I read this piece of advice in the novel 'The Last Resort' and i think it's really helpful:

"Whenever you feel dreadful, dear, the best cure is to do something for someone else."

"The use of philosophy is to sadden. A philosophy which saddens no one, that annoys no one, is not a philosophy. It is useful for harming stupidity, for turning stupidity into something shameful. Its only use is the exposure of all forms of baseness of thought. . . . Philosophy is at its most positive as a critique, as an enterprise of demystification."

Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy

"The happiness for which my soul longs is not made up of fleeting moments, but of a single and lasting state, which has no very strong impact in itself, but which by its continuance becomes so captivating that we eventually come to regard it as the height of happiness.... And how can we give the name of happiness to a fleeting state which leaves our hearts still empty and anxious, either regretting something that is past or desiring something that is yet to come? But if there is a state where the soul can find a resting place... where time is nothing to it, where the present runs on indefinitely but this duration goes unnoticed... a feeling that fills our soul entirely, as long as this state lasts, we can call ourselves happy."

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Meditations of a Solitary Walker

[This goes out to my cousin R]

I don't know if anyone else has felt it, but in certain conditions love [romantic love, i.e.] has an isolating effect... it separates you from the rest of the world... you begin to live in your tiny universe, indifferent to what is happening around you... cut from other people... all discussions which you used to take interest in before are reduced to a background buzz... and you feel lonely, really lonely... you have no one but your lover, and although love brings intimacy, it also brings its own taboos and its own sensitive issues... you can't say everything to your lover... you can't discuss your doubts and fears without risking the relationship itself.

"Look for the girl with the broken smile" says Maroon 5 in their song 'She will be loved'. And i have always wondered, 'What does a broken smile look like?' and my meagre limits of experience and imagination have not been able to conjure up any image. And i imagine myself walking down some street, years later in unknown future, minding my own business, and suddenly i would spot a smiling girl, and Eureka! The song would come into my mind like a revelation and i would exclamate in the joy of discovery, "So, this is what a broken smile is!".
Ah, the joys of fantasy. Talk about romantic expectations! :)

I read this quote in the newspaper today: "Write a wise saying and your name will live forever. Anonymous." Lol. This strikes me as so amusing. The author of this 'wise saying' apparently never made it to the hall of fame. :)

Some days back a friend of mine was discussing with me that atheism and agnosticism will necessarily lead to a meaningless life. It seems that most people believe that the presence of a God gives a meaning to their life. I would like to question the nature of this 'meaning'... what is the meaning of this life if we believe in a Christio-Islamic version of God? That an over-whelming majority of humans would simply burn in hell, and that the rest would spend a boring infinity in an oasis of pleasure? That the pupose of this life is to worship a God who has no need of our worship? This doesn't sound very 'meaningful' to me. And then the ultimate question... what, then, is the purpose of God? And there is no answer to this question, as Kierkegaard pointed out, rending belief in God absurd. So, you cannot evade the question of meaning of life just by hypothesizing a God.

"She didn't want me to understand, i saw now. She was enjoying the idea of being incomprehensible."

Zoe Heller, Notes on a Scandal

I think many of us do act like that sometimes. We enjoy being incomprehensible. It gives a strange amusement to see that the other person is just unable to understand what one is trying to say. Perhaps it is some strange variety of vanity. Behind such attitude lies the presumption that others do not have the required experience or intellect to comprehend you. I don't think i have been able to analyze this aspect properly, but i just wanted to point it out, as i realized it when i was reading this novel 'Notes on a Scandal'.

It struck me today that in many ways, our thoughts resemble habits... and there is a deep insight in the commonly used [and commonly ignored] term 'thinking habits'. Just like we developing different habits like smoking, or biting nails, we develop habits of patterns of thinking. Just as these physical habits are determined by conditioned reflexes, type I [Pavlovian] and type II [reward and punishment], the thinking habits are also reinforced by social conditioning. Due to different factors, the patterns of thinking are cemented and it becomes really difficult to change them. It is sometimes said about some person 'He is pessimistic by nature'. But no person is pessimistic [or optimistic] by 'nature', it is the conditioning of his mind which has led to the habit of thinking pessimistically. And like any habit, thinking habits can be changed as well, but it requires patience and consistency, just like in changing physical habits.

Success is the one unpardonable sin against our fellows.
Ambrose Bierce

Indeed. We do not easily forgive the success of others. It is difficult to understand, but somehow our self-esteem seems to be linked with the success/failure of others. It is an absurd emotion, but it persists in the subconscious, nagging and tearing at the fibres of sanity. Why? And what is its cure? Can selflessness be taught?

