Detachment is an interesting concept. Many advocate it. Many others doubt the possibility of its execution. How can one live in a world, love it, and yet not be attached to it?

I saw the Transformers movie yesterday night again (for the seventh time), and was struck by yet another midnightly insight. What is it exactly that differentiates a Transformer from a human being?

I know they are actually giant alien robots who can turn themselves into machines of their choice and there really is no comparison here. But then again, they feel pain and anger just like we do. Also they seem to like certain things about us.

The merciless Starscream for example, chose the form of an F-22 Raptor jet because he considered it the peak of human achievement. Optimus Prime, the leader of the heroic autobots, says humans are a young race and there is goodness in them.

What is it about benevolent aliens that makes them so motherly towards earthlings? I would like to think it is more than space-faring expertise or sheer science. It must be something akin to emotional maturity.

The Transformers in the movie battle each other for power. They actually look as bad as we are, only more dangerous. If we are to get any idea about what it must be like to be an Autobot or a Decepticon, we must take them out of the current frame of reference and look at the bigger picture.

What we have here is a race of aliens whose home world was lost to war aeons ago. They have spent millennia traveling in space and have seen many worlds. They have encountered a great variety of life forms. They have altered their appearances to suit the worlds they have made their temporary homes.

It seems logical that a race of beings much older than us and wiser in the ways of the universe would understand the illusions of physical existence. Any Transformer would tell you that it really doesn’t matter what you look like.

What perhaps defines a Transformer is an awareness. A Decepticon or an Autobot realises that it is not what it looks like or what it is called, but something beyond all that. A Transformer is not attached to appearances.

This does not mean they don’t love appearances. The Autobots not only choose to look like vehicles that suit their moods and personalities, they also ‘learn Earth’s languages from the World Wide Web’. They master accents and mannerisms that appeal to them and integrate them so well that they appear native to the Transformers’ natural behaviour.

I don’t know if you noticed, but the Decepticon called Bonecrusher says a furious and patently Earthly, ‘Bloody Hell!’ moments before Optimus Prime yanks his head out. [Scene]

Trans means beyond. Form means appearance. As Optimus Prime says in his message in the end of the story, “Like us, there is more to them than meets the eye.” He was talking about you and me. But that was just his opinion.

Because India is a deeply religious country
I fail to see the connection. How does gay sex disrupt religion? What, for that matter, does it even have to do with religion? Being stuck in the sixteenth century is one thing. Blaming religion for it is quite another. Religion is not about being static and stuck (though a lot of ‘religious’ people make it look that way).

Because it is immoral
Says you Einstein! I don’t think gay and lesbian sex is immoral. There you go. Your word against mine. Now unless you come out in the open and say that you think you are more important than I am, this is not going to work. And in any case, who died and made you keeper of Indian morality? What, now that we are at it, is Indian morality? I don’t know. And I am sure you will answer by pointing to your personal morality. Pull your head out of the sand asshat! The world is moving on. Try and catch up.

Because it is unnatural
Define unnatural. Didn’t you hear what I just said? Nothing that exists within nature can be unnatural. You are the one who came up with these labels. And since nature knows of no such boundaries, YOU must be unnatural, right? Who made you an expert on nature anyway?

Holy books forbid it
Holy books be damned! I do not intend to allow my country be run by that which is written in them. Anyway, any holy book that you might care to bring into the discussion is likely to trump your own arguments. No holy book I ever read allows for criminalising homosexuality. Religion is more concerned with individual morality and well-being. The idea of making it an instrument of state policy is something only your sorry brain could come up with.

Because you will soon demand the right to have sex with animals
I will not go into defending the argument for legalising homosexuality against that sorry line. But let me ask you this. Why should someone’s sexual preferences be any of your business? Why would anyone go to you for permission before having sex with animals? And why do you bring animal sex in to defend all of your points? You seem obsessed with the idea really.

Homosexuality is a danger to heterosexuality
You are a retard if you think the High Court’s ruling will cause straight people everywhere to turn gay overnight and roam the streets looking for innocents to rape. Do heterosexual people run after all members of the opposite sex they find? Homosexuality has existed in India and the world for thousands of years and never once has it come close to bringing our ever-increasing populations down. Grow up, will you?

Because it causes diseases
First of all, there is no evidence by any medical body of repute (WHO etc.) to support that argument. Secondly, what doesn’t cause disease? You seem to have drawn up a list of things that are wrong with the world and are taking turns blaming it all on homosexuality. What’s next? The rains? Why not ban sex to get rid of AIDS. Or ban currency notes to end robbery and theft? Seriously, you need help!

