An Indian Summer

I wrote a story! This one is set in a background of global warming and climate change.
Read it here!

"Breathe! You are alive!"

I was walking down campus here in Berkeley the other day, along a path I tread often, indeed everyday, and I found this gem of a statement written in chalk on the road.

"Breathe! You are alive!" the writer said, with two little hearts drawn on either side of the words.

I continued walking, but the two sentences reverberated in my head. It was a simple statement of course. I mean, what could be simpler? Breathe, because you are alive. Well, duh! Of course I am breathing, won't I be dead if I didn't?

But then, how often do we think of the fact that we are alive? Alive, as opposed to dead, as opposed to inanimate, a pointless existence that just goes from one day to the next as the earth goes around the sun? Alive, as opposed to a stone that sits there, silent, till it is kicked about; alive, as opposed to dead, as most of the universe is; a cold lifeless place, most of it, with perhaps only the third small planet from a medium sized star capable of giving birth to life.

Life! What a miracle it is! Don't you see? You and I are part of miracles! Living, breathing miracles! How beautiful and magnificent are those millions of cells that pervade our body, constantly metabolizing, with their elaborate machinery of nuclei and mitochondria and ribosomes and DNA, a whole factory packed in a system so small it would put the best engineer to shame! How beautiful the lungs, full of tiny balloons to allow diffusion of oxygen as the blood passes behind the thin walls, how amazing the notion of  diaphragm that goes in and out, up and down to control intake and outgo, and how wonderful to know that even as I am writing this and you are reading this the whole machinery is going on and on, lub dub, lub dub, a wonderful incessant machine bringing in the precious fuel of oxygen, itself left behind by the sudden appearance several million years ago of a breed of creatures capable of actually storing energy, actually holding onto the sun's fusion; the best solar cells there are. And how wild that this energy all comes from the heart of a star that is such a huge explosion in the making, one of the strongest creative forces in the universe!

And not just life, but life capable of understanding itself! Life that has tiny little cells holding hands in such incredibly complicated patterns as to appear completely random, while at the same time giving the appearance of exquisite design: I am talking of the brain of course, the mother, quite literally, of all machines and all machinations humankind has ever concocted, all of art history culture literature science and this post itself emanating from that cosmologically tiny mass of grey cells in what to the best of minds seems an almost unsurnmountable enigma! And how inspiring to know that just one such a mass of grey cells somewhere, that one such miraculous creature hardly a few cosmological instants ago, took a piece of chalk and scribbled on the road what he felt inspiring, and me, an apparently unrelated creature, should stare at the statement and feel inspired enough to write this post, inspired enough to share with you....

Inspiration! What could be more miraculous than the fact that happiness and beauty and hope and creativity can flow like water from mind to mind and creation to creation, as if we were all part of just one huge canvas, one impeccable story that stretches as much through space as it does through time, as much through perception as through imagination; as if, as Walt Whitman said, we are all just part of one powerful play; each of us contributing a verse. Not just any verse, mind, but a verse, of the most powerful play in existence:

Life.

And you say you are insignificant, that you can find no meaning, that you are bored and disinterested in life. But how can you be? You are alive, isn't that enough? You are a living, breathing miracle.

So breathe. Because you are alive.

Now go inspire someone.

Against Intelligence

A tirade against "intelligence" has been building up inside me for a long time, but only now have my thoughts become clear enough to say something worthwhile. So here goes :)

The word "intelligence" is surprisingly commonplace, and at least colloquially, people kind of agree on what they mean by it. Intelligence seems to involve, to quote from Wikipedia (or rather from "Mainstream Science on Intelligence"):
"A very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience"

Well, that's the definition, although I don't know (and don't think) if that is universally accepted. Most people when they talk of being "intelligent", especially when they say "X is intelligent" seem to have in mind logical puzzles, abstract thought, complex ideas, the like. They also talk of it in admiration; almost as if intelligence is a quality to be desired, and all life on earth can be arranged beautifully in a single linear scale from the "least intelligent" to the "most intelligent". Of course, with humans on the top, and maybe some humans on top of others. (What great narcissism to think that humans have to be at the top of the ladder! Perhaps the position of possibly being the first species to calmly, knowingly and willingly destroy itself is worthy of some pride! But let's keep cynicism out of here).

From an artificial intelligence perspective however, this notion of intelligence seems almost hilarious. Playing a game of chess, for instance, or solving a Sudoku puzzle, is the easiest thing to get computers to do. A few lines of python code will get you a very good sudoku solver. To take a simpler example, multiplying two numbers together is extremely simple. So much so that, funnily, in today's day and age "thinks faster than a computer" is a feat worth world records!

Yet by several other metrics, computers are not even close to human abilities, or for that matter maybe even monkeys. Let me give you a typical example. The best possible computer vision systems in existence today will take roughly a minute to identify tens of objects in an image. The human brain on the other hand, though sluggish in solving Sudoku puzzles, can detect thirty thousand kinds of objects in under a tenth of a second. That's thousand times more computation, in a thousandth fraction of the time. Oh, and I forgot to mention: at almost twice the accuracy.

