Constructive Interference

Chapter 5: Varun subs

noreply@blogger.com (Vyaas) — Sun, 17 Aug 2014 06:11:00 +0000

Consider a bead of oil, whose size Millikan would approve, falling gracefully through one of those civilization altering furnaces. The surrounding air molecules possess a kinetic energy of such intensity that they violently pummel the inanimate drop's surface, bruising it with an unrelenting and absurd rage. In an inexplicable urgency to rush into the drop's core, the rabid air dislodges the drop's own molecules, surrounding, evangelizing and authorizing them with their newly bestowed absurd fury. The drop's unleashed rogue remnants join the absurd army of chaos by the quadrillions, breaching the shrinking drop which is, beyond certainty, doomed to a most horrifying annihilation. Many of these rogues purposelessly collide against the air molecules, some collisions merely reorienting the rogues and original assailants, but others, with just the right amount of maddening bloodlust, enjoin in a fierce kiss. A kiss that lasts just long enough, that the mating molecules transfigure into harder, tougher, stabler species by discharging yet newer, evermore violent berserk rogues! An aging fraction of these rogues, as though overwhelmed by the exponentially increasing action, "relax". That strange principle of physics that says that there's no free lunch, that all phenomena are really transactions of some kind between an object and the rest of the universe, insists that this relaxing be necessarily accompanied by an emission of a prescribed number of photons, particles that put all others to shame when it comes to weight and speed. A speed so raw and large, they reach the Sun in a matter of minutes if nothing stops them! That the word "blitz" was reserved to describe fast - yet again absurd - war is by no means an accident. The absurdity deepens when one realizes that a portion of this light that happens to be obstructed by clueless gazing eyes appears blue to them only because the voids in said eyes that are quote blue-sized feel them! As a certainty buff in my undergrad days, that sentence - uttered by a Physics Professor with a similar aim as mine today - emblazoned in what has since then felt like a vacuous skull, the agonizing realization that not only is there no capital-T-truth but only capital-P-perception, but that all capital-P-perception is itself inherently capital-I-incomplete! If like me, you seek the comfort of a one-size-fits-all explanation, you may, like me, feel haunted while asleep and awake! Please pay attention to what you students have chosen to embrace! The matter in this course is incredibly amusing, but you may need to seriously revise your notion of what an explanation means. This narration which to some of you may sound grotesquely anthropocentric, is more elegantly slash coldly - depending on where you come from - presented by relationships between symbols in a language, don't forget designed by humans, called mathematics. Some of you may think that the truth is in the math, but I submit to you that you'll have better luck finding proofs in puddings! In this course you will find yourselves so frantically masturbating over these symbols, especially on the mornings of your midterms, that the so-called truth starts appearing weird in the way a word starts appearing weird when uttered over and over again. Truth. Truth. Truth. Truth. Truth. Truth. Pronouncing it differently doesn't make it any better. Taruth. Taaaaaruth. Truuuuuuuuth. Taaaaaaaaruuuuuuuuth. How bizarre! I'm told this is called semantic satiation. And I don't feel any wiser knowing that! Back to the realtime-non-relativistic-millisecond sized action movie whose denouement you may have pieced together, which is that the stormy volume of hot gas engulfing the now faint wisp of an oil drop has burst into a Dodger blue flame that will consume the central wisp before a final disappearing act that's a worthy metaphor for the neubulous bind between all life and death! And in a plot-for-a-sequel-that's-so-good-it-write's-itself, the rogue molecules who weren't recruited for the quote full-burn begin to coalesce into giant factions of nasty black solid particles, who harbor a dissipating anger that radiates bright yellow! This is soot. It's carcinogenic and deadly to humans; the universe is indifferent to it. The next time you see a candle flame and feel a blessing of peaceful serenity gracing your optical apparati, I invite you to recall the spectacular chaos that is taking place underneath it all. I take it that you all received the memo saying that the principle requirement of this class was the staunch belief that however chaotic slash complicated phenomena might seem and however impossible it is obtaining a quote final solution, there exists a set of fundamental and immutable processes that when deftly superposed can sufficiently approximate the capital-T-truth. By sufficient, I mean that the set of phenomena a certain number of you will be toiling away in a basement lab trying to perfectly reproduce at any time of the day, another group of you must be able to develop an accompanying working model for; a model that we can use to make quote predictions. If that sounds like a Sissyphusian sort of deal, I promise you that I'll do my best to make the climbs and descents interesting. Speaking of interesting, let me begin today's class by introducing to you this beast of a brainiac called Ludwig Boltzmann...

Chapter 4.8: Vladimir looks out the window

noreply@blogger.com (Vyaas) — Tue, 22 Apr 2014 10:51:00 +0000

Sky hangs gray like dampened canvas.
Inner city scintillae appear smog-muffled.
The night, a starless cave.
A warm breeze perspires northern sweat.
Lucid dreaming prom queen kicks at her blanket.
Netflix blunted undergrad reaches for his phone.
Writer's blocked writer masturbates fiercely.
Nuclear scientist's wife curls up fetally in despair.
Thirsty homeless nobody clenches collar with remaining teeth.
Well fed cats cradled in wrinkled Paget's diseased arms.
Hypnotic dubstep reverberates underneath pavement.
Night-shift Nurse prays while cancer dances.
10 year old autistic experiences scalding injuries in nightmare.
Single mother of three destroys final traces of self esteem.
History majoring stripper services orally for a hundred more dollars.
Daytime TV sitcom actor downs tequila, convinced that life is a sick joke.
Off campus night guard stays awake via myoclonic shocks.
He is also getting brutally cheated on.
Lawyer he could never afford hugs a tear drenched pillow.
"Stalwart" marketing exec actually gets sleep at night.
Overly anxious insurance company applicant possibly ODs on sleeping pills.
Rabbi knocks over his bedside Talmud upon an involuntary bowel discharge.
Member of the ghetto scores an unbelievable amount of dope.
That it was counterfeit he will realize before dawn. Painfully. Very painfully.
The Los Angeles night sky is an inaudible slumber.
Her homes wrecked by overpowering insomnia.
A self damaging streak runs across her brow.
A people disfigured.
By loneliness.
By themselves.

Tennis

noreply@blogger.com (Vyaas) — Tue, 22 Apr 2014 07:51:00 +0000

Always an advantage to serve.
Its a fault to overstep.
Just get the other to miss you.
Try not to throw a racquet.
Don't be in love for too long.

Chapter 4.7: Still trying

noreply@blogger.com (Vyaas) — Sat, 19 Apr 2014 09:15:00 +0000

And in my den of delirium, my hamlet of hallucination,
A maddening proof of apoplexy pours into the chalice of my shitty existence,
Spilling right through the clouds that only now realize they're not solid.
The fucking procrustean nature of physical law makes all being look futile.
This futility being the bastard product of Purpose!
Ah, but what of Purpose? Does not the symphony he orchestrates bore him?
What are HIS dreams? HIS Purpose? We're being led by a sophist.
Who gives meaning while defying definition!
Leave me alone, while I replace all my windows with mirrors!

Chapter 4.6: Vladimir tries

noreply@blogger.com (Vyaas) — Thu, 17 Apr 2014 10:44:00 +0000

Here, in the Metastable province of uncertainty,
I choicelessly squat Metabolizing a reality,
A suffering that Metaphysics has cursed upon me,
A paralysis Metastasizing with the pulse of quartz.
Tick. Tick. Tick. This Metadrama has seized all ceasing.
No Metamorphosis of ideas slash bodies will wind this clock back.
Alone in the horizonless shadow of Metaphor, I hear my skull crack.

Chapter 4.3: Varun's X

noreply@blogger.com (Vyaas) — Sat, 05 Apr 2014 08:22:00 +0000

When X speaks, X is thoughtless.

And when X is impassioned, X is insensitive.

And when X is engaged, X is also preoccupied.

I feel lonelier when I'm with X than without:

subject to X's mental projects,

cornered by X's mental projections,

bludgeoned by X's mental projectiles.

X makes love masochism.

X spoon-feeds me hope.

Ctrl+X = 2X.

X lures me to the depths of X.

X traps me in the fluorescent lit parts of my mind.

Where the asylum swallows sanity to make room for X.

X cares not for my inner Y.

X lulls me to Z.

All X knows is 'I,I,I'.

X isn't variable.

Chapter 4: Ellendale

noreply@blogger.com (Vyaas) — Mon, 24 Mar 2014 18:16:00 +0000

"Varun. Metaphors. Beautiful things aren't they?"
"Indeed."
"The poets are our optometrists."
"Indeed."
"Will you please grant me membership to the library of your thoughts? Oh what unread philosophical conquests await the avid student in those unforgivingly thick volumes? What melancholic poetry sits gathering dust in those bending shelves? What terrible realities lay veiled in the guise of fiction? What divine Mathematics hides in those cavernous depths where men before me were loathe to tread? What Theology sits reserved exclusively for the cathedral of your soul?"
"If poets are our optometrists, you are my cataract Vladimir."
"Be cruel all you want. But I am in love Varun! In thick, viscous, adhesive love!"
"I hope for your sake and to a greater extent mine that this doesn't go unrequited."
"Varun, you should behold this angel's touch on numbers. I feel like a virgin around her when she derives. She calculates frugally, simplifies daringly and abstracts mercilessly. What may seem like the empty imitations of some creepy Dirac-Fan-Club president, to judgmental fools, when she invents symbols to encapsulate her various thoughts, but to the trained and patient eye, what awaits is a colossal statue whose everything upward of the waist remains in the clouds; Berniniesque balls hanging and all. Certainly her ability with symbol manipulation must mean she has an eye for symbolism in literature! And you know perhaps better than I do, that such a mind is incapable of boredom. Theoretically. Her mind must be a whirlwind of the most sublime, the most enraptured thoughts Varun. I can feel it! I can hear the harp in her head! She is the unity slash singularity slash proverbial one!"
"Holy Jovian Vortices Vladimir! Have you told her this? Minus the Bernini balls part?"
"No. I will disclose all this in an appropriate sonnet."
"Sonnet. You make me wonder sometimes if you're hopeful or dopeful."
"Light me another Varun. I want to share something with you."
"Anything as long as you spare me the eye surgery."
"I said something to a student today and he responded by helping himself to a generous portion of umbrage."
"What did you say?"
"I asked him to work hard."
"And?"
"He broke into song about how life had dealt him a tough set of cards and how his self-made republican father had always demanded the unadultrated best and how being an undergraduate here is really hard with all the unfairly analytical subjects that expose all kinds of voids in an undergrad - intellectual and, perhaps ergo, emotional - which they aren't really equipped to handle given a preponderance of lousy teachers in high school and a current roster of apathetic slash zombified professors accompanied by subpar yet headstrong sidekick TAs and so on and so on."
"And you responded to all this with some "work hard" aphorism which is always prone to be perceived, here in the United States of Never Wrong and Exceptional Tweens as insensitive, snobbish and coming from you, Soviet?"
"I call such events sub-zero slip-ups."
"..."
"..."
"You make me feel like that girl from Inception whose only purpose in the movie was to keep the audience in the loop by asking the most obvious questions."
"..."
"The fuck is a sub-zero slip-up?"
"Remember the first Mortal Combat movie? Combat with a K?"
"Yes."
"There is a memorable fight scene. Liu Kang Vs Sub-Zero. Liu Kang is this Chinese Kung-fu fighter defending the realm of Earth while Sub-Zero is one of the mercenaries of Shao Khan, this insanely strong inter-cosmic tyrant who likes fighting all the time; never dies but simply exiles himself upon defeat."
"I know Vladimir. I spent retarded amounts of time and dollars on plastic gamepads and pixelated blood."
"So in this scene, Liu Kang tries delivering some Shaolin love where the moon don't shine but Sub-Zero is light-footed like a ballerina and evades all the incoming blows. Remember also that Sub-Zero can turn things into ice by simply touching them while Liu Kang needs to be sufficiently enraged to shoot a modest albeit difficult to reckon with ball of fire."
"Seriously Vlad. Puberty through college, I was unhealthily infatuated with female video game characters, making me want to beat them up with every male soldier, cyborg, samurai, sorcerer, psycopath, sadist and savant. I couldn't process real life the way a normal teen would. I know all of Mortal Combat. Combat with a K."
"That means you will certainly recall that after a couple minutes of cries, grunts and evasions, Sub-Zero distances himself from our befuddled Buddhist and gets into a kind of squat, commencing to channel the forces of comic book nature in an effort to create a hemispherically expanding field of ultra low Temperature, threatening to turn our oriental hero into a polar zero. Kitana who Liu Kang has some PG rated hots for, walks in at this point and cryptically instructs him to "use the element that brings life", reducing the fight to a second grader's riddle."
"I remember all this with scarily vivid clarity. Isn't there a conveniently placed bucket of water some place?"
"Yes! Which Mr. Chow-Mein grabs and starts rotating about an axis perpendicular to his side profile, with a centrifugal force that keeps the water from spilling out. And while Sub-Zero is still summoning, rather greedily, more and more energy to create a large hemisphere of some fiercely low entropy around him, Liu hurls the bucket at him, which the water leaves and enters the aforementioned hemispherical field turning into a spear. The spear accelerates towards the hemisphere's center, where Sub-Zero spends his last few microseconds stupidly gaping at the inevitable. The Beast from the East emerges victorious, the scene giving the viewer some sort of Buddhist-wisdom-trumps-typical-American-bigger-is-better-stupidity vibe. "
"What is the relevance Vladimir! What is the metaphor?!"
"The metaphor reveals itself when you pay attention to the way we human beings converse: We are constantly creating such force fields around ourselves in some desperate attempt to fortify against the unknown. Force-fields that change sometimes the very structure of incoming matter to reassure us of our positions and to obliterate or at best, dilute the words of our interlocutors."
"..."
"When I say something with the most Gandhian intent, it could be perceived as violent by those of us with very sensitive force-fields. Conversely, when I utter the kind of bigotry you'd expect from a red-neck, it could be perceived as a joyful expression of camaraderie! It is a different matter to peel apart the origins of our force-fields. They may come from surrounding culture slash educational traditions slash instinctive prejudices. But the point is that we must disarm ourselves from time to time so we can appraise something for what it is and not what it ought to seem like for if not, like Sub-zero, it will prove to be our undoing. The world maybe so badly misunderstood thanks to our automatic personal force-fields, that we can never get to the bottom of anything. The Truth will simply laugh at us, her mirth sounding so faint and distant, it becomes indistinguishable from noise."
"Are you saying that you should have been more sensitive to your student's position while at the same time he should have been more sensitive to yours? Did both of you Sub-Zero slip?"
"Precisely Varun! We must try and meet half-way and arrive at the truth together."
"You are full of fantasy today."
"Am I?"
"Yes you are. You are in thick, viscous, adhesive, eewy, guey love. For it is only when one is in love that he slash she must necessarily surrender his slash her singular view of the world and instead adopt the point of view of two."
"You melt me Varun."
"Eew. Pull yourself together man."
"I can't. I'm Melting..."

Infrequently Asked Questions, an Introduction to the Untitled Enlightenment Project

noreply@blogger.com (Vyaas) — Tue, 02 Jul 2013 19:17:00 +0000

Augie March, the chief protagonist in Saul Bellow's memorable bildungsroman, narrates the following gut-puncher of a scene:

I remember I was in a fishmarket square in Naples (and the Neapolitans are people who don't give up easily on consanguinity)--this fishmarket where the mussels were done up in bouquets with colored string and slices of lemon, squids rotting out their sunk speckles from their flabbiness, steely fish bleeding and others with peculiar coins of scales --and I saw an old beggar with his eyes closed sitting in the shells who had had written on his chest in mercurochrome: "Profit by my imminent death to send a greeting to your loved ones in Purgatory: 50 lire."

The beggar's surprising calibre of wit, should be relatively less challenging to the imagination of my fellow Indian city dwellers, than our friends in the first world, given our distinctly high frequency of encounter with them (beggars). The beggar's appraisal of the upper class sentiments, his simplistic but quite accurate perception of the role of money in a society stratified by income, his method of channeling the power of cruel irony to strike his audience with a profound level of awareness for only the briefest moments of self-doubt/loathing. These conceptions of the witty beggar, however excruciating to our feeling of "Life is good", comes easily to the "urbanized" Indian citizen, who perhaps even imbibing this newly acquired wisdom, pays heed to it via the simplest of gestures.

Or so I could fool myself into believing.

In my view, a debilitating wave of cynicism and apathy has swept our nation (yes, the very same as Cardinal Goswami's). What has become far easier to imagine is the emergent narrative, that is virtualizing reality with an emphasis on self-gratification:
1) The beggar's predicament is the result of his karma.
2) Also, the collection of crooks, hoodlums and hooligans we call the Government.
3) Also, maybe the beggar can get a job and earn a living like the rest of us hard-working people.
4) The caste system is unfair you say? Have you not heard of quotas or what?
5) Yes, the quotas don't work, but see (2).
6) I'm just an honest labourer-by-day-family-man-by-night. I vote and pay my taxes. What else do you want me to do? "Think our country" out of disaster?

That is simply a sample of the kind of self-congratulatory yet nihilistic dialectic that Amartya Sen was emphatically NOT referring to when romanticizing the Indian instinct to argue¹ . Because at the heart of any serious argument, lies reason. Reason. Yes, it is worth mentioning one more time: Reason. We are becoming a dangerously unreasonable race of peoples. And the tragedy is that it isn't entirely our fault. For what sense is the growing youth supposed to make of a world that apparently values entertainment over ideals (If you find *serious news item with far reaching repercussions* depressingly difficult to follow, why not browse our collection of celebrity gossip that appeals to your apetite for the embarrassing and the inspirational)? What sense is he/she to make of journalists dangling politicians like live bait above a democratically charged mob to invisible avail? What sympathy can be spared for the poor farmer whose circumstances have been relegated to fillers between advertisements for business schools, fast cars and skin care products? How much of his/her conserved time is to be devoted to the affairs outside the solipsistic sanctuaries of social media? The situation is worse than a temporary bout of cultural diarrhea; it throbs with the threat of a metastasizing cancer. Perhaps the allegation of sounding alarmist can be softened if not voided by a personal anecdote.

