Take it ezee...

It is rightly said - Wake up ONLY when you are DONE sleeping. Not before that and not after that. Then how come the alarm clock ever got invented? And pray why? Why did whoever it was, take so unkindly to the human race and mark sleep as a sin? Imagine if there were a time (some parallel universe maybe) where the alarm clock were not yet invented. You might think that it is impossible and it would not work. Are we sure? Let me oppose that view and try to imagine how it might just have worked.

I feel that the importance of time is in order to facilitate the smooth and independent functioning of life as a whole. I mean, you do your job in time so that the other can take up from there and continue with his job and so on. But seriously, what has the alarm clock actually given us? It has given us a sense of false control over time. I can get up whenever I want and the work would get completed in time. Really? Remember the movie you saw last night, well past bed time, and woke up groggy? The alarm clock did wake you up, no disputes about that. But ironic is it not that the alarm clock, in some way, led you to become overconfident about time keeping, and you woke up groggy? Is it a boon? I don't agree to that.

The alarm clock is the epitome of our times (see, even our times has something to do with time). We have put too much emphasis on doing the thing "on time" rather than doing the thing "right". The alarm clock has given us more time in the day, I agree, but we people, as always have ended up using the wrong benefits from it. We have more time, ironically again, more time to "waste". We get up early, reach office on time, work the whole day (mind you, if you have had a couple of beers the previous night, the day is longer than when without a hangover), finish the working day later than our ancestors did and reach home, set the alarm for the next day and watch TV or movies till our eyelids give in to gravity. (well, maybe you made love that night and it was awesome, but trust me, that is going to be worse than the beer. The hangover lasts longer and affects more body parts than just the head.)

So, was that day perfect? We are working more than our ancestors right? Wrong. We are putting in more of our time to do less work. We are becoming more and more inefficient. The alarm clock is saving time so that we end up wasting more time. Its almost sinful. Cut and paste jobs somehow save the day. Team performance absorbs our incompetence. We are a bunch of excuses. We are a slow down on evolution. Humans are supposed to be growing there brains, use that remaining 95% of their brain cells that is already given, instead of growing paunches and beer bags. Come on, think of it. Are we really putting concerted efforts in the time that we do anything? So many distractions, TV ads, shopping, gossip (the eternal waste of not-so-precious time), etc, etc, etc.

The alarm clock, and the innumerable modifications thereof (ever heard the alarm clock which starts so low that you can hardly here it, and becomes so loud the neighbours wake up?), are just a way of waking up early or on time. There is no way that the alarm clock is improving us in anyway. Trust me when I say this. I have been using the variable volume alarm and now I am trained to switch it off when it is low or sleep right through the loudest it can screech. My room mates dread the time at night when I sent the next days alarm. We have a discussion on what time I should set MY alarm, because they are forced to get up when I refuse to budge. They have their body clocks and I have mine. My body clock does not have an alarm anymore. The small alarm on the bedside has trained me to switch off anything that disturbs my sleep, be it the physical clock or be it my internal body clock.

Maybe on the face of this we are heading for the "personalized alarm clocks", that will ring right into your head when you are sleeping. Maybe better, the alarm would ring with a tone that is audible only to you. Hey, that sounds so much similar to my body clock. I already have one inside my body, but I have forgotten to use it. Thanks to the marketing gurus of the 21st century. Stop this madness, its criminal. We don't use 95% of our brains, we don't justify our existence (do we?) and finally we are recreating what we are already endowed with. Why bother with all this? Why not better ourselves? We are a bunch of excuses (sorry for saying it again, for the want of a better phrase), a bunch of excuses, justifying our mediocre existence.

Wake up (not literally) at least to the alarm that is ringing loud enough all around us (think global warming, pollution, nuclear holocaust, arms race, doomsday) and stop worrying about the smallest of all things that is time in terms of minutes. Change the way life is lived. Do you really think that I can not do my work well in advance so that I would never need an alarm? If I can't then I don't know how much to bite so that chewing is thorough. We have lost it to our own creations. We are trying to play God (and believe me when I say that we are terrible at it), and trying to recreate whatever is already created (think Artificial Intelligence, Cloning, Artificial Insemination, Cryogeneitcs, Hair transplanting, and what not). We humans are a great job of evolution after an unknown length of time (do we really believe that we predicted the Big Bang?). We are messing it up. Let us accept what we are and start moving forward. We have evolved to that level that we can procreate life. Chuck Artificial Intelligence (we already have it), and start working on artificially evolving our intelligence. There are only two scenarios that come to my mind. We continue to populate the universe as we remain the "fittest to survive" by evolving our mind's power, or else (this is the path we are following right now) we discover artificial intelligence and that overshadows us as the ultimate product of creation.

Lets look at the black comedy once again. Some day, our intelligence is going to be considered as the greatest link to the next step in evolution, because we created the next step and perished because we refused to acknowledge that we are not the end-product of evolution. We have become complacent and so ingrained with the snapshot of the present that we deny evolution. Do we all really believe that we are where the long eons of evolution decided to stop? No way my fellow humans. We are just a waypoint on nature's plans and let us acknowledge it. Let us know that the rule of "Differentiate or Die", applies to the whole of humanity. Maybe I should restate the phrase as "Evolution or Extinction". Think about it.

I am not making a blank statement here, but am trying to underline the essense of evolution and that we are right in the middle of it. Let us not deny it. Let us be the tools of evolution in as much as the subjects of it. Let us start endeavours that would help us evolve and survive to be a part of the final episode of the COSMOS. "History repeats itself" and we just can't get to accept this. Start now, as a cohesive race to unravel our role in the large scheme of things and then play our part rightly. We have not been evolved to merely exist, we were evolved to accelerate evolution itself. We are like calculators that would calculate faster than the humans who created it. But should we forget how to calculate? (I would like to confess here that I am pathetic with even simple arithmetic operations like addition, leave alone any more complex task) Sorry to say this, but in the process of evolution, we are the first to be reversing the process.

Why not move ahead? No incentives? Really? Think of a unified planet, no discrimination (the contorted creation of small minds to enforce superiority with no real reason, think Hitler and Jews), in plain words, let us make progress just because we can. Lets make college courses such that they would help students use over 15% of their brains. I can only imagine what we can achieve then. Life is going past us, at an alarming pace (a real alarm this time) and we refuse to acknowledge it. We are victims of our own intelligence (think war, AIDS, Radiation). We are the subjects of this ultimate comedy show we call life. Think for a moment, then laugh heartily and then, for God's sake start worrying, 'coz the joke is on us.