Fear

Fear, is one of the most fundamental and primary emotions that all conscious beings possess. It is the basis for the evolutionary fight or flight response that is triggered in times of extreme stress and when we are back into a corner. It is the emotion that has been hardwired into our minds and our very biology. It is quite possibly the most powerful and dominant emotion that we possess, most of our actions are done out of fear, fear of the unknown, fear of inability to survive, fear of stability and so on. Fear pushes us to act out in anger, in ignorance and in pure desperation. It can be argued that fear is the foundation of all other "negative" emotions or even the positive ones. When a person steals, they steal for a few reasons including desire to possess, possibly survival (food) or to thrill. Each of those reasons can be reduced to a foundation of fear. Desire to possess is fundamentally about fear of inadequacy either in monetary/material possessions or in social status. Survival is self-explanatory, no food=death and fear of death is the most base emotion. Thrill is the fear of normalcy, fear that one does not really experience happiness or excitement unless acting in such a manner.

Fear, I think is an amazing thing, quite possibly the most positive emotion we have because every time we are caught in its iron like grip we have the opportunity to fight it and conquer it. It is an opportunity for us to judge our own mettle. Do we give in or do we stand and fight, overcome our fear and push forward. There is a saying by Ambrose Redmoon:

"Courage is not the absence of fear but the judgment that there is something more important than fear"

Fear gives us an opportunity to display and know our own courage. Fear has the ability to overpower our minds and our reasoning but we have the ability to try and resist that, it is in using that ability we can conquer fear. As the statement above says, we will always have fear but it is finding something that supercedes and shines a light over fear. For some people that thing is God, others is the love of their life, others its principles or even self-enlightenment. Fear should never hold us back and control our actions, Fear should impel us towards venturing into the unknown and opening up new horizons for ourselves. Every time we conquer one fear we open up a part of ourselves that has been hidden or ignored and for that we gain strength and wisdom. Life cannot be lived fully if fear looms over our heads and controls us. Far too often we use fear as an excuse not to live fully, maybe it be prior experiences which have hurt us and left us fearful of pain or the fear that maybe the risk we take will leave us with nothing or severely limited. Fundamentally, we have the power to conquer and channel the fear into something powerful to fuel us. Find that greater thing than fear and know that to be you, then fear is nothing more than a hurdle to jump rather than a mountain to climb.

India

Of late I have been really missing India. I used to go every couple years and spend months there, it was usually in the summer when the weather was hot and humid. The summer months would be spent with me sitting in a pool of my own sweat while I was assaulted by dozens of tiny blood sucking insects, and no I don't mean lawyers, I am referring to mosquitoes. On top of that I would usually get sick for a week or so because I love/loved street food. See in India, the best food you can eat is the food made on the street by small time vendors. The food was simply the best food you can eat anywhere. Who can resist the taste of food cooked in the finest bacteria infested water, mixed with human sweat and dirt from the street. I personally believe that those ingredients add the je ne sais quoi to the taste. Once you have the street food, you will constantly crave it like a good addict craves crack. It is simply put some of the most amazing food one can eat.

I would constantly be traveling in the summer while in India, usually on family temple tours. We would spend about 10-20 days going from city to city visiting vast, ancient and extravagent temples, usually of the Vishnu persuasion. Some of my fondest childhood memories are from those trips. There is something wonderous about being able to see the top of a temple towering over large and densely populated trees, as if it is an divine establishment in the midst of lush greenery. Some of these temples were built into the top of a mountainside where we would trek up the mountain then have to enter into small crevices to finally get into the sanctum sanctorum. Then as you enter into the sanctum, it is usually a very solemn and dark place lit by only lights of a lamp that are placed to highlight the deity, who is adorned with the finest clothes and jewelery that money can buy. The light from the lamps reflects off the gold and diamonds that drape the deity and adds an inherent glow, highlighting the sacredness of the location and the deity. Some of these temples are becoming more and more like tourist attractions but a few of them truly inspire and pervade you with pure spirituality and a sense of communion with the unknown. A sense of oneness with nature and the universe would also accompany you, especially in the peaks of the Himalayas, with the flowing Ganga or Yamuna, where great beings found communion with all that was, is and will be, but my experiences there are another post and a later part of my life.

