Why do I know you?

Priyanka Bhattacharjee, my colleague and friend in geometric software posed a simple question on her yahoo messenger(as her status message) yesterday: Why do I know you?

I found the question interesting. And it triggerred a chain of thoughts. But what I achieved after racking my brain is utter frustration. I could do nothing but to flounder aimlessly in the realm of metaphysics in search for a consoling answer. I attempted in vain to decode the key point of the question as I often do. Many times the answer lies in the question itself. All you have to do is to find out the word which you consider important or emphasized. Or you need to hit upon the premiss or assumption behind any argument or even question. But none of my formula worked. After sometime I relented.

But she aroused me from my mental lethargy by asking this question directly to me. I tried to evade the question and took her for a ride in an absolutely unrelated domain. I praised her for conceiving this great question which was an undeniable testimony of the originality of her thinking and which was so concrate an evidence of her having inherited the Bengali tradition of mysticism etc.

I said then that whys cannot be answered. For instance all us are familiar about the law of gravitation. We are able to calculate the force with which the bodies(independent of their sex!) attract each other. But we do not know why does it happen. Science explains the hows but feels hopelessly helpless when we expect it to unravel the ultimate reasons for anything.

Then I asked her whether she was familiar with Brownian motion. I posited that we are like those little molecules which move randomly in a space and our interaction with one another is like their collision with other molecules which are also moving randomly. Some collisions are very light, like a gentle touch or brush which corresponds to our casual meetings with countless people in our day to day affairs. They scarcely leave anything significant mark in our life. But there are a few people who change the whole course of our life by their forceful impact. Like a head-on collision. For sometime, life seems to be at a standstill! The speed as well as the direction of life changes. Our world-view alters. We change as a person and we notice change around us in the world also!

This often happens when we fall in love!! Life suddenly seems to be beautiful, more pleasant than ever. The songs become more, much more meaningful and everything appears to be dancing with joy at the tunes of life: the leaves of the trees, the clothes hanging on the strings and even the stones at the roads when you kick them with an abstract affection you've never felt before. The flowers shower more fragrance and the moon seems to radiate more milk in the night. You marvel at the various patterns the clouds make in the sky and you wonder at the range of colours the sunsets offer in those evenings. Everything around seems beautiful and the things which are not beautiful never seem to be around! The pressure of pleasure brings literature in life. You remember poetry to recite before her. You even try to write for her but only to rub or throw that away because it hardly expresses your feelings for her. You do everything keeping her in mind and heart. You think everything keeping her in mind and heart. You even dream keeping her in mind and heart. No matter what mirror says, she becomes the most lovely creation of nature. Your eyes see her even while they are closed(believe me it happens!). And her voice defines music for you. You enjoy talking all the banalities and inanities of life at the cost of your sleep. You even read Linda Goodman's love signs for God's sake! You start planning a life with her ceaseless companionship. In a nutshell, you go bananas. :)

But beauty is transitory and it is vulnerable too. Then if anything in life happens which means 'sorry for interruption' in your unrestrained high-amplitude high-frequency romance then you get a shock of your lifetime. And it invariably happens. The son-of-a-bitch Murphy's law is not utterly nonsense it seems! When it happens you suddenly become aware of your hitherto unknown capacity to experience pain. In fact you realize what the word pain means! The gloom of the lonely evenings eclipses the last streak of your happiness. And your own memory creates the phantoms which steal the rest of your life. In the sleepless nights you recall her promises, her pledge of eternal intimacy but then you realize that there exists no court in this world where you could go for justice and appeal against this unilateral decision which affects your life so unthinkably much!! Your mind, if at all it recovers, questions the veracity of her vows but your heart, in whatever number of pieces it might be, refuses to see anything but the look of her glistening eyes in those tender moments and listens to nothing but itself. You imagine thousand possible reasons to absolve her of any perfidy and any guilt(koi majboori rahi hogi, yoonhi koi bewafa nahi hota...). You even hope that she would come back to you some fine day with the same disarming smile as if nothing had happened. You walk to her street in the veil of darkness and stop to look at her house. You turn and look with infinite emotions at the place where you once sat and talked about some most trivial topic in utmost details and with boundless interest. Your eyes continue to see her.. anywhere and everywhere and sooner than later you are declared to be a victim of schizophrenia. You imagine countless circumstances which would have bred better endings or no endings at all. You even remember the things which had never happened. Your plans cry for their future. And many untold stories cry for their expression. But you find youself alone, and utterly lonely. The burden of love and its invisible products seems unbearable. Hardly anything attracts your attention let alone interest. Words like success and achievement become foreign and hollow. The life doesnt seem to be so worth living. The world seems to be anything but of concern. And God seems to be far, vary far.