As an undergraduate in Mechanical Engineering in my senior year, I had realized my over-nursed dream of building and explaining the working of a bicycle gyroscope to students from other departments during the annual ME symposium. For those of you unfamiliar with this remarkable contraption², the bicycle gyroscope is a standard apparatus used to highlight a very non-intuitive aspect of angular momentum, whose centrality to modern physics can never be understated. Understanding it is a necessary rite of passage for anybody who wishes to grapple with both classical and quantum theory. It is like DNA to a Biologist, rational choice theory to an Economist, the Rosetta Stone to a Historian. The gyroscope is also of immense import to the mechanical engineers who concern themselves with the stability of trajectories. Needless to say, a PhD in physics who teaches the subject for a living, however entranced he/she is by the bizarreness of the Conservation-of-Angular-Momentum's universal validity, surely can be expected to be that soul in the crowd for whom this demonstration is hardly surprising. So it was to my surprise, when my very own PHYSICS PROFESSOR congratulated me not for my expository account of this phenomenon, but rather sarcastically for my legerdemain. At first, I thought he was inviting a dialogue on "True" understanding and that this was his method to inspire me to become a better teacher. But I quickly realized, judging from his shockingly retarded grasp of the subject and its jargon ("things don't simply stand erect and go round and round"), that he hadn't the remotest inkling on what he was talking about! The look of puzzlement on anybody's face when their intuition is challenged is a secret craving of mine, but there was nothing appetizing about this man's doubts, or rather, his certainty. It was in this moment forever crystallized in my memory, that my inner scaffoldings came crashing down: How did this person acquire his degree? What sort of textbooks did he read to avoid confronting this subject through the 5+ years of his college education? What sort of peer group doesn't challenge such deficiencies even for fun? What sort of entrance exams fail to catch such severities and how poorly trained are his employers who make decisions regarding his raise? Which accreditation board was to be held accountable? Who were his teachers and what abject nonsense had they inherited? During which generational shift exactly had it evacuated the minds of those in charge that Science was a proven and rigorous method of enquiry that had encircled Nature as its item of utmost import and for the sake of civilization could not be surrendered to such causality? And what of this man's conscience; the gaping hole in his knowledge didn't stop him from questioning his student's credentials. Was he even aware that such a hole stood agape? After all, one can easily recall instances when one's simplest revelations came after a gentle nudge. To have gone through life without these effective prods would require an incomprehensible grade of immunity to criticism, or worse, a complete eradication of it! At the time it looked like an isolated instance of the kind of lack of awareness you'd expect from the reekingly rich, but society's true colors were beginning to emerge and my resulting extrapolation turns out to be hardly inaccurate. Politicians who don't understand the constitution are commonplace. So too are stenographers who posture as journalists, businessmen who are selectively blind to how their fortunes are intricately linked to the misery of millions, lawyers who'll stop at nothing to win an argument, corporate capitalists' respiratory relationship to IP, cricketers who seem oblivious to the havok money has wreaked in their sport, film producers content with their usual recipe of endocrinologically oriented high grossing scripts, revisionist historians leading cacophonous bandwagon's of propaganda, economists blind to unintended consequences, etc. And here's the gut punch with the same implicit content as Bellow's: the people around us are the ones who comprise this society, this reality. You and me, by this analysis, regardless of whether we like it or not, are complicit in these decays. My Physics Professor - writing this sentence was not easy - was a harsh representation of everything that was wrong with the World, with India and with me.

It is here that I wish to reintroduce our reluctant average Selvan who might have unwittingly suggested the key to a better future, perhaps hopeful that his interlocutors would take his meaning literally and shut up once and for all. Can we in fact "think" our country out of disaster? I hope to attach meaning to this phrase in the remainder of this pamphlet.

A good place to start would be to adopt the language of logic. Consider two propositions A and B. Also consider the simple third proposition, that the truth of A implies the truth of B i.e. if B is true, A must be true. A particular sort of A is that which is rendered meaningless when left all to itself. For instance, let A be the loaded statement "India is a secular country." Let B be "One is free to follow any religion in India without persecution." Now, if B is true, A is true by definition. But if B is false, is A still true? Answering this question requires knowing what it means to be persecuted. Given the broad spectrum of lifestyles in any subcontinental society, it is safe to assume that getting a majority to agree on what persecution exactly entails is very difficult. So let us strengthen the idea of Indian secularism with another proposition C: "Candidates contesting for office don't exploit people's religious affiliations for votes." C now gives A a discernable shape and allows us to discuss secularism in terms of political motivations³. So if C is true, B is true and A is resoundingly true. But if C is false, B is less plausible and A is even less plausible. Let us stick in a couple more to include considerations regarding indoctrination and law: D "Public institutions like schools and colleges do not have religious affiliations" and E "All religions are equal before the eyes of the law". For a very strong A, we could even throw in a forceful statute F "Any Member of Parliament if found encouraging religiously polarized communities to commit atrocities like, I don't know, demolishing mosques, burning houses and killing people should be tried as purposeful instigators and stripped of their political standing with breakneck immediacy." Now, if one were bold enough to utter A, one would face the uphill task of backing it up with B,C,D,E and F. If even one of these is false, A's truth can be rightfully called into question (even if F's language isn't optimally disinterested). If all of these propositions are found to be false, A is not only false, but downright laughable. In fact, insisting on a poorly verified A's circulation can cause some serious destabilization in the meaning of words like secularism and democracy.

This kind of reasoning is powerful. For one, it is academic and not colored with prejudice; it is simply an exercise in seeing what Indian secularism should entail if it is true. Both the atheist and the believer can agree on the logical relationships between the various propositions and their observable truth values, however distinct their moral judgements on those truths are. The logical route avoids the tediously useless complaints that we've grown tired of hearing, for example, how Hindus were original settlers or how Muslims raped our women. Do those facts have any bearing on our modern conception of secularism? If they do, this discussion was over before it even started. We shouldn't be discussing secularism but how best to allot rights based on genetic heritage!

Another advantage in using the language of logic to arrive at truth values is allowing for a separation of the ideal from the real. No country has completely achieved B,C,D,E and F because reality is extremely complicated. What we're interested in is the degree of difference between the real and the ideal because operating on the platform that connects the two is our only hope for progress. Too long in the logical board room can result in plain impracticable propositions like "ban all religion". Besides being hopelessly unpragmatic and dangerously inconsistent with other core ideals like freedom and liberty, it heralds a tone that is insensitive, brutish and above all certain. Shouldn't all exercises that seek the truth begin with the humble realization that nothing is certain?

Indeed, religion plays a huge role in people's lives and to have it questioned, controlled, altered and mocked can cause many people to visibly sweat. The various interpretations of religion being a way of life or a set of self-contained moral codes or a source of transcendental experiences are all too bulky for the metaphorical carpet to hide. Surely even the atheist can imagine the plummeting of hope being a good enough reason for many to transfer faith to some greater entity. These personal entanglements don't even begin to describe the political nightmare of a fact that all religions are not actually equal, that some are more extreme than others: Jainism compared to Islam for example. And in the midst of this asymmetry, promoting tolerance as a slogan introduces immense inconsistencies in fostering brotherhood and fellowship⁴. These realities defy rational deconstructions but cannot by virtue of that fact become the very reasons for upending our logical explorations. We have no choice but to use A through F as a basis set to tackle these more difficult questions. The infrequently asked ones. For if we shed A through F, we'd be trapped in an infinitely anarchical game of goal-post moving. Questions like "what is secularism after all?" and "didn't democracy mean anything goes?" are smoke alarms signalling the pyromaniacal lust that burns reason black. If we are sincere in our admission of these problems, then we're obliged to do our best to fix them, and to fix them is to question the validity of not just the answers, but of the questions themselves. Seriously. As in seriously.

"But what is secularism after all?" queries the confused heart. Did proposition A pop out of thin air? Is A even a valid axiom? What with the majority belonging to one religion and all, is A an example of some edgy committee writing? Some perfunctory attempt at emulating the West? Some pipe dream inspired by Marxist opiates?

Everything you experience in life is equal to everything that impinges on your sensory system. You are the absolute center of your universe and your attachment to yourself is the singularity that makes your living even possible. Your reasoning is reflective of the world you exclusively perceive. Which is why it is easy to get carried away. Everything that doesn't belong in your interior design can become superfluous and extraneous. Why should Indian secularism's flimsiness bother you when your everyday experiences have no perceivable relationship to it? Why ruminate on impending ecological disasters when guaranteed a lifetime supply of air-conditioning? Why lose sleep over some border conflict taking place at exotic altitudes? Soon, the triumphant cliche "Out of sight, out of mind" exits, and like a responsible bellhop, hooks to the doorknob of your mind that familiar beige colored tag that reads "Do Not Disturb" prefixed with an italicized "Please" for good measure.

Prop A is readily reduced to a silly non sequitur, too often as a result of the above solipsism. Mounting a defense for A does not require the mental gymnastics of math proofs. It doesn't require research labs or a thousand page treatise. Its proof languishes in the depths of our experience as self-aware Human Beings⁵. Your ability to socialize without steering the conversation back into your problems every five minutes, your capacity to imagine that you could very well be the problem in the first place, your sense of judgement to convict yourself for being majorly wrong. Dishonest even. If you aren't immediately being persecuted, you would be if you were exchanged atom for atom with someone who was. That thought experiment is more than legitimate because it is the only means to open your mind to the truth that you are not in complete control of your fate, that you are not at the center of the Universe. That is the capitalized, block-lettered and seriffed TRUTH. And this non-empty, in fact very substantive empathy that emerges from your awareness of what it means to be persecuted is key to getting prop A. Simply being aware, being conscious of your environ and your place in it can inspire the necessary and sufficient set of inarticulable propositions that convinces none other than YOU.

Think about this formula of awareness and reason. Take the rape epidemic that has besmirched our Country. If you are aware that as a citizen, you haven't magically severed your umbilical connection to our country's patriarchal roots, then chances are that you can recollect some of the instances when you indulged in some minor patriarchy yourself. Be it in the perception of the role of the Indian Woman: objectifying her as a piece of meat, stereotyping her as a housewife/cook, emphasizing the imperative that is her good looks, patronizing her implicitly/explicitly when she outdid herself or remain passively background when someone else treated her in such ways. Why, even the language you use could have been the friendly fire you once relegated as benign⁶. With this deep awareness of the underpinnings of chauvinism, having renounced your claim to eternal correctness, how could you muster the gall to jump onto the streets and parade the castration of a rapist, when that is clearly the most obscene of tangents that impersonates the solution? Fight molestation with molestation? Surely it strikes you that as a middle class well educated student of Life, you have benefitted from a set of experiences that has taught you better than to go about brutalizing the opposite sex. But you can also ask yourself about those who were brought up in the most miserable backdrops of our country, where the toxic combination of poverty, piety, peerhood and patriarchy, can drive someone into making dangerous life choices. Atom for atom, it could be you. Now, observe our proximity to the root of the problem. Intimidating. But close. Well poised to tackle the real bull by its horns. Our debates, press releases and legislation can address a richer, more effective solution procedure starting from here. For we have thought and reasoned that the problem has less to do with how we protect our women, and more with how we treat them. Grotesque doctrines in religious texts will be criticized, because your umbrage comes nowhere close to hers. Female roles in mainstream Indian cinema might undergo an overhaul and you might have to answer the unsettling question of why your first response was "I'll adjust." Only awareness can reveal the truth. Only reason can set it free⁷.

Apparently, our cynical times call for empathy's defense. "You dare empathize with the scumbag, pervert, barbaric rapist? Has your sense of true north escaped you? What evil ganja have you been smoking?"

I wish to introduce a coinage, The Disease of the Synecdoche⁸, a.k.a. DOS.
The frequent DOS attack here is that a part of my opposition to the rape isn't so much about the rapist as it is about society's instincts, hence the whole of my opposition is voided due to the elbow room I've gifted him. By empathizing with him, I have become his lawyer, his publicist, his loyal fan. By some accounts, I promote his merchandise and also secretly god-father his children. The reason this line of reasoning is automatic, is the same reason the aforementioned solipsism is also automatic. It is intracranio-numbingly easy to take such cross-Atlantic leaps of logic when you've renounced all your stakes. There are other extremely relatable examples:

"Modi is guilty? So you're from the left? One more of Sonia Ji's stooges? Naxal?"

"Gays are humans? Next you'll say cows are humans. Then pigs."

"Farmers are committing suicide? So should I stop buying groceries so we can join them?"

Don't pretend you haven't heard at least variants of such right-wing poetry. And don't be surprised when you come across similar speech impediments from the left:

"Sonia Ji is guilty? So you're from the right? One more of Advani's acolytes? RSS?"

"The Iraq war is freeing people? Why don't we bomb everyone and free them all?"

"Farmers are committing suicide? So should I stop buying groceries so we can join them?"

What we have here is a set of growingly innovative automatic DOS defences, a socio-immunological proven method of evasion. Conflate, accuse and repeat. At the speed of sound. It becomes impossible to be critical without being violently polarized. Arundhati Roy is a naxalite. Palagummi Sainath is an alarmist. Vandana Shiva is a hippy. This Standard Operating Procedure indicates a bad conscience. Ask yourself: Was there a condoning of the rape? Was there the slightest insinuation that the victim was asking for it? But in swoop the pundits, the television anchors, the spokespersons, the geriatrics and the juveniles, stroboscopically finger-wagging to the tune of conformity. Our media has set the agenda and its survival as an industry depends on us participating in its narrative. And its narrative has a complicated dependence on revenue. Advertising and television ratings have sealed themselves as indispensable fittings to today's information manifold. Expect a media with a predator's instincts for the quick buck. That's why our TVs have gotten louder and varicolored; because the quickest buck comes from exploiting that intracranio-numbing ease with which we surrender to self gratification. Shouting matches, celebrity gossip, doomsday soundtracks, vivid imagery, inflated rhetoric, controversy curdling are all turning out to be SOP in the media because it appeals to our automatic disposition to be minimally engaged so as to not take anything outside our immediate lives seriously. Consider just a few recent articles of news that have been squeezed dry of their shock value and thrown aside like spoilt cheese:
1) The Indian Jawan who was returned mutilated by the Pakistan army, was an opportunity to conduct a nuanced discussion on the sanguinary confusion regarding Kashmir's allegiance and the tinderbox description threatening Pakistan's sovereignty (cf. MJ Akbar's "Tinderbox - The Past and Future of Pakistan"). Instead, Goswami, India's self-appointed Premiership, used this opportunity to extend his Pan-Indianism to call for War against Pakistan by inviting Pakistani scholars and ex-generals to his primetime show and silencing them every time they offered evidence of peaceful piecing together of the problem. The exchanges closely resembled the sweaty testosterone infused clinch fighting seen in WWE matches, minus the spandex⁹.
2) The maoist attack at Chattisgarh that killed 28 Congress workers was as good a platform as any to deconstruct the politically charged race for resources, the plundering of adivasi land, the historical and sociological circumstances permitting a dominant presence of terrorists in the state. Once again, Goswami's sympathies for those suggesting carpet bombing the affected areas seemed strongly parallel to the predictable climaxes of action movies.
3) The IPL "rotten apples" disgraced for match-fixing could have been just the episodic segway required to step back and inspect the beast that Indian Cricket has become. It is a billion dollar industry mixed with the drama and trauma of Bollywood, which bandies about players like pieces on a life-size game of Monopoly played by businessmen whose abodes are in clouds. There is also a compelling similarity between America's war on drugs and India's war on match-fixers. Institutionalizing and hence legalizing betting could subtract significantly from the work of policemen, who lets not forget are at the service of the Indian public first before investigating the semaphores of entitled cricketing tweens. And the currency siphon stemming from the corporate-government nexus can be seen in the Indian budget's tax write-offs (cf. Sainath's "Many Insecurities") for the entertainment industry, which the IPL is neatly bracketed into. Money that rightfully belongs to the uplifting of our poor Indian laborers. You can imagine the ready reluctance to engage in these harsh realities. It would depress people. Make them feel guilty in pleasuring themselves like hormone besotted boys who just discovered the internet. It might even stir them into action and possibly ruin the business model. A business model so plastic and surreal, it can be thought of in the same sense as a lingerie model.

Look how cripplingly inadequate our information sources are. The nutrition value of our news channels, if you can pardon the gruesome analogy, would have us suffering from goitre, scurvy, rickets, parasthesia and night blindness all at the same time! The paralysis is not meant to be an exaggeration. If you are attentive of the paid-news pandemic, from local language news papers to the English Behemoths, you'd immediately see how this single phenomenon can be the undoing of our sovereign republic. To compare this to McCarthyism like propaganda is like not getting a good joke. The bureaucratically mottled universe of Kafka and the tyrannical hell of Orwell, as overused as yardsticks for doom as they are, enunciate the reality well, because cliche alone explains cliche. And as Sainath coldly exacts his judgement on Indian mainstream news, "Forget Professor Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent¹⁰. We've begun to Manufacture Content!"

So when we can't trust our mainstream media, how are we to witness reality? How does one separate it from the fictions that are understandably linked to an impregnable business model? How does one begin to think and calculate when force fed the deceptions and delusions of our media?

The questions are surprisingly old and are even canonical starting points in studies in philosophy, namely epistemology. One metaphor that isn't repeated enough is that of Socrates' Allegory of the Cave, found in Plato's Republic, Mankind's first attempt at assimilating a coherent theory of Justice. Socrates encourages his disciples Glaucon and Adeimantus to conduct the following thought experiment:

Imagine a cave in which prisoners are tied by their arms, necks and legs, constricting their view to only one direction, specifically towards a large wall facing them. Behind them is a fire that lights the cave and in front of it, yet still behind the prisoners, are figures casting shadows on the large wall, like some sort of bizarre cinematic puppet show. All the prisoners can see and interpret is limited to their sensations of these shadows. With no way of realizing that a world exists outside this claustrophobic nightmare they've come to call home, they get supremely confident that what they are experiencing is in fact reality. Then one day, one of the prisoners is released and dragged out of the cave into the world outside, where after his eyes adjust to the Sun, slowly starts to put two and two together, that life all this while had been a fantastic delusion. This education, the real meat of his enlightenment, was something inexplicably worth sharing. So he comes back to the cave to inform the prisoners that the lives they are living is imperially fake, that the gap between their belief in the constitution of reality and their knowledge of the constitution of reality is unimaginably large. But the prisoners are so hardwired to their beliefs, that this "freed" prisoner starts to sound like a trickster anarchist. The allegory is supposed to be a reference to the real life of Socrates, who was eventually fed hemlock and put to death for precisely this sort of annoyance.

The Greeks were definitely onto something when they were discussing education as a liberation of the mind. All this stuff about awareness, reason and truth converge beautifully at the focal points of our education. An education that is less about examinations, job interviews or status symbols and more about refusing to serve another term in the comfortable prisons we've erected for ourselves. And it turns out, this most electrifying liberation is exactly what the most downtrodden, exploited and poorest people in our country can benefit from the most. You are the class of people that become lawyers, businessmen, politicians, journalists, doctors, writers and Physics Professors. You are the beholders, transmitters and guardians of our culture and economy. Your imprisonment, is thus our culture's imprisonment, and the ones who suffer the most are the economically and socially backward classes of your society, for you are their employers, their representatives. And when you screw up, you are unwittingly boring away at the lives of an entire class of people, which our media's business model doesn't permit us to think about.

Please don't fall for the tempting although pathetic Synecdoche that understanding DNA, rational choice theory, the Rosetta Stone and gyroscopes frees the oppressed classes. The kind of thinking required in the serious study of these subjects is the same kind of thinking that fosters the liberation of the mind. It isn't the actual content of these subjects, but the self-contained dialectic in them that offers the chisels and forks to break out of our Shawshanks. Put another way, it doesn't matter what you think but how you think. Anybody can have thoughts, but the distinction lies in the machinery that produces them¹¹. The difference between inspecting prop A through the lens of empathy is different from accepting it as an immovable standard. Both views may reach a moral equivalence on paper, but only one of them offers the opportunity to extend the perimeter of understanding. Learning the structure and functions of DNA, besides leaving one absolutely slack-jawed at Nature's infinite complexity, dislodges you from the center of things, and reminds you that to tackle complexity is to be disciplined and free to consider possibilities foreign to your life's routines. To digest the inherent paradoxes of rational choice theory is to be hypersensitive to the power of incentives and psyche. To appreciate the Rosetta Stone is to confront mankind's roots and its immutable love for language and how it always seems to magically supersede its grammar. How can such intellectual excursions not affect the way one perceives and interacts with fellow human-beings? And how can one ignore the ingrained humanity in these subjects? If you write software and are aware of the way it shapes society and its consciousness, then you will think deeply about its repercussions and might not be as trigger happy as you're told to be by execs when its time to file for an IP patent. If you are a businessman, even if profit-making is the end goal, being aware of how much you owe society and how similar everybody else is to you can go a long way in codifying ethical practices. If you are a minister in charge of foreign affairs, being aware of the kind of privileged access you have to operations of the WTO and the UN and the economic avalanches they can cause in particular regions, is more than half the battle won in resuscitating the World's lowest classes.