If I went to India during winter, most of my days would be spent going to music concerts all day because that is the season of the Chennai Music Festival, where all the best carnatic musicians in the country and world come together and perform concerts every day. Its a time of immersing myself into a world that I rarely get to fully enjoy and a culture that only exists for me on my ipod. There is nothing quiet like being at a concert when you can actually observe the musician making music on the spot as they get lost in the moment. India in the winter is also India without the mosquito invasion and the sultry humidity of the sub-continent.

India, at any time is one of the most amazing places on this planet because it is living contradiction, it is the ancient and modern world converging into the same place. You will see a brand new mercedes hybrid racing down the street along side a man riding a bullock cart with wheels that are about the fall off. A high paid industrialist will be eating alongside an Vedic priest who still lives in the mentality of 3000 years ago. Democracy meets Dharma, Capitalism and Karma converge. Superman posters will be all over the city while statutes and idols of Hanuman are found on every street corner and tower over neighborhoods. India is where my soul resides and I miss it dearly.

Surrogate Motherhood

Before reading my diatribe or even discussion of the issue please read this article: http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/03/outsourced-wombs/

There are couple main issues here. First the broadest issue, what is the relationship between you and your body. One might say that you are your body but using a grammatical argument I can assert that the mere fact that we can say "my body" implies a fundamental difference between I and body, the body is relegated to possession of the I, much like we can say "my car". The subject, I, has possessory control over the object, body. Now, an argument to counter this that grammatical arguments aren't arguments of reality but of practicality and cultural milieu. While there is some merit to that, given that some languages do not have the concept of mine that English and most languages have. I don't want to delve into that argument but just want to say that lets assume a possessory interest between you and your body. If there is a possessory interest then next logical question is what level of interest do you have in regards to your body, meaning is it absolute or conditional.

Absolute interest means just what it states, the individual has total control over what they can or cannot do with their body much in the same vein as they have total control over what they can do with their car. If I want to destroy my car then I can do it and no one can stop me. Now, if the interest is conditional then how much control does one have over their body? The answer is that for nearly every state in this world, the individual does not possess absolute interest in their body. The governments regulate what we can do to ourselves and what we cannot. The United States has outlawed most drugs while in Amsterdam some drugs are allowed. In many countries, attempted suicide is a crime and for those who are wondering why suicide isn't considered a crime, send me your address and I will come and hit you upside your head. If you complete a suicide, YOU ARE DEAD. The government asserts some interest in your body. Whether they should be able to or not is another question, a question I will delve into at some point because it depends entirely on your view of the body and also the role and origins of government/statehood.

Now, how does all this apply to surrogate motherhood. Surrogate motherhood is about two key issues. First, does a woman have an possessory interest in her reproductive organs. Second, can that possessory interest be used for monetary gain? The answer to the first question is yes but in most of the world it seems to be absolute interest. A woman can do what she wants with her reproductive organs and if that is the case then it follows that she can loan or rent out those organs. If a man can donate his sperm to a sperm bank for money and a woman can donate her eggs then why can't a woman rent her uterus out? Consider manual labor such as construction work, is that not using of ones limbs directly for money? How about test subjects in medical trials, don't they use their bodies as grounds for determining if a drug works properly? It is theoritically speaking almost the same thing.

I think the issue that is most argued is that surrogate motherhood allows for society to view the human body and specifically a woman's body as merely an object, which many argue would dehumanize and allow people to disrespect and abuse women. This, I think would only occur when society begins to treat the act of surrogate motherhood in a mechanical fashion, not if we treat it as a way to help both infertile couples and woman who are poor. There is another argument that this is taking advantage of the poor woman and using her poverty to one's own advantage. The same can be said of any sort of labor, one of the main reasons that people get jobs is to make money so that they aren't poor and can live or survive. It is part of the human condition in this day and age. If the woman who decides to become a surrogate mother and does so because she needs money, what is wrong with that? We assume that people make rational decisions in regards to any other job so why don't we do that in this regard? I think a reason is that we are still paternalistic in regards to poor woman. There is a sense that poor women are less able to make these huge decisions which I believe is wrong. In fact these women are doing the opposite they are making rational decisions to help and further their lives and the lives of their families. They view surrogate motherhood as a job that lasts 9 months but which will keep help their families for the next 10 plus years.

