Eyes

Eyes

Wednesday 4 December 2013

A friend in need is a friend indeed.

Since I was a child I've wondered what that meant. It seems all so terribly easy, and logically flawed. It gives an awful lot of credit to the wrong part, the receiving rather than the giving part. Debates on how the phrase was really meant notwithstanding, the public currency that backs the 'friend' being the one in need, far outweigh any other interpretation. Because that is the most popular notion, the version we want to believe. Now that that's sorted, again, what makes the person in need get to be the real friend?

It is undermining the altruistic giver. Which would well fit with long lasting claims that we are selfish creatures, engaged in a battle of survival, incapable of displaying altruism. Incapable of showing kindness to others at a cost to ourselves. Yet over and over again we know of people around us, people among us, people who become famous on account of touching acts of selflessness. All this altruism that we see in ourselves and others, is it just self-interest in disguise? Anyone who has given without an obvious return will testify to how rewarding it is, giving you a feeling of having done something important and valuable thereby increasing your own self worth. Helping people even features in the 'World Happiness Database' (yes, such a thing exists!!) in Rotterdam as a clear measurable towards increasing happiness. There is also the danger of subconsciously nurturing the idea of having invested into a pay-back system, making it a right to receive the same treatment in turn.
This is one depressing way of looking at human nature, there are yet darker ones too that I need take no responsibility for!

Around 1968, George Price, building up on the works of a number of other scientists like Hamilton and Haldane, came up with an equation that explained how altruism could thrive even amongst groups of selfish people. Phew! just when you thought there was no helping us! All these guys contributed towards developing a simple equation to explain that an organism would demonstrate self-sacrificing behaviour if it would enhance the reproductive chances of those it was closely related to. Price
 walked into the University college London an unknown academic, presented it's staff with this remarkable equation, and walked out with an honorary position and the keys to his own office. As Haldane had explained, he himself was willing to sacrifice his own life either for two brothers, or eight cousins - that is, by kin selection. Since he would share 50% of each brothers genetic make, and 12.5% of each cousin's, his genes would survive even if he were to die. That's a nicely squared off equation, you'd have to agree, and it does make my perspective look so much more cheerful!

If for the survival of ones own genes or for the sake of cashing into a feel-good pay back on investment scheme, can altruism even be considered altruism at all with so much vested self-interest? Price was so depressed when he found out that he and his buddies might be right that he gave himself over to the service of others and became a devout Christian to prove that human beings are the only species that can beat out their own nature. 5 years later he killed himself. The debates about the scientific roots of altruism continue to rage.

That's not a happy ending and it is the season of Advent. I will turn this around.

Whilst biology and psychology are part of understanding behaviour it can never be an entire and complete explanation for the complexity and grandeur of the human condition.
I confess, I kind of fancy myself to be a good friend, the giving part, the part that should rightfully get credit. There is no way to make this sound less conceited, so it's a good thing we have sorted out that altruism has nothing to do with it. Conversely, when in the rain, I'm quick to make an inventory of the people that come to my rescue. Taking the opportunity to determine who my real friends are. It isn't fair or accurate. People are the way they are - some of them our friends for good reasons. Giving to, and receiving from them, each in its own a privilege and a gift. Let not one be celebrated any more than the other, rather celebrate having someone to give to and having someone to take from. 


Friends are friends indeed. Happy Advent!

Tuesday 3 December 2013

Do you believe in Santa?

He could have asked differently, challenged me to come out with it - 'Does Santa exist?' But he didn't. He asked 'Do you believe in Santa?' Asking for my opinion, not wanting black or white. Giving me room to deflect. In his very protected 8 years of life, he has come to trust my judgement. It's flattering and humbling in equal measure. Where is this heading, will I have to open the whole can of worms? Are there really Tooth fairies and Easter Bunnies and how are babies really made? We're going to have to come clean with them sooner or later. I can tell he's on the fence with this, he could go either way. His voice says there's not much time left to buy.

But there is some, and I'm going to use it. Whatever the skeptics may say, there is a point to all this yarn spinning. Childhood is so fleeting. The trusting innocence and boundless imagination is here and then it's gone. To never be re-created again in any other phase of our skeptical age and life. How dreary would the world be without that priceless look on faces with childlike faith in magic and make-belief! How conceited and dreadfully dull to claim, only that can be seen and touched is real. All things in this great universe not comprehensible to our doubtful minds just couldn't be. There couldn't be a God, or love or life on Mars. And what would inspire poetry and romance and all that makes this existence vibrant and exciting? The wisdom of Lucy has answered these for me.
There is such a place as fairyland - but only children can find the way to it. And they do not know that it is fairyland until they have grown so old that they forget the way. One bitter day, when they seek it and cannot find it, they realise what they have lost; and that is the tragedy of life. On that day the gates of Eden are shut behind them and the age of gold is over. Henceforth they must dwell in the common light of common day. Only a few, who remain children at heart, can ever find that fair, lost path again; and blessed are they above mortals. They, and only they, can bring us tidings from that dear country where we once sojourned and from which we must evermore be exiles. The world calls them its singers and poets and artists and story-tellers; but they are just people who have never forgotten the way to fairyland. - L. M. Montgomery.
'Do you believe in Santa?' he gently presses.
'I like to honey, I like to believe in Santa'. Stay my child, for as long as you like in the age of gold.
Satisfied, he replied, 'Me too!'