Your education, if you choose to take ownership of it, will restore your grasp on reality. It is a painstaking process. It can be a frightfully lonely one. But it promises to reveal the truth if you're persistent. Like the emergent structure of a Sierpinski triangle.

It would be remiss not to complete the context of Bellow's beggar in Napoli, or rather Augie's. His realization that awareness was inseparable from strangeness is a comforting admission:

Dying or not, this witty old man was sassing everybody about the circle of love that protects you. His skinny chest went up and down with the respiration of the deep-sea stink of the hot shore and its smell of explosions and fires. The war had gone north not so long before. The Neapolitan passersby grinned and smarted, longing and ironical as they read this ingenious challenge. You do all you can to humanize and familiarize the world, and suddenly it becomes more strange than ever. The living are not what they were, the dead die again and again, and at last for good.
I see this now. At that time not.

This pamphlet aspires to be the spark of your personal renaissance. Via subjects mentioned in this preface and more, we hope to strengthen this thesis, that it is possible to "think" our country, and ourselves, out of disaster.

References:

[1] Amartya Sen's "The Argumentative Indian"
[2] If beauty is a priority, see The Feynman Lectures on Physics (Volume 1)
[3] C is however not entirely independent of B because of this other nagging concept called Democracy, for if B is false, C to some degree is rendered false as well, because the effectiveness of my vote has been altered by my religious affiliation (hence persecution). Real life is difficult to distillate into mathematically precise ideas, but we aren't looking for complete descriptions anyway.
[4]Do you tolerate your brother, or do you love him?
[5] David Foster Wallace's "This is Water", one of the greatest commencement speeches in recent history, lays the sufficiency condition, awareness, for the Copernican revolution of the mind.
[6] "Be a man." "You throw like a girl." And also the etched-in-memory-forever "You catch like a girl."
[7] Our existential retreat is best summed, not by the difficult to parse Heidegger ("We are thrown into this World"), but by the language artist Salman Rushdie who in his "Midnight's Children" writes:

“I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I'm gone which would not have happened if I had not come.”

[8] Synecdoche, n

a figure of speech by which a part is put for the whole

[9] The E in WWE stands for Entertainment.
[10] For an introduction to Propaganda models, there is no better place to start than Professor Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent". And for an encapsulation of our postmodern TV culture, read DFW's essay "E Unibus Pluram".
[11] Christopher Hitchens offers an example to illustrate:

The examination for captaincy in the navy used to be a very demanding one. There came a day when a young man was sitting for his exam and he was asked what he would do if a great wind got up and was blowing him towards the rocks. He said he would tack a starboard and pile on an extra sail. Said the admirals, "What if the wind continues to blow you towards the rocks?" He replied "I'd continue to tack the starboard and I'd add another main sail". He was asked the question again and he gave them the same answer. Then finally one of the admirals asked, "Where are you getting all this sail from?" The Young captain-to-be said ,"Same place you're getting all that wind from."

Saturday is mine

noreply@blogger.com (Vyaas) — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 11:20:00 +0000

Today was a complete day.
I made Sambar.
And Poriyal.
Bindi.

I get Strang splitting.
Finally.
Fourier showed up again.
In a place I hadn't looked before.
Spectrally as always.

Only Mozart played.
Allegro. Allegro. Allegro.
Heart relaxed.
Hammock style.

Helped myself to some surreal existentialism.
No Exit means an infinitude of things.
Sartre man.
Soul stuff.
Brain bluff.

I miss my dog friend.
I miss my friend dog.
I miss Jude and other helpless things.
I miss a girl who doesn't exist.
You parsing this?
Deep shit.

I shed a tear.
For love.
Artificially.
When no one was looking.
So I could write about it.

Saturday is mine.

Chapter 3.5: Varun conducting market research on Chywanprash PLUS in Starbucks sans Summers

noreply@blogger.com (Vyaas) — Sat, 18 May 2013 00:58:00 +0000

“Have a nice day!” the barista recommended to me, in a voice of maternal aspiration. I carried the steaming cappuccino back upstream of the multi-ethnic queue to find a seat among those who weren’t as paranoid as they should have been at how their laptops were literally screaming out loud - electromagnetically of course- their unencrypted data on Starbucks’ unsecured wifi network most likely sidejacked by adolescents who didn’t need to be begoggled hirsute grease-transuding computer-science majors to know the difference between http and https.

I’d ordered a wet cappuccino. Not the dry shit that some cost-cutting executive made default, its ultra-light foam barely weighing the cup down during the most benign of zephyrs. You had to prefix your order with the word wet. Few loyalists knew this. Fewer convince themselves that knowing such a thing is what makes them different from all those superficial coffee consumers whose gustatory systems have been vestigialized by their “drink-don’t-think” instincts. I thankfully don’t belong to this snobbish subset, but can always pretend to be, which confuses me. How much of one’s life is pretense and how much genuine? Are they truly two different modus operandis? Are they necessarily opposites? Can one be the adjective of the other - genuine pretense or pretentious genuineness, in which case, are they inseparable? Then what about mens rea? Does it make sense to convict murderers who genuinely intend to inflict death but pretend to be innocent and not soldiers who pretend to intend to inflict death but are genuinely innocent? Maybe the problem is with language. “Murderer”, “Soldier”, “inflict” , “innocent”, “genuine”, “pretend” are words whose definitional spaces are overlapping, making it difficult to disentangle them and arrive at some truth. But if language is used to convey truth - no, reality - and language is so garbled, then reality should appear garbled too! But “reality” is also just another word, so I shouldn’t be too surprised if it’s likely to seem as garbled as any other concept, like “fiction”. So upon subtracting the garbling due to language, am I then left with reality’s inherent garbling? But there I go again, applying concepts like subtraction to things that defy any notion of quantity! What we’re left with then is Tarski’s inescapable theorem: “Snow is white if and only if snow is white.” Has humanity ever heard a more profound yet meaningless revelation? Here’s another one: the last line, the thundering conclusion, of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” which achieves its full nihilistic force in German: “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.” This is the state of human understanding. Where reason dissolves in this plasm of absurdity. Like the sugar in my wet cappuccino.

The barista was clearly an undergrad, perhaps coping with some difficult concepts in the Arts and Humanities, judging from the cover of the book on the countertop which had grown a significant taper from spine to fore-edge from the absurd number of fluorescent yellow and pink post-its protruding like torchered tongues from the pages, titled “Poetry for Dummies”, its familiar cringe inducing shade of aureolin yellow , its alienating subtitle “A reference for the rest of us”, its wide-eyed lizard looking mascot pointing shamelessly at some promotional device like “for more, visit us at dummies.com”. The series of books began with one written for young enthusiastic DOS programmers at a time when computers didn’t belong in social settings. Apparently Hungry Minds Inc., now acquired by John Wiley & his Sons, are of the impression that the formula that makes engineering problems appetizing to the application oriented palate is the desired template for all subjects (“subjects” here refers not to various fields of study, but to the customers). This seemingly crackpot wishful thought is realized through a series of preceding paradigm altering marketing strategies: First make the customer feel more stupid than he/she originally feels by agreeing that his/her self-loathing is an authentic feeling that must be embraced and not corrected. Once the “dummy” is stuffed with a sufficient number of metaphorical saccharine lollipops and reassured that his/her feeling of entitlement to knowledge sans any serious work ethic is justified, proceed to distill concepts that took what is left of humanity generations to construct and refine, on the basis of publishing logistics like page limits, word limits, illustration limits and ultimately “average end user” limits. Upon adequately undermining “competing” authors and professionals (publish or perish remember?), climbing up the bookshelves by brutally, year after year, convincing students first in cities and then in an entire nation that their capacity to read “big books” is marginally better than a retarded child’s and that they shouldn’t shit themselves that they can actually grasp complex ideas independently, what with all the mass media having increased average endocrinal activity across the board. Encourage students to believe that everything (not just topics like fishing, carpentry, photography and combinatorics but interpreting Shakespeare, Heidegger, Heisenberg and Monet) can be understood if it were only presented properly, replacing the burden of learning with the burden of teaching. This should afflict a growing number of Professors with “teaching hypochondria”, debilitating them to take refuge in and learn from pop-culture so that more students don’t fill the feedback forms with “failed to make the class interesting”. The entire textbook industry has to get with the plan before they’re eliminated - effaced - from this life-size version of Monopoly. They reduce pages and increase font size, multiplying the number of books by the number of solipsistic character traits of the intended reader, flooding the market with the euphemistic Choice(TM). The academic inflation proceeds like a runaway chain reaction, gobbling up and delegitimizing the high standards of inquiry, and what once served as a gentle reminder of your stupidity is now a megalomaniacal institution founded on that single fact. Brace yourself, for you will soon witness an apocalyptic cultural impulse to know everything by doing nothing! Everything must be compressed, as lossily as possible, and delivered in between and alongside scheduled social gatherings and unscheduled social networking. Learning is now another form of entertainment, having inherited the nomenclature of advertisers (in all fairness, this needn’t have been the original intention of Arthur Nielsen). Good luck trying to deliver a compelling thought without the aid of a soundtrack, animation and a subscription package, all of which, incidentally, increase one’s arsenal to bullshit their way through life. Syllabi are truncated, TAs are hired and the job market is streamlined, now that the average college graduate is a lumbering mass of such astonishing stupor, conformity training isn’t even playfully considered as a worthwhile investment in “leading” corporations. So desensitized is he/she, that ideas like Democracy and Equality which are tectonically shifting right underneath his/her feet, fail to cause even the faintest of stirrings. But of course! Your ability to stand on your feet will determine if you can perceive the ground beneath you moving or shaking. But if you're dangling like a puppet in the hands of those who refuse to drop you, what strange meanings freedom, liberty and justice take?! Right to food isn't right to nutrition, its just right to food. Right to education isn't right to learning and questioning authority, its just right to education. Meaninglessness abounds because being philosophical, i.e. discerning, is what a drunk person is accused of when digressing from that ever-fecund topic of boobs & bums by raising some unnerving question on existence or purpose using an articulation broken and stunted by alcoholic incoherence. Orwell’s dystopia is nothing but a cheap horror film compared to DFW’s. The Dumminess that was all the while silently gaining market space has completed its transition to something far more impotent and lethargic that even the puppet masters didn't foresee but are nonetheless rejoicing: Sheer Mass Dumbness.

And just as I was independently discovering the roots of Postmodernism, teetering on the cliff of sanity in an exhausting effort to distance myself as much as possible from the threatening imminence of a syllogistic avalanche, I heard a tune that restored my mind’s balance, at least temporarily, via appeal to my nostalgia, wafting through the caffeinated air in the usual way that Starbucks manages to make even the harsh acoustics of punk rock sound like white noise:

She...
She screams in silence
A sullen riot penetrating through her mind
Waiting for a sign
To smash the silence with the brick of self-control

I started pondering the relevance of the Green day lyrics to an ongoing exchange within earshot, between the barista and the next customer, apart from them both being girls.

Maybe the barista has little to no choice in the economic circumstances that made her pick up that book and not a compendium of World War I poetry which is the best place to start IMO if you want to experience the stomach-tightening amphetamine-like lyrics - written by articulate warriors thronging in bloodshed, longing for peace, of mind and nation (in that order) - that can erupt in one a feeling of Gestalt unique to one’s Erfahrung which mitotically splits into an incalculable Zustandsumme of perceptions that flagellate one’s mind into submission to this greater unknown wisdom and bestowing a sense of humility that textbook publishers couldn’t give half a rodent’s turd about, this realization never getting the chance to dawn on her fast lane life because of the bullshit she’s had to put up with since that time when some widowed art teacher told her her crayon drawing of her golden retriever resembled a horny capuchin monkey and that her talents would be better “harnessed" in learning an instrument, which she did, only to discover that she couldn’t concentrate on her finger-key coordination whether it was Beethoven’s Fur Elise or Billy Joel’s Piano Man because the piano was next to a goddamn window through which you could always see kids - orphans perhaps - playing on the lawn, the frustrated instructor having exhausted all her innovative teaching strategies including a glucose rich reward system, informs her parents that she had ADD, and like all those parents not one of whom suspected the window (or the glucose), they shovelled into their problem child’s pried open oral cavity adderall, ritalin and dexadrine in whimsical proportions until Mommy learnt how to use the internet and promptly stumbled upon webmd and/or a Tom Cruise interview that revealed to her that she could be killing her daughter with the bulldozer dosage, so she threw the pills and started consuming her own out of a self-inflicted depression arising from feelings of being an inadequate mother, thus spiralling out of self-control until her husband found her drug-riddled body one day laying on the bed naked with a cocaine moustache and “who-needs-boys-when-you-have-toys” toys, causing him to file for divorce, further contributing to their daughter’s disillusionment with the matrimonial institution of love, and later all semblances of love and similar romances, like Poetry, which she could never get even if she tried because most of her life had been the pursuit of things decided for her on her behalf, like the time when she felt that shoe-shopping was an empty headed excursion to the mall designed precisely by overrated fashion companies and their cold-blooded advertising minions to lure children away from the Library and into a world where stupid insecurities like the color of your skin, hair, shoes and nails would give rise to zombie consumerists who’d open their Lavender Lambskin leather handbags to pull out their Crimson Cowhide leather purses to pay for the latest fashion trends manufactured by WTO-protected cigar smoking CEOs like her presently-disowned-merely-biological father, all this she was scared to tell her bffs because they’d bully her and seduce her pussyclined bf in an act of teenage alienation which was too much for her to handle, worsened by her bf dumping her anyway for this chick who’s older and taller than him in a dominatrix kinda way that made her more anxious and insecure than ever before, driving her insane during a period wherein between being eiffel-towered by strict-protein-diet quarterbacks and cruelly speculating on the psychotic thrills in poisoning this year’s prom queen, a tiny voice inside her head (where the fuck else?) was gradually mustering the critical impulse load to get her to finally visit her now rehabilitated mother who responsibly advised her to join a Community College and get a degree in Literature or something for a fresh start, except that it would never be a fresh start without electroshock therapy and what comes next can only be worse but she’d do it anyway, yet Poetry could suck a bagodicks cause she had to make a living by working at a coffee shop serving random ungrateful judgemental strangers.
Like me.

Are you locked up in a world
That's been planned out for you?
Are you feeling like a social tool without a use?
Scream at me until my ears bleed
I'm taking heed just for you

Or maybe the barista was a senior scholar with no history of traumatic events, reviewing the book in an intellectually honest attempt to inform posterity to abstain from shallow simplistic works for sound Aristotelian reasons articulated in a disinterested yet stirring fashion.

Whatever it was, the Chinese girl on the other side of the counter couldn’t care less. She was clearly new to campus. And the English language.

Barista: Hey! How are you today?
Chinese girl: I’m wanna coffee.
Barista: Which one?
Chinese girl: One.
Barista: I’m sorry Mam. You need to pick a coffee.
Chinese girl (bringing her right index finger to the right side of her nose adorably): One.
Barista (vigorously gesticulating at the giant menu behind her- large fonts for beverage, small fonts for price, smallest drink is called a “tall” - which was suspended from the ceiling at an angle so as to optimize ease of viewing): You’ve got to PICK a drink on the menu.
Chinese girl (points at a not-to-scale picture on the menu of a steaming black liquid that resembled inviscid tar in a porcelain cup placed on a saucer that didn’t make much sense for coffee but looked pretty all the same, as though driving home the point that inanimate objects can look photogenic too): That!
Barista: I’m sorry Mam. But you have to tell me which one. I honestly can’t make this decision for you.

Why the flaming fuck was this barista increasing the complexity of her sentences when she was more than capable of understanding that the customer was a foreign student with a local-language-limitation? I momentarily thought of drilling a hole and tunneling this insensitive bitch through it and into a hypothetical PRC that had exchanged ideological roles with USA, where she’d have to pay for an overpriced education in a country that thinks or at least behaves like all other countries are inhabited by people who bathe in shit but since her own country can’t provide a decent education because of a restricted system that conflicts quite obviously with their undemocratic authoritarian tradition, she ends up being surrounded by people with different values, all of whom she reasonably expects to fathom the globalized world order and its inherent inconsistencies and injustices but is shocked to realize that she can’t find the most minimum of sympathies from even baristas (forget the customs officers) who address her in complicated Mandarin, a language she promised to the PRC government that she’d intended to learn during the time she’d spare herself when everyone else went clubbing and boozing in the weekends which gets her thinking about how fascinatingly different this culture really is and finds no compelling reason to hate it until this ignoramus barista’s limited imagination in what constitutes a universal cup of goddamn coffee assaults her perceptions of multiculturalism to the point where she’s trying to remember which finger it is that conveys the unholy trinity of insubordination, impatience and intolerance.

She...
She's figured out
All her doubts were someone else's point of view
Waking up this time
To smash the silence with the brick of self-control

Chinese girl (looks around helplessly and then strains with all her might): Regurrarr!
Barista: Will that be a tall or a grande?
Chinese girl (bringing her thumb and index finger together to indicate the word "small" hoping that this barista would not think she meant lobster): Smarr!
Barista: Ooookay! That’ll be one ninety five.

Chinese girl produces a one dollar note, three quarters and two dimes, balancing her turquoise colored purse between the palm, ring finger and pinky of her right hand with the other fingers designated to hold the sleeveless hot cup of coffee, maximizing the arm's neural flux, causing visible tremors in her shoulder that eventually caused her to drop the money which was in her left hand on the floor, so she bends over spilling the coffee on her crotch, Billie Joe Armstrong joining in the scream:

EHHHHHH,AHHHHHHHHHH!!!

I decided to walk outside. The stuff was wearing off.

Chapter 3: Campus

noreply@blogger.com (Vyaas) — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 10:11:00 +0000

“Fuck!” I yelped, as the large dusty cardboard box came crashing down on my knuckles with a censoring thud. The miniature gyroscope inside could be heard clattering against what was surely the polished plate belonging to an Euler’s disk, to my relief, as it could have easily been bar magnets shattering the glass of a plasma ball, which ought to have been accompanied by a distinct pop due to air violently invading the privacy of low pressure argon. It was a box of physics toys that Summers left behind along with an assortment of papers, stationery, books and a wizened old Thinkpad which looked like it could use an armchair and a fireside.

I played along with the other graduate students’ belief that he would walk in some day and casually open up his terminals, plug on his earphones (through which, I was certain, no music was ever playing) and script in different syntaxes that showed in the psychedelic colors of VIM, as though his absence was due to some acknowledged sabbatical or internship. And here we are, after a year, finally getting over Summers’ departure. Why he left these behind is a greater mystery than why he left. That was obvious. You know that feeling- when a party reaches that tedious staleness after the first few two beers, when conversations resemble the voidness of the speakers’ thoughts ever more vividly, when everyone is rushing for refills and veiling their life’s longings in barefaced consumption, when the interesting people exit for a smoke to exhale their disgust without speaking it, when the music, however thumping and tribal, fails at stirring a semblance of celebration, almost like a religion’s dwindling appeal - however much this puts one into a fantod, it would be impolite to just get up and leave with a silly excuse; that would be an overt “fuck you!” to anyone with just the right amount of intelligence to see through the lie, but just the wrong amount to think that this party needed them. Summers got himself fired by the Department instead.

