Back home in India. Not quite. In Siddhachal, Thane, Mumbai, India, which is a difference. Disorientation is a function of the imagination. I close my eyes and see Singapore, I expect to smell the faintly aseptic essence of TV rooms and Lounges, and dog-shit, garbage, lead-dust, and other smells violate me. My head is swimming in excrement, at least chemically. Trees are dusty brown, not emerald green, and roads are warty, grey-green, not the frozen, placid sea of concrete. How beautiful, though....not the noisy chaos, not the desecrated earth, the dust-choked trees, but the inert-lipped persistence of the people, the tunneling eyes, the brusque strides. Is it puerile romanticisation, or a sincere expression of my emotions? I might never know, not if I take a path that determines not to care.
The world is infinite, man, infinitesimal. Hence he sees it in different ways. Food nourishes different parts of the body unequally, so do man's views nourish various facets of his thirsting character. I feel I am special because of a simple fact. One day I am in a pure citadel, a jewel on the pacific, the other, in the mountainous end of a rotting, floating city. One day I am among people of engaging innocence and unblemished optimism, the other amongst gritty township's repressed, yoked individuals. I am nourished, no, I am intoxicated.
I might know neither, if I take the path that determines not to care.
But wanting to know is to demand infallible certainty, yearning to experience is to demand omnipresence, insisting on changing is perhaps to demand omnipotence. How I wish I was the collective consciousness, the spirit of the earth, God himself. Then I can do all. The genie says, three wishes I grant you...here, these are my wishes.....that I know all, that I experience all, that I can command all...not as myself, but as all...to be a drop, and an ocean, to be a blade of grass and the vast continent. To be an atom and the universe. Not as little, alienated egos, but as....ineffable expressions of pure spirit.
However, I cannot ask for that.....the genie would not grant me these.....

Optimism and Pessimism

Optimism is repugnant from many angles, especially the psychological. Psychologists have no problems cataloging unpleasant thoughts, even if the said thoughts are pleasant to the thinker. One such was of downward social comparison, basically a euphemism for getting an egoboo out of the shit others are in. Optimists are said to engage in that. Optimists also engage in rationalisation, or challenging negative viewpoints and leaping on to positive ones. Place this cognitive pole vaulter, in say, Soviet Russia (?) or perhaps into the cast of a terminally ill cancer patient...and still he is gonna smile through it all, descending to more and more undemanding and 'simple' pleasures. There are in fact, very few things that an optimist really honestly feels optimistic about, except perhaps, his tendency towards optimism (!). He is optimistic about everything, because he knows he will be a consistent optimist. Also, his faith in humans may well make him more trusting, easier to work with, a better 'team player' (bile attack.) etc etc....so that wherever the hell he is he is gonna be pretty well off.
Now pessimists, however, are far more honest. They don't want to project themselves, because their expert conscience more than deflates the 'hollow-gram' (please be charitable to the pun). Whats more, they can't fairly engage in DSC, because how cruel does that bloody sound! to them. whats more, they can't challenge negative ideas with any real vigour, because sooner or later, you are going to be keen enough to notice the overwhelming odour of chance and absurdity in one's life. Chance, and its evil progenitor, Fate, hang like a rumbling ocean with all the unsubtle hints of an impending Tsunami. Now, of course, you are gonna be calling them whiners. But you gotta talk, to whine. And mostly, pessimists reach absurd levels of loquacity in their adolescence and lapse into a defeated, soft-breathed silence. A pessimist is not, however, pessimistic about his pessimism. Metacognitively, he is proud and dignified about his commitment to honesty. Though he does experience the occasional kick of the conscience when his actions are too dissonant with the demands he makes on himself, he develops a profound, sombre dignity, laced with sardonic humour and irony.
The only time he engages in DSC is when it becomes Downward Psychological Condescension: at least he isn't a pussy like the optimist. A flaw in his thinking is his tendency towards negative rationalisation, that is, have neurotic suspicions of things that are, actually, not bad at all.
Pessimists change the world, or pretty much die trying without really cribbing too much about it. After all, what had they to lose?
Optimists adjust to the world like chameleons, green to the leaf, grey to the swamp. They change, not societies, but things. The pessimist thanks him for the new tools, and leaps into the fray, to change greater things.
And then, society changes, nourished by the blood of several pessimists, until it has a new facade, a new hope, a new direction? And the pessimists of the first become the optimists of the new order.
The rebel of one century becomes the conformist of the next, and so this age old cycle continues.....
There can perhaps be no end to this supremely vicious cycle, unless of course, somebody gives us immortality, undying beauty, godly character, and the rest of the supreme virtues, without asking us to get it ourselves. But there again, the pessimist won't go within a thousand miles of such an offer, because underneath that facade of self-contempt/dignity, seriousness/irony and other contradictions, he thinks he is the beacon of truth, and hence, of immortality, beauty, divinity and the rest of the supreme virtues.
Let us hope that these two will one day reconcile, by some proper effort of theirs.