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.