How To Live

Lately I've been wondering a lot about, well, how to live. In the quest to understand life, I‘ve read a lot: philosophy, evolutionary-biology, neuroscience, history, social-sciences, astrophysics, quantum mechanics, gossip columns and porn. So far, I must admit, not much progress has been made.

Cicero said “To philosophize is to learn how to die”. I have a few suggestions for Mr. Cicero, but let's get to the point.

So, how to live? Simply stated, we don’t know, we don’t even know whether it is knowable, and more importantly, whether the question is valid. It is definitely not like “How to whistle” (which is a fairly complex activity I assure you; the Youtube videos aren't much help).

Chances are little that you’ll find an answer in a blog-post. Analytical answers might never come. Just look at us, spending billions and still struggling to spot the tiniest particle. So I turn to readily available wisdom in self-help books:

Live as if today were your last day:
If I were to live as if today were my last day, it most definitely will become one (unless they put me in jail before I am done with my exploits). Let’s, for the sake of argument, assume that my morality stays intact and the expectation of a sure,timed death doesn’t trigger a violent reaction. In short, let's assume that I will be a good person overall.

Let’s take it slowly. Here’s the deal: You got just today. Will you bathe? Think it over. Remember, you got just 24 hours to live.

I won’t.

(Tragically, in the only case when you know for sure that today is your last day, they not only make you have a bath, they shave your head as well.)

However, since I am being a good person on the last day, I would call up Ma and Pa and tell them how much I love them. I finish the rest of day being extra nice and I go to bed expecting not to wake up again. I might call Ma again.

With 99.999% probability, I will wake up the next day. Since the deal remains the same, I won’t bathe and I will call Momma. If this continues for a week, my Mom will understandably take the next flight to Bangalore. Then she’ll find that I haven’t had a bath for seven days!! Like SEVEN whole days !! Need I say more?

So, you see, this philosophy won’t work. One can try and modify the theory to say that “live as if this is your tenth last day”. Most of us will bathe with respectable frequencies after this modification. However, will you pay the month electricity bill? I won’t. I suppose you get the drift.

Pacuvius, a wealthy man who lived a couple of thousand years ago, used to hold a regular burial sacrifice in his own honor, with wine and the usual funeral feasting, and then would have himself carried from the dining-room to his chamber, while eunuchs applauded and sang in Greek to a musical accompaniment: "He has lived his life, he has lived his life".

What is the best use of my time right now?:
A little reflection on this and one realizes that this is like an infinite loop with nothing at all happening inside the loop. One needs to fix sensible intervals between the “right now”s. It can’t be too long either, else significance of “right now” is lost. Let’s say an hour. Now what? This maxim has nothing to say for what is the best possible use. It’s more of a technique rather than a solution.

Also, this technique shares the flaw (although not as acutely) of the previous saying. Who, in his right mind, will say “Right now, the best use of my time is to have a bath”? Answer lies in the question. Someone who is too itchy and stinking, even for himself, will eventually find that a hot bath is the best use of the next few minutes.

Another limitation is that one might get occupied with local maximas and lose sight of the long run fulfillment. The best possible use of the next ball is to hit it for a six, but attempting so every ball won’t win you the match.


Took the road less traveled by and that has made all the difference:
Robert Frost wrote the poem in jest. To Frost’s dismay, the irony was lost on almost everyone and the lines ended up being used in motivational ways. Even his closest friend Edward Thomas, an accomplished poet in his own right, and for whom Frost wrote the poem, didn’t, so to speak, get it. Instead, he got inspired and joined the English army in the First World War. Frost wrote this poem in 1915, Thomas got killed in 1916.

More often than not, it’s the traveler that matters. “Taking the road less travelled” can’t be a universal rule anyway as one would expect a uniform distribution of people on all roads if it was as simple as that, unless of course the road is less travelled for a sensible reason. E.g. You won’t make it big just because you choose never to have a bath.

Live life to the fullest:
Like what? Should I install a bath-tub instead of using a shower? This maxim makes me feel like blowing up a big balloon.
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In short, I am not impressed. You know how the whole thing is:

(A very very complex and huge expression) = ?

You ponder a while and then tell yourself “This shit is taking long; let me grab a cup of tea and two cookies”. By the time you are back with your tea, already sore at yourself for having finished the cookies last night, the left hand side of the equation has become furthermore complex.

With life, the rules are not only complex, but fuzzy and evolutionary. As it is, even the strictest of formal systems are doomed to be incomplete. I guess there isn’t much else to do, but to live life to the fullest on this last day of my life and squeeze in a leisurely bath somewhere along the road less travelled.

