The reasoning mind

"Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. But the mind is an attribute of the individual, there is no such thing as a collective brain. The man who thinks must think and act on his own. The reasoning mind cannot work under any form of compulsion. It cannot not be subordinated to the needs, opinions, or wishes of others. It is not an object of sacrifice."

-- Howard Roark in the bestselling novel "The Fountainhead" by Ayn Rand

Get ready for a ride!

Is this real or am I still dreaming?

This could be one of your many reactions after watching the movie "Inception"!

Someone wrote as his Facebook status that the movie cannot be described ... it can only be experienced. Well that's true!

So folks, fasten your seat-belts, make sure you are properly seated, sit tight and concentrate: you are in for one helluva ride!! Dreams within dreams, layers within layers, mazes within labyrinths, a whole new world created by your subconscious - something which your conscious mind is usually incapable of. And when it's all over, you are so unsure of your own 'reality'.... you tend to ask: am I still dreaming?

Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) has this extra-ordinary skill of accessing people's minds through their dreams and extracting ideas that can then be sold to the bidder. His team is trained to create dreams and sharing it with the one whose mind is to be read. The technology to do so is futuristic. After an unsuccessful attempt to steal an idea from the owner, Saito (Ken Watanabe), of a corporation and failing to deliver it to the corporation (Cobol Electrical), Cobb and his teammate decide to run away and hide. Saito offers them to redeem themselves by working for him. But this time, they are not going for an extraction but for an inception! The stakes go sky high when Cobb is given the job to place an idea in the mind of Robert Fischer, Jr. (Cillian Murphy) of dissolving his father's (Fischer's) company, after his death, to stop it from becoming a monopolistic single corporation in energy. Cobb wisely chooses his team that includes an architect Ariadne (Ellen Page), a potion-maker Yusuf (Dileep Rao), and a forger, Eames (Tom Hardy). With the combined efforts of the team they are to deliver the idea in a mind which, to their horror, is trained to defend itself even in the subconscious!

Moreover, Cobb's insistent problems of his past haunt him, and threatens to ruin him and his whole team by playing havoc in the most dangerous mission, with the ominous possibility of getting trapped in the dream forever!

Thrills, nail biting suspense, edge-of-the seat action, a script that keeps on your toes, and amazing performances: these are some of the facets that make this film what it is.... a blockbuster! And of course above all and beneath everything, it's the idea that brought the Inception. As one user review in IMDB states, it definitely is "[Christopher] Nolan at his most intelligent best".

I give it 5 out of 5! Wish I could give more!

Don't miss it!! :)

Hyderabad: lopsidedness!!

What can be said about Hyderabad?

A city? A metropolitan in the making? An urban area?

Hmmm.

I doubt this idea, of calling Hyderabad a city! Why?

Any city requires the kind of citizens that know how to live and work in a city, how to go about traveling in it. Also it requires the kind of planning that is so lacking in this "city". If one wants to see what I mean, just have a look at the traffic movement in our "city". Be assured it is going to tell you a lot about the kind of people that live here! And the municipality of this place? I don't have to write it here for those who live in Hyderabad. Their work speaks for themselves!

Through ad-hoc and senseless growth in the infrastructure, the authorities are trying to "develop" this "city", and, duh, turn it into a "metropolitan"! Rest assured, this is impossible!! I repeat, impossible! The reason for this: the people! The citizens who live and work here! They apparently do not know what it means to be in a city, except for a very few.

We Indians, generally, have a tendency to live a carefree life. However, an urban life has some expectations from the ones who are living it. It demands us to be more responsible and conscious of our surroundings, and asks us to have some civic sense, some idea of how we can make our stay in it comfortable. We have lived our lives (our fathers and fore-fathers) in villages mostly. The kind of life that exists there is quite simple and straightforward, without the complexities of an urban area. We do not need to follow a code of conduct so much there. Population density is usually low due to being spread out to a vast area. It seems as though the urban life has been given to us, from outside, while we were still unprepared or under-prepared for it. The growth is not organic. We, the people, were never taught or we never learned what it means to be in a city, the kind of conduct that we need to practice to have that good city life. Even our education system (syllabus) ignores this aspect of teaching. Under these conditions, no matter how much "development" you bring, doesn't matter how many concrete structures, skyscrapers or flyovers you erect, Hyderabad will still lag behind of being called a city.

It can be argued that the population is a bit too much for managing the "city" properly. Agreed, population is a problem but not the real problem. The real problem lies in the over migration of people (from rural areas and far away towns), and in the lopsided government policies that encourages such an exodus. The post '91 India saw a heavy movement from villages and towns to big "cities". It was the mid 1990's, the IT "boom" and with it, the growth in real estate that led to the manifold increase in the population in Hyderabad, thereby increasing the pressure on the scarce resources of the "city", especially its water table. If only the authorities had properly handled the "boom", there wouldn't have been so much of chaos as we see it today here. For instance, instead of concentrating all the IT companies in Hyderabad, they could have been distributed in the upcoming towns like Vizag or Vijaywada or any other. People would naturally like to work in areas which are nearer to their native places. However, this did not happen and so the "urban" chaos.

