SATYA. KYA HAI ? (What is the truth?)

"SATYA  KYA  HAI" ?
(what is the truth?)

 
One day the great philosopher Socrates came upon an acquaintance who ran up to him excitedly and said, "Do you know what I just heard about one of your students?"

"Wait a moment," Socrates replied, "Before you tell me I'd like you to pass a little test. It's called the Test of Three."

"Three?"

"That's right," Socrates continued. "Before you talk to me about my student let's take a moment to test what you're going to say.

The first test is Truth. Have you made absolutely sure that what you are about to tell me is true?"

"Oh no," the man said, "actually I just heard about it."

"All right," said Socrates. "So you don't really know if it's true or not. Now let's try the second test, the test of Goodness. Is what you are about to tell me about my student something good?"

"No, on the contrary..."

"So," Socrates interrupted, "you want to tell me something bad about him even though you're not certain it's true?"

The man shrugged, a little embarrassed.

Socrates continued. "You may still pass though, because there is a third test - the filter of Usefulness. Is what you want to tell me about my student going to be useful to me?"

"Well it....no, not really..."

"Well," concluded Socrates, "if what you want to tell me is neither True nor Good nor even Useful, why tell it to me at all!"

The problem with our human race is that we are news mongers. It starts with the first cup of morning  tea when we pick up the newspaper and get brainwashed. And then there is the bombardment of a hundted TV channels, each presenting its own version of the TRUTH.Everything there is supposed to be true. An advertiser claims that his brand of toothpaste is better than the rest. Years later we find at our cost that it was not true. Same thing with claims about tonics, snacks and houses on sale and other things. And to confound the matter celebrities are roped in to drive it into your memory cells that truth, and nothing but the truth, is being told. No legal responsibilities fixed on celebrities . And we just remember the falsehoods of  Goebbel !

Even the BBC is now suspect ! Read this:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/bbc-accused-of-telling-more-half-truths-and-lies-than-the-nazis-at-snp-conference-a6697761.html

The age of internet is a nightmare. You type something absolutely false and with a click it spreads faster than wildfire across the world. A simple,honest, peace loving citizen does not know what to believe.

That reminds me of a poem by  one of our most respected leaders. Here it is :

                        सत्य क्या है ?
                          यक्ष प्रश्न
            ~ अटल बिहारी वाजपेयी

-------------------
जो कल थे,
वे आज नहीं हैं ।
जो आज हैं,
वे कल नहीं होंगे ।
होने, न होने का क्रम,
इसी तरह चलता रहेगा,
हम हैं, हम रहेंगे,
यह भ्रम भी सदा पलता रहेगा । . . . . .

सत्य क्या है?
होना या न होना?
या दोनों ही सत्य हैं?
जो है, उसका होना सत्य है,
जो नहीं है, उसका न होना सत्य है ।
मुझे लगता है कि
होना-न-होना एक ही सत्य के
दो आयाम हैं,
शेष सब समझ का फेर,
बुद्धि के व्यायाम हैं ।
किन्तु न होने के बाद क्या होता है,
यह प्रश्न अनुत्तरित है ।. . . . . .

प्रत्येक नया नचिकेता,
इस प्रश्न की खोज में लगा है ।
सभी साधकों को इस प्रश्न ने ठगा है ।
शायद यह प्रश्न, प्रश्न ही रहेगा।
यदि कुछ प्रश्न अनुत्तरित रहें
तो इसमें बुराई क्या है?
हाँ, खोज का सिलसिला न रुके,
धर्म की अनुभूति,
विज्ञान का अनुसंधान,
एक दिन, अवश्य ही
रुद्ध द्वार खोलेगा।
प्रश्न पूछने के बजाय
यक्ष स्वयं उत्तर बोलेगा ।

****

MAYA -The deception

" MAYA - the deception"

We were in a moving train.The boy must have been four year old. He was quite excited..This was perhaps the first time he was having a train ride and he was thoroughly enjoying it.

