যার কথায় লিখতে শেখা
নিজের তুচ্ছ শব্দগুচ্ছো
পুড়িয়ে ফেলার কিছুটা আগে;
তুচ্ছ, অথচ অমূল্য,
দরদামে বিক্রি হয়েছে হাওয়ায় হাওয়ায়;
গন্ধে নেই, ছন্দে নেই, অস্তিত্বে নেই
নেই-এর পাহাড়ে থাকার আশ্রয় নেই;
মধ্যরাত, বুকের ভেতর নতুন দোয়াত -
আছে তবু - না থাকার গল্পের ধ্বংসস্তূপ।
সায়াহ্নে ভোরের আভা সাদায় সদায় অমসৃণ
ছিটকে যাওয়া গোলাপীর মত
আমার অভিমান; উড়ে, সুরে জুড়ে রঙিন।
যদি রং খেলতে বিকেল অপ্রস্তুত
হয়ে সন্ধ্যাতারার অপেক্ষায় কেঁদে ওঠে
রাত যদি শূন্যস্থান হয় পৃথিবীর স্থিরতায়
যা হয়, হয় না, তার কোনটাই বা সয়?
What do we need from this world?
The world has always been a mirror,
Shining with the thinnest of rays,
In love, and in awe, of being alive.
The world is music, and rhythm
And waves, or displaced particles
Simply put, a fellow traveler,
On a carpet of relative absurdities.
If you ask me what I have left
With and without me, I wouldn't frown
For any more than a moment, or word
For what is, is but an illusion of sorts.
The illusion that sings to me
On a cold desert night, bisecting the dunes
As the earth travels, relative to the stars
And light; and rhythms which are; and used to be.
To wonder about reality is to wonder about illusion. What is it that we mean by the word 'real'? Do we refer to something deterministic and absolute; something fundamental in its essence? Duality exists evenly both in the question and in the answer. The fact that absolute realism is intertwined with the abstract, seems by itself to be an absolution.
Nature is probabilistic. But this statement is a 'fact'. Or is it? If the statement allows for error bars, then the outcome, which is just another statement becomes the fact. And there starts an endless loop, a circle, encompassing a void.
The light emanating from a CO2 laser appears green to some people, and then to some more people, and then some more, until it experiences someone who is colourblind with respect to green. To the eye then, colour is an illusion. But the laser light has a definite energy (statistically). It has a measure. Does measure not reflect definitiveness? Well, no, it does not. To a non comoving observer, the frequency of the laser is something else anyway. And something else to somebody else. The Physical is an illusion, as is the Metaphysical.
To think deeply is somehow to not think at all. There was a void, there shall be a void, as there is a void...until there is the Physical. The touch. Fingers and water. Lips into each other. Feelings, continents apart. To awake, to know, to breathe, to know, to awake. To think deeply and to not think at all. The void is all there is, and the void encompasses it all.
To be And not to be; To be conscious and to be free of thought; To know and to lose it all; are but one and the same; dualities in each other's embrace, free together but bound as well. Everything and nothing; Nothing and the whole. What is, is what was. What shall be is just another duality.
Is it duality then, that is real? Or is it our ego that is?
What follows next in the article takes a more technical approach.
There's indeed a definitive skeleton of the classical world; the world run by laws of classical mechanics. Predictions are true to a very high degree, with accidents being rare events. An escape from this world that we inhabit, the world of our senses, ensures a trip through the inner randomness. To escape from what we know, what is boring, is then to delve into the laws of multiples, and thus towards the realms of dualities - of zeros and ones.
True, everything can indeed be constructed from a collection of 0s and 1s. But is it necessary to break the existing into its 0s and 1s to reconstruct the same? Or is it also enough to understand the existing and consider that as just another building block? Enough, for whom? There opens a door for ambition and ego. This is also where in some sense modern Statistical Physics encounters duality. Do we try to understand Nature at the fundamental level by studying strongly correlated electrons, or do we ignore 'unnecessary' grains of sand and simply call a brick - a brick; and use it to build a pillar? An example of the later is the formulation of the physics of universality through phase transitions.
There is no definite answer to this dilemma either. This brings the discussion back to square one. What defines 'need'? For all we know, everything is Natural. Be it ego, or asceticism - anything that exists, the Physical and the Metaphysical - is but natural.
To seek inward or outwards is the duality of humankind. Life is the superposition; of two conflicts. What happens to consciousness once the collapse comes into existence? What really is the collapse? Is it eternal Nothingness? Or does it have an alibi - the consciousness? If consciousness ceases to exist, what does that even mean? Is consciousness only a captive to cellular organization, or does it pertain to all that is? Air, water, rocks, and illusion itself? Is illusion and consciousness one and the same?
Let's argue that consciousness is information. Then, it is everywhere. What the universe then is, is a duality of compression and release of information. Life, or in a broader sense, anything Physical is the compressed state. That is all how we can 'feel' information. Both its release, and it, itself remain beyond our present physical bounds of 'understanding'.
The next part of the article has deeper use of first person expressions.
The more I dive into my research, the same philosophical outcome I arrive at. It is as if I keep taking detours from the center, in search of a new destination. But all I seem to gain is the experience of the journey. It appears increasingly obvious that deeper quest for the 'fundamental' only leads to one answer : randomness. Whether one tries to negotiate through Vedic philosophy, quantum mechanics or statistical physics, all roads lead to randomness; the indefinite; the undefined. This journey at once seems to be a futile, pointless exercise and an enriching, humbling experience. The duality rests and resets eternally; enlightening the perimeter of a void that shines and veils equally.
