Ever since the world began

Moving on

2009-03-05T13:19:00.001-08:00

I am shifting my blog to Wordpress and can be found here. Hope to see you around in the future!

Ishwar Allah tere naam, Hey Ram!

2009-03-05T09:46:00.001-08:00

Two amazing wtfmaxness in today's newspapers. The first one concerns a curious kind of ban that has been declared in Malaysia.

Action can be taken against non-Muslim publications in 10 Malaysian states if they use four words related to Islam, including ‘Allah’. A 'fatwa' had been issued to prohibit non-Muslim publications from using the words ‘Allah’, ‘Kaabah’, ‘Solat’ and ‘Baitullah’ in their reading materials.

Post buying the exclusive rights of A. R. Rahman's Jai Ho for its election campaign and engineering the appointment of the tainted Navin Chawla as the next election commissioner, the congress has decided to make the issue of acquiring Mahatma Gandhi's belongings a matter of national priority. But the current owner is playing hard to get as an article in NDTV reports:

In his proposal sent to Indian negotiators hours before the precious items were set to be auctioned, James Otis, who gave Antiquorum auctioneers Gandhi's iconic watch, glasses, a plate, a bowl and a pair sandals, asked New Delhi to "substantially" increase the proportion of its budget
spent on health care of the poor, shifting priorities from military spending.

The second wtf comes in the form of Anand Sharma's (minister of state for external affairs) reply to James Otis (see article):

India rejected the conditions set by the American auctioneer of Mahatma Gandhi's personal items for stopping the memorabilia from going under the hammer and is in touch with United States and international legal agencies to get the articles back.
"Gandhiji himself would not have agreed to conditions. The Government of India representing the sovereign people of this republic cannot enter into such agreements where it involves specific areas of allocation of resources," Minister of State for External Affairs Anand Sharma said.

Reading these sanctimonious words would make one wonder if it was an indecent proposal that James Otis made originally to have elicited such a self-righteous response. The UPA layers are slowly beginning to unfold as elections approach, and the stench continues to rise; talking of elections, I feel a tingling roll in my stomach when I think of them. Are those butterflies of excitement or bugs of despair? I wonder.

The Middle

2009-03-03T22:14:00.000-08:00

When I remember bygone days
I think how evening follows morn;
So many I loved were not yet dead,
So many I love were not yet born.

-Ogden Nash

Slam-dog

2009-03-01T15:37:00.000-08:00

Some quotable rhetoric from Jug Suraiya in a recent editorial:

More recently, Bachchan, in a blog that sparked off the current round of controversy on India's poverty, voiced similar sentiments regarding Slumdog Millionaire. Bachchan seems to find the portrayal of India's poverty gross and distasteful, rather like cracking racist jokes in front of a racially disadvantaged person, or breaking wind at the dining table. Unpleasant things, like racism, flatulence and poverty do, regrettably, exist. But must we have the bad taste to discuss or exhibit them, more so when guests are present? Wouldn't it be better all around, more polite and socially correct, to pretend that these awkward things just don't exist? And of course if you can afford to donate Rs 50 lakh to a temple which you visit with your son and your 'manglik' daughter-in-law to be, when you make as much money if not more from commercial endorsements, including an ad for what is billed to be the world's most expensive suiting material, as you do from your movie roles, poverty must seem like a really insensitive joke or a particularly nasty expulsion of gastric wind.

Flowers

2009-02-28T19:33:00.001-08:00

Those roses in our backyard have left this world
once again. Silently, without fanfare.

I suffered happier bruises
when I picked some for you,
foolishly bartering somber memories for an elusive hope.
The ones that escaped my touch persisted,
sticking to their unwavering loyalty
for a life that wasn't theirs to own or nurture.

The ones that stayed back-
scented our tea and enlivened our home
through their life;
Emboldening my need
for someone other than themselves.
Until,
A wandering dog decided to lie beside them
and breathe his last.
And pat they fell like a pack of cards,
to sheathe him in tender blossoms.
That was it.

The ones that I sent you-
must have long withered by now.
But in this short inconsequential life,
the grandeur of their silence
dwarfs our individual destinies.

The Boxer

2009-02-27T19:09:00.000-08:00

One of my favourite-st songs performed by one of my favourite-st singers.

Now the years are rolling by me,
they are rocking even me;
I am older than I once was,
and younger than I'll be, that's not unusual.
No it isn't strange, after changes upon changes,
we are more or less the same;
After changes we are very much the same.

These lyrics, surprisingly, are not present in the original album version. But those are fantastic lyrics anyway. If I was the Mahmud of Ghazni and Simon and Garfunkel were my court composers, I would have given them a dinar for every couplet they ever wrote; and certainly not renege on my promise like the Mahmud originally did to Firdausi when the latter presented his magnum opus, the Shahnamah. Now enough with that anachronistic fantasy :P

Thanks Sudeep for 'leading' me to this :-).

Really?

2009-02-26T08:32:00.000-08:00

Some days ago, a friend with whom I regularly correspond by e-mail, complained that my blog posts were getting heavier by the day. I wrote back saying I could not help it for I don't really have a talent for humor in writing; or to put it more equivocally, I haven't really bothered to 'cultivate' that skill.

But then humor exists around you, and even knocks on your doorstep thanks to rapid dissemination through the internet. During the last two days, whenever I logged on to IBNlive to check for updates on the 26/11 chargesheet, a particular link caught my attention for it was the only one on the page in blue font. Of course, on finally reading the article I was "hee-haw-guffaw" for at least twenty minutes and promptly shared it with my fellow grad-student friends who, like me (as the rest of the world sees it), lead boring "monochromatic" lifestyles, in need of succor.

Now I won't go about analyzing the article because there isn't anything much to it beyond its hilariously ridiculous content. In a nutshell, it talks about the results of a survey which indicate that indians are extremely happy with their sex-lives and top the list in a 13 nation survey. Now that has either got to be a lie (99.9%) or unfortunately, as I have said before, I need to accept being on the wrong geographical side of cultural evolution at the wrong time (0.1%). However, it is more likely a case of flawed experimental design more than anything else. It's like conducting a survey on the degree of satisfaction with public intellectual discourse and having a tribe in the Papua New Guinea hitherto untouched by civilization topping the list. Or alternatively conducting a survey on cultural pride and finding that the Texans made it on the top.

On a side note, I confessed to a friend yesterday that eating tofu is going to be extremely difficult for the next few days (ref: article). As it is vegetarians have limited options in the west; the rest of the world, please don't hijack those to construct disturbing metaphors as you fancy :-). Now I go for lunch, but Oriental is out of the list for sometime.

I realized today

2009-02-25T13:28:00.001-08:00

that I have completely lost interest in following any kind of commercial sport on the television or the internet. I do not look forward to 20-20 or the Grand Slams or the Football leagues. I wonder what happened.

A day in a life

2009-02-23T20:38:00.000-08:00

Should have been practicing at the piano but did not. Was reading stuff that I should not have been. Was clicking my fingers when I should have been thinking more coherent thoughts.

I have been dreaming and sleeping all of today when it ought to have been a day of productive activity. Had the most peaceful nap on the floor of the common lounge on the side of the infinite corridor. I dreamt about my losses. The hour seemed like five and I woke up fresh and resolute, eager and earnest to seek redemption. But the cajoling lightness of the day caught up soon and I found myself walking out of a tepid immunology lecture to watch the early sunset by the Charles. Then I felt bad about it and wondered when I was going to catch up on the biology that I have been procrastinating for so long. As one grows older, one wishes one were more cavalier during past years.

I attempted a jog in the cold but inadequate stretching over the last few weeks is troubling me in the form of a prohibitive muscle sore. Came back to my room, dreamt for a while and read some inconsequential physics for sometime with an attempt to engage a wandering mind. But the flickering yellow across the street is hell bent on putting me to sleep again I shall go back to some more unconsciousness with a hope of waking up to a more engaging day. It's been a light and tender day I could have done without:

This is my dream,
It is my own dream,
I dreamt it.
I dreamt that my hair was kempt.
Then I dreamt that my true love unkempt it.

- Ogden Nash

Not the best follow-up to an uncanny poetic brilliance but all my body is up for now is a big yawn! A sorry blasphemer I will be.

Excerpt from 'India after Gandhi'

2009-02-18T22:32:00.000-08:00

It's the late hours of the night and I'm finding it difficult to sleep. I was flipping through the pages of Ramachandra Guha's wonderful book on post-independence India - India after Gandhi. I had read this book cover-to-cover in a marathon attempt about a year ago. It is a profoundly important book and deserves a second reading, especially when one easily forgets important details over time.

I was re-reading chapter 27 -titled Riots- and I came across a passage that I felt the need to quote on this blog. It was an excerpt from an older book called Nailing the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (by a certain D. R. Goyal) which Guha quotes as 'a concise summary of the ideology of the Sangh Parivar'. Now, many will think this is hackneyed and unnecessary. In our liberal minds (sorry for the presumption; but I doubt any conservative reads my blog), we know what the RSS/BJP/VHP stand for and desire to perpetuate. But such razor-sharp characterization is rare and I feel obliged to share it with the others. Goyal states that 'without fear of contradiction, it can be stated that nothing more [than the following] has [ever] been said in the RSS shakhas during the past 74 years of its existence'. (brackets mine)

Hindus have lived in India since times immemorial; Hindus are the nation because all culture, civilisation and life is contributed by them alone; non-Hindus are invaders or guests and cannot be treated as equal unless they adopt Hindu traditions, culture etc.; the non-Hindus, particularly Muslims and Christians, have been enemies of everything Hindu and are, therefore, to be treated as threats; the freedom and progress of this country is the freedom and progress of Hindus; the history of India is the history of the struggle of the Hindus for protection and preservation of their religion and culture against the onslaught of these aliens; the threat continues because the power is in the hands of those who do not believe in this nation as a Hindu Nation; those who talk of national unity as the unity of all those who live in this country are motivated by the selfish desire of cornering minority votes and are therefore traitors; the unity and consolidation of the Hindus is the dire need of the hour because the Hindu people are surrounded on all sides by enemies; the Hindus must develop the capacity for massive retaliation and offence is the best defence; lack of unity is the root cause of all the troubles of the Hindus and the Sangh is born with the divine mission to bring about that unity.

This straightforward ideology is transmitted among the Hindu thinking class in subtle ways - lofty religious liturgy from the Ramayana and the Gita are cherry picked to sugar-coat this nonsense, it is then mixed with a manufactured fear of a culture and identity threat; the Congress, with its many shortcomings and incompetencies, provides a closure to this potent recipe of obfuscation. As I sit in a foreign land and type these words, nearly 80% of my kin day-dreams and romanticizes about the BJP overthrowing the UPA in the forthcoming general elections. They are good people, lead honest lives as far as I know, nurturing their family and doing well in their careers; and they only form a microcosm of the large chunk of affluent society in India who openly root for the Hindutva brigade as a result of a self-imposed faith-based insecurity and manufactured consent that spread like a virus. They are blissfully unaware of the moral wager that rests on their conscience and more importantly, their common sense that is on a vacation. The BJP government in Karnataka has, with its mute spectator-ship of organized persecution of Christians in the state and its stellar handling of the Shri Ram Sena goons, proved once again where its loyalties lie. Rajnath Singh and Advani are resurfacing with their Ram-Janmabhoomi-talk; it is important not only that we call a spade a spade, but also try reason with others who sit on the fence.

Taliban havoc continues

2009-02-18T09:19:00.000-08:00

A week after a supposed 'peace-treaty' was arrived at between the Taliban and the state of Pakistan, a Journalist who was doing no more than what his profession demanded was shot and decapitated in the Swat Valley. The ceasefire is a euphemism for Taliban to impose its will on the valley and its people in the name of the oppressive Islamic Shariah law. I wonder what was going on in their minds when the safeguards of democracy in Pakistan agreed to something like this. What could this possibly achieve? It reminds me of the fable of the frog and the snake.

This is disturbing news. India has palpable reasons to fear Taliban's rise; I wonder what the West is thinking. As another article puts it:

But in the event the Taliban are seen to be moving in on Islamabad or there is a danger of Pakistan's nuclear weapons falling into their hands. America's mini war in the tribal territories could escalate into a full-scale war with uncertain consequences.

----------------------------------------------------------

I came across the Opinionator article in the New York Times earlier today; notwithstanding its title that might obscure the gravity of the Taliban takeover of the valley, it spreads out some of the western opinion on a platter:

The Pakistani government has essentially given control of the Swat Valley to the Taliban. It means that the Taliban are now 100 miles from Islamabad and the military center of Rawalpindi. It also means that Pakistan’s Northwest Province is well on its way to becoming what Afghanistan used to be–a sanctuary for Al Qaeda and related terrorists. The most infuriating aspect of this development is that the Swat Valley residents were apparently looking for a simple government service that Islamabad could not provide–a justice system.

Muhammad Yunus

2009-02-16T21:18:00.000-08:00

A conversation with a friend earlier today reminded me of Muhammad Yunus's autobiography which I had the chance to read a year and a half ago. In fact, I had gifted a copy of Banker to the Poor to my dad on his 53rd birthday without reading it myself. It was my dad who read the book and shared his excitement with me over a dinner table conversation which lasted till midnight. He presented, in a seasoned raconteur's style, the gist of what Yunus and his colleagues accomplished by establishing a sustainable system of microcredit in Bangladesh. I was thoroughly inspired by what my dad said and I ended up reading the book over the following week.

Today I found myself in my dad's shoes, making a loose attempt at narrating the events that led to Yunus's conception of Grameen bank. I came back to my room to look for some online chapters from the book to refresh my memory as I have forgotten most of the details. It turns out that the online website of the book displays the very chapter that affected me the most (when I first read it) for free reading. It's only a few pages long , the prose is simple and I strongly recommend that you read it. What is perhaps most striking is Yunus's underlying humility behind the things that he did, his earnestness to learn about the problem before attempting a solution and the sense of purpose that motivated him to execute his vision.

I remember a conversation I had with an American office-mate some months ago; he happens to be a registered republican. He was explaining (nothing was argumentative here because I was a mute listener) why he was economically conservative- 'people are poor by their own choice and deserve to be so. I work hard to earn my money and I don't want to part with it to help someone undeserving in the name of taxes or charity'- a simple argument with high rhetoric value more than anything else; but something that people find easy to buy and ideologize. After all, one doesn't have to read Milton Friedman to be Republican. Furthermore, this is probably what many libertarians feel too. Perhaps the reasonable right minded ones among these might change their mind or move to a less extreme ideology if they read Yunus's account of rural Bangladesh and are willing to be affected by what he saw.

People like Sufiya were poor not because they were stupid or lazy. They worked all day long, doing complex physical tasks. They were poor because the financial institutions in the country did not help them widen their economic base. No formal financial structure was available to cater to the credit needs of the poor. This credit market, by default of the formal institutions, had been taken over by the local moneylenders. It was an efficient vehicle; it created a heavy rush of one-way traffic on the road to poverty. But if I could just lend the Jobra villagers the twenty-seven dollars, they could sell their products to anyone. They would then get the highest possible return for their labor and would not be limited by the usurious practices of the traders and moneylenders.

The Art of Mozart

2009-02-12T19:27:00.000-08:00

I just got back from a wonderful All-Mozart program at the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO). Once again, free tickets could be procured through channels available to a lowly graduate student at MIT. As with the previous visit, armed with our cavalier sense of adventure, Priya, Varun and I managed to sneak into expensive balcony seats on the first floor. Over the period of two hours, the orchestra played 5 symphonies - 1) No. 1 in E-flat, K.16, 2) Symphony in G, K.45a, 3) No. 13 in F, K.112, 4) No. 14 in A, K.114, 5) No. 18 in F, K.130 (P.S: I'm typing these names out from the program brochure so that interested people can search for them on youtube. It's not like I remember them off the top of my head :P ).

The first of these was composed by Mozart when he was eight (by that time I had read my first comic book), the second when he was ten (that's when I started sleeping alone at nights courageously), the third when he was eleven (almost puberty), the fourth when Mozart had barely reached fifteen (that was when I first fell in love with a girl in my class; part sexual, part juvenile) and he was sixteen when he wrote No. 18 (never mind the attempts at correspondence). If I, without absolutely no talent for music could feel liliputian, read this:

Of course when we recall that Mozart was twenty-seven when he wrote that impressive piece (referring toSymphony no. 25), and that he was only a few months past his thirty-second birthday when he composed the great final triad, we are jolted into the realization that all his symphonies are in a sense early works (he wrote forty-one in his lifetime). At thirty-two, Brahms, Bruckner, Elgar, Hindemith, Martinu, Sibelius, and Vaughan Williams-among others-had not yet dared their first symphonies.
-Quoted from the BSO brochure (italics mine)

I have admitted before that I have no particular acumen for music or the technicalities behind it. If I love a piece, even my ability to describe my feeling in a manner that people might call 'aesthetically refined' is highly limited and susceptible to fallacies. But I have always felt with Mozart's music, that simple transcendental quality that makes it immediately appealing to one's ears. Be it the buoyant Turkish March, the sombre Requiem, the beatific Eine Kline Nachtmusik (one of the many movements) or my favourite, Symphony no. 25 in G minor, they are simple and will not fail to enthrall the accommodating and discerning ear. As a columnist in the brochure puts it:

Mozart of course came to take pride in his ability to write music that seemed simple to the simple but whose non-obvious complexities were there to delight those with more demanding ears. The minuet along with its tightrope horn lines, offers a canon to begin with and a few surprising harmonies in the Trio, and the finale brings everything to an exuberant, joyous close.

There's something in Mozart for everyone :-)

Modi's Gujarat

2009-02-11T09:13:00.000-08:00

When my father was visiting Boston a few weeks ago, I brought up the topic of Modi and his recent deification by the Indian corporate lobby. I was not surprised to find some sympathies and even admiration for the man in him,being an entrepreneur and an industrialist himself. This naturally led us to a heated debate and the only concession I managed to extract from my father was the following - Modi's much admired efficiency in commissioning SEZs and removing red tapes for corporates with economic interests in the state is not going to extricate him from the moral obligation to commit to a fair trial on the 2002 events where his culpability as the leader of the state is a matter beyond reasonable doubt to any person of moderate intelligence. Even that drained me out of my powers. But as an essay by a sociologist that Deepa Nair mailed to me states:

The career of Narendra Modi is a case study that will intrigue many. He's a politician seeking to redefine himself and Gujarat. He's doing this not in terms of a holistic vision, but a fragmentary one. He has the industrialists on his side because he simplifies rules and regulations for them. He has the religious sects with him because he speaks the hybrid language of history and modernity. He claims the new by antagonizing the old, creating a middle class urban base that dreams of change, tired of the old grammar of party politics and caste equations. No leader is more contemptuous of his own party than Modi.

Continuing,

What defines him is speed: He is in a hurry, so he is intolerant. He hates any form of opposition and his ruthlessness stems from there. Often in India, we confuse the arbitrary and the ruthless with the decisive. Ratan Tata forgot the Tata tradition to opt for Modi's modernity, and created a favourable social contract between two outstanding modernizers. Gujarat is probably the only state where the SEZ and the privatized ports have legitimacy. In the short run, Modi is king. Long live the king of the short run. What of the long run?

It's no surprise that such qualities will immediately find the admiration of industrialists like my father. It is not that their kind is morally shallow or even oblivious but one has to understand that one is often limited by the boundaries of one's own interests and perception. It will, however, be an extremely sad state of affairs if in the futute, political dissent becomes the prerogative of merely the academic elite and the vast ocean of illiterate masses. As the essay puts it better than I could dream of:

As John Maynard Keynes said, we'll all be dead, but memory lives, and the future will ask questions which may not be popular today. Is Gujarat India's China, seeking to substitute Chinese ruthlessness for Indian deliberative democracy? What of justice for marginals and minorities and for all the opposition that paid the price for dissent? Dissent is a precious way of life. If Gujarat were measured in terms of a dissenters' index, it would rank abysmally low. If competence were evaluated in terms of diversity, well-being and value maintenance, we've already lost the battle.

Modi's Gujarat is a future urban nightmare. On ecology, health and welfare, Modi shows little competence. Privatising health is no way to well-being. Creating education as a business is no guarantee of quality. As a master of methodology, Modi is all technique and speed, without vision.

Two things

2009-02-10T11:43:00.001-08:00

made my day today.

The first was an article in the Indian Express which Purushottam Dixit forwarded this morning. The article described RSS's recently announced plans to synthesize a cola drink based on bovine urine, which is considered extremely nourishing in some older Hindu texts. Ordinary human beings and the late Morarji Desai would disagree there, albeit with different points of view and naturopathic propositions. Now, we always accuse the Hindutva brigade of the lack of imagination but the Sri Ram Sene and now the RSS have proven beyond reasonable doubt that they have developed a fine capacity to think out of the box. I imagined it'll be wonderful if these guys actually make and market such a drink and get it patented. Furthermore, it'll be awesome if this drink, let's call it Gau-cola, kicks Coke out of business. They might even sign up Aamir Khan as their brand ambassador, who knows!

But then the Coca Cola company might hit back with their own shocker. Remember, the recipe for the original Cola drink still remains a secret from the world. There might just be a secret ingredient beyond our imaginations. Yikes!

The next was this blog page about the 'Pink Chaddi' campaign. It's suddenly all over the place- Amit Varma has written about it, there are facebook and orkut groups attracting throes of members and even the TOI and IBNlive mentioned it over the last couple of days. It's pink chaddi vs saffron dhoti one on one now. Suddenly, the west has become a hackneyed spot for St. Valentine's. Some Indians always find themselves on the wrong side of revolutions :P

Ram is back

2009-02-07T05:05:00.000-08:00

The headlines of all the Indian newspapers are displaying a new pet topic - the BJP has asserted its intention to resurrect the Ram Janmabhoomi issue and place it among their primary political agenda. Articles in the Indian Express, TOI and The Hindu have quoted Rajnath Singh's words at a recent rally:

"Jahan tak Ram Janambhoomi ka sawal hai, koi ma ka lal Bhagwan Ram me hamari aastha aur nishta ko diga nahi sakta (No one can shake BJP's faith and reverence to Lord Ram),"

I was surprised to see the party president so vehement on the issue for I have memories of him as an inarticulate, almost incompetent speaker when he tried miserably to defend his party in the aftermath of Godhra. But then I saw the actual video of his speech where the man raises the gauntlet of faith to be cheered by an audience with cries of "Jai Shri Ram".

It is just miserable that a mainstream political party is able to win seats in the parliament by harnessing its agenda on an religio-centric issue like this. The talk of giving this issue the highest priority in their political agenda is understandably directed to a section of the Hindu classes comprised of the middle class and upwards. And it would be least surprising if a large part of educated Hindus actually vote for the BJP across constituencies obeying the calling of their faith. A good part of my extended family falls in the bracket of these deluded fools. They remain blissfully unaware of the moral obligations that they have failed to live upto.

We have a plethora of political critics attacking the BJP's stand on the basis of its provenance in pernicious identity politics but surprisingly, not on the basis of its inherent irrationality and subterfuge.

Some music

2009-02-06T20:02:00.000-08:00

I attended a concert at the Boston Symphony Orchestra today; MIT students get the privilege of attending fifteen free concerts in a year and today was one of those days. The menu consisted of two Mozart arias, a piece by a modern American composer by the name of Schuller and Brahms' Symphony no. 2 in D, Opus 73. I had not heard any of these previously. The two sopranos were wonderfully sung by a lady in a pretty black-purple dress and the Brahms' Symphony turned out to be a fantastic experience. The Schuller piece was a bit tedious and I didn't enjoy it very much (the complete absense of melody was one reason. Postmodernism may sound cool, but it does get a little difficult on you sometimes). The concert was conducted by a cheerful corpulent old man in the grand Symphony Hall which dates back to the late 1800s. Though all student tickets had been assigned the front rows on the ground, some of us to smuggle ourselves to the balcony seats on the second floor since they were vacant and inviting. The theater has a wonderful ambience that combines baroque designs on a Victorian canvas with some Greek sculptures placed in a series on the high walls. When the concert ended with the Brahms' crescendo, it was as if the entire hall lit up with a double luminescence as everybody arose to close the ceremony with a thunderous applause.

