The science of thought

Its 9:30 AM on a Monday morning in Fremont, a sleepy suburb of San Francisco where I am hurrying up to reach work and tackle the upcoming week. I reach the first major intersection on the way and come up with the first big decision of the week. A green light to go straight and yet I needed to take the right turn to reach my destination. I stop to look for any oncoming traffic and quickly take the right. The next thing I know is that there is a squad car with lights on flagging me to make a pit stop. Err, not a great start to a week. My crime of passion? Making a right turn without stopping for upcoming pedestrians! My grounds for appeal – The pedestrians were on the other side of the road and at no point at risk of being run down by my car. This incident left me in a philosophical mindset, wondering about the purpose of human life. The jobs that we do as humans, is it different from the jobs of our co-habitants on planet Earth?
If we were to take any species of fauna on this planet, what primeval task would we characterize them with? What would be the thing best suited for a tiger? Hunting? What would be the innate thing for a dog? Probably being a follower and being devoted? Now if I were to extrapolate the question around the human species, what would the answer be? The obvious answer would be to be able to surmise and logically deduce. Stephen Hawking is the perfect example of a member of the bipeds who although being severely quadriplegic uses the most important organ given to us all-the brain. Sherlock Holmes, the sleuth from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictitious famous detective series said one time to his comrade Dr. Watson explaining the lack of sleep, food and drink when in hot pursuit, “My body is merely an organ to carry my mind from one place to other. I don’t need anything else. The brain is the most essential part of my body and that is what I use the most”. Isn’t that the absolute truth? Yet if I were to look into the variegated professions that humans from across the globe have chosen, what is the percentage of people whose jobs involve thinking? Of the total number of people whose jobs involve cranial activity, how many people actually do justice to that one solitary organ which puts food on their table. In my limited experience of being a human being, I have found that thinking is the single thing that people abstain from. There are rules and regulations around civic society, diktats, commandments which govern our existence. We as humans don’t trust our own ability towards taking decisions. We seem to be more at ease with having someone else do our thinking for us. There are few amongst us who have the aplomb to think and take pride in that fact. The great philosophers of civilization – aka Leonardo Da Vinci, Aristotle, Plato, Machiavelli, Freud to name a few have done this with arguably varying degrees of success. History has always been the precursor for future. When anarchy is rampant, there rises a few good men who has the audacity to envision beyond the evident and the banal. While we complete the first decade of the twenty first century, the world is looking towards one such charismatic leader who can guide us through the labyrinth of phantasmagoria towards the true end.