People might also argue that infertile couples should adopt instead of trying to go the path of surrogacy but I think that ignores the fact that one of the goals of human existence is to perpetuate one's own genes. Adoption is something that lofty and I think something people should do but its not the only alternative to actually having children of your own. Surrogacy can and should be an option if that is something that one really desires. Nor should it have any moral indignation attached to it.

Ring in the New Year, Welcome to 2008

So this is my first post in a while and of 2008, sadly I only had blogged once in 2007 and I know I keep saying I will try be more regular in my blogging but I haven't been able to. I don't believe in resolutions so I won't be making one now, lets just say I'll make a good faith effort to be more consistent.

Now with that out of the way, lets get on to the topic of the day. I've had a few things on my mind of late, primarily the role that honesty, consistency and character play in today's society. Of these words can be reduced down to the simple idea of honor. By honor I am referring to the idea of personal integrity and strength of character. A person for whom their word is their bond and who would rather make the hard and more often than not right choice over the easy and more personally beneficial choice. I've been finding it harder and harder to meet people who possess those qualities, especially in New York.

We tend to place more value, as a society and people, on the end goal and notions of success than we do on character. Honesty is a core value that needs to be foster and ingrained more into people. Honesty in word and action. The foundation of honesty towards others is to first to be honest with oneself as the root of dishonesty is delusion of both yourself and the person you are dishonest with. In order to be more honest, it would require deep introspection and analyzing of yourself, to see who you really are to discover your desires, wants, goals, strengths, issues, weakness and flaws. Honesty requires that you face all of these things and determine what if anything you wish to do about them. The hardest part is to confront your flaws and come to terms with them, either as something you need help to overcome or something you need to fight against. Raging within each of us is a desire to ignore our flaws because to confront them would mean to stare our own inadequacies in the eye and see the darkness that dwells in us. Each of us has that darkness in us, some more than others.

Too often people don't want to stare into that abyss because it is scary and depressing, it can force us to drop whatever notions of self we held before and demolish our self-conceptions. This confrontation is not a one time action but a consistent and conscious decision on our part to keep doing so because every time you keep confronting yourself, you shine a little more light and gain a stronger and rooted center. I believe this will force you to be more honest with yourself and paves the way for you to be more honest with others.

Once you are honest with yourself, the harder quality to possess is strength of character or the will to act. Knowledge without action is useless and honesty without the will to change or improve is only subjectively good. What do you do after you know confront yourself? Do you just take comfort in that knowledge and continue on? or do you delve deep and try to develop yourself and turn those flaws and issues into something that builds your character? Take the statement in Batman Begins "its not who you are underneath but what you do that defines you", as corny and cliched as it may sound it rings with sound of truth. It is our actions that define us, not necessarily what we think inside our minds. I maybe the most honest person with myself but if I don't give others the same level of respect, then fundamentally I can't call myself a truly honest or good person. Honesty and respect go hand in hand, to be honest with someone is show them respect as a being who is worthy of you. There is a saying in hindu thought "satyam vada dharmam chara" Speak the truth and act righteously. To remain true and honest to yourself and others even in the face of adversity and fear is truly courage and strength of character, that is how one should be defined. A person should be idolized not necessarily for money, skills, abilities or possessions but on their character. How do they deal with adversity and what happens to their values and truth when it is put to task? Just something to ponder about. Any thoughts?

And I'm back!!!!!!!!!

I've been away for quite a while and I really don't have a great excuse other than that I was busy but I am going to try and be somewhat consistent now. I've posted on a variety of topics in the past and today again I want to post on something that I feel is rather important, ethics.

Socrates says that an unexamined life is not worth living. I believe he makes a rather powerful point and one that bears important scrutiny. Introspection is the key to growth and development of our ethical, moral and spiritual lives. When we examine our lives on a continual and regular basis we place our development as a key component of our being. We need to be able to reflect on our life and decisions in order for us to weigh who we are to who we can become or want to be. For Socrates, the Ideal life is one spent in search of the Good. What is the Good? The Good is Knowledge and evil is nothing but ignorance. The goal of human existence is to discover that Good and that Good is universal. It is a ethical, intellectual and spiritual good.

