An Infinity Unknown

Take a minute & answer these question before proceeding to read: How was your time in school? What are the top 3 things you recall of your time there?


A dear friend asked me how I recall my days in school. I would have imagined a response like "It was fun" or "So much fun & play" or at least "It was so depressing" or "I met my husband/wife there" or something like that escape my lips but none of that sorts did. To my very surprise, I realised & muttered that my days in school were a string of shining & achieving. While I did enjoy myself thoroughly & had my own share of spats & mud-fights & puppy-love & infatuation for some teachers (some I am still in touch with), I don't seem to recall my school days as a span of learning & shock. What I mean by shock is what an old villager feels when he is shown how email works. The excitement with which he claps his hands when he gets a smiley on the chat screen from thousands of miles away is missing from my memory of school. To think that that is where I learnt nearly everything of life's fundamentals. It is poor solace that most people around me too recognise their school as something other than where they were surprised at what life had in store for them. It should not be immediately deemed an issue with the school system. Let us not view it as a problem.


Perhaps what surprises me is my mental romantic want that school would be remembered as an excursion where we discovered so many new things. Math, for instance, opened the doors to the world of numbers. Geometry & mensuration made the world of shapes so amazingly beautiful. Literature & the world of words which I play in was woven tale by tale throughout my schooling days. The human body & photosynthesis is still a magical realm to me. Refraction & how we would all tilt our head to view the pencil under water was brought to my eyes then. While I do not deny that I learnt all of this in school, I do not recall the awe or the surprise in discovering how echoes were produced. It was a fact that we were exposed to & then provided with the formula to compute various aspects of a problem using the time taken to hear an echo.


I remember a simple boyish conversation amongst a few of us who were exposed to the speed of light. We proposed that if I was 20 feet away from a candle (which was covered) and moved at the speed of light, then would I ever see the candlelight if I began moving away from the candle as soon as it was uncovered. The point was, since the light from the candle & I would move at the same speed, there will always be a difference of 20 feet between me and light. To think of light being held back like a stream of molten silver was amazing in conception & even today makes me nearly want to move that fast. That is the awe I refer to. The sheer amazement of using & studying a boomerang (yes, I went to YouTube to see how a boomerang is thrown).


I am not sure if the younger days in school are meant to provide the necessary tools so that those who are sensitive might explore & be amazed & those who aren't will make a living anyway. I would think that the initial years are when the child is likely to be stunned & amazed. To utilise the natural inclination for wonder is what I would think all of education should be about. Even if we eliminated tests & grades, our current approach to introducing a child to the wonders of this world would not focus on stunning the child.


It is not entirely clear to me whether wonder & amazement is best in retrospect. Do children merely see & get used, like a child using a smart-phone and thereafter finding nothing amazing about long distance communication or mobile apps or processor technologies? Adults who see a smart-phone for the first time are indeed amused & amazed at "how much technology has advanced" and hearken back to days when "all we had was a rotary phone & long distance trunk calls". Is amazement always in contrast? I recall the first time I saw a bike in a cage/steel sphere, I was amazed & also thoroughly interested in the notion of centripetal forces. I had nothing to compare it to - sheer adrenaline racing act! But a growing plant is hardly an awe-inspiring thing to a child until she sows the seeds & watches it grow, understanding all that it goes through.


I think schools denature knowing. Whether they do it consciously or not is secondary to this exploration. By capturing the flight of a bird into paragraphs of text about hollow bones & air currents we seem to steal away the opportunity from a child to watch birds & ask questions & seek to understand. By insisting that one be provided all possible knowledge even before curiosity or need arises, we are in essence removing the wonder of first encounter. I might never see a polar bear but I have studied so much about it that perhaps if I saw it in real life, I might be less amazed than if I knew nothing about it.


I think the question that remains is, can we essentially remain ignorant till need arises? What is the price we have to pay for that? Why can we not spend the early years in wonder & then grow organically & apprentice?

