Back to business

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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.