Vijayendra Mohanty

Here is how evolution happens. Organisms have genes that dictate behaviours and appearances. These genes are copied at the time of reproduction and passed on to the offspring. Every once in a while, a random mutation enters this process. This means that a mistake happens when the genes are being copied and something changes in the larger picture, ending up with an organism that has a quality not found in any of its siblings. This quality can be a longer tail, a shorter hind leg, a previously non-existent thumb, an ability to breathe underwater, a larger brain, and a good many other things that you might imagine as well as I can.

Here is how storytelling happens. Storytellers have tendencies and styles. These guide their choices in terms of what kind of stories they like to consume as well as the kind of stories they create. When they create stories, they largely follow templates that exist in their minds — templates that decide tone, pace, and sometimes even the message of the story. However, these templates never create exact copies. In fact, it is well-nigh impossible to create exact copies when telling stories. Random mutations enter this process as well. These mutations are mistakes (for lack of a better word) that change the story (the storyteller’s offspring) in ways big and small. As a result of such random mutation, a Flash Gordon becomes a Star Wars; a Superman becomes a Captain Marvel; and so on and so forth. The mutation can take the shape of a character motivation, a slightly different-looking spaceship, a differently coloured cape, or something else.

What is common to both evolutions are two things. One is mutations. The other is the act of copying.

Creativity is a result of you deciding to copy. And it is a result of the changes that creep in because of you being you. You can not, no matter how hard you try, create something that someone else might create. If you tell a story, it will have you in it. You can not keep yourself out of any story that you are telling.

You and I and everyone else in the world is part of the genome that goes into the making of stories. Stories are the beings (gods?) that we exist in the service of.

There are very good reasons for you to not get into a fight with a Royal Bengal Tiger. The tiger has a set of distinct advantages when it comes to a fight scenario — advantages that you, as a human being, lack.

Having said that, there may be at least one good reason for the tiger to not mess with you either. While he may have teeth and claws, what you have is no less dangerous.

You have other humans.

If a tiger enters a human settlement, it may very well get away with injuring or killing or eating you, but it will probably hesitate because there might be consequences. Members of the society that you are part of will do everything in their power to find and kill the tiger. If they do not do so out of a sense of revenge, they will do it to avoid the possibility of future attacks.

People watch out for their own. And by “their own”, I mean people they identify with on a family or clan level. This game of consequences is played between human beings on a regular basis as well. Weapons become “deterrents” between nations and attacks on individuals become flash points that start world wars.

The reason I find this phenomenon fascinating is that consequences, despite not actually having any kind of physical existence, are as real, as dangerous, and as effective at starting or ending conflicts as weapons or physical advantages. I was reminded of this while watching Game of Thrones earlier this week an also some Star Trek TNG episodes dealing with the interactions between Starfleet and the Romulan empire.

The promise of future consequences acts as a shield as well as a motivator. And all it takes is imagination. Ironically, it doesn’t work if your enemy has no imagination. They have to be able to think that far into the future — far enough to be afraid of what may follow. Feels strange, but your greatest advantage against the tiger requires him to be intelligent and imaginative. Faced with a tiger who can’t wrap his head around the idea of consequences, you are dinner.

Thor is a Norse god of thunder. He is also a Marvel comics superhero. He was a god once, an actual god who found worship in homes and hearths and had temples devoted to him. He was prayed to and his name was spoken with, among other things, devotion.

The Thor you and I know better was recently seen in a Hollywood production by the name of Avengers. He was found fighting an onslaught of warlike aliens in defence of the American city of New York. He was seen working in partnership with a spy organisation (again American) and was almost beaten by the product of an unfortunate laboratory accident. The likeness of his mighty Mjolnir can be ordered from online stores, to be used by children for their playtime needs.

The Marvel version of Thor also explains Asgard away in terms of cosmology and some amount of speculative science. While none of this is necessarily an ‘evil’ and creative new interpretations must always be welcome, I can’t help but feel a small pang of sadness at the thought of a pantheon that no longer lives the way my gods do.

If Hinduism dies out (Don’t look at me like that. Anything is possible.) perhaps there will be cinema featuring a dashing Rama fighting a monstrous Ganesha for the safety of America.

