SOME PUNCHY PHILOSOPHICAL PLUMES

From Sampath’s Desk:

 

 

SOME PUNCHY PHILOSOPHICAL PLUMES

A food for thought for life philosophy overs!

 

Is the beginning the end in the offing? Or, is the end the beginning in the offing? However, neither the beginning nor the end is the be-all and end-all! Let us ask ourselves a tricky question! Which of the two came first – bird or egg? A mind-blowing answer could be “The bird is egg evolved and the egg is bird involved.” How’s it? Biologists concerned with study of evolution of living organisms would however go with the former only!

 

Life is a continuous process of learning, womb to tomb. Learning consists of listening (not just hearing), understanding, absorbing, assimilating, retaining, remembering and ploughing back the inputs acquired to churn out intellectual outputs, turn out knowledge products and putting them to use when an occasion arises or demands.

 

Everyday gives you experience – good or bad. Every day is a welcome day. Good days give happiness; bad days experience. Don’t blame bad days. All are God’s blessing. In fact, every minute of life not just increases your age but helps you gain valuable knowledge and experience too.

 

We are now in an era of ‘questioning the answers’! Assume if one asks today “Why is the grass green in colour?” and another were to reply “it is so by nature”, there will be no takers for this theory or concept. No one will be satisfied with such token answers. For, everyone goes by scientific explanation or materialistic logic. Human intellectual curiosity doesn’t accept or stop at whatever perfunctory answers given to serious questions. In this knowledge explosion era, none will settle for any mechanical answer other than that explains the law of physics i.e. grass is green because it is able to absorb all the colours of the sunlight (colours appearing as spectrum if it pierces through a prism or when a rainbow occurs on the horizon) except green. This physical phenomenon gives the grass the green colour to the grass. Again, isn’t it mind-boggling that water is a blend of oxygen and hydrogen (H₂O)? Would anyone have believed it centuries ago?

 

While the laws of science are absolute and can stand factual and practical scrutiny, psychological, moral and/or ethical laws can’t always be put to scientific scrutiny. 

      

A simple belief based on moral and ethical law/theory is ‘a good deed begets a good deed’ and ‘a bad deed begets a bad deed’. Consider these new proverbs, ‘violence begets violence in an endless spiral unless checked’ and ‘an eye for an eye will make the whole world blind’. Do they hold good and happen all the time? Do people take lessons from these sayings and stop their (mis)deeds? The answer can only be in the negative, I suppose. Although these are beliefs generally acknowledged by people they can’t always be subjected to practicality much less scientific scrutiny.

 

Let us consider another plain example. When you happen to come across a statue of a dog made of stone, there are two ways of looking it. One may see a dog in stone form; another may only see a big stone simpliciter (without acknowledging the existence of the dog in stone form). The same analogy holds good for paintings and other forms of art including fine-arts. It all depends upon through which glass one looks through; how aesthetically one is able to see things and in what perspective?

 

Former Indian Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, an acclaimed world statesman and basically a materialist, if not an iconoclast but had no religious moorings, subscribed to the view (on November 3 1959) that all good thoughts resulted in good acts later, which, according to him, is a natural law. To quote him, “I have often said that I don’t believe in the rituals of religion. What is my religious outlook, I don’t even know myself? But I do believe firmly in one thing that just as there are laws of physics and laws of chemistry, there are laws of good action and bad action too. Evil action must necessarily, sometime or other, bring bad results and good actions must necessarily give good results. I cannot say in what form this happens, but that is a law of nature.”

 

Even the great Revolutionary and National Tamil bard Subramania Bharathi questioned a Goddess thus, “How come righteous and noble persons suffer hardship, inconvenience and misery, while the wicked, wretched and crooked people thrive, cherish and prosper”?

 

It can’t be denied that while Nature has ready-made answers to certain questions, situations and happenings, some other things do remain a riddle -esoteric, abstruse, cryptic, enigmatic  and answer-elusive.

 

Secret to ultimate success is to have more beginnings than endings. Every morning dawns with a new beginning, new blessing and new hopes. Even if some expected things are not forthcoming, never mind. Never leave the hope there will be a good day breaking with the next dawn. For, there should always be light beyond the tunnel. End of a journey may possibly be a beginning of another, good and successful.

 

Senaca would optimistically assert, “Every beginning comes from some other beginning’s end”. Trying times need not drag you down if you will see them as doorways to new beginnings.

 

Let us not be bogged down by some failures. Everything gone is never gone. For it may be a starting point for new things to begin and brighten up the future. After all, life is a journey, not a destination; so, keep traveling!

 

 

 

R.SAMPATH

26/5/2020