It is worth remembering, when we talk of things like IBM's Watson, that Watson is the exception rather than the rule. In most parts of artificial intelligence we struggle to do tasks that humans and monkeys and, who knows, perhaps half the mammal kingdom achieves subconsciously and, for all intents and purposes, instantly. (Of course, fellow AI-folk know this well enough, but that's not the case out in the non-computer-science world). The hardest, the most impossible tasks for AI right now are those that evolution solved millions of years ago, before we puny humans came about and thought up math and reasoning and abstractions.

And the reason such things are hard is not because we don't have enough transistors or we don't have enough RAM or anything like that. No, the fact is, they are just hard. It is relatively easy to think 5 moves ahead in chess in silence for several minutes; it is incredibly hard to try to discern if that little patch of what-seems-like-orange is a carefully camouflaged tiger that might devour you within the second. Evolution, unlike its supposed "pinnacle", us humans, sure got its priorities right.

Now many of those "in the know" will claim that many problems of "reasoning" or "planning" are also incredibly hard. True. But it is also true that people also think of "playing chess" and "verifying proofs" as "intelligent activities", and very frankly, they were for all intents and purposes solved at least 20 years ago.

What am I trying to say? I am trying to say that I can't understand why "reasoning" and "solving problems" are de facto assumed to be the definition of "intelligence" and hence worthwhile goals to strive for. What is it about logical reasoning that automatically makes it the right metric to rank living organisms and people? Why does the fact that we can solve math problems make us better than those tiny bugs that can survive naked in frigging space, or the ospreys that can identify underwater prey from far above in the sky, swoop down, go underwater (while flying, like actually) come out of the water with prey in hand, and frigging dry themselves while still in flight?

And, more than anything else, why does it make sense for "solving problems", especially "solving exam problems", the way it is done in India at least, to be the right metric to rank people? Why do we so take for granted the fact that those who are "intelligent" are also those "meritorious", and those who deserve "privilege"?

I am not saying that there is no virtue in reasoning, or in the ability to solve problems, which are of course crucial to science in general. What I am complaining against is the fact that while we bemoan "financial privilege" and "caste privilege" we are perfectly happy with a privilege based on a made up notion of "intelligence". How much time would it take for us to learn that any linear ranking of humans is discrimination, that there is no way that you can "rank" anyone, and that "ability" or "merit" is something contingent on the situation, not a single number we can stamp on every one and be done for eternity?

The art of not knowing

I sometimes feel that I am a rather arrogant person: I have opinions on a lot of things, and I claim to know a lot. And I brandish whatever knowledge I have left, right and center. It is a weapon to make people believe you, make them look at you like an expert.

But there is really no point in being an expert. Knowledge closes one's mind, in some way. It seals off questions about some things, it seals away doubts that might crop up now and then, and it erodes one's wonder. Less time, then, is spent in being surprised, and more in being annoyed. You get adept at debating, with the flurry of facts and truths you have at your disposal, yet you slowly lose the opportunity to debate with yourself.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with knowledge itself, only in how you choose to use it. I find more and more that I am using it to win debates. Of course, the point of a debate is never to win, and it is good to understand that. Even if the debate is about a factual claim. There is no point to a debate unless you can take something back from it, and if you are in it for the winning, then you aren't gaining anything from it. You have just closed your mind and are standing guard on the fortress of your beliefs, externally very confident but internally insecure because you are so used to your beliefs being right that all you can think of is the chaos that will ensue if you are indeed wrong.

The key issue, then, is not to gain more knowledge as time goes on, but to stay perpetually ignorant, in some sense. To constantly find new ways of asking questions, new ways of being wrong. To realize that no matter how much you know, there is always the infinite amount you dont know and will never know. And to focus on the ignorance: we are after all a tiny species on an insignificant planet around a nondescript star in a vast universe, and we will always be tiny, we will always be insignificant. There is no "enlightenment" that will open all knowledge to us, the only enlightenment is the realization perhaps that we can never be completely right, only less wrong.

And there is no harm in being ignorant, or wrong. There is a charm, a beauty in discovery, and its only the discovery that is beautiful, never the knowledge. There is a beauty in looking at something happening, or listening to someone speak, and feeling the slow flame of understanding getting kindled in your head. There is also a beauty in being wrong, in being on the "losing" side of a debate. Because arguably, the "losing" side stands to gain so much more: a whole new point of view..

Talk to me

Talk to me.


Talk to me,
Of the sun, the stars, the moon, the skies,
Of the sea, and water, and trees, and forests
Of the universe ever expanding
Teasing, as if,
Our little minds trying
To grab hold of the boundaries
And fit them into a box


Talk to me
Of the boundaries of knowledge
Of wisdom gained and lost
With eyes of wonder
And a voice of truth.
Question me,
Till beads of sweat
Break out on my forehead
Till I frown and flounder
Struggling to grasp
My own follies and truths.


