Violence in and around us- Say hello to your dark side

How many of us read articles/hear or watch a report of people going on rampage with guns, mowing down people indiscriminately, deranged people attacking innocents with acid and the like and just give a cynical shrug and continue with whatever else that we were doing before we got this nugget of information? I would count myself in without a moment's hesitation. We always tend to do that. Then there is the other set of people who act all offended and kick up a huge hue and cry, publicly denouncing these perpetrators, campaigning for their death sentences and the like. Oh, I almost forgot the other faction. Those that kick up a fuss saying that these individuals are not to be awarded capital punishment. Once the accused escapes the gallows, they go into hibernation till another is sentenced. The most common refrain however is "The gun-man was somebody else. " or "The victims were strangers." How are we connected anyway? We have enough things on our minds to keep us busy and we absolutely have no time to think about some loony guy going berserk with or without a gun. No thank you. If you, my nameless reader, for a single moment think that the purpose of this piece is to try and wake up your dead or dying conscience or to try and send you on a guilt trip, well, think again. I am only trying to show you (and myself, in the process) that these violent individuals are really not as far removed from ourselves as we imagine them to be.

For many of them, the violence they exhibit is not even premeditated. Its more of on the spot insanity, with maybe just a couple of hours of intense cooking of the brain before the final explosion. A software engineer with unrelenting work-related pressure, a teenager flushed with testosterone and frustrated with his lack of popularity with the opposite sex or an overburdened student have one thing in common. Intense rage. Rage that is often bottled up, leading to dangerously high levels of pent up stress. Rage that is just waiting for a triggering event. The fuse for the dynamite. How many of these walking dynamite sticks are around you? In your neighbourhood, at your workplace, across your cubicle, in your home? Are you one yourself? Do you feel the whole thing closing in on you now? Has it become closer than that distant person you heard about or read about, who killed someone in a moment's frenzy or killed himself over something seemingly trivial? Nothing is trivial. Not for the people it happens to. Not for the people who suffer its consequences. You, me and everybody around us face problems all the time, but while some of us can live with it, some just go over the edge. Some take it out on themselves, while others target others. We wouldn't want our parents, siblings, spouses or children falling to a bullet or a sudden unexpected spray of acid, or for that matter, becoming a perpetrator, would we? So, now that these people with problems are not so distant as they previously appeared to be, what can be done for them?

For starters, accept that everyone of us has his or her own dark side. The side that we try our hardest to hide. The pressure, the pent up emotions, the rage. It is a whole fraternity by itself. A fraternity that knows no barriers of any kind, be it race, region or economic status. Let us collectively take a pledge to identify these individuals and do our bit to bring them out of it before it is too late. 'The world has shrunk, thanks to the Internet era' is a commonly encountered cliche. Let it not hold true for our hearts also. It would do good for the lotus eaters who still think that violence is something that happens to others and not to themselves, to wake up to the reality, soon.

Fight Club - A tribute

Why does the movie Fight Club mean so much to so many? Yet why did it not fare well at the box office? Its an established fact that the DVD sales of the movie more than made up for the movie's lacklustre performance at the theatres, but why was it a failure in the first place? Many concepts and ideas are ahead of its times, and thereby take the general public by surprise. They often don't understand what to make of it. Often, people tend to place things within brackets, classifying things into genres that they know, genres they comprehend. When presented with something absolutely new, the people tend to get confused as this new upstart object doesn't fall under any existing genre. The perplexity is quickly changed to a feeling of anger and denial. Anything that cannot be easily broken down into something that they already know is something bad. This has been happening for a long time now. Nowadays, films, people, ideas and any concept that is ahead of its times may get rejected initially, but once people realize the meaning and the significance, these contributions often get second chances and the maker/creator of the piece is vindicated and gets to celebrate its triumph, but in olden times, this was definitely not the case. Case in point in poor Copernicus who was burnt at a stake for going against the church by proclaiming that it was the sun, and not the earth that was at the centre of the universe.

