Stop and Think!

Jellyfish. Its a fish that looks, feels like a moving jelly. So naming it a jelly fish is a No Brainer. No, I dont mean that you don’t have to use any grey matter to arrive at this name. I mean it literally. A jelly fish has no Brain. So do a lot of other organisms. But it is a well known and recognised creature, so I’ll stick with it to make my point.

Now Jelly fish has no brain but it survives. It just survives it doesn’t bother about the rest of the world. But we humans do. None of the other 8.7 million species on earth do it. Just us. So, we think that we are superior to them. We think our brains are more advanced than all the other species. This hasn’t yet been scientifically proven but just for the sake of this argument, let’s assume they are. Now are we using this brain? Or May be let me rephrase the question. Are we using our brains correctly?

There are 2 types of humans that I see. Ones who just accept what ever they are told. Ones who don’t. Now, if you just accept what ever is told to you without reasoning, technically you might as well be born as a jelly fish. In other words, you might as well not have a brain. Why carry the weight of 3 pounds that is not needed. Well may be not all of it, just the Grey part. You will still need the white part to remember what is told to you. You just don’t need the part that gives cognitive abilities.

I would like to venture a guess that while reading this blog, especially the previous paragraph, you have categorised yourself as the second kind. The Reasoning Kind. But I’d like to disagree. It might sound a arrogant statement. But I honestly believe that most people do not put their brains to good use and I wholeheartedly wish they did. May be they don’t realise the need to question the status quo. 

Now, I’ll go through a list of few things that I bet you never bothered to think twice about. You learnt them in school, stuffed them in our memory bank and left them there. For Instance, why does one stop at a red light and drive when it is green? Who decided it? Why did they choose those colours? 

But one question always drives me in circles. Well, spheres and ellipses to be honest.
Earth is a sphere and it revolves around the Sun in an elliptical orbit. So, how do we determine the starting point of a sphere or a ellipse?
Well they did do that. In 1850, people from some so called western came together and said, we need to create time zones. This started when railroad connectivity established between Canada and the US. Business men had a tough time with ‘time’. Obviously they did not invite all the countries with people who have melanin in their skin. Then everyone that were invited wanted their country to be taken as a reference point. Now who do you think won in this situation. Take a guess. It was the English. They made England the centre of Earth.
One can argue that there was a very good necessity to draw longitudes. But then they have established the so called East and West. 

Directions are pretty straight forward. The direction that sun rises from is the east. eg: For India Singapore is East. For England, France is East. But its funny that their definition was not relative. Japan is far east, even for Hawaii. And For Korea, US is West. That doesn’t make any sense.

Now lets get back to the concept of time for a moment. A calendar is also a way to keep time. Time will exist even of no one will keep track of it. Now, the best way to make a formula for anything is to find as few exceptions as possible and a unit of time has to fall under same criteria. But they did all kinds of reverse engineering and forward engineering. Its just like the non-metric system in US and UK. Its stupid. An year is defined as time it takes for earth to complete one rotation around the sun. So, where does an orbit start? Why start counting on January 1st. Again you might argue that its a problem with no solution. Some one had to start counting at some point in the orbit. Why not January? Agree.

I’ll use a final example that in completely and utterly illogical. Now. A week has 7 days. There are 5/6 work/week days and 2/1 weekend days respectively (depending on which part of the world you are in). Now why is Sunday a holiday? Why not any other 6 days of the week? This is a stupid thing that was written in bible that no one is supposed to work of Sabbath as its the day of the lord. Now that is fine, but what about the rest of the world. Its not the day of ‘their’ lord. Well except Saudi Arabia, they saw the right through this logic and declared that their holiday would be on Friday. 

You may think that I’m crazy to say that such kind of things are worth thinking about. But I’d argue that these are the exact kind of things that one should ponder about. If we silently follow what we are told, what’s the difference between a sheep(or Jellyfish) and us.