Salt Kidney presents Untangled

The following incidents are based on real life incidents but I am hoping that the people involved will never read this. It is exaggerated to such ridiculous extent that I am sure the people involved will never forgive me. 

He loved his hair and let it grow. It grew and grew and grew for three years. It enhanced his already enhanced personality. He had become a dude of a saint of the place. He walked around the place with the hair flowing around his head. At times, he tied it into a bunch and let it stand proud like a Samurai. Many women looked at it with envy. As for men, they gave a resigned look skywards and complained "Couldn't you have let me retain 1% of what he has? Unfair!". But his hair grew impervious of the jealousies that surrounded it.

One morning, he woke up with a heavy head. It was a busy day and he was worried that a sinus of his was on the minus side of health. He walked groggily towards the wash basin. He took out his brush and applied a healthy dose of toothpaste on it. He shook his head vigorously to drive away the heaviness but it did not abate. It seemed to him that his sinuses had jumped out of inside his head and went right back in with a thud. He looked up at the mirror with an expression of pain in his face. Slowly the expression of pain was replaced with horror. He looked at the reflection of something that looked like a bird's nest at the top of his head. His left hand moved towards his head slowly and he touched the nest like object gently. If there were eggs or chicks in the nest, he did not want to hurt them. He was relieved for a moment to find there were none on his head. But the horrified expression returned, almost instantly. He realized that the nest like object on top of his head was his tangled up hair. He sat down on the floor and held his head in his hands.

That morning he spent two hours trying to get to the root of the tangled mess atop his head. He realized it was pointless to split hairs further. He adjusted his hair and wore saffron turban around it. He looked at himself in the mirror and a faint smile appeared on his face. If he had a necklace made out of rudraksh, he can pass of as an ascetic. His colleagues were shocked to his appearance. While some said "You can't walk around like this" others advised "Just remove that mess man" and some simply gave a perplexed "What is this!". He walked around unfazed by the comments. But by the end of the day, the comments had reached that area of his brain that lay right underneath his tangled hair. He got many bottles of liquids related to hair and asked a few of his colleagues to help untangle his hair.

He sat under a tree with his eyes closed while his colleagues poured the various liquids into his nested hair and started pulling it apart. The expression on their faces reminded one of the carvings of Narasimha's face as he tore Hiranyakashipu apart. They spent the next hour and half in pour, tear and swear. At the end of the ninety minutes the liquid in the bottles were nearly spent as was the stamina of the tear-ers. The hairy crown on his head remained intact. He stood up and announced cheerfully "let us continue tomorrow." He did not wait to listen to his colleague's protests. From the audience came a flurry of comments made in bad taste "hair today gone tomorrow", "it was a hair raising experience", "we should probably rename him hairy puttar". Everyone dispersed instantly.

The next day, he came with his crown still in place. He greeted his hairy-army brightly. The self declared commander of the army had called in sick; apparently resting a ligament torn arm. That evening a few new recruits to the army started working on the breaking the hairy fort. The audience were not interested in watching the proceedings. They decided to go out for a tea.

They returned twenty minutes later. They found him sitting alone. His army was nowhere in sight. They walked over and asked him where the un-tanglers were. He answered "Oh, they are working from inside." "Inside where?" Two hands came out of his hair and said "we are here".

Wonder Woman

I have seen Wonder Woman in "Justice League". She was one of the many superheroes in that not interesting movie. I remember seeing snatches of Wonder Woman during channel surfing many years back. She got a movie for herself but I did not bother to see it. Recently, I read an article, which said that the movie had elements of chauvinism in it.

As I was surfing through a set of movies, I came across the movie Professor Marston and the Wonder Women. When I read its synopsis, I realized the background in which the comic on Wonder Woman was made. The life led by its creator and his family during the first part of 1900s amazed me. It cannot be done today and yet a set of people lived such lives in those chaste times. The movie was a wonderful watch. I got to know an incredible piece of history. 

Next stop: Wonder Woman, the movie.

