Author's note: I found this post buried amongst several drafts that I had left untouched, deteriorating in the drawers of my blog. It's more of a diary entry of the 4 years of life in IIT looked at in retrospect, but it's...slightly weirdly written.
Four years. Full circle.
Starting with studying following a long bout of even more studying and preparedness for God knows what. Before a blink and before your mouth can whisper the words "Physics" swept into the general mayhem of Computer Science oh my God Computer Science the El Nino of this day and age. Then induction and recursion and the world becoming clear to you no wait its gone again because here come AVL trees and that weird rotation and poof you're gone. Then back again through algorithms and languages and numerical computing and image processing till I close my ears and say no no no more trying to make the little numbers move faster and yet do that same thing looking at a computer screen full of numbers to make them behave they should behave. While I wait for the rest of my life to take off and let go.
Words on a black board, words on a white board. Words on a white board in Bangalore, sitting in Microsoft feeling all free and unreal and finding "Computationalism" a word that means nothing and yet so much because it is at the end of four years of that very word gnawing at your mind. And then a blur and a whiteboard again and matrices and classmates and photographs and thoughts amiss and heartbeats racing. Then back again through time and those thoughts you must not speak now because what's buried is buried but it wasn't at that time because everyone knew it except me and because it was me they were talking about behind closed doors into innocent ears. Then race ahead because memories have a habit of erasing everything just when you want those memories back because if memories weren't erased we would all be Turing machines with infinite tapes, not feeling anything because it hurts too much to feel. And memories that want to erase those parts too, the good ones that you want to hold on to because obviously good things can't survive without the bad. Errors go and so do mistakes, we converge to a solution we don't even care about because what we found has been erased. Little waves with soft white hands.
And down and down and further down where those hidden demons of guilt and self pity coil into each other like mating snakes. And the mistakes you did and the words you said because they were not spoken but typed and I couldn't look into your eyes when I said them and you were so far away you wouldn't have heard if I had shouted. So like words on a computer screen, commands that have no meaning but will go drive the little read write heads that will erase everything. rm -rf *. And then you can go on and put new stuff in there while I am left grapling with a connection gone bad which funnily is how everything else around is, the numbers dont add up, I'm not converging to a solution and the errors are not going down fast enough and what the heck am I doing the right thing?
Right thing, right thing, right thing, right thing and suddenly who are you kidding you've been a criminal all along. Tick tick tick tick then oh my god you've been Cross all your life.
Then four years later you realise we are all wrong, and the only task now to be done is to learn to forgive yourself.
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Will you teach me to dream this once?
Will you teach me to dream this once?
I knew how to, long ago
Sitting often, by the window
I wondered and thought and wished so
I never knew then that sometimes the night
Must go without its moonlight
Or sometimes the sun would come to the day
But leave it all a starving gray
I didn’t know then that roses too
Wither away like the others do
I didn’t know then that I would too
When so many dreams didn’t come true
Will you stay with me a little while?
Will you be there on those nights
When it’s all darkness and no moonlight?
Will you listen to me when I have stories to tell
Or when there’s nothing to say and its silent as hell?
Will, when it gets too real
When things start coming, crashing, down,
Will you help me put the bricks back
Will you help me once again off the ground?
These wings you give are all very well
The skies are blue and there’s lots to tell
But will you be there if the garden’s no more
And dreams have turned into nightmares sore?
I knew how to, long ago
Sitting often, by the window
I wondered and thought and wished so
I never knew then that sometimes the night
Must go without its moonlight
Or sometimes the sun would come to the day
But leave it all a starving gray
I didn’t know then that roses too
Wither away like the others do
I didn’t know then that I would too
When so many dreams didn’t come true
Will you stay with me a little while?
Will you be there on those nights
When it’s all darkness and no moonlight?
Will you listen to me when I have stories to tell
Or when there’s nothing to say and its silent as hell?
Will, when it gets too real
When things start coming, crashing, down,
Will you help me put the bricks back
Will you help me once again off the ground?
