Thursday, July 23, 2015

On original thought


What is originality?This is one of the fundamental questions that very few people bother to ask.What is an original thought and what is its importance?What people think and believe is affected by so many things that after a point it becomes really difficult to separate the adopted thought  from the genuine.

The fact is that there is a general level of acceptance about certain things like if a politician says that women should not have voting rights he would be shred to bits on prime time news because the general acceptance in the society is that men and women are equal at least that is what everybody in principle has  to pretend no matter what they think in their private lives.But  if the same politician had said the exact same words a 100 years back they would not have evoked sharp criticism only raised brows may be and if he had said the same thing 200 years back it would have uninteresting even dull responses because he would be stating only the accepted norm of the  society. So the point  is that there is a certain unwritten common  code of acceptable behavior which the society follows and it cant be codified


But fast forward 200 years and the accepted norms are changed.The question arises how do these changes arise and why do we as a citizen blindly follow the accepted norms the prevailing society.If for example a person holds the opinion of equality of men and women because it is what everyone says .Should that person get credited for holding such broad views about women or is he merely a function of the society that he is born in ?.It raises the serious question whether  our thought is only reliant on the prevailing society or are capable of independent thought process of our own?And if so where does our influences end and original thought begin?

Thursday, June 11, 2015

On Freedom

I don't know what kept me from writing for so long...i guess it was the lack of readership or rather lack of interaction which disinterested me in writing posts.And i think it hits everyone who blogs at some point of time when  you don't seem to have the motivation to blog but here i am giving it another go.
For some time now i have been thinking about freedom and what is it actually.Now it being an abstract concept it is very difficult to come up with an exact definition for it and yet wars have been fought, massacres have been committed, people have have been killed  for this very abstraction.

But are we really free??Us the people who are supposedly free now that the British have left(Obviously i am referencing India only because it is unlikely that the six people who would be reading this post would have a US passport).Do we make the choices that we want to make?Or are we just following the existing structure of the society because that is what we are supposed to do and that is what is easy to do??In that respect are our choices the function of our surroundings and if so than where does the freedom lie?Isn't it all an illusion of freedom under the chains of societal norms.?

What i believe is that freedom is a huge responsibility.Freedom makes us feel lost.Freedom makes it difficult to decide because there is no guideline to follow.Freedom can make life hell.And so we have devised several contraptions to give us a path to follow which includes religion.Now religion in itself can be a very broad term but the one here is the ugly organised religion of evangelism and conversions.This is the religion of the priest in the grand inquisitor(Brothers Karamazov) where the priest rebukes Christ for having given the curse of freedom to the people and says that he is no longer needed.The chains of church would provide the salvation to the common man.

But i don't want to go into how freedom is suppressed.I want to talk about are really free???anywhere at all??anyone at all??what is true freedom?I think true freedom would lead to us gratifying our needs.And in all possibility in the order of Maslow's pyramid.But to be able to know ones desires,that in itself has become a big task because of the years of influence of the existing society wherever we live.To be absolutely free of the shackles of society that is something that i think about.The people who meditate possibly Buddha or Mahavira might have come across this only.They might have been able to delve deeper into themselves and see beyond what was being projected on them by their times.

If we make free decisions,where would that lead us to?Not just big decisions the daily life decisions that we make.How do we spend the 24 hours that we are provided daily?Eating ,sleeping, performing daily routines beyond this how do we decide what to do with our time?Most would be doing a job.But ultimately it is something that we do for money?So is that what should be our driving force??Is that what our freedom has led us to??And there is no denying the value of money.But if we are free to do anything what would we to do?