My JoJo - My Love

And Jojo is no more. He died two days back. Jojo was my pet dog,a labrador. Stayed with us for 10 years.This is my epitaph for Jojo.
Jojo was born to my pet, Honey. It was a cold night in Mhow when Honey started delivering. One after the other, the pups came out of her in flimsy bags, which burst on delivery and the pups popped out. But there was one bag lying in the room corner which did not burst. When I saw closely, I found a limp pup body in it with no signs of motion. But before I could move away, the body moved. In it, I saw tiny paws moving very weakly, trying to break the bag from within but unable to do so. I burst the bag and out came JoJo.
In the beginning, eyes of all pups were closed. In a few days time, all of them opened eyes, but not JoJo. We thought he would open them a few days later. That day never came. He stayed that way for all of the 10 years.
The vet told me to allow him to put JoJo to sleep. He said it was not possible to keep a blind labrador. But we ( my wife and I )did not listen. And thank the Lord we didn't listen.
Weakest of the litter, he was also the smartest. He was the first to start eating mashed bananas and sip milk. JoJo was not one to remain at the bottom of the heap pf four pups. He would push others away and always claim our attention. His lack of vision never prevented him from finding me. Bumping into chairs and walls, he would be with me whenever I entered home.
And his touch was supreme. It gave me more pleasure than touch of most humans. Many a time, I had bits of food in my hand which suddenly vanished. His warm and moist mouth would suck it out of my fingers as gently as my sons did in their childhood - and with as much right!
JoJo gave us the most complete love a living being can give to another. I am not a good enough writer to express what he gave us. Just capture my feelings if you can.

Modern permissiveness towards pure sleeze

There is presently too much sleeze, sexism and nudity on the screen. Today many a girl is ready to bare almost all of her modesty for a few lakh ( or is it crores) rupees.Talking of lakhs and crores reminds me of something. One of the well known personalities ( probably it was GB Shaw ) asked a socialite whether she would spend a night with him for a few billion pounds. She said that she would think about it. He then asked, 'Will you do it for 10 pounds?'. She blew up,' What do you think I am? A whore?'. 'That has already been established', he said,'What we are now trying to establish is your price'. So the celebrity page 3 level has nothing to do with the classification.It remains the same.
Today, you can see more of a woman's body on the public screen than what you could have seen in a mujra in the chowk of Lucknow, about 50 years back. And, mind you, today we are comfortable viewing this public screen nudity, munching bikaneri bhujia with our mothers, sisters and daughters. No problem at all. On the other hand, the mujra of yesteryears could only be seen by cutting away from the family and sneaking to a specifc marked locality of town.
Where are we heading?
Oh, I can see the question coming. Hey, Alok, if you protest against it so much, why do you watch it? Double standards.
I watch it because I enjoy seeing it. However, whatever I enjoy does not become sanctified for public life. I obviously enjoy sex. That does not mean that it becomes right for everyone to have sex in public. C'mon, I am not a benchmark.
When one sees these girls on the screen, I wonder what their fathers and brothers are undergoing watching same. And someday, what about their sons and daughters?
And why am I not passing the same strictures against the shirtless Salman Khans of the screen. Well, it simply is not nauseating enough for me. Let someone who is really shocked, write about it.

Belive in destiny? - then why bother

As would be clear by now, I am the bad boy- a well established atheist. But I pity the good boys of the game – the worshippers.
Almost all of them are also believers in destiny. They feel that every event of their life has been scripted by the moving finger, which, having writ, moves on. It is all tied up in advance – how they will fare in studies and career, who they will marry and how and when they will kick the bucket.
Those who do believe that all this is sewn up before they even take their first breath should actually be most blasphemous, most irreverent and most spontaneous. If all will be what it has to be, why bother? Surprisingly, however, you find them queuing up in long lines in front of astrologers, face readers and roadside parrots to find out about their tomorrow. Then they try various stratagems to change the expected outcome to something the want it to be.

By doing this you clearly doubt the credentials of your God.
You are like a customer who asks a mechanic the cost of repairs for his car and finding it too high, moves off. Coming back after a few days, you asks again. If the mechanic quotes higher this time, you remind him of his previous low quote. If he has forgotten the previous quote and makes a lower quote this time, you would be last person to remind him of his previous assessment.

Oh come on, either believe that your God is a wise person or do not.

I do, however, find some sense in the following skeptical approach.

A famous scientist was found nailing a horse shoe to his door for good luck. When asked, ‘Do you believe in God and luck?’. He replied, ‘ No, but since nailing a horse shoe costs so little, isn’t it worth it? Just in case.’

Willing to divorce your spouse? When will you divcorce your parents?

