New World Order

I have always experienced patterns or connections in random meaningless data, the specific experience of an abnormal ‘meaningfulness’ derived from such pattern searching has forever driven me. Up until now I held that life is like this stable digital pulse with periods of Highs and Lows, times when everything goes your way and times when it doesn’t, with a sharp narrow transitional moment in between which either knocks you down to the bad times or hoists you up to the good moments. I thought that we had these stable periods of joy and sorrow which endured for some time till they encountered that invisible transition known to and detected by none.

But suddenly in what can be classified as nigh epiphany, I realized that this practice of looking for designs is nothing but an exercise of allowing yourselves to be fooled. Patterns, designs and formations are not the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, they just cannot be. It is our bounded rationality which is letting us into this giant trap of thinking we know the answer.

Since forever, Man, confined by his limited understanding but elevated by his conceitedness, has strived for established order in utter chaos, he has been seeking pattern in a disarrayed world; only to find out that it is uncertainty and randomness that govern his world. It is out of sheer vanity that he still believes in a deterministic approach when nature itself stands for probabilistic and dynamic change. Despite all this, with the aid of past trends and experiences, he audaciously and persistently has thrown his opinion in the face of doubtfulness, but barring few instances has only emerged clueless in front of the unsettling behavior of this universe.

This uncertified philosophy finds its application in the placement processes which happen every year in a lot of campuses across India. There are umpteen attempts at controlling the flow of the process but what reigns supreme at the end of it is - Entropy. It is a classic example of Brownian motion at work, where despite myriad trials you cannot control it or ascertain a fundamental underlying rule defining it. The only measurable difference that can be extended on a personal level is the increased probability of an event or success by relentless and planned effort. 

You can ensure that the likelihood of an occurrence is more through a strong crusade but you can in no way be absolutely certain about it.

The past week saw a similar recruitment process here at XLRI. Operating under the heavy burden of a massive loan, functioning at beck and call of the senior batch and quietly squirming through boring lectures, the junior batch’s only chance to redeem themselves of everything that they’ve been through is the SIP. There’s a truckload of effort being put in by the students, but in the end it’s randomness which prevails. Some gain by the luck of the draw, some are at the receiving end of the situation but the one thing that stands out of such an excruciating process is you get to see the true colors of everyone.

As the entire event unfolds, few primary opinions and first impressions last, some people forge new bonds while the others forego the old ones. The process is the perfect litmus test of the two-three month old friendships which had earlier blossomed under the ever so quiet and halcyon environment. Surprisingly and fortunately, the majority here turned out to be inherently supportive and it indeed is delightful to find help from someone you least expected from.

Beyond anything else, the most important thing to come up from this act of randomness is you begin to respect people and no longer see a competitor but an ally in them. Personally, it was the most important and joyous few days for me here at XL, not just because for the first time I was going to get paid to do an internship but I realized that most of us are good people. The three and half days served as the perfect glue for binding the otherwise strewn and dispersed populations into one cohesive unit for a lifetime.

And that only happens when you accept the randomness at play, it’s only when you disregard the material aspects of the process that you can actually value a human being for his real worth. Though Thermodynamics will tell us that we are all heading towards utter pandemonium, it’s the acceptance of this fact that would structure and order our lives and the Summer Internship Placements bear a testimony to this thought.

Though the world around is abstract, disordered and heading towards more disorderliness, letting go of the illusion of control would certainly, oops … I mean in high probability, help us appreciate its every RANDOM Act of Kindness.