On India

"God created men, Colt made them equal."

For the state to confiscate and restrict arms is an injustice intolerable to a free man, but one could be excused if one finds it acceptable in a nation-state where there is an easy and efficient recourse against violence, especially for the weaker sections who do not have money or power.  In most places, this recourse is The Police.

In India, guns are de facto legal and affordable only for the rich and connected.  To add injury to this insult, the police usually side with the rich and connected and shoo away or beat up anyone who dares to think otherwise.

And since the police is worthless to a common man, one might think that after all the courts will be fair.  That assumption too is badly trampled as soon as one tries to litigate against the state or against the powerful.  In the rare case that there is a just verdict, the powerful keep appealing, finality is elusive, and as they say, the process is the punishment.

For a common man or woman in India, a region replete with injustice, illegality and corruption, not only is there no recourse to arms, but there is no recourse to law enforcement, and there is no recourse to the courts.

People might say the United States is corrupt too, and the powerful have their advantages, but it is head and shoulders above a third-world hellhole like India when it comes to the right to bear arms, the right to approach the police, and the right to a fair trial.

People might want to leave India for many reasons, but I left India to escape this tangible sense of being helpless in the face of aggravations.  I do not wish to approach a well-connected bureaucrat, and to stand before him, and to lower my dignity and beg for his favors to do something that should be done as a matter of course.

For those who cannot leave India, my advice is to lay low politically, and not be brutalized by the state.  You cannot do much as an individual, and you should try this perilous path of being a lone-wolf reformer only if you have no other ambition in life, especially that of living a free, peaceful and intellectual life.

If you wish to consider joining a mainstream or alternative political party, remember that the political parties are a reflection of India at large: corrupt, brutal, nepotistic, opportunistic.  You will have to kiss the feet of men like Rahul Gandhi or Narendra Modi or Amit Shah or Arvind Kejriwal, or Mr Vijay.  That may not be abhorrent to you, but it is to me.

I find it increasingly true to say that though I love many things that have happened in India (especially as it relates to some forms of music and literature and philosophy), I hate what it has become.  It is an ugly, dysfunctional and despotic region, and I feel fortunate that I am no longer trapped in it.

The Infinitesimal and the Infinite

 A friend shared a poem with me today:

Vast Emptiness

Emotion less
Thought less
Good less
Bad less
Joy less
Sorrow lessDevoid of it all
Is this vast emptinessA few fireballs littered around as stars
A few pebbles thrown around as planets
A few specks of dust moving around as life
As plants as trees
As insects as worms
As fish as reptiles
As birds as animals
As men as women
And the non-gender ones tooWinds swirling
Rains lashing
Thunders thundering
Dust storms brewingOf what significance
But an eternal play
Of time in the lap of timelessAll of the above
But words in my head
Without words
There is but
Vast Emptiness

I used to have similar thoughts, and I'm sure many a reflective man or woman have had the same.

But here is a counterpoint to this wondrous feeling and cognition of being a mere speck in the vast space-time. And that is the wondrous feeling and cognition that in this infinite vastness, infinite duration, but at present, here and now, I am. I exist, I am aware, I see, I wonder.

The insignificance is as marvelous as the infinitely improbable existence of us. Both are marvelous, both are wondrous, both are worthy of one stopping in one's tracks and be awed.

One existence, that of space-time, is infinite (notwithstanding the Big Bang model of a finite universe), the other ephemeral: I was not aware before I was born, and I shall be not aware after I die. But in a certain sense, I am eternal too, because I am part of this universe. And I shall never cease to exist, but shall go on to appear in different forms.

And what a wonder of wonders that matter arranges itself so as to be self-aware. It is perhaps the greatest wonder of all.

On the Grand Design

Suffering is always tragic, often random and mostly senseless.

It is a worldly endeavor to lessen suffering, while the other-worldly pursuit is to "transcend" suffering since suffering is a "noble truth" from which there is no escape, only transcendence.

A friend of mine, with a network of well-heeled people in his network, writes on LinkedIn:

Seemingly adverse things appearing in abundance and without warning could be arising for one of two reasons. First, it may simply be that dealing with them is a necessary step in our development and without them our life journey will be a superficial success. Relatedly and importantly, these circumstances appear because prior volitional activity or accumulated karma making them the birth child of thoughts or actions we have taken in the past, whether we can directly recall or correlate to the present incidents.

Whatever the specific reason, I take great comfort in the fact that there is zero randomness in how my life’s events unroll and I look ahead with optimism and enthusiasm, knowing that the temporal map of these occurrences is accurately following the karmic load that I carry and strive to purify.

I quote an incident from an earlier article of mine:

Abandoned in Life and Death
Parents leave baby boy undergoing treatment at PGI

In a blatant display of extreme callousness, parents of a seriously injured baby abandoned the child midway through treatment in the PGI Intensive Care Unit.

Faced with absence of support in a critical condition, the infant breathed his last on January 7 and no one has even come forward to claim the body, which is kept in the mortuary of the hospital.

...

Although he started stabilising in the ICU, his parents suddenly vanished. After unsuccessful attempts at locating the parents, doctors informed the police.

...

Ruby passed away on January 7. 

...

The religiously-inclined might say that the child must have come to this world with his karma and that divine justice is infallible. And thus we avert our eyes from what must have compelled the parents of this poor child to desert him, and what must be improved in the hospitals, and in the mind-sets of doctors of this country for these events never to happen again. God forbid.

Truth is not comforting, it just is.  The truth is that this baby, Ruby, died of injuries and from lack of care, not of Karma.

Tragedy is not confined to the suffering of children, though it is perhaps easier to see that they did not deserve it.

I imagine the suffering of Ruby's mother as she abandoned him.  I imagine her compulsion, or perhaps her desensitized debasement.

I imagine the suffering of a father and a mother as their child is kidnapped and never found, as they imagine him or her to be amputated and made into a beggar or be raped by those who do not deserve to be called human beings.

I imagine the suffering of a noble warrior like Jaswant Singh Khalra, who, for protesting against others' killings, was himself tortured and killed by Punjab Police.

I swear, to my last drop of blood, and to my last breath, ... I swear on the still smoldering, in my heart, funeral pyre of Ruby who I never met, ... I swear on the courage of Jaswant Singh Khalra, that I will never forget your suffering, or justify it as part of a grand plan, or rationalize it as what you deserved because of your karma, but that I will hold your injuries as mine, that I will fight against what killed you, and that I will reject the abject nonsense of the eastern "wisdom" that claims that the world is perfect as it is, only if we would see it that way.