Showing posts with label Nietzsche. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nietzsche. Show all posts

Saturday, August 29, 2015

Closures, Beginnings

Caturday is here. 5 days of the week got over pretty fast, though my boss will attach any label but 'fast' to the way I'm doing things. I have no answer, for now. Play has tragically dominated my life, and though it has felt a bit useless and uneasy, it has also felt workable and 'contemporary'.

As today fades away, I recollect and find that today was about closure to a BIG premise which I'd put forward to friends in ideological (or, humanist) passion a decade back. An inquiry into modalities of seeking, which worked out just fine for me. Oh how I get to rub them over it. Serendipitously, we - the same trio of that inquiry - meet in a few hours; timing to match south Indian movies.

First day of the weekend, that I am already in, is planned with the sis. She gets to physically tie me a thread of validation-as-brother and I get to vouchsafe her protection (and/or money), one last time, for this annual recurrence would be difficult to partake in once she's infected with marriage and relocates to Australia with Hub.

Roomie is taken with the version of bed-bound fitness regime introduced. He has bluffed about giving a fvck about fitness for so long that I got annoyed and gave him some encouragement today. His room/ bed, in fact is a better place to start on it than my own. He, predictably, found it amusing and hard, and beneficial. If there's the least he could start with, it gotta be this (otherwise we're staring into a void here). He followed his first try with a cigarette, which tells a lot of his cancerous disposition.

Somebody went on a shopping spree and got a whole lotta brain juice - books - over the week. At the end of it, 5 new books in the stack, and 1 in transit. They shall be devoured the coming week, which has a zealous streak of activity planned and purchases towards maker projects lined up.

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Thus Spake Baba Damdama

"Give me, woman, thy little truth!"
"Thou goest to women? Do not forget thy whip!"

I can picture at least 6 faces in Indian media who regularly come and talk on the talk shows talking a lot more at the usage of the above lines, that come from a 19th century classic ("Thus Spake Zarathustra", by Fakir W Nietzsche). Yes, Nietzsche (hereafter referred to as N) was known to be a misogynist. Its nothing surprising, though, his perspective has been a recurrent one through history and cultures. There's always the occasional ruffle in media over incubation-chamber analogy of the female specia. My (narrow) anthropological finds, though, make me believe that the modern society (American?) seems a little better - see how Maroon 5 and James Blunt can change the world for the good!

Some other great anti-pickup lines from the same chapter:
: Everything in woman is a riddle, and everything in woman hath one solution—it is called pregnancy.
: Two different things wanteth the true man: danger and diversion. Therefore wanteth he woman, as the most dangerous plaything.
: Man shall be trained for war, and woman for the recreation of the warrior: all else is folly.

I pretty much LOLd at every line word up there.

What makes me even more fascinated with this perspective of N is its resonance with that of holy men across the holy Himalayan circuit (as much of it that i've seen i.e. Hardwar, Rishikesh, Kedarnath). Nothing better to start with drawing parallels than how the book starts:
When Zarathustra was thirty years old, he left his home and the lake of his home, and went into the mountains. There he enjoyed his spirit and solitude, and for ten years did not weary of it.

That makes N your average Baba Damdama (Baba = holy man) that you find sprawling all over the lower Himalayan tract. They (holy men) have little veneration for anything but their own philosophy, much like Zarathustra. They are filled to the cup with misogynistic takes on anything concerning the...uh...gyne. They make the male species seem like some divine mutation, out-of-line with regular evolution.

But those folks and my old roomie aside, we have good faith that the leading generations will not think likewise.
That is because soon after independence, Jawaharlal Nehru commissioned a scientific study to put an end to this woman-vs-man debate once and for all...
The average woman was found to have an IQ of 3 pigeons. The average man was comparably smarter, about 5 pigeons.* Don't be surprised - pigeons are smart and were considered appropriate benchmark at that time.

This performance - which makes 'venerate' a synonym to 'torture' - is no reason to make any gender generalisation.

* In marital union, however, their (man-woman's) combined IQ surprisingly reflected a huge drop, to an average of 1/2 a pigeon. This fact of an average Indian pigeon outsmarting an average Indian couple, is why pigeon was denied the status of national bird. The Peacock was chosen (though later studies proved that even the Peacock outsmarted the average Indian couple, it was too late to retract the Peacock, as our handicraft industry had already put this bird on over 1,80,000 export items - as the reader should know, that handicrafts lobby is very strong here in India, only next to the mixing-blood-in-ketchup lobby).