Socrates asks the quintessential question: what is the good? This question can be considered from a variety of perspectives like good business, good morals, good friends and so on. But thats not what Socrates is really referring to, rather he is talking about the idea of the Ideal or the Right. He informs us that the good life is the life of virtue, material growth is not seen as being part of the good but rather self-development, the fostering of virtues. In our modern world especially in this country, self development isn't important but material growth is what is important and the basis of what is termed success. Most of the East, Middle East and other such regions accuse the West but more specifically America of materialist culture, a culture which centers around monetary gain, material comfort and amassing of a personal fortune. This criticism applies to corporate America and the now burgeoning upper class. When the average salary or compensation differential between a CEO and employee is 400 to 1, such claims don't seem to be too far off the mark. CEO have enormous golden parachute packages, were even if they were to perform badly and their companies loss millions if not billions of dollars, they will still get multi-million dollar packages. On the otherhand, most employees are not given remotely even decent severance packages if anything at all. Such focus on increasing one's coffers fundamentally shifts society's vision for what is important. Maybe the focus so be something less material and more principled.

A Great Opinion Piece by Pervez Hoodboy about Pakistan

http://www.despardes.com/articles/dec06/20061218-reimagining-pak.htm

Its a great article about Pakistan and I think it applies equally to India.

Meaning in a Meaningless World

For most of us, we think that life has some plan for us, a destiny so to say. I am a lawyer now because it was something I was meant to do, it is my purpose as far as I know. I'm not sure that life has an intrinsic meaning like that. There are only three certain things for all living beings: birth, death and change. We have no idea what the future will bring besides change and death, in fact sadly for millions of infants in the world that is the fate that they will experience. As human beings, who have developed our intellectual, emotional and psychological faculties, we desire meaning beyond the three certain things in our lives. We desire meaning, a purpose for our continued presence and even for our eventual yet inevitable demise. Most people find that meaning through the idea of God. In otherwords, we do not possess inherent meaning to our lives but only in light of and due to God and God's will.

As my previous posts might suggest this is not something I agree with but I think my rationale is a bit different from what is expected. I'm not saying that its not God who adds meaning to our lives but God is one of the supplemental factors. The meaning to our lives must come from ourselves, our inherent worth as the most intellectually and maybe morally evolved beings on this planet. Our meaning comes due to our relationships with each other and the bonds we possess as being born into the family of living beings and more specifically the family of beings with intelligent thought. We are the natural caretakers and guardians of each other and the world we occupy, due to which I have a natural duty to my fellow human beings to try and provide them with the most freedom and choice that I can coupled with the duty to try and help them find that best way to make our lives on this planet as wonderful as possible.

Our meaning is our guiding light and our foundation for growth in a world which seems to defy our methods to control it and predict it. It may sound confusing at first glance but I think its simple. I believe that once we as a collective species begin to place each other's fundamental freedom, well being and rights as paramount, the social world we live in will become more and more of a utopia that we dream of. Simple in theory and near impossible in practice. Why? Because of the nature of our existence as we currently understand it, the Ego or the part of us that separates us from each other and tries to pry us from the underlying unity that is reality, forces us to think of our individual selves, ideas or communities first. From this desire to see our individual selves, ideas or communities gain prominence we become attached to it and this attachment leads to our inevitable conflict with those we view as different.

So what does this have to do with the meaning of our lives? Well, we have to remove our egos from the equation and in the words of the Gita, act without attachment to the outcome. Act for the greater good, see ourselves as instruments or parts of a larger unity. All things are composites of numerous other things but in order to function they must act together with emphasis placed on the unit as opposed focused on the individual. The basic underlying point I'm trying to make here is that service to our fellow beings is the meaning that we must give ourselves, find your niche in the world and make sure its a niche that will benefit others and perform it to the best of your abilities and do it as a service to others. Doing that will bring light into the meaningless world that we lived in before and it is in that service that God can be found. Service of man is Service of God.

Michael J. Fox versus Rush Limbaugh

This topic angers me because I'm at a loss why people would even listen to Rush Limbaugh about something in which has no knowledge. It is clear when you watch the video of Michael J. Fox that he is not acting and he does not have control over his movements. People like him and Christopher Reeve have been fighting to find a way to cure these genetic problems for years. Its sad that we need to have some entertainer who develops the problem and then uses their influence and star power to fight for the cause. Whats sad isn't that they fight for a noble cause but that we as a society have a blind eye to it until such a person comes along.

