Fat-Tailed Reality

I’ve just read Ramzy Baroud’s My Father was a Freedom Fighter – a riveting, heart-rending story of a family’s journey through the years of Palestine’s siege. As I turned the pages towards the unalterable end, almost willing the pages and the story to metamorphose, I realized that this is yet another validation, and the starkest one yet, of the fact that there is no justice in the real world, and there’s no meaning to anything. For if there is meaning, what the hell is it? Actually, I’m being unnecessarily abject; of course there is meaning. It’s that life, like all things with more than 30 units (or, as in this case, people), is approximately a normal distribution (click only if unsure what this is). To be precise, reality is akin to a normal distribution, albeit with slightly fat tails (the origin of this post’s title, also a poor excuse of a takeoff on the name of one of rock band Queen’s greatest hits). Any other meanings are but our enterprisingly creative minds trying to ascribe causality (just like CNBC TV-18 tries to reason out every 0.01% change in the Sensex). I often think that this ability to identify reasons, to rationalize, is mankind’s single most valuable trait; for it pushes us to work and back every day, it pushes us to get married, have kids, anything to mask the boredom of spending on Earth 60-80 periods of its revolution around the Sun.

Please let me expound (like I’m really asking for permission) on the normal distribution issue a little more. What do I mean exactly? I mean that, of the total population in the world, some will have unbelievable luck. Some will have similarly unbelievable bad luck. Others (like you and me. Or just me – I’m not pushy) wallow in our mediocrity, staring at the sky, and wondering why that cloud is shaped like a horse, and why that other one is shaped like a giant hand flicking someone.

Now, who the hell has unbelievable luck? You know a few of them (not too many mind you, this is after all a close-to-normal distribution). You may not realize the extent of their luck, given your penchant for, and expertise at, attributing reasons and skill. But they’re there. I won’t name any very famous people, coz that can get ugly. Instead, think about the guy who won INR 1 cr. on Kaun Banega Karorpati. Or the woman who cleaned up on the slot machines at the Grand Lisboa casino the other day. Or, in fact, all the ladies and gentlemen they describe in self-help books like The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Unlimited Power, Awaken the Giant Within, The Power of Positive Thinking, etc. (How are there so many such books?? It’s like a giant ship loaded with self-help books pushed itself towards the shores of humankind and autonomously unloaded them, and we, a free-thinking populace, helped ourselves to the multitudes of brilliant tomes! Anyway, another rant, another day).

Bad luck? For starters, the 1.5M Palestinians that Mr. Baroud alludes to in his book. In all my cynicism, I cannot but feel my eyes well up as I approach the final pages. As they say in Hindi, hum apne dushmanon ke liye bhi aisi dashaa na maange (‘We wouldn’t wish this fate even for our enemies’). Or, to a much, much smaller extent, the guy who spends the greater part of a year imbibing the habits of Great Person A and Great Person B, but doesn’t ‘make a million in 5 days’. Instead, he loses the price of the book, the space the book takes up in his home / office, and the time he spent in front of the mirror ensuring that the transformation to Great Person A or Great Person B is complete. Or even the dinosaurs, who, no doubt, searched for a higher meaning and purpose during their existence – little did they know that their fate, seemingly, was ‘not without a sense of irony’ (definitely check the link – its hilarious, but in a very sad way. Thanks, Abstruse Goose and Rukesh).

So where does that leave all of us – in the middle? We were blissfully unaware of reality, and were cheerfully achieving our mundane goals and breaking our New Year resolutions. And we were happy. But now I’ve gone and spoilt it (sorry, should have put up a ‘Spoilers be here’ warning at the beginning of the post). Or have I? For I think that this realization brings peace of mind, lack of attachment; in fact, it brings Zen – of some sort anyway. We can go through life in the knowledge that whatever will happen, will happen. We are but pawns at the mercy of a being running an infinitely huge, infinitely fast, coin-tossing machine (if you believe in God), or of an infinitely huge, infinitely fast, coin-tossing perpetual motion machine (if you don’t). You’ll do your best anyway (what if I’m miserably wrong), and can yet be serene irrespective of the outcome. You can say, like the Tralfamadorians do, ‘So it goes’.