chaotic order

Before you start reading this essay, Let me place on table a fairly long warning or disclaimer, as the case may be. Here it is.. The moment one starts talking about sex, and its tremendous ramifications in Modern society, there is almost definitely an instinctive withdrawal into a defensive cocoon. We have all three (not fifty) shades of opinions about it. From the ultra conservative bought up on puritan values, to the ambivalent individual who could swing both ways, to the modern libertine Who has no inhibitions or scruples  -  almost everyone has a definitive view on this matter falling within this broad spectrum. In the following paragraphs, I review one of the finest adaptions of this complex theme on screen, and in the process present my views as usual. So for those of us for whom the subject of sex is an anathema or would touch an uncomfortable raw nerve, I apologize. But It is my strong conviction that nothing is outside the purview of one's awareness, and to be intelligent

"A Home Owner now..." About 55 years ago, on a wintry day, Professor Lorenz, meteorologist at MIT was simulating weather patterns based on 12 variables on mainframe machines. That particular evening, he was recreating a weather pattern of two months ago with 12 verified, documented values. As he stood up after hours of concentrated work, and grabbed his coffee cup to walk out for a short break, he lazily punched in the decimal number .506 for one of the variables ,instead of the original recorded value .506127. When he came back after fifteen minutes, he stood staring at the screen in disbelief. All the wavy graphs on his monitor for last two months looked radically different from what he had earlier tabulated and observed. There was no resemblance between the original graphs and the new ones simulated by his software. At that breathless moment, he had a tremendous insight into what had happened to generate this drastically different simulation. The minute rounding off he

The seed of experiential spiritual search is sown only when there is grace -  call it grace of God, life, nature, luck or any other name you may wish. And what I mean by "Spirtual search" is genuine discontent with how we have been leading our lives so far, and allowing that ever present little inner voice which incessantly keeps humming in the background, pointing us to a more richer, deeper and more peaceful place within to be our infallible guide.. None can deny this inaudible voice!!. Even a full blown atheist feels it in the marrow of his bones. In the Gita, The master says " Rare is a human birth, rarer still are circumstances that pushes one to search for real peace , and  rarest are those who diligently pursue that faint thread of everlasting peace and attain it.."  Like the Greek myth where Prince Theseus  holds onto the thread given by his lover Ariadne to find his way through the complex labyrinth to kill the Minotaur and redeem his love; Grace, ofte

Jottings: Slice of life. The city of San Francisco always holds me in thrall. Especially, the eclectic downtown surrounding the Union square. I am not sure what pulls me into its vortex of attraction ; it could possibly be the strange mixture of beauty, vulgarity, class and style that abounds in every brick of this beautiful city. My work has taken me to many places in this country, but in none of them do I drop into such a contemplative spell as I do here. Here is modern Human life in a nutshell. Alongside the posh, affluent and high browed millionaires walking its elegant undulating roads; homeless men and women clad in cast away tatters, reeking with sweat and smell of their defecation, intoxicated with pot - smiling, laughing and dancing with gay abandon also walk oblivious of their pathetic state. The city embraces all of them and mixes their lives in its phantasmagorical melting pot. It accepts none, it rejects nobody - the atmosphere of the Bay Area transcends petty human in

The question of "What if" constantly haunts Man. He is probably the only creature endowed with this ability to imagine, introspect and extrapolate alternatives.  Questions like what if I had married John instead of Tom?, or what if I had accepted admission into Johnston college for a course in Literature instead of joining engineering at Livingstone, or what if I had said yes to Stephanie when she invited me to her Party and not go out with stag friends and got piss drunk? What if I was born to parents with an aristocratic lineage -  there are innumerable such trivial, vital and sometime life changing what-if's in our lives. More so, because we value chronological time very much, and pretty much look at ourselves through the prism of  time as measured by clocks and calendars. We are given to understand , or let me say, indoctrinated from childhood that our lives are to led in a linear manner, and what has happened today is irrevocably lost and buried in this inexorable m

Jottings: Slice of life... William Blake is better known for his Dionysian energy that filled his verses than for his sensitive poetical nuances. Unlike Keats, Shelley’s and Wordsworth’s who are read purely for aesthetic pleasure, Blake is read for sheer force of his mystical convictions. In his masterpiece “the marriage of heaven and Hell”, he writes: “ If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern…” No contemplative philosopher, modern or medieval ,have escaped the power of sentences like these, and in the same vein, some of Blake’s ecstatic outpourings have also led to justifications of Drug use in the literature of modern thought. It was, Aldous Huxley - a thinker, novelist, and philosopher, I greatly admire, who wrote a pivotal slim volume in 1954 titled “The doors of perception” ( a title borrowed from Blake’s quote above) that more or le

If there is one thing that distinguishes modern times with our past generations, it is the abundance of choice we have in almost everything we do. From the time Adam Smith made a philosophically imperative case of "capitalism" in 1776 ( coincidental isn't it? with birth of America) with his Book "Wealth of nations"; industrialism, division of labor and specialization have literally usurped the laid-back attitude of common man exchanging goods. Earlier,He could only barter what he physically had with others who could give him what he essentially wanted. Since needs were less, choices were almost non-existent. And of course, they did not have to deal with a class of people called Marketeers or advertisers, whose only task to is to weave new needs where there is none and push people on to a "hedonic treadmill". For our ancestors, as long as their basic needs were satisfied, there was no grave psychological discontent. I don't think history even spea