Wednesday, June 25, 2014

God is in ultraviolet

No, I am not saying that because most of our  Hindu gods are depicted as bluish. The reason is also not because he is right there, you know he is there  but you cant see him.

Until we discovered ultraviolet rays some of the things were unexplainable. The only way we could explain our way out of it was to attribute it to a mysterious higher force which has the ability to do things us lowly humans cant. This is not true just for ultraviolet. Till electricity was discovered fish which identified its prey based on electrical signals sent by the prey would seem to have been guided by divine instinct. 
In a lot of cases we invoke the divine when our quiver of scientific ideas is inadequate to explain something fully. 

I  mention ultraviolet because it is one of our more recent discoveries which has managed to explain hitherto mysterious things. The conventional belief is that what is mysterious must definitely be magical. But the more practical belief should be that what is mysterious is .. just mysterious. At every point we make this arrogant mistake of thinking that whatever can be invented has been invented, we are at the forefront of technology and our understanding of nature and sciences is so great that it cant really progress beyond this.  

We will be proved wrong. By the next generation. 

They will definitely discover newer things and look at the world with a much better vision. They will dispel some of the ignorance of our generation and wonder how primitive  a life we must have led to not have known <some funky thing> the same way we look at the older generation with pity for not having known the usefulness of Google. They will push back the boundary of the divine just a little bit. 

Because, God can only exist beyond the realms of  understandable science.

(I am of course not taking the poetic argument of those who see God in the beauty of science. They see God in the greatness of evolution and natural selection. They equate beauty and truth with God. And of course some who believe that science can explain everything, but God oversees that. I could get on board with such a god but if that were so, there is no clear reason why God should be so human-centric. There are more bugs than humans, we are definitely outnumbered in terms of the volumes.  )

update: Some article I was reading seemed to hint that astrology is such a science. That we dont know its workings, therefore cant trivialise it. I am on board with it theoretically and do accept taht there is a chance that it works in ways we cant understand at this point, but my heart still finds it silly to think that Jupiter which is a million miles away is influencing how short-tempered I am. 

Friday, June 20, 2014

In defence of the fake.

Original. The word has great value. It means you were the first one to come up with something or it could mean that the world saw yours first. Either way, the value is about hundred times that of the non-original. Fake, on the other hand is its much unloved cousin.  Its cheap and dirty, lives on the by-lanes, sneaks up unsuspected and runs off with the money intended for the original.

It is all so grossly unfair.

Picasso is considered a genius because of his ability to paint. Someone else paints just as well and has painted the same things as him, and his works are indistinguishable from Picasso. But one is considered a master and the other a forger and a scamster purely because they were separated by a few centuries. ( yes, I understand that he was trying to cheat and imitate, but am talking about the basics) Why isnt some random guy's water lilies valued in billions if it looks like the water lilies that Monet was looking at when he painted his? Are we not paying for the beauty of water lilies looking like water lilies? Are we instead paying for the idea? Art collectors and investors would like to tell you that there can be value only when no one else has it. But we started collecting art in order to make ourselves happy. If the only thing that can make you happy is the fact that no one else has it, your problems go deeper than can be solved by a piece of art hanging on your wall.

A similar reasoning can be applied in the case of fashion brands as well. If it looks like Gucci, smells like Gucci, is as durable as Gucci, it is as good as a Gucci even if you pay one tenth of the price.  When brand name implies quality I can understand paying a premium but in most cases we pay just for the brand name. In which case what gives you happiness is not the bag itself but merely the fact that you are possessing one. You are paying for a mental value than a physical utility.

Let me tell you again, this is a scam. A scam run by companies who want you paying more, who do not want you to see whats real, who do not want you to just be happy with the basics. They create random needs you do not have and then make you feel inadequate when you do not fulfil them. What else can be a reason for the existence of so many ridiculuously priced luxury brand of watches? How much value can you extract from a watch for you to pay lakhs and lakhs?

I know I sound like some conspiracy theorist who claims that aliens are running our planet and deluding us into living in this hamster wheel while they amass all our resources but I am not that stupid. All I am claiming is that some earthlings are running our planet and deluding us into living in this hamster wheel while they amass all our resources.