Fahrenheit 451...

Well - this isn't a tribute to great Ray Bradbury - great souls never need a tribute. They are always around. Their presence in the worlds - both real and ethereal - doesn't necessitate any events - be it birthday, anniversary, or death.

The impetus is more subtle. It's quite intriguing how visionaries' creations emerge, expand and evolve with time, and become future-realities. And more intriguing is how world remains obscured from it. 


A fish doesn't realize she is in water until she comes out, to find out it was her survival. Countries, societies, families - all meet similar fate. The pattern? Ignore little changes. Ignore need to change. Ignore inner voices. Suppress anything that tries to tumble one out of his vaguely-defined comfort zones.

Complex? Yes it is. Take for example Galilio's overthrowing of Aristotle's postulates about Earth being the center of the universe. World hanged him until he bagged for mercy, and died with the kind of fame that he didn't deserve.

Looking at 20th century progress of mankind, one feels proud. But if one looks at the five centuries of turmoil that renaissance-martyrs went through, one wouldn't be surprised we are living in a world that is so industrialized, automated, and comfortable. There is so much sown in by our ancestors - their blood, their right to live with peace, their convictions, their freedom of ideas and expressions. 


And what we reap are just palpable outcomes of those seeds. We have a world full of facilities, we have a world full of elusive progress. And yet we don't have enough freedom. Nor we have equality or wisdom.


Our ignorance to such tumultuous building blocks of history paves the way for our insensivities towards changes taking place as we live. Insensivities to little changes that should forewarn us of something bigger. Insensivities to those often harsh but truer voices that forecasts how the world will be. Insensivities to our own sensitivities that fade with time, with our willful consent.

Galileo died thinking the world didn't deserve him. He didn't live long enough to see his truths being realized around the world - shortly after he died. That, in fact, was a fact that elevated himself above every moral system of religion and science prevalent in his time. He died with regret, but his regret was like that of Jesus who forgave his tormentors for their inability.

The irony was on Ray Bradbury. He lived through the turmoil he predicted at its birth, and gleefully watched people garlanding him, with total disregard towards the truth he predicted. They didn't strangle him. They did worse. They celebrated him as a visionary who predicted that all the wise words will be burnt some day. And at the same time they materialized everything he depicted as devilish in his magnum opus.

It isn't about how much a written word matters. It matters just like DNA - and this fact does not owe its credibility to our acceptance. In the last half century, the world has been burning every written word, despite being existent because of it. It has burnt this word not in literal sense - but in poetical sense. This written word has meant our ability to think and grow, to indulge into something with deepest desire.  The world has buried this written word below a pile of junk - Gadgets, events, and puppets. 

If irony has got anything intertwined with greatness, here it is:
Reflecting on his name - he was a Ray of hope with a Brad in his pen that endeavored to amend the civilization. 

Well, he got Buried.

RIP.

Why man needs success...

When reading the title of this blog, you would expect it to discuss success in societal definitions.

In other words, you will expect that this post will go at length to make you think - 

-success: what is it that you really want because you love it. 

-success: what is it that you really love but don't want to own.

-success: what it is that you despise but still want because your friends/relatives/peers want you to want it.

-success: what it is that you really don't give a damn to, but still want because your enemy loves/hates it.

-last but not the least (and how could I have forgotten it!), what makes you successful

Well, actually, none of it.

This post will analyze success not as a social phenomena, but as a biological need.

A complete 180 degree reversal from what you expected? 

Well, it's needed. Because we are talking about the thing that makes us go round 24 hours, 7 days.

We want to build up our theory on some example postulates. So postulates like "The need for success in a man is similar to a need for success for a dog/lion/duck", "Monkey was less inclined to succeed than a homo-sapiens" and so on. 

Darwinially (the adverb I just coined), yes. 

Man want success not because of a psychological characteristic called Ambition, but because something much deeper within him as a species. Something inner that drives him for food, something basic that makes him starve for sex - similar something drives him crazy for success. The more openly he accepts and follows this hunger, more successful he becomes in socially acceptable norms. The more he suppresses this primal need, more he suffers.

Come back to evolution: Darwin was the one who firstly claimed it is man's fitness success to have survived.

Likewise, every organism fights its way to survive, to grow, and to rule.

If at some day man fails to function because of the evils he has done to mother nature, the process will not be different from a stock-exchange graphs - which is a mere short-span manifest of our need to surround ourselves with success/failure.

Fitness today is never limited to physical state. Mental fitness has worldwide acceptability as a basic right.

Success plays an important psychological factor in his multi-dimensional development.

In order to be fit, man needs to accept 'need for success'. 