I didn't follow any of the technical details in the musical pieces, but hopefully someday I will. I learn that Mozart's 25th and 40th are going to be played sometime soon; I hope in all earnestness that they allow students. Following this line of optimism, on someday much farther than today, I hope I'll be able to play Chopin's waltzes to someone willing to listen.

So intimate, this Chopin, that I think his soul
Should be resurrected only among friends
Some two or three, who will not touch the bloom
That is rubbed and questioned in the concert room.

- from Portrait of a Lady (by T. S. Eliot)

-------------------

Over the last few days, I've developed a great liking to Bruce Springsteen's latest song which also happens to be the title song of "The Wrestler". It is 'existentialist' in its theme, and that is perhaps the most appropriate word that fits the feeling that the song induces. But it's not exactly that either. There is more of the defiance of Prometheus than the stoicism of Sisyphus in the song according to me, and that makes it all the more appealing.

Something about the song resonated with my own mood for the last couple of weeks and I guess it gradually grew on to me and I became fond of it. I don't have the words to express it, but then these friends always defect when you want them the most. Of course they have your interest in mind lest they appear out in the open and reveal more than you yourself can fathom. It is difficult to talk about the things and experiences that affect you while avoiding the landmines of affectation.

I remembered the first time I had read Albert Camus' 'The Stranger' and the thoughts that occupied my head when I tried to make sense of the philosophy from the fiction. Mersault, the principal character in the novel and the narrator, reveals so less of himself throughout the story and suddenly there is an avalanche that flows from his voice in the last few pages. The last paragraph of the book is one of my favorites in among all the fiction I have read:

People were starting on a voyage to a world which had ceased to concern me forever. Almost for the first time in many months I thought of my mother. And now, it seemed to me, I understood why at her life’s end she had taken on a “fiancé”; why she’d played at making a fresh start. There, too, in that Home where lives were flickering out, the dusk came as a mournful solace. With death so near, Mother must have felt like someone on the brink of freedom, ready to start life all over again. No one, no one in the world had any right to weep for her. And I, too, felt ready to start life all over again. It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the gentle indifference of the world. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with cries of hate.

2009-02-05T19:41:00.000-08:00

Pramod Muthalik, the kingpin of the Sri Ram Sena has announced (Excerpt from www.indiauncut.com):

Our activists will go around with a priest, a turmeric stub and a mangalsutra on February 14. If we come across couples being together in public and expressing their love, we will take them to the nearest temple and conduct their marriage.

There exists a second level of absurdity beyond the obvious - the tacit assumption that the couple in question would necessarily be Hindu.

Myanmar

2009-02-05T17:11:00.000-08:00

Already Myanmar’s government is one of the most brutal in the world, and in recent months it has become even more repressive.
A blogger, Nay Phone Latt, was sentenced to 20 years in prison. A prominent comedian, Zarganar, was sentenced to 59 years. A former student leader, Min Ko Naing, a survivor of years of torture and solitary confinement, has received terms of 65 years so far and faces additional sentences that may reach a total of 150 years.

We blame our political history for what goes wrong in India today - reservations, minority appeasement, corruption, Kashmir and what not. But isn't it noteworthy that we have a reasonably stable democratic political establishment compared to our immediate neighbors in the subcontinent? It is no less than a miracle of fate that has escaped our notice. I need hardly mention the state of Pakistan and its military history; Nepal is a fledgling republic with a history of Maoist terror and palace intrigue, parts of Sri Lanka are still reeling with civil war in its north and Bangladesh has just recovered from a inhuman period of military emergency.

A possible danger of a military coup in India would hardly occur to any of us even in the wildest of our imaginations. Unlike Myanmar or Bangladesh our military has been "mostly" loyal to respecting constitutional civil liberties (quotes to highlight Kashmir and the eastern states as outliers to this simplification). And unlike Pakistan, the Indian military has been quite faithful to the central governmental directives and non-intrusive in state policies.

It's difficult to imagine what the situation might be in countries like Myanmar, for even journalistic reporting of facts is scarce. One feels the same moral outrage against the Indian government for not speaking out against atrocities meted out by the military government as one feels against the US for its complicity with Israel against Palestinians. It's a country where over 3000 political prisoners are suffering injustice including the country's only Nobel Laureate who has been under house arrest for nearly eleven years. The military outlawed her lawful right to assume prime-ministership of the country in spite of winning an 80% vote in the general elections around 1990.

India has her own troubles to deal with at the moment. As I remember reading the words of an author (can't recollect the source)- India is an "unnatural nation" and an "unlikely democracy". My idealism might fade away soon enough as I gradually age. But will there be a time when we have governments and leaders who speak unequivocally against such crimes in our neighborhood (after having set our own house in order to begin with) calling a spade a spade? Or will future political and economic power (wishful thinking) make us indifferent or worse, embrace the American ways of unlawful intervention for propagation of self-interests under a sanctimonious guile? Only time will tell.

But one thing is certain - we can change our political friends and enemies, but not our geographical neighbours

A fascinating story

2009-02-04T19:08:00.000-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/05/world/africa/05nazi.html?hp

onerous music notes

2009-02-03T17:54:00.000-08:00

The wasp and all his numerous family
I look upon as a major calamily.
He throws open his nest with prodigality,
But I distrust his waspitality.

-Ogden Nash

My piano instructor is a real wasp. He's passionate about his teaching but he stings when you try to be a smart-ass. I assumed I'd be able to compute note positions as fast as I could play them on the piano, but only ended up falling flat on my presumption and looking stupid. If only natural numbers were one-hundredth as close and personal with me as they were with Ramanujan, I'd have pulled this one off :-(.

No more mental gymnastics from now on. Read, repeat and remember will be the way hereafter. Ess muss sein!

The scientific method

2009-02-02T16:56:00.000-08:00

This lofty phrase that cuts through much of the debate between proponents of intelligent design and Darwinists, theists and atheists, seers and scientists, astrologers and statisticians is really this simple (watch video).

One of the qualities of greatness is the ability to keep things simple and to be able to harness insight with a clarity of vision. People might disagree to this obvious simplification and they may be quite right in their criticism. Complexity is quite a necessity in the domains of writers, artists and poets - and I won't try to go exploring the nature of that kind of complexity because it is quite likely I might fail miserably. After all, there certainly is a reason many of us prefer Umberto Eco over Dan Brown. We can use this as a point of convenient departure.

A mail from a friend got me thinking for a while about directive principles like Occam's razor - unarguably human psychological artifacts that have proved quite useful while constructing scientific theories. They have also been misleading at times- the simplest example that comes to mind is the misplaced Aristotelian assumption that planets moved in circular orbits, the circle being the perfect shape. Another cute example that comes to recollection is the following conversation between a philosopher and his friend (I forget the names of the characters and I cannot find the source; I shall try to reproduce it from memory to the best of my abilities):

Philosopher: Tell me, why did they assume that the sun went around the earth in older times?

Friend: Why, because it's obvious isn't it?

Philosopher: What's obvious about it?

Friend: Why, it's obvious from the way it looks up in the sky, isn't it?

Philosopher: Well then, do tell me how it would have looked if instead, the earth went around the sun?

So, simplicity (or perceived obviousness) isn't always the name of the game. That said, there are other kinds of artifacts which scientists have exploited in recent years- things that fall under the bracket of 'transcendental reasoning' or 'enlightened empiricism'. Physicists, especially post Einstein, have very frequently made successful "leaps of faith" in order to preserve abstract concepts like conservation, symmetry, parity and even things like immutability of the second law of thermodynamics.

Why? Because there is a gut feeling that these things must be overarchingly correct. Of course, as Feynman himself says, the experiment should be the final judge of the thesis and also the progenitor of enlightened reasoning (as I read a couple of years ago in Freeman Dyson's "The Scientist as a Rebel", they found out that nature violates the principle of symmetry during reflection).

I have rambled enough without a direction. I return to my basic point about the power of simplicity and I now contrast it with what I percieve as obscurantism in the domain of knowledge (which safely leaves out art from the discussion). Many of us (and I confess I have been a prey too) have sometime or the other, succumbed to the temptation of being obscurantist in the process of sounding lofty and intellectual to others. Well some people in the world make make an entire life out of it :-).

I have, in the not so distant a past flung many a diatrib e at my disregard for such postures. A much more eloquent essay against pseduoscience is the "Postmodernism Disrobed" by Darwin's rottweiler. I might be totally wrong (as my friend kp used to passionately reason) with my views and there is a possibility that I might be misplaced to an extent too. As a a student of science and more importantly a Bayesian, one cannot rule out any possibility wholly. But it does serve as a pretty robust working principle and makes me personally prefer Russell over Sartre, Feynman over Lacan and V.S. Ramachandran over Sigmund Freud.

But as much as I dislike obscurantism in scientific claims (to the point of possibly being irrationally militant against it :P), I love fiction and poetry. Oscar Wilde could not have been more closer to the truth when he said:

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless.

The Respite Ends

2009-02-01T18:59:00.000-08:00

Semester begins tomorrow. Coursework is not particularly exciting - a course on systems engineering which I daresay would be tedium, one on advanced reaction engineering which might hold something interesting and a graduate course on immunology; I'm looking forward to the last one for that is the only one of direct relevance to my research at the moment.

Florida turned out to be a welcome break for all sorts of reasons. For one, it helped me get away from the sense of mental haste that seems inescapable in Boston. Besides, thanks to my father, I indulged in a good deal of luxury and leisure during those five days. When pleasure ceased to please me, I thought. Some hovering delusions became apparent in the light of calm and calculated reason; the path of liberation, however, was not so evident.

My mind seems to waver and I cannot pay attention to the news either. Moving on,

I plucked out my tattered copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four and started flipping through its pages. Few books have affected me as this one did five years ago; it was like being punched out of a coma. I leave you with some of my favorite passages:

Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.

----------

Winston Smith: Does Big Brother exist?
O'Brien: Of course he exists.
Winston Smith: Does he exist like you or me?
O'Brien: You do not exist.

---------

We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us; so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves before we kill him. It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be. Even in the instance of death we cannot permit any deviation . . . we make the brain perfect before we blow it out.

Bernie Madoff

2009-01-29T15:25:00.000-08:00

Shocking skeletons are coming out of the closet from the Madoff scandal as revealed by a recent editorial in NYT:

I’ve obtained a list of nearly all the private foundations that invested money directly with Mr. Madoff, at least at the time of their most recent tax filings. Even in the unlikely event that they cashed out since then, they may still have to repay the money to others.

What is staggering is how many of these 147 foundations had all their assets invested with Mr. Madoff and may have been wiped out as a result. For example, the Avery and Janet Fisher Foundation, which supported everything from various museums to meals-on-wheels programs, appears to have been fully invested with Mr. Madoff. And the same is true of dozens more.
The Picower Foundation of Palm Beach, Florida, with nearly $1 billion in assets and a major contributor to non-profits across the nation, has already announced that it will close down because of its Madoff investments. Its beneficiaries have included a neurological research institute at MIT, the New York Public Library and the Children’s Health Fund.

The MIT institute mentioned is the "Picower Institute of Learning and Memory" which stands opposite the Stata center on Vassar street. I pass through the building everyday on my way to the campus and I often think of taking courses there in my future semesters given my developing interest in neuroscience. Now its very survival seems to be a matter of speculation.

The Story of India (BBC documentary)

2009-01-28T19:36:00.000-08:00

Some days ago, I got a chance to watch "The Story of India" which is a six-episode documentary produced by the BBC. Conceived and narrated by historian Michael Wood, it is a panoramic sweep on nearly six-thousand years of Indian history. The perspective of curious enthusiastic westerner is dominant throughout the film, but it is a substantial effort on the part of the crew and deserves to be watched as a fitting acknowledgment to their meticulous attempt. Therefore -Highly recommended!

The first episode presents a few glimpses into the pre-Aryan history of the subcontinent, finally culminating in the Indus Valley period. What particularly got me interested was the presentation of small investigations that possibly hold answers to the anthropological history of the Aryans in the subcontinent. First, satellite topographic images showing compelling evidence of the past existence of a river in the North West frontier have been published by a group in Imperial College, London. Though they don't mention it explicitly in the episode (to the best of my knowledge), this is a clear reference to the river 'Saraswati' which is mentioned in the Vedas (on a tangent, the other river that finds mention in the Vedas is 'Suvatsu' loosely translated to 'white serpent'. The associated valley is now known as the Swat region in Pakistan where the Taliban have taken over and are wreaking havoc). Then follows a cute part where Wood goes around the streets of Afghanistan trying to re-create 'Soma-rasa' that is frequently mentioned in the Rig Veda (The climate of the Indian plains is supposedly not conducive for this plant to grow). But the most fantastic part was the visit to an archaeological site in Turkmenistan (Central Asia) where remains of a lost civilization that reared horses and used chariot-carts (raths) have been excavated.

I got interested on this debate some months ago and though it's completely baseless, my gut inclination has been towards the invasion hypothesis. Prima facie indications responsible for this are two - 1. the Indus Valley script has no seeming resemblance whatsoever to Sanskrit or Tamil. 2. Anthropological and archeological evidence state that the horse (which finds very common reference in older Hindu texts) was first domesticated in Central Asia and not in the plains. Anyways, I'm neither skilled nor qualified to be able to authoritatively comment on this issue; it is just something that interests me and I have gathered some superficial knowledge on the issue based on recent reading. The last part of the episode deals with the excavation of (the possible) Hastinapura, the capital city of the Mahabharatha by the Indian archeologist B. B. Lal (incidentally, this research is discussed in length in William Dalrymple's City of Djinns)

The second episode deals with the extraordinary life of Buddha (who is one of my personal heroes) and Alexander's famed attempt at invasion through the Khyber pass. Subsequently, the rise of the Mauryan empire is presented at length, with primary emphasis on the lives of Chandragupta and his grandson, the emperor Asoka. The story of Asoka is the stuff that legends are made of. We owe it to the British for bringing us this part of our history into our consciousness starting with William Jones who founded the Royal Asiatic Society in Calcutta in the 18th century (V. S. Ramachandran calls him the 'father of comparative linguistics'). I remember being deeply inspired by Asoka's story when I heard it as kid from my grandfather during bedtime; those memories were revisited when I went to the National Museum in Delhi in the summer of 2008. Outside the main entrance is one of Asoka's stone edicts, where he proclaims the message of universal tolerance and compassion with an emphasis extended to the animal kingdom.

In the third episode we visit the south, which, towards the beginning of the first millennium AD traded gold and lapis lazuli among other things with the Roman empire and even with the Hellenic world. A short glimpse into the unique Graeco-Indian empire that ruled India in the early part of this millennium with the Kushan king Kanishka is provided. This empire, that made its capital the city of Peshawar, was primarily responsible for opening up trade routes like the Silk route from China. Incidentally, the progenitors of this civilization were nomadic tribes from China; by what wand of nature they settled in the northwest and developed a beautiful synthesis of Buddhism and Hellenes remains an enigma.

In the fourth part, we come to the Gupta dynasty, supposedly referred to as the Golden age of India. This was the time when Vatsyayana wrote the Kamasutra, Kalidasa and Asvaghosha wrote their plays, Aryabhatta brought in the zero and Bhaskara estimated the circumference of the earth. However, the revival of Hinduism by Adi Sankaracharya does not find mention and we immediately jump to the south of India to the time of the Cholas (giving the Chalukyas, the Rashtrakutas and the Pallavas a slip for considerations of time). The art and the legacy of the Cholan empire is discussed in some detail (they are to my knowledge the first Indian empire to engage in colonial expansion through sea-routes) and there are glimpses into the beautiful temples of Tanjore (which happens to be my native place too!).

-----

I wanted to finish the blurbs for parts five and six but am feeling increasingly overpowered by sleep. They shall follow. But I shall mention in passing that all the facts covered by this documentary is a small subset of the spread that Nehru provides in his 'Glimpses..' or alternatively 'Discovery of India'. I have come across many people to have a very narrow and monolithic view of Nehru based (I believe) primarily on preconceived notions. We thus fail to understand his significance as a writer and historian of rare skill and erudition whatever be his political legacy and personal life scandals. I recently achieved my first 'conversion' on this issue - my victim being my own father who has started reading 'Glimpses..' to bedtime :-).

Why does it keep repeating?

2009-01-27T19:40:00.000-08:00

1. "Sri Ram Sena" and the Mangalore Pub
2. Shiv Sena and Hotel Intercontinental Grand.
3. MNS and Mumbai University

Embittered. Hurt. Depressed.

I don't want to think or write about it. I have nothing to state except the naivest of hopes that such vandalism ends and the youths, who are the principal instruments for effecting the will of fiends and demagogues against other youth find better avenues. Having stared at the computer screen for more than fifteen minutes without being able to continue, I give up, weary and helpless. One cannot be creative about issues that drive one to mad rage.

Unfortunately, mental disengagement seems difficult at the moment to do anything productive. Hence, capitulated sleep.

Boca Raton, Fl

2009-01-26T19:45:00.000-08:00

I arrived earlier this afternoon in Boca Raton with my dad. While he is here for a business conference, I made use of the opportunity to make a getaway from the Boston freeze. As he got busy with his meetings immediately on arrival, I sought to explore the place on my own. Besides it had been a while since I could afford to go out on the roads with only one layer of clothing and roam around in shorts. The absence of public transport was expected; so, armed with my i-pod (which was resurrected from idleness after a whole semester), I started walking on the street right off the coast listening to my favorite Jim Morrison songs. They somehow fit snugly into the mood. The sun, somber yellow now, was on its way home mixing its warm benedictions with the cool sea breeze blowing soft and flat. I passed by a group of fat men smoking cheroots in a communion after a swim in the sea; behind them stood a bunch of pretty young girls drying themselves up and playing some sort of catch-and-run while at it. Their liveliness seemed inviting but I don't think they would have been even slightly impressed if I removed my t-shirt and joined them in their game. Besides, it seemed the boys they came along with were playing volleyball at a distance, so I looked askance and trod along the concrete road with 'Feast of Friends' playing inside my ears. Morrison's songs were getting somber and heavy down the playlist. It was then that I passed by a car whose music seemed to overpower the volume of my i-pod and my attention was all of a sudden beleagured. The driver of a car, a man of about twenty-five, had his stereo on full volume and was singing along in the loudest and the most monochromatic of voices:

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

This man's appropriation of any other singer/group would have put me off, but this was just the change I needed. And I was happy to search and find that my derelict i-pod had all of Bob Dylan. I walked aimlessly for another hour or so (no intended metaphor with the song there please) and returned back to the hotel to find my dad still engaged in his meetings. He was finally relieved and we went out for dinner at an Indian place with a couple of his colleages. The were busy discussing business over dinner and there was very little I could participate in it except when they discussed current political affairs. I was quite up-to-date on the Satyam story and I was found useful when the others were trying to remember names from the new board of directors, their older CFO and CEO (I have a useless memory for such details; I wish I could remember facts from molecular biology/biochemistry with the same level of comfort). As I was relishing an especially good Masala Dosa, they started speculating on some M&A plans for the future. Though by then I had stopped paying attention and was on my own stream of thought, I could hear fancy words like profitability, revenue model, core-competency come up again and again. I recollected then the short period of my IITB life when I engaged in some serious preparation for interviews with consulting firms with some of my favourite people. Little less than a year before, I could fancy myself being quite interested in making sense of such conversations and trying to show off some of my own gyaan on this matter, given that I had the pride of being recruited on a hot-shot consulting job swelling up my chest. Presently however, the time, the thrill and the illusions are long gone. An ordinary graduate student with ideals in his mind and a hope of finding vitality in his work is all that remains.

------------------------

My dad is an interesting character. In spite of being a pucca man of business (which he undoubtedly is) he sometimes shows a childlike curiosity for matters of science that are of little use to him. When we were still in Boston yesterday, after relishing a lunch of rasam and pongal that his soon assiduously prepared, he asked me to sit down and explain what 'entropy' and the 'Gibbs free energy' meant. He confessed that he had never understood these things while he was himself a student of chemical engineering and all the books he read subsequently never really provided a clear understanding of these concepts. Over the twenty minutes or so, I tried my best to use simple examples (which included a most wonderful example I stole from Richard Feynman's Cornell lecture titled 'The distinction between past and future', the video recording of which I had seen recently during MIT IAP series. Interested people can find it in his collection of popular lectures called 'The Character of Physical law' available in paperback) and illustrations to explain the general concept of thermodynamic potentials and the corresponding consequences of the second law. My dad would incessently interrupt me to ask questions and make me constantly reflect on whether I was being effective in transferring what I understood about these quantities to him. He smiled when he finally understood one of the points I was trying to make - that the law of increasing disorder was not a consequence of some cosmic force in the universe but that it can be simply understood as the sheer statistical preponderence of disordered states over ordered states (once again here, Dawkins' nice analogy with a 'library' presented in his essay 'Darwin Triumphant' from 'The Devil's Chaplain' proved handy) and then he said that would be enough for the time being. I am not sure I entirely convinced him at the end and it made me realize that it's difficult teaching someone who has had a principal role to play in shaping your own conventional wisdom both by nature and nurture. I am sure he took his siesta that afternoon thinking that he sent me to all these colleges and bought me all the books I wanted in my 'pursuit of learning' but that the returns of those investments were not entirely evident at the moment. :-)

Taliban and Arjun Singh

2009-01-24T18:00:00.000-08:00

Rarely have I been as scared in the recent past as I was while reading this article in the NYT earlier today. It describes the Taliban gaining consolidation in the Swat valley in Pakistan and their flouting of every law of the land while spreading a wave of unspeakable terror among the natives. Every line is shocking beyond description. Doubts to whether the US reporting was cooked came to my mind, so I did a simple search on google Pakistani newspaper reports on the same issue. They resonated with the NYT report, for instance this one and this one. The Dawn article also glibly reports some spineless political moves that the civilian government is making to "keep the Taliban at bay".

Among the many things that the Taliban have kept themselves busy with, one is the "blowing up of approximately 150 schools in the Swat area" 100 of which were schools for girls. As the Dawn article states, one of the 'strategic measures' being employed by the Zardari government to reach a compromise with the Taliban is the promulgation of Shariah law in the region. Shariah, among many other things, forbids women from attending schools and permits only madrasa education for the men. In the light of all this, let us also remember with pride that not more than a few days ago, our wonderful HRD minister passed a law which places madrasa certificates on par with CBSE and SSC certificates (Read this article) for government job applications. What a travesty!

There is another thing that deeply bothers me. I haven't yet come across one article in the Indian free press questioning this decision. Google for the subject and you will find a couple of dozen newspapers reporting the decision but I would be grateful if someone could find me an article by any journalist/op-ed speaking critically on this issue. One only finds comments and outburst such as the following (taken from an online discussion forum) :

The foolish rulers thinking this step will bring the muslim community in to national mainstream,no. psudo secularists betrayed hindu community by giving unconstitutional rights to minorities. where is our SNDP,NSS leaders who are always talking and fighting each other in the name of reservations? Why they are not open their mouths

hindu wake up.. wake up.

--------------------------

BJP will do nothing
If any one expects to BJP to do any thing, they are living in a fantasy world. BJP too is now behaving "secular" and would agree with this move. It is upto a Hindu at an individual level to understand his true situation and make his kids hard fighters. Let them use the existing schools and facilities, study hard and win in competetive exams. No madrassah based idiot would even come close. And let hindus start getting into every government job through sheer merit. Muslims then can do what they do best, Jehad and kill innocents.

A nation where public dialogue is of such stellar quality deserves such laws :-)

Strike one and two

2009-01-23T20:14:00.000-08:00

True to his word, Barack Obama issued executive orders on two fronts immediately after the transfer of powers - to close the Guantanamo prison camp in no more than a year's time and to reverse the many bans and restrictions imposed by the Bush administration on abortion aid programs. Stellar!

I watched the inaugural speech alongside a number of MIT students. The unanimous verdict was that the speech was inspiring and one noticed jubilant approvals when the new President assured his audience that scientific research will not be compromised any longer (Bush and Cheney were booed correspondingly). Yet, one finds Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman playing Devil's Advocate in his recent editorial in the NYT on the economic policies addressed by Obama in his inaugural speech. Though Krugman doesn't go beyond criticism in this particular article, he has attacked specific policy initiatives of Obama ever since the latter's election.

