Beuatiful Song by Guns n Roses

The world as I see it - an essay by Albert Einstein

Thanks to Atanu's blog, I got introduced to this essay by Albert Einstein. I downloaded this ecopy of a book with the same title which is collection of a few essays by him. I will write the commentary of my understanding of these essays and a few excerpts from his essays, in this post. Until now, I thought Einstein was a genius only in Mathematics. The more I read these essays, I find that he was not only a great scientist but also a great philosopher.


The italised portions in quotes are written by Albert Einstein. The non italised portions if present are my comments.

Essay : Good and Evil

"It is right in the principle that those should be best loved who have contributed most to the elevation of human race and human life."

If every human being realizes the validity of the statement, can you imagine the kind of world we can have on this planet.

"The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained to liberation from the self"

Travelling

Over the period of 8 years I have lived in United States, the number of places I have visited is relatively lot less in comparision to others. I thought that the lack of enjoyable company was a reason for this and I thought once I have this, I will be able to enjoy travelling to faraway places like others do. Thats when I read this excerpt from Ralph Waldo Emerson's famous essay " Self-reliance" on travelling.

"Travelling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go."

Is there a deeper reason behind my non enjoyment of travelling ??

Holi - Time to get nasty

Holi is fast approaching. This year I will celebrate Holi with my friends at Stanford University Campus. This event is being organized by Aasha Stanford. It appears to be lot of fun. I am looking forward for it.

Bertrand Russell quotes from " On Keeping a wide horizon"

"Some people are able to avoid despair ( of living in this world filled with misery) by living a purely personal life, deriving their happiness entirely from private affections and instincts. Mere living, by itself is not an adequate purpose for any reflective person. What is the use of caring for childeren, if the world is to be such that existence is intolerable for them?"

"If there is any way out of despair, it must be by remembering more things not less, by enlarging our horizon, not by narrowing it, by being more aware of what is good, not by shutting our eyes to what is bad."

"In the non-human world, there are the stars, and the sea and the wind in the trees, summer rain and song of birds in spring. It is necessary to remember that the human race, with all its tumults, is only a part, and a small part of the whole universe."

"Every one agrees that we should not be self centered, relating everthing that happens to ourselves, making ourselves the center of the universe. But it is also, to a lesser extent, a defect of imagination to make mankind centre of the universe, or to attempt measure eternity with a clock."

"The human nature is a strange mixture of divine and diabolic, both equally real making both good and bad equally inevitable."







The entire article is here
http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1904&context=russelljournal

The status of women by Bertrand Russell

I am an admirer of Bertrand Russell and his philosophy. Though I find a little too hard to undestand some of his literature, the ones I do get to understand, make lot of sense to me. I was reading this short article on the status of women written by him. Some of the quotes that capture the essense of his philosophy on this issue are written here.

"In the modern world there is a wide spread recognition of the gain of character involved in acting upon one's own initiative rather than upon outside compulsion; and it is felt by most unbiassed persons that all forcible dominion is bad in itself, as well as degrading in its effects upon master and slave."

"What I wish to urge is that liberty becomes increasingly important as the relation concerned is more intimate; that therefore it is more important, in the family than inthe state, and most important of all in the relations of men and women. The more two people have to do with each other, the more desirable it becomes that they should not prey upon each others spontaneity, not impair each other's self-respect and self-reliance. "

" It is not always sufficiently realized that love without respect is degrading, both to the one who loves and to the one who is loved. To the one who loves, it affords a constant temptation to think that the qualities whose absence makes respect impossible are not really important; to the one loved, it brings the complacent feeling that, since love has been obtained, further improvement is unnecessary."

"People are far too apt to content with seeking happiness for those they love, reserving virtue for themselves. "

"To any one who has once realized what human companionship is capable of being, almost all existing marriages seem to involve something which is close to chastity."

"By not being consulted, women soon become unworthy to be consulted; the love of power which is ingrained in almost every humanbeing, cannot find a legitamate outlet, and therefore turns, except in a few women of more than usual sincerity, to the arts of managing and "tact" of inventing false reasons and choosing times when the lord and master is " in a holiday humour, and like enough to consent". All this, which is evil, and is traditionally urged against women, is as directly the result of oppression as are bombs in Russia."

