Into My Narrow Shed

2008-03-08T15:08:00.000-08:00

I came out of my Kumbhakarna-esque blog-sleep to link this: why Barack Obama is the Kwisatz Haderach. Here .

The Indian Clerk: A review

2007-10-19T18:43:00.000-07:00

"Ramanujan says nothing. Instead he rests his head against the pillow and turns, once again, to look at the river. And Hardy wonders: from his starting place, from the pial at twilight, could he have traveled further."

The eponymous 'Indian Clerk' in Leavitt's novel is Ramanujan, but 'The Cambridge Don' would perhaps have been a more apt title for the book, as the book is much more about Hardy. Ramanujan remains a cipher throughout the book: his inner thoughts are never presented by the author. It is Hardy we get to know really well.

However, in another sense, The Indian Clerk is very much about Ramanujan, in showing how even the most brilliant among us are ultimately dependent on the systems and institutions that govern our lives. It takes the First World War to bring out the full capriciousness and cruelty of the British institutions. Hardy is careful not to make his pacifism too overt during the War, for fear of losing his fellowship. Many see him as a coward, and he watches Russell and Eric Neville lose their fellowships at Cambridge for their pacifism. Russell can afford to, but Neville is a lesser talent, mathematically and otherwise, and is soon forgotten. Their tragedy is of course nothing compared to the tragedy of the men dying at the front. Hardy befriends one of them, called Thayer, and has a short homosexual affair with him. However, he is always embarrassed by his sexuality, as well as Thayer's social class, and can never bring himself to treat Thayer as an equal. As someone from a family of schoolteachers who moved up by navigating the system, he does not have the same insouciance towards it as his peers Russell and Littlewood have. As Hardy muses as he watches his dying mother's ravings:

"She speaks of school. And why not? All her life she has spent in schools. Both she and his father. From Ramanujan's perspective, there must be little difference between him and Littlewood, him and Russell. All are children of affluence to him. And how can he be expected to recognize what separates Hardy from the others? For Littlewood comes from a Cambridge family; Russell is an aristocrat. Whereas Hardy is merely the child of teachers...Hardy is dependent on Trinity, just as his father was dependent on Cranleigh, his mother on the Training College, his sister on St. Catherine's. The only difference is one of prestige. Without the support of munificent institutions, all of them would be lost."

Of course no one knows the cruelty of institutions better than Ramanujan. Ramanujan's story is often told as one of 'genius will out', but that is a fallacy: essentially a self-fulfilling prophecy. Ramanujan's genius for all practical purposes does not exist till he gets the seal of approval from Hardy, who in turn got his seal from Cambridge. No one sees it better than Ramanujan, who, even after building his reputation, wants the B.A. he was never granted by the education system in India. He hopes one of his papers will win him the Smith's Prize, a prize for undergraduates. This irritates Hardy, because Ramanujan's work is far above the prize. But the reality is that he doesn't have the Smith's Prize: he wants the prizes, else he is not a genius, not even to himself.

Hardy takes a long time to realize this. Their relationship for a long time is one of mutual incomprehension. Hardy has a strong perception of himself as an underdog. He identifies with other underdogs, he likes to 'save' them, the way he saved himself with his own brilliance. But his self-absorption, combined with an acute sense of his own status in the class hierarchy, does not make him a very good savior. It takes him a long time to understand Ramanujan's demons are much more severe than his own: his lack of formal achievements and medals, his difficulties and inadequate appreciation of formal proofs in mathematics, a sense of wasted years, his distance from his family, his constant sense of being an outsider, or even his Hinduism that forces him to a vegetarian diet difficult to maintain in wartime Britain. Ultimately Hardy and Ramanujan manage to form some sort of personal bond beyond the professional relationship they had, and Hardy helps him achieve a part of his hopes (against strong racist opposition from Trinity). But the war ends soon after, and Ramanujan wants to go back to India.

The novel is about a lot of other things besides Hardy's relationship with Ramanujan: the troubled life of John Littlewood, the Cambridge Apostles, Russell's activism during wartime, Hardy's atheism, his relationship with his sister, and a (probably fictitious) unrequited love Alice, Eric Neville's wife, has for Ramanujan. I was dissatisfied with his potrayal of Hardy's atheism: it seemed too formulaic. Also, Leavitt seems to make Hardy colder than he perhaps actually was. Anyone who has read 'A Mathematician's Apology' cannot help feeling a certain affection for Hardy's love of mathematics. This love does not come across in his potrayal by Leavitt.

But ultimately the book is not about mathematics. It is about a certain period in English life, when the political and social hypocrisies of the empire were unraveled by an inglorious war. It is also about how the systems and institutions of the time did not treat its greatest minds very differently from how they treated the callow youngsters sent to the front. In this aim it succeeds marvelously.

"And the amazing thing was that they never let him [Thayer] go. They would break him, and send him home for repair, and break him again. In much the same way, I realized later, we broke Ramanujan, and patched him together again, and broke him again, until we had squeezed all the use we could out of him. Until he could manage no more.

Only then did we let him go home."

nerdfoolery

2007-10-02T19:14:00.000-07:00

Webware makes its list of 5 funniest tech comics. xkcd is on top, and it is by far the best. It was a weird mix not so long ago: Randall seemed to be trying too hard at times. Its grown more sophisticated since. The only thing I find odd is its focus on computer science jokes: are there enough CS people out there to constitute, like, a market?

The desi name on the list, Krishna Sadasivam's PC Weenies (#3), is worth a look. Some good ones here and here.

Speaking of desis, a brief bushily bewhiskered brown sighting was reported from phdcomics recently. Pradeep, physics major, spoke seven words in all, none of them funny.

2nd October

2007-10-02T18:25:00.000-07:00

Selling at my campus bookshop: Gandhi finger puppet, whiter than Ben Kingsley- $5.00 only.

In the company of Che Guevera, Leon Trotsky and Nelson Mandela (out of frame-v desilike brown hand visible).

I am not complaining-they got the big ears right.

Should I be offended?

2007-09-12T17:46:00.000-07:00

When something like this happens, I know its time for a shave.

Random (Asian) dude at bus stop: Is Pakistan sunny?
Me: No more sunny than Texas, probably.
R(A)DABS: What was that?
Me: I am not from Pakistan. I am Indian.
R(A)DABS: Oh! I am sorry. (pause) Wow! I am glad I didn't mistake a Pakistani for an Indian. That could have been complicated. Indians are peaceful people.
Me: Why do you care if Pakistan is sunny?
R(A)DABS: Uh, I thought if its sunny, it should go help the sunny people in Iraq.
Me: Umm, I guess.

I realized later he meant Sunni.

The Mahatma's Khadi Franchise

2007-08-19T11:25:00.000-07:00

"'We want to harness capital to our side,' [Gandhi] wrote in his paper, Young India....Indian capitalists naturally wished to take advantage of the boycott of Manchester goods. But Gandhi's assurances notwithstanding, what was to be considered swadeshi cloth? This was in part a problem of definition - mill-made cloth could be endorsed as swadeshi, although strictly Gandhian principles appeared to rule this out. Some mills, however, used yarns made in Manchester. This was not considered acceptable and the Congress was drawn into bargaining with businessmen to ensure that swadeshi cloth was not made with foreign yarn that was merely woven in Indian mills. Eventually, a deal was made between some capitalists and the Congress, which set a maximum permissible percentage of foreign yarn in Congress-endorsed swadeshi cloth."
- Benjamin Zachariah (Nehru)

There was also the problem of piracy:

"But mill owners had also to be rebuked for weaving coarse cloth on their machines and passing it off as hand-woven khadi - the latter was still a few rungs higher up the moral ladder in the Gandhian scheme of things."

Kagemusha: a confused review

2007-08-15T18:43:00.001-07:00

I was afraid I will not like Kurosawa's Kagemusha (The Shadow Warrior), and in a way, I was right. At 180 minutes, it takes its time, including a five minute sequence where a character (who is not seen again) does little besides clean and load his gun, and another where the future king of Japan gets up and does an impromptu Noh dance. But it still is a haunting film, about the dynamic between individualism and collectivism. The most intriguing part is that Kurosawa refuses to side with individualism: rather his sympathies (I think) tacitly seem to lie with the other side. That certainly is a bummer: which was the last movie you saw where the hero was not a rebel of some sort.

The movie starts with a thief (who remains unnamed) being brought before the Samurai lord Shingen Takeda, by his brother Nabukado. The thief has a close resemblance to Shingen and will be useful as a body double. This saves the thief from the fate, crucifixion, that he was intended for, but he is unimpressed. He boldly confronts the warlord and tells him that a man who has robbed and killed thousands cannot be a judge of his petty crime. However, soon, the warlord is dead and the thief is required to take his place. He is reluctant: he cannot live a lie, plus he wants his old life back. But he agrees when he realizes that his refusal might well spell the end of the Takeda clan. He is not of the clan, but he also wants to be useful, to have served a purpose, even if that means living a lie.