Because homosexuality will cause mankind to become extinct
Fantastic line of reasoning sir! You get a toaster. The only way, in my humble and irreligious opinion, mankind is going to go extinct is if we bomb ourselves into oblivion. I don’t think homosexuality will achieve what years of planned birth control initiatives failed in doing. In any case, homosexuality has been around for centuries and not done anything of the kind. All the Delhi High Court’s ruling does is give dignity to people who want to be themselves.

So you say we should just allow people to do anything they want?
There are two sides to this answer. First, you are nobody to allow or disallow me to do anything at all. Secondly, it is my belief that the age when regressive thought controlled the fates of nations is past. You are obsolete. I am free to do anything that is within the ambit of the law and doesn’t harm another. The choices people make in their private lives are up to them and are not something the state should bother itself with. Those who fail to keep their opinions of others to themselves, should be heard out and ignored. Happy?

This is not over. We will be back
Sigh. I wasn’t hoping to change your hearts really. I just like kicking you around. This is not about homosexuality really, is it? You just want your will to be done. Well, same here. Come back any time you want. I will wait.

There is this thing we all know. It might just be the only thing we are all certain about. We think, we hope and we plan to the best of our capacity. And yet, nearly all of it is rooted in chance. The only thing that will happen for sure is that we will all die.

Is that why we don’t talk about it? Because we are sure it will come? The way I see it, it appears more a case of denial. We refuse to talk about it, we fear signs of ageing, we even presume we are safe and secure in our environments! We refuse to consider the possibility that we might just drop off the edge of a cliff one day — tomorrow maybe — and never return.

Death therefore, becomes this dark inevitability — the end of everything good and worthwhile. Fear is the only emotion that comes to be associated with it.

A few years ago, I saw my grandmother die scared. Her last years were spent in anger and worry. She fretting over her medicines, pitied herself. She passed away with her eyes wide open, staring into the world she so desperately wanted to hold on to.

Her death wasn’t untimely. She had had a long and eventful life. Her youngest grandchild, that is me, was in college when her final illness started. Yet, there was no peace. Whether we look away from it, or thrash about frantically when it is at the door, our fear of dying is unreasonable.

We believe that our lives will follow a template. There is the modest beginning (birth, education, growing up), a significant middle (professional life, making money, gathering possessions, finding a partner, having children and raising them) and the inevitable end (old age and death).

Growing old and dying is a lucrative proposition indeed. But expecting it to actually happen is like betting. Living the template above also involves living in denial of the truth that is death for a major chunk of one’s life.

The problem with the template is that it prompts you to postpone things you love to a fabled ‘content’ part of your life. ‘I have always wanted to paint. I will take it up when I have made enough money,’ or ‘I will write my novel when I have settled down in life.’ When do we settle down? When do we ever call ourselves content? When do we stop preparing to live our lives and start living it? We sure as hell don’t have forever, and we know it. The idea is simply unaffordable.

It is a small wonder then, that after a lifetime spent just ‘surviving’, we can greet death with little more than fear. A good life is much more than just surviving.

A couple of months ago, when I decided to quit my job to write my book, friends and family asked me if I wasn’t scared about my future. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I was shit-scared. Scared that I would die without even having started on my first book (and I intend to write quite a few).

My attitude may appear pessimistic or paranoid to you. I see it as quite the opposite. I see death and am aware of it. It is around. It will take me when it feels like it. There will be no warning. But that is not what I am afraid of. What strikes fear into my heart is the possibility that I will lose sight of death and I will wander aimlessly and while away my time. Then one day death will come around and it will be my time to go. I don’t want to go without having told a single good story. Maybe I will go with death kicking and screaming, begging him/her to let me tell at least one more story. Even so, at least I would have tried.

The idea is not to be afraid of death, because honestly, it wouldn’t help. We ought to treat death as a reality — unpredictable and inevitable. That would let us cherish the years, months, days and moments before it even more. Life is for living, and death is truth.

I bet there were no grammar books involved. You weren’t subjected to critical studies and there were no tests to ascertain your level of intimacy with your mother tongue.

You learnt by immersion. You heard things, repeated them as best as you could (while people around you laughed at you), and eventually got the hang of it. You will agree with me when I say that the method is efficient. I am sure you speak your native language far more effortlessly and expertly than you speak languages you took classes for.

The first time I saw a computer was in my uncle’s office. I wanted to know more, so I started frequenting a cybercafe in front of my college where I had to pay them by the hour. I was fascinated. I told as many of my friends about ‘this Internet thing‘ as I could. I wanted everyone online. Some listened, most didn’t. They couldn’t imagine how computers might change things. They admitted the experience was fancy though.

A few months later, my college introduced a basic computer course. Those who signed up would get a DCA (Diploma in Computer Application) certificate after ten months. The lure of an additional certificate got many to join. Where I come from, your chance at employment is considered directly proportional to the number of certificates (fake, pointless, or otherwise) you have.

Nearly four to five months later, I learnt that none of them had even touched a computer yet! I hunted down someone from the economics department who I knew was taking the course and asked him what the classes were like.

