Well, that seems to be a decent title for a blog! Not too funky, rather, not at all funky, it's just a plain simple archaic way of saying 'Hey! I am an intellectual, I am here to give insights from a perspective that only few possess......blah..blah..!' It does give a classical ring to the ear, so different from the current trend of throwing all intellectual meat down the drain. It does provide a sense of egoistical satisfaction of being different, yet classical. To quote Eric Hoffer, 'If you give too much of freedom then people tend to copy one another' (well, I may have messed a up a few words here & there in this short sentence, but this was indeed what he had meant to have said!), which implies that (in case you belong to the generation of blockheads who fail to perceive a metaphor's implication) that majority of humans are incapable of making proper use of their freedom, and hence they just peep inside someone's door (or window, you can take your pick of your favourite mode of voyeursim), and copy whatever they see and believe that he/she (again, you can take your pick of the poltically correct pronoun) is unique as only he/she is copying his/her neighbour! Well, he/she would've been absolutely right if the habit had remained confined to one individual, but unfortunately/fortunlately (again, you may take your pick, depending on your philosophy of life, that is, if you have any, else don't bother) he/she is not the the only one to come up with such a fantastically simple idea. Homo-sapiens are ingenious and innovative creatures, they can think of many ingenious and innovative ways of not doing or thinking ingeniously or innovatively but instead ingeniously & innovatively copy others and present the ideas, actions, concepts, etc. etc. as their own, and hence Eric Hoffer came up with that ingenious observation summed up succinctly in the innovative one liner quoted above. Academicians and intellectuals even have a big and impressive word for it, 'plagiarism', and reams of laws are being written nowadays to justify the creation of this word by trying to prevent it, under the aegis of another impressive lexilogical conundrum "Intellectual Propert Rights"! Now, given that majority of people make up the average (that is what the statistical definition of average implies, believe me it is so!) are the ones who end up copying each other, the ensuing collaborative effort results in mediocrity. Then these vast majority decide (well actually, one bright spark perhaps accidentaly decides it, and others quickly follow) that it is too boring and unfashionable to keep on doing the same thing that others do, hence, why not copy from the past (meaning 20-40 years), and recycle those oldies with a new funky package, and there's even a technical name for this too(!!!), 'remixing'. So we have remixes of old music, movies, art, literature, apparel and what not, bypassing the dirty word of plagiarism, and feeling cool about it!!! This, again, leads to mediocrity in the eyes of few like me (who bothers about them anyway!). And so the likes of me, the residents of a dilapidated mansion dedicated to the old style of elegance and simplicity come out in the sun looking for sponsors to spruce up the old structure, take pleasure in proclaiming our classical individuality through our expressions which are decidedly uncool, but hopefully pervasive if not incisive. Hence, the title of this blog that I conjured up in less than a minute does give me a sense of pleasure, simply because it is so uncool that it makes me feel cool (kewl)!!
But if one tries to unearth a deeper meaning of that innocuous (unkewl but cool) one liner that constitutes the name of this blog then one can come up with more interesting conjectures, like 'Hmmm..... I am here to provide an outsider's impression of the inside things.....'; sounds vague? Well, you see, we astronomers are always outside viewers, we use some simple technological equipments like telescopes & electronic detectors mounted in huge observatories (many of them our now space borne satellites) and use computers (at times super-computers, or more commonly a poor man's cousin of these behemoth like structures, viz. linux clusters) to do some tedious data analysis using physics, statistics and what not, in order to see the extremely distant objects called cosmic sources (stars and galaxies and related structures, if you like!), and try to fathom what goes on inside them. So we are forcefully limited to exterior views and yet all our efforts go into understanding the interior workings. Hence, we assume that we are very good at understanding systems by just viewing from outside!
Well, effectively, to understand any system, one does need to observe it from outside, for the complete view always eludes the observer who is a part of the system. Therefore all science, cosmology as well as all philosophical studies of life, universe, etc. are extremely difficult things to do in life, akin to the proverbial elephant being looked at by a few blind people. Hence, to get a proper view of any system one needs to look at it from a distance just enough to cover the whole field of view and just near enough to resolve all the details (ask a photographer how to accomplish this!), and then go about observing and inferring. And it might be obvious from the title that that is what I have set out to accomplish, understand this earth along with the all the non-living and living organisms that populate it! ;-) At least, you can never accuse me of not having lofty goals. Wise men (nowadays that is synonymous to management gurus) say that having a lofty goal clear in your mind implies the work is half done. :-) The only difficulty is persisting with this dream for long enough time, guess I will have the perseverance to keep up with the demands of it, a small part of which includes informal documentations of the observations, inferences and thoughts. I guess this blog seems to be quite a nice place for it.
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