The Last Pole

I stood upon the ruins of what was once a city;

Warsaw is nothing more than a mere wisp of a memory now,

As it was not, ever since they had arrived. 

I stared at what was once a home, that curiously belonged to me

As if such trifles mattered any more.

I stood upon the mounds of men,

Of what was once a living, breathing person and many, many more,

Now strewn away, frozen and stiff, 

And yet still hauntingly alive, 

Mocking the living, at the plight of life

I stood upon what was once a nation, 

As lands yielded to the greedy tentacles of flames infernal, of their device

As farms of fire spread their seeds,

As rains of fire drowned the ominous sound of a thousand bees

Bees that spit fire, and belched hate

I stood upon his gaze,

The hatred, cold and hard

I stood upon what was once me,
A haunting memory,

As I mocked, at the plight of their lives...

The Beginning of the End

Of all the people with whom I share no sliver of convergence in lines of thought, except perhaps for this one, and yet have a great deal of respect for the views and ideas they posses, it is Arundhati Roy who crowns the jewel. Her recent article on the fires raging about the nation, while not agreeable in whole for me, is most thought provoking. There is a great deal of hullabaloo going on currently in the country, largely concerning a certain gentleman, who refuses to eat, ironically, in a bid to have his cake and eat it too. But stripped of all the embellishments and moral festoons adorning a largely non-glamorous core issue that the nation faces every day, one sees only a social malaise, a disease, a parasite hacking and gnawing the gut of the nation from the inside, the parasite of corruption.

Corruption is quite a pervasive issue in the country, so disturbingly so, that the Indian public have taken it for granted as a way of life. No one bats an eyelid when the civil servant sits behind his desk scratching his ears and grinning sheepishly, no one would bother obtaining licences and permits the old fashioned way, we now have agents, people with backhand connections willing to do our dirty jobs for us, we have driving schools that confidently aver that the people needn't learn driving, since all it takes are a few smiling faces of Gandhi to get a blind man his driving licence, or a building permit, or a liquor licence, the list would go on. We have successfully corporatised even corruption. And yet, no one has registered disagreement regarding this issue before, and somehow, suddenly, there is a section of society, calling itself 'Team Anna' demanding that the Government cease its corrupt activities at once.

The problem is, while Anna Hazare's intentions are, to the best of my knowledge, most veritably honourable, he seems to be guilty of over-simplification of the problem, not unlike his self appointed mentor, Gandhi. Mohandas Gandhi saw a problem as he perceived, proposed solutions to that problem and presented it to the extant keepers of order and expected them to endorse the proposal in full, no conditions applied, the terms being non-negotiable. If the keepers of order, in this case the Indian Colonial Government, saw differences with him, he would coldly announce that they shall face the repercussions. Anna Hazare has been doing more or less the same thing, employing the very device Gandhi employed when he opened the Pandora's Box, the Kryptonite of any Liberal Government, Satyagraha. Satyagraha is a form of protest most effective against a nation that rules by law, not by decree, because it is a form of protest that can cause massive upheaval in the existing fabric of order, with little or no laws bent or broken. While Satyagraha might have worked against British Imperialism (the jury's still out on that one, though, as to who really won Indian independence, Gandhi, Hitler or the anti-imperialist labour government headed by Clement Atlee) in a manner that is broadly construed as favourable to the national interest, Anna Hazare's Satyagraha seems as hollow as Bush's War on Terror. One simply cannot protest against corruption, or propose a solution that involves the imposition of draconian laws and legislations that will severely punish perpetrators accused of corruption. That would just imply that one treats the symptom and hopes that the issue would eventually dissipate. Moreover, such a police state is against the principles of a nation with a liberal democratic tradition.

Like Satyagraha itself, corruption manifests itself as a problem only due to the sheer scale of its proliferation. Individually considered, most corruption cases are minor infractions of the law, and yet it is a colossal cork on the nation's progress due to the sheer number of people causing the minor infraction of the law. Now, increasing the severity of the punishment for corruption would imply that a person was punished severely because, though the infraction was minor, it shall be considered as a severe offence because a lot of people are doing it. Such a system of penal code is inconsistent the principle of a liberal democratic nation which believes in reasonable doubt, an a priori assumption of innocence, and most importantly, punishing a person for the severity of the crime that must be regarded in isolation with all other cases and treated as an independent case, because one cannot simply punish a person severely because other people, no matter how many, have committed a similar offence in the past. Using punishment as a deterrent is a practice unworthy of this day and age, when people question the legitimacy of capital punishment.

Moreover, let us assume that the Lokpal does not include provisions for a stricter code of criminal law germane to corruption in public office alone, for its jurisdiction ends there, and still we are left with an agency that covers every single government officer from the lowliest clerk to the PM. From where will the human resources for such a massive organisation come? It is only natural to assume that they shall be handpicked by law enforcement veterans beyond reproach, and that they shall pick candidates of similar credentials. If the Lokpal provides for an agency that big and pervasive, it means the existing governmental structure is so corrupt that it requires an external watchdog to curb government servants from giving in to their baser temptations under the table. If the existing governmental structure is that corrupt, it simply cannot have as many 'clean' civil servants as this new agency requires. If it did, existing law-enforcement agencies could do the job. Moreover, if an external agency is simply going to do the job of CBI with a bit more powers, why not give those same powers to the CBI? Wouldn't it save the taxpayer the billions that Anna Hazare is trying to save from corrupt politicians? Besides what is the guarantee that this agency shall remain clean? Glossing over the naive idealism of Anna Hazare, similar to Gandhi and Nehru in many respects who believed independence would solve all the problems faced by India, an agency that has almost limitless powers over the Government adding to the fact that it shall consist of appointed officials, fashionably christened as 'Members of Civil Society of Eminence', a euphemism for Hazare sycophants, as opposed to democratically elected members is tantamount to declaring democracy as the root of corruption, and that draconian laws and procedures that control every facet of government is the answer. If this is how India is going to deal with its problems, it is beyond rational plausibility that India can get anything done right, with short-sighted and self appointed political messiahs mouthing the words 'Dharna' and 'Hartal' on their lips for every problem.

