The rise of fatherhood

Having a child is probably one of the most incredible things that can happen to a person. It is a moment unlike any other, especially when it is about the first child. There are myriad emotions overwhelming a person simultaneously and it is probably difficult for anyone to decipher what exactly are these emotions wreaking havoc inside. And I am just referring to the days leading up to and right after the birth; there are a million other things one might feel in the time from conception to the time of the birth and a million more will follow while raising the child, but the moment one sees one's child for the very first time is an exquisite cocktail of head spinning emotions. Sufficient content has been written and consumed repeatedly over centuries on how it feels to become a mother, right from excruciating anatomical details to tiniest of emotional details. Males, generally, are more immune to emotions, yet the advent of fatherhood does invoke quite an emotional response even from the most frosty ones (even if they deny it and don't have any visual indications of it). Most of it is probably plain old biological programming hard - wired to ensure the propagation of the species, yet, it is crafted so exquisitely that one can't help but wonder if it is the same for everyone or unique to one.

So, what does it feel like for a make to have a child? Like being hit by a freight train and still delightful? Here are the top ingredients I could pick out of the heady emotional cocktail of new-found fatherhood:

1. Helplessness / powerlessness

Yes, that is correct, the most conspicuous emotion a soon-to-be father experiences is helplessness / powerlessness. It doesn't matter where you are from and how wonderful and state-of-the-art the medical facilities are, the period of time when your partner is undergoing contractions and labor pain, or the period of time when your partner is in the OT for a c-section, you will feel the stark antonym of omnipotence - sheer powerlessness; you want everything to be alright, you want your child to be born healthy, you want your partner to make it out of it unscathed (relatively speaking). But, you realize that despite your best efforts, as a mere mortal, all you have control and sway over is just your own anatomy (that too, barely). It is at this moment you understand the need of relinquishing control, essentially and precisely because you have none.

2. Belief in higher powers

No matter your religious outlooks, when you sit and wait for your child to arrive, when you have acknowledged your own helplessness, the next step along the journey is to question the cosmos - if not me, then who? That question inevitably leads to an answer not everyone ascribes to but gleefully or resentfully agrees to - that there is something beyond our knowledge and comprehension that now controls the outcome of this episode. People ascribe a multitude of names to it - god, destiny, fate, karma, the universe, the cosmos. That is when the ones with a sense of religion start to pray, and the ones who believe in the laws of attraction and the universe probably send out vibes and thoughts into the universe. Either way, you beg whoever is in control of the outcome to flip the coin in your favour, because you cannot, no matter how hard you try.

3. Joy

The most-associated emotion with child birth is probably joy and it is so because of valid reasons. The moment you see your child for the first time, you experience pure, unadulterated, cosmic joy. If you want to draw figurative parallels of it, do not even try. There is no other feeling and not enough adjectives to describe it. Perhaps the word “joy” itself is an underwhelming image of it. It is probably akin to being touched by angels or blessed by god , but who knows? It is boundless, it is transformative, it is the extent of emotional cognition. No matter what words are used, you would only know it if you have experienced it.

4. Anxiety

From the moment you first hold your child, with the slew of all the love and care that wakes up in the deepest, darkest crevices of your soul, there is also a dark passenger - anxiety. There is a constant state of anxiousness that persists and heightens every time someone checks on your child, everytime your child makes a sound, everytime the breeze touches your child gently, everytime the clock ticks. And it is not just anxiety; there is a mix of fear and worry alongside it. This concoction makes you wish that somebody had invented time travel prior to this moment so that you can look into the future just to make sure that everything turns out just right for your little thing. There is no alleviating this constant state of anxiousness; there is no remedy, just the sense of perplexing fear lurking consistently.

5. Protectiveness

With the constant worry comes the antithesis of it as well - constant protectiveness . As a father, you feel responsible for keeping your child safe constantly. You monitor every aspect of the environ to assess potential threats, you scan every individual approaching your child, you put an extra pillow around to ensure they are well cushioned, you pull your child closer to your chest when a chilly gust of wind threatens a sneeze and you innately are ready to do everything in your power to make sure no harm comes to your child on your watch, even though nobody told you to do so.

