The Last Humanist

Applied Physics

2011-07-10T19:55:00.000+05:30

The really smug feeling that you get from being a Physicist arises out of the confidence that you can dismiss every other field of study in this universe as just "Applied Physics".

There's only one field of study that trumps Physics

- Philosophy (which by-definition is META-Physics)

A letter to all the parents of IITians.

2011-07-10T19:49:00.000+05:30

This is a letter that I'd love to post on behalf of every IITian to his/her parents:

Dear Mom & Dad,

I know that I was one of the smartest kids in my school. I was always 1st or thereabouts. You know what? Every SINGLE one of these 2000 guys who joined along with me, can say the same thing about THEMSELVES. Yeah! Yeah! I know that the general idea is that I should top every single semester and come out in 4 years as the student of the year. But let's be just a little bit more realistic.

If I flunk a course: Remember. I didn't commit murder. I didn't burn your house down. I didn't plant a bomb in a crowded public place. I failed a course. I know you don't want to see me as a loser but please put it in perspective.

I may not win every single competition. But the only time I lose is when I do not dare to enter a competition for fear of losing.

I have come here to learn something. I'd like to come out after I've learnt it. If it takes 6 years (instead of 4) for me to learn it, SO BE IT!

Love you.

In life... and death

2009-12-31T13:59:00.001+05:30

the gloom envelops /
smothering all in its wake /
~~the~~ loving kiss of death /

the joy of being alive!

2009-12-28T00:59:00.000+05:30

It is such absolute fun to be alive. So two movies today. Well, technically speaking, I saw the same movie twice, today. 3 idiots.
And I left the movie theater early on both occasions: The first time (5 minutes before the movie ended) to prove a point (that I never watch a movie till the end). the second time, just because I love singing, and there are few places as silent (and conducive to the act of breaking out into an impromptu rendition of "Bheegi Hont Tere") as the parking lot of a movie theater half-an-hour before the last screening of the day ends.The parking-lot attendant looked at me as if I was mad. He probably doesn't know how close he was to the truth. I'm not mad. I'm just high! High on a four-letter word called "life".
I pity the Chatur Ramalingam's of this world (and I know a few of them) who are so immersed in "making it BIG" that they have neither the awareness to recognize the value of here-and-now nor an understanding of the value of being able to follow one's dream.

I'm retired and proudly so! Not at 60 like my mum; not at 50 like my brother hopes to one day; not at 45 like Citibank promises its customers; But at 32.
I did not succeed monetarily in life. I dont have my own car, or my own house. I don't have a regular job. But I have a piece of knowledge that I'd love to share with you guys.
To succeed, you don't need money; you need desire. The desire to wake up each day thinking "Let's have some fun. Let's learn something new!" The desire to sing at the top of your voice. The desire to be in love with yourself irrespective of what the world thinks of you.
Once you have that desire, it is only a matter of time before that desire nags you to drop every mundane thing you are doing, and to embrace life.
Cheers!

The subtle art of counter-steering!

2009-12-24T08:53:00.000+05:30

"If you want to turn left, push on the right side of the handlebar. If you want to turn right, push on the left side of the handlebar." The kind of intuitive steering advice that you got when you first started riding a bicycle.

All bikers learn pretty quickly that at at any speed faster than a snail, the only way to take a turn on a bike is to lean into it (the turn, that is). But what most bikers do not know is the subtle art of counter-steering.

The concept of counter-steering is a simple one.
If you want the bike to go left, what you have to do is push the right-side of the handlebar slightly forward: i.e. "Push right to go right"; or "Steer left to go right". Now this may sound counter-intuitive at first, (but then that is why it is called counter-steering) but it works. I'll keep the Physics simple.

First, let us look at why leaning into turns works, then I'll demonstrate how counter-steering achieves the same effect.

Rolling and turning: Angular velocity!

Anyone who has ever tried to roll a paper-cup will know that the cup rolls and turns at the same time. This is because the rolling paper-cup has an angular velocity and the larger radius at the open-end of the paper-cup implies that the open-end has a higher liner velocity than the closed end. A point on the open-end of the paper-cup hence covers a greater distance than a point at the closed-end. The only sensible way to achieve this is for the cup to roll as shown below.

sidetrack 1. Incidentally, cars actually use a differential to giving the outer wheels a greater angular velocity, and hence make the outer wheels go through a larger distance than the inner wheels, thereby accomplishing a turn. How do trains turn? Check out RPF's Fun-to-Imagine series, for a really elegant explanation to this problem!

Leaning a wheel:

Car tyres

Motorcycle tyres

Motorcycle turns are possible because motorcycle tyres are not flat (like car tyres), but rounded. When a motorcycle is moving in a straight line it is vertical and its contact patch is in the center of the tyre. When a motorcycle leans, however, it rides on a contact patch that is closer to the axis of the wheel itself. Since the parts of the tyre farthest from the axis of the wheel are moving faster than the parts of the tyre closer to the axis of the wheel (constant angular velocity but greater distance between the tyre-patch and the axis of rotation), the outside edge of the tire contact patch is moving faster than the inside edge. And as we have seen before, when one part of an object has a higher velocity than another part of the same object, the object executes a turn. If the shorter distance (between the contact point and the axis of rotation) is on the left, the wheel will turn to the left. In other words, leaning to the left, makes the wheel turn left! Hence leaning the bike to the left, makes it turn left.
Of course, you can take the force point of view as well! Leaning to the right but without sliding means that there is a frictional force to the right which is... yes! The CENTRIPETAL force required to keep the bike in a circular path. The force view-point begs for a more involved study of rake and trail and the fork design of the front wheel, all of which contribute towards making the bike turn into the curve, so that the centre-of-gravity is again under the bike.

Making the elephant lean!
Now, leaning into a turn can be done by physically shifting body weight, and it works... on light bikes. (My apologies to owners of pulsars and unicorns, but the facts speak for themselves.) Shifting the centre of gravity of bike-and-driver on a 130 kg pulsar, or a 11o kg RX100 is one thing. Trying the same technique on a 184 kg bullet is a whole different ball-game altogether. I'm a 90 kg (and not proud of it) mass and I find it extremely hard to get my RE Bullet 350 to change directions using the leaning technique alone. Imagine the difficulty a 70kg newbie would have! So how do we make the elephant lean?

Counter-steering: finally!
Iamgine you push the right-sdie of the handlebar forward. Initially, the front tyre of the bike turns left. The dentre of gravity of the bike and rider is no longer between the line joining the points of contact between the front tyre and the back. The cg is slightly towards the right of this line, because this line has shifted slightly to the left. Now consider what happens when you tilt something so that its centre of gravity does not lie between the points of contact. Put your cell phone on the table so that it rests on its side. now tilt it to one side. You will see that it falls over because it is no longer in equilibrium.

The same thing happens to the bike. the bike starts to topple to the right, because the centre of gravity of the bike is to the left of this line joining its points of contact with the ground. So, pushing the right-side of the handlebar forward makes the bike lean to the right. Once the bike leans to the right, we know it turns to the right as explained above. Once it leans to the right, we know why it turns to the right.

Quad Erat Demonstrandum!

Using Counter-Steering

Most bikers use counter-steering unconsciously to take turns and are not even aware that they are doing it. This subconscious nature of the act of counter-steering makes this a hard skill to develop as an evasion tactic. Consider that you see a pothole a little to the right of you as you are driving. Seen you've seen the pothole late, you might try evasive action at the last moment. And the "intuitive" act of trying to steer away from the pothole by turning the handlebar away from it, actually causes your bike to go towards the pothole. But if you can learn to counter-steer consciously, you can avoid this kind a mishap. You will learn to make very sudden sharp changes in direction by actually turning your handlebar towards the pothole rather than away from it.

Statutory Warning!

If you intend to learn how to use counter-steering, might I suggest that you do it on an empty road?
Leaving the handlebar in the counter-steering position will end up in the bike crashing downwards upon you. And you don't want a 186 kg monster landing on your legs... So, use counter-steering to merely establish the change in direction. Once the bike leans over, and starts turning, correct the direction of the handlebar to prevent the bike from falling.

Young riders pick a destination and go... Old riders pick a direction and go

2009-12-24T04:41:00.000+05:30

I'm heading down south again!
Homeward bound!
The students can wait. The road cannot!
Thanks to blogosphere for getting moi back in touch with a vanished friend!

Om shanti, shanti, shantihi

2009-12-21T02:42:00.000+05:30

Om Sarve Bhavantu Sukhinaha . Sarve Santu Niraamayaa Sarve Bhadraani Pashyantu. Maa Kaschid Dukhamapunuyaat. Om Dhyau Shantihi, Ambareesham Shantihi, Prithvi Shantihi. Aaspah Shantihi, Aoushadhaya Shantihi, Vanaspataya Shantihi ,Vishwedevaa Shantihi, Kaama Shantihi , Krodha Shantihi, Brahma Shantihi, Sarvam Shantihi, Shantirevam Shantihi OM Shantihi, Shantihi, Shantihi !

Tread Carefully!

2009-12-14T22:27:00.000+05:30

I found this lovely piece by Julie Collings!
This young lady has an amazing voice; throaty and melancholy: probably one of the best female voices I have listened to in a long time!

I just love the lyrics.

I will come away at the seams
Take hold of everything I can reach

Nobody told me
We'd be dancing in the dark
Retracing footsteps
Trying to make my mark

As we all unfold
Slowly things spin out of control
Tread carefully
There's pieces of me I'm still looking for

Now they say there's not enough to go 'round
No space for my two feet
To touch the ground

You say it's easy,
'Give everyone there space
And orderly queue
Don't step out of place'

As we all unfold
Slowly things spin out of control
Tread carefully
There's pieces of me I'm still looking for
Still looking for

(Still looking for)
(Still looking for)
(Still looking for)
(Still looking for)
(Still looking for)

I will come away at the seams
At the seams
At the seams

Irrelevant Conversations

2009-11-19T15:35:00.000+05:30

A brave man once requested me / to answer questions that are key / is it to be or not to be? / and I replied 'oh why ask me?'

Was listening to nick drake's 'suicide is painless': a song that has become a part of my life, courtesy m (may her Scribble Pad rest in peace). I have heard a few covers of the song and I like nick drake's version the best. His flat and unemotional tone goes brilliantly with the lyrics. I had the title of the song as my goog-talk's status. As it turns out, I had one of the most pointless conversations I have ever suffered; and the conversation was triggered by the status message. Seems oddly ironic, that! But, let's talk about the conversation itself.

Rooney (name changed to protect the author against a libel lawsuit) started a chat with me: an exercise he attempted 26 months ago and promptly gave up as being too hurtful. I will take the credit for that too, of course. On that occasion, he wanted to talk about volleyball and school and nostalgia in general. I'm not exactly the emotional kind; not about school at any rate. I never did see the point of reminiscing about a time of my life when my primary motive was "getting more marks than Sowjanya". But Rooney wasn't to know to know that, of course. That conversation was a classic case in point for my "lost child" theory.

(Sidetrack1: begins)
The concept of the "child lost in a mela" is a common recurring theme in Bollywood movies. Of course, in the 70s, these lost kids would all meet up and recognise each other (each of these n lost kids would have had 1/nth of a medallion that help the job of recognition or, better still, they would all have a common family song that they would sing to establish their credentials: Yaadon ki Baraat, et al)

Even as a kid, I found the idea that you could drop a relationship or a conversation as a five-year old and re-start that relationship or conversation twenty years later as if nothing had changed in the 'tween, to be extremely unlikely if not totally absurd. Things change! (Not a particularly insightful or original observation, I must admit. But it is obvious enough and valid enough to need neither an explanation nor a justification.) m used to tell me that she found it hard to start conversations with people she had lost touch with, because she never knew how much the other person had changed. My point has always been that people don't change radically. Well, I did, but that's just moi! My explanation for the awkwardness in starting a conversation with someone you lost touch with, is the fact that the reason for your conversations when you were together was merely proximity and not bonding. Conversation with most people on most occasions is contextual. If the context does not exist, neither does the conversation.when you have lost touch with people, the context in which the live their lives can be different from the context in whcih you live yours. If the context is no longer shared, obviously the conversation is forced or empty (or both).

(Sidetrack1: ends)

On the earlier occasion, Rooney wanted to talk about "things in common", which we had quite a lot of as kids. A dozen years down the road of life, Rooney was still talking about our school principal and volleyball and Alistair MacLean. To be fair to the man, I'm not criticizing him for living in the past. Since Roon and I shared no "present", he did have ample reason to believe that he could start with nostalgia. There was nowhere else to start the conversation with. But sharing the same geography fifteen years ago is not the same as sharing a connection for life. Of course the conversation went nowhere. I told him so in as many words. Rooney hung up the phone and, in all likelihood, muttered some obscenities on the way out.

