Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Circus

In the jungle of Institute of Indian Technologies, there existed two crazy students, with particularly varying interests. The Monkey was a detailed thinker, mostly residing in his own theme, and rarely peeking out to see what the world was doing. He'd get a screenshot of the current state of world, and will quickly recreate in his brains what must have happened, and then he would quietly get absorbed in his thinking. The Donkey was the one who was always on the roll when it came to foreign policies, polity, politics, and bureaucracy. He would always have a conclusion ready on the weirdest of the patterns and he would often extrapolate them to predict what the future held.

Two years later, both of them passed and joined the beautiful world outside. Their job description was the same. Only that satisfaction level was different. They would often meet and The Donkey would often narrate interesting affairs surrounding, or may be they would discuss the ideas of various people.
One day, while roaming, The Donkey mentioned a famous quote, "The god is a performer, performing before an audience too afraid to laugh". "Don't we remember something about an audi, performance, stage, and we all being characters?" The Monkey thought. Strolling in the great market place, the two friends were discussing this. The Donkey continued, "The Penguins at a far-away-land Antarctica often feel hungry at a time when there are too many fish in the sea. They dive to dine, and before doing that, wish each other bon appetit. The sharks too feel hungry at the same time, and they too wish each other bon appetit, and then hunt the penguins! Look at the comedy- they both feel hungry at the same time!!". Seeing the facial expressions of the Monkey, Donkey suggested another example- "The newly born birds which live near ponds often take their first flight after a few days of hatching. The comedy is that if they crash during their first flight, they often fall in the open mouths of crocs and other animals waiting for them. They become the feast of these animals in the first flight itself!", continued Donkey, " If you call it a comedy, it's a grim one".
"Take a third example- In Sundarbans, the jungle is so dense that humans often prefer to live near the shore of delta. The water level often varies markedly during the whole day, and there live piscivorous tigers, who drink that saline water. These tigers, often known as Royal Bengal Tigers are the smart and aggressive cousins of other indian tigers. They are big, and they are bad, they know their footsteps, and they will hunt humans, whenever they can. It is virtually possible to go deep inside the forest." Having laid a proper foundation, the Donkey took a deep breath, and continued "Now, the fun part is that honey bees also make their combs in the deep forest. The combs often are huge. Now, humans have to go inside to harvest honey from the bees, where their predator awaits!".
The examples started a train of thoughts in Monkey. So far, he believed world is an auditorium, and the god is the only audience. Now there is an opposite theory, the god is a performer, and we all, observers. How can it be? It seems like the trees are moving in a direction anti parallel, when we move.
To interconnect both the perspectives, we can shift our own. Imagine the world is a circus, with everyone being a performer, and god being the ring master. May be he's more than a ring master, he may be an organiser, who has put a constraint, a starting condition, continuing conditions for the act, and a terminating condition. The performers in circus are all acrobats, so they can not see their own moves, but can witness how the tight rope walker is performing, and how good the tigers are doing ball with the humans, etcetera. Now, we can safely say the god is performing, we too are performers, and yet, we don't dare laugh, because we are walking on tight rope ourselves. We laugh, we fall. Only if we are too busy to watch others than noticing our own steps on the tight rope.
Special Mentions: Chaitanya Vardhan for his inputs, Voltaire and Shakespeare for sharing their piece of perspectives, God- his circus is interesting.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your company pays you extra bucks for writing blogs? How the hell do you take out so much time dude!

Nimesh said...

hmmmmm... *smiles*

Swapnil said...

This is beautiful writing - just the thing I wanted to read from your end!

Really well written and easyread!

By the way, this anonymous guy himself has so much time. I see anonymous almost on every blog. He is charismatic man, I am sure he is very fast with typing and browsing, he writes quotes, books, scientific papers and what not!

Oh anonymous! I bow to thee!

and yeah... press Ctrl Del Alt when in trouble!

Cheers!

Anonymous said...

@ Swapnil: Thanks for the remarks. Often it's pretty simple to explain what happens in real life :)
cheers,
Priyodit

Atul Agrawal said...

Good one Nimesh.
Keep it up.

Nimesh said...

Thnx Atul