An idea...

Today's world needs a new religion, a new belief which can hold their life together - is what Nakul & me concluded after a funny discussion at VK radi (an eatery at BITS Pilani). We thought we were the right guys to go ahead and seed such a belief in people's minds. All we needed was an extremely sane guy who could connect easily to the masses and make them believe in whatever philosophy we plan to grow. We couldn't think of such a guy but I very much knew a girl who I thought would be a perfect fit for the role - Sindhu.

An hour later, the 3 of us were sitting at Sky Lawns and discussing about what we thought was a growing problem - lack of understanding about life. Yet another hour passed, before we realized we were just sitting and throwing around idiotic ideas that would never work. So we left. But only now do I see how many new and insane ideas that one hour of talk had seeded in all of us. Yet, we left the place without any prejudice for or against any idea.

After going back, I got hooked on to gmail as usual - a prized trait gifted by CEL (Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership, BITS Pilani), specifically by one lanky, energetic idea bank at CEL called Chinmay Kulkarni. I still don't know what made me dig out a saved chat that was a few days old, where me & Sindhu had tried to come up with a million reasons for why the world and its people are the way they are. What caught my attention was a phrase that could only mean one thing to me at that time - 'Captain Jack Sparrow', but it meant a lot more. It meant 'Life in its complete form' - Vita Peracta.

A week later, we were working on creating a game where the virtual world responds to the player's decisions in exactly the same way as the real world would. But the problem was that the virtual world would have virtual people and we had no clue about how virtual people behave. We did not even have a clue about how real people behave in a real world. A few days later, we found out, no one else has a clue either.

The world still rested its head on the shoulders of two tall figures in Psychology - Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. It probably was too ahead of their time to think about going one step ahead of their psychological theories and start testing if they can accurately predict people's behavior using any of those theories. It sadly turns out that you can't. People are too unique to be boxed into standard categories and deduce their behavior. What we needed was a framework to accommodate millions of traits that make us what we are and yet keep the framework simple enough to be put to everyday use.

Sounded like it was still too ahead of our time as well, we now pardoned Freud & Jung. Seemed impossible. Yet, we felt we were holding in our hands, the ends of a few threads that would someday stitch themselves into a beautiful picture of the human mind. We started to help it stitch faster. The idea had taken hold, dreams of an infinite possibilities had found a way to creep into our minds and to me personally, it was a joyful way to keep myself distracted from everything I hated about our world - Boxes & Walls.

[This post is dedicated to Nakul & Sindhu. I'm beginning to realize that an idea is a bunch of ignited minds and not just a bunch of connected thoughts. The latter can never change the world and we're experimenting with the former.]