Come aboard, If your destination is oblivion

 ‘Come aboard, if your destination is oblivion - it should be our next stop.’

That's a fine sentence from the book Life of Pi by Yann Martel.  This is how Pi Patel invites Orange Juice, the orangutan to his boat.

  

  I thought hard about this - Why did I like this line so much? As usual I have come up with a theory - as always a bizarre one, something even the hyena in Life of Pi would find hard to digest.

  First of all, it has a lot to do with my mood, for I didn't notice such a beautiful sentence when I read Life of Pi for the first time. And for that reason no one else can derive as much happiness as I did on reading that sentence, never. May be there is someone out there who can extract much more happiness out of that sentence than me, but not the exact amount of happiness if happiness could be measured with two decimal places.

  Don’t go away; the bizarre part of theory is not yet over, because the sentence works at another level- with word association and context of the story. For the context, the situation is bleak with Pi losing hope over being lost in the Pacific Ocean. He has a tiger, a heinous hyena and a crippled Zebra for company. He has almost lost all his hope, that' when Orange juice, the orangutan floats up on a pile of banana.

  Do you see the connection between oblivion, horizon and hope? You wouldn't, because I made that up.Horizon rhymes with oblivion, and it also rhymes with hope.

  To Yann Martel's credit, he has used one word to evoke three different images; hope, horizon and mental blankness. Was it his true intention? Or a piece of genius, we will never know, nevertheless he chose the perfect word. For Pi, the statement is an absolute truth; there is no hope of a horizon, only blankness and fear of being forgotten by the world. 

The result is a sublime multi-layered sentence, the context of the story makes it all the more better.

 ‘Come aboard, if your destination is oblivion - it should be our next stop.’

 Sounds weird and unbelievable?  Try giving me a better story, I will gladly accept. After all we believe in miracles not because it is true, but because that is the better story. At desperate times, even despair is romanticized. Aren't we always a foot away from imaginary despairs?

  

What happened to your new year resolution?

In an earlier post, I had proposed to write more about why we fail to follow up on our New year resolutions.

  There are three kinds of people when it comes to resolutions: The first kind who still believe in resolutions, the second kind who stopped believing in resolutions because it didn't work out for them, and the third lucky group who probably wouldn't read this blog - those disciplined kind with enough self-control to achieve their resolutions. I’m definitely not in the third group.

 Now what has self-control got to do with resolutions?

  When resolutions are made, they are often in different realms, like doing more exercise and following a new diet plan. You might think there is a connection between exercise and a diet plan. Yes there is, but a Big No when it comes to resolutions. Often two or more resolutions are packaged as if it is a combo meal at McDonalds.

  You say, ‘A veg burger please’

  The vendor says, ‘ Do you want Pepsi?’

  You reply, ‘Ya, a Pepsi too.’

  ‘Sir, shall I make it into a combo? ’

  Without thinking much, you say, ‘Okay, Combo then.’

There you go, you went there to take a Burger, and finally ended up raking a lot more calories.  That’s how resolutions are made, one sticking on to the other. You are better served if you had struck to just the Veg Burger, so is with resolution, it is better to stick with just one resolution at a time.

What happens when you have more than one objective?

  Let’s say you start your day with some exercise early in the morning. As long as exercise is not a habit, you are exercising considerable amount of self-control to get up early in the morning and go for that jog. It is a different matter when it becomes second nature.

  Let’s say you have 100 self –control points in your kitty, and as you exercise, it comes down to 50 in one hour. Then you've to follow the diet, the diet is new for you, and there are some bland items on the menu. There you need some self–control again to stick to the tough new regimen. But you are not fresh, and your self-control score is on the wane. The waning self-control is a big bane, and that tempts you to drop your diet plan altogether. And that creates a ripple effect, your confidence on the other resolutions are affected, and eventually affect the attempts of developing the exercise routine. In the end, all the resolutions come down flat on your face, and you wait till the end of December to make your next plan.

So what’s the way to tackle this?

  The best way to handle the problem of waning self-control is to take just one resolution at a time. By having just one resolution or one objective at a time, you are allowing optimal consumption of self-control. When I say one objective, I mean one clear objective across different facets of your life, personal and professional.

  Even a tough deadline at office is going to impact the process of building a new habit, because even that takes up a lot of energy – in turn self-control and that means a lower self-control score. This is because, we have only a certain amount of self-control (Say 100) and the self-control score changes based on the activity you perform. (When does your self-control score reset to the highest value? That’s for another day.)

  Agreed we cannot control every external factor, especially when it is a professional commitment. Knowing that the external factors interrupt our good effort, it is only prudent to decide the execution time of your resolution; the new resolution need not be a New year resolution.

  For a successful resolution, we need to choose the most comfortable time, and assign the highest priority to it, no matter what. Awareness on how mundane chores impact your important habit-building activities will go a long way in overcoming the obstacles on the way.

