Vijayendra Mohanty

We are apes. We came from an ape-like ancestor roughly ten to fifteen lakh years ago. We have made our way on this planet by using a few qualities that evolution bestowed upon us. One of these qualities is imagination. Yuval Noah Harari (author of Sapiens) calls the acquisition of this gift the Cognitive Revolution.

From human imaginations came structures that hold society together. These structures were not physical ones, but they did end up being the foundation for a lot of physical things in our lives — places of religious value, sacred artifacts, clothes that mark some members of society as being different from others (priests and monks), ideas like good & evil, morality, and even justice.

I have personally come to the conclusion that the idea of justice, more than anything else, is the reason behind the idea of an afterlife.

Think about it. What is justice? It is the assumption that human beings are responsible for the consequences of their actions. Nations have legal frameworks that ensure justice is meted out. Holy books of many religions speak of what constitutes good deeds and bad deeds. They even contain elaborate descriptions of the consequences that people will suffer for their deeds. Some of these consequences come to us while we are still alive — prison, a thousand lashes, stoning, banishment etc. Other consequences — punishments and rewards so great that nothing in this world can possibly measure up — are said to belong in the life after death.

Religions are stories that we made up to make sense of our place in the world. These stories grew in size and scope and listeners became followers and then actual characters in the stories. The rules of the stories began to apply to the people who were listening to them. It is not something that is often readily apparent, but the stories you listen to, can swallow you whole. It starts when you cry while reading a novel, or while watching a movie. The next thing you know, you are cosplaying at the comic con. Humankind, the species of ape that is us, was swallowed by the stories it told when it did not have a very good grasp of the way the world works.

Justice does not exist. It has no reality outside of human imagination. It only works because we make it work with the help of each other. And often, it doesn’t even work then. You don’t need me to give me examples. We all know good people who have suffered and bad people who have gotten away without punishment. Justice is a fiction that must be real if human society is to work.

So here we are. We need to believe justice exists (otherwise, what’s the point?). But we can see with our own eyes that there is no absolute justice in the world. So we push the boundaries of our story and tell ourselves that justice does exist, that the good will be rewarded no matter what, and that the bad will be punished no matter what. We tell ourselves that death is not the end and that there is space for justice to work even after a human being ceases to exist. And since the imparting of justice requires judges law enforcers, and punishers, the afterlives we imagine are full of gods, angels, demons, and divine jail keepers.

If you are trying to change something about yourself, you are probably going down the motivation path. You are subjecting yourself to good, positive thoughts in hopes that it will instill in you a sense of purpose and the will to begin the process.

The reason that goes wrong is that change does not come from happiness. Think about it. If you are happy, there is no reason for you to change that state of affairs. Your reasons for wanting change come from unhappiness. To go from wanting change to actually changing, you need to amplify that unhappiness, not assuage it with happy thoughts and feel-good psychological trickery.

You will change when your current conditions fill you with so much disgust that you run away from them. So much disgust that you will crawl if your legs fail you. Such overpowering disgust that you cannot bear to stand not changing for even a moment more.

I don't swear much. I have, in recent years, taken to using the word 'fuck' a fair bit, but that is mostly because the word lends itself to such an extraordinarily wide range of uses. It is a habit that will very likely surprise people who have not spoken to me in a few years.

As far as insulting goes, I prefer to be clever and tongue-in-cheek about it. So that rules out calling people names or putting labels on them that might imply they have sexual relations with family members (who I naturally have nothing against). I don't say bastard — it doesn't seem like there is anything inherently shameful about being a bastard. It is an aspect of one's being that would seem to be entirely out of one's hands.

The worst possible thing I might ever say to someone I have a catastrophic disagreement would be “fucking idiot”. It's mostly just “idiot” with a pinch of “fucking” thrown in for emphasis and flavour. I use this insult because I do think there is something contemptible about being ignorant and stupid, especially when it is wilful.

I suspect also, that another reason I use it is because it is my greatest insecurity — being an idiot. I am mortally afraid of being stupid or ignorant. I have made it the mission in my life to know as much as possible. I read, learn, and try to constantly better myself. It seems lofty and inspiring until you realise that all of it is simply me running away from my greatest insecurity — the pit I dread falling into. The idiot pit.

The worst names we call other people come from what we suspect ourselves to be. Anger is when I take my worst self and project it at the object of my anger.

If you create (or have ever created) entertainment products for mass consumption, you have very probably come across the refrain, “They will not get it.”

What this invariably entails is some kind of alteration in what you are creating. This alteration, for the most part, takes one of two forms. You either dumb it down to suit the perceived inability of your audience to “get it”. Or you keep what you have in hopes that your audience will be interested enough to raise their own standards of appreciation.

