The End II

This poem is an afterthought of my own story, The End. This started as a thought and now rests as a full fledged poem. One is incomplete without the other. Even though you can understand this as a stand alone piece, it is not meant to be one.

My brothers,
Unknown,
Took your life,
They took
What you held dear.

I do not know
What they did,
I do not know
Why they did
What they did.

Now you stand
In front of me,
Claiming revenge,
Claiming
An eye for an eye.

I did not kill,
I did not plunder,
I did not ravage,
I did not murder,
I did not destroy.

Why do you
Do that to me,
When I did
Nothing
Directly to you?

You can take,
Take my heart,
Take my soul,
Take my life,
If it, you, satisfies.

If
My blood,
Soothes your,
Drink my friend,
Drink till the end.

~Aditya

Truth

This post has its origins with a question that I was asked - is truth absolute, or is it relative.

Truth is supposed to be a fact verified. It is supposed to be conformity to reality, and a value near to a true value. This brings us to the question, whose reality, whose verification and who is the person who sets the true value.

The process of knowing the truth is simple, know the fact to be verified, have the prerequisite knowledge, and cross verify this fact against the knowledge. This means that of the three steps two are ours. The knowledge and the testing process are ours.

When there is two-thirds of the truth that is subjective, how can truth be objective? How can it be absolute?

The truth is always relative.

Let as assume that there is some fact, which has not been verified yet. As long as someone does not know of its existence, it is not truth. It has no bearing on anything and it does as good as not exist at all. The reason being until someone can acknowledge its presence there is not effect of its existence.

When the first person perceives it, he shall perceive it according to the set of rules that he has formed for himself. He shall perceive that fact according to his own knowledge and shall state it to be a truth for the first time. This is the first truth and it is relative.

As time passes, more and more people will perceive the same fact and shall test its authenticity based on the knowledge and rules that they possess. This is to say that each person shall take this relative truth relatively. When they too come to the same conclusion based on their own cognitive processes, the authenticity is established. More the people who are in accord, more is the strength of the truth. If there is not one dissenting voice among the crowd, the truth shall get to be absolute.

Regardless of whether the fact is absolute truth, perceived by many to be the same thing, or relative, the moment I see it and start applying my thought process to understand it, it becomes relative. If my conclusions agree with the majority, the authenticity is enhanced, if not I become a dissenting voice. In the case of the latter, one would need to go over the truth forming process one again to ensure that they have the knowledge required and have used the correct cognitive processes for coming to the conclusion about the fact.

Truth seen for the first time
Is relative,
It is mine, it is new.
You agree, so does he,
We make it absolute.
When I see it anew,
I see it with my senses
It becomes relative.
Truth to me,
Is never truth to you.

God and Man

This post is inspired by the comment on Suchitra's Nandi

Man of flesh
To god of stone
Hear with stony silence
Words of lament
Words of pain.
Give me what I need
Give me what I want
Do not let me go alone,
Stay beside,
Do not tell me you are there.

Man of flesh
To god of heart
Hear my heart
As it cries out to you.
I hold you inside
For outside I mistrust
I hold you inside
For inside
Mine is truth
Truth is mine.

Man of flesh
To god of flesh
You gave me form
Which I gave you
Hold on to me
I hold on to you
Look out for me
Look out at me
For I can’t
Look you out

1st May 2007
~Aditya

Reason

Why does man exist? What was the reason behind his birth? Is there a reason what he is, what he wants to be, and what he is to become? Is there a reason?

If there is one thing that I have seen in the last year, it is this. Reason is supreme. I can say this with an amount of certainty. I hope that by the end of this post, I shall be able to say why.

A strange thought occurred to me today. Which would I take if I were given the choice between honesty, truth, reason, knowledge, and emotion? Without a moment of thought, I knew the answer. It is reason.

I shall begin with what is reason. Reason is cause. Reason is effect. Reason is like the root of a tree hidden from sight. Reason is the leaves that we see.

The dictionary gave me the meanings when I asked. There are six of them:
• A rational motive for a belief or action
• An explanation for the cause of some phenomenon
• The capacity for rational thought or inference or discrimination
• The state of having good sense and sound judgment
• A justification for something existing or happening
• A fact that logically justifies some premise or conclusion

I will go back to truth, emotion, honesty, knowledge, and reason.

If asked to order the above in the increasing order of importance I would have emotion, honesty, truth, knowledge and then finally reason.

Emotion is the human reaction to any given situation. This act requires the least thought. It is based on previous experiences, desires, and needs. There is irrationality when it comes to emotion. I need not elaborate on this; everyone has been in acceptance for centuries that to act on emotion is foolishness.

Honesty is, well being honest. It is saying what one perceives to be the truth at all points in time, it is making sure that one does not defraud anyone; one does not commit a crime, is free from any thoughts of doing the above, and is without pretensions. How important is this? The reason that I do not rate this as important is because it is derived from others. It does not have any importance of its own. One knows that one commits a crime when one knows what the laws that he/she is governed by are. One knows that one is speaking the truth when one knows what true and false is. One knows what honesty is only by knowing what dishonesty is and taking care not to follow that. How can something that does not have any meaning of its own be important?

