The 'It won't happen to me' syndrome!!

The other day in the Marketing class, in a discussion on a case based on the ways to promote awareness about HIV AIDS, another interesting topic came up. It found only a few minutes of audience in the class, but left me pondering over it. It was the 'It wont happen to me' attitude.

It does sound familiar, doesn't it? We all choose to believe in it and then refuse to accept that we do. For instance, in the context of the topic for the class discussion, there is a large number of educated, supposedly aware people who choose to indulge in unsafe physical relationships without proper precautions, and their reasons are all based on several premises like 'I think i can trust that certain person' or 'He/she looks healthy' or even the worse 'few partners = less risk", basically all stemming out from the root perception: 'I know it is dangerous, but it wont happen to me'.

This syndrome is not restricted to this context alone. We can apply the same to the rash driving of bike riding. I understand that the adrenaline rush inhibits the logical reasoning to some extent and makes u less risk averse, but generally, it is also the syndrome in question. 'I've done it so many times, once more won't hurt. People are involved in fatal accidents, but it wont happen to me'.

Another profoundly apt example is that of smoking. It can sometimes be surprising how hypocritical some people can be. They know smoking is not healthy. They sometimes even ask others to quit. But them, it cant affect them. 'People die of lung cancer caused due to smoking, but I am not one of them, It wont happen to me'.

We fail to give a rationale for this attitude, yet we try and disguise it in several ways. We give reasons we ourselves know aren't convincing. We call it fate, we call it positive attitude and sometimes even term it as hope, but is it really that? There is a thin line between being hopeful & positive in life and being careless and oblivious of the dangers around us. Yes, hope is a necessary ingredient of our everyday survival, but u can't jump in front of fast moving train and 'hope' it does not kill you. It is good to have a positive outlook towards life, but it is better to be prepared for the worst. And as it may seem to you that you indeed are ready for the worst, it very often is an illusion, and God has several ways to give u a reality check in that respect; sometimes the hard way around.

A few instances in my life bear witness to such reality checks. I've found Terrorism occupying the headlines of the newspapers ever since i started reading (or skimming) through them regularly, which happens to be quite a number of years now. I always knew that innocent people become victims of this curse everyday; several die too. But as much as I felt sorry for them and angry at the evil, I kind of believed that I would remain untouched by it, the same '...it wont happen to me' at work. During my stay in Mumbai, from 2002 to 2008, the city saw more terrorist activities (primarily bomb blasts) than i can count on my fingers (toes put together too). If it was a border, or a nation at war, i would get it, but mumbai being a metropolitan, buzzing with businesses, finances and party going urban crowd, these terror attacks were incomprehensible for me.

The few that are etched in my memory, possibly forever, include the one time when there were serial blasts in the local trains of western line in 2006. Incidentally, I always travelled to my college in local trains for all of the 6 years that i stayed in Mumbai. I used to carry a first class student pass and as fate would have it, the blasts happened in the first class compartments. In fact, one of the blasts happened in the same train that i'd been taking for the last 2 years on my way back home and at almost the same time, a couple of stations after it left the station where i used to board it. Thanks to the preparatory leave for the exams, i was at home. Had i been on that train, I'd be a fading memory for many today. The trains resumed service a day later and my leaves ended a couple of days after that. It was time to return to the same train, all over again.

As I boarded the train for the first time after the gruesome incident, my stomach churned. It was one of those moments when you redefine the meaning of fear, hope and courage for yourself. It was a deadening fear to imagine that a set of similar unassuming people were ripped apart in a similar surrounding of a first class compartment, only a couple of days back, and i could have very well been one of them. I realized that courage, in fact, was not being immune to fear, but knowing that it exists and accepting it in your daily stride, as the people in that almost filled train compartment had. I felt the power of hope when the train started its onwards journey and all I wanted that day was to survive the next half an hour of the journey and reach my college alive. I've never been good with reading people's mind and thoughts, but trust me, that day i could see the same hope on every face in that compartment and no matter how much they tried to hide it under a nervous smile, the combo of fear, courage and hope made its stark presence felt nonetheless.

This was not a standalone incident that made me value the positive attitude and hope in life, there were some more. The 26th July, 2005 rains in Mumbai when the city saw more rainfall in a day than Sydney experiences in a whole year, found me and each one of my kins, both my sisters and my father, stuck at different places overnight due to the flooding. All communication channels including cable and telecommunication services went down too, making the condition even worse. I walked around 12-15 kilometers next day back home, witnessing the wreckage all through my way. People had died, hundreds of them. A couple of days later, everything was back to normal. It rained again, and we all left for our colleges and work yet again.

These, and many more incidences later, the city did teach me the value of life and living every moment in such a way that if we die in the very next one, we have nothing to regret. It also taught me the necessity of hope in our daily life. But most of all, it taught me that if it can happen to any one else, it could happen to me too. The best that I can do is take chances with anything but a human life, be it mine or someone else's.

Life has a knack of screwing with you right when you start getting the impression that you have it all figured out. It throws such volleys at you, it really does. All you can do is bounce it back off your courage and hope you will survive the next one too!!

