Thoughts Unlocked

Existentialism refers to the works of 19th and 20th century philosophers which broadly seeks to emphasize on the individual and how he/she seeks to understand his/her existence is this world. Thus individuals throughout their lives make choices and decisions and thus define who they are. The core of human existence is to find meaning in their lives and identify themselves in this world. Thus „Existentialism „seeks to analyze and understand human existence.

According to Walter Kaufmann, Existentialism is a body cover that writers put for philosophy against traditional philosophy. Existentialism as theory defines the freedom available to mark dissatisfaction against traditional philosophy as superficial, academic, and remote from life. It supports the idea of not being associated with any particular school of thought, beliefs and systems. It is a timeless sensibility that can be discerned and can be sustained protest and preoccupation.

One of the grounding principles in existential thought is that reason cannot be the only basis for human identity. It‟s only our work and we ourselves define what we are as human beings. Existentialism is referred to as a reaction to a secularised world; where role of religion, morals, purpose, virtues and universal truth are minimal. Existentialism made an effort to describe the implications and possibilities of the foundation less world.

According to existentialism what is "good" for us cannot be determined and so we must be the founder of our own values and projects. Radical sovereignty comes with radical failure and we must be prepared to deal with both.

This cannot be done solely on the basis of Sciences like biology, physics, psychology et al. Nor can existence be understood by adding the concept of morality to science or taking recourse in the concepts of God, nation, authority , tradition, work et al. Existence is something more, something that might change from individual to individual. Man thus exists first and then he seeks to define himself in this world. Rather than Man being predefined or Man being a fully described model of a „Human‟. This responsibility of his own existence leads to „Angst‟.

Existentialism also stands for the free will, ability to make choices and responsibility of his choices/actions of Man. Thus Man is free to choose and decide how he interprets the world and what choices he makes. But at the same time he is wholly responsible for his choices. He is the one who bears the burden of his actions and cannot blame society, laws, ethics, culture et al for making him do things and their future consequences. Personal responsibility and accountability is stressed upon.

Another important thought is the „Absurdity‟ of this world. Existentialism begins with the realization that the world is not totally rational and is ambiguous. Thus, it is not an easy job to find the meaning of one‟s existence in such a distorted world. The concept of Facticity also is an important concept. Basically it means that Man is free with respect to his present and future but he does carry the burden of his past. Thus he can do whatever he wishes to do keeping his past existence and its consequences in mind. Freedom is always there but only within the range of what is allowed by the results of his actions in the past for which he is totally accountable.

„Authenticity and Inauthenticity‟ are related to the actions performed by Man. Thus man should be authentic in his behavior which essentially means that he should act and make choices so as to be what he is. He has to act keeping in mind that he is free. Inauthentic behavior on the other hand means when a person behaves so as to meet or confer to certain rules or standards or tries to ape somebody or concept and thus forgoes his freedom. When he acts believing that he is constrained due to lack of choices and thus can blame reasons external to his self for his behavior.

Existentialists as a rule were against „Rationalism and Positivism‟. The basis of this treatment is that the world is irrational and the concept that human beings are rational creatures. Adhering to rationalism leads to suppression of individual freedom and thus leads to anxiety. If one seeks to give a meaning to his world, he can do only when he let goes of reason. This is the only way to exist and find meaning in life is through deciding and assigning meaning to one‟s life. This cannot be achieved through pure rationalism and the person who tries to do so will forever be lost, in despair and will not be able to succeed.

The existentialist thought was shaped by a number of philosophers but among them Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre stand out. The thoughts of various existentialist thinkers vary vastly. Thus it is difficult to come up with one exact definition of existentialism. Still, the concept of individual human existence and absurdity of the world (to an extent) seems common in all their thoughts.

The existentialist movement was hugely popular during the post war era primarily due to its focus on freedom of the individual and partly because of the strong views and literary works of various existentialist thinkers.

Location : Central Hyderabad

The city looked so much like Lucknow as i zigzagged through the rowdy Hyderabad morning traffic sitting on the back of my sales officer's bike. My 1st day making sales calls and i could not have asked for a better weather.

The best thing was the use of Hindi , albeit mixed with telegu and the typical Hyderabad accent which took some time to get used to. So a 'nahi' becomes a 'nakka' here. Also the address of retailers as 'anna', 'seth'.

The high point of the day was when we discussed the 'Snake' which had landed at my SO's home while sipping on hot yet amazingly refreshing Irani lemon and mint tea.It's apparently a common sight in the locality where he lives near osmania university which is shrouded by vegetation.

