Solitary Soul

THE BEAUTY OF CHAOS – PART 2 Mario D’Couto             For those of you who have read the life of Benjamin Franklin, he was a man who lived his life to the ‘T’. He was disciplined because of which he became successful. Although, he had one small weakness: he could never keep his place in order. For a man who invented the bifocals, the lightning conductor, the flexible urinary catheter, became the first US postmaster general, served as America’s ambassador to France and who was also the president of Pennsylvania, he struggled with this particular quality. He wrote in his autobiography, “My scheme of order gave me the most trouble, my faults vexed me so much and I made so little progress in amendment and had such frequent relapses, that I was almost ready to give up the attempt.”             This may sound a bit weird or out of place from one of the most determined m...

THE BEAUTY OF CHAOS Mario D’Couto             We all strive for order in our day to day lives and yet we find ourselves in the most bizarre, muddled up situation where we just don’t know what to do about. For those of you who have read my article on “Acceptance”, you will see that this acceptance is not something that is passive but rather it s about owning the situation and doing something about it.             I guess one thing we need to realize is that the rules of the world are not cut and dry as though out to be. Einstein’s discoveries about what was really going at the most basic level led us to believe that there must be something beyond the physical. The basis of this thought process lies on the fact that the particles that make up our universe do not just move in a straight line and react in a perfectly predictable way. In fact, if you get down to the mos...

IS RELIGION TRULY AN OPIUM FOR PEOPLE? Mario D’Couto             In as much as life is beautiful, it has its own challenges and sometimes the road may not be smooth enough. We may have to experience the occasional bumps and knocks or sometimes the situation can be so bad that we may fall down in a ditch and struggle to get back up.             The above title is based on a statement made by Karl Marx who said that religion is the opium of the people. If we go to dig into its meaning, the implications behind it could be a bit alarming. For instance, if you have examined or seen people into drugs or mental patients in hospital or even animals in a veterinary, whenever they become restless, a dose of injection is injected to tranquilize the person or the animal. In a similar way, Marx equated religion as a ‘drug’ that was used by religious leaders or priests (in parti...