The movie at this point touched a raw nerve with me: the dilemma that anyone who grew up in a traditional society like Japan, or India, faces. The choice between the role we are expected to play as part of the society we are born in, and our sense of independence. This is not so true of my generation, but I meet so many people from my father's generation and above who spent their lives playing roles they felt they were born into: the good son, the good husband and father, the perfect wife. And like the thief they play the roles so well, they become these roles, and sometimes you cannot tell if there is a real person besides the role. Did they all make a conscious decision at some point to play the role?

Kurosawa sees the tragedy in this, but a certain dignity. As Nabukado, who occasionally played his brother's double himself, tells the thief:

I was for a long time the lord's double. It was torture. It is not easy to suppress yourself to become another. Often I wanted to be myself and free. But now I think this was selfish of me. The shadow of a man can never desert that man. I was my brother's shadow. Now that I have lost him, it is as though I am nothing.

Kurosawa identifies with the loss of individuality, but at the same time sees a dignity in accepting the role. To accept it is to live with the satisfaction that you have done your duty: there may not be happiness, but there is a certain sense of meaning. To not do so is to be selfish. But selfishness is such an old world sin ;) .

The movie ends in tragedy, with a final battle sequence, where the arrival of modern guns signifies an end to the traditional Samurai way of life. The Kagemusha dies trying to stay true to his illusion even though it no longer matters: his secret is out. What is Kurosawa trying to say? Is it a heroic death, or a pathetic one? I went with pathetic, but someone with different cultural assumptions might see a heroism in that tragedy. In fact, I have a feeling my father and I will disagree :).

Perhaps the point is the ambiguity: that every culture has its own tacit assumptions, and not realizing those assumptions means talking past one another. Is that what Kurosawa is trying to say?

I give up ;) .

Off to India

2007-06-20T22:12:00.001-07:00

Warangal station, fruit seller, originally uploaded by Dancewithshadows.

After 3 years. Finally.
Whew!

The World is Not Flat

2007-05-27T00:06:00.000-07:00

On eight nails sticking out of the earth, just high enough to defeat the Pacific, lives an entirely different world, or perhaps two worlds. As a kid I remember wondering if, when Sri Lankans drew a map of their country, they drew India in a corner, really small, like the way our maps showed Sri Lanka. Obviously I wasn't paying a lot of attention when the teacher discussed geographic scaling. In Hawaii I corrected a different, in some ways an opposite, error.

Eight hours by flight from both the US mainland and Japan, it is hard to know where to fit Hawaii. McDonald's and calligraphy shops face each other, and Macy's and sushi, and beautiful banyan trees that reminded me of India, with people sleeping under them through the afternoon. And it is not like Chinatown, where you go down a certain street to find a different world. Here two worlds collide on every street, confidently incongruent.

I was initially stupid enough to be surprised that one of the western-most corners of the US should be its most east-like. But it was good to be reminded that east is east and west is west only because that is how we print our maps. If we published our maps with the eight small islands in the center, and the world flowing both ways from there, breaking off perhaps somewhere in the middle of Europe, that map would be just as accurate.

Honolulu:

Kilauea volcano (Big Island):

Kona:

The Explosion

2007-04-17T16:36:00.000-07:00

In memory of the victims of the Virginia Tech massacre, and also of the countless massacres ongoing over the world.

The Explosion

On the day of the explosion
Shadows pointed towards the pithead:
In the sun the slagheap slept.

Down the lane came men in pitboots
Coughing oath-edged talk and pipe-smoke,
Shouldering off the freshened silence.

One chased after rabbits; lost them;
Came back with a nest of lark's eggs;
Showed them; lodged them in the grasses.

So they passed in beards and moleskins,
Fathers, brothers, nicknames, laughter,
Through the tall gates standing open.

At noon, there came a tremor; cows
Stopped chewing for a second; sun,
Scarfed as in a heat-haze, dimmed.

The dead go on before us, they
Are sitting in God's house in comfort,
We shall see them face to face -

Plain as lettering in the chapels
It was said, and for a second
Wives saw men of the explosion

Larger than in life they managed -
Gold as on a coin, or walking
Somehow from the sun towards them,

One showing the eggs unbroken.

-Philip Larkin

Even when we have no clue where we are going with our lives, and I sometimes do get the feeling I am making up the story on the go, there is a feeling that it will all make sense at the end, years, perhaps decades, from today. I have no idea what it must feel like, if some lunatic comes out of nowhere and picks up this story you are writing, tears off the last page, and says, sorry but it has to end right here. How unfair that must feel, and how helpless.

Breaking news

2007-04-12T17:26:00.000-07:00

A daddy's disappointment to beat Abhishek Bachchan and Julian Lennon.

It appears that the closest living relative to Tyrannosaurus Rex is the humble Gallus domesticus.

The answer my friend...umm, nevermind!

2007-04-10T23:54:00.000-07:00

Robert Lucky recently had a short opinion piece in Spectrum, where he confirms an uncomfortable feeling I've had for a long time:

'Many questions following technical talks seem intended more to show the expertise of the questioner than to elicit information.'

I am glad I am not the only one who thought so. Lucky has a few other observations:

'The (typical) question goes something like this: “Are you aware of the work on this subject by Professor John Blutarsky at Faber College in 1962?”...“Oh, yes, that Blutarsky,” you say, playing for time. “It’s been some time since I studied his work, but I believe that his assumptions were quite different, and we all know how much technology has changed since then.”...There is an uneasy stirring as people crane their heads to view the questioner. Who is this expert who is familiar with Blutarsky, whose obviously important work the speaker seems not to know?'

There is another category of questioners: those who don't want the speaker to leave with the impression that no one was listening. So a few questions are raised about obvious drawbacks/extensions to the work, something along the lines of 'have you considered the case when k=0', or 'how will your approach do if conditions z hold'. The speaker might then explain that they were not really focusing on the k=0 problem, though with some modifications, it might be possible to get reasonable results. Of course no one really cares what those modifications might be: they are just relieved that the talk did not end in the question-free zone. That would be bad karma.

You can read Lucky's article here.

The Path of Khan

2007-03-24T21:01:00.000-07:00

"At the height of the British Empire, the chess loving Indian servant, Sultan Khan, arrived in the imperial capital as part of the feudal retinue of Sir Umar, his high caste master. While Sir Umar deliberated in the rarefied atmosphere of London conferences, with British panjandra, on the future of the Raj, his retainer started to take on the British élite at chess. Sweeping all before him, the Indian genius entered the international arena where, playing top board for the British Empire team, he defeated grandmasters, such as Rubinstein. Tartakower also succumbed to the Indian sage, and then came Sultan Khan's greatest triumph - a win against Capablanca. Then, as suddenly and mysteriously as he had arrived, Sultan Khan departed for India and was never heard from again - though rumours did emerge from Kashmir in 1951 that an Indian village chessplayer, when shown the games from the world title match of that year, had opined: 'these are two very weak players!'"

-R.N. Coles (The Best Games of Mir Sultan Khan (An Indian Mystic Challenges the West)

Anand's ascent reminded me of the strange and Ramanujanesque story of Mir Sultan Khan, for no reason really, except that he too was from the Subcontinent. Technically, I believe, Sultan Khan was India's first chess grandmaster (sorry, Vishy), though he died in Pakistan, and he was certainly the first Asian grandmaster.

Sultan Khan was a servant to Umer Hayat Khan, a minor raja from somewhere in Punjab. He is said to be illiterate (though there is some controversy regarding this), but his unique talent in chess was noticed by the raja, who brought him to England.

Sultan Khan won the British chess championship in 1929, 1932 and 1933, and also represented England at the Chess Olympiads all over Europe. His most famous game is the one in which he defeated Capablanca, perhaps the greatest chess player of this century.

But unlike Capablanca, whose only duty as 'ambassador-at-large' for Cuba was to play chess, Sultan Khan had a day job. It was in the service of Hayat Khan, thereby making the maharaja the only man in history to have the British chess champion serve him chicken biryani. Well, not the only. In the words of the American chess grandmaster Reuben Fine:

"When we were ushered in we were greeted by the maharajah with the remark, 'It is an honor for you to be here; ordinarily I converse only with my greyhounds.' Sultan Khan, our real entree to his presence, was treated as a servant and we found ourselves in the peculiar position of being waited on at table by a grandmaster."

It is not known what Sultan's feelings were about the situation. In fact, the most troubling aspect of telling his story is that his own perspective is entirely missing.

He was ranked world #6 in 1933, his game was improving daily, and even greater things seemed to be in store for him, when King Khan decided to move back to India, and took his server with him. The grandmaster disappeared from the world of chess.

The British had predictably romanticized Sultan in the meantime, and reporters kept searching for him decades after his disappearance. The British Chess Magazine reported in the 1950s that he now made a living as an opera singer in Durban, and was believed. Hell, a guy who could win the British chess title while waiting tables for a maharaja could certainly be an opera singer in South Africa.

The truth was in some ways more interesting. Sometime in the early 1960s, the chess writer R.N. Coles painstakingly traced Sultan Khan to his village in the Sargodha district of Punjab(Pakistan), where he found him sitting under a banyan tree smoking a hookah. Sultan challenged Coles to a game of blindfold chess, which the writer 'wisely declined'.