In today's conversation, Rooney was evidently distressed or, at any rate, disturbed and had happily (definitely not an appropriate usage of the adverb) concluded (because of my status message) that he had found someone else who was in the same depressing boat. (At this point I must apologize if my summary is incorrect (or more likely apocryphal): In the guilty conversation, Rooney was spectacularly unclear (or unsure) with his nouns, and put on the word "it", a burden that "it" could neither semantically nor logically be expected to bear.)

- note to oneself... less parentheses tends to imply greater linearity : ergo, TRY AGAIN! -

The Roon-man was depressed and evidently in the process of hating himself for it. Depression, I must add, doesn't go along with Rooney's world-view which requires the obvious and overwhelming presence of the clichéd perimeter of Argentum. His objection to depression is primarily wistful: Life should be beautiful. Too much roberto benigni has been watched, methinks. He wanted me to confirm that I saw the ray of sunshine that he could not. He wanted me to confirm that that there was more to life than this. But! But, he did not want to actually tell me that he wanted my help. I was not going to offer it him on a platter. For all I cared, he could bloody well ASK! Well, he didn't; nor did I. The details are irrelevant. Roon had done something that he believed was wrong, and he needed me to tell me that it was alright. I obviously was going to say no such thing. Not because of any objection (in principle) to lying, but merely because I had decided that I had no intention of satisfying his whims. Also, I might have been taking him to task for not declaring his nouns.

An excerpt from the conversation is given below: 3 things to be noted.
1. Very few complete sentences. Typos galore.
2. The banality of Roon's questions and the irreverent nature of my answers
3. That IS my goog talk theme - light sabers et al.

Darth Roon: you really are not serious are you?

Sriharsha, The Jedi Knight: not serious abt what?

Darth Roon: but what is the motivation.....?

Sriharsha, The Jedi Knight: for WHAT?

Darth Roon: there seems to be no point.

Sriharsha, The Jedi Knight: this conversation?

Darth Roon: no, not really :-)

Sriharsha, The Jedi Knight: I'd start agreeing in about two minutes :)

Darth Roon: i am just fine. cool, man.

Sriharsha, The Jedi Knight: didnt wnt to know :)

Darth Roon: i am very happy.

Sriharsha, The Jedi Knight: didnt need to know.

Darth Roon: harsha, you rascal you.you are a good guy man, but obivously you can give a guy a heart attack.

Sriharsha, The Jedi Knight: your problem seems to be that I dont take empathy or sympathy very well.

Darth Roon: that whole thing is going to be a stupid assumption though.

At this point in the conversation Roon decides to try again.

Darth Roon: all right harsha-san! harsha-san: how's life?

Sriharsha, The Jedi Knight: Your consistent refusal to spell out the nouns is discomforting.. almost like you have no idea what you want to apply those statements to...inane question deserves inane answer. life's good! :)

Darth Roon: how's the wife?

Sriharsha, The Jedi Knight: the person who played that that role exists, she just doesn't play that role any more.

Darth Roon: harsha, you remember the time we were conversing at the htoel in madras when i gave you the shirt from nba --- what was it, the scaramento kings, who was it, the guy...? you still ahve it?

Sriharsha, The Jedi Knight: tony kukoc bulls no 7. I dont have any personal possessions to be cherished. conscious choice.

Darth Roon: zen. or minimalism ?

Sriharsha, The Jedi Knight: neither..

Darth Roon: too small, eh?

Sriharsha, The Jedi Knight: just carelessness brought on by apathy

Darth Roon: after all, ravi shankar thinks pi is of no value

Sriharsha, The Jedi Knight: and that would be of least relevvance to me.

Darth Roon: sure, sure. there is no period in life. ha ha ha ha

-------------------------------------------------------------
I have played irrelevant conversation as a game. But this is the first truly irrelevant conversation I have had. From the beginning to the end, the conversation was pointless: not one redeeming note. And it was triggered by Roon's concern for my "obviously" depressed status. Frankly, If I had to pick between suicide and this kind of conversation, I would pick suicide any day.

'Cause suicide is painless / it brings on many changes / and I can take or leave it if I please
...and you can do the same thing if you please.

Strumming along...

2009-11-08T02:50:00.000+05:30

For years I've been a lazy bum. Waiting for someone to point out a good piece of music to me. (I did find some amazing stuff: Scribble Pad's m got me hooked to Amy Grant, DP got me in touch with Alan Jackson's Margaritaville) But I never actually went hunting for music. Well, yesterday, whilst waiting for a friend to come back online, I was hunting for something good to listen to, and I stumbled onto GarageBand. Fifteen minutes of pseudo-random clicking later, I found some gems. It's amazing the number of gems that will turn up and land in your hands if you actually take the effort to sift through piles of rubbish. These are lovely pieces. If Joni Mitchell or Norah Jones had sung these, we'd have a few best-sellers on our hands. But then that's why GarageBand is there right?
This is some of the stuff that I'm listening to... and strumming along with...

Erika Chambers: If only tears! (soulful, stirring, powerful vocals... not really my kind of music, but amazing melody)

Hard times: Dear Mama (wish I was home with you and Daddy! simple... lovely country tune)

Julie Collings: Tread Carefully (as we all unfold / slowly things spin out of control / tread carefully / there's pieces of me I'm still looking for)

Irrelevant Conversation

2009-11-05T16:05:00.002+05:30

This was a game we used to play in IIT. 'twas called "irrelevant conversation" and ze rules were simple. Two people made one statement at a time, with only one condition: No statement made by either person should have any relevance with any other statement made previously by either person. Sentence fragments were not allowed. The first person to spot a mistake by the opponent would have to slap the table with an open palm and say "I object". If the objection stood, the other person would have lost the game. If the objection was overruled by the moderator, the person raised the objection would lose.

Irrelevant conv. was immensely popular in IITM in the mid-nineties. There were elaborate strategies devised to fool the opponent including the following:
Strategy 1 was to say, "I object!" without actually slapping the table, and then wait for the opponent to ask what the objection was. When the unsuspecting took the bait, the first person would then object, properly this time, that the other person had responded to a question and was hence out.
Strategy 2: the opening statement would be "IIT". the opponent would object that this was not a sentence. the first player would then insist that what he had actually said was "I eye Tea", and that was a complete sentence by itself.

For some reason, non-IITians didn't really seem to like this game a lot. I wonder why! :)

I was talking to some of my students, yesterday, who were asking me to reduce the number of jokes I cracked per class. They insisted that the jokes were distracting them and that they could not concentrate on the lecture because they were thinking about the joke.
(I had explained entropy and spontaneous processes, by using the example of a person
farting in a room, instead of the more traditional one of opening a bottle of perfume. The joke raised a stink!)

My stand was, and always has been, that humour was essential to learning. Bernard Shaw's work is proof undeniable that the technique of wrapping a didactic lecture in a humourous package is an excellent way of delivering one's message to one's target audience. (I enjoy Stephen Leacock's work too, but it has far less value as a lecture series.)

The students had a fair point as well. They insisted that they were interested enough in the quality of the contents of the package and didn't really care about the wrapping it came in.

I accepted the possibility that they didn't need the humour to keep them interested in the lecture. But i refused to believe that the joke could be so gripping as to compromise their ability to concentrate on the lecture.

I told them that they could always put the joke aside.

It was at this point in the conversation that the idea of irrelevant conversation came up. I remember having done pretty well in the game, and my basic strategy had been to concentrate on the words that the other person was saying without actually taking in the meaning completely. If I actually tried to figure out what the other meant, it also usually meant that, at some level, I would respond to their words. (This, I had learned through experience!) the key to winning was being attentive enough to hear the words, but to also be distracted enough to prevent those words from being integrated into one's though process.

To be able to take in the humour (and not be distracted by it), would necessarily imply a level of distraction that I wouldn't appreciate in my students. They've made their point and there will be fewer jokes in class of course.

But I cannot imagine going through life the way these kids do. a 17-year old taking something so seriously that he/she does not want to be distracted by a little irrelevant conversation!

Is this normal? Am I too old to understand what they think like? Or is there something fundamentally and systemically wrong with a person who has such a rigid interpretation of his/her wants?

(Having written that last line, I realize that I could well have written it about myself. I do have a very precise idea of what I want. Maybe it is not the rigidity of their ideas that I abhor. Maybe the key is that the ideas that these people stick to are abhorrent to me!)

I have some plans. Maybe I'll post the results some day.

Break on through...

2009-11-05T13:18:00.003+05:30

we chased our pleasures here / dug our treasures there / but can you still recall / the time we cried
Break on through to other side / Break on through to the other side / Break on through...

It does come through that Morrison was poet and only then a musician.

The thing about being on the other side of 30 is that it puts one's life thus far into rather a harsh perspective, especially for a geek. Before he turned 30, Feynmann had already come up with his Principle of Least Action. Before HE turned 30 Niels Bohr had proposed his model of the atmoic structure. Einstein had already had his annus mirabilis, and would never do anything quite as remarkable for the next 50 years. Alan Turing had cracked the Enigma machine. Warren Buffet was a slow starter. He was 32 before he made his first million. I don't intend to drag the writers and poets in here, because they are even scarier. Keats was dead well before he turned 30. As was Jim Morrison.

And what have I done? Well, nothing really. My life's story reads like a boring script of a boring soap opera (without all the extra-marital affairs).
2003: Got into a new job. Got into a relationship. Had parathas for dinner. Smoked Gold Flake Kings. Drank lots of vodka. Started writing on a new blog. Cheered Real Madrid during the Champions League.
2005: Got into a new job. Got into a new relationship. Had noodles for dinner. Smoked Menthols. Drank lots of rum. Started writing a new blog. Cheered AC Milan during the Champions League.
2007: Got into a new job. Got into a new relationship. Had pasta for dinner. Smoked Dunhill. Drank lots of whisky. Started writing a new blog. Cheered Liverpool during the Champions League.
2009: Got into a new job. Got out of all relationships. Had lasagna for dinner. Smoked Davidoff. Drank lots of single-malted Scotch. Started writing a new blog. Cheered Manchester United during the Champions League.

The only doubts for 2011 are merely questions of what I put into my body while I support a yet-to-be-identified football club.

The point, of course, is that my life is NOT in a rut! My body is just settling into a pattern that has just enough variation to prevent stagnation. My mind on the other hand is racing; against time as it were. For long enough I've sat on my arse - an armchair philosopher - content to reflect and observe without affecting the world. My life expectancy is 10 years and counting. Since I do not believe in the comforting thought of an after-life, and because my life has followed a path that merits eternal damnation, if said after-life does indeed exist; it is indeed a short span of time that exists for me.

I'm writing, again. Not on my blog though. Look out for the book stores in summer 2010. Three books should hit the stands in India. A romance; a textbook on physics; and a treatise on living a rational life. The first should be the most inane and the most successful. The last should be the most entertaining and the least successful. The second would be my magnum opus.

If I can get someone to read these, I'll write the three books that actually kick-started the literary fire in my brain. With due apologies to Douglas Noel Adams, the books that make up this philosophical trilogy will be named ...
Where God went wrong
Some more of God's greatest mistakes
Who is this God person anyway?

This post by itself is very obviously a note to a friend. To her, I recommend a Raj Kapoor song that goes: "Chalna jeevan ki kahani, rukna maut ki nishaani..."
I, personally, am with Johnnie Walker on this one.

Back in business

2009-09-17T11:05:00.002+05:30

Update: Moved to baroda, awaiting arrival of bike. TEACHING!

auf Wiedersehen

2009-08-16T12:02:00.002+05:30

I've always wanted to end a conversation with these words... Call it the mean streak in me! Actually I think I don't have a mean streak. It is not only true that on average I'm mean, it is also true that all of me is mean (if you know what I mean) .

Without any further ado, I'm off.

There's a sad sort of clanging from the clock in the hall
And the bells in the steeple too
And up in the nursery an absurd little bird
Is popping out to say

"Fuck You"

It's something unpredictable... but in the end it's right.

2009-08-01T02:35:00.007+05:30

Disclaimer: The below piece is being written by a mildly drunk human. All indications of oneself's spirituality are probably merely of the ethylated kind.

July 23rd - I became an uncle officially. Would have preferred a niece, frankly, but a nephew should do just as well. Join me in my hope that the young one lives a life of freedom.

July 28 - I became single again officially.

Aug 4 - I'll own an Enfield Bullet!

trivia begins

I'm going to have the bike painted black; in honour of Captain Jack Sparrow!

What the Black Pearl really is... is freedom.

trivia ends

Which of these events has the greatest impact on me at the moment? Which of these will leave the most lasting impact?

To put it in my most oft repeated abbreviation... DKDC.

Don't know. Don't care.

I really don't like to think of who or what my freedom really is going to be from... who or what I'm running away from. But the answer is probably, "Myself."

I love solitude. I'd love to share that sense of peace with someone. If you can explain that oxymoron away, you'd have done me a huge favour.