To Err is Human, To Approximate Divine

Whatever you studied till date was not accurate. Your reaction?? A typical ‘Who cares!’ shrug. If I tell you that whatever you see does not exist in space at the point you think it is, you’ll be zapped. Then if I tell you that the earth revolving round the sun and the sun revolving round the earth are fairly accurate statements, you’ll feel I am using some alien multilingual verbal communication technique to crack a joke. But all this is true, though it denies the basics which we have used, to build upon them, a huge monument of knowledge.
Welcome to the world of approximations. Approximations, which do not hurt but make our lives easier. Approximations, developed by humans to fit huge packets of complex realities into smaller and convenient suitcases of observations and calculations. We won’t be wrong in saying that whenever physicists got stuck in calculations, mathematicians took over and whenever mathematicians got stuck, approximations too over.
Optics, mechanics, magnetism, electrostatics and dynamics, chemistry, mathematics or even real life, nothing remains untouched by approximations. When human capabilities fail, approximations revive them. Some approximations were born before their more accurate counterparts and some later. The former category includes Newton’s laws governing motion. Its accurate version was given by Einstein in mass energy equation and relativity. Other example is the formula to evaluate the speed of sound that needed the Laplace correction later.
Let me first justify the examples used in the opening of this article. The first example is related to the fact that till now we’ve studied only approximated versions of most of the theories and laws and never bothered to find the accurate statements, and why should we?? We needed to score marks which were possible by merely mugging these theories up. But the adverse affect of this was that these approximations have become our common sense and anything that denies them seems to be absurd. The third example is one such ‘acquired common sense’.
The earth revolves round the sun and the sun revolves round the earth depends upon which body we chose to keep stationary with respect to the other. Keeping the earth stationary, we find that the sun revolves round the earth. Other planets, though, undergo a complex path and may or may not return to their original position after some time in this case. This is nothing but the independent choice of frame of reference. We usually chose sun as centre only because the resultant paths of other planet come out to be simpler geometric shapes, be they ellipses or ellipsoids, in this frame of reference, thus making their study and observation easier.
The second example arises from the fact that we approximate the refraction of light caused by different layers of our surrounding media due to their varying density, be the reason be varying temperature or composition. But if we consider them, the objects we see will turn out to be the images of the object displace by a small distance from the actual position of object in space. This is because the reflected light from the object which is responsible for our vision gets refracted by the different layers in the medium and no longer has the same orientation in space as one would expect from a straight light ray.
Such approximations are so ingrained in our lives that we take them as default conditions. I wonder if a bill will be passed to accommodate the ‘Right to approximate’ in the constitution, though I would prefer the ‘Right to choose a frame of reference’. But before political bodies even remotely think of such a concept, you can approximate the value of this article as zero and forget it before you start questioning the ‘commonest’ of your common senses.

...And Then, I Died

NOTE: This article may depress you a bit so if you aren't up for it, I recommend you not to read it. For those who go ahead to read it, i suggest feel and visualize to get the actual essence of the article.


…and then, I died!

The rule of destiny- Death, is an inevitable hour. An instant to come by and stand still, to recollect what was gained and what was lost; the opportunities caught hold of and the ones left alone. The moments cherished and the agonizing instants.
The faces surrounding me, once familiar, are now helpless and distant. An emanating wail that resonated in the background is now dying off gradually transforming into muffled sniffs. It took them only a moment to believe it, but I am still in some kind of trauma, a state of shock; instants passing in front of my eyes like a series of multidimensional images but the voices in the images are crystal clear. One after the other, I see the moments of my life passing by like a train. I am falling off like a feather, apparently lighter as if the gravity has been reduced to a negligible force, or so to say, a mere pull of a string. I land with a thud, but no pain. The pain has gone, the sensation persists; the sensation of DEATH.
The end of a long journey is near. My last stop is within a touching distance. I still can’t believe it. Now I feel how valuable my life was, the joys, the sorrows, the emotions, the relations; all is over in an instant. I feel sad, really sad, but no emotions appear on my face. I try hard but I seem to have lost control. My face has stiffened, my brows elevated, mouth gaping in a state of shock and eyes filled with agony and desire to survive. I wish I had one more day to live, just one more day, to tell those whom I cared for, whom I loved but never said so thinking that there is a lot of time left for that but suddenly everything has shrunk to this instant. Time, for me, has stopped. I want to say sorry to those I have hurt; some of them need to know, I never meant any harm to them. The rivals seem to be best of friends and their rivalry, best of friendships. At least, I lived then. I breathed and talked, felt and thought.
I want to shout for help, to plead to the world to save me from this darkness that is enveloping me, to drag me out of this moment and pinch me and say- It’s all a dream. But alas! No words come out, the lips refuse to move, the eyes refuse to blink, as if telling me- You have seen enough and said enough; your time is over and in this game f life and death, there is no Restart. They seem to tell me that they now need to rest, an eternal rest. I see several faces having multiple emotions. I wish to stretch my arms and ask them to pull me up but my body seems to revolt. It is rock steady. My arms seem to weigh a ton. I am falling into a deep dark bottomless pit, deeper and still deeper and no one is pulling me up. They are watching me go but the poor helpless creatures that humans are, they are mute witness to my end. Probably, they will understand when they die as I now do. I feel pity for them; and I feel pity for myself. Still no emotions on my face save the shock of death.
I see hallucinations. I think, I see God. I am not sure but the images keep changing in my vision. The time has slowed now. The world seems to be a mute television. The chaos has reduced to a faint buzz in the ear. I feared death throughout my life but look at the irony of the situation, I AM LIVING THE VERY MOMENT OF THE DEATH.