Ultimate success or failure is a natural selection (Darwin again!), and is an implicit ingredient in every animal's life.

Favourite bedtimes bestsellers

In my last post, A good bedtime book is like, I wrote about cradlesong nature of the storybooks people love. I also said, it's their indulgence that keeps their sleepy eyes glued to the page, and without it, there is no life. Today I want to expand this indulgence idea.
Indulgence, to some who has experienced it, transpires well, but what they in their heads connect with it maybe different from what I meant by it when I connected it to bedtime books. To others, it simply means nothing; perhaps they don't know what the word means, or they had never experienced that kind of indulgence - the one which is aroused by something like a novel or a storybook.
First of all- indulgence is no thrill. Rather, it's a complimentary to that. The kind of feeling you get as you read a page-turner airport thriller is not indulgence; it's curiosity, and pure adrenaline. Indulgence feels like a slow, steady stream of life - quietly and gentally taking you along.
Characters chatter over coffee-cups for some three chapters, and that thing keeps you actually glued, though you are hell bent to make fun of it once you have read it fully. That's indulgence. Now let's dive into some examples.
Harry Potter, my personal favourite bedtime, is a perfectly normal teenager (except he is a wizard, yes, but his emotions are completely human and matured in timely fashion). In the beginning, except for the searing scar on his forehead, he is not exposed to any larger-than-life problems. The rejection from his aunt's family is nowhere unseen in the real world. He is a brave boy, craving for his lost parents like any other would be, before finding out he is a wizard and he has enemies. But that doesn't end his normal life. He still goes to Hogwarts, studies for seven maddening years - yes, there wasn't any spell that could compress the course content, and for good! If there was one, millions of readers would have lost the sense of normal, slower pace of life that beat within Hogwarts. They would not have known about Harry's friends and foes, their unworldly abilities yet worldly emotions. There were spells that could do Harry's homework, but he still had to attend classes, take notes, and bear punishments! That gave a sense of routine to Harry's life filled with unworldly challenges. That gave the story a meaning for millions of its readers.
Another example that pops to my mind is Rudy Baylor's life in Rainmaker - a bestseller by John Grisham. (Lawsuite thrillers are no favourites of mine, but I read John Grisham simply because his extra-ordinary creation of routine life on pages. Abundant coffee cups and sandwiches!) Rudy Baylor is a law passout who stands amid an uncertain future due to his sudden job loss from a top notch law firm. He is a graduate with not-so-great aspirations and not-so-great credentials. In a rags-to-reaches tale of Black family who lost its son in cancer due to negligence by a big insurance firm, Rudy brings them a staggering 40 million verdict that he himself did not anticipate. But more striking feature of the plotline is how his own life flow: how he struggles for a job like any low-grade student, how he struggles for clients after having secured one, how he starts out his own firm with a seemingly dumb paralegal, how he deals with his equally perplexed love-affair in the middle of all this, and how he also makes justice with his casework - all this not so excellently, but quite diligently. If you read it, it seems like its not leading to any end - all Rudy does is to tumble between things he can't control. And yet the end arrives, a meaningful one, just like good and bad things emerge at any given moment of everyday life.
Take life of Michael Corleon before he assume's his father's position in Godfather. I truly revered Don Vito Corleon's character, I must say. But if somebody asks me what kept me turning the pages, it was Michael - Don's youngest son - without doubt. All he does is follow the course of the events like many of us do. Don is a hero, Michael is a person, though later he transform himself into someone of Don's stature - one of the real motives in Godfather's plot.
There are countless other examples. Frodo's quest in Lord of the Rings - pursuit of a common man. Or take Ken Follet's less celebrated novel Whiteout, where the female protagonist is a system security operator in a biotech lab - a profession with whom hundreds of thousands of security guards can connect to. And it's a tale woven around snowy Christmas nights, a time no one could have missed in their lives. Readers hinged upon these connections.
If you observe, indulgence has normalcy at its root, and normalcy does not necessarily come from Heros. It comes from seemingly normal people who, when faced with abnormal circumstances, follow their minds and hearts, and turn out to be heros. Normalcy also does not stem from extremely challenged people's life. Challenged people arouse sympathy, normal people arouse a sense of belonging. There are more normal people in the world than the challenged ones, and that explains why these "routine" novels became favourite bedtimes and bestsellers.
You feel nothing is happening since some hundred pages, yet for some reason you cannot betray it, because it feels like your life, your routine a precondition under which you live most of your days and do your tasks.
This normalcy falsifies the reader within you, who sometimes expects thrilling twists and dazzling turns. But it justifies a person within you whose struggles are not grand. It connects with inner you.
Perhaps this is something that you want when you say your prayers before you sleep.