Let us, for a moment, set Hazare aside, and examine corruption itself. Corruption at high office is a direct consequence of corruption at lower levels. If a traffic policeman takes fifty rupees to permit someone to park as they please and gets away with it, the office pushes the limit of unacceptability of corrupt practice a little higher, and so on till the likes of Kalmadi and Raja open the floodgates into their own coffers. The root of the problem is that power corrupts, and moreover, corruption results when rules exist not only to facilitate ease of administration, but as a façade of impenetrable red-tape. Let us take an example of a simple case of illegal parking. Illegal parking would not be a problem, if legal parking was not an inconvenience, for a greater section of society indulges in the infraction of the law for the sake of convenience more than anything else. So, someone, say, A, would park right next to a dejected sign despondently reading "NO PARKING" for the sake of nobody, in exchange for a little favour to the local policeman on traffic duty. If lawful parking facilities were provided, such as public parking garages at strategic locations, this problem could be minimised. Moreover, one must bear in mind that, after all, as criminologists have been saying for ages, absolute power corrupts. As I read on a blog by Amit Verma, if a hundred and fifty civil servants and peons could manage to delay and derail any project quite simply by a simple act of withholding a dozen signatures, the government baabu who is aware of this fact is bound to take advantage of it. And if the Lokpal bill gets through, it only means another bunch of bribes added to the existing long list, for a simple construction project or a business licence. When power corrupts, the answer simply cannot be creating another structure of near omnipotence, the efficacy of which only relies on a billion hopes and prayers that it shall stay clean for the foreseeable future, in other words, till the next general election, after which a certain Thambi Hazare will demand a LokLokPal bill and this would arguably go on.

Therefore, what Anna Hazare is doing, while it might generate a strong consciousness among the people against corruption, is something that is most definitely going about in the wrong way, because the Government alone is not guilty of corruption, but every single one of us is. The reason his movement garners so much support, is because it is a morally unequivocal issue, something that can mobilise the public with the help of rhetoric and exhortation. All it takes for one to join this movement is a misplaced sense of righteous anger, the cloak of patriotism and the idea of 'If you're not with us, you are against us'. Moreover, it provides for a mule, a scapegoat, wherein, the cause of corruption not the Indian society, but the Government. He has masterfully created a target for public anger, when, ironically, every single one of us is guilty of corruption, however minor, at some time or another. Blind patriotism never achieved anything apart from the security one derives in being a part of a large group. Patriotism is merely the façade of a scoundrel or the refuge of a coward. It is an emotion, and nothing has been done right in the heated moment of emotions running rampant through the veins of the nation. Corruption is a social issue; it is vastly more complex than the requirement of a simple yet stern watchdog whipping government servants into shape. Corruption is said to be eradicated only when a Lokpal Bill is rendered irrelevant. By creating one, we perpetuate the culture of corruption, and the culture of a police state side by side, to keep the public under check. But unlike what Arundhati Roy said, this bill is not just anti-poor, it is anti-everybody. So the next time someone asks one to join the rally alongside Anna Hazare, please note that they are asking one to participate in the dangerous erosion of democracy, India's only asset so far.

Alive

Bring to peace the harrowed mind.

Set to rest the harried heart,

Become death, for all that come to be,

Must someday, come to cease.

Be the full stop, to all sentences.

Be the happily ever after of real life.

There may be nought beyond, I may never know,

But there was a lot before, or I wouldn’t be, I wouldn’t cease to be.

Be the escape, some crave, some yearn.

Give unto them, sweet release,

From temporal realms, the carnal prison;

Let escape the bounds of life,

Let fly free from one’s own clutches.

Let go.

Be the sweet release – of death

Be your soul, be its freedom,

For life is most at the end of its tether

Your heart palpitates, your breath stops,

Yet you are alive, for you are free.

Fly from this empty rock, the ground of life.

Soar above the empty cage.

Let pass, let see what is beyond,

Cross Styx, fall unto Hades’ arms

Upon his cold bosom.

Set free. Extinguish the flame.

For there may be clouds above, yet it is the sky.

The G6 of Literature

In tune with my literary listings, I now plan to explore the other end of the spectrum, the best of them all, at least according to me. One might agree with me or not, if one doesn't I'll probably like you even more because I can have an interesting debate on the topic and also, "I'M RIGHT, YOU'RE WRONG, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH!!!"
So, here are a few authors who I think are one of the best at what they do best.

1. William Shakespeare: Although many a high school student has fervently wished upon this gentleman a great deal of ills, he remains the king of playwrights, for nearly half a millennium, a no mean feat. William Shakespeare had this uncanny knack of telling stories that had a bit of everything in it, and as far as documentation of thereof is concerned, he seems to be the first one to do so. His plays are beautifully crafted masterpieces, his characters as living and breathing as you and me. After all, who can forget Shylock or Hamlet or Lady Macbeth? He always portrayed society as it was, be it the vehemently anti-semitic Venice and it's bourgeois or the wavering illiterate masses of the Roman Republic. He was a master of human psychology; his characters responded to real situations like real people, with raw and fundamental emotions acting as their only impetus. It was this fundamental soup of human emotions that make his characters timeless. Anthony would have done the same thing if Caesar was assassinated in the 21st century. Lady Macbeth would have goaded her husband into such heinous crimes at any point in history because they responded to basic emotions that never change. His plots may be simple enough to be portrayed on a stage, but one must notice that complexity of his plots do not arise from grandiose settings or vast arrays of characters, but play out as intense battles inside every character of his. Apart from these, his language is probably the apogee of Early Modern English, his puns and metaphors ring in our ears to this day.
2. Charles Dickens: Another master storyteller, he weaves magic with his words. An astute observer, he brings to life his characters based on real-life experiences, whose realism gets poignantly reflected in his works. He was a brooding recluse, whose only effective channel of communication was his ink stained pen and coarse paper. Known for bringing to life cities and countries with mere adjectives, he is probably most famous for his smoggy London and the East End. His works reflect his sense of strong Christian morality, and in the process help bring about a keener understanding of the poor and downtrodden in an era where only the lofty aristocrats and wealthy industrialists occupied the popular imagination. There is beauty in every word of his, his stories crafted to perfection and the words flow as eloquently as the sound of a babbling brook. His characters, again, have endured the onslaught of time upon our imaginations, with Oliver Twist and Philip Pirrip tenaciously gripping a part of our hearts reserved for such masterful machinations.
3. Agatha Christie: She is the undisputed queen of crime. Her lovable Poirot is the grandfather I never had, clumsily endearing, but keen as flint. He is all I hold dear in a character, he is vain, but lovably so, he's a genius at what he does best and is simply adorable. Miss Marple, on the other hand is a quaint Englishwoman, a complete antithesis of Poirot's flamboyance. She is the stolid and respectable spinster with a mind sharper than her knitting needle. Both characters, with a host of others that come and go are a deep treatise on human nature. They are subtle, crafty and purely ingenious, nearly as much as their creator herself. Her plots are shrouded in thick mystery, opening up in slices invisible to the naked eye, until the end when one realises that the clues were pointing in a direction that was glaringly obvious in retrospect. Her books are the best source of dopamine induced highs.
4. PG Wodehouse: You can't say his name without giggling a little. He makes everything funny, so much so that when one reads his books, one must keep first aid handy enough lest one cracks one's ribs. Delightfully hilarious, his books transport the reader to an entirely different world; a world of corrosive aunts, bumbling uncles, crafty fiancées and the hapless protagonist who knows he's a bit of an ass but hopes you wouldn't mind. His world is a cosy retreat from the day-to-day drudgery, a freshly mown lawn with drops of softly scented dew shimmering on a spring morning in the midst of the desert of real life. His characters, though formulaic, are delightfully lovable, the most endearing caricature of human society yet. His plot twists and narrative leaves the reader gasping for air, before which the next line comes along with a funnier anecdote or simile. His language and writing style is an asset to English itself, trapping all his good humour and zest for life within a few pages. If one hasn't read Wodehouse, one hasn't led a happy life.
5. JRR Tolkien: The indubitable lord of fantasy, Tolkien has brought incalculable happiness to bespectacled nerds and dragon lovers across the world's basements. He is the father of imagination, weaving whole new worlds as complex and complete as our own with a mere stroke of his pen. The level of detail and authenticity he brings about in his narrative is simply mindboggling, the little poems he inserts in between, more than adorable. Even though his characters are idealised exaggerations, his work has the epic quality only found in mythical texts, a feat not easy to achieve. His plot is gripping and intense, the words that describe them being as heated and fiery as the bowels of Mordor. As I always say, a passage written in good English when read out loud makes my mouth water, brings a fullness to the tongue, and The Lord of the Rings makes me drool incessantly.
6. Mark Twain: As I have come to notice, he is the only American in this list. Mark Twain, unlike the others on this list, consciously made an effort to write for a simpler man. His books had no lofty pretensions, no flowery indulgences with the finer aspects of the language, just merely a narrative, a simple but colourful narrative, but with equally powerful characters. Who can forget Tom Sawyer or Aunt Polly? He captured the essence of the simple life in America, he brought about a shift in the paradigm, wherein literature now appealed to a poorer section of society, not because he pandered to their baser sensibilities, but was because here was an author who portrayed a world even they understood. His work had an innocence and a childlike quality about them that made them intensely lovable. They were a genuine expression of his interpretation of American society, a world of simple people, hard-working and upright.