"The power of admitting facts, without which people can neither act rightly themselves, not help others to act rightly, is very seldom acquired by those who have never faced the world on their own account."

"The woman I imagine is to retain the sympathy and kindness which belong with the maternal instict, while everything is to be done by education and way of life to cure the indirectness which comes of the instinct for being loved rather than for loving. And when the world contains women of this type the companionship of men and women will become something which at present exists only in very rare cases, where on both sides good ends are desired, and reason takes the place of the desire to have one's own way. At present, men and women seldom have any real companionship, or any real understanding of each other's best; brought together by temporary attraction, they remain strangers, and as a rule hamper each other's development. In all this there is no necessity; it is due mainly to the fact that subordination rather than liberty is expected, and that women's follies and men's vices are pleasing to the sense of superiority of husbands or wives as the case may be. To teach men and women to love equality and liberty is the real beginning of all reform in personal relations; and until this is done people will continue to degrade and depress those with whom their lives are past."





The entire article is available here

http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1788&context=russelljournal

The real purpose of philosophy

I have been reading a few philosophers for a while now. I dont recall the reason that made me interested in reading philosophy for the first time. I am reading this book named " The art of living" which is a summary of teachings of the greek philopher Epictetus. This little section in the book put my reasons for reading philosophy very nicely.

" We become philosophers to discover what is really true and what is merely the accidental result of flawed reasoning, recklessly acquired erroneous judgements, well intentioned but misguided teachings of parents and teachers, and unexamined acculturation. Philosphy's purpose is to illuminate the ways our soul has been infected by unsound beliefs, untrained tumultous desires, and the dubious life choices and preferences that are unworthy of us.

Philosophy calls us when we have reached the end of our rope. The insistent feeling that something is not right with our lives and the longing to be restored to our better selves will not go away. Our fears of death and being alone, our confusion about love and sex, and our sense of impotence in the face of our anger and our outsized ambitions bring us to ask our first sincere philosphical questions.

Philosphy's remedy is the unblinking excavation of the faulty and specious premises on which we base our lives and our personal identity."

Why Buddhism fascinates me

Akhari Kavita - The Last Poem

This is a novel by Rabindranath Tagore. I havent read this yet but I read the story of this novel in one of Osho's books and I thought it was worthwhile to blog about it.


Story: A young woman and a man fall in love and as it happens, immediately, they want to get married. The woman says, " Only on one condition I am willing to marry you." This woman is very civilized and sophisitcated. The man says, " Any condition is acceptable, but I cannot live with out you." She said, " First listen to the condition; then think it over, because it is not an ordinary condition. The condition is that we will not live in the same house. I have a vast land, a beautiful lake surrounded by trees, gardens and lawns. I will make you a house on one side, just the opposite from where I live."

The man said, " Then what is the point of marriage?"

She said," Marriage does not make living under the same roof mandatory. By living in two different houses, I am giving you your space and I will have my own space. Once in a while, boating in the lake, we may meet ( To be completed)

My Career

Last night I had lot of time on my hands to kill and I spent it contemplating on my life and its events thus far. I looked back a few years in to my past and tried to think of the reasons that motivated me to do, what I have been doing. As a kid it was the rat race at school and the desire to out do my fellow class mates, the primary motivation that drove my performance in academics. There were a few things in the curriculum that I studied out of love for the subject, but this was a very rare occurance. When the time came to join, the school of engineering, my major was chosen solely on the merits of my rank in the common entrance test and not based on what I wanted to study. Ofcourse my understanding of what each major dealth with was very limited and I ended up choosing electronics and communication as my major. It was more or less a random pick.

When I came to United States for graduate studies, I decided to major in DSP an communications. If you are thinking that I was knowledgable enough by now, to know what I wanted to study, you got it all wrong. I picked DSP, not because I was good at Math or the basics of Signal Processing, but because for some reason, DSP sounded more glamorous to me. After barely surviving 1 semester of DSP courses with 3 B grades and not knowing what I learnt during that semester, I figured, DSP was not my forte and like most other Indian students, I choose to study VLSI for rest of my graduate school.

This tells you that, the important decisions of my career have been random or populist picks and I never asked myself what is that I really wanted to specialize in. My guess is that many other Indian students have had their career choices made in similar fashion. I think there is a huge need to have a career information guide that provides the information about various career choices. This can be a great resource to many students of the future generation.