I enjoy having conversations with my brother. I tend to be more philosophically inclined and he is practical. I am a pessimist (realist I like to think) and he's an optimist. I think what I like is he shows me a different perspective to things. Not a rose-tinted glasses perspective. That I wouldn't buy. But that there are other ways to see things as they really are. Or the way I see things may not be as bad as they really are. Though I challenge him, a part of me feels comforted. I marvel sometimes at how he manages to remain so optimistic. He's been through a lot in the past few years, through stuff that would have knocked the optimism out of anyone. But he still seems to have got it. I admire that I must say. I don't think I could have survived the things that he went through but those kinds of things wouldn't have happened to me because they require being in situations I am too scared to put myself in. I would never take those kinds of risks. I am a scaredy anxious cat :( I wish I could be more dare devil, more throw caution to the winds, to hell with it all, etc. But I am not. Which is not the bigger issue. The bigger issue is in spite of that I live life with a worry of what could happen, what I did wrong, and so on. Though I don't even do anything... I suppose that's why it's fascinating for me to learn how someone can be such an opposite and still be so open to experience, free... I wish it would infect me, that spirit. It feels nice to be buoyed up by it even if for a little...

Interesting quotes on time from Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain:

"...we say a thing is "brought about" by time. What sort of thing? Change?"

"Only in time was there progress; in eternity there was none, nor any politics or eloquence either"?

I have never really pondered on the idea of time in the raw too much. I suppose in a way memory, hindsight, foresight, planning, etc are all a function of time? If I am looking back, I am pondering on time? If I am thinking about the future, I am pondering on time? But what I mean is, these things relate to time when one is inside of time but how would one think about time from outside of it, as a concept? I wonder if we did not have bodies that showed the ongoing marks of time, would time matter to us the same way? We keep count of our time so to speak with birthdays, new year's, etc, but why really, or would we if we did not have finite lives? An achievement of sorts... to win time, buy time, overcome time... 

I want to chew on all this a bit more but it's one of those odd nights for me, strangely, when I am in something of a cusp of both time and space... Tonight I am in one place, tomorrow I will be in another, and day after I will be in Dubai—4 hours behind in time. In the middle of all this I will be experiencing a space, this hotel at Beijing airport for a bit. Have you ever had a meal or a dish at some place you were just passing by and thought about it fondly, wished you could go back in time or visit it again in the future, and have it? So last year when I stopped over at this hotel, I ordered a mushroom soup. I loved it so much, I ordered the soup again... hehe! and ever since then, I have wanted to try this soup again. Should we say time brings about some things after all ;)

I have had so much going on that I did not have much time to reflect and when I reflected, I had no time to write, and now when I think about what I was going to write, my mind draws a blank. It feels empty. But maybe that's not right... It's perhaps too full and cannot focus on any one thing in particular. I don't know...

On my last day, many students made me feel special. Some took pics with me... it was quite heartwarming. I feel like Chinese students tend to connect with a teacher in a far more personal or relational way, not the same as say a British student. It's like they are not receiving ideas or instructions transactionally but trying to connect to the person, especially the more engaged among them. Reminds me of how in our Indian system we used to have the idea of a 'guru'. A guru means a teacher/mentor but it's much more. You look up to a guru the way you look up to a parent. The English language doesn't seem to have a word to capture the depth of it.

Reminds me of something I wanted to write about a few weeks ago. It was a conversation during lunch. We were talking about the immense variety of food in the canteen and I was asked what the canteen food in my college was like. The question unravelled me. My mind couldn't come up with an answer on the spot. I groped for it and said what seemed very close: we rarely went to the canteen because there were many restaurants and places to eat outside. Later I went back to the question. The fact is I always want to give an honest answer but I feel like most people are not looking for that kind of honesty or detail when they are making casual talk. That is something I have to be conscious about. I had forgotten that most colleges in Mumbai including mine at the time ended at 1.00ish so I didn't need to have lunch outside. My house was barely 15 minutes away. So only on rare occasions did I have outside food and very rarely in the canteen... I didn't have much money to spend you see ;) It was just as well I went with the polite answer…

"The temporal immortality of the soul of man, that is to say, its eternal survival also after death, is not only in no way guaranteed, but this assumption in the first place will not do for us what we always tried to make it do. Is a riddle solved by the fact that I survive forever? Is this eternal life not as enigmatic as our present one? The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time."

~ Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

This makes me think… Would I puzzle over the meaning of life as I do now if I did not have to face death? Isn't it my mortality that makes life a riddle to solve for me? I need to know the point of my being here for this short while, or, to know if it is not this short at all. I have little time to find out the point and to live it... and no way of being sure if I am right. Isn't that what adds poignancy to the ‘riddle’. It's a living riddle really, an existential one, not an abstract one. But would it be 'existential' in the same way if we were never to cease to exist? Would the word 'existence' mean anything when there is no opposite of it?

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Napoleon, when hearing about Laplace's latest book, said, 'M. Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its creator.'

Laplace responds, 'Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là. (I had no need of that hypothesis.)

~Pierre-Simon Laplace