Talk to me
As the night wears on
As conversation gives way to debate
And debate gives way to thought
To questions unanswered,
Till the moonlight becomes a silver thread
Entwining us together in this moment
This instant of discovery
Wedged immovably between
The transience of now
And the permanence of forever.


And talk to me
Till when the sun comes up
With the red horizon
Boasting the regularity of day,
We have our secret safe:
A secret question we shared,
A secret answer we found,
And a night, etched in memory,
When we found ourselves.

Devil's advocate II - The JEE

It is now well past 1 am, and hence well past the time when I am expected to be both awake and sane. It follows therefore that I must do something insane now, such as getting into an argument over the internet.

Now, contrary to what this post's title seems to indicate, I am not going to argue that the government's decision to scrap the JEE was right: to be sure, I know little or nothing about that decision to make any informed argument whatsoever. I am, however, mildly pissed off at the flurry of Facebook shares this decision has caused, and at the number of "Save the JEE" banners that have cropped up. Pissed off partly because, hey, this is hardly the biggest issue right now worthy of attention (hear hear, so said the guy with a blog post on the topic!) but also because for some reason people seem to have this highly romantic view of IIT, almost as if it is some sort of coming of age ceremony; you know, something that separates the "men" from the "boys". The sexism in that statement is very much intended.

To be more precise, here are some of the arguments that are put forward, and why I think they are bad.

1. "It promotes a level playing field". It does not, rather obviously. Anyone who has been through the IIT system will know that quite a majority of students who get in are those who went to some coaching institute or the other, which is of course a monopoly of the privileged. This argument doesn't even deserve a rebuttal. 
2. "It tests raw intelligence". A milder version of 1., according to me, and subject to the same fallacy.  I have heard/seen people argue that the prevalance of coaching centres is just a small flaw that can be plugged. Not so. A little bit of thought will tell you that there can never really be an examination which does not favour the privileged : imagine two children of identical innate intelligence, the one unschooled, working perhaps for most of his childhood, and the other an upper middle class kid sent to the best schools. By the time they give the exam, the latter very simply has just had a lot of time to think, not withstanding the schooling. Intelligence grows with time, with experience and with education. Short of putting an electrode into the skull at the time of birth, there is no real way of checking "innate intelligence" or "creativity". If such things exist.
3. "JEE establishes IIT as a global brand". That is, to me, a totally meaningless statement. What are we more concerned about, providing higher education or creating brands? True, the IIT brand helps us graduates along quite a bit, but saying that the purpose of the JEE is to give IIT a brand name makes JEE sound like those annoying stickers on apples that say that they are imported, and that are annoyingly hard to remove.
4. "You need a difficult exam because studying at IIT requires some caliber." Well it's not supposed to. They are undergraduates for God's sake, IIT is supposed to provide them with caliber. I was a teaching assistant for Dan Klein's undergrad AI class last semester (we had 400 students in that class. Hear, ye who say that IIT has too many students, although we were 7 teaching assistants), and the one thing that the class taught me was that it is possible to have a course that doesn't require superhuman "intelligence" and yet teaches a lot. The assignments were extremely simple by IIT standards  (you could do them in a couple of hours), yet a lot more engaging and interesting than most (probably all) of the assignments I have ever done at IIT, and their coverage of the material couldn't have been better. In any circumstance, if a teacher cannot teach a student something, it is by definition a fault of the teacher. No one said teaching was an easy job.

There, that's it. I have vented my feelings. In short, the JEE isn't the sparkling jewel in a messed up education system. Quite the contrary: it is merely the sad and unhappy marriage of a higher education system that can't find enough teachers and a sickly mindset that forces engineering dreams like straitjackets onto innocent children.

And like it or not, we are the children of that marriage.

Adios.

[UPDATE: Abhishek in his post rebuts a lot of the other arguments that people have against passing the JEE. If you need any more convincing you should read his post. I especially like these lines (I couldn't have said it better):
"If you have any competition of academic perseverance, choose the best five(?) thousand out of five hundred thousand, pack them off to sanctuaries and drill them in technical knowledge, you are bound to unearth a few diamonds. Those diamonds reflect some of their light on all that 'made' them, viz. the academic contest and the sanctuary. And the latter become holy."
]

G

Wrote a story! Read it here:
G.pdf

It's not a very good story, but it came to me almost whole, and I've learnt it's usually not good to stifle such stories.

Also it has a liberal sprinkling of science, mainly about vision science. I will not claim that the science is accurate, but it is accurate to the extent that it is based on reading half of a random vision science paper. If you want to know, the condition I talk of is, I think, called "visual agnosia", but I have had no interaction with anyone who actually has that condition; this is entirely my imagination. So pardon me if I am completely off-track.

