Eastern Vagabond

Essays on travel, cities, memory, and the unnoticed textures of the world.

Tag: evolution

  • The Grey World – II

    I’ll pick up from where I left in my last blog.

    The grey world, I’m beginning to realise, is more like a black hole – As vast as a universe in itself yet invisible to the external eye. Those who enter it, never come out. And somewhere along the way, they lose regard for what’s white/ one/ light/ virtue because it holds no proprietary right on the Golden Rule which is quite fair; only too far from what’s conventional and orthodox.

    It sometimes puts me in awe how brimming with meaning our world is, or can be if we really choose to notice. There are small truths floating all over in space, conforming or denying each other yet remaining truths in their own right. Think of all the religions as small, contradicting truths, for example, or libertarian vs authoritarian ideologies, republicans vs democrats, darwinism vs creationism, or science vs religion etc. So many of them to put us in awe. So much contradictory to put us in awe. Where do we find the golden rule that weaves them all together. More and more people are realizing that the uncharted spaces between non-conforming truths need to be explored. We can see efforts being made. I just discovered Broadly’s documentary ‘Inside the Weird World of an Islamic Feminist Cult’ which is basically a group of Islamic creationists led by Mr Oktar who claims to be the first Imam to introduce his followers to feminism. People are scared of him; some find him rather ‘weird’ (as the title of the documentary suggests); even I find his kittens unusual but I appreciate him for exploring the no-go area between traditional Islam and modern feminism, trying to modify each to bring them into harmony.

    Clearly Oktar has lost association with and regard for traditional Islam so much as for modern feminism, in hope of finding the middle ground. It can’t be said as of now if he has discovered the golden rule yet but one thing is for sure: he is never going to lapse back to either. So I guess he is a man trapped in a black hole. Kudos to him and everybody else exploring the grey world.

    Reference:

    ‘Inside the Weird World of an Islamic Feminist Cult’ documentary link: https://youtu.be/7bH21w2R0hc

  • Madness & Sanity

    In the following essay, i will examine the terms madness and sanity, their evolutionary backgrounds, whether a harmonious equilibrium between the two is achievable, and the role played by each in our survival as a species.

    Sanity, in colloquial sense of the word, means to be in your right mind, conforming to the standards, being a part of the mob and going with the flow. Madness, on the other hand, is being socially aberrant. Wear a suit in mosque, sherwani in x-country and shorts for an interview and you’re already up for the title. To understand this painfully immense pressure one feels about conforming to certain standards of the society, and hence called sane, we will have to delve deep into the secret vaults of history from the point of view of evolution.

    Millions of years of evolution have hammered in us human beings, instincts that have helped us fight off extinction. Programmed to protect us in potentially hostile primitive environments, our instincts have managed to steer us clear of the lethal grip of natural selection and ensured our survival as a species. However, the civilized world today has rendered most of these instincts much less useful, if not exhausting. Remember the last time, you walked up the ramp for a performance and you looked pale as ghost. It just so happens that every time your brain detects a fear signal, it draws in all your blood from the skin so as to minimize the blood loss in case of injury. There is no way you can tell your fear instinct that the stage fright is technically different from the fright of a pouncing jaguar; that you are not likely to bleed therefore it should probably stop drawing further blood from your face which is reducing you to a nervous stuttering wreck on the stage. Adhering to the community, just like that, might once have been important for our ancestors to survive. Hunting together, bringing up children and securing a safe habitat were all legitimate needs and community living provided for them well enough and hence embedded itself successfully as a compelling instinct in our nervous systems. After we moved on to cities with governments and sophistiated procedures in place so as to protect us from possible harm, leaving little, if any, job for the instincts to do for our survival, the real conflict started to emerge. There were people who still wanted to pursue the same homosapien-ic life except in a more sophisticated fashion, wearing a bow-tie, cologne and all. There were people, on the other hand, who though appreciated the role community instinct had played thus so far, now wanted to break free of it to allow the current of evolution push them further on. Those who stayed put, they believed, would be those who drowned. The people who upheld this radical idea acquired the title of madmen.

    Contrary to the popular belief, true madness is not the absence of sanity. It’s just the triumph over it. You can be a madman if your madness defeats your sanity and is served by it all the same. Once you pull off this balance, evolution will make sure that your children don’t wipe out from Earth as the dinosaurs and mammoths did millions of years ago.

    P.S.: I’ll hopefully elucidate the role of love and madness in evolution in a series of posts. I understand that the essay needs more explanation. Please let me know if you find anything that does not make sense to you.