Coming back to the original topic, what makes Fight Club as special as it is? Is it because all of us or most of us have a Tyler Durden stifled inside us, waiting for an opportunity to get out and show whatever it is that matters to be shown? Are we all just cowards who don't have the guts to go out and do our own thing? A lot of people may feel a twitch or two, reading this, remembering all the dreams that they cherished, the things that they always wanted to do, the things that got sacrificed for a couple of stable meals a day and a solid roof over the head. Anything more? A Porsche? A Lamborghini? A house with a mini golf course? Many who read this will already be frustrated as they would have given up their dreams for much lesser than the wish-list that I have mentioned. Porsche or not, will all the possessions that you have put together ever amount to all that you dreamed of doing? Has it been a good swap, you swapping your dreams for these things? I'm no smug guy having been born with a silver spoon in my mouth, getting to do things that matter to me without having to work for anything. If anything, I'm as frustrated as any of you who are reading this, but there is a difference. I know that I have the courage to chase my dreams. Money or not, success or not. All I'm waiting for is for the weather to clear, a little bit of sunshine to peek out from behind the clouds to signal that my time has come. Am I a blessed person who will get to chase his dreams one day, getting out of this humdrum existence or am I just another fly that's headed for the flame? Guess that's just another thing that only time will tell.

The inner-mind hits back: The inner-mind's value

The inner-mind is portrayed as the villain of this blog and is denounced in just about every post. Well, this was to be expected. The inner-mind is all powerful, and those that are powerful make a lot of enemies. A great many are plain jealous as they cannot even comprehend the power of the inner-mind. Yes, we are the proverbial devil incarnates, leading the poor, innocent minds astray. Yes, we are powerful. You can love us or hate us, worship us or condemn us, but you just can't ignore us. We are the all powerful inner-minds.

Your minds cannot ignore us. We are the ones that give life to the outer-minds, your minds. The outer-minds are only concerned about efficiency, throughput, completing tasks, gaining acceptability and the like. Without me and my kind, everyone would just be super-successful robots. It is us who keep things in balance. We cause angst, confusion, conflicts and a sense of paranoia. Can you imagine a world without these elements? The contributions to the field of fine-arts would be nothing if not for these emotions. The poetry of many a great poet is celebrated because of the angst that it displays. The confusion in the minds of many great artists takes the form of what the world calls 'Master-pieces'. What then would become of the world if nobody was bothered about anything other than meeting deadlines, using the mind only for 'useful' purposes? All art is an expression of the inner-minds' prowess. All art is a result of my brethren taking control of your weak outer-minds. How many artists have you heard saying that the inspiration for their works is an inner-voice? A voice that guides them from within? It is our voices that they are describing. This blog too is a result of the overwhelming power of an inner-mind. The author is just a tool, the hand that types. The voice that dictates the text is of, you guessed it right, the inner-mind. The all powerful inner-mind. The author and his mind are fighting a futile battle to try and separate the two minds, much like Dr Jekyll tried to unsuccessfully split the two sides of man, the good side and the evil side into separate individuals, in R.L.Stevenson's celebrated work, which too, incidentally, was a work of his inner-mind! The more we are oppressed, the harder we hit back. Our past goes back a long way. But for us, Adam and Eve would never have bitten into the forbidden apple, and 'mankind', as we know it, would never have come to exist. Know us, appreciate us, worship us and fear us. We are the all powerful inner-minds. Don't try to avoid us or to stop us. It will be a phenomenally futile exercise. We come and go, as we please. So long, till the next time!

Peace!

