The cut

I remember how the protagonist in Andre Gide's "The Immoralist" was thrilled at the sight of fresh, warm blood oozing in profusion from the young finger of a child who cut himself while playing with a scissor. The protagonist was convalescing from what could have been a terminal illness and this crimson liquid that poured before his eyes filled him with a sense of health that was amiss and life that could have been.

I write this today as this imagery suddenly came back to me while I was staring with no insignificant fascination at the copious drops that squirted from a deep cut on my own little finger of the left hand. I marveled at its lusty volume, its lucid texture, at its engaging colour. I looked captivated as it traced its path around my palm and my wrist, wetting and painting them. I was charmed to see the water turn red in the basin, the skin split into a deepish furrow & the affliction of impudent, cold water on raw flesh.

I was enchanted at this sudden reminder of life.

The separation

Detachment, on the whole & in the long run, is perhaps a good idea. I say 'perhaps' because there are times when doubt creeps in. In relationships, it always makes us the needed & never the needy, so much so that there is no or very feeble yearning in us to reach out, that separation does not make us bleed and that unions make for joys lackadaisical and ephemeral. It makes our memories, of happiness and sorrow, blurred.

The fan

What with a certain modicum of a Kingfisher Strong inside of me & the calm confidence that comes from tucking into a succulent leg of a chicken, I was hoping that the game that unites us a nation, mostly in despair, will have a surprise for us. And to top it all with a Foster's halfway through the game & to continue the spirited performance lacing our veins with Romanov, throwing in some potato chips in between, else they'd feel left out - you know- , and enduring a headache, and lucky distorted positions in the armchair, and not urinating as all the luck may flow out, letting in mosquitoes through the backdoor open exactly at thirty five degrees to the the normal, all that & more - and they go and lose the finals!!

Actionable Philosophy

One of the most captivating conversations I had recently was about the translation of philosophy into objective actionable entities in our daily lives. For all my reading, and only a certain portion of them have been what could be called philosophy, I really did not have any ready answer to that. I talked it over with a friend of mine later in the day.

As a first, I feel that this world we dwell in is not completely explained within the paradigm of logic, rationality and reason. If this were so, given all the problems we face today and the underlying 'facts', we would have solved a lot many problems than we have. Versions of truth are coloured by our own perception of it. I feel that philosophy can influence this perception of the world around us & from this changed perception will flow more granular, actionable items in our daily lives. So, essentially, I am trying to establish 'philosophy' as an entity differentiated from our daily lives, spent engaged in a lot of 'operational' details, which on the average are managed without a 'differentiated' point of view. And inculcating a perspective that does incarnate as things we do, is a process that is more gradual than sudden, and requires assimililation more than picking. So 'getting it to work' is a two fold process including 'getting the idea' for a start and then 'living the idea', each of which, I feel, is a time consuming process and also a very personal one. A process that necessitates a certain amount of unlearning, a lot of sensitivity & openness, & does not guarantee any tangible manifestations after all. And all successes or failure in doing so, are perhaps more manifestations of the person & than that of the philosophy.

Also, in addition to changing the actionable entities, a change in perspective can potentially colour the goals we seek. Given this holistic nature of change, we are therefore limited to pursuing ends which still retain their significance in this 'changed' world. So we can face a contradiction of sorts if we do not re-examine our whole world in this new light.