These wings you give are all very well
The skies are blue and there’s lots to tell
But will you be there if the garden’s no more
And dreams have turned into nightmares sore?
Writing again!
Just wrote a story. You can get it here: The Gift. Its my first foray into fantasy, so I hope you'll be a little lenient with criticism :P. Will blog again soon....
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Life is beautiful
Phew...what a journey it has been.
When I look back at the past two or three years of my life, and especially at the last few months, life has been a whirlwind. I have been working almost non-stop for the past year, and in the meanwhile my fascination with my work has deteriorated into disappointment, sometimes even disillusionment. In the backdrop of all this I have made the decision of going for a Ph.D, and at the same time been assailed by doubts as to whether this was the right choice. And somewhere down the line I have had a remarkably bittersweet experience with relationships.
Then suddenly, this other day, in the midst of all this chaos, I decided to take a day off. Off, not as in run off to a movie, or catch a hasty train to a hill station. Off, as in the idle, time-is-eternal off: grab a novel, sit down where the only company you have is yourself, and watch time fly slowly by.
It was afternoon, and the sun was out, strong, but not scorching. In front of our hostel is a small garden of sorts (a herbal garden supposedly), and strewn about are a couple of benches and swings. I sat on a swing, behind which towered a tree. The sun shone through the leaves, and made beautiful patterns of light and shadow on the book I was reading. Every now and then a cool gust of wind blew, brushing through the leaves and the blades of grass so that they rustled. In front of me a small ladybird toiled its way through the grass.
But it was the pace of time then that struck me most. Time did not exist here. Time was a concept unknown to this world. Here the wind did not care whether it was 1 pm or 1:05 pm. The grass did not care whether I managed to stick to a deadline or not. The ladybird had no assignments to make, no papers to publish, no goals to follow. They were just there, in the present, eternally in the present. Looking at that scene you felt that this here could never change; that this moment would go on forever, and that sometime after eternity you would look up from your tranquil reverie and find that ages have passed, that you are old now, and it doesn't matter that you spent your life looking at the blade of grass fluttering in the wind, for that was somehow what you were born to do in the first place.
How different this was from the world in which we lived! How different from numbers running down a computer screen: 27 seconds to run through 30, 000 data points! How different from assignments, projects, applications, forms, mails, letters and phone calls! How different from the constant second hand chasing you through the day, reminding you that hey, you have a life to take care of. Life? What life? Can life be spent chasing life?
Let us pause for a minute here. Let us not rush through life, let us not aim at accomplishing a million things in life. Let us just learn to watch instead of look, absorb instead of witness. Let us not, as Wordsworth said, lay waste our powers, getting and spending, late and soon. For life is not a trial, life is not a mission we have to accomplish. Life is beautiful, and it is meant to be lived.
When I look back at the past two or three years of my life, and especially at the last few months, life has been a whirlwind. I have been working almost non-stop for the past year, and in the meanwhile my fascination with my work has deteriorated into disappointment, sometimes even disillusionment. In the backdrop of all this I have made the decision of going for a Ph.D, and at the same time been assailed by doubts as to whether this was the right choice. And somewhere down the line I have had a remarkably bittersweet experience with relationships.
Then suddenly, this other day, in the midst of all this chaos, I decided to take a day off. Off, not as in run off to a movie, or catch a hasty train to a hill station. Off, as in the idle, time-is-eternal off: grab a novel, sit down where the only company you have is yourself, and watch time fly slowly by.
It was afternoon, and the sun was out, strong, but not scorching. In front of our hostel is a small garden of sorts (a herbal garden supposedly), and strewn about are a couple of benches and swings. I sat on a swing, behind which towered a tree. The sun shone through the leaves, and made beautiful patterns of light and shadow on the book I was reading. Every now and then a cool gust of wind blew, brushing through the leaves and the blades of grass so that they rustled. In front of me a small ladybird toiled its way through the grass.
