I recently read the non-fiction book Into The Wild. The book is based on Christopher McCandless. Here’s an an excerpt from the book, a letter written by him to Ron Franz, an elderly gentleman he met and formed a bond with while travelling: (Alex is the name he assumed after he left home.)

Alex here. I have been working up here in Carthage South Dakota for nearly two weeks now. I arrived up here three days after we parted in Grand Junction, Colorado. I hope that you made it back to Salton City wihtout too many problems. I enjoy working here and things are going well. The weather is not very bad and many days are surprisingly mild. Some of the farmers are even already going into their fields. It must be getting rather hot down there in Southern California by now. I wonder if you ever got a chance to get out and see how many people showed up for the March 20 Rainbow gathering there at the hotsprings. It sounds like it might have been a lot of fun, but I don’t think you really understand these kind of people very well.

I will not be here in South Dakota very much longer. My friend, Wayne, wants me to stay working at the grain elevator through May and then go combining with him the entire summer, but I have my soul set entirely on my Alaskan Odyssey and hope to be on my way no later than April 15. That means I will be leaving here before very long, so I need you to send any more mail I may have received to the return address listed below.

Ron, I really enjoy all the help you have given me and the times we spent together. I hope that yo will not be too depressed by our parting. It may be a very long time before we see each other again. But providing that I get through ths Alaskan Deal in one piece you will be hearing form me again in the future. I’d like to repeat the advice I gave you before, in that I think you really should make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing or been to hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one piece of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. If you want to get more out of life, Ron, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to sch a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty. And so, Ron, in short, get out of Salton City and hit the Road. I guarantee you will be very glad you did. But I fear that you will ignore my advice. You think I am stubborn, but you are even more stubborn than me. You had a wonderful chance on your drive back to see one of the greatest sights on earth, the Grand Canyon, something every American should see at least once in his life. But for some reason incomprehensible to me you wanted nothing but to bolt for home as quickly as possible, right back to the same situation which you see day after day after day. I fear you will follow this same inclination in the future and thus fail to discover all the wonderful things that God has placed around us to discover. Don’t settle down and sit in one place. Move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon. You are still going to live a long time, Ron, and it would be a shame if you did not take the opportunity to revolutionize your life and move into an entirely new realm of experience.

You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.

My point is that you do not need me or anyone else around to bring this kind of light in your life. It is simply waiting out there for you to grasp it, and all you have to do is reach for it. The only person you are fighting is yourself and your stubbornness to engage in new circumstances.

Ron, I really hope that as soon as you can you will get out of Salton City, put a little camper on the back of your pickup, and start seeing some of the great work that God has done here in the American West. you will see things and meet people and there is much to learn from them. And you must do it economy style, no motels, do your own cooking, as a general rule spend as little as possible and you will enjoy it much more immensely. I hope that the next time I see you, you will be a new man with a vast array of new adventures and experiences behind you. Don’t hesitate or allow yourself to make excuses. Just get out and do it. Just get out and do it. You will be very, very glad that you did.

Take care Ron,

Alex

Ron was 80 years old when he received this letter urging him to live life. He never met Alex again, not in this world.

Excerpt via.

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I pasted this letter not because it amazed me, but because it is a concise explanation of all there is to an adventurous life. If you are unfamiliar with the core of this idea, I suggest reading it a few times.

To his Grand Canyon point I’ll add that if you can, hike from one rim to another. I’m so happy I did it earlier this year.

Back.

I had the time of my life in Ecuador. Give me a few days to process the experience and write about it.

I’ll be travelling in Ecuador for the next 10 days so the blog won’t be updated. Ecuador is a known unknown for me. I’m eager to see what it holds in store.

See you on the other side.

The headline says:

Anna demands Bharat Ratna for Sachin Tendulkar

The article says:

Anti-corruption activist Anna Hazare on Wednesday said Sachin Tendulkar should be conferred with the Bharat Ratna, joining a long list of admirers who have demanded the country’s top civilian honour for the cricketer.

“Sachin Tendulkar is an icon for Indian youth. He has made India proud with his exploits in cricket. I feel he deserves the Bharat Ratna,” the anti-graft crusader said after inaugurating a tennis tournament in memory of his late mother Laxmibai at his native village Ralegan Siddhi.

