Hark, here comes the bomb

It’s a Sunday morning, and I’ve been awake since 8 am, thinking. My Sundays usually don’t plan for much of that, since I’d prefer to waste them sleeping or just generally lazing around. This morning, however, an article in the Times of India caught my eye – ‘Whoever attacks, Pak will hit India’. The basic point of the article is a shift in Pakistan’s nuclear strategy (or perhaps it’s been their strategy all along - to tell the truth, I really don’t know much about international happenings). Retired Pakistani general Mirza Aslam Beg says that regardless of who attacks them (Pakistan) or tries to ‘degrade’ their nuclear assets, New Delhi will be a gently smoking crater. This is a new theme, which throws the question of deterrence into stark relief.

The nuclear bomb was first brought onto the world stage at the end of World War II, used to wipe out the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The reverberations of this bombing were so intense that they’re still being felt today – even Microsoft Word doesn’t have issues when you use those two names. In fact, it helpfully capitalizes their names, at leaves it at that. Not too many things are capable of commanding such respect from Word, which should give you an indication of just how serious this is. The pilot of the plane carrying one of the nukes was apparently so horrified by what he did that he killed himself. Hmm, I wonder if Bush would call that collateral damage? Anyhow, cheap shots at the monkey in the White House aside…

Men (and Women, for that matter), have always fought to protect what was theirs – and, in some cases, to take what is theirs (not their own theirs, someone else’s theirs). World War II is a prime example of what happens when an entire country suddenly gets the Napoleonic Itch. Thankfully, though, at that point, the limit of damage that one could cause was limited to conventional bombs – say, capable of destroying a building, or a few buildings at a shot. Also, to bring about this happy state of affairs required some sort of self sacrifice – the willingness to fly a slow, bumbling bomber into the range of enemy guns, or to sneak across enemy lines in order to blow something up. One way or another, there was a human cost to bringing pain to the enemy. These days, we’ve gone beyond that. Rockets don’t feel pain. Rockets don’t have families that are destroyed just as surely as their targets. It’s good, in a way, since it saves a lot of heartbreak. The flip side, of course, is the fact that since all you’re losing is a pile of metal and circuitry, there’s nothing preventing us from firing salvo after salvo at ‘the bad guys’. Border scuffles are a good example of this. If it involved some human sacrifice to fire an artillery shell across no man’s land, you can bet it would happen a lot less.

Now, nuclear weapons are a beast of an entirely different texture. ‘Small Boy’ and ‘Fat Man’, the only two atom bombs ever to be used in war (by the Americans, if you didn’t know, the same people who press most stringently for non proliferation, and get rabid at the thought at the enemy using them), were capable of destroying a city. These days, their ‘yield’ is much, much higher. Refinements in technology, and frantic work by militaries across the globe have brought us to the point that a nuclear strike would ensure the death of that city, and irradiation of the land around to such an extent, that our generation, at least, would never be able to return.

We’re no longer talking about military deterrence. What we’re doing, ALL of us, you, me, even people who have no say in the matter, is tacitly approving of our governments holding the rest of the world hostage. Why do you think Iran wants the bomb so badly? Certainly not as the centrepiece of a governmental shindig. It’s defence of the worst sort – the threat of nuclear obliteration matched by the same on the other side. A beautiful metaphor was the last scene of Reservoir Dogs – six men holding guns, each pointing at someone else so that no one was safe. And all it took for all six of them to die was for one of them to start shooting. And they did.

The reasons for having nukes are endless. Defence. Prestige. The other guy has it. If we don’t, he can do what he will with us. It’s the ultimate equaliser – no matter how small your country is, if you have a nuclear bomb, it automatically buys you the right to be called Sir. It’s also proof that Power is not a zero sum game. If everyone has the bomb, then we’re all Sir. Or Ma’am. Or dead.

What are you scared of?

What scares you? I don’t mean this question in the sense of what frightens you, or startles you, or makes you hide under the bed, quaking, until someone is kind enough to put the movie off and put the lights on – I’m taking about fear.

