Part Time Philosopher

I remember the idea for this post, came during one of my drinking orgies at spikey’s place. And like all the other ideas…it vaporized the next morning.

I should try writing when I am drunk. But that’s an issue we will not elaborate on.

Jumping straight to the point (for those who know…pun is absolutely intended!!), we have heard and quoted people like Shakespeare, Karl Marx, Aristotle, Freud even. But have we ever thought, what made these guys so quotable?

A cursory glance through some of the status messages posted on fb and twitter, makes you think there is a philosopher hiding in everyone of us. Each one of us knows how to live their life, each of us has a set of rules by which we define ourselves. Then why doesn’t anyone quote us?

Frankly, do we just need to get a book published filled with our ideologies which people would read and then bam!! You are now officially branded as a philosopher.

In one of my previous posts, I lamented the lack of content in the bottom left corner of the ToI’s editorial page,. What does one have to do if we wanted to post our feelings in that column? Is there an entrance exam of some sort which you have to pass to be called a philosopher and get your ramblings published? Or have these ‘well learned’ people passed a course where you were fed a steady diet of salman rushdie and shobhaa de?

Look at blogs, which we all write and read. Doesn’t a blog provide a window to a person’s mind? On what basis do you judge that a particular post could qualify as a good philosophical read?

One of my college seniors authors a blog which has received 2,50,000 plus hits. I mean, this guy was just a year older to me. We studied in the same environment. What level of enlightenment could he have reached to become so well read?

What the heck, I think sometimes. May be each of these philosophers had a personal Ellsworth Toohey, who made them famous. May be these guys were not so great after all, atleast no greater than us.

Each of us has found his/her own personal wonder in this life. Each of us has pondered on the answer to the ultimate question and many other smaller questions and we have received our own personal answers.

What is it that makes some answers more acceptable and the others not so. What makes these full time thinkers greater than us part time philosophers?

PS: Dhr, Chatur, Mudit and Sharad- i have disabled the automatic notifications...if i am to be read, i will be  read by choice. 

Utterly Meaningless Post

Horrible, horrible this day is for me.

I am alone, in my room. I have smoked 5 cigarettes in the last 3 hours. I don’t want to get drunk. I have work pending from my office. i shouted and cursed one of my best friends for not acting like one.

Four episodes of how I met your mother have done nothing to lift me up. I cant talk about this to anyone because then they would think ‘ohh!! U face a lot of these days. We are alone too…aren’t we living our lives? “

This is one of the primary reasons I loved college. I always had people whom I could go to. College brought me a variety of people with a variety of sensibilities. It was always entertaining, even a mundane thing as watching an old hindi film was exciting because the people made it so.

Those who resort to books, movies or pets to get rid of their boredom have never ever given people enough chance. Those intellectuals who curse the morals of this world that we are living in should try and live it instead of blurting sermons to fools like us.

The other day, D said…during an entirely unrelated conversation that we were born losers. By we he meant him and me. I so wish this was not true and I don’t want to believe it but in my heart of hearts, the pessimist that I am, I know that this could be. Inspite of our dreams to achieve we may not make it big.

But strangely this fact doesn’t seem to bother me much. Because at this moment, inspite of being at this place and time, there are people somewhere in some corner of the world who consider me as their friend. What bothers me is that whether these people whom I have now would stay forever. What bothers me more is that none of the people whom I call friends are with me now.

Loneliness brings out this animal in you which will devour if u don’t treat it. It brings out your entire life story and plays it in the form a ghastly movie which you can never forget. It will make you think that your entire life was a joke. A dream if u can since most people are now bitten my the movie ‘inception’ which never existed. And the moment you die in this dream, you will get a kick and you will wake up in the real world.

It is like those characters John Nash sees in the movie, ‘A Beautiful Mind’. What if none of these people existed ever? What if you wake up and realize that the world that you’re living in is a close resemblance to the one George Orwell describes in ‘1984’.

What if this animal gets the better of you and you end up in an asylum.

What if your life had no meaning at all.

Evolution...or is it?

As I sit here in this swish Bangalore airport lounge trying to find means of staying awake till 4.15 am (the flight got delayed…you know how it is right) I can think of no other means to pass my time than to write this. And since I am not as well connected as some of my peers for whom constant connectivity in the form of a tata photon or a blackberry has become de rigueur, this post may see the light of the day in a few hours from now.

This airport has a non-smoking policy, which means, people who end up waiting here as I do have to make do with the ridiculously expensive coffee served by the CCD outlet here (and there a lot of these in Bangalore!!) or as I have done, use the chewable form of tobacco.

This brings me to the thought, why is all this brouhaha about smoking caught up in the recent years. The central govt. pulling out all stops to ensure that people are discouraged (discouraged mind you…not banned altogether) from smoking. From the innocuous Statutory Warning on cigarette packs, we now have a picture of tarred lungs occupying almost 1/3^rd the area of the packet.

This is even more funny if you consider the imported cigarettes that are now available. We have slogans like ‘Smoking damages lungs’ to ‘Smoking causes slow death’. Some TV ads have taken this even further discussing the ill effects of smoking on our virility (in the case of men). Ouch!! That hurt.

If we start to think over it, every little thing in this world, everything that we eat or do has a potential risk of death. Driving can cause death, drinking can cause death which follows a liver failure, over-consumption of tea has known to cause failure of kidneys, even tomatoes have this effect of causing kidney-stones and don’t even get me started on the effects of butter and cheese.

Why is smoking taboo then? If we look at our history, we have the nawabs of Ajmer and Lucknow smoking hukkas, which are more dangerous than the filtered stuff we smoke. Why that, even our older folk, be it our grand mothers or grand fathers smoked or chewed tobacco. We have portraits of American presidents smoking cigars. Che Guevara/ Fidel Castro smoked the all famous Cuban cigars.  There are as of now, to my knowledge, no cases of death by cancer of all these famous personalities.

Is it that these people had some gene combination in them, that prevented these deaths? Are we, inspite of claiming to be more evolved than our predecessors, ultimately a weaker race? Or is it that some random guy just started all this and the highly credulous people that we are, started believing all this talk about death by cancer?

Or is it that the cause of death is something entirely else. It may be the huge amounts of poisonous gases that we discharge into the atmosphere each day through our automobiles, airplanes (ironic..huh!!), trains, fast F1 cars, air conditioners, deodorants, refrigerators etc. the cigarette smoke may just be a catalyst to all this venom that we inhale everyday.

Our forefathers, who after all their smoking led healthy lives and died for reasons as varied as pneumonia to brain hemorrhage had none of this to bear. The reasons of their death are entirely  different than what tobacco is known to cause. Why blame the innocent leaf then?

We have our classical singers, whose red teeth bear testimony to the fact, that even they cannot do without tobacco. That they are alive at 70+ age and showing no signs of having undergone a chemo, goes to show tobacco isn’t that dangerous after all.

It may happen, that my theory (if I choose to call it) may be disproven in the time to come. But as of this date, this time when I am finishing my post and proceeding to the security check, this babble of mine may ring some bells.

It is with this optimism, that smoking once again brings out the beauty in the women and the masculinity in the men like the days of yore, like it did to our on-screen and literary heroes and heroines, I sign off.

Foot note:  Overdoing anything is bad and smoking is no exception.

Ankle note:  according to totally unverified statistics, cigarette consumption has increased in India, in the past     decade. The guys designing the anti-smoking logos…you need to do a better job

Shin note: Underage smoking is absolutely foolish. Grow a beard first, think about smoking next.

Knee note: I totally hate waiting alone. As they say, the devil’s workshop has done its job.