It is reassuring to know that there exist smart and honest people out there who constantly question and criticize the administration even when the public opinion is largely approving. This might be a direct consequence of the skeptic outlook of the intellectual elite; but then, not everyone can pull it off in a scholarly manner. An ordinary chap like me finds it difficult to keep up with each and every topic that is important to the world. Skepticism that doesn't have information and depth to back it just amounts to pigheadedness. And to be perfectly honest, I've never had a intuition for economic concepts except the most rudimentary ones - if a million monkeys like me were laid end to end, we wouldn't reach a conclusion on an economic policy ;-). Besides, I have other fish to fry.

I have recently developed a great regard for dissenting voices across history. I wish I had the time to explore Voltaire, Rosseau, Bakunin, London, Thoreau and the likes. They were necessary in the absence of democracy, but now they are all the more important in democracies like America where propaganda is much more subtle. There probably exist dissenting voices in India too but the frequency of their appearances in popular newspapers is quite rare. On this thread of thought, I am reminded of a passage about the famous evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane from an essay by Ramachandra Guha:

In 1957, Haldane left England to make his home in Calcutta. Several years later, an American science writer referred to him as a "citizen of India"**.Haldane replied: "No doubt I am in some sense a citizen of the world. But I believe with Thomas Jefferson that one of the chief duties of a citizen is to be a nuisance to the government of his state. As there is no world state, I cannot do this ... on the other hand I can be, and am, a nuisance to the government of India, which has the merit of permitting a good deal of criticism, though it reacts to it rather slowly. I also happen to be proud of being a citizen of India, which is a lot more diverse than Europe, let alone the U.S.A., the U.S.S.R., or China, and thus a better model for a possible world organisation. It may of course break up, but it is a wonderful experiment. So I want to be labelled as a citizen of India."

**There is very likely a typo here. It ought to be "citizen of the world"

----

Appa arrives in Boston tomorrow. We're going to Florida on Monday where he has to attend a conference and I will be making sand-castles on the beach. Presently, I have rediscovered:

1. that molecular biology is quite interesting. And that experiments can be wonderful. I read about the Meselson-Stahl experiment a few weeks ago; I cannot believe how it escaped my attention during undergrad. It is one of the most beautiful and simple experiments that I have come across and should be regarded as textbook in experimental design.

2. that Jawaharlal Nehru remains my favourite historian despite his biases for China, Russia and the Congress. He can be forgiven for innocence on the first two. We all know he paid his price for China years later.

3. that not all the happiness in life is confined to human relationships. In fact, hardly any is.

Oscars

2009-01-22T17:21:00.000-08:00

There must be cogent reasons behind it perhaps, but I am quite sad that 'The Dark Knight' did not make it to the top five :-(

Watched 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button' and absolutely loved it (though it significantly diverges from Fitzgerald's original short story). Watched 'Slumdog Millionaire' and liked it too notwithstanding certain leaps of faith and willing suspensions of disbelief that were needed. 'Milk' and 'The Wrestler' are next on my list of movies to watch.

Some more doublespeak

2009-01-21T21:19:00.000-08:00

The following is an excerpt from a recent editorial in The Economist urging for a ceasefire between Israel and Gaza, an event that happened on the following day.

Some of the hypocrisy in the Arab world is unspeakable. Syria, for example, is one country to accuse Israel of “genocide”. But in 1982, when Syria’s own Muslim Brotherhood rebelled in the Syrian city of Hama, the regime responded by shelling the city indiscriminately for three weeks, killing about 20,000 or 30,000 civilians. In Gaza Israel has killed 1,000 people. It is not playing by Hama rules, let alone committing genocide. Russia’s onslaught on the Chechen city of Grozny in the mid-1990s is reckoned to have killed some 20,000 civilians. As for Hamas itself, it deliberately murdered hundreds of Israeli civilians in buses and restaurants in the intifada of 2001-03.

Before I sleep every night, I read about 3-4 news articles and the sites vary from day to day, all of them western newspapers. One is no longer surprised to find such glib language used with great facility to buttress the most ridiculous of arguments across respectable journalists in the west. It seems a pathological condition, a self-deception of an unprecedented kind in supposedly freethinking democracies - something that would have surprised Orwell himself. But it ceases to be funny when you remember that lives cannot be lumped in multiples of thousand. It is beyond belief that in a country where popular public discourse is so often conscious to the inherited "Judeo-Christian" values, it is so very difficult to find a voice in the popular media who opposes these west-supported invasions as 'morally outrageous' and not simply 'politically imprudent'. The article ends:

For Israel, however, the sword alone will never be enough. A small country with many foes cannot afford to become a pariah. And Israel has a particular reason to avoid killing civilians, since the people it is bombing are the neighbors with whom it so much needs to live in peace.

Some expedient reason to stop mass murder, isn't it?

Obama's inauguration

2009-01-21T06:11:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, January 20th was a momentous day in the history of the USA. While President Obama made minimal references to this historical shift in his inaugural speech, he harmonized many emotions when he referred to the nature of improbability that "a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath".

His speech was forthright, emotional and pregnant with fresh confidence that we have come to regard as an epitome of great modern oration. In an attempt to be cordial on a day of celebration, he refrained from explicitly criticizing his predecessor other than saying that the present systemic failure was the sum total of the inability of "those who hadn't the courage to take hard decisions". He stressed on the immediate uphill tasks before his government - resurrecting and revitalizing the economy, demilitarization of Iraq and improving the health care system. There have been reports suggesting that he has immediate plans to disband Guantanamo Bay and also remove restrictions imposed by the Bush administration on pro-abortion groups, both of which would be immensely gratifying steps if implemented soon enough.

But there was one part in his speech that I was disappointed with (the constant references to God and Jesus throughout the proceedings was something that bummed me out further, but that's a given). Something, where I hoped the 44th President would have differed from his many predecessors. With sweeping patronization, Obama said “To all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born, know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.”

Obama's election coincided with my birthday here. I have had deep admiration for man ever since I heard of him and my reading of his autobiography only entrenched my respect for his indomitable courage, conviction and more importantly his aspiration to the highest office of the biggest democracy with a principled heart beating in his chest. But since his election, my regard for him has vacillated and even gone downhill for a bit. One principal nail was his stance on the Israel invasion of Gaza which he met with calculated silence initially and in the passing, appraised it as yet another 'strategic blunder' or 'mistake' (the other was the Iraqi invasion). by the incumbent government. I had hoped he would correct this in his inaugural speech, but it was not to be so.

Remarkably, such a poor stance is highly regarded among the American intellectual elite as 'principled opposition'. The official and reports in the New York Times are so depressing- nearly 1400 Palestinian deaths as opposed to 13 Israeli deaths and vast areas of Gaza devastated and raped off civilian infrastructure - one wonders whether there is any need to speculate as to what the 'real' figures and picture might be! With such outright crime before our eyes, how can calling this or Iraq a 'strategic blunder' be regarded as 'principled dissent'?

Boston is one of the places where you could sit in a coffee shop and find your neighbours involved in passionately sophisticated discussions about art, science and politics - the city having a rich academic culture. When one is bored of one's own work/reading, it is always a great pleasure to eavesdrop into something interesting. Yesterday, on one such occassion in Huntington avenue, I found a group of women (who I suspect were liberal arts teachers) discussing the coming of the new President. Boston, unlike the south, is a place where people openly support abortion, same-sex unions, the right to an independent stand on religion and abhor conservatism. Yet five out of seven among these consented the American support of Israel! (one of them even quoted the death tolls and referred it to as an unfortunate statistical consequence) One is surprised to find so much obfuscation in the conscience in the most powerful democracy in the world (with the grand specter of the fifth amendment) to not realize that there is something grossly wrong in American interventionism over the years. Not surprisingly, the two women who did not support the America's policy on Israel called it a 'mistake'. This is the legacy that every such subterfuge since the Monroe doctrine and the white man's burden has left us. But this is by no means a principled dissent!

Another Ramble

2009-01-19T20:00:00.000-08:00

I have often tried to reflect on my schooling experience and attempted to deconstruct its effects in shaping my overall personality, outlook and character. These were merely contemplative exercises but nonetheless I think they helped me form some strong opinions about how primary and pre-college instruction ought to be in a general sense. When I try to gauge the ten odd years I spent in schools in terms of learning, I look back with a lot of disappointment at a good deal of 'lost time'. That there was an absence of direction towards life's broader goals does not bother as much as the pestilential presence of rigid constraints that conspire to limit you to much narrower, pettier goals - passing exams and beating your peers at grades for instance. I recently read an interview of Noam Chomsky (incidentally, I also had the good fortune of hearing him speak on the Gaza intervention in a recent public lecture at MIT) where the interviewer asked Chomsky on his schooling. Chomsky attended an experimental progressive school until he was twelve when he was transferred to a "college-oriented school" in the city. He says:

"...it wasn't until I was in high school that I knew I was a good student. The question had never arisen. I was very surprised when I got into high school and discovered that I was getting all A's and that was supposed to be a big deal.

In fact, every student in the school I had previously attended was regarded as somehow being a very successful student. There was no sense of competition, no ranking of students..... Well, anyway, at this particular school, judging from my experience, there was a tremendous premium on individual creativity, not in the sense of slapping paints on paper, but doing the kind of work and thinking that you were interested in. Interests were encouraged and children were encouraged to pursue their interests. They worked jointly with others or by themselves. It was a lively atmosphere, and the sense was that everybody was doing something important."

- taken from The Chomsky Reader

Such 'progressive schools' do exist in India in a small number. But I am quite certain most of them are prohibitively expensive and accessible to only rich families. Most of the other supposedly 'good schools' which include the ones I went to are primarily concerned with populating 'merit lists'- a term that I have come to regard with utmost disdain over the years. The unfortunate consequence is that most students who out happen to be outliers; those who do well in spite of the system, not because of it. I was no outlier as a schoolboy. I did well in my exams and lived in a world of my own delusion thinking that was all there was to learning. My parents and teachers were happy with me and the sum total of this status quo was that I learned absolutely nothing in my school beyond mechanically chewing and regurgitating the regimented syllabus.

The unfortunate thing, in the words of a Brazilian educator, is that most schools are "more preoccupied with the transmission of knowledge than with the creation, among other values, of a critical spirit. From the social point of view, the educational systems are oriented to maintaining the existing social order and economic structures instead of transforming them".

There is certainly a lot of truth in the above statement even if one were to refrain from sourcing these political accusations to an active agency in the system. But even then, this is a much more charitable position if we notice that even transmission of knowledge degenerates to rote learning in our schools- the pedantic recitation of facts as opposed to the assimilation of a principle and exploring its consequences thereon. To quote Richard Feynman from 'The Pleasure of finding things out', an inseparable part of robust learning is to realize the difference between 'knowing the name of something and knowing something'. The following is one of his famous anecdotes involving his early childhood experiences with his father:

‘See that bird?’ he says. ‘It’s a Spencer’s warbler. Well, in Italian, it’s a Chutto Lapittida. In Portuguese, it’s a Bom da Peida. In Chinese it’s a Chung-long-tah, and in Japanese it’s a Katano Takeda. You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You’ll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird. So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing - that’s what counts!

The Necessity of Atheism

2009-01-19T04:35:00.000-08:00

I recently came across a remarkable essay written by the famous English Romantic poet, Percy Shelley titled 'The Necessity of Atheism'. It was first published in 1811 when the author was merely nineteen and its "audacious content" led to his immediate rustication from Oxford. What surprises me is not that such an essay could be conceived and written nearly two-hundred years before this day- there had been a sufficient maturation of the scientific method and philosophical literature (with the exception evolutionary biology) for thinkers to be motivated in this direction and Shelley was by no means ordinary in his capacity to do so-, but that in spite of the avalanche of scientific work that was accomplished in the following two hundred years the kind of nonsense attacked in this essay still persists in the minds of the educated class (not the 'opiate masses' as Marx condescendingly put it). Shelley was writing at a time when western colonial powers engaged in slavery with impunity, sati and untouchability was shamelessly prevalent in India and the world was still in its infancy of socio-economic and political thinking. Undoubtedly, many of us can rationalize (Dawkins' saw-toothed shaped Zeitgeist curve for instance) as to why we haven't progressed in this direction - a big factor in contention is the championing of religion (or conservatism in a broader sense) by many managers of political power across the world to facilitate the propagation of their self-interest. But let me be infantile here for a moment and shout - this shouldn't be the case!

Sir W. seems to consider the atheism to which it leads as a sufficient presumption of the falsehood of the system of gravitation; but surely it is more consistent with the good faith of philosophy to admit a deduction from facts than an hypothesis incapable of proof, although it might militate, with the obstinate preconceptions of the mob. Had this author, instead of inveighing against the guilt and absurdity of atheism, demonstrated its falsehood, his conduct would have, been more suited to the modesty of the skeptic and the toleration of the philosopher.

Mind you, this was penned nearly sixty years before Bertrand Russell was born in Victorian England and readers would note that what I have marked as bold can be considered a trite version of Russell's famous 'celestial teapot' argument. What is more inexplicable is the observation that a book like 'The God Delusion' should be a bestseller two centuries later! In no way do I intend to disparage Dawkins' excellent book; I have to admit that in some manner, it led to my own 'conversion' or at least facilitated it greatly. Many of my friends would agree to this too. That is, until you read Russell and realize that he was much broader than Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens (the three 'bright' Musketeers of the present) put together. Perhaps in another ten years I will say the same thing about Kant and Bacon. But let me be childish yet another time and expostulate - My parents should have introduced me to this shit!

India Inc.

2009-01-18T06:28:00.000-08:00

While the Satyam fiasco is still fresh in the minds of the nation, news of India Inc.'s overwhelming endorsement for Modi as PM is the talk of the town. This support, apart from making L. K. Advani very pleased and encouraging him to express saffron solidarity with Modi in his latest blog entry has also frothed trouble for a little known CPI(M) MP in Kerala who talked a little too much by praising Modi's economic policies. The thought of Advani as PM sends shivers down my spine as such (being not so inconceivable a possibility); I fear a slip disk if the Modi speculation draws close to reality.

My trepidation reached highest levels when I saw a video that had Anil Ambani speak the following salutary words for Modi in front of an audience primarily comprising the hotshots of India Inc. It almost sounded as a call to arms:

"If one Dhirubhai can do so much for India, imagine what a thousand Dhirubhais can do. If one Narendrabhai can do so much for Gujarat, imagine what Narendrabhai can do as a leader for India."

A thousand Dhirubhais can ensure that India Inc. evades every possible taxation and can buy out every spoke in the central government with unprecedented impunity. As far as what a thousand Narendrabhais can accomplish for Gujarat or one Narendrabhai for India is concerned, I don't even want to indulge in speculation.

Ludwig van

2008-12-24T21:08:00.000-08:00

One doesn't have to read Anthony Burgess or watch Kubrick to be driven to madness by Beethoven's 9th:

"The magic power re-unites all that custom has divided,

All men become brothers under the sway of thy gentle wings"

Lucky for me, I managed to borrow Herbert von Karajan's rendering of Beethoven's symphonies from a friend before he left for India. Nothing lifts your spirits better in moments of solitude!

Mildred Rogers

2008-12-24T14:33:00.000-08:00

There's one like her in all of our lives, isn't there?

2008-12-23T13:39:00.000-08:00

From Of Human Bondage (Chapter XLVII)

------------------

At last, in a small room, Philip stopped before The Lacemaker of Vermeer van Delft.
"There, that's the best picture in the Louvre. It's exactly like a Manet."
With an expressive, eloquent thumb Philip expatiated on the charming work. He used the jargon of the studios with overpowering effect.
"I don't know that I see anything so wonderful as all that in it," said Hayward.
"Of course it's a painter's picture," said Philip. "I can quite believe the layman would see nothing much in it."
"The what?" said Hayward.
"The layman."
Like most people who cultivate an interest in the arts, Hayward was extremely anxious to be right. He was dogmatic with those who did not venture to assert themselves, but with the self-assertive he was very modest. He was impressed by Philip's assurance, and accepted meekly Philip's implied suggestion that the painter's arrogant claim to be the sole possible judge of painting has anything but its impertinence to recommend it.

----------------------

I wish more days were like this; when one could read, reminisce and introspect with absolute impunity :-)

People talking without speaking; people hearing without listening

2008-12-13T05:54:00.000-08:00

Excerpt from engaging editorial by Shekhar Gupta in the Indian express earlier this week:

Any number of illiterate emails and SMSes now float around, not merely cursing politicians, but spreading utter falsehoods about the Constitution and laws. There is one, for example, that says that our Constitution (article 49-O, it specifically says) entitles us to go to a polling booth and say we do not want to vote for anyone, and if the number of such votes is higher than votes polled by the leading candidate, the election will be set aside and nobody will be elected. So that is the way to fix the political class which, realising that, has kept that article under wraps. Now most of us passed our class X Civics a long time ago, and God alone knows how, so let’s not question anybody’s knowledge of our Constitution. But none of the thousands of very well-educated, rich, successful, respectable people through whom this silly mail has passed and been forwarded, have bothered to check that venerable document. For, if they did, at least one myth would have been set at rest: Article 49 deals with some thing very important, but it is not the right of negative vote, but the protection of our monuments.

Refreshing change but..

2008-12-12T19:48:00.000-08:00

The first draft of the long overdue Administrative Reforms Commission is out. It is remarkably puzzling that the UPA government took this long to deliver on a promise they made ages ago. Unfortunately it took an catastrophe of the magnitude of the Mumbai attacks to set the wheels rolling. While a glance through the key points does encourage optimism, I wonder whether a review held as late as after 14 years of service isn't a bit too late. In fact, as the exact words go "the first review at 14 years would primarily serve the purpose of intimating to the public servant about his or her strengths and shortcomings, while the second review at 20 years would mainly serve to assess the fitness of the officer for further continuation in service".

What is the basis for 20? Why not a shorter period, say 5 years? There are many such questions which pop up as one goes through the provisions. Nonetheless, in the spirit of things, it is a step in the right direction. Der aaye par durust aaye (hopefully!)

The premature birth anniversary of J. Willard Gibbs

2008-12-11T20:23:00.000-08:00

Today was the last lecture of 10.40, the dreaded Thermodynamics course of the MIT first year graduate curriculum in Chemical Engineering and a day of custom. The course, while evolving in details over the past years, has retained its capacity to inculcate a perpetual sense of fear and delirium across the class throughout the semester. Its apparent level of difficulty can be traced back to (or blamed upon) exclusively one man in the history of thermodynamics- Josiah Willard Gibbs (partners in crime include G. N. Lewis, James Clerk Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann :P). While mechanical and civil engineers revolve their lives around trivial heat pumps and thermodynamic cycles and while physics majors possibly escape the classical approach (most certainly the thermodynamics of solutions which is Gibbs area), possibly chemistry grad students are the only other sorry souls who have to endure the abstruse pain of Gibbs' calculus of thermodynamics and his geometric phase equilibria ideas.

But I like Gibbs. He is one of those towering figures in American Science (preceding giants like Feynman, McClintock and even G.N. Lewis) who's work was so original and ahead of its time that it evoked the interest of very few people in Gibbs' lifetime. It took a scientist of the greatness of Maxwell to immediately understand the significance of Gibbs' idea of the U-S-V surface (in this, they are almost like the Einstein-Eddington pair). Gibbs was a solitary figure who remained in the Yale campus all his life and produced an astoundingly rich body of work. Personally, the most significant aspect of Gibbs to me is that he made seminal contributions to both classical and statistical thermodynamics theory.

Back to 10.40 and today's lecture. Jeff Tester, the main instructor of the course is one of those classicists who revels in the joy of teaching this course which has been meticulously designed by him and his predecessors over the years. He filled his lectures with romantic connections to the historical development of the subject (one unfortunate consequence of this fact is that he was as abstruse as his idol Gibbs in some regard, but then this being his last year at MIT, one could overlook his indulgence) and his reverence to the likes of Carnot, Clausius, Gibbs, Boltzmann and Lewis. So as the custom goes, the last 10.40 lecture is marked with the celebration of Gibbs' birthday, although the actual date is in February. Legend has it that Bob Reid (Tester's predecessor as the 10.40 instructor and also incidentally Tester's PhD advisor) used to dress up as Gibbs to the lecture that day (tweed suit with flannels and all) and deliver his lecture in a New Haven accent. Tester did no such thing (though I think he could have pulled it off) but brought the customary cake (see picture) and tried to make sure fears were alleviated (or atleast momentarily forgotten) before the final exam week!

Most of the text is quite readable but for those who're curious about the formulae:
1. Bottom, top: The Gibbs Fundamental Equation in differential form
2. Bottom, bottom: The Gibbs Phase rule
3. Top, left: The fundamental statistical mechanical relation between the Helmholtz free energy and the canonical partition function.
4. Top, left: The kth Legendre transform of a first order homogenous function.

That's it for now until exams I suppose!

Midnight ramble

2008-12-10T22:05:00.000-08:00

As a student of science, there are a number of times when I feel confronted with a frightfully overwhelming feeling; a cursory glance at the various monthly journals that are displayed in any MIT library is enough to digest the sheer rapidity with which different areas are progressing. One wonders if one can make any significant contribution in an era of such stupefying complexity where progress is being made, both at the core and the interfaces of various disciplines, at breakneck speed.

These experiences instill humility but at times challenge your confidence. However, there are reassuring times too. Times when you suddenly find yourself understanding a particular idea faster than your colleagues and have the good fortune of helping them out (and vice versa), a moment during an incomprehensible physics seminar when you are suddenly able to relate to a particular concept and integrate it with pre-existing knowledge. hours of pen-paper algebra leading you to a completely unanticipated wonderful result staring at you like a beacon in a storm- all of these replenish the elixir in the staggering spirit when it's weary of the world.

Enough of the indulgent ramble. What prompted me to put up this post was a lecture on TED by the famous neuroscientist V S Ramachandran which somehow captures the simplicity that lies behind profound ideas capable of really making a difference and causing a paradigm shift in our understanding of things. Highly recommended to anyone aspiring leave behind an original idea in this world! :-)

Random political thoughts

2008-12-08T20:30:00.000-08:00

I have, like every other insignificant thinking Indian, gone through the successive emotional phases that followed the terrorist attacks that shook Mumbai on 26.11. The initial anger intensified into helpless frustration as I stuck to the news website during those forty-eight hours, the mind feeling restless and sombre as the battle with the terrorists went on. The frustration then funneled into a call for desperate action and all reason was momentarily abandoned as the blind heart responated with the vox populi - "Enough is Enough", notwithstanding the embarrassing dramatization that the Indian media resorted to (Indian Express perhaps being an exception) and is continually on display. Later, the mind pulled back its senses and all that it could see was repeated stagnant rhetoric on every other talk show and every other opinion article. I had my own thoughts on the matter but then, what was their worth?

As usual, there has been constant bashing of our neighbours on this matter. Just read news items from either side of the border and one can at once infer the surge of nationalistic pride that result post such catastrophies when fingers are pointed. The case of Pakistan is quite unfortunate - its economy being in shambles (inflation close to twenty-five percent), its internal security being as bad as that of India (if not worse), its crackpot military establishment working against the interest of the state, the civilian government of this fledgling democracy is in dire straits at the moment. To call them weaklings is a platitude - the fact that ther President feels compelled to write such an article in NY times is a candid testimony of their hopeless situation.

Amidst all this frenzy, the Indian administration has to decide on its course of action. As Raja Menon put it in a recent interview, India and the US have to save the Pakistani Civilian government from another military takeover. Any military move from India, at this moment might drive Pakistan back into Musharraf's hands (his mouth seems to have opened again). Lalit Mansingh constantly keeps emphasizing the importance of diplomatic pressure, and while this has not quite worked in the past, I cannot but help agreeing with his stance, given that we're dealing with an infant civilian government and given that it is in our best interests for Pakistan to develop a democratic stability.

My book to bedtime currently is "Freedom at Midnight" by Lapierre and Collins. I cannot help but feel with a sense of irony that Jinnah's dream, one that he achieved in the nick of time while fighting tuberculosis, has degenerated into a failed state caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.