The boy had just peeped out of the train's  window when the train was moving over a level crossing. One moment the waiting road traffic was far ahead of the window. The next moment it had swept past and gone.

The boy wanted to know why these waiting cars and trucks had rushed past us when they were not moving. His father tried unsuccessfully to explain it to him and, after a succession of questions from the boy, he slapped him hard.

I felt bad. Not because the boy got slapped. He was in any case born to get a lot more beating later in school soon. Those were the salad days of school masters - "spare the rod and spoil the child."  I felt sorry because a Fundamental Question had been raised and  remained unanswered : The WHY of this relative, deceptive, world.

You see the Sun rising in the east in the morning. Well it is not rising. It is a perfect case of deception. It is, as a matter of fact just the other way round. You are in fact moving and the irony is that you can't feel it.. . . . . You see a bright star in the moonless dark sky at night. Well it is quite likeky that it is not there at all now. If it is five hundred light years away that means that what you are witnessing was there five hundred years back - that is, before Babur came to India..  The star may have disintegrated a long time back. . . . . . You lie in your cot under the soundless stillness of a  starry night. The silence is there because you cannot hear that deafening cosmic noise, because your range of hearing is very limited. A normal ear will hear sounds only within the range of 20-130 db though the universe is far  too noisy and  constantly exploding. And to stretch the facts to an eerie level, there may be, as you read this blog,  persons from another planet sitting right next to you  in your room, watching you. You power to "see" is also limited to the range of spectum known as VIBGYOR and you would not see them if they are in vibrations outside this range.

Javier Sotomayor (Cuba) is the current men's record holder with a jump of 2.45 m (8 ft 0 1⁄ 4 in) set in 1993 – the longest standing record in the history of the men's high jump. But on the surface of the moon even a kid can break this record because a high jump is also relative to the gravitational pull.

It is all RELATIVE !

There is an anecdote of Einstein explaining his theory of relativity to a layman. It was printed in “The New York Times” in March 1929 :

“When you sit with a nice girl for two hours you think it’s only a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove for a minute you think it’s two hours. That’s relativity.”

The ancient people of India had, not without reason,  called this world  a web of deception  - MAYA !

***

THE PROBLEM WITH APPLE

"THE PROBLEM WITH APPLE"

It was the year 1666 C.E. The plague had closed many public buildings and meetings. Newton had to leave Cambridge. He shifted to Woolsthorpe Manor, near Grantham in Lincolnshire, the house where he was born, to contemplate the stellar problems he had been pursuing at the university.

He was sitting under a tree obsessed with the problem of the orbit of the Moon around the Earth and the influence of gravity.

And then that Apple fell on his head! And the students of physics got an additioal "LAW " to cope with :

" . . . . that any two bodies in the universe attract each other with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. " (Demands quite a fine- tuning of mind to grasp the meaning!)

I find apples creating problems everywhere. ADAM, the first man on planet Earth, soon got into serious trouble after eating an apple. He was thrown out of the garden of Eden after he shared one with Eve. He should have avoided eating it. He had clear instructions  There were other fruit trees too and there was no ban on eating any other fruits. He could have eaten an Alfonso mango or a banana. And see how the humankind now  suffers the curse for that solitary apple. There seem to have been no curses on the human race before Adam and Eve disobeyed. (Well there was no human race for that matter!)

You know the story of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs". The apple is here too. Just to make you recall it with ease here is an excerpt:

" . . . .After turning into the Witch, the
Queen declares that Snow White should suffer "a special sort of death". Looking through her spellbook, she comes to the recipe for the Sleeping Death, and, reading of the poisoned apple's effects, decides that it's the perfect way to get rid of her . . . ."

The question here is " Why an apple? why not a pineapple ?" . And the  answer is that Apple creates problems. Elementary Dr. Watson!