 Go try this at home! Come back with success your story, Good luck.

Ordinary people; extraordinary obedience

  
  Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority" (Milgram, 1974) 

   Milgram's experiment attempts to explain why reasonable people do unreasonable, irrational things when instructed by an authority. Would we, ordinary people, doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on our part, kill thousands of people in a war situation? Especially if prodded by a charismatic leader? Milgram says yes, there is a good chance that we'll end up doing things beyond our imagination if ordered by someone in authority.  

  Although obedience to authority is a watered down answer to how leaders managed to persuade followers to perform heinous crimes without an iota of guilt, the hard question remains why would someone consider such leaders as an authority? How did such leaders manage to prevent an internal uprising among educated individuals?

 A German movie, The wave has some interesting answers to questions on authority and autocratic leadership. Although the leader is the initiator of a movement, the followers are the ones who keeps it alive, they are the ones who make the thought of a leader into a full fledged movement. 

  Just like the greed of the leader, the followers become addicted to the movement, they believe that the movement is bigger than them, and they begin to identify themselves as a part of an elite group focused on a unique goal. In the process, they lose their own identity - they are thinking for the group - they are more worried about the so-called greater good than themselves.  

   In fact, we don't have to travel back to the past. There is no dearth of charismatic leaders’ closer home, occupying the front pages of national newspapers and primetime hours of the TRP hungry TV channels. How did they achieve such strong followers even while their leadership style is far from the ideals of democracy? 

  Will we do it again if there is another audacious authority? You mock me; you think such audacious authorities are a thing of the past. Wait for a moment, think about this. 

  History is full of repetitions, full of charismatic leaders, who thought they were entitled to everything, who thought greed was natural, but none of them lived forever, they fell for their own charm. They may be long dead but their crimes still lives in the pages of history books; some printed, some never printed. Some proven, some unproven. 

   The obedience to authority, unswerving obedience to authority has stood the test of time, and nothing has happened in the recent past to indicate a different future. 

The Pendulum clock - Part 2/2

 Read Part 1 here.     

    It soothes me to believe that a neighbour wakes up hearing the twelve second sweet drum roll at somewhere after midnight - remember our antique clock has no sense of time and purpose, although it did not forget its purpose on purpose -  it saddens me that its chimes are as useless as an index-less encyclopedia.

     On a tangential note, my mom says that as the dawn approach, at about six in the morning, the chimes are so unbearable that even the dumb donkey of the nearby dhobi runs around flapping its long ears - it doesn't bother me at all, I mean the ding-dong of clock, not the donkey. 

    That's when my dad's dear friend told us the secret of the antique clock. Dramatically, as if in a Shakespeare play, he said,  
  
  " It's far from a mere machine, and so close to a living being, 
    It seeks attention, like the children at dawn bed-peeing, 
    A stopped clock is correct twice a day,
    An unwound clock is never correct a day."

   Ha!...The antique clock needs rewinding - an act of kindness and attention to keep up the top performance. I can only exclaim at the coincidence - it is just what we want in our life. Unwind and reflect - a small act every day to keep us on our toe, and at our peak performance level. 

  After all, rewinding is the act of telling yourself the story of the person you want to be, and if you can't remind yourself of that ideal person every day, no one else will do it for you. And you will soon forget the person you wanted to be - just like the purposeless antique pendulum clock.

   You see, all the adults are like antique pendulum clocks, we need to unwind, rewind and let go of things at times, although it is often more cumbersome and tiresome than allowing chance to take its course. Why take a chance? 

The Pendulum clock - Part 1/2

  We have a new member at our house, an antique Pendulum clock-- if you can bracket fifty years under the term 'antique'. The clock is sturdy, and the clock led me to the history of pendulum clocks, and on how even moving a pendulum clock to a higher floor is bound to influence its accuracy. 

  Gifted by a very dear friend of my father, it is absolutely useless in terms of meeting the purpose of a clock, keeping accurate time; it goes slow by five minutes every eight and half hour. The lag-factor is accurate; calculated after intricate notes and calculation during the long sleepless hours I spent in my bed in the last two flu-struck days.

    Despite its flaws and the lack of purpose like most of us, what it does best is that it keeps chiming regularly, very  much like us. We do the same thing over and over without knowing why we are doing it or what we are supposed to  accomplish from whatever we are doing without knowing why we are doing it.

 There is a whole lot of difference between gaining three years of experience and having three years of one year experience - the latter is the type of experience we gain when we do the thing that we did in the first year for three years, and often is the type of experience most of us manage to gain - Just like the purposeless pendulum that chimes without proper rhythm.
  
 But the dear friend of my father came home to tell us the secret - The secret of the pendulum clock.

 --To be continued

A bit of history : If someone sells you a four hundred year old pendulum clock, beware, he surely thinks you are a fool. There is no four hundred year old pendulum clock; the oldest one would only be around 350 years old.