Category: Essays

In the vast tapestry of human history, patterns emerge that echo through time, revealing a disconcerting truth — the recurring nature of humanity’s failings. From the heartbreaking Armenian Genocide to the chilling orchestrations of Stalin’s Great Purge to Hitler’s holocaust to the present-day genocide in Palestine, we find ourselves ensnared in an endless loop of repeating history. It’s disquieting, these parallels between eras, prompting me to ask the question: why does humanity seem destined to recreate the traumas of the past?

The pages of history, whether stained with the ink of Elif Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul or the dystopian visions of George Orwell’s 1984, bear witness to the cyclical dance of power and oppression. Stalin’s Great Purge, akin to Hitler’s sinister regime, marked an epoch where totalitarianism seized the reins, leaving a scar on the collective memory. A scar that has opened today, to fresh, bleeding wounds.

Stalin’s Great Purge

The Great Purge, courtesy of Joseph Stalin, in the Soviet Union during the late 1930s, stands as a dark testament to the consolidation of power and the purging of perceived threats to the regime. This historical episode, marked by mass arrests, executions, and political persecution, left an indelible mark on the course of the Soviet Union. While the exact numbers are difficult to determine due to the secretive nature of the Soviet government and the lack of reliable records, most historians believe at least 750,000 people were executed between 1936 and 1938. More than a million survivors were sent to forced labor camps, known as Gulags¹.

“Fifth column,” “enemy of the people” and “saboteurs” were some of the terms Stalin used to describe those who were sought out during this period of terror². The assassinations and arrests started with members of the Bolshevik party, political authorities, and military personnel, then extended to peasants and non-Soviet ethnic minorities. No one was safe. Not artists, not scientists, not intellects, not writers, and most assuredly, not foreigners³. Furthermore, Stalin issued a decree that made families responsible for the offenses committed by a husband or father. This meant that children as young as 12 could face execution for the actions of their relatives⁴.

Parallels in the Present

Guernica by Pablo Picasso (1937), Image credits: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

Fast-forward to the present-day tragedy in Palestine, genocidal in its nature and proportion. Resonating echoes of Stalin’s Great Terror, we see Israel launch an offensive against a people whose only fault is their existence on a land that the former, and its Western allies, covet. This offensive is constructed around the perceived threat that Israel feels it faces from the outfit, Hamas. So deep is this paranoia (or a political construct?) that Israeli Government officials have gone on record to even place members of the UN on the Hamas list.

While the human toll unfolds like a narrative in the tradition of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry, where each verse carries the weight of displacement and longing, Israel continues to operate under the forced narrative of wanting to eliminate the threat to the Jewish people, further bolstered by unwavering support from the west. Voices of dissent are swiftly and brutally silenced, pleas fall upon deafened ears, calls for empathy and understanding go unanswered, alliances shift, and motives remain elusive. Governances and Western media seem intent on vilifying the ‘other,’ a recurring motif serving as a justifiable cause for annihilation.

For with great power, motivated by great greed, comes great paranoia and the need to keep it all “safe”. By whatever means necessary (and in Israel’s case, unnecessary). At any cost. No death is a conscientious burden.

I watch with tired eyes, a broken heart, a maimed soul, as history repeats itself. And keep asking, why? Why them? Why this? Why again?

Humanity’s Paradox

To comprehend this cyclical narrative, I turned the lens inward and came to a conclusion: Humanity is ensnared in a paradox where progress coexists with regression. The innate human tendencies towards power, control, and the fear of the ‘other’ create a fertile ground for the re-emergence of historical patterns. The timeless words of Jorge Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” resonate as a cautionary tale against our collective amnesia.

Scène des massacres de Scio by Eugène Delacroix (1824)

In reflecting on the Great Purge under Stalin and the contemporary genocide in Palestine, it’s disheartening to realize how humanity perpetually falls short in learning from its own history. The echoes of past atrocities reverberate, yet we seem unable to glean the crucial lessons they offer. We express horror at the tragic failings of past leaders, patting ourselves on the back for progress, yet the cycle persists.

The paradox of acknowledging historical atrocities while congratulating ourselves on our supposed moral advancement is a stark reminder of our collective failure to truly absorb the wisdom of the past. The sobering truth remains — governments across the world continue to stumble on the same pitfalls, continue to fail their people, never fully internalizing the imperative to evolve beyond the recurring mistakes that stain our shared history.

Breaking the Cycle?

