There is no such thing as a happy philosopher.

The God who looked like a man

I was unsure of what to feel while watching him walk down in heavy steps with a stump in his hand, for the last time. Never thought it would happen to me but now that I am reminiscing and playing the videotape in my mind of last 16 or so years that I have watched cricket, my throat is having this seldom pain of choking, eyes are just a little bit more moist than usual and a feeling of hollowness is creeping in my mind. I know it's temporary, but what is not.

It's officially over; my childhood, my younger years, the days of standing by the big glass windows of TV shops in school uniform while on the way back home in order not to miss watching him play, the days of continuing the interrupted work after he was out, the days of sadness after he failed to deliver our unrealistic expectations, the days of euphoria after his glorious drives and centuries. Aaah, those precious days. How can one man, whom I have never ever met and probably will never meet, fill my heart with nostalgia and sadness?

The game must go on, in fact it will, maybe with more grace than ever in the footprints of the legend. Coming generations will look at his numbers and might acknowledge his mastery. Maybe these numbers will be surpassed, maybe the records will be broken, maybe new legends will walk the crease but that divine aura, that sheer joy of watching a little humble man wearing those fat pads, that helmet with the flag of a country which I so deeply love and carrying that heavy wooden thing, will be blatantly missing. I will still watch the game, I will sometimes still have those foolish and baseless superstitious rounds of holding my pee, blinking my eyes five times in one second, keeping my fingers tangled in particular constellations and alike, until we win a tense match or while someone special is in the 90s; but certainly that someone special will never be there, he retired today. Sachin is retired. The feeling will take months to sink in, maybe more than that and when it has, I will look back and realize with a sense of unexplainable feeling "I lived in the times of Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar".

Thank you very much Tendlya, for being so greedy to play all these years and for giving us a truly memorable childhood and moments. Those memories will be cherished. Thank you so very much from the deepest of my heart.

(Photo taken somewhere from the internet.)

The Good Brahmin by Voltaire

"I wish I had never been born!" the Brahmin remarked.

"Why so?" said I.

"Because," he replied, "I have been studying these forty years, and I find that it has been so much time lost...I believe that I am composed of matter, but I have never been able to satisfy myself what it is that produces thought. I am even ignorant whether my understanding is a simple faculty like that of walking or digesting, or if I think with my head in the same manner as I take hold of a thing with my hands...I talk a great deal, and when I have done speaking I remain confounded and ashamed of what I have said."

The same day I had a conversation with an old woman, his neighbor. I asked her if she had ever been unhappy for not understanding how her soul was made? She did not even comprehend my question. She had not, for the briefest moment in her life, had a thought about these subjects with which the good Brahmin had so tormented himself. She believed in the bottom of her heart in the metamorphoses of Vishnu, and provided she could get some of the sacred water of the Ganges in which to make her ablutions, she thought herself the happiest of women. Struck with the happiness of this poor creature, I returned to my philosopher, whom I thus addressed:

"Are you not ashamed to be thus miserable when, not fifty yards from you, there is an old automaton who thinks of nothing and lives contented?"

"You are right," he replied. "I have said to myself a thousand times that I should be happy if I were but as ignorant as my old neighbor; and yet it is a happiness which I do not desire."

This reply of the Brahmin made a greater impression on me than anything that had passed.

Excerpt taken from a book which, I am more than delighted for that, have opened the heavy doors of dark fathomless well of philosophy for me. The book is a fun ride explaining with exceptional clarity and a skilled writer's prose gems like Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Greek dudes (and other significant ones) playing their genius minds with ever confusing metaphysics, unsolvable ontology, delusional epistemology, society, morality, truth, reason, belief, beauty, instincts and the "lovely elusive God". The greatest success of the book is that amidst this chaos of thoughts and ideologies, it fathers sheer fondness for philosophical spaghetti and unleashes the hunger within for true wisdom. The book is called as The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant.

Listography List 

Cold blooded suicide is the strongest reply to the devil that they call God.

Freewill Part I

All that we are left to play with is nothing but virtual freewill. It is free since we can choose and it is virtual since we think we can. But do we really have a choice here other than to choose? Are we not forced to choose; for if we do not, we cease to exist. Are we not forced to think every single second of our lives except during sleep and coma? Perhaps we might be deluded to think that we have the power to choose by something we are utterly unaware of.

We are somewhat conscious about our own existence, instincts, desires and feelings; however, a wise man may advice that we should not allow ourselves to be needlessly haughty by being convinced of our wisdom about all that there can be. Plethora of unknown metaphysical and physiological elements in our minds as one might choose to call them. Isn't it possible that we might be completely unconscious about one of those elements which is controlling us from within? An element which is letting us think that we do have freewill? An element which have been deceiving the mind of men for ages? We are able to, sometimes if not always, control our primordial instincts since we know of their existence. But how can we control the unknown if we know not its form? And if we can not control it, how can we say we have freewill? I suppose, the greater our ignorance, the feebler is our freewill. And our ignorance, I am convinced, is mighty great!

When a lion kills a cub of a lioness in order to necessitate her to mate with him, does he even have faintest of a choice other than killing the cub? Is he even aware of his instincts to mate? Where and how does our freewill, regardless of its mirage like attributes, merge with the border of our ever compelling but somehow subdued instincts? Where do we exactly start being human beings?

 

These questions, disregarding their logical validity and sanity, where do they come from? Is it that underlying unknown entity at play? I am not sure, all this might just be plain bullshit and after all we may just be a bunch of chemicals. This acceptance of sheer ignorance of everything and the consequent submission to incomprehensible fate are intensely suffocating and emotionally strangling. In silence of the night, an uneasy feeling creeps into my mind from the darkness. I feel like a fly stuck in a spiderweb which tries to untangle the unknown sticky stuff out of its wings for that ultimate freedom. But it ends up getting more and more entangled. And eventually dies; hopelessly, helplessly. Without the answers.

I must admit these days I'm heavily influenced by Spinoza and my thesis topic of Hardware Assisted Embedded Virtualization. Spinoza igniting the match and my topic pouring technical oil into the fire. The connection between Spinoza's ideas and this post is understandable but how my technical thesis is helping these thoughts is quite undecipherable to me. Nevertheless I sense some similarities between hardware abstraction in virtualization and abstraction of thoughts from raw feelings, desires and instincts in human mind. How a hypervisor fools the virtual machines into believing that they are the only ones controlling the hardware is fascinating and so the possibility of that unknown layer in our psyche came into being. I am sure after a month, I'm gonna come back to this post and look at this outright absurdity and hope that the fly gets free. 

What choice do I have anyway other than to hope. 
And there is only one thing which can free us. I can bet my life on it.
It's death, my friend!