A hideous ogre! Ugly, monstrous, unworthy of Love.. so did Shrek think
Judged, ridiculed and withdrawn to a shell, he had had it to the brink

‘BEWARE.. OGRE!!!’ read his signpost, as lonelier he felt in a crowd
Resigned to himself without a fear or hope, of self-containment he was proud

Once, to reclaim the solitude of his swamp, a mighty battle he fought
What quirk of fate would next befall, no fortuneteller would have thought

In the highest room of the tallest tower of the fiery dragon’s keep
Waiting for true love’s first kiss lay one lovely princess asleep

To donkey’s charms layed the dragon her arms, for Shrek the princess fell
She could feel how he felt inside, ‘cos upon her she had an evil spell

But love couldn’t pierce the ego’s shield, as he had his own monsters to feed
So he relenquished true love and friendship, Princess Fiona, and the “noble steed”

A true pal that donkey was, yanked Shrek out of a psyche so marred
Like a true knight did Shrek fight, and saved Fiona from Lord Farquaad

There’s a cue to take here, there’s a lesson of life to learn
The battle hymn forbids us to turn our backs on what we most yearn

So we point a gun to our head, and like a tired circus clown
Keep dancing to the tune of the barrel, long after the curtain is down

Defiant doggedness or airy abandonment, when in this eternal tug of war
Remember; Being incarcerates only substance, the ethereal just drifts afar

Accept reality, not defeat, is what the astutest of sages told
For there’ll be battles galore, fight a battle worth the gold

In the battle for privacy and isolation, his true love did Shrek find
Irony of Ironies; beauty turned into a beast more beautiful, when broke the enchantment of the “fearful” kind

It’s sad we spend our lives caged in a box, which we ourselves did once create
So when you’ve had enough, just break free and trust the whimsical oddities of fate

 PREFACE                           

Does it ring any bells? It would, I guess, for the most of us!                            

We talk so much about democracy. We believe in it. We stand by it. We invoke its principles when arguing about “rights”, “freedom”, “governance”, “leadership”, “justice” and what not.  For a lot of us it’s almost a religion, a belief! But just like religion, the idea of democracy almost always goes unquestioned. We never rattle the ageless granny’s  feet  and ask what’s so charming about her, why she clicks, or why some people say bad, bad things about her, why yet some treat her as a worthless concubine, good only for one thing.  She’s just our dear granny who’s always been around and we are so used to her charms and illnesses that, subconsciously, we’ve accepted them as a part of her. There seems to be nothing  much left to question.                                

As philosopher Daniel Dennett would say, most of us just believe in belief rather than believe first hand.                                   

For a change, unlike religion that I ‘ve royally ranted about in the past, I fully stand by Democracy.  It’s a first hand belief.  But ‘m still going to put it on the dissection table under the knife of rational strutiny!  I admit, I might prove  as much of an expert on democracy as would Paris Hilton on flying space shuttles. But after much introspection, I am going to give it a go.                                

What we usually don’t question is what we usually take for granted. And what we usually take for granted is what we usually don’t look outside of. Some lucky ones do get the chance though, sometimes unwillingly or even undeservingly.  As did one of my dear friends recently ( willingly and deservingly though!) whose usually jet-setting between the Middle Eastern arab countries. Mesmerized by the wealth brought upon itself by the blessing of the unending abyss in its oil wells, my friend came back pretty impressed by the monarchy of Saudi Arabia (he hates the gulf’s airlines though as they reek of labour class gentry!) and  made a case against democracy that it is inefficient and hypocritical.  He would rather have us dispensed with it.                                   

There was a point. Look at countries like China, South Korea, Mexico, the gulf countries. They started the race with us, each of us with our bowls in our outstretched hand, yet they are much more prosperous now, or much safer, or much more organised and much more livable, or a mix of these qualities, at least by the looks of them. There’s something common in all of them. Neither of them are proper democracies and never were.                               

India, although, champions the democratic principles in a much more religious way. What are we missing? Before I delve into democracy, I want to set the stage and the props.     

    SYSTEMS THINKING                         

I believe that society is a complex arena and a lot of us fall victim to our simplistic thinking. It’s always good vs bad, moral vs immoral, right vs wrong, black vs white. As we are becoming ever more cognizant of the  inherent uncertainties of nature, and the intrinsic irrationality that suffuses from human free will, we are starting to realize that digital thinking is not what we need. We need a much more weighted approach which is introspective as well as empirical.                               

To give you an example of what I just said, I am going to tell you about a little local-train journey that I remember. With me was friend of mine who had just joined a prestigious bank after earning a prestigious masters degree from a prestigious B school and I was leaving her back to her 5 star hotel accommodation that her company had provided. We were discussing about her recent  trip to China, the hitherto autocratic communist superpower, and I was curiously  listening to her fresh insights & observations and the things that  people talk about when they come back from their first trip abroad. Winding down the labyrinth of our talks, we came down to the point of what was wrong with our country. What were we missing on? I said people have to become more sensitized to the democratic process. It’s because we take our freedom as our birthright, as if it should be served to us on a golden platter everyday by god himself, and ignore our responsibilities like a huffing dog on the street while we are licking the ‘free’dom off our fingers. I asked her how many of us thought twice before buying a packet of biscuits on a local station, demanding a plastic bag to carry the stuff to our friends and in less than a minute, nonchalantly throwing the bag off to the tracks. I qusetioned why we couldn’t take the responsibility of keeping our own cities clean. Her answer, which was delivered in a serious and concerned tone,  blew me away; she said if we did that, the economy would crumble. A million sweepers would become jobless!                               

Aaaaah.. the B schools! So basically, the statement translates to:                               

We should have crime, else police will become jobless.                               

We should have disease and suffering, else doctors and the entire drug industry will become jobless.                               

We should have stupidity & immorality, else the motivational speakers and the new age spiritual gurus will become jobless.                               

Yeah! We should have all of them together, else god will become jobless!!                               

It was an obviously bogus answer. You would be wondering what my reply was. Well, I was dumbstruck! I knew it was a flawed argument but it didn’t strike me immediately, why exactly. On my way back I mulled hard over the question.   I was cursing my wits that I couldnt reply to her immediately.  None of the BMC workers who clean our gutters live beyond fifty, yet argumentatively, he would anyway die of hunger if I didn’t pee on the road! It was a stupid dilemma and I knew for sure I was missing something.                               

But after an hour of hard thinking, I realised the fallacy.  Filth, crime, disease, stupidity and immorality are not just temporary fluctuations in a system waiting to settle down to stability. They are a part of nature. They are in its design, as are lightning and hurricanes,  and we can never completely get rid of them. We can, at best, just handle them. And handling is a process, which can be made ever more efficient. And in carrying out a process we need people! So nobody is becoming jobless.  Efficiency is a two-pronged drug, it protects and it cures. I felt elated to imagine the sweeper on railway stations in a protective suit and equipment, his job being to keep a not-so-dirty station sparkling clean instead of just keeping a filthy station out of a state that wouldn’t need bio-terrorists to make a massacre, and not becoming a social and economic burden to the nation by harbouring terminal illnesses.                               

I realized that democracy too wasnt immune to such natural problems, actually the very same ones stated above, and it needed much more than just simplistic thinking that my friend and I, for a while, fell victim to. I realized we, the people outside of academia and scholarly circle,  don’t reflect enough. We think we do but we don’t. I myself just reflect enough to realize that I don’t reflect enough.                               

Though ideologically democracy espouses the principles of freedom more than any other means of governance, it has also been its biggest impediment. Democracy has been criticised by many intellectuals over the ages. From Plato to Milton Friedman. Criticisms have been varied, the most important among them being irrationality of voters, inefficiency, political instability, short terms, mob rule, and popular rule only as a façade to mask the rule of the élite.                             

While I am not going to reinvent the wheel arguing about the boring pros and cons of democracy, I want to give this debate a new geometry. I want to go deeper into the whys behind the whys of intricate gears and levers of democracy. So I will attempt to show this whole complexity from a new angle from where things appear much clearer to me..                          

 THE LENS OF FREEDOM                          

Like I said earlier too, I have realized that the greatest impediment of democracy is the same principle that forms the bedrock of its whole philosophy; freedom. As shown in the cartoon above, we are awful with handling freedom. And that’s exactly the point of my debate; the evolution of freedom.                             

The concept of freedom is a very tricky one and relatively new to the human race. We have always been slaves. Slave to nature, slave to religion, slave to the society, slave to the king or the queen, slave to our so-called leaders, and most of all slave to the manifold of our own knotty psychology and consciousness. If anybody has noticed, free will isn’t really that free. And, as a species,  since we have spent so much of our evolutionary time being some or the other kind of slave, I contend that we are simply not psychology evolved to handle freedom. We find it difficult to steer ourselves through a maze of choices. Now, I am not saying that freedom is synonymous with choices but just to make a point, everybody has faced a dilemma with choice so its easier to relate to the topic this way.                             

What really is freedom by the way? I have never come across an absolute answer to this question. If you look in the dictionary for the word ‘freedom’ , you’ll find twenty different definitions and they all seem to be floating in a dimension of their own, only very seldom crossing each other at a common point. My only conclusion is that there is no absolute answer. And if there was to be one, it would be; There’s nothing like absolute freedom.                             

We have always been evolving towards greater freedom. We are more free than we ever were. The world now is full of choices, some of which were always there in a hypothetical space to which we didn’t ve’ access, and others which we have invented for ourselves. E.g. Women now call themselves liberated, in the sense that now they can decide their lives for themselves, earn their own living and spend it as they want, decide for themselves what they wear,  their career, their boyfriend (or girlfriend, lately!), their spouse, how they raise their children etc. They have an equal say in everything, at least according to the law. That’s a radically different picture compared to the world that was 50 years back. Still we don’t feel free, not very often do we?  That’s because freedom is not a close ended straight road to which we could all just say; See you at the last stop. Freedom is not something which will one day see itself reaching to some kind of a logical conclusion, when there’s no more freedom to be achieved and all the dilemmas are sorted out. I surmise that we will keep redefining freedom and rediscovering its meaning and form to no end.  When I say we dont feel free I mean we still feel the viscosity, the friction of the path of freedom on which we’ll forever keep walking.                             

Absolute freedom, an apparition which has been talked about for centuries by poets and philosophers alike, is in my opinion a paradoxical concept by its own definition, especially considered in relevance to our topic of debate. Consider this simple reasoning; Suppose the humanity has attained total, absolute freedom. That means I have the freedom to kill you and you have the freedom to live! So who among the two of us would you think is free?                     

 If you’re not convinced, I can go deeper on a metaphysical, philosophical level. Absolute freedom means ability to make a choice and act on it completely detached from the input, control, or otherwise influence of persons or society. That means if one claims to have attained absolute freedom, he claims to have detached his self from ‘causality’ i.e. he is no more influenced by causation nor is he the agent of causation to anyone else harbouring the power & privilege of absolute freedom. In such a case a sense of self would be lost since consciousness expresses itself as a memory of an ordered array of  events, with causes & effects providing for the ‘order’ element as cause always precedes the effect and events can then be recorded by the mind on a timeline. Impotent causes and uncaused action will simply add up to an incoherent memory and the loss of awareness of the any direction of time, hence of self.  To get a clearer picture of this, imagine a movie tape and imagine the information on that tape to be the whole of your life. Now suppose, any element of causation is removed from this movie, and the movie now is made of randomly jumbled 1-second frames as the linking element between the frames, causation, is now lost. Imagine playing this movie and watching it. Do you think it would make any sense? Earlier, the movie was a story, now its a mesh of crap. That’s what our consciousness would become if causality was totally eliminated from the world, and that’s exactly what absolute freedom entails for itself to manifest.  Hence for somebody having absolute freedom, the freedom would really be absolute but it wont be his. The whole concept of he and his would thaw into nothingness, so the freedom which we call absolute couldn’t be ascribed to a living, conscious entity anymore. It just means since his actions would be uncaused, they would be random, indeterminate and hence meaningless.  Absolute freedom not only does not exist, it cannot exist.                     

You must be wondering why I am drilling so deep into this ‘absolute freedom’ territory. Well, I am hunting for black gold which would come gushing out. My point here is that since absolute freedom does not exist. we have to question, keeping aside for a second our inescapable dependence on nature, what keeps us from reaching it. What keeps the check? Is it ingrained in the design of nature? Yes, I say; Its our Karma; Our reaction to causality ( from the fundamental level of which we are inescapable by the very design of nature), and the agent of further causation, resulting in an endless cycle. People take their democratic freedoms too much for granted and shoo away their responsibilities. It is utterly frustrating to read some rosy sounding philo-phony-sophers in the spiritual columns of newspapers saying that man’s ultimate goal is to attain absolute freedom. Agreed with the endless harp on freedom but what about its limitations? We don’t learn enough about them. Neither through school, nor through our leaders and gurus.                           

Purely from a system’s perspective, any system which is not absolute and operate under some laws, has to have its checks and balances. With all the parameters set properly within a body of laws, the system tends to be naturally stable as one parameter keeps a check on the other and vice-versa, like the classic example of crabs in a jar pulling the escapists down. Laws can be flexible but only to an extent. I see democracy as a fenced playground. Frolic as much as you will, but you’re not allowed to break the fence. You break the fence and a pack of howling wolves could barge in and devour you, as well as everyone else, alive. You could increase the playground area, but you would have to augment the fencing proportionately. So, like Spiderman said, “with great power comes great responsibility”. I would morph it to; with greater freedom comes greater responsibility since freedom is nothing but power to act to your own will. We can have as much freedom as we want, provided we are ready to handle the baggage of responsibilities that tends to balance our newfound freedom by tying us down in some way or the other.                         

THE HIROSHIMA                         

A radioactive uranium atom takes a hard stance on absolute freedom. It fissions into smaller atoms indeterministically, spontaneously, uncaused by any external agent, accompanied by a huge amount of energy ( for a single atom). Tinker with this freedom just a teeny-weeny bit  in a considerable mass (technically called the critical mass)  of uranium, and what you get are a thousand splendid suns. Right over your head! You get a Hiroshima!                         

In a democracy, freedom does not just mean being free to do what you want. It also means making yourself free and willing to take the full advantage and use to the fullest the rights and opportunities guaranteed by the government and the constitution. This second aspect of freedom requires us to break free of the shackles of ignorance, fear, misinformation, gullibility, herd mentality, groupism & narrative fallacies. I’ve borrowed the last term from Nassim Taleb’s book The Black Swan. Taleb shows how, in an attempt to make the world around us more and more predictable by consuming ever more information, we end up messing things so badly by trying to build a definite narrative around the information. What about the information that’s hidden, unseen or unknown? And there’s always a lot of it. Always! We have to ask ourselves how that changes the narrative, the story.                        

Since, as discussed earlier, all the cripples stated above are natural and given. We will always have irrational voters with impressionable minds, especially in the wake of factors like poverty and religious sentiments. There’s no dearth of incompetent leaders either.  What do we do then? Before attempting to answer that, I must say that while thinking along these lines I ve been mighty impressed by Taleb’s ideas and philosophy. He propones the philosophy of empirical skepticism. Being a trader and playing dodgeball in a highly unpredictable world of free markets, he has made himself a lifelong investigator of randomness (though I am not trying to make any comparison between social and economic randomness). He says; If you cannot avoid it, expect it. The question here is, who should be at the expecting end? The public or the political parties?                   