American Gods

American Gods is one of the most, if not the most, imaginative book that I have read. It is violent with plenty curses and sexual situations. But it deftly deals with Gods and religions. It talks about the world that we live in. About the influence of the past, present and future in our lives. Among all the trash in the book exists a thoughtful core. While I was reading the book, I could not believe the twists and turns it took. It is a book that I will always look at it awe. 

In 2017, I heard that it has been made into a series and that it is available on Amazon Prime. I did not dare to watch it on my TV in my living room. I was not really interested in watching it on my mobile or laptop. This weekend, I was alone at home and though had truck loads of work to do, I was not interested in doing it. I wanted to be irresponsible and irresponsible I was. I watched the first season of American Gods, all 8 episodes in less than 24 hours. It was amazing. Beautifully made! As expected, it was extremely inappropriate with violence, sexual violence and cursed laced dialogues. It was worse than the series "Rome". But I loved it.

Some of lines from the series are amazing. I am not sure, if these are in the book too. I have no choice but to go back and read the book within the next few months. 

"What should I call you, if I were so inclined?"

"Its all about getting people to believe in you. Its not about case, its about faith. Well, take this plane for example. This 80 ton chub of metal, cushion and Bloody Mary mixes has no right to be soaring through the sky but along comes Newton explaining something about the airflow over the wing creating an uplift or some such nonsense. None of it makes any sense but you got 82 passengers back there who believe in it so fiercely that the plane continues its journey safely. Now, whats keeping us aloft? Faith or Newton?"

"Religion inspire in those who fear nothing the fear of the gods and using that fear requires a certain element of messing up."

"Faith should not leave the faithful dangling."

"Do you trust him?"

"I know who he is. I know who he was and I can depend on that."

"Machine made goods! You used to do everything by hand. Craft and not manufacturing. Now! This is craft."

"Neutral in the face of injustice is being on the side of the oppressor."

"Do you love God or are you in love with God?"

"In the Americas, anyone can be anything they insist upon - new name, new life. That's the place a body could be happy."

"They don't have a king in America"

"Not yet. Everyone needs a king."

"Forgot its Easter."

"Well its Sunday, 16 April. Seven days after the vernal equinox"

"I love Easter"

"Oh! Many do. Some for the rabbits; some for the resurrection; most think of food. They don't think of the truth of the day and why would they. Yeah, you could call this Easter or we could call it what it really is - a pagan ritual, the celebration of the beginning of spring dating back around 12000 years. People celebrate it without realizing are doing it in the name of Ostara."

"Theres no end to the cruelty of men threatened by strong women."

"Worship is a volume business. Whosoever has the most the followers wins the game."

"Life is long when you have a regret. A moment can last forever when you can see how it should have gone."

"We should start with a story."

"Jesus!"

"I am gonna tell you a story."

"Haven't got the time for a story. Just do your work."

"Let me tell a damned story."

"I got a good one. Once upon a time... See it sounds good already. You are hooked."

"Do not confuse confusion for anger"

"Angry gets things done."

"Believing is seeing. Gods are real if you believe in them."

"Same every year, Ostara. You do all the work and he gets all the prayers."

One of the Jesus' say "I am a belief and so I don't how to not believe."

"Death is usually the last enemy."

"What do you think Gods do? They do what they have alway done: they mess with us. They mess with all of us. Just don't take it personally."

"Its religious Darwinism. Adapt and survive."

"People create Gods when they wonder why things happen. Do you why things happen? Because Gods make them happen. You want to know to make good things happen? Be good to your God. You give a little, you get a little."

"Tell the believers and non-believers that we have taken the spring. They can have it back when they pray for it."

Varanasi notes: GVK

On day two of the gathering, I had 30 minutes prior to the small group discussion. I walked across the road, through the gate and down the path towards the bench overlooking the Ganga. The points mentioned by the speaker that morning started my thinking engine. I felt that the outcomes from the thinking process should not be lost. So I sat down on the bench and started writing thus after looking at the Ganga for a few moments.

