Science: Boon or Bane
Logic, limits and imagination…
Education has taken me where music cannot follow.
Yet, I am a musician more than a student,
More dark than I am grey, so popular
With my thoughts, that they aren't mine. Ever!
Not when they wake up at dawn, nor when they die at twilight!
I wrote this many years ago in response to a post on someone else's blog. Someone who writes wonderfully and is very famous for it too. It basically starts as a negative of his writing and then jumps into a few original lines describing my failure at originality. The theme is one that lies close to heart. The very Floyd-ian "We don't need no education" theme.
I have now maintained for many years that it is science that ruined me. Maybe, not all of education did but science definitely did. I learned laws, learned logic, learned cause and effect, and learned that everything has a rational explanation - if it doesn't then it is my duty to find one. I learned to look at possibility and probability and learned to revel in compliments like "iska dimaag computer se bhi tez chalta hai!" And while my chest swelled with pride at my brilliant rationality, I never figured what I was unlearning.
The more I learned to explore, to find solutions, to widen the realms of logic, the more constricted became my thought process. I am now left bound by rules, by connections, by associations, by plausibility. My imagination today is limitless as long as it stays within the limits of science. The days it manages to break free of its boundaries it pretends to dazzle, displaying islets of transcendence that exhilarate and disappoint at the same time. The sky is the limit and the eye can see as far as the horizon, maybe even a little beyond, but those are the boundaries that are.Those are the boundaries where creativity starts, where music and poetry bud, where reality actually begins? Those are the boundaries that sometimes disappear, at other times melt long enough to allow a view of what lies beyond. Or is it what actually lies within, occasional glimpses into the self?
Then the boundaries reappear; fences preventing the mind from wandering, keeping the unknown dangers away. Those are the times when my rant against science bounces off the barricades and resonates. The last time it happened was in the presence of my ten-year-old niece, leaving her aghast at the thought. A young child who, like some strange doppelganger from my past, began recounting the boons of science. How many of us wrote of science being a bane in those essays in school, I wonder? But is the rant against science valid? Wasn't Einstein a scientist as well as one of the greatest philosophers we know? Weren't most, if not all, inventions a result of creativity, of pushing the limits, setting new boundaries or eliminating them altogether? Am I the one at fault then? I believe it is a bit of both, a curtailment by laws of an already limited creative cesspool!
Which brings me back to the original 'unpopular' post by another who initially made his name in science but didn't let it tie him down. Who, I remember on a terrace, amidst puffs of smoke, talking about an unrest - to leave it all aside and follow the creative spark - which he did. It's the only time I met him but I remember being envious of his passion, a passion I had lost. Today he is a star, making music that has given me much joy. But I am no longer envious, because I have rekindled something of my own too. I don't wish fame (because frankly I am not that good) but I hope to keep on pushing my own boundaries. Maybe someday I will be able to see beyond the horizon by myself without needing the occasional shoulder to stand upon.
Till then...
Education has taken me where dreams cannot follow.
Yet I am a dreamer more than a student,
More dark than I am grey, so popular
With my thoughts, that they aren't mine. Ever!
Not when they wake up at dawn, nor when they die at twilight!