What if....?

1. What if people in this world whimsically made decisions in their lives based on numbers? No, I am not talking about some astrological excursion, but something more naive, more un-rational. For instance, what if your girlfriend breaks up with you because she does not like your new phone number? For some idiosyncratic reason she does not like the pattern of 7s and 2s in your number. You say 7182477122, and she hangs up the phone and never sees you again. Again imagine you are flying into town, and you tell your folks the flight number 521 and they decide not to pick you up from the airport. Wouldn't that be fun? But we do not do that. Why not? Is there a reason? It is almost as if your girlfriend and your folks tell themselves, "What his phone number is or what his flight number is is pure chance. He does not have any control over that. He is just "given" these numbers." Is that right? They decide to forgive and overlook these small things. The boundaries of legitimacy and justification humanity seeks are not drawn on this landscape. Not yet, at least. These boundaries only come later, and little further down the line -- for instance, if after giving your girlfriend your phone no., you tell her not to call after 10 pm since you would be busy with other things, she would, quite justifiably, dump you. Where the boundaries are drawn is a matter of convention. But is it arbitrary? Can the whole of humanity easily will to change these boundaries simply because they want something different? Or is there a compulsion, a necessity, to this convention? Whatever it is, there is a lot of "covering up" that we do before we come to our sense of justice and normality. If we had covered up starting from a different point, we would have had a different set of conventions, a different dance to dance.

2. Imagine a world where academic people, researchers, do not depend on grants and scholarships to conduct their research and make their livelihood. What if only filthy rich people got into academia? Then, no one could pressurize them to finish their dissertation or book in a couple of years. They would have the required financial independence to prolong their projects until the project comes to its own fruition. The thoughts would come to them, and not viceversa. They would incorporate all the boredom, the deviations, the alterations of their moods, their natural growth into their works. This financial independence, more importantly, would give them freedom from the political status quo, the norms of bureaucracy, including the norms of scholarship. Perhaps then the quality of the works coming out of our academic institutions would also be a lot higher. Money is indeed underrated.

3. What if none of our languages had the active voice, and we conversed only with passive voice? We might not be better off, but perhaps we would've checked a lot of uncalled-for aggression in us.

Pet Peeve

I cannot stand someone insulting my intelligence. This happens especially when the other person tries to deceive me. I am not implying that it is impossible to deceive me, but only that when something is uncovered as deception, it no longer continues to be one. The deception itself or the intent behind it is not something totally bad by itself. I am no such purist. In fact, an immaculate deception has always intrigued my fancy. But the audacity or the stupidity to think that I will not figure out that I am being deceived hurts my intelligence. (I experienced this recently when grading papers of students (and I have also experienced this time and again dealing with different people). One Lisa thought that I could not differentiate between a Kant and a Lisa!)
Sometimes, I get the feeling that the deceiver knows that I know that I am being deceived. But then he tries to play this inarticulate game with me. He goes along with the deception, hoping that I will suppress this knowledge for some unknown reason against my own better sense. As if with a wink of an eye he can seduce me into his world, and then leave me stumped in the real world! In such cases, it is really a plea which says either that "Come on! You know how things are, you know how it is.. just pretend that you do not know what I am doing." Or that, "Come on... you have deceived and lied in the past too... you understand the need!" Sure I do, but I was the deceiver then! And I did not get caught!