As I sit down to write, the words by Rage against the machine come to my mind.

It has to start somewhere It has to start sometime

What better place than here, what better time than now?

K's point on decisions startled me; it was a revelation. I don't remember his words exactly but the gist of his words were that decision is not a good word as it implies the existence of confusion. It means the person has not made up his/her mind. It implies that choices exist in the person's mind and choices, in turn, implies that the confusion resides in a person's mind. This thought goes against many of my beliefs. Decision making, I thought, is a quality that many of us desire to possess. But I had never really thought the choices itself as a sign of confusion. How can I! Are we all not encouraged to have choices to choose from? Why are we encouraged thus? An incident that took place the previous evening provided me with a response (I use "a response" and not "the response" - even here I see the existence of choice). 

A mobile phone at home stopped working suddenly, which, in today's world, is equivalent to having a near death experience. I had to order a phone through Amazon, immediately. My own mobile phone was ignorant of the fact that it was residing in the constituency of the Prime Minister of India. It would not connect to the Internet. With great difficulty, I found an Internet friendly location by the Varuna river. I had made the decision on the model to be purchased right at the beginning but I did not buy it immediately. I desired to find something better. So I went through the reviews of a number of phones. Thirty minutes later, I realized there were no better phones to purchase and went with my initial choice. 

I brought in the confusion of choice and spend thirty minutes of my life is searching for something better sitting in a dark, lonely and mosquito ridden place to ensure that my choice was the best one. The desire for being correct; not just being correct but being so correct that no one can discover even an iota of incorrectness seems to bring in the choice. The choice leads to confusion that results in a decision. The process of decision making itself results in a feeling of satisfaction. One gets the feeling of authority - "I had a choice and I decided to pick the best". The process of decision making itself is frustrating as one has to go through a set of conflicting and contradicting views. Ultimately, if one investigates the decision making process one would realize that it is more based on heuristic than logic. But one never investigates and ends up living satisfied with the decision and the process of reaching it.

This is the way most of us live. But K is trying to make us not live the way we live. All his talks try to move us away from our everyday confusions, which, at most times, results in confrontations. He is trying to bring clarity into our lives. Unfortunately, clarity is something I struggle to find in many of his talks. I have to think and think and think to get a glimmer of understanding. Frankly, many of the words I write here are not the ones I wrote in my book by the Ganga but required many hours of thinking.

We walk along the path of life and reach an intersection. Our life comes to a stop as we stand at the intersection wondering which path to take. We ask the people passing by on their opinions of the path. They give their opinion and based on these opinions we take the decision and choose a path. Our own experience of the path might be different from what we expected but we cannot go back. We continue on our path to get to the next intersection and the process repeats. As per K, by the time we get to the intersection, the path to be taken should be obvious. We shouldn't be waiting at the intersection looking at the choices. If we ruminate on this thought, we hear K telling us that  our paths should be free of intersections. There should be no choices, no confusions and no decisions. But this does not mean that one should mindlessly go about living one's life. It means the opposite - one should be mindful of the occurrences in one's life. One should truly know where he/she is.  Am I there yet? Obviously not. Will I ever get there? I don't believe I will but it is worth trying.

In the video, K also mentioned that one should be selfless in one's actions and should have a silent mind. During the small group discussion the next day, one of the participants appreciated the statement. All of us shook our heads in agreement. He continued that it would be impossible for him to have silent mind but from that moment he will work on making his actions selfless. I did not agree with the latter part of his statement though. I believe being selfless is next to impossible. The happiness one feels when one sees the happiness that has resulted from one's actions removes the selfless nature from one's actions. Actually, I don't think the happiness itself is the problem. When this happiness becomes an obsession, one starts doing good only to feel this happiness. I believe that becomes a problem - the act of selflessness becomes an addiction. The problem lies in this addiction as addictions of any form only leads to selfishness.

