The Brave Pedestrian

Not all dogmas originate in religious mumbo-jumbo, old customs and beliefs. Some of the most injurious dogmas are invisible to us because they are woven into our social millieu -- the secular-global-careerist-consumerist culture that prevails. Let me pinpoint one such dogma IDGiSA-IDTaSA (pronounced as 'Idgeesa-Idtaasa). The full form is: "I don't give shit to anyone, I don't take shit from anyone." We have a minds-eye picture of a model citizen who lives and lets live -- a pleasant, helpful, no-nonsense person. And we each believe that we are this model citizen. And therefore, when we percieve someone as interfering in our lives, we turn indignant and say, "IDGiSA-IDTaSA!!!" It's a dogma. It is thoroughly untrue. Living is a process of giving shit and taking shit as well as gold. You exhale what I inhale, you fart what I inhale... and unless I learn to hold my breath for a verry long time, I doubt I can escape a whiff of what's in your re...

OK, I expect to draw some serious flak for this post… but here goes, anyway. Our relationship with entities is as complex as it is with other human beings and other species. We exploit and are exploited by, derive sustenance from and give sustenance to, large numbers of entities all the time. But they, not we, are the prime movers of our relationship. For millennia, they have shaped our future by selectively breeding us, whispering (so to speak) ideas into our little heads, nudging  homo erectus  to become man-the-toolmaker, and then man-the-wordsmith and finally man-who-inhabits-the-world-of-ideas. Humans today live and swim in ideas the way fish live in water. Ideas are their home, their natural habitat and the means of their continued existence. Rabbits cannot live without their intestinal flora, and humans cannot live without their ‘cranial fauna’. Rabbits are rodents whose lives depend so heavily on harbouring the right sort of intestinal bacteria, that at the time of we...