Persistence

Persistence

Computer scientists talk of persistence
It is a thing you want
You want your data to stay
In a hard disk, or in some machine
But someone should tell them
Things shouldn't be persistent
They've got it all wrong

Because my feelings are not bit vectors
That won't change,
And I don't need to look back
And see who I was
Only to feel regret
Welling up inside

Because the past should be perfect
And the little nuances
That we endured from day to day
Should be smudged out lines
In a black and white photograph
So you can laugh and say
"Look how funny I look!"
And then whisper softly
"It isn't the same anymore"

Because words should not survive
The constant rub of time
They should mingle in the paper
Till all that is left
Is the sweet musky smell
Of yellowed notebook sheets
So you can believe the illusion
That yesterday is far away

Because when things persist
They are not memories anymore
They are truths, and sadly,
You can't feel nostalgic about truths.

Gently

Gently!
There are butterflies hiding
Beneath the leaves of the night
Gently! There are fireflies shining
In the shadows of the light
Don't flick your hand so carelessly
You know you'll scare them away:
These thoughts that hide in your eyes
Won't survive the light of day

You might not care, you might not know
Or perhaps you do, and choose to forget:
These dreams of yours show on your brow
And in what you choose to leave unsaid.
They hang like dew drops in the air,
These dreams of yours that you wouldn't say
And I know, though you deny them now,
You sometimes hope that they would stay

Well, perhaps, when we meet again
For a fleeting moment in the summer sun
And when we'll say those senseless words
And, as always, choose to run
You'll spare some thought to all this, I say,
That you whispered to yourself in the night
 And you will not laugh away
At these dreams that you held so tight

So gently now, before you start,
There are butterflies hiding in the night
Say softly what you will,
There are fireflies hiding in the light.


Endnote: In my defense, it is nearing 1 am :P

She was an angel, was she not?

She was an angel, was she not?

The winter's cold, the fog is dense
It was as dense yesterday.
I drudge along the road I take
Today, as always, as everyday

The chemist at the corner here
Has worn a scowl every time I pass,
But today, as I walk by near
I hear him break out into a laugh.

I look inside, but she's no longer there
Only the chemist with his toothy smile
But a silent whisper in the air
Tells me she stood here awhile

Further the road is crowded still
It is, as usual, a busy day
Yet, a look and I can see
Her footsteps all along the way

The beggar by the side is smiling, not
Because of the generous note he just received
But someone with a patient ear
Thought of paying a little heed

The man in suit right up ahead
Has paused in the middle of the road
Wondering, why on earth did that lady now
Smile at him with a smile so broad?

And everywhere where she walked past
Though the fog hangs in clouds of grey
She has left a trail of pleasant surprise
That something is different about today

She lingers in the smile on that woman's lips

A blink in the eyes of that boy standing there

A thought that just made time stand still

A faint fragrance that hangs in the air.

She lingers in the blades of grass
The dew that trembles on forgotten trees
Even the spider, busy on its web
Is surprised by the sudden breeze

She was an angel, was she not?
Perhaps she was just you or me,
But she left behind a little thought
As divine as thought can be.

The Devil's advocate

I intended this post to be about Anna Hazare's supposed fast, but as I write this post, I read that the impasse has ended, and the government will indeed join hands with civil society to draft the bill.

Should we be happy? I am tempted to say "yes". We seem to be firmly on the path of battling corruption. It seems the government will be kept in check by the civil society, and hopefully it will be hard for the "corrupt politicians" to  derail the process.

There are, however, several caveats. Involving the civil society in legislation is not a panacea that will rid the society of all evils. Not all members of civil society are of as spotless a character as Hazare, and more importantly, there is no law of nature that the civil society should always be right. All of us have very good intentions for the country, but as someone said, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions". Saying that there should be no corruption is easy, to implement a law that will be successful in eliminating corruption is definitely not.

It should also not be taken for granted that civil society is always correct in its intentions. Right and wrong are dangerous and slippery things, and this is especially true in a nation where the vast majority of the populace is not literate enough to log on to Facebook and air their views. It is easy for us to support the drive against corruption which seems very obviously right, but it is much harder if the issue at hand is, say, the Naxal problem, or, God forbid, the issues of Kashmir or the North east. Also, Hazare has a great backing now, but we are very likely to ignore him when the problems he is talking of do not concern us, us being the middle class, educated population that reads newspapers, logs on to the internet and signs petitions. Indeed, how many of us really knew about Hazare's work in a Maharashtra village?

It is easy to look at your Facebook page and be heartened by the flood of support for a cause. Yet the fact remains that the set of Indians who have the wherewithal to air their views, over the net or otherwise is a miniscule proportion of the true India. As such, chances are that a movement that agrees with the conveniences of the educated elite will be touted as a "revolution", and a movement that does not will be scorned upon as a "mutiny".