Ogden Nastiness

2008-12-06T21:53:00.000-08:00

If you'd ask me to take a call I'd say,
that vintage leather-bound books,
Are birthday gifts superior
to trinkets and worthless coffee mugs.

Often though there are shades of gray,
beneath the glowing leathery looks.
Be sure to check the interior
for pages punctured by literary bugs.

-----

Sorry if the degree of imitation is shameless and unbecoming :-). There are a million escapes from Thermodynamics at the moment, all of which are extremely inviting.

Updates

2008-12-05T19:01:00.000-08:00

I plead guilty for not putting up a single post since coming to grad school. There hasn't been much I have felt compelled to write about and for whatever I have felt for, leisure has been scarce. Now that I think of the past, I never wrote in solitude. If I ever gave the impression of being a lone thinker trying to arrive at the truths of the world by being violently original, it was probably a farce that my subconscious played with me. It was a farce that thankfully did not consume me. Whatever I have written, it is with people in my mind - people I know, people I love and people whom I can feel at home with.

MIT has been a good experience till now. With the exception of the heavy academic workload that can sometimes stress one out, I love every part of being in this wonderful campus - the infinite corridor, the libraries, the free food, the coffee shops, harvard square, the charles river and downtown Boston. I hope it gets better with the semesters to come.

My research area and advisor have been finalized (almost). I would be working in what my group refers to as 'Computational Immunology'. Broadly speaking, the work would involve using theoretical frameworks rooted in statistical physics to understand adaptive immune response in organisms like you and me. In the immediate future, that would involve two things- learning a lot of physics and learning a lot of biology - I'm looking forward to both.

Social life took a sharp change from the IIT setting and it looks like it has equilibriated once more. 'Change', as it is understood, becomes less prominent as one gets older. The only constant companions I am looking forward to at MIT are the corridors, the bookshelves and the pebbles on the riverside. The others will come and go, take a part of me and leave me a part of themselves.

A lot of memorable things happened this semester beyond academics - Sailing in the Charles with Varun while the weather was still kind, the wonderful Clay Memorial lecture at Harvard on the life of Euler, the de-stressing 4$ movie screenings on weekends (A Clockwork Orange, The Godfather and Forrest Gump), Henry V, 'Into the woods', MIT rendering of Beethoven's Eroica (where I return from to type this post) and the wonderful trip to Purushottam's at Baltimore.

The semester's about to end in a couple of weeks. My near and dear ones in Cambridge will leave me alone to face the winter's wrath during Christmas.

Fuck you

2008-11-27T04:57:00.000-08:00

for breaking my silence but stripping my words off me.

2008-07-27T03:22:00.000-07:00

'To know my country, one has to travel to that age, when she realized her should and thus transcended her physical boundaries, when she revealed her being in a radiant magnanimity which illumined the eastern horizon, making her recognized as their own by those in alien shores who were awakened into a surprise of life; and not now when she has withdrawn herself into a narrow barrier of obscurity, into a miserly pride of exclusiveness, into a poverty of mind that dumbly revolves around itself in an unmeaning repetition of a past that has lost its light and has no message for the pilgrims of the future.'

- Rabindranath Tagore

2008-07-24T08:36:00.000-07:00

Hi Chithi and C'pa,

I'm just dropping a customary note since I have nothing better to do at this moment. It is pouring heavily outside and am therefore confined to my room in the hostel. I am currently reading "The Discovery of India" by Nehru and it is magnificent beyond belief. I cannot believe it took me so long to get down to reading this book. I had read a few disconnected essays from the book from time to time but it is only now that I am on a cover to cover voyage. It makes me think of everything else I read as overrated drivel. Page after page of Nehru's sparkling prose feels like somebody finally switched on the light bulb in a heart of darkness. There are so many things that he talks about and it is remarkable that the man possessed such an immensely ecumenical breadth of culture; something that one finds so lamentably lacking in even the most educated of Indians today.

love,

karthik

PM's statement

2008-07-22T08:43:00.001-07:00

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's Lok Sabha statement is up for viewing, which he chose not to read but submitted it to the speaker. It is fairly verbose and does contain some self-righteous rhetoric regarding the contributions of the Congress to India's route towards development. But the document itself begins with a trite bashing of the leader of the opposition, L. K. Advani that is especially delicious. That it comes from a man who is usually regarded as a taciturn statesman and who calls himself a 'Prime Minister by accident' makes it even more punchy:

As for Shri Advani’s various charges, I do not wish to waste the time of the House in rebutting them. All I can say is that before leveling charges of incompetence on others, Shri Advani should do some introspection. Can our nation forgive a Home Minister who slept when the terrorists were knocking at the doors of our Parliament? Can our nation forgive a person who single handedly provided the inspiration for the destruction of the Babri Masjid with all the terrible consequences that followed? To atone for his sins, he suddenly decided to visit Pakistan and there he discovered new virtues in Mr. Jinnah. Alas, his own party and his mentors in the RSS disowned him on this issue. Can our nation approve the conduct of a Home Minister who was sleeping while Gujarat was burning leading to the loss of thousands of innocent lives? Our friends in the Left Front should ponder over the company they are forced to keep because of miscalculations by their General Secretary.

The Dark Knight

2008-07-18T04:34:00.000-07:00

Caught the latest Batman flick first day-first show at PVR mulund and with the knowledge that it's a Nolan movie I had expected it to be good. But it was fantastic beyond belief. Let me make it simple - if you're a cinema fan with a slightly refined appetite that does not restrict itself to a particular genre, set of actor(s) or themes, go watch this one without fail! It shall be worth your money-that's my guarantee. For Batman fans I'd say get your ass in that theater as soon as you can.

For me, the movie has three heroes:

1. Heath Ledger as Joker- With due respect to the legendary Jack Nicholson, Ledger takes the cake by far with the last performance of his life. Ledger's Joker is sadistic, psychotic, disturbing and much more complex than Nicholson's. The scene between Joker and Two-face in the hospital in the latter half of the film is one of my favourites.

2. Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard for background music - This is one of the best background tracks I have heard in recent times (the other one being that of Philip Glass in Kundun). The violins kept playing in my head hours after the movie while I kept imagining how the experience would have been, if it were not for the music. The music has a constant sense of urgency to it along with a mood of impending chaos, breaking into a crescendo whenever Batman or Joker enters the scene giving it a flavour that is so much more different than the usual drab monotonic scores of most superhero films (That said, the Superman score remains one of my all time favourites :-) ).

3. Christopher Nolan as Director - This guy is the twenty-first century powerhouse packed with the talent of Hitchcock, Kubrick and Spielberg together. He proved himself with Memento and totally arrived with Batman Begins. His Prestige remains one of my favourite movies of all time. But with The Dark Knight, he leaves his contemporaries far behind in skill not only as a director but also as a master story-teller. The over-rated M. Night. Shyamalan does not even come close.
The performances of all the leads are extremely competent and for one thing, it is a direct result of the shaping of their characters by the writers (points to the Nolan brothers once again). Christian Bale as Batman is good (albeit the look of his lips when he tries to get the Batman intonations working is definitely funny), Gary Oldman is restrained and good as Lieutenant James Gordon, Aaron Eckhart is fantastic as Harvey Dent/Twoface and Maggie Gyllenhaal makes for a good Rachel Dawes though I wish Katie Holmes were around. Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman are at their usual best. Though Heath Ledger outruns all of them by miles by being more than top-notch as Joker.

The film gets what it deserves from the cinematography front. The aerial shots of Gotham city and the action scenes are breath taking. On the flip side, the movie could have been a little shorter but no one's really complaining :-). There's definitely gonna be second viewing from my side sometime next week!

Back to business

2008-07-16T00:11:00.000-07:00

After what was without doubt the best vacation of my life, I am back to my burrow with the sense of urgency reaching out to me- tentacles and clamps. Some unfinished business remains on the thesis front with regards to submitting a journal paper which I have absolutely no interest to work on. Amma smiles me with ladles and tongs in her hands reminding me of my utter lack of dedication when it comes to learning some cooking. I reply with the words "Sandwiches, salads and flavoured yoghurt." She responds sharply, "Proteins?"

My google reader has clocked 1457 unread posts. With one stroke of exasperation, I marked all of them as "read" and unsubscribed myself from quite a few pages. There are too many people around with too much to pontificate about and something in my head reminds me that I'm tired.

I realized that my flight to Boston allows only 23x2 kgs on board. Apart from the utensils and the cornucopia of masalas and other condiments that my mother has already made reservations for, I get a feeling I am going to find place for very few books. Despite being told that the first semester at MIT will allow no leisure for divergent reading I was hoping to carry some books that have been breathing dust in my library for ages. I have finally decided to do whatever it takes to carry the following books. Suggestions for additions and editions are invited though there is a polite possibility the latter might fall into deaf ears :-). Generous donations in the US will be welcomed with folded hands and might be rewarded with fine dining ;).

1. Discovery of India and Glimpses of World History - Jawaharlal Nehru. Both magnum opuses of immense scholarship. I have read both in parts over the last four years but something in me makes me think I would say the same thing four years hence too.

2. GEB- The Eternal Golden Braid - Douglas Hofstadter- Elezier Yudkowsky had recently remarked in Overcoming Bias that a person who has not read this book is incomplete as a human being. Taking that more as a compliment for this wonderful book than anything else (there is no shortage of such rhetoric in the internet these days :P ), I shall first admit that I am still incomplete as a human but shall strive hard to get there from now ;).

3. History of World Philosophy - Bertrand Russell- Once again, a magnum opus by one of the most fertile minds of this century. Haven't read much of the book except the chapters on Spinoza and Kant.

4. The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass- Have a vintage copy of this book but unfortunately never got down to reading it.

5. Collected Short Stories- Jorge Luis Borges- The master postmodernist fiction writer. For any of you who don't have a copy of this book, I highly recommend this collection.

6-10 - Suggestions are welcome :-)

There is life...

2008-07-06T20:44:00.000-07:00

elsewhere. But there are no stories one can fall asleep to.

The porticoes where we hid and sought are now a charred legacy. Our secret inscriptions have long dissolved and are now polishing stones on river-beds. Light rays and bandicoots enter and emerge unscathed from that heartless house.

Time refuses to budge. Some compromise. Some life.

Apologies

2008-07-06T07:23:00.000-07:00

I have not stopped blogging (for better or for worse) :-).

In the middle of a family vacation, I have just managed to find an efficient internet connection in Haridwar and thus, am able to slip this post in. I was pleasantly surprised to find a couple of mails in my inbox demanding an explanation for temporary dormancy on this blog page.

I know that my readership is still a very modest number and mostly comprises of close friends and some good Samaritans. Also, with the advent of the wonderful Google Reader, I thought it would be unnecessary (and lame) to wave hands and publicize my departure. Nevertheless, I extend sincere apologies to the handful who missed me and paid fruitless visits to this page. With folded hands, I shall also gently recommend the use of GReader.

For the record, I was hibernating the past few summer days in Auli, a ski-resort up north of India. Six days and six nights at Clifftop Club were extremely comfortable, indulgent and rejuvenating. Apart from long solitary walks on endless grasslands amidst the friendly society of cows, sheep, mules, sheepdogs and mountain peoples, I managed to catch up with cricket, Wimbledon and some awesomely kitschy hindi movies (Read Beta, Judwaa, Aflatoon et al).

I read Heart of Darkness once again. Can't say it was an easy read, but this time around, the imagery seemed a lot less alien than when it was confronted in the confines of concrete walls. Conrad was followed by the long procrastinated but fantastic City of Djinns by William Dalrymple. The book, in a nutshell, is about the city of Delhi. The author narrates the story of Delhi through the lives of its creators and inheritors through the annals of history. There is some fantastic early British, Mughal and Pre-mughal history in the book.

Dalrymple was followed by Richard Dawkins' collection of essays, A Devil's Chaplain. I somehow can never get enough of Dawkins! For those who don't want to go through the prolixity of his other books (The Selfish Gene, The God Delusion, Unweaving the Rainbow, Climbing Mount Improbable), the book makes for a great read. Especially heartening to read is Dawkins' eulogies for Douglas Adams, William Hamilton (the famous British evolutionary biologist) and Stephen Jay Gould (the famous american evolutionary biologist, popularly seen as Dawkins' academic nemesis).

I didn't know if I was ready for non-standard fiction just yet :). But binging on non-fiction called for a brief respite and I re-read Summer Lightning and Heavy Weather. Wodehouse is indisputably the best comic writer ever.

Following a friend's recommendation, I have finally gotten down to reading Jeanette Winterson. I had paid a visit to Odyssey the day before the start of my trip and picked up the only available book- The Stone Gods. I'm liking whatever I'm reading right now and I shall hopefully post about it later.

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I shall be in Delhi for the next two days catching and will hopefully get to spend a day in the National museum. From the day I read about their repository of the Indus Valley relics, I have been longing to get there. Wednesday, I catch an early morning flight to Leh for a 5 day sojourn with a few close friends.

It will be another week/ten days before the revival :-) Adios!

Amitav Ghosh's latest book and The Great Gatsby

2008-06-18T23:11:00.000-07:00

Amitav Ghosh, for all my money, is one of the finest authors in India today. I have found both his fictional and non-fictional works outstandingly perceptive of anthropological issues and what makes them special is Ghosh's deep compassion for the human condition- a rare quality these days especially when most authors are preoccupied with brandishing their opinions missing out on the delight of communicating experience without judgment.

I haven't read his latest book, The Sea of Poppies, but I plan to read it sometime soon. I came across this (rather long but nonetheless interesting) interview of Amitav Ghosh by a refreshingly perceptive and intelligent interviewer. While much of their discussion is about themes and techniques in The Sea of Poppies, the author also talks about the ideas that influence and inspire his writing. The latter part of the conversation begins at the use of language in the book and how the medium of expression itself can become a theme in the narrative. Ghosh shares some fantastic history on word origins that is worth reading:

Which is why I feel that if me, and other Asian writers, if we are going to write in this language at all, then we must reclaim for it what it historically had. When an English newspaper says about our writing that these guys are bringing all these new words into the language, it’s nonsense – those words have been there for centuries!

Some colourful swear words were in the dictionary too. Let me tell you about something interesting I came across in the lascari dictionary written by Lt Thomas Roebuck, in 1812. When he lists the words of commands...have you ever heard the word “habes” (pronounced hab-iz)?No. In lascari, when you wanted to tell a sailor to pull, or heave, the translation that Roebuck provides is “habes”. I’m not sure what the root is, but it was a very common command.

So he provides this word and then adds in brackets, “Sometimes it may be necessary to include a few words of abuse, for example ‘bahenchod, habes!’ Or ‘saale, habes!’”We have somehow become very embarrassed about these things today. I hope I’m not offending you, but the word “beti-chod” (daughter-fucker) has been used going back to the 17th century, in English as well.

A preceding post in the blog actually discusses some interesting linguistic gymnastics that Ghosh indulges in, in the book.

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I just finished reading The Great Gatsby. The book is one of the earliest 'American novels' and to say that it is a fantastic read would be an understatement. Indians (from time to time) like to indulge in coffee-table criticism of the wanton materialism that has forever prevailed in the west while being happily oblivious (or indifferent) to the rising tide of extravagance that carries us all. In that, F. Scott. Fitzgerald was one of the earliest critics of the materialism and economic opulence that followed the first World War in America.

There is a difference between scholarly criticism and haranguing. The former stimulates the reader to evolve as a thinker rather than blindly marry to the ideas that any good writer would be able to weave into a convincing prose. Both Fitzgerald and Amitav Ghosh belong to the former category of intellectuals; in writing, they acknowledge the difficulty of translating experience into ideology. Personally, this limitation is the strongest case in point for the necessity of fiction in our lives. It is in this exploration that the seed of imagination germinates and it is important to experience it rather than be instructed by it.

Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

Indus Valley

2008-06-17T09:59:00.000-07:00

The debate as to whether the Indus Valley civilization was a progenitor to the Hindu culture and tradition has been an area that has been intensely pursued by the BJP/VHP brigade in recent times. While this issue is yet to assume proportions comparable to the Ayodhya and the Ram Setu propagandas, it is noteworthy as a case in point of how political vested interests corrupt debates that ought to be resolved through simple falsifiable evidence. Thank god that the sites lie in Pakistan for I wouldn't have been surprised to find shiva lingas mushrooming from the excavation site with Hindu groups striking vehement claims to the hallowed land of their ancestors.

A very interesting article that was linked from another blog reviews the various theories that attempt to explain the collapse of the Indus Valley civilization. As to whether that remarkably advanced civilization finally evolved (or should I say degenerated) into the later Hindu civilization- the people who gradually drifted eastwards, to settle on the Gangetic plains or whether it was annihilated by Aryan invaders (as an excavator of the name Wheeler had suggested in the 1940s) who brought the Vedic culture with them is an issue that remains to be resolved. But the extent to which bigoted vested interests constantly supress true scholarship is evident from the following passage from the essay:

Did the Indus directly seed what eventually grew into the second wave of Indian civilization? That is a hot political as well as scholarly topic. "This plays a significant role in today's India," says Possehl. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which ruled India from 1998 to 2004, declared the Indus to be the progenitor of Hindu civilization, a controversial claim in a country with a large Muslim population. While in power, BJP pumped additional funding into Indus-related digs, and its influence over archaeological matters remains strong. Last fall, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) was harshly criticized in Parliament for asserting in a report that the underwater ridge connecting India and Sri Lanka was natural rather than the remains of a bridge built by the traditional hero Rama. Under pressure, ASI suspended two senior employees involved in the report. In May, members of India's Supreme Court expressed sympathy for a lower court decision ordering ASI to investigate the formation.

Such are the reasons why most of the advances in the historical understanding of this subject have been made by Western academicians and not researchers from the subcontinent. A disgusting case of falsification of evidence to buttress the Hindutva-mediated hypothesis has been documented in The Argumentative Indian. Despite much contrary evidence, the Hindu camp has constantly asserted with absurd confidence that the Indus Valley civilization was Sanskritic in nature. Two Indian researchers, N. S. Rajaram and Natwar Jha published a book in where they claimed to have deciphered the 'hitherto-undeciphered' script of the Indus Valley civilization. They attributed the script to 4000 BC (which was nearly a thousand years before what had been established earlier) but also claimed that the tablets found referred to the Saraswati river mentioned in the Rigveda. They produced a seal with a picture of a horse on it, which was amply forwarded as 'indisputable' proof of the Vedic/Aryan identity of the Indus Valley civilization.

It was later found that the alleged horse-seal was a fake, the credit of its creation going to Hindutva activists. Researchers from Harvard University demonstrated the fraud beyond reasonable doubt. But as Sen says, even the demonstration was not enough to end references in school textbooks to the 'Indus-Saraswati civilization'.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics

2008-06-17T04:48:00.000-07:00

If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations- then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations.If it is found to be contradicted by observation - well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

-Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1928)

Damn those puritans

2008-06-15T09:26:00.000-07:00

William Dalrymple writes about the retrogressive fate of sexuality in the Indian culture through the ages in this highly informative article.

As McConnachie makes clear, the Kamasutra was in many ways an act of resistance against the growing tide of Hindu and Buddhist ascetic puritanism that was beginning to question the libertine lifestyle of the third-century nagarikas—or young men about town—at whom the text was aimed. These polygamous and hedonistic nagarikas sound a little like characters from a classical Indian version of Sex and the City. They "incline to the ways of the world and regard playing as their only concern," writes Vatsyayana. Such a man, he writes, chooses to live in a city "where there are smart people" or "wherever he has to stay to make a living." He sets up the perfect home, "in a house near water, with an orchard, separate servants quarters, and two bedrooms." One is for sleeping. The other is devoted entirely to sex. Inside he keeps his vina to strum, implements for drawing, a book, garlands of flowers, a board for
dice, and cages of pet birds. His bed should be "low in the middle and very soft, with pillows on both sides and a white top sheet." His orchard should have a sturdy swing.

In the early evening the nagarika should attend a courtesan's salon, to discuss art, poetry, and women. Later he should visit a musical soiree before returning home to await his lover. If she arrives wet from the monsoon rain he should courteously help her change, before retiring to the frescoed bedchamber which has been festooned with flowers and made fragrant with incense. Dancers and singers will amuse the lovers as they chat and flirt. Only then are the musicians sent away—and the lovemaking begins.

free speech

2008-06-10T12:42:00.000-07:00

The state of free speech in India, if I may be so optimistic to use the very term, has always been of concern to me. The the current populist spirit of 'better fed than free' makes sense when you speak of the imminent priorities of the country, but I believe (and hope) that there will be some time in the future when the right to expression would be more intensely promoted in the public sphere than what is being done today.

The episodes of Taslima Nasreen, MF Hussain and Kumar Ketkar have shown glimpses of the extent to which certain groups can oppose free speech to promote self-interests. It is also pathetic to see how the higher judiciary in India still refuses to come under the purview of the RTI, in spite of much support for the motion among the Indian intelligentsia. The smug unwillingness to show transparency is an abomination, especially after reports of many judges indulging in extravagant misuse of the state funds have pointed fingers at the judiciary. Another deplorable example showing the extent to which legal mechanisms can be misused to protect vested interests is that of the Ahmedabad police commissioner filing charges of sedition (not defamation, mind you) against the TOI for publishing reports that questioned his competency in providing anti-terrorist security to the Gujarat citizens. See Jug Suraiya's article about the dubious nature of a concept like sedition itself, and its recent appearances (and its misappropriations) in political rhetoric.

A passing note

2008-06-08T00:11:00.001-07:00

With my masters dissertation approved, the last of my IIT duties have been dispensed. The next few days involve actively avoiding the computer and indulging myself to irresistible Bombay monsoons. The air outside my room is amazingly fresh and inviting; I want to indulge as much as I can.

I have decided not to subscribe to TOI anymore on Google reader, because it is an ordeal to go through every irrelevant and stupid news piece that it sends you. Check out this and this.

Karma

2008-06-05T06:21:00.001-07:00

Amit Varma has cited two passages, one by Gandhi in 1934 and the other a recorded quote by Sharon Stone recently, where both describe earthquakes as cosmic punishments meted out to sinful humans. I was reminded of an interesting piece from Sam Harris's An Atheist Manifesto:

As Hurricane Katrina was devouring New Orleans, nearly a thousand Shiite pilgrims were trampled to death on a bridge in Iraq. There can be no doubt that these pilgrims believed mightily in the God of the Koran: Their lives were organized around the indisputable fact of his existence; their women walked veiled before him; their men regularly murdered one another over rival interpretations of his word. It would be remarkable if a single survivor of this tragedy lost his faith. More likely, the survivors imagine that they were spared through God‘s grace.

Only the atheist recognizes the boundless narcissism and self-deceit of the saved. Only the atheist realizes how morally objectionable it is for survivors of a catastrophe to believe themselves spared by a loving God while this same God drowned infants in their cribs. Because he refuses to cloak the reality of the world‘s suffering in a cloying fantasy of eternal life, the atheist feels in his bones just how precious life is--and, indeed, how unfortunate it is that millions of human beings suffer the most harrowing abridgments of their happiness for no good reason at all.

When I heard the learn'd astronomer

2008-06-03T11:09:00.000-07:00

(A poem that I don't agree with but whose spirit of naked rebellion of order I find difficult not to admire)

When I heard the learn'd astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and
measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much
applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

- Walt Whitman

Jai Jai Money

2008-06-03T09:10:00.000-07:00

Taking inspiration from Tirupati, it seems now that even the Vaishno Devi shrine authorities have adopted the concept of 'priority darshans'.

The decision to organise paid darshans was taken by the Vaishno Devi Shrine Board on Sunday. Now a traditional mata ki aarti can be organised inside the sanctum sanctorum at Rs 1000. And those who are unwilling to wait in long queue can enter the shrine by paying an entry fee of Rs 500 or Rs 200. This reduces the darshan time by over 50 to 70 per cent.

"The facility is like a tatkal service for devotees who have tight schedules and are keen to offer prayers at the earliest," M K Dwivedi, Additional Chief Executive Officer, told PTI.

