Anatomy of Love

We often talk about having a ‘crush’ on a certain girl or a certain guy depending on our sexuality (I am also including the LGBT community in my discourse). But do we actually know as to what we are deliberating upon or more specifically do we actually mean what we verbally express. Now, depending on the intensity of the ‘crush’, it might metamorphose to the next logical step which in popular parlance is called ‘love’. I have tried albeit in vein to go deep down into this whole phenomenon and ascertain the exact anatomy of this process. At one point in time in my life, I used to think that ‘love’ is actually a sugar-coated term for sexual attraction, but then how would you go about defining the phenomenon when it goes beyond the normal sexual relationship as in the cases of our parents. The ironical contradictions start right from here. But would this relationship happen between two heterosexual guys or two heterosexual girls? The answer is a forgone conclusion which is a ‘no’. Then what is it which goes about bonding two individuals? Seriously, I am pretty sure that even the best psychologists would not be able to come up with one single convincing answer. A lot of psychoanalysts have tried to unravel the mystery behind this process. In the course, umpteen theories have cropped up but the sum and substance of the phenomenon has remained an elusive entity. What exactly happens when an individual gets attracted to another individual? Biologists would say that certain hormones work in tandem to create this feeling. But is it really that simple or does it go beyond what is obvious and on the face? In fact, why is it that only one individual from a crowd attracts another individual? I mean, these are certain questions whose answers are not as simple as we deem them to be. If we are to analyze this process in detail, then we have to take some specific examples.

Rahul (Name changed) saw Anita (Name changed) in a wedding ceremony. Rahul for some reason continued to stare at Anita although he had no idea as to who this girl was. After some time, he went ahead and got introduced with the girl and within no time became good friends. The ending of the story is not important. The most significant part of the story is that Rahul got attracted to only Anita amongst a bevy of girls present in the party. So, biologists, how would you guys explain as to what was so special about Anita? If we were to follow the case in its totality, we would be able to appreciate that Rahul continued thinking about Anita even after he was done with the wedding party and it was not all about sex although it might have been a part of his thinking which is nothing but natural.

If we dissect literature from across the world, it can be seen that 'love' has been romanticized and immortalized to the extent that it is viewed as a special creation of nature. According to my very own ignorant interpretation, it has been done to erase the physical aspects of the process and give it a divine form. May be it is inherent in men to castigate all physical processes as vulgar and not worthy to talk about although we do find mentions of physical beauties in ancient Indian literature which have been brandished as erotic scriptures by the western pundits. I vehemently oppose this partial approach to 'love' as it is intrinsically related to physical satisfaction. And there lies the beauty of 'love'. A person can offer his/her body to another individual only when he/she is comfortable with the other individual and that happens only when he/she trusts and thus loves the other individual. Although, skeptics might argue that in the present age of instant gratification, these words are all but idealistic but even he deep down his heart knows this to be true.

A grave saga of injustice

Today is the 63rd Independence Day of India. On this day, exactly 62 years ago, India snatched independence from the imperialist and fascist British regime. The British hegemony came to an end with Jawaharlal Nehru taking over the helms as the first Prime Minister of liberated India. After ruling the Indian sub-continent for over 200 years, the English rulers left India amidst tremendous confusion. The rest as they say is history with India going from strength to strength over the next 62 years. Today, India is an economic superpower with the GDP growth rate next only to China, another oriental power hub in the making. Thus Independence Day is a great event to celebrate for most of the Indians and they do that with much fanfare and jubilation.

