Hope Burns



Could it be that hope is just one of those things people invent to make the rest of the world fall in line, like God, religion, ethics, moral values and all the other crap that keeps you from cracking someone's skull open with a cricket bat? To hope is to fool yourself into believing that the world is sane, that everything you ever believed or thought you knew is true. Hope is faith. Faith is a fucking lie! They lie to you, and you continue lying to urself. Its like an anaesthetic drug. It takes the pain away for a while, and you think your pansy ass isn't on fire any more, only to wake up and smell the shit you're drowning in. There's a load of other crap that comes with hope. Shit like sportsman's spirit. Hoping that your day will come. Even love. Love is hoping that you'll be loved in return.

End of discussion!! This fuckin settles the whole god damned argument of ethics!! Man is an animal that has desires, and should do anything within his power to fulfil them. That is what life needs to be. Yearning for friendship, love, respect and every other insanely vague abstract notion is so fucked up. Fuck the world, fuck your jobs, fuck your salaries, fuck your profiles, fuck your careers fuck your shortlists, fuck your tests, fuck your interviews, fuck everyone else and fuck you, fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck FUCK!!!!

The day my head explodes and dogs on the streets come to lick blown up bits and pieces of my useless brain, tell them i said FUCK!!!!

Not Again!

I'm drunk again. Got through half of Scott Adam's new piece called God's Debris yesterday. It got me thinking, and I wanted to be the first to claim that i've found a flaw with his logic. Public admission of the fact that my actions are motivated by a vulgar hunger for appreciation is something I only do in an intoxicated state. Public? Ha!! Not like anyone reads this crap. Anyway, the guy suggests that an omnipotent God, would find no activity, thought, or pursuit to be challenging other than finding the answer to one question. What happens when and if he is able to self-destruct? The old man goes on to suggest that all of life is a result of God attempting to figure out the answer by 'blowing himself up', and that all of matter and life is nothing but God's Debris enacted upon by the invisible force of probability.

Inspite of the scientific bias of my thought process, if I choose to neglect the absurdity of the ideas suggested as consequences of this conclusion, absurdity which is evident from the smallest bit of scientific reasoning, I've still managed to spot a flaw which Adams almost challenges the reader to find, using very uncomplicated logic. A great deal more uncomplicated than my construction of sentences.

My reasoning is, that if God is truly an omnipotent being, immune to the diseases of us mortals, then he is also immune to the much heralded disease called inquisitiveness. Why would God want to know what happens upon his destruction? I'll end this useless argument here in order to avoid offending any religious person who happens to stumble upon this blog.

I say useless, because in keeping with traditions of the material world, if we focus only on the result or impact of Adams' story, it achieves what it set out to. It is indeed every bit as thought provoking and enjoyable as it was intended to be. The only grievance us narcissists may harbour is that we didn't come up with something as creative ourselves.

Whatever I've read of the story, forces me to wonder what concept of a God I'd come up with if had to use my imagination to create one whose existence could explain all observable phenomena convincingly enough. If I had the power to create a God, how would I make him? Hmm... the alcohol is wearing off, and creativity is preparing to return to its den. I guess this will have to be the subject matter of the next blog entry, and the result of another night on the streets of Delhi, spent punishing my liver for my mind's mistakes.

Post-Electoral Coalitions


The Constitution of India, or any other country for that matter, is nowhere near an exhaustive set of ‘rules’, in the sense that it doesn’t foresee every possible circumstance that the nation may face in reality. These limitations are expected, because the rules of governance have been laid down by humans, and unlike the ‘laws of nature’, they suffer from the same limitations that human beings do. Yet we choose to follow these rules, because of the putative practical advantages they offer over anarchy. We all forgive the inadequacies of our governance system for reasons such as lack of better alternatives, inability to affect change, or the simple fact that we were born into such a system and, over the years, we have internalized the ‘values’ or the ‘ethics’ that form the basis of our constitution to such an extent, that our imagination fails us when we attempt to think of alternatives.

We may justify the dismissal of any grievances against The Constitution, that arise from its ‘incompleteness’, but would we be willing to ignore an ‘inconsistency’ in the constitution?

