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...

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...

Until very recently, the term 'consciousness' was exclusively reserved to describe only the human experience of cognition and thinking. This was, of course, a result of the hegemonic scientific dialectic in our society. By its monopoly over definitions, science was determined to keep the animal kingdom away from being conscious at all. Until apparently sometime in 2012 this happened . However, the curious thing about it was that this admittance of animal 'consciousness', occurred much more like a UN resolution, than as a scientific breakthrough. Instead of the time tested age old scientific methodologies of "truth-finding", the definitional laxity occurred in the form of the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, which was signed into existence by a group of prominent international scientists. While the comedy of the situation was ticklish to me on its own, it also drove home a very obvious point as well - that essentially, science has very little to say...