tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-226684202024-03-08T06:24:23.641-08:00ChintanAnkithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17470055340115740608noreply@blogger.comBlogger163125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22668420.post-2316048214206818322009-04-19T01:29:00.000-07:002009-04-19T01:30:50.146-07:00Blog movedThis blog has moved to:<br /><a href=" http://www.ankitsrivastava.net/chintan/"><br />http://www.ankitsrivastava.net/chintan/</a><br /><br />Thanks,<br />AnkitAnkithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17470055340115740608noreply@blogger.com21tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22668420.post-90043080184447799372009-04-08T00:13:00.000-07:002009-04-08T01:02:20.633-07:00God's Delusion<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_kUnoNnoMFDg/SdxZ0e87gjI/AAAAAAAAAKA/dzjWYhUcQuY/s1600-h/photo.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 600px; height: 450px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_kUnoNnoMFDg/SdxZ0e87gjI/AAAAAAAAAKA/dzjWYhUcQuY/s400/photo.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5322227617841775154" /></a>Ankithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17470055340115740608noreply@blogger.com253tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22668420.post-72969323821619457862009-04-07T23:08:00.000-07:002009-04-07T23:28:45.161-07:00Orwell on subversion<div style="text-align: justify;">George Orwell in 'The art of Donald Mcgill' talks about the innocence of subversion and how it is one of the essential characteristics of human beings. The following paragraph is taken from his essay where he is musing about the necessity and the origin of the dichotomy of 'Sancho Panza and Don Quixote', 'Jeeves and Wooster', 'Holmes and Watson' etc.<br /><br />"But though in varying forms he is one of the stock figures of literature, in real life, especially in the way society is ordered, his point of view never gets a fair hearing. There is a constant world-wide conspiracy to pretend that he is not there, or at least that he doesn't matter. Codes of law and morals, or religious systems, never have much room in them for a humorous view of life. Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie, and the reason why so large a proportion of jokes centre round obscenity is simply that all societies, as the price of survival, have to insist on a fairly high standard of sexual morality. A dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack upon morality, but it is a sort of mental rebellion, a momentary wish that things were otherwise. So also with all other jokes, which always centre round cowardice, laziness, dishonesty or some other quality which society cannot afford to encourage. Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice. It has to demand faultless discipline and self sacrifice, it must expect its subjects to work hard, pay their taxes, and be faithful to their wives, it must assume that men think it glorious to die on the battlefield and women want to wear themselves out with child-bearing. The whole of what one may call official literature is founded on such assumptions. I never read the proclamations of generals before battle, the speeches of fuhrers and prime ministers, the solidarity songs of public schools and Left wing political parties, national anthems, temperance tracts, papal encyclicals and sermons against gambling and contraception, without seeming to hear in the background a chorus of raspberries from all the millions of common men to whom these high sentiments make no appeal. Nevertheless the high sentiments always win in the end, leaders who offer blood, toil, tears and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic. Women face childbed and the scrubbing brush, revolutionaries keep their mouth shut in the torture chamber, battleships go down with their guns still firing when their decks are awash. It is only that the other element in man, the lazy, cowardly, debt-bilking adulterer who is inside all of us, can never be suppressed altogether and needs a hearing occasionally"</div>Ankithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17470055340115740608noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22668420.post-56003090490437844742009-04-05T01:47:00.000-07:002009-04-05T11:06:48.566-07:00Mexico: Impressions<div style="text-align: justify;">Barely a week has passed when 3 bikes with 4 riders started on their 5 day trip by driving towards the Tecate border crossing to Mexico. Mexico... The name has a vaguely identifiable ring of romantic imperfection associated with it. For a boy who hails from the chaotic environs of a continuously hyperventilating country, the measured dozes of unsullied oxygen sometime leave a gaping hole of desire. This innocent desire for the occasional mathematical imperfection of sweeping mountain curves, the infrequent sight of fault in the perfectly manicured fauna, the silhouette of a city to resemble, if only intermittently, more a dilapidated crone than a lady in short black dress- this desire makes me appreciate the ragged, jagged, relatively arbitrary world that Mexico has to offer. In its crumbling edifices of randomly packed matchboxes, in the arabesque pattern of its road network, in the decreased field of personal space, Mexico reminds me a lot of India. Saying that I love all of this all the time would be falling into a trap that we desis fall in all too easily. The trap of not loving the country but the romantic idea of it. But I do miss it occasionally. Striving for betterment, perfection, one sometimes misses the age of fault; much like that old television that had to be slapped on the side to improve reception, or that insufferable P.T. teacher who was all too ready with the stick. <br /><br />So what is Mexico like?<br /><br />The arbitrarily cracked asphalt is often overloaded with disintegrating pickup trucks with a driver in a shabby checkered shirt and seemingly doped passengers curiously staring at you from the open trunk. Children in tattered attires who haven't been told that every stranger is a pedophile wave enthusiastically at you while you pass them on your motorcycle and young girls with skin tight jeans and a bit too much rouge for a Wednesday afternoon giggle and whisper naughtily if they happen to catch your attention. Traffic follows street laws but things always seem to be hanging in a precarious balance, forever in the danger of snapping into a chaotic disarray if only you grew complacent for a second. There are speed limits but the police is refreshingly inept and corrupt so that the time it takes to get from one point to another depends only upon how much of a badass you can be. Shopkeepers humor you with generous help as you gesticulate with exasperated flourish and try to inquire about the price of one 'churro' in your impotent Spanish. Road workers, from behind the clouds of gaseous asphalt and sunny dust, raise the right thumb in a friendly approval of your foreign presence and meanly attired army men on infrequent check posts show more interest in the volume of your engine than the contents of your bag. Drunk girls with time at their hands and mischief on their minds shout from behind the germinating veil of night 'Do you speak English' as three Indians, quite unsure and slightly flustered, fidget and fumble and finally drift. Local bands bellow their loosely strung concoctions as the hopped up night swirls around them in an inebriated frenzy and the sauced celebrations stretch deep into the dark. And below the starry expanse of the unbridled sky with the swathed sound of the distant water and the intoxicating smell of spirited festivities, one sits on the rampart of simplified life and tries to make sense, and embrace to some extent, a world that is so different from the one that he has left for a little while. A very young boy selling insignificant tchotchkes is happy to sell off a considerable portion of his merchandise for 15 pesos and Bhatele remarks, "He finished off his shop" and we break into spontaneous laughter. He laughs too and stashing away the 15 pesos, moves ahead with the satisfaction of a business well done. <br /><br />Hopefully I'll stop to reminisce some more for there are such beautiful memories.