Sunday 16 June 2013

Send To > All.

Ever wondered what kind of dimwits at work mistakenly sends out mass emails to the whole company? There is at least one of those every 2 years in our 40,000 global organisation. Who does things like that anyway? How can anyone be that stupid??
Now I know. Anyone in today's work environment deals with IT support for every annoying malfunctioning digital detail. My malfunctioning digital detail was my BlackBerry - for a whole week!! Rather than see it as liberation from corporate slavery, I pined like a dog for my master. When should I heel? When must I jump? My master control panel was rendered defect. Me and my notions of self importance were frantic about getting my life gadget to work again. At this point, I had gone through several calls with the technical support. With each trial and failed solution I was getting  more frantic. Finally after running through the last proposed procedure unsuccessfully, I was peeved! Am I expected to bear through yet another call of which the first 5 mins are annoyingly dramatic music followed by 'Your call is on hold. Hold the line please. Your call is on hold. Hold the line please...'? Pressed for time with meetings back to back and with the urgency of an upcoming business trip, I just had to sort this out in the few minutes I had to spare. So I hurriedly, sent out an email from my desk to the techies that my problem still persists and I FRIGGIN needed a solution soon, so they had better get their asses moving!! It came out much nicer than that, more polite than I intended to be. Because I was so hard pressed for time I guess. That's interesting - that being a bitch may actually take more effort than being nice. Send! Right about the time I hit 'Send' is when I realised I chose the wrong distributor list. AAAAAARGH!!!! Rather than mail the BlackBerry services I had sent it out to BlackBerry Users, which is basically everyone in the company that owns one of these 'Employee-on-a-leash' gadgets. A clean 80%-85%. Brilliant me!

Where I work, we insure and reinsure all kinds of stuff, all over the world. We are about the biggest in the business and are hence able to attract a wealth of talent. Some of the brains around are Aeronautical engineers, pilots, doctors, physicists, chemists, statisticians, mathematicians, climate researchers, geologists. We virtually have specialists for every faculty of every industry to work out complex risk solutions for casualty, property, marine and aviation, financial risks, etc etc etc. Right. And they just, all of them that is, received my mail requesting help for my persisting Blackberry problem. The earth didn't split open and swallow me. I did wait in the hope that it would.

Just about the exact moment I hit the 'Send' button I got that unpleasantly sinking feeling embarrassing blunders can cause. As most of you are aware, one can revoke, or attempt to revoke a sent mail. As most of you might also be aware, this handy feature is no use for the thousands of very engaged, busy professionals who open new mails almost immediately on receipt. So most of the damage was irrevocable. And then the most interesting part of this experience started to unfold. My inbox started filling up with responses, which were one of two kinds - (A.) cheerful or (B.) sour. Type A, were compelled to react out of a sense of duty/protocol or just mere pleasantries. One response, a pilot from Type A, explained politely he wasn't  in charge of the BlackBerry services and therefore, very apologetically explained, couldn't help me. Another Lawyer offered, in addition to a hesitant apology, that he forward my request to the appropriate service since he unfortunately wouldn't be able to solve the problem for me. There was also the jovial congratulatory remark about my 'moment of fame' which even my slinking around at work couldn't avoid. There were those among Type A too that were old colleagues I had worked with at some point of my career, who had moved to other countries or departments. They were pouring in with "Hello's" and "How are you's" and "Good to hear from you's"....ahem. My mistaken email also became a social medium of connections and re-connection of sorts. Almost emotional and nostalgic sometimes. Especially in the case of a particular colleague who wrote back from our South African office with words of warmth and greetings. I probably won't ever see her again - incidentally that was her last week with the company. If not for my mail, I couldn't have said goodbye. Type B were the usual sour frowners, complaining about the inconvenience. The ones that took the time and effort to make their displeasure known. These are the ones that I was dreading in the first place, the reason why my mistake could have been so potentially disastrous. It turned out, Type A vastly outnumbered Type B. In all, I received a little over 50 responses. The rest thankfully just ignored my mail, recognising it to be the mistake it was. The whole goof-up turned out to be an experiment in Human psychologies - and a very reassuring one at that!

Should this experiment ever be repeated, I hope to be a Type A. Unfortunately I don't know that for fact. What type would you be?



Wednesday 20 March 2013

Sleeping beauty.