The snake charmers do brisk business charging 200 Rs for each catch and then pocketing the allowance given by the forest department to bring in the catch or by eating/skinning the snake. The latter seems more like a conspiracy theory as suggested by a retailer. But you never know , India was considered the snake charmer's land for nothing.

Yeah, my journey in sales has begun.It's back to Karnataka after 2.5 years. I hope this stint proves as fruitful and lucky for me as the last one which practically changed the entire course of my life.

P.S: The food is awesome here, specially paradise biryani :)

I woke up to the sight of a pristine lake set amidst old conifers grazing past my window. “You are now entering Norway and leaving the European Union. Please keep your passports handy for security check”. The police woman greeted me amicably and wished me a pleasant stay. I got down at the next idyllic station with a cup of hot chocolate in my hands. The station was all but a small cabin meant for the station master and I could see the village through the entrance.

Cut back to the next day, I was walking on the international highway with cars zipping beneath me at 100 miles an hour and the Fjords visible across the horizon. I was kind of lost. It was pretty apparent, as the kind lady came over and gave me directions in as much English as she knew.

The next day I was roaming around Oslo at 5 in the morning with glassy mist shrouding the city. I went to parks and monuments and sculpture gardens with no care about my safely. Why would I. It was Norway after all. The most developed country and among the richest and safest in the world. Good times, no worries and sparkling life long memories.

Two days ago the Sunday Times headline read “Terrorist strike in Norway”. I was in utter disbelief. It rapidly turned to sadness and my first reaction was “At least let some places free from all the mindless bloodshed”.

Somehow we have sadly come to accept bomb blasts as part of life in India. But the above incident made my conviction even stronger. We really have nothing in our control when it comes to security. Be it any place, any situation. The reason is simple. You can have all the control and precautions in place. But how can you stop a ‘human mind’ with its conviction, whims, madness and bitterness from exploding. How can you judge that the person sitting next to you in your office, bus, with which you interact, buy stuff et al is not going to explode? Just imagine the activation mechanism of a nuclear bomb in the hands of a madman and how his one flick can change the course of millions of people.

Is there any protection against that one Human bomb who can be anyone among the billions who tread this earth? I am not saying that we should start looking at adversity and begin to see people who are out to kill us at each juncture. All that I have personally realized is that Human Life is so fragile and vulnerable. We think and act so as to feel that we are in control but who are we really kidding on an absolute level?

Just a last thought. In the utterly sad Mumbai attacks a few weeks back an unlucky person was found dead with 10 lottery tickets on him. Just to say, how small our Big plans for life become when fate strikes that fatal blow.

Here goes :

Read in recent times:

Interview with the vampire : As poetic as a gory vampire story can get.

Coming up for air: Typical sublime Orwell classic.How we all strive for our childhood and want to re live it but alas can't do it in reality/totality

Vernon God little : Truly deserved the prize. Sarcastic,taunting and darkly humorous. A hint of Salinger is evident.

The fist of God: As good a war novel as it gets told in the fluent Foresyth style.

Making History : The context was enticing but Stephen Fry is disappointing as an author in this one

Fault lines: Well researched with clear arguments. Rajan proving his mettle as an economist.

Fooled by Randomness : A jewel of a book. Can't seem to have enough praises for this one.

Ascent of Money : Hugely informative and gripping narrative. A must read for all lovers of finance.

Kafka on the shore : The best magical realism/surrealism work i have ever read. It's not a book, it's more of an experience where you transcend reality and venture into a strange new world which vaguely feels familiar. And Murakami was right that one needs to read the book many times to unravel the mystery. Well, i am game \m/

Stumbling on Happiness : A must read for anyone with even a hint of curiosity/interest/enthusiasm about psychology, human behavior and the mind.

Currently Reading :

100 years of solitude : Magical and fantastic as Garcia Marquez always is. But it kind of gets repetitive after a while.

A guinea pig's history of Biology : Looks really promising :)

Wish List :

Surely you are joking Mr Feynman

Dorian Gray

Chanakya's Chant

Time and again when I visit Mumbai and happen to observe the struggle ( described as animal like by a friend) that people go through every day I go back to the perpetually elusive question that has been plaguing me since past few years. What is the point of everything? Why do we exist? What we running after? Is there a goal or an objective at the end or the billions of humans treading this earth are just doing the same thing over and over again just for the sake of doing .Rather than the achievement of any specific and definable aim ? What has the existence of centuries of life on earth counted to? Is all this frivolous? Are we here just because the odds were in the favor of the genesis of life thus culminating in the right conditions during the big bang (of course to the subject that we are smart enough to find out what really happened when all this began )?

