My problem with life in India is that it’s simultaneously too hard and too easy. The easy bits are getting main roles in films, getting into A-list parties, and staying out of jail for drunken, unlicensed, uninsured, helmet-less motorbike riding only costs about 6 Aussie dollars. But the stress and frustration associated with something simple like buying coffee or getting dressed can cause me to vibrate and clench until I pop a valve.

I just went looking for Sony Pix to do an audition. I plugged “Sony Pix Mumbai” into Google maps and got a hit:

So I rode to the designated dot with the help of my occasionally awesome but frequently annoying GPS guided phone, to find the dot was on a big pile of crappy nothingness.

I checked the map again and again, and came to the reluctant conclusion that someone had actually bothered to go to Google Maps to place a marker, but had not bothered putting it in the right place.

I rack my brains every time this happens, trying to deduce the mentality that leads someone to make such an effort with a result that is worse than had they just done nothing (I fixed it).

On my way home, I stopped for coffee at Baristas. I pulled my bike up to the curb, kicked out the side-stand, switched it off, got off, pulled my helmet off and when I started walking away the security guard, who’d been sitting there watching me the whole time said: “You can’t park here”

Surely my intent to park the was apparent from the moment I pulled up, or perhaps more obvious when I kicked out the stand and leaned the bike over, but definitely when I turned off the engine, and I absolutely don’t plan on re-parking it anywhere after I’ve stood up and got off – but no. He waited until I’ve removed my helmet and started to walk off before he said something. Exactly the same thing happened only yesterday – it happens so often. I try to laugh it off but often fail and sound like a manic pirate: “Haha-har-harrr-arrgh!”

Pull this handle.

I think one explanation for the general theme of this directionless drive to do could be the notion of ‘dharma’ – which is your life’s purpose, doing what you’re meant to do. Dharma doesn’t care how efficiently you do something, it relates more to being in a continual state of doing whatever it is you were born to do, as well as you were destined to, until you die. Getting stuff done early doesn’t mean there’s any less stuff to do. If you did do it, then you’ll reincarnate into an even cooler caste with yet another dharma. There’s no escaping it, life after life, and aspiring to escape your destiny within this life is almost disrespectful.

Sure, people break free from the restraints of caste and rise to dizzying heights like the Ambanis, but it is much more common to go down the caste system than up. Climbing takes hard will, courage and lots of luck. Falling is as easy as having cow blood thrown on you, marrying wrong, getting raped or even divorced. In short, acting out of turn is more likely to send you down the ladder than up. In India, innovation is infrequently encouraged.

Pull the other one!

So I went in to buy my coffee and noticed that the glass door has a “Pull” sticker on the outside of the door, and another “Pull” sticker inside – but it’s a swinging door and can go either way, and anyway, neither side has a handle, so in effect neither can be pulled, nor need they be.

Maybe he could have put a push sticker on both sides, it’d easier to do with a coffee in your hand, but why did he bother at all?

Because that was his job. The fact that this swinging door doesn’t need stickers doesn’t change the fact that his purpose in life includes adding stickers to doors.

I was shooting a TV commercial recently, and the costume guys always love to help me get dressed. I assure them that putting on clothes is something I can and do do frequently without them,  but they are determined to help; even if that help consists of them holding my fingers and causing me to fumble as I thread my belt through the loops in my pants, all the while saying:

“It’s fine. No really, I’ve got this. Please, let go. You aren’t helping. You’re actually making it harder”.

But the costume wallah has a purpose. Part of what makes dharma a righteous path is the fact that sometimes it’s a challenge. Many obstacles will pop up to deter you from your purpose, but if you’re born into a job (as castes often are – and named so – Mr. Sodabottleopenerwalla) then you’d bloody well better do it, regardless of how pointlessly irritating it might be.

It must be noted that the excessive amounts of wasted effort do seem to keep everyone rather busy, doing and undone-ing things that took a lot of doing and didn’t need getting done in the first place. It’s a wonderful system that seems to support an unimaginable number of people.

Many Kakapo birds only gets laid once, AND THAT'S WHEN THEY'RE AN EGG! - Zing.

