So many living creatures on this planet. All of them breathing, eating, defecating, procreating and suddenly one day, cease to exist. Each one of us rises from a part of this planet. We consume what is already a part of this planet. We make that a part of us and eventually perish and become a part of the planet all over again. The cycle continues.

Then, what sets us humans apart? Maybe the power of discretion and freewill. The sensory organs are given to every creature albeit with adaptive differences.

But essentially, we are just formless energies that assume some shape. Anything and everything beyond that is the perception of sensory organs at play.  As is said in the Hindu culture, ‘Sab Maya hai’ – translated as ‘It’s all an illusion’.

Then we add the layers of emotions and feelings. These are self-upgrading software programs that get hardcoded into us by the society using certain tools.

Earlier, these programs came with certain user manuals. But the software updates are now far outpacing the updates to the user-manual and most of them are deemed outdated. They are deemed outdated because the newer updates are merely cosmetic and not touching the basic architectural design of the software.

Hence, we are expected to learn and evolve on our own and the only societal tool we are left with is the “Moral compass”. And what’s worst? it’s not calibrated. Each one looks at the world through his own.

Just like an operating system needs minimum hardware requirements, do we upgrade our hardware to accommodate the new patches and updates? Or will our hardware burn with these constant OTA* updates? Are they even really necessary? Manual or auto? What would happen if we pause, redesign the architecture before anymore upgrades? Can the software be re-programmed?

Maybe it’s time to reboot. Before the system “hangs” …

*OTA – Over the Air – Automatic updates that the society/peer pressure ‘push’es.