Skip to main content

Simplicity



Profound truths are often as simple as Einstein’s famous formula, E=mc2 or Benjamin Disraeli’s aphorism, “Youth is a blunder; manhood a struggle; old age regret.” Beneath the apparent simplicity lies immense profundity. That every mass is a terrific bundle of energy is at once simple and profound. The growth from youth’s blunders to the regrets of old age is also simple and profound.

   Most people refuse to understand the simplicity as well as profundity of truths that matter. They like to add colours and flavours to truths in order to make them more bearable or more attractive (apparently) or to wield them as weapons for self-aggrandisement. Then we get all sorts of religions and creeds and isms. And the concomitant struggles and strife.

   “The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts,” said Alfred North Whitehead. “We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, ‘Seek simplicity and distrust it.’”

   Unless we understand the profundity that lies hidden beneath the apparent simplicity, we are likely to fall into many traps like power games. Do people really want profundity? That’s an interesting question. The answer is, more often than not, No. People want power or something that makes them feel good about themselves. Consequently there is neither simplicity nor profundity.  Instead there are falsehoods masquerading as truths.

   We are part of a gargantuan procession of masquerades.  Anyone who refuses to play along becomes a caricature labelled as antinational or something like that. It’s a funny world. Who should I thank for all this fun?

PS. Written for In(di)spire Edition 224: #simplicity


Top post on IndiBlogger, the biggest community of Indian Bloggers

Comments

  1. Well analyzed the topic and brought out the reality in the world thru' this Post.. Thanks for sharing the Post, Matheikal!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Veiled Women

One of the controversies that has been raging in Kerala for quite some time now is about a girl student’s decision to wear the hijab to school. The school run by Christian nuns did not appreciate the girl’s choice of religious identity over the school uniform and punished her by making her stand outside the classroom. The matter was taken up immediately by a fundamentalist Muslim organisation (SDPI) which created the usual sound and fury on the campus as well as outside. Kerala is a liberal state in which Hindus (55%), Muslims (27%), and Christians (18%) have been living in fair though superficial harmony even after Modi’s BJP with its cantankerous exclusivism assumed power in Delhi. Maybe, Modi created much insecurity feeling among the Muslims in Kerala too resulting in some reactionary moves like the hijab mentioned above. The school could have handled it diplomatically given the general nature of Muslims which is not quite amenable to sense and sensibility. From the time I shi...

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Insecurity and Exclusivism

“ Hindu khatare mein hai.” This was one of the first slogans that accompanied the emergence of Narendra Modi on the national scene. It means Hindus are in Danger . It reveals a deep-rooted feeling of insecurity. Hindus constitute an overwhelming majority in India – 80%. All the high positions in governance, judiciary, academics, any significant place, are occupied by Hindus. Yet the slogan was born. Strange? It will be facile to argue that Modi used this slogan and its concomitant hatred of Muslims and Christians as a political weapon for winning votes. True, he was successful in that; he rose to the highest political post in the country using minority-bashing. But the hatred did not end with that achievement; rather it spread outward and became more exclusive. Muslim and European rulers of India were booted out from the country’s history books and wherever else possible like the names of roads and institutions. With vengeance. Now there is a concerted effort going on to place In...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...