“But isn’t that dependent?”

“Yes, but what about the rivers and oceans?”

“What about them?”

“They all have a way about them”

“True”

“So, I say, lung cancer might not necessarily be cured”

“But still can be cured on days without being dependent on truth, isn’t it?”

“You can put it that way”

“So truth still remains true?”

“Doesn’t have to be  exquisitely tight I assume”

“But how do you know where to go and where not to?”

“It shouldn’t be that difficult, you can just go for a walk outside the luxurious hotels of pica chiccu, if you reach a mountain-edge and walk past it”

“But it hasn’t been proved that it exists”

“You got to try it”

“Whatever, I still would like to believe that if you truly believe in something….”

“Isn’t it just obvious? Doesn’t necessarily mean it is true all the times, but sometimes it is, your beliefs probably aren’t used to living on earth”

“What a golly”

“It doesn’t have to be one”

“Is it approximately 9.8ms^-2?”

“Doesn’t matter”

“What if it is a false calculation?”

“Doesn’t matter”

“May be it is harmless,

“I know the burden of modern drudgery, but your exclamations and pitch differences won’t change it”

“You are getting metaphorical”

“Try taking everything as it is–literally”

“I am almost there, but this is really difficult; trying to scour that last shredded piece of evidence to support my belief”

“As I said, on occasions, life doesn’t need to complicated”

“Do you mean I should stop seeking it?”

“I didn’t say it; I just mean that you don’t need some divine shit or clairvoyance to see that sun doesn’t hide itself everyday in the east”

“But I can at least try to be creative”

“Anything that might help” ……He takes a heavy shield which is worn by the warriors, and wraps himself with that. He is made to believe by his clan that there is a Magic, which other people cannot just see, simply because people don’t believe in it. He (I keep saying he because I just don’t want to raise a debate about it, but if I seem to be doing that, then let me be clear—I am not a chauvinist) fights his little instincts, thinking that is necessary to do so to do get results in this experiment. He plummets, and people who wait outside, ready to praise him for his belief, people, waiting there for some divine intervention, hear a lonely splat.

So you had taught me how to recover from a spin when the earth beneath me seemed to spin out of control. While I lay in the crotch of my folly, trying to see beyond my what-I-believe-to-be-true-encrusted-wall, I wish the person speaking to my male lead—the alpha—would have crossed the barrier, somehow, just to know that everybody in this world is with him, and he didn’t need a private universe to know that interstate highways too have got speed limits. Really? You ask. Yes, I say if it is not for that, we still might be sitting on the trees and flinging crap at each other. It’s not so much an algorithm for taking out a bucket from a well, as a “life is too short to do that” defense. Not selecting hypotheses and scrutinizing them is one way of not doing that.

“But you were not even listening to national anthem, were you?”

“No, I wasn’t”

“What caused you action action what you action-ed?”

“Thought of equaling that which I had never equaled”

“Was it necessary?”

“Not, as telegraphic as you put it now, had crossed my mind, I mean the thought”

“I ask again, was it necessary?”

“I ran deep into myself, I can’t necessarily say it was necessary”

“So you dangled over the waters and thought that your feet are clean?”

“Now you talk about water, let us be clear about what we are talking here”

“Yes I have to create truth, then another, and I must continue to do so”

“Why should I believe you?”

“Because the truth doesn’t change even when you don’t believe me”

“You just told me that there is no truth”

“I never said that”

“Wait, you just say something and the next moment you come up with a smirky-refutation”

“Yes, that is ‘true’, as you say, the key is to do it selectively, and you will master that with some time and practice”

So, he races—we are unable to see the light in his eyes, he thinks, but, he didn’t know that he was festooning reality with another reality, another world within another world. Pardon me, but don’t you sense an emotionless rational human being there? And what about intentions, don’t they count? You ask. It hardly waits for you, which is what he had to understand. You don’t necessarily have to fall because you want to be saved—like wanting your wants—you have to know whether you want it or not, you want that feeling, but the feeling is very different from what-it-is. It is born outside sometimes, but lot of times, if you know it—the falling star remains the same—you have to make your own whisper, a wish perhaps, but the star, still, remains the same.

The Chevy Nova never sold well in Spanish speaking countries. “Nova” means “it doesn’t go” in Spanish.

So what is the magic? Does it exist? Is it some special power? Postulating ‘I-believe” as magic hasn’t worked; we have already seen that, been there and done that. Is it just that we come up with postulates just because we don’t know it? We don’t have to know it, I say. You have a model, you work with it, you keep working with it as long as it is working (whatever that might be for you), and you start working with something else after that. Do you still think that the question needs to any more difficult now? Yes, it isn’t that difficult, but it is hard to undo the beliefs, when we have held them for so long, it is painful, you want to enjoy the truth, but it can’t be so to start with. The best advice you will ever get will hurt, because it has to? Not really, I think it has to do with you giving up something, something you were holding on to for a long time—like not believing in a belief, or believing the wrong one.

Are we obsessed with too many maps? We don’t travel that far really—forget about going in different directions—now that will need lot of time in your hands, lots of balls perhaps? What is the fun? You ask—of trying to get a kick just for the heck, traveling to places where you shouldn’t? There are just too many territories to cover everything, we cannot do that. Altering from inside to outside? It still remains the same—sun doesn’t go down in the east because you observe it. It would still be the same even if you don’t. Kick—get it—or just kick it, it still doesn’t remove the impressions of what-should-be from what-it-is; we cannot be deceived because we cannot be persuaded. No, you don’t even have to believe this, I am not a know-it-all, I am just saying it was important that you read Bible in the schools, why not Ramayana or Mahabharata? There you go again, it doesn’t really matter.

So what gives? “I am not particularly sure about that”, you say. I don’t know if people really mean that all the times or sometimes or selectively choose it for themselves, not sure, that is all it gives, but how sure are our beliefs about what we believe or what we do not. Can we genuinely be unsure about our own beliefs? Yes, may be we can attach a probability to it, and recalculate it all the times the event changes. But how is that possible? The information about lot of things won’t ever change, and so won’t the probabilities which are functions of information and not dependent on your or my beliefs. The core temperature of the Sun is still the same, the boiling point of pure water? Or the impure water—does it really come down to 50C in some part of the world, can you still say, well, it is “subjective”, it depends?

There there was, he was, my friend, he waited until reaching the gates of heaven (damn my obsession with heaven and hell), just to know whether he can enter the same or not. He maintained his way, his way of right, his right of way, but, in the end, he died as if he was plain wrong. Why not give the at least the idea a chance, if not beliefs. Are you engaged in war of beliefs? Engaged in war of ideas? Which one should you participate in? Can we regenerate something substantial rotten? May be we can, may be we can’t, but, one thing is for sure, we would again be asked to give up our long loved propensities. No, on both the counts, whether relativity holds good or not, we have stop saying “what is true” unless we totally believe in the belief behind the truth. We need to assert the correspondence between what is inside and what is out there. We should not confuse inability to conceive the truth with ‘can a belief ever be wrong’.

You see? Beliefs don’t change reality. Yes, they change our personal-worlds, our beliefs about belief in what we believe– a personal reality.

I wish the question had been simpler than that.