Whatever: Musings of a Bored Soul

In the old days, tyranny was so... obvious. It wore spiked helmets, had dragons, or was just named Joffrey (probably have watched too much Game of Thrones). The modern architects of soul-crushing compliance know that if you want people to stay in their place, you don’t chain their ankles or put their heads on spikes. You simply ensure that most brains have a smooth, frictionless surface where no "dangerous" thought can catch traction. Contemporary education offers a grand lobotomy. Now, the diplomas are printed on expensive parchment and the thinking skills (critical to duur ki baat h) are buried in an unmarked grave beneath the accreditation boards. The education system is no longer a forge for the mind; it is a factory for The Katora. We spend considerable years and hard earned money (money gained from corruption automatically upgrades the quality of your katora) to decide what material our personal begging bowl will be crafted from. In the name of degree or diploma, we hav...

It is a quiet suffocation to sit in warmth while the rest of the world shivers. There are people sitting at polished tables, who might not be cruel, but who are devastatingly cushioned. They are wrapped in a protective insulation woven from safety, inheritance, and the lucky accident of their birth. They wear their privilege not like a weapon, but like a pair of noise-canceling headphones; the screams of the world are reduced to a hum that is easily ignored. When you speak of injustice—of the laws that break bodies, of the poverty that erodes souls, of the systems designed to crush—they listen with a polite detachment. They nod. They might even offer a sigh of performative sympathy. But their pulses don't jump. Their appetite does not wane. To them, the tragedy is theoretical, a philosophical puzzle to be debated over a cup of tea, rather than a reality that demands reckoning. One might say that they have taken Rawls’ noble "Veil of Ignorance" and repurposed it into a set...

A silence sits at the heart of logic; a quiet gap that David Hume famously identified and which philosophy has never quite managed to close. It is the chasm between the world as it is—the cold, hard facts—and the world as it ought to be—the realm of morals, duties, and worth. Hume argued that no matter how long you stare at a description of the physical world, you cannot squeeze a single drop of moral obligation from it. You can describe a man holding a knife, but the atoms of the steel and the physics of the hand will never whisper the commandment: “Thou shalt not kill.” The “ought” is a ghost which does not appear in the machinery of the “is.” Mark 8:36 poses a question hauntingly similar to Hume’s problem: “For what shall it profit a man, if he gains the whole world, and forfeits his own soul?” If we view this ancient question through Hume’s modern lens, we see a collision between two different kinds of reality. On one side lies the “Is” of the materialist. This is the gaining of t...

The self finds itself languishing in a room in one of those human buildings. A room full of empty noises: the clink of a glass, a burst of manufactured laughter, the drone of a story about a terrible commute, and such and such. Just humdrum conversations like paper boats, floating on the surface, terrified of the depths. Someone approaches. Their name is… something I was told a while back. They smile, a perfect practiced curve drawn on their face. "How's it going?" they ask; a question that requires no real answer. And then it starts: the mental fracas. The self splits into two. One half, the diplomat, smiles back. It finds the expected response and the mouth utters it. It performs the dance, the careful two-step of pleasantries that mean nothing and cost everything. But the other half, the true half, starts screaming. It rattles the bars of my ribs, struggling to escape; be anywhere but there. This isn't connection; it is a transaction. The treasure of my attention, ...

Aristotle once described a friend as a “second self,” and I feel that love, in its truest essence, surpasses even this. When one experience such a bond, the one they love receives the same care and dignity that they grant their inner self. Another way to put it: "There is no distinction between how I treat myself and how I treat them; both dwell within the same sanctuary. To harm or disrespect them would be to attack at my own essence. To invade their space or violate their being would be no different than self-betrayal." Love, when it flows from this depth does not seek to diminish either, but instead unite both in the integrity of one soul. And yet, when suspicion arises where only reverence thrives, it pierces deeply. It is a unique kind of hurt, not because devotion falters, but because words seem powerless to explain what is so certain within: "I cannot and will not harm you. You are too intertwined with my very core; harming you would be self-destruction. It create...

We distinguish between ' an interest in nothingness ' and ' an interest in nothing at all '. The latter feels no call at all - neither from existence nor from the non-existent, not from the visible or the invisible. No internal or external pull (or push) moves him. This is a disinterested apathetic person moving through life in a state which could be written off (by some) as anhedonia.  The other - i.e., the ones interested in nothingness - do not suffer the lack of the ' pull '. Their object of attraction, however, is the transcendental - formless, attribute-less, timeless, and even witless. This pull is a way in which the search for the absolute truth expresses itself in our heads. It generates an obsession with  निर्गुण,  निराकार, and  निर्विकार. Why (and how) does one develop a taste for such unmentionables could be fertile field of inquiry, but I'll dare not foray lest bitter realizations arise to haunt me! But such tendencies sure have larger consequen...

  I do not use that word – love (too misunderstood, damned, and misused). However, err not. Being an aspirational member of Dumbledore’s Army, and a lifelong adherent of the Swanson Code – ‘If you don’t believe in love, what’s the point of living? ’ – it is just the word with which I have issues, not what it is supposed to convey. (Again, I do not mean what people generally use it to convey – desire, or want, or all the ‘ships’ being shipped nowadays.) Also, I won’t tell you how I would define love – because I would not! Some things – law, life, love, duty – are निभाने के लिए (I could not better convey it in this language). These are borne by acceptance, dedication and devotion, not by definition. As it is, the very challenge is to seek (or come across most unexpectedly) a person for whom the soul instinctively and effortlessly scooches to make space, as if it always belonged to them (and you never knew that the said space existed before you met them). Chalo! What was this supp...