Remusings

This is a story set in my city, Dhaka, when one autumn day in the early '90s, hundreds of people gathered outside Dhaka Central Jail in protest. They were seeking to stop the hanging of a man who was apparently on death row, within the premises. However, the problem was, the man was not in the jail at all. In fact, he never existed. When I was 8 years old, Bangladesh was a country of 120 million. Dhaka was a city of 7 million. And we all had 1 television channel we could watch - Bangladesh Television. Back then, a TV was a matter of novelty. And coloured TV sets were only the luxury of a select few in Dhaka. It was a time when people across the country were crowding around the one television set in their villages. Congregations formed inside lone huts juiced up by a stolen power line, where scores of people would gather to watch the entertainment. The magic box would bring us a select range of programming - from the state-scripted nightly news, to heavily censored 80's Ame...

We are beautiful. Together we shine. We are loud, we are music. We are dance, dance, all night. We are permanence, like love, like hope, like time. We are ephemeral, like wisps of hash smoke, Exuding like visual poetry from your lips to mine. We rise and we fall, to the moods of the skies, To the drone of the planet, to the hum of the cosmos that never dies. We live, to live hard We choose it - living hard, over hardly living. To live, is to keep moving, We understand this truth. And we pay homage to it in our dance moves. We seek moments. Moments of laughter, boisterous and great. We take our laughter with a side of stomach ache. We seek moments of ecstasy, piercing and soulful. We feed off the lifeforce of numinous truths. We seek moments of caring, compassion and tenderness. We bask in the warmth, the buzz, the fuzziness. And we seek moments of meaning. Meaning so overwhelming, that words collapse before it. Meaning so profound, that silence is its true la...

F: I could accuse you of the same fault Terence, of sweeping generalizations and knee jerk aversions. T: As is your prerogative of course. But do tell more. F: Your constant tirade against modern science and rationalism , bears within it many contradictions you know. It seems like your demonization of science is solely calling for the glorification of the irrational. How can that not be anything but simply reactionary? T: Granted. I do have a particular bent for the irrational and absurd . And I do seek out and revel in finding the edges of the impossible , the improbable , the unexplainable , and to some the indigestible . But, the way I see it, I am simply tooting for the underdog here. Don't you think the irrational deserves a mascot too, like science is for the rational? F: But don't you find that to be quite myopic, un-ruminated? T: Rationally, yes. Irrationally, well.... F: Now that is just aversion! T: Okay. You got me there friend. But my reverence for ...

It was one of those conversations had in tipsy stupors, when the topic of religion materialized in our midst. The thread that led to this theme included multiple steps - beginning with the sorry state of our world today, quickly transforming into global geopolitical dynamics, to the polarities of East vs. West. Hanging out with social scientists can lead one into such snaking trialogues, which more often than not were cyclical. And too often they ended with somebody raising their arms in despair and yelling "Fuck it! It's all going to hell!" "Western religions are not worth busting your heads over!" said my friend, almost on the edge of one of those cries of despair. Terence and I were being thoroughly entertained by (and partaking in) Baba's periodic outbursts for a couple of hours now. "These religions are suffering from such a crisis of spirit. There is nothing left in them. Christians are no longer christians -their new religion is money!" ...

boundary ˈbaʊnd(ə)ri/: a limit of something abstract, especially a subject or sphere of activity. "a community without class or political boundaries" The human story on this planet can be viewed essentially as a progressive creation of boundaries, with the intended consequences of facilitating interpretation and bringing meaning to the cosmic data. In that sense, history then is not simply a "trendless fluctuation" or "random walk" of events, but more like a sprint in a specific direction - resulting in the creation of progressively more complicated boundaries. At an individual level, the first imposition of a boundary in our being, is in the very act of being born. By which, each and every one of us, without intention or consent, are destined to begin our journey by setting the most ephemeral (yet the very real) of all boundaries - between life and death. It is a preconditioned boundary, necessary for the possibility of the phenomenon of li...

The human facility for language is arguably the most bewildering behavior possessed by any species in the known history of the planet. It is the ability to cognize a thought, by generating small mouth noises that travel through the air as acoustical reverbations. Following which (in a dance of mirrored reflection) the same reverbations fall upon the eardrums of a receiver, mapping sound waves into perceivable thought. The singular requirement for the completion of the loop, is that there must be a mutually agreed upon dictionary as reference between the cognizer and a perceiver. Even by the most flattened definition of the much debated phenomenon of telepathy.... Telepathy tɪˈlɛpəθi/ noun:  the supposed communication of thoughts or ideas by means other than the known senses. synonyms: mind reading, thought transference ....the phenomenon of human language is clinically the same enterprise - transference of thought from your mind to mine. There is also our miraculous a...