Conclusion

That said, these are not the only emotions you would feel and, depending on you, you may or may not feel all of these. And if this sounds discouraging or it appears to highlight negative emotions over the positive ones, just remember that this is about a very small , albeit important , chapter of a much larger tale that is yet to be written. Nobody said raising another human being would be easy , and well, it apparently isn't.

The Illusion of Digital Choice

The internet has been home to digital content since its advent. The archaic HTML based websites were the point of initiation for digital content, which has since gone through an evolution on boosters apparently to reach the current state of micro-blogs, blogs, pictures, short videos, long videos and whatever else you can think of in way of digital content. 

Digital Content Boom

With the increase in the penetration of internet, and with mobile devices becoming more powerful and capable, the amount of digital content being produced has sky rocketed in recent years. It is estimated that 2.5 quintillion bytes of data was created per day in 2020. That is 2,500,000,000,000,000,000 bytes (I took the effort to count and types - it's 17 zeroes)! And all this when only 60% of the world population has access to internet, with most of the data accessed / generated via smart phones. The journey of content has also been pretty obvious - starting from text based content like tweets, emails, blogs to snaps, insta posts, stories, reels and short videos, leading to more data generation and subsequent consumption.

Ka-ching

Marketing has always been closely linked to a brand's ability to ride the trend. As digital media and digital content became popular, digital marketing too dug it's tooth into it. From advertising on websites, to sending generic emails, to generating tweets, blogs, videos, pictures and memes, digital marketing has probably evolved at a pace abreast with the digital revolution itself. And it has been a rousing success for marketing, because it is estimated that close to 70% of instagram users check out a picture or video shared by brands. The basic concept, of course, is maintaining and maximizing the time a user spends on a particular app or website, browsing the promotional content. And with great marketing, comes great moolah.

Painting individual bulls-eyes

From statistics and the teenagers we notice recording weird acts on their smartphones in the streets, it is evident that the amount of content generated daily is immense. For the sake of the moolah, it is imperative that users eyeballs need to remain hooked to one's app or website in order to view more and more promotional content, subconsciously influencing the user's buying choices IRL. How, then, is that achieved? If you remember an android-faced Mark Zuckerberg in front of a committee, you know the answer to it - by personalizing the content offered to a user based on millions of data points gathered via billions of interactions. Every interaction of a user becomes an event that is recorded and used to refine the content curation algorithm (AI! Yeah baby!) for the user, ensuring more and more screen time for the app or website (the current estimate is 142 minutes spent on social media daily on an average).

Frog in a digital well

The concept of personalization or curation of content might be good for the corporations, but, from the perspective of the user, it constructs a ailo around the user, entrapping her in content filtered to the T based on previous interactions. What that means is that the user always gets only a specific subset of the content, no matter what is generated outside of that. If you are a fan of Venn Diagrams, think of the subset as a very small bubble inside a very large circle - that is all the user sees if left to her own devices. 

The illusion of choice

Every social media or digital content app makes the user believe they are free to view whatever content they choose, follow who they want but the dire reality of it is that their digital world is akin to a softer version of the Truman Show, with choices seeming abundant yet restricted to a small set. The user, of course, can search for specific terms and inorganically increase the bounds of their dome, including new data points, but that requires knowledge of events outside the dome, creating a paradox in itself for internet driven generations - to view content outside the curated items, you need knowledge of outside events; to have knowledge of outside events, you need relevant content to be made available. The primary means by which a user gets her daily dose of world events is, today, primarily digital - tweets, websites, videos on social media. What appears on the user's feed from the gigantic set of events generated at any instance is dependent on the previous interactions. If someone has not shown interest in soccer, they would probably not know that Argentina won the Copa America after 28 years; and they have no way of knowing it unless they know that there is a tournament like Copa America or a game like soccer if their knowledge is driven off digital content. If they have not shown any prior interest in Soccer, even searching for Argentina using common search engines might not yield their Copa America win as a first page item.

All is not lost

While the major players that dominate the internet are instrumental in perpetuating this art of digital confinement, there are those who want to use internet for knowledge sharing rather than profiteering. Search engines like duckduckgo provide avenues to showcase how an internet without money-making motives would look like and that is hope enough for an inevitable revolution that would come, eventually, gradually.