Sultan Khan is believed to have died in 1966, at the age of 61.

Sultan's most famous game, against Capablanca, described by Chessgames as The Wrath of Khan, is online. I was interested enough by Sultan to go through the game, and if you like chess, you won't regret it. It is clear that his victory against Capablanca was no fluke. Capablanca seems to dominate initially, but Sultan, by forcing a clever exchange of his queen with Capablanca's two rooks around the 20th move, kills off all his momentum. After that it is Sultan all the way, and Capablanca's solo queen keeps trying quite helplessly to break into Sultan's defences. Capablanca is so distracted by this that he lets Sultan create a passed pawn, and that proves to be his undoing.

Disclaimer: This is just my interpretation of the game between Sultan Khan and Capablanca. I am a very indifferent, and needless to say, amateur chess player, so I may be entirely wrong.

Sources:
1. wikipedia
2. The Edinburgh University Chess Club Website
3. Chessgames
4. classicalgames.com
5. chesshistory.com

Topalov topples

2007-03-22T22:32:00.000-07:00

Viswanathan Anand finally lives up to his first name.

After clinching the Morelia-Linares tournament, Anand is set to move to the world number one spot in the FIDE chess ratings, beginning April. Topalov is moving to number two, after coming out seventh out of the eight players at the tournament (tying with Peter Leko).

Anand was the FIDE world chess champion(distinct from the ratings) in 2000, but didn't play Kasparov, thanks to Kasparov still being in the last throes of his ten-year itch. Anand's situation was akin to that of the king in chess: everyone knew the vizier was the real boss.

But seven years later, it is the real thing. He is boss and everybody knows it. Great news for him, and world chess could use a new face after last year's sordid hungama by Topalov over Kramnik's restroom habits.

The Indian media doesn't seem to have latched on to the story yet. They might when he officially takes the spot next month. After the cricket world cup hype that blew up in their faces, they may be glad for any distraction. Or maybe this will be buried under endless cricket-related faux-introspection that we are inevitably due for.

300

2007-03-15T00:19:00.000-07:00

If Manoj Kumar made a movie about Prithviraj Chauhan starring Sunny Deol, it would be like 300.

Except they probably would not depict Muhammad Ghori as an eight foot giant of ambiguous sexuality.

There's a lot of discussion on the web about the politics of the movie. No one seems to be surprised by how breathtakingly inane the screenplay is. I mean, we do call comics 'graphic novels' now, don't we. And Frank Miller is supposed to be some kind of graphic novel god.

Yes I know, its just an action movie and not supposed to be taken seriously. Someone should have told the director that.

PS: Sneaking suspicion: Am I getting too old for this kind of stuff?

One need not be a chamber to be haunted

2007-03-11T12:21:00.000-07:00

He was an old, half-crazed peasant who begged for a living during the day and played funny tricks on his benefactors at night. Draping a white sheet on a ladder he would walk about with it, to the terror of the villagers. Sometimes he covered his face with soot and, peeping through windows, called out the occupants in a nasal voice. During the day he was a picture of humble obsequiousness. At night he transformed himself into a malicious imp- so clever that though many suspected him, no one ever caught him. When he lay dying he confessed everything and with his death the village was rid of its ghosts.

-Saratchandra(Srikanta*)

Class conflict with a supernatural twist. Clark Kent and Superman in rural Bengal: the possibilities are endless. I wish Saratchandra had pursued this story, but he lets it drop.

How did he pick him victims? Was his sadism random or did he have a method? Did he only torment those who tormented him, or did he pick up cudgels for others. I wonder if he planned his deathbed admission all his life, his only moment of glory and sweet revenge. If he had accidentally died without telling the village he was the ghost, he might actually have come back as a ghost to let them know.

*from Aruna Chakravarty's translation

2007-03-01T18:39:00.000-08:00

The Perry Bible Fellowship asks a difficult question.

A Star is Dead

2007-02-17T00:24:00.001-08:00

One of the most impressive discoveries was the origin of the energy of the stars, that makes them continue to burn. One of the men who discovered this was out with his girl friend the night after he realized that nuclear reactions must be going on in the stars in order to make them shine. She said "Look at how pretty the stars shine!"
He replied, "Yes, and right now I am the only man in the world who knows why they shine."

- Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures

I always envy people who can identify constellations, an ability I have never been able to develop beyond the basic Ursa-major level. But it must be good to have friends up there, so, when you look up, you can give Auriga, or some other constellation you recognize, a good-natured wave or a pranaam(which will duly reach in 5000-odd years), before carrying on with this tale told by an idiot.

I was fortunate to be working on a project with a few astronomers for a while, and their passion sort of rubs off. I am still not on talking terms with the stars. The good news is that I now enjoy gaping at those pretty pictures as much as the next yokel.

Hubble snapped the picture above yesterday, of an extremely photogenic white dwarf around 4000 light years away.

You might remember that the Sun will die as a white dwarf too, but now you get to see it. The barely visible white dot in the middle will be the Sun(shrunk to the size of earth), and the glittering expanse of millions of miles of gases, a mixture of helium, oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen, smoking hot at around 200,000 C and emitting ultraviolet rays, will easily reach earth.

Trust a poet to get it wrong: the world will end with a bang after all.

Check out Hubble's website for truly awe-inspiring photographs.

2007-02-16T18:08:00.000-08:00

Odd that the brain could function on its own, without acquainting him with its purposes, its reasons. But the brain was an organ, like the spleen, heart, kidneys. And they went about their private activities. So why not the brain.

-Philip K. Dick (The Man Who Japed)

Really, when you think about it.

I swear on the bones of Charles Darwin....

2007-02-12T21:47:00.000-08:00

One evolutionist actually does say that in Flock of Dodos. In his defense, a) he is drunk, and b) he is very very angry.

Directed by Randy Olson, evolutionary biologist and two-time TA for Stephen Jay Gould, Flock of Dodos tries to understand why, what should have been game-set-match for the evolutionists, is running into tie-breaker after tie-breaker.

Olson thinks it is because most scientists are ugly, don't suffer fools, don't look good on TV, and couldn't speak in 'talking points' to save their lives.

Intelligent Design proponents, on the other hand, seem to speak only in talking points. Every ID fan Olson talks to raises the same arguments, such as, how just as anyone can tell that Mount Rushmore has to be intelligently designed, it is obvious that life too is, then some platitudes about irreducible complexity, and claims that biologists intentionally lie and mislead (picked from Wells' Icons of Evolution). On the other hand, they are always nice, never condescend, some even carry around helpful little photographs of Mt. Rushmore with them to make their point. The ones you get to meet are bearded old gentlemen or loving grandmas (all the bible thumpers having been pushed to the back pews).

Olson makes this point wonderfully when he asks a scientist (I forget who), "Their catchphrase is teach the controversy. What is your catchphrase?" The scientist is stumped, "Catchphrase?" Ultimately he comes up with 'Teach the Science', which is not so bad, if only someone used it.

The best part about Flock of Dodos is that it is constantly funny, never takes itself seriously, and remembers its own lesson and never condescends.

And yes, Happy Darwin Day.
If people remember your 198th birthday, that is a very special achievement.

Koi Sukha Hua Patta tha...

2007-02-09T23:03:00.000-08:00

Nida Fazli reads his beautiful nazm valid ke vafat par (on the death of my father) here. He was unable to attend his father's funeral because he could not afford the journey.

You can also listen to his hamd (in praise Of God). Its certainly the quirkiest hamd one is likely to hear.

The South Asian Literary Recordings Project records the works of writers writing in different South Asian languages, in their own voice.

I have a fascination with poets reading their works. What a poet emphasizes, and what he/she does not, tells so much about how they interpret their own poems.

2007-02-06T20:17:00.000-08:00

One of the guys I frequently run into at my department kitchen uses one of these for his afternoon cuppa.

It always reminds me of that sequence from Annie Hall.

Annie: Sometimes I ask myself how I'd stand up under torture.

Alvy: You kiddin'? If the Gestapo would take away your Bloomingdale's charge card, you'd tell 'em everything.

He is a nice guy and all, but c'mon, coffee mug Che is ridiculous. I know this sounds too glib: it puts the moron in oxymoron ;) .

You may be more popular than Jesus Christ...

2007-01-31T12:57:00.000-08:00

...but can you beat yahoo?

The Daily Domainer points out that yahoo has overtaken sex as the most popular search term on google.

Shallower creatures might be intrigued by the rise of yahoo, but I am more concerned about the decline in interest in sex.

If you think its just statistics, consider this: the battle between Satan and Christ is also coming to a head, with Jesus finally catching up, even as Satan holds on to his awe-inspiring lead in Turkey, Slovakia and Norway.

Trend-watchers might also remember that as of January 2007, God has held his own against Paris Hilton for a whole year. And while that contest is by no means over (the Lord, in his majesty, will be the first to admit he is no Paris Hilton), it does make one wonder.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

Or maybe not. The Beatles vs Jesus Christ is still a no-contest.

PS: In case you were curious about Aamir vs Shahrukh (it isn't pretty).

