I wonder why I wonder

I have a little cousin whose favorite game is to keep asking why. Any tale I tell him, he will make sure that I don't get away with it easily. He would want all the details, all the nuances. I can't help imagining the catastrophe that would result if he watched our Indian movies.

The point is, he once had a conversation with his father that went something like this.

"Daddy," he asks as he settles himself on his father's lap in the car. "Why are we going in the car?"
His father, my uncle, who has an immense amount of patience and good humor when it comes to him, answers - "Because it's too far to walk."
"Why?"
"Because you wanted to go that ice cream parlor and it is way out."
He kept quiet for a while. Then, he suddenly asks, "Daddy, why is this a CD player?"
I, sitting in the car, was flummoxed. Why indeed?
His dad replies, "Because it's not a cassette player, that's why."

What a profound thing to say! Why am I? Because I am not you. Why is this world? Because we are in it!

My physics teacher once told me that if you kept asking why, you would leave the realm of physics and enter the murky zones of metaphysics and the even murkier zones of philosophy. Why is the earth round? Why is sphere the perfect shape? Why is there something called surface tension? Why should there be a God? Why should this universe exist? Why is it that we are here and not on Mars? You get the idea...

A case in point. I work in an IT firm. Yeah, I know what you're thinking. You and everyone else. The thing is, one begins to lose his identity when in such a firm. You are no more Mr or Ms So and So. You are Employee no. 132851. You are your ID card. You are your proximity card. If not for the card, you don't exist. All these common complaints, I am sure you've heard tons of times, which set me thinking.

How else are you known? By your name? But a name is just a different form of a number. Your ID. You don't exist if not for your name. Then, what's in a name? What's in an Employee no.? Who are we really? Much as I hate being an egoist (or is it egotist? Never could tell), the only real identity is 'I'. Not 'you', not 'her'. Only 'I'. I can visualize Descartes nodding his head in approval.

If that be the case, what are you to me? Or you a fellow 'I'? Can I ever think of you as a living being, when I sometimes feel you are all props in my stage? Will there ever come a time when I acquire this elusive 'collective conciousness'?

Bharathiyar - my mentor in several ways (for those of you who don't know him, he was a great tamil poet - a freedom fighter and a rebel) - once wrote a song that I will try to crudely translate here.

If all that is seen eventually dies out,
Then all that has been concealed should come into existence.
If that be the case, am I a dream?
Is this world a lie?


PS: The title of this post is actually borrowed from another great man, Richard P. Feynman.