A little experiment

I had decided to try out a different version of Project 365 that was doing the rounds. I thought I would write a post on this blog, one for each day of this year, for no reason other than the want to do something seemingly vivacious.

After one month of adhering to it, I realise that while its possibility is not to be doubted, its value raises some questions.

I wish this blog to be where matters are delved into in depth. This calls for more deliberate composition as well as sufficient research and analysis. This places a great demand on time which seems to be more energetic in running away as I grow tired through the day. I am a poor manager of time too, but how vain a want to be able to manage time.

I seem to be more active on Twitter. Perhaps the demand that 140 characters places on me fits the allowance of a day's work. Nevertheless, it is disappointing to fight with fictitious needs of a post-a-day and of satisfying length. The quarrel itself is my creation and whining about it might not hold your attention. Hence, I have decided (and my trunk of decisions spilleth over) to train the longer, more involved works to this attache and shorter quicker works to the Twitter chalice.

Seeing without seeing

Q: That which occurs when we are confronted by all sorts of shapes and forms is called ‘perception’. Can we speak of perception taking place when  nothing confronts us?
A: Yes.
Q: When something confronts us, it follows that we perceive it, but how can
there be perception when we are confronted by nothing at all?
A: We are now talking of that perception which is independent of there being an object or not. How can that be? The nature of perception being eternal, we go on perceiving whether objects are present or not." Thereby we come to understand that, whereas objects naturally appear and disappear, the nature of perception does neither of those things; and it is the same with all your other senses.

These are a pair of questions asked in Hui Hai's text called The Zen Teaching of Instantaneous Awakening. The entire text is beautiful in what it presents to the mind and soul.

I was repeatedly called to this paragraph when in my own personal experience I noted something. I was reading a prayer out of printed text. This particular prayer I am familiar with though I don't know it well enough to recite it by heart. Nevertheless, when I recite it my mind wanders all over the world in places I have perhaps never been an never shall be. But my eyes continue to flow over the text and recite them without my having to be conscious of what I am reading. And once I complete the prayer I re-run the entire episode through my mind to realise that I don't recall having read a single word though I did recite it all. To play voyeur to the mind is perhaps my most favourite means of passing time.

So here my eyes see though my mind doesn't seem to see and my tongue recites as if there is a direct connection between eye and tongue. With the mind having seen nothing, it might be inferred that there was nothing to be seen. Nonetheless, the eye did see and the tongue did recite. In other words it was as if nothing confronted me but I still perceived. This is certainly not what Hui Hai is implying but these incidents made me re-think our notion of "mind", "perception", "brain", "sensory organs" etc.

Living Life For History

I am often the best historic character that the avid historian would have liked to pursue. Forever in my every move I leave behind hints to the "Why?" and the "What else?". There is lesser delight in living than in playing to this lean picture of a historian frothing at his mouth with excitement as I make choices and burn bridges. His sheer delight when he finds the crumbs I dropped to lead him to the inner workings of my mind and then lead him on to other alcoves of my psyche is quite a reward found largely missing in a life lived for a single audience. Thus I seduce him with stray excerpts of conversation about the adventure I am about to undertake, or the sin I am about to commit which none shall know and he can pride in being the only one who figured it out after onerous pondering and research. My every moue will have him wait with bated breath wondering on whom will the fires of wrath descend.

This historian feels my pain because he wants to know more. He exults in my victories for he doesn't want the adventure of the scent he is tracking to die down. He assiduously records my every move and my every thought. He gives my life's every single act a voice of a narrator who himself will find a voice a few centuries hence. Such is the voice he lends that if I were witness to my life retold, I would aspire to live like that all over again.

Drifting Pithiness

The only warm hearth we can always return to is our childhood memories

At every opportunity to not know, I shamelessly choose to know.

The patient sheet of paper - never asking me to shut up.

If only she could love me and not the image of me I wanted her to once love.

On the pavement, my body feels and holds the rush of every vehicle and in that incessant throb, a deep calm and quietening...

Such a pitiful heart which mistakes attention for love

How different is day from night!? My life is not of my plot; my dreams are not of my design.