Friday, March 4, 2016

Genuine openness or just a convoluted sense of sweet wordiness?

Lately I found myself struggling with my inner thoughts and my action in life.

People are crazy.

That means I’m also crazy.

If that is real, what am I doing here in this world?

Craziness breeds craziness. 

Here’s a short story I used to listen to when I was young. It’s called “Drink Bitter Rain”.

As usual, it started with “Once upon a time”.

Bitter Rain
Once upon a time, there was a young man in a small village who has prescient power. One day he predicted that there will be a heavy downpour of bitter rain in coming years. Anyone who drink bitter rain over time will slowly become neurotic, dumb and crazy. The plan was to store drinkable water so that they can withstand the bitter rain period. Anyone in the village paid no heed to this young man’s advice. Despite the blatant show of their indifference to his suggestion, the young man began storing drinkable water in his house.

Time has come. Bitter rain started to pour one day and last for several months. Villagers have no other way but just to rely on rain for their daily usage. Gradually they slowly turned into someone who couldn’t think logically and became dumb while the young man enjoyed doing his daily chores as usual. Over time this young man found himself contradicting with villagers all the time. All villagers now assumed that there was something wrong with the young man. There was always a struggle between all of the villagers and the young man, a loner who thought he was a logical person while the rest were inflicted with bitter rain virus yet the villagers accused him of his weird and idiosyncratic way of living.

Finally, he couldn’t hold himself any longer in the midst of dumb people living around. He came up with an idea that he was going to drink bitter rain and become “one of them” or ….
---------------
That’s the end of the story. Hanging you in there, but there’s also ample amount of truth in the story as well.

There are many possible interpretations on the story. The obvious one is
1) Villagers are crazy and the young man is a sane person. Or

What could have been hidden in the story is
2) The young man himself is actually an insane person yet he thought of himself as some kind of sage, giving unsolicited self-righteous advice, and assumed all people (villagers) around him are dumb and crazy.

So coming back to my thought process of who is really crazy, and what defines a craziness?

When I contemplate on “craziness”, I neither define a situation when a person wants to study all night long before an exam nor do I assume that a person from a poor background wants to become an engineer.

What I found craziness in every day events is when people begin to make a poor judgment and nobody is correcting them either by rational discussion or logical conclusion. What’s even more depressing or frustrating at times is when people start cheering up for the very poor judgment.

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