The box also contained a blunted walkalong glider, a faded pair of nontransitive dice, a crumpled paper with drawings of either a flute or a Ruben’s tube, a scientific calculator incapable of matrix operations and a plastic folder thick with pages of various widths labeled “Delightful Tangents”. The afternoon Californian blaze poured through the single hung windows to illuminate the Brownian motion of the dust that I blew off the surface of the folder. It contained printouts of various articles in painfully low dpi: “The soul of a man under Socialism” by Oscar Wilde, “Copyleft: Pragmatic Idealism” by Richard Stallman, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” by DFW, a series of chapters from John Hopcroft’s “Formal Language and their relation to automata” and a bunch of others in subjects of sociology, psychology and - what would have been a curiosity a year ago but not anymore - high energy physics abstracts from the parody journal snarXiv. Interspersed in these were his own scribblings, mostly equations in which there were more subscripts than variables, qualitative inequalities like “Orange > Apple” “Cauchy-Schwarz > all other inequalities” “stdout > filename” and doodles of colliding vortices connected by Feynman’s wiggly arrows. I pulled out a stapled set of sheets and read:

Harmony of the Hypotenuse
by Nathaniel Summers

A point by itself is unvivid and boring, like the banter of businessmen and wives,
Impotent it isn’t, upon infinitesimal thought, how else can one construct lines?
Straight as usual, not necessarily you say, but lets dignify postulate five,
Three rightly placed yields a singular hypotenuse, prejudiced to orthogonal sides.

Their relationship is a simple one, so claim the bitter, unloved headmasters,
“Forget it and starve to death,” they pronounce, among other disasters,
“Spare the sturdiest pillars for logic, leave others their gilded pilasters!”
Of philosophical proofs they were teaching, to a classroom of young poetasters.

No experiment compels sufficiency, unnecessary is the cry for application,
Proving here comes from neither of these, to be brave is to be a mathematician,
To call axioms assumptions and postulates hypotheses is a sign of utter conflation,
Math outranks your pedestrian truth, get out if you need verification!

A multitude of proofs this theorem boasts, popularly algebraic and geometric,
Loomis shows three-seventy of these, including dynamic and quaternionic,
He ridicules the exclusions, and rightly so, where’s logic in those trigonometric?
Sine and Cos come from the right angle triangle, not some principle anthropic.

The first recorded survey goes back three thousand years, if we give or take a few,
An exemplary product of Babylonian inquiry, as shown on Plimpton three-twenty-two,
When civilization renounced her umbilical connections, in the ancient city of Eridu,
In glyphs of Sumerian, these sexagesimal triples, graced us with our first clue.

The premier formalism is owed to the bright mammals, across the Corinthian isthmus,
At a time when Homer laid claim on their souls, through his mighty Odysseus,
And half a millennium before the miserable and illiterate, following of Christ Jesus,
The foundations of mathematics were first uttered, by the elites of celebrated Pythagoras!

Although his writings aren’t extant, his oral tradition we shall reproduce,
“Within a square of side ‘a’ plus ‘b’, sit four triangles hardly abstruse,
They share those sides with a slope ‘c’, rearrange twice and you shall deduce,
that ‘a’ squared and ‘b’ squared in sum equal ‘c’ squared, without a deuce of an excuse!”

Its these simple profundities that reveal immensely, the beauty of thought to my heart,
What a difference intelligence makes, how it places us human beings apart!
Unraveled was the edifice of geometry, the plans were drawn for Descartes,
“Cogito Ergo Sum!”, he said, need we ever remind ourselves we’re smart?

Before I sink into romantic quicksand, I wish to complete this shabby presentation,
Of the theorem’s glorious proofs and history, onto Euclid’s colossal assimilation!
Different from Mendeleev’s but as fundamental, these Elements - the building blocks of creation!
Book 1 defines points, lines, congruence, triangles unto the 47th proposition!

This proof is longer than the previous graphical, but lets not mangle beauty,
To read the axioms and common notions, and the definitions is our implicit duty,
Your sincerity’s reward is a cerebral revelation, of mankind’s most valuable booty,
Lo and behold this arresting emergence, an ensemble of propositions in tutti!

For fools who choose to be mathematically homeless, I wouldn’t mollify your despair,
But remember that a triangle between parallels, whose gram its base does share,
Is equal to half the gram in area, with absolutely no change to spare,
Right this triangle and proceed bravely, if ever this proof you dare!

Jefferson and Franklin opened with Euclid, “We hold these truths to be self evident”
Orwell insisted this declaration unmalleable, so did our sixteenth president,
There exists a proof by his fellow Republican, later a White House resident,
A time when our leaders were mentally faceted, and in matters of triangles not reticent.

Garfield the twentieth prez began, by first splitting a trapezoid in three,
The areas of which add up to its whole, to this fact we’re compelled to agree,
Since each of these figures possess a different base - a construction prima facie,
The equality follows with the most minimal effort, no need a doctorate degree.

May your curiosity voyage the Pacific, and reveal the glorious Eastern fecund,
Break yourself from the shackles of hubris, to others too knowledge beckoned,
Zhou Bi (Suan Jing) of one hundred BCE, had with a geometric proof reckoned,
Thirteen centuries onward Ujjain blessed us, with the Leviathan Bhaskara the second.

Of all the above this is most artistic, it makes for a pleasing rangoli motif,
Lay the shorter base of one upon, the hypotenuse of another for relief,
Do this with four to enclose a square, for effect deliver on your handkerchief,
Impress your friends with the straightforward equality, in beauty restore their belief!

But if you lack friends, I implore you not fear, now is not the time to mope,
For you there is reason, and an intelligent soul, with mathematics you must elope,
With her go forth and erect the fortresses, of civilization’s ultimate hope,
Let illogic be the downfall of your enemies, let them tumble down their slippery slope.

The reason Summers was fired is a secret only the Department higher-ups and I were privy to. Simply put, he had automated his entire research. Not just the Data Acquisition or the Direct Numerical Simulations. From framing the problem statement to arriving at the conclusions, everything was coded in python wrapped c++. Our lab specializes in turbulent flows over bluff bodies, so much that we’ve been conferred the vulgar slogan “You give us a bluff body, and we’ll give you a turbulent flow.” This “Industrial Empiricism on Steroids”- quoting Summers - prompted his rapid disillusionment in the pursuit of his PhD within the first six months of his recruitment. To preserve the idea of using his brain, he began his own private programming exercise. The consecrated Scientific method of breaking a complex physical phenomenon down to study the relationship between its relevant variables had now been perverted into figuring out how plausible relationships yielded sentences like “If X is greater/less than the threshold frequency Y, then Z increases/decreases by an/ALPHA order/s of magnitude.” Depending on the results of the experiments and simulations, more sentences like “Turbulence model K predicts within-reasonable-accuracy/wrongly the observed power spectrum L” were tailored. Such examples constitute a well known branch in formal language theory called context-free grammar wherein sentences can be constructed from simple mathematical statements like equalities, inequalities,implications, etc. One can get away with Summers’ “academic murder” particularly in fields that lack rigorous standards for apparatuses (low tolerance “controlled” environments such as in our “Facility”), which make for a discourse mired in conflicts independent of any meaningful furtherment of fundamental knowledge, where the contest between claims gains self-fulfilled legitimacy because not one single group possesses the mature balance between technology and scholarship. Once the relevant data sets were acquired and non-arbitrarily deemed sufficient, Summers’ code would simply brute-force compare various permutations, utilizing the University’s High Performance Computing Center’s Terabytes of storage and TeraFLOPS of speed, iterating through multi-dimensioned arrays of TeraCRAP, until the elusive set of patterns emerged as a palpable fabric of binary brocade. These were then translated to mathematical formalisms and passed through a series of linguistic checks to be further translated to context-free English.The resulting set of unambiguous but semantically incoherent statements, written in familiar academic argot, were iteratively refined to weed out recognizable traits of postmodernisms by comparing the generated sentences to those parsed from contemporary literature through a script wordplayfully titled “muspeak.py” after Orwell’s throttlingly unambiguous Newspeak and the symbol for dynamic viscosity in fluid mechanics. And since today’s attention deficit peer-reviewing standards allow research groups to publish data with just about any sloppy hand-waving explanation chaperoned by a citation to another group’s marginally better reasoning, Summers - or rather his code - had to once again simply parse relevant papers, pooled from a trivial keyword web-crawl (that Google hands on a platter viz. Scholar), for sentences that either supported or rejected his findings. These ingredients, iced with pretty contour plots and an inscrutably conclusive summary, were sufficient for publishing a paper in the Journal of Advanced Fluid Mechanics, in Summers’ case titled “The effects of percussive perturbations on the shedding frequencies of isotropic vortices.” The paper was accepted and even lauded for its “precise delineation of the relevant phenomena” by eminent scholars at Princeton and Stanford! Summers went on to publish two more; “High Weber number shearing at critical Pressure and Temperature” and “Criteria for Transonic boundary layer tripping on the NACA 0012 airfoil” in the following months, passing the Turing test with flying colors. It was only after the third that he revealed to me, one alcohol-fueled night, what the solitary desktop icons “automate_papers.py” and “muspeak.py” on his computer were all about, leaving me face-palming with a “2+2= what else could it be?” level of force. He could have wrapped up his defense in similar fashion but instead, as if a savage dining on barbecued-academic-institutions wasn’t enough, for his postprandial moral intercourse a.k.a. kicks for dicks, he sent JAFM a letter of mockery stating that their standards were “deleterious to Science” and “couldn’t possibly warrant $31 a paper”. This damning rebuke whirlwinded him straight into the Dean’s office where he was asked to quit the PhD program with immediacy, but was offered a position in IT that paid him double to keep his mouth shut. He took it. I still work here.

I rearranged the papers and slid them back into the folder feeling an absurd sense of restoration- does he not care about this crap anymore?

It was 2 pm and I’d developed a craving for coffee. “Anyone for a cuppa coffee?”, I asked with no actual intention of hanging out with the same people I would eventually return to work with. “Just had one at Lunch” said Cory, excitedly minimizing a dense excel sheet and opening up his browser to render facebook, tacitly and/or subconsciously justifying the cue for break time. “Naaaaah,” brayed Alessandro who was hiding a Neapolitan smirk behind a copy of “People”-it was hard to tell if Jennifer Aniston’s nose was a result of another septoplasty or a photoshop airbrush. Alessandro once shared an interesting theory on how Italian laziness shows up even in their coffee brewing tradition: “You see the Frainche use-a the forced steam to-a brew thee coffee. We use-a thee gravity.” Ping paused his Massively-Multiplayer-Online-Role-Playing-Lacanian-Unconscious-Sex & Violence-Satiating-Game to turn around on his black-sweat-soaked-fart-adsorbing-bacterially-decomposing-leather chair and raise his right middle finger high over his rectangular head with an expression which would have looked menacing if he were in control of the narrowness of his eyes. Poor Ping was always made fun of because of his low alcohol tolerance, evangelism for state capitalism, loyalty to Panda Express and unbelievable lack of talent at table-tennis. And he didn’t drink coffee.

“Well fuck you guys. I’m getting a coffee!”

The vestibule to the elevator was flanked by doors on either side, with the leading pairs belonging to the richer groups that fired lasers from one to the other either for velocimetry or for chemical diagnostics or as a security system to alert the others of an incoming advisor. Not out of the fear of being fired on grounds of fucking around - PhD students are known for their stoicism- they were compensating for the shenanigans they missed out in school. Although that is visibly changing. Now the incoming candidates enter with full fledged lives - they snowboard, ride fast cars, go on dates (with an emphasis on the plural), have more than three friends in real life, pay attention to College sports, organize poker nights, swear by smart phones, work strictly from nine to five, spend hours in the gym fine tuning the appearances of their biceps and triceps and quadriceps and glutes, watch late night TV, take month long vacations, treat their pay as hard earned and go to office hours. Or maybe its just the West Coast.

The elevator doors opened to reveal a group of overconfident good looking undergraduates who’d formed a study group after their Thermodynamics instructor insisted that teamwork and brainstorming were excellent ways to grasp the subject matter. They were here to bribe Ping into giving them the answers to this week’s assignment on ‘Rubberband engines and Carnot bicycles’ by inviting him to the weekend’s fraternity parties where they would promise him more than just free drinks. It goes without saying that Alessandro would be invited too, at least by the girls. Cory didn’t like parties, but would go anyway. I got onto the platform and pressed “1” which should have rightly been zero. I checked to see if the ironic notice plate had been replaced. It hadn’t: “If this elevator for some reason stops, don’t panic. Press the Panic button below.”

It was a bright Summer’s day with no cover except for a single contrail that had grown Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities diffusing outwards like a growing series of tsunamis. You could tell it was a working day by the number and kind of bikes parked outside the Central Library: white kids’ chopper aspiring beach cruisers were mostly absent on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights and the rest were utility bikes that were typically fewer in number only in the wee hours of Monday morning when assignment deadlines expired and gave birth to new ones. The Central Library served as a symbolic representation of the social hierarchy. The basement housed a very large scale integration of Indian and Chinese electrical engineers who professedly work well under pressure, which is ipso facto the promise of bountiful pleasure. The top floor was for rich seniors who sat on sofas with feet outstretched on ottomans, macbooks on their laps, gazing out their windows momentarily distracted by the incomprehensible futility of their existence, the glowing pale white monochrome half-bitten apples on the backsides of their LCDs unflinching and unforgiving in this or any other philosophical investigation. Undergraduate girls who wore sunglasses that weighed more than the rest of their clothing, lay sunbathing on the lawn, their shock absorbing breasts pressed against the drying grass, deprived of their photosynthesis, and their boyfriends rubbing sunscreen about their lumbars tracing cardioids with the heels of their palms while sporting a look of pathetically blatant concupiscence. An all girl acapella group found itself surrounded by onlookers while rehearsing for the upcoming All American Intercollegiate Acapella World Championships. Two obese twenty year olds clapped their elephantine hands, slapping thick layers of accumulated jiggling fat to a rhythm they were beatboxing in a low register. The other two girls were the foci of everyone’s ogling. One showed off a generous surface area of cleavage fanned out by a decollete neckline, the sunlight adjusting the shine of her flowing red hair as she swayed her head in a kind of two-dimensional normal mode while singing in an angelic voice, her lips thin and taut with arousing wildness. The other, equally pulchritudinous and endowed, her bright brown eyes catching the sight of my Adam’s apple rematerializing upon soaking up her callipygian contours, accentuated by a tantalizingly thin translucent skirt which was in a shade of gray that I can best describe as F0F0F0 in rgb hexcode. Their beauty played in concert with their masterful superposition of octaves,delivering a breathless vocal cadenza foreign to the autotune exploits of every other schmuck with a hairstyle and a record label.

“Windmill, windmill for the land.

Turn forever hand in hand

Take it all in on your stride

It is stinking, falling down

Love forever love is free

Let's turn forever you and me

Windmill, windmill for the land

Is everybody in?”

It was an unfamiliar acoustic-like rendition of Gorillaz’ electronic hip-hop single “Feel Good Inc.” Everyone clapped and joined in the chorus, but how many, I wondered, could place the reference to Orwell’s windmill? This song is as subversive a take on today’s aspirations for a socialistic utopia as Animal Farm was when it first came out in 1945. There’s a book I dare Disney to plagiarize. They couldn’t even if they wanted to anymore. Too busy rewriting Spiderman’s love triangle or curbing Luke Skywalker’s incestual proclivities in an attempt at parenting their audience - an audience that can’t read or has ever perceived of a need that precedes their creed and causes them to cede the high steeds on which they speak of greed like a child who pleads for more and more until it succeeds and settles for thoughtless speed that breeds stupor in a mind unfreed and unsheathed to the bullshit that misleads ephebes, stampedes the buried values underneath souls which bleed in a silence that exceeds the torture of Hades so they proceed to scrawl a melancholy screed in the parentheses of our deeds which alas, no one will ever read.

Varun calm the fuck down. Have some Chyawanprash. Take it easy.

I pulled out from the crowd and headed towards the StarBucks which was attached to the side of the library like some sort of symbiotic tumor. I had scheduled to meet Summers there to give him my latest batch of Chyawanprash. Chyawanprash is the brand name of a popular Indian laxative which was also now the codename for a form of esculent marijuana prepared for students on campus (exclusively by me) who suffered from pleurisy but still wished to get high, basically made of sugar, cocoa, milk, vanilla and varying grades and molalities of marijuana depending on the customers, who I’m told know best. The name is accidental; when I first got into the racket, I found myself running out of containers so I emptied one of the many of my roommate’s dabbas and repacked it with what looked indistinguishable from the original contents. (Many pranks were played indeed with little sympathy for my roommate’s dyspepsia) The name stuck because of various reasons, the most significant among which was its instant appeal to hipsters.

Summers’ Aqualung figure was immediately discernible among a sea of Starbucks Loyalists, sipping coffee and playing with a cigarette between his fingers. “Varun! Over here!” he called, overemphasizing the alveolar trill in my name. “Hey!” I replied and sat opposite his shabby person.

“Did you bring the stuff?”

“Yeah.” I pulled it out of my jacket’s underside and handed it over to him without a fuss.

“All point zero zero zero one kilograms?”

I took a couple of seconds. “Yeah. Thats three on your tab so far.”

“Sure. So, tell me something mind-blowing” he demanded, pocketing the dabba.

“I’m fresh out of mind TNT.”

“Not even a little dyna-mind?”

“Did you know that the sleeve of your Cappuccino could save a hundred thousand trees?”

“This single sleeve?”

“Well, not by itself. But you endorse the idea.”

“Would they let me endorse some other ideas?”

“...”

“These self-righteous capitalist....raptors!”

It was very difficult of late to discuss anything with Summers without it degenerating into a diatribe on capitalism. It was his new thing. But maybe that is the nature of our generation’s impediments. I couldn’t let that come in the way of the career advice I was about to ask of him.

“Professor Krauss believes that Science teachers should be paid more.”

“Why on Earth?”

O-Oh. “To incentivize a Scientific upbringing.”

“Professor Krauss, with due respect, is punching way over his weight. He thinks that by paying Science teachers more, more people will wish to teach Science and hence more people will learn Science. Tell me Varun, are you seriously asking me this?”

“Well, yeah. It is a popular economic model.”

“You present yourself a strawman.”

“...”

“You see the flaw in the argument. Money can’t buy certain things. No matter how much you offer to pay Science teachers, the thing that inspires one to pursue Science can never be shaken - Curiosity. Krauss thinks he can inspire people to be curious by luring them with money? How does one look at a butterfly and remind themselves to ask questions of the light interference from the wings, or its bizarre metamorphosis upon conjuring up the thought of a luxurious future. Many ideas have gone down in history with the reputation of the excreta of a Rhinoceros. This is I hope is one of them.”

“Somehow, I’ve lost my craving for coffee.”

“Idiot. Him I mean.”

“He did say it was a controversial idea.”

“I think he believes it. It comes from his militant atheism, this idea.”

“Surely you are a militant atheist yourself?”

“For different reasons, not the least of which comes close to the otiose Republican imagination of his.”

“Then how do we improve Science education?”