Don’t get me wrong. Superheroes are fine. But they can’t be all there is to a god. Especially when it comes to living gods like the ones that prevail in India. An entire culture rests on the shoulders of Rama and Ganesha. They are ideas yes, but more importantly, they are ideals. Their existence is spread out over temples and sacred spaces all over India. This distributed physical existence is bound to be different from one based on shopping malls, toy stores, cinema halls, and action figures.

To be fair to America, they have no gods. So they do the next best thing. They appropriate other cultures’ icons to satisfy their imaginative needs. I guess Norse myth could have ended up in worse places than Marvel studios.

The word humanoid means that which looks human. If we find humanoid species on another world and they call themselves Romans, they might call us Romanoids. I say this, not merely to be playful with words, but to make a more interesting point.

When we visualise gods and deities, they always have human chracteristics. Apart from looking like us, they also share our capricious natures, our sense of morality, and our tendency to be territorial. This is because we see the worlds through human eyes — which are the only eyes we have. A dog with an imagination will also visualise god with dog-like characteristics. It is only natural.

Subjectivity is our prison. And our relative inability to view the world from outside it even shows when some people speak of human beings being “more evolved” than other animals. Evolution has no path. There is no direction that it progresses in. Species take shapes that best suit the need for their continued survival. This applies to human beings as well as it applies to the “lowliest” single-cell organism.

Every characteristic we have that we consider an advantage over other living creatures exists because it became essential to our continued survival — not because we were worthy of it and nature bestowed it upon us. In fact, mutating in order to better adjust with our surroundings is not even a guarantee that a species will survive. Numberless animals and plants have disappeared because nature’s rate of change was faster and more powerful than their ability to adapt. Evolution requires one to not only be willing to change, but also to be able to change fast enough.

The only thing great about being human is the ability to understand the processes that brought us into existence. We can value this understanding and make an effort to maintain it. Or we can consider ourselves the pinnacle of evolution and while away our time until nature pushes us in more inhuman directions.

We keep hearing about how everything from marketing, to news journalism, to advertising is going digital. At first glance, this might simply be taken to mean that we are replacing brick-and-mortar infrastructures with ones made of code, that they are merely leaving old media and moving things into cyberspace.

But something going digital can mean much more than that. The change we keep hearing about is more than just a synthetic change of clothes. Look at how the nature of news media changed after it went digital. Look at how music changed after it went digital. Marketing and advertising underwent something of an overhaul as the field took to the digital realm. In all these cases, in addition to the outward change of medium, a lot of the core values also changed. Music comes to us through digital media now, but it also comes in smaller doses — as individual tracks (as opposed to a whole disc full of songs). News now comes to us as short text updates and video clips that are often only a few minutes long (earlier these were long form reports and hour-long video shows). Going digital changed these venerable old-world domains in very fundamental ways.

How might the digital switch affect the act of storytelling? In a previous essay, I wrote about how the web might eventually become a vehicle for the mass distribution of short fiction — how it may finally free the short story from the clutches of the short story collection (much like how it freed the individual song from the clutches of the disc). But there is more to be considered here.

Here is the core difference between digital and analogue.

Analogue systems are small packages of causality. This means that they contain a set of components that are related to each other either chronologically or by way of a hierarchy. Analogue systems give you the whole picture containing all these components and then you have to decide which parts you want to focus your attention on. Think book. Think audio cassette. The various different content units in these media are united by a common theme or source or idea.

Digital systems are cropped versions of these packages. Instead of giving you access to the whole picture, they narrow things down and make you focus on only one thing. This helps avoid clutter and simplify matters by reducing cognitive choice, but it also does away with a lot of context. Think single short story (as opposed to a thematic collection). Think single MP3 file instead of a CD.

Here’s an example to illustrate the point I am making.

An analogue watch is the one with the dial. All the numbers from 1 to 12 arranged in a neat circle with hands for hours, minutes, and seconds to point to them in the appropriate manner and help you understand what time of day it is. A digital watch on the other hand, breaks the idea of time down into only the right now. You see a set of digits on the little screen and all these digits do is tell you what time it is now.