It’s ecological. If one billion people suddenly became efficient, if they only did things that needed doing, and did them right the first time, then I recon an overwhelming number of lovely Indian people would quickly find themselves unemployed and starving to death.

The Socialist Party of India recognized this, and rather brilliantly suggested that India ban English in schools, computers in offices and all farm machinery, which would send it back into the dark ages.

Inefficiency and absurdity might be an evolutionary result of overpopulation, much like how New Zealand’s Kakapo bird, which has evolved in an environment devoid of predators, has dealt with overpopulation by becoming fat, flightless, and amazingly inefficient at mating. Those factors are now sending it close to extinction, a fate unlikely to face Indians anytime soon.

*I must note that my observations are the subject of personal opinion, and in this are predominantly about traditional Indian culture – and are not at all about Indians in any kind of intrinsic, genetic sense. I am also not making a negative value judgment about it. Yes, it annoys me, but that doesn’t make it bad, it just means that I don’t get it. I hope you’re only mildly offended.

Technorati Tags: Bollywood, hinduism, India, People, politics, rationality, religion

He hates athiests and loves hair dye

Archbishop Anthony Fisher today decided to let the world know that he’s rather stupid. He used his inaugural Easter message to blame atheism for the ills of the 20th century, namely Nazism, Stalinism and Pol-Pottery.

What a dull cookie – particularly owing to the fact that he belongs to a church that is currently headed by someone who belonged to he Hitler youth and may have protected child molesters.

The reference to Nazism is regrettable, but it gets worse. He’s been so absorbed in his faith for so long he doesn’t realise: People don’t believe in Christianity because logic seems to indicate that a creator set up an intricate set of rules and laws that govern the natural universe and then occasionally breaks them for us if we ask him; they believe because that makes them feel good.

I was at the police station this afternoon complaining about bureaucracy to Khan, my friend and mechanic. Khan had found my motorbike at the police station, it’d been stolen a few months earlier – and we were trying to get it back. I was having difficulty proving that it was my bike, and the police were having difficulty explaining why they had it in the first place.

When I was done whining, Khan had a go: His hands had developed arthritis which was making it very difficult for him to twist spanners and all that jazz, so I suggested he eat more fish. He said he couldn’t cook it nor afford it because his wife’s recent cesarean section had put her out of action (so no cooking and no job), which meant he had to cook for her with his bung wrists. I asked why his wife’s mum didn’t cook (she lives with them) and he told me she’d recently fallen and was now paralyzed from the neck down, probably for the rest of her life. He had to look after her too.

Khan hadn’t slept properly in two months, because his two month old C-section son was very ill and crying and needed constant monitoring. I suggested he take a few days off from his workshop to look after his family, but he explained that he’d lose customers, and without the income from his workshop, there wouldn’t be enough money for the various medical expenses he had to pay for his wrists, his wife’s antibiotics and dressing, his son’s medicine, and his mother-in-law’s everything. Plus, they’d all go hungry – those four, and his nephew (who he looks after since his brother died), his older son and his daughter. He now looks after all eight of them (I’ve forgotten one, probably another niece) single-handedly; they live in a room that measures about four by four metres in a shitty part of Mumbai. I’ve visited him there – it’s dank, smelly and cramped.

‘Uppar wale ka hath mein hai’ he said to put me at ease when I’d run out of helpful suggestions and had resorted to apologising like it was all my fault. It means ‘It’s all in God’s hands’ or more specifically ‘the upstairs guy’.

That’s why he has faith – because it gives him strength to keep going in the face of incredible odds. Were he an atheist, he’d be inclined to believe that he’s in a rather unwinnable situation – with his ability to earn diminishing, and a brand new expensive son to add to his already huge burden, he’s kinda fucked. Belief in intercessory power (a god that intervenes) is all that gives him hope.

I’m an atheist of luxury – I don’t need god to solve my problems, because my problems involve trying to figure out who I’ll need to bribe at the impound so I can get back my fancy, shiny, noisy, penis on wheels. I’m an asshole.