The purpose of The Constitution is to provide a set of rules, so that the country may be governed in a ‘democratic’ way. The basic principle of democracy is that ‘the opinion’ or ‘the will’ of the majority takes precedence over that of the minority. The Constitution must ensure that this principle is followed in all matters. For The Constitution to be considered consistent, it should not be possible for the rules of The Constitution to result in a situation where the will of the minority overpowers that of the majority.

In real life of course, we see such situations everyday, and The Constitution empowers us just enough to be able to say “iss desh ka kuch nahi ho sakta”, and continue sipping our cup of tea. But the one that is most discomforting is, when the leader of the smallest political party, is able to dictate governmental policies.

This is not an uncommon situation in coalition politics. Let us assume that the elected members of parliament are true representatives of the majority of people that voted. For the purpose of this discussion, those that do not vote do not exist, and the choices that the elected representative makes during governance will be the same that the majority of people from his/her constituency would make in those situations. Also, let us assume that the elected representative has no personal choice, i.e. he/she is merely an instrument voicing the opinions of the people he/she represents; similar to a loud speaker through which people speak. The function of the ‘loud speaker’ is to ‘speak’ and be heard, i.e. to act upon the will of the people he/she represents. Like a real loud speaker, this one needs a source of ‘power’ to speak. So the primary motive of the elected representative is to ‘speak’ for the people (rendered incompetent to speak for themselves, by The Constitution), for which he/she needs to be in power, which gives rise to the secondary motive of coming into power by whatever means necessary and permissible. This elected representative is also a member of a political party. This is the first stage where people are treated as numbers and just added up into groups. The members of the political party that were elected now stand as one entity, one group of people who have the same opinions. The party must ensure that it represents a majority of the country’s population to come into power. Coalition politics allows that small minorities may add up to form a majority. This is the second stage where the subtle differences of opinions are ignored and people are grouped together in a herd. Vague concepts such as political ideology must not figure in the purely mathematical matter of securing a majority. Suppose that all parties, excluding the smallest one, are divided among two competing coalitions of equal strength. The smallest party becomes the most important in forming a majority. The smallest group of people in the country, dictate which half of the country’s people will become a majority and which one will become a minority. The straw chooses which camel’s back to break.

The situation described above, results in a problem similar to the problem with simple majority as opposed to absolute majority. If every 1% of the population differs in opinion from the other, except 2% that don’t, the simple majority of 2% is stronger than the remaining 98%. To safeguard against this situation, we say that the party in power must represent the absolute majority of people. This doesn’t work when parties are allowed to add up to form an absolute majority. Formation of post-electoral coalitions occurs in two steps:
1) Parties ignore each others differences of opinion.
2) Parties unite to form a majority.
The second step is desirable, as it is in accordance with the secondary objective of coming into power. The first step though, neglects the primary objective of ‘speaking’ for the people. This conclusion makes the logical assumption that the two parties would not be separate entities if there were no difference of opinion. If there is no difference of opinion between two parties, the people have nothing to choose from and they wouldn’t care who comes to power because the parties essentially represent the same opinion, so this assumption doesn’t harm the argument in any way.

What we see here is that in allowing post-electoral coalitions to form, The Constitution allows the secondary objective, of coming to power, to take precedence over the primary objective, of representing opinion of the majority, thereby becoming inconsistent with the principles of democracy. Formation of post-electoral coalitions, essentially says that when the nation’s opinion is divided, the nation’s opinion is disregarded.

The problem has an immediate solution of re-election. But it is also possible that the mandate remains fractured after each re-election. In real life, the nation cannot afford to go to elections again and again, and it is argued that allowing post-electoral coalitions to form can save us the trouble. It can be shown that if 100 people have 3 parties to choose from, the probability that re-election will be required due to lack of absolute majority (>50%) is 0.2727… if coalitions are not allowed and 0.2525… if coalitions are allowed.
We supposedly elect a representative because of the ‘promises’ he/she makes, and the opinions he/she holds. By allowing post-electoral coalitions to form, we are allowing the representative we elected to ‘change his/her mind’, to disregard the ‘ideology’ he/she was elected for, to compromise on certain issues without our consent, just so that we can lower the chance of re-elections by 7.4%.