Speaking for myself, I’m scared of being exposed. No, not the ‘Oops, I seem to have left my pants at home’ kind of thing – I’m scared of people who know me well enough to tell that I’m full of shit. I don’t know if this is something that everyone goes through at some point or another, but recently, I had a chance to put all of this into perspective.

We’re all of us pretenders, to one degree or another. There are those lucky few who are so comfortable with who they are that they never need to pretend to be anything but themselves (how I envy them). There are the others, who muddle amiably through life with a bit of a façade, but just enough to keep them going, and not so much that it gets in their way. Then there’s the category that I fall into – those who, for some reason or another, find the need to constantly wear a mask, and constantly pray for a chance to take it off. Even in writing this, I find myself reworking sentences again and again to minimize the strength of what I’m saying, in the hope that people don’t realize exactly what I’m talking about – which kind of defeats the purpose of this article. It’s pure idiocy, but there you have it.

Anyway.

A few years ago, I was lucky enough (even though I didn’t realize it at the time), to meet someone with whom I’d never have to wear a mask – she, quite honestly, was prepared to accept me for exactly who I was – which, as it turns out, she knew a sight better than I did. This is where the sad part comes in – instead of being grateful, I got scared. I’d been working at that particular façade for quite some time, and I was pretty proud of it, to tell the truth. To have someone turn up and say, ‘Okay, nice try, but you’re still a coward underneath it all, aren’t you?’ is unsettling, to say the least. I should have been grateful. I should have realized what I had (hindsight is great, isn’t it? It lets you see exactly what a fool you were, back then, and allows you the knowledge that no matter how far you get, you’ll still be a fool when you look back from further on). What I should have done, and what I could have done, and what I did do are three very separate things – but you know how it goes. I lost her, and with it, I lost any chance I had with her.

I guess what scared me was exactly how well she knew me, to the point of voicing thoughts that I’d fought long and hard to keep trampled. Every man has hidden depths, yes, and in some cases, we’d prefer that those depths remain hidden.

People like me, we pride ourselves on being independent – at least, in thought. We tell ourselves that since we’ve had some pain in our lives, that the best thing for us to do is to hide what and who we are, and especially what we’ve been through to what we’ve become. As it turns out, what I was hiding was simply myself, and what I was losing out on, was life.

In this particular instance, I’d convinced myself that what I’d been through had made me completely emotionless, that nothing and nobody could shake me. It’s really, really frightening then, when someone tells you (albeit in a poem)

‘I’ve seen the colour of your spine, and it’s not the invincible shroud black that you paid for…more like the colour of lukewarm chai on a cold afternoon.’

Or something like that.

Leaving aside the truth of that sentence, the simple fact that someone could know me well enough to voice my deepest fears – well, I ran. I’m not proud of it, but I’m not really ashamed of it either. I won’t bother to say you would have done the same – nobody can know what they’d do until faced with the actuality of it.

It would be nice to assume that no one could know you better that you know yourself. And it’s terrifying when you find someone who knows you better than you know yourself.

I did learn one thing, though.
Don’t be scared.

The Web of A Life

Imagine a spiderweb, if you will. Threads crisscross each other, meeting at different angles, sometimes running perpendicular, sometimes looping forwards to run parallel to each other, but forming a continuous, unbroken…err…web. Now, imagine yourself at one of the intersections of threads. There are, simplistically, six ways you can go – upwards, downwards, forwards, backwards, left or right. The particulars may vary, but in general, these are your choices. Now, to add a further twist, imagine a web that responds to your choice of direction, that is, depending on what you do, your options at the next intersection, or indeed, the distance you must travel to the next intersection changes. Confused? It’s not over yet, but have faith, we’re nearly at the end of this cumbersome analogy. As a final complication, imagine the rest of the world traveling along this web at the same time as you, and everybody’s choices affecting everyone else’s future choices.

