In a construction site, right next to my apartment, on a particular Sunday, work was proceeding at a slow rate owing to the constant absenteeism of some of the workers. So I slipped in through the maze of laid down steel rods across the compound through the rubble in the hallway over the stair case through the pitch dark interiors on most of the floors to the top floor. Here a guy was marking steel rods to precision lengthwise and proceeded to cut them up with a chisel held in hand by another worker, while the former began pounding on to its top with a lead hammer. for a minute, I shuddered with the thought of a portentous and revolting outcome that was not impossible given the ruthless hammering with no scope of an error; the hitting had to be right on the top of that chisel's head. Under the scorching sun these men were dutifully finishing up laying down the roof's foundation in steel for yet another floor in an apartment which was being built in a series of endless and aggressive move by the real estate agents in the city.
It was the seventh floor and the wind was pushing me off the edge, so I had to bend down on my knees. I sat there watching the landscape before me filled with apartments in different colors, some grand and unique for the rich class, others somber and sufficient for the middle class, some were still under construction like the one I was standing on. Meanwhile, the men broke for lunch and I sat with them to have a little chat. Each of them had a lunch box or a carriage to be more specific (with three or four boxes), the men scrubbed the dirt of their pale brown wrists that were so hard, rugged and lacerated like the soil of once fertile river bed that is exposed in summer with the water above it all dried up. Presently, the men were eating up with common faces of famish. I sat in the room next to them with an inquiring face, watching a jagged corner with a brick protruding or the roof with a steel hook hanging out for a chair to suspend from it. One of the men finished his lunch and his countenance that of happiness, so I proceeded to ask him how he felt about his work.
He was at a total distress that he had to put up extra effort and invest more time and energy so he can cover up for the absentees. His work involved laying roofs; that was his specialization. But now, he was also venturing into electrical work. It was a totally different field, but he had no choice but to learn the trade and make something out of it, so to be employable. He figured there were quite a bit of construction sites that were abandoned due to recession, so it made sense for him to work in more than one project at a time. So he travelled between these sites everyday doing different jobs of specialization at different locations. I enquired about his family and he puts up a depressed and sorrowful face and went on to explain that he was living away from his wife and kids. To cheer him up, I asked him what he does in leisure time; this definitely charged him up, for he stood up and pointed in the direction of a cinema theater. That he said was his leisure abode, and he enjoyed every bit of it.
After I came home, I quickly typed from the jot down notes of the interview on my PC and I went to bed. That night I had a dream, in it I met a woman who had lost her sense of balance due to an overdose of a drug that was supposed to cure her headache. The overdose clogged her arteries near the ear drums and led to a total collapse, and since then she had not only lost her hearing, but she also lost her sense of balance. She would not know if she was standing still or inclined anymore, she would not know if she was leaning forward or backward, she felt nothing. All her other senses were intact, but the sense of balance was lost and she was tripping over frequently, her failure to notice that she was standing on a flat ground led her to fall off and she complained that she perpetually felt as if the ground on which she stood was slipping off from beneath her feet and that she experienced a free fall. She was not able to feel gravity at all.
Then I met another guy who presumably was a scientist who had alienated himself from the society for over two decades and was working on a project which involved the brain and its controls. He was studying the compensating effects of the brain. He kept his right hand tied to a pole since the beginning of the project, and he had a helmet on and was sitting on a chair that had a toilet seat attached to it. The helmet was powered by electricity and was connected to a panel before him with knobs and controls of all sorts. On his laptop, he typed with his left hand, read and reread the results of his brain scan done by the helmet twice a day. His objective was to find out to what extent the brain compensates. He took time to explain his project from the beginning. He tied his hand to the pole for over two years, it went totally numb and the inactivity over the first two years of the project led the brain to discard the input brought from the neurons from that area and proceeded to use that portion of the brain for another part of the body that was excessively used, this happened to be his left hand. Consequently, over the next two years, his left hand became more agile, while his right hand was lost. He freed his right hand form the pole after two years, un-tethered but it lay purposeless. Now, he gradually endeavored to wake up the dormant neurons on his right hand for the next two years, this he did by piercing the skin on his right hand with a pin or surgically making cuts on his right wrist or sometimes even holding hot objects. After two more years of excruciating pain, his right hand became active again. Throughout this period, he carefully monitored the progress with brain scans by his helmet.
