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14 February 2016

mechanical world

two things
firstly why is it so hard to get across to people? nobody hears anything, let alone listen.
even when they do hear, they guess what I am saying and assume something and not hear what I am actual saying at all.
and then there are mental block which blocks them from hearing something different from what they have thought.
most people are so closed to new ideas!
uff its hard to communicate at all. whole new post needs to be dedicated to blocked shell of brains to resistance to new ideas.


So coming to the idea itself
Is the society especially the western society becoming more mechanical?
are robot like attributes valued more than human like attributes?
like accuracy over heuristics, order over chaos, pursuit of perfection. organisation, punctuality, following of rules take priority over orthogonality and imagination and initiative.
At first look it seems like the correct thing to do. who in their right minds would prefer chaos to order? we have been taught this since childhood, we are all shit scared of chaos! Ok order is required, but the desire for order in now infringing on our creativity and initiative. The rules are made for lowest common denominator, everyone should be able to follow it. If you are smarter than the rule book, screw you.
What you dont believe, ever talked to a call centre script?  Is there really a person behind that phone? no there isnt. there is just a script.
I went to a first aid course. First things I was told was don't use common sense :D follow the book.
compare a burger maker in Mc donalds with a Chef.
each and every mc donalds burger is the same, it makes millions of dollars, average chef can not make that amount of money. a chef can make a burger and not a single employee of mc donalds can make a burger, they are just clogs in the machine.


also our expectation of things to be orderly is so strong because our left brain is dominant
Like ironing clothes, we want plain wrinkle free clothes, so what's wrong with Ironing clothes? nothing. but  how we value people who have ironed clothes more than people with unironed is wrong.
if you look at cultures, Western rich ironed their clothes, Indians and Africans didn't, so our cultures are naturally at a disadvantage in this kind of judging.
ok fine nothing wrong with ironing, I cannot accept wrinkled clothes. it a disgrace. that's fine.
What about wrinkled faces? The same values start to apply here and we value unwrinked faces more than wrinkled ones. we want to hide all imperfections, we want plastic surgery. Is it a disgrace to have a  wrinkled face just like wrinkled clothes? untidy?
we want perfection, we want straight lines and circles, we want to tame nature, we want to prune our plants into straight lines :D I find square shrubs most ridiculous ever!

Is this coming down to the same discussion as yin and yang, we are too yang. we want to control and mend rather than just be and go with the flow. Isnt that what I am saying in so many words?
we are unbalanced, we are not balancing our yang with yin, right wing and left wing both are yang, western culture is yang, it is not being balanced by the Eastern culture of acceptance and just being.

we want fast roads we want smooth roads we want barriers speed limits etc etc so that we can get fastest from A to B at a very predictable time. Why are we not asking ourselves why we are actually going about so fast like headless chickens? Is it really necessary to go like this at all?

as a consequence we are becoming piece meal than whole picture people
we are suppressing whole parts of our personalities which actually make us happy, which are meaningful
like people of ikeria
they have no concept of time or timlyness
we are becoming like the time saving people in momo :-)

disgust

Do animals feel disgust?
we are disgusted by body odour shit, for animals these things are extremely interesting :-) Do animals get disgusted by anything at all?
The purpose of disgust is to keep us away from and prevent us from doing some things, same as fear..
what is the between disgust and fear?
fear is usually about unknown things and it is overcome once we get to know.
fear is more overcomable by rational thought than disgust. disgust is just disgust?
in fear we avoid something for self preservation
in disgust we avoid something for revulsion
nature wouldnt want us to fear slimy things or cockroaches, is disgust always small scale than fear?
btw cockroach what I feel is disgust and not fear, but I most tell people I am afraid of cockroach.
we may fear useful things it is called respect :D like fire or elders.
It is very obvious fear and disgust are different. I am wondering why nature evolved two different emotions, couldnt disgust be replaced by fear, is it so in animals?

I googled this and found that animals do feel disgust. mammals anyway cats and dogs! not at the same things as us, like poo and body odour but some smells and stuff apparently.
What about children? I think they dont feel disgust untill upto 3-4 years.

