Read More, Become More

Fiction is a very powerful idea. I can't say that any other life form on our planet has ever graduated to using the full power of fiction like we have. The most they can rely on is the immediate knowledge from their genes and what they learn vicariously. 

But we have an unique advantage. We can put all our working knowledge of our culture, our traditions, things of practical importance into a tidy little capsule called a story. Once all this knowledge is filled in that capsule it is only a matter of time someone will come along and swallow it. It may not profoundly affect that person's world view but it will surely make a dent. How big a dent it can make depends on how potent the capsule is & how often he swallows it. 

Fiction in the form of books has changed the way people perceive the world. It has made our existence a lot more colourful and has added flavour to our experience which, at that moment, we couldn't have added on our own. A lot of times writers dissect their character's thought processes. This helps the readers clearly understand a character's actions. If a reader looks up to that character then the thought process seems like an incentive to improve ourselves to that standard. Even if we read of some character behaving disagreeably, we can always feel it and it reflects our own cultural & social upbringing. It brings out our ideas about good & evil & allows us to express them in our thoughts.

These thoughts wouldn't have come out on their own unless we were subjected to that experience directly. Fiction speeds up this process minus the pain of living through it.

The structure of fiction is also unique. There's no contents page, no acknowledgments, no introductions. We plunge directly into the narrative right from page one. This puts us front and centre of the events that unfold. No other form of correspondence or form of knowledge transmission works that effectively. Every other form needs some sort of qualifying introduction to set the tone for what's to come. Even a brilliant piece of music needs a right setting.

Since we humans are a bag full of feelings and emotions, whether we like to admit or not, fiction brings out the best and the worst of our feelings. We feel for the characters, we feel for their outcomes. Perhaps we feel for them more strongly than we feel for our own outcomes. That's because in fiction the characters' actions are always motivated by some thought. There's no room for purposeless actions. This is contrary to the way we humans go through life. We usually do a lot of things that are motivated by some thought but largely there are a lot of other things we do automatically. We have a subconscious drive that pushes us to do things we wouldn't do if we carefully consider them. Sometimes we are not even conscious of the purpose of our actions and are made aware only after someone or some event brings it to our attention. This possibility opens up a whole new world of exploration for us. Fiction can help us see the motivations behind the characters' actions & can make us question ours as well. Without fiction for our aid we would pay an hour's fee to a therapist to help us understand & untangle the subconscious intentions behind what we do. But the joy to figure it out on our own is totally different and it's much more vivid. 

We generally have these self biographies running in our head. They tell us who we are, what we must do, what we are like. These biographies change with our experience & knowledge of ourselves & the world around us. These biographies seem remarkably similar to reading character profiles in fiction. They are highly imaginative & very colourful. They make us look either good or bad in our own eyes which in turn determine the kind of mood they put us in. We have this remarkable tendency to observe our behaviour & deduce what kind of a person we are. Fiction is a similar process where the character is written & presented in front of us to figure out the labyrinthine thought behind each action. Fiction can helps us question what our biographies should be like. 

Aristotle said that "We acquire virtues by first having put them into action ... we become just by the practice of just actions, self-controlled by exercising self-control, and courageous by performing acts of courage." What better way to get acquainted with our actions than to see us emotionally respond to what the characters do? Better yet, they can also change us into who we wish to become. A good story invokes all these thoughts & puts us in an inevitable position to answer these questions about ourselves. That's why reading novels involving existential themes are very difficult to accept. They force us to ask what is our purpose & may force us to consider that there may not be any.

Read More, Become More.

Ineffectively Effective

Its a crazy notion to have after a decade's worth of usability experience. After I have graduated to using good technology in the form of my new mac, it suddenly dawned on me that whatever I know about computers & IT systems (those necessary and unnecessary details), I owe it to the pain and suffering of my Windows-PC days.

I think this human brain is not equipped to enjoy life's simplest pleasures but to constantly mull over details. But I like this idea. I don't know a lot, but I know more than average about computers than there is to know. Apart from my graduation in the field of IT, I wouldn't have had the claim to knowing anything I know about computers. But this education begun a lot earlier in my childhood.

There was a dutiful windows PC at my uncle's place, which me and my cousin used to tinker with. Then there came a PC at my home, which I used to tinker with. The tinkering was less due to curiosity and more due to some abnormal machine behavior. To come to terms with it now, it was more about curiosity than about abnormal machine behavior. I distinctly remember dis-assembling my computer for the first time, each part lying on the floor as a spare part in a broken machine. I also remember what happened after that, I forgot how it looked before and how to put it back together again (big oops there). Then came a horrible 5 hour zig-saw workout, trying to put humpty dumpty together again. I put it back together and there it was, working like a charm. After that I knew a lot more about the relationships of various parts in the computer than I knew before. No college degree in IT can teach you that so effectively. 

I had developed a new found respect for closed systems because of this experience. The kind of software environment that windows has, also makes it easier to get various software applications to use for any of your needs. This is thanks to a very strong developer community which fed the outsized market share of Windows. Understanding how the hardware works, understanding the software environment have surely helped me appreciate the system more when I started programming. I think I owe my "big picture" viewing skill to my early days of suffering with my PC. 

To make the picture even bigger, I think suffering and pain have a lot more to offer than pleasure and satisfaction. Suffering creates a desperate need to get out of that feeling, and it probably is the source of the urge to act, to move, to aspire and to achieve. Suffering is also an extremely good educator. It holds us up by our heel, upside down, shows us how bad it can get, effectively pointing us to hell. Then it drops us and hopes that we land on our feet. If we fail to land on our feet, we succumb to the suffering and if we do land on our feet, we learn about our ability to stand amidst any great fall.

My PC days were filled with remarkable ineffectiveness and lots of lost productivity. I almost always ran out of Memory (applications became more powerful than my ability to upgrade my computer's memory). I always had the processor 5 times less effective than the one needed to run what I wanted to run. I was always ran out of hard disk space (data grows on you, mysteriously, until there is no space left on the disk). So all these things, could have held me down and I would have constantly demanded a better computer, almost every 6 months, which I did. But my father knew something I didn't, perhaps. He never gave in. So now I had to be satisfied with what hardware I had. It taught me amazing lessons about living within my means. Even now, I tend not to exceed my means (in money, time, computer memory) even when I have enough of it. I use it conservatively remembering the times when all these things got used up a lot faster when I didn't keep a check. What a way to learn to be frugal, I think!

So I owe most of my simple ways of life, to my small tete-a-tete with technology (or the lack of it). I am sure living in a urban setting has the same effects on the human mind. There is usually no adversity of opportunity, which teaches us to take it for granted. But I appreciate the people who come from the country side or from under privileged part of the society, where the opportunities for growth (personal and social) are so scarce that they grasp to any opportunity, big or small, with the same fervor. 

I think there are more lessons in adversity worth learning than we normally want to get away from.


I think I am beginning to agree to what Marcel Proust said, "We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full".