It Really Doesn’t Matter

If you are the kind who admires confidence and decisiveness, I am afraid I won’t be leaving a great impression on you if you happen to be seating opposite to me after the waiter has handed the menu cards.

It would have been easy if we were seated in a French or an Italian restaurant and I were too shy to mispronounce a dish; I would have chosen the one which is easy to roll off the tongue regardless of how it might taste. Instead, I am shameless enough to say the number against the dish or point finger at it on the card and then nod when the waiter pronounces it properly (I am sure they are trained with only those French /Italian words). Or I can always show it to you and you can order it with grace. So my unwillingness to choose from the menu card is cuisine-agnostic. (I might be flattering myself by calling it unwillingness, as it is most probably perceived as an inability.)

It’s not that I lack the discerning taste altogether. Capsicum is chilly and banana is sweet. Chilly is better than sweet. And I do derive pleasure from the food, especially if it tastes like chocolate (chocolate is not counted in sweet). But I find it hard to calculate which item on the menu will bring me more joy. Sometimes I have a vague idea, but I believe it will be too arrogant on my part to announce based on that, because you will take it as a well thought decision based on clear preferences. It will be an implicit lie. I can’t be cheating someone who is dining with me unless I am bound to benefit a lot from it. I would rather let you choose and go with it, feeling safe in the knowledge that overall there is more satisfaction in the world.

Admittedly, there is a catch here. It might be too taxing on you to pick for two. It’s unfair to assume that it’s easy for you to choose. I don’t want to be a freeloader. As a means to avoid implicitly lying and freeloading, I have decided to take the following route the next time I find myself with a menu card in my hands:

“Honestly, it doesn’t really matter, but I’ll go with X, with toppings of Y, although Z seems to be equally fine. However, if you have a better idea, feel free to pitch in.”

This should not imply I am open to eat a half cooked cat. The variance and quality is bounded by the cuisine and the place of which I am aware by virtue of holding the corresponding menu card.

Ideally (subjective), the menu card should simply have a scale which asks “How hungry are you?” (In future, they can have scanners at the door that judge the hunger-level without relying on perceptions.) They can make the card fancy by starting the levels from “As hungry as a rat” and ending at “So hungry that I can even eat a rat right now”.

There is little confusion in the case of drinks though. It all depends on whether I will be driving afterwards. If no, I go for whisky, else beer it is. If you are a guy and you order vodka or a cocktail, I won’t trust you with my car. So you better not be a guy.

Too many ‘if’s and ‘I’s in this post: another not so impressive trait in a man. But I am relieved to have made my stand crystal clear.

Tooth-Fairies And Soap

Yesterday I helped the cause of a budding barber. Although my right ear still hurts, I am satisfied with my readiness for an impromptu “Who has the shortest hair?” contest.

It’s been a long break and I am pleasantly surprised at the number and identities of the people who noticed the absence. I have come to realize that this blog is seen more as a tool for self-exhibition than as a place where I write stuff.

But this self-exhibition is still a fiction (albeit of little commercial value). What I exhibit is of course chosen and/or manipulated. (E.g. More than half of the apologetic scenarios mentioned here never happened. Apologies for that.) Nearly all of us do this selection with a varying degree of awareness and intent.

Does that make me liar? Well, I do lie sometimes in real life, but the lies on this blog are of different nature. I add ornamentation purposely to entertain, and not to cheat. Things that I have on mind while writing are on the lines of “Does this sound funny or intelligent?”, “What if?”, “Is this getting too inconsistent?” etc. I don’t see this blog as a place where I express my innermost thoughts (blah) or try to connect with people.

However, I maintain that I did have that haircut from a novice barber yesterday.

Meanwhile, my new neighborhood is living up to the expectations mentioned in the previous post. Also, there ain’t gonna be no Deember for me. Fish are too selfish to bother about their owners. I now have a small garden instead, with over a dozen plants bought from a nearby nursery. Tender little weeds have begun sprouting in most of the pots. I don’t have the heart to snatch them out of the soil. They look like a bunch of street puppies wagging their tails amidst the foreign bred dogs.

I watched television for a few weeks (mostly trash). In every episode of “Emotional Atyachar”, after the initial preaching about the vices of infidelity, whenever the cheating partner smooches the enchantress, they blur the area of action and pop comes the advertising banner below: “Spraymint . Be kiss-ready”. I love capitalism.

I must clarify though that despite the last example, I am all for capitalism. More things get created, both good and bad. Creation is, well, interesting. If you mock at it, you better be good. Saying “Tooth-fairies are bullshit” isn’t enough, true though it might be. Saying “The only Tooth-fairy I have known is that beautiful dentist” is better, but still lame. It’s hard to match the idea of “Tooth-fairy”, however ridiculous it may seem.

