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 !

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