But certain uncomfortable questions do raise their ugly heads in the midst of this frenzied merriment. In order to appreciate the root of these questions, let us go back in history and analyze the price that India and a section of the Indian diaspora had to pay to gain this so-called Independence. India was divided into two parts, the predominantly Hindu India and the declared Muslim Pakistan. East Bengal which was all this while an integral part of India and a region which produced the maximum number of martyrs who laid down their lives at the altar of Indian Freedom Movement, became a part of Pakistan and came to be known as East Pakistan. Consequently, a large number of Hindus were evicted like animals. In the process, women were raped, men were killed, all the properties snatched from these helpless families and these families were driven like wild hogs from their own homeland. Not knowing what to do, some of these families caught the jam-packed trains and landed in Sealdah station in Kolkata which became their home for a fairly long time only to eventually land up in refugee colonies and be looked down upon by the local population. A large section of these evicted families actually gave in to the promises of land and livelihood given by the just sworn in Indian government and boarded the ships to Andaman and Nicobar Islands, then a dreaded place because of snakes and poisonous insects only to see that even the basic life supporting systems were not installed there. Fifty percent of these people died due to a myriad number of reasons ranging from snake bites to drinking poisonous water because of the paucity of the universal medium. The ones who were lucky or unlucky enough to survive lived the lives of primitive human beings. Even today, one of the major languages of Andaman and Nicobar Islands is Bengali and two of the MPs elected from that region had been from that community. I am sure; everyone has heard the name of both Monoranjan Bhakta and Bishnupada Roy.

Anyway, let us go back to the original discussion. Some of the evicted families, residing particularly in the Northern block of Sylhet (Srihatta) and Kumilla in East Pakistan crossed over to Assam and Tripura for getting refuge. Thus, a significant demographic invasion took place and the population structure of both Assam and Tripura went for a toss. In fact, Tripura became a Bengali dominated state and Bengali was inducted as the co-state language along with the indigenous Kokborok. In Assam, the Barak Valley in the southern part of the state became a Bengali hub because of the rampaging refugees. Obviously, the indigenous Assamese populace felt threatened by the burgeoning number of Bengalis and thus started the Assam movement in the mid-seventies which saw the cold-blooded murder of many Bengalis throughout the state. Even people who came in before 1971 were branded as foreigners and killed. Thus a group of people who shed the maximum amount of blood for the Freedom Movement of the country became the obvious victims of Independence. Today, being a member of that community, I seriously question Indian Independence and its aftermath. We are living sans identity. Neither the people from West Bengal consider us as their brethren because we are from East Bengal, nor the people of Assam and Tripura take us as their own because they see us as intruders. Just because of some treaties which were signed in New Delhi by the political bigwigs back then, we lost our land, identity and dignity for ever. Even after this, if I celebrate Independence Day, I would be a traitor to my community. For me and lot of us from our community, it is a black day.

Views from the sidelines

We often talk about a state of mind called conservatism and by our very own admissions despise the crux of it on the pretext of it being anti-progressive. But have we ever tried to analyze as to what this concept stands for and why do we think that we are not conservative. The answer lies somewhere deep down inside. Actually, if we go further down, we shall all find that we all are conservative in our very own ways and domains.

Before theoretically going down to the roots of the issue, let us try and understand as to what conservatism accounts for. This is actually a condition of the inner self where changes are viewed with doubt and disorientation and thus resisted with some force. It is a state of mental inertia where a steady state is preferred over changing situations. In fact, we all have it in ourselves to question any change that might be inflicted on even the most trivial part of our life. Thus if we don’t find the comb on the table that we usually brush our hair with, we try to find it and come back to the normal and usual condition. In fact, the eternal sense of insecurity inherent in us masterminds the process to a large extent.

Now if we extend the concept to our social practices, we can actually draw a comparison between our personal idiosyncratic conservatism and the social conservatism which is largely expressed in terms of group behaviour. Thus when we are talking about the existence of Casteism as a sign of extreme conservatism, we somehow seem to be vindicating our very own conservative attitudes. Now for the sake of argument, people might say that our personal sense of conservatism is not holding the society back. The standard answer that might crop up from this argument is that if we are so reluctant to change our simple behaviours, then how can we expect the society to change. In fact, brand loyalty is just another form of classy conservatism. When someone is so rigidly sticking to his personal choices, then how can he expect the society to change so drastically so as to abandon superstitions which have long been practiced.

No, I am not defending the resistance to change; I am just trying to point out that change is not external. We all have to realize that the society is a conglomerate of individuals like you and me and not an external entity which is as eternal as Mount Vesuvius. If we, as individuals, can bring in subtle variations in the way we live and let live, there is no reason as to why the society as a whole would not shred its known avatar and be more inclusive in its approach. In fact, if we analyze the major revolutions of the world which brought in major reformations, we would be able to appreciate the fact that individuals can work wonders and can transform their respective societies.