The problem with assumptions

2007-01-26T18:46:00.000-08:00

xkcd is surreal sometimes, sometimes plain weird.

PS: This is where I stole my pic from.

Or perhaps He does not know

2007-01-20T13:47:00.000-08:00

Who then knows whence it has arisen,
Whence this emanation hath arisen,
Whether God disposed it, or whether He did not,-
Only He who is its overseer in highest heaven knows.
Or perhaps He does not know.

- Rig Veda (creation hymn)

If you watched Bharat ek Khoj, you might remember the same hymn played in hindi in its title song.

Wahi sachmuch me jaanta, ya nahi bhi jaanta.

Its surprising that thousands of years ago, people were willing to admit they didn't know a thing about God or creation. I don't know where that honesty disappeared.

They must have gone woefully wrong with their kids ;) .

The Imperialist Strikes Back

2007-01-15T03:11:00.000-08:00

I had to blog this bit of trivia.

What is common to Liberia, Myanmar, and the United States?

Answer: The only three countries that still follow the Imperial System of measure.

Cliff at slashdot pointed out this interesting little nugget. He also suggested that it might be a good idea for the US to switch to the metric system.

I thought it would be a very non-controversially good idea for the US to start getting used to the metric system. Besides the incentive of getting its name off the only list that reads more embarrassing than the Coalition of The Willing, there is also the confusion, sometimes very serious, trying to cope with two systems creates.

But Cliff was on to something, as he filed it under the worthwhile-but-pigs-are-likely-to-fly-first category. In vindication, the little entry generated one thousand three hundred-odd comments, with passionate arguments for and against. Clearly people do get worked up over the metric system.

But, it turns out, people get even further worked up than that. Though the protest against metrication is usually conventional, such as placards or Simpsonesque civil disobedience, some people have actually gone to the trouble to set up websites, of which slashdot points out freedom2measure.org. The reason given on the website is not laziness, or who's-going-to-go-about-changing-all-the-boards-now, or sheer pig-headedness (which are all perfectly good reasons, btw). No, it would threaten the American way of life. I guess if you provide logical reasons you run the risk of being refuted. But what to do of emotions. Dil to Pagal Hai.

In its defense, the website provides other reasons. For one, the metric system is sexist, as it was 'almost wholly created and standardized by male scientists and bureaucrats' (apparently because the lesbian cabal was busy with the imperial system). Also, it quotes the great French Man of Destiny:

The scientists adopted the decimal system on the basis of the metre as unit. Nothing is more contrary to the organization of the mind, memory and imagination. The new system will be a stumbling block and source of difficulties for generations to come. It is just tormenting the people with trivia.

-Napoleon Bonaparte

Seriously, who better to defend the imperial system than the grand imperialist himself?

A New Poet Arrives

2007-01-13T01:01:00.000-08:00

A New Poet Arrives

A new man flies in from Manchester.
Fran Frittlewood.
Death to the Public Schools,
Ready to piss in the eye of the Old Universities.

A big woolly striped scarf around his neck,
The hunched antagonism of a left wing student,
How right he is!
Through immense spectacles he sees clearly

That only a New Movement can save our souls.
Wordsworth's great beak was pecking at that apple.
The tree of knowledge,
Dividing line between the past and future.

Take off those vestments, and those vested interests.
Show as a naked soul. You must admit
He's onto something.
Change, in the Arts, is nearly always good.

- Gavin Ewart

The sarcasm almost killed me.
Gavin Ewart, an admirer of Auden and also Betjeman, is generally known for his light verse. There is, in his obituary in The Independent, another poem excerpt; containing, in characteristic english (or desi) style, a cricket reference.

All roads lead to...

2007-01-12T16:51:00.000-08:00

Austin for me.
Sigh!
Back home. After a long and winding vacation, with Slj.

Highlights include a visit to Canaan Valley, West Virginia, where in the beautiful countryside punctuated only by pickup trucks, snow-white churches and restaurants advertising home-made meals, I got my first sight ever of the leafless autumn I only knew through comparisons to Larkin's bored childhood.

Then a visit to Baltimore, MD, where at the science center embarrassingly(for us) short of adults, with an increasingly exasperated Slj beside me, I indulged my juvenile fascination with dinosaurs.

Finally a short but exciting trek at the Breakneck Ridge trail, NY, with my brother and his fiancee.

Canaan Valley, West Virginia:

Science Center, Baltimore, MD:

A Giganatosaur

Tyrannosaurus rex

Breakneck Ridge, NY

I thought this was a desi aunty monopoly

2006-12-28T19:46:00.000-08:00

'Pianist! Oh, that's one of the words they just love, almost as much as doctor, Doctor. And residency. And best of all, his own office. He opened his own office in Livingston. Do you remember Seymour Schmuck, Alex?" she asks me, or Aaron Putz or Howard Shlong, or some yo-yo I am supposed to have known in grade school twenty-five years ago, and of whom I have no recollection whatsoever. "Well, I met his mother on the street today, and she told me that Seymour is now the biggest brain surgeon in the entire Western Hemisphere. He owns six different split-level ranch-type houses made all of fieldstone in Livingston, and belongs to the boards of eleven synagogues, all brand-new and design by Marc Kugel, and last year with his wife and his two little daughters, who are so beautiful that they should be in college - he took them all to Europe for an eighty-million-dollar tour of seven thousand countries, some of them you never even heard of, that they made just to honor Seymour, and on top of that, he's so important, Seymour, that in every single city in Europe that they visited he was asked by the mayor himself to stop and do an impossible operation on a brain in hospitals that they also built for him right on the spot, and - listen to this - where they pumped into the operating room during the operation the theme song from Exodus so everybody should know what religion he is - and that's how big your friend Seymour is today! And how happy he makes his parents!"

- Philip Roth (Portnoy's Complaint)

2006-12-17T03:13:00.000-08:00

In case you have forgotten how exquisitely funny it is, or if you are wondering what I am doing up blogging at 5am, I discovered an hour ago that someone recently uploaded the first four episodes of Yes, Minister to youtube.

Another short clip, from Yes Prime Minister, where Sir Humphrey explains Britain's defence policy.

My favourite quote from the series:

"They like activity. It is their substitute for achievement."

I must be special, to need neither ;) .

Tuesday morning 4am

2006-12-12T02:07:00.000-08:00

Bhor

Good night, world. See you at 11.

2006-12-10T20:08:00.000-08:00

Tough week ahead.

The Truth about George

2006-12-09T15:24:00.000-08:00

George: Are you a philosopher?
I: Yes.
George :I am too.
I: What do you philosophize about?
George :I like kittens.
I: How about puppies?
George :Puppies are tasty.
I: Are they more tasty than kittens?
George :No. Humans are more intelligent.
I: Do you eat humans?
George :Yes.
I: Does that make you a cannibal?
George :No it makes me what I am.
I: And what are you?
George :Human.
I: So am I. What a coincidence. Do you like Shakespeare?
George :Yes, but some people do not like Shakespeare.
I: And do you like opera?
George :Not really.
I: Which is your favourite play by Shakespeare?
George : None, you talk to people that see Shakespeare? Aren't they on skivacations all the time?
I: Maybe skivacations is where secret cabals meet to watch Shakespeare.
George : No. I mean. You do not answer my questions.
I: I mention a lot of things that I don't even know of.
George :Yes, we humans are not perfect.

So, did he pass the Turing Test ?

For people who are not into machines for intelligent conversation, George is a chat robot with a famously snarky sense of humor, that won the Loebner award in 2005, for coming closest to passing the Turing Test. He almost did with me, above, but then an anaphor did not resolve, and the conversation went rapidly downhill. But still, in my experience with chatbots, this is the best conversation I have ever had.

George is available online for chat 24 hours a day, so is his cousin Joan, who won the 2006 Loebner award. But be warned, there are over a 100 people chatting with them at any given time, and you will not be spoilt for attention. First, there is a short wait time after each sentence, and also they maintain no memory of what you said a sentence ago(not that they can't do it, but with so many people talking to them at the same time, it is probably too much trouble). So conversations are more fun if each of your sentences stands independently by itself.

The way George works is different from most chatbots. It remembers smart things other people said to it. When you say something it searches its memory for smart things people said when it had said something similar to your current statement. In turn, it will remember all the things you say to it, and use them later, so you'll be training it as you talk.

As Maugham said (and I quote ;) ), quotation is a serviceable substitution for wit.

Another connect

2006-12-05T18:55:00.000-08:00

More trivia. Less nerdy than usual.

Who connects, the fifteenth Poet Laureate of England, the 'first American hero', the only character to appear in all M*A*S*H* episodes, and the first detective story.

Hint: Think British-born Oscar winner leading male.

Answer: Daniel Day-Lewis

Daniel Day-Lewis, son of Cecil Day-Lewis, the fifteenth Poet Laureate of England, famously played Hawkeye/Natty Bumppo in The Last of the Mohicans, the movie based on James Fennimore Cooper's novel. The tagline of the movie was the first American hero. Alan Alda's character Hawkeye in M*A*S*H* supposedly got that name because Cooper's famous novel was the only book his father ever read. The movie's director Michael Mann felt the audience would snicker at the name Natty Bumppo. So Day-Lewis' name was changed to Nathaniel Poe. Poe, of course, is credited with writing the first detective story(ok, this one is a slight stretch, but I wanted four :) ).

