Fragmented Brain Matter » ramblings

Passion / Reason

bhowmik — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 14:12:29 +0000

pas•sion |ˈpa sh ən|
noun
1. strong and barely controllable emotion.

Have you ever heard how your voice sounds coming through the amplifiers of passion?

There is a distinct resonance that it has, an almost unbreakable quality which transcends reason. And there in lies the problem.

Passion is all consuming. It strains the reins of reason, which is all that channels it to fulfil its destiny.

Passion clouds Reason.

To make one heard the other has to be masked.

Passion disregards the need for reason to channel itself. While reason heeds not the wild notions of passion.

Ignorant are they both … They do not realise that it is not in their individuality that they should revel, but in their duality.

Within each is hidden a secret desire to be what the other is and within each is the power to obliterate the other.

Find Equilibrium and there lies the key

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Blogging

bhowmik — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 10:20:29 +0000

I am inherently a very private person. Talking about what i am thinking or feeling is extremely difficult for me. I believe i am a good listener. I can sit and listen to others for hours in fact i encourage others to talk to me. I love it when somebody can talk to me about whats on their mind, I love it when somebody argues with me about whats on their mind, the insight and passion and the perspective that each person brings to situations which are probably an everyday occurrence fascinates me. But when it come to me doing it …. i always hesitate

As a result i am a hesitant blogger. I find it difficult to write about things which are private and considering my temperament pretty much everything is private

Here is where i make an attempt to try and come out of my shell.

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people …

bhowmik — Fri, 29 May 2009 21:47:55 +0000

Interacting with people is a very strange thing. With a little over 6 and a half billion people in the world you are bound to find disparities in how people are.

But then you come across incidents that reaffirm your faith in humanity and then again something happens that completely shatters your belief in the same quality.

I guess its also relative to the context you are looking from and how you see people. Its all relative to what you want out of the interaction and do you get it or not. If yes then its great and if not then its crap.

The only thing i can deduce or learn is that there’s a lot of jerk’s out there and there’s decent people out there each of us has our share of the freaks we are going to bump into. As long as we stop judging people frequently and stereotyping them we should be fine.
Its all about limiting expectations.

But then again how can we not have an opinion. Isn’t it the easy way out – Get what you need/want and then move on without pondering too much about the specifics – Isn’t that a very selfish (for lack of a better word) way to pass through life?

Oh dear … One of those early morning philosophical outbursts … pardon me for the grief

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pictures …

bhowmik — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 02:42:00 +0000

The thing with pictures is their ability to tell a story. Their ability to be able to let you weave your own story around them. They can move you, annoy you, humour you.

They have the power to convey.

Maybe the only place where silence is more captivating than the visual impact on the viewer. At times you see pictures which just scream for an accompanying commentary because the silence is too haunting and you just want to turn your eyes away not wanting to know what is behind them while at the same time not able to turn away.

Its a funny world…

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ethics…

bhowmik — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 04:23:00 +0000

How often are we placed in a situation where we have to do the right thing? ethically right, morally right? how many of us actually think before doing if whether what we are doing is ethically right? is it morally right?

The concept, the idea of Ethics is a very fragile one, it changes from person to person and from situation to situation, we build a frame of reference throughout our lives as we go forward and keep referring to that when faced with situations where we have to decide, what happens when we come across a situation where there is no frame of reference or we come across a situation we’ve never encountered before nor have we heard of someone coming across something like that.

At what cost should you draw a line while doing what is “ethical” for that situation?

Does not doing the right thing mean doing the right thing even when no one is watching? is the fact that we are doing the right thing motivation enough to do the right thing even when we know that nobody is watching or nobody will ever know?

At my age I am still building a frame of reference, I can hardly say that I have enough reference points but what i do have is too many situations which make me think almost on a weekly basis and at times on a daily basis and it feels as if this is a never ending quest for reference points, there are too many different people in the world and too many points of views, and one man’s poison is anothers meat. The reference points keep on accumulating and at times even shifting.

What I need is another way to actually figure out what is right. I am by no means a saint nor do I claim to do the right thing always, although I do make an effort, but I am also guilty of actively skirting the ethics issue many a times.

And this in itself raises a question in my mind, how often do we have moments when we can say in retrospect that we did the right thing? Do morals hold any value these days?

How do you decide at times when you have no previous frame of reference, how much are you willing to pontificate on a decision for which you are not sure of the right moral or ethical ground? Is it easier to just go by what your gut feeling tells you is a lot less stressful but maybe not completely ethical?

I am reading Mahatma Gandhi’s “My Experiments With Truth” and in one chapter he talks about how he stole some gold from his brother’s chain to pay off a debt but then his conscience riddled him so much that he had to tell his father about it. And what affected him more was his father’s reaction, instead of getting angry his father was surprised and couldn’t help himself from crying at his youngest son’s honesty and this affected the young Gandhi more than a reprimand from his father would have.

What stayed in my mind from this episode is the fact that Mahatma Gandhi was only around 14-15 years old at the time of this incident, how does a child that young formulate a frame of reference what does he look towards when deciding what is the right thing? Can a child that young even have a conscience which is developed enough to needle him when he does the wrong thing?

Is it enough to trust your instinct when trying to be ethical? Can you be ethical all the time? Can you justify not being ethical at times?
Is it enough to do the right thing as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody? What if doing the right thing will hurt somebody else? What if doing the right thing will not hurt anybody except you?

Doing the right thing doesn’t mean that you have done something wrong for which you have to make amends, rather, the way I define it, is more of a situation where you are in a dilemma about what is the right course of action and each such situation is unique in its own way, each situation has to be dealt with in its entirety and a particular context and after the situation has finished we may decide how, if at all, it may serve as a reference point.

ethical dilemma.

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