Frankly, I thought once that this seeming paradox had a loophole: the possibility that I would find someone who would suffer the same paradox. and live the cliche'd happily-ever-after life.

I tried to explot this loophole once. The experience was pure purgatory. A brief touch of hell of the kind reserved for one who has merely not believed in the truth: for one who believed an idle dream. A place that characterized an eternal desire for paradise but no realistic chance of attaining or reaching it: A peaceful idyllic place whose very peace became too violent to bear. Hell-lite as it were.

I'd not like to try it again. This time it would be a wilful sin. The sin of lust. The sin of choosing material comforts over meta-physical onces. And the reward would most likely be hell-proper.

And thus I am...

Living...

Condemned for eternity to a life of solitude: the life of a disbeliever in all concepts human and humane: the life of a man who knows no pleasure beyond his own - no pain beyond his own - no feelings beyond his own - and no thoughts beyond his own.

Of love I dare not speak. I have not the credentials. But, if I did love, it was the two of them. And they silently turned away. Not their fault obviously. My mother will bear testimony to the fact that I have always hurt those who are closest to me. A fact I'm not proud of. A fact that I probably do not do enough to change.

There was a time when i knew every thought of hers: when words were dispensed with because they weren't necessary: when I could truly say "you say it best when you say nothing at all". Oh! What would I not give to hear her voice again!

One last roadtrip planned. From Chennai to nowhere-in-particular.

The requirements?

Silence... lots of it.

The objective?

To hold infinity in a grain of sand and eternity in an hour...

I promise that my last words to you will be "I hope you had the time of your life." If When i do post just that one line, please indulge me and look into the obituary columns of The Hindu.

Discussion in abeyance...

2009-07-14T20:58:00.003+05:30

I dont know if the cigerettes drive the lack of sleep or if things are the oher way around, but the net effect seems to be that I spent 100 of the last 106 hours awake. I apologise to those of you who might have wanted to talk with me (I mean both of you!) but couldn't because I wasnt on goog talk. I do know that there are discussions that have been left hanging for a fortnight. Please do call me for I cannot come online as often as I used to. (Have I told you that I pronounce the 't' in "often"? (Note: The use of -quotes for the char and double-quotes for the String. Also note the uppercase 'S' in "String". If that doesn't tell that I'm a Java coder; nothing will;)

Planning to get sloshed tonight. A (feeble) attempt to soft-reboot my system so that I can sleep more hours/day. If that doesn't work, I might just have to go and get my heart stopped and restarted. Anyone (or many) wanna join me for a booze-session? Also, does anyone own a de-fibrillator that I can borrow if Plan-A doesn't work?

GRT Grand beckons. Gotta get in before the last order. Bubye!

The family education saga: a new hope

2009-07-06T13:02:00.006+05:30

One oxymoron that I never can get the hang of is the sight of a teacher shouting "Silence!" at the top of her voice. Through 14 years of schooling in arguably Vizag's best school, I've lost track of the number of times I've heard teachers holler. I hated every one of those moments. Especially when the voice sounded like it had been utterrred by a banshee! Mrs. Meenakshi Pradeep instantly comes to mind, as does Mrs. Harsha Chiranjeevi (How I hated the fact that the woman shared her first name with me!).

Why do kids shout? My own childhood is far enough in the past for me not to hazard an opinion from memory, but having taught children long enough, I have finalized on two things that are as much instinctive as they are environmental: 1. There's safety in numbers. Kids will readily pipe in when others shriek but will be more circumspect about being the first audible voice. 2: We all open our mouths when want someone to listen.

The traditional system of raising one's hand and getting permission from the teacher is based on eliminating the former factor without eliminating the latter reason for speaking.

More on that later (perhaps another post). For now I just wanted to write about a school that completely took me by surprise. Here was a school with roughly 150 kids in the primary section (Pre-Kinder Garten to 3rd) and I couldn't hear single screaming voice - either teacher or student - as I went past the classrooms. Mrs Annapurna Emani had invited me to visit her school (Jassver EMS) while we were discussing Anitha's teaching efforts in Gurgaon on my last trip to Vizag. Annapurna Miss, as we all called her as kids, was my history teacher in school, and she had since worked in Muscat (Indian School) before coming back to India to take over as principal of Jassver. She was forever an enigma to me: her dignified demeanour just did not go hand-in-hand with her twinkling eyes : Tradition and adventure together? That was too much for my kiddie mind to handle.

An invitation from Annapurna Miss was just too good an opportunity to throw away, so my regular day-job took a hike for 24 hours, even though I wasn't completely sure that this school would be any different from the dozens that I had visited and taught in (including some of the "better" ones in Chennai - I'll tell you another day about how i think the DAVs suck!).

To say that I was shocked would be an understatement. Even before I entered the school building, I knew there was something different. There was none of that deafening noise of a classroom full of students trying to ~~recite~~ shout the multiplication table at the top of their voices. Since I had long come to recognize a school working day by this particular ritual being carried out religiously every morning by the students of the municipal school right next to my house, I could be forgiven for being disappointed that Annapurna Miss had asked me to meet her on a school holiday. As I walked into the building - escorted by her son (and my good friend), Uttam - I could hear children laughing and singing. When we entered the principal's office, we were greeted by the sight of a cute-bouncy-haired, brown-eyed toddler sitting on top of the principal's desk and rearranging the desk's layout as she saw fit (which mostly involved throwing things around). Mrs. Annapurna was watching the 2-year old, fascinated. The kid looked up at us (Uttam and me) and promptly went back to the task at hand.

The next half-hour was a masterclass in education: Why should children not be forced into learning something they don't want to learn? Why should teachers never shout at a child? Why doesn't repetition work as well as it is proclaimed to work? (Evidently, there's no way an IFSJ will ever learn by rote!) But I was still a little doubtful. After all, familiarity with the problem doesn't necessarily bring you closer to the solution!

While we were waiting for the opportunity to go around the classrooms, Mrs. Annapurna asked me if I had ever seen a Taala Pathram (Palm Leaf manuscript). When I remarked that I hadn't, she promptly took out a palm-leaf manuscript. This one had been handed down through generations before finally finding its way into the lady's hands. She estimated that it was probably a few hundred years old.

One of the teachers (what a coincidence: this teacher was an Anitha too) dropped in to let her know that we could go around the classes.

We visited the primary section, and the first thing I noticed was that there were a few kids who were moving from one class (the KG section) to another (the Pre-KG section) and a few more who were just peeping into classrooms without actually venturing inside. When I asked Annapurna Miss what section they belonged to and why they were walking around, she explained that until the 3rd standard there were no really no restrictions on what the children could do. Those who did not want to set in the class needn't. Letting the child find it's comfort zone was more important than forcing discipline. She told us about a kid who in his first year at the school did not actually enter any of the classrooms though he peeped into quite a few and participated in many more. This kid, she told us, was now one of the leaders of his 3rd standard class (both academically and in other activities). By the time I had watched the children learn how to count (through a lovely interactive song-and-dance with multi-coloured pebbles), I realized that Mrs. Annapurna's school actally walked the talk.

I had to cut the visit short to catch my flight, but not before I unearthed part of the secret of Jassver's success. That piece of information is something that I'd like to share with one person first, before I make it public. The rest of you will just have to wait in line. :)

Incidentally, Annapurna Miss casually said that she'd like to have me work for her school. I'll have to ask her if she meant that seriously! If she does mean it (whatever be the offer), I could well be joining Jassver in two months time!

p.s. You can read more about the Jassver School here and here.

The family education saga: another chapter ends

2009-07-04T19:49:00.006+05:30

In the early 1970s, Manda Subbalakshmi, had to choose between being a sportswoman (Handball), a Commercial Tax Inspector, and a primary school teacher. She chose to join the Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan as a Primary Teacher, though she continued to play sports competitively. One day, she landed awkwardly while jumping during a handball match and tore the ligaments completely out of her left knee. Her doctors advised her to rest her leg completely, forget sports entirely, and take up a desk job. That was in 1979.

On June 30, 2009, Manda Subbalakshmi retired after thirty eight years of service in the Kendriya Vidyalaya. Every single evening, she came back home with her kness swollen. Every single morning, she was the first one in the family to get ready to go back to school! On seven different occassions she was told that she would not be able to take another step in her life. On all seven occassions she was back on her feet in less than a week.

She taught whatever she was asked to teach: Hindi, Social Studies, English and occasionally everything else. She taught just about everything she knew, and she kept learning more. She is one those people who learns how to do something simply because it is there to be learnt: Knowledge for its own sake.

I don't know how much I learnt from her. But I do know I'll treasure two ideas she inculcated in me.

The only opinion that ultimately matters is your own. Never let anyone tell YOU what YOU are worth. Never let anyone tell you what you CAN or CANNOT do.
Never give anyone the responsibility of making decisions for you. Never blame anyone for the way your life turns out.

Wishing my Mum has a lot of fun as she embarks on her next assignment: Imparting her wisdom to her first grandchild!
Thanks, Amma!

From Fundamentals to Rules: How religion evolves...

2009-06-27T08:10:00.005+05:30

It is interesting to note how the shanti mantra evolved. This be from the Brihadaaranyaka Upanishad, one of the oldest of the lot.

ॐ पूर्णमदः पूर्णमिदम् पूर्णात् पूर्णमुदच्यते |
पूर्णस्य पूर्णमादाय पूर्णमेवावशिष्यते ||
ॐ शान्तिः शान्तिः शान्तिः ||

And for those of you who cannot read devanagari...

om poornamadah poornamidam poornat poornamudkyate
poornasya poornamadaya poornamevaa vasisyate
om shanti shanti shantihi

(Remember 'Asatoma satgamaya...' ? Yup! That is from the Brihadaaranyaka Upanishad as well.)

In this, one of the earliest Upanishads, the Shanti Mantra talks about the nature of the Absolute. Brihadaaranyaka Upanishad is associated with the Yajur Veda (specifically the Shukla Samhita). Yajur Veda of course deals with the mantras associated with performance of rituals: the interpretation as well as the procedure.

As we jump to the Atharvana Vedaa, the shanti mantra suddenly becomes a shopping list! - Do this, Do that; don't forget this; God Help me! - The Realization of the Absolute is forgotten; the rules remain.
For instance, in the Mundaka Upanishad, The Shanti Mantra takes this form

ॐ भद्रं कर्णेभिः श्रुणुयाम देवाः ।
भद्रं पश्येमाक्षभिर्यजत्राः
स्थिरैरन्ङ्गैस्तुष्टुवागं सस्तनूभिः ।
व्यशेम देवहितम् यदायुः ।
स्वस्ति न इन्द्रो वृद्धश्रवाः ।
स्वस्ति नः पूषा विश्ववेदाः ।
स्वस्ति नस्तार्क्ष्यो अरिष्टनेमिः ।
स्वस्ति नो ब्रिहस्पतिर्दधातु
ॐ शान्तिः शान्तिः शान्तिः ॥

om bhadram karnebhihi shrunuyaama devaaha
bhadram pashyemaakshabhiryajatraaha
sthirairanngaistushtuvaagam sastanoobhihi
vyashema devahitam yadaayuha
svasti na indro vriddhashravaaha
svasti naha pooshaa vishvavedaaha
svasti nastaarksyo arishtanemihi
svasti no brihaspatirdadhaatu
om shanti shanti shantihi

For the record, The Yajur Veda (along with Rig and Sama) predate the Atharvana Veda.

Yet another example of how Religion starts of with good intentions but invariably ends up as a set of rules. The funda still makes sense but, over time, the rules tend to become irrelevant.

p.s. Couldnt find my hardbound copy of the Upanishads. Wikipedia to the rescue (for now). Gotta scurry to Landmark and pick up another set!

Constellations (Or why I'm called a joyless soul)

2009-06-24T01:00:00.003+05:30

A friend asked me if I would help her identify a few constellations. (sidetrack begins... She has the luxury of living on the top floor of a building and hence having instant and unrestricted access to the terrace. Now, anyone who knows me, realizes how much I love sleeping under an open sky. sidetrack ends.) Now, I'm capable of recognizing Orion's belt (thanks to Scribble Pad's m.) and a few of the major constellations visible in the northern sky. so it was not surprising that i offered to help her.

People who know me through my blog (and most others) will know that any offer of asistance from me comes with strings attached. In this case, I proffered said service (the one of identifying certain celestial conglomerates) with the caveat that the service not be mis-used. She warily asked me what would count as misuse. I promptly proceeded to inform her that I would help her identify the constellations, only if she promised to not use that information for non-scientific or pseudo-scientific purposes like astrology. I was persudaed to throw in poetry as a possible use that did not violate this tenet. The lady finally did laugh it off with a shrug and ended the conversation with "You are such a killjoy, Harsh!" I've never managed to get this woman to call me by my given name; a fact that irks me no end (but THAT is another post altogether).