The interminable love of the underdog

Human race and it's incessant love affair with the notion of the rise of the underdog is as old as civilization itself. For as long as a semblance of societal hierarchy has existed, the concept of the underdog has been romanticized in the minds of the people in the lower strata of the societal hierarchy. Humans are perhaps the only species that can feel a sense of achievement in the triumphs of others. The sheer thought of witnessing a low ranked team win (or even put up a close match) against a higher ranked team, watching a challenger win the title against the reigning champion, seeing the current government overthrown by a completely new regime...the list is endless.

The order of the society

For as long as the concept of civilization has existed, there has been the concept of a hierarchy that has existed alongside it. Castes, professions, economic sections, player/team rankings - it has been called by many names, but the core concept remains the same - there are those who are at the summit, there are those who are on the incline trying to reach the summit and there are those who are at the base and have either no desire or no hope of reaching the summit. That has been the order, the way of life. From the leader of a tribe, to the kshatriya and the Brahmins of Vedic period, to the kings in mediaeval times, to elected leaders of democratic nations, to the elite 1%, to the champions of a sport - there have always been people who are identified as the zenith of achievement in the society or a specific area; and then there are those who aspire to replace these groups or individuals at the top of the pyramid, and an indifferent mass of people who are too busy with the travails of survival to think of upward movement in the ecosystem.

The Cyclic nature of world order

Throughout history, there is a pattern to the overthrowing of the alpha by the challengers. It always follows the same modus operandi - the middle section, with the help of the lower strata, overthrow the upper class. The middle becomes the top, a new middle is formed while the bottom remains at the bottom more or less, except for some who move to the new middle. And then, after a period, the cycle repeats. This is true for society at large, political parties, democracies, economies, sports, even in office politics. Every Revolution or civil war the world has seen is an example of this; the entire concept of anti-incumbency stems from this fundamental truth of human nature - humans favor the challengers, not the rulers; and the human need to dethrone the rulers is insatiable.

Punching above weight

Think of a sport that you watch often, and imagine two teams or individuals (not your favourite ones, to avoid any bias), one ranked in the top 3 and the other ranked somewhere in the 30s (or an unseeded one), facing each other in a match. As s person with no bias for or against any of the participants, who would you be more likely to support? Exceptions apart, most of us would want in our heart that the team or individual with a lower rank would defeat the one ranked in the top 3. As humans, we romanticize the victories that defy odds; we want that the challenger who has worked his way to this match up via sheer hardwork and willpower should reap the fruits by emerging victorious against the one touted as one of the greats of the game, even though we have no apparent gain from the triumph. The same goes for economic classes - where we want people with regular middle class upbringing to break the glass ceiling and enter the elite 1%, or in politics, where we often vote for some new to oust the people in power. The churn of people is an undeniable favourite of masses, and it has to do with how we view ourselves. We are the middle layer, struggling to get to the top in some aspect or other. That makes it easy for us to relate to the underdog - because we are the underdog in some sense, in some aspect of life. Once that bind of relatability is forged, emotions soon follow and we find ourselves in the corner of Rocky trying to outlast Creed, of Switzerland trying to out-kick France, of Aam Admi trying to overthrow the incumbent - because we see a bit of us in them; we see the struggle and the spirit and the dedication which we ourselves are putting in somewhere else.

Kyunki...master bhi kabhi challenger tha (the master was once a challenger)

In all the emotions and the cheering for the underdog, there is an essential detail we often overlook - the master that we are now asking to be dethroned was once a challenger; it took all their spirit and willpower and dedication and prowess to become a master and they have been consistently putting in their 100% to stay there. Mass memory, of course, is goldfish-y, and the masses would not remember the moment when this master took its place at the top, they had been cheered on by the same masses that are now cheering against them. That is the reality we live in.

But cheer on!

No matter who your heart supports, the underdog or the alpha, the incumbent or the challenger, do cheer them on. The uniqueness of humanity lies in empathy, where one can affect the energy levels of someone else by merely a few acts of encouragement. There will be days when probably you would be an underdog and you just might gave people in your corner, people you have never known even, cheering you on, and that can be the difference between winning and losing!

Are we losing our EQ?