See any discord there between demands and I feel he deserves?

***

Agencies are credited for this news report; all news websites have the same article. Details are scant — we don’t even know if he said this by himself or he was asked the question, “Do you think Sachin deserves the Bharat Ratna?” Big difference.

Everyone reads news headlines and moves along these days. Only headlines are posted at micro-blogging sites like Twitter. It is likely that many out there read the headline and are now under the assumption that Hazare is a megalomaniac, based on this report.

Not that I care.

I was digging through Jai Arjun Singh’s old posts and I found this:

“In a way, Delhi 6 was my attempt to remake Aks,” [Rakeysh Omprakash] Mehra said during our phone chat. It was a casual remark, we had to quickly move on to other topics and he never got a chance to elaborate, but for me it tied in with some striking similarities between the two films. Both use masks and reflections as ways of concealing or revealing things about their protagonists – and by extension, about people in general. Both also contain extensive Ramayana imagery, with Rama and Ravana presented as mirror images. Aks (which means “reflection”) is very obviously a story about good and evil defining and complementing each other, but this theme recurs in Delhi 6 too. An idiot savant literally holds a mirror up to society, but everyone ignores or makes fun of him – until the end, when communal discord brings unpleasant things to the surface. An elaborate Ram Leela performance spread over days runs parallel to the film’s main narrative, a rampaging monkey man is used as a symbol for fear and paranoia in a divided community, and at the end the hero dons a monkey mask to try to make people see reason.

An aha moment. This similarity had never occurred to me.

***

I might be repeating myself here, but Roger Ebert and Jai Arjun Singh are the only two film writers you will ever need. Beauty, humility, simplicity; even their criticism is nice. At times I follow links and recommendations to movie reviews by film critics who are not the above two. I regret reading them within the first few sentences.

This is perhaps a matter of taste and I know everyone has their favourite film critic. But if you’re up for it, try this experiment: For a month, take a break from your usual film critics and only read Ebert and Jai Arjun Singh. Tell me if it made a difference to the way you look at movies.

If you haven’t seen Drive, watch it. Just for the music. Here’s a sample.

Everything else in Drive is cool too. Roger Ebert’s review is agreeable as always.

No less than four Republican candidates for President have been asked by god to run for President.

You cannot make this stuff up.

Andrew Sullivan links to this post by Jennifer Fulwiler who converted from atheism to Catholicism. Her search for love and the meaning of life lead her to Catholicism. Fair enough.

Then there is this paragraph:

However, I did notice something: almost all the people who had impressed me with their ability to defend their faith through reason alone, both famous authors and people online, were Catholic. In fact, the more I paid attention, the more I saw that the Catholic intellectual tradition was one of the greatest in the world. I began reading books by Catholic authors; not that I was really interested in Catholicism, I told myself — I was just looking for something good to read. But I couldn’t help but admit that these people seemed to posses an understanding of the world and the human experience that I’d never encountered before. They had the same solid grasp on science and the material world as the atheists, but also possessed a knowledge of the movements of the human soul that resonated as true down to the core of my being.

A Hindu will read this and rightly wonder why the exact same argument couldn’t be used to state Hinduism is the truest religion.

I have often said that I don’t care about people’s religions as long as it doesn’t affect others (or me, if you’re someone close to me). Some of the best people I have met have been religious. And religious people — alright, some — do plenty of good deeds. This is understandable because they have an obvious incentive to do good deeds: They do not want to burn in hell.

Anyhoo, I had fun reading her post. But — and you knew there was going to be a but! — note this sentence towards the end of her post:

And, in the first statement of faith I’d ever made, I told my doctors that I would not use contraception, because I was Catholic.

Yep, she’s all in.

Imagine if she were voting for the Mississippi personhood proposition. If I had to take a guess, I’d say she is likely to vote that life begins at conception. Add many more like her and a girl who is raped will not be allowed to get an abortion.

Now it is okay to care about her religion. And it tells you why atheists care so deeply about others’ religions.

(I do not know who I’m talking to. I have close to zero religious readers here! But I have a few religious readers. Awww, thank you!)