It still fascinates me that ignorant people like Rush Limbaugh, Kurt Warner, Jim Caviezel and so on can come and stand against an issue that has the potential to save the lives of millions of people and relieve the pain and suffering of potential billions. The idiocy is that somehow these people think that stem cells are potential human beings therefore the stem cells should be protected from being cloned and used to make other cells. The reason that stem cells are considered to be potential human beings by scientifically ignorant and conservatives (somehow these two groups end up being the same group) is that they have the potential to become any human cell and the way they are extracted requires that an embroyo be destroyed. I previously discussed stem cells and so I won't rehash that entire discussion.

The Stem Cell debate is intricately tied into the Abortion debate, because basically the same argument that has been used for abortion has been used for stem cells. Essentially, what we have is policy makers and legislators, who have no foundation in modern science and thought. When we have the big decisions makers and we give airtime and weight to any joe moron with a opinion, we end up with a society that is more controlled by marketing and propoganda than actual evidence and research. I blame faith for this problem, faith which cannot be scrutinized without angry rebukes and criticism from those who possess such faith. The notion that God hates abortion but favors a war on terrorism, is ludicrious. How can religion in any objective manner provide us a basis to judge when life begins? or which lives matter?

Maybe this is a tangent from the topic at hand but I think it is connected. Let me try and explain my thought process. The metaphysical notion of God and God's relationship to His creation sets the framework of how we view ourselves and our relationship to the rest of creation. God made all the animals then made man, who is considered to be separate from all the rest of the creation. Man is not an animal but something entirely different as such we must have different rules apply to us. We have total dominion and mastery over all the creatures of the earth, hence we can kill this planet, its non-human inhabitants without any fear of reprisal. That might explain why we have conservatives who refuse to accept the reality of global warming, mass extinction of animal and plant species in the world and draining of the world's natural resources. We can experiment on mice who possess a fully functioning nervous system and thereby pain but we have opposition to using stem cells which don't possess any nervous system or any method of feeling sensations, in fact the idea of feelings or sensation cannot even apply to it. These stem cells can eventually lead to a cure for many of the diseases that plague us. There are millions of people on this planet who suffer from paralysis, children with multiple sclerosis, our elders who have alzhemirs, others with parkinsons and so many more disorders, which all can be eventually hopefully addressed by stem cell research. Thoughts? Comments?

Hindu Mythology: Raama Part 1

One of the most powerful ancient methods of disseminating morals and knowledge was through the art of myth telling. The cultures of the ancient world used this uniquely human aspect to attempt to explain the world and the drama of human existence. Most people in the modern world know a few of the ancient myths such as the Hellenic myths: Illiad and the Odyessey. People also know the Teutonic myths of Thor, Odin and Loki. The least known myths are the myths of South America, Africa and ancient Sumeria and Persia. My particular area of expertise is Indian and Persian Mythology. So given that, I want to try and discuss a few of the characters that have been highlighted in Indian mythology beginning with Raama, of the Ramayana epic.

Raamayana means the Journey of Raama. There are numerous versions of the Ramayana but the original version is known as Valmiki's Ramayana, named after the first poet in India, Valmiki. Indian mythology has a unique feature in that the author of the epic also is a character in the epic, which also occurred in the Mahabharata with Veda Vyasa. Raama ("he who causes joy") was the first son of the monarch Dasaratha ("He who controls ten chariots"). He was born due to the intervention of the Gods. Dasaratha could not have children on his own so he performed a yagna or sacrifice in which he recieved divine nectar which he split up between his three wives. Raama was the oldest and first born. In later times, Raama became identified as the full avatar or manifestation of the Supreme Being, Vishnu. In Valmiki Ramayana, Raama was considered human but only in a few places was his divinity hinted at.

Raama was considered to be the perfect man, husband, father, king and son. I personally think this was the later thinkers imposed on the epic and character. Valmiki, I think, was trying to show that there cannot be a perfect human being that will appease all people. The crux of the entire Ramayana laid in the simple fact that each of the characters had to pick which duties they held to be superior. Dasaratha when he exiled Raama picked his duty as a husband and king over that of a father due to the promise he made to his third wife Kaikeyi. Raama, when he abandoned Sita in the forest during her pregnancy chose his duty as King over his duty as husband.

