Finish First or DIE!

I love observing people from a distance. I do it all the time, almost everywhere. Over time, I noticed something peculiar about a lot of people around me. A principle they subconsciously follow - "Finish First or Die!".

Take a drive on Indian roads and all you see is people desperately overtaking each other like their lives depend on it. Sadly they often risk losing their lives doing this.

Stand in a queue at a railway station and you will see people pushing and shoving at you with no respect for personal space. Not only are they ready to grab an opportunity to jump the line, they live in fear of somebody else doing the same to them.

Gas Stations, Post offices, Banks, Airplanes, heck anywhere, same story. Mr. B can't bear to wait behind A. Instead, B loves waiting next to A. When space clears and A is slow, B will jump at the chance and steal A's position. But the twist is, C, D, E and F are also impatient, so poor Mr. A finds himself pushed back of the line due to a second's hesitation.

There's no compassion, there's no consideration, there's no organization. Only chaos, greed and selfishness. The quest for being numero uno. Why is everything in life a race and where are we learning this concept? Of course, it's School!

Sadly, from a very young age, kids in India are taught to aim to be better than everybody else, not aim to be brilliant individually. Everybody from teachers, to relatives, to parents, to strangers tell us that in life, you've got to be ahead of everyone else.

There was this school bus with a motto proudly printed all over it and it said - "Strive to Surpass". Really? Strive to surpass? It sounds like, as long as you're ahead of the others, you're all good. They just want to keep you ahead of the race, but sadly, only one can finish first. The rest of the hundreds of students will have failed to live up to the motto of the school.

A sad incident that went viral across the world was in Bihar with parents risking their lives to scale the walls of a multi-storeyed school building passing notes through open windows to help their kids cheat and pass the exam. With such experiences, the kids get brain washed into a narrow minded perspective that this is how life is. It's a competition and it's about beating everyone else.

The kids never realize that outside of school, different people run at different speeds and the race of life is not a one-way race. There are millions of directions to choose from. Everybody runs a different race at a different speed. For a certain student, just passing is a major achievement, for another, 98% is not enough. Different goals altogether, yet judged by the same standards.

Kids may not realize this, but parents and schools need to. If the current system of striving to surpass continues, all we will be left with, are students standing in a single file who can recite the entire text book word-to-word but not know the meaning of any of it. I've already come across such people in my life. "This is how you solve it, I don't know why, but this is the right method" - a pretty common sentence you hear in schools and colleges.

Competition is good to an extent as it brings out the best in you. But putting competition ahead of the final goal is going a bit too far. There is a time and place for the ultimate quest in being first and it usually belongs on the racing track or some similar sporting event. But in regular life, there are a lot of things that you can do at the pace you want to. You don't have to beat the others to it.

No medal will be given for getting first off the line at a traffic signal. No award will be given for being the first person from a crowd to get into a train. No cash prize will be given for being the first person to step out of the airplane doors. Arrive at the destination early, but you don't have to arrive first. Do well in the exam, but you don't have to finish first to prove you're good.

Success shouldn't be measured by how many people you beat, but by how many personal challenges you overcame. 

No Place for Humans

It has always been told that everything about this Universe is perfect. A bit too perfect, especially when you consider Earth. I mean, look at how things came together to support life. It's just unbelievable to think of how many factors affect the possibility of life on earth.

People talk about water, but that's not even touching the surface. Water has been discovered on so many other planets and asteroids, so why aren't they supporting life? There's more to Earth than just water. The Sun for example is strangely just about the right size (at this moment) and giving off just about the right amount of heat and light for a planet like Earth, placed at just about the right distance to function. But again, that's not it. We have an atmosphere. The Sun despite doing everything right for us has one bad effect - Solar Winds. Winds strong enough to blow away our atmosphere. So after having all the conditions good for life, our atmosphere could've been blown away leading to a lifeless planet that was otherwise perfect. It's mostly thanks to that swirling mass of molten metal buried deep underground that's actually saving us. The Earth's Magnetic Field is present due to this swirling mass of metal and is the reason why our atmosphere doesn't get blown off, and also why most space rocks entering the Earth's atmosphere get burned up before crashing on our heads.

I'm sure there are more "perfections" that have caused Earth to be capable of sustaining life. But of course, this perfection isn't going to last forever. There could be a day when the Earth's Magnetic Field starts fading away and soon our planet is no different from Mars, airless, dry and lifeless. There WILL be a day when the Sun loses its energy and bulges to a size enough to consume the Earth. There could be a day when a blast of cosmic energy from a black hole vaporizes us before we could spell the word 'Death'. And there could be many more of such likely events that will trigger the End of the World.

So to think that the Earth is perfect, I feel is a mistake. The Earth's capability to sustain life is nothing more than a byproduct of the Universe's random and chaotic nature. In my opinion, Life itself is quite random. We may not yet have enough knowledge about how Life was created but I'm hoping we will, because I still find it hard to believe there is a Supernatual being that has created us, who happens to be very similar looking to Humans (according to our own conclusions). I still haven't felt we are that special. Dinosaurs ruled the Earth for millions and millions of years and were eventually killed away, we haven't dominated the Earth for even a fraction of that time, why can't we assume that the Supernatural being actually resembled an ancient pre-historic creature and created them to exist for millions of years? To me Nature is not something that can be tamed or controlled. Nature simply evolves into complexity, but when things get too complex, Nature simply hits the Reset button.

