Remusings

Breathing - the act of taking air in and out of our bodies - is an activity intrinsically tied to being alive, yet most of us live with little conscious awareness of its existence on a daily basis. The reality of being alive can be defined by the act of breathing itself. Breathing in and out in a steady rhythm signifies that there is life within a body. When one places the finger under the nostrils of a corpse, one is seeking the feel of the breath as the telltale sign of the presence of life. However, despite the vital role of the breath in the phenomenon of life, one can feasibly spend an entire lifetime without ever noticing that one is breathing. In lives lived such, if ever this awareness does arise, it might only be when when one finds oneself gasping for breath, after a hard workout or maybe in the unfortunate situation when one is drowning underwater. In the absence of breath, breath is quickly recognized as the most important necessity for life. The human body is an orch...

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...

There exists an open secret in the heart of Physics, that stands to challenge all sciences of matter. It appears in the form of two theories within quantum physics, that profoundly reorient truths previously held, and shed light on the nature of reality as a whole. These theories have shaken up our understanding of the world and universe in the 20th century. Yet, oddly enough, the news of their implications seems not to have trickled down to the other disciplines as one would have expected. Nonetheless, their congruence with some of the axioms of spiritual doctrines is not to be ignored. Having abandoned the formal pursuit of the sciences at a young age, there are limitations in my grasp of these Quantum Mechanical theories. Yet, I present here approximations of my understanding, reached through casual self-education, and highlight my perception of their implications. As I understand it, the behaviour of subatomic particles, at the quantum mechanical level, demonstrate many pec...

It is obvious that there exists many definitional ambiguities with regards to the phenomenon that we call "life". Interestingly, in a world where hegemony of description is essentially the seat of power, the term has yet to be completely hijacked by the authoritative establishments under which we live today. Therefore, when I decided to Google "define life", the output was multifaceted, diverse and often vague. Nonetheless, conversation cannot be stopped short, simply for lack of exact descriptors. Among the many definitions I found, there is the scientific one (defined by the dynamism of biological processes), the pragmatic one (defined as the necessary condition to be 'alive'), the temporal one (defined as the phenomenon that occurs between birth and death), the philosophical one (defined as the existential conundrum within which we all dwell). And among the various other articulations on the net, Terence McKenna provides a definition of life that I...

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...