Today my exams got over. I am going home this morning. I will come back to college after 10 days. When I came here I was reading Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig. It is a very deep book. It takes a lot of time to read, but you certainly enjoy reading it. There is so much meaning to each and every word, and then there are explanations to everything he says. The way he gives objective arguments to present his point of view is really noteworthy. I haven’t completed the book yet but will try to complete it in these vacations. It is one of the few books, that shake your whole personality and forces you to rethink everything from the start. Hope I get time to complete it.

The other book I read a few days back coming to college was 1984 by George Orwell. One of my best reads. How differently you can think. It may seem to be all his imagination, it is, but the way he puts it. It should not be taken as an imagination if you want to understand or get the meaning of the book completely. It is an argument, and then if you look at the way he has presented that argument is beautiful. Very few works are complete in themselves. Orwell has created a whole new world. He has created a new language Newspeak for this world. Basically he has created his tools and with the help of his tools he explains the concept of hierarchy. He has concentrated on world politics but it is so very true in a generic sense. If you get hold of that book, then don’t let it go. It’s worth more than any formal education.

Hierarchy is something without which the world just can not exist. You can not define white by using just white, you have to make a reference to black in order to do so. So to define the good you need the bad. If you look from a distance it seems that those who are poor who come lower in hierarchy are suffering the most and the ones sitting on top of them are enjoying themselves. Now there can be two arguments to explain the above statement. One as we said if there is no bad there can not be any good, hence the difference. Secondly if you look at the above argument more closely, then you see that I haven’t stated that whose argument is it, of upper class or of the lower class. I would say of both because it’s a circle. The upper class may say that they will suffer if the lower class does not behave in a particular way. So in order to hold power the upper class will allow only limited liberties to the lower class or to the proletariats and if they are unable to limit them they suffer.

So we see that if everyone is suffering then where is the meaning to all this. You don’t live to suffer or is it the other way i.e. “you suffer to live”. The question can be put in other way also. Why do you enjoy those moments the most in which you have put optimum effort. You win a race and you feel so great. But if you are an Olympic sprinter you won’t have the same kind of feeling beating a group of small kids in the race, then the people who can give you some competition and there is something called the joy of running. You run because it gives you pleasure, it relieves your mind. The question is why it relieves your mind? Why is labor needed to obtain pleasure?
Why there is pain in life? Is life not complete without death? And the death we are so afraid of is nothing more but the mother of all these pains. So when we say we are living life which is everywhere interjected by these pains. We should say that we experience life and death simultaneously i.e. in our pleasures and pains. My pain is pleasure for someone or vice versa. Is it all the zero sum game?