Musings...

I was watching a spider running away in the bathroom since water was coming near it; I then wondered, how does one organism learn from another? Is it like the story (or experiment) of 100 monkeys where 100 monkey learns and the same automatically spreads to others? Like are today's generation smart/have wide exposure due to reason of critical mass? or is it something else altogether? Are city animals smarter than jungle animals? or is just that organisms develop learning based on a combination of environment, heredity and own skills? Or is it nothing other than an intelligent power be it God or consciousness or Power (to avoid controversies) permeates everything which learns from circumstance or events and becomes the intelligence it is? Or does the Power becomes the way it is to match the requirement of the environment? Would Gandhi have become a leader he was had he never returned to India? Would Einstein have formulated the theory of relativity if he was encouraged in the class?

Just imagine if we never had the concept of age? and lets further imagine that we didn't break our lives into ages? Of course the flip side is we won't able to celebrate birthdays but we can always get around it by celebrating anytime any day? Anyhow this thought came up when one of my nieces and I were chatting and she had gone to a party and someone raised this issue feeling old. But do think over... do we actually feel old? Doesn't the thought occur only when someone says it? Don't many of us have the feeling of always wanting to be young? There are only two issues to the thought of age - firstly that physically we are not able to do certain things and secondly when society looks askance if an old person gets married to a young person saying "think of your age before marrying, he/she is young enough to be your daughter/son" this again comes out of the multiple barriers/categorisation that we keep putting - which paradoxically comes out of our need to s

"The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. " so says Marcel Proust a French writer. Today i was watching an interesting episode from a serial "one life to love" - NDTV - They come with very good themes on living our lives fully and one of the persons who really lived such a life so it is said is Leonardo da Vinci who wrote or practiced so many aspects of the world be it art or even medicine. Our lives have become so fast that we have no attention to the process and set our sights only on goal. This is so be it in office where only goal matters; when we eat, we are busy watching TV or rushing to finish, when we travel to our workplace or home, the attention is to reach not the process; Have we lost the ability to enjoy beauty of the present? Imagine eating a luscious mango - can we enjoy its fragrance, its flavour, its color, its taste, its soft feeling and the sound of our teeth biting into its soft flesh? In short can we pay