Bzzzzzzzp...

As black holes go, the most crippling is the one where you realise you are now not worthy of any emotive indulgence.
Not worthy of happiness or joy, satisfaction or accomplishment, peace or anger.
Your emotional rights as an individual are sucked into oblivion by the black hole of self-recrimination.
Self-recrimination. That’s the toughest jury; Borne out of true self-inquest, devoid of distraction and sleight of heart, or mind.
Like black holes in space, we know they exist and what they do, but there is little fuss about the exact moment of contact with one.
Just a bzzzzzp.
Gone.

Yin, Yang, Yawn...

The yin-yang of human experience bemuses me.
A soldier is sent to war, then accused of excessive violence.
A jockey is allowed to race a horse, then restricted from using a whip.
This constant see-sawing of human nature to try and soothe consciences and justify pursuits that fall clearly in that ‘grey’ moral zone provide stop and think moments for (wo)mankind.
I have bemoaned on this blog that not enough people are stopping, thinking and then talking about it.
Maybe they are talking, but the amount of bullshit in cyberspace just drowns out any intelligent thought, reason or discussion.

Sexy like hard work

Learning and scholarship and hard work and thrift and deferment of present enjoyment for future gain.

Lee Kuan Yew, creator of modern Singapore and former PM, explaining why Asians succeed.

None of those words are sexy, none make for exciting copy or eye-ball grabbing headlines.

Yet, as the Asians move to take over the world, parents will have to weigh carefully drawing a balance between the un-cool truths of the past and the hip calling of the future.

How to propagate the grind without killing the innovation.

Or else, the inexorable cycle of life will bring us to ruin.

Systemic change morally endemic

The simplicity of right and wrong.
That is at the heart of Anna Hazare’s movement.
And that is what makes the sophists – and by that I mean Nandan Nilekani and Arundhati ‘one-novel’ Roy - uncomfortable.
And that is also what endears the urban middle class to the movement.
Anna is the embodiement of our desire for moral salvation.
Mired in grey, the modern human’s insatiable appetite for materialism has been re-hued in plain black and white by Anna’s campaign.
And like life itself, we see that morality, unsexy as the word is, is what it all boils down to.

Sophistication runs riot

Sophism was a movement in ancient Greece where an argument was obscured by big words and complicated concepts so as to hide the truth.
The movement gave us the word sophistication, which, over the years, has come to mean a good thing. A compliment.
Barack Obama is a sophisticated president.
The sophistication of modern life, however, was torched and looted by educated, middle-class and affluent rioters in London.
For just one moment, we were offered a window to the heart of modern humanity – the animal spirit laid bare.
Now, the argument is more earthy - parents teach your children well.