One should, I believe, act in accordance to the need. If the situation demands selfless action, do so. But do not go in search of it. More than anything else, it is the intent of the action that matters. I had written in my notebook that our actions should  not cause harm to other but that's not right either. One cannot say "my actions should not cause harm to others". Every action we take causes harm in some form or other. The buildings we build, the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the air we breath, the vehicle we use; almost every action of ours result in harm to others. Not just that, it is done for oneself in some manner or other and hence the element of selflessness is lost. I believe finding answers to the following question would help us.
1. Why am I doing it (the intent)?
2. What is the harm it causes and can we live with the harm caused?
3. Is this action really necessary?

The answer to the questions depend on one's personality. The search for selflessness should not lead one to inaction.

K talked about fear in another video. At the beginning of the talk he announced that by the end of the talk the people in the auditorium will not have fear within them. He then spent many minutes defining fear.  He also spend an annoying amount of time to inform the audience to come along in the journey as partners and not as listeners. Ultimately, he spent three fourth of the speech in this manner. Finally, he got to the cause of fear. According to K, time and thought are the causes of fear. I did not understand why and how time and thought are the causes though. At the end of the video, I had no idea how to deal with these causes and ultimately with fear. The video was played after dinner. Some people dozed through it and others walked out. I did neither though I was tempted to do the latter.

At the end of the talk, K warned that one had to understand the concept as it is being said and it cannot be left for later. I felt disappointed and felt that K had not evolved the thought fully. It seemed he was not prepared to talk on that day but was forced to do it. This video was a taped in 1980. Another video from 1984, touches on the same topic, fear. In this case, I was able to understand K's explanations. He seemed to have developed the thought and was patient enough to explain it. In the talk, he maintained that thought and time were the main causes of fear. As per K, thinking about an event that occurred in the past and expecting it to happen in the future brought about fear. It could be a pleasant occurrence that you are worried will not happen again or an unpleasant event that you believe might happen again. Either way thinking brings in fear.

The other cause of fear is time. When K talks about time, he is referring to the time we take to act.  We think we have time to change and don't start the process immediately. K continues that the future is now - what you are now is what you will be in future and what you were in the past. This means that if you want to change, change now - you are what you will be. In this video, K talked about our lives being a bundle of memories. Through our lives we add memories but memories are static. K went on to say that motives in our lives arise from our memories and hence they are static. Life is all about movement and static objects clash with objects that move. Hence we should find a way to live without motives and learn till there is nothing to learn.

Public speaking is a tricky business. I believe the speaker should combine knowledge with passion, language and wit to capture the audience's attention. Wit is not a necessity though. The tricky part in the above mentioned list is knowledge. It is a necessity else the speech would end up being hollow. Its existence does not guarantee a good speech though. It has to wrapped well prior to its presentation. It cannot be presented raw; one should not give a sugarcane to someone attempting to sweeten his/her tea. On the other hand one should not wrap it so much that the audience get tired unwrapping it; one should not provide a sachet of sugar to a person looking to sweeten his/her tea in a safe. As an example for a statement wrapped in complexity look at the statement "this control empowers the service provider to address the issues faced by one or more end users, by providing multiple packages that have fine-grained control on the end user’s network needs". It can be simplified as... Nevermind! I am sure it can be simplified.  In between all these knowledgeable speakers lie a set of speakers who wrap words masquerading as knowledge in layers on complexity. Thus public speaking is not only a challenge for the speaker but also for the listener too.

One of the speakers at the gathering, spoke gravely with a stoic countenance. He talked on the topic of crisis in society (which demanded a stoic countenance from not just the speaker but from the listeners too). The crux of his talk was about our society being mired in the crises of greed and triviality. According to the speaker our society our society is involved in triviality in all spheres of life -  Be it politics, sports, entertainment or social interactions.  He also talked of our insatiable hunger for a lot more than our requirement, which has resulted in widespread disparity in our society. The point on the crisis of greed disturbed a few, including me, in the audience. One person talked about this discomfort in the ensuing small group discussion.