This, in essence, is the difference between the digital and the analogue. Analogue narratives give you context — a sense of where you came from and where you are going. They give you the whole picture and let you see where you are in relation to various other points. On a wrist watch, even though it is 3 pm, you can see that it was 1 pm some time ago and that you are on your way to 4 and 5 pm — the numbers are all on the dial, plainly visible at all times regardless of where the various hands are pointing. It may not seem like much but I think it matters on a cognitive level. In a similar fashion, digital media has narrowed the feel of the news narrative down to single units of information. The focus has shifted from the narrative to the event happening right now.

Instead of there being a large capsule of information like the newspaper where you had an entire sequence of pages containing various sections, sub-sections, and categories, your news now consists of tiny text updates floating about freely in the blogosphere, statusphere, and other assorted spheres. Video media also, in the analogue world, used to be part of a package — an entire channel that ran 24 hours a day and had content divided neatly into sections, shows, and prime time news hours. Now, it is disjointed and free from the constraints of such envelopes. With analogue media, you viewed a content unit as part of something larger — a newspaper, a 24-hour-channel, a book — but when this same content went digital, you started seeing these same units as things in and of themselves. What was lost was the sense of context and the sense of history.

The thing about digitising units of content is that it can’t be done infinitely. You can strip a newspaper down into sections and it will only become a smaller package. You can strip each section down into individual reports and each report, though devoid of the package, will still make sense upon reading. You can go even further and break the report down into even smaller parts and share those (quotes, a line of statistic etc.) and share those about as tweets and similar text updates. But such stripping down eventually hits a barrier. You can’t break things down beyond a point because you start sacrificing coherence of the narrative. A single sentence might be easier to consume and digest than a 500 word news report but there is really no comparing the respective value of the two. An hour-long video can be broken down into several smaller clips that may make sense by themselves. But again, it is coherence that is at stake. You can’t immerse yourself into the experience of a 2-minute-video of two people discussing a matter of national interest as well as you can with a prime time TV interaction.

Immersion is key to experiencing a story. If you have ever lost yourself in a book, you will know what I am talking about. You can’t read a story as a side activity. Well you can, but then you wouldn’t really be experiencing it. A book — a packaged super dose of concentrated fiction or non-fiction — helps this immersion process. For the duration of time that it takes to finish the book, you are completely inside it. There are no distractions, no advertising, no alternate means of entertainment, no email, and no friend requests. Experiencing a narrative is all about the willingness to put in time.

There is talk among futurists about the future of storytelling. They talk, among other things, of interactive narratives — where the reader or viewer may be able to set into the story and affect the course of events by his or her actions. They also speak of the reader or viewer’s ability to enter the story at any point in the middle and proceed from there to any other point in the narrative. Basically, this amounts to skipping the beginning-middle-end structure of a narrative and playing it as you might play a game. We are replacing the reader with the gamer. In the process, we might unsettle the structure of the story in a very fundamental way. I am not saying that’s a bad thing. It is obvious that the story as it exists in traditional media like books can’t perform according to the same old standards on the web.

But even as news reports evolve into something different from their analogue ancestors, becoming statistic-laden chunks of information (as opposed to being a narrative), I still think there is something to be said about the simple act of listening to a story from beginning to end. If the real time web has proven anything, it is that we look for distractions every five minutes. And it is not possible to have an engaging relationship with any kind of narrative without spending quality time with it. Interactivity for the sake of interactivity might end up killing the story as we know it.

The story is an independent unit. Take it out of the paper envelope called book or publish it on the web as plain text, it doesn’t matter. But as far as structure goes, the old model — beginning, middle, and end — seems like something that is integral to storytelling and therefore, worth preserving.

Some time ago, on an episode of Game of Thrones, Sam and Gilly were walking back to the wall from the far North. To pass the time, Sam the nerd starts telling Gilly all that he knows about the wall and the history of the night's watch. He knows dates, names, and events of key importance. This amazes Gilly. To her, the fact that Sam can know all these things by simply looking at small squiggly lines on paper, is nothing short of magic. As someone who writes to convey ideas and is rather acutely aware that every word he writes will outlive him by centuries, I often find myself struck by this very same sense of amazement. Writing is a powerful kind of magic that transcends the limits of a human lifespan.

When people first started writing, it was not a commonplace talent. Priests wrote, kings wrote (or had people write things for them and about them). The common folk only heard the stories. This is perhaps why, to this day, something becomes more worthy of trust if it is in writing. Think of the phrase “likh ke deta hoon”.