<br /></div>Ankithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17470055340115740608noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22668420.post-50114719838558010632009-03-23T18:09:00.000-07:002009-03-24T00:08:15.696-07:00"You are a good writer"<div style="text-align: justify;">So two of my last three posts have been videos of other people with the last post dated a considerable time ago. Hmmm... can you hear the tinny screech of my iron-ical knowledge-spatula desperately trying to glean the last scraps of ideas from the dark, gaping barrel of imagination? Hopefully though, plain old lethargy has the same unmistakable sound; hopefully it has the same unmistakable feel of yielding which is vested in the sorry contortions of a soldering wire bent one too many times. The truth is, last month or so was eventful. Although eventful in a way I would not prefer other months to be but, nevertheless, a set of rollicking, saddling, galumphing, and sobering experiences. And no one, during such periods, has either the time or the inclination to stare at the screen for an hour or two while disjointed words string together to form incoherent sentences to be published as insignificant posts on barely read blogs! There are more worthy ways of setting fire to time.<br /><br />Someone, a literarily very talented person, told me that I'm a very good writer. The arid night had the surprising signature of moisture. I could have sworn that I believed that the washed out sky should have had the full milky moon. And the voice, in its calmness betrayed anger, in its monotonicity-sarcasm. Now Sarcasm is a beautiful thing. I adore good sarcasm for its fluid, razorlike strokes which can make clean incisions without making you immediately aware of the gravity of the cuts. Like an altimeter, it celebrates with equal vivacity both height and depth at the same time, depth being the more sinister part of the equation. The higher the praise, the greater the schism and, thereby, the more biting the actual intent. I am, therefore, happy that on that calm, windy night I wasn't pronounced an excellent writer. <br /><br />So do I care? I wonder... what exactly is good writing? Wilde's 'The decay of lying' is one of those pieces of literature which has left a lasting impression on my thinking. More than it being a praise of the 'art of lying', it is an emotional and resounding case for the plain, simple joy of unbridled expression which is unmindful of the clutches of reality, and heedless of the boundaries of mere reason. 'What is a good lie? Simply that which is its own evidence.' Unapologetic, unabashed, bare, brazen, and honest. And it doesn't take a huge stretch of imagination to see that the only effort in this world that is completely unapologetic, wholly unabashed is the one that is done for one's own happiness and nothing else. By extension, good writing, like a good lie is one that gives pleasure to the writer. And I cannot really think of any other activity which is as pleasurable to me as the effort that makes a set of words not just a sentence but so much more. When the transmittance of a mere idea is taken from the dull precincts of efficiency and elevated by grammatical adornments and lexical embellishments, when surprising connections are revealed between mundane reality and obscure ideas through weird interconnections of neurons, to quote Fry, when the tripping of the tip of the tongue touches the top of the teeth to transport one to giddy euphoric bliss, when... I think we get the idea. So do I care? Not if incorporating any changes suggested to me would decrease the amount of pleasure I derive from the effort.<br /><br />Sorry for being a slacker these last few weeks :).</div>Ankithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17470055340115740608noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22668420.post-29769344120653011442009-02-26T00:49:00.000-08:002009-02-26T01:21:39.601-08:00Science, reality, religion etc.<div style="text-align: justify;">It's interesting how I tend to get entangled in extended durations of 'investigations' into specific subjects. Of late, the subject has been science in general. Actually calling it science would be narrowing the scope to a very orthodox view. It has more to do with the human effort at understanding how nature works; while we happen to gain those insights with science, the more important idea is the effort at understanding. This brings us to the topic of how precisely does reality correspond to our explanations and how long shall it keep doing it. Moreover, why exactly is it comprehensible (I think it was Einstein who said that the incomprehensible fact is that nature was so comprehensible), what makes us believe in the relative validity of theories which are just a result of our imperfect impressions gathered by our imperfect senses, and finally, if our scientific explanations are ephemeral (as history has proved time and again), what makes them vastly more credible (at least to me) than the religious/mystic (non)explanations.<br /><br />Below is part of a video of the brilliant Feynman expressing his views on some of these topics. The relevant points start at 3:20.<br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/9CaL5NslOxE&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/9CaL5NslOxE&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br /><br />Anyway, the book that started this wretched chain of thoughts is David Deutsch's 'The fabric of reality' and it is quite simply, a work of genius. The brilliant thing about this book is that it boldly argues and presents conjectures on such difficult topics and manages to provide convincing arguments for its case. Deutsch doesn't dabble in mollifying opposing viewpoints and thus presents a book which is as incisive in its insight as it is overarching in its reach. He lays the grave of such philosophical junk as solipsism, inductivism, positivism and doesn't shy away from pointing where some of the most brilliant minds (Weinberg, Wheeler, Hawking, Penrose etc.) went wrong. He manages to narrow down his discussion to four of our best theories: quantum theory, Karl Popper's theory of epistemology, Darwinian evolution as modified by Dawkins, and theory of computation (Turing principle), presents the underlying unities among all of them and clarifies as to how all these theories, together, provide us with the most comprehensible and integrated view of our world yet. In other worlds, our first 'Theory of everything'. Its an intense book and I've already started it again in order to make more sense than the 5% I have managed to make after the first read :).</div>Ankithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17470055340115740608noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22668420.post-76136806659332671762009-02-08T01:13:00.000-08:002009-02-08T01:38:15.053-08:00Mnemosyne vs. Camera<div style="text-align: justify;">It was raining hard today and I went on a drive. I went to a place called Mount Soledad from where you can see vast expanses of San Diego and the endless ocean and as I peered down from the mountain top I saw one of the most beautiful views of SD I've ever witnessed. <br /><br />For a second I thought, hell! why do I not have a camera, it's a shame that this view will dissolve into the ravenous night in a few minutes and all that I'll be left with are faint impressions on an uncertain canvas. And dissolve it did. But I still stand by my aversion to a camera and my dislike for photographs. Photographs are too perfect to be interesting. They are too truthful to be beautiful. What memory preserves in jars of translucent glass, pickled in spices of uncertainty, salted with a heady mixture of imagination and lies - a photograph crams it up in definite color schemes between the convenient borders of a 4X6. At this point, I'm not sure if the background far into the ocean today was dark green or blackish gray, or if the patches of rain far into the distance overwhelmed the sunny green land but mnemosyne, in all her supple grace, paints a picture that has a vague tint of satisfaction and peace. They say that the most erogenous part of the body is the brain. They say that the best actors in the world are the ones that we carry in our heads. I agree. A photograph is only perfect. Too bad it fails to do any better.<br /></div>Ankithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17470055340115740608noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22668420.post-32944992513838874012009-02-05T20:33:00.000-08:002009-02-06T00:15:54.826-08:00David Deutsch on TED<div style="text-align: justify;">Following is simply the most brilliant talk I've ever heard. TED is a highly respected platform and David Deutsch is a highly regarded physicist. Here he talks about the concept of knowledge, how it makes humans different from other species, and finally tackles the often emotionally driven topic of Global Warming and beautifully puts things in perspective with insightful rationality:<br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/gQliI_WGaGk&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/gQliI_WGaGk&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br /><br />What surprises me the most is the clarity of his thoughts and the over-arching grasp of his analysis. Genius! Well, I came across this a few months ago but my mistake that didn't share it earlier.