Vaccuum of thought.......

Hi again everyone......after a loooong gap!

Time's at a high premium nowadays as thesis submission is round the corner - the culmination of two years of a tumultuous journey through the annals of science, pawing over the trails of thought, observation, reasoning, doubt, despair and finally childish joy! This article is not intended to be a lesson in either of the above, but a candid collage of some thoughts on "thought" I realized mainly in the last 2 years and want to share before bidding farewell to this intellectual haven!

I was watching this commercial the other day proclaiming in an ultra-cool genre "Thinking is such a waste of time!", and i said to myself - "Wow!", now that punchline required some serious thought! Isn't it extremely rare nowadays to find simple, logical and visionary thought around us? I mean the costliest thing available in the global market is probably sound logic or balanced thought! The world is just so overflowing with extremities and imbalances, sentimentalists and sensationalists, unreal cynicism and rabid oversimplification, pseudo-intellectuals and knee-jerk administrators ....... in short, thought seems to be at an all-time low in a world that tends to believe "Thinking is such a waste of time!".

As soon as one hears of the word "intellectual", "education" springs to the mind - doesn't it? But to think of it, most education only trains the mind in ideas and concepts ...... it only helps us getting through volumes of text and instructions to the ultimate destination - ability to think! But it is possible to essentially "think" without an academic pedigree! Recent research pretty conclusively showed that the centers of learning and thinking in the human brain were not only distinct but quite independent of each other! Surprising? Well, quite a few of us would be surprised to realize how little we know or indeed think about so many things we take for granted as "known" or "thought through".......maybe after reading a good book, attending an enlightening talk or just asking ourselves some simple and tough questions! But somehow the clarity and balance of thought in most matters are highly weighted by prejudice, misinformation, emotionality or outright ignorance! So the thing comes down to respecting knowledge as ability to think, correlate and realize - something we intellectuals and "educated" beings rarely ever do! That might be why the Noam Chomskies, Richard Dawkins, George Orwells and Arundhati Roys are not fashionable celebrities or "cool" commodities - even though they happen to be the leading philosophers of our time and adhere to the highest values of intellectual integrity, some of us rather prefer to label them as "leftists", "non-believers", "illusionists" or "sympathisers of extremism"! Most of our minds are just ignorant of the more important things in the world and are confined by us to our little cocoons filled with convenient inconsequential fodder to "think" on - we tend to put so much brain into petty matters that we often miss out on the larger picture!

Perhaps the most intellectually rewarding human experiences are not learning things, but two facets of ordinary daily existence - realization and correlation! Isn't the real application of any knowledge only possible on realizing the learning? - whether it is music, sports, science, literature or even cooking! The second aspect of "thought" most lacking in our immediate conscience is "correlation" - as my thesis supervisor once said very truly, "The time I realized that fluid mechanics and thermodynamics were intricately related was when I actually understood both subjects" - similarly it is not really possible to think about or through anything in isolation.....this world is a giant continuity of beautiful truths - sometimes impossible to comprehend, but beautiful none the less - and literature, maths and science are just convenient, approximate attempts to segment the one giant truth! Thinking emanates in the human mind and manifests in different forms for different fields of life.......but the need for exercising the grey cells is universal for the human race........not only for taking great strides in time, but more importantly for keeping one's own self on the right track and preventing the misuse of intellect!

So friends, we don't have to go mad or become a sadist or loner to realize the importance and power of "thinking". Let's try to take interest in different things outside our little cocoons, respect knowledge and not degrees, and begin to appreciate the beauty of a broader understanding of life in simple terms....do we really need to be nerds to do that? In the list of Nobel achievements across all fields, you will find a lot more of very simple and broad thinking than complex theories....so, yes, the answer is that we do not need to be "nerd" or gifted in any particular way in order to be able to think, because each one of us is born with it. In the complex world of today, we need to constantly climb out of virtual boxes of knowledge that surround us from time to time........once outside we can breathe the fresh air of freedom and feel the radiance of truth....there is a need to unlearn the past to learn new things with a child's enthusiasm...."unthink" opinions and decisions in order to rethink about matters we already made up our minds on...."applying thought" to answer the right questions......and now, more than ever before, not just thinking on information but through it.......making sure the pen (mind) remains mightier than the sword!!! Not "thinking is such a waste of time"!

"Information is not knowledge." - Albert Einstein