Musings of a tired mind

First there was the pressure to succeed - to clear JEE, to get into another good college, to get a job and so on. Then there was the pressure to be independent. You must not depend on anybody for anything. You're always alone in the end. There came the pressure to be confident and composed at all times and the pressure to know what you want. How can you be confused? And sometimes I can almost feel the pressure to be happy. And if you can't deal with any of these then it's simple, there's just the pressure to wear your masks well. 

My take-aways from Farhan Live

Okay, I have to agree, this is not what people typically take away from concerts, so please, bear with me. 

1.       I hate concerts. There, I said it. I know it’s an absolutely blasphemous thing to say, especially considering I am a 22 year old college student. But I truly hate concerts. I hate the crowd, I hate having sweaty people all around me. I hate the blaring speakers which cause your ears to stop functioning for the next 4 hours. I hate waiting in the neverending queue to get in, and then standing on the 0.5 sq feet of space one gets for two hours till the concert actually begins. And since the music, which is supposed to make it all worth it and probably even does to some, somehow gets drowned below all of those annoying things  and when I recall the 3-4 concerts I’ve attended all I remember is the crowd, the humidity and my aching legs, I think it’s time I accept I hate concerts.

2.       Apologies are not redundant. I have often felt that once the act is done, you can’t take it back and so no matter how profuse or genuine the apology is, it’s useless. But that’s not how we humans work. Even though the words don’t actually make a tangible difference, they make us feel better. The consideration of the other person somehow ameliorates the irritation. So whether it is Farhan Akhtar apologizing for starting the show late or the girl standing behind you who just elbowed you saying she was sorry, they are necessary and they make a difference. 

Happiness is ephemeral and meant to be so. This realization is mostly due to the lines of this beautiful song - Chaahat ke do pal bhi mil paaye duniya mein yeh bhi kam hai kya. The idea of what exactly is happiness has always eluded me. I have never been able to decide how exactly you decide whether you’re happy but at some level always believed it had to be something lasting, with some quality of permanence attached to it. And hearing those lines, with this cool breeze blowing into my face for the fraction of a minute, it dawned on me that I had got it all wrong. Because for those thirty seconds, I was happy, in spite of the crowd around, the humidity, and the pain in my legs and I remember that moment. So it’s not as ephemeral as it seems after all. And this one's probably a tad too profound to be based on one line and a whiff of breeze, but such things just come to you, don't they? 

Arbitrary Coherence

I just read Predictably Irrational, and true to the reviews I had been given, it’s an interesting read. Its use of rather ordinary events and occurrences to reveal observations that are surprising and often bordering on alarming is what makes it tick. And what further makes the book engaging is how the author extrapolates these observations to show the impact they can have on our lives.

One of the concepts the book introduces is ‘Arbitrary coherence’. While talking about how we decide what would be a fair price for a particular commodity, it says that we always compare any given price to the first price that was registered in our minds, but the first price that got registered is itself arbitrary, and is not necessarily dependant on the actual inherent value of the commodity. So even though our definition of a fair price is coherent about an anchor, the anchor itself is arbitrary.

This reminded me of another discussion I had a few days ago, the often repeated debate about whether there is something called destiny? Whether man decides what to do with his life or is it all pre-decided? Can one carve his own destiny? The way I think of destiny is that we all get some signposts, some guiding milestones. What we do with these milestones may depend on us but the milestones itself can’t be explained. They are quite arbitrary. There may be a coherent explanation of how one reached where they got, but going back you’ll always come to one point that is quite arbitrary.