<br /><br /></div>Ankithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17470055340115740608noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22668420.post-6154832654817884812009-02-03T15:41:00.001-08:002009-02-03T18:10:23.043-08:00Power of Metaphors<div style="text-align: justify;">I do not profess to be any sort of a music connoisseur but in my limited experience the one piece that astonishes me to no end is Ralph Vaughan Williams's 'The Lark Ascending'. And I have used the word 'astonish' not by mistake. The primary emotion that I have when listening to this piece is not one of happiness or satisfaction but astonishment. Somehow while listening to this piece with my eyes closed, the abstract idea of a graceful skylark slowly rising up above the crystal water into the endless sky manifests itself in the mellifluous sounds of the lone violin. And it amazes me that something as disconnected as music is able to evoke such a specific emotion. I suppose this is a very subjective experience but allow me to develop the point.<br /><br />I feel that the lone quality that separates a genius thinker from a mediocre wannabe and an ignoramus is the capacity for metaphorising, so to say. The power to draw striking analogies between seemingly very different fields is the stuff brilliance is made of. I suppose we all have some sort of 'knowledge specialization' now that we have ventured beyond the dark ages of immaturity and pointlessness and I suppose we shall continue to add to our repository of existing understanding for the rest of our lives. As is probably done by any and every human being. But at the cost of sounding a bit defeatist most of us would vanish without a whimper in the cosmic sonata or without a flash in the divine pan. And one of the most important reason for this, I feel, is that the power to discover the underlying simplicity of this seemingly chaotic universe doesn't come easy. And to most, it doesn't come at all. And this power to find an underlying order simpler and more beautiful than the mess it bedrocks is the power to form metaphors and analogies. We can see it everywhere but lets take science for the sake of our hardwired brains. The story of science and its heroes is a classic case of gradual simplification and continued unification of our concepts. From Newton's brilliant insight that the forces that make the heavens go round are the same as the force that squashed the most famous apple in history to Maxwell's observation that electricity and magnetism can be combined beautifully into one elegant theory to Einstein's leap of imagination which unified space and time to Bohr's fruits which managed to provide a unified umbrella theory to 3 out of 4 fundamental forces of nature and the present quest for the final frontier that seeks to unify gravity with the rest, it's one breathtaking story of a string of ideas that are the scientific equivalents of the literary concept of 'metaphor'. In fact, our theories are nothing but self consistent set of metaphors relating mathematics and the observable reality and that is the poetic beauty of our simple universe. And like a great piece of music, like Beethoven's 9th, like Van Gogh's Cafe Terrace, like Wilde's essay on lying, like Fry's wonder at cheese and wine, like the soaring flight of the skylark, the joy of finding that there is an order under this chaos, that things are interconnected and simple below this mind-numbing physical complexity is one that gives me goosebumps.<br /><br />'Metaphor' in fact is hardwired into our systems and we cannot speak a simple sentence without resorting to it in one way or another. As Guy Deutcher mentions in his brilliant book 'Unfolding of language', language itself is built upon a reef of dead metaphors. If you go back long enough in history simple words like 'back', 'have', 'will' etc. will turn out to be metaphors. And as we start maturing as a civilization, as our 'tolerances' for existing metaphors increase, the more experimental and cutting edge of our writers begin exploring other metaphors which are more radical than the old ones but nevertheless stomachable for an age of increased sensitivity. The same happens with ideas and concepts which increasingly seek to interconnect hitherto disconnected notions with more flamboyant analogies and more radical metaphors. So when Nabokov wonders about the dancing electric wires as he sits on the window seat of a traveling train and compares the motion with the life of a human being suffocated by social clutches or when Fry compares language with sex, one has to sit back, shake his head in reverence and give it to the genius who could connect such uncoupled ideas. And it's not that their analogies are contrived. I suppose you need a sufficiently developed sensitivity to appreciate the brilliance required to come up with such unifications in very much the same way wherein an average person will be able to relate the concepts of love and rose because the metaphor has been so beaten to death. So if one is willing to give legitimacy to the connection between a love and a rose, ideally, every connection should be beyond reproach and hence our snickering disapproval for the avant garde seems baseless.<br /><br />But the more important and 'underlying' argument is that simplification and unification are concepts that a human being seems to strive for in all his endeavors. And when such comprehensibility and interconnectedness emerge from a heap of confused mess, it's a very primal joy. That it's an effort that is beyond the average human being is without doubt. Knowledge by itself is not of much use. I mean, Dan Brown seems to have a lot of knowledge but he doesn't bring anything really new and interesting and thought provoking to the dinner table. We are super specialized in our fields but as to our ability to further our fields by any respectable jump, the lesser said the better. But knowledge definitely is the bedrock upon which a greater understanding is constructed. It's like Fry's complaints about the sorry state of the 'verse libre' generation who do not write metrical poems not because they do not want to but because they cannot. Newton famously said, 'The reason I have been able to look beyond others is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants' and he was referring to Galileo. So genius is a rare combination of a voracious appetite for existing knowledge and an uncanny ability of simplifying the current scheme by discovering hidden and often surprising connections. That is why Wilde was such a great genius. What we often overlook, overwhelmed by his brilliant wit, is his encyclopedic grasp of literature before his age. What we often gloss over, however, is his unmatched capacity of elucidating faint connections. 'No man is ever completely unhappy at his friend's success'! It's a faint connection, a frail analogy, a tenuous 'metaphor'. But it's there, vital and universal.</div>Ankithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17470055340115740608noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22668420.post-86000270570201287102009-01-18T23:07:00.000-08:002009-01-19T00:07:30.519-08:00Swan Song<div style="text-align: justify;">And there it was. On the white water. Under a black deserted sky, ominous and cloudy save the faint moon, abruptly punctuated by the dark lake in the distance. And still, breathless silence of a world dumbstruck at the sheer beauty, the bloody audacity of beauty, the painful intolerance of beauty, the insurmountable allure of perfection, the insulting mockery of it all. There it was, its white coat reflecting the soft moon in a blurred concoction of fractal complexity, its long slender neck rising above the surface of water with an elegance unspeakable, its wide open eyes shimmering with the innocence of stupidity, utterly confident of the immutability of future. Silly swan! In the calculated expanse of his wings was the grasp of his dreams, unsullied, untainted - ultimately unintelligent. In the perfection of his form lay the idea of an unimprovable future. In the grace of his movements, the surety of a sunny day. In the arrow through his neck - the shattered shards of the perfect life. Helpless as he writhed with this unquenchable pain, as he jostled with this anchor which had tethered his mighty flight to the lowly ground, as he tried to squeeze out the last tones from his fast emptying barrel - in his desperate attempt to save the quickly disfiguring pot of his dreams, in one of those stupid ironic moments when death lays bare the most human of hues, when life lives with an unmatched vitality in the arms of death, he broke out into the most gut wrenchingly beautiful song of his life. And it pierced through the deafening silence with the power of a bolt through a menacing sky, with the simple beauty of the fall of the last leaf of a dying tree, with the tonal perfection of rain over water, with the divine harmony of - silence. And silent it became, with the sanguined water, some blood stained furs stuck to the steely tip and a lifeless, formless, helpless body aimlessly drifting away into the frigid dark, the depressing reminders of a promise ruthlessly trampled. And the sand slipping away from my hand - faster the harder I try to contain it, with an almost mocking, insulting nonchalance until my fingers press against the face of my palm and I realize that it's finally over. The song that I just heard has also stopped. Yes, it's finally over.