She was disturbed by some of the excesses taking place as a result of the gathering. She was referring to the number of people who traveled to attend the gathering. In many cases, the attendees used the luxury of an airplane or AC compartment in a train to travel. She continued that the attendees stayed in comfort and consumed sumptuous food during their stay. She felt uncomfortable with this indulgence. She wondered if we were being insensitive about the issue while we talked about it at length. Are we all not adding to the crisis of greed while we talked about it? The learned facilitator cleared his throat and responded. Unfortunately, his response was did not address the questions.

Group discussions are dependent on the facilitators. Some facilitators play the role perfectly by asking a few questions to enable the discussion and by taking part in the discussion as an equal member of the group. A few start off quietly like the previously mentioned facilitators but soon take complete control of the proceeding. By the end of the discussion, the facilitator has a response for almost all the questions and everyone ends up listening to the facilitator quietly. The third kind can be classified as the expert facilitator. He/She takes complete control of the discussion from the start. They have responses for every question and the group discussion ends up looking like an interview or press conference.

One of the group discussions, had a facilitator of the third kind. A senior and respected person at the gathering facilitated the discussion. He was an expert in many fields. So he started answering all the questions from the beginning of the discussions. Soon, every member of the group addressed the questions to him and not to each other. Though the facilitator's responses were informative and illuminating, the nature of the group discussion changed. One of the younger participants was offended by the manner in which the discussion was proceeding. He protested by reminding facilitator that this was a discussion and not an expert opinion session (of course, he was not this blunt). Now, it was the turn of the facilitator to be offended. He did not hide his vexation as he answered that the participants in such discussions are all at different levels of thinking. So the discussion will not be among equals and tends to be pointless.

The incident brought out interesting aspects of today's world (and maybe the world at all times).  Members of the older generation are eager to bestow their learning and knowledge to newer generation. They authoritatively try to educate the younger ones. But the younger ones are not interested in listening. They want to explore and discover for themselves. They too want to share their discoveries. From their point of view, the world has changed and the rules are different. They believe that the older generation does not understand the world enough to advise them. The many generations that occupy our world brush against each other uncomfortably.

Such tussles between generations are common all over the world. But it disturbs us to see people, whom we consider learned, involved in such tussles. Their learnedness is seen in their talks but one can perceive gaps in their actions. The dichotomy between words and actions exists all around and the participants of the gathering are not above this dichotomy. K's messages bring in the additional complexity of being understood in many way or sometimes not at all. I think it is a blasphemy to think that K's messages has the absolute truth embedded in it. As a matter of fact, I don't think absolute truth or for that matter, truth exists. Everyone lives by their own truths but the trouble starts when one starts believing that their truth as the absolute truth.

We spend a lifetime building our truth and then go away.

PS: The GVK in the title stands for Gathering at Varanasi on K

Bohemian Rhapsody

The trailers of Bohemian Rhapsody promised an interesting fare. The 12 year old expressed his desire to watch the movie. His parents looked at each other worried. Biopics on rock groups were usually not appropriate material for children. But the boy was a big fan of Queen and was vehement he would watch the movie. He eagerly watched all the teasers and trailers. He ensured his parents were also a part of these viewing. Though they loved what they saw, the boy's excitement worried them. Finally, the release date of the movie arrived. The father eagerly checked the movie's rating on IMDB. He let out a sigh of relief; the movie was rated PG 13. The boy had turned 13 by the time of the release, which meant he could watch the movie.

One Friday afternoon, they walked into the theatre humming "We will, we will rock you". The movie started and it was a slow but interesting affair. The father wished it was a tighter movie. There were a few mildly intimate scenes at the beginning. Nothing disturbing! Even the Bollywood movie were risqué compared to this. After about an hour or so later, the scene had Freddie playing on the piano when Paul walks by and plants a kiss on Freddie's lips. The 13 year old was shocked and could not contain a "What the" within him.

He walked out of the theater with three thoughts. Queen is the greatest band on the planet and Freddie Mercury the greatest rock star. Freddie Mercury was gay, which meant he kissed and was kissed by many men. Freddie Mercury died of AIDS and not drug overdose.