Every beautiful thing that happens on Earth is credited to the Gods - Seasons, Monsoon Rains, Solar and Lunar Eclipses, and many many more. Also every bad thing that happens to us is again credited to the Gods. The Gods were angry so they sent down these destructive Tsunamis, Tornadoes, Earthquakes, Meteoroids, etc. But sadly I see everything as a phenomenon caused again by the randomness of the universe itself. Some things are hard to predict because they are caused by Nature itself. It is how I think Nature decides to reset itself. When warm moist air meets cold air, there will be a reaction and if your house happens to be under that reaction, the Gods are angry on you? How does that explain anything?

The biggest mistake we have made is to assume that we are perfect. We've been this arrogant ever since we started recording things we observed. It was universally accepted that the Earth was flat, and that we were in the center of the Universe, and everything else revolved around us. What arrogance! Not only did the Earth turn out to be round, we are no where near the center of the solar system, the only Natural thing that revolves around us is the moon, and the solar system is nowhere near the center of the Milky Way, and the Milky way is not the center of the Universe. So how did we think we were so special? The only brilliant part about this whole thing is, we learned all this ourselves! The farther we could see, the more insignificant we became.

And in all this insignificance a lot of us still believe we are special. We think Earth is special. We were given brains and suddenly Humans became special. But we didn't stop there. Humans with a certain skin color were more special. Humans of a certain gender were more special. Humans that belonged to a certain religion were more special. Humans that belonged to a certain sect within that religion were even more special. Thinking of all this, I actually wish that there really is someone up there who is laughing at the way we treat ourselves and everything/everyone else that are not like us.

We are described as Social Animals. We we are nothing more than Political Animals. "Another person's loss is my gain." Really forward thinking there. If Earth really had a character and a soul, Humans should've rightly been made extinct by now. But maybe the Earth is more patient, or maybe we haven't yet reached the height of our stupidity yet. Oh my, are we going to be worse than this? It really scares me to think that Earth is actually waiting for Humans to reach such a low point that we are going to be the cause for our own destruction. And then, the Earth will breathe again, sweeping away the filth and making way for a better species. So it will be Us who would trigger the End of the World, the Universe can just wait and watch as we all fall apart.

Purpose?

After experiencing so many different things in life, I was suddenly hit by this very intriguing question.

"What IS Man's purpose on Earth?"

A child is born and he is the most beautiful thing on Earth. He is sent to school to Learn. To get educated. But in what? And what is this education? What are we learning about? Why are we learning how governments are made, how airplanes are built, how DNA can mutated, etc? What are we learning if, all we are really doing is following what somebody else told us? And who gets the authority to test another person about his 'knowledge' in a certain field? Why is there a 'certain' field? Why doesn't Man learn Everthing? And what is Everything?

Why does one have to set up a 'career' in life? Why are we trying so hard to beat each other when we are supposed to be looking at a bigger picture? What is the bigger picture? Why should we be able to go a Restaurant and get food served? Why is there a need for somebody to cook for us, and why should there be a person to serve? They are people with a lot of questions too. Why should they be restricted to that small space? Man is all of them. The cook, the server, the customer, the buyer, the seller, the bartender, the drinker, the entertainer, the manager, the lawyer, the plaintiff, the defendant, the richman, the beggar, the loser, the prodigy, the actor, the audience, the lover, the hater, the inventor, the destroyer, the creator and also the Killer.

All these are things that man does for himself. Why is the waiter serving you with extra care? So you would tip him and he would make more money. Why is an exotic dancer showing off her body? Not for somebody else's pleasure, but to make her own living. Where is the Man, that would do things for every Thing other than himself? Why does Man have to start a career and do things for his own good? What is success? Man beating Man? Man beating other creatures? Man defying Nature?? How is any of this called Success?


Why are we even living on this Earth?  I still haven't found out a purpose in Life. Are we supposed to just live it out and wait for the day to die? Or are we supposed to do something with this chance of life? It clearly isn't a video game where the character has a clear motive right from the beginning - rescue the Princess. From what I see, we aren't really living. We seem to be surviving. Humans are just trying their utmost to survive. And unfortunately the only thing that's stopping us from 'living freely' is our own Human Race! We've got to beat our own kind to prove a point to our own kind! Sad. 

All this brings us back to something that has apparently become as important as oxygen - Money. It's like opening the Pandora's Box if one starts talking about money. Pretty much everything on this Earth and Beyond has a price. It's a well known fact. Land, rocks, wood, water, shelter, energy, knowledge, experience, happiness, freedom, friendship, love, marriage, divorce, and even death. Nothing has been spared from that ever sticky price tag. Almost all of these were supposed to be available for free. Something happened in the history of the human race that created this thing called Money, and it has turned out to be the root of all evil. It can't be more true that even something as simple as freedom costs money. Today we are struggling to go back to the Moon because it's expensive! It's one of those saddest eras in the 13 Billion Year history of the Earth.

It has come to a point where the "Purpose" of a human being is to earn Money. Purpose - The title of this blog post. So is this what it brings us down to? Earning a man-created materialistic thing called Money? Man does awesome things, there's no doubt about that. But all that awesomeness was for the sake of money? In today's world, it defines who we are or rather sadly, how better we are than the others. Ugh, my brain is filled with that one sound, Ugh!

Earning to live, living to earn, earning to earn, living to live. I don't know which one of these is relevant to human life anymore, but I do hope we choose wisely and find the real answer to the question nobody seems to care about - What is the Purpose of Life?