Monday 9 November 2009

Ignorance is Bliss

Was having a conversation with my mom today on how all we "intellectual" and "thinking" people have done is to complicate our lives. She gave me the example of a second cousin of my dad's who just got married (she's just my age folks!) and was perfectly fine with whatever she had and without any fantastic notions of compatibility or romance or connect or whatever other hogwash that we come up with in the name of enlightenment, intellect, exposure blah blah blah...

Well, you see mommy, it is a double edged sword. You gave us books to read when we were little. We became the intelligent, broadminded little know-it-alls who were always the teacher's pet in school and got good grades. But along with that our imaginations also flew. We discovered thoughts and desires which we might not have chanced upon in our limited experience of the world. We learnt to look, question and re-examine everything. We learnt to want things and we learnt how we could get them. We got addicted to the joys of curiousity and the search for more.

Ignorance is bliss indeed but once you chose to think, you can't escape it. Neither can you escape the consequences of suspending or ignoring your thinking for a short period of time for it will always come back to you multiplied manifold.

9 comments:

cynduja said...

Very well said...its like being blind and imagining the world, and then opening your eyes...what you see may not be what you imagined, but its closer to what is...in reality

cynduja said...

They hammer into our heads lessons on humanity, and then don't like it when we understand the theory and try to practically implement by falling in love with boys from another religion, region, country....

Nithya said...

@cynduja there is a line to theory they say. I just always wonder which of the longitudes is the line you see... they are all parallel and equally capable of resulting in happiness

Kiki said...

we think....therefore we are! ... cheers to that!!

Rehab said...

In a discussion with a friend about adulation and the love is blind concept I remember saying ' Love that is blind and submissive will have a lifetime of discovery. Both good ones and bad.'
And its particularly stifling to think that with the intelligence we all are endowed, we rarely ask the right questions.
Not just about marriage, but about God. How many parents allow their children to explore different styles of religious and moral thoughts? And how many parents wont balk at the idea of their child converting to some other religion?

Nithya said...

@rehab dining table intellectualism is comfortable. Apply it to life and people start to get distinctly uncomfortable with thinking.

cynduja said...

@nithyaravi, @rehabc
dining table intellectualism, and real life conflicts never depicted better, than in guess who's coming to dinner
But the deal is, dining table discussions are a gr8 start, and beautiful seeds of thought, ..if tht doesn't exist, thr is jst abs no possibility of action...at all!

Nithya said...

@cynduja @rehabc I couldn't agree more. Much of this post and the rest on this blog owe their existence to dining table intellectualism. Unfortunately, we have fostered intellectualism without cultivating the courage it requires. Which is why we meander lost and make compromises and choices that we don't understand.

rehabc said...

Its like my reputation theory. It means that most of our actions are dependent on salvaging either our or our parents' reputations. The pitfall? In both cases u are confining to someone else's ideas. Whether u have a good reputation or not.

 

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