Anton Chekov was a Russian physician as well as a short story and play writer. Chekov practised as a doctor all his life, while producing literary works of great value. He once wrote in a letter:
"Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress"
I found this interesting because i too am a medical student at the moment, and i too am highly interested in literature. :)

Why is virginity associated with body and not also with the soul? Are not the brushes of first love as much important a psychological event as the physical act of coitus? Mental and physical virginity are surely distinct and i think it is quite possible that a prostitute might still be a mental virgin... she may have experienced sex but has she experienced love?

Now If I wrote you a love note
And the world found out every word I wrote

What would you do?

[Modified lyrics of Justin Timberlake's 'My Love']

The mouth obeys poorly when the heart murmurs.
Voltaire

Ah, the tragic fate of all people who are born with the condemnation that they have to tell the truth. I find it very difficult to lie, even when it is necessary in certain circumstances.

It is terrible to witness to a man of genius whose intelligence is only equalled by his arrogance and pomposity. What a waste... if despite all wisdom one is not a man of pleasant character, his whole knowledge is meaningless. I have an instant dislike for such people, but apart from hate, i also feel pity for them.

I sometimes encounter people who accuse me of being too much anti-religious... sigh... i suppose i'd just quote Voltaire, “Religion, you say, has produced countless misfortunes; say rather the superstition which reigns on our unhappy globe.”
First find out what religion really is, and then talk about being 'anti-religious'!!!

"I have reached a point where I consider no woman really attractive. No defect can be hidden from me. That is impotence."

I. B. Singer, A Friend of Kafka

I saw a drama on TV today in which a patient of cancer was about to commit suicide when he met a girl and fell in love, and then he no longer wanted to die. Later in the drama he said to the girl, 'Before meeting you, my life was purposeless; now it has a meaning.' And this simple sentence [though very common in stories as well] always effects me greatly. Perhaps because some time back in the past, when i was going through a severe phase of existential angst, and i felt as if there was nothing in life worth living for, it was the sense of love which gave me a direction, a purpose, a will to live. The warm emotion of love is the only antidote to the cosmic loneliness faced by man in this world.

If this life is worth living, it is not for God, it is not for country, it is not for honour, it is for love.

We live in a rainbow of chaos.
Paul Cezanne

But even a rainbow displays order... chaos is perhaps an order too complex to be understood.

It is not too uncommon to find 'gems' in the graffiti scribbled at places... just like i saw this statement written on a college table:
"My love has reached the summit where my God lives."
I think it really speaks for itself. I wouldn't dare to say anything more. :)

If a woman becomes aware that a person is interested in her because of her beauty, would she be flattered or offended?
Flattered, because it is a compliment to her looks.
Offended, because this admiration ignores her personality and what she is as a person.

He who praises everybody, praises nobody.
Samuel Johnson

This reminds me of an incident i also one mentioned some months back in another post:
[http://awais.tigblog.org/post/41205]

I heard a dialogue once in a drama, "He who loves everyone, loves no one." And this always reminds me of the above written view.
And once a certain friend of mine mentioned a class fellow who was very popular and i, influenced by this pattern of thinking, replied, "He who is loved by everyone is loved by no one!" :)

I had a chance to read a dialogue between Richard Dawkins and Francis Collins on the issue of God and Science, organized by TIME magazine. [Thanks to my friend Saad Javed.] The debate can be seen at this link:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1555132-1,00.html

I'd like to make some comments about it.
The dialogue was good in the sense that it made clear the two conflicting positions of Dawkins and Collins. It would have been foolish to expect some sort of a compromise or a synthesis of the two views. It is not a simple matter of reason, because both Dawkins and Collins were presenting their ideas on the basis of some 'belief', forming a kind of closed system. When you begin to conjecture about things that have at the moment no possibility of empirical or rational verification/ falsification, then it becomes impossible to refute the opposing view.

For example, one of the reasons Collins gave for his belief in God was that it is almost impossible by pure chance alone that the values of the six universal constants are all in such perfect harmony with each other to produce a universe that makes life possible.

TIME: Both your books suggest that if the universal constants, the six or more characteristics of our universe, had varied at all, it would have made life impossible. Dr. Collins, can you provide an example?

COLLINS: The gravitational constant, if it were off by one part in a hundred million million, then the expansion of the universe after the Big Bang would not have occurred in the fashion that was necessary for life to occur. When you look at that evidence, it is very difficult to adopt the view that this was just chance. But if you are willing to consider the possibility of a designer, this becomes a rather plausible explanation for what is otherwise an exceedingly improbable event--namely, our existence.