Literary Plague

There are books in which every page one reads, is a work of masterful art. Very few books fall into that category, and are rightfully called classics. They will live forever in our hearts; their characters shall always remain relevant in today’s world, no matter how old they are in their conception. A fewer authors can call their books their crowning achievements, feathers in their hats in a field where people frequently get reprimanded for inflicting such rot upon humanity. There are many authors in the latter; I’ll gladly name a few of them:

1. Chetan Bhagat: He and his semi-autobiographical ‘stories’ with a narrative so colourless and plain, reading it’ll remind you of a ten-year-old’s account of his or her weekend. Like many people who try ever so hard, we have a writer whose language is as half-baked as his plot and characters. If they were inspired from real life, he would’ve led a really one-dimensional life where all his acquaintances would’ve been caricatures of over-simplified stereotypes. I assume he operates under the presumption that his works must be accessible to the ‘common man’. Unfortunately, he seems to end up writing for the complete imbecile. Real works that make no flamboyant pretence are what are accessible to the common man. RK Narayan wrote for the common man, Chetan Baghat spews filth upon the sanctity of the written word.
2. Christopher Paolini: Classic plagiarism is what this gentleman, no, amateur adolescent, in every sense of the term, is capable of. I used to hate The Chronicles of Narnia, for it seemed a cheap bootleg of The Lord of the Rings, but no, a new kid’s in town, quite literally. Shamelessly lifting characters and plot elements from Lord of the Rings, Chronicles of Narnia, and even Harry Potter, this pseudo Norse myth styled disaster only succeeds in disappointing the poor reader. I lumbered through the first book because I opened it, woe is me, and I gave up on humanity when I saw the second book adorning a shelf in the local bookshop.
3. Sydney Sheldon: I know, quite controversial, but yes, in the most affirmative of tones, he’s the father of cheap, Hollywood styled banality in literature. Every story of his features an extremely good-looking, perfect-in-everyway protagonist who, for some reason, gets entangled in something big, and with every chapter, the crisis gets bigger and bigger until it all diffuses in the end making it the king of all anticlimaxes; and there’d be a meaningless love story thrown somewhere in between for the sake of it, while it wouldn’t make sense at all, in terms of its relevance to the plot. His books are well-written scripts for tasteless soap-operas, not works of literature. Hackneyed cliff-hangers and loud explosions must remain only in Michael Bay’s movies intended to kill the viewer, not in a book. “Mainstream Hollywood” is the bottom-line of all his books; while it fails to entertain as a movie, it does even more so, as a book.
4. Dan Brown: He is the master of the familiar. Five books into his career, every single one of his books is similar to its predecessor in more ways than one. I wonder how many people appreciate his books now, for they just contain different conspiracy theories, different locations, similar characters who only differ in their names, but the same story. The format in which the story unravels itself is also the same, something which is bound to test every reader’s patience. While old wine in a new bottle is desirable, his books are not. While he might be interested in sighting lofty castles that do not exist amidst the clouds, the rest of us are more earnest and have no patience for the modern Don Quixote, only not very lovable but equally dense. Frankly, no one gives a damn about how ugly people danced naked every full moon standing in buckets filled with sushi hundreds of years ago.
5. Stephanie Meyer: No words can describe the injustice she has wrought upon humanity by force-feeding her tosh about vampires making Bram Stoker puke in his grave. I’m sure Hell has a special place for the publisher who cleared this drivel for publication. Mere fodder for over-weight middle aged women too ugly to find a husband, this is not literature; it is an insidious crime to have written this load of baloney. The reason this series of books is so repulsive is ubiquitous, but I shall elucidate anyway. The central theme has a colourless and nondescript protagonist, a character any reader can identify oneself with because the character has no personality of her own. Added to this is a boy, so freakishly handsome in every way, one would think he has issues related to self-esteem for falling for our main character in the first place. Wait, that’s not enough, the final nail on the coffin was making this man a vampire. The tale then reaches new levels of absurdity when it panders to baser emotions of every black-sheep of literature, letting real readers bite dust. Twilight is not a vampire novel; it is a cheesy romantic story begging to be used as toilet paper, masquerading as a fantasy novel to trick the hapless reader into untold misery. If one calls oneself a twilight fan, one has either been paid huge amounts of money to say so, or one is a complete idiot.

Superpower for Dummies

Power is the ability to make other entities do and say as one would want them to do and say. It has taken so many forms and has shifted hands so many times in history, that it is necessary to study the nature of power itself in a geo-political perspective for any nation harbouring ambitions of becoming a superpower.

