Kaleidoscope of Human Life

Mohammad Gill
Feb 10, 2003

The greatest creation of human mind is ‘words’, both spoken and written. It has furnished a great of expression to human intellect. In fact, it has elevated the homosapiens species far above the others and rightfully made man to acclaim to be the best of all creations (Ashraf-ul-makhlooqat). Consider poetry, for instance. Without words, this beautiful mode of expressing human thoughts, sentiments of emotion and would have remained hidden in the depths of human body.

It is more than a hundred years that the phenomenal Ghalib wrote his inimitable Urdu poetry; its beauty is so enthralling that every time I read his diwan, its newer meanings and nuances bewitch me. For example, one of his verses is:

Kiss mun^h sey shukr keejiaey iss lutf-e-khaas ka
Pursish haiy aur paiaey sukhn darmiyaa^n naheen

(How can I express my gratitude for this special consideration?
There is inquiry about my well-being though there is no occasion for it)

His diwan is spilling over with beautiful and charming verses. Then there was Iqbal whose extensive canvas of poetical thought and beauty of expression touched so many hearts worldwide. In more recent time, there was whose quartet

Mataa-e-loh-o-qalm chhin gaiye tau kiya gham haiy
Keh khoon-dil-mein dabo lee^n hain ungliaan mai^n nay
Labo^n peh muhr lagi haiy tau kiya keh rakh dee haiy
Har eik halqa-e-zanjeer mei^n zuban mai^n nay

(I’m not grieved if I’m robbed of the use of pen
Because I’ve drowned my fingers in my heart’s blood
It does not matter if my lips are sealed, because
I’ve placed a tongue in every link of my fetter)

is ever glowing and curiously soothing in spite of its rebellious helplessness.

Then there were great Persian poets, e.g., Rumi, Hafiz, Omar Khayyam, Tahireh, and host of others. Tahireh’s verse

If I cast my glance towards you, face to face and tete-a-tete
I expound thy grief, point-by-point, strand by strand

had deeply moved many great poets, including Iqbal. Then there were great kavis of Hindi and Sanskrit. The great classical poets of English such as Byron, Shakespeare, Keats, Tennyson etc. provided emotional and spiritual nourishment to countless people. There are numerous other languages such as Chinese, Japanese etc. in the world; these languages must also be rich in poetry.

Then there is the prose in which great works of human creative have been produced. In Urdu short stories, consider Prem Chand, Manto, Krishan Chandar, etc. whose creative writings affected human life in unique and sundry ways. Recently, I learned of Arundhati Roy whose first novel, “The of small things”, won the coveted Booker award. Then there is Sidhwa Bapsi whose “Ice Candy Man” won universal acclaim. There were great classical British and American masters of English prose, e.g., Dickens, Joyce, Maughm, Hemingway, Mark Twain, Pearl Buck, Faulkner, etc. The great writers in the continental languages such as Victor Hugo, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, etc. to quote only a few, have also left an indelible imprint on human life.

Now consider other modes of artistic expression, e.g., painting, miniature painting, drawing, , etc. without which human life would indeed be a veritable barren expanse. A great Mughal Emperor with undying for his beloved queen, Mumtaz Mahal, built a mausoleum for her, which became one of the wonders of the world for its architectural beauty and grandeur. His for his Mumtaz seems to vibrate in every piece of its structure. Mourning for his own material destitution, Sahir wrote his Taj Mahal in a fit of rebellious explosion and it became a sort of Taj Mahal of Urdu poetry.

Eiffel erected an iron tower in Paris, which is a monument of human engineering design and construction skills. The Golden Gate Bridge is simply a beauty of engineering . The new means of transportation such as motor vehicles and aeroplanes are testimony to the unfathomable analytical and synthetic skills of human intellect.

Archimedes, one of the ancient Greek philosophers and mathematicians, was so much overwhelmed by the excitement and thrill of his discovery of the ‘ of Buoyancy’ while he was taking a bath in his tub, that he ran out naked on the street shouting eureka, eureka. He was also responsible for giving the method of computing the area of a circle and thus discovering one of the fundamental constants of mathematics, i.e., pi.

Talking of mathematicians, consider Pythagoras. He was so much engrossed by the power of numbers that he raised them to divine level. His theorem describing the quantitative relationship between the three sides of a right- angled triangle is a ‘thing of beauty’. Inspired by Pythagoras, Fermat in a moment of creative bliss conceived his ‘Last Theorem’, which taxed, challenged and bewildered hundreds of mathematicians for a veritable proof. Finally, after more than three hundred years of hard work, the desired solution was produced in the last decade of the twentieth century. The innocuous act of throwing dice and betting on random events of chance led to the formulation of theory of probability, which found its application in Theory of Quantum Mechanics in the twentieth century. The problem of crossing the Seven Bridges of Konigsburg led to the development of Topology. Mathematics has become such a vast field of knowledge that it is difficult, if not impossible, for one person to comprehend all of it. It is said that Archimedes knew all the mathematics that was developed up to his time. The same thing was true of the great German, Gauss, and English, Newton. The last mathematician to know all the mathematics up to his time was the French, Poincare, who died in 1912.

One of the great inventions of human mind is logic or the Greek logos. Aristotle developed the formal deductive logic, which was destined to revolutionize the human way of thinking analytically. Using the technique of deductive logic, inference is deduced from a set of premises using a relational statement (the middle term). It paved the way for neat and fastidious development of scientific theories and would eventually become the bedrock of computer logic and algorithms.