So I wonder – even if it is a fantasy, perhaps his fantasy is helping him more than I am.

Perhaps you could offer Khan a seat?

But then I have a lurking suspicion that faith put him in his helpless situation, that if we chose to live as equals without irrational beliefs there would not be such incredible inequality; that if he could wear condoms he wouldn’t have had yet another child; that the poor, the uneducated and the downtrodden like him are used as fodder for the power-hungry elite like Fisher; and that if the Catholic Church really gave two shits about anyone at all they’d stop being such money-hungry child-molesting festering puss-filled weeping wounds on the backside of humanity.

Christians who wear the bracelets and chant the mantra “What would Jesus do?” Listen up: He’d come here and kick ass. What did he do? He was a wonderful man who tried his hardest to destroy a harmful religion because he saw it sucking the life out of humanity. He was worldly, educated, and brought a lot of Hinduism into Christianity.

He only got angry when he went to temples because they were money hungry, he hated the exclusivity of Judaism so he opened it up for the Gentiles, he hated the idea of eternal suffering so he offered the hope of salvation, and he thought bacon tasted nice. He stood against everything that Judaism stands for, if you ask me.

If he came back he’d be Luke Skywalker, and he’d light-saber this evil Senator Palpatine, Hitler Youth prick who’s spreading aids in Africa, and he’d love Khan even though Khan’s a Muslim, because Khan is nice and cares about people and he looks after my bike.

A video of me and my penis on wheels:

Technorati Tags: atheism, christianity, hinduism, India, religion

The danger with emotional beliefs is that they are rarely questioned with reason, and yet they are defended with passion. Their hidden value is their demonstration of how wonderful we humans are.

It seems as if the harder the idea is to hold with reason and logic, the harder it must be gripped with fanaticism. You’d think we’re the opposite – but us humans aren’t very rational.

There is no way of categorically knowing whether there is life after death. I think that belief is a selfish and self-serving notion, and doing good to secure a better afterlife is even more selfish.

I think that there is no life after death. I think we are all part of an organism we call Earth, and we live on through the goodwill we spread during our lives and the nourishment we offer the worms when we’re dead.

That seems to me to be a reasonable reason for doing good, but that’s not why I do good. I do good because it makes me feel good because evolution has a preference for niceness and that’s why it selected me (and you too). The species’ that had a penchant for murder and incest were dispatched by the law of natural selection.

When I share my rather dull and ill-formed thoughts, people get angry about a matter of opinion. Why is that? Because they want to believe so much they mistake that desire for belief.

Actual beliefs are debated dispassionately, emotional beliefs cause emotional reactions.

Samuel Hahnemann: Alchemist

This dude, Samuel Hahnemann came upon the idea of treating conditions with more of a substance that causes those conditions. It spawned from the observation of how vaccines and snake anti-venom works.

It was a meritable musing, but under lab conditions he found that giving someone stinging nettle when they already have a rash just makes the rash worse.

He’d clearly mused for long and hard about how famous and remarkable this discovery would be, and was rather invested in the idea of it being right. When his results showed him that more nettle causes more rash, he decided to mix the nettle with water.

Lo and behold, the lower the amount of active-rash-causing ingredient, the less worse the rash became. He continued adding water until he had mixed it a mind-boggling 10⁶⁰ parts water and 1 part active ingredient, meaning that for a single drop of pure nettle you’d need more water than there is on earth. This process you and I might call ‘dilution’ Samuel rather ironically called ‘Potentization’.

Actually getting the required level of dilution is so difficult (as it requires de-purifying water and then purifying it again) practitioners of this witchcraft use jars that are merely sat near one another, so that the nettle in one jar will encourage H20 particles in another jar to become nettle-like. They claim water has a memory, it’s absurd. What would cause the water to become nettle-like rather than jar-like or bench-like or Samuel-like? Why wouldn’t the water remember back to when it was being a whale’s urine or Jesus’ wine?

He called it Homeopathy, and it works.