This web, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call history. “But”, you cry, “that’s nonsense, you’re a fool indeed, history is what’s already happened!” I’d like, if I’m allowed, to pose a different definition. History is happening all around us, at every point in time. “We”, as some important bugger once said, “are moving through time at the rate of one second per second”. If we pin events down, and dissect them, and analyse them, and write cumbersome treatises on them, then yes, history changes form from a glorious, living, breathing creature into the sad, dry, boring subject we’re forced to mug date by date and chapter by chapter in school – which might also explain the profound distaste people normally show when the topic is brought up.

History, then, is happening all around us. It might not be important in the grand narrative sense of it, but nonetheless, it happens. My choice to sit here, writing this at 4:30 in the morning two weeks before my finals definitely shapes the web before me – there is a large prospect of an irate mother in my future, and an even larger prospect of some frantic, last minute cramming right before my paper. Which further modifies the web, and so on. The interesting bit, though, is how we humans fit into this web.

Humans, as a group, seem to be the most confused species on the planet, if only because we have so many choices before us. For something a few rungs down the ladder, such as a monkey (to which we bear a distinct similarity, or at least, I’ve been told I do), the choices are simple. Eat that fruit, drink that water, sift through that other monkey’s hair for lice, and the world is your crustacean. Humans, on the other hand, routinely face thousands and thousands of choices, whether it be what to eat, what to drink, what to wear, or, for those with higher expectations of themselves, which side of the bed to get out of. Instead of making life as simple as possible, we’ve reached a point where the number of decisions we take every day has gotten so out of hand that we’ve developed defence mechanisms to deal with them – routines. Now this might just seem like a pointless rant from someone who’s just been ‘talked to’ by his mother for waking up late once too often, but I beg of you, hear me out.

Zen tells us that instead of thinking about things, we should just do them, and learn from the experience, rather than trying to reason out what would happen, and then doing it, with our minds filled with foregone conclusions. It stresses more on instinctual behaviour and understanding, rather than active, meticulous, point-by-point analysis. Follow what seems right, it says, and you will be at peace. Don’t look for things, but wait for them to come to you. The minute you try to supersede your instinctive thought with rationality, you’ve begun the slide toward a splitting headache, and a bagful of existential dread. More than that, Zen advocates following ‘natural rhythms’ – eat when you’re hungry, sleep when you’re sleepy, and so on. To try and wrestle what I’m saying into another analogy, life is like a dance, and history, more so. You can’t force yourself into a dance – you simply surrender to the music, and let your heart guide your feet. Even I, who could easily aspire to the top ten list of most incompetent dancers, manage not to look like an utter twit when I try this. But I digress.

Human beings are defined by a number of things, at least in their heads. What I do, what I earn, where I live, what I buy, what I eat, and so on – all ‘my characteristics’, I’m told. Advertising caught on to this fact and set about making the products they represent seem like gateways to better self-images. If you pay attention to some ads these days, then you’ll know what I’m talking about. A couple of sprays of a popular deodorant, and I’ll have hundreds of screaming, excited, and above all, hot women running after me. A particular brand of diesel promises to have my car grow horns and charge off into the mountains followed by a crazy lightning storm. Basically, the average day for the average human involves a few hundred instances where he’s being propositioned into making a particular choice, usually involving a lighter wallet, and ownership of something that he probably doesn’t need (For those of you who notice that I said ‘he’, rather than ‘he/she’, and object, you can go to hell. Feminism is all well and good, but I’m a man, and I refuse to write as if I have a severe biological identity crisis).

To get back to the initial point, then.

Life is an n-dimensional web, with turning points at every step. Humans have varying influences (and effluences) on this web, depending on the impact of their decisions. My choice, for example, to write this load of nonsense, will have a relatively negligible impact, when compared to America’s decision to go on raising their interest rates to stem the haemorrhage of capital heading east. Right and wrong are mere opinions, rationalisations that we make to convince ourselves that their choice was one that will benefit them – whether it be personally, or to their community, or society in general. Not all decisions are important, however – the trick is to find out which is which.

As for me, I think I’ll have a cigarette.