This brings us to truth. Truth is fact verified. It is conformity to reality and actuality. Logically, one would think how does one know what is real and what is not? How does one know what is reality and what is a mirage? How can one differentiate between what is actual and what is not? The answer is from three steps. Step one – know the fact. Step two – know the premise against which it has to be verified. Step three – know the process of verification. When all these three are applied together, we get what is truth and what is not. This means that truth itself is derived from something else. It is knowledge.

Knowledge is the result of three things, perception, learning, and reasoning. I am not born with knowledge. I gain it by asking questions. I gain it by experimenting and trying to find out what caused the result of that experiment. I know because I learn, I know because I perceive and I know because I reason. This makes reasoning above knowledge.

Learning and perception, I have not touched. The reason being learning is a direct result of reasoning. I learn when I reason why, how, when, where, and what. Perception is too vague and differs from person to person.

That leaves reason. Reason is the cause. When one thinks about why something happens, one shall always conclude, everything happens because of a reason. Everything happens for a reason. When one thinks about what happened, we are reasoning what happened.

Reason is the effect. When one does something, the result is the reason that someone did the thing in the first place. One likes to think that everything they do has a well thought reason behind it.

Reason is knowledge,
I ask, so I learn.
Reason is truth,
I know, I asked, I learnt.
Reason is honesty,
I check, I knew, I asked, I learnt.
Reason is emotion,
I feel, I know why, I asked how.
Reason is reason,
I am because I reason.

She

Her breathe on my chest
As she lay beside, asleep,
Blew as a cyclone, To the depth of my heart.

The words I read in her eyes,
Say much more than her speech can,
The radiance of a full moon raising,
In the black of her eyes.

Divine music flows out,
With every word she sings,
Music like never heard before,
Reaches my tormented soul, brings peace.

And as she lay beside me,
Sleeping unfazed by this world around,
A calmer face, you’d never see,
Radiant like the rising sun.

Waves on a windy morning,
As she danced all around you,
You see in her bouncing tresses.

The way that her cheeks puff to a smile,
When the clouds of pink arise,
Pink as seen in a new born rose.

The birds start to chirp,
On seeing her every morn,
Without any make up,
Purer than the nature around.

She’d never walk at all,
Seemed to dance wherever she went,
Taking you along, a new life to behold.

~Aditya

Insane and Sane

Insane or sane,
I do not know.
The feeling I feel,
I never felt before.
Insane, I hope not,
Sane, I think not.

Insane or sane,
I do not know.
A way seems lost,
A fear seems found.
Hope not insane,
Feel not sane.

~Aditya

The Bride

She stands there at the doorway,
Watching every approaching face,
Searching for the face, she last saw,
On the day she was in silk and lace.

That day is still vivid in her memory,
When she was taken into a man’s life,
The pride that made her heart swell,
When she became a soldier’s wife.

The very next day the war began,
A war fought for the sake of peace.
“A soldier first, a husband next”, he said,
“I have to go and fight till the guns cease.”

She gave a husband to fight a war
With persons whom she did not hate.
Now she waits for him to return,
Knowing that it is in the hands of fate.

Many a mother have given their sons,
To die for the motherland of everyone.
Sons, born to a fathers face, unknown,
Nor do they realize they shall not come.

As she waits for him to return home,
In person, either in life, or in death,
The post man becomes her daily friend,
Lest her husband sneak up to her in stealth.

17th October 2003

~Aditya

Absence of Light

Absence of light around one
Keeps everything in the darkness.
One shall not see the shadow,
Behind the man we see, hidden.

Put the man in lights, ablaze,
The shadow comes out in the open,
The man is now standing alone,
Gone away his shadow.

The light is coming from here,
With the man standing before it,
The shadow is pointing away from him,
Away from the direction of light.

Put your world into the light
To see what with you is good,
So that the bad shall shrink away,
Driven by the light you receive.

Unless you come into the light,
You shall be blind to all,
As absence of light around
Keeps everything in the dark.

~Aditya

War and Peace

The world’s at peace
Wars not fought.
My mind’s at war
With an enemy hidden
No face, no body
No figure for me to wound.
Wounding it is, me,
To the depth of my soul.
My soul’s bleeding
And the wound’s too deep.
The world’s at peace,
The war’s inside me.

~Aditya

Who is next?

The guns of battle sound all around me,
A thousand cannons and a million guns
Each more devastating than the one before.
Death is free and is running amok,
The faceless man on the other side,
A side not your, containing enemies,
One that you have never met before,
Nor shall you ever meet again.
Madness to kill a man, unknown
A reason to do you have none.
What sin did he commit my dear friend,
The only sin, that he is from the other side.
He shall never see the face of his child
Holding on to its mother frail hands,
As they sit up looking at the winding road
Waiting for the day their love shall return.
But due to a stray bullet from your gun,
Those lonely eyes that scan the horizon
Shall keep scanning for the rest of their lives,
Searching for a soul that shall never return,.
The blood that stains your hands now,
A deed committed in the name of patriotism,
A word for frenzied murderous fervor,
You shall never wash it off your soul.
I am no better than any of those murderers,
I too have taken lives, some died before
Others still living, wishing they were dead
Worthless lives they lead, waiting to die.
Now I sit here waiting for the night
To come and envelop my tortured life.
Give me respite from all the killing
A time to rest, to plan whom to kill tomorrow.


~Aditya