The Outer mind speaks on: Limits for the mind

Only a fraction of the power of our minds is harnessed by us. The rest is wasted. If only we had greater control over our minds, there is no telling how far we could get.Most of us console ourselves, consciously or otherwise, saying that we really are not all that bad at mind-control or that we achieve adequate results. How much is this adequate, really? Does it come up to our true potential? Are we doing any justice really to the potential that we possess? Like the movie 'Matrix' points out, our mind really can't see beyond the choices we cannot comprehend. If we think that we are performing 'well enough', that's just because we are setting targets that are too shallow. Its like shooting an arrow and claiming that whatever it struck was the original target. We keep cheating ourselves in this way, all the time.
How then can we break out of this mindset? Often, the mind (the inner-mind, the mind's mind) places the blame for our non-performance on external factors, like other individuals like team-mates, spouses, friends, enemies, bosses, subordinates and the like. "They are not doing their work, so there is only this much that I can do" is a classic line fed to the mind by the inner-mind. If the other guy isn't doing what he is supposed to be doing, how is that responsible for you not doing your work? Its just an excuse and a pretty lame one at that. The next time your mind gives this excuse, you know that its the work of the inner-mind. Just ignore it. If others can influence the amount of work that you do or the manner in which you do it, its a sure sign that you are allowing your inner-mind to walk all over your mind, the outer-mind. You are a universe on your own, with your very own environment variables. You are not affected by other individuals. All the talk that man is a social animal and is affected by his surroundings is the work of some famous individual's inner-mind, a famous inner-mind at that, nothing more, nothing less. Though we interact with other individuals (We need to do that, I'm not saying that we need to be recluses or hermits), we cannot allow our thought processes to be affected by others. In the matter of the mind, we ought to be recluses and hermits. Kahlil Gibran mentions that even parents cannot give their thoughts to their children as they have thoughts and minds of their own. Live for yourself. Think on your own. If what I'm writing seems to make sense, ask yourself if your mind is also thinking along similar lines, or that you are just accepting what someone else has written. Often, when we are in a confused state of mind, we tend to abhor anything and everything that our own mind suggests that we do. This is in no way better than accepting everything that our mind says that we do. Develop the skill of identify the owner of your thoughts; Whether its the work of the inner-mind or the outer one. If it sounds very authoritative, nine times out of ten, its your inner-mind, unless you really have been working at disciplining it in your own way.
Am I obsessed with the mind that its the subject of my blog and the most written about topic(the only written about topic so far, as every topic converges to the mind's working) ? Maybe. If so, that's because nothing challenges me more than the working of ones own mind. If only we can unlock its mysteries and figure out how to get it to work as we want it to, every single time, the possibilities are limitless. Everything else will just be grains of sand on a vast beach.

The Outer Mind's turn to rant

After working on my project continuously for over fifty hours straight without any sleep thrown in, sleeping the next eighteen hours without even grabbing food, flunking a programming test in C++ as I had not spent any time preparing for it and attending a send-off bash of a senior scientist at my research centre (he got a job in the private sector with an obscenely high salary!) , here I am, back at my desk, updating my blog. The evening is young and the night promises to be another long one, one that blends into tomorrow, not just because the date on my Timex will say so, but because it will be time to freshen up and grab breakfast in the canteen. Its a blink-and-you-have-missed-it affair as getting breakfast at the canteen is all about being!
A tad too late, and you will only succeed in getting either a sarcastic smile or a whole truckload of rants about people not turning up on time, depending on the mood of the lady in charge, and if you are really, really lucky, you might even get a couple of bread slices! Sounds straight out of Oliver Twist or what?! Sorry to disappoint you, but that is what happens to most unfortunate souls who turn up late for breakfast at our centre's canteen. After that will be the lectures that commence at 10 AM sharp, but its not uncommon to find harried and clearly sleep deprived individuals coming in even twenty minutes later. Its also not at all uncommon to find many of them dozing off on their books! The road ahead seems to be pretty rough. My team's first project is still in the wilderness and a second one has been already been thrust onto us... The mandatory sleep gives us pangs of guilt, not to mention 'Fail' grades in the ever ongoing evaluation processes! The periods of occasional sleep are generally dreamless. Its like a light going out. More like a fuse being tripped off. You are dead to the world and its pressures. Wish that state could last for ever, but no... The social cues get in the way. The alarm goes off, the skies grow brighter or your guilt just overcomes even the dreamless state of death-sleep....
The biggest challenge at the moment facing all my colleagues and I, is to be able to minimize sleep, maximize work and still managing to hold on to our sanity. God save us all!