Yet, within this bleak, infinite cycle, I refuse to give up hope. The same history that served as warnings of our propensity to repeat mistakes also offers a roadmap for change. It beckons us to learn, grow, and challenge the status quo. Breaking the cycle requires a collective commitment to empathy, understanding, and a resolute rejection of the toxic narratives that perpetuate division. An urgent need to rewrite our present and the future.

May the ghosts of the events starting 7 October 2023 haunt our consciences for as long as we live. And may the hope that future generations heed the lessons we seem inclined to forget to burn bright. Unlike the trauma Holocaust survivors and survivors of the Nakba are reliving, let’s aspire for a different legacy. A legacy where the shadows of history don’t cast the same pall over successive generations, ensuring that they are guided, rather than shackled for eternity.

Did You Seriously Trap a God in Schrödinger’s Box?: A Genre-Hopping Thought Train from Religion to Quantum Physics

By Nilay Bhatt

On 23/11/2023

In Essays

Welcome to our annual game night! Today, we sit back, relax, and think about how quantum and existential physics inform our perception of existence and play into the beliefs that shape modern religions by juxtaposing it with an abstract and far-fetched metaphor that will require you to suspend disbelief and possibly adopt an optimistically nihilistic attitude on the absurdity of it all.

Would you care for some Planck fries before we get started? Or maybe a Bohr Slurpee? Surely an Einstein Burger?

Before an age of organized religion that absconds scrutiny on ‘righteous’ grounds dawned on the human race, we have always been curious creatures whom Prometheus carved from his clay. Maybe he forgot to bake into us the knowledge of the true nature of reality, for we have always persisted to traverse beyond the stars, to peel back the jet-black curtain of the cosmos and see who is holding the strings. Because on some level, we feel, that by understanding the nature of our reality and those that shape it, we can be more comfortable with the sweet pleasures and pains of our existence and the undeniable fact that we will all die.

If that is so, believing in something, or someone, makes it easier. It helps us process life in a palatable manner, especially things beyond our control.

Before we commercialized and weaponized our deities, early cavemen worshipped their animals and the earth around them, giving birth to the first animalistic, pagan, and pantheistic beliefs that would later influence religion as we see it today.

But the skeptics have always been there right at the side of the believers.

The Allegory of Faith by Johannes Vermeer (1670–1672)

So how do we know that Gods exist? How do we know that they do not? Some of us rely on our scriptures, while some rely on the concept of energy and entropy. Some think of it spiritually while some do not think about it at all.

Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning as well as other writings examine the notions of God and existence in relation to each other. Frankl’s conception of existence drops out the deterministic Freudian triad of ego, id, and superego with their attendant conflicts. Frankl goes beyond the deterministic Freudian doctrine of the equilibrium (the homeostasis) of these conflicting elements—at best a fractious psychological armistice—to assert the existence of the unique antecedent which he calls the ‘unconscious God.’
William F. Ryan, The Notion of God

In his book, Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager (“A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp”), translated in English as Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning, Viktor Frankl says that the deterministic view of observing a human mind as a supreme battle between Freudian principles of ego, id, and superego is reductive. He believes in a deeper guiding force within us that helps us find purpose and meaning in life. This Unconscious God looks at existence from a spiritual level. A far cry from simpler times when we worshipped the rabbit we were about to eat.

We evolved and so did our beliefs. Or maybe we just branched out. Some people feel kinship to their idols while some believe in God and his child come to save us all. There are those who believe in spiritual immortality, proclaiming the balance of birth and death as a transaction of energy within the universe and some just do as their parents tell them to and leave the rumination of existence for the tortured philosophers.

The Cat’s Out of the Box, Baby!

The Fall of the Rebel Angels by Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1562)

Since we are all settled in, we can possibly actually relax now. What is that you hear? Oh no, it’s just Schrödinger’s box. He left it here in my care for he claimed it held hostage- wait for it- God. He said he captured the maker and the destroyer of all worlds within the confines of his wooden box.

I rolled my eyes “God does not exist, Schrödy.”

“Are you sure?” he smirked.

“I mean… he could.” I am confused at this point. “No, no. There is no God. But maybe…”

He just smiled. “Don’t wreck your brain. Look, just open the box. You will know! If God exists, you will find them inside. Also, might I add, it is heteronormative of you to assume that the supposed God would be a dude. Do better.”

“Okay, but what happened to the cat?!”

He was already gone by then.

For the unversed, Schrödinger, all the way back in 1935 developed a thought experiment. He had a love for felines and a healthy distrust in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, usually associated with Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg (who postulated that a quantum system could exist in a superposition of multiple states until observed, at which point it collapses into one of those states).