But it was the pace of time then that struck me most. Time did not exist here. Time was a concept unknown to this world. Here the wind did not care whether it was 1 pm or 1:05 pm. The grass did not care whether I managed to stick to a deadline or not. The ladybird had no assignments to make, no papers to publish, no goals to follow. They were just there, in the present, eternally in the present. Looking at that scene you felt that this here could never change; that this moment would go on forever, and that sometime after eternity you would look up from your tranquil reverie and find that ages have passed, that you are old now, and it doesn't matter that you spent your life looking at the blade of grass fluttering in the wind, for that was somehow what you were born to do in the first place.
How different this was from the world in which we lived! How different from numbers running down a computer screen: 27 seconds to run through 30, 000 data points! How different from assignments, projects, applications, forms, mails, letters and phone calls! How different from the constant second hand chasing you through the day, reminding you that hey, you have a life to take care of. Life? What life? Can life be spent chasing life?
Let us pause for a minute here. Let us not rush through life, let us not aim at accomplishing a million things in life. Let us just learn to watch instead of look, absorb instead of witness. Let us not, as Wordsworth said, lay waste our powers, getting and spending, late and soon. For life is not a trial, life is not a mission we have to accomplish. Life is beautiful, and it is meant to be lived.
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Against Rationality-Part I
I guess four years is a wee bit too late to vent my anger at life, the universe and everything in general and the engineering world in particular, but hell, better late than never. Plus, four years of harrowing experiences in the midst of scientists and engineers does things to you, and I have to say some things before I go a little balmy in the head.
So this post (and a few more to come) is about "rationality", "logic", "reason", "science", "intellect", "intelligence" and so on and so forth. It is about the standard dogma that is indoctrinated into so many Indians, most of whom land in such grotesque places as the IITs. It is about the belief, reiterated till it becomes fact, that yes, life is logical, that reason, cause and effect are things of infallible accuracy and unfailing integrity. More particularly, it is about the high status we accord to science, logic and reason, and the farthings we throw at everything else.
So let me start. Being, unfortunately, a science student myself, I will let this first post follow "logic" through science.
Science itself is logical, and so is mathematics, so what use would it be to look at logic within the framework of science? Actually a lot, and for that precise reason. Science is something we always regard as being logical, in other words, being derived from fixed, though maybe unknown, rules. Rules, of deduction, inference and reasoning. We science people like so much to lay down rules, to lay down formulae, and to exclaim with unabashed pride that, hey, this sequence of symbols on paper explains everything!
Towards the end of the 19th century, this was the general mood prevalant among mathematicians. Mathematical proofs were getting more and more formal, with fixed rules of inference, and mathematical logic had firmly taken ground. Mathematical proofs were becoming more and more "mechanical". Hilbert, as part of his 20 problems, asked the obvious question (Entscheidungsproblem): How mechanical are mathematical proofs? Does there exist a set of axioms and a set of inference rules that will lead, "logically", and hence "mechanically", to every known theorem in the book?
If Hilbert's proposition was true, all that you needed for mathematics was a set of symbols, and a set of axioms and inference rules operating on those symbols. Nothing more. What those symbols meant, or if they had any meaning at all, would be insignificant. Meaning would essentially a matter of book-keeping
Then came Kurt Godel, and his Incompleteness theorem: For any formal logical system that was consistent, there was always a statement that would be true if your axioms were true, but that you could never prove by the rules of logic. In other words, logic, the simple rules of inference, would not suffice to determine or prove this statement, and yet this statement would be true. The way you could prove this statement was to talk about the meaning of the statement, something that logic was incapable of doing.
The point I want to drive home is this: logic is not how theorems are proven. Logic is not how science happens. Science and Mathematics, though they seem driven by logic, are not driven by logic, or at least not logic in the sense of a set of axioms and inference rules. What it is that drives them, and what kind of "logic" is involved, well, I'll harp on that on my next post.
So this post (and a few more to come) is about "rationality", "logic", "reason", "science", "intellect", "intelligence" and so on and so forth. It is about the standard dogma that is indoctrinated into so many Indians, most of whom land in such grotesque places as the IITs. It is about the belief, reiterated till it becomes fact, that yes, life is logical, that reason, cause and effect are things of infallible accuracy and unfailing integrity. More particularly, it is about the high status we accord to science, logic and reason, and the farthings we throw at everything else.