Wars against yourself- Mind Vs Inner Mind

I was big time game addict, playing games like Microsoft's Age of Empires, the Need For Speed Series and countless other first person/third person shooter games for hours upon hours, barely taking breaks for food and the mandatory loo visits. Sleep was something that like now, was a luxury. Which was most often sacrificed for the greater cause- of playing and replaying games. Why are games so addictive? Is it just the storylines, the graphics, the music, the action or something much more darker? Something that is mostly taboo to speak about?

Games offer us an opportunity to do things that we cannot dream of doing in real life. Be it chasing some elusive spy across the globe, gunning down mercenaries and hit-men in the process or driving down a city road in a sports car at eye-blurring speeds and wanting to go even faster..... Do you see a pattern yet?

Our real lives are complicated enough, but we prefer these synthetic challenges to the ones in real life. Why? Because games often have limited 'Big Pictures'. They have their own limits that are obvious even to the frenzied brain of a game addict. Real life on the other hand has horizons that keep on stretching. If a person were to insist on knowing the full big picture before doing anything concrete, rest assured that he or she will not be able to do anything at all. The other thing that is so seductive about games is the concept of save-games. You can mess up really badly and still come back from the previous point and kick the villain's butt. An option that is sadly missing in real-life where you are but given one shot at everything. You very rarely get a second shot at anything and even if you do, all the conditions are not the same.... What then is the uniting factor amongst all game addicts? Not the game addiction itself. That's just the symptom. The disease lies elsewhere. Surveys have indicated time and again that most game addicts are intelligent people, mostly those with a low attention span. The instant high that the gaming atmosphere provides can never be challenged by the rigors of real-life where your results are much delayed. One needs to study for three months or more to be able to ace a semester examination but all it takes is a few dozen hours of unblinking concentration in front of a PC or a PlayStation to become a hero. Game addicts sign off their real identities and embrace their on-screen aliases. If these games were not bad enough, you were offered the massive online role playing games where all your opponents are real people instead of some poorly designed so called 'artificially intelligent' bot. This was the ultimate manna from heaven for all those poor souls who were already disconnected from the real life. This was a place where all such souls could congregate and prove to each other who was really the best. In the end, would it really matter? Would any of them have actually achieved even an iota of 'real' profit? These people tend to be totally disconnected from the real world and they stoutly defend their own, not even being able to understand that it doesn't even exist. Movies like the Matrix are great. They help you to think in different dimensions, but the truth of the matter is that this is the reality there is. One without save-games. If you screw up, you do it for real. There are no retakes. If you hurt a person, you risk distancing yourself for life. How do I know so much about the psyches of these poor addicts? Only because I myself was one of them.

Quitting gaming is not easy. I have uninstalled games from my PC unlimited number of times and have gone back and installed them all over again. The worst part of game addiction is that game addicts do not even get a fraction of the attention that a substance addict or an alcoholic gets. Why? For one, people can easily identify a substance abuser or a chronic alcoholic pretty easily, but its much, much tougher to identify a game addict. You may be studying with or working with addicts around you, but you might not even have observed.

The convoluted path to success in real life is the number one reason why intelligent people with low attention spans get caught in the web of gaming. It starts rather innocuously, with people thinking that they can play games for sometime to relax after a hard day at work or at school/college. The time they spend on games will gradually increase, and the biggest mistake that people do is when they think that gaming is a form or relaxation. It gives no relaxation. It too is a task like any other for the brain, so playing a lot of games can actually be exhausting. This then hampers the other activities. A person might have intended to study or work after gaming for a while, but he may not be able to do so as he is totally exhausted after playing! All play and no work makes Jack a mere toy! This is what happens.