Isaac Asimov once speculated about the origin of the phrase “Cyclopean Wall”. A cyclopean structure is, according to the dictionary, ancient masonry made with massive irregular blocks. Asimov deduced that even though a civilisation (a Greek city state for example), might have had the technological know-how to build great walls with large blocks of stone, to a less advanced people, it might appear to be magic. In this case, it is possible that they thought these walls had been built by Cyclops — the mythical one-eyed giants of Greek myth and folklore. Since a non-scientific people could not wrap their heads around the idea of man being able to lift and use enormous rocks, they assigned magical qualities to the architectural style itself.

There is a superstition in the Western world that involves horse shoes. If hung above the door, a horse shoe is supposed to ward off bad luck. Horse shoes are made of iron and the analogue of this superstition in India assigns magical properties to the metal. I remember once, when I was a child and tormented by nightmares, my mother gave me a piece of iron to place under my pillow at night. Iron, she said, has magical properties and can ward off evil.

Remember those stories where the hero had a magical sword. A weapon that was hard and sharp yes, but there was something additional to it. It was particularly effective against monsters and creatures of darkness. It could do more than just injure them — it can kill them. It can cause them to disintegrate and melt away into the darkness. Iron has always been considered to have magical properties. This may be because the first weapons and cutting tools were not made of iron. They were made of copper and bronze — metals which are pretty but not very effective when moulded into swords, especially when the opponent has an iron sword.

Now imagine a soldier convinced of the superiority of his bronze blade facing off against a strange invader from another land. His sword bends and then is cut clean in two by his enemy's iron sword. His surviving colleagues run back with stories of an invincible enemy and their magical swords. The mind is susceptible to irrationality in the heat of battle, but some strains of such thinking must have remained. These strains have been assigning magical qualities to iron ever since.

The human tendency to make sense of things can be an overpowering one. In the absence of reliable information, it tends to runs away in strange directions.

The idea of evolutionary advantage can be a double-edged sword. You can explain away some bits of the mystery of existence with it and you can make some other aspects infinitely murkier. On Quora, someone asked why we have not evolved to be giants. Below is my answer.

Modern human beings are probably smaller, weaker, and more prone to physical damage than their ancestors were. We used to be more muscular (against animals), and hairy (against cold) than we are now. But we have still gotten to the stage we are in today — that of being the dominant species on the planet. We fear no predator and the climate does not pose as much of a threat to us as it does other members of the animal kingdom.

We got to this stage, not because we grew large and strong, but because we didn't. While growing large would definitely have made us more ‘fit’ for survival, not evolving into giants worked out better.

John Gribbin once wrote that cranial capacity is no guarantee of a species growing smarter. Dolphins and whales are pretty smart, but they do not ‘rule the world’ like we do because they never had any reason to get clever. I should clarify here that the only people to suggest that human beings rule the world are human beings.

We didn't have that kind of bulk. What we had were hands with opposing thumbs. In order to survive, we had to make use of what we had. So we built weapons to help protect against predators, started hunting for food, invented agriculture to ensure availability of food through tough seasons, started wearing clothes to protect us against harsh climates as we traveled the planet. We survived, and better yet, we thrived.

So sure, we could have become giants and survived. But we didn't. We got smarter and survived. And truth be told, I rather prefer it this way. I have a feeling that having the odds against you help you grow. If we had been giants today, we perhaps wouldn't be talking about our place in the order of things (like we are right now). In all likelihood, we would have been preoccupied with the upcoming mating season, like a whale.

Doubtless, you have views on humanity — what it is, what it does, what it should do instead, and how great or awful it is when compared to other species and / or in the larger scheme of things.

It has been suggested that there is something unique about humanity. Interestingly, all those who made these suggestions were members of the human race. Despite our best literary / speculative / philosophical traditions, there has never actually been an outsider’s view of us. The larger scheme of things is exactly what we fail to wrap our heads around when we say anything about humanity. We can’t pass judgment on humanity with any level of accuracy because we are human.

It seems counter-intuitive, doesn’t it? Since times immemorial, human beings have given free expression to views concerning their place in the world. These expressions have taken two primary shapes — the good view informed by optimism about human potential; and the bad view informed by humanity’s destructive nature.

