To Be or Not To Be

A little kingdom I possess,
Where thoughts and feelings dwell;
And very hard the task I find
Of governing it well.
~ Louisa May Alcott

...that more or less describes my situation!

~A Wise Man Said~

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
~ Aristotle
Thursday, December 20, 2018
 
In Dubai! This is the time I usually visit my family, and my family for all intents and purposes has moved to Dubai for now… so here I am!

Would like to wish you all a very Merry Christmas… seems a bit of an apt occasion for a ‘religious’ post… and though this post is not exactly that, it’s probably as close as I will ever get…
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Be like the sparrow! 

“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.” ~ Matthew 10:29-31

I have many a times written about how I find it difficult to blindly ‘believe’ or have ‘faith’ like many do. I do not have confidence in the existence of God (though I would very much like to) but I cannot say that I reject his existence outright. As they say, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I have not seen or met or heard God, and it is also difficult for me to accept that the Bible is written by the hand of God. In fact, I think it’s better that it is not because the way the Bible portrays God—particularly in the Old Testament—is not how I would like to imagine a loving and caring God to be, if he were to exist. One could say that the Bible symbolises those times but this would be illogical to me because then it would mean it was written by man like many other historical documents and not directed by the hand of God. If God is the creator of times himself, he would surely say things or make man say things that would transcend time. He would not, I would imagine, have human limitations. Well, you see why it’s difficult for me to believe…

But I was trying to make a point from the opposite camp. The reason I shared the introductory quote is because oddly it has had a powerful effect on me. Not as a quote but as an idea that got passed on to me at Sunday school (a religious class for Catholic kids) and somehow vaguely stayed afloat in my consciousness. It is only fairly recently that I actually verbalised this idea to myself when I decided to embark on a particularly risky venture as it seemed to me (but I find most ventures risky!) in the words “be like the sparrow!” It has an emotive as well as action element to it when put this way and what I impress upon myself through this imperative phrase is that if sparrows can go about their business without a care for the future seeing as God looks after them, I very well can… because he very well looks after me too! I need to throw caution to the winds and “be like the sparrow”. Sometimes when I am overthinking about what might happen in a dire situation or when am not sure what action to take because I don’t know what would be the outcome, this phrase just pops into my head. This doesn’t mean that the next minute I simply do what I am not sure about doing but it gives me some comfort, to be honest… that things will be alright… just trust yourself and go ahead.

I know… it might seem strange that given what I said about my lack of confidence and faith, I invoke a trust and faith in God in moments when things are not in my control. I cannot really explain it except that it feels good to think that someone up there will take care of me as much as he takes care of the little sparrows. It affords me an inner strength that comes from having a psychological safety net in a largely unpredictable world. Come to think of it, isn’t that how religions were born… as Voltaire said, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him” … I very much agree.

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 5:47 pm 2 comments
Thursday, December 13, 2018
 

One of the reasons I like reflecting about things on my blog as opposed to any other social media platform is because it gives me the illusion that no one is reading. Even if you are, you’d most likely be people who are genuinely interested in what I’m saying if not actually able to relate with my thoughts. Writing feels enjoyable to me if I don’t have to filter my thoughts too much and don’t have to cater to a ‘specific audience’. For example, on LinkedIn you know you have to say something that is relevant to careers, work, etc. because that’s what the space is about. On Facebook, you know your uncle and cousins are reading so that cramps your style and even your content quite a bit. Twitter puts too much of a premium on space so you either have to have an idea in a nutshell or something very current and breaking.
 
All these platforms have some or the other built-in constraints; naturally so because that’s what differentiates them from each other and that’s why they are all still alive and running. But the blog platform which was my very first social media venture remains to this day my top favourite. It gives me the scope to explore without any constraint on topic, without a care for who my audience is, without any specification as to word limit. That’s not to say that I treat it like a completely private space. Very long ago, at the time I first started this blog, I adopted this mantra that I read somewhere that anything you write on the internet is like writing on an open postcard. Maybe intended for a few but can be read by all and if it is read by anyone at all, I should be fine with it because that’s the nature of the territory. The consciousness of it being like an open postcard does work as a subtle constraint at the back of my mind but in a positive way because it makes me feel a sense of responsibility about my writing unlike what I would feel if it was my private diary. This means that I do reflect more about whether my writing conveys my message well, whether it is coherent, whether it could be misinterpreted, whether it is meaningful as a piece of writing. I wouldn’t worry about these things if it were meant for my eyes only but I think this extra bit of reflection helps me tremendously not only to hone my writing but also to evaluate my own ideas. If I am unable to express my ideas clearly for an imaginary reader, chances are that my ideas themselves aren’t clear. It is in this kneading of my own thoughts, ideas, arguments in the writing process that I feel I come to better understand not only the subject matter of my writing but myself as a subject…
 
When I go through my years and years of posts on this blog, I almost feel like I am getting newly introduced to this person who is actually myself… though I am usually surprised at how little I have changed! :)

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 6:19 pm 0 comments
Wednesday, December 05, 2018
 
Political correctness…gone mad?