Last but not the least, we have to bear in mind that the ills we are fighting against are not external but internal. As someone pointed out in an article, this is free India, and the only evil empire that we can get freedom from is ourselves. When we say that politicians are corrupt, we have to bear in mind that we elect them. There is no external "pseudo-democratic" government: our country is the sum total of the people in it, no more, no less. We have to realise that the evil of corruption is not in some abstracted out entity far removed from the people: it is in every one of us. The law of corruption that we require is, technically, a few hours in front of the mirror.

I guess the thought that I want to leave you with is this: We all supported Anna Hazare's quest to get a strong Lokpal bill drafted, but why did we support it? Was it merely because we have all been at some point or the other been victimized by corruption? If the answer is yes, then it means that our activism is merely a product of the injustices that we perceive as being done unto us, and that what we are striving for is, at the heart of it, no more than our own self-interest. At a deep, and perhaps (but hopefully not) an unachievable level, what we should be driven by is a question of what the right thing to do is. If each of us tries to do what is right, then the politician and the bureaucrat are also not corrupt, and the civil society doesn't need to arm-twist the government into doing what it needs to do.

Memories

Memories.
Footprints left behind, that have long since been washed away. Fragrances left untouched, pressed in the leaves of books. Voices, unspoken, hidden in melodies and songs. Little joys that got lost in the cracks of life, but only to take root and bloom as flowers a long time hence. Gifts that come back every once in a while, just when you least expect them, and just when you no longer remember what they contained, and so you open them and it is all the same again. Words that form but lose themselves before pen touches paper, like a little firefly of joy that must perennially be just out of reach, yet bright enough to light you through the rest of your life...

Memories...

Timeless

There was a time when we had time,
To look upon the day,
To contemplate for months on end
How a game was played
To walk from home to the market,
(It wasn't ten minutes away)
As if it was a thing to do
And should take us all day

There was a time when we stood in wait
For a lazy winter sun
To dispel the fog so we might begin
That day's share of fun
Which wasn't anything but laze around
Till the day was done
And talk about how the winter's gone,
how warm the days become.

Not long ago, almost every day
Down the street we'd walk,
As the day toiled on around us,
For hours and hours we'd talk
I cannot count how many hours
I spent with you on the phone
And now you send me a gift and I say,
"Sorry, I must begone!"

And the clock hands run swiftly past,
Blink and the day is done
I only count my coffee last
And where I have to run
It's better this way, at least I forget
All that I leave behind
I don't remember what race I'm in,
But I must get to the finish line!

The beard

He stood in front of the mirror. He had grown a beard. He never thought he was capable of growing a beard.
He never thought he was capable of a lot of things.

"Bad things happen to good people sometimes, child. But good always wins" His mother had said that. When at the age of 18 he saw his parents divorcing each other he lost faith in that statement. It was a lie, he decided. His mother was either not good enough, or it was a lie. It was definitely a lie.

It was not that he did not love his mother. He loved her, even when he stormed out of the house soon after his father left, leaving her alone and stranded in a large, cold house. He loved Maya too. Back when she laughed at his jokes and lay her head on his shoulders, back when they exchanged marriage vows, back when they bought a new house, but also that hot summer day when the sun was so bright it made you think strange thoughts. But it wasn't the sun. It was he himself.

He held the blade in his hand now. He felt an urge to feel its edge. See how sharp it was. Would it cut skin? Was it enough to reach an artery? The blade he had used then was a kitchen knife, that most ubiquitous of weapons. He had been in the grip of an uncontrollable rage, he told himself later. The sight, the thought, that Maya loved another, was too much for him, he told himself. He told the people around him again and again. But it didn't make the nightmares go away. He could not forget the blood on the knife, the blood gushing out, almost laughably, like a water from a broken pipe, only it was redder, thicker, more vindictive. And surprised, alarmed; Maya's eyes were staring at hime the whole while, even as she fell. He stared back at her, stared at her and the knife, the knife and her, unable to comprehend that the blood on the floor meant that something bad was about to happen. Unable to comprehend that he was taking a life. Unable to comprehend that she had her hand in his sometime ago, that they had exchanged vows, walked round fire seven times, that her hair had fallen on her face just so, that she clicked her tongue to dismiss him when he teased her, that she was no longer here because the blade had killed her. He had killed her.

Through his prison sentence and even now, he saw her face again and again. Not her laughter that he had fallen in love with. Her terrified face, staring back at him, like him, speechless, too speechless to ask questions. Every day this past week he had held the blade in his one hand and the razor in the other, and he had remembered the blade of the kitchen knife. And had just stood frozen there, his hands shaking terribly as the whole day replayed in his mind again and again....

His mother was in the same house she had always been in, although creepers had begun to climb the walls and the drain in front of the house was perennially blocked. He hadn't talked to her since he left the house in the rage. He went back today. His mother opened the door. She was very old now, almost blind with age. She peered through her glasses at the face of her son. Do you need a coffee child? I can make one right now. She went to the kitchen while he looked around the house. She gave him the glass of coffee and sat on the sofa. He sat down beside her. He looked at the coffee. She had always made the best coffee in the world.