What he found out was astonishing, brain compensated for the need of senses on his right hand by allocating the same space that was once complimented for the excessive action on his left hand. Now, with more action on his right hand, the brain allocated more neurons for the right hand, but there was a cap, a threshold beyond which excessive activity did not mean more allocation of brain space. At this point, he proceeded to redo the whole experiment with his left hand tied up to the pole. Amazingly, the left hand took five years to convince the brain of an inactivity, which the scientist attributed to the increased action hitherto (which must have solidified the network of neurons for the left hand communication). His brain scan reports substantiated his theory with grandiose results. As soon as the left hand became numb just as the right hand once was, he untied it and began by pricking, holding hot objects, making cuts with a sharp blade.
The results were overwhelming, brain compensated for the activity on the left hand by reallocating the same space that it once possessed, which was not a miracle by any means (considering that he already was aware of this and was expecting the result). What perplexed him was that the left hand which took over five years now became active in a period of just four months (fully active reaching the threshold of space limits in the brain).
This surprised him, so much so that he repeated the entire cycle of tying up the right hand first (for two years), letting it go (for two years), then tying the left hand (currently in the third year). This is where I met him; the left hand was in its third year of inactive state. There was still life left in it, he made checks every now and then by pricking his naked palm with a surgical needle. After listening to the whole story, it occurred to me that perhaps the left hand became active in four months relative to the two years period of right hand because the left hand was more active than his right hand all his life. also, because the initial relocation of neuron facility was done to increase the activity on left hand, brain must have developed a neural obsession of some sort to the left hand, and it wont let it go so easily (that’s why five years) and when it found activity, brain compensated for the activity immediately (four months), for the neural tracts were all streamlined with increased activity hitherto. The scientist was fascinated with my surmise, but he was disinclined to let go of the experiment midway.
Next day at office, I told my friend about my dream and asked if it made any sense to him. It was no surprise that he made no attempt to connect the dots, weave a nexus out of a mirage of unconnected superfluous and unbeknown stories. Then at lunch, over the table, I proceeded by asking him, if he enjoyed the work he did. He said he most certainly did. He was getting paid a hefty. He had a car to drive home, a wife to go home to, kids to look forward to, and all sorts of things that he supposedly enjoyed in. then I asked him, if anything made sense, life, beyond, cosmology, science, brain, DNA, evolution. I went on; literature, science fiction, psychedelic rock, aphrodisiacs, elation. He looked dumbfounded. so, presently, I mellowed; does it bother you that you are a body the mechanics of which have all been primed by evolution over two billion years of time and does it worry you that you are but compounds of hydrogen and carbon which apparently took birth approximately fourteen billion years ago. Ok, what about galaxies and the black holes at their centers.
do you know what happens when two black holes occasionally find out that they have attractive forces in their vicinity, they come together and with them, the debris of a million stars and a thousand planets around each of those stars come whirling towards each other before the cataclysmic action of the two black holes eating up each other and forming a single black hole occurs. Where there were two galaxies, now we would have one. The stars and the planets of the two galaxies are of course still aimlessly stuck up with the attractive force of the single black hole now formed. Earth is one of those thousands of planets revolving around one of those millions of stars stuck up in the traffic of one of those billions of black holes in this cosmic end of forever.