A superpower is a nation with such overwhelming power, that it can impose it's will upon any part of the globe with the whole world as it's sphere of influence with a few rogue states labelled as pariah states by the international community for the crime of standing up to the reigning superpower. There have been many superpowers in the past, the Spanish Empire, The United Provinces of the Netherlands, Bourbon France, the mighty British Empire, USSR, the list can go on to include Rome, Mongol Empire, Ming China, etc. Ancient superpowers cannot be classified as superpowers per se, because although it's known world was it's dominion, it's power ended there. It did not have the capability to impose itself of a truly global scale until the modern era. The first superpower in it's true sense of the word was arguably the British Empire; it contested for control of all the seas and held a third of the land area under it's control, directly or otherwise and was the first empire upon which the sun truly and literally never set, while the same expression was used for the Spanish and French Empires merely as a exhortation.

However, there have been long periods in history where no single nation ruled supreme leading to a multipolar world. The inter-war period was one such political climate, where Britain, France, Germany, Russia, USA, Japan and Italy all had their own spheres of influence leading to devastating consequences. The Cold War world was bipolar with the NATO and Warsaw Pacts dominating diplomacy. Superpowers are formed under peculiar political circumstances where one nation held a distinct advantage. While all the history is fascinating in sorts, one must really wonder as to what makes a nation a superpower.

A superpower needs the following :

• An unchallengeable military superiority: The Spanish Armada, The Royal Navy and now, the US navy are all examples of this unparalleled military hegemony. In fact, the US navy today is larger than the the next 13 largest navies combined while the Royal navy in it's heyday packed more firepower than the next two largest navies combined. A navy is the most valuable asset of any superpower. While armies can impose upon the land, a navy is the only force that can control distant parts of the world and keep distant lands under check. This was one of the reasons Russia desperately wanted a warm water port and fought the west for two centuries for at least one such port. This was the same reason Britain and the United States resolutely never let Russia expand southwards. If a nation wishes to project it's power across the globe in a sustainable manner, it needs a large military force, especially a gigantic navy.
• A large treasury: After all, it is money that makes the world go round. A country that wishes to broaden its sphere of influence must have the financial resources to back the efforts. A large military needs a lot of money, a lot of money also brings financial leverage and economic clout over smaller nations. This was the precise reason the Spanish Empire imploded. Spain, a staunchly Catholic nation was adroitly against Shylocking, as it was derisively called, the practice of lending credit at an interest. Without easy credit, the economy got static with galleons full of gold and silver from the New World just sitting in Spain funding only costly wars and futile imperial ambitions. The Thirty Years' war was the spark that blew up the Empire's fortunes, with Bourbon France filling the void, albeit temporarily. It was another nation, surprisingly tiny, but ruthlessly mercantile, that eventually rose to the top: The Netherlands. Wherever there was money to be made, the Dutch were there. Their merchant fleet was the largest in the world, often called the Dutch golden age, with a vast military fleet to secure shipping routes. It became so prosperous that it shadowed much larger empires like Spain and France who made no guise of their antipathy towards this brutally money-minded tiny kingdom. Therefore, as history shows, money is the oil that keeps the wheels of nations moving, money is so important, that a tiny nation can weed it's way to the top with money alone, lots and lots of sweet money.
• A sizeable population: It is not easy to get to the top, it takes a lot of hard work. What is even more difficult is staying there. The Netherlands did rise to the top, but the Dutch were promptly supplanted by a larger version of their nation, a nation equally ruthless in it's economic pursuits, equally mercantile, but larger, Great Britain. What made this even more ironic was that the British were the only ally the Dutch had with an ounce of teeth against enemies like leviathan empires united by a common religion and disdain towards this tiny nation of the Dutch, France and Spain. British ascent was not peaceful, but riddled with constant resentment of Dutch wealth and vice versa. The reason the British came out the winner was because of their sheer size in comparison to the Netherlands. The same can be said for the demise of British hegemony in the world. By 1890, The United States had overtaken Britain as the largest economy in the world, while Germany became the powerhouse of Europe, robbing Britain of its title of "The Workshop of the World". The reason this was achieved was not because of any other factor but size. The German Empire was the most populous state in Europe, after Russia, obviously, and the USA was simply huge. Both these countries ceaselessly performed as factories flooding the world markets while Britain took the back seat in industrial capacity and switched to a service based economy, the world's first post-industrial nation. European hegemony was further strained by the World Wars, two devastating conflicts from which Europe never recovered. However, even if Europe had remained peaceful, it's supremacy was not sustainable, solely because of the reason that there were much larger nations in the world that had simply not realised their potential. It was only a matter of time before they did, which meant that any European nation that held the reigns merely had a fleeting advantage over other nations, something bound to disappear in time. At this point, one might argue that Britain and France had vast empires and thus could industrialise their colonies. However, it must be noted that, imperialism, as a concept is not sustainable. The very fact that the British educated the colonial subjects in the Western school of thought proved to be their undoing. To rule over a set of people, one needs one of these things: authoritarian control, or popular goodwill. The British colonial government had neither, the French were even worse. The very fact that British colonial governance was praised for it's liberalism ( it must be noted that this liberalism is relative to other European powers of the time and must not be compared to current standards of human rights.) proved to unleash nationalist aspirations among the populace because the British did not assimilate the natives into their culture as the French tried to do, believing in the policy of non-interference, especially after 1857. The French, on the other hand tried so hard to assimilate native cultures that the indigenous people resisted the invasion of their culture. Ultimately, both the empires could not sustain themselves. But it must be noted that, unlike other empires that came crashing down, these empires merely faded away, quite gradually. The reason for that was, thankfully, ultimate admission of the fact that these empires were not sustainable. Therefore, for any nation to be sustainable as a superpower, it must have a sufficiently large population that identifies itself as one nation.
• A vast area of fertile land: This one is obvious. Any nation needs a large land area to sustain a sizeable population. More specifically, it requires a large area of arable land with favourable climatic conditions. While agriculture can be the least profitable of all economic activities, it is still, by far the most important and this requires land, a lot of it. A large population needs large quantities of food. One can always import food grains, but to maintain a sustainable superpower status, one needs to produce as well as consume. To produce large amounts of food, one needs large areas of arable land. In fact, land is the only reason Russia became a great power in the first place. It has a moderately substantial population, but the reason for that is that it has unimaginable amounts of land. If one takes up nearly half of the largest continent in the world and more than half of another continent, there are bound to be some people in it. We call them Russians. Russia has vast tracts of extremely fertile land, rich natural resources and vast amounts of unpopulated land to spare. This was the reason that even though Russian industry in the 19th century was non-existent, Russia packed a considerable punch on the world stage, enough to alarm the then most industrialised and powerful nation in the world, Britain, to declare Russia as the nation most likely to challenge British supremacy, even though Russia hardly had a navy, spawning the Great Game of the 19th century. Industrialisation of Russia only rapidly catapulted it to the status of a superpower. Despite the demise of Feudalism, land still plays an important part in the prosperity of any nation. Lack of land is the reason Japan does not reign supreme despite an exceptionally industrious population, which while pushing Japan to the status of the second largest economy, a title it held for forty years, could not do much to further Japanese economic power than what it is today. Therefore, a superpower requires vast swathes of fertile land, a favourable climate and abundant natural resources.
• Popular mindset and ruthless expansionism: No empire can be built through peaceful means. Any change in established political order can only be achieved by forced upheaval of the existing order. As controversial as that sounds, it is sadly true. One cannot name a single superpower that emerged in history after long periods of peace. The Spanish Empire ruthlessly exterminated the native Indian populace, The Netherlands emerged after the Thirty years war and the Eighty years war. The British Empire emerged as a nascent colonial power after the Seven years war, it's hegemony sealed after the Napoleonic wars. Germany was born after the Franco-Prussian war. The United States emerged after the Second World War. Wars make and break nations. Wars are triggered by expansionism. Today, however, expansionism has evolved from the idea of political control to economic influence. Still, a nation has to ceaselessly try and expand it's economic horizons. If a nation wants to be superpower, it has to start behaving like one. Diplomacy is like a poker game, one loses the game if they play it badly even if one has an unbeatable hand. Any nation that has become superpower at some point started getting incorrigibly assertive. For example, even though Britain reigned supreme uncontested on all seas, the United States boldly declared in 1920 that it shall endeavour to build a navy second to none. The boldness of this averment was compounded by the fact that Britain was an ally of the USA, not an enemy. Thirty years later, a wish came true. The US navy surpassed the Royal Navy as the most powerful navy in the world. If the USA had decided that it mustn't expand it's navy at the cost of British goodwill, the scenario would've been extremely different. Apart from this assertive confidence, a nation requires a population that is productive and ingenious. The reason the industrial revolution first took place in Britain and no where else was because of a strong Protestant work ethic compounded by a benevolent social institution welcome to change. The reason Soviet Russia collapsed was because it's society was becoming stagnant after half a century of political repression, reflecting on economic stagnation. For any nation to be a superpower, it needs a dynamic populace welcome to change and an innovative workforce willing to try new things.
• Liberty and Democracy: Finally, any nation aspiring to be a superpower must have a liberal government institution in place. Tight repression and strict regulation stifles innovation, the heart of any superpower. To maintain the popular dynamic and ingenuity, one needs a liberal government granting certain fundamental rights to it's citizens, and independent and impartial judiciary and an firm and insurmountable democratic tradition. The reason Britain outgrew it's continental neighbours was because of it's benevolent rule. The reason Soviet Russia collapsed even after having all the ingredients for a superpower was because of an authoritarian regime that stifled it's populace. The reason the USA lived on and will do so for the foreseeable future is because of democracy.