Irrational, misinformed, ill-informed and, especially, hungary voters jeopardize the democratic process. But a lot more dangerous can be the poisonous tree that sprouts from that little, apparently inconsequential (the “what difference does one vote make” mentality), malignant seed that such voters plant in the ballot box. Just like other natural occurences, there always are people who harbour a grotesque idea or a philosophy and don’t ever excuse themselves to think outside their little box. Till such people are contained within the masses, they’re harmless like the little radioactive uranium atoms I mentioned above.  But when we make them leaders, accumulate around them a critical mass of followers and artificially trigger the would-have-been-spontaneous decay with the chant of ”hail Hitler”, the chain reaction starts and BOOM! What you get is a Hiroshima! It’s just that instead of radioactivity, it’s the political, economic, intellectual and moral shit that persists for years from one such explosion. Half-baked notions of democracy in the minds of people further allow these so-called leaders to take the idea of freedom too seriously and too far, who get seduced by the goal of absolute freedom, but only for themselves ( And I have shown pretty well above that absolute freedom can never be personalized. Little Uranium atoms have absolute freedom but its impersonal and its expression; inconsequential).  They hijack democracy to express their  “democratic right” to propone and live their freakish whims, supported by a mass of hypnotized followers. Radical notions are infectious. With a mass following and a little wits, these leaders soon become dictators.                   

Coming back to the question I posed above; who should be at the expecting end?  Democracy is a form of governance that puts the least tax on exercise of free will but from it results a torrent of irrationality and stupidity on one hand and blatant rape of power on the other. Anyone who’s read Orwell would understand it better. Within the sphere of their roles, leaders definitely are important but within a system, I dont like to see them as more than our elected representatives. To distinguish them from the public would be to call them rulers instead of leaders. So I would say it should be the public. More interesting would now be to ask; Who should be at the end of public expectation? (Remember that we are talking of expectation in the sense of expecting what cannot be avoided, not expecting what we desire) The answer, unfortunately, is usually taken to be ’the leader’ or ‘the ruling party’. So should we expect since indolence and corruption of our leaders cannot be avoided, we should expect it and see what can be done? No, just forget about the leader for a while. Since I just eliminated the leader, I would say it has to be the  public itself. The public has to be aware of its own debilitations and expect that it would be irrational, irresponsible and corrupt and then see what can be done.  The leader is nothing but our own extension. As the public, so its leaders. I like to think that once this happens, the leader part would largely get taken care of by itself.                  

SO, WHAT CAN BE DONE?                   

I would very frankly say that I dont know.  Since it’s a utopian fantasy to have a society of perfectly moral and responsible citizens, its difficult to say what’s the way out. But as they say; “You may be disappointed if you fail, but you’re doomed if you don’t try”.  The step before the first step as a society would be to start thinking holistically. When we say a problem cannot be done away with, we only mean it cannot be done away with completely.             

Coming to the first step, I think it has to start with education, but not just formal education. Education has to be our cultural artifact, a lifelong process. The first objective of such education has to be to sensitize, not to teach. Teaching, to most people, is resonant with rote learning, a task, like learning the commandments of religion that are forever debatable and conveniently forgotten. Education on the other hand is something that one absorbs, mulls about and get effected by.              

I have often pondered over the dichotomy between the use of the word ‘our’ and ‘your’ in school textbooks. The latter is seldom used while being taught about civics or economics in school. ‘Our’ country, ‘our’ economy, ‘our’ environment, ‘our’ responsibilities! The word ‘our’, in my opinion, has been overused on the pretext of humility and to convey the thought that the sayer is not any different from the listener and not exempt from the same responsibilities.              

While all of the above ‘ours’ are definitely our’s, the word ‘our’ paints a different impression of its meaning when being taught.  The word ‘our’ becomes a sea of masses where ‘my‘ becomes an implicit, undermined and diminutive entity. Think of the phrase ‘my responsibility’. Where does that ‘my’ stand in a billion ‘ours’? I can hardly even see it. An ‘our’ devoid of ‘my’ is a  sum of a huge number of zeroes, a zero itself. ‘Your’ on the other hand singles out a person. It has a singular existence. It points very bluntly to you. That’s an example of the linguistics of the script of sensitization.            

I like to think of democracy as a complex machine, a robot maybe, with its remote control in our hands. Knowing that we are not psychologically evolved to handle freedom, to intuitively process information  and expecting we would make mistakes, what should be our mitigation plan? Well, we werent evolved to operate robots or other complex machines either! But we are damn good at using them. We are very careful with our expensive, fully automatic washing machines. We don’t run them like arcade games. Why? Because we realize their worth, they come with a user manual and we get a demo. We have to not just create a user manual of democracy but create a real good demo too to sensitize people, to make them realize not the worth but the pricelessness of ‘freedom’.  We also have to take care that this demo be interactive.            

Movies and TV campaigns are doing wonderfully at this but they are not interactive. I think this is a job that can be done to a magnificent level by schools! Today we are in a dire need of good role models, especially the children. Since academia is the one social institution that mulls the most over matters of sociology, morality & ethics, I think the rebuilding should start from there. I grew up disillusioned with my teachers as most of them were payed robots imparting knowledge, not education. Teaching, not educating. Teachers would ve’ to fill up the vacancies for role models before anyone else!            

Marching on, given all the sensitizing, we should still expect there’ll be people who still wont learn. Those who’ll still spit on the roads, fling the plastic bag out of the moving taxi, vote for the wrong guy and not give a damn about any of it. Or worse, those who will take democracy into their own hands like the Senas in Mumbai who can turn a vibrant cosmopolitan city into such a wretched, deplorable mess and trample on the freedom of freedom itself. What do we do now? We hedge our bets on those who do learn and let those who dont learn be the scapegoats, who tread the path of radicalism and make of themselves living examples of what not to be. Thats my personal philosophy; Its more important to know what not to do or what not to be. The rest is all experimentation, exploration and luck!            

Ultimately, for any of this to happen, the law has to be made almighty and its implementation much, much stricter. With people willing to be sensitized and learn, I hope we will see it happening in the future. There are examples to be hopeful; The women’s rights movement, legal stance on homosexuality, the pink chaddi campaign!            

I have to admit though, that change in a country like India will be gradual. One mistake our founding fathers made was to declare the country a democracy while keeping the economy under the autocratic government control. Economic liberalization has come very late to us. Journalist Fareed Zakaria, in his book The Future Of Freedom has argued that democracy works best in states that are constitutionally liberalized. He says democracy leavens better from liberalizing autocracies than regimes which mix election and authoritarianism. That explains China better I guess. Of course, we cannot expect 500 million hungry and hurt Indians to listen to reason. Sensitization does not work on someone hardened up to hunger and hatred.    

I think that from the government side, this would be the most important step. The economy has to be in concordance with democratic principles; Free markets governed by strict rule of law. Many governments have long feared free-markets for their assumed potential to create a dog-eat-dog world and subjugation of the poor and the under-privileged. I am no expert on the subject of free markets (who is, by the way?) but I support the contention of Steve Forbes, the CEO of Forbes Inc. that free markets are governed by the Invisible Hand of demand & supply which bring millions of human beings around the world together into a network of mutual cooperation as parts of the supply chain without any need of a central planner as brilliantly illustrated in the essay I, Pencil: My Family Tree by the educator and the thinker Leonard Read. Ultimately, it’s based on trust & freedom. Isn’t that what democracy is about? Forbes says if the government restricts itself to, and take very seriously, the task of  playing a watchdog, making sure that everybody plays fair, watch out for financial bubbles like those in the 2007-08 crash ( the first hand responsibility of which Forbes puts on the US government for excessive printing of currency and fostering an environment where greed was natural to run wild), not indulge in too much of artificial tinkering within the economy, any disparities created within the economy eventually soothes out and the system is self-equilibrating. My point here is that the dose of socialism, which probably was needed during the poverty ridden conditions of the time of independence, has gone on too long and has only bred corruption, within the government itself,  more than anything else. Let the citizens be the owners of the enterprise of nation building, let them be the primary stakeholders, let them share the risk, let them capitalize on that or let them fail and learn. Let the real democracy have its day in the sun!   

THE VISION      

 Letting bygones be bygones, the only way is to look forward. The legendary Italian philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli had argued on a cyclical theory of government where monarchies always decay into aristocracies, that then decay into democracies, which decay into anarchy, then tyranny, then monarchy. Left to its own devices, I guess this is probably how it would be, the gleaming example being Pakistan as it keeps vacillating between dictatorship and something resembling democracy. But today I would rather see democracy as in a process of evolution. Both human and societal.   

Evolution is irreversible and is self-optimizing. Thanks to the information revolution, it’s not the same playing field anymore. We have as much information at our disposal as we want. Citizens can now take informed decisions, only they are not used to it. Globalization has further changed the scene. It has become the normalizing factor which maintains the equilibria of common denominators of the most popular ideas of humanity. Technology has already drastically altered the ideas of freedom of speech and the expression of ideas themselves. What more could prove that fact more than that you’re reading this blog.  It’s still a mayhem but citizens, the common man, today has more power than he ever did. That fact cannot be contested.

The vision of democracy that I like to have is that of a not-so-near future. And a rather cheeky one, if I may opine. I would divine that two to three hundred years hence, the forms of governance that have existed till now would become fossilized. The world would become one giant, global organism with states and economies just being the organs. Technology is bound to play a huge role and not just in digitizing the voting process ( that is not even more than a decade away in advanced countries!) but in governance itself. The cripples of psychological evolution of freedom within human mind shall be done away with by the hyper-advanced networks of artificial intelligence that would exist then. Those who want to jump the gun and shout we’ll become slaves of technology and that history repeats itself, I would want to assure them that humans would have done much thinking after having watched the movie I-Robot! Well, I am no soothsayer but I’d like to believe it would be a symbiotic relation between man and technology. I am skeptical of how different both these terms will remain! 

There are two other major things I still am skeptical about in this audacious future of mine. One is the evolution of justice. Second is whether I’ll be remembered as a great thinker of the past or forgotten as a drunk, delusioned blogwriter. But well, you are not forgotten as anything. You’re just forgotten. The second one really bothers me!

With a child’s heart, you’ve got no reason to frown.

Love is as welcome                                                    

No grown up thoughts                                                 
To lead our hearts astray.

 The ripples from the heart rending news of Michael Jackson’s death on 25^th of June, 2009 outshone any seismic misadventure of man or nature. The world imploded into grief and a torrent of mourn swept around the globe.

 News channels had a field day with one of the biggest stories they’ll ever get to cover in their lives. Celebrities from all over the world, who earlier kept their reservations on speaking about the “controversial” superstar, dumped all those hesitations and came to the fore with their myriad stories of how they grew up to his music, how much and in how many ways he inspired them, how he touched millions of lives with his philanthropy and how a lot of them probably wouldn’t have been where they are had Michael Jackson not been there as their childhood idol. These were not just western pop starts but people from all spheres of life including presidents, sportspersons and Indian folk singers. Frankly, it was pretty surprising to me.

 Personally I have no idea where to begin with or what to say. Like million of other people, MJ was my personal hero too. I am pretty passionate about a lot of things but I don’t think there is any other thing or person about which or whom I read more than Michael Jackson. His life was as rivetingly fascinating as it was unusual. His life was the stuff that legends are made of.

 Born as the seventh child in a family of nine brothers and sisters in 1958, Michael was soon recognized as a prodigious singer. His father, Joe Jackson, a crane operator in a steel mill, used to do live gigs in local nightclubs to complement his meager salary. His mother used to sing at the church. Gifted with the right genes, his father recognized the gifts of his four elder sons and they formed a band. At the tender age of five, Michael moved an audience at his school function to tears with his rendition of a song. Brought to Joe’s notice by his wife, little Michael was promptly added to his brothers’ band as their front man. Hardly anyone had an inkling of the indelible mark this little black boy was destined to leave on the world history and culture.

 Virtually overnight, the Jackson family’s stars changed. The band called The Jackson 5 became popular in local nightclubs and talent shows. Soon they were popular across the state. The band’s big break came when they landed a contract with exclusively black record company called Motown records. Their 1969 debut album, Diana Ross presents Jackson 5, broke a record held previously by The Beatles of most US no.1 hits from a single album. Four singles from the album, including the now immortalized tunes like I’ll be there, I want you back and ABC shot straight to no.1, a record to be broken later only by Michael himself.

 The Jackson brothers didn’t look back. Hit after hit, they accumulated piles of awards, fame and money. They even had a cartoon show themed on them. At the center of all this circus was a reticent little boy who, while on stage, was an absolute charmer with his mellifluous voice, his supercharged dance moves and his witty sense of humor.

 But off-stage his life was starkly different. With a stoically disciplinarian father, who had got used to skinning him with a belt at his every whim for the minutest of his errors while performing, and contractual obligations to be met, concert commitments to be chased, Michael’s real life was ghastly and ruthless for a kid of his age.

 I recall Michael lamenting in several interviews, especially the one given to Oprah Winfrey in 1993, the tragic loss of his childhood. He told that his life as a kid in his early days was school–recording studio–home late night—school the next day. He reminisced how badly he wished he could just go to the park, something so trivially mundane, something that most of us take so much for granted. Later in his teens it was worse as they were always on tour. So instead of school a tutor would accompany him on tours and thus he got further isolated and was hardly getting to interact with anyone of his age. His brothers were his only friends.

 With his every move photographed and fed to public curiosity to be judged and measured, Michael kept turning inwards upon himself becoming ever conscious of his looks, his changing voice as he hit puberty, and every step that he took out in the public. People were in awe of this little prodigy who had turned the tables over the biggest names in music of his time, and his rags to riches story. People looked at him in amazement and thought, aah, what a life he has. Little did they know he was like a mirror image looking back at them and saying exactly the same thing.

 Came 1979 and Michael’s solo career skyrocketed. Michael had moved from Motown records to Sony. He teamed up with music producer Quincy Jones to come up with the album Off the Wall which had sold more than 10 million copies till around that time and earned him his first Grammy for the song Don’t Stop till You Get Enough. Praised for its unforgettable melodies like Rock with you, She’s out of my life; Off the Wall was only a warm up for the world to embrace its new God.

 In 1982, Michael created the album Thriller which shattered every record, outsold every other album, and changed every convention. Thriller is an album that will probably stand in perpetuity as the biggest selling album of all time, with a massive 110 million copies sold till date. With groundbreaking videos, breathtaking music that leapt across genres, lush vocals and a signature vocal style, Michael was proving himself as a relentless experimentator, an innovator and a risk taker. Thriller swept 8 Grammies, produced 7 top ten hits and stood at no.1 for 37 weeks.

 With Thriller Michael not only provided a new life line to the flagging music industry but also broke racial, social and geographical barriers. Billie Jean was the first video by a black artist to be played on MTV which owes a lot of its later success to Michael Jackson. Michael was the first true global superstar. He was also always way ahead of his times with a canny, intuitive ability to spot and fertilize latent business, technological and cultural opportunities which later allowed him to become such a huge trendsetter in almost every aspect related to his craft.

 What followed Thriller cannot be described in words. His later albums Bad, Dangerous and HIStory became some of the world’s best selling albums of all time. Michael scaled unprecedented heights of fame and fortune. He became a demi god, a cultural icon and America’s most valuable export to the rest of the world. In the remotest corners of the most secluded lands, if people knew just one person from the outside world then it was Michael Jackson.

