commencement speech I am going to give to university graduates in the future.
To fill their hearts with hope, kidneys with kindness and loins with love, I am
going to tell the celeb version of the story. I am going to blah-blah the usual
popular culture narrative of being the tough-guy that I have always been. How I
have known always what I wanted to do and how I have worked and worked and
worked, harder and harder to get what I want. For you sweet people, I have no
ego to defend as this blog is already an incorrigible record of personal
embarrassments.
If you
look at my story, my "personality currency" was relatively rich in
math and scientific aptitude. So, I gravitated towards a career in that. It
took me a while but I had my doubts all along. But, given my personality, I
feel that a career in something scientific was inevitable. It was meant to be,
sort of. I wasn't a gifted cricketer or conceived as a Terminator. I was giving
this wallet that contained a sound engineering predilections. It took me quite
a while to convince myself of that. I tried all sorts of opportunities till
something worked out that I am content about. In other words, I just shopped
for my engineering career as it seemed the best deal to keep me happy, given my
context. It was as if I was sifting through different aisles in a clothing
store trying out various types of suits and finally, keeping the one I liked.
That's the logic for any shopping. Isn’t it? We keep on trying and trying
till we find something we really like or many a time, hastily select whatever we find to be the best of
all the options available and move on to some other aisle in the store. If you look closely at everyone's
lives, the same process is worked out all the time. Some people hate studying
but they are heftily built and have no moral quandaries in snatching whatever
they want by punching people in the face. If such people go to a career
counseling center, they are more likely advised to become mobsters and
gangsters, not go to school and become an economics graduate, work for
wall-street and create recessions. Some people are born with plenty of good
looks and those are the people who cultivate the right attitude to become a
fashion model with shaved torsos and over the years, end up unveiling their own
brand of fragrance. Someone might be better at writing or music and they get to
be famous so that they can talk in interviews about god-knows-how they are
spreading love through art. Someone is probably good at getting people to do
things that they hate to do, they become your boss. Some people are born naked
and have a genetic condition that prevents them keeping clothes on their body,
they become social activists who strip for a cause and so on. As you can see,
what you end up professionally depends again on the your effort, talents, the
socio-political habitat, timing and luck. Of all, you have control only on the
effort. As comic-genius Woody Allen quips, "I think, being funny is not
anyone's first choice".
We all shop around and get the best goods we can.
That's all we are doing. Who, as a child, wants to grow up to be entertainment
lawyers, dog-poop collectors, investment bankers or septic tank engineers, bank
software developers ? They are all very important functions needed for the society to run and yet, they were also compromises and negotiations made in the shopping store so
that we can move on to other items.
CHAPTER 3 : WILL YOU MARRY ME ?
No where
is the shopping metaphor more stark and visible than in the world of human
dating. It is as ridiculously obvious as the dual wave-particle nature of light
or that brain-storming never works. Each day people are falling in love or
meeting new people or entering a casual relationships or trying to make things
work or dumping someone or trying to move on with their lives or getting
separated or meeting friends with benefits or attempting trial marriages or
locking into arranged marriages or trying alternate lifestyles including
kissing your own mouth or even changing their gender to see how graze the grass
on greener side like the lonely cow on a solitary pasture and so on and so on -
oh! that glorious, that magnificent kaleidoscope of romantic arrangements
presenting myriad and mystical games belonging to the kingdom of the heart.
Ask
HIM (Horny Indian Male) why he's nuts on every girl he meets, he will tell you
that his engineering degree makes him so insecure that he has to shop till he
drops. Ask any girl what she is really looking for, she will describe her
knight in the shining armor must definitely have two working ears. Every time,
we meet a potential mate, the brain works its magic and makes us fall in into a
special trance. There is a shopping festival in your head then: Do we share the
same interests? Does she have a killer belly-button? Does he have a good sense
of humor? Will he let my mom and dad live at our house? Will she let me pursue
my interests in fighting social change through poetry? Can I still play video
games after we have kids ? What will happen to my comic book collection if I
end with this girl? What's his taste in music, movies and arts? Who are her
personal heroes and favorite dictators? Is he crazy enough ? Does she cry a lot
or Is he the strong, silent type? … and when the score is high enough, you fall
in love, you get hitched, you get pleasurably imprisoned into the noblest of
unions. Or quite the opposite. You fall out of the trance when some kind of
reality slaps you in the face. You don't love the product anymore. You want to
return the product and demand a refund perhaps. You want to exchange it for
something else. May be, you are interested in a product similar that you have
always owned and you realize to crawl out of the closet. Or you may be don't
want anything at all for sometime now as you are convinced that all products
are worthless pigs. Whatever it is, it's all shopping, folks. The unconscious
land never sleeps. It keeps itself busy in the trial room putting on a cloak,
admiring from a distance by comparing the reflections of the cerebral mirrors.
It seems to be constantly making judgments on every minor experience we are
having. It is perpetually, habitually, tirelessly sifting through the various
aisles of experiences as we go through our days, trying to rate, learn, record
and remember the emotional preferences on a scale of "That sucks" to
"That's awesome".