Although many nations have ruled the world, each nation that supplanted the existing superpower brought something new to the table. Till Spain came along, empires were restricted to individual regions. Spain broke that shackle to build an empire that stretched across the New World, It brought the concept of naval supremacy into the equation. Any superpower had to have a great navy. The Netherlands later brought trade into the equation, which meant that any nation now vying for the superpower status had to control world trade. Britain brought industrialisation which meant that superpowers now had to be industrialised nations with supreme control over world trade with an insurmountable navy. The United States brought size into consideration which meant that any superpower must have all that Britain had, in addition to a vast population making up a huge economy at home. The next superpower must have all that the USA possessed with something new to offer. It could be India, it could be China, it could be a united Europe, only time can tell.

To be

Befallen on the widen'd flat,
Was the servil sodden rat,
But on the saem did shoote out we,
The roote of our own miserie.
But why were we on this ground put?
With the vulgar bandicoote
If he were not but so as I
If he were not as eye for eye
For this rat doth so plague us free
As doth question burning me
As who I are and so dost he
And why we all so came to be
He may not be as sundry
As methinketh as doth I
Natheless virtue pricketh me
For so dost thee and so dost he
I cannot but compaer so
Humour of mine and all his four
Whithout sembling, holt and heath
Of courages mine and in his sheath
We drew our courses bothe the twain
We drew our virtue on slate plain
Mine with noble chivalrie
His with base debaucherie,
Twixt bothe lay the bold ensigne
Of one's own granden designe
I could choose and so could he
Of what beast or knight one woulden be
T'is not discerned beyond the erth
Of what natures are or of its birthe
For now I am and so is he
Midst Nature's cosmic symphonie

Religion

In tune with all the other ruminations of my mind, the next concept I decided to tackle happened to be religion. Unlike my previous treatise on the topic written in a frenzy of indignation and outrage, this time, I have tried to be as cold, dispassionate and detached as possible. Personally, I do not believe in anything, for I believe that I am not qualified to judge how the universe might function. But it does not stop anyone from scientifically dissecting and studying the concept of religion and its metamorphosis to organised religion and universal liberalism in some cases.

Fundamentally, what is religion?
It is a set of beliefs and theories on how the universe as the promulgators of the tenets saw it works and functions. It need not be true, it need not be false, but the interest or the need for this concept is more sociological and ideological. It is more of a set of rules than a system of unravelling the mysteries of the universe, although the latter is a significant part of religion. It's chief concern lay with the society than with the heavens.

Man is a social being. Therefore, in order to live among other such beings, each with objectives and aspirations as self-serving and diverse as one's own, a protocol has to be stipulated. The protocol goes by various names and forms from the Ten Commandments, Shariah, Dharma, Tao, etc depending on the region. Judeo-Christian cultures have the Ten Commandments, Islamic culture has the Sharia, Hindu, Buddhist and Jain cultures have Dharma, and so on.

If one looks at all these scriptures, one would notice striking similarities between them, indicating an underlying symmetry, the sociological need to arrive at very similar sets of rules across diverse cultures and beliefs. This means that the fundamental sociological needs of every human being is the same, regardless of the culture, race of geography. They are:

• The need for respect: Human beings crave for the respect and approval of their peers. It is an evolutionary trait to make us want to be agreeable to others, so that we remain a social species. No matter what anybody says regarding how they live life for themselves, and how they are not influenced by what the neighbours will say, they will always do, for we are hard-wired that way.
• The need for survival: This need is not restricted to us alone. Every organism does the most in its power to stay alive. 
• The need for comfort and pleasure: We constantly strive to make life easier for ourselves, it is also an evolutionary trait, perhaps trying to make us work towards the betterment of our own lives to give us a better chance of survival.