The increasing divorce rates saddens me.
Divorce is the direct result of treating the sanctity of marriage-borne relationship as different from birth relationships. We do not 'divorce' our parents or children. Why not? Because it is 'not done'. At least, till now.
Once divorcing parents or children also becomes the norm, life would be strange. Dad spanked me, so I divorced him. My son hangs out with people I do not approve of, so I divorced him. A frightening scenario!
No, it does not happen that way. We treat these relationships as 'inviolable' and divorce of them as 'unthinkable' - and hence they stay stuck. There is no getting out of them, so they are OK.
Life in a prison is unbearable only because there is the hope of the gates opening one day. If the doors are closed forever,prison is OK. Limitations bother us only in comparison to the possibilities of 'no limitations'. It bothers me that I can not bat as well as Mahendra Singh Dhoni ( a great Indian batsman). However, the fact that I can not run as fast as the jaguar does not bother me.
Provide some 'unbreakability' to the institution of marriage and it will pull through most of the bad times.
Of course,one does not want to promote slavery for life.
We do not recommend total abolition of the capital punishment. We just want to enforce the philosophy that 'capital punishment is only for the RAREST OF RARE cases'.
In the rarest of rare cases, parents are , even now, 'divorcing' their children and some children are 'divorcing' their parents.It will always happen. But let us make divorce of marriage related relations as difficult as is the 'divorce' of birth related relations.Those who find these difficulties as more bearable than the marriage are welcome to divorce.
The very concept that marriage related relations are as dear as birth related relations will go a long way.
As a matter of fact, marriage relations should be treated as many degrees more inviolable since, unlike birth relations, these are a result of our own choice.
The new system expects people to marry the person they love. The old system expected people to love the person they marry.Regardless.
In any case, what has love got to do with marriage? Marriage is a responsibility which must be discharged whether or not I find love in it.
Marriage, like all other social institutions, is meant to promote stability of the society, even if at the expense of the individual. Were it not for the needs of the society, one could well 'live' with one's partner without marriage. Many do today. Their parting of ways does not invite social censure.
As I said earlier, if you treat marriage as inviolable, you will find even the ugly aspects of marriage quite bearable.

Provocation in cases of sexual abuse

Females who dress provocatively, are themselves responsible ( at least, partially) for bad things like lewd remarks, rape etc that happen to them.
Whenever I have made this statement, I have comfortably managed to get myself labeled as a conservative, anti-women's lib and usually a 'man with a warped mind'.
Well, all that can be attributed to me ONLY if I have made any value judgment. Actually, I am only making a factual statement, not a value judgment.
Provocative dresses affect male physiology in a manner that the evil things that follow are only the natural consequence of same. Whether the male physiology SHOULD be or SHOULD NOT be affected by the provocations caused is another matter and has to be answered by the Lord Almighty, not me. In the present scheme of things, it does. Period.
Let me also slip in a bit of value judgment now. Leaving a house open does attract thieves and any robbery therein can be, at least partially, attributed to the carelessness in leaving it unlocked. The blame does not pass off from the thief to the house owner, but the house owner can not be fully absolved either.
You might argue here that rape etc also happens to girls who are decently dressed. I agree. However, that in no way means that provocative dressing does not start the chain of events which is likely to result in bad things. It would be bad logic to accept this.
In urdu, there is a good ' sher' ( couplet ) to suggest the same. It goes like this -
Sabhi mujhse kehte hain ki nazarein nichi rakh
Koi unse nahin kehta, ' Yoon na chalo ayan ho kar'
Roughly tranlated, it means - Everyone tells me to keep my eyes low. Nobody tells her not to move so provocatively.
See you.

Thinking, unfortunately, is a digital system

Point 1. I have located the seat of human problems. It lies in the human brain. We can think and reason, and that is hugely unfortunate.
Human brain can differentiate between what is and what can be - or even, what should be. That makes a highly fertile background for dissatisfaction. The dog, I suspect, does not compare the state of 'what is' to anything else. He lives happily in 'what is' and dies when the time comes. Mind you, I will also die when the time comes - but not before spending a lifetime worrying about it.

Somewhere, I read the following lines ( exact words, or author, not recalled now ) -
Heaven from all creatures hide the book of fate
All but the page prescribed, their present state
From brutes what men, from men what spirits know
Or who would suffer being here below
The lamb, thy is doomed to bleed today
Had he thy reason, would he skip and play?
Pleas'd to the last, he crops the flowing food
And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood
Oh blindness to the future! kindly given
that each may fill the circle, marked by heaven
Who sees with equal eyes, God of all
a hero perish, or a sparrow fall

But man is not content with the hidden tomorrow. He looks into palms, stars, faces, crystal balls and even tea leaves to decipher tomorrow. Gosh!
Do you know why ' Zebras do not get ulcers'? By now, I suspect you would have guessed.