He lay down with his head on her lap. They sat that way for quite some time. She caressed his head, her wrinkled hands no longer possessing the strength of old. Yet it was just as the old times. Back when good always won.

He began crying. "I am sorry, ma" he whispered between his tears. She continued to caress his head. "Bad things happen to good people sometimes, beta. And sometimes good people do bad things. But good does win..." She smiled. "You are capable of a lot of good, A. Don't lose faith".

He looked at the mirror. He was capable of good. He looked at the blade in his hand and the razor. He put the blade in the razor and began to shave.

Endnote: Tried my hand at a very short(by my standards) story :)

Of fear and courage

I am just back from watching the movie "King's speech" and it is truly very good. It talks of the King of Britain during the times just before the second world war, and his battle against his own stammering and the associated fear of public speaking. The good thing about this movie is that it talks of the King in very real terms, terms familiar to you and me. Indeed there are points in the story when you ask yourself, "What wrong did the poor guy do to be forced to become King?"

I think fear is more universal than we care to admit. We might fear the most trivial of things, or we might fear the greatest. It might be the fear of height, the fear of failure, or the very simple fear of speaking aloud in public. But how we are limited by it! We skirt it, evade it, clothe it into so many different forms. We describe it as evil, put it beyond space and time and beyond our control. We talk about it, if at all we do, in hushed tones, angry tones, defensive tones. In extremes, we wage wars to convince everyone else it is not a fear anymore.

When we run away from our demons we make them larger than they really are. Even our own hands make scary shadows on the wall by the candlelight; not looking at our hands we cower away from the shadows. I can catch myself saying a hundred times in the past year: "Oh my God there were so many bad things happening and I have so many problems and someone please save me" when it is just a meeting with a professor that's fraying my nerves. I go hiking in the mountains and I cloak my simple fear of falling into anger at the clouds and the incessant rain and my friend who has forgotten the way. I turn my fear of telling the truth into a fluid definition of truth itself. There are so many little fears that would be really trivial to deal with if I could just look them in the eye and see them for what they are. Except that I don't because I am so afraid of them I just take the easy way out of seeing it all as a ploy by the world to get the better of me. You know, I would be the happiest man in the world if the world just stopped holding me down. Yeah, right.

It is truly a gift, to be able to hold your fears to the light. To be able to face your demons. And it is not that our fears are insurmountable; we merely lack the will to do so. I am not sure why, but many a times I feel I actually like being afraid. Maybe because it is so much easier.

"What are you afraid of?" asks the speech therapist of the King in "King's speech". So, what are you afraid of?

Rain in Berkeley, winter in Delhi and other assorted thoughts

Semester ends, leaving me with just about enough energy to write in bits and pieces. Also it is raining, which is stupid, because I find it hard to make sense of winter rain. I mean, of course parts of South India have winter rains, but winter in South India is no colder than summer in California (which is saying a lot, because summer in Berkeley was pretty warm), but rain in winter makes it all the more dismal, if it wasn't already. The days are way shorter, and my sleep cycle more or less attempts to follow the sun, which means these days I end up feeling sleepy sometime around 8 (the sun goes down before 5) and on days when it is cloudy and rainy(like today) I find it hard to justify to myself the need for wake-fulness.

Its winter in Delhi, and I guess that means fog and caps and gloves and sweaters and jackets (I haven't really looked at the weather reports, mind!) And there's just so many things I want to do this winter, apart from fulfiling the quite impossible promise of meeting each and every one of my friends that winter this year is going to be a blur. There's also a certain amount of "research" to be carried out, and the fact that I should be "self-motivated" means, as usual, that I will pretend that my ass is on fire.

Which it is not, to say the truth, because this semester has been pretty chill as far as courses and all are concerned. True, I have witnessed, alternatively, moments of crushing self-doubt and moments of inspiration, but I guess that is par for the course. Especially since my usually active emotional life has been flattened out, because of which my out-of-commission amygdala has decided to have some fun with my academic life.

I guess the intensity of my emotional life is pretty much proportional to the number of girls I have around me. I am tempted to qualify the statement to "the number of undergraduate girls I have around me", which becomes kind of like a tautology till the point I actually end up messing around with a graduate girl. However it is kind of true: there's a lot more "life, the universe and everything" quality about undergraduate life, mainly I guess because people around you are of a much greater variety. I mean, it's kind of hard to discuss the usefulness of a "conditional random field" to a physics student, but it is even harder to keep "average precision" out of a talk with a lab mate. Plus, instead of a coffee shop we have a coffee machine at the pantry, which cleverly translates into no more than a few minutes of conversation per coffee break, as opposed to hours of philosophy at the Nescafe stall. Also, they somehow managed to create a lab which has an awesome view of the whole California bay, and of the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco, and in doing so completely removed the incentive to go out for a walk. (Why do you want to go out when you can see the Golden Gate bridge from your office floor?) Not that I am complaining of course; the sight of the orange sun falling behind the far away bridge and letting off crimson streaks into the clouds will make me sigh any time of the year.