This was just to present before you the meaning of head-on collision. The effect is actually much more profound but to understand that you'll have to feel it yourself or you need a Somerset Maugham(Of Human Bondage) or a Gabriel Garcia Marquez(Love in the time of cholera).

My God!! This time I royally deviated.

But not for long. While taking my regular post-dinner walk this question again tried to haunt me when found me alone at night. I couldnt resist much. But... just a minute... hey!! my formula worked!! Yes it did. The underlying assumption implicit in this question, or for that matter in any question starting from why is the essential purposefulness of the world. Why means what for? There has to be a motive for everything, for our existence, for the existence of the tree in your backyard and the cat in your neighbour's house, for the existence of the crators on the moon, for any event that occurs.. like the marks you obtained in the history paper in the 2nd term exam when you were in class 8th. I admit everything, however minute, can be of paramount importance for you and me if it influences our life in a subtlest manner. Perhaps that's why we feel obliged to attribute reason to anything around us. We even say that the cow exists to give us milk. But think! Aint we being unduly and unreasonably egocentric? The species like us can be and will be obliterated from the face of earth in no time! We tend to ascribe meaning to everything, big or small. But we shouldnot forget that we do it just to make our life easier and simpler. We tend to categorize, theorize or put things into perspective because of our inherent inability to deal with chaos and disorder. But the truth is that the world is not made for our amusement. And it is not obliged to submit to our megalomaniacal sense of ego and its nonsensical products. And very often we tend to distort the fact to put in into one of the pre-defined class. Robert Pirsig beautifully illustrates this point by giving us the example of Platypus, a mammal which lays eggs. Its discovery had shook the foundation of the scientific world. When the esteemed scientists found it not fitting into the definition of either mammals or the egg-laying animals then they refused to recognize its existence rather than revising their theories!! The theories we make rule our minds after their creation. The 'causal and effect' theory is no exception. But the causal effect is in fact what we observe and interpret by employing inductive reasoning. But there is nothing logical in it. Empirical science is never logical. It is based upon experimentation and observation and assumes that nature is not erratic. But we can never prove with certainty that the nature would continue behaving in the similar fashion tommorow or even 1 hr later. And we can never prove that change in nature is not the nature of nature. But we forget the limitations of inductive reasoning and confuse its derivatives with something absolutely true. So, in a nutshell, all our science is nothing but stories. Pure myth, nothing else. Its only virtue, that too debatable, is technology which keeps us busy(and that's all!!) in the disguise of something which has been conceived to free Man from misery and pain. Bullshit!!

After all our all systems of morality and hence laws are based on certain premises. We presume an order in the system. We believe in a reason which is nothing but blind superstition. But its existence is, like the existence of God, is necessary for those who run the world. It is to fecilitate them, the priests, the kings, and now the leaders and managers. But all of them are either morons or bastards. This explains why(see how deeply this word has been injected in our blood, we can hardly convey our thoughts without it!) we need this word 'why'. To perpetuate the myth of reason.

The more mature behaviour would be, though certainly more challenging, to accept the things as they are. Lets free ourselves from the old patterns.

ciao