After all the criticism, there is still some hope that people would realize. What about the authorities? Well, they won't do anything unless we do. They know how we are. After all, they come from among us!!

A Political Sense

Part of my hobby, or my passion is to understand the relation between the Law of a state or a nation and the people (of the state or the nation) for which the law is made. In this process of understanding I came across a wonderful passage by a leading European philosopher of the 17th Century. Comments are welcome.
The passage is as follows:

"The last end of the state is not to dominate men, nor to restrain them by fear; rather it is so to free each man from fear that he may live and act with full security and without injury to himself or to his neighbor. The end of the state, I repeat, is not to make rational beings into brute beasts and machines. It is to enable their bodies and their minds to function safely. It is to lead men to live by, and to exercise, a free reason; that they may not waste their strength in hatred, anger and guile, nor act unfairly toward one another. Thus the end of the state is really liberty."

- Spinoza, Tractatus Politicus Ch. 6

Again, comments are welcome!

Miss the maturity: Chronicles of Cardiff

Everything has its limit!

I say this to myself and to others usually. When I first came here to the Cardiff city to do my post graduation, I didn't have the slightest idea that I would find such good company here. The company of friends. It took me, for the first time I suppose, almost no time to get along with people here so easily. Almost all of my friends are from the same country, and being away from respective home played its part, and we quickly became comfortable with one another. Sharing our stories with each others, cracking jokes at almost every sentence we spoke became the norm. However the speed has its repercussions as well. And it happened here too, for me at least.

A big part of my life during and after graduation had been filled with serious reading and contemplation, and discussion of issues that hardly any one of my age would have done at that stage. The friend circle that I've always had, especially after my graduation is the one I know I would cherish till my time comes. The intellectual atmosphere that I was in, the spiritual uplifting that I got was refreshing. Every time I felt like I was losing myself, I would seek the company, meet with those friends and then feel the rejuvenation. It was this friend circle, the reading and the discussions within it that actually and eventually brought me to this city for doing my MBA.

Now, as I'm here, I was supposed to do my work sincerely as I had taken a risk of leaving a good-earning job for it. Alas, I'm not doing that. I blame myself for it. I've let myself too much into the jokes and senseless discussions here. It's reaching the brink of insanity. My reading has gone to the lowest, my studies disrupted. And the worst, I now feel like I've even started losing my religion. It is just at the beginning stage, but I can sense the decline in the spirituality - the very force that keeps me ticking. Maturity is one thing I feel lacks so much in our talks. This I miss the most. And from my past 2-3 days it's actually making me feel like I've had enough of all these. I want to go back home as soon as I can... Miss the maturity, miss the touch with the reality. I don't wanna get trapped in the matrix of delusions!

God help!

P.S. (This was by no mean a critique of my friends here. No. They are my treasure! I'm simply turning over the coin and looking at the other side of it. It is a critique on myself.)

Is democracy failing?

I've been thinking a great deal on this question: what has become of the word so dear to everyone, 'democracy'? It strikes me at moments when I don't understand how people can be so blind to the injustices perpetrated on other human beings by individuals or political parties. I think it is the frailty of human mind: "self-interest". This thing in itself can't be a problem. It's a law of nature that allows an individual to grow, learn, adapt, innovate and even to contribute. The problem where I think starts is when the boundaries of this self-interest starts narrowing down, up to the point that an individual thinks of nothing but his/her personal interests, even if it comes at the expense of the other's interests!


When this happens, it becomes easy for the political parties to play with the public: to pit people against people while they enjoy the benefits that the current "democratic" system offers to those who are in power. And what about the people who are away from it? Who do not fall into this violence? Hardly is there any voice from these apolitical ones. And when they speak, they limit themselves to petty regional politics or to local-level administration only. They almost never discuss issues that really matter, the policies that the govt after Govt. follow. This becomes a major plus point for the powerful. They tend to exploit this situation.

We have such examples where the parties and individuals get away with crimes, murders and genocides. Improve the administration, make it more business-friendly, and there you go. Almost no one is interested in finding out about the crimes they had committed earlier. Some of the influential would even try not to get the truth out as it might disturb the stable environment so needed for the business. And many are simply happy with the "freedom" they think they are getting. This departure from the reality is partly due to the skewed and manipulated reporting of the main-stream media. The misrepresentation and outright lies about the different communities living in the country by movies has also played its part.


There are also those, the tiny minority, who understand what democracy means, who refuse to give in to the powerful and who refuse to accept every piece of news they get from the corporate media. What happens to them? Silenced! Killed! Raped! or simply Ignored! Still some are fighting. Some fight in the literal sense. They pick up arms to make their voices so loud that they cannot be ignored. Do they still get their right? As far as it can be seen, no! There is a major war taking place in the heartland of the country. Villages are being burnt, forests are being cleared, and people are being left homeless, their livelihoods destroyed.

What happens to such a "democracy"? Can it be called a democracy in the first place? If yes, then what is left of it today? Is democracy just about maintaining vote banks? Is it failing?? What is missing that is so essential to the very functioning of a democracy?