I have never met him, barely spoken to him. Yet I am most intrigued. He's the Prince in the alternative Sleeping beauty. The end of this tale is left unfinished, open. Especially for him.
She continues sleeping, sleeping, sleeping. If her mind is imprisoned in an unresponsive body or she is blissfully unconscious to all and everything, one can never know. For all she does is sleep.
Every new day is identical to the last. Her favourite music plays in the background. The scent of her favourite flowers fill the room. She lies numb to his tender stroking. He talks casually about his day, as husbands do to their wives. The curtain flutters lightly in the breeze, sneaking in a ray of sunlight on her face. She twitches. He beams! She's happy! She's here! Little signs, big messages.

When he can tear himself away, he's trotting the globe, this Prince. On the determined search for something that will wake her up. He's going to bring her back. There has never been any doubt.
In respectful disagreement of every bit of medical proof and advice to the contrary, he keeps on looking. His search widens as do the months prolong.

There are only one of two possible endings.
One day she may awake. And he would have found it.
Maybe she won't. And he'd keep on looking.




Monday 21 January 2013

Darkness there, and nothing more.

Absolutely nothing. No, less than nothing. I have my eyes wide open. Nothing. Eyes shut tight. Same nothing. Not a shadow, not a shape. Natural instincts of panic were set off as I was guided in by the waiter. Through a supreme act of will, I resisted turning around and running. Probably anticipating this from years of experience on the job, his grasp stayed tightly firm. I moved to my seat under his guidance in little pigeon step shuffles, which is where I stayed put for the next 2.5 hours. It was a full house tonight, wherever it is we were. It is a weird experiment, precisely why it's so popular. Very weird and very intriguing.
It took a good 25 mintes till everyone 'sounded' seated and the hysterically accosting cackle began to subside. The 80 people (voices) were calming down. The brain responded to an unprecedented loss of a one sense, vision, by putting all other remaining senses almost immediately in overdrive - especially that of hearing and paradoxically also speech.  Which resulted in fine tuned, overly sensitive ears on high alert meted with unnecessarily loud voices competing with each other. A recipe for insanity, had it gone on longer than 2.5 hours. But 2.5 hours in utter, absolute, total darkness....and dinner, could just still expedite the process of insanity. Dinner was an additionally interesting aspect of the evening, once I had worked out where it is dinner would be placed. There is also the matter of locating utensils of cutlery, plate and glass to transport dinner and drinks from (invisible) said location to mouth. Given the circumstances, the animalistic option of eating right off the plate also exists. It's not like anyone could frown at my table manners. To complete the effect, the 4 course menu wasn't disclosed either. We must be very bored to seek out this kick! I realise I haven't heard much from my partner. My need to stay in control, kept me focused on taking stock of my situation. Gathering my bearings in as much as I could. So I went about groping cautiously at my surroundings. The table I'm sitting at is as broad as my legs are long - from foot till knee. "Opps, sorry! Didn't mean to kick, just measuring". Coordinates of serviette and utensils mapped out in my mind, explored by technique of stroking obstacles with hand, never losing contact to avoid knocking over tall objects like bottles of water etc. In the process, hairy male felt-up arms length away on left. Anther, not so hairy, also male, same distance to the right. Sex gauged by startled voices - however accurate an indication of sex that may be. Minor embarrassments in light of knowledge gained. Little experiments also performed of holding hand in front of nose, moving serviette up and down in front of face. Fascinatingly, uniform, complete blackness. Zero visibility confirmed again. Very satisfied indeed with myself, to have conquered the limitations and sized up my environment! I am now ready to share the results of a well analysed picture. I'll be our path finder tonight! So, what happened to him anyway?

'Dining in the Dark' - it was his idea to begin with. "It's like with human relationship's" he had said, "groping your way through darkness. Searching for things you couldn't identify when found. Feeding off them nevertheless". It is an uncannily close analogy. He had no picture now, he said. Reportedly holding his head in his hands. He was finding the whole experience most exhausting. I eagerly shared, with an annoying insistence, the vivid picture I had cleverly deduced. He couldn't see it. "What good are eyes, if there is nothing to see". A circumstantial blindness. All the waiters in here were blind, moving around with enviable dexterity, clicking away their fingers to gauge each other's positions. We were diving into their world, fleetingly, without their skill. It might have been easier to let go and free-fall into the experience. We wouldn't know, because we couldn't let go. During the courses, the stupefying game of keeping food perched on fork, till fork was successfully guided to mouth, was repeated as many times till scrape tests on plate concluded relatively empty plate, or the bother of chasing around obstacles on plate got too exasperating causing us to give back course uneaten. Between courses, I was tiring myself out fighting off messages from my brain to send my body into sleep mode, naturally associating the darkness with bed time, whilst my body was trying to consume and process dinner courses. Eventually when I wasn't playing spoon and marble race with unidentifiable food and with nothing else to do, I sprawled across the knee-to-foot broad table and gave in to my brain. Darkness, nothing more.