They were just classes, he told me. The instructor dictated notes, which they dutifully jotted down (with pens, on paper notebooks) and memorised. Then they took written tests where they were asked questions like ‘What is a dialog box?’ and ‘How would you shut down Windows 98?’ and ‘How would you launch Microsoft Word?’ and ‘Define an operating system.’.

This was stuff I figured out on my first day in front of a computer! And I am no genius (though I will happily forgive you for thinking so). It was the Windows 98 GUI for God’s sake! I asked him if they were ever going to actually use computers. He said, “Of course. But the basics are most important. We have been told we will be allowed to operate on the machines soon. They are making us ready for it.”

Where do I start? Never mind. I will refrain from fault-finding and skip straight to the solution part.

I don’t think computer skills of the basic kind fall under the scope of science anymore. They are more of a social skill nowadays. For a course like DCA, you definitely don’t need to memorise the definition of an operating system.

How about if you just let students play around with computers and acquaint themselves with the system? Then the instructor comes in and fills them in on the technicalities. It is simple, workable and saves a whole lot of time and energy for everyone involved.

Sadly enough, most ‘computer institutes’ spread all over the small-town India follow the age old top-down classroom model. Small wonder then, that most of them have one or two computers for a class of over twenty students.

We are kind of missing the whole point of computer literacy if you ask me.

What does ‘One’ mean exactly? Does it point to an individual? I don’t think so. Numbers (like God) aren’t tangible. They are concepts. They make it easy to grasp reality. They have no independent ‘existence’ of their own.

Even what we call an individual isn’t really one. A person is made of cells and cells are made of molecules. It is energy that holds it all together. But this doesn’t make you or me any less tangible than we are. It is just that we have both agreed to perceive each other as individuals.

Look at the world around you. How you define it depends entirely on you. You can see it as ‘one world’ if you want to, or you can choose to see it as a bunch of disparate entities. It can appear as one family to you, or a collection of hostile nations at odds with each other. You may want to see the world as home to billions of individuals. You could even choose to see it as an enormous cloud of energy holding together a whole lot of particles, giving them the semblance of our physical world.

The point I am trying to make is that the world, or reality, isn’t objective. It is an interpretation. Each one of us lives in his own world. The nature of each of our worlds depends on our own respective natures.

So the existence of God, quite like the existence of peace or harmony or hatred or violence, depends on you. If you do not believe in the existence of God, it is not because of lack of proof. It is because you don’t want to.

You let him know that you consider him mature enough to handle the truth. You tell him that he is someone you feel comfortable being honest with. You place your trust in him.

It might appear sometimes that the only way out of an uncomfortable situation is a lie. But to lie to someone in order to not hurt them is, at the end of the day, a show of disrespect.

About a week ago, I was sitting in the company of a few random journalists. They were talking about Twitter, a hot little web service that allows members to post 140 character updates to the internet and receive similar updates from other members. These updates, technically speaking, are status updates (the sort you post on Google Talk or on your Facebook profile), but they can vary in nature. People use Twitter to break news, do political commentary, share interesting links, and even write micro-fiction (stories 140 characters or less in length).

However, as is common practice among people from mainstream media, nobody in the gathering saw Twitter as much more than an uppity little pastime. Why anyone would feel the need to broadcast the most frivolous bits of their daily lives to the whole world was beyond what they could imagine.

I joined Twitter over two years ago. I was there before Barack Obama got on it and made it a crucial tool in his campaign to be the President of the United States of America (and won!). I was there before some of the world’s largest corporations started using Twitter as a direct line to their consumer base. I was there before news of some of the most devastating natural disasters in recent times spread across the world through Twitter.

I have seen it all unfold, in a manner of speaking, before my very eyes. As you might imagine, every time Twitter is called ‘frivolous’ (or some such thing) in my presence, my heart rages in righteous indignation. Why must something as time-tested as Twitter suffer judgment by those who only came to know about it five minutes ago?

I have therefore, taken upon upon myself the reponsibility of bringing to mainstream light, the various glorious aspects of Twitter.

Twitter for News:

Logging into Twitter every morning is like entering a village square at mid day. The place is full and everyone is talking the talk of the day. I admit, it is very noisy, but one learns to listen soon enough.

People are usually discussing the big news of the day, current match scores, their opinions on what TV thinks is ‘in’ along with random bits from their lives as well (like how bad the traffic is or how much they would like to quit their job RIGHT NOW). On Twitter, the tiny is as newsy as the big and breaking.

And this isn’t news handed down to me from the high and mighty mainstream either. It’s people like me – office-goers, bus/train-takers, students, entrepreneurs – the everyday sort, who tell me what’s up with my world.

What’s more? I get to join in. I discuss issues of national and international importance with people from all walks of life and make informed decisions. I am part of the news cycle. I am the newsman as well as the audience.