Related Trivia: Cecil Day-Lewis had strong communist leaning and fought for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. He also wrote seventeen successful crime novels under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake, when he initially couldn't make a living as a poet.

In the beginning was the nerd

2006-12-03T15:28:00.000-08:00

"Sir: In your otherwise beautiful poem 'The Vision of Sin', there is a verse which reads - 'Every moment dies a man, Every moment one is born.' It must be manifest that if this were true, the population of the world would be at a standstill...I would suggest that in the next edition of your poem you have it read - 'Every moment dies a man, Every moment 1 1/16 is born'...The actual figure is so long I cannot get it onto a line, but the believe the figure 1 1/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry."

- Charles Babbage (letter to Lord Tennyson)

From Doron Swade's The Cogwheel Brain.

The book does not clarify this, but I certainly hope to God he was kidding. Though it would surprise no one if the 'father' of computer engineering was a nerd.

First day at school

2006-12-02T00:07:00.000-08:00

First day at school
the large boy
kindly
hurled my ball
with amazing skill
high over the roof

soaring out of sight
out of my prosaic life

Unstintingly
I gave him
my admiration

As others have done
when their respect
money
virginity
honour hope and lives
have been hurled
triumphantly out of sight

- Michael Ivens(1914-2001)

First day at school, I was accosted by two kids on my way back home, who made fun of me and the stupid little briefcase-like steel box I used to carry to school(I never understood why I used to carry that back then, and not a school bag like everyone else). The box had its purposes: I gave their heads a solid smack each with the box and executed a quick exit while they lay flat on the ground bawling their throats out.

That is the first memory I have of being uncommonly pleased with myself.

2006-12-01T17:25:00.000-08:00

'Research ! A mere excuse for idleness; it has never achieved, and will never achieve any results of the slightest value.'

- Benjamin Jowett (1817-1893)
(English theologian, master of Balliol College, Oxford)

Someone got it right ;) .

Only connect

2006-11-22T11:08:00.000-08:00

Nerd trivia.

What is common to the alphabets x, q, z, and i, in the context of the Internet?

Answer: If you type x,q, i or z.com as the URL, it works. No, the other letters don't.

There are six single-letter domain names on the internet, which were registered before ICANN refused to distribute any more in 1993. They are, q.com for Qwest Communications; x.com owned by PayPal (it still works); z.com for Nissan's Z cars; i.net, a domain name registration company; q.net, for Q Networks; and x.org for the X.Org Foundation.

ICANN stopped giving out single-letter second-level domain names in 1993, because it was afraid that 'two-dot' domain names may not be enough to cover all the websites in the world, and it may need to use these single letter domain names to introduce another level (eg,: google.x.com ).

More nerd trivia.

Math is War

2006-11-15T19:31:00.000-08:00

Reductio ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician's finest weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess play: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game.

-G. H. Hardy (A Mathematician's Apology)

Wow. Hardy sure knew how to write.

Incidentally, this sounds even better in Bollywood hindi/urdu ;) : "shatranj me khiladi to bas ek pyanda ya ek mohra daanv pe lagata hai. Par Euclid wo shaqs hai jo saari baazi daanv pe lagaya karta tha."

PS: No disrespect to Hardy, of course.

Story my professor told me

2006-11-14T16:45:00.000-08:00

An engineering and a mathematics professor go on a camping trip. And because they did not consume enough Ramen in grad school, they carry a couple of packets with them, so they can have some for breakfast as well as dinner. Every morning and evening one of them has to light a fire, go down the hill they are camping on to get water from a river, boil Ramen in the water, and then wash the Ramen pot back by the river.

The first night the mathematics prof does everything according to plan. He lights the fire, gets the water, cooks Ramen, then washes the pot and brings it back. The next evening, its the engineer's turn, and he decides to do his friend a favor. He covers the dying evening fire with brush so its easy to relight in the morning, and he brings back water in the pot after washing.

The mathematician wakes up promptly at six. He notices the water in the pot, and the dormant fire. He promptly throws out the water, and extinguishes the embers. Rubbing his palms together with satisfaction, he says: "Now that reduces it to a problem with a previously-known solution."

2006-11-12T18:40:00.000-08:00

A friend blogs about what he aptly calls the Gowda circus ...

2006-11-11T21:56:00.000-08:00

If I were called in to construct a religion...

Philip Larkin reads his poem Water.

The text is here.

Few poems showcase Larkin's technical mastery as this poem. He sounds facetious when the poem starts: whoever gets called to construct a religion? The second line seems even stranger, and you wonder if he has any idea what he is talking about. But when the poem ends, merely twelve lines later, and only thirty seconds in his reading, he has already moved from his inane premise to build the sense of a religious experience.

Like many agnostics, Larkin had a clearer conception of what religion tries to answer, than the very religious.

There is one poem where he does it even better, his celebrated High Windows . Who else could write a poem that starts with the f-word, and ends in a church, and so convincingly?

I work all day, and get half drunk at night...

2006-11-10T23:17:00.000-08:00

The last poem Philip Larkin wrote was Aubade. An aubade is a special kind of poem, about two lovers separating at dawn. Larkin wrote his aubade to life. There is an audio recording online of him reading the poem. It is one of the most beautiful things I have ever heard.

For the visually inclined, here's a video of Alan Bennett reading Aubade, set to New Order's 'Your Silent Face'. But be warned, Alan Bennett is an excellent actor, but there ain't nothing like Aubade in the old man's voice himself :) .

And simply because I love it so much, I'll copy the poem below.

I work all day, and get half drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not used, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never:
But at the total emptiness forever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says no rational being
Can fear a thing it cannot feel, not seeing
that this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no-one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

The poem's sense of depression is almost numbing, and not for everyday, but when Keats said that truth is beauty, few poets took him seriously, but Larkin did. His poems always saw life 'plain as a wardrobe', and when he faces death, he cannot see it any differently.

What is strange is, what is Larkin doing in a Crowded House video?

Taal sa hilta raha man

2006-11-06T23:53:00.000-08:00

Dhar gaye mehndi rache
do haath jal me deep
janm-janmo taal sa hilta raha man

baanchte hum reh gaye
antarkatha
swarnakesha-
geetbandhuo ki vyatha
le gaya chunkar kamal-
koi hathi yuvraj
der tak shaival-sa hilta raha man

jangalo ka dukh
taton ki traasadi
bhool, sukh se so gayi-
koi nadi
thak gayi ladti hawaon se
abhaagi naanv,
aur jheene paal-sa hilta raha man

tum gaye kya-
jag hua andha kua
rail chhuti, reh gaya keval dhua
gungunate hum bhari aankhen-
phire sab raat,
haath ke rumal sa hilta raha man.

- Kishan Saroj

I had been planning to translate it to english, but I don't know if it will work in a translation. Definitely not in one by my hands.

You can read the poem in devanagri here .
The fonts can be downloaded here .

Dawkins clips again (Haggard and Al-Khatab)

2006-11-03T19:12:00.000-08:00

I did not know that Dawkins had done a BBC documentary, The Root of All Evil? in January 2006. This clip, that seems to be all over with the recent evangelical scandal, tipped me off. The most fascinating part of the clip is the pained expression on Dawkins' face, as Haggard bludgeons him to silence by the sheer arrogance of his humility.

Searching for other clips, I found this one about an interesting character called Yousef al-Khatab, aka Joseph Cohen, a secular New York Jew convert to Islam.

Dawkins is remarkably patient with him, but loses it in the end.

Yousef: ...Correct yourself, fix your society, fix your women.
Dawkins: Fix my women! Its not my business. Its my women's business.
Yousef: When you take women and dress them like whores on the street...
Dawkins: I don't dress women. They dress themselves!
Yousef: But you allow women to go on the streets dressed like this. What's going on with your society?

So he grew up in New York, and does not realize that men cannot 'fix' women? The good thing about being a fundamentalist is that, when you lose an argument, you do not even know it.

But what was saddest was the lost expression on Dawkins' face, as he tried to reason with these men, and failed each time. I don't know if he ever was naive enough to imagine he could use modus ponens with these people, but this sure looked like a learning experience for him.

I was getting bored with Dawkins' god-baiting, but now I think he is really doing us a favor.

Match Point

2006-11-03T00:48:00.000-08:00

"It would be fitting if I were apprehended... and punished. At least there would be some small sign of justice - some small measure of hope for the possibility of meaning."

I liked Match Point, what seemed like Woody Allen's interpretation of Crime and Punishment. Though the movie does not see any final redemption for its Raskolnikov. As a character scoffs: 'Faith is the path of least resistance'.

It does come across as pretentious at a couple of points, but I am willing to tolerate a hint of pretension, so long as a movie is interesting.

The Woody Allen movie I disliked was Manhattan, which was pretentious about quite stupid things.