The hypothesis of this God is purely theoretical conjecturing. It is of course a possibility that a designer might have tuned this constants, but it is not a necessary explanation. For, as Dawkins shows, there might be other explanations. A unified physical theory may show that these constants are interlinked and not free to vary. Or there may be billions of universes, and among them it would not be improbable for one universe to have these constants in harmony.

DAWKINS: People who believe in God conclude there must have been a divine knob twiddler who twiddled the knobs of these half-dozen constants to get them exactly right. The problem is that this says, because something is vastly improbable, we need a God to explain it. But that God himself would be even more improbable. Physicists have come up with other explanations. One is to say that these six constants are not free to vary. Some unified theory will eventually show that they are as locked in as the circumference and the diameter of a circle. That reduces the odds of them all independently just happening to fit the bill. The other way is the multiverse way. That says that maybe the universe we are in is one of a very large number of universes. The vast majority will not contain life because they have the wrong gravitational constant or the wrong this constant or that constant. But as the number of universes climbs, the odds mount that a tiny minority of universes will have the right fine-tuning.

But this explanation too is purely theoretical at the moment. The first possibility is based on hope. There is at the moment no such Unified Theory regarding this constants. And there is no proof also about this multiverse idea. Hence, this too is a sort of 'belief', a belief which is based on the extension of science, but nevertheless incapable of verification/falsification.

Now, since both these explanation are incapable of being proved or refuted, we can't say who is wrong and who is right. Which one you feel more inclined to believe simply depends on you.

Dawkins is right when he says that a belief in God is some sort of an evasion to find scientific causes of things. 'Now Dr. Collins says, "Well, God did it. And God needs no explanation because God is outside all this." Well, what an incredible evasion of the responsibility to explain. Scientists don't do that. Scientists say, "We're working on it. We're struggling to understand."'
And by attributing a cause to God, it becomes kind of sacred, and most people tend to avoid thinking about alternatives. When it was believed by people that God sent rain, or God chose the sex of the baby, it became almost blasphemous to discuss these issues from a scientific context. At present, based on similar thinking, there is immense discouragement to study the mind-body relationship from a scientific perspective because people consider it blasphemous to deny the existence of soul. In this way, religion does impede scientific progress.

Dawkins recognized the possibility of something 'grand and incomprehensible and beyond our present understanding', which Collins immediately labelled as 'God'... but Dawkins pointed out that this God could be any of the billion Gods. To believe this God is the Yahweh, God of Jesus, or say the Islamic God is almost irrational.

Collins was right when he pointed out an aspect about atheists. "Atheists sometimes come across as a bit arrogant in this regard, and characterizing faith as something only an idiot would attach themselves to is not likely to help your case."
I surely agree with him. I am a regular visitor of the Atheist vs Theist forum on Orkut, and the arrogant and insulting behaviour of the atheists is very marked. And it is also wrong to believe that only an idiot would in a God, because this is not the cause. Most of the greatest and brilliants minds of mankind believed in some sort of a God. True, belief in God is not logically necessary, but it is surely logical possible, and is certainly not irrational.

The concluding comments of Dawkins are surely worth quoting:
But it [the idea of a supernatural intelligent designer] does seem to me to be a worthy idea. Refutable--but nevertheless grand and big enough to be worthy of respect. I don't see the Olympian gods or Jesus coming down and dying on the Cross as worthy of that grandeur. They strike me as parochial. If there is a God, it's going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed.

Words are meaningless outside their context. It is their use which defines them. A word in void has no meaning at all; only in a sentence does it gain a significance. Are human individuals also like this? Is it the society around which confers a meaning upon us? Are we meaningless as individuals, dissected apart from the society? Even a rebel is a 'rebel' because of his opposition to the ideals of the society... without this society, this antagonism, what identity would he have?

"It was one of those days when it's a minute away from snowing. And there's this electricity in the air, you can almost hear it, right? And this bag was just... dancing with me. Like a little kid begging me to play with it. For fifteen minutes. That's the day I realized that there was this entire life behind things, and this incredibly benevolent force that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid. Ever.

Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world I feel like I can't take it... and my heart is going to cave in."

[From the film 'American Beauty']

It is a day to pay tribute to the French existentialist writer and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir! Happy Birthday!

'Everyone has his own standards.'
'Yours are astray. It's always the same with you. Out of optimism or systematic obstinacy you hide the truth from yourself and when it is forced upon you, you either collapse or else you explode.'

The Age of Discretion

P.S. I have been quoting her in my blog previously as well.