Many times, Twitter serves as a live news source as well. For example, if a tweeter is at a momentous gathering or at the scene of a disaster (like the 26/11 terrorist attacks), all that anyone, anywhere in the world has to do is to start following his updates on Twitter to get their fix of the latest.

Of course, such news may be fragmented and full of noise. But then so is TV news. I am not suggesting Twitter as a replacement for news channels, only as a complement. An extra layer of protection against newslessness, if you will.

Twitter as a networking space:

I follow over 2000 odd people on Twitter. Among these, are business-owners, students, scientists, military men, techies, researchers, money experts, designers, writers, artists, photographers, and these days, even celebrities (blessed aren’t we?).

Needless to say, life isn’t ever dull on Twitter. Besides, a resource base so diverse and knowledgeable is a thing to die for, don’t you think? Sure, Google will whip up more links than you need, but there is something about actual expert advice that a search engine doesn’t even come close to beating.

Twitter is an extremely handy tool when it comes to basic research. Are you standing before a multiplex wondering which movie to go for? Post a tweet via your mobile and watch recommendations and mini-reviews flow in. Looking for a good online resource on banking? Post a tweet. If you’re even slightly lucky, you will probably get pinged by an actual banker.

Twitter for branding:

Twitter works because of the people on it. But unlike something like Facebook or Orkut, Twitter enables a much more open exchange of ideas and conversations. Whatever you say on Twitter, goes out to all your followers. Over time, a tweeter builds a lasting identity in his little pocket of people.

Those who have the most to gain from branding, have taken this message to heart. Existing brands – corporations, publications, movie studios – have taken to Twitter to complement their advertisement strategy. Lesser brands have benefitted from Twitter too. Pizza shops, libraries, movies have used Twitter to gain traction in their respective markets. Twitter is where word-of mouth truly comes to life.

More and more celebrities have taken to Twitter for better self-branding. And not just movie stars either. Twitter is now home to sportspersons, authors, ministers, wannabe-ministers, public servants, NGOs, TV personalities and a whole lot of other professionals. It is a market for markets.

This Lok Sabha election, in a somewhat Obama-inspired moment, politicians and political parties alike chose to make Twitter a tool in their campaign strategies. I have personally been in the middle of several heated debates with some very dedicated political activists.

Twitter started off as a seemingly inconsequential status update service, but grew into a many-fangled modern beast of communication. What it is today, is a model of connectivity much suited to our chaotic times.

Twitter isn’t one tweet. To see it at work, you need to jump in and let it wash over you. Unless you would rather just watch TV of course, in which case, God help us all.

“I do not believe God exists,” said the man who didn’t believe.

“I know,” said the believer, and bit into his apple.

“Prove to me that God exists,” said the one who didn’t believe.

“I can’t,” said the believer. “It is not something that can be proven. If you want to see God, you must believe in his presence.”

“I can’t accept that,” said the disbeliever. “How can I believe in something which you can’t prove? It is unscientific.”

“You will find proof when you believe,” said the believer who had stopped to pick the seeds out of his apple.

“Hah! Nice try!” said the one who didn’t believe, somewhat triumphant.

The believer looked up and said, “I can only tell you that this apple is sweet. Whether you believe me or not is up to you. But your refusal to believe that the apple is sweet without even tasting it, is unscientific.”

“Nice try!” said the disbeliever, sounding slightly less triumphant this time.

What colour is it? Do you like the colour? Does someone you know like the colour? Would it look the same if you were to look at it under a different shade of light?

Now feel it up. Is it hard or soft? Is it rough or is it smooth. Does it feel dry? Or does moisture meet your skin?

Would it feel the same if you touched it out in the hot sun? If you kept it in the freezer for an hour, would it change?

Would the orange appear as soft to a baby? Would it appear heavier or lighter?

Now think of something in your life — a condition. Something good that brings happiness to you.

Did your friend get a promotion? Are you happy for him? Do you foresee a better future for him?

But does your friend’s prime rival at work see it the same way? Do you find your happiness reflected in him?

Here’s the point I am trying to make. Nothing is what it seems. Reality isn’t objective. Everything around you looks the way it does because it is you who is looking at it.

The world isn’t out there. It is inside you.

His people raged all around the chained prisoners and his soldiers fought against an angry crowd intent upon lynching those captured.

The king silenced the crowd with a motion of his hand. He didn’t want the hands of his people sullied with the blood of murderers. His people were not killers. They were builders and poets and traders. He will not let them turn into the object of their hate.

The king dispensed justice swiftly. To those who had killed his people, he gave death. Those who had desecrated his people’s holy places, he sentenced to slavery, so they may help build back that which they had destroyed.

And to the one who had taken his only child from him, the brave king gave forgiveness.