Art Prose & Rhyme Blog

Evolution in an universal sense (encompassing living replicating open thermodynamic systems and non living systems) also means increasing complexity in structural organizations in Time.
Time in this specific context can however be observed only as a linear phenomenon, even when it may contain within itself cyclic Time, i.e., perfectly stable thermodynamic states (or to express it in biological terms, like Ramray, as the basic moduli of biological structural organizations) and as such, so the classical theory, inevitably and remorselessly destined to a final death in an universal cosmic entropy! No big bang, like the birth of the universe or for that matter of a human child with a primal scream, but a slow fading away of everything in a warm nothingness or for that matter the silently witnessed natural death of a grand parent.

Mind you the modern physics won’t deny you the possible existence of other universes where these laws do not apply! Or the fact that quantum physics will give you the blessings of a doubt within a microcosmic universe.

The fact is we understand actually less than before, because behind the apparent complexity of the observable universe there resides still more complexity. Einstein probably thought the universe as big as a Galaxy. And Hubble did not know of the new universes imagined by modern mathematicians, physicist and cosmologists to extend well beyond our 4 (space time) dimensions in some unobserved 7 (mathematical) dimensions. And quantum and modern physics think strings and the new particles with their flavors are the basic structures of our universe, because they can not at present go deeper than that. Once another Hubble uses a new nano-telescope you may find a cosmos within a gluon!

Science is a grand story of the humans, how can it be otherwise? And similarly your question concerning the where-to of evolution is also a grand question of the humans? In a way both are philosophical and it is less a question of physics versus biology, but something more substantial but constrained by the trends, paradigms, fashions, instruments, technologies and hopes of the times!

Have you ever wondered at this one crazy thing?

Why were the brains of the Homo sapiens already endowed with an hardware that could produce an Euclid, an Einstein and a Riemann long before there was any actual need for it? They only needed 5% of that primate asset if you consider the selective pressures imposed by the times! Or were the other primates already so advanced that a capability to construct the Euclidean geometry or our religion and poetry was a prerequisite for survival?

I am absolutely not hinting at anything. I personally think it may have been an accident, in fact life itself and the universe may be an accident or the dream of a Brahma! But the most enlightened of modern physicist will probably claim that life and subsequently Intelligence is an inherent property of Matter! This is not the place to talk about our concepts of matter as such.

But we do come to this unavoidable conclusion, that intelligence in its most higher abstract form is also the ability, perhaps an unavoidable one to ask that very question that Mavani has raised. And as such represents a legitimate field of honest scientific enquiry?

Physics has no answer and will probably never have one.
Biology? Not when evolution is perceived only as a measurable change in allele frequencies within populations! This however does not preclude us from attributing intelligence and purposeful functionality to a highly organized state of ants or to a kingdom of the bees!

The answer to Mavani’s question can not lie within measurable Quantifying Sciences.
No doubt philosophers like William James, psychologists and sociologists have tried to answer such questions, especially those with an rather imperfect understanding of Darwinism in 19th Century Europe. Most of the latter have tried to explain (rather explain away!) the need for such questions through cultural relativism!

What Biology and Physics do not understand is vastly more than what they do.

Just wait 20 years more!

And the answer under the present paradigm to Mavani’s is of course: there is no teleological factor in evolution, but nevertheless the evolution has blessed us with a structure (brain) that does ask such questions, actively seek answers to such questions… and strangely feel disappointed when it does not find the answer?

I have of course my own explanation for this phenomenon. But that won’t answer Mavani’s question in the way he seeks the answer. It too can be considered as explaining it away and to be associated with the predominant paradigm of our epoch.

Willed purposeful acts associated with awareness have been recently attributed to certain species of singing birds, many members of the primates, canines, whales and what not!

Add to such purposefulness some rudimentary language, one time or another you will have word for purpose. This word initially associated with concrete physical acts (violations) meant to serve some physical bodily purposes for primary existence is transposed onto certain abstract categories. Life, Evolution, Universe…

I claim any species that does not indulge in an aware purposeful manipulation of the outside world would never ever ask a question concerning purpose of life!

The question in intimately connected with the ability to handle purposefully and to conceptualize it by means of an inherited language.

Your question is human. Nature may not be aware of it, operating as Nature does on an nonverbal plane. You may however project your purposefulness on it, and it may or may not reflect it. When it does reflect it you can consider yourself lucky! If it does not, you can just accuse the science of wallowing in a primitive stage or not possessing the rightful instruments.

Or better still, seek your own answer, based on what life teaches you everyday, with and without instruments .. and may be help develop our knowledge of the universe in more than one dimension.