 A lot of his critics consider his lost-childhood story as a weepy excuse for his purported “eccentric” behavior, a yarn he spun to cover up his alleged misdeeds with children. They claim he always had the silver spoon and that there are other child stars who’ve had traumatic childhood but they came out of it smiling so why he couldn’t. Well first of all, hardly anybody was as big a child star as Michael. Because to be Michael Jackson you have to have a father like Joe Jackson who would stamp discipline all over your body with his belt, virtually every other day. Secondly there has hardly been anyone who was pretty famous as a child star and grew up to be an even bigger star. The gravity of the wanton excesses of tinsel world sucked them in before they turned 20. To escape that pull, one had to be as austerely disciplined and determined as he was, but being that was not free of cost!

 Most importantly, other child stars might’ve gotten out of their childhoods unscathed but Michael was different. He was amazingly sensitive and amazingly ‘up there’. This is a concoction of qualities where understanding of human nature stands at the brink of our knowledge. In his autobiography Moonwalk, he writes that at the height of his fame when the world wanted to see him, feel him, emulate him and consume him, love him to death, he felt he was the loneliest person on Earth. As sensitive to other’s pain as to his own, Michael had decided early on that he would use his extraordinary power and prowess to make the world a better place.

 Throughout ’80s and ’90s Michael toured the world extensively. Leaving fans awestruck by his electrifying performances and the most technologically advanced stage productions; he was also visiting various children’s hospitals and orphanages with loads of gifts and tremendously increasing his knowledge of various countries, cultures and their problems. At many places he would donate his entire concert fees to local charitable organizations as he did in India.

 Before the scandals broke out MJ was known only for his music & philanthropy. He received numerous Humanitarian Awards including a Guinness world record for an entertainer supporting most number of charities. It is estimated that he has denoted and raised over $300 million for charitable causes through his music, including the star studded anthem We are the world, and through personal donations. To know more about Michael’s philanthropic efforts click here.

 But post scandal, a lot changed. He earned a title for himself. From superstar, he had become a “controversial” superstar. He earned a nickname too: Wacko Jacko. He became embroiled in lawsuits, allegations, and a press that was devouring him into pieces every single day on their front pages.

 Michael’s public trials began in the late ’80s when plentiful rumors about him started appearing in the papers. The press knew a simple truth. It’s a vicious cycle of love and hate. Too much love and suddenly the needle on your lovemeter crosses the 12o’clock boundary and you enter the area of hatred. Just like we need somebody to love, we have an equipotent desire to have somebody to hate. And Michael was an easy victim. He was at such dizzying heights of mega stardom that being there was a Herculean task of maintaining a precarious balance, and pushing him off was easy.

 The rumor mill started with his changing appearance, and lightning skin colour. It was alleged that he had “bleached” his skin white (I have no clue what that means), that he hated his race and the colour of skin that it endows. Later the rumors kept getting wilder and more exotic. There were stories of him sleeping in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber to immortalize himself, of having acquired the bones of the mysterious creature called as the “Elephant-Man”, that Michael Jackson had died and his sister Janet sometimes shows up as Michael! In 2000 Vanity Fair magazine exploded through the ceiling into the outer space of ridiculousness. It alleged that Michael wears a prosthetic nose, bleaches his skin as he doesn’t like being black, that he attended a voodoo ceremony in Switzerland to kill Steven Spielberg among others (Spielberg and Michael were always on very good terms after they met and worked together for the movie E.T. in 1983) and sacrificed 42 cows and bathed with their blood. You’d really have to be a goofball to believe that!

 While discussing these rumors with one of his biographers once he exclaimed:

 “Why not just tell people I’m an alien from Mars. Tell them I eat live chickens and do a voodoo dance at midnight. They’ll believe anything you say, because you’re a reporter. But if I, Michael Jackson, were to say, “I’m an alien from Mars and I eat live chickens and do a voodoo dance at midnight,” people would say, “Oh, man, that Michael Jackson is nuts. He’s cracked up. You can’t believe a damn word that comes out of his mouth.”

 But the truth is that this world is full of goofballs.

 Michael soon began to be seen as a weirdo. No doubt he was a little eccentric, and it was something totally expectable from a person who had never seen any normalcy in life. But in the pre-scandal days he was seen as an innocuous eccentric. Post scandal, an eerie eccentric!

 In 1988 Michael purchased a 2800 acre property and turned it into a fantasyland. He named it as ‘Neverland Valley Ranch’. Neverland is a fictional place where children never grow up. Michael was a person of iron will. He believed in the power of dreams and he chased his dreams and one by one turned them into reality. Neverland was the finest and grandest physical manifestation of his soul. Inside, there was an amusement park with all its roller coaster rides, a water park, a theater, a zoo, a museum of arts, a go-carting track,  a toy train (with a real steam engine), and of course his palatial mansion. Neverland was also something that put a drastic twist to his life.

 Michael was famous for his reclusive lifestyle. Yet nothing was further from truth. Michael opened Neverland’s gates to all the children of the world and their parents. Every three weeks he used to invite terminally ill children to his ranch to have the time of their lives before they forever fade off into darkness. Michael had an amazing connection with kids. In the acceptance speech for his Grammy Legend award in 1993, Michael said:

 ” I realize that many of our world’s problems today – from the inner city crime, to large scale wars and terrorism, and our overcrowded prisons – are a result of the fact that children have had their childhood stolen from them. The magic, the wonder, the mystery, and the innocence of a child’s heart, are the seeds of creativity that will heal the world. I really believe that.

What we need to learn from children isn’t childish. Being with them connects us to the deeper wisdom of life which is ever present, and only asks to be lived. They know the solutions that lie waiting to be recognized within our own hearts. Today, I would like to thank all the children of the world, including the sick and deprived . . . I am so sensitive to your pain.”

 The world saw the first glimpse of Neverland in 1993 when talk show host Oprah Winfrey interviewed Michael. He also clarified a lot of rumors. He looked white because he had a debilitating skin pigmentation disorder called Vitiligo which killed his melanin producing cells. He used make-up to cover the dark patches. Since melanin is a protective pigment which wasn’t being produced in his body anymore, he had to wear facial masks and wide brimmed fedora hats to protect himself from the Sun, which had later become his fashion statement. He also revealed the mystery behind the hyperbaric chamber. He suffered second degree burns on his scalp in a pyrotechnics accident while shooting a commercial for Pepsi. Pepsi paid him a million dollars to not sue them. He used the money to build a burn center and was taking a feel of the hyperbaric chamber which doctors use to hasten the healing process when some jerk took a photograph and it was plastered all over the next day.

 It is till date the most watched interview ever. It’s a crying shame the media continues to deliberately ignore or show deliberately misconstrued conclusions of what are logical and truthful explanations from the man himself, to his perceived bizarre behaviors. Then they say he was reclusive, he didn’t give interviews. Why would he, when whatever he said in those interviews hardly went past the interviewer. He was made controversial by the media because controversy sells like nothing else.

 The biggest knock of indignity that completely shook his world and changed the entire course of his life, and perhaps even took his life was the pedophile tag the world hung on his name. Had the child abuse allegations not been there he’d probably have been alive today. 

 In 1993 Michael was accused by a 13 year old boy, Jordan Chandler, of sexual molestation and pedophilia. Michael strongly denied the allegations and said he would slit his wrist before harming a child. Michael’s family and friends stood solid by him but his image had taken a severe battering. It was the perfect opportunity for his adversaries to bring him down. Fired employees, disgruntled managers, his business arch-rivals all had their moment of glory and claim to fame. Michael, on suggestion from his lawyers, settled the matter out of the court. The boy’s father pocketed $13 million and agreed to leave him alone. What kind of dad would do that if MJ really had molested his child?

 The next time, it was Gavin Arvizo in 2003. He had appeared earlier on the infamous 2001 documentary Living with Michael Jackson conducted by Pakistani-British journalist Martin Bashir. Michael caused a furor back then when he admitted he lets children (not just boys!) sleep in his bed. He said: “What’s wrong with sharing your bed? The most loving thing to do is to share your bed with someone”. The boy was then all praise for him and even said Michael was like a father to him. But Michael also said he never literally shared his bed. His bedroom is a duplex. So if kids sleep in his bed, he sleeps on the floor. He also said he has never personally invited anyone in his bed or in his room. The children loved him and wanted to stay with him ever longer till it was time to sleep. The once cancer stricken boy admitted he himself wanted to stay with him in his bedroom, while his mom and siblings stayed in the guest house, and it was nothing sexual.

 The scandals fed the media for years as it did the late night comedians who took cheap shots at him to earn their bread. Since objective reporting by the media had long been dead, the allegations further fueled ludicrous stories by spin doctors making Michael look even weirder. Media completely ignored the other side of the story, focusing only on Michael’s antics.

  Jordan Chandler’s father was a screwy dentist, who was often sued by his patients, and a failed Hollywood writer. The lawyer that the father hired had an even tainted history. The whole story of the frame up was published in 1994 in a GQ magazine’s article ‘Was Michael Jackson framed’. If you Google about Jordan Chandler now you’d find numerous articles on him admitting that he lied for his father and that he was drugged by his father before his confession was taken. I would also like to point out that no charges were pressed against him by the state as police could not find even an iota of evidence against him.

 The 2003 accuser’s family was much, much less credible and Michael decided that this time he’ll fight for his good name. A public trial commenced. There are numerous interviews of the jury members who presided over his trial and they say they never once believed the prosecuter’s side of the story which seemed utterly made up.  Jurors also claimed that the mother of the accuser was extremely ill-behaved. A number of other celebrities including Jay Leno, who loves to make jokes on Michael Jackson, testified that the woman was a con artist and had tried to cheat them. The woman was later convicted in separate cases for cheating to gain welfare monies and charged heavy penalties and community service. The boy, Gavin Arvizo, was caught stealing from J.C.Penny’s store, and ransacked a dentist’s office among other such offenses. Stricken with cancer, Michael saw this boy come back to life. It was his fault he was so giving of himself that he completely ignored the warning signs. Michael was finally honorably exonerated on all 10 counts of sexual offense and 4 minor counts. 

 Michael grew deeply frustrated with all the accusations, lies and the hate campaign which the media had put into gear against him. His albums grew angrier, the music grew darker and lyrics reeked of profound frustration and hurt. A majority of the songs on his later albums are mostly on social issues and personal tribultions. His album HIStory contained only one love song! (which opened to a new world record anyway). He chose to speak only through his music and if you take a look at lyrics of his songs like Scream,  Stranger in Moscow, They don’t care about us, Childhood, Tabloid Junkie, Money, Privacy, Jam, Leave me alone, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

 Experienced with media’s deceitful ways, Michael placed personal cameras while shooting for the Martin Bashir documentary and when the documentary was aired what happened was what Michael suspected. Cunningly edited, it showed Michael in a negative light as a person & a father. Michael released his own version of the documentary, The Michael Jackson Interview: The footage you were never meant to see, as a rebuttal and proved his point how media can twist the facts and give them any color it wants. And not just it can, it does!

 The 2003 allegations left him deeply emotionally scarred, and he spiraled into depression and got addicted to antidepressants and painkillers. He lost a huge amount of weight too. To the outside world though, he was still the invincible king of pop.

 Michael Jackson was a man of steel. It is an absolute wonder, given his mercurial, horrendously complicated life, he lived long enough to celebrate his fiftieth birthday. No matter how much you harden from outside, the core of your soul remains as sensitive. He fought till the end and took it as long as he could. But death is the biggest and the only absolute reality of life and it finally caught up with him.

 He touched hundreds of millions of lives like nobody else ever did. He was the most famous man on the planet. He inspired a whole generation to be whatever it wanted to be and to be the best at what it chose to be. Look at all the young music stars today, they swear by him. It’s a very sad fact – and history is witness of this- that whenever there’s been a godsend epitome of excellence, of genius, and of salvation, we have pushed him to death. Persecuted and martyred on the altars of envy, greed and hatred.

In innumerable ways he made himself the exemplar of many things. Just as much as he inspired the world, it also learned from his mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes, but he was the first one at whatever he did no matter whether it turned out to be good for him or vice versa. But the sad part of his life was that people forgot that, after all, he was just a human being.

During his final days he was preparing for the biggest comeback in the world; 50 sold out shows in London’s O2 arena. With a humongous fortune amounting to billions of dollars, but little liquidity to pay back his massive debts, his finances were in a real mess. A greedy coteris sucking up to him had mismanaged his estate for years. The concerts was expected to provide some fresh ‘O2′ to his flagging financial situation as well as his career. But nature had better plans for him!

I know there’ll always be ignoramuses who will go on believing bullshit about Michael and there is nothing in this world, no amount of evidence, no measure of convincing power that’ll stop them from believing what they believe. I feel sorry for them that they choose to spend their lives hating someone. Michael went away with no hate in his heart. He reconciled with his father long back and never spoke disparagingly of any of the children involved in the accusations. During his guest lecture at Oford University in 2001, he said:

“If you enter this world knowing you are loved and you leave this world knowing the same, then everything that happens in between can he dealt with.”

 I hope history will be kinder to him in death than it was in life. RIP Michael Jackson. You were a man of honor and sensitivity. You were not only the king of music but a billion hearts, mine included. You were a loving father, a true humanitarian and the greatest entertainer to ever walk the earth. A thousand years from now, all this scandal crap will be forgotten, but your music will resonate forever.

For ages, this has been the constant rant of religion against science. Sample a quote from Dinesh D’souza, a contemporary champion of religion (particularly his own), and author of the bestselling book ‘What’s so great about Christianity’ (really, what exactly? And what’s not so great about other religions?).

In the secular account, “You are the descendant of a tiny cell of primordial protoplasm washed up on an empty beach 3 1/2 billion years ago. You are a mere grab bag of atomic particles, a conglomeration of genetic substance. You exist on a tiny planet in a minute solar system in an empty corner of a meaningless universe. You came from nothing and are going nowhere.”

In the Christian view, by contrast, “You are the special creation of a good and all-powerful God. You are the climax of His creation. Not only is your kind unique, but you are unique among your kind. Your Creator loves you so much and so intensely desires your companionship and affection that He gave the life of His only son that you might spend eternity with him.”

This was published in the San Francisco Chronicle in an article by D’Souza. Here’s one more from his book:

While the atheist arrogantly persists in the delusion that his reason is capable of figuring out all that there is, the religious believer lives in the humble acknowledgement of the limits of human knowledge, knowing that there is a reality greater than and beyond that which our senses can apprehend.

Now I have a real problem with this statement. Firstly a scientist, maybe not an atheist but a practitioner of reason nonetheless, is always forthcoming to acknowledge what and how much he does not know and how much he can know, and the possibility of him being wrong. Religious leaders on the other hand are dictatorial about the minutest details of how god created universe and man, including the exact time and date. So much for humility!

Well, let me confront this matter head on then. I am going to educate the readers about an idea, an offshoot of contemporary cutting edge science, which attempts to explain mind and matter abreast. It’s a profoundly arresting idea that explains not just the material universe but also consciousness, thoughts and free will. A grand new approach with deep spiritual significance. This idea is called the ‘Holographic Principle’. It holds that universe is actually an illusion, a hologram. That despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram. This might seem like fiction or a mystical aphorism but has a very firm mathematical footing.

First let me give you some background. My apologies to the scientifically uninitiated reader in case he/she finds it difficult to assimilate this stuff.