Shantaram

I just finished reading a book that quite honestly, changed my life. Now, I don't mean changed my life in the happy happy joy joy kind of nonsense - it's a lot deeper than that. I'm not going to try and tell the story in my own words - I'm simply not capable of it. Also, I don't think I've read the book enough times. Nonetheless, it's a fucking fantastic read. Probably one of my favourite books, and that's saying quite a bit , coming as it is from a chap who wastes as much time on books as I do.

It's strange, how these things happen. The first time I caught sight of this book, I was on a bus heading to Kasauli for a holiday with a bunch of friends. One of the chaps who had gone with us had it with him, and I promptly whacked it from him for the journey, having forgotten to bring any batteries for my walkman (such is life). I only read a chapter or so, that time - and when we finally got off the bus, it turned out that Shantarams journey hadn't ended - he was headed back to Chandigarh, safely tucked into the carrying rack above my seat, out of harms way. Might still be there, for all I know.

But I digress.

The point of this post - in full defiance of the fact that this blog is called Rointless Pants (bit of the lackwards banguage there, it's hot all that nard) - is something that I read in the book, which I wanted to share with whoever has the patience to read this nonsense I spew out.

These two characters, Lin and Kader Khan, they're talking about God. That's something I've always been interested in, since I don't really believe in God (but yeah, I still capitalise the G. No sense in aggravating others sentiments, I suppose.)

The conversation goes something like this.

What is God?

In the begining, there was nothing. And then, the Universe came into being, with what's popularly known as the Big Bang (must have been fun, eh?) Anyway, with the Big Bang, presumably caused by the fact that everything that we know in the Universe was packed into a space which, technically, has no space (something like a local train in Bombay during rush hour), everything came into existence. At that point, everything was composed of the simplest possible structures - say the great great great grandaddies and grandmas of the simplest, simplest things we know today, smaller than atoms, smaller than quarks.
The Universe, from that point on, has been steadily moving onwards towards complexity - quarks clubbed together to form atoms, atoms to form elements, elements to form molecules, which formed the stars, and the planets, and so on. Life, as we know it, emerged when a single cell, which, by itself was a huge step up from the nothingness that the Big Bang hurled into existence, decided it felt a bit lonely. Voila, a mitotic (or meiotic) split! And then there were two...
This process has gone on and on since the first something went 'plop' in the primordial ooze. And it's given rise to civilisations and empires, races and tribes, markets and battlefields, and great works of literature and poetry and art and cooking - and all that's just on this planet.
Presumably this process is going on somewhere else also. It's almost inevitable, given the sheer size of the Universe (that we know about), and the different structures that can be formed. Life is a bitch, perhaps, but a tenacious bitch, for all that.
So, the Universe is moving towards a greater complexity, with each instant of its existence. This greater complexity, or rather, the greatest possible complexity, is what God is all about.

This is where the book trails off, and when people who read it start thinking.

It's a good philosophy - it brings together the grandeur of something we could call God, and conveniently leaves out all the rest of the relisgious psychobabble that marks where God left off and Religion took over. But here's another thought.

Suppose, at some distant point in the future, some living organism perfects time travel, or a universal theory of everything. That means, that theoretically, at least, they could know everything that happened at every point in time, or at least the important changes in the web of existence, which led to the point where they are. Perhaps even nudge the web to the appropriate junctions leading to them? Miracles, even?

Okay, and another one.

Suppose this Ultimate Complexity is like the Ultimate Molecule, it's components are everything in existence, combined in such mindboggling ways that defy present imagination, let alone comprehension. And when the universal clock of entropy finally runs out, and there's no energy left in the universe, that Ultimate molecule finally has no mass, and therefore, requires no space. At that point, perhaps the slightest bit of energy would cause it to explode - since everything that that energy touches suddenly has mass, and finds itself expanding with nowhere to go.

Boom.

I realise, of course, that none of what I've said is backed up with the slightest shred of evidence, and moreover, it's a really crude argument (Pratchett was write - it's hard to communicate a deep thought in a language first evolved to let the other monkeys know where the ripe fruit was), but I hope you'll bear with me. It's been fun.