</div>Ankithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17470055340115740608noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22668420.post-40384160018183534322009-01-04T23:02:00.000-08:002009-01-04T23:22:48.730-08:00<div style="text-align: justify;">I was reading 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol'. A few lines worth sharing:<br /><br />Yet each man kills the thing he loves,<br />By each let this be heard,<br />Some do it with a bitter look,<br />Some with a flattering word.<br />The coward does it with a kiss,<br />The brave man with a sword!<br /><br />Some kill their love when they are young,<br />And some when they are old;<br />Some strangle with the hands of Lust,<br />Some with the hands of Gold:<br />The kindest use a knife, because<br />The dead so soon grow cold.<br /><br />Some love too little, some too long,<br />Some sell, and others buy;<br />Some do the deed with many tears,<br />And some without a sigh:<br />For each man kills the thing he loves,<br />Yet each man does not die.<br /><br />-Wilde<br /><br />Such a poetical exposition of the essential connection between love and hate that leaves them both tangled in each others embrace, hanging in an exquisite balance whose unstable equilibrium is a relationship.</div>Ankithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17470055340115740608noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22668420.post-65976789084872909622009-01-02T22:33:00.000-08:002009-01-03T02:16:30.914-08:00Mnemonically speaking<div style="text-align: justify;">In thinking about my distant past I'm frequently surprised by the clarity with which certain small details, quite insignificant in the normal scheme of things, rush through the haze of at least 2 decades. It has the same effect of staring down into a valley on a particularly foggy day. Backgrounded by a blurry, vague mist the bushes in the foreground glisten and sparkle with an astounding detail that is completely missed in the mayhem that is the inevitable concomitant of clarity. Similarly my past, so nebulous, so amorphous like a long exposure shot of a waterfall in which water looks more like a continuous fabric than a collection of long quantum streaks, provides a canvas of such assorted medley that the resultant is a whitish, palish sheet of paper on which arise the geometrical flashpoints of my life. My life, in hindsight, conveniently expressed, summarily summarized by the relative perspicuity of periodic insignificance! <br /><br />How else would I explain the lucid taste of Calcite which still clouds the tongue everytime I take a piece of chalk in my hands; the memory arising from my taking a bite out of a classroom piece at a time in my past that is as lost to my mind as the complete repository of my Bio knowledge. How else would I explain the exactitude with which the parabolic trajectory of the six, which was the result of two and a half paces of dance down the wicket and a mighty heave on the onside, is affixed in the jumble of my mind? How else would I explain the vivid memory of the primordial bliss that engulfed a child of 6 in the company of his mother who is chattering away on a clear spring afternoon under a bright yellow sun on a white concrete roof of a dilapidated signature middle class society building with moisture induced black algae on the outside walls that is punctuated with small mottled glass windows and frank, public private balconies? In comparison, all the important landmarks, examinations, birthdays, marriages, trips etc. appear as if from behind a rain spattered glass window. They are there alright but as their own ghosts; they are all there in the realm of the fuzzy no-man's land between the conscious and the subconscious. Like the indefinite transmogrification of reality in its caricatured alter-ego that resides within the boundaries of somnolence. And I'm never sure that upon trying to extract a particular portion of that gooey mixture, what I'm ending up with is actually a slice of my life or just a phantasmagorical remnant of a confused mind. <br /><br />I suppose this problem is uniquely my own. Imagination tries to fill in the gaps left by a memory that has been a shameless bum with regards to its own work. I have, without a shred of doubt, the most incompetent, most vacillating of long term memories among all those I've met. But then I don't remember most of them :).</div>Ankithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17470055340115740608noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22668420.post-90378183627011154282009-01-02T00:57:00.001-08:002009-01-02T02:16:13.870-08:00Foggy and Gloomy<div style="text-align: justify;">Wilde once said that all bad poetry is a result of honest emotions. Well... at least my poetry is bad... it's in fact verse!<br /><br />I wonder what to write on<br />in times of such distress,<br />with gloomy days and foggy nights<br />solitude lone buttress.<br />Specters rise in ghostly dance<br />from all engulfing mist,<br />I raise my hand to touch them all,<br />moisture my mistress.<br /><br />Memory with its shearing edge<br />cuts carves clean car-cass,<br />and chops it to a deja vu<br />bludgeons it to molass.<br />And I walk on with eyes put fix<br />into the foggy dark,<br />anxiety, nerves, concern, shivers,<br />trepidation en masse.<br /><br />Ink in the pen, starts to dry<br />with careless nonchalance,<br />in horror do I gape at the<br />precarious imbalance.<br />As it tilts here and it tilts there<br />I'm left to ruminate,<br />over our hollow rein on life,<br />self-deluding pretense.<br /><br />Well... too gloomy I think, too dark. No no, things are not nearly dark enough but midway through it I was seized by the romantic imagery of it all. It's a vicious circle, gloom. It feeds on itself. The more eloquently you express it, the more beautiful, alluring, all-consuming it becomes until you are reduced to a whining, bleeding heart that your emotion and sympathy laden ideas want you to be. I know it from experience and I believe it very deeply that I have been dealt a more than fair hand. My travails have not been worse than anyone else's just like the travails of most people in the world are probably worse only in their own eyes. But such rational justifications do not stop me from writing self-indulgent, morose lines like the ones above. Hmmm... was it Gandhi who once said that to be happy, you only need to look at a person sadder than you?</div>Ankithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17470055340115740608noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22668420.post-31275206989133708942009-01-01T18:26:00.000-08:002009-01-01T18:44:51.086-08:00Fry on Language<div style="text-align: justify;">I recently came across this brilliant post on the subject of language by Stephen Fry and since I can never express my own feelings with the clarity and eloquence of the master, I will reproduce a part of his text here. From Stephen Fry's musings on the subject of language:<br /><br />"I’ve mentioned those French intellectuals the structuralists: one of their number, perhaps the best known, Roland Barthes, liked to use two words jouissance and plaisir. Le plaisir du texte. The pleasure of the text. Those who think structuralism spelt or spelled death to conscious art and such bourgeois comforts as style, accomplishment and enjoyment might be surprised that the pleasure of the text, the jouissance, the juicy joy of language, was important to Roland and his followers. Only to a dullard is language a means of communication and nothing more. It would be like saying sex is a means of reproduction and no more and food a means of fuelling and no more. In life you have to explain wine. You have to explain cheese. You have to explain love. You can’t, but you have to try, or if not try you have, surely, to be aware of the astonishing fact of them. We would never notice if the fat and protein rich food with which cows, ewes and nanny goats suckled their young could not be converted to another, firmer foodstuff that went well with crackers and grapes. We wouldn’t go about the place moaning that sheep’s milk was only of any use to lambs, any more than I have ever heard anyone wonder why pig’s milk doesn’t make a good yoghurt. In fact if you suggest drinking pig’s milk or horse’s milk, people look askance and go “yeurgh!” as if it’s the oddest suggestion they’ve ever heard. We take what nature and custom have led us to accept. As Eddie Izzard pointed out, it’s odd that bees make honey: ‘after all,’ he said, ‘earwigs don’t make chutney.’ And take that arbitrary fruit, the grape: suppose grapes didn’t uniquely transmogrify themselves, without the addition of sugar, into a drink of almost infinite complexity? We wouldn’t wonder at the lack of such a thing as wine in the world, any more than we wonder that raspberry wine (despite the deliciousness of raspberries as fruit) can’t, in the proper sense, exist or speculate on why the eggs of carp aren’t as good to eat as the eggs of sturgeon. But every now and again we should surely celebrate the fact that caviar is so fine, that the grape offers itself up so uniquely, that milk products of three or four species have such versatile by-products for us, that the grain of some grasses can be transformed into bread, that the berry, pod or leaf of this plant or that plant can give us chocolate, coffee or tea, and that while the fuzz of this plant can’t go to make a shirt, the fuzz of that unique one canand the thread of this insect can go to make a tie, while the equally impressive thread, in nature, of that other insect can’t be spun into the simplest handkerchief. Is it weird that silkworms exist or is it weird that only the silkworm will do when it comes to silk and only the cotton plant when it comes to cotton? To put it again, in an accidental line of decasyllabic verse, ‘none would be missed if they didn’t exist’. And if language didn’t elicit pleasure, if it didn’t have its music, its juiciness or jouissance would we notice, or would always be destined to find pleasure in it because that’s a thing we humans can do? Out of the way we move we can make dance, out of the way we speak we can make poetry and oratory and comedy and all kinds of verbal enchantments. Cheese is real, and so it seems, is the pleasure of the text."<br /><br />His full post can be found at:<br />http://www.stephenfry.com/blog/2008/11/04/don%E2%80%99t-mind-your-language%E2%80%A6/<br /><br />hmmm... quite a brilliant article and it makes me wonder about those philosophic thoughts which advocate a spartan and austere life, taking the juice out of life itself so that it would never spill on your clothes. Would terming it 'to always err on the side of extreme caution' be right? Is pleasure the most basic human duty? A duty which like all duties is extremely difficult to live up to but whose idea is the idea of a perfect life.<br /></div>Ankithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17470055340115740608noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22668420.post-30173242206875774262008-12-26T10:13:00.000-08:002008-12-26T10:58:22.578-08:00Anand<div style="text-align: justify;">In one of the most poignant scenes in Bollywood history, a hyperventilating Rajesh Khanna says to a massively worried Amitabh Bachchan, 'जो खत्म हो रहा है वो शरीर है।' (That which is ending is the body) and follows it up with one of the most beautiful poems I've ever come across:<br /><br />मौत तू एक कविता है,<br />मुझसे एक कविता का वादा है मिलेगी मुझको<br /><br />डूबती नब्ज़ों में जब दर्द को नींद आने लगे<br />ज़र्द सा चेहरा लिये जब चांद उफक तक पहुचे<br />दिन अभी पानी में हो, रात किनारे के करीब<br />ना अंधेरा ना उजाला हो, ना अभी रात ना दिन<br /><br />जिस्म जब ख़त्म हो और रूह को जब साँस आऐ<br />मुझसे एक कविता का वादा है मिलेगी मुझको<br /><br />which, when translated reads like:<br /><br />Death, you are a poem,<br />and you shall meet me; in your poetic promise.<br /><br />when pain begins to subside in my sinking pulse,<br />and the pale moon reaches the horizon.<br />while the day is still in water, and night lurks on the bank,<br />neither dark nor alight, when it's neither a day nor a night<br /><br />when the body ends and the soul takes breath,<br />you shall meet me; in your poetic promise.<br /><br />----<br /><br />Not the brightest of thoughts with which to start the day but it does serve to elucidate the power of creative effort. Art, in its best attempt, trying to veil the hideous reality in a beautiful raiment, thereby engendering an experience that is as rooted in ethereal beauty as in dead certainty. Bare truth is not only depressing, it's also predictably boring. A creative vision, in the above example, seeking to redress reality's morbid obsession with its own mediocrity and inevitability. <br /></div>Ankithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17470055340115740608noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22668420.post-8719212464262446032008-12-20T20:10:00.000-08:002008-12-21T18:35:22.062-08:00Oh Lolita!<div style="text-align: justify;">I suppose the fascination; this secret, almost amoral intrigue, the all too well known broad desire of uncertain and unsullied youth which makes it look with slant,unsure, fidgeting but intermittently riveted eyes at the lady in elaborate disrobe on the cover of magazines which invested too heavily in the aphorism, 'a picture is worth a thousand words'; about one of the most controversial books of all time started more with hearsay than with rationality. There it was, tucked away with almost unusual secrecy in one of the damp, dark, dreary passages of the library between other books by the same author which had been unfortunate enough to have not been controversial enough for me to remember their names now with any sort of clarity. There it was, 'Lolita', sinister and inviting in the blackness of its hardbound, evil and guilty in the deluge of its perverse reputation, smug and defiant in the light of its success but classy and confident in the quality of its prose. I had heard about it, I have been hearing about it, I heard that they made a movie on the story and I heard that Bollywood duly followed suit by copying it in one of those mind dumps which starred one of those mind dumps whose father had the foresight to give up the mighty good name of the Srivastavas. Oh! I can imagine how mediocre the movies must have been.<br /><br />As someone said to me, good books make bad movies. And Lolita is far from being a good book. It's a brilliant book. One of the best I have ever come across in fact. Simply put, it's the testimony of a pedophile/murderer. Oh! how crass it sounds, how viciously unworthy a subject upon which the creative juices of an artist be spent, how overwhelmingly lopsided our emotions regarding the deviant fetishes of one so deranged and how swift our 'fair' implications and judgment. How warped and perverted must the story be! Well, it's not warped and it's not perverted. I'm sorry if it's too hard to believe but it is a beautiful tale of a person who belongs to a group who has had the terrible misfortune of having an interest which happens to have not had found any favor with the majority view of acceptable social conduct. I'm not advocating that his behavior must find a champion in one as vocal and might I say deranged as Ms. Roy. I'm just saying that in a society which is continually expanding its realms of what it finds acceptable, to use a term from Dawkins in this continuing moral zeitgeist where gays are allowed to be happy and gay the protagonist (or antagonist?) of this novel represents that portion which has been dealt a hard hand by nature. Tough luck, you deserve the consequences! we might say and move on. But this book stops where our sense of propriety dictated us to look in the other direction. And it's a worthwhile read. After all, is there is sense to our quest for knowledge if not for widening our horizons of rational thinking and sensitivity?<br /><br />It's essentially a love story. A tale of unrequited love which sees its highs in vigorous, periodic, closely spaced but almost never narrated sexual encounters and its depressing lows in juvenile indifference and jejune preoccupations unmindful of love's shivering and hesitant supplications culminating in a subdued whimper in one of those agonizing moments which, given the poignancy of the situation and masterful exposition of heart's innocent cries, manages to leave a slight trace of moistness in even the most arid of eyes. Yes it's a heartbreakingly beautiful story and it ends up making you feel for the pains and travails and joys and miseries of the eloquent debauched. Such is the power and beauty of author Nabokov's narration that Lolita's final words ('No') stand as iridescent, incandescent reminders of all those times when one has felt completely helpless in the face of all those resolute but heartbreaking Nos. Except in this occasion while the reader's sympathy should have rested with the corrupted and defiled it instead embraces the corrupt and the defiler. The language is a spectacle to behold and is an added incentive if one is needed. I really am too incompetent and too small to even do justice to the brilliant shimmering blaze with which Nabokov's flamboyant prose is alight. Suffice to say, it's been one of the most satisfying reads. Both linguistically and as a really good story.