Schrödy wondered if that would apply on a macroscopic level: to bigger objects. Simply put, if you put a cat in a box and release a radioactive atom, it could decay or not decay. If it decays, it will release a poison and kill the cat.

Now, until you open the box and make an observation, the cat exists in a superposition: it is both alive and dead simultaneously. I know I know, this is a bit abstract for our less scientifically inclined readers, but bear with me for a moment, for Schrödy has now trapped God.

So? Does God Exist? (Psst, You Might Not Like the Answer)

The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp by Rembrandt (1632)

For those of us still on the fence as to where we stand in the grand scheme of the cosmos, while wanting to adhere to principles and dogmas of science that promote inquiry, opening the box Schrödy has left for us might not be the wisest idea. We are a product of our preconceived beliefs, and our life experiences shape us to influence the way we see the world and react to it. Has Schrödy really trapped the God? Does God even exist?

Until we open the box and observe, God exists in a ‘superposed’ state. They are either in the box or they are not.

They exist or they do not.

The act of observation collapses the superposition into a single state. In the context of religion and belief in God, one’s personal beliefs, experiences, and interpretations can also influence their perception of God’s presence or absence. It also evolves our questioning. Do we even want to open the box? What would become of the world if we do know, especially if it is an answer you do not like?

The existence of God and the nature of divinity are deeply complex and subjective questions that transcend the scope of empirical science, and in an extension, this thought experiment. It just serves as an aperitif, a vaguely clouded metaphor reflective of the real-world state, posed just to highlight the complexities in the nature of these inquiries and how (and if) science and faith can shake hands before the coin toss.

Encore

Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Viktor Vasnetsov (1887)

Now that the night has sighed its way away and dawn breaks out from beneath the mountains in gentle, lapping strides, I leave you with this quote from Kierkegaard, one of the most influential thinkers in existentialism, who believed that God comes into the single individual, and that’s where the place of God is. It’s not “out there” somewhere.

I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations — one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it — you will regret both.
Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life

At the end of the day, perhaps a solution is to open Schrödy’s box and if you decide to believe what your eyes see, do so. Make your existence easier.

If not anything else, thought experiments like these prove that there is a way for science and religion to coexist in a begrudging harmony. That they can pave a path forged in inquiry, faith, and most of all tolerance.

Perhaps that is how we discover, and uncover, the greatest secrets of this maddeningly beautiful universe.

Oh, and if you see Schrödy, tell him to take his damn box back.

Shattering the Fourth Wall – The Flair of the Self-Aware

By Nilay Bhatt

On 24/03/2023

In Essays

Long before Phoebe Waller-Bridge looked awkwardly into the camera and won the hearts of even the most stone-cold viewer and critics alike with her perpetually messy life as Fleabag, our article opens with a panning view of a house in the suburbs in the earlier years of this century. It is a rosy morning and our camera pans through the idyllic street gently littered with orange autumnal leaves, to the window that offers a glimpse into the life of a normal family, blissfully unaware of the voyeuristic eyes of hundreds of viewers picturing them in their heads through the screen of whatever device they are reading this article in.

Inside the house, a child sits in front of her TV set and claps her hands when a familiar figure in the now-iconic pink T-shirt, orange shorts, and a splashy purple backpack grins through the screen of the vintage television set. Her friend is an intelligent simian creature named after human footwear. “We had such an exciting trip today! What was your favourite part of the trip?” The valiant Dora the Explorer asks the little girl watching her adventures. “The lava mountain! The lava mountain!” The child shrieks in joy.

Her brother is a comic book aficionado and is sitting in the adjoining room reading The Sensational She-Hulk #1 which came out way back in 1989. He usually reads the adventures of Professor Charles Xaviers and his merry band of mutants, but he is partial to Jennifer Walters. The superheroine is flexing on her comic, flaunting her perfect hair while threatening the X-Men readers to finally give her story a shot. “Okay. This is your second chance. If you don’t buy my book this time, I’m gonna come to your house and rip up all your X-Men.” She grins. What can I say? She has a reputation for talking with her audiences.

Hey! See what I did there? I’m talking to you now. That’s cool, huh? Enough of being a peeping Tom to these poor kids. Let’s take a stroll in times of yonder. Yes, even before Matthew Broderick’s dashing turn in Ferris Bueller, or Mary Maclane’s 1918 movie ‘Men Who Made Love to Me’ where they address the audience directly. Roll the camera.