The Secret Alliance

Science and technology have always seemed to be in conflict with religion and God since the onset of human life on earth. But if we pause and ponder over this, we may wonder how deeply interwoven and related these two entities are. The fact that people fail to understand this relation leads to big confusions. For instance some ‘purely scientifically oriented minds’ believe that religion is an absurd concept and has no significance in the world of quarks, mesons, black holes, supernova and DNA. They think that religion has reached its expiry date and is no longer relevant in this technology driven world.
The viewpoints of those who radically oppose technological growth are more skeptical. According to them science has left us in a world without wonder. Our sunsets and sunrises have been reduced to wavelengths and frequencies. Though all people are connected to each other electronically, still we feel lonely. The complexities of the universe have been shredded into equations. In this grand scheme of universe, earth and its life is given a stand of a meaningless speck, ‘ a cosmic accident’ and in the quest of finding answers and proof, all it is finding is more and more questions.
Both the opinions of the debate can be argued with equal success. But the fact is that in spite of these views being correct factually, these arise due to one-sided vision of this concept. Science and technology in no way disprove the presence of God but it is a medium to understand God’s ways and His vision while creating the universe. Conversely, religion does not oppose scientific views but acts as a guiding star for the moral aspects of science. For instance, we acquire great knowledge from science, be it about particles so small that they are practically non-existent or be it energy sources, which may by a small reaction destroy complete life on earth, but science does not warn us to consider the moral implications of the use of this knowledge. It is religion that acts as signposts to otherwise mad rush of reducing sizes of chips or earning profits in the form of material money and fame.
Science and religion do not outdo each other but in a very elegant way, designed by God, they compliment each other. Though there are some issues that still put them in opposite stands but this does nothing but point towards the fact that we have not fully understood God’s plan. A baby is born with no knowledge of science but knows to soothe its spirits and stop crying when fed. It knows to cling on to something in case of a fall. Do these inborn instincts not point to the presence of God? Let alone the babies, do we not see God’s hand in the framework of this universe. Science proclaims that even the slightest change in force of gravity, composition of elements or weight of an atom would have rendered our universe a lifeless mist rather than magnificent seas and heavenly bodies. It would really be foolishness to believe that such a brilliant arrangement where everything falls into its place perfectly is just a chance. Seeing this probability, it is better to believe in a power greater than us rather than believe in a mathematical impossibility.
Blaming science for the destruction already caused and the damage already done can be regarded as an offence on par with blasphemy. It is not science that has ruffled human life but human mind itself. It is our self-centered nature that has rendered us miserable. It is not science that drifts us away from religion but it is our willingness to dump old views for the new ones and unwillingness to incorporate both old and new concepts in unison. Science opposes not religion, but some man-made rituals and beliefs that have been taken too seriously without understanding the prime underlying reason for which our ancestors devised them. The need of these, now no more due to world wide awareness, these pass to be nothing more than superstition and need to be dumped.
Religions are nothing but the ways to praise the supreme power, the one and only God. But when religion and beliefs start opposing other equally clean and relevant religions due to man-made rules and beliefs devise by notorious minds, opposition of science comes into picture, which is almost always mistaken to be opposition of science to religion at large. In a similar way, religion is not an obstacle in the way of science but a guiding signpost. It just depends on our vision, on how we visualize it.
Let us take an example of the ongoing tussle between scientific and religious minds over the issue of cloning. The discovery of simulating a birth of an identical life form made great waves in the world of science and the scientists are eager to carry out their experiments on humans but there is a huge opposition from so to say ‘truly religious people’. But if we do believe in God, don’t we say if God had not wanted us to clone or to simulate birth at all, could He not have rendered DNA incapable of doing so after isolation or could He not have erased all possible ways of isolating the basic entity of life. But no, He cannot have made a mistake. This argument does not despise religion and favor science but as said earlier that science are in perfect unison, science does put restrictions on the use of this technology. Before using it on human beings, the moral implications of the process have to be ascertained and science does not allow to carry out a process without considering the pros and cons. This process can be carried out in future if its pros outweigh the cons at large but otherwise dumping it is what science and religion both instruct us to do. It may perhaps be carried out under some restrictions but for now, it needs to be paused and thought over.
This is just one of the innumerable examples that tell us about the deep relation between science and God. It is only that we are not able to read them properly. Human minds initially prioritized religion, then drifted towards science without understanding this relation and it is now that they have started accepting both though there always have been a minority of enlightened ones who had better understanding of this underlying principle that still holds true- God’s presence is reflected in both religion and science and both form an integral and indispensable part of our lives.

PS: inspired from Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code :)