</div>Ankithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17470055340115740608noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22668420.post-32860341207836761602008-12-12T11:47:00.000-08:002008-12-15T14:39:11.076-08:00Monday grays<div style="text-align: justify;">My mobile, weary and red-eyed, listless and slightly annoyed, almost in half sleep whispers in faintly audible blues that the divine order of time has just passed the obscure milestone of the middle hours of the day: 2. And there I am, nestled between the warm embrace of a jaipuria and soft hollows of a 'Sultan Fageras', hair unkempt, face weirdly contorted by a prolonged bout of improper sleeping posture, lying face down with the resolve and the dignity of a soldier recently gunned down on the battlefront. And the irritating phone, oblivious of the ruckus it's causing, unmindful of its amplified and distorted resonance in one so comprehensively unconscious, heedless of its own prickly dissonance and smug in its self delusional belief of digital perfection and recorded harmony, goes tee-tuu-taa-tee-tuu-taa. Ah! if only it had not burned a hole the size of several centuries in my pocket, I would have promptly dealt with such insolence in the form of a raised arm, a clenched fist, a sudden jerk accompanied with a muffled bang and hopefully shards of glass and silicon and bruised pride and hushed conceit. That bloody thing!<br /><br />It's raining cats and dogs outside... metaphorically speaking that is. A literal manifestation would certainly have been reason enough to hurriedly wake up but a metaphorical manifestation of the phenomenon is the best anesthetic ever devised by the devious divinity of the divine. I can hear the cats and dogs slamming down on my window, much like hearing the suicidal tantrums of a very long Chatai from a great distance on Diwali. It looks capitally bleak outside with a bright, all engulfing darkness, a sweltering all pervasive cold, a dry, stifling, itching wetness, a still, inanimate, heavy presence of immobile wind, and the contorted, comic, strained postures of weirdly stretched trees against a backdrop of mercurial, protean, capricious stagnation. The window pane is dotted by the blood of cats and dogs and seems to be trying its best to keep the two worlds separate. The ebullient, jubilant, ecstatic, unchained, primal, unforgiving spectacle much like one of those mysterious tribal ceremonies you see on Discovery or NatGeo or low budget B movies, outside and the subdued, stagnated, controlled, diluted, chained world much like nonfat milk and soy substitutes and mocktails, inside. The one outside is fastened and the one inside is fastened! <br /><br />I think another hour would do me good.<br /></div>Ankithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17470055340115740608noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22668420.post-81517304691264062232008-11-21T23:21:00.000-08:002008-11-22T08:01:33.786-08:00Impressions in the dust<div style="text-align: justify;">This Indian trip was memorable for more ways than one. Yes, I'm back in the ever eternal mild weathered and indolent San Diego with more than a month's worth of dust in my hair, incense in my nose, and lukewarm misty memories in my heart. And I cannot wait to put some of my impressions into words because that's what I have been thinking about through most of the flight and in fact most of the trip.<br /><br />A friend of mine who wants of visit India as soon as possible keeps saying that she wants to do it because it's been such a life changing experience for so many people and I could never take her statement without a hint of incredulity. The exoticism that India represents to the materially worn eyes of a westerner hardly registers to our sensibilities which are often numbed by her superficial harshness. It, then, is not out of place for me to wonder as to how exactly does she expect the Indian experience to change her life. Does she mean it in the spiritual sense, or does she expect the country to put the social issues of our times in a different, maybe even a more important context. India after all is the screaming, wailing, tormented megalopolis of social iniquities, moral encumbrances, and communal apathy. And yet her stuttering swagger into the unknown, however dilapidated, is a source of much joy and hope. Does she expect some of that light to rub on her? And how exactly does that great bowl of seamless integration of suffering and joy, tears and laughter, hope and pessimism, affect one of its own sons? How does that brilliant conglomeration of stupefying paradoxes register on the self proclaimed anesthetized rationality of someone like me?<br /><br />Oh! how little do we know! How simplistic our arguments and how immature our reasoning? Slightly paraphrasing Heller, in a company of men who seem to lack all discretion, I manage to stand out as the one who lacks more discretion. I won't go as far as saying that this Indian trip has made me revert my positions on several issues but I would certainly say that for a country as complex as India simple abstractions from simple minds like mine are bound to fall upon their faces. After all, India is a country that exists against all odds. And it exists well enough. During the course of its history it has taken the severest of blows and came out stronger. Whatever doesn't kill her only makes her stronger and what is bane for most other nations is the one shining panacea of her ailing existence. India's complexity, it seems to me, is the paramount factor that has prevented her during crucial times. As Shashi Tharoor puts it very well, everyone is a minority in India. This complexity, this benumbing intricacy, this stifling convolution seems to have instilled a sense of patience and tolerance among its sufferers and stung by her own plurality the country hops over one obstacle over another in all its contradictory elegance. She marches on to conquer the moon in a spacecraft that probably began its journey with a ceremonial coconut. Her silicon sons mint money in millions in a country which resonates from the throes of its hugely impoverished lower class. Bollywood churns out significantly more movies than Hollywood selling silver dreams and sanguine hopes to the millions who live in shanties at less than a dollar a day. And of course they buy them happily enough. She is Hindu and Muslim and Christian and Sikh and in fact every religion known to humanity. She is multilingual, multi-ethnic and multicultural and smells of the spices of a cuisine of such divine variety that it sends the brain whizzing. She is garish and subdued, subtle and overt, loud and serene, spiritual and morally decrepit, rich and famished, ambitious and satisfied, rational and superstitious, orthodox and liberal all at the same time. That's the paradoxical existence of India. As someone said, if you can say one thing about India, the opposite would also be true. These contradictions are living and breathing, alive and kicking in the country. How, then, can you simplify such glorious uncertainties into insipid rationality? <br /><br />There is so much to like about this India. So much to be happy and inspired about. We talk with clinched fists about religionism and regionalism. People have made political careers out of these and other differences. Here is a thought. India is what she is because of all its constituting differences. We have seen unicultural societies wither away against time. India is a success because she has accommodated them all while she kept paying the price of changing according to the latest onslaught. While the stiff got broken, her malleable existence merely changed form. Her opportunistic survival has endowed all that is beautiful and all that is sad with her. And that's the only country we have inherited. She might be complex and her diversity might be acting as friction in her search for rapid development but that is precisely the trait that makes her what so many of us have come to love and appreciate. Her contradictions and her uncertainties are the most unchanging, unaltering, and reassuring facet of this great civilization.