And finally Berkeley is beautiful. It's an amazing campus, and it's one of the few places that seems as amazing when the clouds are low and the rain is incessant as when the sun is out and the dew glistens on the blades of the grass......

A-patriotic

Suddenly for some reason I am seized with doubts about my own country. Is it because I never read the news very thoroughly back when I was in India? Has my sudden separation from India suddenly and Bollywood-ishtyle-ly inspired in me a desire to stay up-to-date? Or is it merely the fact that events in recent times have taken a turn for the worse?

Of course, that India is not utopia is obvious. Nor are all bureaucrats, politicians and the like benign. Nor is the general public sensible, or even sympathetic. This is not to say that I am willing to ignore all the glaring inequities that exist in the country, and that seem to grow with development, or the fact that in human development India ranks far far below. Yet, somehow the image in my mind was of a country, and a government, trying to take care of the people, in spite of its flaws. I always kind of assumed that we might be dumb, stupid and selfish, but nevertheless we were somehow in the same boat.

Two things have contributed to my growing doubts. The first was Arundhati Roy's comments about Kashmir, and the second was a talk I recently attended about human rights violations in Kashmir. Probably human rights abuses happen in almost every part of the country, in some form of the other; what shocked me was the constant reference to India as a "State", sometimes even as an "occupying power" that was systematically perpetrating these violations. It was weird to hear about the "Government of India" in the same vein that we used to hear about the "British Empire" in our school history classes. Are we suddenly an imperial power come to rule all the innocent Kashmiris, tribals and poor people, as Roy seems to make it out to be?

But who is "We"? What is the identity of this country that I call India? Am I not as much a part of it as a farmer in Andhra Pradesh, or Manipur, or Kashmir? Do I not share the identity of being an Indian with all these people? Why these doubts and questions and the injustices being perpetrated by "the Government of India"? Why is the problem suddenly external? Why do these walls suddenly crop up between the "have's" and the "have nots"? Or rather, why do these walls suddenly take the form of national, race or caste boundaries, as if somehow independence from "the ruler" automatically implies upliftment for "the ruled"?


I am not taking the side of the "Government of India", or the big "Corporations" or all those people upon whom we have agreed to place the blame. Nor am I attempting to take a stand on Roy's, or anybody else's, opinions about whether Kashmir should be independent or not. All I am asking is that, when every human being in the world needs the same basic rights to well-being and life, why are always battle lines drawn? How come that there is always that ruler who is a tyrant and the people who are exploited, and how come that no matter how many revolutions and freedom struggles come and go, the exploited always remain the exploited? Is it ever possible that there is "good governance", that the society is just and equitable, and that development reaches the lowest rung of the ladder as much as(and hopefully more than) it reaches the  highest rung?

Did we not, when we became independent as a nation, found ourselves on principles of equality and liberty? Where then do such questions come from? Why are we not one nation on the arduous path of development; why are we a million nations fighting ourselves?

Naked

Not through the walls of nations, or through the barbed wire that runs like thorns through the hearts of lands, tearing apart the world like a painting torn to shreds. Nor through the words of language, sounds spoken meant to mean something as if the beats of your hearts and mine followed a grammar and an alphabet..

Not through the glass of wealth, either looking down from palatial balconies or up from the footpath, not through the contempt for a class too ordinary, nor through the envy for a wealth ill deserved, neither with covetous eyes, nor with patronizing ones, neither with an intent to give, nor with an intent to take...

Nor with a critique of my knowledge, marveling at intellect or laughing away ignorance, searching for the genius or scorning the foolishness,  neither to learn, nor to teach, neither to scoff, nor to stand in awe...


Not through the filters of morality either, not through the idiosyncracies of my beliefs, my  opinions, my inclinations and orientations, moralities either true or imagined, principles either arbitrary or justified, not through politics and ideologies and calculations and ratinalizations, as if right and wrong were counters in a bank..

See me not through flesh, or cloth, or action, or habit...

See me as I am, naked. Place your hand against my chest and feel the beats of my heart. Hear my voice thickening with emotion or going shrill with joy, feel my hands clasp and my fists clenched in emotion. Stare into my eyes and feel me through these walls we have erected between ourselves; stare deep into my heart, know me for who I am...

And walk with me, like one human with another, like two living beings who share a universe, this planet, this sunshine, and above all, this moment....

On Gaia

Disclaimer: I am no authority on the subject. I am not responsible for any loss of life, property or sanity that results from this post.


When sometime ago I was doing this course (rather notorious in IIT) on "Technology, Development and Society" (don't ask me why), the professor took upon herself to explain to us the Gaia hypothesis. This hypothesis, immensely controversial, to say the least, states, very loosely speaking, that the whole of earth is a single organism, and like all other organisms it seeks to preserve itself. That sounds so intelligent-design-y right? I thought so too..