Which finally leads us to the topic of the post! Why am I such ajoyless soul? Why do I insist on being a right-royal pain in the posterior?

My primary hatred is towards pseudo-science and its proponents. I do not have a problem with phenomena that cannot be sufficiently explained by science as we know it till date. To give just one example of such phenomena, I can control the weather around me to a certain extent, but I cannot explain, in scientific terms, the process by which I do this. I'm perfectly willing to let this go as just one of those things that our knowledge of science (in this case: the modus operandi and the capabilities of a human brain) is not sufficient to propose a hypothesis to explain the phenomenon.
It is not unscientific to acknowledge that there are things that cannot be explained by science. That is a limitation that Science (and I) can live with. However any concept that is claimed to be scientific, or that is made to appear to be scientific (by the mis-use or abuse of scientific terms), but which does not adhere to an appropriate scientific methodology, lacks supporting evidence, or which does not have scientific rigour, is non-scientific.

Belief in pseudo-science (astrology, zodiac, tarot, etc.) is naïveté (at best) and denial (at worst). Proponents of pseudo-science are either naïve people (with good intentions) or charlatans. Now, it doesn't really matter which is worse (though I personally don't mind the charlatans as much as I mind the misguided morons).
What matters is that AFAIC (as far as I'm concerned), you have no business talking pseudo-science, especially to a scientist. If you want me to to stop arguing, just say the F-word (that would be FAITH... not the foul four-letter variant).
IF you bring in the concept of belief, I'll agree that you have every right to have your own axioms. But if you try to make somethign sound scientific by using words like "energy" and "force" indiscriminately, KNOW that I have Occam's Razor and I will use it ruthlessly to slice and dice you and your arguments.
Science... is not a matter of opinion!
Amen! (tongue firmly in cheek!)

Guilt and Shame... Part I

2009-06-23T15:45:00.004+05:30

Guilt and Shame are not just emotions that people feel. Like all other emotions, Guilt and Shame have evolutionary roots. Let us axiomatically assume the three Laws of Humanics. Shame is the system's way of negating anti-societal behavior while emphasizing the need to prove oneself acceptable/desirable to others. Shame is the system's way of enforcing the 2nd Law of Humanics - Thou shalt obey the system. Guilt evolved as an implementation of the 1st Law of Humanics - Thou shalt not harm a human or through inaction allow a human to come to harm.

Note that neither Guilt nor Shame have any impact on the 3rd Law - Self Preservation. Guilt is not rooted in the need for self-defense. Rather, for guilt there must first be some concern with the welfare of others.

The classic example of caring and responding to the distress of another human is probably in the parent-child care system. As a child becomes aware of distress in others (including awareness of being a source for others distress), develops empathy and sympathy, and the wish to help others, the capacity for guilt becomes developed. Unlike shame, guilt is not associated with anger at others, guilt is not associated with feeling inferior to others.

Although animals may have the precursors for shame (sensitivity to dominant others and submissive behavior) and guilt (care-giving), I'm not entirely convinced that animals feel shame or guilt as such. They lack self-conscious awareness (of "being a self") and the capacity to reflect on behavior and judge them good or bad.

Humans have evolved certain cognitive competencies that enable Guilt and Shame. First, humans became able to form symbolic representations of objects in the world and of the self and others. Symbolic self-awareness comes with language and the ability to symbolize "the self," the ability to "imagine" the self as an object and to judge and give value to the self; to have self-esteem, to think about the meaning of one's appearance to others and the implications.

Evolution also provided humans with the ability to understand what might be going on in the minds of other people. One can think about what motivates someone else's behavior, what they might value or devalue, what they know and what they do not know, and one can think how to manipulate them to like us or be wary of us.

Linked to these abilities is metacognition - to be able to reflect and judge one's own thinking and feelings.

Guilt and Shame make sense only to an evolutionary entity that has these three abilities. Without meta-cognition, there is no way a man could feel disturbed by the knowledge that he-she is mentally undressing a woman. Without the ability to figure out how someone might think, there is no way you could explain to a human why calling someone a bastard might hurt the person who is being thus adressed. Without the ability to be self-aware, there is no way you could feel self-conscious: Without self-consciousness, there is no meaning to Guilt or Shame.

So, what about people who don't feel Guilt or Shame? Are these people sub-human or inhuman in any way?
The next post has the Analysis...

p.s. The theories explained in this post are not opinions. This post is almost entirely based on well-established facts and conclusions based on anthropological research.
p.p.s. No! the reasearch wasn't done by me!

Love, Life, and a large dose of Logan: The week that was

2009-06-21T01:07:00.010+05:30

Finally, this blog has its first non-didactic entry.
Stuck at home for the early part of this week, courtesy influenza, I spent it in the usual manner; Little contact with humanity, lots of DVD, a little benadryl and extensive theorizing.
But first let me start with O Henry. I was reading The Last Leaf (yet again) and was surprised (yet again) how much the story enthralls me. It is probably just my obsession with the idea of death, But, for me, the climax of the story is Johnsy's flash of realization.

"I've been a bad girl, Sudie. Something has made that last leaf stay there to show me how wicked I was. It is a sin to want to die.

The rest of the lovely tale is typical O Henry irony.

The theme of ensuring that one leaves one's mark - one's masterpiece - before taking leave is one that I, the ultimate theatric, have often toyed with. (Incidentally, I pronounce the word "off-ten".) I've kept my debts low (both financial and emotional); ever prepared to pop-out of this world with a "No Dues" Certificate.

But what of my thoughts? What about those unexpressed emotions, sentiments, anger, love and despair that must eventually die along with me? Do I want to be remembered? Yes I do? Do I want to be missed? Most definitely NOT! In a world full of deceit and hidden agenda, I've always attempted to be blunt - brutal, at times - about having my intent very much visible. Even if my penchant for dramatic effect has often kept the manner of fulfillment of said intent in suspense!

Well, I've made my final peace with the last remaining secret. She knows; Finally! How I've felt in the ten years that I've known her and not said a word. I wish I could have said it like this... :)

Oh, and she does look like Kiera Knightley. :)

And after all the years of excuses and lies (including the big fight with DAAD about bunking a lab course to go make it to IIT-KGP) the truth is out. Those words are so beautiful... "Without hope or agenda"...

Life goes on... The same brainless work. The same silly games. The same infinite stupidity. And the same solitude.

And I caught X-Men Origins - Wolverine on DVD last night. Amazing flick! (But don't take my word for it! After all I adore the character and will watch the Logan saga, even if the role is assayed by Akshay Kumar!) And finally we have a director and writer who stick to the story line of the original comic book: Unlike the silly spider-man movies which turned the arse-kicking punch-line quoting spidey into a love-lorn loser! I watched the entire X-Men series and then, out of pure masochism, downloaded and watched the spidey movie series as well, just so that I could feel the difference.

And so ends the inside view of my mind and its twisted and dizzying paths. I promise to get back to being "Il Professori" very soon. Let me just get over the virus.

the end is nigh!

2009-06-17T15:29:00.004+05:30

As I sit in solitude enforced by H1N1, all I can think of is this episode of House M.D where Gregory House is ranting about medication and how it is used.

House: This is our fault. Doctors overprescribing antibiotics. Patients getting them over-the-counter. (sarcastically) Got a cold? Take some penicillin. Sniffles? No problem; have some azithromycin. Is that not working anymore? Well, try levaquin. [There are] Antibacterial soaps in every bathroom. They'll be adding vancomycin to the water supply soon. We bred these superbugs. They're our babies, and they're all grown up, and they've got body piercings and a lot of anger!

Every year, the attacks come; wave after incessant wave of mutant viruses. Probably, this is just the eco-system known as Earth defending itself from the largest and most deadly virus that has ever threatened to destroy it. The joke of course is that the virus is Humanity. Can we fight back the next wave? And the one after that? Is this doomed to be an eternal struggle or is this the precipice?

Labelling

2009-06-17T01:05:00.003+05:30

What is it about men that prevents them from having the balls to play a gay guy in a movie?

I was watching bits and pieces of this movie called Girlfriend (Isha Koppikar and Armita Arora) on TV as India snatched defeat from the jaws of victory (yet again).

What struck me abt this movie was the fact that this was the second or third Indian movie I had seen where the lead character was homosexual. The common theme I noticed was that Nandita Das (with oodles of panache), Shaban Azmi (with grim determination) and Isha Koppikar (with a generous dose of bloody-mindedness) played convincing parts; without any gestures, mannerisms or any other suggestions or attempts at typecasting. The homo-sexual nature of character came through in the words and the actions - as it was meant to be. Mind you - I'm not comparing the relative worth of the movies themselves - just the lead characters and the people who played them. The homo-sexual lead character was a real 3-D person. Not a sex-driven maniac. Not a prop. And definitely not a caricature.

My big question is this... When (ignoring Mango Souffle) did you last see an Indian male actor/star do a serious role as a homo-sexual character?
It isn't that our writers don't know how to create convincing homo-sexual characters. Maybe it is just that our leading men have not the guts to play a serious homo-sexual character. Maybe we - men - are more afraid of the label "gay" than women are of the label "lesbian".
Why? Is "fear" really the word I'm looking for? Or should go for it's Martian twin Deimos?

(This needs more thought; but I'm too tired to stand up, let alone drive. Can someone pick up the cigarettes for me?)

Games People Play!

2009-06-16T05:27:00.000+05:30

The trouble with playing a trick on a highly intelligent man like Mr. Teller is that the time it takes him to figure out from the moment that he sees there is something wrong till he understands exactly what happened is too damn small to give you any pleasure!

- Dick Feynmann

Timeout!

2009-06-14T16:01:00.002+05:30

~~I'm down with the flu. Possibly the swine variety. getting it checked today. Take a break!~~

Checked.. its not H1N1. Hallelujah!

Love is sacrifice? I think not!

2009-05-15T07:39:00.002+05:30

True love : defined by a pathlogical need to distance oneself from one's own ego that one may let another's feelings define their life. Or so generations of star-crossed lovers' stories would have us believe. The gullible among us fall for the sales pitch, of course. And so... we are now in a position to enumerate the two forms this gullibility predominantly takes.
1. Those that let their muses move them into the center of their (the muse's lives) lives and feel indebted to said muse for said act.
2. Those that move their muses into the center of their lives and start to believe that they have loved (and probably lost) and are much the better for it.

The former set of people exhibit a condition commonly known as stupidity (and associated with species of lesser native intellignce... and gults! - come to think of it. The latter set of people exhibit all the symtoms of pure unadulterated megalomania. Beg to differ, do you? Well! Let's see...
The typical lover tends to believe that he / she is the centre of her partner's existence. Accepted? NO! Ok let's take a questionnaire.
Q 1: The fastball! What do you (as a lover) believe?
A 1: I believe I can make the world a happy place for my girl / guy / sigh!-don't-bother.-It's-gonna-take-long-to-explain-my-partner's-gender
Strike 1: Strong belief that one can do the impossible!

Q 2: The curve ball! Your lover is happy / sad / angry / feeling victimized. Who caused this?
A 2: Must have been Me!
Strike 2: Claim (unsupported by any known evidence) that one defines the other person's very existence.

Q 3: The Slider! For your lover's life to change what one significant event would be sufficient?
A 3: If my life changes, my lover's life will to! I quit smoking, and she is so much happier now. I started spending my evenings at home and she feels so ALIVE!
Strike 3! My life defines hers! Biologial and evolutionary evidence not withstanding.

The only true self-sacrificing love is instinctive; mother-to-child or elephant-herd-to-calf. Any "love" based on choice (and not instinct) is not self-sacrificing; it is truly and distinctively megalomaniacal.

Go get your head checked... By a jumbo jet... (my apologies to Blur)

The God of Punchlines is bested.!

2009-05-12T01:48:00.003+05:30

I always used to blieve that if there was one thing I was good at, it was the ability to pull out a punchline. Well, Whaddya know! I've been bested. And here is the one that bested me...
"I'd much rather be hated for who i am than loved for who i am not."

Touche to the MAX!

Indulge me!