Most people go for the first option. They give their audience what they think they want — a below par product, a sub-standard work of art, something that does not demand much from them. I will argue that this is disrespectful towards the people who like your work and that an artist's true responsibility is doing everything in her power to give the audience what they do not know they want.

At the end of the day, your choices are these:

• Drop standards to cater to a larger mass of people, or;
• Maintain standards of quality and force your audience to raise their standards.

Of course, what goes without saying is that the second choice, where you choose not to go for the mass market, practically ensures that you will only ever have a small base of followers. But these followers will be people who respect you. And what's more important, these followers will be people you can respect.

The Gaia hypotheses, as it was originally proposed by James Lovelock in his book “Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth”, suggests that the Earth self regulates. Let me elaborate.

Through the course of its life, planet Earth has undergone many changes. Sometimes, frequent volcanic eruptions have overheated the atmosphere by filling it with ash and greenhouse gases, sometimes external forces like massive asteroids have seriously damaged the atmosphere and the geography of the world.

Lovelock noticed that in spite of all these factors, the proportion of gases in Earth's atmosphere has remained more or less the same, ever since life took off as a dominant phenomenon. The technical term for this is “homoeostasis”.

This is a very important observation because the state of life on Earth relies to a heavy degree on the balance of gases in the atmosphere. Even seemingly tiny shifts in this delicate balance can seriously affect the planet's life-supporting capacity. Lovelock compared this to atmospheres of other planets like Mars (which was a curiosity among scientists back then as far as life is considered) and predicted that Mars is a dead planet. The planet's atmosphere didn't reveal any signs of homoeostasis upon telescopic observation. Later missions proved him right. Mars is dead, as far as life of the Earthly kind (carbon-based, oxygen-breathing) is concerned.

Lovelock came to the conclusion that there is something about the Earth system that constantly regulates the state of the atmosphere to keep it in that delicate life-supporting state. Gaia is simply the name he gave to that phenomenon.

While the theory was strongly contested when it first came out, recent years have found many new takers for it. Because of the obviously semi-religious connotations of the theory, some quarters have interpreted it differently, giving it a magical colour. But for anyone interested in knowing more, I recommend Googling “James Lovelock Gaia”.

Lovelock also makes some dire predictions for our future as a species. He says that global warming (regardless of whether it is man-made or natural), is pushing the boundaries of the Gaia principle. Gaia moderates the balance of life by switching species on and off. For example, if a certain species of rodent becomes too numerous in a certain habitat and starts to seriously threaten the balance by consuming its resources too quickly, nature brings into being forces that may eradicate or contain the rodent species. This can be in the form of a superior hunter species, or a disease-carrying virus that would wipe the species out without affecting much else.

If humans continue to be a threat to the balance of life, it is entirely possible (says Lovelock) that nature would quickly and quietly wipe us out while letting the rest of Earthly life remain.

Human beings have wondered about the purpose of their existence for a long time. The question occupies everyone's mind at one point or another. I have given it thought as well. The closest I have ever come to anything resembling an answer is this:

We are here to understand.

In the scale of cosmic time, human existence (as we understand it right now) is small in terms of size as well as in terms of the amount of time that we have been around for. It is fair to say that nothing we have ever done in the course of our existence so far has made any difference to the universe.

We think of our lives as important and as having consequence, but few of us leave anything resembling a legacy behind. It is very likely that when humankind vanishes off the face of the Earth, the planet will not have suffered a great and irreparable loss. The universe would not even notice our departure. No stars would explode in sorrow and there would be no slowing down of the galactic spin.

We are no different from the rocks and dust that surround us. We emerge from inert matter and we disintegrate into inert matter. And for a brief duration of time therein, we are aware of things. We know things, and we know that we know things. This cognitive advantage is all we have. It is all that separates us from inert matter. It is what causes us to stare at our own hands in amazement and marvel at the sublime beauty of all the natural forces that brought us into being and made us what we are.

The human promise – if there is such a thing – lies not in any thing we can acquire, build, or dominate. All such achievements are bound to be as fleeting as we are. The human promise lies in the here and the now. It lies in our ability to process reality and come to conclusions about our world. In the long run, it will not survive. Its importance lies in its existence.

At the end of the day, understanding is the only thing that we can do. It is not the means to an end. And it is not an end. It simply is the only thing that matters.

As individuals and as members of the human species, the only point of our existence (it seems to me) is our ability to observe and understand. If we do this one thing, then, at the time of its end, this universe will have been more than just a universe. It will have been a universe that, for a fleeting moment, understood what it was despite largely being composed of inert matter. And that is something special.

Compared with the story book universe inhabited by, among others, characters from our favourite comic books, our world has a low likelihood of unlikely things happening. A spider bite in our world, for example, is more likely to give you a disease than super powers. Exposure to radioactivity is more likely to kill you than give you super powers. Dying aliens are quite unlikely too, as far as occurrences go. But oddly enough, these things happen with surprising regularity in story books.