In the age of Blackberries and palms, it is only fair that Gods have their schedules optimized. Darshan has become like an FMCG, and John Milton, unless his remains have long vapourized, would definitely be turning in his grave.

That murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts. Who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed,
And post o'er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait."

A Free Man's Worship

2008-06-02T13:40:00.000-07:00

The Dawkinsque critique against theism is primarily occupied with countering literalist claims to the nature of reality and the universe presented by religious institutions and hence is considered atomistic and reductivist by many critics. Stephen Fry states in an interview that such a world view (referring to Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens) is devoid of the poetic liturgy that the believer can identify with in her copy of the King James Bible or the Bhagavad Gita. While literalism of any kind reflects a deeply entrenched delusion that needs to be uprooted through systematic reasoning, atheist rhetoric needs to traverse beyond the present counter-argumentative nature that merely confines itself to scientific diatribe against Intelligent Design.

Sam Harris says in his manifesto that "atheism is not a philosophy or a view of the world". I disagree with him when he says that it is simply a "refusal to deny the obvious". In the present format, atheism probably isn't a philosophy. But I believe it needs to strive towards being one. Religion finds staunch adherents, not because it offers a particularly appealing picture of the universe or nature, but because it pretends to offer transcendence to its followers. It appeals to the human condition in a way that one finds liberating from the instincts and desires that bind one to one's earthly existence. Religion took the easy way out because the quest for its perpetuation was always a quest for power. Through deceit and cunning, through the continual inculcation of fear and prejudice, by tabooing and chastising the spirit of inquiry, religion ensured its propagation through the ages. In its most iniquitous forms around the world, it persecuted the powerless, trapped others mentally causing them to turn a blind eye towards the suffering of their brethren and caused a systematic degeneration of a large part of society (which continues) ensuring that the parochial walls of fear and dogma-based faith make it impervious to reason and the nobler ideals of humanism.

Hence, if a rational and a liberal atheism has to triumph, it has to be integrated with a larger and a more universal world view that moves beyond merely debating the existence of a God. It has to strive to achieve those ideals for the individual and society which religion only pretended to achieve all these years. It has to convince man that the world holds in its bosom, a vast potential to the achievement of transcendental ideals, those that elevate his pursuits above and beyond the realms of his appetite.

I give you two excerpts from an essay by Bertrand Russell. It was one of his first essays arguing the case for atheism. While Dawkins, Harris and even other texts by Russell have convinced me of the intellectual, ethical and moral rectitude of being an atheist, this is perhaps the only essay upon reading which, I have felt truly inspired to proclaim that I do not require any God to lead a life that can extend beyond personal goals and ambitions.

1. Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins--all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.

2. The life of Man, viewed outwardly, is but a small thing in comparison with the forces of Nature. The slave is doomed to worship Time and Fate and Death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour. But, great as they are, to think of them greatly, to feel their passionless splendour, is greater still. And such thought makes us free men; we no longer bow before the inevitable in Oriental subjection, but we absorb it, and make it a part of ourselves. To abandon the struggle for private happiness, to expel all eagerness of temporary desire, to burn with passion for eternal things--this is emancipation, and this is the free man's worship. And this liberation is effected by a contemplation of Fate; for Fate itself is subdued by the mind which leaves nothing to be purged by the purifying fire of Time.

Single mothers, Gay and Lesbian couples win right to parenthood

2008-06-02T03:22:00.000-07:00

In a landmark resolution in UK, single women and lesbian couples have been granted parental rights. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill waives the requirement that women need a male support in order to approach a fertility clinic. It is also expected (and naturally correct) that gay men who use surrogacy will be allowed to enjoy similar rights. It is said that the Bill will also recognize both partners as legitimate parents of the child as opposed to considering only the natural mother or the father involved in fertilization.

Understandably, there are dissenters. And it is no surprise to notice which ideological camp most of them come from. The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster thinks it strange that the Government should want to take away not just the need for a father but the right for a father. Others disapprove stating that this would amount to conveying that fathers are not important, or are less important than mothers.

Such detracting criticism reflects the nature of the deeply entrenched patriarchy and religious literalism that plagues even fairly progressive societies. If the well being of every British child is what truly concerned these dissenters, then why isn't there a proposal to make every couple desirous of parenthood pass through a socioeconomic filter that would decide whether they are capable of raising a child in the first place? Does the presence of a father implicitly assure a good childhood as the Archbishop seems to suggest? Consider the first two comments following the news post:

1. Incredible. A male child growing up without a fatherly influence, will not get to know the behaviour of a mature man , like a father . Male childs will be weak if they get raised up by women only and when these humans grow up to their their twenties, they ll act more like a mother than a father.

2. And we wonder why society is breaking down, why young men who have no father figure knife each other. Get a grip NuLabor, your time is up.

I fear with the very thought of being around at a time in the future when these issues would be discussed in India; when these voices, reeking of the past and a lack of imagination, would be lurking around only to emerge from different faces.

Classical Misrepresentations

2008-05-29T11:04:00.000-07:00

Some years ago, when I was reading The Sign of Four, I recollect having been particularly disturbed by the description of the little dart-welding, dark skinned, deceptive Indian native that the villain, Jonathon Small, smuggles from the Andamans to carry out his nefarious plans in England. It was representative of a particular brand of racial stereotyping that was rampant in the writings of classic authors like Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling. Consider, for instance, this line from the Sherlock Holmes' mystery describing 'Tonga', the perfidious, snake-like havoc wreaking uncontrollable pygmy of an Indian:

"It was that little hell-hound; Tonga, who shot one of his cursed darts into him. I had no part in it, sir. I was as grieved as if it had been my blood-relation. I welted the little devil with the slack end of the rope for it, but it was done, and I could not undo it again."

Some would say that such a characterization should not be used to read too far into the author's mind and if anything, should be written off as a peccadillo subsumed under the larger umbrella of artistic freedom. Nonetheless, it is surprising how deeply progressive writers such as Doyle (someone who was singularly responsible for popularizing the methods of science and deductive reasoning) had a part of their minds that still lived in the past. And this was a time when the moral Zeitgeist was undergoing rapid progressive transformation, thanks to philosophers and visionaries in the West. This was a time when slavery had long ended in America, a time when feminism was already a significant social force in Europe, a time when philosophers like T. H. Huxley and John Stuart Mill had broke open conservative traditions through critical reasoning. Three years after the publication of The Sign of Four, Swami Vivekananda's speech at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago would be greeted by a thunderous applause by a prominently white audience.

But my thoughts in this vein were rekindled today, not by Conan Doyle's works, (which in spite of being masterful are filled with such racial innuendos) but by one of the most innocuous of authors in the English literature- the master comedian P. G. Wodehouse. While most of us fancy Wodehouse as light reading, I read Wodehouse carefully for I find his wit unparalleled and worthy of emulation. At the same time, his writing is pregnant with incredible perception and satirical irreverence of English orthodoxy. Dawkins' tells us how Wodehouse's writings were filled with extremely smart and appropriate biblical allusions (See The God Delusion):

P G Wodehouse is, for my money, the greatest writer of light comedy in the language, and I bet fully half my list of biblical phrases will be found as allusions within his pages. (A Google search will not find all of them, however. It will miss the derivation of the short story title, 'The Aunt and the Sluggard' from Proverbs 6: 6.) The Wodehouse canon is rich in other biblical phrases, not in my list above and not incorporated into the language as idioms or proverbs. Listen to Bertie Wooster's evocation of what it is like to wake up with a bad hangover:

I had been dreaming that some bounder was driving spikes through my head — not just ordinary spikes, as used by Jael the wife of Heber, but red-hot ones.

Coming back to what whetted my appetite to write a post was a growing consternation at regular negative allusions to the 'tropics' and the 'natives of the subcontinent' in Wodehouse's classic bestseller, Life at Blandings. In an otherwise hilarious racket of a series, these instances seemed like bad notes spoiling a well-woven melody. The first instance that I quote is from Summer Lightning(1929), when Millicent discusses Schopenhauer with Sue Brown, who is posing as Miss Schoonmaker in Blandings Castle.

Schopenhauer says suicide's absolutely O. K. He says Hindoos do it instead of going to church. They bung themselves into the Ganges and get eaten by crocodiles and call it a well-spent day.

For all his mystical infatuations with the wisdom of the east, I am pretty certain that Arthur Schopenhauer would not have made a statement that even suggested a practice similar to that described above. But while The Sign of Four was published in 1890, Summer Lightning was published much later in 1929, sixteen years after Rabindranath Tagore had won the Nobel Prize in Literature and ten years after Srinivasa Ramanujan had left Wodehouse's country after one of the most successful collaborations in the history of mathematics with England's most famous mathematician then. In less than a year's time, India would have its first Nobel laureate in Physics - C. V. Raman. Gandhi was already world-famous and highly respected in England. Yet, Wodehouse's representation of India is reminiscent of the arrogant Maculay and James Mill (who is said to have written the first 'authoritative' history of India) as opposed to the likes of his own contemporary writers like E. M. Forster. As an other example, consider the following statement of Colonel Horace in Something Fresh(1915) when he speculates what must be wrong with Rupert Baxter's disposition:

It's a well known form of insanity. Paranoia- isn't that what they call it? Rush of blood to the head, followed by a general running amuck. I've heard fellows who have been in India talk of it. Natives get it. Don't know what they're doing, and charge through the streets taking cracks at people with dashed whacking great knives.

I was surprised to find not two but five or six instances throughout the Life of Blandings where the tropics were used with great dexterity and with to make fantastic allusions to degrees of madness and insanity that can manifest themselves in humans. I was far from outraged when I read these things :-). However, they invariably led me to reflect upon the biases that writers carry in spite of not wanting to be labeled as such. My only take-home from this is that in the process of being funny and witty, one just ends up being squarely obnoxious and unjust to a largely heterodoxical culture, worthy of kinder words. Such misrepresentation is more of an indicative verdict on the intellectual limitations of the author as compared to being defamatory on the an entire culture/community. I still stand by my love for Wodehouse and Conan Doyle - they are to me, the greatest comedy and mystery writers respectively and absolute masters of the English language. No reader can miss the feeling of a rejuvenated ability to write and speak after reading a single chapter of any book by either of them. But a writer must exercise caution; it is easy to get carried away forgetting that there is a thin red line separating satire and stupidity.

Conundrums

2008-05-29T03:32:00.000-07:00

I made an honest confession to myself yesterday- I suck at math puzzles. Unless the puzzle has a familiar character, attacking the conundrum is to feel like a monkey trying to pluck a banana using two long wooden sticks. To begin with, he feels confident and sophisticated thanks to the impeccable machinery in possession- sticks and opposable thumbs. But he soon realizes that neither of the sticks is long enough to reach the banana and finds himself unable to conjure a successful contraption with the tools at hand. Incapacity turns into frustration and the monkey begins to gnaw his teeth in exasperation. And finally, he ends up doing what he always wanted to avoid- break the entire creeper with his might for that one measly banana. That's the (similar) feeling that this monkey gets when all intuition fails and one has to resort to the savage way of doing puzzles. And when out pops an elegant solution from a smarter friend or the answers on the back of the book or the bottom of the page, one feels really really stupid.

I spent a nearly half an hour trying to write down the solution to a pretty looking problem that was suggested by Onkar yesterday morning- Given any group of 6 people, prove that you can always find a sub-group of three individuals that has one of the following properties - (a) Everybody knows everybody in that group (b) Nobody knows anybody in that group. (Also, assume that only two kinds of relationships exist between a pair of individuals- they either know each other or they don't; eliminating one-sided acquaintances). I have this infatuation with generalization. Naturally I started playing with variables, started writing comprehensive combinatorial possibilities, applying PHP and doing all sorts of tortuous things that only made life more difficult. Ultimately, I arrived at a solution that I knew was far from elegant as soon as I had finished it. A complicated solution is worth the effort if it leads to new insights about the problem- (say) like what should be the minimum number of people to make the same statement about groups of four, five, etc. But my solution was a mess; brute, lacking any new insight and boring.

But I still felt the relief of solving a problem; or to rephrase, this was how I felt until I heard the solution from Onkar, after which I felt incredibly stupid, like a monkey who's outsmarted by a smarter monkey in the banana game. The elegant solution proceeds like this. Imagine you are one of those five people. Then (convince yourself) that there will be (at least) three people, all of whom are either your acquaintances or completely unfamiliar. Assume without loss of generality that it is the former case (for if it is the latter, the arguments are completely analogous). Now among the three people who are your acquaintances, if you can find two persons who know each other then, combined with you, we have a group of three individuals, all acquaintances of each other. If this does not happen, then we have three individuals, all strangers and we have the required set. Complementary arguments apply if the original set of three are complete strangers to you and it can be trivially seen that one can always find a set of three individuals satisfying either of the two properties required. Incidentally, one needs a minimum of seventeen people (I haven't checked this yet) to be assured of having a sub group of four individuals who are all acquaintances or complete strangers.

Well, I have reconciled myself to this fate of mine- I suck at math puzzles. However, there have been a handful of times when I have felt the bulb glow in my head while working on a puzzle/problem and those times have been memorable. But the great thing about these puzzles even to someone who is fairly mediocre at solving them like me is that solutions often contain brilliant insights that stretch your intuition. In spite of possessing fairly competent analytical skills, people often get their intuition wrong with these puzzles. The best examples come from those involving probabilistic reasoning involving variable change (or conditional probability). I shall quote two examples:

1. The first is the often mentioned Monty Hall Problem or The Game Show Host problem- You are playing a game show where the host shows you three shut doors (A, B, C) and asks you to select one. In one out of the three doors lies the sports car of your dreams while inside the other two, sits a goat each. You select 'door A' because your mother's name starts with the letter 'A' and you think that will bring you luck. The host the opens door 'C' that contains a goat, and asks you, "Mr. K, so would you like to stick with door A or would you like to switch your choice?". The question is, what must you do to maximize the chances of winning the car? Stick or switch?

There used to be a show called 'Khulja Sim Sim' on television some years ago with the same format. And whenever confronted with above question, most people used to stick to their choices. There is a certain sense poetic justice, a moral high ground that people associate with following a set of ideals and that makes them avoid caprice. I am not aware of the statistics of the show but I won't be far from the truth if I claimed that two out of three people who would have stuck to their choices would have ended up with the goat. That's what simple probabilistic bookkeeping tells us. Though I cannot remember the exact details, I think I was properly bowled by this question when I had heard it first as a kid. It is very likely I would have felt that the prudent (and moral) thing to do is to stick to your choice.

Now that I know the solution to the problem (if you switch, you are likely to win the car 2 out of 3 times), I know what was wrong in my thinking so. But since the time I understood the problem, I have posed this question to many people and I have observed that it shocks most of them. It was just yesterday when I communicated the problem and explained its solution to an acquaintance and while he acknowledged the solution he kept wondering that there was some 'deep mathematical flaw' in the reasoning. It is not surprising that when Marilyn vos Savant posed the problem and the solution in 1984, many people, including PhD graduates and professors disagreed with her solution. In spite of the fact that the mathematical reasoning was as clean as a virgin's honeypot (and not terribly difficult either, one had to simply account for the conditional probability) vos Savant arguments had to be validated using computer simulations and mock trials in classrooms. I shall not bother writing down the solution here; it can be looked up online in hundreds of sites.

2. The other problem is called the double toss problem and is much more straightforward compared to the earlier one. The problem goes as this: I have tossed a coin (assume unbiased) twice and I tell you that one of the tosses turned out to be a head. I ask you the probability that the other toss was also a head.

Most respondents (primarily non-mathematicians) tend to answer half as the probability. Their reasoning is simple yet specious - since the tosses are independent why would the outcome of the other toss depend upon this one. While this is true in the literal sense, the context of the problem asks you to go a little deeper. To make a small digression, suppose I told you instead that my first toss was a head and asked you what is the probability that the second toss turned out to be a head. Many people cannot differentiate between this and the original problem. Yet they are fundamentally different.

Let us look at the set of possible outcomes of the two tosses - TT, TH, HT, HH, each with a probability 0.25 with H denoting 'head' and T denoting a 'tail'. Now when I say that 'one of the tosses turned out to be a head', this confines us to the sample space - TH, HT, HH. Now the only case where both the outcomes were a head is the case 'HH' but since it is one of three possible outcomes, the chance associated with it is 0.33. But when I say that 'the first outcome was a 'head'' as in the second case, the set of possible outcomes are - HT and HH. In this case, the probability is 0.5.

Interestingly, even this problem created a lot of controversy leading to lot of experimental validation in spite of a clean mathematical explanation. But the funny part is that the problem was not posed in this form in its original version. The original problem went something like this : You meet a person who confesses to having two children. If she tells you that one of them is a boy, what is the probability that the other one is too. Incidentally, survey forms were dispensed to mothers known to have two children of whom one was a boy to calculate the chance that the other one was too. The survey results showed that 35 % of respondents had a second boy-child, a figure that is close to 33% than to 50%. But it is nonetheless funny that such an experimental validation had to be carried out to resolve a clean mathematical argument (assuming of course that the sex ratio was 1:1).

While I often despair my lack of the fast mathematical intuition to penetrate such simple yet confounding problems, I am happy to know that I can fairly easily grasp the arguments that explain these riddles. I refer to the feeling as 'enjoying artificially sweetened sour grapes' :P.

Article on Predatory growth in India

2008-05-27T06:42:00.000-07:00

The Economist recently speculated that the inflation rate could hit 10 percent, stated a CNN-IBN article that I came across yesterday. This is despite the fact that this year, India is all set to register a record growth rate. Those of us who commonly cite the Chinese model of economic growth might want to know that both India and China have suffered this paradoxical phenomenon- a high rate of growth going brothers-in-arms with increasing economic inequality among classes.

The problems of welfare and developmental economics are really deep and complex. Many (including me) cannot even get their dialectic parlance beyond commonalities like 'free-market economy', 'socialism', 'demand elasticity' or 'marginal utility'. And I couldn't disagree more with G. B. Shaw who insinuated that the economists were a group who if laid end-to-end, could not reach a conclusion. They are a set of people I have come to deeply respect for their ability and courage to articulate these problems so well. But I often wonder whether the ability to penetrate conventional wisdoms to disinter latent insights ever translates into good public policy.

I came across this article yesterday and it was one of the most deep and perceptive essays that I have read in recent times. Only after finishing the article did I find out that the author was an emeritus professor at JNU, Delhi (such thoroughness and erudition can come only from an academic) by the name of Amit Bhaduri. On the problem of China/India growth-inequality paradox, Bhaduri delineates:

A central fact stands out. Despite vast differences in the political systems of the two countries, the common factor has been increasing inequality accompanying higher growth. What is not usually realized is that the growth in output and in inequality are not two isolated phenomena. One frequently comes across the platitude that high growth will soon be trickling down to the poor, or that redistributive action by the state through fiscal measures could decrease inequality while keeping up the growth rate. These statements are comfortable but unworkable, because they miss the main characteristic of the growth process underway. This pattern of growth is propelled by a powerful reinforcing mechanism, which the economist Gunner Myrdal had once described as ‘cumulative causation’. The mechanism by which growing inequality drives growth, and growth fuels further inequality has its origin in two different factors, both related to some extent to globalisation.

I strongly recommend the article to anyone who, like me, has felt the paralysis from old cliches and the lack of fresh perspectives while discussing these issues. With the UPA brandishing the increasing growth rate as the natural panacea to all the socioeconomic inequalities that continue to affect nearly a quarter of our population, with evangelical platitudes like "high growth will soon be trickling down to the poor" being constantly mouthed, this article analyzes the apparent Indian economical dilemma- is product growth going to really solve the problems of inequality in India?

Bhaduri's critique of 'predatory growth' can be summarized by a quote forwarded to me by Anirudh Patil (who incidentally was responsible in leading me to this article) - Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell.

McCain can?

2008-05-26T08:37:00.000-07:00

An excerpt from an article describing Senator John McCain's health reports:

The doctors also said McCain has occasional momentary episodes of dizziness when he suddenly stands up, high cholesterol, blood in his urine from an enlarged prostate and kidney stones. Additionally, McCain had his most recent colonoscopy in April, when six benign polyps were removed.
He also suffers from degenerative arthritis in his joints from broken arms, legs and shoulders suffered when his plane crashed in Vietnam.
His medical records revealed that he takes simvastin to control his cholesterol, hydrochlorothiazide for kidney stone prevention, aspirin for blood clot prevention, Zyrtec for nasal allergies and a multiple vitamin tablet.

If McCain is elected (personally I hope he doesn't for I have reasons to fear the Republicans), he would become the oldest President in the history of the United States. Apart from what is mentioned above, the article stated that the Senator's history puts him at increased risk of skin cancer. He also recently underwent treatment for a 'minor skin cancer in his leg'.

But in true Monty Python style, the same article concludes:

However, McCain’s age is not a problem for voters, according to recent national polls. Now that the medical records are also in the open and do not reveal worrisome health conditions, he is more than ready to compete.

Inscrutable is our appetite for contradictions and absurdity!

Kaifi aur main

2008-05-26T02:45:00.000-07:00

He often finds himself in the society of things that leave him overawed and humbled. He can locate his position in many of these situations; a mute witness to an unconquerable, brilliant expression of art. And like Salieri, he curses God to have given him the longing but denied him the talent. All his vanity and hubris are uprooted mercilessly and flung beyond the horizons of his imagination. His identity thins beyond recognition and the only place he finds solace is in the gentle indifference of the world that has accommodated his mediocrity long before finding a place for him in its vast bosom. Nothing defeats a person like a beauty that he can sense but cannot conquer. Nothing makes him feel more human.

I saw a play in Urdu yesterday. On recollection, I cannot help but think that every moment of that play was pure gold and I am yearning to catch it once again. Bearing the yoke of an unfamiliar language was certainly a severe limitation, yet the feeling that I experienced was that of a wanderer who had fortuitously arrived into a foreign land where, despite the atrophy of language, he could understand the feelings of the native culture better than those of its own. The machinery of expression was more friendly and even without resorting to sophistication, it was pregnant with the inconceivable variety of human experience.

I am reminded of Jack Kerouac immortal lines (Source: On the road):

"..and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles.."

However I try, I can simply not get myself to write a part by part review of the play. It suddenly seems a task too formidable and it would be presumptuous of me to make a half-hearted attempt. I shall refrain.

2008-05-24T19:23:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, I read an article about a poor Kolhapur Dalit boy Sridhar Kamble, who, owing to his single minded dedication to astronomy, had landed a NASA scholarship. This news piece and the one in TOI were both really heartening to read; they made me happy with the thought that true scholarship paid off. This was rural India making a statement. The voice and will of the oppressed triumphs. The article mentioned the numerous hardships the boy's poor farmer father had to endure to make his son study. In spite of selling more than half of his land, the boy was short of meeting his travel expenses and I was satisfied to read that the state had intervened with a scholarship to fund his expenses.

But the words jumping the gun could not have been more ominous. The first CNN-IBN article that hit my face this morning was about the entire business of Sridhar going to NASA being a fake and a case of deceit and forgery. He probably did have a genuine interest in astronomy, but he had faked documents starting from his 10th marks to his correspondence with NASA, in order to get funds from the government. Unfortunately, this momentary lapse of the boy (who is all of seventeen and cannot be guilty of dreaming high) is going to extract a heavy price on his future career and education.

Selective abortion in nature

2008-05-24T10:47:00.000-07:00

A Danish researcher proposes an incredibly intriguing hypothesis - that the sex of the progeny is related to the stress levels experienced by the expecting mother during her pregnancy. Based on data collected from surveys that were administered to nearly 8000 expecting mothers between 1989 and 1992, the researcher arrived at a startling correlation- the more stressed a mother had been, the less chance she had of having given birth to a boy.

Most of us are statisticians enough to appreciate that correlation does not imply causality. However, the goal of scientific investigation is to look at possible causal structures that manifest themselves through final correlation. The investigator believes that if at all there is such a causal mechanism that directs the sex of the baby according to the stress experienced by its mother, the reasons are likely to be adaptive rather than pathological.