Confessions from an Atheist

Atheism – Is it a concept or just a belief system? I have been relentlessly striving to decipher the answer to this enigmatic query for a fairly long time. But alas, the answer has eluded me just as light from a torch-light eludes the shaky grip of a little child when he attempts to catch hold of the beam. Before we go and try to analyze this fundamental question, let us first try and comprehend the fine line of difference between a concept and a belief system. If I were to put the distinction in lay man’s language as per my very own lay understanding, a concept is actually a set theory or assumption put forward by an individual or a group of individuals and accepted by another individual or a group of individuals whereas a belief system is actually the creation of an individual without any formal recognition. This mental creation can actually be customized according to the physical and emotional needs of that individual without necessarily intruding on the belief system of another individual.

Unfortunately, although atheism has been talked about and debated like hot cakes since time immemorial, very few people have actually come forward to standardize this phenomenon. Thus the question has sustained itself. Now let us look at a different dimension altogether. Let us try to define atheism as a separate entity. If we go according to popular myths, atheism is a state of mind where an individual denies the involvement of a creator of this universe and thus completely disowns god and its progenies in all its manifestations. Unlike agnosticism, it does talk about divine interventions albeit in the negative connotation where it does so to disprove the theory it is deliberating upon. Thus according to the earlier definition, it can be treated as a concept as all the hitherto known atheists have subscribed to this basic inference. But, the problem arises after that. Different atheists have approached atheism differently as regards following its tenets in their life is concerned. For example, there are atheists who go about propagating their ideologies to everyone they know and try and inflict their opinions on the people they know propagating that only their theories hold credence and the rest are all crafted works of fantasy. Then, there are atheists who believe in keeping it to themselves and democratization of the individual thought process. They don’t believe in spreading and enforcing their opinions on others. Thus, this inquiry would persist till there are theists and atheists.

As an atheist (although I don’t quite agree with this categorization) myself, I have seen that although atheists deem them to be special creations of nature believing in the ‘true ways of functioning’ of mother nature, they are as rigid as their theist counterparts are. They get so obsessed and possessive about their ‘extremely logical and scientific way of thinking’ that they often forget that everyone has the right to express their opinions. As a teenager, I also fell into this trap. I used to ridicule and denigrate people who believed in god and thus found myself completely alienated and negatively interpreted among most of the people I knew. Now, as a matured person, I dread the atheists as much as the theists for their completely stereotyped notion about everything around them.

With passing time and increasing awareness, I have realized that there are many questions to which we would never be able to throw light and consequently people have taken to God to find a universally acceptable answer. We as atheists have never tried to address these basic issues and branded theists as emotional fools. As a human being, I have given up. As long as we cannot explain this universe in its totality and describe all its variations with subtle craft, we cannot expect people to follow science because even science has failed at various levels. As a student of physics, I find it difficult to admit but yes, even physics has given up. In fact, physics can only predict probability and not certainty. This is obviously a retrenchment in its earlier nineteenth century stand but then again physicists don’t know a way out of it. Thus, I have stopped making seemingly very intellectual comments about the absence of god as I know that even if the person whom I am talking to might not be knowing the failures of physics but I, as a student of science, can’t ignore my insecurities about it.

Paradigm Shift - Continued

Deliberating on the concept of  the ‘Frame of Reference’ according to the ‘General Theory of Relativity’ it is indeed an irony to analyze how different individuals perceive this world in different ways. At one point of time, I used to get tremendously charged up when people used to express contradictory opinions even on trivial issues like the value of time in life. Being an ardent believer of freedom and liberty in all walks of life and as championed by the theory of democratic communism, I used to animatedly oppose the infliction of any enforced opinion. Consequently, I used to hit out at any individual who worked according to the whims of others. It was the time, when I was getting highly inspired by the theory of free thinking and liberation of the mind. But with maturity, I have realized that one really cannot judge others by staying in his/her own domain. In order to appreciate the other person’s opinions, it is absolutely necessary to put on the other person's shoes and look through his/her glasses.