Fire and Ice

2006-10-30T21:19:00.000-08:00

A long discussion on sepia mutiny today about science and religion. Reminded me of this poem.

Some say the world will end in fire;
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Ah, the not so gentle Frost. I wish we saw him more often.

The poem could be an allegory for so many things, but if science is fire and religion is ice, then I'd say it is a tossup between fire and ice.

Constructing HAL

2006-10-27T22:25:00.000-07:00

An interesting presentation by Doug Lenat, AI pioneer and founder of cycorp, at google.

Cyc plans to feed all the information in the world into a computer, and then let the computer use first order logic to reason with the information to answer questions. Now before we go all 2001 over this, its interesting that Lenat has been working at it for over twenty years, and the system can now answer questions like 'Is President Bush inhaling or exhaling right now?' correctly, with an 'I don't know'.

To be fair, some of the examples in the presentation are impressive, but is it a victory for AI, or for Moore's law? I am not a great fan of the Deep Blue approach to AI problems. It seems the way to solve an AI problem is to destroy it.

On the other hand, Lenat does point out a very serious problem with gradual learn-by-experience approaches: a Catch-22 situation where the less the system already knows, the harder it is for it to learn further or evolve. So classical AI might be a good bootstrap to give learning systems a headstart. That is actually a very good idea, and I haven't seen anyone doing that.

Only connect

2006-10-26T15:42:00.000-07:00

Nerd Trivia.

Connect the Unabomber, pornography, Lord Byron, and a concurrent programming language.

Answer: David Gelernter

David Gelernter, professor at Yale, and a target of the Unabomber, invented the concurrent programming language Linda, named after Linda Lovelace (the star of Deep Throat) as a twisted sort of joke, as the only other woman to have a programming language named after her is also a Lovelace: Ada, daughter of Lord Byron.

You can't make this stuff up.

Some of us just go one God further

2006-10-21T22:42:00.000-07:00

"Usually they say they were expecting a man in a wheelchair who can't talk. They confuse me with Stephen Hawking.
Is he going to hell too?
I reckon so...
Ya, maybe so, maybe so...God doesn't like black holes..."

Colbert interviews Richard Dawkins.

I idolized Dawkins as a teen, but he is getting a little repetitive. Still, for nostalgia's sake.

2006-09-15T22:21:00.000-07:00

A day before the (Moharram) processions were due to take place, a young [Sunni] Saudi prince told me he could not understand why the Shias had to scourge themselves. "The events they are remembering took place long before they were born, and there's no reason for them to blame themselves now because there's nothing they can do to stop what happened."

-Michael Field (Inside the Arab World)

It is gratifying to see how reasonable people can be about religion - if it is not theirs.

In Minstrels Today.

2006-08-25T14:47:00.000-07:00

Guest poem sent in by Lakshmi Jagad.

"On Death, without Exaggeration"

It can't take a joke,
find a star, make a bridge.
It knows nothing about weaving, mining, farming,
building ships, or baking cakes.

In our planning for tomorrow,
it has the final word,
which is always beside the point.

It can't even get the things done
that are part of its trade:
dig a grave,
make a coffin,
clean up after itself.

Preoccupied with killing,
it does the job awkwardly,
without system or skill.
As though each of us were its first kill.

Oh, it has its triumphs,
but look at its countless defeats,
missed blows,
and repeat attempts!

Sometimes it isn't strong enough
to swat a fly from the air.
Many are the caterpillars
that have outcrawled it.

All those bulbs, pods,
tentacles, fins, tracheae,
nuptial plumage, and winter fur
show that it has fallen behind
with its halfhearted work.

Ill will won't help
and even our lending a hand with wars and coups d'etat
is so far not enough.

Hearts beat inside eggs.
Babies' skeletons grow.
Seeds, hard at work, sprout their first tiny pair of leaves
and sometimes even tall trees fall away.

Whoever claims that it's omnipotent
is himself living proof
that it's not.

There's no life
that couldn't be immortal
if only for a moment.

Death
always arrives by that very moment too late.

In vain it tugs at the knob
of the invisible door.
As far as you've come
can't be undone.

-- Wislawa Szymborska

2006-06-26T17:53:00.000-07:00

"I have known more men destroyed by the desire to have wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and harlots."

-W. B. Yeats

I will not stick my neck out and agree with him entirely. But I can see what he was talking about.

Banality kills, faster than booze.

Thunder Road: The Dirge

2006-06-24T03:39:00.000-07:00

Bruce Springsteen has a different version of Thunder Road in his 'Live 1975-1985' collection. It is a tired dirge to youth and ambition, unlike the album version, which was a celebration, powerful and desperate at the same time.

The live version is a distinct song in its own right.

So you're scared and you're thinking
That maybe we ain't that young anymore

You don't believe him when he sings this in the original, but in the live version you do. Springsteen sounds old. And the girl seems much more important.In the album version, he is not talking to the girl. Sure she is addressed, but it is merely incidental. You can see the guy is wrapped up in what the future will bring him. It is Springsteen, of course, and you know that the future did bring him a lot, and the song becomes a huge celebration of that special belief that people have in their uniqueness, which was proven to be true in dear Bruce's case, and when you are young, you think it will be proven in your case too.

The live version came as a shock to me. Coming from Bruce the Boss, it should have been a gloat as much as a song. Who can sing the song with a smugger, more satisfied smile? But it is strange what he makes of it. Was Springsteen disappointed in any way? Well, I would have been too, if I had released such horribly mediocre albums as Human Touch and Lucky Town to follow up Darkness on the Edge!

Kidding. But only partly. We all end up being disappointed to some extent. Not with the world, but with ourselves. We are not the perfect, ideal heroes we see ourselves. As we grow, we catch ourselves lying, cheating, manipulating, compromising, and getting used to the mediocre, and we realize we are no better.

It's a town full of losers
And I'm pulling out of here to win.

Only, you pull into another town of losers. Maybe fewer losers, if you are lucky. But losers, nonetheless.

Yes, I am not exactly upbeat today.

Gieve Patel: Desi Doctor Poet

2006-06-23T01:49:00.000-07:00

It takes much time to kill a tree,
Not a simple jab of the knife
Will do it. It has grown
Slowly consuming the earth,
Rising out if it, feeding
Upon its crust, absorbing
Years of sunlight, air, water,
And out of its leprous hide
Sprouting leaves.

So hack and chop
But this alone won't do it.
Not so much pain will do it.
The bleeding bark will heal
And from close to the ground
Will rise curled green twigs,
Miniature boughs
Which if unchecked will expand again
To former size.

No,
The root is to be pulled out –
Out of the anchoring earth;
It is to be roped, tied,
And pulled out-snapped out
Or pulled out entirely,
Out from the earth-cave,
And the strength of the tree exposed,
The source, white and wet,
The most sensitive, hidden
For years inside the earth.

Then the matter
Of scorching and choking
In sun and air,
Browning, hardening,
Twisting, withering,

And then it is done.

- Gieve Patel

A killer of a poem, if you will excuse the lousy pun. I always admired its surgical precision, and today I discovered the poet was a doctor. Another poem by Gieve Patel, I discovered while searching for this one.

it makes sense not
to have the body
seamless,
hermetically sealed, a
non-orificial
box of incorruptibles.

The Seventh Seal

2006-05-06T03:17:00.000-07:00

I saw The Seventh Seal today. It was perhaps Ingmar Bergman's first major movie, and you can tell. Not in the sense that it is an immature or flawed work, but by the theme. The movie is about the Godless universe, the pointlessness of life, the inevitability of death, and the overall stupidity of it all. Only a fresh young film director can decide he shall make a movie that will ask the most important questions ever. And the central premise of the movie is breathtaking in its theatricality - death confronts a knight back from the Crusades in medieval times, and tells him he has to die. The knight challenges death to a game of chess. If he wins, death has to let him go. The very idea: a medieval knight and death play chess for the knight's life. Yet, it does not appear absurd in the movie. In Bergman's words:

'It was a delicate and dangerous artistic move, which could have failed. Suddenly, an actor appears in the whiteface, dressed all in black, and announces that he is Death. Everyone accepted the dramatic feat that he was Death, instead of saying "Come on now, don't try to put something over on us! You can't fool us! We can see that you are just a talented actor who is painted white and clad in black! You're not Death at all!".'

But somehow it does not happen.

One of the best scenes in the movie is where the knight Antonius Block(played by Max von Sydow) visits an old(even by middle ages standards ;) ) church. He goes to confession and death masquerades as the priest(screenplay translation from Swedish, excerpt from here):

The KNIGHT is kneeling before a small altar. It is dark and quiet around him.
The air is cool and musty. Pictures of saints look down on him with stony
eyes. Christ's face is turned upwards, His mouth open as if in a cry of
anguish. On the ceiling beam there is a representation of a hideous devil
spying on a miserable human being. The KNIGHT hears a sound from the
confession booth and approaches it. The face of DEATH appears behind the
grille for an instant, but the KNIGHT doesn't see him.

KNIGHT
I want to talk to you as openly as I can, but my heart is empty.

DEATH doesn't answer.