Talking of these medical chaps  called "doctors", apple has been declared a threat to their profession. Remember what your Grandma had told you : AN APPLE A DAY KEEPS THE DOCTOR AWAY! I I am not very sure about the other "doctors" -  the PhD and D.Litts - but I guess their families also avoids eating apples to be on the safe side. I know atleast one management professor  whose wife eats a lot of apples. For a long time now, he has been on peripatetic lecture tours !

And now the smartphone company that fell in love with Apple is also in trouble. See this report:

"Crunch time for Apple as it prepares for face-off with FBI"

What might happens at this week’s congressional hearing as the iPhone maker continues to defy last month’s court order over phone encryption?

New York police officers on guard outside the New York Apple Store last month as the company’s battlewith the US government rages. ---

Sam Thielman New York and Danny Yadron San Francisco
Saturday 27 February 2016
(The Guardian) 

And that blessed Globe Theatre script  writer known as Shakespeare maintained that names did not at all matter !!

“ What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.
(William Shakespeare , Romeo and Juliet)

But ofcourse he was a smart guy. He avoided mentioning Apples except inadvertently in "Hamlet.


THE PROBLEM WITH APPLE

"THE PROBLEM WITH APPLE"

It was the year 1666 C.E. The plague had closed many public buildings and meetings. Newton had to leave Cambridge. He shifted to Woolsthorpe Manor, near Grantham in Lincolnshire, the house where he was born, to contemplate the stellar problems he had been pursuing at the university.

He was sitting under a tree obsessed with the problem of the orbit of the Moon around the Earth and the influence of gravity.

And then that Apple fell on his head! And the students of physics got an additioal "LAW " to cope with :

" . . . . that any two bodies in the universe attract each other with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. " (Demands quite a fine- tuning of mind to grasp the meaning!)

I find apples creating problems everywhere. ADAM, the first man on planet Earth, soon got into serious trouble after eating an apple. He was thrown out of the garden of Eden after he shared one with Eve. He should have avoided eating it. He had clear instructions  There were other fruit trees too and there was no ban on eating any other fruits. He could have eaten an Alfonso mango or a banana. And see how the humankind now  suffers the curse for that solitary apple. There seem to have been no curses on the human race before Adam and Eve disobeyed. (Well there was no human race for that matter!)

You know the story of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs". The apple is here too. Just to make you recall it with ease here is an excerpt:

" . . . .After turning into the Witch, the
Queen declares that Snow White should suffer "a special sort of death". Looking through her spellbook, she comes to the recipe for the Sleeping Death, and, reading of the poisoned apple's effects, decides that it's the perfect way to get rid of her . . . ."

The question here is " Why an apple? why not a pineapple ?" . And the  answer is that Apple creates problems. Elementary Dr. Watson!

Talking of these medical chaps  called "doctors", apple has been declared a threat to their profession. Remember what your Grandma had told you : AN APPLE A DAY KEEPS THE DOCTOR AWAY! I I am not very sure about the other "doctors" -  the PhD and D.Litts - but I guess their families also avoids eating apples to be on the safe side. I know atleast one management professor  whose wife eats a lot of apples. For a long time now, he has been on peripatetic lecture tours !

And now the smartphone company that fell in love with Apple is also in trouble. See this report:

"Crunch time for Apple as it prepares for face-off with FBI"

What might happens at this week’s congressional hearing as the iPhone maker continues to defy last month’s court order over phone encryption?

New York police officers on guard outside the New York Apple Store last month as the company’s battlewith the US government rages. ---

Sam Thielman New York and Danny Yadron San Francisco
Saturday 27 February 2016
(The Guardian) 

And that blessed Globe Theatre script  writer known as Shakespeare maintained that names did not at all matter !!

“ What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.
(William Shakespeare , Romeo and Juliet)

But ofcourse he was a smart guy. He avoided mentioning Apples except inadvertently in "Hamlet.