Things need not be fantastic in a general sense to be marveled at. Take Soap. Soap, like every one of us, is made up of many-many subatomic particles. It can be traced back to Big-Bang. And soaps, as we know them, will cease to exist in not so distant future. The soap I bought after the hair-cut, had it been luckier, could have rubbed the dirty body of a beautiful Tooth-fairy. It still could, if I get luckier. A soap can be eaten too (it’s delicious).

I must stop here. I am hungry. There are too many loose and philosophically contestable statements in this post already.

I Think Therefore I am

Don't know why, but I find myself in an academic mood today. Please pardon me for these feeble attempts at explaining things that are too profound for a novice to declare command over. Nevertheless, it can be seen as an interesting challenge to be able to put the terms in a layman's language.

Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) .This is a logical statement. It's not your regular wisecrack or an inspirational saying like "I believe, so I will. ", but a conclusion arrived at with much deliberation and analysis. The great philosopher Descartes spent years in seclusion, clearing up his mind of previously acquired wisdom, to come up with his Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences.

The mindless adoption of the statement in puns and quips on TV and in everyday life goes to show how knowledge/things are taken for granted once they are created and ready to use. A classical example is "Zero". It took millenniums and civilizations, before "Zero" was "invented" and now we find it hard to even imagine that "Zero" was something which needed to be "invented”. To us, it now appears to be such a trivial concept that we put it in the syllabus for kindergartens. Please do read this link to appreciate the sweat gone into creating "Zero".

Returning to the topic of the day, why does "I think" conclude that "I am”? Why didn't he make a statement like "I breathe, therefore I am"? To get the answers, one must first know what the need for the statement was.

One of my friends is partially color-blind. The day we discovered his "condition", we were arguing over the color of a flag on a temple about half a km away; he claimed it was green while to me it was orange. Thankfully enough, a couple of other guys joined us and we won 3-1. Later on, that friend had a check-up done and the "condition" was diagnosed.

Still, the whole episode left me wondering, what if someone identifies a color as green, but the shade he perceives is what looks orange to me; and vice versa. The problem with my friend was that he saw both of them as one color which he called green. However, it seemed perfectly plausible that some other person perceives the color-spectrum in a different way like the way we do when we wear colored goggles; what if someone would have put a colored goggle on me right from the time I was born. I wouldn't have been diagnoised with color-blindness since I would have still distinguisehd between all the colors; just that the perception would have been different. Is there one "true" perception?

Descartes noticed many such inconsistencies around him. Then there were questions like what if reality as it appears to us is a dream too. Am I just a part of someone else's dream or imagination? Or things and people around me are nothing but creation of my mind.

So he decided to build a system based on reasoning alone and devised a few rules to help him do that. One of the most important rules is known as "Cartesian Doubt", which, in his own translated words, is to "reject as absolutely false everything concerning which I could imagine the least doubt to exist.” This explains why he cannot start with "I breathe, therefore I am". To make this statement, one must first define what is breathing. That would involve defining nose, air, lungs, life etc. Not an ideal way to begin. He doubted everything he perceived and nose was definitely amongst them.

Once again he beautifully explains: “considering that all the thoughts we have when awake can come to us also when we sleep without any of them being true, I resolved to feign that everything which had ever entered my mind was no more truth than the illusion of my dreams. But I observed that, while I was thus resolved to feign that everything was false, I who thought must of necessity be somewhat; and remarking this truth--I think, therefore I am--was so firm and so assured that all the most extravagant suppositions of the skeptics were unable to shake it, I judged that I could unhesitatingly accept it as the first principle of the philosophy I was seeking."

So there. That's why it is "I think" and not "I breathe" or "I sleep". Thinking is the first and only activity that is self-evident,verifiable and not needing a definition.

One must be careful here; the above reasoning does not allow me to conclude that Priyanka Chopra exists because she thinks. For me, she is an external being, a perception and hence may be part of an illusion. A lot more reasoning and arguments than the one involved in reaching this first principle is required to even start considering Priyanka Chopra's existence. However, when and if she is thinking, then she too can be sure of her existence only. I am afraid that even after establishing further principles, I won't be existing for her.

Another point to be noted here is that the reasoning involved to reach the statement, or the first principle as it is called, just means that "I" that is proven to be existing here is something that is thinking and not necessarily the "Prashant Dhanke" as I know him to be; in fact that existing, thinking thing is not even established to be a human being. Many more principles need to be established and reasoned before such complex statements can be discussed.