Truth, power and peace

"Only power can protect peace", Says China Air Force Commander (refering to imminent unavoidable militarization of space) and "Only power can protect truth", says RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat (in news on TV, can't find link). Without endorsing the philosophical background of both, let me agree with "power can protect peace/truth" and disagree with the word "only".

Power is an easy solution to protect peace and truth, but a very dangerous one. All the history will show that centralization of power has always led to its abuse more than holding up peace/truth. While Bhagwat acknowledges that truth has a way of staying dormant and that it never dies, my contention is why do you need power in the first place.

An easy argument is that in order to preserve your identity, you would prefer that someone powerful doesn't arm-twist you for his personal interest. All the politics at national and international levels in its most genuine form keeps coming back to "I want to be powerful because I don't want other powerfuls to dictate my life."

The difficult part is to understand that the power is not over others, but over self - one, in preserving myself while being arm-twisted, and two, controlling myself and avoiding arm-twisting others. Even if I suffer or even die in the process, the truth does not, it never will. I end up living through the truth that lives beyond me and everyone else.

In the long term, majority people (and I am sure other animals and plants) want peace and truth. The natural path is of peace and truth. By the logic of evolution, life moves to a path of 'fit'ness to the environment around. The environment is the facts - the truth. Keeping it sustained is peace.

Any suppression of truth only builds a temporary imbalance. Unnaturally tackling the imbalance using power only creates another bigger one somewhere else, until it all collapses and ends up abusing the power. It is like entropy and the second law of thermodynamics (more on it sometime later).

Without contradicting oneself at different points of time, the only long term sustainable strategy of life is truth and power over oneself, thereby implying peace and benevolence (not necesssarily altruism).

musical programming

I am kicking myself. Why didn't I try nyquist or chucK or something else before? The huge list is on wikipedia for the starter!!

HAVE.. TO.. CODE.. MUSIC..
/zombie-mode

Crude humour

Obama: Who are you?
Hu: Yes.
Obama: English please, and it will be great if you can open your eyes.
Hu: I speak English. China speaks Engrish. Hummer is Chinese now. China makes everything now, including milk in melamine and toys in lead. We will also break India apart and ruin their exports. We will rule the world.
Obama: We can't let you take jobs out of America. Yes, We can, with a 't.
Hu: We are not taking Jobs. (Punches Steve in the eye) He has an iJob.
Steve Jobs: Hu stays hungry. Hu stays foolish.

Posting after quite a while. Will write more later. Currently reading Ayn Rand, Bertrand Russell, J Krishnamurti and other interesting stuff about economics, evolution, science, technology and steel.

PS: No harm intended. I know India is not the perfect place on the earth and I don't hate the dragons but everybody is making too much noise about their esteemed return. And too loudly. Shh! They are listening.

Renewable energy and Music

Both the topics interest me but the blend seemed inconceivable.
Till I heard, rather saw Solar Punch perform during IYCN Conference on Climate Change held at IIMB about a month back.

Awesome concept.

They use solar panels to power their sound. To be able to play in low light, they use batteries which are charged during the daylight. They add a touch of glitter with those chain of lamps, and of course with their music. And with their lyrics which are mostly related to sun.

And they work at their jobs full time. They are touring along with IYCN to promote renewable energy, taking sabbaticals from their jobs.

Awesome concept.

Defining love

The age old question: What is love?

1. Caring for someone
   
2. Not expecting something in exchange
3. Willingness to give anything up (except your core values/beliefs/system)
4. Forgiveness/Absence of hatred or indifference

I think the last one is generic and yet elegant. Hatred comes from feeling of merciless revenge. Ability or willingness to forgive someone (sometimes after a punishment/revenge) is absence of unforgiving hatred, is love.

In the vaguest of terms, I have no idea how convincing this argument is. I just scribbled out the train of thought. Don't think too much about it, you need not react to this thought immediately. Take your time.

cowards strike again

Yes, you heard it right
cowardice it's not a fight
brings anger than fright.

Yet another test
of the society's patience
someday it will end

You want your voice heard
you shout but you don't listen
we are far too many

Your noises will drown
you shout or we do, anyway
the world is worse-off

The more you do it
the more it unites us all.
Worst ever deadlock
------------------------------

Cowards. You did it again. If you have any guts, dare to touch me, online or offline, day or night, Mumbai or Bangalore. I'm no powerful, yet you won't dare. Because you have no courage.

You hide behind the mask of your fundamentalistic issues. Don't you realize the next wave of issues you create? Your families are destroyed, so are those of peaceful comrades. One of my friends (who is peaceful, like most of the Muslims) was about to beactually denied his visa to US (to visit Stanford univ.), just because you express your outrage in hostile manners.

Some good things will come out of this, although there were less bloody ways.

First, it will tend to reduce corruption. Police will unite against death of colleagues. System will be pressurised to stop Havala route of money.

Second, since CEOs of companies got stuck in the hotels attacked, companies will be forced to rethink their social responsibility. They can no longer shrug it to the government that the world should be a better place for everyone.

Third and not so cheerful, life of peaceful Muslims will get worse, but in the long run they will turn against you. You are not helping your community at all, forget about bringing Caliphate rule (Like all recent blasts, HuJI are being suspected behind this. Update: Deccan Mujahideen have taken responsibility via email, but media suspect LeT.)

Last, it will force me to think - "Can I do anything?" And there so many like me, that somebody will have an answer soon.

Questions to my friends: Can we do something? What should we do?

WTF

What do you do on a lazy drizzly sunday evening with awesome weather -

1. watch cricket match
2. study for end term exam on next day
3. listen to a torturous discussion on topics hardly relevant to you

I happened to choose the third option today. Since the match was shortened to 22 overs and studying for exam is also no fun, there was a little consolation anyway.

From another standpoint, I took pity on life that offers only sucky choices.

How many things have you come across at a stretch which have left you with the feeling "WTF?"

• Your mentor prof asks to meet on a day before exam
• You are the first one to arrive, and prof comes when you are on your way back
• There are two groups apart from yours, yours will be discussed last, and apparently you need to sit in other discussions
• One group discusses their project for one hour, you sit quiet
  
• Prof says it will be over in another half an hour and actually means one and half
• Second group discusses for another hour, you are again forced to attend because apparently it is relevant to your project. In reality either
1. you already know it, or
2. you don't know it but it is totally irrelevant to you, your life, your project, and your exam on next day and you couldn't care less, or
3. you stopped listening while thinking "even this shall pass away" until you get bored of that thought or any other line of any poem too, or
4. you are lost in the thought of pending assignments and prof himself answers a question he has asked
   
• Your turn comes, prof asks more questions than you do, does not answer any and draws a diagram no one can understand later
• You want to ask a genuine doubt, but unlike everyone else in the institute, the prof who is the chairperson of computer centre, does not have office 2007 installed on his pc
• Update: Prof scans your pendrive in suspicion of a virus, but his own system is infected and it creates 68 trojan files in otherwise clean folders
  

I can go on. The point is, whatever I did ended in "WTF". You might have gone through something worse. But hey, you didn't blog about it.

On a positive note, it has probably made me more tolerant (or ignorant) of bullshitting.