Hot November

I have been itching to restart the fun with writing. Writing makes me laugh, at myself as well as the phenomena which I observe around me. Sharing the posts on blog may share the laugh with others. So, here I go.

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When I woke up today morning, I accidentally spotted few cute birds around my house. Obviously, these birds have been around always. It's me who has been indifferent to their existence.

At amable, we had some extraordinary programs for children and parents and teachers and....probably every human on this earth. To rephrase it, "we believed" we had some extraordinary programs. The bitter truth I faced was that people need to buy what you have for it to actually become extraordinary. Say you constructed a beautiful house which no one purchased or even after purchasing, no one stayed in it. Though beautiful, it's finally a house and cannot convert to a car or a computer or anything else. It has it's own function. If it's not giving shelter to anyone, what is it's real worth? One may question: "When a flower blooms deep somewhere in a forest, does it matter if anyone noticed it?" Well, if no human notices it, it could be okay but, it does matter to the flower if no butterfly or bee notices it.

When I observed those birds today morning, it suddenly occurred to me that we humans have based our survival on other humans appreciating our work. To be explicit, our survival depends on other humans finding our work worth enough to pay for it. Do I want this to be different? No, I don't have an opinion (as if it mattered) on how it should be or how I want it to be. I am just observing and trying to understand what's happening around me.

It appears that nature wanted everything in this universe to be interconnected and also, dependent on each other. So, humans depending on other humans seems to align with nature's wish. However, as our soceity is growing (at least we perceive it as growth), this interdependency of humans on other humans is only increasing and becoming more and more complex. Most of us have become experts in one area for which other humans pay us money which we further use to buy everything we want.

Given this continuously growing network of inter dependencies amongst humans, it's understandable that we tend to assume this local complex network between humans as the only dependency network. It's understandable that we tend to forget our dependencies on other life around us. I had to put efforts to realize that the birds I saw today, have a role to play in my life.

The rainy Diwalis and the hot Novembers have been bothering me for some time. I have been observing wet Diwalis in Bangalore for some years but, now I have been seeing that in Gujarat as well. In my last visit to Gujarat, we were using fans even in the night in the November month. If I extrapolate the current trend, soon we would have only two seasons - summer and monsoon. Also, these seasons would keep changing every 2-3 weeks.

I really cannot imagine what would be the challenges which our next generation is going to face. I further have a low confidence guess on how to prepare them for those challenges. They may need to be really creative to innovate new solutions for the generation old problems like food and shelter. Or they may chill out because nature would have taken the full control, thereby leaving them as mute spectators.

Eating is stressful

I sometimes feel stressed about this eating business. We eat daily at least 3 times a day and empty daily. I wished this was configurable. Imagine each of us is deciding if we want to eat daily or every alternate day or once a month, once an year. Imagine we had eating seasons where you eat for a week every quarter while someone else eats every month.

 

  

It would be interesting how each of us would configure our eating frequency depending on our body ambitions, our professions, the culture, personal ambitions….Imagine what would happen to the restaurants. Would they shutdown or do business in spikes, the way resorts do. Probably eating out would then become premium. I wonder though what would happen to the pleasure we derive out of eating. In the current state, it’s the taste and hunger which gives us the pleasure of eating. In the configurable model of eating, the tongue is not going away and hence, taste would continue to play it’s role but, what would happen when hunger can be planned?

If and when I become the God, I would experiment giving these configuration options to the poor humans and have fun. As of now, fortunately I am not the God. So, let’s come back to what we have. This need to eat daily, implies that there is a void inside which has to be filled every single day, multiple times and in different ways. Do we have similar void for learning as well? Is learning a need, a want or an incident? If it’s a need or want, how configurable it is?