Seeing is not always believing

I've recently noticed that I'm slowly but surely become more cynical about some things I once believed in fervently when I was younger.

I realised this when I was watching the much hyped "The Triangle" on Star Movies yesterday. It's a series on the Bermuda Triangle and cashes in on the mass hysteria and superstition that surrounds the legend (see? I'm being cynical already). The first episode was rather entertaining I must say but I can't say it attempts to demystify BT anymore than X-files attempts to explain the supernatural. In other words, the series merely adds fuel to the fire by playing on the supernatural aspect of it all.

There was a time, as a teenager, when I used to read everything related to the supernatural, UFO's, ancient legends and the sorts. I didn't percieve them then with a cynical eye but with an innocent and open minded thinking that still hadn't got around to forming an opionion on the subject.

I used to watch documentaries on T.V that purportedly "investigated" these phenonmenons but only managed to lend more enigma to the cases they investigated. It was also the time when NDTV's Prannoy Roy used to have the excellent "The World This Week" on Doordarshan and I remember watching news reports on crop circles in Britain in one of them. This before Doug Bower and Dave Chorley owned up to making hundreds of crop circles in England to fool the public.

Every bit of information regarding the legends of the Lochness Monster, the Sargosa Sea, the Tunguska explosion, the Great Pyramid of Gizah, Easter Islands, the Roswell Incident, Spontaneous Human Combustion, the Nazca Plateau patterns, haunted house, et al were all hungrily lapped up and digested as fast as I could.

However, somewhere along the way I turned a cynic instead of a convert and begin to explore material that would explain some of these fantastic theories. Sure enough, one of the best books on BT, "Bermuda Triangle Mystery- Solved" was precisely what I was looking for as it methodically and brillantly dissected the myth about BT through some excellent investigative writing and research. That was the turning point, I think, as I realised that for every fantastic and outlandish theory there is a plausible and beguilingly simple explanation.

It turns out that we, in reality, like to believe in stuff without understanding any of it. For example, why do some of us like to believe that if we change our position on the sofa when Sachin is batting, he would be out? Doesn't make any sense, does it? But how many times have we done this and continue to do it when Sachin or India bats? It's implausible but our belief system can be so strong at times that we tend to put aside all attemps at rationality.

The same case can be made out for our superstitions and beliefs in miracles and even God. I mean, what's the difference between believing in UFO's and believing in God? I don't see much by the way of rational explanation in either case!

Go ahead, call me a cynic.