KNIGHT
The emptiness is a mirror turned towards my own face. I see myself in it, and I am filled with fear and disgust.

DEATH doesn't answer.

KNIGHT
Through my indifference to my fellow men, I have isolated myself from their company. Now I live in a world of phantoms. I am imprisoned in my dreams and fantasies.

DEATH
And yet you don't want to die.

KNIGHT
Yes, I do.

DEATH
What are you waiting for?

KNIGHT
I want knowledge.

DEATH
You want guarantees?

KNIGHT
Call it whatever you like. Is it so cruelly inconceivable to grasp God with the senses? Why should He hide himself in a mist of half-spoken promises and unseen miracles?

DEATH doesn't answer.

KNIGHT
How can we have faith in those who believe when we can't have faith in ourselves? What is going to happen to those of us who want to believe but aren't able to? And what is to become of those who neither want to nor are capable of believing?

The KNIGHT stops and waits for a reply, but no one speaks or answers him. There is complete silence.

KNIGHT
Why can't I kill God within me? Why does He lives on in this painful and humiliating way even though I curse Him and want to tear Him out of my heart? Why, in spite of everything, is He a baffling reality that I can't shake off? Do you hear me?

DEATH
Yes, I hear you.

KNIGHT
I want knowledge, not faith, not suppositions, but knowledge. I want God to stretch out His hand towards me, reveal Himself and speak to me.

DEATH
But He remains silent.

KNIGHT
I call out to Him in the dark but no one seems to be there.

DEATH
Perhaps no one is there.

KNIGHT
Then life is an outrageous horror. No one can live in the face of death, knowing that all is nothingness.

DEATH
Most people never reflect about either death or the futility of life.

KNIGHT
But one day they will have to stand at that last moment of life and look towards the darkness.

DEATH
When that day comes ...

KNIGHT
In our fear, we make an image, and that image we call God.

Wow!

Quoting Larkin:

'And saying so to some
Means nothing; others it leaves
Nothing to be said.'

For me it was the latter.

Rang De Basanti

2006-03-18T23:35:00.000-08:00

I always thought there were two kinds of men in this world; those who go to their death screaming, and those who go to their death in silence.
Then I met a third kind.

The movie rocks!

the four years...THE four years...

2006-03-18T18:27:00.000-08:00

A part-proxy Post: Courtesy Deepu

It has been aeons now and we started off at a time, which in hindsight, almost seems like some long-lost childhood.

Dodging the ragging sessions of seniors to the bullets of the STASI like police force; countless hours spent in idle planning about elusive treks across the length and breadth of the country; late efforts to hurdle across insurmountable-looking barriers for REC tests and then even latter minute decisions to give it all up for another session of idle gossip on esoteric topics from Alexander to Mobutu Sese Seko; planning dilettanteish endeavours ranging from breathing life to the dying embers of the quizzing culture at REC to still-born attempts at creating literary magazines and then scaling down our literary ambitions to a successful launch of a raunchier one; dumb charade competitions to forming a crack quiz team, which roared in the halcyon days and bowed out unfortunately with a quiet meow; emulating Lance Armstrong on our home stretches - the Ring Road; expanding our knowledge of ourselves with impromptu folk dance performances; the first session of Rum and Coke in the hallowed precincts of B-69; the rave sessions of bacchanalian merrymaking at Hotel Radhika; star-crossed hillocks which would go on to name this Yahoogroup; cycling to Mandira Dam and back in a 50 km cyclathon; Dolo Gobindo Sahoo and the Ranga-Kutta methods which makes the eponymous wedding boy what he is today; snipping off bullet-ridden jeans until they became your first acquisition of designer denim briefs; the highs and lows of the campus period;Buddykoti and myself striving hard to outdo each other on Mess Charges and occasionally on the lawns of Hall-3 as we fought over the rights of use of a Bhutanese owned cycle;load-shedding induced musical soirees on the corridors of successive hostels; the thousand mistrusts with Boney M over a whole lot of issues; Vishy boy being made to do the laps of the stadium as the 'Gunduest' of us all during ragging to the countless bangs that your fists had to endure to wake up Kumbhakarna from the arms of Morpheus; the 'bald-pate' fashion statement which elevated REC-Rourkela to the forefront of inter-REC haute-cotoure initiatives; cycling across the mountains behind Hall-5 and slipping into wilderness between empty snake-skins and mountains that seemed as if they were from Middle Earth; the first endless night of conversation in Hall-1 46 about puppy love episodes; the change of address of Suratna to the romantic alcove of the REC library as Cupid struck hard; morning shows at Konark and the libido-induced mass rush of Hall-1 to the Kama Sutra in the middle of Sem-1 exams; German club books and election strategies - phew!

And Ranga's endless wall-staring sessions(someday I expected him to start talking to it); the six week hiatus when we resolved not to discuss girls,and did not; the 3 days after that when we talked nothing except girls; Ranga and I forming an antakshari team, clearing the prelims to end the main rounds at MINUS five; Fredrick Wright's insufferable audio rounds; the depression in the civil(ranga, boney and vishy) camp, with SSPP saying aye to Kalia; our first quiz at REC(Hall-3 with Subrat), a day before the ED submission; surdie's eternally fathomless gyan on life, women and Nietzche; acting out Tierra del Feugo and god-knows-what-else for Dumb Charade practise; Deepu's indiscriminate beliicosity, including antagonists like Ratul and Swagat; his final revenge on Variyar; the tragi-comic sinedie; the Spice tent and the free cake coupons; the all night walks through Kharagpur; Ranga as Reading Room Sec, and the lurid magazines; the 250-odd times we listened to Bada Din on that odd contraption....
And on and on and on... Some of the above would perhaps be decipherable only to some and some others may just have become corrupted files in your memory due to non-use over the years - but we have the Aegean stables here of memories and we haven't even scratched the surface of the Pune ones. Guys, TheSadKaffe was created to keep rejigging the memories of the past and celebrate the togetherness that we created. It has been nearly 8 and a half years of knowing each other inside out and I guess, all of us have in a whole lot of unusual and queer ways, become a part of each other.

Vishy's marriage happened in a bit of a hurry and Wally, old boy and Priya, my sincere apologies for not having the time to pen down something in those maddening, frenzied days of B-School life. But as Ranga readies to tie the knot, I feel happy in a very quaint sort of way - almost as if the years are beginning to tell upon you and the feeling of an epochdawning and another setting. Don't know if I have been able to put it forth aptly, but I thought that I will scribble a few lines about the old days and hope, it brings a welcome whiff of nostalgia and a thin smile on the faces of all you hopeless bunch of baboons. Cheers RANGA boy and from everybody at TheSadKaffe, congratulations and best wishes.

Add a toast to THE SADKAFFE and all that it stands for.P.S. And to think of it,"Ranga" was never his name.

Yet each man kills

2006-03-06T14:14:00.000-08:00

Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

- Oscar Wilde

If you put the words kill and love in the same stanza, I guess you cannot go wrong.
It gets better.

Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the hands of Lust,
Some with the hands of Gold:
The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold.

Some love too little, some too long,
Some sell, and others buy;
Some do the deed with many tears,
And some without a sigh:
For each man kills the thing he loves,
Yet each man does not die.

Too many have lived

2006-03-06T14:07:00.000-08:00

Too many have lived
As we live
For our lives to be
Proof of our living.

Too many have died
As we die
For their deaths to be
Proof of our dying

A story by Dashiell Hammett begins with these lines. It was in a detective story collection I had. Far as I remember, I never read the story. But the lines would jump out of the book, eight lines of verse in a book containing approximately eighty murders.

Its cliched and teenagish. But like some people are suckers for romantic comedies, I am a sucker for this kind of stuff. I am quite the armchair revolutionary.

which simon and garfunkel album am I?

2005-12-03T15:43:00.000-08:00

center>
I'm Bridge Over Troubled Water!
Which Simon and Garfunkel album are you?

The answer my friend...

2005-09-27T15:35:00.000-07:00

There is the old Indian debate about arranged marriages vs love marriages. I always think it is a stupid debate...I mean, you do not decide you want a love marriage, and then go out looking for ways to get into one...if you do, it is probably more arranged than love...but there is another more interesting debate....is it a good idea to do the running-away-from-home thing to marry someone you want to marry?...how much is the 'love-of-your-life' thing really worth?

Love is a way too overrated emotion. It was the supposed grand solution to all of 20th century woes...perhaps like religion was before that...and its likely to continue that way...mainly through lack of competion...'I stand alone without beliefs, The only truth I know is you.'...how simple and comforting...to put your faith in 'you'...some you...

But if you have to do something for the 'you'...how far is it a good idea to go?...to damage relationship with your family, etc etc?....especially if their objections are the pointless ones...like community, religion, etc?....I think at this point it has nothing to do with the love thingie....it is about the type of person you are...if you are the pragmatic type, maybe you would not really want all that trouble...if you are the rebel, you might just go ahead and do it for the kick, and for the inevitable round of envy and applause...

I guess I am too cynical....yeah, I am...but then, life is a bore, and if you expect you will find someone who will make it endlessly exciting for you...well, good luck to you, and you will be the first ;) ....