Also I have comprehended that there is nothing called positive or negative. It all depends on which side of the benchmark a person is standing, based on which he/she makes his inference. We need to appreciate the fact that, we cannot jump into value judgments all the time; rather we need to take a fuller approach to life which is based on a inclusive perspective. But, unfortunately, we always try and prove ourselves right on the face of others and fight to prove our superiority. The standard excuse that we have for doing this is the presence or absence of logic forgetting the fact that life cannot be rationalized and hence cannot be explained with the help of logic. Life in itself exists and is breathtakingly beautiful because of its enormous diversity and the tremendous irrationality it exhibits in its functioning. But then again, my opinion might be contradicted by someone who might be reading this blog and this is how life sustains. I believe, I have penned down my thoughts and life in a reasonable way for others to understand. This blog is not supposed to offend anyone but to make people realize the beauty of diversity.

Finished

Paradigm Shift

Nostalgia is something that can engulf even the strongest willed person and consequently I can't be expected to be an exception either. There are certain compartments in every person’s coffer of memories which he/she protects from all kinds of infringements and interference. It is indeed a matter of profound irony as to how past draws us in its seemingly cozy arm lock. To be precise, this phenomenon can't be actually branded. It is an ethereal experience which is far beyond the worldly confines of noble and ignoble. I remember that my maternal grandfather categorically tried to sum it up for me ages ago when as an individual I hardly had the capacity to visualize life with its overtly beautiful yet horrific intricacies. But now I realize that the above might be one of the reasons as to why I am a bit more matured in worldly parlance then what my age prescribes.

Anyway that is not what I want to convey here. Born at a time, when slowly but surely, the X-generation culture was wallowing its way to the fore, I had the fortune to have a completely different upbringing. I  specifically remember that during my childhood days,  my maternal grandfather always used to lay more emphasis in bringing about a revolution in the way we think rather than aping the western culture without comprehending its widespread repercussions. He believed in intrinsic changes by virtue of modernizing our thought process and not by randomly overturning our hitherto accepted ways of life. I also remember considering him as my only friend, philosopher and guide. I used to call him Dadun. It is a stark reality of life that our mind gets conditioned to a certain school of thought and thus we interpret everything around us according to that belief system. But Dadun always used to advice me on not closing my mind and be receptive to everything which seemed beneficial and good. Being a victim of partition, he was a hardcore follower of communist ideologies. But he never coaxed me to join the bandwagon. Rather he believed in Socrates’ ideology of shaping our opinions on the basis of independent reasoning and not on the basis of deep influences exerted by someone else whom we adored and respected. But with the gradual passage of time and the accompanying gaining of maturity, I realized that even without my knowledge, I had started believing in communism myself and had actually become a typical communist not believing in anything that is not backed by concrete scientific evidences.

Here we need to distinguish between communists who become so for the heck of it and communists who become so because of ideological sidings. I can confidingly suggest that I belonged to the second category. With the works of Bengali literary stalwarts like Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay (of Devdas and Parineeta fame), Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore and Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay (of Vande Mataram fame) and later Samaresh Basu and Sunil Gangopadhyay inspiring me to the hilt, I got inspired by the 'Reformation Theory'. But the person who inspired all these ideals in me passed away in 1999 when I was in Class VIII. I still remember that dark day. Not delving deep into what happened that day, let me get back to what I was talking about.

With ideologies and a vision of a just society dominating my self identity, I was always treading on a different dimension altogether. In fact, I wanted to take up science in my Plus 2 despite being the best in English in my class not for the lure of getting into the more lucrative professional courses and be a part of the popular culture. The decision was largely inspired by a longing for a deeper insight into the intricacies of our material world. I remember, after reading the Tagore classic Chaturanga, I became so upbeat about the non-existence of God and my atheistic concept that I was virtually searching for people to convince them that God is a mythical concept and the religions are creations of men to actually sustain the deep divide amongst societies. I used to proclaim with pride that I believe in the religion of humanity and my god is self-conscience. But after going through Einstein’s ‘General theory of Relativity’ in my Physics (Honours) classes, I got a severe shock. I actually linked it to our everyday life and understood that the perspective changes the moment the ‘Frame of Reference’ is changed. So, nothing is absolute and everyone is right in their own specific ways.

To be Continued...