</div>Ankithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17470055340115740608noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22668420.post-53369388428401315752008-11-09T06:54:00.000-08:002008-11-10T05:32:36.940-08:00Bronze screen<div style="text-align: justify;">The television scene in India is actually quite awesome. I know, I know, I can hear the elitists sharpening their claws right at this moment, I can smell their anger induced perspirations as these words come out of my mouth but I won't buckle down under their university-educated snobbery and they cannot stop me from saying what might not really be true but nevertheless is widely accepted here. Television in India kicks ass. My observation is that only the roles are jumbled up. Otherwise everything is quite hunky dory.<br /><br />India TV which is supposed to be a news channel is Discovery channel incarnate for the average Joe-2-patialas and the Hokey-moms of India. Only recently it was showing the breaking news about a breathtaking discovery of a cave that leads straight to 5-deities hidden in nether-lands. As their camera crew braved the placid waters and unthreatening facade to gallantly go where no man had gone before in search of the darkest secrets, they came across vicious demons like vampire bats, poisonous spiders, and a total of 1 snake. While the blinking, garish, red arrows and red circles told my unenlightened eyes where to look for spiders, bats, and snakes on a screen filled with spiders, bats, and snakes, I munched off half my fingernails in nerve-racking anticipation. Adventure journalism at it's finest hour. Aaj Tak is not far behind with dramatic reenactments which are more dramatic than reenactments, running commentaries on the various serials on other channels, and a breaking news at the rate of 1 every 20 picoseconds. It's more soapy than the regular soaps and more thorough on it's subjects than it's subjects. And other news channels are trying their best to play catch-up. <br /><br />I think soaps are basically marriage videos. I am just waiting for a dedicated channel which would consolidate it all and run all these serials one after another after editing out the irrelevant portions and dialogs so that we can all watch one marriage after another non-stop. Tulsi getting married to Mihir, Parvati to Mr. X, catwoman to Shri Krishna, Ekta Kapoor to an ass etc. I think that would be the logical next step. Then they can have another channel and compile a 24-hour broadcasts of all those facial close-ups with accompanying doomsday music. People getting shocked, euphoric, foxy, inconsolable, surprised, apathetic, maudlin, jumpy and maybe even orgasmic. The last one would push the TRPs even further. <br /><br />And the talent competitions are the soaps. There is talent no doubt but there is just too much other stuff going on. You know the kind of thing that is so common a phenomenon to reality television. False emotions, pointless suspense, sensationalistic editing, provocative reactions, dishonest appraisals and much more. It seems to me that the best talent on display on these shows is acting, hence they should cut the crap and start calling them soaps now. <br /><br />But the crowning achievement of all these super-mediocre efforts are the comic talent competitions. I cannot categorize them into any genre. I cannot view them from any positive angle. They are the common variety of arse-gravy we, as Indians, are all familiar with. They have a humor quotient worse than the worst jokes that used to come in the 'dekho hans na dena' section of Champak. 'Dekho hans na dena' never made anyone laugh and thus fulfilled its own prophecy but these shows go further. Their cheapness rivals the content of those greasy joke books that you used to see on railway station book stalls which either had a big buxomed lady or Kushwant Singh or both on their cover. They are loud, mindless, phony, and gut-wrentchingly humorless. I have felt happier and more invigorated watching snails move and watching glaciers melt. There is more humor in those eternally pessimistic Russian writers who could never stop talking about the Russian farmer whose wife had an affair. Manoj Kumar who spent the better part of his life brooding over country, wife, children, and 'mitti' which produced 'sona', eyeing the world with half his face was funnier. The great Greek tragedy is more comic and Ekta Kapoor is smarter than those scores of comedians who infest these shows with the revulsion of fungi on a piece of moldy bread...<br /><br />I see that my tone has reversed. Oh well! time to stop<br /></div>Ankithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17470055340115740608noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22668420.post-41539357192978498942008-10-27T08:00:00.000-07:002008-10-27T09:16:16.774-07:00The amazing traffic<div style="text-align: justify;">I just finished reading Maximum City by journalist turned author Suketu Mehta but this post is not its review. If I had to put my impression of the book in a few lines: It's a brilliantly researched piece of work, an effort that more than succeeds in bringing to us the dirty truths behind bomb blasts and the ensuing riots of 1993, the fine structure of Bombay underworld with its political and judicial affiliations, the seedy underbelly of the seemingly unending red-light behavior of the creeking megalopolis and its insistent fight for resurgence in the form of honesty, zest, and the will to survive. It's a very good book. But I wouldn't want to read it again. If only I could, I would have reversed my act of reading it. The easiest way by which truth manages to be stranger than fiction is by being more gruesome; and unfortunately for me, I never enjoy reading about the fine nuances of 3rd degree. Like everyone else, there is a pervert in me but it never raises its head to witness brutality. So Maximum City has been a bit of a drag really, especially after Orwell's 1984. John Wright's 'Indian Summers' was a welcome relief. To undo the effects I have started yet again on my absolute favorite, Catch-22 :).<br /><br />Coming to the point of the post, Mehta mentions that traffic fatalities have actually decreased in Bombay in the last two decades and I would be surprised if that was not the case in every major city in India. It's an unintended fallout of city streets which are more crammed than ever before. The average city speeds have come down and people can basically stop from 20 to 0 in the space of a 50 paise coin. It's difficult to inflict major injuries at 20. It's a nightmare at 0. All you can do is take out your machete and start hacking away but I do not see any particular incentive for doing it either. And I don't see anyone else brandishing anything even remotely similar to a Rampuria. So obviously, fatalities are almost non-existent given the crawling speeds and an unexplainable disinclination in people for road-rage induced homicide. <br /><br />All seriousness aside, it's awesome, spine chilling fun driving in Lucknow and it's humbling when you try to analyze how the hell everything just works. I am not trying to be an apologist for Indian traffic. I am genuinely amazed by its intelligence. It should not work. It just shouldn't. But it works and it works like a charm. It's a living, breathing organism with the IQ of a Nobel laureate. Forgive me for the comparison but it seems to have the sloth of Yokozuna but in fact has the nimbleness of 1-2-3 kid. Things get rearranged in matter of milliseconds. It's so well internalized you do not appreciate how this complex machinery is working. One small glance, a minute gesture, and the turning car would slow down ever so slightly so that it could turn with a decreased radius and you scrape past. And that small action simultaneously kickstarts a huge chain of reactions where every single one of the 70 adjoining units including cars, motorcycles, scooters, pedestrians, rickshaws, trucks, dogs and cows moves, accelerates, breaks, stops, shifts, turns, honks, swears, barks and moos to account for the new equilibrium. It's brilliant.<br /><br />Contrary to what people think, I feel that the traffic in India is extremely polite and forgiving and it never makes you feel that you are being done any favor. It's noticeable when one tries to cross a busy intersection. It's impolite and impassable only for those who feel that they will get run over if they wade in. Once you start inching forward and basically hold your ground without making any sudden movements, the traffic adjusts itself to allow you room. It breezes past you from all sides but acknowledges that you have a right to your territory and it never tries to intimidate you out of it. Then you move some more.<br /><br />After a bit of driving my scooty around in the particularly 'undisciplined' Lucknow traffic, I have noticed another interesting fact about it. There are very little, if not, no sudden movements. A mathematician would have described the multitudes of vehicular trajectories on a Lucknow road as smooth. Continuous and Differentiable. That is another reason why there aren't more accidents. Many more.