This, probably, is going to be one those rambling, going-nowhere posts.

Nine years ago, when I had first stepped into the Parkinson's Library at the University of Leeds--Leeds, where this blog was born, nine years ago--I had, for the first time in my life, realized the immensity of the written works of human beings. I had never before seen a library that big, with so many books in one place. I was truly awed by the human ability to write, the human mind's ability to create squiggles on paper which not just mean something specific but have the ability to create images as good as real in the mind of the reader. Have you thought of it that way? We make marks on a paper with some coloured sticks; someone else looks at those marks and knows exactly what I am thinking; that someone else can also mentally conjure an image that is very close to the image that I have in mind. All through squiggles on a blank surface. I still feel rather overwhelmed when I think of it this way. In subsequent years, I have seen, and read in, Oxford's Bodleian Library. It is some 800 years old. We have been squiggling for so many, many years!

And then I hear something like Dmitri Shostakovich's Waltz No. 2. How is it even possible for anyone to create sound like that? I don't know. And yet, the human mind is perfectly capable of such creation. This is not sound made by our natural voices, which can sing and hum, and which we have heard in us, around us. This is sound made from an assortment of metal, string, animal skin, wood, and wind. How does a human mind even imagine this sound before going about creating it?

At times like these, when I think of what the human mind can make, I am truly spellbound.

But then there are humans slaughtering each other, in ways that even animals don't. Humans slaughter everything else as well... every single thing we see around us. We hate everything so much, isn't it? We hate other animals (we kill and torture them for fun, we eat them for pleasure, we take away their homes and poison their food), we systematically destroy everything we touch (the air we breathe, the food and water we consume, the ground on which we walk), we are greedy and selfish beyond all explanations. And this behavior--this behavior which we all, in some way or the other, are so bloody proud of--springs from the same mind that writes those books and makes that music.

Maybe that is justice in itself: That something that has the power to create such beauty, shall also be so inherently, rottenly ugly; that we shall have the power to make the most magnificent of things, and yet choose to use it to do so much more harm than good (and come up with justifications too).