2009-05-09T18:45:00.002+05:30

An armchair philanthropist (my boss, incidentally!) was talking about how he felt this intense guilt eating out when he saw hungry kids. As if he was cheating them when he partied or had dinner at a posh place. I think he expected me to click my tongue and empathize or possibly even tell him what a good person he was. You bet he was surprised to hear that I had no sympathy either for the hungry kid or for the guilt-ridden man. (Oh I wish the chap had been of telugu-origin. I would have referred to him as the guilty gulti. But life gives me not these silly pleasures! c'est la vie!)
Bach to ze ztoree ... Fact is that I indulge myself: more than most people I know. 'Indulgence for its sake' is one of my axioms. Probably not the most glorifying of axioms: probably not the most soul-stirring. Definitely one of the more satisying. 'Greedy sonofa-bleep!', do I hear you say? Well, you are right. Have your laugh.
Indulge me, for a minute while I take a hypothetical. Three people come to me. They want money. They all tell me that I should give them the money today or there will be untold grief. One of them is a local politico who wants me to pitch in for the local Ganesh Chaturthi celebrations. The second is a little kid who expects to be given money because he is hungry. The third is the local drunk; a ruffian, and a wife-beater. He is begging at the bus stop. His next stop, I know, is going to be the local wine shop. One quart of the cheapest whisky! So who do I give the money?
Nobody! I have a drink myself on behalf of the drunk! I dont do equality. I dont do justice. People only deserve what they are smart enough to get. The hungry kid plays on your guilt. The drunk plays on your sympathy. The politco plays the dual card of religion and fear. I understand the cards they all are playing. And I don't fall for 'em.
Its interesting that you will ask me next why I dont care for the kid. In return, I'd love to ask why you dont care about the drunk, but that is another post. (Oh, I'll just be lazy and ask you to look up the views of Alfred P Doolittle on "morality and being deserving". His views are mine, in thihs case.) I hope that we all agree on why the case of the local politico is being dismissed outright.
Yes. I understand that there is a very distinct possibility that the kid isn't acting; that the kid is really hungry. I know what hunger is. And I understand the pain involved in starving because you can't afford to eat. I understand why people would be interested in feeding the kid. It's hard-wired by evolution. If mother's didnt find breast-feeding to be arousing, that would be the end of the gen-nxt. We are, as humans, hard-wired to take care of the child. But I've learnt how to overcome that instinct. As a matter of principle, I will zealously make everyone EARN their winnings. No freebies here! I can be exceedingly open about how much I'll give, but I wont give unless you can give me something in return. You have to realize that there is a value system, and that everything has its value (if not a price). MY generosity has its price.
How disgusting of me!? Well, not really. What is the price you are looking for? You want to be a "Good" person. You want to go to heaven. You want to feel good about yourself. That you have done a "wondrous" act of selflessness... and hence you are a much better person than those around you. You want to feel all this in return for a loaf of bread. What do I want? I want the kid to tell me what he will do for me in return for the loaf of bread. I ask you! Which is the higher price?
The only thing in your favour is that you arent asking the poor kid for anything in return. But I cant help that. The kid is the only person I can ask from. No one else owes me anything. :)
As it happens, this kid looked at me startled and said, he couuldn't do anything. I showed the kid where I lived. And I told him he could get all the money he wanted from money if he could find something that I would be interested in, in return. He didn't come for two days. Yesterday, he came over to tell me that if I could let him clean my bike, he would let me make breakfast for him! Those were his words! He turned the damned thing around. IT wasnt about "need" anymore. IT was about opportunity. If I gave him the opportunity to clean my bike, he would give me the opportunity to feed him breakfast! Smart kid. HE aint going hungry for too long! He;s learnt how to survive.
Oh btw, the reason I dont have any patience for the guil-ridden among you is this: Life presents you with problems everyday. Now, when the problem appears, you have four choices:
1. you can solve the problem.
2. you can deny the existence of the problem.
3. you can acknowledge that you cannot solve the problem and you learn to live with it.
4. you can whine about how life has given you or someone else a shitty deal.
The first two are my favourite choices. I have patience for anyone who takes options 1 through 3. I shan't give the time of the day to one who takes option 4. Because this person is not part of the solution, and doesn't even merge into the landscape. HE is part of the problem.
(Oh! Just remembered an old chemistry joke. If you aren't a part of the solution then you are a part of the precipitate! One of Dad's best. Though I dont know if he made it up.)
Oh! A friend wrote a piece that touches upon a similar theme. You might want to read the piece. Her take is very different take from mine, and I promise that it will be far gentler on your mind and eyes than this one.
Another double large Smirnoff please. Dont bother with the ice. I have mine neat.

Missing a part of me

2009-05-05T23:12:00.002+05:30

I know this path -
I've been down it before.
It ends in lonelineness -
I know.

You walked there once -
with me.
As I was learning to walk -
free.

You held my hand and smiled -
gently.
By the rose hedge, you turned around -
and kissed me.

The hedge is still there -
the roses still bloom.
The garden is still beautiful -
just not so much without you.

I miss your loving eyes.
I miss your silly smile.
I miss your hug.
I miss your touch

I know how much it hurts.
I know the pain will never dull -
for I'm missing a part of me.

Ammamma says goodbye

2009-05-01T15:19:00.003+05:30

Ammamma passed away on the 28th. I made it home in time to ask her one last time if she wanted to play chess with me (on the condition that I be allowed to cheat, of course!). I don't know if she heard me, or understood. I hope she did. I hope she smiled and said "I'll beat you yet!" Because that is the kind of woman she was.

Ammamma lived to a ripe old age - though she would (like my mother) insist that she was always 16 years and a few months old. She lived her life by her own terms. Failing eyesight and a rasping cough were the only signs that age had caught up with her. At an age where Alzheimer's and Parkinson's are par for the course, Ammamma beat the odds. Her memory was intact - as was her ability to control the world around her. Right till her last moments she never groaned or moaned or complained. She took all that life and death had to give her and faced it with a determination not to let it overpower her. WOW! What a way to go!
Will I have the same courage when it's my time. Probably not.
Tata! Ammamma! Love you.

going home

2009-04-25T20:01:00.003+05:30

My mum called me today. Ammamma is dying.
She's 90 years old. Loves life. Loves to dress up extravagantly in silks she can hardly carry the weight of. Knows how to pout until she gets her way. She taught my brother and me how to play chess. Turned a blind eye every time we cheated to win. She hasn't sun in over 50 years, but she will still lift her eyebrow if she hears one wrong note! We grew up listening to her strident voice as she yelled out "Bala! Apaswaram!" every time my mother goofed up during a song. She still hopes that she can hold on long enough to hold a great-grandson in her arms. She has the humility to acknolwedge that she will not learn everything in her life. That there will be things she will never understand. And yet, she knows how to operate the microwave and the cell phone.
She has probably forgotten more about pain and suffering than the rest of my family put together have ever learnt. And still she smiles.
I just hope I can reach home and say goodbye to Ammamma.
Is it just coincidence that Vizag is 500 miles away from Chennai?

Income Tax and Opportunity cost...

2009-04-05T12:55:00.006+05:30

If you ask anyone in my office about my tax-saving habits, they'll burst out laughing. (If accounts are to be believed, I manage my money worse than George W Bush managed his presidency.) Every single person in my office offers me friendly advice on how to make more or save more or invest more. They think I'm stupid or naive or just misinformed. They are frustrated that I won't learn.

I don't plan my savings. I dont do tax calculations. I don't invest. I don't even send my bills to the office FINANCE department for reimbursement. Supposedly, I lose 1 lakh every year simply because I pay tax for money that should have been in the form of investments or reimursements and hence non-taxable.

I get their point (obviously)! But do they get mine?

My point is this: 40K in one shot is a bigger amount than 50K spread over twelve months because of the nature of our expenditure. And I'm the only guy I know who understand this.

I don't waste time every month trying to find bills so that I get my reimbursement money. I dont keep track of bills. I don't forge reimbursement claims. I don't fudge my tax amounts. I dont account for my investments, because i make no investments that can be accounted. I tell my finance team that I'm not looking to make any investments, so will you please deduct the appropriate tax amount from my salary every month?

Every month from June to December, I am the butt of office jokes on money management. And then the calendar turns over; the financial year-end is a quarter away; and the jokes have dried out.

I'm the only person in my company who draws the full regular salary for the months of Jan and Feb. Everyone else pays massive amounts of income tax (accrued over twelve months) for the investments that they had planned to make but couldn't. To add insult to injury I get extra pay in the month of March after my reimbursement-money has been taxed and the left-over given to me. I'm the only guy in my office who actually has a cash surplus on April 1st.

How much time did i spend thinking about tax-and-reimbursement this last year? Twenty minutes or so I guess, mostly while writing this post. How much time did you spend this last year on tax planning and reimbursements? I spent a lot of energy in ignoring all your advice. That effort was well-spent for me. How much energy did you put into your tax planning? Was it worth it?

It's true that, in reality, I made less money than I should have over the year. But THAT is a cost I'm willing to pay for the oppportunity of spending a mini-fortune every April. It's not how much you earn that counts. It's what use you put your money to.

I'm writing this piece from a beach resort in Mahabalipuram; with a glass of fine Australian wine in hand (I, and not the beach, being the possessor of said wine). Where are you now?
< sarcastic smile; as I plug my earphones back in to indicate the end of the lecture >

Zoom out to the music of GNR's Paradise City: man raises his glass to his lips and his eyes to the horizon.

Cut to credits...

The heartless brute

2008-12-20T18:40:00.002+05:30

I've found that, to survive, most people need just one person's companionship. Life is especially easy when the person in question happens to be oneself. I love my life. I love my own existence more than anyting else on earth. But that really isnt saying much because I have a cavelier attitude to life; especially my own. Can I really care about anyone else or anything else? I treat the average person on the road with much more friendliness than you ever have. Frankly I care a lot about all people. But none too much.

There are three maxims that form the theme of existence.
1. I have principles I live by. I don't have principles I'll die for.
2. What people see in me is what they portray of themselves to me, magnified. You love me: your return will be unwavering, unfaltering, undivided passion and love for you and you alone. I will scheme and plot your destruction if you as much as TRY (or even THINK of trying) to screw with me.
3. I travel light on physical possessions. I travel heavy on memories.

These are as good or as bad a set of maxims as any other. And they are definitely better than living with no principles.

I am 'The Heartless Brute', am I?
Look inside yourself, sweetie. The heartlessness is all yours, returned with thanks!

2008-12-04T05:27:00.003+05:30

An old piece I wrote as a comment on a friend's blog.

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

... my contention basically is that the concept of blissful ignorance should be looked into. True blissful ignorance is a litchil hard to find. Mostly its a fearful, escapist sort of ignorance: A refusal (the bull-headed kind) to ask a question if one has even the slightest inkling that one will not like the answer to that particular question. It is an in-your-face sort of defiance. ... it is the act of ascribing motives to this ignorance that helps us understand the ignorance...

The lack of intellectual conversation is an indicator of a deficiency: a deficiency of values, at that; almost, a lack of values. An unwillingness to pursue a truth...

The thinker cannot be an existensialist, though he/she/it can find some much needed rest in the concept. The thinker cannot think for too long if his value system replaces the pursuit of a truth with a pursuit of happiness. Existentialism is the Carribean for the under-used over-endowed 21st century man: Sunny beaches; bird-watching; and delicious drinks served with little blue umbrellas. (yes. Snatch.)
Existentialism is a vacation spot. It is a refusal to look for meaning. It is a I'm-basking-in-the-sun-.-Let-the-world-take-care-of-itself attitude that is perfectly acceptable as a state of mind, but is hardly worth having as a way of life. It is a burden if you try to carry it with you for more than 3 years :) Because it presupposes something which it shouldn't... That there is no truth. I'm not saying there IS a truth. I'm saying its flawed to assume that there is or isnt a truth. Neither approach is self-contradictory... But then, neither approach is... ummm... scientific.

Talking about brick walls; I had an interesting conversation today. The person I talked to, expressed a penchant for punching at brick walls. Note... I didnt say "love"... or "desire" or "morbid fascination"... I said "penchant". This wasnt about martyrdom... This was about purpose. The idea being to knock on everything. and check to see if it sounded solid or hollow. Every hollow is the sound of a wall that is hiding something.

And this is where that difference comes in; between people who are acting "blissfully ignorant" and those who are "comfortably numb"... The numb ones are hiding their own feelings... from the world... sometimes, even from themselves. The actors have walls to hide the world from their vision...
The truly ignorant ones are those who do not walls or barriers. the truly ignorant ones are the ones without the sensibility to make value judgements: the ones who eat in the mess, because they do not see food as having a value that can be qualitatively or quantitatively expressed.

Very few of us can afford that luxury. We know too much. I for one would be very ready to pass judgement on these people... All of them really; and not just the truly ignorant. almost all of them, are a waste of resources, really. They contribute nothing to broadening the boundaries of knowledge. Some of them, (Paulo Coelho, et al) even tend to tighten that circle of knowledge.

Here, I am presupposing the intrinsic existence of a value system; a UNIVERSAL value system that places knowledge above ignorance.

The flaw with "pursuit of happiness" is that it glorifes a chase. It is not a purpose... It is a path... I would have accepted "being happy" as a purpose. I would have accepted "maximization of instantaneous happiness" as a purpose. "Pursuit of happiness" is not a purpose. It is an excuse... and a very sorry one... because it has an inbuilt escape route. I pursue happiness, but dont find it... But thats okay because the purpose of life is "to PURSUE happiness"; not "to BE happy"...
That is unnacceptable because it is not a PURPOSE. It is not a goal.