It works on dizziness, headaches, stress, sleeplessness and a variety of psychosomatic skin conditions. The healthy living prescribed by homeopaths also cures fatness and other health problems associated with being unhealthy. It also has no side-effects, because it’s water. It’s a placebo that works quite well, because it’s water. It is water.

Gloria's loving parents

It didn’t work for little Gloria Thomas because placebos don’t work if you’re too young to understand what it was meant to be doing.

Her parents were true believers in homeopathy, and rather than test their belief with conventional medicine they watched her worsen for 5 months and then die from a severe case of eczema that lead to an infected eye that killed her. Ouch.

They were rightly convicted of manslaughter.

In a world where a large portion of medication is side-effect ridden and geared for profit rather than health, it’s understandable that people are looking elsewhere.

But what about the upside?

The upside is: Homeopathy is proof of our ability to fix ourselves with the power of thought.

Consider what this mum is saying about the resurrection of her son (who’s been dead for a year) who she starved to death for not saying ‘Amen’:

“Queen said God told her he would come back. I believe it. I choose to believe it,” she said. “Even now, despite everything, I choose to believe it for my reasons.”

- SMH Feb 25th 2010

We believe in emotional things to differing degrees because we feel bad and they make us feel good, mostly because they take control away from us humans (who are fallible and fickle) and gives it to some imaginary higher power, which is always assumed to be benevolent or at least fair. The universe isn’t fair. It wasn’t fair to the dinosaurs, trilobites or the dodo. It has been fair to us (so far) because we’re so damn intelligent.

Back when we didn’t know that the earth was round and that the sun wasn’t a flaming chariot; when volcanoes appeared to us as if the sky had turned to fire; and insect plagues seemed too awestriking to be natural; it was understandable that we invented stories to explain these things.

We invented stories to describe the change of the seasons so we could pass on knowledge about when to plant crops, and we invented stories about the bad places that bad people went for doing bad things. These stories kept social order when the truth was unknowable, they became an excellent tool for power.

But now we have a particle accelerator at CERN that’s cracking the mysteries behind the milliseconds after the big bang, the Hubble telescope measuring space’s background radiation to determine the age of the universe, and IBM is moving around atoms on an infinitesimally small scale as a publicity stunt; the answers are now within our reach.

We are now in a unique age when we can start to take responsibility for our own existence, define our own destiny, and debate our own morals. We can do this with an understanding of how we exist within an ecosystem that is symbiotic, and that our actions have an effect on everything around us.

Although all our atoms were once parts of stars that exploded squillions of years ago, the arrangement of the stars in the sky on the day of your birth does not determine your personality type. You choose how to behave every moment of every day, and those choices determine what you are.

Atoms arranged with a scanning tunneling microscope to spell IBM

If you’re annoyingly possessive with your partner, that’s not because your a Sagittarius, it’s because you love them and are scared of losing them because you secretly think they can do better than you. Perhaps they can. They might be able to go and find someone that is in control of their emotions and takes responsibility for their actions.

If your house burned down and you lost everything that was important to you, you might be inclined to say that everything happens for a reason. Perhaps it did. Perhaps it happened to teach you a cosmological lesson in material detachment, but perhaps the reason it happened is because you like smoking in bed. Things just happen, but you can take something positive from every situation, because that’s a choice.

When you look at the complexity of life on earth, or the enormity of the universe as you gaze at the stars, you might be inclined to feel purposeless, insignificant and pathetically mortal. Perhaps you are. Perhaps instead you could feel blessed to exist within such an amazing system, and become determined to be an important and powerful influence in the world. After all, the odds really were stacked against you or anything like you existing at all, ever. Perhaps your way of saying thanks is to do some good in ways that are of actual benefit to the world. Even if god exists, he doesn’t want you wasting the resources he gave you on shrines and holy wars!

We can hold opinions and relinquish them dispassionately as new evidence comes to hand, knowing that all the time we are becoming more right, continuing our asymptotic journey towards perfection. Detached from value judgments and superstition we will start to get emotional about things that are real and important.

When we start to look at the world as it is rather than as we want it to be, we become more powerful within it. We take control over our lives and the cause and effect of events that happen within it, and with that understanding comes clarity and peace.

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