Look at it from the comic book point of view and you will find that such odd occurrences happen with great regularity in the same universe.

People say miracles are impossible. But when you think about it, it seems obvious that miracles are only extremely unlikely occurrences. An event gets called a miracle because it happened, because it was extremely unlikely to happen and it still did.

If comic book universes actually existed somewhere in the multiverse and if we could compare them with the world we live in, we might conclude that our universe has a lower ‘miracle range’. And yet, it may be argued that miracles happen quite regularly here as well. Of the millions of sperm cells that leave for an egg, only only one makes it. It is a mighty unlikely occurrence, but it happens every single day and is exceedingly common.

A wondrous story book universe therefore, simply exists inside a wider range of possibilities. Spider bites give people superhuman abilities, aliens land up on Earth with alarming regularity, children are born with the ability to shoot laser beams from their eyes. These are all extremely unlikely things, but they are made possible because of that universe’s support of a wider range of possibilities.

Scientists have spoken of our reality being a small part of a multiverse. A string of universes containing all possible worlds. Perhaps, somewhere out there, in that infinite string, is a world where strange and wonderful things happen everyday, much like in a comic book.

The music industry was changed forever when mp3 files came to be the default unit of music media. Before the single soundtrack became the fundamental unit in the music market, that position belonged to the record. That is why the sellers were called “record companies” and not “song companies”. Music lovers bought a CD of 10 songs and ended up truly enjoying only one or two of them. They couldn’t choose to buy individual soundtracks unless they illegally ripped songs off a purchased CD. In an ideal world, a record company would have noticed the demand for such a market model and embraced the mp3 format, but it didn’t happen that way. The companies fought legal battles against teenage downloaders and spent money on advertising campaigns that made downloading music seem like a mortal sin. In due course of time though, the single song did find its way into the record companies’ good books. They slapped DRM tags on it and went about their way in the usual fashion.

The good thing that came out of all this was that no longer could a bad song ride into people’s music libraries simply by being in the same CD as a good song. Good songs get downloaded, bad songs get ignored. That is what the new single-unit model made sure of.

Oddly enough, the flexibility of the web hasn’t done much to the market that deals in words — book selling. This is especially odd because the web is fundamentally a text-based environment. The web is different because it is based on a whole lot of words (text, code, source etc.)

The default unit in the book market remains the paper book and the nature of our favourite genres hasn’t undergone much of a change either. Novels are still long and chapters are still the building blocks that go into their making. This is not surprising since, even in the music market, it was the distribution mechanism that changed and not the form of music.

But that is not entirely true, is it?

The record can be split up into songs and the songs can have their own independent existence. The novel loses everything if the chapters become independent. This is why it is unrealistic to expect the web to change the book market. The form factor does come into play when we consider web compatibility. Forget book-length narratives, people won’t even sit through a 5000-word article.

What the web CAN do is become a field for short fiction. The single short story can become the equivalent of the single soundtrack. In the minds of those who read fiction, the short story is still part of a collective — an anthology, a collection, or a series. While the idea of a short story collection may not be something evil, this collective does not have to be a tangible construct. It can simply be an identifier — a label — a title or description to help contain a mass of short narratives.

What that means is that the short story does not have to be part of a physical book. It can exist on its own as a work of fiction. If it needs context, then that can come from a label. Each Byomkesh Bakshi detective story is an independent work, but it gets context from the title and the shared character set. A reader, if/when he finds a Byomkesh story, does not need a physical construct (like a book) to be able to place it in the right folder in his mind. In the music market, such contextualising happens by way recognising artist names. In the book market, it can happen through author names and franchise names.

Think about an online marketplace where you go and find short stories listed. Some are independent of franchise context, some belong to a particular series (Byomkesh Bakshi?) and all stories are brand new. You read excerpts and click on the buy button next to the stories you find interesting. You pay… what? about 10 rupees for a story and it is added to your library.

The problem is, we don’t have suitable micro-payment systems in place to make such a marketplace possible. In addition, I have a feeling that such a market will work more for short fiction that falls under some manner of concept umbrella. For example, people will be more likely to buy stories featuring their favourite characters or stories by their favourite authors than go for something standalone (both in idea and author terms). Think about it — Would you rather buy from DetectiveStories.com or ByomkeshBakshi.com? A story’s presence is felt not just in the words it uses, but also in the anchors it places in the backs of our minds.

It is possible to free fiction for the web, but it will take some serious thinking and a rather adventurous spirit among publishers. Heck, if the micro-payment thing wasn’t in my way, I would have done this myself by now.

