Viswanathan K's Thoughts

John Milton famously wrote, “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven”. After reading David Eagleman’s hugely entertaining set of (very) short stories, Sum: Tales from the Afterlives , (yes, each tale is about the afterlife), I was left wondering if that tendency of the mind doesn’t stop even with death…   That story is titled Egalitaire . Imagine a compassionate God, one who acknowledges that life isn’t (wasn’t?) black and white: “Humans could be good in many ways and simultaneously corrupt and meanspirited in other ways. How was She to arbitrate who goes to Heaven and who goes to Hell?” Stuck with this impossible choice, She simply eliminated the choice! “She shut down the operations in Hell, fired the Devil, and brought every last human to be by Her side in Heaven.”   Most importantly now, everyone was treated equally. True equality had become the norm. You’d think the humans would be ha...

Nietzsche once said, through his character Zarathustra: “When (man) invented hell . . . lo, hell was his heaven on earth; he could put up with suffering now, by contemplating the eternal punishment of his oppressors in the other world.” If that definition is too Old Testament for you, would you agree with these two definitions? The first one is by the group, Talking Heads : “Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.” Nick Carr took that definition to its logical conclusion and wondered: “If we further assume that hell is the opposite of heaven, then the distinguishing characteristic of hell is unrelenting eventfulness, the constant, unceasing arrival of the new. Hell is a place where something always happens.” I am guessing the Buddha would have added a very important point to Carr’s definition: “That’s hell only if you choose to react to every such occurrence.” What would you consider this description of one version of the afterlife by David Eagleman in Sum: Fo...

Benoit Mandelbrot (mathematician and the guy behind fractal geometry) was the kind of guy who didn’t stick to one topic; he liked to flit across subjects. Before you think of him as a rolling stone, check out how Mandelbrot saw himself in his memoir: “In Dante’s Divine Comedy , the deceased sentenced to eternal searching are pushed to the deepest level of the Inferno. But for me, an eternal search across countless scientific fields beyond obvious connection managed to add up to a happy life. A rolling stone perhaps, but not an unresponsive one.” If “eternal search” is what hell is all about, I don’t think it’s such a bad place at all! Unless, of course, the search is an impossible one (like finding the last digit of pi or something like that). But most of the time, finding new questions to ask, the pursuit of those answers and then finding those answers is what makes life (and work) interesting. It is icing on the cake if along the way you get to draw parallels and join th...