Minds

Statutory Warning: If you are a self-confessed intellectual in search of an overly cryptic writing, or an obsessive, modern-day version of Romeo/Juliet looking for some emotional atyachar, please press the red coloured box at the top-right corner of this window, and see what happens!

Also, if you totally hate mathematics, you are forewarned ! The following article can cause severe headache, and a string of profanities at some inopportune moments.

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I once heard of a city-bred genius, who told his more rustic companion, that once you have seen one field, you have seen them all. In other words, nature can be quite boring. The friend replied, that perhaps he had never seen a field in his life.

Now, make no mistakes, I really love nature. But I also happen to be an insufferably analytical person. I just could not get the logic of the village guy. I mean, most of the fields do look the same, right? Could he just have been bragging?

It was only a few months back, that I got the solution to this irritable problem. I was studying a topic on probability, called Ensemble Averaging, and they talked about “realizations” of a random variable.

Unlike normal averages, where you add up a number of variables, here they considered just 1 variable. Now, what the hell is that? I was quite frustrated, till my usually-cryptic-but-kind-for-once prof gave me a hint. To quote him, say 1 hen lays eggs over 10 days, you have 10 eggs, and the average weight can be easily found. But what if 10 hens lay eggs on the same day? what then?

Once I got the hang of it, i realised what the village guy meant. There is just 1 field, but what if a hundred people look at it, all at different times?. Some see it drenched in sunshine, others see it under a rainbow. Stilll others enjoy its beauty with 'kids' of all ages playing their hearts out in the mud. Not to mention those mindless jerks like me, who might stare at it, without enjoying any of the above. According to mathematics, they are just looking at different "realisations" of the field.

It is all about your mind.

Now, How many millions of times have we heard that people change, people leave, people stop caring, blah, blah, blah...?

But what you have inside your mind is never going to perish. The class-bunkings, the first cigarette, cheating in the tests, a truly romantic date which was spent taking a walk on a very badly pot-holed road, they are all there in your mind. What about those memories? I mean, the people might have all changed, but your mind has preserved the best of their realisations for you to enjoy. Won't the world be a much better place for us all, if we could let everybody live their lives, not trying to change anyone, but spending time with those people that matter the most to us, in those avatars, that we hold so dear?

I don't wish to offer free advice here, but let's face it. Whether one is in pain, grief, happines, content, whatever, it is all in the mind. This doesnot make these feelings untrue, but when we understand that we can actually choose whether we are happy or sad, I think it helps.

A real damn lot.