Do you know what happens when one of the stars dies? It collapses under its own gravitational force as it runs out of nuclear fuel. When our sun runs out of hydrogen, same thing is going to happen to it. Some stars are so gigantic that after collapsing under their own weight, they still have an excess of mass around them, which they have to shed off. This results in the most astonishing and most beautiful cosmic episode of a nebula. The star collapses gradually into a black hole with density and gravitational forces reaching infinity in the black hole. Close to the black hole is a region called the 'event horizon' where even light gets trapped and can’t escape. Nothing escapes from there. The star's mass can’t fit into the small black hole that has now formed, so it gradually slips into it under enormous pressure and the volume creates turbulence and temperatures of extreme degree. At this point, the chunks of mass trying to enter the black hole are spitted out at the mouth of it in all the directions. Along with the mass, forces, magnetic, electrical and gravitational are pulled apart like strings of a guitar and they begin to vibrate in this region. The vibrating and energetic forces become overwhelmingly predominant and the atmosphere here breaks into reduced state of elements. All the compounds break apart; mass disintegrates into clouds, and thereby creates the gaseous cloud of disintegration around the collapsing star.
After the forces subside this gas or debris reunites locally to form planets and these planets get picked up by local stars and the gravitational forces keep all these newly formed celestial bodies in orbits. Chances are that a planet finds itself in a place of lesser radioactivity, lesser and more predictable environment away from asteroids and meteors with a good distance away from the sun, where carbon reduces into the planet's atmosphere, but not too far that the sulphur and nitrogen are predominant. If another small planet (not many such small planets, for they would create turbulence with an increase in gravitational forces of tantamount existence) protects this planet (by revolving around it) from sun's occasional maladroitness (solar strokes, where the magnetic intensity that is stuck up behind a slate of ever rejuvenating energy of fission suddenly bubbles out and surfaces with pent up energy just like a bubble surfaces on boiling water. when this happens, the force strikes the planets in its vicinity, and its so strong as to dislodge the planet from its previous orbit) of course, this won't happen to the planet in question now, because this one's got a neighbor ring planet to with hold it in its orbit, cushion it from occasional celestial enigma. Well, now if this planet cools down without further inquiries form other celestial forces, if it fortunately does so, then the atmosphere favors the formation of a protein in favorable conditions under sea bed with the effect of ultra violet radiations from the star nearby. This protein molecule over the next two billion years, over a tiresome process of endless trial and errors forms a series or a chain of molecules with the ability of creating themselves from raw materials. This process of molecular cellular action results in an organism. All such organisms well programmed to 'find themselves in the next generation' do so by their convenient means. These convenient means get changed over a period of time with competition from the fellow organisms to fight for living space and the changes in atmosphere.
Let me narrate you a story. Lions are not called kings of forest without a reason. They are heavy, muscular, ferocious and formidable hunters. They have the ability to kill their cousins (cheetahs, tigers). Their territorial instincts are so well defined that no other predator even in its wildest dreams enters the lion’s area or domain. Now, here is the story. Male lions fight over the female lion and the loser leaves the territory. The winner on the other hand mercilessly kills all the cubs of the female lion that she has had with the loser lion hitherto. This action tethers the victorious male lion and the bereaved female lion in an evolutionary paradigm. The male lion has washed off all the obstacles for the female lion to mate with him by killing all the cubs of loser lion, so the mating happens and the next generation of lions is stronger and muscular. This gives us an insight into how, only the best genes are passed into the next generation.
Why bisexual? Why are we, species bisexual? Have you ever asked the question? Here mate, let me narrate you another story. A female lioness (wandering outside its territory), pregnant one, in its delicate position luckily chances upon a hidden deer's corpse on a tree (cheetahs usually do that; they hide their gatherings on tree tops). Now, as she sat down to have her meal, here comes a wolf and fights over the meal and eventually wins the meal. Under normal circumstances, the lioness would have had the wolf too as the meal, but in this delicate situation, she lets go of the meal. This happens over a period of times, and the wolves one night surround him and kill him, eat him up along with the baby in the womb.
