Brown Motion

There are many things we think we know. We have theories and postulates and fact and fiction. There is belief and faith and hope and a prayer. And then there is the unthinkable. Unbelievable. Like the rape of young women amidst the society we live in. Children wiped out with gunfire that comes from a weapon we created. Immense tragedies that are done in the name of religion, faith, beliefs, chemically induced fantasia or extreme circumstance. What is that? Unknown Unknowns is how I would like to qualify these. We are good at labeling. Genocides, homicides, suicides, degrees of manslaughter (even if the perp is a woman), infanticides, pesticides, his side, my side and so on. Then there are the hazards - fire, flood, poison, moral and other intangible kinds. Yet events happen with increasing frequency that baffle even the most astute amongst us. We as a species continue to surprise ourselves daily. I mean look at - for example we are still around when a civilization thou...

This morning I am thinking of how we deal with available information that bombards us in petabytes on a daily basis and how we have to make sense of it all for ourselves and for our children. This from a semi avid blogger who contributes in kilos to the petas. What got me thinking was an off hand remark from an acquaintance recently. When asked if he had heard about a recent large scale, headline item, power outage in India he remarked that he did not pay much attention to the news - in fact he did NOT listen to them as a rule. That got me thinking. Was he serious or delusional or somehow had more sense than most of us walking around? Recent tragedies including the one in Connecticut just yesterday which had our president step out and say 'Our Hearts Are Broken Today' was headline news. Whether that is something you can ignore or take in stride and move on is what I am trying to determine. For all its achievements humanity stuns us yet again. Media plays an important r...