Thursday, March 31, 2011

Statement of Purpose, Forsaken and Forlorn...


in scientia veritas, in artes honestas...

It would not be very wrong or outrageous to say that one could treat illness with music, paint a canvas with sulphur and cadmium, write poetry for proving a mathematical theorem and take a photograph with the blink of an eye. Indeed, music IS therapeutic enough to alleviate depression, paint IS made up of chemical substances, poetry comprises of metric rhythms and mathematical progressions, and memories are photographic images of past incidents stored in the brain. Yet, as Einstein quite rightly points out, gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love. Also, imagination is more important than knowledge. New discoveries and inventions would have been impossible without creativity and imagination.

Hence, in my mind, the scales don’t really balance when it comes to science or arts. It’s a never-ending base-superstructure (base being science and superstructure being arts) dialectical leitmotif for me. But however often this recurring imbalance haunts me, I always knew that one reciprocates the other and that there has to be a structure that houses both the disciplines. The boundary seems to get blurred in a post-structural fashion, as if by deconstruction, and the field of Anthropology wins all the votes. But one must look hard for something, sometimes consciously and sometimes even the world conspires and gets it for you when you are temporarily not looking. The moment of arriving at a juncture where a balance is struck is almost like death, which is only the beginning. One gets flashes of the past in a series of linked montages at such arrival points and it makes all the more sense, just like in the Nonsense of Sukumar Ray or in the secret anagrams of Leonardo Da Vinci.


Just like Alice, I would like to keep myself busy in all things human. I would rather indulge myself in social questions and finding scientific answers so that our planet doesn’t get run over by intergalactic bypasses and leave the residual hitchhiking survivors like Douglas Adams’s character Arthur Dent, cursed to forever brood over the planet that was really never meant to be obviously because of the insensible viscous acts of human civilization.

We have done more damage to our planet than the rodents that destroy our crops. If in science lies the truth and the key to technological advances, in art lies the honour in keeping and maintaining such advances. Human beings fight among themselves and in doing so create havoc and leave a long trail of wreckage endangering life on Earth and nature itself. If we don’t act responsible socially and resolve social problems within our communities then the relationship between human and nature will worsen. We get angry at each other and greet each other with atom bombs. But what could we do when the Tsunami washed away several lives, and stripped off the nuclear plants naked? When nature strikes back, we will all be mashed into a coagulation of useless dump that might resemble some 20th Century Dada art but it needs serious recycling with another Big Bang. It wouldn’t even be funny!