Then at the end of the course one of my classmates made a presentation on the Gaia hypothesis, and one slide really stuck in my head. It drew a distinction between Gaia and Darwin's natural selection, and I remember my classmate's words: she said that Natural selection was about adaptation; the Gaia hypothesis was about adaptation and change. The idea was simple: we have a tendency to view natural selection as individuals competing in a static environment. That however can at best be an approximation to the true situation: we don't just compete and adapt to the environment, we also change the environment itself.

How does that change things? Weirdly, when you endow living organisms with the power to change their own environment, what you often get is a remarkable stasis in the environment. There is this mathematical model called Daisyworld. It is a planet in which the only living organisms are two species of daisies: white daisies and black daisies. The white daisies can survive in warm climes and by reflecting the sunlight they reduce the temperature around them. The black daisies can live in the cold and by absorbing the sunlight they increase the temperature around them. Now consider a situation in which the sun is constantly coming closer to the planet. When the sun is far away, the black daisies dominate, and they make the planet warmer. As the sun comes closer, temperatures tend to rise, making it possible, then favourable for white daisies to grow; the white daisies dominate, bringing temperatures down. The result is that temperatures remain steady for most of the time, rising steeply towards the end.

Natural selection, and most of our scientific thought, tends to view the environment as separate from the living organisms. It is assumed to be like an infinite source or sink of resources, passively playing its part, merely providing the stimulus for life to evolve. The truth however is that the environment is inseparable from the organisms that it supports. All the daisies in the daisyworld example are linked with the environment, and with each other. The heat that one black daisy absorbs makes life harder for another black daisy sharing the environment, and easier for the white daisy. Although this simple, rather local effect is easy to grasp, it leads to rather counterintuitive global effects: the temperature of the world remains constant, as if there was an intelligent entity trying to control the environment, as if the planet was truly alive, trying to survive.

But is it really so counterintuitive? Consciousness itself arises in our heads from neurons that have no idea what we are thinking about. This queerly magical notion of control, this "I" whom we call intelligent is emergent from the behavior of innocent neurons, in the same way that the temperature of Daisyworld is emergent from the behavior of innocent daisies. In each case, each individual component is prohibitively simple, yet the system of interacting agents is prohibitively complex.

The fun part is that this interaction acts at so many different levels. The daisies interact with the environment to generate Daisyworld, cells interact with each other and the environment to give rise to the entity called a daisy, molecules interact with themselves and the environment to give cells their meaning, and so on and so forth. There is a whole web of interactions, and it doesn't go wide as much as it goes deep. I would think that this interaction is critical to explaining the complexity of the world we live in, but science has always striven to simplify, to reduce the complexity, and we have always abstracted away the rest of the world when dealing with any system of particles, considering it as constant. My feeling is that in doing so, in our quest to simplify, we might have approximated away the very basis of nature.

Change

Change.

Little by little, I bring myself to look at the mirror. See the man there without averting my eyes. Yes, not a boy anymore, but a man, at least physically. The stubble that the razor has a hard time removing is testimony to that.

I wash my face with cold water and think of the days gone by. For the umpteenth time perhaps, but it's different now. See, the future has caught up with the past. The circle is complete. It's time for change.

I get dressed, think absentmindedly of whether I should put a jacket on. I walk out of the door, find a cold but pleasant wind shake me out of my sleep. Pull me out of my dreams. Things have changed, no, go back, rewrite. I have changed. I hold the steering of my life. There is no denying that I always did.

Yes, I hurt you, you there, if you're reading this. I said I loved you and I hurt you. I have done that so many times now it doesn't even make sense to apologise any more. The only person I should apologise to is probably myself. Yes, dude, you're not a saint. You have a little bit of the devil in you, just like everybody else.

Yes, I lied. I lied so many times and when I said I will say the truth, I lied. I lied to myself and to everyone else who mattered. I am not the great guy you imagined me to be. Look at me, I stand naked in front of you, in flesh and blood, mortal and far from invincible. I hold no power other than the power I hold over myself. There are no great deeds I boast of, no overwhelming goodness inside of me, no superhuman ability in need of respect. Just me, with all the pimples on my face and my nails dirty and my clothes in need of washing.

And yes, I hold the baton for change. I hold the key to my own future, the same as everybody else. The tiny key made of gold that will unlock the pandora's box of possibilities, only I need to have the strength to face them. I stand at the helm of my own ship, the captain of my own soul and that thought is as terrifying as it is liberating. I can make anything I want to. I can create the world I want to live in, and I have done this all this while, without knowing it. I m holding my pen writing my own destiny and I've just realised the fact, I've just realised that I'm the only person turning the inexorable wheels of my fate. Not the system, not God, not you, just me.

I'm not perfect, I'm not ideal, I'm not perfect. I'm just here. At the forefront of my destiny.

And I'm here, holding the flag for change.