I want to write about two very specific dangers of thinking like a human being. When we do that:

1. We tend to not think like any other species, and;
2. We seem to confuse our view of the world as being some kind of objective reality.

The first danger is something we are already living through. Our speculative fiction often makes no distinction between the destruction of the earth and the destruction of humanity. We have, in our own imaginations, made ourselves the sole reason behind Earth’s existence. We behave as if all other life on earth is somehow of secondary importance. I would love to read a book where another species lives under a similar shadow of vanity. Recommend away!

The second danger makes us take ourselves too seriously. We talk of humanity’s future and destiny as if it really is a thing. It’s not. We may never make it to the stars. We may never even make it to the end of this millennium. We may allow our self-importance to choke civilisation to death. And the point I am making does not suffer one bit even if we are pessimistic about our chances. Humanity might achieve all that the optimists say — it might even outlast and outperform their wildest utopian dreams.

Human exceptionalism is something that gets into our heads early and insidiously. And despite the fact that it is within our power to push it aside and be genuinely objective, we fall into the many traps that come with it. Whether we believe we are worthy of the stars or that we don’t deserve to be part of the ecosystem we are in, we encourage the lie that there is something special about being human. There isn’t. We are just another animal, living out a meagre existence with our heads full of stories featuring our own selves as hero and villain.

Do you believe in a world without borders?

I don't. Here is why.

Every time I hear someone say nations and communities are evil constructs and what we should all try to belong to is humanity, I begin to wonder what that particular person means by “humanity”. Would she, for example, be comfortable being in the same house with people who believe girls do not deserve education? Would she be okay with being in the same club as people who believe gay people should not get married? Do these subsets of “humanity” feature in their Universalist Utopia?

They don’t. She is deluding herself with vain dreams. And she is doing it out of intellectual lethargy. The task of dealing with differences is obviously much harder than dismissing it all as evil (nationalism, communalism etc). So instead of engaging constructively with those she disagrees with, she takes refuge in the imaginary ideal of a world without borders. It is classic escapism.

The diversity of humanity is mind-boggling. It is kind, cruel, pitiful, glorious, inspiring, and oppressive — all at the same time. When someone talks of ‘belonging’ to humanity, they are usually talking about an imaginary, Universalist version of their own world view. The peacenik thinks everyone should sit together and sing songs of happiness. The religious extremist thinks everyone should worship One God. These may look like vastly different things, but the issue at the core of them is the same — the desire to have everyone correspond to One way.

Such Universalism does not exist. It also can not exist. And the reason for this is that the universe (and all its subsets) rebel against uniformity. Diversity is the thread that runs through everything. The world that we live in is biased towards growth. It explodes with creativity, expanding in all directions with all its strength, creating groups, ideologies, communities all the time. It is defined by differences. The last thing it wants to be is ‘one’.

The universalist ideal is a dangerous myth that people attach themselves to without considering its practicality or consequences. When you start believing that it is possible to put everything in one box, you also (unconsciously, and perhaps gently at first) start imposing this universalism on everything. People, communities, ideologies which do not fit, will therefore be forced to fit. Before long, this force-fitting will become the cause of even more conflict and someone, somewhere will get fed up of it and call upon everyone to belong to One World.

Universalism is the most violent and culturally destructive phenomenon ever conceived. The idea that everyone can belong to One Way of life and believe in the same ideas runs counter to the diverse reality of the world.

I for one, think the world is a most wholesome thing. I also think that most of our world’s problems stem from the belief that we can somehow make it better by practising one ‘ism’ or another. Belief in a golden tomorrow drives us towards doing terrible things to each other (Firefly anyone?). A much better way of living, as per me, is to see the world as it is (as opposed to what we would like it to be) and choose from among the options we have while letting others make their own choices.

Words carry weight. More than being just arbitrary symbols representing sounds and concepts, over time, words acquire a flavour of their own. They stir passions, instill sentiments, and direct the course of civilisations.

I want to talk about two words in particular — forward and backward — and the ideas and values they represent along with how they affect our way of thinking. Forward and backward are loaded words and they come with some heavy implications. Upon comparing them we find that there seems to be something inherently good about the future and something very shameful about the past. The future is generally seen as a place we ought to aspire for — a golden time of prosperity and happiness where today’s problems would cease to exist. The past is perceived to be the source of all the troubles we have right now — it is a dark place populated only by the mistakes we made when we didn’t know any better.