“What is this vulgar urgency for improving Science education? This distracts from a more entrenched problem in our Society.”

“Class struggle?”

“You complete me.”

“I have to go.”

“Next week same time?”

“Same place. And by the way, you’ve left a bunch of stuff back at the lab.”

“And?”

“Don’t you want it back?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Let some junior stumble on it and put the pieces together and revelate. I will be needing some self-learned younglings in the future.”

“Later.”

I walked away empty handed and uncaffeinated. Summers had sealed a fate that was incontestable to him while I was here grappling with Life pulling the rug from right underneath me. Research was shit. Teaching was shit. Food was shit. Colleagues were shit. People in general were turning into Non-Newtonian goops of shit. All I had was my Chyawanprash hustling and some incoherent ideas and misplaced affections.

I returned to the lab to find everyone exactly how I’d left them. I opened up my browser and did something I was sure I would regret for a long time, but as Zizek says, “Why be happy when you can be interesting?” I began to type in Gmail mustering all the genteelisms I could recall:

“Professor,

After much deliberation and insomnia, I’ve come to the rather difficult decision of resigning from your establishment. This may come as a surprise, but I assure you that I’ve given this much thought and feel that I have no more time to lose. Where to shed this saved time I have not figured out yet, but.....”

I felt stupid at this point, stopped typing and closed the fucking thing, dejected at the strength of my convictions. Just then an alarm went off.

“Professor incoming!” shouted Ping. Cory deftly restored his desktop and Alessandro flung the magazine in my direction. I grabbed it and sat on it, feigned a casual disposition and whispered under my breath, “Just a little longer.”

Sirens of the past

noreply@blogger.com (Vyaas) — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 11:52:00 +0000

The condemnation to repeat the past is not limited to those who forget it, as George Santayana had warned, but extends to those who remember it as well, for this selective amnesia is dangerously institutional. When our political propaganda displays not even the most superficial self-respect while spouting Nehru-Mountbatten conspiracy theories and Indus-Vedic clericism, when our history teachers bulldoze forensics with facts and figures, when historians like Romila Thapar are pilloried and demagogues like Subramaniam Swamy are celebrated, one can readily be considered naive, if not dramatic, if he/she fell off their chair in shock! The earnest can at best raise their voice to those high inaudible pitches while the disinterested are content to meekly concede to incremental “progress”.

The overdue return of History to the Humanities from the Social Sciences would go a long way in resurrecting the past alongside its many struggles, material or ideological. The style of narrative history (effectively employed by such eloquent writers as Ramachandra Guha and William Dalrymple) compels readers to juxtapose past with present while challenging them to discern differences besides that distinction. I shall present an example to illustrate the exercise:

Utilize the full range of your imagination to recreate an Indian Courthouse in the city of Ahmedabad on March 23rd, 1922, in which Mohandas Gandhi has just been sentenced for sedition; the incriminating articles in question were those that appeared in Young India, critical of the malfeasance of the British Raj. The audience comprise all sorts from the marginalized lower castes to the highest British nobility, their perspiration either a result of anxiety or ineffective ceiling fans. Gandhi is offered a final statement in an act of imperial generosity. His opening lines must have sounded surprisingly apologetic to patriot and prince alike:

“Before I read this statement I would like to state that I entirely endorse the learned Advocate-General’s remarks in connection with my humble self...it is very true and I have no desire whatsoever to conceal from this court the fact that to preach disaffection towards the existing system of Government has become almost a passion with me...I knew that I was playing with fire.”

We’re off to the races! Section 124A is still enshrined in our constitution despite the admonition of Jawaharlal Nehru in 1951: “Now as far as I am concerned that particular Section is highly objectionable and obnoxious and it should have no place…in any body of laws that we might pass. The sooner we get rid of it the better.” Invoking the law to silence activists, journalists and cartoonists and further bolstering the code with a draconian IT act is an exhibition of unmitigated arrogance on our government’s part, not to mention the callous defenestration of historical prescription to do otherwise.

He follows this confession with an audacious challenge:

“I do not ask for mercy. I do not plead any extenuating act. I am here, therefore, to invite and cheerfully submit to the highest penalty that can be inflicted upon me for what in law is a deliberate crime, and what appears to me to be the highest duty of a citizen. The only course open to you, the Judge, is, as I am going to say in my statement, either to resign your post, or inflict on me the severest penalty if you believe that the system and law you are assisting to administer are good for the people.”

When I read this the first time, I paused in feverish retreat. Here was a scrawny little malnourished Indian, attacking the British oligarchy with nothing less elegant than sardonic articulation, questioning their deepest moral integrity, if any was present at all. Contrast this arresting grade of conviction with today’s unimaginative politically correct equivocation. Few politicians speak with an emphasis on morality, fewer of these are morally upright. The business of preserving and revealing the truth is now, rather overwhelmingly, in the hands of our journalists, who are unfortunately in the hands of our politicians. Of the handful who deny and defy such complicity, one has resuscitated my hope to the brink of optimism- Palagummi Sainath. Here’s his view on the dismal state of our media:

“"It’s not like we’re the good guys and the readers are so crude" - That’s an argument a drug peddler could make: “I’m a decent guy, it's these assholes on the street who want the stuff!” I don’t believe this for a moment! If patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, what the reader “wants” is the last refuge of every intellectually bankrupt editor known!”

The polemical tone of Sainath (assholes, intellectually bankrupt), I contend, is simply a different style of provocation, much like the affected humility (cheerfully submit, deliberate crime) of Gandhi. These cancel out to reveal inescapable truths; both call a spade a spade in very different ways. As a society, the onus is on us, to rectify our aptitude to read past such ornaments and repellents that can take us to every exalted place but the truth. (A parallel but less pressing inquiry: can I confidently insist that my readers require no such training?)

Gandhi proceeds to summarize a bit of History which I choose not to abridge for two distinguishing reasons: 1) it tells us much about the growth of the man, 2) it is an honest admission of the past which by today’s tendencies to trash, would serve as rich fodder for alleging complicity and treason:

"My public life began in 1893 in South Africa in troubled weather. My first contact with British authority in that country was not of a happy character. I discovered that as a man and an Indian, I had no rights. More correctly I discovered that I had no rights as a man because I was an Indian.But I was not baffled. I thought that this treatment of Indians was an excrescence upon a system that was intrinsically and mainly good. I gave the Government my voluntary and hearty co-operation, criticizing it freely where I felt it was faulty but never wishing its destruction.Consequently when the existence of the Empire was threatened in 1899 by the Boer challenge, I offered my services to it, raised a volunteer ambulance corps and served at several actions that took place for the relief of Ladysmith. Similarly in 1906, at the time of the Zulu ‘revolt’, I raised a stretcher bearer party and served till the end of the ‘rebellion’. On both the occasions I received medals and was even mentioned in dispatches. For my work in South Africa I was given by Lord Hardinge a Kaisar-i-Hind gold medal. When the war broke out in 1914 between England and Germany, I raised a volunteer ambulance corps in London, consisting of the then resident Indians in London, chiefly students. Its work was acknowledged by the authorities to be valuable. Lastly, in India when a special appeal was made at the war Conference in Delhi in 1918 by Lord Chelmsford for recruits, I struggled at the cost of my health to raise a corps in Kheda, and the response was being made when the hostilities ceased and orders were received that no more recruits were wanted. In all these efforts at service, I was actuated by the belief that it was possible by such services to gain a status of full equality in the Empire for my countrymen."

This can be read as either a self-centered nationalistic rationale or an apology for traitorship to the global anti-imperialist struggle; there are still ruffled feathers over such interpretations (that 'revolt' and 'rebellion' are within quotes gives me good reason to believe the latter). But we can be sure that Gandhi was no fool and accepted the logical consequences of what he said. How many of our parliamentary representatives own up to mistakes, confess inner conflicts and accept responsibility for the ills of society? But it begs the question: how many of their electors share any of these traits? Are we setting impossibly high standards by quoting Gandhi? Quite the contrary! If History makes any difference, as we claim it does, we should aspire to making Gandhi’s standards the bare minimum! Conveying my honesty in saying this becomes especially tedious when addressing those who prefix Gandhi’s name with the inordinately lofty title ‘Mahatma’. Elevating a man to such an eminence generally tends to render him and his ideals elusive to both adoption and scrutiny. It also leads to missing crucial ironies in the man’s life: He intended harmony among Hindus and Muslims but insisted that his disciples chant “Raghupathi Raghava RajaRam” in gatherings and marches. He dismissed western education but articulated supremely in English. He stood for the poor but decided that burning produce was symbolically worthier. He spoke of women’s rights but denied his own dying wife penicillin. He vehemently opposed free market ideas but is on every inflating rupee note worldwide! These are the makings of a man, not a saint, and as Kamal Hassan portrays in his magnum opus ‘Hey Ram’, we do the man, and ourselves, a great injustice by deifying him.

And now comes the true thrust of the speech, an excerpt that can sit by itself and still say all that has to be said:

“I came reluctantly to the conclusion that the British connection had made India more helpless than she ever was before, politically and economically. A disarmed India has no power of resistance against any aggressor if she wanted to engage, in an armed conflict with him. So much is this the case that some of our best men consider that India must take generations, before she can achieve Dominion Status. She has become so poor that she has little power of resisting famines. Before the British advent India spun and wove in her millions of cottages, just the supplement she needed for adding to her meager agricultural resources. This cottage industry, so vital for India’s existence, has been ruined by incredibly heartless and inhuman processes as described by English witness. Little do town dwellers know how the semi-starved masses of India are slowly sinking to lifelessness. Little do they know that their miserable comfort represents the brokerage they get for their work they do for the foreign exploiter, that the profits and the brokerage are sucked from the masses. Little do they realize that the Government established by law in British India is carried on for this exploitation of the masses. No sophistry, no jugglery in figures, can explain away the evidence that the skeletons in many villages present to the naked eye...The law itself in this country has been used to serve the foreign exploiter...In my opinion, the administration of the law is thus prostituted, consciously or unconsciously, for the benefit of the exploiter."

Now, simply reread that only this time removing the word ‘British’ and letting ‘the’ refer to mass-globalization/crony-capitalism/UPA-government. Here is an excerpt from Sainath’s collection of rural surveys and reports titled ‘Everybody loves a good drought’:

“A profoundly undemocratic streak runs through India’s development process. Exclusion doesn’t end at the symposia. Peasants are excluded from land issues in real life too.Villagers are increasingly robbed of control over water and other community resources. Tribes are being more and more cut off from the forests and their experiences in contempt.Real development would involve the transformation of the human state to a higher level of being and living. Almost all versions of development accept that. However, such a transformation must have the participation and consent of those affected by it. Their involvement in the decision-making process. And the intrusion on their environment, culture, livelihood and tradition by that process should be minimal.But that sounds too much like work. So you can have a play staged and enacted with all the main actors sitting in the audience- if they are around at all. If reality smells, rewrite the script. Take the current champions of ‘change’. Those shouting loudest about change among the elite are the very people who ran this country for over forty years. If it is in a mess, they had much to do with it.”

When asked about how people can be so insensitive to suffering, he charges our journalists' and readers' inability to make connections. For instance, an eagerly anticipated fashion show and a sudden rise in the suicide rate of cotton farmers is a spatial connection hardly unlike the temporal connections we've been discussing.

Gandhi again:

“The greater misfortune is that the Englishmen and their Indian associates in the administration of the country do not know that they are engaged in the crime I have attempted to describe. I am satisfied that many Englishmen and Indian officials honestly believe that they are administering one of the best systems devised in the world, and that India is making steady, though, slow progress. They do not know, a subtle but effective system of terrorism and an organized display of force on the one hand, and the deprivation of all powers of retaliation or self-defence on the other, as emasculated the people and induced in them the habit of simulation. This awful habit has added to the ignorance and the self-deception of the administrators”

Jayprakash Narayan of the Lok Satta party presents, well above the “corrupted souls of men” argument, a more intelligent and progressive thesis, namely that our institutions/systems allow and encourage seemingly "victimless corruption" (Coal-Gate, Arms-Gate, 2G) among the “amorphous whole”. Decentralization of power, incentivizing vigilant reporting, eliminating old electoral practices and exercising swift prosecution are solutions that don’t require you to be a political scientist to understand. But acknowledging that these are even possible requires a more sympathetic stance- our politicians are who we churn out from our institutions, who are elected by vote-banks that comprise us. If our criticism degenerates to cynicism, if we unanimously become anti-establishment, we must always remember, as Narayan puts it, that “we are the establishment!”

Gandhi proceeds to point out the obvious inequity of Section 124A:

“Section 124 A, under which I am happily charged, is perhaps the prince among the political sections of the Indian Penal Code designed to suppress the liberty of the citizen. Affection cannot be manufactured or regulated by law. If one has no affection for a person or system, one should be free to give the fullest expression to his disaffection, so long as he does not contemplate, promote, or incite to violence. But the section under which mere promotion of disaffection is a crime. I have studied some of the cases tried under it; I know that some of the most loved of India’s patriots have been convicted under it. I consider it a privilege, therefore, to be charged under that section.”

And here is Sainath's lament today:

"As early as in 1893, Reuters assigned a correspondent, S.H.S.Merewether, to cover the famine-hit districts of this country. Apart from his reports, this resulted in a book, A Tour through the Famine Districts of India. In it, he wrote that his assignment came about after a request Her Majesty's Government had made to Reuters. The Raj, among other things, wanted to counter the riffraff of the nationalist press. The Reuters man stood up for the Raj. Denouncing the Indian press for its 'sedition', he wrote that 'a censorship of the native press would not only be expedient, but seems an absolute necessity.'It seems extraordinary that so miniscule a press should have had such an impact. More than a hundred years later, a much larger press has failed to do the same. Issues crucial to hundreds of millions of Indians demand its attention. But it has not put the government on the mat."

One can see clearly how history remixes itself. Any further commentary would be patronizing to those who grasp this point and useless to those who haven't.

Santayana's famous warning is part of a larger body of work titled 'The Life of Reason'. It appears in this much more scathing paragraph on mankind:

"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in whom instinct has learned nothing from experience. In a second stage men are docile to events, plastic to new habits and suggestions, yet able to graft them on original instincts, which they thus bring to fuller satisfaction. This is the plane of manhood and true progress. Last comes a stage when retentiveness is exhausted and all that happens is at once forgotten; a vain, because unpractical, repetition of the past takes the place of plasticity and fertile readaptation. In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity. The hard shell, far from protecting the vital principle, condemns it to die down slowly and be gradually chilled; immortality in such a case must have been secured earlier, by giving birth to a generation plastic to the contemporary world and able to retain its lessons. Thus old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp."

Chapter 2: The Auld Dubliner

noreply@blogger.com (Vyaas) — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 22:07:00 +0000

Aldous Huxley, using the anomalously engineered Bernard Marx as a pretext, shared a distinctive observation on friendships: “One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.” And no punishment is more wounding than the excavation and presentation of one’s flaws, that one who is up to speed on all other secrets. For all the hours my girlfriend Yaren spends in front of the mirror trying to look so excessively beautiful that returns begin to diminish, I would be pleasantly surprised if she, even for a fleeting instant, saw herself as the vain subsidized ignoramus that Summers and others lampooned. No amount of narcissism can perforate the veil that guards against self-scrutiny. Why, it in fact thickens it! So could I subject her to my Huxley-punishment without interfering with our prosperous, increasingly blasphemous, almost bonobo-like love making? Psycho-analysis between lovers is suicidal and undarwinian. Why else are our genitalia and brain separated by every other important organ?

Summers once told me that “if your love life can be articulated by just a series of Nickelback songs, you have wasted your time.” Summers was swifter with his punishments, and for some reason that defies my lexicon, I admired him for that. I also hated him for that, in a non-contradictory way, if you know what I mean. No? Precisely!

And keeping with the fuzzy logic of relationships, Yaren is the loveliest creature to have simultaneously won my utmost passionate loathing. All equilibrium is the balancing of competing forces. Its stability, only our unfree will determines.

Summers saw Yaren, justifiably, for what she displayed. She talks so loud as to challenge the reach of small megaphones. She smiles with such a width as to force it on others’ faces, unwilling or willing, out of courtesy or for the possibility of sex. Respectively. Her limited vocabulary is reminiscent of Orwell’s Newspeak; the same adjective used with integer-like prefixes. Good. So good. Sooo good. Soooooo good. Fucking good. Sure, Turkish is her first language, but that fact only invites my shallowest of sympathies. Why did she choose a Greek with whom she could speak only in the handicap of English? Did she not feel she was forsaking the most integral aspect of development, namely self-expression? Tone deaf. Paint resistant. Obtuse in matters of science. Numb to history. Literature, to be generous, limited to celebrity gossip. Where is the self-expression? Upon the subtraction of language?

My agnosticism irritates Summers. “You’re worse than the clerics because you facilitate them with the benefit of the doubt!” And although I’m sympathetic to some of their doctrines on certain occasions, these are staggeringly outnumbered by their egregious conduct in many others. Yaren was brought up in a house that believed in reinstating the Caliphate. Which is why I take refuge in something my father never told me, but Nick Carraway’s did, in the opening lines of the Great Gatsby: “Whenever you feel like criticizing someone, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” Or have had the disadvantages you’ve never had! For Yaren, even if she refuses to pledge her allegiance to the Islamo-fascists, has clearly been hollowed out by her religion, valued, it seems (excuse the grotesque imagery) only for her fertility.

All her life worshipped for her genetically inherited anatomical proportions. Only. Exclusively. Entirely. (Remember Daisy reliving her delivery to Carraway?: “I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool - that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.") Flowers from strangers everyday, hoping desperately to sample, in not necessarily dignified ways, that pleasure attainable only from the warmth of the carvings of Nature herself! So it is that my curse carries with it this blessing. We’ve gone steady for two years and have even discussed marriage on two occasions! I could fill her with wisdom and vanquish the vanity society demands of her. I could teach her English, see her breathless under the Northern Lights, amaze her with Bernini, shock her with Kathakali and if Britain rightfully returned the Elgin marbles, take her home to revel in the reconstituted Parthenon! We would be self appointed ambassadors for our countries, showing the world that the inflamed strain between Greece and Turkey belongs to a darker time of the past. We, the moral exemplars of international diplomacy! Look how man has graduated from Crusades and Genocides; surely this lustful relationship has the potential to blossom into a lovely family with lovely children with lovely ambitions. Who is this cosmic debris called Summers to bully me into conducting a moral biopsy of Yaren, this gem that hides behind me from the jealous gaze of Aphrodite herself! He can go on distributing his overpriced cigarettes to the homeless of Los Angeles and snuggling in the cold binding of Plato’s Republic!

In the brownish orange dimness and the working class stench of the Auld Dubliner is where I chose to spend my last moments with Summers. I was leaving Los Angeles to begin the New Year with my conscription service of six months and then resume the promise that love is notorious for withdrawing. Yaren was driving me to the airport, on the way to which we stopped to rendezvous with Summers for a last cheers. The Hooligans were not playing their usual Irish cacophony tonight and I was hoping they would, as it would avert any confrontation between Yoko Ono and Non-Lennon, who was unusually well-groomed, his eyes were not sunken, his sweater lint-free, his hair gently curling away from the back of his neck with the luster of some cheap hair gel. We sat around the brightest lit table and ordered two whiskies on ice (Yaren didn't drink), consciously deciding to partake in Summers’ strict choice of beverage in an act of childish solidarity.