To start with, an elucidation of the birth and existence of universe and of human consciousness, thoughts and emotions has been the holy grail of science since eternity. The latter one has been a much tougher nut to crack. However, pioneering studies have been done in both cosmology and neuroscience and a myriad of thoughts have come out of these studies.

So let me start off with groundnuts first and then move on to the tougher nuts. There are two grand notions in physics. One is Einstein’s general relativity and the other is Quantum mechanics. While general relativity, which is basically a theory of gravity, describes the macro world quantum theory rules in the land of the sub-atomic. These two theories have been tested to boggling accuracies and they have always stood to their guns. Physicist Richard Feynman has described accuracy of quantum theory to measuring North America to the precision of the width of a human hair.

Now the catch! Both theories are worlds apart when it comes to compatibility. They are like Sri Lanka and LTTE, but both equally powerful. They rule different territories but reside and put a claim on the same piece of land, in our case the universe.

General relativity treats the 4-dimensional continuum of space-time ( 3 dimensions of space and one of time) like a rubber sheath which can be curved and warped.  Gravitation arises from the curvature of space-time, which makes objects move as if they were pulled by a force. Conversely, the curvature is caused by the presence of matter and energy. And at the heart of quantum theory is something called the uncertainty principle which says that certain pairs of physical properties cannot both be known to arbitrary precision. Among these pairs is the pair of energy and time.

While a space-time free of matter and energy should, according to general relativity, be flat like taut elastic the uncertainties of quantum world will allow tiny quanta of energy to be borrowed from empty space and manifest itself as a matter-antimatter pair. Before anyone could, even in principle, make an observation of this event by resolving it along a temporal stretch, the matter-antimatter pair will annihilate into pure energy which will be returned back to space. Smart, ha! This uncertainty lends itself to the real emptiness of space, which is where the conflict arises. Seen at a very-very small scale of distance, the empty space rather looks like seething, boiling foam of particles becoming for an ephemeral instant and unbecoming the next. Perhaps like infinite bugs-bunny-ghosts playing hide-and-seek with each other bobbing their heads out of their bunny holes for a teeny-tiny instant and ducking back before anyone notices.

According to Einstein’s equations, a sufficiently dense concentration of matter or energy will curve space-time so extremely that it rends, forming a black hole. The laws of relativity forbid anything that went into a black hole from coming out again. It is at the heart of this black hole where both theories come into direct conflict and all known laws of early twentieth century break down.

Reconciling these two theories has been the biggest ambition of theoretical physics for more than last half a century. And it is this burning ambition that has pushed humans beyond their intellectual boundaries, produced the humongous amount of avant-garde mathematics, and has took us ever closer to, as Stephen Hawking puts it, “the mind of God”. It has turned old notions on their heads and resurrected even older philosophies to new glories.

Now, this quantum mechanics is a big monkey business. Physicist Michio Kaku says “If a thousand philosophers were to think for a thousand years to conjure the strangest thing they could think of, they still won’t be able to come up with something as strange as quantum mechanics“. In the quantum world a particle can be at many places at the same time. A particle, say an electron which is a discrete entity, is a wave as well which is non-discrete and continuous, both at the same time. In ‘Quantasia’, there is nothing like an objective reality. It’s just a world of potentials waiting to be actualized by an observer. Its laws make a clear distinction between experience & information, observer and the observed, though both are part of the same universe and made of same stuff.  But the most bizarre quantum-phenomena award has, for a long time, gone to phenomena called ‘quantum entanglement‘.

Have you ever noticed how, sometimes, you can instantaneously recollect memories of your distant past when something about it is mentioned? How you become instantaneously become aware of your toe thumb the moment I mention toe thumb? That’s the essence of quantum entanglement, the principle of non-locality or instantaneous-action-at-a-distance. It has been observed that particles once together share the brotherhood no matter how much you separate them. If you change one physical property of one partner of the pair the other long lost brother, even if a billion miles away, would experience the same change in the same physical property, instantaneously. This violates the upper limit of speed of any communication which relativity says cannot be greater than the speed of light. Two ghosts talking?

This paradoxical and counterintuitive nature of reality and the unexplainable phenomena had forced the entire science fraternity to question their entire working philosophy. Things they had adapted and those they had rejected. One such philosophical corpse that they had to dig out of its grave was monism, the principle that there is only one basic substance or principle as the ground of reality. And one principle that science has, for centuries, built itself upon but which didn’t seem to be working anymore was reductionism.  The idea is that you could understand the world, all of nature, by examining smaller and smaller pieces of it. When assembled, the small pieces would explain the whole.

So was there a plan B? Did science adapt itself to this torrent of unexpected findings? The answer of course is yes. Unlike the dogmatic dictums of religion which contort the truth to their own convenience, science contorts itself to suit the mood of reality. One of the earliest questions that has kept the physicists beating thin air is what should be considered as the most elementary of all nature, out of which all reality emanates? Is it a particle, superstring, what? Early 80s onwards, the heroes of reason started thinking long and hard but now, not having the solid ground of reductionism under their feet to stand upon, their imaginations started running wild and torrid like steam escaping from a pressure cooker. And an answer they did come up with. The answer was: Information.

This was a brand new paradigm. The most gifted child of monism. It made a lot more sense. Everything emanates out of information. Physicist John Wheeler has called matter and energy as mere incidentals of information. I’d add space and time to them. The robot at the automobile factory is supplied with metal and plastic but can make nothing useful without copious instructions telling it which part to weld to what and so on. A ribosome in a cell in your body is supplied with amino acid building blocks and is powered by energy released by the conversion of ATP to ADP, but it can synthesize no proteins without the information brought to it from the DNA in the cell’s nucleus. Everything in the universe seems to be communicating to everything. The whole universe is alive with consciousness. And what constitutes consciousness? Experience. And what constitutes experience? Its information!

We ourselves have ushered in an age of computers and communication. Memory storage devices are becoming ever smaller and their capacity is ever increasing. In early ’50s a brilliant mathematician Claude Shannon mooted the question: How much information can you stuff into a communication signal? The formula he obtained was similar to Boltzmann’s entropy equation. Entropy is a physical property of matter whose measure can be seen as the amount of randomness in a system. In 1877 Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann characterized entropy more precisely in terms of the number of distinct microscopic states that the particles composing a chunk of matter could be in while still looking like the same macroscopic chunk of matter. Entropy thus became the most widely used measure of information content. For instance, the design of every modern communications device–from cellular phones to modems to compact-disc players–relies on Shannon entropy.

This led a Princeton physicist named Jacob Bekenstein to raise an even more fundamental question. In principle, what is the maximum amount of information that can be stored in a given volume of space? Or in other words, what could be the greatest entropy that a given volume of space could contain. Infinite, one might say. But it’s not that simple. The answer was to be found in revolutionary studies of black holes done by Stephen Hawking and Bekenstein himself.

Now, let us understand this by doing a thought experiment. Imagine you are in a room. What is the maximum information you could pack within this room? Suppose you used every atom within the room to write information upon. That’d be a lot of information! But you can always stuff in more atoms, cant you? So you keep stuffing in more and more information. As each particle gets lesser and lesser space, it keeps getting angrier and angrier; its face turns crimson and it starts behaving like a maniacal freak banging ever more riotously into other atoms. Technically speaking, its entropy keeps increasing. But you go on and on and on and on. To keep those atoms incarcerated within the room you have use more and more energy. Were it not for gravity, you could go on ad infinitum. But law of gravity places an upper limit as to how many atom-inmates you can keep jailed within this cell. As the atoms get closer and closer the gravitational glue between them becomes stronger and stronger which keeps crushing the atoms’ right to freedom & liberty (precisely speaking, the electron degeneracy pressure) with stronger & stronger force until you reach what is called the Chandrasekhar limit. Beyond that, space-time implodes and the whole room gets eaten up by the big-daddy-monster of all existentiality, the black hole. Oouchie!

Does it burp? That’s a very important question. Bekenstein did the same thought experiment and he found classical black holes to be violating a fundamental law of thermodynamics; the total entropy of the universe can only increase. It cannot decrease, let alone disappear completely. But that is what a classical black hole seems to do (classical meaning when quantum nature is not taken into consideration). When matter-energy collapses into a black hole, it in a way, detaches itself from the fabric of universe. Whatever has gone into it cannot be accessed from within the universe. So you work your butt off, stuffing more and more information into your imaginary room and suddenly, oh, it’s all gone! A classical black hole does not have entropy. Not actually. Hawking tells us if quantum effects are taken into picture, black holes aren’t truly black. If more matter, which means more entropy, is thrown into them, there is a corresponding increase in its mass as well as the area of event-horizon, the two dimensional boundary of a black hole from beyond which, nothing can escape its tremendous suction, not even light. In the simplest case, it has a form of a sphere. He also showed the area of an event horizon can never decrease. Getting any ideas? This was a monumental discovery. Results from string theory, about which we’ll talk later, show all the information that went inside the black hole stays around as ripples on the event horizon. Black hole has entropy and it resides on its boundary. When more matter is thrown into it, the entropy of the black hole increases as an increase in the area of its event horizon. So does it burp after eating up your room? You bet it does! And in this burp, you can find all the information that the big-daddy-monster ate up.

So all the information inside a black hole is written on its 2-D boundary. This is the manifestation of holographic principle. Could our universe, which we perceive to have three spatial dimensions, might instead be “written” on a two-dimensional surface, like a hologram? Our everyday perceptions of the world as three-dimensional would then be either a profound illusion or merely one of many alternative ways of viewing reality.

To understand better, we have to first understand what a hologram is. Holography is a technique that allows the light scattered from an object to be recorded and later reconstructed so that it appears as if the object is in the same position relative to the recording medium as it was when recorded. The image changes as the position and orientation of the viewing system changes in exactly the same way as if the object were still present, thus making the recorded image (hologram) appear three dimensional. A holographic image is stored on a photographic film as an interference pattern of a light beam scattered from the object and another, reference light beam from the same source of light. The resulting light field is an apparently random pattern of varying intensity which is the hologram. If the process is reversed, i.e. if the hologram is illuminated by the original reference beam, a light field is diffracted by the reference beam which is identical to the light field which was scattered by the object or objects. Thus, someone looking into the hologram ‘sees’ the objects even though it may no longer be present.

A Laser created hologram

The logos on mobile phone batteries, the back of your credit cards etc. are all low quality holograms. Holograms can be reconstructed in thin air with the use of lasers. Holographic principle is used in various other imaging techniques like MRI scans where images are mathematically reconstructed inside as a digital image inside a computer from the interference pattern.

What followed from the above discoveries was a generalization that the information that can be stored inside a volume of space is proportional to the surface area of its boundary. What does that imply? Is objective reality merely a phantasm? Some kind of a hologram? Is the real reality outside the universe? The major of world’s religions, the major of world mystics would be smelling the sweet air of vindication at this moment. Eternal vindication! Let’s explore further.

The idea of a holographic cosmos was first mooted by Gerard ‘t Hooft. It was a follow up of a visionary physicist, David Bohm’s groundbreaking work. Bohm, as a graduate student of John Wheeler, the man who coined the term “black-hole”, was mighty dissatisfied with the ways of contemporary physics of his time. He made the startling assertion that the universe has a deeper, “implicate” order which manifests itself as the “explicate” order of the everyday world. What we understand as objective reality. The real reality is that there’s no reality. Not in the way we see it. The quantum dualities, the paradoxes, the entanglement all point to the fact that universe is actually just an illusion. In one of his books ‘Wholeness and the implicate order‘ Bohm writes:

“In the enfolded [or implicate] order, space and time are no longer the dominant factors determining the relationships of dependence or independence of different elements. Rather, an entirely different sort of basic connection of elements is possible, from which our ordinary notions of space and time, along with those of separately existent material particles, are abstracted as forms derived from the deeper order. These ordinary notions in fact appear in what is called the “explicate” or “unfolded” order, which is a special and distinguished form contained within the general totality of all the implicate orders”

Through his idea of an implicate order he contends that all paradoxes disappear as reality is but one. He gives an analogy to explain the phenomenon of entanglement.

 Imagine an aquarium containing a fish. Imagine also that you are unable to see the aquarium directly and your knowledge about it and what it contains comes from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium’s front and the other directed at its side. As you stare at the two television monitors, you might assume that the fish on each of the screens are separate entities. After all, because the cameras are set at different angles, each of the images will be slightly different. But as you continue to watch the two fishes, you will eventually become aware that there is a certain relationship between them. When one turns, the other also makes a slightly different but corresponding turn; when one faces the front, the other always faces toward the side. If you remain unaware of the full scope of the situation, you might even conclude that the fish must be instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is clearly not the case.

Another analogy that he gave to propose that all plurality of the manifest world is but revelation of an underlying singularity is to consider a pattern produced by making small cuts in a folded piece of paper and then, literally, unfolding it. Widely separated elements of the pattern are, in actuality, produced by the same original cut in the folded piece of paper. Here the cuts in the folded paper represent the implicate order and the unfolded pattern represents the explicate order.

The holographic cosmos idea was brought to its Technicolor reality by string theorist Leonard Susskind. String theory is the fruition of the ambitious reconciliation efforts mentioned earlier. It’s an idea that says that all the potpourri of elementary particles, the quanta of matter, energy and the four fundamental forces of nature are different vibrations of a single, 1-dimensional mathematical entity called the superstring. Like strings of a violin, they vibrate at different harmonics. These multitudes of harmonics produce the manifold notes that form the entire symphony of universe, life and everything that exists including space and time. These strings vibrate not just in our familiar 4 dimensions of space and time but an abstract 10-dimensional space-time with six dimensions that curl up on themselves extremely tightly such that they cannot be seen or felt. To give an analogy of tightly curled dimensions, imagine looking at a high-tension power cable from a distance. It looks like a true 1-dimensional line. But on closer inspection you notice it has a girth, a closed circular dimension. The infinite shapes in which these dimensions can curl dictates the degrees of freedom for vibrations of strings. There can be 10⁵⁰⁰ such shapes all corresponding to different possible universes one of which is ours!

Till 1995, there were five different string theories. It was an embarrassment for most string theorists, people working on the most ambitious project in the history of mankind. An embarrassment of riches! In ’95 a man named Edward Witten changed the whole landscape of physics. In a revolutionary move of sheer intellect, he united all string theories in an 11-dimensional theory he named as M-theory, ‘M’ standing for “Magic, Mystery or Matrix according to taste” in Witten’s own words. Witten conjectured that under higher states of excitation, strings can expand into higher dimensional entities called ‘branes‘. These branes can grow to a size of a whole universe and in fact our universe is speculated to be one such brane. M theory has also been dubbed as Membrane theory. Like a blind man that feels the legs and trunks of an elephant and mistakes them for different animals, Witten proved that the five string theories were actually trunk and tail of one large beast, the M-theory. Witten was proclaimed as the “Most intelligent man on Earth” by the millennium edition of TIME magazine.

