Conquest of Happiness - the Common Sense Way

This is a passage from Betrand Russel's book 'Conquest of Happiness'. I have not seen any other modern book putting things in so simple a manner. And I have found that this is closest to what common sense suggests. You can read the whole book online here.

The capacity to endure a more or less monotonous life is one which should be acquired in childhood. Modern parents are greatly to blame in this respect; they provide their children with far too many passive amusements, such as shows and good things to eat, and they do not realise the importance to a child of having one day like another, except, of course, for somewhat rare occasions.
The pleasures of childhood should in the main be such as the child extracts from his environment by means of some effort and inventiveness. Pleasures which are exciting and at the same time involve no physical exertion, such, for example, as the theatre, should occur very rarely. The excitement is in the nature of a drug, of which more and more will come to be required, and the physical passivity during the excitement is contrary to instinct. A child develops best when, like a young plant, he is left undisturbed in the same soil. Too much travel, too much variety of impressions, are not good for the young, and cause them as they grow up to become incapable of enduring fruitful monotony.
I do not mean that monotony has any merits of its own; I mean only that certain good things are not possible except where there is a certain degree of monotony. Take, say, Wordsworth's Prelude. It wll be obvious to every reader that whatever had any value in Wordsworth's thoughts and feelings would have been impossible to a sophisticated urban youth. A boy or young man who has some serious constructive purpose will endure voluntarily a great deal of boredom if he finds that it is necessary by the way. But constructive purposes do not easily form themselves in a boy's mind if he is living a life of distractions and dissipations, for in that case his thoughts will always be directed towards the next pleasure rather than towards the distant achievement. For all these reasons a generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men, of men unduly divorced from the slow processes of nature, of men in whom every vital impulse slowly withers, as though they were cut flowers in a vase.

I do not like mystical language, and yet I hardly knows how to express what I mean without employing phrases that sound poetic rather than scientific. Whatever we may wish to think, we are creatures of Earth; our life is part of the life of the Earth, and we draw our nourishment from it just as the plants and animals do. The rhythm of Earth life is slow; autumn and winter are as essential to it as spring and summer, the rest is as essential as motion. To the child, even more than to the man, it is necessary to preserve some contact with the ebb and flow of terrestrial life. The human body has been adapted through the ages to this rhythm, and religion has embodied something of it in the festival of Easter.

I have seen a boy of two years old, who had been kept in London, taken out for the first time to walk in green country. The season was winter, and everything was wet and muddy. To the adult eye there was nothing to cause delight, but in the boy there sprang up a strange ecstasy; he kneeled in the wet ground and put his face in the grass, and gave utterance to half-articulate cries of delight. The joy that he was experiencing was primitive, simple and massive. The organic need that was being satisfied is so profound that those in whom it is starved are seldom completely sane.
Many pleasures, of which we may take gambling as a good example, have in them no element of this contact with Earth. Such pleasures, in the instant when they cease, leave a man feeling dusty and dissatisfied, hungry for he knows not what. Such pleasures bring nothing that can be called joy. Those, on the other hand, that bring us into contact with the life of the Earth have something in them profoundly satisfying; when they cease, the happiness that they brought remains, although their intensity while they existed may have been less than that of more exciting dissipations.

By Ganesh Kulkarni

Why Piracy Sustains?

Ans:

The question actually is - 'Why people pay Rs. 200 for sundry items like a cup of coffee, while buy/download pirated material to save as low an amount as Rs. 150?

Here is what I think -

There is 1 thing that makes people sensitive to price, and it is the 'Experience'. I am ready to spend Rs. 100 for a CD of good songs (even Rs. 100 for a song like 'coffee...' which is composed by you). But the thing is that the the distribution sucks. Believe me. I will prefer paying Rs. 50-100 for a VCD/DVD which have been made available by Mosaer-Byer instead of downloading the movie via torrent which might take 12 hrs. But to buy a CD, I have to go [:(] and face a sales-person [:(] who sucks [:(]. He just does not understand 'value' of what he is selling. So, the CD's are just thrown into a box [:(], and the customers are expected to make a 'discovery' of what they want [:O]. Compare this with pirated material. Take e.g. torrents. You can search [:)], you can download samples [:)], you can read comments [:)], check ratings [:)] - and if all THAT satisfies you, you download the item. The factor that the item is free ('stolen', if you please) is, thus, essentially secondary.

It is all about 'experience of buying' - if the experience is good (as in CCD) I am ready to pay Rs. 100 (for 1 cup of coffee). If it is bad (as in most taparis), I decide against paying even Rs. 5 and prefer to go home and make myself a cuppa.

And believe me, for artistes, their time will have more 'value' than your actual creations when you are alive.

By Ganesh Kulkarni

Reality Is A Farce

Today I got to read 2 extremely brilliant articles which propound a line of thought to which I subscribe whole-heartedly. Interestingly these articles might have seemed a bit politically incorrect had there not been an economic slowdown.

A little secret that will make the world fall apart

Most of the time, the valuelessness of money doesn't really matter. As in a Ponzi scheme or a run on the bank, unless everybody tries to cash out at the same time, nobody ever notices that the bank didn't actually still have all the money you gave it in deposits. Conversely, unless everybody tries to actually exchange their money for goods and services all at once, nobody realizes that the economy didn't actually have all the goods and services you thought you could pay for. When people realize it all of a sudden, that's when you get inflation.

-- Does not this post reflect the title of this blog itself!

The future is… boring

Computers again. We made text editors; text editors expand until they can read email. We made web browsers; now web authors spend half their time choosing an optimal shade of blue and tweaking animation timings. We made software installers with automatic downloading and dependency checking; now systems like Debian split each package into infinitesimal pieces just because they can. We made spreadsheets; they were done by 1995, so we added Clippy instead. We made fancy GUIs with detachable, customizable toolbars and subwindows; now we have non-detachable, non-customizable ribbons and tabs. We made email, then newsgroups, web forums, blogs, and now twitter; the same thing over and over.

And yet we keep trying. Technology fixes a problem, and then it overfixes it ...

-- Is not this the reason why our generations can fancy a 4-Hour Workweek? My father and his father’s father never had any time to kill…

By Ganesh Kulkarni

Indian Diaspora – Economist.com View

“You are our permanent ambassadors”, the delegates were told by one minister. India believes it would not have passed the Indo-American nuclear deal last year without their help behind the scenes. Barack Obama, then on the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, told the International Herald Tribune in 2006 that “there appears to be a very co-ordinated effort to have every Indian-American person that I know contact me”.

Link.

By Ganesh Kulkarni