Let’s go all the way back to when stage plays and performing arts was the new cool. Let us imagine that stage, shall we? We know it has three walls, well sort of, as performers elicit the widest range of emotions ever conceivable in front of a live audience. There is a fourth wall too. It separates the performers from those watching them, completing a bubble of sorts, and in its entirety, completing the illusion that we buy into. Denis Diderot, a prominent figure in ‘The Age of Enlightenment’ is said to have conceived this wall, advocating its existence: With a fourth wall, performers can more closely imitate reality.

Denis Diderot by Louis-Michel van Loo (1767)

Every once in a while though, a character will address the audience directly, displaying a surprising sense of self-awareness. As if they know that the reality they are in is not real. That it exists for the purpose of entertainment or for creating meaningful art. It’s an illusion, suspension of disbelief, that the assemblage and the performers are collectively buying into. Media in general. So when a character chooses not to, we call that ‘Breaking the Fourth Wall’. The simulacrum of the conceived barrier separating realities is shattered. It’s a tongue-in-cheek metaphor, I know, but the brilliance of this tool in the performing media, and now on celluloid and TVs exhibit exceptional savoir-faire.

It is not only a demarcator of the emergence of a renaissance in the naturalistic theatre, but it is also a break from dramatic conventions that dictate buying into the fake reality of the performance. While some may argue that the fourth wall did not even exist for the staging of the Bard of Avon’s plays, what with William Shakespeare’s love for soliloquies and monologues being directly spoken to the viewers, the art of breaking the fourth wall has expanded since and continues to do so. From comics to mockumentary-style television to video games to Ryan George’s hilarious Pitch Meetings on Youtube, it is a savvy tool used deftly by artists and creatives alike.

Some use it as a tool of comic effect, while some use it to make their characters more complex and dynamic. Some use it as a window into the world a character may inhabit, and to explain their motivation, while it has also been used to elicit sympathy or other emotions for a situation or a character. Alvy Singer, played with heart-breaking sincerity by Woody Allen in the brilliant movie ‘Annie Hall’ (1977) breaks the fourth wall several times. Allen said of that, “because I felt many of the people in the audience had the same feelings and the same problems. I wanted to talk to them directly and confront them.” He managed to comfort us as well while at that.

My editor reminds me to mention that this technique exists in literature too! It’s called Metalepsis, the writer’s version of going meta. Be it John Fowles’ utterly brilliant “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, Lemony Snicket’s well, everything (Dear Reader, there are people in the world who know no misery and woe…), or the deliciously ergodic and auto-referential, genre-hopping, paranoid masterpiece of Mark Danielewski, ‘House of Leaves’, metalepsis itself, its influences in post-modern and experimental literature have been phenomenal.

Not to mention, ever since She-Hulk literally broke the fourth wall in her comics to have a word with her editor (something replicated unfortunately poorly in her MCU show), others started doing it too, most well-known among them being everyone’s favourite Merc-with-a-mouth, Deadpool. It is worth mentioning that characters like Dr. Fate, Squirrel Girl, Loki, and even Superman have been known to do the same in the comics on occasion.

Oh wait, I’m receiving some last-minute notes. Looks like that’s all the time we have today, folks! Imagine me winking through a loop of concentric circles, Looney Tunes style. Breaking the Fourth wall is a brilliant technique when used smartly, even sublime. So when the next time a character smiles at you through the camera, maybe smile back at them? Let them know you’re in on the secret.

Kick Up at a Hazard Table by Thomas Rowlandson (1787)

Why Do Good?: A Guide for Times When It’s Not Easy to Give a Shit

By Nilay Bhatt

On 01/03/2023

In Essays

When you turn on your television to sift through the evening news after sitting on the couch with a glass of chardonnay which you have convinced yourself will be the only one tonight (because you need to ‘decompress’), you cannot help but sigh as you sink deep into the couch: “The world is on fire and it is only getting worse.”

This could easily have been a manifesto on why that is a loaded statement or how it would be better for everyone involved if you keep the bottle of chardonnay out of your arm’s reach. Though the sentiment is not erroneous either. There is so much absurdity happening all over the globe
with much of it providing a reasonable explanation for despair, ethical quandaries, and mental disorders that plague an entire generation.

Trauma has become generational, and each younger generation is inheriting a borrowed world where there seems to be a constant and consistent erosion of authentic values and morals. Of course, one can also argue the essentiality of the doctrines of relativism on ‘no absolute truth’, which emphatically suggest that the power vested in perceiving something in relation to another and proclaiming it right or wrong is firmly rooted in the context attributed to it and influenced by motivators of convictions, conventions, and abstraction from a form of a vantage point.