It is these branes of M theory which lend themselves as the most promising candidates for being god’s photographic film for playing his mischievous tricks on us. The ‘ripples‘ on these branes can contain all the information of a whole universe in all it’s quantum majesty. In the same year, Susskind presented a formulation of then new M-theory using a holographic description in terms of charged point black holes, the so called ‘D0 branes’ of type IIA string theory, one of the five string theories. In 1997, Juan Maldacena, a colleague of Witten, gave a much more concrete picture of holographic principle. Using M theory, or specifically “3+1 dimensional type IIB membrane”, he showed that two universes of different dimension and obeying disparate physical laws are rendered completely equivalent by the holographic principle. He demonstrated this principle mathematically for a specific type of five-dimensional spacetime (“anti ­de Sitter”) and its four-dimensional boundary. In effect, the 5-D universe is recorded like a hologram on the 4-D surface at its periphery. Superstring theory rules in the 5-D spacetime, but a so-called conformal field theory of point particles operates on the 4-D hologram. A black hole in the 5-D spacetime is equivalent to hot radiation on the hologram–for example, the hole and the radiation have the same entropy even though the physical origin of the entropy is completely different for each case. Although these two descriptions of the universe seem utterly unalike, no experiment could distinguish between them, even in principle. This was later confirmed by Witten for space-times other than anti-de-Sitter.

Is this all true or just fancy mathematics? Are these theories open to experimental scrutiny? Partly, yes. Though we can’t directly observe the reality of these grandiose claims we can still predict the effects they have in the observable world and measure them. So has there been any experimental evidence? Quantum theory says space cannot be divided into infinitely smaller chunks. You can, at best, use one indivisible chunk of space to write one bit of information. This chunk of space is of the area of 10^-66 cm², the area of the smallest possible brane. It’s called Planck area, after the founding father of quantum theory, Max Planck. It’s such preposterously small magnitudes which makes direct observation by any conceivable experiment unfeasible. If the hologram theory of universe is correct then this chunk of area would reside not within our universe, but on its holographic boundary. Since volume is always numerically greater than area, in order to have the same number of bits inside the universe as on the boundary, the corresponding chunks within our space would be much bigger than a plank area, of 10^-36 cm². At this scale our instruments can claim, with inflated chests, that they are up to the job. Certain kind of gravitational disturbances, or disturbances in the space-time fabric which, if holographic principle is correct, would occur on this magnified scale of distance rather than at planck-scale, can be good vindicators of the holographic universe idea. Exactly such disturbances have been detected in 2008 by GEO600, a gravitational wave detector located near Germany.

Holography may be a guide to a better theory. What is the fundamental theory like? The chain of reasoning involving holography suggests to some, notably Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, that such a final theory must be concerned not with fields, not even with spacetime, but rather with information exchange among physical processes. If so, the vision of information as the stuff the world is made of will have found a worthy embodiment.

For the likes of D’Souza, who would raise his palms heavenwards to the sounds of gothic music reverberating in the background, and rush to proclaim that this is a grand illusion designed by the great almighty god, that’s its god’s hand painting those branes with information, I’d hate to be a killjoy. The holographic principle is profoundly rooted in arduous mathematics. A loving god wouldn’t be bound by mathematical laws I guess! The real repartee comes in the next part. Stay tuned.

For those of you who have not an inkling of it, I am proud to present the Holonomic Theory of Brain.

Before waving the green flag to this exuberant journey, let me help you fasten your seat belts and make sure you are fully ready for this.

In a series of landmark experiments in the 1920s, brain scientist Karl Lashley found that no matter what portion of a rat’s brain he removed he was unable to eradicate its memory of how to perform complex tasks it had learned prior to surgery. Somehow, the parts were as good as the whole as far as memory retention was concerned.

Holograms have a curiously remarkable property. If a hologram of a rose is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the rose. Indeed, even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film will always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the original image. Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole.

During the middle of the twentieth century, the discipline of psychology was at its enterprising best. It was bravely foraying into new territories and gathering perplexing and inexplicable results. It was expanding its roots and out of these roots were germinating newer sub-disciplines like Parapsychology. One of the most eccentric findings of parapsychology was a class of phenomena termed as Extra Sensory Perception or ESP. The consensus of the Parapsychological Association is that certain types of psychic phenomena such as psychokinesis, telepathy, and precognition are well established. While a lot of findings remain shrouded in skepticism, all of these findings just cannot be brushed away or considered as pure debauchery of its claimants.

The phenomenon of precognition, or foreseeing events before they happen, has been pretty well established. Not just in psychics but normal people like you and me, albeit with different ability. It has been found that every person has a small measure of precognition ability. Studies have been done in which volunteers were asked to watch a series of randomly sorted pictures on a computer and their brain activity was measured. All these studies have had consensual results. A fraction of a second before a frightening image was displayed, a sudden surge in brainwaves was observed with an accompanying rise in fear hormones like adrenalin. We get a premonition of terror before it actually strikes us. Same has been confirmed for a lot of other emotions and mental states.

Similarly, telepathy has been a well known acquaintance to science as well as fiction. Telepathy has been one of the most established of all paranormal phenomena, no doubt accompanied by a healthy dose of skepticism, controversy and fraud. Several different kinds of tests have been developed to investigate telepathy and to make sure it was not in any way a work of chance. Volunteers who claim to have telepathic powers have been put to rigorous tests under controlled laboratory conditions like sitting down one volunteer to look at random computer generated pictures and transmit them to another volunteer sitting across the wall in another room who has to guess what the first person is looking at. Results declare that a lot of such volunteer pairs have been able to portray what the other person was looking at with a fair amount of accuracy that cannot be statistically dismissed as mere chance. Perhaps the weirdest kind of telepathy, called ‘Extended mind‘, has been used by both CIA and KGB during the Cold War era. Extended mind is a concept in which mind becomes one with matter and boundaries between mind and the external world disappear. During the height of cold war, people professing Extended Mind powers were used by both the secret agencies on opposite sides of the Pacific to guess out details of the respective rival country’s nuclear installations. Descriptions and the make of nuclear facilities were orated by psychics employed by CIA to artists who used to sketch them down to the finest details. These pictures were confirmed much later by satellite images and high-altitude reconnaissance data and were found to be in surprising agreement with descriptions of psychics!

The opera of fields, the tango of entanglement!

Plausibly the most glaringly perceptible harnessing of super-human powers is demonstrated by the monks of the ancient Shaolin temple in China. These practitioners of martial arts, over a period of over thousand years, have learnt to mobilize an essential life force which the Chinese call ch’i. They use it in Martial arts as well as medical healing. They claim that everybody carries ch’i but they can concentrate ch’i into one part of their body on will. I remember watching a documentary on Shaolin temple in which the kung-fu master was able to twist a metal spear with its blunt end on a rock and the sharpened head poking into his throat! Ch’i has been proven to be a real energy form than just a deception. I also remember watching a medical practitioner of Ch’i mobilizing the energy into his hands and transferring it from there into a sick person. When a drenched towel was placed on the sick person’s stomach, steam started rising from it. Infra-red cameras detected a real, thermal radiation emanating out of the practitioner’s hands.

So how does science takes these punches in the face? Quite seriously. From all the scientific studies one thing is crystal clear. There is nothing mystical about the form of these energies. They are complex electromagnetic fields interpenetrating into each other. What remains mystical is the source of their origin within the body and the way some people are able to mobilize them. Until now!

Brain, no dubt, is the most miraculous contraption of nature. Deep insights into the nature of consciousness by some of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century has revealed an inextricable connection with the weirdo of physics; the quantum theory. That’s understandable. Uncanny questions merit uncanny answers. The connection was first argued for in 1989 by the Oxford mathematical physicist, Sir Roger Penrose.

In The Emperor’s New Mind, he argued that known laws of physics are inadequate to explain the phenomenon of human consciousness. Penrose hinted at the characteristics this new physics may have and specified the requirements for a bridge between classical and quantum mechanics. He claimed that the present computer is unable to have intelligence because it is a deterministic system that for the most part simply executes algorithms, as a billiard table where billiard balls act as message carriers and their interactions act as logical decisions. He argued against the viewpoint that the rational processes of the human mind are completely algorithmic and can thus be duplicated by a sufficiently complex computer.

We can all empathize with Penrose’s view. Human thought is after all non-deterministic, non-causal and non-algorithmic. And human memory is non-local. Free-will rips into the future with a zeal that has a character of bemused disorientation. Could a robot be created that would possess free-will, think, build philosophy, build its own moral precepts, cry tears of joy, have the ability to get angry, but not get angry when a dear friend, in a fit of rage, says something hurtful? Nah! It’d involve so many calculations that it’ll probably blow its head off. My semi-qualified judgment but still, I think if such intelligence could be a product of artificial synthesis, it’d be an impossible feat to achieve without taking the quantum route. In the world of computation, the age old brain is the undisputed king!

Apart from Penrose, there were other people at that time pondering hard over consciousness. Among them was Stuart Hameroff. Hameroff was pretty excited by microtubules, components of the cell cytoskeleton. He was pretty amazed by their role in cellular navigation. Microtubules are dynamically unstable and are found in almost all cells. They lend major structural support to the cell by acting as scaffold for the cell, and assist in major cell functions like cellular division. Their dynamic instability lends them a capability to expand, contract and function as a cellular motor. It was this last function that gripped Hameroff’s interest. In a bacteria, microtubules forms the motor that rotates its flagellum, which can be compared to a ship’s propeller, that help’s it navigate its way to its home or its food, or its mate! Microtubules make a bacteria look as much designed and conscious as man in that they are complex, have a sense of purpose and they know what they are doing. It led Hameroff to speculate that they were controlled by some form of computing. It also suggested to him that part of the solution of the problem of consciousness might lie in understanding the operations of microtubules in brain cells, operations at the molecular and supramolecular level. Penrose and Hameroff proposed the Orch-OR theory of consciousness but we’ll talk about that later. First things first.

The man who finally nailed the quantum theory of mind was a Stanford neurosurgeon and psychologist, named Karl Pribram. Inspired and excited by David Bohm’s idea of implicate order, baffled by the whole-in-every-part maxim of memory, and the similarity of ideas budding inside his head with the holographic principle led him to call up Bohm and propose a collaboration. The fecund duos groundbreaking work produced what is called the Holonomic Brain Theory, which provided not only a consistent mathematical explanation for consciousness but also free-will and emotions. This theory is the real confluence of mind and matter, of body and spirit, of man and the higher power.

Hameroff had argued that the microtubulin fiber inside neurons function as sites for quantum activity. The question of why would incite a much detailed technical discussion which I shall avoid. Pribram had a similar idea but his interpretation was radically different.

Karl Pribram has demonstrated with his holonomic theory of brain dynamics that the cerebral cortex is the site of a holographic information process he calls a multiplex neural hologram that is dependent on local circuits of neurons without long fibers that do not transmit ordinary nervous impulses. Pribram says “These neurons function in the undulatory mode and are above all responsible by the horizontal layer connections of the neural tissue where holographic interference patterns can be built” .The neural hologram is build by the interaction of the electromagnetic fields of the neurons similarly to the interaction of sound waves in a piano. When a piano is played the keys strike the strings generating a vibrational standing wave between the two ends of the string, creating an interference pattern (This interference can be destructive or constructive).Nodes of constructive interference, of these sound frequencies, create the harmony or harmonics that are the notes making up the music we listen to. Pribram has demonstrated that a similar process is continuously occurring in the cerebral cortex by means of the interpenetration of the electromagnetic fields of the adjacent cortical neurons, generating a harmonic field. According to Pribram’s model his harmonic electromagnetic field distributed in the cerebral cortex, holographically stores and encodes a huge information field responsible for the emergence of memory and consciousness. As the music is not in the piano but in the resonating field that surrounds it, so our memories and consciousness are not in the brain, but in the holographic information field that surrounds it. So the notion, that mind creates consciousness gets turned over its heels. Consciousness is Universal. It is consciousness that creates the appearance of the brain as well as the body and everything else around us we interpret as physical.

 

Pribram’s neural wave equation, describing holographic neural network processing is similar to the Schrödinger wave equation, a central equation of quantum theory which describes the wave nature of every particle of matter and energy, with the addition of the de Broglie-Bohm Quantum Potential. This is not coincidental and opens the possibility of holographic interaction between receptive fields in the cortex with the holographic quantum universe described by David Bohm. Thus the Holographic quantum field around our brain resonates with the universal consciousness, the Schrödinger wave function of the entire universe, allowing all perception to arise! [1]

 

This new holographic paradigm allows us to rethink the manner in which information processing occurs in the nervous system. In this context, Pribram’s quantum holonomic theory of brain function is one of the most brilliant and revolutionary contribution to neuroscience in the 100 years since the initial studies of Sherington!

The brain uses the same mathematical image reconstruction techniques as are used in the imaging techniques, namely Inverse Fourier-transformations, formulation of which earned Dennis Gabor, the inventor of Hologram, a Nobel Prize.

According to Bohm, this implicit wholeness, of which our universe is an explicit, holographic, manifestation, is not a static oneness, but a dynamic wholeness-in-motion in which everything moves together in an interconnected process. It brings together the holistic principle of “undivided wholeness” with the idea that everything is in a state of process or becoming. This universal flux he christens as Holomovement. The world is awash in this flux and our mind, whether awake or asleep, is in constant connection with this flux which gives dynamicity to our thinking and feelings. The new form of insight can perhaps best be called Undivided Wholeness in Flowing Movement. This view implies that flow is, in some sense, prior to that of the ‘things’ that can be seen to form and dissolve in this flow. Rather than starting with the parts and explaining the whole in terms of the parts, Bohm’s point of view is just the opposite: he starts with a notion of undivided wholeness and derives the parts as abstractions from the whole. The essential point is that the implicate order and the holomovement imply a way of looking at reality not merely in terms of external interactions between things, but in terms of the internal (enfolded) relationships among things. He notes how “each relatively autonomous and stable structure is understood not as something independently and permanently existent but rather as a product that has been formed in the whole flowing movement and what will ultimately dissolve back into this movement. How it forms and maintains itself, then, depends on its place function within the whole”. For Bohm, movement is what is primary; and what seem like permanent structures are only relatively autonomous sub-entities which emerge out of the whole of flowing movement and then dissolve back into it an unceasing process of becoming. The universal truth of creation and death!

Our ego-consciousness seems to mask the universal relatedness implied by the Holographic Principle, and it is perhaps only through transcendence of the ego-consciousness that the higher orders of experience can become conscious.  In the phenomenon of synchronicity, there seems to be a meaningful connection between individuals that breaks through the barrier of ego-consciousness. Such a connection is reported by many individuals in the so called higher states of consciousness like dreams, deep meditation, or near-death-experiences. Brain mapping studies performed during the occurrence of these harmonic states have shown a highly synchronized and perfectly ordered spectral array of brain waves that form unique harmonic waves, as if all frequencies of all neurons from all cerebral centers played the same symphony. This highly coherent brain state generates the non-local holographic informational cortical field of consciousness interconnecting the human brain and the holographic cosmos.

The waveforms, within the matrix of a distributed system, allow fluctuations taking place to create new patterns, according to Pribram, and the resulting dynamic potential can then organize new foci of activity oriented to the precipitation of strategic planning and exercise of free will.

A question of profound import that arises here is why, if the world is in some sense a hologram and all objective reality an illusion, do we observe the immense vastness as a hard reality. The Orch-OR or Orchestrated Objective Reduction theory of Hameroff and Penrose explain this in terms of wave-function collapse by the act of observation, or decay of the wave nature into one hard reality and the discreteness of everyday life. This comes in conjunction with the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum physics that at every wavefunction collapse the world gets split into infinitely many universes each with one version of reality in contrast with a single superposition of all realities that was existing before the wave-function collapse. This is quite counterintuitive and Pribram & Bohm’s model deny a wavefunction collapse. Bohm being John Wheeler’s doctoral student shares his view that ideally, there should be no distinction between the observer and the observed as both of them are part of the same universe. The principle of universal consciousness wouldn’t really wish a tussle between subjectivity and objectivity. Both observe each other and both are the observed.

