Blabbers on a Friday (late) night Or Random s**t thoughts crossing an idle mind

 [Disclaimer: I do not own the copyright of the images below. They are obtained by randomly 'google searching'.]

It’s another Friday night of the month, late night actually. It’s almost 1:30 am (and so it’s actually Saturday). And I am sober. Friday night, to most people, is the most awaited moment of the week. Why? Of course man! It’s the threshold of the highly anticipated weekend of relaxation, of spending more time with friends and family and of course of not having to deal with words like ‘boss’ or managers! Besides, who loves Monday mornings? Monday mornings are the gateways to a long week of work! And that sucks, doesn’t it? Hence, Friday nights are the times when undergrads party hard with beer, girls (for straight guys) and loud music that will probably crack the sky! Friday nights are when typical grad students seep a beer or two at a bar complaining how frustrating PhD life can be. 

And I am sitting in my apartment, having finished watching ‘Love Aaj Kal’ (for the 2^nd time actually, the first time being 2 or 3 years back when I saw it in theater). It’s a pretty good and enjoyable movie I think. And tomorrow I think I’m gonna watch The Dark Knight Rises in IMAX, praying and hoping that the unfortunate Denver-tragedy which happened yesterday, doesn’t repeat anywhere again! Probably it’s going to be the last (good) movie which I’m gonna watch with the two people with whom I’ve watched movies religiously every weekend, for the last four years. It’ll suck to watch movies alone after that. My every-weekend-movie-at-theater craze might die down soon after, who knows!

I’m nearing four years of completion into PhD and I am already beginning to feel as if I’ve had enough! Enough of what? Well, enough of stress, hard work, fun, excitement, frustration, s**t and everything else. Frankly, these four years have made me ‘something’ from ‘near nothing’, which of course doesn’t mean that my undergrad life was waste. Undergrad life teaches about things which are different. It teaches about how to make a transition from being under your parents’ shelter to facing the brutal life. Grad/PhD life teaches from there. PhD, it is said, is a humbling experience. True. We begin to realize how insignificant our knowledge is, how unskilled and non-expert we are, and how limitless the ocean of unexplored knowledge is! But it’s starting to get enough! Of course there are too many things still to learn for me, but frustration is a part of the routine. Sometimes (or mostly nowadays) I feel like yearning for a life with no stress and deadlines! Life of a researcher is full of failures, punctuated by successes, said a leading world expert on semiconductor lasers. Very true.

Okay. So? So I put up this gtalk status sometime back: The tragedy of life does not lie in not being able to reach your goal. It lies in not having a goal to reach. How thought-provoking and inspiring! “Not having a goal to reach” is life’s tragedy. Fine. Let’s not talk about the unfortunate people who struggle for two meals per day or who are living at the edge of life-death due to living in sensitive or volatile geographical locations. Let’s talk about you, me and everyone who can read my blog – we all who have access to internet, have a decent salary/stipend, a decent (though monotonic) life. Do we all have a transparent goal in our lives? Is becoming an engineer, a doctor, a professor, a scientist, an MBA, an entrepreneur – a goal in life? Yeah, may be. And what then? We will do our work, our job, maintain a family, live till old age, see our children grow up, see our grand children grow up, and then we die. We will all die – the sinners, the saints, the emperors, the CEOs, the terrorists, the scientists, the beggars, the lovers and the lovelorn – we all will die. So, I’m trying to argue with myself if, having a ‘goal’ in life eventually matters at all! It matters to how we live our life, and how meaningful and worthy we make our lives to be. But since our life will anyways come to an end one day, it doesn’t matter if we had any goals in life or not. Death neither depends on how we lived our life nor on what we achieved in our life. So am I trying to argue that ‘life’ is totally meaningless? If that is so, then there’s no charm and hope in continuing to live or work further! That would be a completely depressing, pessimistic and hopeless perspective. Doesn’t matter. Whether or not life has a meaning, it has to end one day. So what do I do? Well, I do what everyone does! Live life to the fullest with no worry about death! Live life in a way so to try to bring smiles to as many people’s faces as possible. Live life in a way so as to try to do something for mankind. But then, how can I live life with such zest and energy when I know for sure that it’s very short-lived? I mean, I could have been one of the 12 unfortunate people who were killed yesterday by the gunman at Denver had I been living in Denver, CO and not in Columbus, OH and had I gone to watch the first night, first show of the Batman movie! Then, my 27 year old life would have come to an end, and this post wouldn’t have existed at all! Highly possible and likely. Suppose I was killed yesterday, what would have happened to the work, the meaning and purpose of my 27 years of life? Let’s forget the sentimental part of my relatives crying or breaking down. There’d have been no meaning of course! I lived, and I died. In these 27 years, neither have I been able to do something that can affect mankind in a good way (although I’m trying with my research J) nor have I been able to bring smile to people’s faces with any meaningful philanthropic work. So my life till now has no meaning, at least that’s what seems to me.  

Do I live, or do I exist? And why?

Am I speaking like a mentally unstable guy? No, I think I am speaking like a philosopherJ, asking questions which have baffled humanity for thousands of years. I cannot find answers to these questions in one random Friday night, for God’s sake! Alright, I asked “What is the purpose of doing research, because eventually we gotta die?” to one of my colleagues sometime back and he replied “We are all participating in building that fort or tower of knowledge….brick by brick, stone by stone. All scientists of the past had contributed their part in building it and now we are continuing to help put one brick at a time in our life. It doesn’t mean we won’t die but it helps expand mankind’s understanding of how the universe works. It is a gradual process.” And then I asked one of my non-departmental friends “Why do we live and why do we work when one day we are gonna die?” and she replied “”Because we are thrown in to this world… and we can’t do anything about it. As long as we are here, we just keep playing (working) and living.”

It’s 2:30 am now and I am debating with myself about the meaning of ‘life’ on a Friday night! That’s what happens when you’re a PhD student with no girlfriend and no work-related deadlines close-by. Let me conclude this random blabber on a serious manner. Let me quote two of America’s most prolific writers/scholars and a few lines of their questions/answers. These can really, really help a lot on trying to appreciate what ‘life’ is all about! 

“I am attempting to face a question which our generation, perhaps more than any, seems always ready to ask and never able to answer -- What is the meaning or worth of human life?...Astronomers have told us that human affairs constitute but a moment in the trajectory of a star; geologists have told us that civilization is but a precarious interlude between ice ages; biologists have told us that all life is war, a struggle for existence among individuals, groups, nations, alliances, and species.”    -----              - Will Durant

“Dear Durant

You ask me, in brief, what satisfaction I get out of life, and why I go on working. I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs. There is in every living creature an obscure but powerful impulse to active functioning. Life demands to be lived. Inaction, save as a measure of recuperation between bursts of activity, is painful and dangerous to the healthy organism—in fact, it is almost impossible. Only the dying can be really idle.

I do not believe in immortality, and have no desire for it. The belief in it issues from the puerile egos of inferior men. ... What the meaning of human life may be I don’t know: I incline to suspect that it has none. All I know about it is that, to me at least, it is very amusing while it lasts. Even its troubles, indeed, can be amusing. Moreover, they tend to foster the human qualities that I admire most—courage and its analogues. The noblest man, I think, is that one who fights God, and triumphs over Him. I have had little of this to do. When I die I shall be content to vanish into nothingness. No show, however good, could conceivably be good for ever.”   - H. L. Mencken

Interested readers can explore more here:

http://www.philosophicalsociety.com/Archives/Durant%27s%20On%20The%20Meaning%20of%20Life.htm  

 and here:

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/01/on-meaning-of-life.html