हम सब बस बेकार ही हैं....how does playing Bridge get me a personality?

Two individual things caught my eye today in the newspaper. Yes i do read it every morning with my morning coffee. First was the 42nd Bridge Championship in Chennai, and the second was a public awareness advertisement about honking on the road, in traffic.

Who do i have to do with the news about a Bridge championship, i don’t play the game, know very little about it let alone, then why am i so interested in it? For this news sent me away on a little train of thoughts; which when it stopped left me at the station of self realisation, and thus came the idea of penning my resultant learning from that journey down memory lane.

Before i start my train of thoughts journey, as is common with rail journeys, i have to show the conductor who am i? Not the spiritual, purposeful question everybody is asking everyone and themselves, but just a more social status of mine. I am successful or so i like to believe, earned enough money, though there can never be enough, to indulge in most of the frivolities of life, own at least two cars, have changed more mobile phones than i may have changed lightbulbs in my life, and have an excellent credit limit with various banks. I may or may not be married depending on which angle i want to look at it, but i can travel comfortably, stay at hotels on a strata above normal budget hotels when i say i am travelling on budget. But then all of this that i have, and have done, is for me and maybe somethings for my family as well.

But the where did i come from? By that i didn’t mean which city or my place of birth, or that of my forefathers. Where do is come from is indeed a question which asks what is my spiritual or character lineage, who were the people who came before me?

My grandfather was in the irrigation department. He was the first generation of kids to migrate out of our village, study in the city and get a government job. Eventually he even rose to the position of Director in the same department. He helped start and finish more irrigation projects in his areas of posting than the number of books i can ever hope to get published. But behind all that he was a farmer at heart. He would regularly dirty his hands, so to say, at least once in an year, in the fields. Even before i was born, he was a seasoned man, human rather, rich in practical experience, well travelled, had enough knowledge of culture and behaviour of people, which i may need two life times to gain. Some of it i know from my father. About how he was as a person. My father seldom talked about him, in fact he seldom talked much. But when he did, he ended up teaching me a lot about values of hard work, sincerity, truthfulness, and common sense. He taught me all this not by speaking, but by his actions. All of this, which i ultimately chose to forget so that i could become successful quickly. My father was well educated. Being born in the era when our country had just attained independence, he was the youth in the 70’s and 80’s. They had huge responsibilities to fulfil, at home, in society and they took upon themselves to fulfil a few for the nation. This was a generation who never had it easy, they had to get to everything in life the hard way. And that he did. He was a grade one officer in the revenue department. While growing up i learned a lot about how he was as a professional, by the awards and recognitions he garnered, time to time. Some small tokes i too wore at times on my clothes proudly, little understanding their meaning then. I think with all the law that he wrote, the amount of revenue he got for the government, would be enough to sustain the state along with the whole of his department for eons. He was extremely intelligent; brilliant; infact very observant and has astute knowledge of life. But behind all this he too was a farmer at heart. Though i had never seen us visiting our family villages, since i had grown up, or him working in a field, but he know all that there was to it, and practically too not like me who had read about kharif and rabi in the class 3rd or 4th and forgotten all about it since it was of now use after the exams. He could tell a person from a tree, and one tree from another too, unlike me, who thinks humans are humans, come in different shapes and sizes, and anything green is a plant, tree, or shrub or a vegetable.

My maternal grandfather was a national level bridge player. Not as a vocation but as a hobby. Infact he even was a cricket player at the sheeshmahal club, and an umpire as well later in his life. And an officer in the secretariat. He came from a family of intellectuals and lawyers. I think he was the second generation in his house to leave farming and dwell in to the urban lifestyle. On my mother’s side every one was creatively gifted. His youngest brother was a sitar player, in fact he was a principal at a prominent music college. I have recollections of him playing music at home, with many now famous people learning from him.

