The rule of the rules,How convention thrives.

When I began ,I had no idea what to write about.I kept asking myself if my blog has really exhausted all topics until ,pretty serendiptiously,Simon and Garfunkel sung out in my headphones-

"From the moment of my birth

To the instant of my death,

There are patterns I must follow

Just as I must breathe each breath.

Like a rat in a maze

The path before me lies,

And the pattern never alters

Until the rat dies.
And the pattern still remains

On the wall where darkness fell,

And it's fitting that it should,

For in darkness I must dwell.

Like the color of my skin,

Or the day that I grow old,

My life is made of patterns

That can scarcely be controlled"

Ever observed a procession of ants walking across the walls?From a distance,it gives you the illusion that its one dashed line stretching from end to end but peer harder,closer and you will discover its wiggling ,actually.A similar experience is when you take a thought shuttle to mars and gaze at earth.It will seem silent,dead ,till the morning prayer chorus at the nearby school will wake you up with a jolt.

Like many of my friends,I too have been intrigued by the effortless and magical and monotonous way convention thrives.I am not exactly your pipe-smoking skeptic(read Russell,if you haven't yet) and for that matter,a large part of me is anesthetized enough to adopt the very stereotypes that I am derisive of.But,this is what I see through the sometimes blinding glare of the obvious.

Self similarity of structure.Two years have passed since I first stumbled across an image of a fractal.Besides its enchanting symmetry,I always attached a mystic value to it.Mystic because I knew the image had something more to convey ,more than its awesome beauty and serenity.And now,I know what it wanted to say-When I listen to some powerful political oratory on television,I get the eerie hunch I am listening to the same guy who came to my hostel,campaigning for elections.True,the words are different and it is in another language,but I can't help but think its the same voice in a new echo and I am sure,you too will agree.Such is the nature of convention,its self similar nature,its ability to replicate itself at all levels,ensuring the smooth transition up the hierarchies of age,class and situations.

Thoughtless over-idolization of the unconventional.Having just finished Philip Roth's The Dying Animal,I take the liberty of using his eloquence to make my job easier.In the book,the narrator describes one his exceptionally beautiful but cerebrally limited female students' reaction to Cubist art-"Art that smacks of modernity leaves her not merely puzzled but disappointed in herself.She would love for Picasso to matter more,perhaps to transform her,but there's a scrim drawn across the proscenium of genius that obscures her vision and keeps her worshipping at a bit of a distance".

No wonder then that extremely ordinary individuals will so verbally harp on the greatness of a Steve Jobs speech without ever getting its real message and wear Che Guevara T shirts without any knowledge of his ideologies.For if you are incapable of making that leap of faith across the sea of mediocrity,you make up by standing in meek but fanatic worship of those who have done so-an unnecessary deification that separates you from the genius of a great idea and keeps you protected in uneventful ignorance.

The mind as the new chimpanzee.Dad once sighed remorsefully on looking at my trigonometry textbooks in class 9,something which he was exposed to,only in college.Compared to the bygone era,all graduate out of high school as scholars.Such is the humongous amount of information compressed into school curriculum.Add to that the way,internet is pushing the human race towards complete knowledge equality and you may be fooled to think that man is once again poised to begin a new era of unprecedented creativity and innovation
Not exactly.

We like to think we have evolved,that we have left our cousins in the trees far behind and to some degree that is true.But a more peculiar thing has happened,as man has reasonably succeeded in the business of a fitter survival,the new chimpanzee is not the body,but the mind.Fifty years ago,this chimpanzee could wrestle with calculus only after college.Today 's preparatory schools have enabled this chimpanzee to juggle with complex mathematics and difficult literature at as early as middle school.Imagination is what I would call the brain of the brain,the mind of this new chimpanzee .It is one thing that really makes humans what they are.Every act of creation ,from a great work of art to a novel mathematical theorem is,in isolation, an exercise in absurdity.Only later does society appreciate its beauty and its applications .And in imagination,man has not progressed much in the last thousand years,inspite of the rise of knowledge,it is still a scarce commodity.The growth in the generation of original ideas is certainly not commensurate with the rapid spread of education.Rather,too much education educates you out of the creative,absurd process.

Immanuel Kant says that convention is time-tested and good,traditional rationality is a boon and it is in our best interest to embrace God and religion.I beg to differ slightly.If one is born with the rare gift of insanity,one should channelize it into creativity(in any form) for, in the words of Camus,'Art defies that part of existence in which each individual is no more that a social unit or an insignificant cog in the evolution of history'.
Convention will continue to thrive as it always has,but time and again,someone will find the courage to question it,to flout with it,and all we can hope is that a norm,that was hitherto bigoted and meaningless ,will be replaced by another that makes our lives better and encourages creativity.