So let me start. Being, unfortunately, a science student myself, I will let this first post follow "logic" through science.
Science itself is logical, and so is mathematics, so what use would it be to look at logic within the framework of science? Actually a lot, and for that precise reason. Science is something we always regard as being logical, in other words, being derived from fixed, though maybe unknown, rules. Rules, of deduction, inference and reasoning. We science people like so much to lay down rules, to lay down formulae, and to exclaim with unabashed pride that, hey, this sequence of symbols on paper explains everything!
Towards the end of the 19th century, this was the general mood prevalant among mathematicians. Mathematical proofs were getting more and more formal, with fixed rules of inference, and mathematical logic had firmly taken ground. Mathematical proofs were becoming more and more "mechanical". Hilbert, as part of his 20 problems, asked the obvious question (Entscheidungsproblem): How mechanical are mathematical proofs? Does there exist a set of axioms and a set of inference rules that will lead, "logically", and hence "mechanically", to every known theorem in the book?
If Hilbert's proposition was true, all that you needed for mathematics was a set of symbols, and a set of axioms and inference rules operating on those symbols. Nothing more. What those symbols meant, or if they had any meaning at all, would be insignificant. Meaning would essentially a matter of book-keeping
Then came Kurt Godel, and his Incompleteness theorem: For any formal logical system that was consistent, there was always a statement that would be true if your axioms were true, but that you could never prove by the rules of logic. In other words, logic, the simple rules of inference, would not suffice to determine or prove this statement, and yet this statement would be true. The way you could prove this statement was to talk about the meaning of the statement, something that logic was incapable of doing.
The point I want to drive home is this: logic is not how theorems are proven. Logic is not how science happens. Science and Mathematics, though they seem driven by logic, are not driven by logic, or at least not logic in the sense of a set of axioms and inference rules. What it is that drives them, and what kind of "logic" is involved, well, I'll harp on that on my next post.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Questions
What is the meaning of life? What is the purpose? Why the big deal about being born, crying and laughing, loving and hating, living and dying? Why are there relationships? Why are they so important? What is so unfathomable about solitude? Why must I need someone else?
What exactly is meaning, if I am searching for the meaning of life? How do I define meaning? Understanding? Truth? What is truth? What is reality? Is it confined to what we perceive? Or is it something other, our understanding of which is necessarily imperfect? Is meaning abstract? Is it tangible? Is it a mathematical equation that will crop up on running a MATLAB code? Can it be encapsulated in an equation?
What is my reality? Who am I? Am I just defined by how I act towards others? Is my identity dfefined only by my actions? What about thought? Am I defined only by my thoughts? Do I exist only because I think?
What does it mean to think? Who is thinking? Is the neuron in my head firing at so many times a second thinking? Does it know it is making me happy or sad? Does it have an inkling of the questions I am asking? Does the brain have an idea? Can I exist outside of my thoughts? Can I exist without my brain? I don't think during sleep; don't I exist in sleep?
Who is this I? Why do I keep saying I? What does this mass of cellls and tissues have to do with me? What prevents me from taking a scapel and dissecting myself to see what I look like? Why is this I so important? Why do we never hurt our 'I', but somehow always manage to hurt our 'we'? What is it that makes you different from me? Why are your thoughts your own, and why are my thoughts my own? If this I is embodied in a physical form why can't I take it out and keep it in a glass jar forever?
Is I abstract? What about thought? What about meaning? How much of it is captured in the alphas and betas of science? What prevents me from writing the Schrodinger equation for everything? Can this everything reside in an equation? Can this be a computer program, with an input and an output, and we merely players, chips in the Turing machine? Is there a tape running somewhere with a pattern of 0s and 1s that tells me everything about everything? If not, why am I studying science? Why am I looking at alphas and betas and trying to decipher meaning, if meaning doesn't reside in them? What does meaning, truth, reality, consciousness, life reside in? What are these words, and why are we so obsessed with them we write blog posts about them?