The existentialist, for me, is the biggest sinner. :) Being comfortably numb is the biggest sin of them all. Even cynicism is a lesser evil, because it, at least, acknowledges a deficiency and is dissappointed with it.

Oh, and incidentally, it does not really matter to me if you have never read Aristotle or Kant. But it does really matter to me if you do not ever reach a point that Kant, Descartes or Leibniz reached in their search for meaning. It matters even more if you do not intend to do any thinking in that direction.

Because it matters to me that you are a person who eats, sleeps and fornicates, even if you do nothing else. You consume resources.... Resources that could have been used by someone who was operating at a higher level. A level that cares about knowledge and meaning.

I, for one, really care about one thing... Efficiency. And it is most efficient if we can do this over a good hot cup of coffee at GRT one of these nights :) The treat's on me, dude!

OF Heroes - Act I Scene II : Science and Religion

2008-11-14T08:55:00.002+05:30

Act I Scene II

Zoom to IIT Madras. The tech-fest had featured a quiz which was very popular. The week after the tech-fest, a physics class has suddenly come abuzz. The discussion is on Perpetual Motion Machines.

Prof: PPMs are impossible. The one shown here [slide show moves to a picture of Maxwell’s daemon] fails because it violates the third law of thermodynamics. You simply cannot generate negative entropy through an event.

Student: Sir. I have a tangential question actually. Why are the laws of physics so sanctimonious? Aren’t laws meant to be broken?

Prof: [silencing the ensuing sniggering] Because this is Science, not Sociology!

Student: I’m not trying to be funny. I’m trying to understand Sir. I’ve had this question in my mind for seven years now. Why is it that Science as taught in classrooms frowns upon doubts on the accuracy or credibility of its laws? Isn’t it true that progress in science has been made not linearly but in leaps and bounds, and that these leaps have always been preceded by an experiment or evidence that actually questioned the validity of what was hitherto thought of as a law?

Prof: The evidence comes first, does it not? The laws of physics are suitably changed to accommodate the new evidence. Relativity being a case in the point.

Student: Precisely Sir. Michelson-Morley’s experiment proved once and for all, that velocities did not add up algebraically. The law had to be changed to incorporate this factor called the speed of light. The point is that the interferometer experiment was a climax of scientific thought on relativity(though it wasn’t the end point of that line of study). The experiment was definitely not the beginning of the thought process.

Prof: what are you getting at? [visibly interested]

Student: What I’m getting at is this. The thought experiment came as a result of a belief that the law of simple vector addition of relative velocities was questionable. If it wasn’t, then it wouldn’t have been questioned.

Prof: That is not necessarily true of scientific experiments. Consider the gold-foil experiment. Rutherford’s experiment was a totally random one. There was no reason to believe that it WOULD work.

Student: Sir, there HAD to be some reason to believe that the experiment MIGHT work. Otherwise the experiment wouldn’t have been conducted. Rutherford didn’t reach the position he did - one of the premier scientists of the 20th century - by being whimsical! I’m not saying that Rutherford did not believe the prevalent scientific standpoint regarding the composition of the atom. I’m saying he had reason to believe that there was a possibility that the theory might not stand up to rigourous examination. Granted the possibility was low, hence the test was conducted by Geiger and Marsden, not by the man himself. Though, of course, Rutherford did take... Um... get the credit!

[More coughing and sniggering ensues in class. It is a well-documented belief that the number of papers which have a professor's name as the author is directly proportional to the number of research students the professor has. Professors have a long history of taking credit for work done by researchers working under them.]

Prof: [silences the class once again. This time he is visibly annoyed.]

Student: What I’m saying Sir, is this. Unless an accepted theory is questioned and an alternate one is proposed, there is no meaning to Science. If there is no procedure for questioning and re-evaluating our axioms, what is the difference between Science and Religion?

Prof: We’ll tackle this later. Its time for the next class. [The class is over.]

Of Heroes - Prologue & Act I Scene I

2008-11-11T06:12:00.004+05:30

Prologue
In the movie Unbreakable, Elijah Price makes a very interesting observation. He asks David Dunn (a security guard by profession),

Why is it, do you think, that of all the professions in the world you chose protection? You could have been a tax accountant. You could have owned your own gym. You could have opened a chain of restaurants. You could've done of [sic] ten thousand things, but in the end, you chose to protect people. You made that decision, and I find that very, very interesting.

In Elijah's story, this analysis of Dunn's heroism is merely a sub-plot: a comic-book background for the showdown between Mr. Glass and the Unbreakable. Elijah highlights the contrast between plus-infinity and minus-infinity.

What I will attempt in the next few posts is a comparison between the finite and the infinite. So what is the finite? Any researcher worth his microscope will tell you that ant colonies have a 'life': an awareness greater than the sum of its parts. Individual ants can be really stupid, selfish and short-sighted, but ant colonies are pretty intelligent. In fact, ants survive because of this ability to form colonies that are wiser than just a collection.
It bears thought, that if there exists a being, that could look at the earth in the same scale, it would see humanity as another colony. Hopefully there will be enough evidence to show that humanity as a whole greater than an algebraic sum of its parts.
I will ask you to take my word for this. We are a colony. Humanity, as a collection, is a sentient being with a greater awareness than all of individual ones. I trust you won't have trouble accepting this: It is a better scenario than just being a random collection of humans. Even if you don't, let us take this forward as a hypotheses. It is neither central nor integral to my moot point. It just happens to make for a comfortable (if not comforting) analogy and has the additional advantage of dramatic effect.

As the drama unfolds, we see the action from the eyes of the sentient being. (We shall henceforth refer to this sentient being as HB. That will serve the twin purposes of being easier to type and giving me the little insider joke. More in the footnote.) Lets get straight to action. HB, as part of his/her/its research, is studying the curious and mysterious ways of the human colony. As we turn Voyeur and peer over HB's shoulder into her notebook, the drama unfolds

Act I Scene I
Human ants are mostly either soldiers or workers. the roles seem to involve specific training and characteristics, but it is quite common for roles to be interchanged. The most significant point about the human ant is its myopia. Each one follows its own path; selfishly so. Each is driven by its own testosterone and by the pheromones of those around it. Each seems to be aware of its own individual little goals. Each is awake to its own individual little knowledge. The colony survives on the back of an incredible amount of knowledge gained as a community and neatly warehoused for future reference. The colony also survives on little green pieces of paper (reference: The inaptly-named trilogy by Douglas Noel Adams). The colony itself has a greater awareness. The evidence of the recent financial crisis showcases both the myopia and the selfish short-term interest of individual ants or groups of ants.

Preview to the next episode: Alarums. Hero approaching...

Footnote: HB is a tribute to the one person in whom I have seen the qualities that makes me believe that Nietzsche's Übermensch is not an idle dream. It is but one of life's little ironies that my vision of a personified Overman is indeed that of a woman. 'twas but natural that my sentient being should be an Overman. I apologize to the lady in question for any slight on my behalf, whether insinuated or explicitly stated.

Disclaimer: All resemblances with Asimov's 'I Robot' are but a natural consequence of the theme.

What are friends for!

2008-11-07T21:10:00.003+05:30

For turning up when you least expect them to!
:)
I've not been this happy or this hopeful in a month!
Its gonna be alright. I can save this. I can make it work. I know.

Of Solitude and Loneliness

2008-11-04T12:41:00.003+05:30

Rilke wrote,

Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.

I had that love once. I dream that somewhere buried in the mists, that love is still there. The memory at once ephemeral, at once alive. How did i let it go out of my hands? How did i let it go out of my heart?

p.s. Thanks Silly for introducing me to Rilke.

Fade to Black...

2008-10-19T19:47:00.002+05:30

To be able to discern is the first sign of intelligence: To be able to distinguish by sight, sound, touch or knowledge one entity from another.

I was listening to Kurt Cobain today and a thought came by: A thought that hadn't entered my mind in a really, really long while. I wished I was dumb enough to just exist. (Not too dumb actually... Smart enough to make a decent living as a software engineer. Smart enough to crack a su-do-ku in 2 minutes. Just dumb enough not to feel a sense of remorse that I do not get intellectual gratification every day of my life. Just dumb enough to not feel dissatisfied by the quality of my conversations. Just dumb enough to not feel a sense of contempt at the quality of my life.)
How arrogant can I be?
Very! But that isn't the point here. Or is it?

Well let us get around that particular problem. Why don't we change the offensive word? And a few other things, while we are at it.

I wish I was numb enough to just exist. (Not too numb actually... Alive enough to still get a joy out of running and playing football. Aware enough to feel a smile creeping across my face as I listen to a particularly heart-warming rendition of Brochevaru. Just numb enough not to feel a sense of remorse that I do not get intellectual gratification every day of my life. Just numb enough to not feel dissatisfied by the quality of my conversations. Just numb enough to not be disturbed by the fact that my life is being lived like everyone else's.)

Benzodiazepine, anyone?
Awake, alive, aware, distinguishing and discerning. But not really caring too much. Comfortably light-headed. (A little nasal congestion might happen, yes. But anyone who has ever heard me sneeze will tell you that it hardly makes a difference.)

A life, yes. What a life...

(Debated, with myself, for ten minutes whether I really felt like ending that with a question mark or an exclamation mark. I didn't really know. I don't really know. I don't know if I will ever really know. Hence the ellipsis.)

sigh! There are some things I wish I never had access to in the first place.

p.s.
She once told me that I think too much. I think I agree with her.

The hand that rocks the cradle

2008-04-22T08:55:00.003+05:30

, is the iron hand that rules the world!

The worst thing that can happen to a mountain climber is that his rope gets entangled around his neck. (Yes... HIS rope and HIS neck. This isn't about political correctness. this is about what I see when i think 'mountain climber'. and I think... 'man'. (Aside: When authors imagine animal characters for their books, do they see the gender of the animal as well? Read Douglas Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas. The essay A Person Paper on Purity in Language has a brilliant take on sexism, if you are interested.))

Asides apart, the central issue is legendary. From the waters of the Nile in Egypt to the tourism industry in Goa, human history is replete with examples of the life-line that has a strangle-hold on the lives it sustains.

Opportunity cost no longer makes sense; for, in both cases, the cost is the same and the opportunity - non-existent. You cut the rope; and you plummet to the end, at 32 feet per second per second. You don't cut the rope; and asphyxia takes over, at 72 beats per minute and counting. Which number do you choose?

I choose choice. I will die of my own volition. As DP once famously said, "The best way out of a hostage situation is to take the gun and blow your own brains out!".

Snip!
And I'm free... Free falling.

Of Heroes

2007-11-05T10:32:00.000+05:30

It is not to the cliched overweight-actor-past-his-prime-running-around-trees-with-a-girl-young-enough-to-be-his-daughter description that I talk about. The reference is to the greek myth of a demi-god.
Scenario 1 : Villian X decides he wants to "RULE THE WORLD"
Proposed Solution : "Oh, I'm a mere mortal! This business of saving the world is not meant for ME!. You need to clean up a place, bring in the gods, old chap."
Actual Effect : Big dude turns up at prescribed place with weapon of choice, mouths the greek equivalent of "kutte, kamine, main tera khoon pee jaaonga!" and vaporises / inters / sends to hell / turns into animal / curses said villain. Has a regular day in the office, in other words.
Side Effects : No sooner have you invoked a god to do the needful than you have made his adversary an equal, a near-match, by association.

The regular fights, man could take care of. The really big ones, you could depend on one or more gods to do the needful. What do we do about those in-between disagreements? You know the ones : larger than pillow-fights but smaller than a holocaust!

The greeks were pretty smart peoplle, eh? The saw the problem and built the work-around. Horses for courses, as it were. Well, Heroes for courses at any rate. Split the responsibility between man and god.

Suited the Gods fine, all they had to do was fornicate. Usually it was Zeus who rose to the occasion. (pun most definitely unintended) Suited the humans even better. Mortality was a bad deal and if you didn't get screwed by the neighbour you would be by the income tax department. Why not by a God? At the very least, you got into a position where your name was written down in a book for scholars to mug up before they wrote their exams. If you got screwed by the right God, you might even get a painting. Of course your nose would be made too long, your cleft lip replaced with a pout, your privacy would be invaded for cinematic effect. But look on the bright side. Until this dude grew up to normal height and took on the villian, you had one hell of a farm-hand to help you.

History does not record what the heroes felt. Wise decision come to think of it. They probably might not have said anything that you might want to tell your children. Just imagine telling the story of Hercules to your grandchild.

