Who Am I

WHO AM I
You wanna know
My name is Vedant
Thats all I've been told
For my knowledge of my family
Ends two generations ago
My grandparents and my parents
My parents and me
Thats all I've unraveled
Of my family tree

But is that all I am
The dead end of a lineage?
Oh no I am more
An individual in my own right

What means then
the capitalised question
the answer for to which
I haven't the faintest suggesion

Am I Just
Another name to burden your memory
Am I just another
Adition to general suffering
Or am I a person
With a purpose in life
To give and to take
All that I feel is right
How do I know
What I am for
For that I haven't been told
Prior to entering this world

Hell! I dont even remember
The time time when I arrived
How then would I know what
Those then there did profesize

Or is there a person
Behind all grand purpose
Waiting to emerge
From anonimity's darkness

I cannot answer
The question you asked
The answer will appear
When my life forms the past

Don't think that you
By me have been smitten
For I cannot read
What hasn't yet been written

Strengths, the Human Mind and the Mahabharata

I had written a rather bland morose and uninteresting article on this topic in the month of december simply titled 'STRENGTHS'. That was the result of a random tangible idea that had come out of one of my ritual tussles with insanity. That idea sparked off a chain of thoughts which when impregnated with certain inferences have transformed into the following theory:

It is true that a human being is a multifacetted creature. There are many different levels on which the human being operates. And for each of these levels we possess a separate strength. There are five different strengths that each one of us is equipped with. There is the most obvious, the physical strength which enables us to do mechanical things like lifting and moving. The greater the magnitude of this strength, the greater the ease of those operations. Then we have the slightly more subtle psychological strength which enables us to concentrate on one particular object, be it an action or an artefat. The third would be emotional strength or the ability to control ones own and at a later stage of greater magnitude, the emotions of others. Then would come the mental strength which is the power of deduction, this strength is directly linked to the level of intelligence of the person. The last and arguably the greatest of the five strengths is spiritual strength. This is the most difficult to obtain and the most difficult to practise and ascetics in India (and around the world before the christian invasion) have spent their entire lifetime in the search of this strength. At the most mundane level it entails the ability to amplify the magnitude of the other four strengths by using the energy of the soul. And at the most lofty level it entails the ability of the soul to remain alive without the help of the body for short periods of time and even space-time manipulation.

These strengths are also linked to the five elements, each one of them representing one strength. air-mental, water-emotional, earth-physical, fire-psychological and ether-spiritual.

Ether has often been interpreted as being the stuff souls are made of. But I would like to go a step further and say that ether represents quantum foam (quantum foam is the nature of space-time at the subatomic level). I can't yet explain why I make this assumption.

The five strengths are also linked to the five pandavas (the principle protagonists of the Mahabharata) in the sense that they represent the five facets of a single man. Or in more mundane terms, the five pandavas represent a single person who had multiple personalities that were bound into one integral whole. Yuddhishthira, represented the emotional strength- he never gets swayed off the righteous path by his emotions. Bhima, obviously represents physical strength. Arjuna reprensents spiritual strength, Nakula represents psychological strength as Sahadeva represents mental strength.

Then what does the relation these five have to each other have to do with the strengths? Sahadeva and the other four are not born of the same mother, thus Mental strength is not related to the other four strengths (namely physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual) as deeply as those four are inter related to each other. Mental strength, or intelligence is a direct consequence of the physical connections made between the neurons in the brain, they can be manipulated by the soul, but the connections are very much physical, tangible and material. Whereas the other four strengths pertain to the soul alone.

Then one would be compelled to ask about Karna, he being a genetic brother to the Pandavas, what strength does he signify? Yes he does signify something but definately not a strength. Karna signifies weakness. The only weakness a righteous person can fall prey to is 'obligation to the unrighteous'.

The epic called the Mahabharata is a thorough study of human behaviour told in the form of a charming story by the means of metaphors.

Antagonise the Crime Not the Criminal

I used to think that this was just another piece of philosophical bullshit. The title is a literal translation of a saying in Hindi (India's national language) which goes like 'paap say ghrina karo, paapi say nahi'.

Then I started thinking,what is a crime? Basically, a crime is an act committed by a person. Any act by a person which causes harm and/or physical discomfort, pain, suffering to one or many persons which may or may not include the perpetrator of the act which if it satisfies some or all of the conditions mentioned above constitutes a crime. So what is the root cause of a crime? Let us exclude the criminally insane from the section of people we base this discussion on for they are a small minority of the human race.

A criminal act, or any act for that matter starts as a chain of thought processes in the mind. These processes are more often than not triggered by external stimuli, and if the stimulus is negative or painful the chain of thoughts is accompanied by a desire to cause pain/harm to the person or object which is percieved as the source of the stimulus. How often have you seen a person getting angry at an inanimate object just because he/she has either tripped over it or banged some body part against it?

Then there is the case of international terrorists who more often than not are perfectly sane people. But why do they do what they do? For some reason they feel wronged by the world in general and more often than not their claim is very legitimate. When an elephant steps on the tail of a mouse it the pachyderm might be completely oblivious of what it has trodden on, but the mouse is the one which might be in excruitiating pain. The same can be said about big countries and small. The big ones might not even notice that one or a few of its actions are detrimental to a smaller country, and even if it notices, it may consider the damage done to be insignificant, but the smaller country might have lost a lot in the deal. This is what spawns terrorists. They truly believe that they are fighting for a just cause. But the case is not so when we consider fanatics, whether religeous or otherwise.

So what we need to battle global terrorism is not a gargantuan military campaign, but a hell of a lot of understanding of why those who are doing what they are doing are doing it. Once we eliminate the reason for which people wish to make war with the rest of the world, there would not be any terrorists.

I hope I am right....lol...?!