Anand Gandhi’s debut feature film was the brilliant “Ship of Theseus” which brought into fore the Theseus Paradox, which inquires “whether a ship that has been restored by replacing all its parts remains the same ship”. Gandhi’s exploration of the paradox was a poignant question, which lead to lot of introspection within me. 

The latest Indispire topic on Indiblogger brought all the questions back to my mind again, which I had after watching the film. These days, creating lists is the new Social Media Phenomenon, which every one of us has indulged in at some point in time, unless you are dogmatic in your resistance to the ideas. The latest one is to name 10 of your qualities that you would want to dump in the next year, which had me wondering, if we will still be the same person the next year after we dump the 10 qualities which are with us, and were defining us to others and ourselves all these years. 

The reason why Theseus Paradox was called a paradox and not a theory, at least as per my understanding, is that it offers only an inquisition of its premise, but never confirms the validity of its assumption, nor is it entirely an assumption in the first place. It is a thought that was spelt out loud, and people who were aware of it can never shake it off from their conscience.

Each one of us want to improve upon our existing life, get rich, peaceful, be disciplined, achieve more, scale heights or any other tangible goals. To achieve these, we line up the skills that we should acquire and list out the hindrances carefully, and resolve to work upon them to achieve what we sought. The journey can be that of a discovery of what we truly are about, or it can be alienating ourselves from what we truly were. 

Either way, it eventually comes down to an irony that, whatever we wanted before dumping the ten things that helped achieve it, would not be probably wanted by the changed person after dumping the ten things. When you are the person without the ten things dumped, you may have wanted it, but after dumping the ten things you may no longer covet it, at least not as dearly as earlier. The updated person would want something more, which may need him again to dump some more things. It’s a never ending phenomenon, like they say; change is the only thing constant in the world. 

I wonder if it is possible for me to become a better person without changing a thing about myself, since I have observed with my past resolutions that I have not been entirely successful in implementing them. Probably, I have to be satisfied with what I got, if I’m averse to changing anything, probably it is not a bad thing after all.

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Written for Indispire Edition 42:10 things you want to dump this year and start fresh next year !... #dump10things