But all said and done, in spite of being a Darwinist at heart (not a social one though), I cannot say I am not surprised (even amused to an extent) when I read paragraphs such as these:

That is because the chances are that a daughter who reaches adulthood will find a mate and thus produce grandchildren. A son is a different matter. Healthy, strapping sons are likely to produce lots of grandchildren, by several women—or would have done in the hunter-gatherer societies in which most human evolution took place. Weak ones would be marginalized and maybe even killed in the cut and thrust of male competition. If a mother's stress adversely affects the development of her fetus (as it is likely to do) then selectively aborting boys, rather than wasting time and resources on bringing them to term, would make evolutionary sense. That, in turn, would explain why women in rich countries, who are less likely to suffer from hunger and disease, are more likely to give birth to sons.

- From The Economist

In so much as the contextual premises that such arguments are based upon, they seem perfectly reasonable. But there is still a part of me that feels something clinically lacking in these reasonings. A lazy disposition holds me back from thinking further in the present moment, so I'll leave it for the record.

Our sweetest songs

2008-05-24T09:50:00.000-07:00

We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

Yet, if we could scorn,
Hate and pride and fear,
If we were things born
Not to shed a tear,
I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.

- From To a skylark by Percy Shelley

jumping the gun?

2008-05-24T08:44:00.000-07:00

Being a part of my generation of Indians, there are sometimes when I feel lucky and gratified to find myself a witness to a propitious phase of rapid economic development in my city. That the scent of this 'progress' has not permeated beyond the urban epidermis into the rural landscape of my country will be of some concern in the near future, with buzzwords like 'inclusive growth' keeping the thinkers and planners busy.

But in an interesting NDTV article, a grad student questions whether these current metrics of growth are reasons to quote and be proud about. She doesn't get into developmental economics and analyze what these metrics really reflect; she is rather blunt in asking us Indians whether we have any reason to be proud about the direction our country is taking. It's not a crime to be 'confident' she says, but fears that this confidence is changing too quickly into arrogance in some quarters - arrogance, that neither has any basis in reality nor advances the interests of 'Brand India' in any way.

In the true spirit of Monty Python, we Indians like to always look on the bright side of life. When we have master campaigners in parties like the BJP, it isn't difficult for most to live under the delusion that India is 'shining':

For instance, if you challenge the idea of a rising India with the dogged optimists by pointing out the Gujarat genocide, you are immediately reminded that Gujarat is also one of the most industrially advanced and administratively efficient states in India. If you point to the fact that most of our engineering graduates are not employable you are immediately reminded that India still produces the highest number of engineering graduates in the world.

If you suggest that Indian democracy is so criminalised that it has killed good governance you are told that no other country sends a billion people to the ballot box. This is the new half-full approach to life but it tends to gloss over anything that points in the other direction and brands anyone who says so as a skeptic and a kill-joy.

I would still like to question the author's premise which made her conveniently assume the naive homogeneity of the Indian voice over these issues. But I cannot help but acknowledge the bitter truth in the following words, where she harpoons this ineluctable diatribe against a nation she believes is counting its chickens much too early referring to our collective dream of becoming a South-Asian superpower:

But a great power is fundamentally supposed to be able to positively influence events, something we can't do even in our own backyard at the moment. Afghanistan is a mess, Pakistan is losing control over itself, Bangladesh can't decide when to have elections, Nepal is in transition and Sri Lanka in civil war.

India has little or no control over events in its own neighbourhood, let alone projecting its power around the world. Besides even when the chance arose, India could not take a bold stand. It refused to condemn China on its actions in Tibet and it did business with the Burmese junta at the height of the crackdown on pro-democracy protests.

Anecdotes-IV

2008-05-23T09:19:00.000-07:00

Probably the last or the second-last in this series. The process is getting too monotonous :-). Following are some Albert Einstein stories.

10. Einstein, who fancied himself as a violinist, was rehearsing a Haydn string quartet. When he failed for the fourth time to get his entry in the second movement, the cellist looked up and said, "The problem with you, Albert, is that you simply can't count".

11. Einstein was attending a music salon in Germany before the second world war, with the violinist S. Suzuki. Two Japanese women played a German piece of music and a woman in the audience exclaimed: "How wonderful! It sounds so German!" Einstein responded: "Madam, people are all the same."

12. In 1946 a South African child, Tyffany Williams expressed in a letter her surprise that Einstein was still alive. He answered: "I have to apologize to you that I am still among the living.There will be a remedy for this, however."

13. An American women's organization protested Einstein's visit to America (1928) on political grounds. Einstein replied: "Never have I experienced from the fair sex such an energetic rejection of all my advances; if it *has* happened, it was never by so many at once."

Anecdotes - III

2008-05-23T05:05:00.000-07:00

7. Today's serving shall involve three stories of the extraordinary Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann (1903-1957)

The following problem can be solved either the easy way or the hard way. Two trains 200 miles apart are moving toward each other; each one is going at a speed of 50 miles per hour. A fly starting on the front of one of them flies back and forth between them at a rate of 75 miles per hour. It does this until the trains collide and crush the fly to death. What is the total distance the fly has flown? The fly actually hits each train an infinite number of times before it gets crushed, and one could solve the problem the hard way with pencil and paper by summing an infinite series of distances.

The easy way is as follows: Since the trains are 200 miles apart and each train is going 50 miles an hour, it takes 2 hours for the trains to collide. Therefore the fly was flying for two hours. Since the fly was flying at a rate of 75 miles per hour, the fly must have flown 150 miles. That's all there is to it.

When this problem was posed to John von Neumann, he immediately replied, "150 miles."

"It is very strange," said the poser, "but nearly everyone tries to sum the infinite series." "What do you mean, strange?" asked Von Neumann. "That's how I did it!"

8.

Student: "Er, excuse me, Professor von Neumann, could you please help me with a calculus problem?"

John: "Okay, sonny, if it's real quick -- I'm a busy man."

Student: "I'm having trouble with this integral.

John: "Let's have a look." (after a brief pause) "Alright, sonny, the answer's two-pi over 5."

Student: "I know that, sir, the answer's in the back -- I'm having trouble deriving it, though."

John: "Okay, let me see it again." (another pause) "The answer's two-pi over 5."

Student (frustrated): "Uh, sir, I _know_ the answer, I just don't see how to derive it."

John: "Whaddya want, sonny, I worked the problem in two different ways!"

9. Von Neumann (like our own Srinivasa Ramanujan) supposedly had the habit of simply writing answers to homework assignments on the board (the method of solution being, of course, obvious) when he was asked how to solve problems. One time one of his students tried to get more helpful information by asking if there was another way to solve the problem. Von Neumann looked blank for a moment, thought, and then answered, "Yes".

Anecdotes -II

2008-05-21T21:30:00.000-07:00

4. More Paul Erdős

a) On one occasion, Erdös met a mathematician and asked him where he was from. "Vancouver," the mathematician replied. "Oh, then you must know my good friend Elliot Mendelson," Erdös said.

The reply was "I am your good friend Elliot Mendelson."

b) He had the habbit of phoning fellow mathematicians over the whole world, no matter what time it was. He remembered the number of every mathematician, but did not know anybody's first name. The only person he called by his Christian name was Tom Trotter, whom he called Bill.

c) This one's definitely a fabricated urban legend, but what the hell :-). There was a storm with thunder and lightening. Little Paul Erdos was in bed, frightened and fretting and his mother couldn't calm him. Then, as mothers seem to instinctively do, she found the right words. "It's all right dear", she said, stroking his shiny head, "there's always a prime between n and 2n".

After that, little Paul drifted off into a blissful sleep.

5. This is a story that I remember reading in E. T. Bell's excellent book 'Men of Mathematics'

This story is about the number 2^67-1, the 67th Mersenne number (Numbers, Mersenne had claimed to be prime, which was proven to be non-prime in 1903 by Frank N. Cole (1861-1927). In the October meeting of the American Mathematical Society (AMS), Cole announced a talk "On the Factorisation of Large Numbers". He walked up to the blackboard without saying a word, calculated by hand the value of 2^67, carefully subtracted 1. Then he multiplied two numbers(which were 193707721 and 761838257287). Both results written on the blackboard were equal. Cole silently walked back to his seat, and this is said to be the first and only talk held during an AMS meeting where the audience applauded. There were no questions.

It took Cole about 3 years, each sunday, to find this factorisation, according to what he said.

6. The mathematician G. H. Hardy was to give a keynote speech at a conference. Asked for an advance summary, he said he would present a proof of the Rieman zeta hypothesis -- but they should keep it under their hats. When he arrived, though, he spoke on a much more prosaic topic. Afterwards the conference organizers asked why he said he'd talk about the theorem and then didn't. He replied this was his standard practice, just in case he was killed on the way to the conference.

It was part of his tactics against God - in that he thought God would not allow him to die on the sea trip, because then everyone would think that Hardy had solved this great theorem. Hardy had other anti-God tactics, including always taking an umbrella, and some grading or other boring work, with him to the cricket games. For an athiest Hardy certainly spent a lot of effort against God.

Apparently Hardy's ambitions were:

Prove the Riemann Hypothesis
Score the winning play in an important game of cricket
Murder Mussolini
Prove the non-existence of God

Anecdotes-I

2008-05-21T10:23:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Vaibhav Devanathan, I have a huge notepad file filled with wonderful anecdotes of scientists and mathematicians albeit in a very haphazard manner, with parts of text transposed from one part to another. To add to my travails, most anecdotes need to be set into prose too; many of them are just points exchanged in e-mails. Nevertheless, some of these anecdotes (or urban legends) are truly remarkable and I feel they are worth the effort of deciphering. But since the task is formidable, I am going to do it bit by bit; so this should be a 3-4 part series starting the current one.

1. A mathematician bought bread once a day from his local baker. The bread was supposed to weigh 1 kilo but afer a year of record keeping the mathematician found a nice normal distribution with mean 950 gr. He called the police and they told the baker to behave himself. One year later the mathematician reported to the police that the baker had not reformed. The police confronted the baker and he said "How could that dastardly math guy have known that we always gave him the largest loaf?

The mathematician then showed the police his record for this year which was again a bell shaped curve with max at 950 gr. but truncated on the left side. The mathematician was none other than Henri Poincare.

2. The Hungarain mathematician Paul Erdos, one of the most prolific mathematicians in history was always making jokes about how old he was. (He said, for example, that he is two and a half billion years old, because in his youth the age of the Earth was known to be two billion years and later was known to be 4.5 billion years.)

He observed one day that the audiences at his talks had been getting larger and larger, to the point where they filled halls so big that his old and feeble voice could not be heard. Erdos speculated as to the cause of this. "I think," he said, "it must be that everyone wants to be able to say "I remember Erdos; why, I even attended his last lecture!"

3. Paul Erdos had his own peculiar language. The following is the glossary of terms that he employed and what they actually meant.

Supreme Fascist = God (Also abbreviated as SF. A person who hides Erdös's socks, glasses, Hungarian passport and kept the best equations to himself)
straight from the book = beautiful, elegant proof (book of the SF)
boss = woman
slave = man
captured=married
liberated = divorced
recaptured= remarried
epsilon = child, or a little
to preach = to deliver a math lecture
to exist = to do math
to die = to stop doing math
trivial being = someone who does not do math
Joe (USSR) = for Joseph Stalin
Sam = USA
Sam and Joe show = international news
On the long wavelength = communist (red)
On the short wavelength = fascist (opposite of red)
noise = music
poison = alcohol
my brain is open = I am ready to do mathematics
when was it alive? = what kind of meat is that?

From the journal of misapplied anthropology

2008-05-21T00:53:00.001-07:00

This, is by far one of the best polemics against Creationism that I have read in recent times. Aah, I wish that I could imbibe some of this razor sharp wit and the skill to hit the nail on the head with precision! As usual, for people who don't want to read the entire thing, I shall leave some excerpts.

Two gentlemen, both with what one might term a mild delusion -- they are deeply involved with people who don't exist. Both spend a lot of money on this obsession. Both can recite, at length, the putative words, thoughts, and deeds of their fictional obsessions. Both have allowed the ideals expressed by these non-existent beings to shape their lives, and both proudly proclaim their allegience in a sect of followers. Despite this odd obsession, both men hold down jobs, have families, pay taxes, and commit no more than trivial crimes, such as jaywalking, or speeding, or ripping the tags off of mattresses. One of these men, though, has a serious problem -- he won't acknowledge the fictious nature of his fantasy friend. The other one has no such difficulty distinguishing between reality and fantasy.

Yet, in our society, the former is considered normal and healthy -- while the latter is, at best, a figure of mockery, at worst, a reviled outcast.
The former man, you see, is a 'Christian', and the fictious being he admires is called 'God'. The latter is a 'Trekker' and his fictional focus is called 'Mr. Spock'.

Given how unhealthy and destructive religious beliefs are, you would think fandom would be lauded and praised. No fan of Star Trek ever went to court to demand that warp drive theory be given 'equal time' with the theory of Relativity, as Creationists have done with Evolution. No matter how vicious the Internet flame wars between fans of Star Wars and Star Trek, no one has yet been burnt at the stake for heresy. Not even the most fanatical follower of Mr. Spock would voluntarily limit himself to sex once every seven years (if the opportunity for more frequent matings ever arose), yet thousands of followers of Jesus voluntarily suppress the most fundemental, basic, human urge for their entire lives. Some women even claim to be the BRIDES of this fictional being, living forever in an unconsummated relationship with a man who does not exist. Compared to that, two Trekkers getting married in Klingon garb is postively wholesome. At least the 'Klingons' will probably have sex at some point.

3. This one is my personal favourite:

Religion is needed to inspire men to do good deeds? If a man chooses pacifism because Yoda said that anger is the path to the dark side, rather than because Jesus told him to turn the other cheek, is he any less of a pacifist? Marcus Welby undoubtedly inspired many to become doctors;Perry Mason, many to become lawyers. The usefulness of incarnate ideals to serve as our guides and inspirations is beyond doubt -- but there is grave danger when we forget these incarnations are just the creations of other men.

Shāntatā! Court Chālu Āhe

2008-05-20T22:57:00.000-07:00

Where Abraham Lincoln emphatically proclaimed that "this nation shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth" more than a hundred and fifty years ago, interesting questions are being raised while debating the exact role of the judiciary in a democracy in 2008. Understandably, dissenters against the recent Californian lift of the ban on gay and lesbian marriages see the decision as "symptomatic of judicial activism that thwarts the will of the people and their elected representatives". This, I guess definitely raises a higher question, one that is often repeated during the course of history - Should the state machinery enact decisions that are against popular public opinion but which, according to it, are morally expedient? Or should it let the public zeitgeist take its own course? Interestingly, even the supporters of gay and lesbian marriages have "questioned the wisdom of the court intervening when public opinion is shifting toward support of gay marriage in any case".

See this op-ed article in Washington post for some interesting bits of history on the legacy of court rulings in America where the entire nation awakens to an inquitous social institution remembering "the principles of the Declaration of Independence which are guaranteed by the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment . . . that all human beings have equal rights . . . and that the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness is inalienable".

So is such judicial intervention a blessing or a curse to the positively evolving moral zeitgeist in a modern democracy? The author succintly concludes:

So was last week's ruling an impetus or impediment to that process? My hunch is that by basing the case for the right to intra-gender marriage so clearly and forcefully on the doctrine of equal rights, the court situated gay marriage not only in an established body of law but also within the essential definition of America. Opposition to gay marriage is most commonly rooted in tradition, religious tradition in particular. But the ideas that all men are created equal and have an inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness are the traditions that define our nation, and by basing its decision on those premises the court did gay rights, and American ideals, a huge service.

As to what the vanguards of our judicial system have been upto, this CNN-IBN article makes some timely revelations :P

2008-05-19T10:44:00.000-07:00

I spent the last two hours reading about this remarkable man who is confronting the worst form of iniquity in our country currently. Thanks to a recent post on a friend's blog, I learned about Dr. Binayak Sen, a public health specialist of international repute and the national vice-president of the People's Union of Civil Liberties (PUCL) , Chhattisgarh. Dr. Sen was arrested in May 2007 for alleged links with Maoist groups under the CSPSA and UAPA provisions, that allow for arbitrary detention denying the right to appeal. Dr. Sen had been actively involved in criticizing the unlawful encounter killings of several adivasis in the state through government controlled civil militia under the pretext of eliminating Naxal activities. The following statement was issued by Dr. Sen a few months before his arrest:

we are seeing all over India - and as part of that in the state of Chhattisgarh as well - a concerted programme to expropriate from the poorest people in the Indian nation, their access to essentials, common property resources and to natural resources including land and water... The campaign called the Salwa Judoom in Chhattisgarh is a part of this process in which hundreds of villages have been denuded of the people living in them and hundreds of people - men and women - have been killed. Government-armed vigilantes have been deployed and the people who have been protesting against such moves and trying to bring before the world the reality of these campaigns - human rights workers like myself - have also been targeted through state action against them. At the present moment the workers of the Chhattisgarh PUCL (People's Union for Civil Liberties) the Chhattisgarh branch, of which I am General Secretary, have particularly become the target of such state action; and I, along with several of my colleagues, are being targeted by the Chhattisgarh state in the form of punitive action, illegal imprisonment. And all these measures are being taken especially under the aegis of the Chhattisgarh Public Security Act.

According to online sources, this man has been kept in solitary confinement for the past eleven months while no conclusive evidence has been found to substantiate his alleged Maoist links. It is unfortunate that a man who has devoted himself to serve the public sphere finds himself the victim of an unlawful state, a corrupt police and an impotent judiciary. The case for Dr. Sen has found support from eminent personalities like Noam Chomsky, Amartya Sen, Ramachandra Guha, Arundhati Roy, filmmaker Shyam Benegal and the Magsasay award winning journalist P. Sainath. About a month ago, the Global Health Council announced that Dr. Sen had been selected to receive the most prestigious international honour in Global Health and Human Rights, the Jonathon Mann award. "The Mann Award is presented annually at the Global Health Councils international conference to "a practitioner who makes significant contributions toward practical work in the field and in difficult circumstances; highlights the linkage of health with human rights; works predominantly in developing countries and with marginalized people; and demonstrates serious and long-term commitment". Less than a week ago, twenty two Nobel laureates from around the world wrote India's President, Prime Minister and the Chhattisgarh state authorities to release Dr. Sen.

I strongly urge that you read about this man and perhaps think of casting a vote on this online petition form. It isn't much to be proud about but the least we can hope is that our armchair activism reaches some considerate ear that has the ability to restore a man his right to dignity and liberty.

Divorce rates and the indian dream

2008-05-18T20:14:00.000-07:00

Amit Varma, in his recent post, articulates on how modernization and technology have bridged the gap between the sexes in recent times. Interestingly, he titles his post 'We Should Celebrate Rising Divorce Rates' and I would imagine he does that with a tongue in his cheek. Though his thesis seems convincing on first read, some clear counterexamples came to my mind in the very beginning. One is that of Kerala, where the empowerment of women has not really been fostered by the advent of modern technology. The matrilineal system is known to have existed in the state since ages. The second counterexample is that of an Islamic country like Saudi Arabia, where, in spite of technological sustenance, the condition of women in society remains decadent thanks to the preponderance of the Shariah laws.

Mr. Varma is perhaps correct in his main thesis- that increasing divorce rates in a country like India is definitely indicative of women empowerment. But I feel he is simplifying the causal connections associated with the empowerment of women in society. For a portrait of 19th and early 20th century British society, I'd recommend a reading of Virginia Woolf's AROO, an essay that I briefly talked about in an earlier post. That said, the quality of life that women in Kerala enjoy (literacy rate of 97% against the national average of 55%; sex ratio of 1.06 as opposed to the national avergae of 0.93; highest and lowest life expectancy and infant mortality rates in India) is something that I find immensely surprising and at the same time ennobling. One finds writers like Amartya Sen (in The Argumentative Indian and Development as Freedom) and Shashi Tharoor (in his India:From Midnight to the Millenium and the more recent The Elephant, the tiger and the cellphone, a collection of essays on India) raving about the Kerala miracle. Sen, tries to articulate some reasons for these successes but I still feel there remain lessons to be learned - for Mr. Varma and the rest of us too.

anecdote

2008-05-18T01:45:00.000-07:00

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, perhaps the greatest astrophysicist of the twentieth century, loved to tell the story of a visit to Princeton in the mid 1980s, where he was feted in honor of his recent Nobel Prize. At the dinner, he found himself seated next to an earnest young man. As physicists often do to make conversation, he asked his dinner companion, "What are you working on these days?" The reply was, "I work on string theory, which is the most important advance in physics in the twentieth century." The young string theorist went on to advise Chandra to drop what he was doing and switch to string theory or risk becoming as obsolete as those in the 1920s who did not immediately take up quantum theory.

"Young man," Chandra replied, "I knew Werner Heisenberg. I can promise you that Heisenberg would never have been so rude as to tell someone to stop what they were doing and work on quantum theory. And he certainly would not have been so disrespectful as to tell someone who got his PhD fifty years ago that he was about to become obsolete."

- From "The trouble with physics" by Lee Smolin

Vanity and vada pav

2008-05-17T20:55:00.000-07:00

Some interesting historical comments about Mumbai along with the washing of Thackeray's (or should I say Thakre) dirty linen in true editorial fashion in this HT article. The other hilarious piece of news that I heard recently was the possibility of the ubiquitous vada pav being patented by Shiv Sena as an exclusively Marathi recipe. They want to rechristen it to Shiv vada pav. Other repercussions notwithstanding, my primary concern is the collateral damage it will cause to my father's love for the mumbai ispecial delicacy. Vada pav might lose one of its more loyal connoisseurs to the brickbats of marathi chauvinism. Happily touring the US right now, my father doesn't know what's in store for him when he steps out of Sahar, oops....Chattrapathi Shivaji International airport.

Same-sex marriage

2008-05-17T08:50:00.000-07:00

A commendable resolution from the californian judiciary as this article suggests. And while the Chief Justice's statement - The essence of the right to marry is freedom to join in marriage with the person of one’s choice- noteworthy his comparison of same-sex marriage with inter-racial union was a bit enterprising, I thought. Notice the following criticism of the resolution. And while it might have its wisdom in Christian bigotry as opposed to scientific reasoning, I couldn't help noticing that it conveyed a fundamental point:

“Sure, it works at the surface level,” Mr. Stewart continued. “But it is actually defeated by the deeper reality of marriage itself. Marriage in its deep logic has nothing to do with race and everything to do with the union of a man and a woman. To apply Perez in the genderless marriage context is actually to betray it.”

A silly question popped up in my mind by the time I was finished with the article, the latter part of which was pretty uninteristing- Is it necessary for two sexes to exist in higher forms? Is there a distinct biological/evolutionary advantage to it?

From Woolf's AROO

2008-05-12T04:20:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Deepa Nair, I had the good fortune to read Virgina Woolf's A Room of One's Own, one of the greatest feminist essays of the 20th century. It was 'Feminism 101' for me personally, and I tried to read it dutifully suppressing any preconceived biases of what the area ought to be about. It would be an understatement if I said that I was overawed by Woolf's masterful prose that sparkled with a rare genius combining depth, vision and balance. It is beyond me to write my own views on the subject and I shall stay clear from untrodden paths. For now, I quote two passages from the essay:

1. In the first passage, Woolf emphasizes that writers, especially practitioners of fiction should consciously avoid a sexual bias in their endeavors, something humans seem to be naturally predisposed towards.

Even so, the very first sentence that I would write here, I said, crossing over to the writing–table and taking up the page headed Women and Fiction, is that it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman–manly or man–womanly. It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a woman. And fatal is no figure of speech; for anything written with that conscious bias is doomed to death. It ceases to be fertilized. Brilliant and effective, powerful and masterly, as it may appear for a day or two, it must wither at nightfall; it cannot grow in the minds of others. Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating his experience with perfect fullness. There must be freedom and there must be peace. Not a wheel must grate, not a light glimmer. The curtains must be close drawn. The writer, I thought, once his experience is over, must lie back and let his mind celebrate its nuptials in darkness. He must not look or question what is being done. Rather, he must pluck the petals from a rose or watch the swans float calmly
down the river.

2. This passage in many ways, is a microcosmic mirror of the entire essay. It captures Woolf's thesis (that a woman requires a room of her own and an income of five hundred pounds a year to be able to pursue something as transcendental as writing fiction) and her call for the emancipation of women.