Point 2. Within the boundaries of thinking, the most serious lacuna lies in the fact that thinking is digital, while happenings are analog.
Whenever something happens, say some feelings emerging within me, it happens ' in itself', and not with reference to some other universal pole. However, whenever I wish to express or even acknowledge it to myself, I need a word/scale for same. Should I be labeling the feeling as ' being angry' or 'being aghast' or ' being distraught'? Though I have the liberty to choose the magnitude - somewhat angry, more angry than ---. very angry, very very angry, I still must choose one of the existing scales - and that is what makes it digital. In forcing an analogous value into a digital system, the base gets corrupted. In most cases, the corruption might be minimal. but a lifetime of ' minimal corruptions' gets quite heavy as age progresses.
How I wish I could think in an analog manner - just the way it is - without needing to force fit it into the digital system of the existing available sets.

Is there some connection between Point 1 and Point 2 above. You bet there is. A dog's life is pure and for its own sake. In Hindi language ( Sanskrit, actually ), I would put it as - swantah sukhayah ( for the sake of one's own happiness ). A human's life is always one of conformity - even if it is to conform to the rigidities of a digital thinking system. Analog is pure, ' whatever it is'; Digital is force-fitted into a system of artificial boundaries - something with reference to others.
In the previous paragraph, I fell into my own trap and now I am editing this post to include this observation. When I was writing about the dog's life, I did not quite mean to express what is normally understood by 'for the sake of one's own happiness'. But that phrase is a well accepted one - a digital finite one. I plumped for it, corrupting my actual analog meaning.

How I wish I were a dog! Hopefully in the next life -but only if I please God in this one.

God - a valid or invalid concept ?

Positive Lifeskills

The concept of a supreme God, as is popularly understood, is self-contradictory, invalid and more harmful than helpful.

Theoretically and ideally, prayer is a means of thanksgiving to a supreme being. However, I have seen it mostly as a submission of a wish list seeking health, money, promotion etc or other such forms of happiness.

That in itself negates the all-knowing concept of God. My logic goes like this -

1. We ask God for help because what he has given to us is different than what we want.

2. If we still want what he did not intend to give us means that we know better than him as to what is good or deserving for us.

3. Hence, praying to God for help negates his supremacy as an all-knowing entity.

Seems logical enough, however unpalatable it may seem to many.

I have placed this logic tree of mine at an excellent free web-discussion site. Do visit it today.
Once there, you will be able to comment on the premises of the arguement I have placed there.It also allows you to uncover the inherent assumptions in the arguement, if any. I find this site to be an excellent tool for checking the logic of any arguement. I urge you to visit it once. Place your logic here. Give it the test of masses.

Don't just hate me for saying such things about God. Prove me wrong. An unexamined life is not worth living.

I have an objection to another typical feature of praying. In most cases, there is a quid-pro-quo statement attached to the wish list. Usually it is in the form of ' If you grant me this wish, I will offer sweets, re-visit to the temple, have a grand celebration etc in return' . To me, it is the absolute nadir of relationships. Is this the right way to approach your father? A biological father, being essentially human, may change his decision based on what you are offering in return, but not the supreme father. I suspect he knows what we deserve and does not take biased decisions.

So, are there no benefits in a belief about a supreme God? Oh yes, there are. To the conditioned minds of most, God provides a necessary device for grievance handling and a source of succour when all else fails. The need is so great at times that is is aptly said - If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

We need to objectively analyse whether the concept has more advantages or disadvantages? As long as you use it as a psychological device necessary for survival, it is OK. It helps in some cases. But then - so does drinking in some cases. Does that make drinking a good thing, a recommended solution?

I did say that God provides a source of succor. It does, but only temporarily. Quite like drinking. There is temporary respite, but soon the reality confronts us again.

I think the concept of God would make a good umbrella but a poor roof.

I did say that this is my radical blog. You had been warned.

Let be and let go

We just do not let others be what they are. We also cling to our young ones for too long. Of course, this may be truer of Eastern cultures than Western. We like to control the lives of our dependants in every single matter, whereas we are not given the power to change even a comma in their lives.

Read the book 'Sidhartha' by Herman Hesse. Sidhartha was the son of a Brahmin (Indian priest class) who was very respected for his piety and knowledge. Sidhartha got restless as a youth, disobeyed his father and left the house in search of truth and wisdom. After going through a lot of pleasure and pain, he settled down to a simple life. From the pleasure episodes of his life, he had a son from a city courteasn. The death of the mother forced the boy to leave the comforts of the city and move in with his father. Being accustomed to the city life, the young bird was not able to adjust to the rustic one. Sidhartha was forever compelling him to do the chores of a simple life and the son was getting rebellious. Sidhartha was getting frustrated at his inability to teach his son the right ways. After one such episode, Sidhartha's old friend talks to him thus, " Why do you want him to do as you wish? Why don't you let him be. You resented your father running your life for you and now you are doing the same to your son. All the knowledge and virtue gained by your father due to his religious sacrifices did not help you escape the pain of life you were to undergo. You had to start afresh and learn it your way. Now you want your knowledge to shield your son from his destiny. Don't make the same mistake, my friend" ( ideas are of Hermann Hesse, words are mine ).

Stop playing God. Let be and let go. Advise, when necessary but be content with it being rejected. And, do not feel so responsible for the lives of others. It would be blasphemy to do so.