You might feel that society is on a decline and there are tidings of it getting much worse. Or perhaps you are tired and blue because even if you try to remain a good person, you have experiences every day that make you lose faith in humanity. Maybe you do not see any merit in trying because nobody else seems to care about it.

It is also conceivable that you do not feel that there is any meaning to the life or existence of a deity and you do not have the religious crutch of fear-mongering to force you into acts of conceived selflessness. Chances are you are just sick of it all and each passing day edges you firmly into an attitude of dismissal. It has become difficult to care.

Why do good then? Why be a good person? Why bother to attempt goodness when there is no scoring system in place that rewards you for it? Why make the effort in the face of convenience and blissful ignorance? An answer to that, if this writer be so bold to eschew is that for better or worse, “We live in a society.”, and that perhaps should promulgate an attitude simpler to understand than “It is the right thing to do.”

As the popular saying goes, you can take a horse to the lake but you cannot make it drink water. Contrary to what is propagated in several forms of media these days, there is some merit in thinking that a person will be a good person, and actively care about being good when they want to be good, rather than them being told they should be good. We are a species of everlasting wonder that way. And it is difficult to care when you are
disillusioned.

A contractualist point of view is eschewed by T. M. Scanlon in his book What We Owe Each Other, a fascinating exploration of morality, ethics, and how they are justifiable while giving strong arguments to the titular aphorism. Scanlon believes in the plurality of moral and non-moral values. His theories suggest that the fairness of a moral decision and motives can be well understood by a system of mutual justification and criticism. Simply put, if what you do is justifiable to all the others involved, right or wrong, it should not be an issue.

So how does it all come together then? We live in a world full of diversity in its human populace in all ways conceivable. Some of us are misanthropes, some religious. Some anarchists or liberals or fascists or socialists. Some have no time to formulate an opinion and some cannot resist making one. The differences in our basic biology to the differences in our upbringings. There are more distinguishers and demarcations than this writer can mention, and yet there is still a common denominator that threads every single one of us into a group. The human condition. We are all in this together, this condition of existence.

And the simple fact of the matter is, all of it becomes so much easier to bear when you try to be good. Because as a species of carbon-based bipedalists evolutionarily gifted with intelligence, it is what we owe to each other. A discussion of what constitutes moral or not proves an interesting leeway for many of us to skirt responsibility, an attitude that has been on a rise for the last couple of decades. It has allowed us to bring up walls of comfort around our lives and stay ignorant of the realities of how our actions affect those around us because they do.

While a more robust discussion of the merits and demerits of relativism and contractualism is beyond the scope of this article, it is the hope of this writer that whatever your stance is on morality and responsibility in society, you see the need for more kindness in this world. The human condition unites us, and with a system of mutual goodness, it instills some meaning into the mundane, making life bearable. A little empathy goes a long way. A random act of kindness might just bring a smile to somebody’s face.

A character in The Good Place, a show that captures the zeitgeist of this chief philosophy and one of the finest pieces of media to emerge in this century makes a very valid point about the same (it has an entire episode dedicated to themes of Scanlon’s book too!): “I argue that we choose to be good because of our bonds with other people and our innate desire to treat them with dignity. Simply put, we are not in this alone.”

The Good Place Season 1 Episode 6 Screenshot — The Good Place S1E06

Being good is not about being a goody-two-shoes or that annoying positive character in sitcoms who’s happy even when the world is falling apart around them (though do you really envy that?). Being good is not about being perfect. We might have the best intentions, and the relativists among you might just smile here, but we might still end up making a mess.

We are a flawed species, something that makes us even more endearing, along with the fact that we are capable of accomplishing unimaginable wonders when we actually do make an effort. Especially when there are more reasons not to.

Being good is about giving a shit. Might be a far reach or a coping mechanism, but being good, and spreading kindness? That might just make the pains of existence sweeter.

Category: Essays

The Infinite Loop of Human Failings: Repeating History But Never Learning

Stalin’s Great Purge

Parallels in the Present

Humanity’s Paradox

Breaking the Cycle?

Did You Seriously Trap a God in Schrödinger’s Box?: A Genre-Hopping Thought Train from Religion to Quantum Physics

The Cat’s Out of the Box, Baby!

So? Does God Exist? (Psst, You Might Not Like the Answer)

Encore

Shattering the Fourth Wall – The Flair of the Self-Aware

Why Do Good?: A Guide for Times When It’s Not Easy to Give a Shit