My pensieve

“IP Addresses are eternal, they just change systems.”

Any spiritual person says that every being in this world is connected to each other and religious person will go on step ahead saying that they all are in turn connected to the almighty. However what is sad is that even with all those wonderful connections, we no longer feel for people suffering right in front of us. I have often talked to friends asking them to contribute to help someone go to school and help them for their education and the common response that I get is there are no people around me who needs such kind of help. Most often, they are kind enough to offer me money and say that they will gladly transfer the money whenever I ask for such cause but when it comes to actually spending sometime and helping the needy, they find it difficult. If all humans were supposedly connected to each other, why is it so difficult for us to see the stark difference in lives of thousands around us.

Now as per many spiritual and religious theories, everybody is connected either through their so called souls or some other way. To take this analogy to internet, these connections are probably the internet where every server having a public IP address is connected to each other through lot of meshes of cables, switches and routers. However as discussed above, people find it very difficult to connect to someone right in front of us. We have lot of criteria before we feel sorry for the person. Whether that person belongs to my state, whether the person belongs to my religion or my caste or my gender, whether he talks the same language or not, what is the economic condition of the person and if he belongs to the same class as mine. When many of these necessary conditions are fulfilled, our empathy for that person is developed so much so that we would cry for the person even if the person is actually on some reality show or a fictitious character in the soap that comes every night. This I consider as private networks. You can communicate and relate to each other very easily only if you are in the same private network on the LAN. Ofcourse as any LAN networks, some are fast with 100Gbps connection between their systems and some are slower. But nevertheless if you are in same private network, you can easily connect to each other. Just a little bit of handshake protocol is required and then you can easily share with each other.
However its not that you don’t relate to people from a different class, religion, language or caste. But there are certain restrictions on the same. Like on the internet, where whether you are allowed to talk to a computer on a different private network is mainly governed by your Gateway/Firewall/Proxy server and the Gateway/Firewall/Proxy server of the other computer. Now in real life I think, the religious gurus/pandits or texts or those language saving groups who come in forefront in the name to save the language are the gateway/proxy/Firewall servers. The texts or gurus decide outside your network, for whom you should have empathy for. If it is a black child in Africa dying of malnutrition, you are allowed to feel sorry for the same but a child killed due to bomb attacks in Iraq/Afghanistan is killed because of their misdeeds in the last birth. A farmer committing suicide is due to his foolishness and lack of education and financial understanding but a software professional committing suicide is due to bad working environment and huge mental pressure in companies. Children not going to school is bad and due to corruption in government but those coming through caste based reservation are the ones misusing the caste card and are the ones who are not allowing good students to come forward in life. All these are filters done by the Gateway/proxy/firewall servers.

Then you have some of the politicians and spiritual gurus who do not specifically belong to any particular group but they often use the divide and rule policy to corrupt you and your group based on language, caste, sects, religion. I think these are the viruses in the internet. Often, they are allowed into the private networks by Gateway/Firewall/Proxy Server like the nexus between various religious groups and the politicians. Once inside the network they do their best to corrupt the whole private network.

Now where do few people who want to empathize for people breaking those restrictions put by Gateway/Proxy/Firewall Servers come in the internet? I am not sure. But sooner they are plugged into the web, the better it will be.