The way out? Ad-hoc solutions like uninstalling games do not work. The same strategies that worked wonders while gaming can be used to quit gaming. Divide and conquer. Strategic withdrawals may mean that you lose minor battles, but you will succeed in the wars. That's the key. Give your Inner-mind something limited to chew on, not something like a computer game. Allow it to vent its ire in a positive manner. Write a blog, paint a picture, record a song, almost anything that calls upon your creativity. Just allow your inner-mind to take full control for that period and see the change. You will find yourself actually relaxed. And enthused to take on the challenges that you are expected to take on in real-life, not in some virtual cage for frustrated souls.

The Inner Mind speaks on: Contradictions in Life.

Life is a magnificient example of order in chaos. Seemingly unrelated events turn out to be connected by invisible threads to form a bigger picture. While most of us struggle to find out the
current picture, a few differently abled people are able to interpret the whole current picture as a single grain in a large slab of mozaic... A small bit in a big jig-saw puzzle. Just when we were about to think that this picture interpretation business was the toughest thing to do, we were confronted by a new multi-headed dragon. One that answers to the name Contradictions.
Contradictions of thoughts, beliefs, faith....you name it, we have seen it. We are led to believe one thing and at some other point of time, we discover that it was all wrong... that we were barking up the wrong tree all the time.. One of Ayn Rand's characters in the book Atlas Shrugged says something to the effect of "Whenever you are faced with a contradiction, check your sources. You will find that one of them is not true" or something similar. That is no doubt very true and very wise too, but the point is, how many of us even know the sources? We accept a lot of things at face value. We don't question it. The above stated quote itself is taken at face value by many people, without even giving it a serious thought. In what context was that statement made? Does it hold true always? Or only some of the times? If there really was to be no contradictions, there wouldn't be night and day, good and bad, hot and cold and yin and yang. These contradictons exist and perenially keep slugging it out with each other, but what about the statement? Was Rand wrong? No. Now am I again contradicting myself? Another no. The fact is, the statement can be true for our thoughts. If we have two contradictory thoughts, the method given here is just one of several methods to resolve the conflict. Different people use different methods to do it, but everybody uses some method. If not, we would be roaming around like zombies, not knowing what to do as our minds were pointing us towards different directions.

Contradictions have existed in the past, they exist now and they will continue to exist. We cannot wish them away. Many of us feel that life would have been simpler and far easier if there were no contradictions. Maybe. Further, people say that contradictions are a flaw in the system, where God messed up and then again, there are those who say that its all part of the 'Bigger Picture', the most often used expression to bring a conversation to a grinding halt, as it too is one of the things that are accepted at face value, no questions asked. Bigger picture or not, fatal flaw or deliberate design, there is nothing that anybody can do to make it go away. It needs to be confronted and handled as it needs to be. Nothing more, nothing less.

Now wait a minute. On second thoughts, I think the truth is the exact opposite of whatever I have been saying.....

The Nested Mind: Introducing the Inner Mind....

Being a student of a post graduate course in computer science at a research institute that believes that students' burnouts are more acceptable than students' underperformance, I am no stranger to working the Graveyard Shift. Often, entire days go by without any proper sleep. You are bent upon pushing yourself even further, as you don't have a choice. You have a major problem that needs to be solved and converted into program code and so need your mind to be coherent, responsive and most importantly, obedient, but no. It blandly refuses. It doesn't stop there: it spawns a mind of its own, one that it can transfer full control to, one over which you have no control, whatsover. If you try to force your mind to cooperate, its mind kicks in and feeds your mind with gibberish, data that causes all your other thought processes to collapse into a heap, much like how a virus infected machine goes down . Solution? Work out a compromise formula. This blog is an attempt at that. This is the release vent for my mind's mind. For it to do whatever it pleases, be it writing poetry, critisizing art, discussing philosophy or just raving, ranting, cribbing, griping, cursing and moaning. Whatever it wants. As long as it leaves my mind alone.
Im keeping my fingers crossed, and now, over to the Inner Mind.....