To broadly cater to the above needs, humans have constantly tried many strategies in the past. We were hunters and gatherers, we then invented the techniques of agriculture to make life easier for us, so on and so forth. But these needs frequently intrude upon the same of another, demanding a resolution of this issue in order to maintain man as a social animal. This is the first necessity of religion; to identify boundaries on the pursuit of one's needs in order to extract maximum benefit for maximum number of people in an ideal case, or in a more practical case, to extract the benefit as equivalent to one's position in the society's pecking order, for it was rarely egalitarian.

It's next concern was to enforce these boundaries, in a form as agreeable to the followers of this set of boundaries on one's personal liberties. This is very similar to managing a bunch of people with the carrot and stick approach. The stick is the limit on one's liberties, the carrot is the fulfilment of need 1: the need for respect. A person who acts unrestrained and has a seeming disregard for another's needs suffers from diminished respect and approval from the society than another who binds himself by these norms.

This now established, these rules have successfully infringed upon personal freedoms for the sake of the greater good. Now, there is another need to be addressed; something not discussed as of yet. It is not a necessity like the above three, but still is important to keep people from getting restive and frustrated. Man is an intelligent being, at least when compared to other species that share the planet. With such a large brain, man was occupied by the need to survive, escape predators and devise hunting strategies when he was a nomadic hunter or gatherer. As time progressed, man got less busy and got more free time in his hands, letting his intelligent and curious mind wander into pondering the questions of life and its purpose.

Once again, it was religion's responsibility to answer these questions and man tried to explain all phenomena he observed satisfactorily with the resources and knowledge at his disposal at that point of time, with his imagination filling the gaps. Religion also became the bridge that connected us to nature, gave a seeming purpose to existence and provided us with answers that satiated our appetite for knowledge. This is religion in its crudest form; it lays out rules for peaceful co-existence among the society as the formulators who defined its confines saw it, it provides answers to questions that emerged from the long periods of inactivity brought about by a settled lifestyle and it tries and maintains order among the group of people with whom the formulators of the same identified.

As one can see, religion can be purely attributed to addressing a sociological need to maintain order in a society of individuals with interests and aims as diverse as themselves. This was probably why government and religion were barely discernible in most cultures till around a hundred years ago, they both more or less had the same function. This was the sole reason, apart from man's egregious odiousness, that religion transformed itself into organised religion.

Organised Religion is probably the reason for everything that is wrong with our world, from terrorism, the crusades, the holocaust (it was not so much as religious as racial, nevertheless), I could possibly go on. One could name any problem on a large scale, not something like one failing in mathematics, and possibly trace it to religious intolerance. So, how did something devised to maintain peace become something of a cause with which one can justify killing thousands of people? For this, one must compare our society with a pack of wolves, or a pride of lions, or hyenas, or any social animal.

Elephants, for example, have the matriarch at the helm, with other females following her to any end. This was a system devised by the mind of elephants, who also had similar needs like our own. It was probably noticed that males tend to often get rowdy and uncontrollable when they went into their teens, while females remained sensible and docile. Therefore, they had to go. Males were kicked out, to rot in the open grasslands, while the females had the wisdom of the matriarch to guide them. Males, when kicked out, formed their own bachelor herds, which is a different story. This is a female-dominated society unlike our own, where the women called the shots. However, it must be noted that this system of obeisance to the matriarch is restricted to the herd. Another female of another herd would munch grass disrespectfully and pass water in front of our matriarch with impunity if it came to it. That female would have her own matriarch, whom she reveres above all else, and would be offended if somebody did that to her.

 Similarly, we are also like a pack of wolves or a herd of elephants, who have respect for a common entity that maintains order within the clan, restricted to the clan. Formulators of their religion concerned themselves primarily with furthering the cause of their own clan alone,  not humanity in general. So, there must also be a clause in every religion that calls for loyalty to that religion, as  a clan could identify itself then only by religion, nationalism is a relatively new concept. Added to loyalty alone, there must be a mechanism that ensures that the clan is defended from other such clans, either through hard influence (invasion) or soft influence (conversion). So, came the concept for fighting for one's religion in order to defend it. The defence of religion is a vague grey topic, open to interpretation, and hence even though Christians, during the crusades, invaded the Holy Land that was thousands of miles from Rome, they were not attacking Islam, but defending Christianity. We, however, need this "one of us, one of them" mentality if we are to survive, or we would have just dissolved into another clan, which typically in olden days involved enslavement and or or ethnic cleansing. So, religion had to have teeth to defend itself and its followers, the defence being subjective owing to practical considerations. Although anachronistic, this trait of religion has existed tenaciously throughout history, and while the world would be a much better place without it, the world would not be a good place without religion itself, for all the reasons mentioned above.

I assume, therefore I am

These were the thoughts that were running through my head the other day, when it was noticed that I had way too much free time in my hands. "Who am I? What do I perceive? How do I know what I perceive is consistent with the truth? What if there is no truth? What if esse est percipi? What if to be is to be Perceived?"

I shall endeavour to answer these questions within the bounds of reasonable assumption. First of all, there are two classes of schools of thought as far as philosophy is concerned: Rationalism and Empiricism.

Rationalism is that branch of philosophy that takes a set of logical statements broadly proven to be true, or at least assumed as such by stuffy windbags who think they know everything, and takes them in conjunction with each other in order to build compound logical statements that would be true if the fundamental statements were true. In effect, one could build up the most complex set of arguments and prove them as true or false as the case may be, if one knew the right set of logical statements proven to be true, in other words, the first principles. A pure Rationalist who frequently gets ahead of his or herself would argue that any truth, however complex can be arrived with a few statements that may be inherently true, like "The Sun Rises in the East".

Empiricism, on the other hand, is slightly pragmatic; it considers only statements that have already been proved true, and makes no attempt to further or extrapolate the proved argument to prove another one, for it was not experimentally proved. In English, a Rationalist proposes, an Empiricist disposes, the Rationalist then attempts to demonstrate against his or her will, and if successful, the Empiricist accepts or rejects.

As one can clearly see, the two schools of thought are at odds with each other. A Rationalist is today's Theoretical Physicist, the Empiricist the Particle Physicist, and each views the other with utter disdain. But one thing that both the schools of thought have missed is the fundamental assumption, the most fundamental one. I refer to the one where we innately assume that what we have proved is absolute.

