Rowling all the way !!!

If the Harry Potter Book series wasn't enough , J.K. Rowlings address at the Harvard University Commencement, (where she received her honorary doctor of letters degree this year) definitely made me her fan. Her speech struck a chord deep down in my heart, and i'm convinced i am not the only one, because she got a long (two minutes to be precise) standing ovation. What really made her talk momentous was the fact that it was written straight from the heart, and out of her own personal experiences in life. It was titled "the fringe benefits of failure and the importance of imagination". Well i guess we've heard a lot of people talking about the curative and salubrious nature of FAILURE but somehow its a little difficult for me to embrace it as gracefully.....
Dont bash me up now. I know ,I know - "Those who want to bear the fruits of their action are but miserly" I have literally grown up with this adage from the Bhagavad Gita. Yet its quite a herculean task to translate it into actions....is'nt it?....working diligently without anticipating anything, least of all failure. However, i would say that the way Rowling puts it, is still a little more comforting.....now now... i dont mean to say that she is better than Lord Krishna and what he talks is all mythological jargon but it is, lets just say, not as stark. Coming back to her speech, she exemplifies with her own life the rewards that she got because she failed miserably on an epic scale.Here's a quote from her address- "Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above rubies." Well i truly agree with her. Failure gives you a myriad things that success can never give you. For instance, it gives you a sense of gratitude and a power of appreciation for all that you have, and will acquire subsequently. Moreover some say, good people become good because they've come to wisdom through failure. So goodness is directly proportional to the amount of failure one braves in life..... or maybe the vice versa could be true as well. Confused?? This equation is a wee bit perplexing for me as well.
By the time you start analyzing whether you ever experienced the fecundity of failure, Rowling jumps on to the second topic 'the power of imagination'. Huh, what has imagination got to do with anything but storytelling.....thats what i thought. But what does Rowling think? She expounds a theory wherein imagination , in its most prodigious forms gives us the uniquely divine power of empathy. We can empathise with humans whose experiences we never share. I am not sure about other people, but as far as my memory goes this is one of the most beautiful metaphors ive heard in quite sometime now. Who could have thought imagination could be linked to something like empathy. It surely takes a genius to do so.
At this point however, one might ask 'so what if we acquire empathy?' My rationale would be that empathy is one of the greatest gifts endowed to mankind . Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people's minds, imagine themselves into other people's places. There are some people who choose to be in their own confines , who have no altruistic motives in life. For such ignorance Rowling elaborates - "Those who choose not to empathise may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy".
Well its already a laudable fact that such a long discourse wasn't soporific for a vast majority of people. Without being didactic, she managed to touch their hearts. Along with it, she attempted to galvanize the youth of today to do something for a better world, because we have the power to imagine better. And last but definitely not the least, she closed the address with a lovely quote from the Roman classics, which goes thus -
'As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters'.
I applaud her for it.

My Inner Strife

Goodness breeds goodness. What you sow is what you reap. Rings a bell? How often have you heard that? I always keep hearing these cacophonous sounds everywhere. Be it a movie, a book or a person for instance. Be good to people and everything good will automatically happen to you. But does it actually happen? I see the most slimy and cunning people climbing the success ladder in today's world. Selfishness is directly proportional to material gains. Isn't it? Then where is goodness in this fast moving world of today. Have we kind of forgotten why we are here.
Well OK .. a lot of people might say i am an idealist.....we should be pragmatic. But all of us are not born with the traits needed to survive in this world. So how do we get them. Its simple. We acquire them. How? Of course through our experiences.There are basically two things that can happen then. Experiences can bring the worst out of us or maybe in some instances the better in us. Its we who decide what we have to do. Haven't you heard that the good and the evil is within us. We decide which one finally triumphs.
However, as Jacques Monod says " who decides what is good and what is evil?" Here is one school of thought which is evenly poised between the two extremities. I already mentioned idealism which of course needs no introduction. There's a thin line between idealism and "practical idealism". Practical idealism is a philosophy which describes the imperative need to implement the ideals of virtue and goodness in oneself. And one of its great proponents is our very own Gandhi. It sounds like utilitarianism, which broadly speaking, is promoting happiness for the maximum number of people we can. But nonetheless its practical and along with it virtuous......hmmmmmm........now don't these two terms sound like 'antonyms'!!
Therefore in retrospect, i would still say its kind of difficult to be 'practically ideal' but not impossible. As far as i remember, as children most of us (not all indeed) were without any malice or any prejudice. The beauty of the innocence of the child is somewhere marred on the way to success in this material world. Many people also say that evil must constantly re spawn but virtue is immortal. That is definitely a consolation. Yet I keep telling myself 'I shouldn't become a bad person because other people are bad to me'. Who knows, i may already have become Satan's accomplice and am not as 'holier than thou' as i perceive myself to be. And in fact, no one knows what will happen in the future. No one knows who will triumph in this never ending abstract war going on inside the grey cells of my brain.

The old order changeth, yielding place to new !!

Ive been thinking of starting this blog for almost 3 yrs now ( this of course would give you an idea about how much i procrastinate). However, why i landed up starting it today, is an enigma for me too. Writing is something that came very naturally to me when i was in school, which ofcourse now seems to be quite a long time back. I remember i used to maintain a diary in which i wrote religiously about all the school affairs right from quarrels between friends to my aspirations of becoming a tennis superstar . Sounds funny, doesn't it. I also wrote for the school magazine and my English teachers did tell me i was good in essay writing. However , these were the only meagre stints i had in writing although i always nurtured this hope of becoming a journalist and writing for a current affairs magazine !!! What a pity it is that i am still doing my PhD (in Molecular Medicine not English Literature) and the writer within me for all these years has been nipped in the bud.....
And to tell you the truth, after all these years writing is a little scary. Its not that i have run out of thoughts or ideas but to pen them down is slightly difficult. But then if i don't do it today i may not do it ever. And hasn't somebody said 'Words, once they are printed, have a life of their own.' So - here I am.