GrandPa: "And then Hercules had to clean up the kings stable."
excitable kid : "And what did Hercules say?"
GrandPa : "He said, 'I'll clean the horse with water redirected from the river, but i'll be damned if the king expects me to lick his ass"

Enlightening, of course, but not the kind of thing you might want to teach your grandchild, perhaps?
So this is where I come in. NO, you pervert. Not THAT! I come in here to tell you what the heroes thought! Or must have thought. Well, would have thougt. Okay FINE, "could" have thought.
Imagine filling out a job application

Position applied for : Hero
Job Description : protector, defender, guardian.
Typical tasks : Hunting and Skinning animals, clean stables, flick horses from neighbour after cleaning stables, find forbidden fruit.
Required Skills : Courage in the face of danger / adversity. Willingness to sacrifice self.
Martial and Moral excellence would be viewed positively.
Myth-Buster Section : No princesses will be made available on completion of said tasks. Compensation package will be industry standard and paid in cash only.
Immortals only need apply. Please bring birth certificate for verification at the time of interview.

Like every other job around, the position is titled stylishly, the job description is nice, the qualifications are just aout impossible to fulfil and the work that you really have to do either sucks or stinks (possibly both). Nobody tells you how to do these things. At best, you can get a map maybe even an Atlas, but that is about all the assistance you will receive.

The only reason anyone applied at all, i guess, is the fact that after the first few trillenia, immortality starts to lose its charm.

Oh, incidentally, I started off trying to say something radically different. I'll give that shot sometime later. For now this stands. I apologise for the puns.

How work gets done... PSP style

2007-09-29T12:35:00.000+05:30

We will discuss this and other related topics sometime.

Balls to reusable / modular code!

2007-09-22T12:27:00.000+05:30

class Progrm1{
public static void main(String[] args)throws Exception{
for (int i=1; i<101;i++)
if (i%2==0)
System.out.println(i + "\t" + Math.sqrt(i) + "\t" + Math.pow(Math.sqrt(i),Math.sqrt(i)));
}
}

class EvenNumbers
{
public static int lowerLimit;
public static int upperLimit;
public static int terms;
public static int evenCount=0;
public static int[] evenArray;
public static double[] evenRootArray;
public static double[] evenRootPowerRootArray;

EvenNumbers(int lower, int upper) throws NumberFormatException
{
if (lower >= upper) throw new NumberFormatException();
this.lowerLimit = lower;
this.upperLimit = upper;
this.terms = upper-lower;
}

int setEvenArray()
{
this.evenArray = new int[this.terms];
for (int loop = this.lowerLimit; loop <= this.upperLimit; loop++)
{
if (loop%2==0)
{
this.evenArray[evenCount]= loop;
this.evenCount++;
}
}
return this.evenCount;
}

void setEvenRootArray()
{
this.evenRootArray = new double[this.evenCount];
for (int loop = 0; loop <>
{
this.evenRootArray[loop]= Math.sqrt(this.evenArray[loop]);
}
}

void setEvenRootPowerRootArray()
{
this.evenRootPowerRootArray = new double[this.evenCount];
for (int loop = 0; loop <>
{
this.evenRootPowerRootArray[loop]= Math.pow(this.evenRootArray[loop],this.evenRootArray[loop]);
}
}

}

public class Program1
{
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception
{
int lower = 1;
int upper = 101;

EvenNumbers eve = new EvenNumbers(lower, upper);
int terms = eve.setEvenArray();
eve.setEvenRootArray();
eve.setEvenRootPowerRootArray();

printArrays(eve.evenArray, eve.evenRootArray, eve.evenRootPowerRootArray, terms);
}
static void printArrays(int[] array1, double[] array2, double[] array3, int terms)
{
for (int loop = 0; loop <>
{
System.out.println(array1[loop] + "\t" + array2[loop] + "\t" + array3[loop]);
}
}
}

TAG - 8 random things about me

2007-08-04T14:29:00.000+05:30

The scribbler tagged me.

1. I know that I am going to hate to the core anyone who tells me that he/she/it reads/likes/adores Paulo Coelho. ditto Richard Bach. ditto Robin Sharma. Anyone who can write about a monk who has a ferrari to sell deserves a lot of contempt. Anyone who reads such a book deserves more contempt.

2. There is a common joke about large software companies: that they have a sign that reads "Trespassers will be recruited". I coined that phrase to explain why infy had recruited me.

3. I'm an elitist. Anybody who says "aitch" is one-of-us. Anybody who says "hech" is one-of-them.

4. My response to people who quote pop-corn philosophy like "Impossible itself says I'm possible" is "Imply itself says I'm ply".

5. I believe in the dictum, "Why fart and waste it, when you can burp and taste it"

6. I always have and always will insist on putting dramatic effect before truth.

7. I don't send forwards. I don't orkut. I don't belong to a mailing group / distribution list.

8. I believe in the Zeroeth law of humanics.

This tag goes thus far and no further - on this route at any rate.

Two is better than one? Not if you are talking about standards.

2007-06-01T10:28:00.000+05:30

Double Standard 1. a rule or principle applied more strictly to some people than to others (or to oneself).
– The Concise Oxford English Dictionary.

I'm not entirely sure I agree. The basis for this definition of double standards seems to be the belief that the validity of a principle is the same for all people and hence its (the principle) application with varying intensity on different people (or classes of people) constitutes double standards (as the term is oft used).

I intend to question the validity of the assumption that a principle is uniformly applicable in all circumstances and to all people. The only principle that I surely know to be applicable to all human beings is that death is a neccessary follow-up to life. I would not propose to suggest that death is caused by life. I'm merely making an observation. All other principles I have heard are made with certain assumptions. When the assumptions are not valid (because they do not represent an accurate portrayal of the situation that is being described), it hardly makes any sense to justify the applicability of the inference.

I have multiple standards: Different standards for different people.
I dont judge people by what they do and how it affects me. I simply judge them by whether they believe in what they do. Ofcourse not everyone gets judged the same. Which is why I'm not horrified when someone steps out of line. I know how to handle them. I am a deviant from society. I know how to handle other deviants. I dont care how you judge me. As long as you dont threaten my life or sanity you are safe. Your opinion of me does not matter to me. What does matter to me is my opinion of you. and that is purely judged by your adherence to your own principles and not because of any differences (percieved or otherwise) between your beliefs and mine.

"Responsible adult", "Mature Professional", "Male Chauvinist", "Overgrown child":

Keep your labels, I have no need for them. I have no use for them. I have no regard for them. I do my work. In the manner I think is right. If you disagree, feel free to continue doing it. But don't do it in my presence unless you can present it a manner where you can list your axioms, your logic and your conclusions. I do not wish to challenge my axioms. I do not wish you to challenge my axioms. I do not wish to challenge your axioms. I do not wish you to challenge yours. On those conditions if we can argue the logic out, please mail me.

If you dont think you have the obligation to explain yourself, please remember that I didnt beg you for it. I merely place it as a precondition. You want to talk with me, you need to explain the rational basis for your conclusions. You want to judge my axioms, you better have your own axioms ready to questioned.

Cheers.
p.s. I know this (or a similar) argument has been used by others before to justify their involvement in what you consider especially disgusting behaviour. If my behaviour comes close to mirrorring that, please feel free to disparage, discredit or even annihilate me. Let my actions be the cause for your anger, hurt or mistrust; not my thoughts or beliefs.

Boardroom PIN-UP girls????

2007-03-08T19:24:00.000+05:30

This
was a story in today's issue of The Economic Times.

Pin-up girls indeed. Nice way to mark women's day huh?

Go PIN-UP GIRLS. Unless there is some lesbianism involved somewhere, I don't see how this has anything to do with a woman's point of view.

If this wasn't written by a man, it was written with the male gaze.

There shall be, perhaps, one or two people (among my readers, that is: if one can still use the plural!) who will understand what causes my indignation.

The rest shall please note that they may, can and should suffer the fate I had in store for them nearly a year ago (almost to the day).

Prostitution: A choice?

2006-11-18T00:52:00.000+05:30

I know men who have completed their undergraduate study in the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and have then decided to do their graduate study in the US of A. And what do these men think is their biggest achievement once they reach there? Going to a STRIP CLUB. or fucking a commercial sex worker. Why do i pick this college specifically? Because these men have "proven" their intelligence fours years before they graduated. Because these men claim to be in the top 0.01% of the population. Because they take great pride in their ability!

And what do these supremely arrogant men do? Actively participate in pornography. LIVE. Or have sexual intercourse with a woman who they the pay for the "service". Dont they feel any guilt? Of course not! After all they didnt FORCE the woman into that line of trade! The woman CHOSE to be there. The woman CHOSE her profession. It is not illegal. There was no coercion.

And what is their excuse for doing what they do? Oh I'm sorry! These men (correction... Men in general) don't need an excuse for going to a strip club or a commercial sex worker. Why do they go anyway? "Curiousity" is the number-one answer. What are you curious about? It is not like a zoo now, is it? Those women are there because men like YOU pay them to be there. They do what they do because men like YOU pay them to do it. You like getting aroused and you like the idea that a total stranger would be interested in arousing you sexually. Even if the truth is that you have to BUY this attention! Don't give me "curiosity" as an answer. EVER!

And what kind of women are they? The word "prostitute", translated, is of course a cuss word in most Indian languages. Hell, the word and all its synonyms are all cuss words in every language on earth. Why doesn't a prostitute or a strip-club dancer/performer deserve your respect? Because she makes money from her body. And why does that make her a person of bad repute? Obviously! She has no place in reputable society. She is vermin. Oh! FABULOUS! So what does that make YOU? If having sex with multiple people is a sign of bad character, then how the fuck are you a person of good character? How do you not call yourself a prostitute? How do you not refer to yourself as a person without character?

So if this is so demeaning to women, why DO some women do it? The woman who makes her livelihood by selling to you the right to violate her privacy and her body does it because YOU make it the best option that she has. Because YOU pay her more to arouse your penis than to do anything else. Sometimes you make it the ONLY choice that she has. Because YOU hold the money. Because YOU enslave her. Because YOU think its COOL. Because YOU are curious. Because YOU think you have the right to own her.

And why do YOU go to the strip club or a commercial sex worker? Because the women that YOU want do NOT need you. They have the money to not feel the need to gyrate on your lap make you ejaculate. And who pays the price for your inability to find a woman to do this disgusting act for you for free? The woman who will do it for a price! Because you have left her with no other way of making her living. Because YOU like the feeling of POWER: of being able to force someone to satisfy your sexual urges. Because, for the women who CHOOSE to adopt commercial sex work as a mean of livelihood, indulging in sex work is not a choice anymore. Because the notion of ‘complete’, ‘free’ and ‘informed’ choice is simply an illusion.

Fuck yourself guys! The biggest insult is aimed at you. That you are incapable of finding someone who will love you enough to pamper to your wants. Because you have to BUY it. Because you have to PAY for it.

the right thing for the wrong reasons: India Today's sex survey

2006-11-14T02:27:00.000+05:30

I was apalled by the last edition of india today; the one that had the sex survey. No I wasn't apalled by the sexual preferences of the indian male. I was apalled by the views of one of the columnists. The aticle was about homosexuality and the writer stated that homosexuality should not be a criminal offense in India because a sizable percentage of the men who had particpated in the surey had stated that they had had homosexual relationships at some point of time.

While I believe that the section 377 is discriminatory, the writer's argument does the cause of homosexuality more harm than help. The writer seems to imply that if 40% of the drivers in India have cut through a traffic signal at some point of time, then cutting a red signal should not be considered a violation of traffic laws. Hilarious argument.

Article 377 should be abolished because it is discriminatory. The goverment has no right to claim that buggery constitutes a moral crime. It is the government of the people of India; not the government of the RSS or the heterosexual male!

The author of that article has no logical or legal foothold when he suggests that homosexuality should not be a legal offense because of the fact that a sizable percentage of the population has indulged in it. Article 377 should be abolished of course; but not because 40% of the men surveyed have had homosexual encounters.

The argument is flawed. And it is shocking that this gets printed at all. What the FUCK do editors have blue pencils for?

Five Ways to Kill a Man

2006-11-07T16:43:00.000+05:30

There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man.
You can make him carry a plank of wood
To the top of a hill and nail him to it.
To do this
Properly you require a crowd of people
Wearing sandals, a cock that crows, a cloak
To dissect, a sponge, some vinegar and one
Man to hammer the nails home.

Or you can take a length of steel,
Shaped and chased in a traditional way,
And attempt to pierce the metal cage he wears.
But for this you need white horses,
English trees, men with bows and arrows,

At least two flags, a prince and a
Castle to hold your banquet in.

Dispensing with nobility, you may, if the wind
Allows, blow gas at him. But then you need
A mile of mud sliced through with ditches,
Not to mention black boots, bomb craters,
More mud, a plague of rats, a dozen songs
And some round hats made of steel.

In an age of aeroplanes, you may fly
Miles above your victim and dispose of him by
Pressing one small switch. All you then
Require is an ocean to separate you, two

Systems of government, a nation's scientists,
Several factories, a psychopath and
Land that no one needs for several years.

These are, as I began, cumbersome ways
To kill a man. Simpler, direct, and much more neat
Is to see that he lives somewhere in the middle
Of the twentieth century, and leave him there.