This is why, we are bisexual. So the male looks after the female during the periods of pregnancy and lactation. What does the male get out of this occupation of simply looking after the female? It does. The male passes its genes to the next generation, and the female does too. Why did not we evolve into organisms mechanically superior to the delicate womb carrying of premature baby? Yes, there are organisms that lay eggs; there are others that lay seeds (plants). Different organisms have survived different conditions and with every passing generation, only the best survive, and only the best pass genes. Bisexual species have also been proved to be more efficient in keeping the populations at a check by means of sexual evolution. Also, in the case of a terrible mutation, if an organism is asexual, the mutation is passed into the next generation regardless. But if the species is bisexual, it may not even find a partner to copulate with (in that case, the terrible mutation is not passed to the next generation). If the organism finds a partner, it would be a weak partner, for the best ones don’t mate with the weak ones with terrible mutations. Even if the mutation is passed to the next generation, it will only exist through the female offspring (If the mutation was with female parent), while in the male ones, the nature of mutation remains passive (such is evolution's mysterious yet beautiful working). Now even in this case, the mutant female species will wholly be discarded by the subsequent generations' best male species and as the gulf widens, the terrible mutation gets lost.
Does it bother you that you are not endeavoring to know who you are, and vainly investing your time (which is the result of fifteen years of universal enigma that includes five years of evolutionary paradigm shifts) in driving home in a car, investing your time in watching TV, conversing with your wife over vain futilities of life and educating your kids about 'how to pretend normal with an abnormal psyche of worshipping a man made ideas such as religion'. This idea of course is only three to twenty thousand years old. Because, we the humans have begun transforming into farmers only about sixty years ago (the actual range varies from ten thousand years in the Americas to ninety thousand years in Africa). Does an idea twenty thousand years old give any credence, does it sound plausible at all that you assume the right to exercise 'intellectual terrorism' on your kids. I say, you don't have the right to do it, let them grow up and know for themselves. You can fantasize, but you cannot push your kids into the same world of fantasy.
By now, my friend is blenched with fear and has stopped eating from his lunch box, which brings me back to the conversation I had with the man at the construction site. He had no choice, but to invest his time in watching movies, for the kind of physical stress he is put though immediately validates his desire to relax, and if he chooses to do it by watching movies, he has every reason to do it. But, what with my friend, he is educated (at least he is called so), what with him, how can he invest his time in deluding himself constantly that everyone around him likes him for what he does. He makes people laugh; he is a good father, a good husband, a good friend and everything. But, what with it? These relations are only numbing his conscience just as the scientist in my dreams experimented with his hands. Only, the scientist did it volitionally, but my friend is totally oblivious to the richness of adventures and chances that have put him here on this planet in a position where he can (without much trouble) invest time in asking the actual questions.
Look at a pin head, there are at least a million atoms on that pin head dancing around, jostling and firing energy, withdrawing into their orbits and all sorts of quantum dramas. our brains (evolutionary triumphs), which are but a complex mass of these atoms put together, have streamlined the notoriety of all these quantum energies into granting us with senses, and top it off with conscience, and re-top it off with the ability to transfer information by making (streamlined and structured) noises. Not all the creatures are capable of asking the ultimate questions, for they have brains too small (body to mass ratio), we are the only species that have evolved into asking questions related to our own existence. We are but one species out of a five million (known) species on our planet, which happens to be part of a solar system, which is but one in a billion in a galaxy (Milky Way), which again happens to be one in a billion or trillion such galaxies that are constantly coalescing in a cosmic drama.
Let us not lose our balance just as the lady did in my dreams. Let us all conscientiously delve into the adventurous developments of us before we reduce into the mass of atoms once again without a conscience. We are conscious for a brief period (of sixty years on an average), before which (for fifteen billion years) we were the raw materials available for the DNA to replicate itself and imbibe the blue print of desire (to find oneself in the next generation). After this period, we simply would disintegrate and reduce into atoms once again. It’s a depressing thought we should vainly invest our time in self gratification impervious to the weight of cosmic extravaganza that has proffered us with something miraculous called conscience.
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