To be sure, it is just a matter of how much effort we put into our culture-consciousness. Given the nature of time, one can’t help going towards the future. Being in touch with the past, on the other hand, requires effort.

But this seemingly simple dichotomy — at a deeper level — may be seen as the essence of the difference between the world views of the East and the West.

The Western view of history is linear — events that are fixed in an age gone by, never to return. This past is what has lead to the present and the present, in its turn, will lead towards tomorrow. This view of the world sees time as linear — as a sequence of events with a distinct beginning, a rather clean progression, and an ultimate end. This view may be seen as being supported by both Western religion and science.

Western religion, mostly Christianity, is based on distinctive historicity — a set of beliefs that root from an epochal event in the past (Christ’s sacrifice) that set the ground for the coming of an epochal event in the future (the day of judgement). There is no deviating from this linear world view. It is, as they say, set in stone.

The science of the West, too, is a progressive phenomenon. Knowledge is seen as a constantly improving value. What we knew about the universe in the past was imperfect (and therefore inferior) compared to what we know today. Similarly, what we will know tomorrow will be a superior and more accurate set of facts. Here too, as in religion, the progression of events is linear.

The end result is that the West seems always to be in pursuit of a golden tomorrow that is perfect in every way. The past, by contrast, is all sins, ignorance, shame, and pain.

The Indian view of time is more complicated. The Hindu idea of itihasa is that of events which have happened, are happening, and will happen again. There is no epochal event that defines reality for all eternity. Instead, such epochal events are spread all through time, repeating themselves at regular intervals, as surely as seasons do. Since ancient times, India has never had a clear demarcating line between science and religion. The human quest for truth weaves in and out of all physical and mental disciplines. India’s religion and science both agree with each other on this cyclic view of reality. While ancient Hindu cosmology speaks of universe upon universe being created, sustained and eventually destroyed in periods of time trillions of years across, Hindu mythology chronicles tales of gods being born in the human world age after age for all eternity. In this view of the world, the past isn’t just a cozy memory to be recalled with nostalgic fondness. It is as real as the present and as important as the future. Time isn’t just a string of events happening one after the other, it is a wheel that goes around eternally. The human being (along with all his affairs) is a mere speck on the scale of eternity, but more than being a mere rider, he is also an essential part of the cycle of events.

These world views are reflected in the social realities of the West and the East. The child — the representative of the future — is the focus of the Western family. All energies are focussed on the individual of tomorrow. This individual, of course, grows up looking for answers in tomorrow and has something of a disconnect with his past.

The traditional family system in India, on the other hand, is not a unit by itself. It is a link that connects the individual with the past as well as the future because both are considered equally important. Elders see their ways continued in their children and children look back upon them for their sense of identity. It is, in many ways, a very fulfilling model.

The Western trend, now very prevalent in India as well, of sending aging parents to old-age homes is equivalent to cutting the individual’s connection with his past.

The question regarding the need for the past is often raised. The answer is simple — you can’t go where you want to go if you don’t remember where you came from. Amnesia is not a traveller’s best friend. The presence of the past is important because it puts things in perspective. Without a link with history, an individual’s quest for identity can quickly turn into a blind dash in complete darkness. The past is a cultural record. All societies big and small — from nations to friend circles, have a culture. In a group of friends, everyone knows each other’s nature. Each friend knows the other’s likes, dislikes, and limits. This knowledge builds up over time and guides the friend circle’s behaviour. Without the solid base that is its culture, the friend circle, or any society for that matter, can not survive.

For example, I believe that the roots of most of Pakistan’s problems today lie in its disconnect with its history. The state of Pakistan turned its back on the millennia-old history that it shared with present-day India and adopted and tried to make alien Arabic roots its own. To put it simply, because they forgot where they came from, Pakistanis have no idea where they are going.

It can only be a seriously warped public discourse that equates being past-conscious with being ‘backward’. A large part of the reasons behind India being considered backward is the tendency among many of us to equate the Western way with progress. As if there is something inherently anti-progress about the Indian way.

It is possible to be Indian and progressive at the same time.