And suddenly, breaking through our persiflage, it happened! “I’ve decided to become a teacher Chris,” she suggested as though her coke was hard alcohol in disguise. It would be apt to introduce another stunning fact at this juncture. Yaren was a PhD student in Electrical Engineering at UCLA, something I was desperately ashamed of. More of the academic system than her, in all fairness. Before my jaw could drop to its full anatomical permission, Summers cleared his throat with, “I take it that you’re rallying for Presidency with your newly formed political party as well?”. Snide remarks are laced with just the right amount of humor to distract Yaren from the deep-seated insult, I prayed. “Haha,” she vapidly responded, once again resorting to giggles instead of words. She looked at me like a Ronald Reagan hopelessly gaping at his fellow Republicans upon uttering the word “Nigger”, querying internally, “what’s all the fuss about?”. “Well, I’m happy you’ve made your decision,” I said pretending to take no hit and strengthened her resolve with a peck on the forehead and a tight clasp of her farthest shoulder. “Since when have you been plotting against young truth seekers,” Summers provoked. And just as a gush of reptilian hatred began to course through his veins, a weak maternal instinct percolated through mine.
“I want to teach in College.”
“And pray tell which subject?”
“Electromagnetic fields.”
“Ha! I’ve seen your head covered more by a hijab than a book.”

This was Summers the Universe's appointed asshole speaking, but I had grown so accustomed to his manners, that the insensitive misogynistic slurs rolled off my exterior as easily as they did off his tongue. Leaving her to defend herself was equivalent to saying “Wait, I’ll get the camera!” while she’s flailing for her life in a pool of piranhas. But it would be interesting to see how she defends herself, I must admit with the guilt of a pervert. The funeral oration of Pericles rang loud in my head, silencing any whimpers of a possible rescue operation: “Having judged that to be happy means to be free , and to be free means to be brave, do not shy away from the risks of war.”
“You don’t have to read so many books to teach. If you understand the material, that’s enough.”
“Indeed. So let me pose to you a puzzle clearly beneath your erudition. If I attached a giant horseshoe magnet to the front of your car parked outside, with its poles facing the front of the car, would it move? Lets assume your car is made up of some ferromagnetic material.”
It was hard to tell if Summers was more confident on the subject or on Yaren’s incompetence. I shared Summers’ passion for science, at least a fraction of it. The principles of free enquiry embodied in the Socratic method stand tall and majestic however prickly they seem to any sentiment. By deploying arbiters on the code of dialogue, we lose sight of the original question and focus counter-productively on intentions. Any self-respecting student of physics can see that the question is a curve ball. It had nothing to do with electricity and magnetism! The car would not move because of Newton’s third law! All internal forces cancel! Only external impressed forces accelerate objects!
“Impossible! The car won’t move,” she answered without a moment’s thought, to my pride.
“And why not?”
“Because the magnetic force needed to move the car is so large. Its impossible to fit such a large magnet to the car.”
My heart sank, under the weight of her goddamn fuckingly miserable unimaginative answer. I gulped down the Glenlivet and landed the ice-filled glass back with a thud, giving away my lost temper.
“What if it were possible to fit the magnet in some fantastical way! Do you think the car would move then?” I thunderously implored.
“Well yeah,” she casually confirmed with an Indian nod, ignoring my seething admonition. What was I expecting? The barman, the musicians, the sweepers, the guards on duty! Even my mother, a retired civil engineer, could be forgiven. But this aspiring Doctor of Philosophy?! She wishes to teach young minds Maxwell by trampling on Newton?! If our institutions were being burnt down by malice upstairs, they were being dismantled by stupidity downstairs.

Summers sipped his glass victoriously, his smug demeanor alerted Yaren that something was wrong. She looked back and forth between me and Summers suspiciously. Her lush lips started to hide her tiny pearly whites and revealed a silent ferocity I’d never noticed before. She was perhaps not entirely of Ottoman descent as the irises of her big bright eyes glared of a possible aristocratic Persian past, perhaps that of a princess’. Her cheeks grew red like a patch of blossoming roses in the snow. Light suddenly shot out from the corner of her eye and I could discern, to my horror, the surface of a teardrop. Tears of hers I’ve seen before, from her uniform set of tantrums, as uniform as her adjectives. But this time they spoke of a starkly different melancholy. The girl commanded celebrity indeed, but this degree must have been the only resuscitation she gave her inner self, that last opening for self-exploration and self-adjudication. And here Summers and I were pornographically blocking it shut!

Gandhi save me! I had betrayed tolerance and compassion for simple-minded moral masturbation! The fabric of a civilized society relies on those virtues above all else, and here I was attempting my selfish embroideries. Staining it with the tears of living breathing bipeds made of the same ingredients as me. Why do I let my pendulum sway to such arc-lengths? Some of us cannot fight, some cannot speak and some cannot even stand. But it is precisely those among us who are defenseless, that the law of the land protects. Prejudice should never be cited as a justification for hatred in a truly secular society. Isn't that the same basis for the freedom of expression also, the humble recognition of all truths as perceptions, however compelling to do otherwise? The demand of equipoise in our republics, requires that we surrender our inner constitutions to it first.

Her eyebrows and lips twitched alternatingly, releasing a trickle on either side of her flushed nose. My inner demons retired mischievously as I reached out my arms to comfort her. If she had rejected them then, I never would have been able to explain myself. She submitted and I hugged her tight, as tight as her rib-cage allowed, as tight as my teeth clenched, clenched at the anger I was struggling to overcome, anger at Summers, anger at myself. It is in these moments of tempestuous inner conflict, that the hardest lessons are learned, and that by itself is a worthy lesson to remember. And although I hadn't come any closer to understanding what love was, I realized what it wasn't.

Summers got up seeming almost oblivious to my revelations and unwilling to placate Yaren in any way. With an inscrutable smile, he stuck his arm out, “Well. I’ll leave you two to go. Congratulations on completing your masters in chemical engineering. Good luck for your participation in warfare and complicity in the dissolution of Europe. And stay hungry, but not for everything. I’ve heard Marine dick is the saltiest.” Shrouding his unknown interiors, was this thick emulsion of slimy obscenity. What was Summers afraid to share? Or did he share so much that nothing was his alone? I shook his hand and saw him walk away to the bar to get himself another whisky, taking note of the Yes classic softly playing in the background:

Move yourself
You always live your life
Never thinking of the future
Prove yourself
You are the move you make
Take your chances win or loser

See yourself
You are the steps you take
You and you - and that's the only way

Shake shake yourself
You're every move you make
So the story goes

Yaren opened her mouth to say “bye”, but her strength hadn’t replenished to complete the syllable. We turned around to leave and on our way out, a middle-aged woman with a smart posture and a pleasing disposition intercepted us to ask,” Who’s your adorable friend there at the bar?”

Yaren wiped clean her tears, sniffed deeply and pronounced with defying confidence, ”His name is Nathan Summers. But you won’t be interested. He’s gay.”

Owner of a lonely heart
Owner of a lonely heart
Much better than - a
Owner of a broken heart
Owner of a lonely heart

Chapter 1: New Year

noreply@blogger.com (Vyaas) — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 11:24:00 +0000

The smell of coffee and curry stagnated in the studio which was dimly lit by pornography emanating from the desktop monitor. Summers’ transfixed eyes lay deep in their craters and reflected lesser light than his greasy forehead and nose. The hairs on his head resembled an orgy of snakes and his wiry beard didn't reveal the computer fat he'd gained during his year long hibernation; a year that was exhausted of all but its last five minutes. He turned his head slowly away from the screen, expressing the kind of grimace one usually employed in the presence of others; his repulsion was ostensibly warranted by the cheesy dialogue. I sat in the corner of the room watching this low definition obscenity with contrasting amusement. Why anyone in their mid-twenties would spend their new year’s eve in this depraved fashion is a mystery one may choose, wisely, to keep intact. But I think Summers is worth unravelling at least in the justice of introspection. After all, who else would decide to refrain from parties they weren't invited to so they could spend time with me?

He abruptly darkened the room by closing his browser and heaved a sigh which punctuated itself with a shrill whistle. Summers was asthmatic, but that didn't stop him from smoking. He eyed the pack of Dunhills on the bookshelf, burdening it with all the pressures a party coordinator from New York felt during the hectic week that followed Christmas. But before heading out for the year’s first charring of his shrivelled lungs, he opened up his music player and clicked twice for a gentle tune to mix with the odors of the room, strangely neutralizing them. He lip-synced to the mellow lyrics ricocheting off the bass notes that rippled across the thinly carpeted floor, supervised by graceful promenading along the fretboard in the style of funk:

Well. I'm up here in this womb
I'm looking all around
Well, I'm looking out my belly button window
And I see a whole lot of frowns
And I'm wondering if they don't want me around

What seems to be the fuss out there?
Just what seems to be the hang?
'Cause you know if ya just don't want me this time around,
Yeah I'll be glad to go back to Spirit Land

The discerning ear would rejoice at indentifying Hendrix but I was intrigued. Even the lightest music with the most juvenile lyrics could evoke profundity given the right setting. Summers’ fingers rhythmically twitched as he summoned his remaining reserves of make-believe to air-guitar. His silhouetted figure arched back in a way that demonstrated far more pain than Hendrix himself might have intended. He stopped to look at me for a second and then resumed serenading himself, spinning languidly on his revolving chair. What peculiar forms human beings take when in private, where their smiles and tears take on a purer authenticity and their thoughts converge on finer focal points. Like the lower entropy that results from the opposite of mixing. In this sense, socializing was an act of violence. It bludgeons away at one’s individual splendor to bring meaningless harmony among the stupid and the ignorant. In its aftermath of pestilential proportioning, it leaves behind a vile offspring of hypocrisies and euphemisms. But privacy isn't just freedom. It is necessary for the smooth functioning of social ironing. For how many lives have been saved by alcohol, video-games and masturbation combined?

Summers was just another human being entangled in the trafficking of love, miserably gasping somewhere between the unconditional and the unrequited. And hate, which is simply love times a negative number, is unfairly diagnosed as disfigurement. The hatred for friends can imply the love for friendship, for instance. Such higher order demands of intellects manifest as hatred when unanswered. Society replies instead by demonizing the poor soul. He is required to search forever like a blind man with cliche for a cane: cornucopias of fish in the sea, pursuit-worthy happiness, greener grass on forbidden sides. But he doesn't make this any easier for himself. His isn't a plea for acceptance but a convulsive rejection of it. Validation is patronizing and engagement is condescension. So narrow is the entrance to his heart, that even the cupid of the highest rank of marksmanship would consider close-range assault. For one’s intellect is sharpened by an open-mind, but what comes of an open-heart but surgery? And if one is to fall in love, is he to sink or swim?

And the age is such that love needn't emerge for the evolutionary incentive to reproduce. There is plenty at stake for the future of the human race and a mere multiplication serves insignificance in a simple-minded curtsy. These inductions of mine may sound far-fetched, but keep in mind that even fiction chances upon truth from time to time, as her seekers are well aware. Why then do I see Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky spread out on his dining table, fragmented pages from abusing the weak paperback binding and stained brown from coffee spills and samosa sauce? Socialism is ~~was~~ is an idea virtuous to the human race that didn't rely on genetic reproduction as much as it did on print, and Summers could very well be an asexual with this in mind. Marx isn't and could never be immortal, but there is a good chance Marxism will be. I find it peculiar that Summers was taking up a political stance in a world that refused to take him seriously. Such are the enigmas of the human condition.

As the song was fading to a close, he pulled up yet another screen, this time white, and fixated on it as though the porn was playing again. “Aha! The hairs on his head resembled an orgy of snakes!,” he announced suddenly, as he typed with the enthusiasm of an amateur writer. But it isn't a young Hemingway who comes to mind, but rather Orwell’s fictional Winston Smith:

“For some time he sat gazing stupidly at the paper. The telescreen had changed over to strident military music. It was curious that he seemed not merely to have lost the power of expressing himself, but even to have forgotten what it was that he had originally intended to say. For weeks past he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed his mind that anything would be needed except courage. The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years. At this moment, however, even the monologue had dried up.”

I ventriloquize Orwell - Animal Farm being a personal favorite - for effect but also to quote a man who was wrought by so-called love, lest we forget that frightfully chilling shriek that the mind cried upon reading the closing sentence of 1984.

Two minutes to twelve as he pushed back on his chair and arose to work on the cigarettes in the bookshelf. His pockets clinked with every step from the Altoids he carried around habitually, in case he wanted to get close enough to offend someone. He placed the pricey filter in his mouth and playfully gestured an invitation to walk outside with him, to which I wholeheartedly obliged. As I followed him to the front porch united in step, I realized an atomic difference between freedom and captivity and how it was possible to have one inside the other. I couldn't feel the cold given my fur coat but it must have been strong enough to have pierced his thin clothing and swallowed his flip-flop laden feet as he visibly shivered. I could have bolted just then, but I decided to stay, or rather, my body did. I felt overcome by an intoxicating expression of sympathy as I watched Summers tilt his head backward at Orion, his gaze a concoction of despair and delight. One had to be alone to witness true beauty. Some things were best unshared, because sharing was caring, and Summers didn't care. And as fireworks lit the sky in the distance, it was a solitary pine tree of all things that caught his eccentric attention. The leaves drew outwards, just like the pyrotechnics frozen in time. At this very moment, the tree was in fact participating in the consumption of oxygen in the atmosphere, very much like the distant fireworks, and every other thinking thing. Everything was connected, by molecules, or more strictly, electrons. He looked down at the origin of this fantastically tall tree and may just as well have contrasted it with the ongoing man-makery: the short-lived fireworks were propelled by gun powder while the nutrients permitting this tree its height and age clambered upward using nothing fancier than capillary action. And what more limited the height of the tree than the diffusion of the nutrient molecules through its cellulosic sinews and their limited supply thereof? Beauty may well lie in the brains of the materialist.

A minute to go, and Summers lifted the lighter to his cigarette. Was it Bertrand Russell who quipped that a fool sat at the other end of the flame? Well, may that fool be the fool of Socrates, the fool who accepts how little he knows! His body shrunk a fraction as he inhaled heavily from the pilot light, that asthma making itself heard despite the bursts in the distance. As those toxic fumes circulated in his corrupted lungs, what thoughts freed his imprisoned soul? What was he learning about the world and himself underneath those malnourished yet impassioned eyes? Few of us experience that fractal like beauty, where something is beautiful in the context of surrounding beauty, one of an infinitude of possible magnifications. He knelt down and patted me on the head and said, “Happy new year buddy!”. At that moment, I leapt up and kissed him on the face wet. He hugged me but awkwardly dodged my further advances as he tried to keep the combusting tobacco from harm’s reach. Somebody had to love this man. I loved this man. How could I not? Did we not share the common experience of being abandoned and lost? Where were those who claimed our affections? Was I that beast who equated worth with love?

I strolled with him around the block unleashed, for while a libertarian walks his dog, a socialist walks with his.

Blood red herrings

noreply@blogger.com (Vyaas) — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 05:08:00 +0000

The shadows cast by mankind's self doubt over their status in the animal kingdom as the rightful opposable-thumb-intelligentsia have gained considerable blackness this last week. Two atrocities out of the thousands tirelessly at war with progress have been elected by our media to represent the extravaganza that is this mankind. One is the murder of twenty children in a school in Connecticut. The other is the rape of a woman in a bus in Delhi.

Media surgeons have unsurprisingly abandoned the restorative in favor of the cosmetic, giving these crimes a face we are forced to recognize and adulate. First there is the mandatory academic exercise of deconstructing the second amendment under the auspices of gun owners, lobbyists and Piers Morgan. Then there is the expert opinion of the self-appointed psychologist who reckons the problem is Call of Duty and not, as his/her qualified but silenced counterpart suggests, the absurd deification of the murderer. For added pleasure (or pain- your freedom of choice comes first), the cadaverous right wing fringe have been resurrected from the graveyard of anonymity to proclaim that it is the "absence of God in schools" that invited the bloodshed. Why, even the Westboro Baptist church have taken advantage of this generous coverage but thankfully seem to only ascend in their impotence!

On the poorer half of this misery riddled latitude, journalists have struck oil; without doing much. Yes, Times of India, the world's best selling newspaper, ran an opinion poll asking voters how they feel the perpetrator must be punished (one of these was "cutting his genitalia"). By repeatedly slipping in the word "intestines" to fill pauses - and squandering yet another opportunity to be critical - they sustain, what they've always set out to maintain: an outrage. And here I was thinking pornography never needed a plot.

But before we line up the guillotines for our journalists, some scrutiny of the proles is in order. Isn't journalism after all, as Arnab Goswami authoritatively insists, an area of supply-demand economics? (I won't speak for the average US citizen to avoid beating a dead cliche.) In India, every husband, father, brother and son is entitled to palpitating grief. But encouraging this to mutate into violence further undermines the hitherto weakened but nonetheless invaluable process of law. Most disconcerting is the lack of introspection among the thugs of various age groups. While the middle-class male youth are plotting castration techniques using the vulgar vocabulary that one finds only on the internet, the soap-opera stupefied senility agrees on death but not torture. But no self-important male wants to hear about how poorly he treats a woman in his own house: ridiculed in private and public, secluded like a germ in a Petri dish when she menstruates, condescended to on matters outside kitchenware, patronized with regular offerings of charity and robbed of every last shred of individuality she dares to reveal. Recall those instances, if you can, when a mother treaded fearfully in the presence of her spouse's kin or a daughter didn't realize she was just sexually abused by a repressed uncle. Also consider the disastrous mangling of a child's mind; growing up in a household where the capabilities of a woman barely trespass outside cooking delicious food. And that's just the self-righteous middle-class fraternity. If this is the behavior of supposedly educated literates, what unit of misdemeanor are we ready to charge our impoverished brothers with? Their wives and daughters can hardly read or write, are frail and undernourished, paid wages rounded off upward from that of a slave's, forced into the most vile and grotesque of sex trade rackets and oppressed to a point where their vocal chords are merely vestigial. Rape is simply the logical outcome of such traits. What sympathy must we spare for the MP claiming that "she was asking for it" or the priest citing her "karma" or the hard-boiled fool who doesn't think twice before implying that she "ought to take it like a man." (Pay attention at the construction sites, where women carry bricks and gravel on their tender heads for ten hours a day in the dizzying heat with a child or two by their side. She's more "man" than many men claim to be. Look how deep this discrimination has seeped into our language.)

The clamor for the death penalty is equally grotesque. Martin Luther King famously said that "darkness cannot drive out darkness", but it seems to have fallen on metaphorically challenged ears. Suggesting the death penalty is also the signature cardiograph of the terminally lazy. Our media have promptly turned it into a trope. Don't discuss the immensely relevant work of Sunitha Krishnan or Arunachalam Muruganantham. Don't reactivate the almost forgotten thesis of Amartya Sen ("The missing women"). Happily shirk the critical polemics of Palagummi Sainath and Vandana Shiva. Instead bring on celebrities like Gul Panag and Shabana Azmi because we are a society that enshrines reputation over action. (Ask yourself why Amir Khan's Satyameva Jayate was a success.) Our media have distorted reality in their favor and it pains me to see our fellow countrymen capitulate without a fight. They exploit our grief and stupidity with the most insensitive candor, by flinging us red herrings like pigeon feed. But these are blood red herrings comrades, and only an intellectual and humanitarian self-cleansing can hope to change anything.

Edit: Sunitha Krishnan was later brought on Barkha Dutt's "We the people". I'm not surprised that hers were the most coherent arguments.