A friend of mine mailed in to express her happiness that a recent photo she posted of herself got a gazillion likes. I think Facebook likes are somewhat like the page view counters of yore. They are fun and ego-boosting but entirely pointless in the long run.

One of Facebook’s goals is to be a reasonably accurate reflection of your real life social connections. This goal actually suffers because of the ease with which people can connect on Facebook. In real life, connecting with someone takes effort. You have to travel, you have to make small talk, at the very least you have to pick up your phone and dial a number. You know who is an important part of your life because they come through this filter – they make an effort to be in touch with you. On Facebook, because the amount of effort required to connect with someone is minimal, even people who don’t much care about you and the events in your life end up watching and reacting to your updates.

Think of it this way. You are getting married and you have sent out invitation cards to all your friends. Those who turn up made a conscious choice to do so. They took the time out, they booked tickets, they put other appointments on hold, and they undertook a journey to reach the place you are getting married at. It took some real effort on their part and that tells you that they attach importance to the relationship they have with you.

If anyone could attend your wedding with the click of their mouse, the element of effort goes out of the picture and there is no way to establish which relationships are important and which are not. Heck! Most people, if they could indeed attend your wedding that easily, would attend your wedding. Who would want to miss out on all the free food on the other side of the “like” button?

Of course, I am talking strictly data here. It is entirely possible that because of Facebook’s ease of use, you might end up connecting with people who might otherwise have remained distant and unfamiliar. But as far as Facebook being representative of your real world social graph is concerned, the current model just doesn’t work. Part of the reason behind Facebook’s early success was the element of exclusivity (with its user base being limited to members of particular institutions). Now it is heading in the exact opposite direction.

I am neither Christian nor Buddhist. But since I am from a country where competitive religiosity is rampant, I think I have a fair view of the issue. I can’t claim to properly understand how Christians in a Christian-majority country might behave. So consider what follows an educated guess.

The difference, in essence, between Christianity and Buddhism is that the former is a devotional path that encourages reliance on an external deity and the latter is a philosophical path that advocates exploring one’s own self. So the comparison here is really between the devotional path and the self-exploratory path. Without going into detailed analyses of the two paths, let me just focus — because that is what the question demands — on why followers of the devotional path might consider the self exploratory path inferior.

Devotional religiosity is very seductive. It is all about feelings and the heart. And as is the case with many things of the heart, it is very hard to argue against emotionally. It grips the believer’s heart and can convince him of the righteousness of his cause even when the said cause is patently ludicrous or dangerous to those around him. In the case of Christianity, the devotee is usually someone who believes that Jesus was the son of god and that he died for the sins of all people everywhere. Believing that this is true gives them a very strong advantage in the form of an psychological anchor. It seems odd when you look at it this way, but it is possible to sail through most life’s problems if you have the luxury of giving credit to or blaming external factors. It makes life simpler. On the plus side, it makes people humble and less arrogant. On the minus side, it makes people suspicious of knowledge and unwilling to deal with objective reality.

Self-oriented religiosity can be an equally seductive idea, but that often depends on how willing the individual is to acknowledge his individuality. In some situations (especially situations involving the aforementioned devotional culture) individuality is sacrificed in service of the community / society. Self-oriented religiosity lacks the advantage of communally reinforced beliefs. Individuals have to make do with the knowledge that their own explorations bring them. They do not have the luxury of putting the onus on an external deity and putting forward the faith argument. Note that none of this means Christians and Buddhists can be neatly clubbed into the devotional and individualist categories. It is possible for Christians to be individualists (by treating the Jesus story as only a moral fable) and Buddhists to be devotional (by putting their trust in the Buddha and not his teachings).

This is a general argument, not a specific one. It compare ideologies, not all the possible ways they may be implemented.

Having thus seen the difference, it should be clear why a devotional-path Christian might find a self-oriented Buddhist inferior. Part of the reason why a devotee will look down upon an explorer is because the latter does not follow commandments. Since the devotee’s entire world view is predicated on obeying a set of rules that come from an external agency (the Abrahamic god, father of the aforementioned Jesus), he or she would naturally find the idea of a human being deciding for himself / herself the path that he should take absolutely blasphemous. Especially since the commandments that the devotee is supposed to follow are rather strict and leave little room for maneuvering.

Another reason a devotee might consider the explorer inferior is because the explorer, by merely being himself or herself, poses an unspoken question to the devotee’s way of life. The explorer makes the devotee wonder if he is right. If the devotee’s god is an absolute authority and if his word is law, then how does the explorer go about his life without drawing any punishment upon his person? And if he can do so, then might it not be possible for the devotee to go about exploring his self as well? This creates doubt in the devotee’s mind and doubt, the devotee is convinced, is the opposite of faith. And so the devotee blames the explorer for challenging his faith and through it, his god.