In the story, Raama abandons his pregnant wife Sita in the forest near the ashram of Valmiki because his subjects thought that Sita was impure because she was held captive of the Rakshasha King Ravana. Hindu thought at that time was that the King is both the civil, political, military and moral leader of the people. The king is to be a moral individual who sets the model for the rest of society. As Raama was king, he decided that he should be beyond reproach by his subjects that he left her in the forest. This is one of the few issues that I have always had with Raama, instead of changing the incorrect values of his people, he succumbed to them. Maybe this was the moral of the story because finally at the end of the story, after Raama realizes his mistake and tries to take back Sita, she rebukes him and returns back into the earth from whence she came.

Valmiki, I believe was trying to show that the choices we make are based on our priorities and sometimes our priorities conflict and during those times we might make the wrong choices. The Raama of Valmiki was a very conflicted individual, not in the emotional sense but in the sense that he had so many values he was trying to uphold all at once. He was a king, prince, man of his word, honest, a son who held his parent's decisions as paramount and so on. Valmiki's point was that there is no such thing as a perfect person, we can strive for that perfection but more often than not we will fail. In my next post, i'll try and delineate the qualities of Raama and show how he is an extremely complex character, who still has a lot to teach us about being human.

The Big 27

So, I recently turned 27 or as they say in india, I'm running 28 (since in india they count your birthday from the day of your conception). Its rather funny because I think I'm supposed to feel different but I really don't, unless you consider that I'm graying a bit more and losing brain cells, hey as long as my hair doesn't fall out, i'm good to go. The one thing that birthdays do is to make you think about the past and with the lens towards the future. In that vein, I've been thinking about my life, where I've been, where I am and where I would like to go.

Life has been described as a book or a journey or a game. Its a book because what you have done is much like what has been recorded into a page, it cannot be changed (i'm guessing this metaphor was created before the invention of the eraser or white out). My life has been a rather interesting ride. I'd say I've experienced a lot more than many people and it is this ride that made me into the person I am now, good or bad thats for others to judge. I don't want to get into specifics because I'd rather people ask about it than me blog about it. My views on the world have changed drastically from high school and college. Maybe I've become more cynical but I think I've become more realistic. My idealism hasn't abated any because I still fundamentally believe in the potential of humanity to rise above selfishness.

The world we live in isn't ideal, its full of hatred, bigotry, anger, ignorance and selfishness. The depravity of the human condition really knows no bounds but neither does the splendor and goodness. Sometimes, just seeing that one kid in the street with nothing but is still content and happy with a beaming smile is enough to make you hope that maybe that kid will be the one who opens our eyes to part of us that connects us to everything else. The values our society pays to money and status is sometimes absurd. Seeing the amount of respect and attention we give to people like Paris Hilton or Donald Trump or other such people is sometimes borderline obscene when the teachers, thinkers, police, doctors, social workers and other such people are paid so poorly yet provide so much for our world.

As cheesy as it might be the line from batman begins really strikes a chord "It is not who you are underneath but what you do that defines you". A good person in my mind is the person who tries to help those that they barely know or maybe those they don't like. Helping people you care about as nice as it is isn't something that should be lauded but should be something we expect from each other. Ya, i've blogged about a part of this before but such thoughts do continue to linger.

So whats all this have to do with my age? I think I'm trying to find more ways to do more but I want to do things big. I want to do work in India help eradicate caste and ill treatment of women. I want to help improve health standards and medical problems. AIDS education, free medicine for the poor and education. I'm Indian and American, I want to find a way to live in both worlds and impact both worlds but its a thin line to find and even thinner line to walk. I guess my real birthday wish is that every year I'll be able to something more for people than I did the year before. Even though I'm not religious and question a lot of faith, I do believe that Dharma sustains uses and protects those who fight for it. Dharma is a living by principles of compassion, justice, honor, truth, dignity and knowledge. Those who stand and fight for these things are never alone and will always find support. Fight for what is right and don't back down even though the rest of the world might stand against you. Justice is never easy but is necessary. Compassion isn't a just a goal but a means, sometimes compassion does mean punishment but never hatred or anger. As long as you are honest with yourself you are honest with others, when you show dignity for others you reaffirm the dignity of yourself. Anyways, I have a bit more thoughts but not right now. Hopefully some of this makes sense. As always leave comments or suggestions.