Being Human

I think I slightly remember that moment when i was playing in sand. This little six legged creature crawled upon my left hand and started running in between my fingers. But this wasn’t what made that moment memorable. As I lay my other hand parallel to my left, the ant unknowingly jumped over to it. Still I think you would say, “So what! That’s not a big thing” and actually you are right. There is no big deal about it but the fact that I as a normal Homo sapiens with no Superman powers was able to construct a path for that little thing. Where ever I laid my hands it followed, they just had to be connected to each other. The question that ponders in my mind after speculating that very situation was “Are we any different?” is there anyone or any form out there guiding us, making paths for our footsteps to follow. Or are we just thrived away with our own free will and the fate of the universe lay on our dreaded hands. These are some of the questions that we continually seek in our entire life and upon finding their answers we feel fulfilled. No, I haven’t found the answers yet otherwise I would have straight away spoken it to you in the first place. Now wouldn’t that be saving a huge amount of time? I’m just going to discuss with you few of the aspects that make us what we are. Faith, trust, love, knowledge and so on all becoming a part of being human.

Recently, the Japan fiasco of the horrible earthquake and the tsunami has brought upon the whole world to a shocking stand still. Many lives have been lost and many unknown lay buried down under some debris. What’s intriguing is that people all around the world are praying for these tormented souls. Now don’t think of me as a preacher of Satan because in a way I think this is a very spectacular thing. There are emails and texts flowing across the globe about mass praying and mourning at 9:30 in the night (or any other time of the day) for people who they have never met in their entire life. Now let’s underline the fact, we know that we are not physically going to be present in Japan and help out those poor people. Also there is no decibel meter around the world that could measure the pain these unfortunate people are suffering from, but still we have that little twitch in our heart whenever we see any news report portraying the sick figures of the casualties. Still we do it, how do we do it? Why do we do it? Is it a part of being human? Feeling the pain though we are sitting in our fully air conditioned homes on one of the most comfortable couches that money could buy?

It’s quite ironical isn’t it, but yet again who says life is a straight one dimensional line. We have what people term as compassion, a completely virtual thing embedded in us which subjects us to these kinds of feelings and emotions. It exists in other species too but please someone tell me which species kneels down in the name of lord and cry their hearts out for those who lay clinging on their last beats in some corner of the earth. I’m not questioning that this sort of a ritual is done or rather preached only by others. Believe me I follow these guidelines myself, not merely subjected to strangers but also to those I know dearly i.e. my friends and family. I pray for their happiness and I want them to prosper, which leads me to the next part of being human. There are very few species in nature that are confided in a family comprising of parents, children and lover. Ant’s lives in groups, birds leave their children when they grow with their shining feathers, heck snakes even eat their children if they feel a bit hungry. Phew! It’s good that we are not like them well at least not all of us. But why it was that nature had a different plan for us or rather many would say GOD had a different plan for each and every being on earth, giving each being a unique blueprint to follow. Why not enjoy the sheer goodness of certainty? Just because it’s boring and there is no fun involved. Well if this is so then GOD is none other like The Rich Uncle Pennybags from the Monopoly. But that’s the way it is and we pretty much can’t do anything about it and most of us rather prefer not to. Why should we also, families provide a healthy and most importantly a supportive kind of environment. At least they are supposed to. And it’s because of this we incur a feeling called affection. It binds us to those not only pertaining to one of our own kind but to a broader audience like pets or even non-living things like old college jeans, shirt and the list goes on.

One of the most funnies and craziest part of being human which I found is ‘faith’. Faith is simply having a virtue about not rationalising over things. It is, because it is. There is GOD because people say so. You would say that GOD is not at all busy and listens to what each and every one has to say and also at the same time. If this is so then you must believe Santa Claus to be real, well he delivers each and every gift to everyone in their chimneys and strikingly fits into it too. Eats up all the cookies and still have no sugar in his system. A guy that old couldn’t survive a single day so we approve his non-existence but a guy talking to billions of people oh yeah! He exists. Why this anomaly exists? It’s all because of faith that have seeded in us that yes there is a force that exist out there and in us too. Maybe because of the elaborate ancient scriptures that prevails though being a bit sceptical. And maybe, just maybe, after many decades ago people would believe in existence of Platform 9 ¾, the harry potter, the avatar land and what not. It’s just like the triple point of water, every form exists at the same time though their existence is defined at different temperature levels or rather I must say at different time. When I walk along the road and the parallel placed street lights appear to increase their proximity among themselves, the whole world starts to converge to a line. What I mean is that future is quite unpredictable, but still we are sometime so affirmative about our gut feeling that “yes it’s going to rain today” and “oh I just know that she’s going to say NO” and so on. It’s what we call the sixth sense. Now this is the only power which I believe what we possess but can only be stipulated and not be proven scientifically because there are no solid facts. Amazingly it’s there with the other species too. Dogs, fishes, birds etc. they all come to know whenever an earthquake strikes and it’s all biologically implanted in their body structure and all the medical jargon and the mumbo jumbo which thank god I am not aware of. This is what faith does to us, makes us believe yet being irrational at the same time, thus blinding us or the truth. Science doesn’t prove its stories without being rational about it. So is science a part of being human? We certainly can’t live with two different contradicting stories. It’s either the big bang or the steady state theory and nothing in between either one or zero. All of these speculations just point to a common point which is that we all are crazy people living in a far crazier world. The power of the nucleus being handed over to 1 year old, BANG! Our very own existence being an anomaly itself or might be a small error indented by some coffee stain on the blue print of the Big Man’s project, trying to erase itself out slowly to Armageddon.

So the final question to which we arrive is “What should we do?” Hey don’t look at me. How could I know, I’m only human.

Published in Avant Garde 2011, LitSoc.