Inductive logic, on the other hand, is based on previous observations of a natural phenomenon. For instance, sun always rises in the morning as has been observed for time immemorial. Without fail, it rose every morning. Inductively then one can assume that it is almost certain that it will rise tomorrow also. However, inductive knowledge is not absolutely sure. For instance, according to Bertrand Russell (A History of the Western Philosophy, p. 543), “There was once upon a time a census officer who had to record the names of all householders in a certain Welsh village. The first that he questioned was called William Williams; so were the second, the third, the fourth…At last he said to himself: This is tedious; evidently they are all called William Williams. I shall put them down so and take a holiday. But he was wrong; there was just one whose name was John Jones. This shows that we may go astray if we trust too implicitly in induction by simple enumeration.”

Induction is effectively, extrapolation based on the previous data. All of our scientific theories are inductive; hence the need for their verification by experimental data. Greek philosophy was purely rational in which no importance was given to actual observations. This led to several cataclysms in . One of them was the Aristotelian geocentric concept of planetary movements.

Francis Bacon laid the fundamental emphasis on empirical observations and consequently experimental sciences came into being. Later, this led to the belief that all reliable knowledge is empirical. This became the cornerstone of the logical positivism movement at the beginning of the twentieth century in Europe. Faithfully, the logical positivists discarded the metaphysical philosophy totally because it could not be verified by actual empirical observations. in the unobservable became suspect. In a way, this led to skepticism, agnosticism, culminating in . This is not to say that there were no skeptics and atheists before the twentieth century; however logical positivism became the touchstone and catalytic agent for proliferating religious unbelief.

In ancient times, man was invariably a polytheist. He believed in multiplicity of gods. In fact, he had gods of all kinds for every secular and spiritual need. Gradually, the functions of all the sundry gods were merged into one Omnipotent who could do every and any thing. Man then became, by and large, monotheistic. However there are all shades of monotheism. The Jews, Christians, and Muslims are all monotheists in their own respective ways. Although their religions are derived from the same Abrahamic nexus yet they are so very different and diverse from one another. They have been waging wars against each other for ever and ever on religious grounds. There are other numerous religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Shintoism, etc. in the world. Wherever the believers of different religions came in contact with each other, there was bloodshed. in , for example, are so frequent and ferocious that many people have sadly accepted them as fact of life rather than aberration of human behavior.

The deep chasm between the individualistic and subjective faiths in divine , of the different religionists is poignantly highlighted by the caption of a chapter in the book “Critical Mass: The Dangerous Race for Superweapons in a Fragmenting World” written by William Burrows and Robert Windren. It reads “ and : Our can lick your .” This also is a sad commentary on the futility and frivolousness of religious belief.

History of human evolution is a kind of limitless quilt sewn with countless patches of different hues and colors. To describe all these patches in any detail is nearly an impossible task but drawing attention to this kaleidoscopic variegation can be useful and enlightening. The recorded history of mankind provides a glimpse on the antiquated grand empires of Babylon and Egypt. Although not much authentic information is available, however, Herodotus, a historian in 450 BC, wrote about the city of Babylon, “In addition to its size, Babylon surpasses in splendor any city in the known world…the outer walls (of Babylon) were 56 miles in length and 320 feet high. Wide enough…to allow a four-horse chariot to run….Rising above the city was the famous Tower of Babel, a temple to the of Marduk, that seemed to reach the heavens.” The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, were reportedly built by King Nebuchadnezzer who ruled around 605 BC According to another account, the gardens were built by the Assyrian Queen Semiramis around 810 B.C. The gardens were irrigated by lifting water from the Euphrates River by means of chain pumps of the kind one still sees operating in the countryside of and . The ancients were ingenious and had creative skills, like the moderns, as is again testified by the grand structures built by the Egyptian Pharaohs. The pyramid of Cheops is an awe-striking edifice of granite slabs. How did the ancient Egyptians manage to mine and haul such huge slabs (more than 30ft. by 15ft. in size) down the river Nile from a distance of several hundred miles and erect them in position, is baffling and a question of investigation and research. The finished structure is indeed huge and massive.

In more recent times, the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Chinese Empire in the east, and the British Empire had their sway on human life as deep and remarkable as the great empires of the yore.

The inception of human history is marked with jealousy, violence, and bloodshed. According to an account in the Genesis, Cain, the eldest son of Adam and Eve, killed his own brother, Abel, in a fit of jealousy. Is there any wonder then that Adam’s progeny followed the footsteps of its progenitor? While the human history is studded with ever-glowing faultless gems of Moses, Buddha, Christ, Muhammad, Krishna and others, it is also tarnished by the bloodthirsty Genghis Khans, Timur Lungs, Mussolinis, Hitlers. History provides us with the accounts of devastation wrought by the hordes of the Mongol Tartars including nearly the total destruction of Baghdad, the City of , and the Islamic Khilafat epitomized by the Abbasid Khalifahs, and of Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasted by the atomic bombs, in our own lifetime.

Then there are the fundamentalists of all the various religious brands, e.g., , , Hinduism, etc., who seek to impose their own brands of presumed divinely sanctioned on others, and there are Sufis and Mystics who seek union with their creator through peaceful and zikr.

Human species embraces peoples of various different colors and race who used to live blissfully, in the past, in their own respective lands without inter-racial mixing and blending. In modern times however, greatly improved means of transportation and communication have facilitated people to come in contact with each other and live together with all kinds of other racially diverse people. Thus, the xenophobic feeling has been greatly mollified and man is discovering its own roots more comprehensively. Although inter- and inter-racial reservations and fears still linger, social accommodation and understanding are becoming more and more evident day by day.

This is how the evolution of human life has always been and this is how it will continue if the nuclear warfare does not extinguish the flame of life on the face of the earth.