But there's fulfilment elsewhere. In an embrace of love, in surrender. For some reason, it is here that duality ceases to exist! What emerges is unity; an union of souls, and union with the whole. There exists no quest for knowledge, or for decoding the unknown. But this too is only an illusion, for this freedom from duality, itself reflects duality by surviving in an association. But here it doesn't matter anymore. What matters is the Physical, the feeling, the touch and the unknown, uncertain future. A game ensues thereafter, between duality and unity. Duality of existence and the union of information; souls.
The duel of unity and duality; the union of both.
"At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom."
As India listened to Nehru's voice on the midnight of 15th August, 1947, I assume the general (and by general I mean "typical" in statistical terms) mood in the nation must have been one of elation and frenzy. India's umbilical cord had not yet been severed. And no, not just from the British Empire but from its own eternal past. History says that India was being born.
When we think of events preceding a child's birth, what comes to our mind is the care that the mother provides for the unborn. When the new nation state of India was coming into existence, then who was her Mother? Can we imagine a pregnant lady playing soccer just moments before giving birth? How would you interpret the man-made Bengal famine of the 1940s, which starved millions of people to death; the same people who produced the harvest only for it to be shipped off to the "Allied" forces on the European battlefield? A mother does not want to kill her unborn child. A mother is not an imperialist, neither is she a Bourgeois elite.
One might argue that Nehru in his speech only mentioned about India awakening and not about being born; and therefore lobby against my initial line of argument. Of course, I disagree. His speech did mention someone as the "Father of the Nation."
The theme behind this article is simple. There was a crusade at play between three competing powers: Liberalism, Fascism and Communism. Two of these at any point were competing against the third, and it so happened that eventually it was Fascism that was put to sleep. The Liberals were the greater power and they were both power drunk and tired enough to have allowed Fascism to propagate in a huge country like India. So a guy who had flirted with both the Communists and the Fascists would never have been accepted by the Liberals. This is why I argue that India was 'probably' better off without Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose.
I am a Bengali and I strongly believe that India has never produced a stronger spine than Netaji's. A spine's job is not just to hold humans erect, but it also houses the spinal cord; our survival instincts. But as we know, blades sharp enough, can cut through both the spinal cord and the soul. In 1947, the blades pointed at India were quite sharp, and I think Nehru had the fluidity to counter the edges.
What we see today unfolding in Ukraine is exactly what India would have been subjected to if the Bourgeois elite had not been in bed with the Liberal structure. Just to be comprehensive, I refer to the ruling class, the Congress party as the Bourgeois center. The nation state of India bulldozed through the five hundred and eighty four princely states quite simply like an imperial power, and both the Liberals and the Communists let this happen without any hindrance. The only exception is Kashmir, but there had to be a buffer state, as we can understand from the current geopolitics of the world. Had Netaji been in power (as some Indians would like to imagine as an alternate history for themselves), I think the country would have been torn apart by civil war. This is not because Netaji wasn't an able leader, but due to his fascist ideological views. The world had just fought a bloody war, and I strongly believe they were in no mood to let another fascist leader emerge out of a land that harboured deep resentment for anything foreign.
This is what the Indian political establishment knew all too well. The principles on which India was founded reassert this claim. Our constitution if anything, is inward looking. Very rightly our politicians attacked not the symptoms but the deeper lying pathogen - they identified the need for reservations - to hold the new nation together. Our constitution was aimed at liberty, fraternity, equality, and sanctity. We decided not to be an aggressive power, but a defensive one. We decided to build our future by straying away from the rule of might. We were speaking a different language from the rest of the world. We were finally looking deep into our past, and were trying to decode a lost grammar. We defend the right of our state to be sovereign, and then we defend the sovereignty of individuals. In other words, India, the nation, was founded on the ideology of Nationalism, and NOT on Liberalism or Socialism. The Bourgeois elite decided to go on an economic path of social justice, as they thought that that was the only way to earn the trust of the working class. The Naxalite movement that ravaged Bengal a couple of decades later bears testimony to the fact that it was a different (from today) world back then. It would have been impossible to simultaneously maintain peacefully both democracy and capitalism in such a large populous landmass, which had had a long history of slavery. Interestingly, a socialist plunge by the Congress party in the 60s seemed to push the country more towards authoritarianism and this fed strongly back into the Naxalite principles. It is no less than a miracle that democracy in India has not only survived, but is flourishing! It is our constitution that has stood the test of time, and I doubt that the story would have been similar if we ever had a dictator in power.
India has every right of abstaining from giving its view on whatever crisis the world creates. It's not just about " India's interests" , as some would like to say. We, Indians speak a different language - the language of non-alignment - the language of being atmanirbhar . I get that the world finds it difficult to understand our ethos. I laugh then when the same world sings praises of Gandhi. It took smartness more than anything else to rid our land off foreigners, to earn our sovereignty. We are still smart enough to keep it that way.
Lest I forget, for when I'm forgotten,
The realm of reality extends
Much beyond the five elements;
The universe rhythms in silence
Neither from a start, nor to any end
My love, we'll meet each other again.
Till then, let's accept what's written
By ancient travelers, eternal cosmic rays,
As they traverse boundaries, of our fates;
Intertwined strokes on a dynamic fabric;
As the comets encircle, and the Earth rotates
So do we, across mountains and planets.
Like the invisible thread that binds together
Truth, to whatever is pure; like the cover
Of clouds touched by breath of the full Moon
Such is the bond that binds me to you
And your effervescence, in confusion and in chaos -
Aeons, days, moments; only destined to pass too soon.