- Edwin Brock

Love and Tensor Algebra

2006-11-07T14:41:00.000+05:30

Come, let us hasten to a higher plane
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!

Come, every frustum longs to be a cone
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.

In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.

I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.

For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?

Cancel me not - for what then shall remain?
Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.

Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
the product of four scalars it defines!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.

I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 phi!

-- Stanislaw Lem

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

The poem was originally written in Polish, so the the credit goes as much to Lem in writing it as to Michael Kandel in translating it into English!

Playing God...

2006-11-04T02:24:00.000+05:30

Do I have the right to run another person's life? Or till him/her/it how to runs his/her/its life?
Or the lives of a group of people?
Of a community?
Of a race?

Do I have the right to uphold the survival of the species?
At the cost of individuals...

These and other related questions popped up yesterday, when a friend and I were talking to a person who had hurt us. I found myself talking about having a moral code. I discovered that the only real thing i wanted from this person was that he/she/it have a value system and that he/she/it stick by it. I was saying that it really didnt matter to me whether a person chose good or bad, as long as he/she/it was aware of the act itself and its consequences.

But was my stance sensible? Was it appropriate? was it acceptable?
The question is a tricky one. Even if it doesn't look like it... Consider this. Would you be impartial between the fire and the fire-fighter? Would you be equally accomodative of a saint and a serial-killer? Of course you wouldn't. You would try to stop the serial-killer; you would try to stop the fire. If you couldn't persude the killer to give up his violent ways, you would try to force him to stop or put a deterrent in his path. Why? It is a moral judgement, right? And it is the RIGHT thing to do, isnt it? Why then, is it so unacceptable that I extend this idea to helping humanity? God makes moral judgements too, doesnt He/She?

Do I sit back and and let soemone glide down a path that I'm sure will lead to depravity or worse? Or do I 'play god'? If someone hurts me, do I try to change the way the person is, so that he/she is a better human being? Or do I just try to prevent the person from harming me again?

What do I do?

I am become death, the destroyer of the worlds.

- Oppie

This makes a lot of sense doesn't it?

2006-11-03T11:11:00.000+05:30

A lot has been said about how to prevent rape. Women should learn self-defense. Women should lock themselves in their houses after dark. Women shouldn't have long hair and women shouldn't wear short skirts. Women shouldn't leave drinks unattended. Hell, they shouldn't dare to get drunk at all. Instead of that bullshit, how about:

If a woman is drunk, don't rape her.
If a woman is walking alone at night, don't rape her.
If a woman is drugged and unconscious, don't rape her.
If a woman is wearing a short skirt, don't rape her.
If a woman is jogging in a park at 5 am, don't rape her.
If a woman looks like your ex-girlfriend you're still hung up on, don't rape her.
If a woman is asleep in her bed, don't rape her.
If a woman is asleep in your bed, don't rape her.
If a woman is doing her laundry, don't rape her.
If a woman is in a coma, don't rape her.
If a woman changes her mind in the middle of or about a particular activity, don't rape her.
If a woman has repeatedly refused a certain activity, don't rape her.
If a woman is not yet a woman, but a child, don't rape her.
If your girlfriend or wife is not in the mood, don't rape her.
If your step-daughter is watching TV, don't rape her.
If you break into a house and find a woman there, don't rape her.
If your friend thinks it's okay to rape someone, tell him it's not, and that he's not your friend.
If your "friend" tells you he raped someone, report him to the police.
If your frat-brother or another guy at the party tells you there's an unconscious woman upstairs and it's your turn, don't rape her, call the police and tell the guy he's a rapist.
Tell your sons, god-sons, nephews, grandsons, sons of friends it's not okay to rape someone.
Don't tell your women friends how to be safe and avoid rape.
Don't imply that she could have avoided it if she'd only done/not done x.
Don't imply that it's in any way her fault.
Don't let silence imply agreement when someone tells you he "got some" with the drunk girl.
Don't perpetuate a culture that tells you that you have no control over or responsibility for your actions. You can, too, help yourself.

If you agree, re-post it. It's that important.

-Author unknown.

Mary Frye - Do not stand at my grave and weep,

2006-11-01T14:43:00.000+05:30

Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there, I do not sleep.
I am in a thousand winds that blow,
I am the softly falling snow.
I am the gentle showers of rain,
I am the fields of ripening grain.
I am in the morning hush,
I am in the graceful rush
Of beautiful birds in circling flight,
I am the starshine of the night.
I am in the flowers that bloom,
I am in a quiet room.
I am in the birds that sing,
I am in each lovely thing.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there. I do not die.

I chanced upon this poem today. It has an interesting history. The only word I can think of is touching. I'll come back and put my thoughts on this later.

The sky turns dark again...

2006-10-28T23:22:00.000+05:30

In the cold november rain.

The burden of the thinker...

2006-10-17T18:42:00.000+05:30

This is an extract from a mail i wrote more than one year ago.

Cogito Ergo Sum: who you are is defined not by where you were born, what you eat or what you do for a living. Who you are is defined by how you think. For some, it is an awareness of an existence. For some, it is the realisation of larger pattern of being. For some, it is just the wait between one basketball game and the next. The quintessential spark of life exists only in the philosophical thinker. It is the thinker who must bear on his shoulders the weight of one billion people who cannot, dare not or will not think. It is on the thinker that rests the hope of humanity for a better itself. But most importantly it is the burden of the thinker to realise that he is the person who is by far the most sinned against. The thinker is not given the right to lessen his burden; and the burden he carries is a great one. The burden of a assembling together a hundred milllion thoughts streaming through his head, each one screaming to be heard or voiced. The burden of knowing that his own existence while grotesque or tragic, probably saves lives. And most importantly the burden of knowing that you can put this baggage down and live the life of a nitwit. While I'm willing to concede that THIS is not entirely fair. That If there is one person who deserves to rise happy every single morning, it is this thinker, and unfortunately we the thinkers are doomed to a life of knowing that anything other than the best is a compromise.

I've made compromises. I know. I've tried to drop this whole baggage so that I could live like a normal person with normal feelings and emotions. I tried to be a person I wasnt. Thank you very much.
---------------------------------------------------

THAT was the mail. One year down, I can happily say that life is just fine. I am no longer trying to be the person I'm not. Good for me.

The Zeroeth Law of Humanics - I

2006-08-18T13:33:00.000+05:30

Popularly known as Asimov's laws, though he was neither the first one to think of them nor the first to formulate them in these words, the three laws of robotics are a very good starting point for a methodical discussion on human behaviour. I'll do you, the reader, the disservice of writing down the laws again. I must crave your indulgence, for the manner in which i shall i write them, even though it is not a personal idiosyncracy that dictates that the laws be written down in this order. But, I'm getting ahead of myself.

The third law of robotics: A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

The second Law of robotics: A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

The first law of robotics: A robot may not harm a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

(One very important thing to look at in these definitions is that they are very precisely stated. One feels obliged to point out the use of the word "may" to imply permission and not "possibility". Thumb firmly on the nose; little finger steadfast in pointing outwards and upwards; the other fingers waving slightly out of sync with each other about their mean position! There MAY be only one acceptable definition for the word "MAY" when not used as a noun.)

These rules are not much as much a set of limitations for a state of mind as guidelines for a way of life.

Think of everything as a heirarchy of systems. And, please do not think of this a moral judgement. I do not make moral judgements based on my moral code.

Every system manages to make its subsystems comply. This compliance can be forced, voluntary or a mixture of both. Dictatorship works on forced compliance. Familial systems work on a mixture of authority, blind faith and voluntary compliance. The most unpredictable systems work purely on voluntary compliance, because there is no form of coercion that is imposed to ensure compliance of subsystmes.
Sucessful systems are those that manage to keep a high degree of compliance or in the very least manage to achieve their goals with whatever degree of compliance that they manage to get.

(This is essentially the import of the second law of robotics)

Each system aims for self-preservation. A system that kills off its subsystems without being able to replace them, will not manage to retain enough subsystems under it. No system can survive without subsystems. Every system hence has to have as one of its rules, the need to ensure the safety and welfare of its subsystems. This is where "free will" comes in. Every subsystem must be given to make the choice as to what it really wants to do.

(This is the import of the first law.)

The exercise of such a choice might be censored to various degrees, depending on the nature of the system and the subsystems. The system tells its subsystems that free will is acceptable as long as the choice does not threaten the existence of the system. The system has as one of its rules, the possibility of disassociating from itself any subsystem that threatens the system. This disassociation might be in the form of termination of the existence of a subsystem or merely the cutting off of diplomatic relations.

(This is the third law.)

These three laws help to maintain a system. Most systems we use, know or see that involve any entity that can express "free will" survive because they follow these laws.

The next post will do you the disservice of an explanation, by bringing in the Zeroeth Law of Humanics...

Language: Take 1

2006-06-10T10:28:00.000+05:30

Rhetoric and Grammar were two of the cornerstones of Classical Primary Education. The third in the trivium was Logic. Evidently the Greeks had realised pretty early that before a child can be taught anything else, the child must first be taught how to think; how to convert her thoughts into words; and how to put her words in a manner that would persuade another person.

It is true, of course, that your language is limited by the thoughts you have. You do not have words to express thoughts you have never had. (We shall, for the present, not stress too much about the inability of people to find words for the thoughts they DO have. It is highly probable that one's knowledge of a language is finite enough to prevent a coherent and elegant elucidation of every thought one has. On the other hand it is impossible for one's language to have words to express a thought one does not have). There is, of course, the technical argument (and a valid one) that a language of a community might have words that express thoughts that a specified member of the comunity does not have. While this might be true, it does not change the fact that a community's language is the means of explaining the sum total of its collective consciousness, and while it may not be exhaustive, it certainly is inclusive. If a group of people hasn't seen snow, it is impossible for the language they speak to have a word that translates into snow. As a corollary, the more important a certain entitty in your environment, the more ways you will find to refer to it. "Death" is pretty much one word for most us. "She died", is a complete idea explained and expressed in two words. But, to a lawyer the sentence hides much more than it conveys. The lawyer knows many different words for death. And for him the sentence smacks of incompleteness.

What is not so well known or well understood is that this works the other way round. The language you speak actually limits the thoughts you have. Learning a new language can give you new thoughts. There are concepts in some languages that don't exist in others. These can give you new ways to think, and change your perspective on things. I first realised this when I was taking spanish lessons. I must admit I started learning Spanish only because it sounded terrific (the language... not the idea). One of the most frequently used words in Spanish is "tengo"... means "have".
And why is this important? Simple. In spanish, you feel cold, you feel tired, and you feel afraid... as opposed to "I am cold", "I am tired" and "I am afraid". In English, fear is an identifier. It is an intrinsic property of the system. Inseperable. In Spanish, "Fear" has suddenly become a detachable; something that can be jettisoned once its outlived its utility. now you see it, now you don't.

Try this for an exercise: Capture the meaning of the German word "zeitgeist" in one English sentence. (unlimited commas, semicolons, colons, em-dashes and parentheses allowed.)

I'll come back and expand this later...
Think about this: "losovona" in Tamizh, literally means blackening her face, loss of honor or taking away honor.
"Manabhangam" in Sanskritised Telugu, means pretty much the same thing.
And these are the two words that replace the word "rape" when something gets translated into these languages. What a pity... There is no mention of force by the doer... No mention of trauma of the vitim... No mention of sin on the part of the doer. Not even the remotest indication of violation of a person's identity. Just shame.

The rape victim has done nothing to be ashamed about. Yet, the only indian words we have as equivalents all imply a high degree of shame on the victim... and almost no mention of the perpetrator of the crime. No wonder, we as a community are so forgiving of this form of evil.

The Humanist: It tolls for me

2006-06-10T00:15:00.000+05:30

John Donne's immortal lines have to be quoted first.

... No man is an island, entire of itself;
every man is a piece of the
continent, a part of the main.
...any man's death diminishes me, because I
am involved in mankind,
and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
it tolls for thee...

The words were written in the seventeenth century, and I'm willing to let John Donne get away for the very obvious gender bias. But the words ring true.

I'm a humanist. Every time the bell tolls to mark the death of one member of humanity, I know it tolls for me. Every child that gets beaten or bullied, every woman that is harassed; every man who is trod upon. The bells tolls incessantly. And it tolls for me.

I'm not a messiah. I do not claim to be. I do not wish to be. I'm a humanist who cares what happens to the world and its inhabitants. And I'm going to fight for the right of humanity to survive... for the right of every member of humanity to survive... (are these goals inherently inconsistent? The next post should answer that)

With a little bit of luck...

2006-06-09T23:28:00.000+05:30

The Lord above made liquor for temptation,
to see if man could turn away from sin.
The lord above made liquor for temptation,
but...
with a little bit o' luck...
with a little bit o' luck...
with a little bit o' luck...
when temptation comes, you'll give right in!