My mother too is quite a lot many personalities gelled in to one. Infact her capacity and will to learn beats me. She has been a home maker most of her life. She has taken care of everyone in our family, elders and young ones alike. She is also a meditation teacher, a course director of a course to teach people how to teach meditation, infact now her hobbies include practising the alternate healing method of reiki, reading tarrot cards, and most recently, astrology.

All through my bloodline, i have been preceded by individuals who have had a personality, beyond their what was their job and source of income, infact today too who are around from that generation have a higher integrity than any of us from this generation.

But then who am i? And this time it is a very deep question, one which actually forces me to go down deeper in to myself to search for an answer. Do i have a personality? Do i have hobbies? Do i have time in this life away from my source of income? If i were to create a report card of sorts, i believe this is what it may look like,

Knowledge : zero, or close to it, about the practicalities of life

Experience : Only what we write on our resume. Of life, we have none, none that we created of our own. We have childhood memories of good times, but same we cannot offer to our own children.

Learning : Hardly any. Because if we had learnt anything we would be off becoming better people, infact we would start becoming people in the first place.

And this isn’t just me, but the whole generation around me, everyone around me. We are the ones honking on the road, we are the ones who had a glorious past, but we aren't having any present. Future? We don’t even have time for our selves; let alone the future generation. They are growing up with phones and tablets, so what of their future?

May be that jam on the road would clear up and we would get to the correct destination in life.

Thriving off Stupidity and other insights....

Man’s progress, and by man, i don’t mean man as in men, i mean the progress of humans as a race, all over, has been in the hands of a few individuals, who have been hailed as game changers, geniuses by others.

Our dependence on them has always been on the rise, with time and with the complexity of changes they keep bringing in the scheme of things. One could guess, that with so many advances in number of schools, universities, everyone getting good education, there would be more people coming out on the top. But that does not seem to be the case, we see so much disparity all around us. What then are these apostles of change fed? What do they see, which by others remains unseen? Is it something in their genes, or the DNA, that makes them different? Or is it their ability to spot a problem and start working on it’s solution before everybody else?

Lets glance back at a few thousand years, lets view early human being, primitive man, cave dwellers, nomads through a different lens on the eye. Imagine the scene when one of them, out of a group, accidentally created fire. There would have been no instruction manuals. There would have been no disclaimers. Just some part of common sense to help him survive. Fire, would have been known already to man in a lot of different shapes and sizes by then, smalls ones which he could probably spit on, or blow some air, to put them out. Some of them would be large ones, which common sense would advise one to run away from, and not try and put them out without external means. If though, anyone was stupid enough to light one up and then try and put it out by jumping in it, or sit in it for that matter, they would naturally perish and hence had the right to remain extinct and cleanse the world of their stupidity too. These days we tend to call these kind of accidents manufacturing defects, and lawyers help us claim millions in damages.

Survival is the main term here. That has what has been constant since the day our species arrived here, on this planet. Infact that is the whole purpose of any species. During early ages when the term “civilization” hadn’t been coined in its modern meaning, one needed a specific skill set to survive. And back then survival meant actual life and death situations. Not just survive education, girl friends and bosses like we do each day. Some of us have to deal with all three, some are lucky enough to be cursed by just one of them. To complete one basic task, say trekking down to some nearby stream to get some fresh water, must have come with a rider - stay alive during the ordeal. Nature and man would have been in a constant fight with each other. Here is where the game changers stepped in. Why not make products, instead of people scurrying around making fires, gathering water, why not provide these as services and charge for it? And then someone went ahead and patented it. Say, rather than everyone creating their own fires, a few of them started going around selling standardised fires. Why let the people take risk of lighting one up and arsoning one whole village with their stupidity? These game changers made life easy for everyone else around. But these are the ones which didn’t let nature take care of the ones which were not meant to be thriving. The game changers brought about a very rapid change in the environment. It meant people could have improved survival chances, lesser heading out in to the wild and hence an extension of chances to spread more stupidity around. Why and how would one buy as simple a product as fire?  Some people may ask. It is simple to create, very easy to control, one of the earliest tool man discovered, which gave him power over most of the other species. For one, there would definitely have been some great marketing strategy behind it. They would have highlighted the chances of reducing mishaps, the dangers of doing it yourself, various accidents that may happen. Then, since people would have been evolving as a colony there would be regulations in place. A personal fire may be only so high, temperature could not be more than so hotness (there were no units by then, so the hotness could be measured by sacrificing something or someone less liked by all). Why wouldn’t then it be better to go for a standardized product, something which could alleviate your chances of survival by manifolds, rather than trying getting killed while creating one by yourself?