Humans might continue to exist for as many moon life cycles as the number of stars being born everyday but will this lead to anything? Except than being involved among ourselves, what do we truly stand for? Sartre in his controversial play “No exit” said that “Hell is other people”. If you really think it is empirically true. Let’s go back to the beginning when we assume that the 1st few Neolithic humans started to exist. They reproduced and created more like them. The world for them would have been mysterious but serenely at peace. Imagining living your life like a 1 year old for whom everything is new. Don’t you wish that were possible? So Man created more Men resulting in the aphorism “Child is the father of man “. This led to the classic economic problem of efficient allocation of resources. When these problems were created few of them moved on to look for greener pastures, something like diversification into new markets.

This process continued for ages and ages. In between man learnt how to hate, kill other men, greed, envy and similar other terms. This led to the creation of justifications and punishments which eventually led to the concept of the modern society /civilization and religion if we keep an objective view. Yes, Man is capable of solving his problems and has done so for millions of years. But who created these problems in the first place? Was it not the acts and whims of men? So now Man has become a vehicle of cleaning fellow men’s dirty deeds (Do we smell lawyers/consultants/ even doctors here?). The problem aggravated and has become so big that practically whatever anyone does , at least in the terms of earning a living , is to solve the problems created by others who were before them.

Thus in a way the existence of men has been defined by men themselves. In simple terms this is just the bartering of goods and service to run the economy. The matter though is not simple as we can show by drawing beautiful artless looking graphs. What about the suffering which has been created? The alleviation of suffering has become a big industry now and is regarded as the best one. But again my fundamental question, why did man create this problem? Come to think of it, the ‘Original Sin’ is probably the most important piece of knowledge which we know. It kind of answers the question of what created all this mess in this beautiful world. Sartre was right in his thought of ‘Hell is other people’ but unknown to himself he proved the existence of the ‘Original Sin’.

So, Man is doing what he created for himself to do. Yes I am wrong since I am not discounting the fact that natural calamities do exist and related issues. But then was Man even supposed to be present when those calamities struck? What if the deviation of rivers was a predestined phenomenon for the sustenance of earth and man was not supposed to be present there? Earthquakes would not have been so devastating had man not created concrete structures.

I am not saying that man should not have done anything. Action is the most revered word and everyone should do the work or action required from him. But why? Just so that his actions result in some more work which would require more action from Man? Why it is that man is always coaxed to work and work and never to actually think and introspect. Why? Is there any bigger aim? Or is all of this merely “Pointless”

She looked at his eyes as they went through the security check. In almost a whole month she was finally able to see him as he was.

The excitement and fanfare of an Indian wedding seemed to have engulfed her life. She desired the presence of her potential husband with her to alleviate her loneliness amidst the train of relatives.

This was it then, she thought and smiled with elation. Two weeks in Europe, just the two of them. How dreamlike it appeared. Two weeks stolen away from the chaotic life led by them, or was it the other way around?

He looked at her and seemed to read her thoughts, smiled back and shouted ‘Love you’ across the security guards and surveillance equipments.

She could not hide her tears and realized the purest and strongest feeling ever.

Life seems to be just this. If we achieve something, we are happy; well and good. If we are not able to bridge the gap between expectation and reality it indeed leaves a hole inside us. Then begins the difficult, frustrating and seemingly impossible task of filling that void. We try to pacify ourselves, talk ourselves out of it, settle for the next best thing, believe that what happened was for our best, degrading the value of our expectation, so on and so forth.

But can this void be ever erased from our memory and our whole personality per se? Or do we keep on accumulating such voids throughout our lives. Just try to imagine the sum of all such voids. It will indeed be a very heavy one. A whole bunch of memories standing for missed opportunities, chances, bad luck, regrets. So as we grow up, all these need to be discounted at the rate of “peaceful and boring” normal existence to get a net present value. Is it not really hard to have that, on ones shoulders, even more so as time goes by. The concept of compounding losses???

What is the solution then? Mathematically it should be:

NPV of Voids = ∑(The magnitude of Void)/(1+Normal happiness rate)t

Now this will turn to 0 , which we ideally want as Normal happiness rate tends to Infinity. Since we can’t really control the magnitude of void all the time (Yeah all of us have got a great illusion that we are in total control of our life , but are we really? ), the most obvious answer is to make our normal boring life so happy and content that such voids may come and go without having any effect on us .

The most obvious answers and solutions are the most difficult to implement.The above is what the Yogis and Swamis do. They do not live in the future (or the anticipation of it as sugested by Heiddeger ) like us, thus time variant voids do not matter.
To put it in another way revise your “Bhoole Bisre geet “--- Mein zindagi ka sath nibhata chala gaya …… “Gam aur khushi mein fark na mehsoos ho jaha”. And again we arrive at the same result .
Think !!! :)