Have you ever experienced a truly marvelous moment in your life and found that your own reaction was not what you had expected? Did you not smile as much as expected when you got you first salary? Did your fiance not cry while saying that life-altering "yes" to you? Did your eyes not tear up when you saw your baby for the first time on the sonograph? And there would be a million other events, though not as significant, where you might have found yourself lacking in emotions.

The cyclic downfall hypothesis

Though you might feel a tinge (or more) of guilt for this, you can find solace in the fact that you are not alone. The reason that we, as a society, consistently fail to meet emotional outbursts and reactions is something that warrants a bit of attention. One of the plausible, yet horrifying, reasons could be that we are producing emotionally moribund pyschopaths by the dozen, leading to a reduction in the overall emotional quotient of the society. It implies that individuals are losing their "emotionality" if you will, due to the way our lives and social interactions are structured. As a people, we are slowing regressing into the nuclear family hunter-gatherer phase prevalent before community living became a thing and farming started in the days of our Neanderthal-esque forefathers. If that is true, it does present a very strong argument in favour of the cyclic nature of civilization - how things usually come full circle, how civilizations rise and subsequently fall, how societies flourish and then die off, how communities prosper and then fade into oblivion. In the mindless race for better futures, lesser dependencies, more independence and simpler lives, the connections we sever may not seem costly, yet they do cost us in terms of soul nourishment and social interactivity. There is a profound loneliness that is evident in most of the people of the younger generations especially in larger cities, where people tend to live away from their families. Loneliness is a precursor to a host of mental health issues, and could possibly impact the way we respond to emotions and react in times of emotionally charged situations. That can explain our under performance on emotional big stages.

The media-dosed baseline hypothesis

The second possible reason that we feel inadequate emotionally is that our reactivity baseline is probably not correct. Most of us experience life-changing moments, well, only a few times in our lives. We don't get first salaries every day, or fall in love frequently (except some lucky people do). How do we know, then, what is the appropriate reaction to these events? As human beings, we have the power to learn from others. That forms the baseline of comparison we create consciously and unconsciously. The older generations formed this baseline looking at the community around them. However, our generation has grown up in an age of excessive media exposure. We had access to media content from across the world during our formative years and we have seen some great performers react to similar life events on screen. That, consciously or unconsciously, becomes a part of our training model for appropriate reactions, which is unfortunate because the actors who we see on screen are paid to react excessively, their bodily and facial expressions, tonality, and every other verbal and nonverbal cue, is exaggerated to ensure their reactions are not subtle. They work hard to make sure that what they are expressing is communicated across media without even an iota of doubt. There is always an element of extraneous effort in reactions when we look at "good" actors - that extra flair of expressions is what makes them good. Though a boon for actors, it creates a false baseline for people in the real world. We start expecting ourselves to react overly to similar situations drawing from our media content viewership experiences, and then feel emotionally short when we do not match up to what we have seen so many times before. As regular humans, we all have different emotional ranges and expressive capabilities, which might not match up to the extraneous baseline established in our minds except for the few who are truly extra expressive. This is starkly in contrast to previous generations, where this baseline was more realistic due to the sample set being the community around, whose range of expressions was of the same magnitude even if not similar. We can probably blame our type 1 brain for this, which introduces biases in our routine thought processes, creating learning models and retrieving information subconsciously without our type 2 brain even being aware of it.

It is okay to be subtle

Though we cannot truly establish which of these is truly the reason for what happens to us, we can say with certainty that it is probably okay to be subtle about the way we feel. The shouting from the rooftops, the boombox driven confessions of love, the passionate bouts of love conjured up at the slightest hints of attraction, the profuse ophthalmic waterworks on every sentimental moment...it might not be your thing and that is absolutely okay. Establish your own baseline of emotional expression and surely there will be people who would appreciate you for being real about it rather than overly dramatic and fake. That is what is essential for a meaningful relationship after all - the honesty of it. 

Can rebirth have a scientific basis?

Disclaimer - this is a purely speculative post and does not aim to offend followers or believers of any particular faith or religion.

Hinduism, as it stands today, is defined by the the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Puranas, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata primarily. As one compares and contrasts Hinduism with the modern religions like Christianity or Islam, one fundamental idea presents itself as a stark difference - the idea of rebirth. Modern religions believe that we actually live only once (go YOLO!), residing for all eternity in Heaven or Hell in the afterlife based on our actions, thoughts, sins, guilt and what not during the time spent living. Hinduism, on the other hand, postulates that the soul is immortal and caught in a cycle of rebirths till one attains nirvana or moksha by elevating one's consciousness and merging into the infinite. The same applies to Jainism and Buddhism too, where Moksha or Nirvana are the end goal. 