"All of my life, I have been fascinated by the big questions that face us, and have tried to find scientific answers to them. Perhaps that is why I have sold more books on physics than Madonna has on sex." Happy Birthday to the man who introduced the general public to the modern physics, whose writings on science have become a source of enlightenment and inspiration for millions... Stephen Hawking! We, all of your fans, love you immensely!

* Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?

* I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.

* It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value.

* Not only does God play dice, but... he sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen.

* We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.

A person, who later got quite close, said to me once, "Wah je... position in f.sc, topper of entry test, philosopher, poet, thinker.....and a long list, inspite of all dat u managed to FALL IN LOVE...hah i am really amused."

I suppose i should consider this a compliment! :-D

The Nobel Laureate author I. B. Singer developed his own brand of religion after a phase of skepticism. He called it 'Private Mysticism'. "Since God was completely unknown and eternally silent, He could be endowed with whatever traits one elected to hang upon Him."

And it is my own observation that different people have a different concept of God, although they may not be explicitly aware of it. Generally speaking, there are three types of God which people have in their minds:

1) The Benevolent God: A merciful, gracious God who loves humanity and is willing forgive the sins of mankind.

2) The Just God: A God who has laid down some rules of reward and punishment and doesn't deviate from them.

3) The Malevolent God: An angry, revengeful God who takes delight in tormenting the people in the burning fires of hell.

Most of the time a combination of these three types is present, but usually one of them is in dominance. Which sort of idea you come to have of God depends a lot on your family and the concepts to which a child is exposed to as he is growing. Your idea of God also determines your behaviour and relationship to religion.

Bapsi Sidwa in Ice Candy Man was describing at one point how different people respond to cold, and i realized i too become 'secretive' when i am feeling cold; i become silent and my conversation is reduced to affirmitive and negative nodes, and even my thinking is inhibited to some extent.

Happy Birthday to the master of style and beauty... the inspiring prophet... Khalil Gibran! Some of his lovely words:

* A poet is a bird of unearthly excellence, who escapes from his celestial realm arrives in this world warbling. If we do not cherish him, he spreads his wings and flies back into his homeland.

* All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.

* But let there be spaces in your togetherness and let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

* Faith is an oasis in the heart which will never be reached by the caravan of thinking.

* For what is it to die, but to stand in the sun and melt into the wind?

"The moment of Infinite Light shrank and grew dim, and Creation began, insanity was born. The demons are all crazy. Even the angels are not completely sane. The world of matter and deeds is an insane asylum."

I.B. Singer, A Friend of Kafka

What makes us believe that the world in which we live is really rational? That it obeys some sort of an order or law? And even if it does, how can we know that our human intelligence would be capable of comprehending it? Just because we happen to be most intelligent species doesn't prove it. Suppose all the adults were eliminated and only children remained in the world, would it be correct for them to assume that their petty intelligence is capable of understanding the reality of the existence?

It is only after reading Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan and Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice-Candy Man have i realized what kind of a horrible disaster the partition of India in 1947 was. The holocaust and the carnage that followed left eternal scars on the face of humanity. The way an apparently humane society can transform into a savage horde of beasts is horrific and shocking. The partition was not just a division of land, it was a division in the very heart of the Indian society, a division which separated the fabric of a cloth into separate strands. It was the failure of humanity.

First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity.
George Bernard Shaw

True, the desire to have this experience, the inquisitiveness to know about this emotion which is talked about so much [and oft abused], this is one of the common motivations behind first love.

Happy Birthday J. R. R. Tolkien, who brought a new dimension to the art of fantasy, through The Lord of the Rings.

Two of his eternal verses:

* "Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie."

* All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king. "

Me [Left], Zohaib [Centre] and Uzair [Right]

My learning of epistemological and ethical skepticism has rendered me invalid and incapable of thinking 'normally'. My world has been reduced to a set of possibilities and probabilities. Certainty has become a myth. Can you say that you trust your friend when you are aware that there is a 1 in 100 chance that he might be lying to you? Can you say that this or that scientific theory is true while accepting the fact that the very next observation may refute it? Ah, how i crave for certainty and ah, how it hides itself beneath layers of veils.

There is no friendship between perfections, because friendship requires accepting your friend along with his/her faults. And i don't think you can call someone a good friend unless and until you can talk to him about your mistakes as well.

Well, i'd just like to say: forget about all those tedious lists of 'resolutions' you make every year and just about for a moment think about how can you make your life meaningful. And it will be meaningful not be stuffing more items into your daily routine but by asking yourself who you really are and what you want to do. Have a great 2007!