‘What are the great poetical names of the last hundred years or so? Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Landor, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Morris, Rossetti, Swinburne—we may stop there. Of these, all but Keats, Browning, Rossetti were University men, and of these three, Keats, who died young, cut off in his prime, was the only one not fairly well to do. It may seem a brutal thing to say, and it is a sad thing to say: but, as a matter of hard fact, the theory that poetical genius bloweth where it listeth, and equally in poor and rich, holds little truth. As a matter of hard fact, nine out of those twelve were University men: which means that somehow or other they procured the means to get the best education England can give. As a matter of hard fact, of the remaining three you know that Browning was well to do, and I challenge you that, if he had not been well to do, he would no more have attained to write SAUL or THE RING AND THE BOOK than Ruskin would have attained to writing MODERN PAINTERS if his father had not dealt prosperously in business. Rossetti had a small private income; and, moreover, he painted. There remains but Keats; whom Atropos slew young, as she slew John Clare in a mad–house, and James Thomson by the laudanum he took to drug disappointment. These are dreadful facts, but let us face them. It is—however dishonouring to us as a nation—certain that, by some fault in our commonwealth, the poor poet has not in these days, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog’s chance. Believe me—and I have spent a great part of ten years in watching some three hundred and twenty elementary schools, we may prate of democracy, but actually, a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born.’
Nobody could put the point more plainly. ‘The poor poet has not in these days, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog’s chance . . . a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born.’ That is it. Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog’s chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one’s own. However, thanks to the toils of those obscure women in the past, of whom I wish we knew more, thanks, curiously enough to two wars, the Crimean which let Florence Nightingale out of her drawing–room, and the European War which opened the doors to the average woman some sixty years later, these evils are in the way to be bettered. Otherwise you would not be here tonight, and your chance of earning five hundred pounds a year, precarious as I am afraid that it still is, would be minute in the extreme.

Of the past

2008-05-11T22:50:00.000-07:00

1.

It's playtime.
I want to undress you
with these eyes
and play
those delightful games
that we had invented
in the past.

I hope you play your part
and help me up
whenever I fall.

Please,
do not desert me
when I am blindfolded,
helpless and alone.

2.

Unmoved by those who suffer,
Unaffected by the chirping sparrow,
Inconsiderate of the those below,
Oblivious to the plaintive roar
pleading its way through extinction.
Our lives are
a characteristic immoderation,
anesthetically impervious
to evocation.

3.

The colours
bled through the sky
as the twilight undressed
and disbursed
the remains of a yellow sun.
The elements descended into her
and found welcome.
They were released
that night;
with the parting
of her legs.

----
Improvising on a quote I heard a while ago - Activity is surgery without anesthesia; Imagination is anesthesia without surgery. Experience is what one needs :-). Clearing my gmail inbox is my way of revisiting the past these days. That is how I happened to chance upon these little friends.

2008-05-11T20:21:00.000-07:00

All of us probably remember the time when the papers were filled with outrage from the intelligentsia following Bal Thackeray's endorsement of Adolf Hitler. The demagogue, surprisingly, stood by his admiration for Hitler even after the criticism. While this might not even be a passing thought for many of you out there, I was intrigued by the possible causes behind this 'telepathic' connection. It is true that we find it plausible that Thackeray can draw inspiration from the life of Hitler (it definitely seems more plausible than the case of Hitler himself who confessed to have been guided in his mission by the music of Wagner) but I still find that the causal connection needs to be articulated. To me, Hitler was acknowledgedly a great mobilizer of masses and a propagandist of unprecedented competence, being able to steer an entire country using his fiery speeches and idealogical harangues. On the other hand, I find myself incapable of separating this acknowledgment of Hitler from a fundamental belief that he was a psychotically deluded man to have committed the atrocities that he did. Notwithstanding his other qualities, Hitler's commitment to his belief that the extermination of an entire ethnic body could resurrect a nation from its economic and social problems is nothing but a delusion and I personally find it impossible to look at him as a role model in any mode of representation or interpretation.

Let me now quote a passage from Amitav Ghosh's essay The Fundamentalist Challenge to invoke his views on the subject of the 'telepathic connection' that I mentioned earlier (People who have read the piece will forgive me for a contrived juxtaposition. While Ghosh does not particularly deal with Thackeray's admiration of Hitler, it is I who has taken the liberty of transporting Amitav Ghosh to the present context for I believe that the views apply):

I was amazed because I could not immediately understand why extremist Hindu beliefs should translate so fluently into sympathy for a group that had no religious affiliations at all, a group whose ideological genealogy ought to have inspired revulsion in these middle-class professional men. It only became obvious to me later, reading reports from Bosnia, Croatia, Sudan, Algeria, Sri Lanka, and other strife-torn lands, that for this species of thinking, religion, race, ethnicity, and language have no real content at all. Their only significance lies in the lines of distinction they provide. The actual content of the ideology, whether it manifests itself in its religious avatar or its linguistic or ethnic one, is actually the same in every case, although articulated through different symbols. In several instances- Sri Lanka, for example- extremist movements have seamlessly shifted their focus from language to religion.

What then is this ideology that can travel so indifferently among such disparate political groups? I believe that it is an incarnation of a demon that has stalked liberal democracy everywhere throughout this century; an ideology that, for want of a better word, I shall call supremacism. It consists essentially in the belief that a group cannot ensure its continuity except by exerting absolute cultural and demographic control over a particular stretch of geography. The fascist antecedents of this ideology are clear and obvious. Some would go further and argue that nationalism of every kind must also be regarded as a variant of supremacism. This is often but not necessarily true. The non-sectarian, anti-imperialist nationalism of a Gandhi or a Saad Zaghloul was founded on a belief in the possibility of relative autonomy for heterogeneous populations and had nothing to do with asserting supremacy.

These are thoughts that must have struck many of us in some form or the other. George Bernard Shaw's following famous quote, "Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it" probably applies to every other form of identity where supremacism manifests.

Meat-va o re meat-va

2008-04-28T21:53:00.000-07:00

This is, forgive me, a rather long post. What I am about to share is the course of an ongoing conversation between a group of people on the subject of non-vegetarianism. The conversation (or debate) was initiated by a friend when he sent some of us a link to a particularly disturbing video documenting the manner in which animals are treated in meat-farms. For the record, he is currently a meat eater. As far as my own views on the subject are concerned, I believe my case is especially unfortunate (tongue-in-cheek). Most of my close friends from school to college have been non-vegetarians and therefore social propriety and prudence have inhibited any strong views on the subject from my side. I find myself the subject of friendly badinage often during social outings but I have rather grown to enjoy them. At the same time, I strongly believe that food habits among people (especially of my age) is more the result of familial predispositions and not a refined/reasoned choice. This is the case, I would say, even with myself, though I have begun to appreciate vegetarianism over the last couple of years.

Before I get down to share the communications, I feel compelled to make two disclaimers. First this post is far from being an evangelical plea for conversion and I pray that it is not interpreted as innuendo towards non-vegetarians. I believe that there is a certain room for reason and debate without doubt; but considering the spirit of the time I would rather lose friends on differences over something like religious tolerance/societal ethics than differences over food habits. The second disclaimer is slightly more specific. On the occasion of one particular e-mail reply (which shall appear later in the essay), I invoke the theme of evolutionary advantage and briefly touch upon the subject of 'rape' in that context. Since this was meant to be a discussion among close friends, I did not bother to elaborate that part of my response;but posting it here, I fear misinterpretation from my readers. Therefore, I shall briefly elaborate on what I mean by rape as being 'evolutionarily advantageous' in the following paragraph before embarking on the posts.

An action or a characteristic is referred to as evolutionarily advantageous if it is able to aid the propagation of the genes associated with the individual organism involved in the act or possessing the characteristic (Dawkins, Diamond). Therefore, the similarity of appearance of a cuckoo egg or a cuckoo fledgling with the corresponding egg and fledgling of another specie like a crow is evolutionarily advantageous for the genes of a mother cuckoo for she can successfully transfer the maternal responsibility to another and ensure that her progeny survives and thrives (see The Selfish Gene). Moreover, this characteristic is genetically passed down from generation to generation. It may be inferred that a mutant cuckoo not possessing the set of genes responsible for such a camouflage would be unsuccessful in bluffing the crow. Unless the mutant cuckoo changes its maternal habits and realizes the compulsion of tending to its own children, it is likely to perish (and soon the class of mutants will disappear from the gene pool). It is with this understanding of 'evolutionary advantage', that I state my view that 'rape' has evolutionary incentives for the male provided he is capable to escape arrest every time he commits the act. The reason we do not find too many rapists around is because strong social disincentives exist against rape in human society- the possibility of arrest and severe punishment, the possibility of becoming a social outcast forever. With possibilities of abortion (which are distinctly human developments) there is a strong probability that the progeny resulting from a rape might not see the light of the day. Therefore, with these disincentives combined with the so called evolutionary incentives, a man possibly finds it more prudent to assimilate into society than try be an outcast rapist. Here, I feel the need to flash another yellow light. I am not undermining the body of ethics and morals that has evolved over the years in our society and become a part of the human psyche. I do not say that they exist only on paper. It is indeed a fantastic thought to imagine that such sophisticated concepts have assimilated into our consciousness leading to an overall stable society than what might have been possible if everyone was left to purely genetic instincts. With this, I begin the series of correspondences (I have withheld the names of those involved for I haven't taken their permission to post this. With their agreement, the names shall be disclosed :-) ):

The following mail was sent on the group. My request to all the readers is to definitely check it out:

http://www.meat.org/

Reply 1:

it's a veg propaganda website!!! :-O waise, i've visited a chicken-farm... conditions are nowhere near as bad as portrayed here. this is probably like "the worst" extreme of the whole thing and nowhere near the mean. comments?

Reply 2 (Karthik):

well, whatever it is, the video left me disturbed. The point is such things are happening somewhere; in this phase of our civilization we do not worry about these questions as much as we worry about racism, casteism etc - which I guess were 'not so' important issues a couple of hundred years ago. The zeitgeist (german: spirit of the time) keeps shifting from century to century and I guess this particular issue will become more expedient when our children will be of our age.

Reply 3:

@Karthik. that was precisely what i was thinking. i was all the time putting Humans through the same treatment in my head and i was thinking why does this sort of thing not generate the same kind of outrage. I mean they are struggling as much as a human would. There is nothing different about their reaction. only that they cannot speak English or something like it. A bunch of scientists were trying to synthesize muscle tissue in labs. I don't think this sort of thing will stop until we have an alternate. Evolutionarily speaking there is nothing wrong with it. and logically thinking evolution is paramount and our emotions nothing but evolutionary artifacts designed to make the human population thrive. Then speaking memetically can such a mass movement like not eating meat really gain any sort of mass popularity.

@Reply 2: well these are conditions on a Meat farm in the U.S and represent the max in capitalist tendencies where the minutest shreds of humanity are removed. The push towards farms like these in India is not a good sign. i was talking to PD yesterday and i came to the conclusion that it is the capitalist system to blame. Its value system is very skewed and it does not take a lot of things worth consideration into account.

Reply 4 (Karthik):

Your point about evolution is interesting. Allow me to try and elaborate my views on the same. I shall keep away from making moral judgments on veggies and non-veggies and let the moral zeitgeist take its natural course.

(Please refer to the disclaimer paragraph mentioned earlier)

Evolutionarily speaking, one might propose many such cogent arguments. Like I told you the other day, it is of immense evolutionary advantage for a male human to go around raping every other woman that he can set his eyes on, being smart enough to avoid competition with other male competitors of course. And this commonly happens in the animal kingdom. A commonplace situation in the animal kingdom is where a strong male member empowers the female and engages in intercourse against her wishes.

Let me digress and give you another example. Consider an animal such as a lion or a cheetah. Do we see it killing indiscriminately? It is often found in the animal kingdom that predators kill only to feed, and do not indulge in excesses. I am not suggesting that this leads us to believe that the particular lion has evolved to think like a hermit but nonetheless saying that its instincts have evolved in order to avoid excess and wastage; too much indiscriminate killing might lead to the extinction of the prey (Lotka-Volterra predator-prey equation anyone :-)?), natural selection has programmed their genes keeping this in mind. On the other hand one does find examples of genocide and massacre in the animal kingdom not between predators and preys but between two different groups of a particular specie itself. 'Gangwars' are known to happen between two different chimpanzee groups where the victors are even known to indulge in cannibalism. The females of the vanquished are, of course, conveniently assimilated into the new group.

Now why am I saying this? To justify parallel human behaviour? Rather the opposite. The very fact that we are able to rationalize these things suggests something. Humans are probably the only species (probably the foremost among a certain small set of species) where social behaviour has come in such close competition with genetic instincts. Our memes are competing with our genes. In the crudest sense, a rape is probably a great thing for both the male and the female - The male chooses whom to rape (it is likely that he will choose someone with good features) and the average female victim is actually extremely lucky evolutionarily because it is only the powerful male who will be able to overpower her as compared to other midgets. But then we have evolved sophisticated concepts like individual freedom, schools of thought like feminism, non-violence, animal rights that suit our appetite for a life with a much higher degree of complexity in the thinking domain in addition to an already existing inconceivable web at the physiological level. When we help an unknown inconsequential beggar on the street, when we share our food with the needy whom we know are going to be of no use to us if at all we fell in some need of our own in the future, when we talk about animal rights, when we respect the women in our society, when we spend time and money to help the superannuated among us fight deadly diseases, when we adopt a child of someone else's we are in possibly many ways going against evolution (at the micro level). But that's a part of being human; and in that sense we are unique. I cannot say if there is some fantastically universal motive behind all this seemingly irreconcilable behaviour. But it seems we do many things that are contrary to the evolutionary paradigms that are agreed upon today.

To conclude, our moral and ethical evolution seems extremely contrapositive to what should be our genetic instincts. I find it immensely beautiful to think about this. I do agree that there are many gaps in my arguments and we might one day reconcile all kinds of behaviour with a unifying theory. But nonetheless it is interesting to see that we are capable of extending our consciousness to other living things to such a great degree- hence compassion, empathy etc. Let me end here with this open string :-) and leave you with an interesting link about a campaign that had got me intrigued when I read about it first a year ago in "The Devil's Chaplain"- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Ape_Project

Reply 5:

Am totally in agreement with you regarding the fact that memes are probably competing with our genes. in fact in modern human society evolution by natural selection has probably died down. What struck me about that piece was the fact that. Not only are we evolutionarily predisposed to violence, but our qualities which are responsible for us not doing so, like empathy, natural justice etc, are also products of evolution. They exist in some sense to make co-operative living possible and are thus evolutionary artifacts. We might easily have been otherwise. It just made me think that the loudest things in my head are products of accident. which is something i find difficult to wrap my head around. Hopefully the memes will trump the genes on in epic battle. Also i agree with your other points too. Concerning he great apes project, why are they drawing the line at apes? Can not dogs and dolphins also feel the same way?? it's highly plausible that they might.

Reply 6(Karthik):

call that a beginning, I would say :-). A universal evangelical plea might reach deaf years; if one is including dogs, he might as well include poultry, cows and pigs which certainly wont be amenable to many people in this world.

Views of another friend:

This one, a very close friend of mine is incidentally a convert :-). He raises a lot of interesting points in the very short mail that follows. I have highlighted the sentences that I found the most intriguing. At the same time, I believe the second paragraph is something that should be taken notice of.

I still think that food pyramid is a better argument in being a vegetarian. It only appeals to human suffering and not the animal suffering (which many people may not connect to). The thing I find the most disturbing is that meat eating people are not willing to face the cruelty of the killing. Even if the animal is killed in the most decent way, people do not want to see/mention/talk about that, leave alone these farms. I see this as plain hypocrisy. I myself (in an obviously superior position of being a vegetarian :P) always tried to cope up with it and one day decided to quit.

The food pyramid argument is this: The animals we eat are almost at
our level in the food pyramid. If we 'produce' meat on a factory scale, we will require a lot of animals, and in proportion a lot of flora and fauna. It gives a lot of stress on the soil. In short, given 1 hectare, if one can produce 1 tonne of corn, the same hectare in general will be able to produce a mere 100kg of meat. It means that when we produce meat as a commodity, we are depriving the people from using the land for vegetable production and hence...

Also, I do not agree with the 'emotions being driven genetically' part. But Karthik said that already.

--------

I am concluding this post here and I must admit that I am not without a feeling of incompleteness. It has certainly whetted my appetite for a deeper debate on this subject. But I guess that will be for the future :-).

The day breaks, the mind aches ...and jingles

2008-04-25T05:24:00.001-07:00

Today
I have known
that the past
ragged, worn,
is longing
to be my friend
again
this May.

We had parted
with smiles
while sharing
open skies.
But the lesson
wasn't learnt
to this day.

And with the Beatles
it seems,
just like yesterday.

----------------

Haven't found the time to write for a while. Rather, the need hasn't arisen. Updates:
1. Wrapping up my thesis/rather resolving everyday to do so.
2. Reading "The Argumentative Indian" again but slowly and carefully, making sure I can quote at will from the book.
3. Experienced the most horrible examination in two years - Non-linear Dynamics end semester. Silly mistakes make you feel silly. Which is good once in a while.
4. Watched the "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" - must watch french movie. Shall blog about it later if I find the time and the inclination and the need.

2008-04-17T09:50:00.000-07:00

waters of another world
descend, trickle down
our window panes
as the sea between us
rises, and swallows
the both of us.

I wanted to say a
few last words
but they no longer
mean anything.

Even Silence,
our common friend
plays a fifth columnist.

I shall not apologize
but only stand and wait
hoping the waters
cleanse and rid me of
the only language
I know;
whose yoke I carry
upon my writing
fruitlessly.

Beseeching Motivation

2008-04-12T22:30:00.000-07:00

My interest in my final year project has faced a slow decline during this entire semester and the previous month in particular. The absence of my guide as a source of weekly acknowledgment has perhaps significantly contributed to that feeling. Things seemed a lot more exciting four months ago. Our investigations had led to interesting results albeit the classical, purist nature of the problem we were pursuing.

Much of our earlier findings were comparatively humbler compared to this one problem that was the subject of my efforts in the last one month. The problem was to investigate the agreement/differences in predictions of the properties of a particular system using three different mathematical models or theories as you might want to call them. Refraining from getting into further details, let me say that weeks of efforts culminated in the finding that these models predict exactly the same thing about the system. I remember my guide telling me that finding a difference would be a significant result in many respects and that would lead to many more interesting threads. But that was not to be. My professor responds to my communication of this news to him in the following manner:

Dear Karthik,
These simulations establish a point either way - when they show differences and when they do not, so I would not be worried too much. These are important results nonetheless and we must plan towards communicating them.
Best,
Suresh

As a novice researcher, there are times more than one when one is compelled to question the worth of one's pursuits and efforts. And the opportunities that I encountered to make suc introspections were more than a few. I would never describe my project in too much detail to anyone who asked me; it falls short on providing either of the two kinds of joy that encourage researchers. I am well aware of the fact that my results will neither have significant practical consequences in the industry nor are the equations that I deal with and the analysis that I do even close to being a mathematician's delight. In terms of the quantum of work needed, my professor tells me that I am ready to submit my thesis but that it would be nice if I worked on a couple of other threads and got them to a 'logical' conclusion.

On another matter, I am thinking of nominating your thesis for the Indian National Academy of Engineering Award (see attached note). This might mean that you organize your work so as to complete the entire process of submission (also examination?) byJune 30. Please go through the site mentioned and see what are the requirements.

Best,
Suresh

I will work for a whole month on organizing my thesis, ensuring that my work flows logically from the premise to the hypotheses to the proofs, judiciously citing every reference and acknowledging every possible help that I received along the way, numbering each equation, table and figure; I shall organize the report in chapters nested with sections which will in turn be nested with subsections. My thesis shall be bound and the institute library will be supplemented with a copy of it. And there it shall remain till antiquity until the taste of the papers matures well enough in the musty shelves to whet the collective appetite of a community of termites.

-----

It was with this feeling of resignation that I decided to take a three day break from work :-). There was an urge to take a long walk along a rainy footpath on a hill starting midnight, to smell the wild flowers along the way, to smile at the people who come there looking for firewood before sunrise and to reach the top early enough to be able to greet the sun as it languidly but unfailingly illuminates our world. When fatigue takes over and when one lacks resolve, poetry seems less poetic and hence I decided to spend saturday night at home. Had coffee with an old acquaintance from school and kindled a (possible) friendship, let my mother relish her powers over me and my appetite and had long talks with my father after a significantly long time.

I know it's difficult to find any kind of reconcilation when you're dissatisfied with work. Acknowledgment works to an extent to satisfy the deluded man. He/She who is satisfied by mere acknowledgment is in all probabilities someone who doesn't have a passion to pursue anything in this world dedicatedly. I have often seen the following question pop up during conversations that I have been a part of, especially if the persons involved are feeding on each other's dissatisfaction with the world as to which pill must Alice take, happy delusion or her unhappy self?

Something that partially inspired me was a letter by Richard Feynman to one of his former students who was unhappy with his life and research. The student had sent a congratulatory mail to Feynman on the latter's winning the 1965 Physics Nobel but had sublimely expressed his unhappiness. The student wrote that he was a 'nameless man' working on 'a humble and down-to-earth type problem' somewhere in oblivion. Feynman writes,

Dear Koichi,
I was very happy to hear from you, and that you have such a position in the Research Laboratories. Unfortunately your letter made me unhappy for you seem to be truly sad. It seems that the influence of your teacher has been to give you a false idea of what are worthwhile problems. The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to. A problem is grand in science if it lies before us unsolved and we see some way for us to make some headway into it. I would advise you to take even simpler, or as you say, humbler, problems until you find some you can really solve easily, no matter how trivial. You will get the pleasure of success, and of helping your fellow man, even if it is only to answer a question in the mind of a colleague less able than you. You must not take away from yourself these pleasures because you have some erroneous idea of what is worthwhile.

To Koichi Mano (the student) referring to himself as a nameless man, Feynman wrote the following words. In the past two days, I have forwarded the entire letter to many of my friends. One among them said that she read the following lines 'over and over again'; they are indeed moving:

You say you are a nameless man. You are not to your wife and to your child. You will not long remain so to your immediate colleagues if you can answer their simple questions when they come into your office. You are not nameless to me. Do not remain nameless to yourself - it is too sad a way to be. Know your place in the world and evaluate yourself fairly, not in terms of your naïve ideals of your own youth, nor in terms of what you erroneously imagine your teacher's ideals are.
Best of Luck and Happiness,
Sincerely,
Richard P. Feynman

This letter carries a lot of meaning for me and as luck would have it, I encountered it at the most appropriate time.

Mars and Venus

2008-04-10T06:51:00.000-07:00

Benedick: That a woman conceived me, I thank her; that she brought me up, I likewise give her most humble thanks: but that I will have a recheat winded in my forhead, or hang my bugle in an invisible baldrick, all women shall pardon me. Because I will not do then the wrong to mistrust any, I will do myself the right to trust none; and the fine is, for the which I may go the finer, I will live a bachelor.

Beatrice: What should I do with him? dress him in my apparel, and make him my waiting-gentlewoman? He that hath a beard is more than a youth; and he that hath no beard is less than a man: and he that is more than a youth is not for me; and he that is less than a man, I am not for him: therefore I will even take sixpence in earnest of the bear-ward, and lead his apes into hell.

- Much Ado About Nothing

As I gradually burrow my way through this fantastic comedy, I enjoy being witness to the amazingly crafted sexual tension between the first MCP and the first feminist in literature (feminist is probably a wrong word but I don't know of the female equivalent of an MCP and I don't want to call her a b**** for Beatrice is much too adorable for that).

Taking a break from non-fiction. Will struggle and get past the comedies of Shakespeare in the next few months :-).

A final example

2008-04-09T07:44:00.000-07:00

Understandably, I have been subjected to some criticism for my previous post. I do not wish to prolong the dialectic but I quote in this post a specific example of how a mind capable of producing brilliant images through poetry on one instance can seem seriously deluded on another. I quote the example of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was one of the prolific romantic poets in late eighteenth century England. He is known to have written very little poetry but all of his works are regarded for their sheer brilliance. E. T. Bell states in "Men of Mathematics" that the German mathematician Riemann is to mathematics what Coleridge is to English poetry.