Now, there is no scientific evidence (as far as I know) to support either of these views as yet, though there are multiple claims of people experiencing both these phenomena. But, come to think of it, the concept of multiverse actually can be attributed to the concept of rebirth. Of course, the similarity is not straightforward or forthcoming. But I assume you would indulge me somewhat.

Let us start with the concept of the multiverse for the uninitiated. Scientists have long theorized that ours is not the only universe that exists. It is theorized that there exist an infinite number of universes, each slightly different from the other yet similar, existing in higher dimensions unobservable to human senses and capabilities. Each universe contains a replica of everything in the other universe albeit different due to the different choices made by someone. So, probably, there is another universe where I didn't write this piece, another one where you did not read this and so on. Imagine all the possible combinations of the sum total of choices made by every conscious being since the advent of time itself - those are the number of parallel universes that exist!

That alone, although necessary, will not suffice the need of what could possibly be the scientific basis of rebirth. For that, another rather inexplicable phenomenon named quantum entanglement needs to be thrown into the mix. Quantum entanglement suggests that in certain scenarios, two particles can be linked together in such an exotic way that information exchange between them is instantaneous depsite the distance between them. There is a sort of cause-effect relationship between the two entities in the quantum realm, the observation or measurements on one particle instantly affecting the measurements on the entangled particle. And this is not a science fiction movie where the term "quantum"-something is thrown around just to avoid explaining the science behind what is going to happen.

With these two concepts in mind, the next item to analyze is the concept of the aatma and it's rebirth. Hinduism is rooted in the idea that the aatma is caught in loop if rebirths (talk about Tom Cruise fighting aliens in a loop!), moving from one vessel (body) to another and that our current life is affected by what we did in the past lives, and what we do in this life affects our future lives. Whatever knowledge we gained in previous lives is not forgotten, whatever good we did, or the bad we did, is not forgotten; it is just hidden or obscured due to our worldly sensory deprivation. Our life is the summation of all the lives we have lived and will live. However, all of this assumes that the arrow of time actually exists, that there is a "previous" and a "next" life. That is true for three dimensional beings (for example, humans), but for residents of higher dimensions, there is no arrow of time, there is no past and no future, no previous and no next. For higher dimensional beings, every moment is accessible simultaneously, just like the three dimensions humans can experience.

An amalgamation of all these concepts presents a highly unlikely yet plausible answer to the rebirth theory. Assuming that enlightened beings probably see higher dimensions and perceive time non-linearly, if we take the arrow of time out of the equation from the concept of rebirth, it simplifies rebirth down to - a being experiencing multiple lives in parallel, simultaneously. Since the theory of multiverse suggests that each of us are living multiple lives in parallel universes, that does not seem to be a far fetched idea at all. Also, the idea that what we do in one life impacts the other is also not far fetched if quantum entanglement exists - all replicas of a being in parallel universes could possibly be connected via quantum entanglement, leading to a cyclic cause-effect relationship of karma as defined in Hinduism.

What does all of this mean, you ask? In simpler words, probably, it means that what a being does in this life, in this instant, in this universe impacts the life of one's replica in every other existing parallel universe. An axiom to that - it also means that one's current situation, the outcomes of past, current and future events and everything else conveniently attributed to fate or destiny is nothing more than the impact of the actions of one's replicas from other universes. There is a shared subconsciousness connecting all the replicas of a being across all universes, connecting them through quantum entanglement, exchanging information on actions, thoughts, ideas, knowledge and much more across universes instantaneously.

As a by-product of this thought, probably 84 lakh (8,400,000) yonis actually point to the existence of 8.4 million parallel universes. Who knows? The scribes who wrote the scriptures were bound by their human potential, while the source of the scriptures were mostly omniscient beings who could perceive higher dimensions and understood the quantum realms. Discourses like the Gita were meant to be simple so that humans could grasp it despite the limited consciousness and universal awareness. Or, probably, it is just the musings of a curious mind.