I enjoy reading Facebook comments sections on interesting news headlines more than the actual articles. Commenters seem to compete amongst themselves to come up with the wittiest of comments no doubt in the hope of getting likes/reactions. I must admit I feel a bit guilty at having a laugh at what cannot but be sad and sometimes downright macabre happenings such as the lady who apparently killed her husband and was found out because her husband’s brother found a human tooth in the blender! The comments were a riot—missing family member, let’s check the blender kind—but as you would agree this was no laughing matter.
Apart from the dose of humour, what interests me about the comments is the window they offer to what and how people really think about any issue. What with the political atmosphere getting hotter by the minute, comments seem to have a way of spiralling down the political hole pretty quick. Words like ‘snowflake’, ‘libtard’, ‘leftie so and so’, ‘Trumpster’, ‘rightwing something’ depending on which side of the fence you’re on are bandied about all over the place. One such word is ‘PC’ or ‘Politically Correct’ which is made to sound like a curse as bad as any other. I have been recently thinking about how this word came to achieve such notoriety and whether there is something to it.
In terms of my personal leanings, I need to declare that I am more to the left than to the right… I wouldn’t want to say anything stronger than that because I have a distaste for adopting labels wholesale but in the present discussion not stating this could be rather misleading as to my intentions. I also feel that your chosen values make you identify with either side but sometimes not all of the values espoused on one or the other side might fit with your own position in which case it’s a bit uncomfortable to represent the entire territory. Which is why I often wonder that people are able to locate themselves on this spectrum easily.
Now, one of the values that is very important and dear to me is freedom of thought and expression. What I mean is that you should be able to freely hold any thought or express any opinion under the sun, keeping in mind that ‘your freedom ends where my nose begins’. It is of course not quite simple to figure out where another person’s nose might begin when it comes to expressing my views but I guess if the intention is to air an honest opinion or view rather than to insult or be disrespectful or to diminish another person’s rights, then probably I am not touching another person’s nose. It can always be argued that there is no way to judge someone’s intention and if someone is hurt or offended by what a person says then he shouldn’t have said it…but carried too far this would effectively mean that everyone should simply shut up because there is no telling what could offend or hurt someone or anyone. Even the truth for that matter could be hurtful! The point I am making is that it is important to have the right conditions for freedom of thought and expression; if people are not allowed to say what they want to say because it doesn’t agree with my opinions, it is not a freedom… freedom of thought and expression is essentially so only when I am able to voice the most outrageous of opinions without fear of being gagged…though I must be completely open for people to voice their own opinions against mine because that is where their nose starts.
To give a rather simplistic example, if someone were to suggest that ‘women are biologically suited only for certain occupations’, the reaction is rarely an argument countering this view. This and many other views that may seem conservative or small-minded or traditional or orthodox usually get shut down as if the author committed a heresy. One is not allowed to think such an opinion much less express it. My question is how can we limit freedom of thought and expression to ideas and opinions that we agree with and dismiss those that are contrary even if they are outlandish by our standards? Granted that one could say that ‘women’ as a group are being diminished by such an opinion but again if this opinion is being honestly suggested rather than with the intention to be disrespectful (a difficult distinction to make sometimes but let’s assume it is not for the sake of this argument), wouldn’t it serve our position better to call for the evidence and then to systematically argue against it rather than to pull down the author, in the process doing what we suspect him or her of doing to us?
I sometimes feel that there is some truth to the charge of ‘political correctness gone mad’ levelled at the left because it seems to me that we do expect people to be ‘politically correct’ when talking about certain topics, ideas, notions, opinions rather than honestly state what they think. I think so because I have noticed that if people were to say anything contradicting the dominant ‘politically correct’ point of view they are not given the benefit of an argument—they are immediately labelled to be something or the other. I wonder what good it does to shame a person to subscribe to a view publicly that he or she does not hold privately. In fact, I wonder if this isn’t the sort of thing that has made people like Trump appear on the world stage. People who are unable to voice what are seen as unsavoury views far from being converted to a different point of view have now found in Trump a leader who will fearlessly speak on their behalf, political correctness be damned. I increasingly see people in comments sections speaking out freely and even brazenly without any worry about how they may be perceived for their non-politically correct opinions likely because they feel emboldened by Trump’s actions. They can even say that climate change isn’t real without fear of being laughed at because the joke’s not on them anymore!
My point quite obviously isn’t that their views have merit but that whether they do or do not have merit, they need to be argued with rather than shut down because that to me is what free speech is about. I also feel that it is better to argue against an argument rather than the arguer because the argument has some chance of going away albeit a miniscule one but the arguer will not. I wonder if it isn’t better in the long run to actually know what’s simmering under the surface of people rather than it blowing in our faces in a Trump-like shape?
Simply put, to me, political correctness is antithetical to free speech. It makes people say things that they may not actually believe and it makes people not say things that they actually believe. The whole point of free speech is for people to be able to feel free to say what they really believe and an atmosphere that encourages ‘political correctness’ does the opposite of that. If the idea was for everyone to think the same views because those have been accepted as the correct kind of views by a certain section of the population, it certainly doesn’t achieve that. It achieves even less because while these views in their own right might have been credible, they are now merely ‘political correctness gone mad’.

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 4:34 am 0 comments
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