The son of man

The Son of Man

Drawn by the Belgian surrealist painter Rene Magritte, whose 110th birth anniversary is today. About the painting, Magritte says:
” At least it hides the face partly. Well, so you have the apparent face, the apple, hiding the visible but hidden, the face of the person. It’s something that happens constantly. Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present.”

Shefaly’s latest was the inspiration for this post.

A Joke!

“An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The first one orders a beer. The second orders half a beer. The third, a quarter of a beer. The bartender says “You’re all idiots”, and pours two ”

Thanks, Sports!

Questions

Thought experiments with unawoken are quite enlightening! I am hereby unilaterally declaring him my guru! In the meanwhile, another “way of life” – that advocated by Diogenes of Sinope

Ah, questions, questions!

A pearl of Zen

Two monks were arguing about a flag. One said: `The flag is moving.’

The other said: `The wind is moving.’

The sixth patriarch happened to be passing by. He told them: `Not the wind, not the flag; mind is moving.’

Hat tip to unawoken for the source.

Tribute

November 4th was a momentous occassion. Pandit Bhimsen Joshi was awarded the Bharat Ratna, the highest civilian award given by the Government of India. The people of India finally recognize a living legend. Here is an example of his extraordinary ability. This excerpt is from the Harballabh Mela of 1957 – India’s oldest classical music conference.

India :(

Amit Varma on India Uncut asks:

“If anthropologists from 300 years later see the screenshot below, of the Times of India’s headlines right now, I wonder what conclusions they will draw:

Profundity 101

Kurt Vonnegut is cynically wonderful. I am reading “A Breakfast of Champions” and seem to find deep meaning in every paragraph – whether he intended them to be “deep” or not I don’t know! An excerpt:

“… Like everybody else in the cocktail lounge, he was softening his brain with alcohol. This was a substance produced by a tiny creature called yeast. Yeast organisms ate sugar and excreted alcohol. They killed themselves by destroying their own environment with yeast shit.

Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.”

Like Dvorahji says, Shut up and be Happy!