Signing off...
What exactly is meaning, if I am searching for the meaning of life? How do I define meaning? Understanding? Truth? What is truth? What is reality? Is it confined to what we perceive? Or is it something other, our understanding of which is necessarily imperfect? Is meaning abstract? Is it tangible? Is it a mathematical equation that will crop up on running a MATLAB code? Can it be encapsulated in an equation?
What is my reality? Who am I? Am I just defined by how I act towards others? Is my identity dfefined only by my actions? What about thought? Am I defined only by my thoughts? Do I exist only because I think?
What does it mean to think? Who is thinking? Is the neuron in my head firing at so many times a second thinking? Does it know it is making me happy or sad? Does it have an inkling of the questions I am asking? Does the brain have an idea? Can I exist outside of my thoughts? Can I exist without my brain? I don't think during sleep; don't I exist in sleep?
Who is this I? Why do I keep saying I? What does this mass of cellls and tissues have to do with me? What prevents me from taking a scapel and dissecting myself to see what I look like? Why is this I so important? Why do we never hurt our 'I', but somehow always manage to hurt our 'we'? What is it that makes you different from me? Why are your thoughts your own, and why are my thoughts my own? If this I is embodied in a physical form why can't I take it out and keep it in a glass jar forever?
Is I abstract? What about thought? What about meaning? How much of it is captured in the alphas and betas of science? What prevents me from writing the Schrodinger equation for everything? Can this everything reside in an equation? Can this be a computer program, with an input and an output, and we merely players, chips in the Turing machine? Is there a tape running somewhere with a pattern of 0s and 1s that tells me everything about everything? If not, why am I studying science? Why am I looking at alphas and betas and trying to decipher meaning, if meaning doesn't reside in them? What does meaning, truth, reality, consciousness, life reside in? What are these words, and why are we so obsessed with them we write blog posts about them?
Signing off...
Sunday, January 3, 2010
Brave new world
This is kind of a response to a friends post in his own blog (see here). I guess another blog post on the same thing is not going to mean much as far as the general creative content of the web is concerned. But if some day blog posts were to count as votes, I would want this voice to be loud enough for the rest of the world (or at least the rest of the country) to sit up and listen.
The world is full of people who work for money, fame, power, or more generally for the carrot or the stick. IIT is especially bloated with such people. It is frustrating, stifling and depressing. I am more comfortable if no one worked at all. If no one studied, and all the IITs and every engineering college in the country ran empty. I am more comfortable with a half-wit who is enraptured by science than by a super-intelligent genius who has his eyes set on the 20-something lakh package at the end of his student life. Frankly, the latter kind of people scare me. Yes, I agree everyone has a reason for wanting fame, money, or whatever, but by that measure Pakistan wants Kashmir, US wants oil and Osama wants the whole world. I don't think I am exactly comfortable with the idea.
I hope you get what I am driving at. A genius working for money is more dangerous than the entire Taliban put together. He might work on a nuclear bomb and sell it off to the highest bidder. Okay, that was scary. On a smaller scale he will simply apply his brains where the money is, working for a corporate giant while the vast damned world waits for someone intelligent enough to solve its problems. Or perhaps he will churn out papers at an alarming rate on how to make epsilon differences to little-known algorithms that matter not except to settle arm-chair disputes over expensive luncheons.
Money, power, fame, papers, accolades. It is all the same. Work not for the motive, the Bhagvad Gita tells us. Work for work's sake, work for the joy inherent in the work itself. Learn for the joy of knowledge. Study for the sake of the joy inherent in discovery. Anything else you do is a sin. A crime. It is murder, of the subject of your study, and of yourself. Getting an A on the course does not mean you learnt something in the course. The grades count for nothing. Zero. Zilch. Anything you do, any work you do, must be done for the task's own sake. Nothing more, nothing less. Otherwise it counts for nothing. Otherwise you could be replaced by a computer churning numbers.