Oh BTW even writing this is giving me goose bumps, google for fear of small holes, actually dont google it. It brings up the most disgusting things ever.Lotus seed kind of things. I never thought lotus seed was disgusting but put those on a human skin and then.. Yew! I want to get some tweezers and get those seeds out of the skin and then I want to scrub those bloody holes clean. Then there were pictures of small holes with insects and maggots in them!!! God!!! Soo disgusting!!  It was my fault. I googled and I didnt leave it alone after the first wave of disgust, I made myself see it, I wanted to try exposure therapy to get rid of the disgust I guess. but oh boy! What a mistake. I dreamt and felt holes and all those disgusting things forming all over my body and real itching all over my body for days. I just had flashbacks upon flash back about these images! Oooooo even now after months after that incident I am still feeling disgust. and such a strange fascination, I kept going back to look at them and get a new wave of disgust all over again! Yikeeess!! Disgust! Yekeeees!


air lift

Air lift is an up lifting and positive movie, it is about the biggest air lift in history. 170,000 Indians were rescued/airlifted during Kuwait war.  Felt very sad. Indian! I am lucky to have a stable country, I am lucky to be an Indian. What about people who dont have a country? Who will help them? Yaziddis and kurds :(  Country is such an artificial construct, nobody knew each other those 170,000 they stuck together because they were Indians. But what is an Indian? So many of those were in Kuwait for so long, They considered themselves Kuwaiti. The movie makes a case for Indian patriotism, but What is Indian? One day they were Indians and now they are Pakisthan.
It drives home the point, make alliances, form groups tribes, It is important. In this world it makes a difference. We are all NOT ONE :-( It made me very sad.
Help your family. what about those who dont have family? Orphans :-(

I dont know the caste of my non bramhin friends, but all bramhin friends have mentioned their caste  :-D Tam bram  is the fastest - will drop that bit of info  with in first half hour of meeting. :-D


It is a little embarrassing and awkward when people refer to their caste ...


He/She/It

    That thing where people insisted that books stop using only He to refer to humans and start using She as well? When I first heard of it I thought they were being pedantic! What difference does it make! bla and all!
    Reading a book which switches between He and She and What a difference it makes! Our mind builds up pictures when we read something. Pictures that are built when u say He ate rice as staple v/s when u say She ate rice as a staple is infact immense. She is infact more inclusive, atleast for me.
    When they used just He to represent humans, they left a huge part of the humanity out of the stories. We only imagined the He's doing everything, even tho we knew that the He refered to both men and women, Our mind built up stories about only the He's.  We expected seperate stories for women, Even tho He and She ate rice, we imagined He eating rice and we ignored what she did, Unless it was explicitly mentioned - Eg: Women collected bulbs or something like that. 
The fact that it is so noticeable when someone uses She says something about how deeply He is ingrained as default in our culture, There is so much implicit bias in our lives!


I saw a face book status on valentines day today - which listed a few men who they said died for love, Jesus being one of them. They were asking where are all the women? Why are they not dying for women? It is a joke. But Its a sad joke, For me it brought home the fact that women have been left out of all the stories, out of all history all these 1000s of years.


history is like memory

it is manipulated, it morphs to fit in with your current acceptable version of reality.

Mahabharata, Ramayana and the purana stories, were they too modified?   Sita's agni pareeksha, did it happen or was it added by later more suspiscious society, the society became more intolerant they couldnot bear Ram living with Sita after abduction even after agni pareeksha so they added the rumours and sent her away to the forest? or was it all one cohessive story? 
Radha and Krishna story has more varied interpretations. They had a deep love between them, They are depicted romantically in many places. But Radha was married, How do people accept this? Many people just make exceptions for stories but some people cant. Sometimes this is made acceptable to current sensibilities by saying Radha was much older and Krishna was a child and their love was like mother and son. Some say this love is like the love between the atma and  paramatma, that it was not romantic. 
Draupati, She married 5 men. Even today the custom of one woman marrying all brothers is present in Himalayan regions, To control the population as there is limited land.  Was she just married as per this custom and later history changed the story to say Kunti ordered the brothers to share the wife so she had to do it, to make it more acceptable to later sensibilities? 


My brain scared me one morning trying to fit in the sloped bedroom roof of my brothers house. my brain somehow believed that the room had a flat roof, to accomodate that reality, it showed me that the wall was slanting steeply towards me! I woke up with a start after that illusion! :)