 
To avoid any misunderstanding concerning the subject of our discourse related to our artwork:  Shantaram,  it is necessary to emphasize the fact that our elucidation of the Theme is not a critic of the book as such.  It is moreover not aimed at appraising the author of the book, a daunting task since the boundaries here between the author and the narrator (the main character of the book) are the most complex and quite warped and very extraordinary if not unique in the international history of fiction.^* Check Wikipedia.org for more details. Nor is it an endorsement or condemnation of the author, the books content or the way of life popularized and eulogized by media and the film and the film festival juries in the last decades, ever since John Wayne, Charlton Heston, Gregory Peck, Peter O’Toole, Richard Burton, Walter Mathieu, Jerry Lewis-Dean Martin, Olivier-Hardy and Chaplin were replaced by most of the time gun totting and in high-tech, from Dolby Laboratories reproduced bullets banging Di Nero, Stallone and Schwarzenegger, Toshiro Mifune and other predominantly in urban underground pulp fiction setting operating million dollar stars at national and international Box-Office. It deals only with that part of the narrative in which Shantaram is imprisoned in Bombay. A literary rendering of the authors confinement at Mumbai’s Central (Arthur Road) prison mixed with flashbacks from the experiences he had in prisons back home in Australia. The author Gregory David Roberts, one must admit is himself more amazing than his creations, more than his urban, rural and tribal characters, facts about him even stranger than fiction.

Not all of the deeds of Shantaram are heroic in the traditional sense of the term and often contradictory. Like Robin Hood he fights for the week and those who are exploited, going as far or even further than Vincent van Gogh in giving away his last one warm coat to those in need.  He is the only non qualified and extremely efficient one-man medical first-aid station in super power India’s slum of 25, 000 fully disenfranchised souls. At times unlike Robin Hood and more like a colossal Gilgamesh, Theseus or Hercules he acts completely alone with extraordinary faithfulness to his inner voice.  Almost like a superman and batman fighting petty gangsters and egomaniacs in the traditional pulp fiction way,  he is also trying to find a personal and social leverage within the colossal chaos and the demons of rampaging almost pathological cancerous corruption evident at all levels of society in the urban jungle of the Metropolis Mumbai.

Yet again he also smuggles drugs and weapons across nations. Weapon smuggling across countries with idealistic intentions may be acceptable in normal bourgeoisie school education, if consistent within the expressed framework of a chosen and chivalrously defended ideology but a hero smuggling drugs makes unfortunately Shantaram a profoundly controversial literary figure, and should make anyone pause, before recommending this book for public school education. We know from history that the King did forgive Robin Hood for his trespasses, which however never made us flinch nor loose our faith in our hero and which we as fans fully endorsed. But unfortunately Shantaram does make you flinch on occasions. However we do know that a drug smuggler is not a pusher. The pusher is probably more often directly confronted with the consequences of his acts. And since Shantaram himself was a drug addict, it somehow does in a way mitigate to some extent this extremely significant trespass, since it is apparently no cold blooded financial calculation that motivated such behavior. In fact the lack of empathy manifested in such act or the callousness displayed here toward a potential victim of such crimes indeed does reflect to a discerning mind the fact, that it is the same kind of disregard and from my explicitly here declared point of view, morally condemnable indifference, that Shantaram exhibits toward his own self at specific moments in his life. Gregory David Roberts is more than aware of this himself and attributes his great enlightening transformation in this case to the accounts that he read about Phoolan Devi. Nevertheless his stuff is not for the faint hearted nor for our youngsters. That said we can proceed with my appraisal of my artwork and one of its main source of inspiration: Shantaram in a Mumbai Prison _ an account of the social structure and behavioral psychology and sociology of a prison rendered in hard-chore visceral literature that ever was!

---

^* Being an Indian by birth and having myself lived three years intermittently in Bombay and the fact that I as a Kashmiri once did amidst others also share the cultural values prevalent in this geo-socio-political region, stretching from the valley of Kashmir to Afghanistan, that are a inherently tribal and basically kinship oriented intermixed with a through predominantly conquest superimposed pan-Islamic universalism. I have to admit that the narrative exhibits through out a sub-cuticle authenticity. In fact I have hardly read any western author who has penetrated so deeply into shared cultural recesses of the social and psychological realm of the sub-continent India _ into the Indian Psyche as one would say in plain english.  This participatory awareness coupled with a viscerally felt sensitiveness pulsates throughout the narrative,  no less also in the depiction of the journey through the frontier provinces of Pakistan and Afghanistan. One feels, that the author must not only have suffered and gone through the ordeals but experienced the events almost as an insider would, with the same recognizable resonating chords of feeling and even perception as a native would!  Something most of the ethnologists, let alone journalists, may dream about. A perplexing authenticity that makes the borders between fiction and fact even more fuzzy!