CHAPTER 4 : I BELIEVE IN SHOPPING
Right
from your childhood hobbies to your choice of pets to your social causes to
fashion style, everything you end up in life is a result of a shopping process
using the "personality currency". I argue that you have a very narrow
lifestyle choices that you ought to accomplish so that you could be modestly
happy in life. In that sense, I do believe in a broad definition of destiny
based on "personality currency". The idea of free will never sat well
with me ever. It seems incredulous that we are making conscious choices and we
ought to be responsible for them. I know not about you but I see no control on
many things that make up my personality. Most days, I do something goofy and
spend my time repairing the situation. My whole life has become a long string
of apologies from my conscious mind because my sub-conscious can’t control it’s
impulses. I'll tell you the most astonishing thing about the mind's shopping
addiction. I would argue that even your value system and moral code is shopped
as well. Our mind adopts a philosophical system that rationalizes and explains best our choices
in life. You might like to think you are a christian or a rationalist or a humanist or a nihilist. The names come later. What you are is already decided and you merely end up identifying with a name. Once again, look closely how it works. A gangster is likely to see the world as a war out
there with everyone fighting for scarce resources. These alpha males try to
profess a world-view of territorial behavior and capitalism just like a typical
chimpanzee. Alternatively, if you share your DNA with bonobos, you will
probably subscribe to a peaceful matriarchal structure and have sex all the
time for fun. May be, if you are a rock-star or unfairly lucky to be a handsome
person, besides going to rot in hell for all the physical fun you had on earth,
you are likely to believe in a less monogamist lifestyle. If you are the type,
who accepts a particular God as the guy who's looking after all your needs, you
are end up as a religious person. If you are a person who questions everything,
you will probably be an agnostic who will oppose abortion and agree with gay
people to marry each other. If you are the Spiderman type, you will think with
great power comes great responsibility. Because I am not Spiderman, I can shamelessly
enjoy power completely oblivious of responsibilities. If you are like a Indian
movie hero, you will think all there is in life is getting married. Depending on the
"personality currency" and how you have lived and enjoyed your life,
you are likely to adopt a convenient value system or a sophisticated
interpretation of the religious scriptures. That's exactly why two people can't seem to agree on the definition of God. That's the reason why we have
different grades of religious enthusiasts ranging from fanatic to nominal -
because all of us shop for a personally suited version of the scripture. The
major conflict an individual faces today is between his own inherited,
intellectual and intuitive versions of God or Universe. If you are the type
that can accept the mythology of God as handed by your family or immediate
society, you will be a part of the club. Else, you rebel and try to settle down
to something between an existentialist and an evangelist. That's exactly how
semi-vegetarians popped out. They want to eat fish and eggs but also want to
distant themselves from more horrible people that murder innocent animals for
their taste-buds. Apparently, they are a separate group of people now.
CHAPTER 5 : EPILOGUE
Folks,
that's all you are doing. You are just shopping on this planet, all the time. Your ego center might
convince you that your life is your handiwork but remember that most of what went into it was
supplied to you by nature itself. You just use what you got to get what you
wanted. I grant you that there is a little flexibility and that's your patience
and energy to keep sifting through the merchandise. In fact, comedian and my
guru George Carlin believes that "even the ability to do hard-work is
genetic". If you are one of those types who claim responsibility for all
the success and blame others for your failures, think a little. You can
actually blame the whole thing on everything else. If you can't choose what
makes you happy and you are actively pursuing happiness, what part are you
actually responsible for ? You are merely executing a script so that you can be
a little less painful. That's the story of your life. Is it a noble privilege? You decide. These are the kind of
thoughts that confuse me when I am sincerely trying to hate someone for being
an absolute moron that he is. Having said that, if all we are doing is
shopping, may be the commonsense rules that apply to shopping apply to living
one's life:
** May be,
knowing about the extent and size of "personality currency" can
prevent a lot of stress. ("find out your passions, strengths, limitations etc.")
** May be,
we should be careful not to max out our credit cards because it was too
expensive ("Don't chase wild fantasies, one step at a time").
** May be,
we don't need to look at how your friend shops ("what's working for your friend may not work for you")
** May be
you can go to a different store and have a different but unique shopping
experience.("Follow your bliss")
Be a
shopaholic. Live it up.
Thanks
to:
- MEDHAJANANAM FOUNDATION - Ignite your Intellect.
- Whatever Works (A movie by
Woody Allen)
- Images off Internet
I am
convinced that this sinful, evil, terrorist-like flavor was surely conjured up overnight by an ill-tempered B-school
intern who didn't care about his job as his real interest in life is to be a
stage magician (although the only trick he knew of making anything disappear is
by surreptitiously swallowing it). Or may be it's an outcome of a 12-hr long corporate team-building exercise whose mission was to create "something instead of nothing" using just three out of the total six sigma principles - There is a lot that can happen in there ... we will never know! But I
command you, the reader, to empathize with me because I try. I really try to
appreciate the taste but yuckkk ... Every time, I taste them I hate the taste
even more. The worst came about when it became the subject of my disturbing
nightmare last night when I dreamt that an army of "Salt and Vinegar" potato chips
invaded my private island where I secretly stored all the slurpy, slurpy mangoes I
have been saving from all my childhood's summer vacations. Before I could get
there, they started rotting all my dear mangoes by offering the very handkerchiefs
they sneezed into - very
much like how the European settlers decimated the native Americans. 
friends that it is indeed a
classic lest they would think you are too dumb to understand such an obviously
awesome masterpiece; 
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