The thing that I want to raise my voise against is not just that. It is something deeper, although I hate to call it this: the system. The system, meaning all of you, me, the professors, everybody, we encourage this attitude. You get projects based on your CGPA. Why? Take it from me, I have gotten A's in courses I never learnt anything from. Why must a low CGPA mean a lack of passion? You get into IIT based on an entrance exam. Why? What does the entrance exam measure? Does it measure passion, a desire to know more? Will it reveal an interest in science? How? When did a pen and paper test ever measure interest and passion?
The professors look at CGPAs when they judge students. The students look at CGPA when they take up courses. In this shithole, someone who is genuinely interested is kicked out of the picture. To do anything he wants to do he has to put forward his gradesheet, and to make his gradesheet look good he has to take up courses he has no interest in. Slowly he lets go of science and looks at the little numbers that add up, like the speedometer in a car race. So many kilometers left, so many covered. Slowly he becomes one of them, one of those who work for the grades. He will pick up a job that will pay him well, bide his life like a fucking machine working for peanuts, even as the child within him, once open-mouthed in awe at the world around him, is stifled, smothered and killed.
Great world, this, the one we live in.
The world is full of people who work for money, fame, power, or more generally for the carrot or the stick. IIT is especially bloated with such people. It is frustrating, stifling and depressing. I am more comfortable if no one worked at all. If no one studied, and all the IITs and every engineering college in the country ran empty. I am more comfortable with a half-wit who is enraptured by science than by a super-intelligent genius who has his eyes set on the 20-something lakh package at the end of his student life. Frankly, the latter kind of people scare me. Yes, I agree everyone has a reason for wanting fame, money, or whatever, but by that measure Pakistan wants Kashmir, US wants oil and Osama wants the whole world. I don't think I am exactly comfortable with the idea.
I hope you get what I am driving at. A genius working for money is more dangerous than the entire Taliban put together. He might work on a nuclear bomb and sell it off to the highest bidder. Okay, that was scary. On a smaller scale he will simply apply his brains where the money is, working for a corporate giant while the vast damned world waits for someone intelligent enough to solve its problems. Or perhaps he will churn out papers at an alarming rate on how to make epsilon differences to little-known algorithms that matter not except to settle arm-chair disputes over expensive luncheons.
Money, power, fame, papers, accolades. It is all the same. Work not for the motive, the Bhagvad Gita tells us. Work for work's sake, work for the joy inherent in the work itself. Learn for the joy of knowledge. Study for the sake of the joy inherent in discovery. Anything else you do is a sin. A crime. It is murder, of the subject of your study, and of yourself. Getting an A on the course does not mean you learnt something in the course. The grades count for nothing. Zero. Zilch. Anything you do, any work you do, must be done for the task's own sake. Nothing more, nothing less. Otherwise it counts for nothing. Otherwise you could be replaced by a computer churning numbers.
The thing that I want to raise my voise against is not just that. It is something deeper, although I hate to call it this: the system. The system, meaning all of you, me, the professors, everybody, we encourage this attitude. You get projects based on your CGPA. Why? Take it from me, I have gotten A's in courses I never learnt anything from. Why must a low CGPA mean a lack of passion? You get into IIT based on an entrance exam. Why? What does the entrance exam measure? Does it measure passion, a desire to know more? Will it reveal an interest in science? How? When did a pen and paper test ever measure interest and passion?
The professors look at CGPAs when they judge students. The students look at CGPA when they take up courses. In this shithole, someone who is genuinely interested is kicked out of the picture. To do anything he wants to do he has to put forward his gradesheet, and to make his gradesheet look good he has to take up courses he has no interest in. Slowly he lets go of science and looks at the little numbers that add up, like the speedometer in a car race. So many kilometers left, so many covered. Slowly he becomes one of them, one of those who work for the grades. He will pick up a job that will pay him well, bide his life like a fucking machine working for peanuts, even as the child within him, once open-mouthed in awe at the world around him, is stifled, smothered and killed.
Great world, this, the one we live in.
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