Another off shoot of this would be courses being given on how to create the perfect fire. Something, which one could very well teach oneself on his/her own, would not only be taught to them, another aspect that they would drill into everyone would be that they are completely dumb, and if they didn’t teach one how to light a fire, these people would be better off being eaten by a lion, in the confines of their homes. Some of the precautions that one may have had to learn the hard way, through way of experiences, would now be available to you as digests. One could now take courses, take a look at demos, read pamphlets (sorry not pamphlets, writing wasn’t invented by then), thus enabling even the most simpletons of the pride to be as smart as the first man who accidentally created fire by rubbing stones. Somewhere down the line, we are still the same dumb, scared afraid learner, this i could deduce from the numerous warnings and disclaimers mentioned on products of everyday use. Batteries, deodorant cans, electronic items, anything under the sun can start a potential fire, of which we are still afraid the same.

Eventually over the history, what people with ideas and game changers have done is provide great solutions, but a few amongst us were greater marketers and salesman, they were the ones who actually gave meaning to these changes. These were the ones who convinced everyone that they could be lazy, safer and survive better were they to adhere to usage of these products. Soon the products became a necessity and not a fashion statement. Case in point the latest smart phones of a fruity named company.

Civilization, as it seems started, because humans could not survive alone, because each one had a limited skill set. We as a race needed a combination of these skills to get by. We needed each other. With the advent of civilization came progress, use of technology, creation by some and usage by a larger number of people, with that came security and safety in the confines of a culture. Now in a group, hidden amongst the doers, a lot more people without any skills could survive, unchecked. Infact those were the ones who would survive the longest. They could grow in huge numbers thus increasing the count of stupidity manifolds. But then they had to do something, otherwise people would have identified such freeloaders, and thrown them out. Thus came into being, politics, religions and economics. With increase in the size of each generation, came the chaos.

Where once survival meant saving ourselves from predator and nature’s fury, with our original game changer’s brought along progress, survival meant one had to had the skills to survive the most dangerous predator of all times, man himself. And the sheer count of descendants of the firmly safe and secure, lazy and stupid version of the us, roaming around freely, is what is making any and all skills redundant really fast.

Majority of us are the descendants of the one who hadn’t thrown a spear, hadn’t gone out hunting, hadn’t lighted a fire on his own, because he opted those game changing products to keep himself safe. And these descendants are the ones now hunting all over the world, in business suites, in religious places, in political arenas, studying what others have taught them, speaking what other spoke before them. These are the ones driving complex machines on the roads, even the roads too have now been planned by similar counterparts.

The game changers, the inventors, the scientists and everyone contributing towards progress did bring us forward by leaps and bounds. Without them we would all still be sitting in some cave carving stone tools and painting on walls. But that also made sure that we would always have a community of people thriving within us, who could be stupid and survive and later put all humanity at risk, just by being alive.

I see a lot of people around who would have been better off extinct, but then its still illegal to murder someone. Stupidity can thrive like the worst viral epidemic. Despite the fact that we have so much more to be afraid of, so many more things we could die by, exploding phones, road accidents, nuclear warfare, airplane crashes, and yet we are still here does go around to show, stupidity can survive humans. If you do think about it, stupid isn’t it?