***

As an atheist, it is easier to accept that there is no larger meaning to life. That to me is a massive advantage when faced with difficulties. All I need to say is: Fuck it, how is this going to affect anything in the universe?

Then I can proceed to do whatever I really want to do.

I can theoretically use the same argument to steal or kill. For that, I have a moral code in place which is not too different from religion, though derived from different first principles. Plus I’d rather stay out of jail. If you cannot think of a moral code that is independent of religion, I’d rather wish you be religious than rot in jail.

And if no meaning to life makes you uncomfortable, you can always derive smaller meanings to life — such as helping others, serving the needy, living for your loved ones. Just don’t confuse the two.

This is all not too hard. Frankly, it is overrated. How many times on an average day do you even have to deal with moral struggles? Zero.

***

Andrew Sullivan is a smart guy but I can see the threads of his logic break when he talks about religion. He is a Catholic.

This is not a judgement or mockery of his faith, just something that is noticeable.

Some astrophysics news:

Scientists have found two interstellar clouds of original gas, which — unlike everything else in the universe — has never mingled with elements forged later in stars.

The existence of pristine gas that formed minutes after the Big Bang explosion some 13.7 billion years ago, had been predicted, but never before observed.

Let me break down this and a few other fascinating facts:

In the minutes following the Big Bang, only Hydrogen and Helium existed in the universe. Minutes. Remember we’re now 13.7 billion years ahead. Hydrogen and helium are the lightest elements in the universe. That is, their atoms are the lightest.

Now you might recall that hydrogen fuses to form helium in our sun.

Recall the boring periodic table from sixth grade. You will see that a lighter element, hydrogen in this case, fuses to form helium, a heavier element, under high temperature. Think of it as two clay balls are combined to form one ball which is naturally bigger, or in physics terms, a heavier element.

The high temperature makes hydrogen atoms paranoid and run around rapidly. This increases the chances it will collide with another hydrogen atom and fuse into helium. Imagine a roomful of blindfolded girls who are told there is a spider in the room. A giant spider.

You get the idea.

Now extend this logic. Every element heavier than helium–oxygen, carbon, nitrogen–is formed similarly. When helium fuses, you get heavier elements. By now, we have 5 elements that form the basis of life-forms on earth. All this happens in high temperature furnaces. Or as we know them: stars. Our sun is a star too. Earth is not a start because it doesn’t have an active core. Plus we’d be fried if the earth were a star. That might be delicious but now I’m segueing into cannibalism.

When a star explodes (This is called a supernova. Sounds familiar?), these elements are carried through asteroids or linger around in space. Some of these asteroids were part of the giant chunk of rock that was primitive earth. Further asteroids kept ramming into earth as it was starting to get its current shape. These asteroids brought the elements that would form water, oxygen, life forms, the metal that forms your iPod, and so on.

That is how we have all the elements that we do on earth today.

Lawrence Strauss illustrates this wonderfully. I’ll attempt to paraphrase: Look at your left hand. Now look at your right hand. The atoms that form both your hands were forged in stars perhaps billions of light years away (in today’s distance). There is an extremely tiny possibility that they were forged in the same star (There are billions of galaxies out there and each one has billions of stars). And yet, they came together to form your body. We are not different from the universe: We are the universe. We carry the history of 13.7 billion years of the universe in every atom of our body.

Isn’t that a beautiful thought?

***

I recall Vivekananda said something very similar while talking about the oneness principle. When I read Vivekananda, that was the first time I understood oneness. Spirituality often talks about how we are one with the universe. It sounds ridiculous to some (it did to me too).

But in just a few paragraphs, we saw how that is in fact true.

***

Don’t be disappointed if you didn’t know all this. For a nerd, I discovered these precise explanations a few weeks ago.

And how awesome Chemistry would’ve been if our teachers had taught us the periodic table in this manner! No?

***

P.S. Yes, I have simplified some things.

[Source]

China on Saturday warned the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader Dalai Lama not to interfere with the “reincarnation” process to select a successor after his death, saying the selection cannot be influenced by any group from outside the country.

Lest you be surprised, China is merely reiterating its stand here. It had said a few years ago said that it must approve the next Dalai Lama reincarnation.

The country had also banned monks from reincarnating.