Pribram-Bohm model takes a different road to the hardness of conscious experience. They propose a lens-defined model of the brain in which our senses act as lenses. The wavefunction does not collapse (Bohm uses the concept of a pilot-wave to ‘steer’ the evolution of the wave-function deterministically). Rather our senses pick out particular frequencies from the noise of the whizzing fields and focus on the selected frequencies for perception. Bohm has said that if you take the lenses away, what you are left with is a hologram.

A hologram! Yes!

From a personal perspective the world makes a lot more sense now than it ever did before. Like an earth diminished to shelled debris by an Armageddon and then everything running back in time and settling back into pristine order, whole before part, the undivided wholeness and the ‘whole’ in its every part. Everything instantaneously connected to everything as manifestations of a monistic reality. Every particle alive with experience. Every particle ‘talks‘ to every other particle in universe.

Telepathy?

Non-local quantum entanglement.

Ch’i? Para kinesis?

Greater synchrony of brainwaves with the holoinformational flux.

Precognition?

That’s a toughie! In a quantum-relativistic universe there’s nothing like a gone past or an imminent future. It’s all ‘nows’. Now-past, now-present, now-future, all existing in a holy communion on that eternal boundary, chatting with each other, recreating themselves as their own definitions. There are no known laws of physics that forbid you to talk to your past or your future to talk to you!

My college years, I spent wondering. How does an enzyme fit right into its target molecule with such an impressive efficiency? It’d be like a lock and key floating in a tank of water and miraculously coming and fitting together. How does a 1 dimensional strand of DNA know how its corresponding 3 dimensional protein will fold in 3 dimensions? They talk! Yeah. Literally. People are actually studying these communication patterns.

The manifest universe enfolds itself like layers upon layers onto the holographic boundary. Each layer being a different world with its own laws, own level of consciousness. More complex it gets, more conscious it gets. From quantum world to the macro world to life.

I surmise it’s a dawn of a brand new era. The holographic principle has not been rigorously proven by experimentation but there has seldom been an idea which is so mathematically elegant but has proven to be false. There are a lot of things which cannot be explained consistently, in both mind and cosmos, without invoking the holographic principle. The complex mathematical analyses of brainwaves, the evolutionary patterns of brain structure with a grossly disproportionate increase in the area of brain surfaces as compared to volumes all point of the holographic principle. Nevertheless, science works on the spirit of questioning and there is no reason why any theory should be exempted from standing to the test of critical scrutiny.

Without question, the holographic principle vindicates the ancient philosophies long upheld by religion and currently disparaged by most objectivists. The ancient wisdom has found resurrection like phoenix from its ashes. The eastern mystics would be dancing in their graves. So if our ancient philosophers and sages could know these higher truths simply through the means of introspection and meditation isn’t science, with its precepts of empirical evidence for validation of any of its claims, too far behind religion which transcends these humanistic precepts and leaps straight to the higher truth?

Well, before answering that let me point out that ‘ancient wisdom’ does not translate to religious axioms. Every age has its own means to achieve its ends, including the quest to unravel the higher truths, to unravel the deeper subtext underlying objective reality. As the ages come and go so does the means and their accompanying merits and limitations. Our ancient sages knew the power of meditation because that was the only means available at their disposal. The new age savants have sophisticated mathematics and swanky gadgets which can unravel much deeper structure of reality, but as an amusing limitation leaves out the holistic picture to be deduced rather than being directly sensed.

There is no reason why ancient wisdom should be disparaged or neglected. That is against the spirit of science. But even more menacing is the diminishing of modern man on the altars of ancient glories. But, sadly, such is the practice of religion. The practice of self decrepitation! Nevertheless, philosophies evolve and sometimes revisit their histories, but religion does not. Religious dogmas have remained immutable.

Coming back to the holographic principle, most of the implications drawn by theologians stem from ignorance of it. Physicists make it clear that the holographic principle is an analogy and warns us against taking it too literally. It is our guide to the deeper and bigger reality. Religious arguments claim that if all of the information required to actualize a universe comes from its boundary and this boundary is unapproachable to our experiments and instruments, then there has to be a god monkeying with this boundary, the one who writes all the information on this boundary. The consciousness permeating the whole universe and connection with it lets us communicate with god without god having to be within the universe. Raphael Bousso, one of the key developers of the holographic idea helps us in being clear minded; he states “The world doesn’t appear to us like a hologram, but in terms of the information needed to describe it, it is one”. The second thing is that religion employs neither unprejudiced introspection nor empirical evidence to achieve its ends. It, rather, uses the fantastic metaphors of religious books as a literal means to get to the higher truths. And it jumps and grabs, whenever it finds similar metaphors of science which are simply out of scope of articulation within everyday language.

Sure, it is an enticing prospect to further the concept of a higher power. But this higher power, I am sorry to say, is not the God of religion. It’s not a personal God. It’s not the god that who suspends the laws of nature on behalf of, and for, a single petitioner as an answer to an individual’s prayer. It’s not sentient, loving god. In fact many modern theologians cringe at the idea of a sentient god. 

Popular physicist and author Paul Davies in one of his public lectures said:

“So strongly did some theologians object to the idea of God as part-time tinkerer that they invented the derisory term ‘God-of-the-gaps’ to describe it. The main objection to a God-of-the-gaps is not so much the happy-go-lucky – indeed, less than competent – nature of this style of designer, it was the ever-present risk that scientific advances would systematically close the gaps, squeezing God into smaller and smaller interstices, perhaps to be displaced altogether in due course. A God who lurks in the dark corners of human ignorance is a God who must make a slow and inexorable retreat as science progresses.”

By ‘god of the gaps’, he means god as an answer to every gap in human understanding of reality. In fact, questions about these gaps were not raised by religion in the first place, they were raised by science. Where do the laws of physics come from? Why do they have the form that they do? Why are they bio-friendly? Because these weren’t really questions to religion as all of them had an innate, implicit answer: GOD.

Science has mooted these questions, tried to transcend the human senses and make sense of their ineffable answers in mundane terms. One of these is the Holographic Principle. And it has shaken many of the underlying foundations of science. It has shown a new fundamental way to look at things. Progression means the best use of available tools. So science can acquire new means to discover reality, shun some and reacquire some others every now and then. If science has found the gaps, only it can fill it. For example, string theories say it is possible that the universe and its laws co-emerged, with the laws sharpening over time to converge on what we observe today. If this gets proven, one gap closed!

The holographic principle sends the ultimate message of the cosmic communion. So Mr. D’Souza, I might be a mere grab bag of atomic particles, every one of it is alive with consciousness. You might be one special creation of a loving god but I am a creation of a hundred trillion little gods each one of whom I love immensely. How can a universe be meaningless where every atom is alive with experience? If god gives our life a purpose, why do a majority of people kill and die in sheer vain? In a universe which gives me the freedom to create my own reality, how can my life possibly be purposeless? I could make it so much better than what someone else could bestow on me because I can change it if I don’t like it. I choose my own reality, my own purpose in life. My consciousness is my supreme God, though technically I should refrain from using the word ‘my‘.

Here is a message of universal oneness. The all permeating universal consciousness. The real purpose is to become one with it. The purpose for being good, being moral.  Goodness for goodness’ sake, duty for duty’s sake. Not for god’s sake. Why do I take so much botheration to write so much? To give information. Information builds the world. Let us have the right bits to build the right world.

 If the intended reader happens to be a devout ‘believer’, let not thou temper be raised my friend as to you I offer the revelry of watching me burn in hell till the far end of eternity for the above blasphemy. So dear reader, just chill and read on. I know this is a sensitive subject of debate for many people. It certainly is to me although I guess there would be a cosmic scale of difference between the sides of the debate that me and most readers would be emotional for. I am sorry to say that I’d be hurting some reader’s sentiments as there is simply no polite way to argue on this. But I would like to extend this argument further to tell people why they are wrong in being hurt.

Here is a little background to the construction of the edifice of my present beliefs. I was born in a Hindu family, and started out just as any other kid. Till the development of any conscious faculty of reasoning, I grew up to the weekly dose of mythological serials on television, recitation of fables and folklore about god before being put to sleep, and to the tales of how infinitely advanced our ancient ancestors were. I would admit I was quite fascinated with god. Beyond kings & dictators and the largest of magnitudes, there was the invincible god.

And people, as described in our epics, were either in direct contact with god or living in the dominion of one of his incarnations. But to my utter distress and beyond any faculty of reasoning was the fact that this was all way back in the past. And this bugged me no end. Why was it so? Why did only this period of our ‘glorious past’ not follow the natural order of progression while every other period did? Why did it sink without a trace, without leaving the slightest of evidence behind? How could such an advanced civilization with all of its wondrous accomplishments leave behind nothing more than some trivial accounts as epics? 

Did we at some point of time, and then onwards, turn into such awful sinners that god decided against letting any of those marvelous – and I couldn’t find a word more apt than this — technological achievements trickle down the cascade of future generations? As I grew up further and acquired knowledge of history, this line of reasoning kept appearing increasingly absurd. Good and bad had always coexisted and so had the battles between them. We, in our present age, are no special kind of sinners.

The concept of god, and especially religion, kept making lesser and lesser sense to me and this process got expedited to its conclusion by the utterly ridiculous content of religious discourses I got to hear early in my life as well as  miserable failure of the ‘god’ concept to stand up to any reasoning, even as little as that of my teenage brain. By the age of fifteen I was an apostate and not much later, an atheist.

A rather lengthy buildup for the actual debate on the topic but I feel it is important. The point I want to make here is that I am neither indifferent nor personally unexposed to the theistic view. But my metamorphosis was a silently churning and elaborately drawn out process. It was not a moment of epiphany. And a decade later I can still feel the freshness of having woken up from the trance. With this piece of writing I want to shake some things up in your mind, want to get you introduced to a new dimension, a new degree of freedom, and that heady feeling of weightlessness which is the quintessence of freedom, that you are sure to experience should you decide to shed the weight of religion and rise above the familiar old dimensions of life.

Let me start with the assumption that there is one god, or one set of gods, for all humanity. Now the question arises, whose version of god is true? We assume one is true and the rest are false. If there is one god for the whole world, and if what religions say is indeed true, then why every religion has its own localized version of it? Why was lord Ram’s presence not felt in America or Jesus’ in India? Sounds absurd? Yes. It doesn’t make sense that a single god of all humanity had a marginal, much localized presence. What was the rest of the world doing while the god incarnate lord Rama was fighting the battles of good and evil in Indian subcontinent? No religion has the mention of any other part of the world whatsoever, else than where that religion originated. And I find it utterly foolish to think Rama, supposedly the incarnation of the same god of all humanity, didn’t know the world outside of India and Sri Lanka. The only conclusion that can be drawn here is that all religions have been carpentered by man.

Many religious apologists say that Rama, Jesus, Mohammed etc. are all multiple incarnations or messiahs of the same god. Here there is a conflict of intent. Why did all these different incarnations preach us antagonistic things and left us to quarrel in perpetuity? And it is not untrue that all religions have conflicting self-interests inherent in them. The same apologists would say that all religions send across the same message of love, peace and loving ‘thy neighbor’. Well this is just loose talk. ‘Thy neighbor’, during biblical times, wasn’t a man of different faith. Getting my point?

Islam is notorious for its concept of Jihad. I don’t think I need to elaborate on that. Take a look at this comment made by one guy on a religious website:

“One thing you said that I don’t agree with is the idea that people should not try to convert other people to their beliefs/religion. As far as Christians go the Bible specifically states that we are commissioned by Jesus/God to do this. (reference: Matthew 28:18-20, “Then Jesus came to them and said, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.’)“

If we are all creations of the same god then why would he create something so self destructive? Humanity has, in perpetuity, been on war on basis of religious differences. There cannot be such a god that destines its own, perhaps the most marvelous, creation for homicide.

Now, for argument’s sake, let us also consider the idea of different gods for different religions. This idea is preposterous right in its premise. In the whole darn universe, supposedly itself a creation of god, all the gods found only one teeny-weeny planet to locate all their creations? Each god could have created a planet, or for that matter a whole universe, of its own. So much for omnipotence! There cannot be such a god.

Also, according to theological description of a personal god, the god hypothesis fails on grounds of ethics. God, according to our pious elders and our religious gurus, demands from us unquestioned faith and obsequious servility. It despises the notion of a free mind and liberty of the spirit and preaches total submission. It demands disempowerment and surrender to the ‘larger force’. It gorges on masochistic sacrifices. It demands that we pity our material existence, live in eternal fear of him and sing hymns to him. Why does got need such condescending vainglory! These are not the characteristics of ‘god’. These are the characteristics of a dictator. If such is god, then he is no different from a despicable human being. Then he is no different from my previous boss whom I completely hate.

Why would a god that is omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent by definition, who is the supreme power, who is the creator of  heaven and earth and this whole boundless universe care for something as trivial as who is praising him and who is not? Or even who believes in him or not. God, in my opinion, should not even mind someone who hates him. That a mere human does. God to me is the supreme judge and the first principle of law is that it’s blind. God has to be someone with a ruthless sense of justice. A judge doesn’t care for whether you like him or despise him. He delivers justice with a heedless nonchalance.

But our god answers prayers and forgives sins if you ask for forgiveness earnestly enough. What about the one who holds his head high, earns his living with utmost honesty, pays his dues & taxes with utmost sincerity, does not care much for the poor but is generally benevolent, loves his life and enjoy it materialistically, is a raging lover in bed (maybe to a person of his own sex!  Or some other kind of sexual sinner!), and at the same time is someone who never prays, doesn’t even believe in god, or maybe is even anti-god and despises religion? What do you say, dear reader? Whom would you prefer? A corrupt person who goes to the temple, prostrates himself in front of god, begs for forgiveness for sins he consciously or unconsciously has committed and donates a large sum of money to the temple or a charity, or a perfectly honest person who follows a rational code of morality, does not care to ask for forgiveness and welcomes punishment for his wrongs, does not believe in charity but is generous to a person he feels is deserving enough of his generosity and denies, in the strongest of terms, the existence or even the need of god?  I surmise you will pick the second one. I certainly will.

And on this premise, prayers or confessions become meaningless. Or even the belief in god. You get for your rights and you pay for your wrongs. That’s the rule of justice. The rule of ‘karma’. It’s deplorable that most people harmonize with this model of god. We are often told things like ‘if you take xyz god’s name hundred and seventy times a day and offer prasad to it every Thursday all your problems will be solved’, and a lot of us take it on ‘faith’. Else than being a plain superstition it is an utter disrespect of one’s self. It’s nothing more dignified than bribing somebody. And I am sure, if there’s a god, it won’t be such a dishonorable entity.

So we see that every conventional model of god is completely incoherent and thus fails. Now some people say their model of god is totally different from what institutionalized forms of religion preach. They make an abstract claim that their god is some ‘higher power’ which is ‘just’ and falls out of the domain of religion. If their definition of god is ‘laws of nature’ is or any such abstruse idea then they can hold on to it. But I wouldn’t prefer to call it ‘god’. To me laws of nature are laws of nature and the word ‘god’ conveys the idea of a personal god. If your god is a personal god then I have a lot more to say. You are my target audience. Read on. Till now this journey may appear to be treading its path on the road of utter cynicism but I promise as you go further you’ll feel a lot more sorted out about your opinions, whichever side they might be on.

