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.

Blame

She was born a bud, a single child of a long stem laden with thorns. Amongst the other flowers in the nursery she lay in wait, opening very slowly, layer by layer, to the gardener who tended to her and to the other flowers that bowed in respect. Her crimson petals glimmered in the morning dew, and around her her fragrance was carried away borne on the cool summer breeze.

As she grew she grew fond of her own beauty, of the tales they told her about her powers. She listened with astonishment of how her very existence had always been a symbol of love, of how the Gods were bathed in her petals always, and of how her nectar was the sweetest possible. She swelled with pride at the power she held, and she grew up believing that she was destined to spread good luck and love and beauty in the world.

They took her to the florist then, and then she lay in wait for her golden moment. She saw in her florist's eyes joy whenever he tended to her, and she responded to his love with love, smiling and shining, a Godess descended upon the world. She was thrilled when one summer evening she was chosen by her florist, her long stalk picked up in his careful hands, and as she crossed hands she looked into the face of the man holding her, and saw joy and hope and radiance. She swelled with pride again, and she shook her petals so the dew dropped from them, as an ode to her own beauty and to the joy she provided.

The man walked her through the street, his hand holding the rose behind the back, as if whatever was to come was a surprise for her. She waited patiently, and soon she found herself being presented before another smiling face, the man kneeling down, she herself in his hands, held up. But the smiling face in front of her stopped smiling, and lost colour.. The eyebrows knit together and the lips moved rapidly, . Then she looked back at the face of the man who was holding her and he wasn't smiling too, and suddenly she saw big drops of water, salty, fall down on her petals. She felt the man's grip on her tightening, stiffening, then letting go, so she fell helpless down on the street, amidst sounds of footpaths where there were no smiling faces. She felt scared, because she had always given joy and never any sorrow; no one had denied being overjoyed at the sight of her beauty, no one had failed to respond to her fragrance, and yet here she was soaked to death in the salty tears of a sorrow she had not known. What did I do wrong she asked, but there was no one to answer; there was no one to answer before shoes fell on her and sucked away her fragrance and pressed out her beauty, that all she had done wrong was to be born a rose.

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.

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.

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...

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.

On morality

The minors are usually the time for a reality check. Dinner time conversations held over tables in a cafe or over walks to and from SDA, on life, the universe and everything fade away into the background. Philosophy restricts itself to the exam and how to get past it. Ideas of friendships and loyalties get morphed into hideous equations of allegiances and infidelities. Left to itself, mired in the swampy undergrowth of the epsilon's and delta's staring back in the unintelligible handwriting of a colleague of yours you don't probably know, abandoned in the sleepless loneliness of a syllabus that doesn't seem to end, the mind thinks thoughts, discards them, then thinks again.

Well, not exactly, and maybe this is a very gloomy picture of an exam that doesn't matter much, but look around you while the exams are going on and you will find an aura of “using” and “being used”. People who never talked to you ask you for your notes, and people you never wanted to face are sitting with you and studying the same things you are. And you have to bear with them because of course this is an exam right? This is reality.

On a larger scale, sometimes, I wonder how true people are to what people say, and believe, about themselves and about the world. If so often friendships and companionships are forged as temporary allegiances in the race to get better grades, to what extent can other human values survive? When people say they believe in something, (even I myself, to say the truth), to what extent will that belief be borne out by their future behaviour?

Sometimes I feel that belief, and principles, and ideals are nothing but matters of convenience. Your principles are whatever it takes to prove yourselves as right and the other person as wrong. You don't act according to principles, you principle yourself according to your acts. Viewed in this light, value systems are not absolute; they are relative, and they are relative in such a mindboggling, frustating way that to talk of them as anything more than the whims and fancies of a mad man that is the average human is blasphemous overestimation.

And this hypocrisy, this dichotomy, between something that is supposedly as universal as a principle or morality and something that is as personal as a like or dislike, permeates every level of society. If individuals hide behind protective armors of their own code of ethics, so do families operate behind the veils of honor and custom, so do religions battle under the flag of injustice and discrimination, and so do nations scheme and plot in the name of magnanimity and peace. Morality is nothing but what you hurl at the other person to win an argument. It is not that it is moral. It is that you want it to be.

We are all pleased with our own moralities, aren't we? So much so that we find it hard to digest that someone else might have a different view. We like to have nice little “pearls of wisdom”, and strew them on a thread and wear them on our neck. But there are no pearls of wisdom. There is no shining light at the end of the tunnel. There is no white, black and color. The truth, the reality, the unknown, unseen morality that we so unabashedly lay claim to, isn't shining or rounded, or consistent. It is not the pearl, it is that irritating grain of sand, an inconsistency, an abomination, is reality. It is hard, and rough, and difficult to digest, and to protect yourself from it you cover it in layers of ambiguity, the way an oyster covers it with its own secretions, till it hurts no more. We bend our pitifully illogical logic this way and that, back and forth, till it can explain what hurt us and what we cannot explain.

And so we “learn”, and forget, and move on. With a brand new philosophy, a brand new set of beliefs. A brand new pearl of wisdom hanging blithely from the necklace around our neck. This is philosophy. This is morality. And this is the quintessence of this world we live in.

Reflections

In the beginning was the world.

It was a world, and that's all. An orb floating through the ever-changing continuum of space, a mass of physics revolving around a yellow-gold sphere of flames, biding its time. Like clockwork, it revolved, it rotated, it looked upon the rest of its kin, as they moved, enmasse, through the ether. A million orbs floating in the sky. In the beginning was the world.

In the beginning was the cell. In the poisonous, ruthless sea of the world, it gasped and panted as it negotiated every passing second, every passing day of its existence, counting its time in the revolutions of the world, in the ups and downs of the burning yellow sphere that dominated the sky, or the waxing and wayning of the calm white sphere as it went through its cycles. Day and night, yin and yang, dark and light, but there was no one to look at it. Yet. For in the beginning was just the cell.

In the beginning was fire. Time had flown past like a river in a hurry to meet the sea, or so it would seem hardly a few milleniums hence. For at no time before had the world seen so much change in itself, nor the cell seen so much of its kin. At no time before had the rapid change of the universe been so obvious, so apparent, as when in that blink of a cosmological eye, things changed forever, and suddenly a pair of eyes fell upon the miracle for the first time: in the beginning was fire.

In the beginning was: what? The world never could have thought of the cell. The cell could never have thought of the advent of fire. And fire would scarce believe that in her simple beginnings something as wonderfully profound as the human mind could take seed. That someday this very pair of eyes that stared at it so absolutely today would someday stare at a rocket fly off to space, at a canvas that would fill up with color, stare at a million things, take in, discover, invent.

That someday the first written word would appear. That someday the first painting would be drawn on the stone wall. That someday someone will start to dream. To love. To hate. To think. That someday, this whole mass of coincidence, would collapse into one single thought in someone's head.

So, right, I'll take your leave. Happy life!