Ravishankar: Why his sitar gently weeps

noreply@blogger.com (Vyaas) — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 21:26:00 +0000

The year was 2006 and it was an early morning in the month of September, when the third semester of my undergraduate studies had begun. As the tides of unknown dreams receded, my hearing was reestablishing contact with the outside world. The door percussively clung to the magnetic stopper with a loud thud followed by a thampura ladled voice that floated across the room pecking my brother and I with precious maternal affection cool as morning dew, almost in harmony with Subbulakshmi's Suprabhatam so as not to awaken us with startling apaswara. I rose with a straightened back that was responding to the fragrance of sandalwood. My mother was standing at the door with a towel soaking up her hair, radiant despite the closed curtains. "Yellu Kanna! Ghenta six-thirty aathe!", she cheerfully implored in raaga. "Seri Amma," I agreed using up my kannada vocabulary. Smiling at my brother keeping blind and flailing his arms for more blanket to hide under, she swiveled back into the kitchen to make us idlis, which now that I think about it, varied in texture and taste based on the radio more than randomness. And when there was no electricity, we were treated to Amma's carnatic gymnastics or gamakas. Music permanently bounced off every painted surface in our house with no regard for the sufficient.

I had my own means of addressing my spiritual concerns. I would run up to the rooftop with my mp3 player to listen to Feynman's lectures for a few minutes while the Sun's light lost most of its blue to scattering, painting the horizon with the remaining red as though this filling was a compulsion, much like music filled the house downstairs. But today's playlist was different. I had just independently discovered Ravishankar's albums. This was important, for if Amma had suggested it to me, I would have instantly rejected it, as is characteristic of any professional adolescent. Of course, Ravishankar WAS played at home, but just when I was deliberately inattentive. Now that I was in the driver's seat of MY Magical Mystery Tour, it had to be an eccentric Beatle and not Amma who introduced this material to me. Sounds of India opens with a four minute introduction to Indian music and if my mother had seen the look of naive anticipation on my face - a boy out of mind and time waiting for a chairlift to scoop him off to marmalade skies - she would be miffed. After all, I had been her first student in carnatic music. Though I didn't expect Amma to get that this was a product of 1968. When Jimi Hendrix was reinventing rock with the release of Electric Ladyland. When Eric Clapton's fans challenged the church over who their deity really was. When the Beatles visited India in an attempt to escape western materialism. (Gita Mehta recounts this dichotomy in Eastern and Western perceptions in an interview with Alan Gregg: "When they got off the planes, they were all dressed as Indians, and they didn't sing Rock and Roll, and they were chanting mantras. And to their horror, we were not dressed in saffron! We were wearing jeans and t-shirts with terrible slogans, trying desperately hard to be like them!")

But if my influences were to be superficial and stereotypical, the music certainly felt real. And "if it felt real it must be real," my selective rationalism permitted. How else could these purely instrumental sounds cause my spine to tingle, heart to race and head to throb while carnatic varnams barely aroused a single hair on my back? Why did Sindhi-Bhairavi make me weak at the knees while all Sindhu-Bhairavi reminded me of was the agonizing sitting posture that tightened them? Why did north sound secular but south devotional? There was something else that delineated my musical terrain: Ravishankar was a savage genius and at first I took this too lightly. His mastery was at such an altitude that I couldn't really tell if I could see it or not. Yet it was blissful, far more than ignorance is purported to be.

I ~~torrented~~ listened to more of this kind of music, gradually resolving the reasons for why the word "genius" must be strictly and exclusively reserved for minds that are incapable of mediocrity. The sitar as pleasant sounding as it is when its strings are struck with the least intention (remember Norwegian wood?), requires a true master to unleash its full potential for euphony, unlike the rhythm guitarist caricatured by Mark Knopfler who "doesn't make his guitar cry or make it sing." The transmission of intense perspicacity from mind to fingers in Ravishankar's case is not very different from a great poet's. I don't mind vandalizing Wodehouse to make my point: "The drowsy stillness of the afternoon was shattered by what sounded to his strained senses like ~~G.K. Chesterton~~ Ravishankar falling on a sheet of tin.” Any player of a stringed instrument, at any level, can appreciate the swells,cuts and blisters that come from inescapable practice. However, perfecting the arduous physiological connections and neural pathways are necessary but not sufficient for the true genius. Therein lies his abundant capacity for metaphor; his ability to tap into his and his audience's various synesthesias. Take for instance his "Homage to Mahatma Gandhi". The first track "raaga Mohan Kauns" is a musical expedition following the life of Gandhi; one can picture a young confident lawyer hailing from South Africa saddened by the pestilential British Raj in the opening bass notes, slowly escalating in tenor through the promise of Satyagraha and eventually exploding in a crescendo that captures the sanguinary amputation of India, leaving the listener with a sense of the past which no history book can hope to convey. And as moist as I tend to become when describing these things, keep in mind that in Indian music, the raaga is the nucleus of the song. It is the auspicious totality of the raaga that scrawls the terms and conditions for every note, vibe, flirtation and detour on the fabric of the song. Mohan Kauns comes from Mohandas and was divined by Ravishankar for the singular purpose of portraying a deified man. My sympathies belong to those who never gave themselves the opportunity to see Indian music in this light. And shame on those who take the numinous hostage in the name of religion.

George Harrison, the quiet Beatle, had started to discern the delusions that come with fame and fortune in the late sixties. Studying the sitar under Ravishankar turned out to be the spiritual resuscitation that he'd secretly longed for. And that infectious grade of moral relativism that is endemic to India gave him a perennial temperature; just listen to "While my guitar gently weeps". It was such a persuasive philosophy that his friendship with Eric Clapton, infamous for philandering with Harrison's wife, survived that tumult. Indeed it had to be Clapton who organized the Concert for George in 2002 at the Royal Albert Hall, where proceedings began by opening with Ravishankar and his devilishly talented daughter Anoushka in an Indian styled orchestra, consecrating the way Harrison would have himself. This music isn't as much of a novelty as it was forty years ago; the opening scene of the Concert for Bangladesh in 1971 at Madison Square Garden shows us a younger Ravishankar tuning his instruments only to be rudely hastened by his audience with loud clapping, to which he wittily replies, "If you appreciate the tuning so much, I hope you enjoy the playing more." By his side on stage was Allah Rakha, another giant of Indian music, who with his tabla vitalized the sounds of the Sitar in cardiac fashion (His son Zakir Hussain magically increased the weight of my lower jaw one night a few years ago). His music touched things before he did as it enveloped his presence everywhere, like atmosphere held by a planet's gravity; his step-daughter Norah Jones has a voice that can lull war to peace. And lets not discount those multicultural concoctions he developed with Philip Glass.

California provides an ample residence to the tired musician, a perk I hadn't factored in when enrolling at USC. The coincidence blessed me however, as I now had the chance to see him perform live, and as I discovered today, his last. I'm filled with an ineradicable hollowness but I'd sound foolish to claim that I wasn't expecting this. My friend and I witnessed his final act at Long beach last month and I remember the momentary lightness of air from a thousand breaths held back at once when he was introduced on stage in a wheel chair carted by his dear wife - with plastic veins running out his wizened nose and an overall terminal countenance of a ninety-two year old that amplified the unease. But once reunited with his sitar, his spell binding notes replenished the air and rarefied it with his own graceful genius, implying that inexplicable immortal character of music. And while the mourning transcends the subcontinent, am I to rejoice that I was one of the fortunate few to revel in his final performance?

Some resolutions

noreply@blogger.com (Vyaas) — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 18:18:00 +0000

It isn't everyday one gets up with the kind of springiness that the realization of experiencing twenty-five revolutions around the Sun can induce one to. The clouds of dawn seem to be tearing themselves up at the behest of my 2.1, vibrating to the scintillating sequence of notes written and performed by Antoine Dufour - who I've had the pleasure of meeting in the illustrious company of Andy McKee and Stephen Bennett, musicians who've kept to the rarefied airs of their own mountaintop, where the Sun and Moon shine with an equal intensity, the trees sweat wine and the cacophony of dubstep is indistinguishable from silence. And before I start looking for an excuse to pen all my pent up superlatives and delay my trip to the Home Depot Center (where that over-rated yet personal favorite footballer of mine, David Beckham, kicks hist last for LA Galaxy), let me simply jot down a few self-addressed mandates to revisit in times of disorientation.

1) Music hasn't adequately stimulated the right hemisphere of your brain, as you've come to realize after reading the morally discerning, cliche rending and deeply evocative prose of authors like Heller,Vonnegut and Bellow who for the longer part of your first twenty-four bore the burning gaze of your negligence, unlike Feynman, Zeldovich and Landau (who thankfully didn't!). Read more Vyaas.

2) Last year around this time, you lost not one but two: your grandfather and Christopher Hitchens, two people who I'm sure would concede to very little agreement besides a joyous hatred for the British Monarchy. If the former blessed you with the moral nourishment required of a boy growing up in India, the latter empowered you with the moral apparatus required of a man growing up in this world. But above all, both men, however ideologically disunited, exclusively resorted to the peaceful virtues of articulation to win one over. The spoken and written word are too dear to civilization, for us to hand over to the machinations of the spineless and cynical. Speak up Vyaas.

3) Hubris is an enemy to reason. Its surplus- I hope you get the gravity of this- is intolerable. For example, the self-congratulatory nature of your research . Never exchange your standards in return for the counterfeit currency of convenience. Only gold Vyaas.

4) Just like an oscillating tuning fork at resonance shakes off loosely attached dust, so too have you jettisoned many a friendship. Those who remain can be counted on one hand. Make a fist and keep them close Vyaas.

But Newton did it...

noreply@blogger.com (Vyaas) — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 05:11:00 +0000

Reconciling inconsistencies in life, yours or someone else's, is strictly impossible. The language of logic which our capacious yet limited brains have conceived and refined over thousands of years, namely mathematics, itself grew aware of this limitation in 1931, in the form of Kurt Godel's historic incompleteness theorems. The basic premise of his thesis is the impossibility of postulating a theorem and using its conclusions to prove its axioms.(A less laborious proof of this seemingly innocuous idea can be found in Turing's alternate approach: "The Halting Problem"). It is impossible to be complete and consistent simultaneously; a fantastically sobering thought! So one is assured to be greeted by the pungent breath of futility upon dismantling people's principles into their irreducible constituent pieces, for what hope is there if we cannot explain the fundamental nature of something as simple as the natural numbers?

This in no way is a permit for unbridled stupidity. Any thinking person always seeks consistency to some degree in the various vocations. A historian would be left scratching his head if there were circulating reports of Japanese aid to British soldiers during World War II, contrary to the documented and demonstrated role of the Axis powers. A physicist's annoyance at discovering that Neptune has a triangular orbit while every other planet traces an ellipse is justified, after having understood the inverse square nature of the gravitational force. Likewise, a chemist's bewilderment at water and carbon dioxide spontaneously recombining to form methane and oxygen, an affront to the second law of thermodynamics, surely evokes atleast a sliver of sympathy from the educated. Why, even the religious, as irrational as they prefer to be, frequently resort to consistency arguments by citing the bible, for example, when confronted with the possibility of legalizing gay marriage. The distinctly human predicament of making sense of our surroundings is anesthetized by its (ill-)perceived consistency.

Having said all this, let me yank you by your collar before we soak ourselves in the rather turbid waters of epistemology. By mentioning Godel, I only wish to acknowledge the perimeter of the battlefield. The irritant in question is that of the cliched standoff between religion and science. What I find extremely easy to tackle is their much saluted compatibility: none exists. Religion stands on the elephantine feet of blind faith, thrives on the arrhythmic heartbeat of dogma, relies on the asthmatic respiration of deceit and does not quite seem to have the anatomical equivalent to the brain. These malignancies are by definition foreign to science. Anyone arguing otherwise has much work ahead of them and I would personally nudge them in the direction of the adeistic(sic) inducing precision of experiments validating the axioms of quantum mechanics.(A reading/viewing of Feynman's lecture "The character of physical law" reveals to layman and professional alike the humble principles of symmetry that science so successfully confides in. Also, his indispensable essay "Cargo Cult Science" should leave readers with a sense of the demanding standards of intellectual honesty required in science, something flagrantly trifled with in organized religion.)

The slightly less impersonal question (that can leave people rudely storming out of your house mid-discussion, as a dear friend did last night) is about the religious scientist. The eruptive sentiment goes something like "I go to church AND do science. Thus I am religious AND scientific." I've scarcely heard someone described as scientific, let alone self-described. Their thinking could be scientific. Their work could be scientific. But a person being scientific? What does that mean? You apply logic and rationality to every one of your actions outside church? Even if that were believable (as far as Godel permits), I would never use the word "scientific" to describe a person, simply because of the pricelessness it lends to the word "method".

If science upholds the sanctity of inquiry against all forms of prejudice to reveal the truth, how someone selectively exercises this reasoning based on his/her proximity to a church tickles me. And aren't people obliged to distinction just as their properties are, as David Hume would have probably demanded? If science cannot look religion in the eye, can a scientist a priest? Yes and no. Yes as a person, no as a practitioner. Let me assure you that the torrent of ad hominems that follow are less troubling than the itchy brand-tag on the elastic lining of one's underwear. Just because Newton et al dabbled in religion, doesn't in the slightest imply that their contributions to science are any less valuable. Anyone making that argument is exhibiting a grave impairment in their understanding of the scientific method: it does not share your bias for or against Newton's beliefs, only the truth. Experimentally verified, peer scrutinized truth. By calling Newton scientific, you implicitly relegate the process of science to everything he did. This needn't hold at all, as one quickly realizes from the flexibility in delegating such arbiters.

Surely, the question on how much religion had influenced the thinking of Newton, Faraday and Darwin is academic. One would do well to note the distinction between a theistic belief and a deistic one, the latter of which is prominent among most scientists guilty of making this a harder battle for atheists to win.(Faraday's reasoning for the relationship between electricity and magnetism purportedly stems from deistic notions of symmetry, the kind of thinking that more famously troubled Einstein in his later years. An especially delicious sampling of the fine-tuning argument is Fred Hoyle's unprecedented use of the anthropic principle to arrive at the prediction of an excited state of the carbon nucleus). Nevertheless, I remain skeptical about those who proudly announce that they are people of faith. It doesn't impress me. It does the opposite. And if this person pursues science as a career, it appears to me that they are convicting themselves of imposture. Now, their work will speak for itself, as it should, which is why it is possible to have religious and intelligent people, a fact that escapes some of my fellow atheists (They would have to rely on their intelligence to avoid conflict between career and any religious inclination). But all this is peripheral to science whose core does not contain any speculations of this kind.

Besides the four horsemen: Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens (all of whom have gold standard arguments against any notion of reconciliation and whose writings are recommended reading for the few asking themselves this question seriously), there is the equally strident but almost forgotten Peter Atkins. Those of you who are aware of the recent victories of particle physics can feel free to juxtapose them (Lawrence Krauss' elegant summary: "A Universe from nothing") with this quote by him in an interview in 1985:

I think there are two sorts of religious "scientist". One is the creationist - someone who believes that everything was created and what we're seeing is just what the creator left around. And I regard that simply as intellectual excrement of the first order and we don't need to worry about it any further.

The second sort, the one that we do have to take seriously, are the believing scientists. The people who are really making an intellectual effort to coordinate their system of beliefs with the tide of scientific discoveries which are slowly pushing them further and further back into metaphor.

I think the acid test of the battle that is going on between science and religion would be science's ability to show that the entire world could tumble out of nothing. It's already got back to within a photon's throw of the origin of the universe as we've gone back into the big bang, and almost to the point of talking about what happened before the big bang. And I see no reason why we should not be able to go beyond the big bang and talk about its inception - how the universe emerged from absolutely nothing. Not just empty space, but from nothing. And how it did so, without intervention. Now, if science can do that, then I think that the religious must concede defeat.

Sharply drawn lines

noreply@blogger.com (Vyaas) — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 03:45:00 +0000

In his autobiography Last Words, George Carlin revisits the moments precursory to his subsequent magisterial comedic dauntlessness. The first cheek swelling slap came when he was defending Lenny Bruce's jabs at religion, ultimately winning the scorn of his then comrades:

It was the most dramatic evidence I'd had to date that these lines were sharply drawn, the legacy of that Catholic upbringing, that clannish Irish working-class neighborhood ethic was a rigid demarcation. Just because you grew up with a guy and shared A,B,C,D and E with him didn't mean that on F through Z you wouldn't be diametrically opposed to each other.

Those of us who've experienced such a revelation can sympathize when I say that it only gets harder. Especially harder with today's indefatigable libertarian ethos. Question your colleagues' F's,G's and H's and be prepared to witness our generation's abject refusal to excogitate. My personal experience is littered with arguments I've had with people I had wrongly placed as kin in thought. A summary of the most grotesque notions still championed by my fellow "educated" 24 year olds are:

1) Brahmins are genetically superior in mind.

2) Dowry is an acceptable tradition.

3) Homeopathy works.

4) The proof for evolution is untenable.

And if that wasn't enough to curdle your blood, what if I told you that some or all of these views are harbored by atheists and fellow scholars in science? My use of quotes for the word educated is frightfully inadequate. I have made it clear to such voluntary flat-earthers, upon uncontrollable frothing at the mouth, that they reserve the right to fuck off. (These were the same carbon-based life-forms I had matriculated with, competed fiercely in exams with, played sports with and even shared a room with.) Further facets of their cretinism reveal themselves facilely:

5) The humanities aren't important in any sense.

6) Morality comes from religion.

7) There is no joy in science until it morphs into a usable technology.

Challenge these savageries and hope that your friend,(everyone's favorite friend), doesn't turn to you and avuncularly point out that everyone has a right to their opinion. (But of course they have a right to their opinion! If we had rights to others' opinions, I'd first want to make sure that I'd landed in Los Angeles and not Riyadh or Pyongyang!) Note the resolute unwillingness to distinguish between an opinion and its content. You think history is a conspiratorial engagement? Can I tell you why you might be mistaken? No? And why is that? Oh, because you have a right to your opinion! Have they taken their right to actually mean not wrong? Few of these invertebrates go the extra blighted mile to give you a lecture on relativism: Right and wrong are subjective; a generation of halfwits who've been taught never to scratch their heads. They draw themselves an impenetrable perimeter; a force-field of self-righteousness and a proselytizing sphere of influence that wins many a fool. Only the discerning can trace the protracted outline of that bestial domination of dogma in people's thinking.

Flee from this depressing slaughterhouse of intellect only to be greeted by a slightly less lethargic yet equally ill-informed tribe of pundits. These specimens have freshly baked conspiracy for breakfast, rabidly nibble on the bones of their political representatives for lunch and zestfully slurp the blood of every duty-bound journalist at dinner to quench the dryness they might have acquired while accidentally thinking between meals. These are the minions of Michael Moore and the puppets of Peter Joseph. They can quote Rand in reply to every question and can tell you exactly who was responsible for the financial crisis. They can turn anything into evidence by playing an apocalyptic background score. Their appetite for empty conjecture is insatiable yet their warehouse of moribund musings never seems to reduce in stock! Barkha Dutt married a muslim and is a congress spokesperson who wants to vanquish Hinduism. Fifty percent of the IPL games are fixed. The Indian Government plotted the recent floods in Pakistan. In fear of being unable to withhold aggravating expletives in the presence of these cerebrovores, I always give my best at sprinting into the horizon.

