If Only...

If only I had known that taking the moral high ground that day would not give me any satisfaction but only make me lose a dear friend.
If only I had known that I could stand to make truck loads of money by investing in Satyam Computers as the news of Satyam scam hit and its stock plumetted to Rs. 7 per head.

I did to my friend what I felt was morally and logically sound on that day. I took a call after weighing the options. My mind was clear as a cloudless day as I went over to what I feel now to be the dark side of friendship.
On that day, I was scared that the company will go bankrupt within the next 10 days, and with our economy rapidly turning from the socialist democracy it was meted out to be, I did not expect much intervention as a bailout from the government. I was scared, yet my judgement was sound...in theory. The stock stands at Rs. 50 apiece, and it's only been a week or two. I still don't know what will happen to it in the future, but I'm coming to that in a moment.


You are logical. You are smart. Yet, you fall. Time and again. You are sometimes lulled into a false sense of security that you can predict what can happen, but you are oh-so-wrong!
In general, decisions can pose the biggest problem to the thinking man, simply because there are so many paramenters in life and each parameter in minutae can divert and revert the course of events. Causality. All the yada yada about Edward Lorenz and his butterflies. But it's true.

Time. In all this ambiguity, time is the only constant. Metaphysically speaking of course. The relativists would be up in arms and point out the Lorentz factor or the train-and-platform experiement, but not today.
The arrow of time always moves only forward. Now, there may be other dimensions and factors shaping our life but we can't feel it or notice it. For a three dimensional being, time is the only parameter that influences decisions.

If we were to know the outcome of a particular action, would it not influence our resolve in doing it? If it was a positive outcome, it would strengthen our resolve and if negative, we would not be tempted to do it! Again, abstrusely speaking, we would never make mistakes if we knew our actions are going to result in 'mistakes'. That's because, a mistake is an 'effect' while our action is the 'cause'! And who can say whether your action is erroneous? Well, only time can tell!

A ruler of time has complete control over his destiny.

God is just a time traveler. The rest, doesn't matter.

Now, consider waves hitting on the rocks. Ask anyone offhand, and you'll be told that the odds are heavily tilted in the rock's favor. If the rock were to think how it's future would be in the midst of the onslaught of waves, the most rational and logically thinking rock would bet on itself.

But the only problem is that time is not on it's side. Entropy.

A milion years later, the rock is not there. Water has won.

If you knew that the odds are completely against you, that you were the rock and time was the sea, would you still want to resist it, or fight it? Is there any purpose in the world? No, I'll rephrase that. Can there be any purpose in life, ever?

Can we fight a fight that we know we are going to lose? Does it make sense to go on when we know it is not going to matter? Does it not entail that we can really win, whatever it may be that we are participating in, only when we get the upper hand over the real enemy, that we gain control over time?