According to Peter Schwartz, a writer and collaborator of Ayn Rand, faith and reason represent antithetical philosophies. The advocates of faith declare that we must accept as true that which is unknowable to the rational mind–that we must believe the pronouncements of some “higher” authority in the absence of any objective evidence or in outright contradiction to the evidence. The advocates of reason, on the other hand, maintain that man grasps the truth solely by a process of reason, which is based on the data provided by the senses.

Leading the charge of atheists are the four horsemen: Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and author of the international bestseller ‘The God Delusion’, philosopher Daniel Dennett, bestselling author of  ‘god is not great: How Religion Poisons Everything’ and literary critic Christopher Hitchens, and philosopher & neuroscientist Sam Harris. I would be borrowing a few arguments and quotable quotes from their books. I also would recommend ‘The God Delusion’ to all the readers which is an unapologetically scathing but a cogent attack on faith and the idea of god.

To start with, Dawkins’ major critique of divine faith is that it has acquired a charmed, status of being untouchable. He argues that it should be treated on the same page as anything else, let’s say art or politics. Dawkins quotes Douglas Adams to make his point.

Religion has certain ideas at heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatsoever. What it means is, ‘Here is an idea or a notion that you’re not allowed to say anything bad about: you’re just not. Why not? – Because you’re not! If somebody votes for a party that you don’t agree with, you’re free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody says taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it. But on the other hand if somebody says ‘I mustn’t move a light switch on Saturday’, you say, I ‘respect’ that.

Why should it be that it’s perfectly legitimate to support the Labour party or the Conservative party, Republicans or Democrats, or this model of economics versus that – but to have an opinion about how the universe began… no, that’s holy

One of the ways in which divine faith dodges the surgical knife of rational scrutiny is by claiming that faith and reason are two non-overlapping entities. It says that science covers the empirical realm: what is the universe made of. Faith, on the other hand, extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. Or in other words science concerns itself with the how questions while only theology is equipped to answer why questions. Like why does anything exists at all.

Dawkins validly argues that not every why question has a legitimate answer. Nor every question starting with ‘why’ is a legitimate question. Why are unicorns hollow? It simply has no answer. Even if the question is a valid one, the fact that science cannot answer it does not imply that religion can. A theologician or any other person of faith is simply no more qualified to answer ‘why does anything exists at all?’ than he is qualified to answer ‘why are unicorns hollow?’ or ‘what is the colour of abstraction?’ or ‘what is the smell of hope?’.

The second way it dodges the knife is by claiming that the question of divine existence simply falls out of the scope of science. Maybe there can be no tangible proof of existence of god but neither can science disprove it. One of the reasons of that, at least on argumentative grounds, is because every such attempt to disprove divine existence is likely to get caught in the ‘infinite regress’ paradox. E.g. if one says; this is how the universe began, other might ask what caused it to begin this way? And what was the cause behind that cause? And behind that… it’s an infinite regress. And ultimately a theologician might argue that the cause behind all the causes, the first cause, is what we call god.

It’s a strong argument but here too, Dawkins validly argues, that it’s a totally unwarranted assumption that god himself is immune to regress. And even if he was the terminator to the infinite regress there is no reason to endow him with the properties we normally ascribed to god like omnipotence, goodness, creativity of design and the more human ones like listening to prayers, forgiving sin etc. And lastly some infinite regresses do have a natural terminator. Like the regress of cutting any piece of matter, say gold, is terminated by a gold atom. So you couldn’t possibly argue that you take a piece of gold and cut it, and cut it further till an infinite regress till you could cut no more. And you get to the root of matter and that root we call god. No. We call it an atom.

Another argument from the faith camp – and this one I find really shallow and mean– is that there are a lot of things for which science offers no explanation. Why does the universe exist, how did intelligent life come into being, to say nothing of various ‘supernatural’ phenomena, or miracles, that occurs and various luminous experiences that people have had. According to Sam Harris, one reason why it has become a taboo to criticize religion is that it is the only game in the town talking about them and dignifying them.

Well my answer to this is that if something is currently inexplicable it does not mean it’ll forever remain so. This is not an epistemological argument as it’s made out to be. We are still in a state of progression and will forever be. If we take a look back into history, it was riddled with superstition and occult. The sky was a gate to ‘heaven’, sun and moon were gods, and human diseases were considered a form of holy wrath for sins as per the religions. Cure for diseases consisted to making offerings to the god and asking for forgiveness, or going to a witch doctor, tantrik etc. There used to be belief in witchcraft and devils and miracles and people took all those things pretty seriously. They took it on faith. 

Had it not been for Leeuwenhoek, who discovered microbial life, Louis Pasteur who proposed the germ theory of disease and people like them, who had the courage to question and seek the truth, we would still have been getting eliminated from earth en masse. It is sad that people still talk things like science can’t explain this and that and blah blah blah when they owe their life, its safety and its comforts to the wonders of science and those who dared to rise above and explore beyond faith.

And let us be clear on the fact that nature doesn’t allow anyone concession with its laws. It’s not that you follow the ones you like and defy others. There have been many great illusionists, take for e.g. Harry Houdini, Franz Harary, David Copperfield and these people have invented stunning illusions. Vanishing of statue of liberty, levitation, perfect mind reading, you name it and they’ve done it. They, by their own proclamation, are illusionists not magicians. And they don’t claim to perform miracles and yet their stunts seem to be exactly that. ‘Miracles’, by the same line of reasoning, are merely illusions that we yet don’t understand. I’ll quote a famous line from Franz Harary: “Today’s magic will be tomorrow’s science”.

And I don’t think I need to say much about luminous experiences of people. It is now well known that human brain can cook up a lot of crap like that. Like a computer, it is electrically wired, and like transistors on a microchip, there are neurotransmitters in the brain. And again like a computer, it doesn’t take much to get those things messed up.

Finally, let us come to the biggest bone of contention in this whole debate: the argument from ‘design’. This is one of the most contentious arguments between science and faith and has caused a huge political unrest in the west. The debate here is Creationism vs. Darwinian Evolution. Creationists are divided into two camps. The self proclaimed believers of divine existence and the others who pass themselves off as scientists. Creationists argue that since life, and especially intelligent life is way too complex to have germinated from a mere chance and the random process of evolution cannot account for it. It is simply a statistical improbability. It has to have an intelligent creator. The believers identify this creator as ‘god’ but the other half of the faith camp refrains from using the g-word. They simply call it ‘Intelligent Design’.

 This shoddy argument stems from ignorance of evolutionary biology and people trying to invade into a field of study that is just not their area of expertise, with an unconscionably brazen confidence. There is mind-boggling amount of evidence that intelligent life has evolved from simpler life forms. Evolution is not at all a random process. And building up of complexity is a cumulative and exponential process. The principle of ‘natural selection’, which lies at the crux of evolutionary theory, breaks the problem of improbability into small pieces. Each of the small pieces is slightly improbable, but not prohibitively so. E.g.  an animal with a slight variation in the structure of its eye – which is slightly improbable but not too much  — which allows it to compete better than the other members of it’s species in its native environment will have better chances of survival.  Over time, nature will select this attribute of eye for being propagated further, and the eye which was less suited to that specie’s survival will either diminish or perish altogether. Thus when a large number of these slightly improbable events are stacked upon each other, and that too over a time period of millions of years, what we get is, indeed, very very improbable.

Evolution is a step by step process and the biggest evidence of evolution is that intermediate stages of this process have been located in other creatures as well as fossil records. Sophisticated computer models show that evolution actually “works”. Among other evidences is the fact that if life was ‘designed’ by an intelligent creator, then the design would have been an optimal one. Our own human body, with all its astounding complications, is a far cry from an ‘optimal’ design. E.g. According to Dr. Michael Shermer the human eye is “built upside down and backwards, requiring photons of light to travel through cornea, lens, aqueous fluid, blood vessels, ganglion cells, horizontal cells and bipolar cells before they reach the light sensitive rods and cones that transducer the light signals into neural impulses”. This fact is also genetically supported. A major part of our genome is ‘junk DNA’, which means it has no function. Here is what Wikipedia has to say about junk DNA: About 95% of the human genome has once been designated as “junk”, including most sequences within introns and most intergenic DNA. While much of this sequence may be an evolutionary artifact that serves no present-day purpose. I wonder how lousy and clumsy a designer will it take to create an eye that’s upside down and backwards and a genome consisting of 3 billion base pairs out of which 2.85 billion are junk!

Another blow to the argument of god as the creator is the simple and intelligible fact that if we were created by an intelligent creator then the creator would have to be more intelligent than us. It is, indeed, possible in theory that we are the end product of an intelligent design. But that designer cannot be ‘god’. If we compare the present period with times a thousand years back, it is convincing to say, to the humans living thousand years back, we at present would appear to be no less powerful than gods. To generalize, any sufficiently technically advanced civilization would be no different than god just like any sufficiently advanced technology is no different from magic.

So, to say, the above argument inevitably leads to another question: Who created the creator? There are two answers to it, one that ends in itself and another that raises the same question to which it is the answer: Either evolution or another, more advanced creator. But who created that even more advanced creator? I could go on but the answer invariably and logically would end in evolution.

A question that still twitters around to the present day like an immortal butterfly from the Garden of Eden is the genesis of life. We are by now, many notches clearer on the view that even if god did create life, the life as we now it today only surfaced as a result of a billion years long game of nature called evolution. Then were Adam and Eve names of two bacteria or something? I wouldn’t want to speculate on that. But what I can tell you from my education in biology and from whatever science I have studied, is that molecular genesis of life is no big a deal. Yeah, we haven’t been able to duplicate the event in any lab but I think I can safely say that in not-too-distant future we’ll achieve the feat.

A part of the reason why I don’t feel the need to hedge my bets on the above prophecy is that, from education, I know that extraordinary things can happen under extraordinary conditions. And our earth, 4 billion years back, conditions were, in fact, extraordinary. Despite brave claims from creationists, citing the problem of ‘irreducible complexity’ and therefore requiring that certain whole systems must be formed intact if they are to have any functionality and that in turn requiring skill and genius to construct, I reiterate that what has not yet been achieved is not an implication of its unachievability. 

The other part of the reason life had a natural molecular genesis is a beautiful theory from cosmology called the ‘anthropic principle‘. You see, it’s not only our life; it’s the whole universe that’s just too marvelous to be real. Our universe, much like life, rests on the knife-edge of physical constants that are scrupulously fine-tuned for this entire potpourri of structures to exist. Though the real cosmological versions of the anthropic principle are somewhat controversial, the biological version of it works just about fine. Notice the word ‘anthropic’. Its dictionary meaning says: of or pertaining to human beings or their span of existence on earth. The question that the anthropic principle answers is: How come is the universe so ‘fine-tuned’ to allow something as complex as life to happen? And that answer is: Because if it wasn’t, we wouldn’t be here to witness it and ask this question! Baffling? Let me explain.

Over and above everything, the anthropic principle is simply an argument of probability. It is a way of lending life to an ‘improbable’ and make it probable. What is probability after all? It is the proportion of the set of favourable events to the set all the events that can possibly occur, called sample-space. And it magnifies this sample space and stretches it to the infinitude of the universe so that even a small, ‘almost improbable’ part of that sample space looks much bigger. In layman’s language, there are an estimated 100 billion-billion planets in the universe. And even if the probability of a region of universe being so fine tuned as to allow the existence of life is one in a hundred billion, there would still be a billion planets in the universe with life. And if there could be a billion planets able to support life, there could most certainly be one! And that would be ours. And here we are mulling about our existence! We are one among hundred billion-billion possibilities. That leaves us nothing much to wonder about, does it?

Here is where I would stop harping upon the scientific arguments against the existence of god. I would like to stress here that the above reasoning with all its evidences, does not disprove the existence of god. But what is does disprove is the need for its existence. Celebrated British physicist Stephen Hawking writes in his iconic book ‘A brief history of time’ that if there was a god, he would have to be within the universe and bound by its laws. In other words, god would have no role to play even if he existed.

God is loosing out to science. It is often seen that after a major scientific discovery, religious authorities jump to the fore to align their respective faiths with it. They’ll come out saying things like ‘see, this is what even our books say’, ‘see, we have known that since millennia’,  ‘see, after all you didn’t find anything new’ etc. so ‘if we do not contest the legitimacy of your discoveries why cant you acknowledge our god’? The answer is that there’s no place he could fit into. Science works perfectly and elegantly without god.

What’s perplexing is why the faith camp seeks its validation in the enterprise of reason called science when it claims to be built upon the premise that it itself is immune to the scrutiny of reason. I feel some constantly growing uneasiness, some apprehension within the faith camp. I feel a constantly growing sense of loss of pace within the faith camp with the objective reality though that is what it has been in denial of since the time of its inception.. Take, for example, the superstring theory, which is the leading contender for a ‘theory of everything’ in theoretical physics. This theory says, in quintessence, that all matter and energy, even space and time is the manifestation of a single, one dimensional entity vibrating at different harmonics like strings of a violin. The religions contend that they have always been saying the same thing, that everything in the universe is unified by some single underlying principle. The difference here is between that of physics and metaphysics. The abstruse religious metaphysics is often just too flexible and consequently fits into any mould of objective reality. The faith camp just never let their ideas take a concrete comprehensible shape until it finds a mould for them. And that’s unmistakably always a one given by science.

Personally, I feel really irritated whenever there’s a new technological development and our indigenous Indian faith camp starts claiming that the particular technology was present way back in the times as described by our epics. They’ll say they had the ‘garuda’ in place of airplane, arrows tipped with mystical forms of super destructive energy instead of missiles, saints would live for a thousand years and all that crap. Here too, I would like to point out the difference. This religious crap stands in sheer mockery of the laws of physics, of nature. In one sweep of a hand, they trash all laws of nature, principles of thermodynamics, law of conservation of matter and energy and all of the human accomplishments.

 People say science and faith are two sides of the same coin. Both seek the same end though by different means. I, as well as a lot of other intellectual people opine, that reason and faith, science and god, as a maxim, are irreconcilable.  And it is precisely the means of seeking their goal that makes it irreconcilable. The problem with faith is that it is dogmatic yet formless. It is founded on the premise that if something cannot be proved, the opposite of it must be true. It has built itself on the premise of lack of evidence. It gives no rational justification for believing in one thing and not something else equally qualified, when even that something else would need no rational justification in exacting a belief in itself. This has achieved nothing for humanity else than a perpetual divide between people for antithetical faiths.

The only way of reconciling faith and reason is to have faith in the power of reasoning. Else at any moment, and across any lifetime, the choice is always either/or: either follow your reasoning mind, or abandon it and place something above it. There is no “middle-of-the-road”.

The above questions are a lot more intimate to a lot of us than the harsh glare of evidence. A lot of people, even big scientists, are people of faith even in the face of all the scientific evidence a lot of which they themselves might have generated. Various researches have proven that humans are not really rational beings. A big part of our driving force consists of emotions, instincts and belief. That is what makes the share market so unpredictable.