There are others who invest their idolatory in cult leaders like Subramanian Swamy of Z.I.L.C.H(Zionist Indian Liberating Champions of Hindutva), Chetan Bhagat of W.H.I.N.E (Witless Hinglish Involving Nothing Exceptional) and Samir Jain of J.I.Z.Z (Journalists of India Asleep). I am ambushed once again by hostile disapproval, but this time sadly, of those closest. Their risible syllogism in such cases is that I can't have an opinion because I don't know what it's like to be a politician, writer, businessman, etc. Despite this statute, if I choose to venture an utterance, it is expected of me to preface my every sentence with the superfluous "In my opinion" or "I feel" or "My limited knowledge tells me". Subconsciously, they feel secure only if I, a mere infinitesimal cog with a benign opinion, declare this fact every single time. They are ready to treat my objections as serious only if I pretend I'm not! I cannot bring my exhausted self to dignify this puerility with sufficient reproach.

A true myth circulates in the inter-webs: if you click every first link on a wikipedia article, you will invariably be led to the entry for Philosophy. The clicks through the imbeciles of my encyclopedia lead me with certainty to the entry for Education, for the lack of thereof. My peers, mainly ardent Anna Hazare supporters, are quick to dismiss the need for education in a discussion of morality. Their argument is as compelling as the case for one more season of Two and a half men. Indeed human beings possess an innate calibration of right and wrong (ignoring the absurd tyrannical tenets of religion), but education provides the much needed fine-tuning. How does one make a morally sound statement that addresses all of humanity without a knowledge of the state of humanity? History, Literature, Science, Philosophy and the Arts are the paraphernalia of those trying to figure out, as my articulate testosterone fueled comrades would say, what the fuck is going on. One would be remiss to forget Socrates' observations on democracy, that its correct functioning is valued only by the professional few. (Today, "Vote Now!" is the loudest injunction to citizens of a democracy, accompanied by a muffled emphasis on public engagement.) Anna Hazare's motives are as commendable as of any supporter of anti-corruption. But a movement of line-dancing hand in malnourished hand towards the gates of Parliament, fosters the kind of otiosity cancerous to rational discourse and ultimately democracy. Let me avoid transferring to a Gandhi Vs. Ambedkar orbit and simply say that the tune of All you need is love has become quite boring, IN MY OPINION.

All this inveighing has left me with very few people to talk to. I thus qualify for that much coveted title, anti-social. I will also be labeled pedantic for pointing out that anti-social is the word originally reserved for those drones who compulsively whip out their cell-phones at every social gathering and spend time with everyone in the world except those in their presence. But so be it. Or as that other Beatle forlornly wrote, Let it Be.

Not so fast

noreply@blogger.com (Vyaas) — Sun, 30 Sep 2012 11:23:00 +0000

Maxwell's equations describe the otherwise recondite interplay of electricity and magnetism. The first two of these gems due to Gauss, deflate many a proof dealt by Newton during his tryst with gravity. Michael Faraday labored the third by toil of experiment and Ampere envisioned the fourth in similar fashion. Maxwell finished the job by unabridging each of the last two and encircling the lot in his famous paper of 1861. It was an unprecedented attempt at relating abstract fields to physical quantities, the speed of light its eau de vie. Responsible for inspiring generations of scientific artificers (most notably Albert Einstein), the equations continue to enthrall physicist and fool(read engineer) alike (less notably me).

In seeking to solve for the electric and magnetic fields, the quaternity's elegance lies in content rather than structure. As anyone in possession of that cellulose pulp of attestation we've come to call a B.S. degree knows, six variables(3 for each of the fields) need six relations to be solvable. Not four! But as anyone worth their cellulose pulp will leap to point out, "Maxwell's equations are entangled!" They are, by virtue of their grandeur, messed up. One must first rethink the field in terms of potentials, before mindfully employing a so called gauge and carving the set with equalities to separate source and sink. This is not to say that solving these equations is any less rewarding. On the contrary, solving them for the first time to derive that spookily omnipresent wave equation, was emphatically liberating for me. In fact, it is that enduring memory, hauled around the recesses of my brain by mechanisms explained by those very equations, which prompts this apology, hitherto mistakable.

When I first started typing on archaeopteryx87, I was craving an intelligent audience. A cry for attention by a piece that belonged to a different jigsaw puzzle. I enjoyed writing but felt lonely perambulating the blogosphere with all but a pocketful of ideas and a limited vocabulary. Although Nikhil and I went to the same school for 6 years, we connected only after we'd separated from our junior heritage. I saw a brain in him that could fire that rifle of reason with the kind of irreverence only a gaunt, begoggled geek could possess. He was perfect. Together we would write and save the world from the perils of dogma and bullshit.

It was only a matter of time until my scientific pursuits and misanthropic views broadened in tandem, bringing my brief, if not non-existent, writing career to a halt. He was more determined and continued the struggle single-handed, literally, to eventually get much better at writing and even managed a publication in the famed Chicken Soup series. This only weakened any remaining resolve I had to write and we thus grew apart as an unintended consequence of our initial excitement.

My recent visit to India was the most sentimental time I had spent at home. Hailing from Los Angeles had only served to frightfully amplify my perceptions of the squalor of the slums, the attention deficit media, the demagogic religious leaders, the indifferent working class and the overall unenlightenment movement (the nation was preoccupied with the appropriateness of cartoons in history textbooks). Bestirred with a feeling of abandonment, I suggested to Nikhil that his passion for writing is better suited for fiercely vocal(yet dithering) forums like reddit instead of the trafficless serenity of the blog. He readily acceded, an indication that he too was losing hope in the efficacy of writing; an eerie personification of an alternate Partha deserted by his Sarathi.

Upon returning to the diametrically opposite City of Angels, a series of events necessitated a second scrutiny of my decision to stop writing. As if to convince myself of the default failures of confrontation, I turned strident, arguing issues considered to be outside the realm of science, defending gay rights, women's rights, death penalties, national science funding, and challenging religion, superstition, dogma (especially that invincible subject of Indian devotion , Mohandas Gandhi). These arguments invariably descended into a noisy, passionate fact-free-fist-fest which gave me lush opportunity to behold how poorly constructed and articulated my own opinions were. Even if some of those stances could be fundamentally right, I felt foolish shaking my fist and stuttering injunctions of equality, justice, liberty and reason without the slightest invocation of context and history. I had become the very uneducated man I was preaching to!

If you think about it, writing is the best way to deconstruct your own dogmas and inconsistencies to lay them bare for analysis. Where do your facts/beliefs/morals/principles really come from? Were you instructed by an authority, a myth, a news channel or by reason? How well can you defend your ideas without sounding like an idiot?

And that old adage of being a good reader before being a good writer is certainly true. The sixteenth century priest, George Herbert admonished: "Woe be to him, that reads but one book!", reminding us that erudition transcends monotheism . The Nickelodeon neo-youth can recall Will Smith imploring his audience to "run and read" at the 2005 Kids' Choice Awards. That advice is all the more a stringent injunction to my peers who, worryingly, haven't taken note of their social-networking narcissism, not to mention their distended abdomens.

Reading and writing, apart from being self-instructive, are the reins of argument and the virtues of a healthy democracy, a truth that stood naked and defenseless with us that day at The Fruit Shop on Greams Road(on Kilpauk Garden Road). I clearly did not bother to consult my faculties, specially that diminished voice of poetry, when I pronounced my cease and desist to Nikhil. But the dark cynicism is bathed in light now and I apologize. I know of only one way I can defend humanity and it is through this blog. Just as much as reason must prevail, so to must her defenders.

And as I snuggle myself for a tranquil pondering on the Bohm-Aharanov effect, I'm convinced that a lack of readership is the least effective deterrent. Never, while exercising science, do I even once think of an audience, although I must admit that communicating it effectively takes a certain amount of theater. The last thing on any respectable scientist's mind is an audience. His work, until publication at least, has nothing even remotely to do with the censorious, cacophonous and catachrestic profiles of his audience. Neither is any serious artistic endeavor the product of servitude to admirers. The equations of Maxwell are indeed artistically equivalent to a Shakesperean sonnet or a composition by Bach. The obvious overlap in these traditions is, as Oscar Wilde discerns from Aristotle:

"Scientifically speaking, the basis of life-- the energy of life, as Aristotle would call it--is simply the desire for expression, and Art is always presenting various forms through which this expression can be attained."

I cringe at the thought of Maxwell rethinking electrodynamics because someone wasn't pleased or too busy to leave a comment. One can be honest only by disengaging from the fancies of one's audience. Irreverence takes a respectable amount of honesty.

P.S. I secured Nikhil's forgiveness before I started to write this, and he has agreed to join me in my quest for clarity. We're not going anywhere. Not so fast.

Majin

noreply@blogger.com (Vyaas) — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 17:43:00 +0000

I find somethings in physics insanely provocative. Lets call them majins.

majin(n): A majin is that which gains value proportional to the thought invested in it.

Majins can make me drop game-pads in the middle of an assassination, unplug my earphones while listening to Cream and sometimes even walk out from a game of football.

Physics is full of majins. It is in fact Majin-Central!

Here's a majin: The principle of least action. Nature can transit from state A to state B in an infinite number of ways. But she chooses the path that minimizes her action. The action is a quantity which takes everything physically relevant into account, like mass,speed,etc.. It is also path dependent, which means that no two actions are the same because no two paths are the same. The path nature chooses to tread is that which minimizes her action. It is why throwing a ball makes it traverse a parabolic path. It is why Earth goes around the Sun. It is why light reflects off mirrors and refracts off lenses. It is why we see auroras near the poles and why fire happens.

Please note that when I say "why" something happens, it henceforth implies that I'm addressing the limit of our understanding through observation. So no more "why"s can follow. They are surely very interesting "why"s, but that isn't the subject of this post. Note: Making conclusions about the origins of your majin deprecates its value, often passing it on to a superior majin. This is often a good thing as it leads to exciting discoveries and more robust and versatile majins. But sometimes, to one's disappointment, this receiving majin might not be superior at all but simply an adhoc means to instate one absolute majin, ruler of all majins. Such a majin has not been verified with observation and if you think it does, you're a crazy person.

Here's another majin: The law of increasing entropy. Entropy is simply our net ignorance of the universe. Ignorance here refers to our lack of knowledge of the positions and momenta of the particles that constitute the universe." But we had no idea about the universe to begin with!", you ask? In physics, one often tends to take a word in existing vocabulary and modify it to suit the idea one is attempting to encapsulate. In this case, the word "universe" simply refers to something thermodynamically isolated meaning no information can escape or enter. Then we're still losing information? Yes! Because things get mixed up. Suppose you knew 2 numbers say 3 and 4. We then mix them up to get 7. There is no way we can recover those 2 numbers. The process of addition kills previous information. One can think of nature as constantly adding things up.

And if those majins weren't entertaining enough, try bringing them together. How is it that when we have such a powerful law like the principle of least action, we're confounded by the equally impressive law of increasing entropy? Is there some cosmic disharmony between these 2 majins? Perhaps one majin is more powerful than the other? Maybe both majins are plain wrong and there is a 3rd more superior less ambiguous majin somewhere? I'll leave this to your imajination.

Burning the Midnight Oil

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 13:41:00 +0000

You're either a morning person or an owl. The famous lark and owl dichotomy estimates when we are at our most productive. At some in your life, you will cross the line and step into the shoes of your alter-ego. The lark will inevitably oversleep for nights in a row- upsetting the circadian rhythm- and thus cross over into owl territory. Usually this happens at University, when you're up partying too hard with the roommates, watching one Matrix movie after another or just marathon watching seasons of 30 Rock.
With the advent of the personal computer (or Mac, for you Apple fans) and ultrafast Internet, burning the midnight oil has changed completely. No more are you stuck at the library's reference section, afraid to take a pee break lest someone up and offs with your textbook on Biochemistry. No more will the librarian bother you to put away your iPod, even though it isn't audible to anyone but you. And yes, there is so much information out there that studying becomes no longer a headache, but sometimes a pleasure.

During the day, I do little of educational worth. I do chores around the house, clean and dust up and do quick runs to the bank, check my email and watch reruns of The Big Bang Theory on television.
Then the government mandated 2 hour blackout occurs, during which there is plenty of sunshine but no electricity to escape the heat of the late afternoon. These two hours, I use to read up on my novels (Stieg Larsson's trilogy and a primer on the American Political system) and also on my Japanese. After the power returns, the next couple of hours are spent on coffee, TV and the loyal iPod. Then as evening arrives, the textbooks are opened up and the journals are opened and I read up on immunology. Each time I brush up on the basics, I learn something new and the prospect of being a tad more knowledgeable than ten minutes back is a real thrill. I split the week between boning up on basics and looking for PhD's. And more often than once, I have a question or am doubtful on the definition of a certain word. Open up Google and hey presto, done!
And Youtube is a rich treasure trove of information on biology and immunology. There are many lectures and demonstration videos covering everything from immunology to basics like 2D electrophoresis! Never again will you be building up on weak foundations or faulty assumptions.

The day ends for me at 2 am when my brain finally stops listening to me and shuts down. I plop down and before I know it it's late morning again. There are a few disadvantages to being an owl: You can't go for a morning walk; can't see the old uncles "jogging" in their shorts; you miss the extra Vitamin D that you get only at sunrise, but hey- you wake up just late enough to justify brushing your teeth and avoid being judged by the neighbours. Hey, atleast you're getting some work done, yeah?

Are you an owl or a lark? Hope to hear in the comments.

5th Winter School of Immunology

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 19:13:00 +0000

The Gods will offer you chances,

Know them, take them.

....

you are marvellous
the Gods wait to delight
in you.

- Charles Bukowski, The Laughing Heart

Indeed they did.
Imagine being invited to scenic Jodhpur to meet 49 other immunologists from all across India to discuss your work and to get to know one another. Now add to the mix that there will be seminars on cutting edge science that's being done in labs as we speak.

The labs of Harvard and Yale Medical School and UCSF, I mean.
Now as the icing on the cake, the faculty from these institutions themselves arrive to teach us a thing or two about immunology and take our questions and sit with us at the dinner tables to laugh and talk the night away.
It seems surreal, but it's true. I just came back in a daze of disbelief, wonderment and inspiration that I've met some of the best immunologists in the world today and also that I got the chance to meet and talk to some of our country's future stars in the field.

Mayakkam Enna- Dhanush's tour de force

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 08:34:00 +0000

It's been a long while since I've gone to see a Tamil film. There are several reasons really, which range from fanatical and unruly movie goers, who boo, catcall and whistle at inappropriate moments to over-the-top, larger than life action scenes and crass humor. But I heard many good things about this movie: the songs were really catchy, the debut of actress Richa was an excellent one and most importantly that it highlighted Dhanush's versatility with regards to donning any role.

The audience,oddly,were disciplined during this heartwarming scene.
The whistles and catcalls ensued during the lead up to the kiss. Oh well, can't win them all.

SPOILER ALERT: If you have not watched the movie, please do not read further. What follows are my thoughts and impressions of the movie. But if you don't mind spoilers or want to agree or disagree with my interpretations later, do read on.

I find it interesting that Yamini (portrayed by Richa) is attracted to Karthik's (played by Dhanush) rash personality. She showed a clear distaste to him in the opening scenes on the beach, but within an hour in the movie, she's doodling pictures of him absentmindedly in her office? Really?
The two lady friends that Karthik has seem to be purely background characters. They appear at the beach scene, then at the forest resort and one last time towards the end of the film.
Dhanush is the master of epic facepalms. There are just a handful of scenes where he doesn't execute the perfect WTF? moment. That little peeve aside, I simply loved the scene on the beach where he confronts his idol photographer; who then proceeds to screw Karthik over after he has stolen Karthik's work and presented them as his own. Kudos to Raviprakash for portraying in his character, the very soul of cruel sadist. In the end, I expected him to apologize for his actions on live television, but it's just as satisfying to see that Karthik wins out. Dhanush's acting style changes completely after his character suffers a head trauma after falling off (the second?) floor building. The scene where he sits alone on the couch staring blankly ahead in the low lit living room is a true testament to the director's choice of lighting to emphasize Karthik's mental condition.
Special props to Richa for playing the role of an icy, yet pragmatic woman in the first part and a grief struck, loyal wife in the second. The scene where her character is abused after participating in a photo-shoot was chilling, but the true KO comes when she wipes the blood stained floor after Karthik violently shoves her aside. All her frustrations are seen when she impotently scrubs the floor and the director dedicates a full minute to her melancholic screams. Powerful stuff.
My only beef with the film is perhaps the anti-English sentiment. Tamil films are known to be embracing of Tamil culture and language and discourage too much of English (words and cultural references) from creeping in, which I believe is fair enough. But there were a couple of scenes, which seem indicative of a hidden frustration among Tamilians about the English language and with those who speak it well. These English speakers- they are labeled as "Peters" (another word for you to learn after you Google "Soup Song"). Metallica's Nothing Else Matters is played at the Beach scene, with the gang humming/half-spluttering the lyrics. For a man like Karthik who hangs out with friends who listen to a lot of English music (and possibly speak it themselves), he seems to show a lot of anger towards Yamini when she speaks to him in English. Perhaps the worst part was when Karthik attacked the bridegroom at the wedding. Drunk as he was, he accused the bridegroom of being a "Peter" just before he smashed a (liquor?) bottle over his head, leaving the bridegroom a bloody mess. Karthik cold have leveled any insult from the Tamil or English dictionary before that act, but "Peter?" Is he that pissed off at people who speak English? And just to be clear, I am not a fan of Kolaveri Di. It's simply doggerel and has survived only because of people's ability to identify with a heartbreak and perhaps of the catchy background music. The lyrics however are disgraceful and truly facepalm- worthy.

All in all, Mayakkam Enna is an excellent film that features an excellent cast, wonderful acting and some great songs. Highly recommended viewing.

update

noreply@blogger.com (Vyaas) — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 07:00:00 +0000

First of.
My condolences to Nikhil on the loss of his grandfather. He was a very special person in Nikhil's life; evident in the way his eyes would light up before cherishing an anecdote or two with me on any given rooftop. Stay strong bro. Most people can only contemplate having such a healthy relationship with their grandparents.

Secondly.
I think I'll blog again. The reason I'd stopped isn't apparent any more. I will return to writing physics and slightly less controversial political commentary.

Thirdly.
Nikhil has done an excellent job with the blog while I was gone. He has taken it farther than I would have ever imagined. While my writer's block was becoming more of a writer's coma, he stayed disciplined and dedicated to this writing exercise and now has a book to his name. Readers take note. Good things happen to passionate, hard working people. Do not confuse this hard work with hard work though. This perceived hard work of Nikhil's is really play to him. So by work hard, I mean play hard.

Lastly.
I am a PhD student now and I love what I do. I pursue science and I am at peace with myself. I get a stipend for reading and practicing physics. For me it is the opportunity of a lifetime: a chance to peer into the workings of the universe and derive the thrill of discovery every day, more importantly self discovery. I'd like to preserve in writing, if not share , some of this awesomeness I pretend to understand. Since I'm practically coming back from the dead, I'd like to start small and try to pull off a weekly posting. As always, I encourage discussion and feedback. I was reading some of my past posts earlier today and couldn't help laughing at how childish I'd been. I guess we're all like that. We grow up.

I'll leave you with this pic of a young Max Plank, taken 22 years before his great revelation.

Dashing eh?