Insanity - III

Ever had a feeling of "What am I doing here?". Mostly its the feeling that you get when you get an invite to a meeting which has no concern to you or what you do. Or sometimes when one of your friends has to go out with his girlfriend and drags you along coz he needs company on the way.
These are one off scenarios and I believe common enough that everyone may have experienced.
But ever had the same feeling in general? As in wherever you are. Ever felt what am I doing here?
Ever tried to broaden the scope of "here".
There's this funny nonsense we used to do. In this one person asks questions and the other answers and it goes something like this:
I need water.
It's in the Pitcher
Where's the pitcher. It's in the room
Where's the room. It's in the school
Where's the school. It's in Sector 13
Where's Sec 13. It's in Hisar
Where's Hisar. It's in Haryana
Where's Haryana. It's in India
Where's India. It's in Asia
Where's Asia. In the world
Where's the world? In the water(as everything is surrounded by oceans)

It was silly I know.. But it was fun to see the conversation returning to the same point again and again.
However my point is not the silliness. I wanted to point out how the scope of here is broadened in each step. We are actually referring the water in the pitcher at all times but the scope is widened with each step.
So have u ever felt "What am I doing here?" on a wider scope. I do so a lot.
When I was in Mumbai. I used to question "What am I doing in Mumbai?" Sometime it would be What am I doing in TCS. But based on my tendency to swell the scope everywhere. Each question would soon become What am I doing in this world/universe. And where is here?
Here on a macroscopic level is a minuscule point in the pattern of time and space. So is it for some purpose that my dot coincides with the dot of here at that moment. Or is it just randomness playing with my dot. And similar dots of millions of other people. Is it random that two people who dont know each other earlier, meet in college and fall in love within a short period of time. Is "Love at first sight" a random feature. Or is it purposeful. Was Bill Gates specifically chosen among the babies to grow up and become one of the richest persons in the world. Or was he the target of randomness. Or was it not decided until that specific moment.
People dont tend to fall in love with everyone who surround them. But with a specific person. So is the couple destined or is it a play of randomness. Probability. All these questions storm through my mind. And I have no idea about any of them. I wonder if normal people have such questions. If yes then how do they deal with them. If no then why not. How can they go on in life with so much things that are blanked out in the mind. With so much understanding still lost out somewhere. Ready to be discovered. How? Why? What? That's all I think these days.....

Destiny & Probability

This afternoon I was talking to one of my friends and we were discussing an achievement when he said that it was just plain luck. As usual.. my mind immediately picked up a thread of reasoning that I had started some time ago. It centers on luck. Destiny. And believe it or not.... Probability.

I had read this book by Scott Adams called God's Debris a couple of years ago. The book broached the same point. What we call luck/destiny... is it not just probability playing it's part. One of my favorite arguments in the book happens something like this:

A delivery guy Y delivers a box to the person X. X starts the argument saying that the box has delivered the person. Y believes that it's the opposite. He's the delivery guy so he delivered the box. And it's revealed that the box was posted by X himself to his own address. The purpose of the box was to make the delivery guy come to his home. So the question hangs.... Who delivered whom?

Anyways coming back to the intertwining of probability and destiny. A Hindu holy scripture says "Karm kar. Phal ki iccha mat kar" Meaning that the duty of a person is to do the work assigned to him in the best way possible. But the person should not expect the outcome. The outcome may or may not be in the person's favor. Doesn't the second part sounds like probability. But then you ask.. why even work if the outcome is not in our hands. Well.. Probability is strange. But being a part of mathematics. Still follows some rules. Whatever work a person puts in goes towards improving the odds of the result being in the person's favor. But probability being probability sometimes it's the less probable thing that happens.

I wanted to talk a lot in this blog. About how probability has worked for me. But well.. maybe later.