But it’s a question worth asking if we really need to be 100% rational. Would the world be a better place if we were solely driven by reason? Love knows no reason still it is beautiful. Often there are realms of life where there is no choice of action that can really be classified as completely rational. Often its all in the grey. And sometimes reason can kill. You might have heard of Jean Burdian’s witty and hilarious allegory of Burdian’s ass: Burdain’s ass perished of hunger stuck equidistant between two equal haystacks when an unreasoning call of hunger would have saved him. Is faith too a similar unreasoning call that has kept the humanity alive?

I must admit this is the section among this whole series of blogs that I had to think about the hardest. To gain some more perspective I conducted a small survey among my friends. I posed the same questions to them. And I got varied answers, all of them quite unique and enlightening.

Let’s start with beginnings of institutionalized religions. In ‘A test of faith’ I had argued about the hollowness of religion and the idea of god as preached by them. There should be no doubt left that religions are a man made myth. Christopher Hitchens’ book ‘god is not great: How Religion Poisons Everything’ is a 250 page magnum opus on, well, how religion poisons everything.  Hitchens has traveled around the world, mingled with the locals and carries along an in-depth knowledge of history and knows all the nitty-gritty of religion. Another argument that he offers for artificiality of religion is the inconsistency within religious books. He argues that the religious books were written long after the time that they describe.  Be it Islam or Christianity or Judaism he offers a blow by blow account of the corrupt beginnings of religion and their obvious fabrication. It’s quite apparent that religions were made to suit the need of those of wrote the holy books, those who wanted unrestricted control over humanity!

The world is rife with religious disputes. Even the ones that seem political have religious undertones. Religion draws boundaries not between masses of land, but masses of people, no matter where they are in the world. Be it the eon’s old discord between Christians and Jews, Islam and the rest of the world, the dispute between Israel and Palestine over the supposed “promised land”, the Gaza strip, or our very own Indo-Pak divide. I think nobody would dispute the fact that the dispute between India and Pakistan is more a dispute between Hindus and Muslims than a dispute between two nations for a little piece of land. India itself is has been torn, stabbed, arsoned, poisoned, lynched, and disconcerted by religious disharmony.

What provoked me into writing this whole series was when a good friend of mine opined that India should be declared a Hindu state. This from whom I supposed was a person with a progressive mindset. She said that is the only practical alternative. In my own survey some people showed a similar bend of mind. One guy wrote he would like India to be secular but there’s a lot of bullshit that goes around in the name of secularism. My friend said Hindus were mistreated in Muslim countries so the Muslim community in India, a good portion of which, especially in the lower strata of the society, share some amount of anti-India sentiment – and that’s a fact – should deserve no better.

For a moment, I too wondered if that was actually what should be done. Tell 200 million Muslims that this is a land of Hindus and they can either accept it or pack their bags and be off to Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan or wherever they want to! That would automatically imply to little children who have no idea what religion is and just happened to be born in a Muslim family. Hindu state would mean a Hindu way of life. So give an unconditional license to the likes of Shri Ram Sene, RSS, VHP and Shiv Sena and other Hindu radicalist outfits to murder whoever opposes the Hindu way of life, become the moral police of the country, tell us what we should wear and what we shouldn’t, what festivals we should celebrate, how we should conduct ourselves, beat up and molest women, demolish Islamic structures, manipulate history and saffronize the whole nation. That, my dear friends, is the Hindu way of life for you! It was pretty clear to me it was time for not Muslims, but religion itself to be shown the door. From all over the world.

But what’s it in religion, I often fascinate, that the masses of the world so hypnotically love? Man, being an intelligent being — well not intelligent in the real sense of the word, but you know what I mean – has a natural curiosity. He’s born with it. Biologically, we are blessed – being sarcastic here—with a certain amount of gullibility. And that’s the recipe. There’s an analogy given by British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell which when I read sent me frolicking with laughter. Here it is:

If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

Do I need say more on that? Sam Harris contends if he  were to propose a new religion who’s ten commandments included things like ‘ you shall educate your kids’, ‘ you shall respect every human’s right to choose his own way of life, including women, homosexuals and every other person who’s voice is repressed’, ‘ you shall not oppose a woman’s right to abort her child, plan her family, use contraceptives’ etc. etc. and not following these commandments would be a sin punishable by eternal torture by 17 demons in hell, would such a religion be accepted? It’s quite apparent that such a proposition would be beneficial to the humanity. What do you think someone would say to that? I surmise it’ll be something like “Ah, are you crazy? Torture by 17 demons? Come on it’s just a preposterous myth! But if the same thing was told to you every single day since you were born, you would believe it!

Is there an innate need of god in us? What does god mean to most of us? A recent research showed that when people pray, the area of brain that lights up in their head is the same one which does when talking to a friend. Maybe to a lot of us, god is that ultimate friend and means of solace when all earthly hope in life is lost. And your ultimate friend you wouldn’t want to loose would you? Even if you were told that that friend is an imaginary one!

I am sure all of us would have experienced the turmoil when our consciousness gets divided into two, one good part and the other one devil, and there’s a tug of war between them. All of us have had moments when the dichotomy was just tearing us apart. I often feel religion is the offspring of man’s distrust of his own nature. Our ancestors knew too well of their devilish leanings. That’s why made it so dogmatic, made a virtue of unquestioned faith in it, instilled a fear of holy wrath for letting in even the slightest of doubt in our mind against the veracity of the holy word, made a sin of all the material pleasures that, in those days, one knew no bounds to and if practiced beyond limits, as they quite often were, could ruin a life. From the day we are born, these things are nailed into our virgin minds and we do the same thing to our kids. Just make them blind to the light of reason. That’s the central dogma of religion. That’s its DNA. Like with life, where the only entity that we pass on to our children from us is our DNA and it takes care of everything else, so it is with religion. It’s DNA takes care that it keeps propagating generation after generation.

One of the eternal fears religion has instilled into us is that without religion, without god, the world would spiral into anarchy. People would be left with no good reason to be moral for it’s the belief in god that is our moral engine. I posed the same question to my friends and asked them what they thought about it, would all of the above happen if one day religion was abolished.  One typical answer that I got was: “YES..coz some sort of belief system is the pre-requisite for lending any sort of meaning to life. If I believe in nothing..What the hell am I living for”. I completely agree with the above statement in general and completely disagree with it as an answer to my question.

Let me start with the facts. If you are well acquainted with world affairs and history – and make yourself if you are not— we would find it extremely easy to have a consent on the fact that the bloodiest historical crusades, the most gruesome genocides, the ugliest forms of terrorism and the most shameless form of corruption has gone on, not despite, but in the name of religion. Forget history, the present world is plagued with Islamic terrorism. Be it 9/11 attackers who gutted the WTC twin towers or our very own 26/11 attackers who held Mumbai to ransom for almost three days, the common thing among all of them was that they were in the impression that they were fighting for their religion, that they would be martyrs, and they were promised an eternity in heaven. And the most formidable part of all this is that these terrorists really believe in what they say unlike our spineless politicians who are just masqueraders.  

Religious apologists utter stupidities like ‘Terrorists are misguided’ or ‘Terror does not have a religion’. Yes, how can it when – history stands witness of this—religion has been the biggest terror of all. It is a fact that many of the world’s religions impose a duty on its practitioners to conquer the world and bring all humanity into its dominion. The words unbeliever & infidel in their dictionaries do not mean someone who doesn’t believe in god but someone who doesn’t believe in their god. Many religious leaders agree on that and if you want to hear them say this live turn the news channels on.

Now let’s take a little case study of India. India is one of the most religious and also the most corrupt countries in the world. Maybe a baffling incongruity to most but not to me. During the Hindu-Muslim riots in Godhra in 2002, the Narendra Modi government with its ‘hindutva’ doctrine withheld the police from protecting the Muslims being lynched there by Hindu mobs. Hindus were given a free license to avenge deaths of Hindu pilgrims returning from their holy city of Ayodhya in Sabarmati Express train, allegedly torched by a Muslim mob. The whole state of Gujarat came to a standstill and the Hindu mobs ran wild not only killing Muslims but looting unguarded shops, in open or closed state, abandoned by their owners in a state of moribund fear. This army of Hindu crusaders fighting in the name of their god included not only the base masses but even educated well-to-do people. Photos of all this happening were published in most of the national magazines. Quite similar was the case during the 1993 Mumbai riots, a very graphic description of which you’ll find in Suketu Mehta’s book ‘Maximum City’.

These people, these human beings, were pious believers who were fighting for the pride of Hinduism. Where was their god and his holy word when they, they meaning people like you and me not the illiterate mob, took their cars to fill in the loot and their family members to help them? Richard Dawkins used another example in his book to state this point, which is that when people say they need god, they actually mean to say they need the police. It may seem blasphemous to say, but I strongly believe that it is the belief in god, not the opposite of it that breeds a corrupt mind. Because god is a police whose is a behind-the-curtain guardian, the smack of whose baton does not burn physically, whose existence you can afford to doubt while committing a crime and who probably really does not exist! God is also the corrupt judge who forgives given you offer a healthy enough donation in his temple or make a compensatory sacrifice.

Only when the only source of his morals is his own conscience, his own reasoning mind, does a man really become a moral being. Because his own conscience is the sole perpetrator as well as the guardian of his actions. Because he is his own judge, first and foremost. And if a man has a clean conscience and that is the only police he recognizes, he will never swerve from that single righteous path. He might deceive a god but with his moral engine firmly ensconced  within his own mind, he will never deceive his own self. Moral dichotomies will disappear and he will see rightly, clearly without the burden of a borrowed code of moral conduct that he doesn’t really believe in. God can forgive him but not his own conscience.

I should stress here that I’m not trying to imply that belief in god necessarily leads to a corrupt mind. Seeds of corruption do not lie in belief or disbelief in god. They lie elsewhere. But belief in god does allow these seeds to thrive because an imposed or borrowed code of morality leaves very little room for self-introspection.

Now one might argue what about the person who does not believe in god and is a real disgrace to humanity. The whole history abounds in such people. Can it not be similarly argued that these people are the prime example of what can happen if one does not believe in god? No. I am going to have to buy the answer from Dawkin’s book, a counter argument so powerful that I’ll have to quote it verbatim:

Individual atheists do many evil things but they don’t do evil things in the name of atheism. Religious wars really are fought in the name of religion, and they have been horribly frequent in history…. A war might be motivated by economic greed, by political ambition, by ethnic or racial prejudice, by deep grievance or revenge, or by patriotic belief in the destiny of a nation. Even more plausible as a motive for war is an unshakable faith that one’s own religion is the only true one, reinforced by a holy book that explicitly condemns all heretics and followers of rival religions to death, and explicitly promises tat the soldiers of god will go straight to heaven.

By contrast, why would anyone go to war for the sake of an absence of belief? 

When one states something like ‘Religion and faith are the source of our morals’, its usually meant that we have been taught so while growing up. So the proper question to ask would be: ‘Do we really learn morals by education? Why would we be good to each other if it not were for god?’ I’d want to start answering that by mooting another simple question: ‘What is life?’ My answer to that would be ‘something that reproduces and is able to sustain itself through continues reproduction’. Throughout animal kingdom, benevolence abounds. Parent animals take care of child animals, members of same species warn each other of predators, ants and bees display astounding social cooperation, and symbiotic relationship exists between members of different species. Why are we good to each other? Because life has to sustain itself. If everyone was only a predator, if everyone just killed each other, life would simply loose its meaning as its existence would become impossible. By sharing and caring we ensure the same for ourselves. By not killing every person who happens to come across our way, we increase our own chances of not getting killed. The principle of live and let live. It’s no rocket science. It’s simple, good old evolution. Natural selection has picked those genes that will ensure their own survival. Religion has got absolutely nothing to do with it.

In Dawkins’ book I found some case studies of moral dilemmas. I decided to test them myself. In my survey I presented my friends with a moral dilemma. All situations involved barter between saving five lives and sacrificing one. In one situation five people are trapped on a railway track with a train screaming down its way. The train can be diverted to another track on which one person is trapped. In the second case the train can be stopped by pushing a very fat man over the bridge. In the third case five people are dying in need of five different organs. They can be saved by killing a healthy man who has all five of them in good condition. I asked my friends how willing they would be to kill one man to save five if it was a split second decision. What was being tried to prove here was that morals are ingrained into our brains by evolution rather than by education. The expected answer was ‘most willing’ for the first situation and ‘least willing’ for the last one as one would be least conscious while killing the first person as he’s a collateral damage while the second situation involves a little, conscious act of pushing the fat man. In the third case it would be a cold bloodied murder. I got my expected answer from 90% of the respondents but what was really amazing was that nobody could come with the correct reasoning for their responses. And that’s an even stronger proof of what I was looking for. Their decisions came from the unconscious part of their mind because if it was coming from their conscious mind they would have been able to reason it out. They would have remembered something from education that they were told. Their decisions came from their own conscience a good part of which comes from centuries of evolution packed into our bodies in form of our genes.

So again, why are we good to each other? This is the most correct answer: It’s in our genes.

Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and provokes no argument. Because the moment we began to reason it out it starts to crack and crumble. It has no rational justification and if it does serve an ontological purpose, it’s by conning gullible masses and presenting a false picture to them, and has to be replaced by something else. We’ll talk bout that something else a little later.

And to my dear friend who said some sort of belief system is the pre-requisite for lending any sort of meaning to life I’d say believing in god means believing in anything but not believing in god does not mean believing in nothing. It is infantile to presume that somebody else has the responsibility to give meaning to your life.

I might be raising some people’s temper who might be thinking I am focusing only on the negatives of religion. Maybe I am. My writing might seem like a hatchet job. One might ask why not I consider the utopian side of faith. For a person who is just too daft to be able to understand anything beyond the antediluvian system of faith, which is the easiest thing to do, the ‘god’ concept provides a platform for building his belief system and that imaginary friend that’s always there. Why not I leave him to that? Because the same thing makes him vulnerable to being duped by unscrupulous religious leaders. It breeds superstition, does not allow for a clear conscience to form and ultimately leads one into wasting his life following something that is just a myth. And there’s simply no polite way to say this.

I might think in favour of leaving one person to his fancies. And seriously, I really have no claim on anybody’s life to ask him to abandon something he has put a lifelong of trust into. But if you look at it holistically it is from these individuals that fanatics and terrorists branch out. Superstitions of individuals cost the society as a whole. It cultivates genocidal social practices that harm both humanity and environment. The Hindu custom of Sati, though abominable, is still practiced in some parts of the country. The caste system has wrecked havoc on social structure which is capitalized on by greedy politicians. Also the Hindu custom of conducting a funeral by putting the deceased on a pyre and immersing the ashes in the holy Indian River Ganga has put an immense strain on the environment. Behind this is the belief that a dip in Ganga purifies your soul of all the sins and thus the soul of the deceased would reach god’s home in a pristine state. The pyre consumes a whole tree and Ganga, at some places, is as polluted as a gutter. So much for its purgatory powers! All these practices have sustained throughout the centuries precisely because they have been deemed immune to questioning.

Maybe faith did serve a colossal purpose in history and ancient times. Maybe it really was that unreasoning call that, through ages of darkness, kept humanity from becoming Burdian’s ass. But I think its day is done. Like an old friend, we have to say goodbye to it and move on to bigger and better and brighter things in life. Everything has to come to an end to allow place for new ones to sprout up. That’s the rule of nature. We have to embrace a new religion, a real religion of humanity, not some imagined being. We call it humanism.