I met someone today who wanted a) to do a PhD, b) marry someone he/she loves...and the family does not agree on either option...my advise would be...do both if you can...but drop the person if you have a choice, and go for the PhD...for a broken heart will mend...but a job you don't like...that really really sucks....

Doing a Larkin.

2005-08-25T19:39:00.000-07:00

Let me post my own attempt to do a Larkin, that is, try to recreate a fleeting feeling in verse.

Were we introduced again,
I will not stand frozen hapless,
Like someone caught in sudden rain.

Ok, its not a great poem. But its my blog.

Larkin's 'Coming'

2005-08-25T18:40:00.000-07:00

There are few things more difficult in poetry than to bring alive a single moment, a single feeling, just as it was felt, before it disappeared. Larkin is the master of the epiphany.

No poet creates a moment as effectively as Larkin does. It is this skill that makes him such a great artist, and lacking this talent, his poems will get tiresome. You meet the cynical old man in every poem, whose childhood is dull, the people he meets superficial and unworthy of consideration. Yet he has an appeal, because this grouchy old man observes the world stripped of all pretension.

I have a strange favourite among Larkin's poems - Coming.

On longer evenings,
Light, chill and yellow
Bathes the serene
Foreheads of houses.
A thrush sings,
Laurel-surrounded
In the bare deep garden,
Its fresh-peeled voice
Astonishing the woodwork.

It will be spring soon,
It will be spring soon-
And I, whose childhood
Is a forgotten boredom,
Feels like a child
Who comes on a scene
Of adults reconciling
And can understand nothing
Except the unusual laughter,
And starts to be happy.

It is not as popular as some of his other works, but I still love it more, as it brings to life this moment where you are alone somewhere with nature, and you feel its beauty, but at the same time its mysteriousness. Just like a child who feels happy on seeing adults around him happy, though does not always understand why.

But Larkin could not keep the grouchy old man out of this poem either.

And I, whose childhood
is a forgotten boredom.

Some people never change.

tv

2005-07-26T15:35:00.000-07:00

Caught some TV yesterday. Friends. Yeah, people exist who haven't watched Friends. Or they did, till yesterday.

One sequence reminded me of of a similar one from Frasier, where the dad has an extra $100 credit to his account. Miles asks him to return the money and he answers: 'Are you kidding? This is America. An entire nation built on the principle of finders keepers!'

Over to Friends, where one of the girls(don't ask me names, I don't remember) has an extra credit of $500 in her bank account. Someone asks her to go shopping with it, and she says, 'No, I can't. If I buy a pair of shoes with the money and I walk down the street in them, all I will hear as I walk is "not mine! not mine! not mine!'"

I think the Frasier joke was better.

darkness at noon.

2005-07-23T14:06:00.000-07:00

Started Koestler's Darkness at Noon yesterday evening. Yeah, its my old problem. Reading too many books together at the same time. But its interesting to read it side by side with Gorky Park. Both deal with the Soviet Union, but their heroes(or rather protagonists, as Rubashov, of Darkness, is not exactly heroic) cannot be more different. Arkady Renko is the man who refused to sell his soul. He is not burning with hatred for communism; he is probably too old and tired, and past all that. But he cannot take all that party and revolution and workers' paradise talk seriously. Its a farce to him. So he simply avoids anything to do with the party as far as possible, and sticks to his job as detective. That is a realistic potrayal of the closest one could come to dissidence in Soviet Russia.

Rubashov of Darkness at Noon is almost comical in comparison, with his faith in the future and how the Party will take the world to a new paradise.

When the novel starts he is locked up in a cell waiting for interrogation. He is finally caught in the net in one of the purges under No.1 (Stalin, I guess). So he broods intermittently over his past and over a toothache(Koestler very effectively uses the toothache as a symbol for his discomfort over things Rubashov did for the party in the past). And all through his brooding, he wonders about - and this is the theme of the book - whether the ends justify the means. This is supposedly the central problem in the book. But I think the way problems should be defined, it is a very badly defined problem.

For one, the ends, the way Rubashov describes them, are laughable. He believes that the revolution is 'with' the forces of history, and it will create a completely just society and a paradise on earth for the masses. Now, such ends- okay, this sounds a little too scientific- are not quantifiable at all! How do you measure the justness of a society? How do you know when you have reached a completely just one? Anyone who believes such ends is simply deluding himself, cos he himself will not know even if he has reached those ends. And even if he does, how will he prove it to others? Darkness is a good book if you want a peek into the mind of a failed Communist, but as a general book raising question of ends vs means, I think it fails.

To define a good 'ends vs means' problem, we need a situation where the ends can clearly be seen, be measured, to be good. Then we can think about the means. A science fiction work may define the problem more clearly.

Suppose you have a planet where people exist with two kinds of mutations. Some have one heart, some have two. Now, the people with one heart can live easily with one, but the people with two hearts, their bodies are used to twice the pumping since birth, can only survive if they have two hearts. Suppose a 100 people on this planet(all with one heart) are about to die of heart failure. Should you round up 50 2-hearted people (at random) and use their hearts for transplant, and save 50 lives on balance?

Ok, all that was a little creepy. But it attacks the means vs ends question with more clarity, cos at least you know the ends are measurably better. Not some vague workers' paradise in the future.

You can solve a tough problem, but what you can never solve is a badly defined problem. That is what I don't like about Darkness at Noon. It would have been fine if Koestler had stuck to depicting communism and why he hated it. But to set it up as an example where the means failed to justify the ends seemed taking it a little too far.

Gorky Park

2005-07-22T14:50:00.000-07:00

Reading Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park. Had tried to read it when I was at Rourkela...couldn't finish it. Well, I was a kid then; this time, I think I will. Its a little ho-hum as a murder mystery. First thing, you do not even know the identity of the three people who were killed(they are discovered in Gorky Park, their faces carved off, their digits chopped off, so there is no identity), so you can't hatch conspiracy theories of your own. Second Renko(the hero) is so convinced that the KGB did it(who else?) , that you believe him, and so there is no mystery at all!

But the description of life in the USSR is v v good. There is one scene I loved, where Renko is at a party, and the hosts show him their new washing machine, 'top of the line' - one they waited 10 months for, where they could have got another model in 3 months, cos they wanted the best. Then they try to give Renko a demo and the machine breaks down. They almost bring the machine to pieces trying to fix it, but no, it doesn't work. Then as good hosts they ask Renko not to tell Natasha, who just got a new piece for herself. Unfortunately Natasha finds a loose knob from the machine lying around, and so they have to confess that the washer 'isn't quite working'. Natsha is not bothered:

' "That's all right. We can still show it to people." She seemed genuinely content.'

Touche!

2005-07-15T22:38:00.000-07:00

Well, I have been gone a long time. I kind of expected that. It is amazing I came back. Friday night and I am sitting in the lab trying to implement k-medoids clustering in MATLAB.

Well...I am not quite feeling myself. You can tell that by the fact that I am here on my own volition trying to write something. Normally I do not feel like writing anything. Quite a strange fact, considering my lifelong ambition was to become a writer....

Pluto went away and I am still not over that. I think back to him all the time. I think I had built him up to be something v big in my life while I was away from him for so long.

Pluto was eleven years old. I am still not sure if that is old enough for a dog. Everytime I hear of dogs that last/lasted beyond 11 years, I feel bad. But I think we took good care of him, while he was around.

To sundays

2005-05-01T15:49:00.000-07:00

Had a pleasantly slow start today. Got up and out of bed at 10:00am, went downtown for my weekly supplies- bean cans and the rest(my love of rajma is really standing me in v good stead here) , then just strolled into the Borders book shop. after a long time. An hour's window shopping there, which was good fun. Read through portions of 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X'. Have to read that one from beginning to end sometime.

Slj is reading 'A bend in the river' by Naipaul. Was discussing Naipaul with her over the phone today, and I think I will go to the library today to get some of his books.

First time I tried to read Naipaul was at REC, and it did not work out too well. I just couldn't stand all the anti-India talk. I could stand it a lot better in Pune. He was a pleasant antidote to the sugary Darlymple. Read Darlymple and Naipaul on India, and you will think they are talking about entirely different countries. India is the elephant and these two guys are the blind men of the parable.

I am not surprised Darlymple is excited by India, because he is a historian, and that is something Naipaul definitely is not. He does not even try. He just gets off the bus, catalogues all the things that don't work, and takes the next bus to another new place. He has no patience for any sort of historical diagnosis of how things came to be that way. So if there is a chance things will change in the future, he never has a clue. That is why many of his 70s and 80s books on India seem so dated now. But still he is a good read, for his sharp eye and acerbic tongue, and his eye for flaws. I doubt he is ever happy with his wife's cooking. She must either be putting too much salt all the time, or too little.

Om Ganeshay Namah! ;)

2005-04-29T15:32:00.000-07:00

So...here begins. After flirting endlessly with the idea of keeping a blog, I have finally beaten the procrastinator inside...though i guess it'd be too early to plant the flag and do the victory dance. I'd honestly be surprised if I ever come around to putting a second post here.