For example, to prove that the Earth is round, Magellan circumnavigated the globe. This was based on the assumption that Magellan really did so and that he was not pulling a fast one on the Portuguese public. If one were to prove that he indeed circumnavigated the globe, he has merely proved that one of the projections of our planet is a closed geometric figure. In order to prove that it is a sphere, one must prove that every projection of our planet is a circle. Magellan had considered only one plane, presumable along the equator, and has merely proved that it was a closed figure, not a circle. It might just as easlily have been an ellipse or a hexagon about the plane of the equator along which he sailed. So it would only be reasonable ( as defined by philosophers ) to reject Magellan's proof of demonstration as a rigorous empiricist. But how about all the later evidence? How may one process the satellite imagery of our planet in innumerable perspectives? We accept this visual proof of our planet's roundness as valid because we can see one of the projections of our planet as a circle. This in conjunction with other photographs taken from different points of reference leads us to the conclusion that since the projection of our planet at different points of reference taken at random is a circle, it must be a sphere. But a purist empiricist would argue that one has only proved that various projections of our planet are circular, but one has failed to prove that it is circular from every possible point of reference and therefore the proof is not valid. So, considering the apparent foolishness and the head-up-his-arse-ness of the empiricist, one simply cannot produce infinite number of photographs to convince him. Instead, we ask him to assume uniformity, that is, we ask him to apply the rule of induction, the rule of extrapolation that says since the projection of the earth at the given point of reference is a circle, the projection from a point that is infinitesimally close to the given point would still be a circle. Therefore, from every point, the projection of the earth to every plane is a circle, and therefore, it is a sphere. This now moves into the realm of rationalism, which can satisfactorily prove that the given logical statement is true based on the truth value of a more simple logical statement, which in this case is empirical evidence.

The statement, however can also be approached in a purely rational way, without any empirical evidence.
The first logical statements are:

• The universe obeys all laws of physics and mathematics consistently. 
• The earth is made of matter.
• The earth exists in the universe.
• Matter experiences the force of gravitation.
• The law of gravitation is true and accurate.
• An attractive force pulls matter closest to the point of origin of the force as possible.
• The sphere is the only solid curve as solution to the collection of all points that are of no greater distance, with respect to another point, than a fixed arbitrary value.
• All the above statements are true.

So, these statements taken in conjunction with each other would suggest that the earth would experience the force of gravitation as it is made of matter and exists in a universe that obeys all laws of physics and mathematics. This force of gravitation, as suggested by the law of gravitation, is an attractive force, and therefore, tends to pull matter to points closest to itself possible. As suggested by the law of gravitation, the point of origin of the force of gravitation is the centre of mass of the object in question, the earth. As the centre of mass of the earth exerts the force of gravity on all other points on the earth, it tends to get as close to the centre of mass of the earth. This would mean that there is a great tendency for points of the earth to get as close to the centre as possible, and therefore, as dictated by statement 7, it would be a sphere.
QED.

Thus, one can prove that the earth is spherical without any satellite imagery, but it would be foolish to assume that this proof is absolute. The empiricist who looked at the rationalist explaining the proof to him would have had a contemptuous countenance as he could provide the rationalist with countless examples of meteors and asteroids that are of any shape but spherical even though all statements collected by the rationalist as first principles were true, his reasoning sound. The only explanation is, he must have overlooked some statements he must have included in his proof, for example: The force of friction and cohesion binds all points in a solid to a degree of freedom so minute, that it forbids the points to move as close to the centre of gravity of the solid as would otherwise be possible.
This would mean that even though all these were true, some other phenomenon occurred that let the earth violate the above statement overlooked by our rationalist and let the points move around freely. While the theory is that the earth melted into a liquid due to the heat of friction, other such objects were less fortunate, with solidity trapping them in hideous shapelessness. This now seems satisfactory, there is also empirical evidence to buttress the claim, there is visual proof of magma underneath the earth's surface and everyone is happy.

However, there are inherent flaws in both the above reasons that simply escape one's attention. These are what one says one takes for granted. First of all, to debunk the impossible to prove empirical proof, even if one were to, by some magical feat that demystifies infinity and transcends it, produce infinite photographs of the earth from every possible point of view, I would not be seeing those photographs as they were, but I would only see it as I perceive. There is simply no way of telling whether what I see is a faithful reproduction of what is, or anything exists at all beyond what I perceive. If the former were true, I would see only what I wanted to see, or some unseen force, within or without, wanted me to see. So I might just as easily see them as circular projections of the earth as another empiricist sees triangular projections of the earth. So, my proof is rendered in-absolute, and completely dependent on the observer. The latter on the other hand, would mean I could see whatever I want, it simply doesn't exist, a mere hallucination on a scale that is grander than anyone ever imagined possible. In either case, the proof becomes observer dependent robbing them of the absoluteness required to prove a fact. Therefore, by proving something empirically, one simply gets over this inconvenience by ignoring it or assuming the credibility of one's senses.

The above reasoning in itself is not empirical, it is the extrapolation of existent ideas to arrive at a contradiction. Thus, it is a rational explanation and no one has produced infinite photographs of the earth. But if I were to somehow prove that a rational proof can be discredited in the same way, it would mean that the above proof of indeterminability in itself has been rendered null and void. This, however, does not mean that empirical evidence can now be justified, as it is not so simple a universe to assume that the negative of a negative is a positive, but is an indeterminate state, assumed in most cases to be positive through induction and extrapolation with the assumption of uniformity of the universe. As in the school of Hegelianism, an idea can be comprehended by robbing oneself of it; the second part of the An-sich: Anderssien: An-und-für-sich series that mean in itself: out of itself: in and for itself. Hegelianism argues that any development of any idea is a triadic process; the first is the idea itself, the second, the opposite or sublation of the idea in the pursuit of its greater significance and the final re-institution of the idea in a more refined and agreeable form. So, in this triadic process, I would only be in the second stage of Anderssien if I disproved and therefore robbed myself of the ability to prove rationally. The third stage would be to outline a rational proof disproving the rational proof leading to another indeterminate state.


The proof is as follows:
We have taken a set of eight statements generally construed as true by general judgement and have built up more complex ideas based on them ultimately arriving at the fact that the earth is round. If, however, by some unaccounted factor, one of the basic ideas were to be discovered false, the entire supposition comes crashing down. The theorem of Rationalism is, "If any idea or phenomenon can be proved as logically sound and consistent by rational arguments, it is logically sound and consistent."
To prove the above theorem, the following statements are taken as first principles:

• The idea or phenomenon to be proved can be proved rationally
• The capability to rationally prove the idea or phenomenon is within our intellectual confines.
• The theorem itself.

