Unknown

We all have an instinctive fear of the unknown and thats why we have come up with so many names for the it - Luck, Karma, Destiny, Stars and what not. In our endeavor to get a glimpse of the unknown we have started by making a basic classification of it - the good unknown and the bad unknown. The good one being represented by God, and the bad being represented by the Devil.
Since we dont know our own selves fully we have extended this classification of our unknown part to ourselves so we keep hearing ever so often "Theres both God & Devil within us".
An example of the manifestation of the unknown is the stock market. To an average person with no inside info, it represents a purely random variable. The stock ticker's movement follows a random walk, or does it? Remarkably good predictions can be made by applying many different mathematical models to it. Since I havent done a course on Stochastic Calculus in Finance, I will stop here but a lot of my friends who have done such a curse would recognise some merit in the statement. While in the stock market we have two major variables - risk and return, and a host of other measures that define the nature of these variables, we do not have any such variables in life. There is no "measure of goodness" versus the net income a person earns over his lifetime. There are not ethics vs. returns graphs. There are no theories that exist tht say that for a person to be alive his life must be a solution of such and such differential equations.
This is the reason why we dont have any mathematical theories yet on how to predict life, in spite of the Hindu Astrology really coming quite close to being called as the Arithmetic of Destiny. What everyone is looking at is the algebra of life, a set of formulas that can be applied and modified to predict the outcome of different events ranging from the mundane to the earth shattering. In fact theres a pretty interesting movie called Pi which shows a number theorist finally getting to a huge number that is supposedly God's number and how he fares. Its a kind of dark movie but definitely worth a watch.
Come to think of it, its good that there is no theory as such, otherwise the astrologers will become the next Investment Bankers, or maybe vice versa, but the end result would be that our lives will be managed by professional life managers and probably will become a tradable commodity on a Life Exchange. Now wouldn't that be fun!!!
Maybe I'll write more abt this life exchange later...seems to be a good idea :-)