Coleridge is best known for 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', some verses of which I happened to read as a kid in school. I distinctly remember following lines; perhaps the stern manner in which my English teacher enunciated these lines facilitated in their being imprinted in my memory,

Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.

Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.

Coleridge was also known for his masterful prose. In the following paragraph (which I reproduce from "Unweaving the Rainbow"), Coleridge notes his exhilaration on seeing a rainbow in the sky (Anima Poetae, published 1895):

The steadfast rainbow in the fast-moving, fast-hurrying hail-mist. What a congregation of images and feelings, of fantastic permanence amidst the rapid change of tempest- quietness the daughter of storm.

Coleridge is known to have tried his hand at science too. He attempted to dissect the light spectrum and is known to have nourished a sincere aim at some point of time in his life to write a treatise on the subject. The following is an excerpt of his 'analyses'. This was written almost a century and a half after Newton had published his authoritative 'Optiks' which had laid the foundation of the corpuscular theory of light spectra and lenses until the wave theory superseded it in many respects. In Dawkins' words, 'Coleridge's heart must have been in the right place with respect to science.....but he failed to live up to his own ideals to "unfold and arrange" his ideas in "distinct, clear and communicable conceptions"'. The following is a critique of Newton that Coleridge penned in 1817:

To me, I confess, Newton's positions, first, of a Ray of Light, as a physical synodical Individuum, secondly, that seven specific individua are co-existent (by what copula?) in this complex yet indivisible Ray; thirdly that the Prism is a mere mechanic Dissector of this Ray; and lastly, that Light, as the common result, is = confusion.

For those who find the above paragraph out of context, Coleridge was essentially opposed to Netwon's thesis that white light consists of seven component lights (which are essentially frequencies corresponding to violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange and red) respectively and they are resolved on passing a ray through a prism. Coleridge had more radical ideas about the nature of colour,

So again, Colour is Gravitation under the power of Light, Yellow being the positive, blue the negative Pole, and Red the culmination or Equator; while Sound on the other hand is Light under the power or paramountcy of Gravitation.

Coleridge and Newton lived more than two hundred years ago. Perhaps, science and poetry were then luxuries that only the elite could afford. But as an individual who perpetually enjoys a healthy confluence between the two domains, I truly feel that obscurantism should be criticized. Romantics who choose science as a subject to write about should judiciously try to keep their language simple and avoid ambiguities. Mathematics and physics do not need to be exoticized to concoct poetry. The poetry is already there.

Pseudo-science and cosmic energy

2008-04-08T07:56:00.000-07:00

I had read an article in TOI half a year ago in the "Speaking Tree" column which appears on the bottom right of the editorial page. Prior to that I never dispensed anything more than a perfunctory glance towards the column on usual days. There were a couple of times, however, when I had read the articles on my father's recommendation. They were personal accounts/anecdotes narrating spiritual awakening and I remember liking whatever I read. So when I was recommended this article by my father (who had been apprised of it by his uncle), I immediately got myself a copy of the paper and read it.

The article was titled, "In Divine Mathematics, Zero = One = Infinity" and I was naturally intrigued by the title. More importantly, I wanted to find out what 'divine mathematics' was in the first place; I was of the prior opinion that the queen of the sciences revealed herself in the same light, be it earth or heaven. The author of the article played around with some mathematical notions and arrived at some supposedly 'startling' conclusions that commensurated, he claimed, with the modern theory of numbers. With all humility, he acknowledged the genesis of these notions to Vedic scriptures towards the end of his essay. His writing was fluent and I found myself appreciating his ability to churn a sparkling prose. The mathematical reasoning, however, was completely flawed and I could not help but wonder how misinformed the author had been. I remember mentioning this to a friend but he chided me for my nitpicking, "Why does one have to read these things objectively. Why can you not regard them as pure contemplative exercises which seek to evoke existing notions in a different light?".

Sure, the pursuit of art and science have one thing in common. Both seek to rid our collective consciousness of the anesthetic of familiarity. The process is not sharp but extremely gradual where a wall is shattered brick by brick and a cubicle is slowly illuminated. This is especially true for poetry, which possesses a masterful capability to evoke and de-familiarize like few forms of art can. There exist so many emotions and thoughts that fail to find expression in our vocabulary and can be stimulated only through media like music and poetry. The following lines by William Blake have, for a long time, been my favorite and never fail to fill me with a sense of wonder whenever I read them:

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
- Auguries of Innocence (1803)

Mathematics and Physics are poetic in many respects. I remember being awestruck on being told as a little boy that the medians and altitudes of any triangle intersect in a single point. I remember being fascinated when I read quantum mechanics, whose notions are so perversely orthogonal to common sense (Richard Feynman is known to have said that someone who claims to understand quantum mechanics does not know it at all) but whose predictions have been vindicated in the real world to astonishing orders of accuracy. I am still coming to terms with whatever I learned in the Non-linear dynamics class I took this semester (The notion that a completely deterministic system can produce long term 'random' behaviour still puzzles me and I know of no philosophical reconciliation to this). Something is 'poetic' because it has this ability to illuminate the unknown even though it might not be able to 'explain' it. Nonetheless, be it the four lines of Blake or the consequences of a scientific theory like relativity, the feeling that one gets on confronting these is that of an unparalleled excitement.

For a extremely masterful exposition on how science can be poetic, I recommend Richard Dawkins', "Unweaving the Rainbow", a book that I shall finish reading by tonight (Unfortunately, many people who are known to me disliked Dawkins immensely after reading his recent book, "The God Delusion. However, polemical though he may be, I stress that this is a man who is worth listening to purely for his forthright honesty accompanied with a rare erudition in the things that he talks about).

My aim in this article, however, is different. The TOI article that I mentioned earlier is an example of what Dawkins refers to as 'bad poetic science'. In fact I would not even go as far as calling it by that name. The article did not contain a modicum of originality that could illuminate the reader; its style was systematically obscurantist like many other exotic commentaries on Hindu philosophy with a startling lack of concern for consistency and sensibility.

In heated wave of excitement, I drafted a critique of the article and promptly mailed it to TOI. A part of it appeared the next week in the newspaper. On retrospection I wasn't very happy with the tone of my mail. On hindsight I feel I was extremely caustic and irreverent even if my thesis was reasonable. When I happened to find it while clearing my mailbox today, some thoughts resurfaced. I have copy pasted the mail below.

I still believe that pseudo-science should be severely criticized. A vocation of precision leaves room for intuition but not hand waving incoherence. But the tone of the critique needs humility. Can one be a benevolent extremist? Some of my friends would disagree. The others would laugh and look the other way.

----------------------------------------------
Dear Sirs,

I do not regularly subscribe to your paper but I happened to lay my hands on the daily issue last Wednesday. I read the article “In Divine Mathematics, Zero = One = Infinity” and by the end of it, was not sure whether I was more amused or more irritated. The article seemed to me a second rate attempt to appeal to the puerile fantasies of many of us (educated) Indians who are infatuated with our scriptures to the point of delusion. As Arundhati Roy remarked in the ‘End of Imagination’, “One can find whatever one wants in the Vedas and the Puranas, so long as one knows what one’s looking for”. As a student of mathematics, who in all humility does not claim authority on the subject beyond the capacity of his limited intelligence, I was shaken by the masterpieces of illogical reasoning that the author puts forward in so facile a manner, perhaps because indiscreet reasoning is the only way one can arrive at some of the fantastic conclusions that he has arrived at. While it is certain that the author needs to retake his primary classes in elementary mathematics, I believe he can be absolved of the act of having his substandard logic published in the editorial section of a national newspaper. Before making an attempt at the English readers of this country, he has successfully mastered the art of self-deception. My knowledge of metaphysics is extremely limited but I know my math well and if I were to possibly imagine a healthy confluence between the two, this article would be the exact antithesis of the same. Though it is beyond my time and inclination to attempt a part-by-part dissection of the article, I shall mention 2-3 instances of extremely bad mathematical reasoning.

The first and foremost thing the author needs to read up is the classification of numbers on the line. Integers and fractions are not all. While I must remark that no student beyond her/his fourth grade would use the word ‘fractions’ (the term is ‘rational numbers’), there is another class of numbers on the number line beyond integers and ‘fractions’ called irrational numbers, which, certainly cannot be interpreted as ‘fractions’. The author is correct in mentioning that a ‘fraction’ is as good a nodal point on the number line as an ‘integer’ but where he errs is to deduce from this that every fraction is an integer! That every imaginable number is a nodal point on the number line does not make all numbers fall in the same class. Integers, rational and irrational numbers are subsets of a bigger class called real numbers. Then there is the class of complex numbers which along with real numbers form the set of all numbers that occur as solutions to algebraic equations. Integers, for instance, have their genesis in elementary counting. While all integers are expressible as fractions (20 = 20/1), all fractions are definitely not integers!

Then comes the experiment that he asks the reader to perform- I quote it verbatim here so as to facilitate a better analysis:

Take a sheet of paper. It is a whole: it is 1. Tear it in two halves. Each half is ½. This is only relative. Otherwise, each half is an independent whole, a one. How do you know that your original sheet of paper was not one half of something else? Likewise, if you tear the half sheets again into two, you get a total of four ones. This process can go on ad infinitum. In effect, you have created an infinite number of integers between 0 and 1. Your original sheet of paper – your original 1- is now infinity. Eka is Ananta!

Applause. Any person of average intelligence armed with a handful of logic would be able to discern that what author has demonstrated in the above ‘experiment’, as he likes to call it, is that any number is infinitely divisible. And certainly not “one=Infinity”, as the author glibly concludes. The total amount of paper (volume, mass however you may refer to it) is conserved (Personally I’d love to read the authors thoughts on Physics) and all subsequent divisions of the paper contain a fraction of the amount of paper in the original sheet. Yes, if you like, you may count these divisions as one, two, three,…ad infinitum. All this says that our notion of numbers is not dependent on the attributes of the physical object that they refer to. But that the whole is infinitely divisible is not equivalent to saying that the whole itself is infinity.

The first sentence of the next paragraph is my personal favourite in the monograph.

Likewise, zero can be understood as being one. How? 1=1/1 = 1/infinity=0. Inversely, 1/0 = infinity. This validates the equation we began with, 0 = 1 = infinity.

The great French mathematician, Fermat stated his last theorem but could not find place for his proof. It took mathematicians nearly 400 years to crack his problem. Personally I don’t think even eternity is enough to come to terms with the level of mathematical erudition that our author displays. What the author has done in 600 words is to make an attempt at thwarting the foundation of mathematical formalism and logic developed by minds certainly more judicious than his over a period of 2000 years. But what disturbs me is another associated fact. If he author would have published his masterpiece minus the references and allusions to the Vishnu Sahasranamam, he would have most certainly been classified a lunatic and been universally ridiculed. And my personal belief is that there is nothing wrong in that because our standards morals, ethics, logic and reasoning should be based on years of experience and not derived in a literalist manner from an antiquated text. These are historical texts which should be preserved and cherished as a part of our cultural heritage but most certainly should not be used as a source of legitimation of our whims and fancies. Let us explore our principles, values and ethics in a world where there is no heaven, hell, redemption, perdition or immortality to look forward to and that would be the highest form of vindication for the atman, if there is some such all pervasive being.

As a message to the editors, I would request them to follow discretion while publishing articles in this column, lest one year down the line “The Best of Speaking Tree” becomes a nationwide bestseller in the humour section of all bookstores.

Sincerely,
Karthik Shekhar

A sense of magnitude

2008-04-03T07:44:00.000-07:00

" ...Fling your arms wide in an expansive gesture to span all of evolution from its origin at your left fingertip to today at your right fingertip. All the way across your midline to well past your right shoulder, life consists of nothing but bacteria. Many-celled, invertebrate life flowers somewhere around your right elbow. The dinosaurs originate at the middle of your right palm and go extinct around your last finger joint. The whole story of Homo erectus and our ancestors the Homo sapiens is contained in the thickness of one nail clipping. As for recorded history; as for the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Jewish patriarchs, the dynasties of Pharaohs, the legions of Rome, the Christian Fathers, the Laws of Medes and Persians which never change; as for Troy and Greeks, Helen and Achilles and Agamemnon dead; as for Napolean and Hitler, the Beatles and Bill Clinton, they and everyone that new them are blown away in the dust from one light stroke of a nail file."

- From Richard Dawkins' "Unweaving the Rainbow"

Unmoved by those who suffer,
Unaffected by the chirping sparrow,
Inconsiderate of those below,
Oblivious to the plaintive roar
pleading its way through extinction.
We lead a life of characteristic immoderation,
with an anesthetic imperviousness,
an inability to notice and wonder.

-Anonymous

We, the celibates

2008-03-30T01:38:00.000-07:00

IITians are used to a reputation in the outside world. I cannot say that we 'command' that reputation but it is certainly thrust upon us, whether we like it or not, whether we deserve it or not. To many women out there, a man who can solve a combinatorics problem faster than he can conjure up an original pick up line and state it confidently might be an immensely unimpressive prospect to bear as a spectacle, let alone someone they might want to solicit for a boyfriend. Indeed, like it is for Major Major many of the women are impressed on noticing how unimpressive we IITians are in these respects.

Some men seek celibacy, some men have it thrust upon them and to some men it comes naturally. IITians come in all three categories. Isn't the inadequacy obvious, when they attempt pick up lines "Hlike, ey, Whachoo doin tonight? Wanna do me?" or the slightly more erudite sounding "I'm a cartoonist interested in making a comic strip. Will you be my comic?" or the absolute chauvinistic loser -"I was caught the moment I set my eyes on you. You're one hell of a hooker!".

The problem you see, is that most of us haven't still gotten over the 'gene chauvinism' that comes to us naturally. Even when an IITian desperately fancies a girl, the feeling of being a benefactor who would masterfully father above-average intelligent children and thus do her and humanity an immense favour overwhelms his fundamental need to be with her and break through the celibacy jinx that has been tattooed on his forehead.

And that is why, I believe it is a terrible necessity that we learn to recognise when a woman is in heat and suppress our natural propensity to turn her off by wearing chappals (even though we may think it perfectly suits our dispositions), sharing sexual fantasies involving mechanical objects that are simultaneously designed to intensify pleasure and circumvent the second law of thermodynamics (say your primary objective was the latter and the former was a mere side effect and you lose her forever), telling her that you're idea of an ideal honeymoon location is Salt Lake City when Undertaker is going to make his last appearance in Wrestlemania 2013 and so on. We need to pay judicious attention to her attention span. That said, I cannot elaborate on the other things that one must do while with a woman. That probably needs an expert which I am clearly not.

The women are out there. But there are stupid people who keep telling us we're still great despite the inability to attract women and make it seem like a cardinal virtue. For instance, an editorial of TOI that I read sometime ago had a fable where an IITian was walking along a lake when he heard a voice. He turned around to see a frog talking to him. The frog said, "Take me and kiss me. I shall turn into a beautiful princess for you to have". He was a little freaked out and took a couple of quick steps away from the frog but his curiosity pulled him back. To reaffirm that this wasn't a dream he went near the frog and prodded it. It squeaked again, "Take me and kiss me. I shall turn into a beautiful princess for you to have". The IITian picks the frog by its leg and puts it into his pocket. The frog is puzzled and shouts, "Why the hell aren't you kissing me asshole?". The IITian smugly replies, "I don't have time for a girlfriend but a talking frog is cool".

Now, who the hell said that we didn't have time for girlfriends? That this was printed in TOI is not any placation. Rather, it is precisely the problem for most people don't read beyond TOI and thus we find ourselves unable to get rid of this reputation! The bigger problem is that most of us (including me some might say) aren't even trying hard to undo this! But a day will come and we will experience testosteronic desperation when a chill will collectively pass through our spines reminding us that our genes are in grave danger of not being passed into posterity. And then when an IITian feels delighted when he spots a frog who says, "Take me and kiss me. I shall turn into a beautiful princess for you to have", he shall immediately pick it up, put it into his pocket and rush to a secluded place with his heart swelling with anticipation. And all the while the rest of the frogs will happily croak, "Dat wuz a gud won. Anudder azzholl iz guin to feel d sting while kissing a speaking amphibian. Wen he will scream in pain und realize dat he shuld huv lernt his biology better, we shall croak appily. "

Random Afterthoughts

2008-03-23T04:41:00.000-07:00

One of the most fundamental truths about the world that we are a part of is the existence and ineluctable nature of suffering in all things living.

- Gautama Buddha

Dawkins and atheism came up during a discussion with a group of friends yesterday. Though we never really argued about anything, a simple question was put forward to me by a friend. It was a question that one normally just whisks away asamatteroffactedly while cold-heartedly arguing about these things but it persisted in my mind this time and kept coming up later that night and during the next day. The question was the following- "Is it possible to rationalize about every aspect of our existence?"

The question is a naive one and theists and atheists would generally give 'no' for an answer without second thought and proceed to discuss more 'meat'. However, in the case of the atheist, a wager rests on her shoulders and that is the obligation to articulate and explain her position in the scheme of things. Before I begin to sound like an apologist, let me state here that I shall persist until I am proven otherwise on my belief of the non-existence of a supernatural intelligent power that governs my existence. But I do believe that the existential reasons that made my ancestors looked up to the stars for help and support were inescapable and are so even today. To take note of this fact and appreciate it was enunciated by the Buddha 2500 years ago when he warned the world against the dubious nature of extremism and brought to notice the inescapable nature of human suffering. The same message is echoed by an Amartya Sen when he begs economists (the same breed, who when placed end to end around the circumference of the world would not reach a conclusion, in Shaw's words) to place welfare above power and freedom above income. He asks us to admit the systematic nature of deprivation that exists in the world in spite of the unprecedented opulence around us. Suffering is primary, more fundamental than envy, love or even hunger.

While in the VT station waiting for my train, I spent a rupee in order to check my weight (a 79 kilo abomination) but couldn't get myself to spare another coin to a hungry child who came up to me later. I was hurrying up to catch my train. I don't give money to adolescents as a principle but I cannot help feeling bad about it hours after that. The irony is that he would have forgotten me and absolved me of my miserliness. This time he gets to do things asamatteroffactedly. Would I have felt better if I would have stopped and bought him a sandwich?

Plagiarism

2008-03-20T03:58:00.000-07:00

I am surprised at how so many people in a place like IITB take to it so easily. It is no longer done in secrecy with the person trying her best to pass it off as an original, but openly and candidly. I saw the first PAF of 2008 a couple of days ago. To say that I was immensely disappointed cannot describe the rush of criticism in my mind for everything that I saw that day. I confess that I have never been involved in 'organizing' a PAF (I have done a couple of voice overs in the past and that's about it) and am probably unaware of the magnitude of effort and intellect that it takes to execute one. But the execution, choreography, production and acting were not what disappointed me (though it is not as if popular opinion endorses them any more than I do). What overwhelmingly caused exasperation was that the entire script and the pedestrian spectacle that was churned out of it were both shamelessly lifted off from a third rate Bollywood film! I was told that even dialogues were conveniently transferred by their so called 'script writers'.

This is but a microcosm of a larger picture of the stagnation that permeates through IITB. Students unscrupulously plagiarize assignments, literature surveys and even theses. It disgusts and disturbs me to imagine the organizers of the recent PAF sitting and brainstorming (one can take that with a pinch of salt) to arrive at a theme for the PAF and in the end, mutually and unanimously agreeing to plagiarize. The story simply repeats when the same guys sit and commit larceny before every assignment, every submission and every thesis defense. Probably the time has come when 'the spirit of inquiry' will exist only as an abstraction and will need to be mummified in a museum of our collective mediocrity. Whatever it is, I am tired of this place and am happy to leave it knowing that I was lucky to know people who ensured that I didn't land up in the same boat as many others!

2008-03-14T23:01:00.000-07:00

We were having supper. There was bread, of course. Brother and I were waiting in greedy anticipation for mother to come and give us our share. She came and served us our loaves giving brother a much bigger helping. I remonstrated but Mother wouldn't hear of it. She said he deserved a bigger loaf because he worked on the fields and I didn't yet. Tears were swelling up my eyes and I was experiencing injustice for the first time. To no one is it as keenly perceptible as it is to a child and I decided to rebel. I got up and with a swift move of hand snatched the pieces of bread from brother and mother and ran away into the woods forever. They were calling out to me telling me to come back, put I was soon out of range and out of their world.

I was running blindly and aimlessly, with two hands full of bread (3 loaves), a mind full of glee and a heart full of exhilaration. But as my luck would have it, I bumped into a hungry bandit who caught me by the scruff and pointed his dagger at me smiling mirthfully with his yellow teeth and blood-red eyes. And while I was experiencing helplessness, he snatched a loaf and began chewing it like a yak all the while holding me by the scruff and laughing at me. With a final grunt of disgust he released me and went on his way knowing that he had left a good deal of indignation for me to ruminate upon for quite sometime.

I pulled myself up and resumed my journey. I ran tirelessly with bread in my hands and a growing determination inside. I stopped all of a sudden on seeing a frail woman lying unconscious on a bed of dead leaves. The sun was upon her body; the colour of her skin was slowly metamorphosing to those of the leaves around her and soon she would be indiscernible. Her head turned slowly and her mournful eyes sought my help. She was beautiful. I felt compassion and broke a piece of bread to feed her. She closed her eyes momentarily to express plaintive disapproval and then compassion turned to empathy as I knew it was water, not bread that she needed. I started looking around again, experiencing a different kind of helplessness and then suddenly I felt a blow strike my head and I fell on the leaves. I turned around to see the woman and a man with a club who I assumed was her mate laughing at my semi conscious body. The woman bent down and released the bread off my hands. Her colour had changed and she no longer looked like she was in need; but the dead leaves stuck on her body as a signature of the deceit she had played upon me.

I woke up to see a lioness staring at me with her hungry eyes. She had drawn her mouth into a ferocious grin and I could see her incisors were craving for a bite. Once again I felt helpless and powerless before her as she came closer. She was in a crouching position and ready for action. I was so petrified that I could not even remember the name of the God we used to thank before supper, much less invoke the being. But to my surprise I saw the lioness draw away and disappear into the woods. As my fear subsided, I understood what power really was. I stood where I had fell knowing I had no bread to eat and nowhere to go. I had heard stories that the woods have a mind of their own and they change their topography to confuse travelers so I realized that tracing my way back home would be out of the question. I decided to tread along the path that was most illuminated. I walked a few steps and saw two bodies lying on the ground. They were the woman and her mate, both dead. The man had been disemboweled but the woman had been mauled and bitten on her neck. I understood what justice meant but I was told later at an older age that what had happened was fate and not justice. The loaves of bread that they had robbed off me lay on the ground beside the woman.

I picked them up and with a queer sense of invigoration, resumed my aimless journey. The illumination was gradually increasing as I walked and I realized that I was walking to the place where the sun never sets, another fact which mother had told me when she put me to sleep. I saw a swallow flying to a tree and from it again continuously. I stood there watching the swallow carry on its recursive routine. Later in my life I heard a fable of a man called Sisyphus whom the gods had cursed to roll a rock up and down a mountain till eternity. What the swallow was doing didn't seem so much of a curse when I saw that it was carrying food for its fledglings. I had felt something watching it, something which I was able to interpret only much later. It was humility.

I walked on the green and auburn fields of the land where the sun never set. There was a small hut, much like our own. I walked to the window and looked inside. There was a woman and a boy looking at the open door with anticipation on their faces.

2008-03-05T09:12:00.000-08:00

There is silence around. It is an all absorbing kind of silence, one that inhibits a person from hearing his own voice. It is a disconcerting prospect to live in a world where certainties transfigure into caprices every other day. It is disconcerting to sit alone in your room and learn through the placid eyes of wall lizard that solitude happens to be a better friend of his than yours. It is disconcerting when love makes its absence felt with a sadistic hint of vengeful but appropriate poetic justice. It is one of those days when thoughts and words dissemble and jiggle around in a concert of confusion. It is one of those days when a man who has all the reasons to be happy is overwhelmed by various apoplexies, in one form and another. He covets unconsciousness as the only possible universal remedy from the bleak and the musty.