Now, if I were to disprove any of the above statements, the whole school of rationalism comes down precipitately. Let us take the first statement; it is straightforward, it is merely an assumption that the idea can be proved rationally. There is no way one can prove it unless they use the proof of contradiction. Assuming that any statement cannot be proved rationally would imply that it cannot happen as one considers the fundamental principles of physics and mathematics to predict the phenomenon or idea. If the idea cannot be proved, it therefore cannot happen. Even this proof has an underlying assumption, which if disproved can crash the argument. The assumption is that the fundamental principles of physics and mathematics are absolute and of immutable veracity. If we can somehow prove that a phenomenon not predicted by these principles can occur, we have successfully disproved the contradiction, thereby disproving statement 1 of the set of first principles. For example, existent physics and mathematics could not predict the uncertainty in the position and momentum of a particle with sufficient accuracy and therefore have been incorporated into physics as an inherent limitation of the observer and the system which, in the absence of the observer, is in an indeterminate intermediate state, just as the Schrodinger's cat. For a brief instant, just after the observation of the limitation of existing physics and the redress of that limitation, mathematics collapsed, rationalism failed and had to be propped back up again with this work around correction introduced into physics. This suggests that the platform we hold for absolute truth in itself is not immutable, but changes with time, as new phenomena are unravelled. The observer does not lead, but lags the system, with a varying set point that accounts for errors produced in the previous iteration. This would mean that any argument can be proved rationally by playing with the most fundamental axioms of physics. Therefore, it is impossible to disprove the first statement.
Moving on to the second one, one can never prove the statement. If we do not have the capability to prove the statement, we will not have the capability to disprove the statement, and the statement will stay in an indeterminate state, glossed over by an assumption that we can prove the phenomenon under question, and see where it goes from there. The third statement leads to ad infinitum and therefore has been left alone. Ergo, it is impossible to prove rationally that a rational proof is valid for any idea or phenomenon. If I cannot prove the credibility of my tools, I cannot use them. If I cannot use them, I cannot prove the fact that I cannot prove the credibility of my tools. We have now entered a state of mutual contradiction that can only be allayed by an assumption on one side to keep the wheels moving. The assumption is that rationalism is valid and therefore applicable.


This, however is not the absolute standard for reason, there can never be an absolute standard. If there can never be an absolute standard, there can be no reason, only a set of conditions, as in, if this were true, that is true. Therefore, I merely assume that this is true, accept it as my most fundamental principle and build ideas from there. But there is no way to tell if it is true, for there is no such thing as the truth.

Good Riddance (Time of your Life)

There are times in every man's life, when he has to shrug it off and call it life. I have done precisely that when it comes to the last four years of my life. We've had our ups and downs, I've had my downs and downs, I've sworn at a couple of teachers quite liberally and have basically made my transition from a fat douche to a slightly less fat douche in the years I have spent on the dusty streets of NIT Trichy. From marathon AOE matches to bad movies to escape the power cuts that last through the entire day, it has been one bumpy ride from the blinking idiot in first year who bunked his first class in the college out of ignorance (ask Gokul, he was a part of this charade) to the blinking idiot who bunked all later classes out of apathy (ask anyone in my department). In this twisted journey, I have met more convoluted characters (read TB, Adharsh) than out of a Quentin Tarantino movie (read HK); some of you interesting (you), others mindbogglingly dull (everyone else), on the whole, it was a nice sample set of humanity in general that greeted my eye when I first walked into the walls of Agate hoping it would have a western toilet. All things said and done, it was a defining journey into adulthood, our own four year long barmitzvah that one needs to remember for the rest of one's life, for I'm sure that forty years down the line, if I'm still alive ( chances are, at this rate, I won't be, so you're invited to the funeral, by the way; bring champagne ) and whenever someone mentions the word Tsunami, there would always be a little part in me that would jump and turn around hoping it was someone from college trying to call me.
Not for the last time,
Tsfu

Catch 42

Curiosity is a wonderful thing. It is what that makes us get over our fear of the unknown and explore new horizons. But clearly, it is not a good evolutionary trait to possess. A curious organism is a dead organism. But with it, we've erased Terra Incognita from our maps, we've conquered the planet. Now we're consumed by an obsession. An obsession to know the nature of this universe. In the process, we have clinically alienated ourselves from the universe, which is good scientific progress, as no physicist should be a part of the experiment he's conducting, or a part of the system she studies. But what we've failed to note is that, we're inextricably woven into this universe; chances are, it wouldn't exist without us, one of the principal prongs of the Anthropic principle. An observer is as important as the system itself and detaching oneself can never be the answer. But the universe cannot be studied if we consider ourself a part of it. We must be the dispensable onlooker on the grand scheme of things, if there is any, in order to comprehend its complexities and intricacies. Would we modify our universe by understanding it? Is our universe getting progressively more complicated the more we understand it? This leaves us between a rock and a hard place. We've never dwelt upon the idea that the universe can never be comprehended, we have always assumed, at times in an insufferably cavalier fashion, that our intellect and faculties allow such a comprehension. It could be our arrogance and vanity, the answer to other equally deep questions that we just trudge along with particle accelerators, each bigger than the last, in the hope of seeing a miniature big bang, assuming it was a significant event in the first place. But the question remains, that if the universe can be understood, can one be a part of it and still hope to do so? If not, who can understand the universe, or how can we do so bypassing this stumbling block of being confined to the universe? There is no way we can study the dynamics of a system if we are bound by it. Therefore, there is no way we can fully understand how and why our universe works, unless we know what lies beyond its ends. Suppose we were to assume that we cannot comprehend our world, it doesn't seem implausible at all; after all, there are many millions of other organisms that cannot, it would be vain of us to assume we alone can. But if we alone could, we as a species would be an evolutionary singularity, an exception. As all exceptions go, we would have been eliminated by the force of natural selection. It would seem that we are well on our way into doing so. Our intellect has grown at the cost of other more 'important' abilities, and any predator would have had a field day on early human herds. Moreover, our brain is the biggest guzzler of energy in our body. It uses up nearly half of what we consume, and while such an arrangement has been declared wholly wasteful by other animals, humans have somehow, dispensed with other abilities like night vision, smell, claws and teeth to pursue a line of adaptation as improbable as remarkable. Stripped of our brain, we're a pink blob of food as ready to eat as apples and would put up as much of a fight. An organism that requires tremendous amounts of energy everyday to tend to a body that in its prime is still as helpless as the day it was born cannot be said to be the fittest. How we were not killed then, is an oddity. But, as evidence suggests, we have survived, and are one of the most dominant species on earth, a force of nature to reckon with. But it can also be, that our intellect is in itself our own undoing. We have existed on this planet for around a hundred thousand years, hardly any appreciable time interval to judge the success of a species which usually stay on the planet for millions of years before nature writes them off as a bad job. Therefore, the answer for the question of whether humans are here to stay can be answered probably after nine hundred thousand years, which seems improbable because we are already on our way to killing ourselves. The chances are, the next mass extinction will be caused by us which is happening as we speak by the way, and we shall go with it. The reason one ponders of humans as a species is because one needs to understand the nature of the observer before any experiment can be conducted. If the observer is limited by the system, it is not a very good observer as our definition of reason goes. If we are not a good observer, it is highly possible that we cannot understand the universe, or if we could, the universe is out to kill us before we do. Both ways, it's not a cheerful thought. The man who said curiosity kills the cat is a wise man indeed.