<br /><br />I know it's a nightmare for anyone who has to face the inconveniences of such traffic conditions everyday and I can only offer my sympathy but as someone who has lost a bit of touch with ground realities, having spent the bulk of his time in the tamed and monotonous precincts of a foreign country, there is a part of me that cannot help but marvel at the brilliant organism that Indian traffic is. The news is rife with hatred and regionalism and violence. They say that the country is breaking down engulfed in its own seething anger and suffocating corruption. They have been saying the same thing for as long as I can remember. India sags a bit, loses its way slightly, shrugs, corrects itself, and moves again. Like its traffic, it works. Against all odds.<br /><br /></div>Ankithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17470055340115740608noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22668420.post-37302262138515799912008-10-22T10:38:00.000-07:002008-10-23T05:02:23.419-07:00To Lucknow<div style="text-align: justify;">I am really sorry for this long hiatus in posting and I hope that all my readers; nearly both of you; would consider my apology in light of the fact that I became slightly busy in the process of coming to India. I understand that I had lamented about rants and reminiscences in only my last post but I hope that you will understand that this trip has the strongest undercurrents of nostalgia running underneath and that obvious comparisons between U.S. and India by a mind as narrow as mine are bound to leave a slightly sour taste in the mouth every now and then; every here and there.<br /><br />My father has had a recent transfer to Lucknow from Haldwani so Lucknow is the place I have the pleasure of spending my month in. It is the city where I had spent, as they say, the prime of my years. Starting as an immature 12 year old cricketing away on dusty Sunday afternoons and glorious January mornings to an immature 18 year old cricketing away on dusty Sunday afternoons and glorious January mornings, I spent the most unburdened part of my life in this city that, to me, has always had the allure of being slightly more sedated, more laid-back and more sleepy than pretty much any other place I have lived in. It had what the French would call 'je ne se qua'. It quivers with the energy of sloth and trembles with the vitality of snores and wakes up under the full bodied noon-Sun yawning and rubbing its eyes and cursing the heavenly cycle for having invented sunlight. It is a spectacularly inept piece of machinery that provides no respite whatsoever to its dwellers. Things might not be as bad as Kanpur or Bangalore but my city has its moments. And I have realized it time and again every time I had to press on the sides of my miniscule scooty to compress it just that little bit so that I could squeeze it into that small gap between that Rickshaw with the Aunt haggling over 2 rupees and that bicycle whose owner doesn't seem to believe in the philosophy that the right of way in India is directly proportional to the size of the engine between your legs. I have a strong conviction that the city has its parallels in John Cleese's Basil Fawlty. It would do all well if not for its residents. But the residents are the headstrong sorts. They would spot every available inch of space with a brick, at least of equal size, if not bigger and when they have finished building over all the free space and when they have zoomed to heights curtailed by government regulations, bribe budgets, and sorry foundations, they would, furtively, encroach a bit of the public road when no one is looking and then they would take out their Hyundaes and Toyotas and Hondas and double up on the road and basically not go anywhere. And no one seems to mind. Placid, quiet, serene, they all seem to have attained nirvana. They are at peace with a city that, in all its commotion, somehow keeps ticking. Ever so slowly, teetering on the brink, it's alive. And I'm really proud of it. Not because it manages to do what every city in India finally does but because buried just beneath the surface, lying dormant, is the oft repeated notion of a rich cultural past and a sober assimilative history. Lucknow has long had comparable populations of Muslims and Hindus. I feel proud of the fact that the city has never played host to any significant religious fundamentalism. <br /><br />While in college too, I kept visiting Lucknow every year over the Summer holidays witnessing to my ever increasing muted disapproval the 'thinning' of the old crowd as they dispersed in search of greener pastures. I looked scornfully at every new flyover that botched up the pristinely chaotic landscape, every effort at modernizing any shop that I used to frequent while I was a school kid, and every new statue that that stupid, dumb, trainwreck of a woman, Mayawati erected in her honor. Then my father got transferred to Haldwani and I have not really had a decent stay in the city for 4 years if not 8. <br /><br />So here I am back again after so many years. Things look about the same. Just more tightly packed together. More half finished flyovers and more road side barbers snipping away at more unshaved faces. More bikes with 25 more CCs dodging more cows and more Indicas. More sweet shops with more people working in them than needed and more rules for buying 250 grams of Jalebi. Coupons and tokens and lines and haggling and ultimately no-lines and more haggling. Huge advertisements rising up into the sky as you traverse a completed freeway. They promise you a better life with beautiful cars and beautiful homes and beautiful locales and beautiful girls. And they hide the sky behind. Then you look down and see a mad sea of ambitions and emotions and dreams heartbreaks all uniformly packed into every square inch of habitable area. Not much seems to have changed really. It's nice to be back.<br /><br /></div>Ankithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17470055340115740608noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22668420.post-31232900605693087232008-09-30T21:47:00.000-07:002008-10-01T01:02:00.461-07:00On rants and reminiscences<div style="text-align: justify;">There are two easy ways of writing an article. When the creative juices dry up, when the mind aches as it is made to cogitate over novel ideas, and when one is at one's wit's end, there are two kinds of topics which are almost insultingly easy to write upon. <br /><br />The first is a rant. One just needs to think about an issue that sends the splenetic juices of fury raging in his veins and lo and behold: the article writes itself. It is always easy to write upon something that makes you foam at your mouth and sweat in your palms. Your adrenaline and anger are so high that you have the capability of literally squeezing out ideas from even a respectably cretaceous skull. That's the reason why we have so many blogs that do nothing but present tirades after tirades of tired trite. That's the reason for the success of reality shows which, for example, put two people who do not like each other together to see what happens. That's precisely the reason why mainstream satire/criticism has morphed into such a sorry spectacle. As someone brilliant once said, 'Emotion is always more easily accessed than reason'. No wonder then that such a form of writing/entertainment, after a point, not only becomes mundane but almost insulting to human intelligence. I like to think that for all my shortcomings as a human being (and there are many), I consistently make an effort at not being a hypocrite. Therefore, I have to admit that this blog fell for such cheap gimmicks once and I do not look back proudly at it. Every now and then when I glance back I feel almost ashamed at how quickly something that started out as genuine satire and innocent fun disintegrated into a dishonest diatribe. Dishonest not as in something unethical or immoral but the dishonesty that comes when you start pandering to the wishes of others as perceived in your eyes. Dishonesty with oneself. I am happy that the phase got over. I might be writing crap now, it might be completely irrelevant, mediocre, pungent and senseless. And it might not be any of those things. For all the fun I have, it doesn't really matter.<br /><br />The second topic in this list is nostalgia. When you are out of ideas, nothing better to save the day than the memory of that heavenly taste of freshly cooked meal that your mother used to make for you as you scurried into the house after a particularly unforgiving day at the school. There is nothing inherently wrong with the idea. The problem though is the popular saying, 'Hindsight is 20-20'. From behind the rosy glasses of nostalgia, every sweet memory becomes sweeter and every tart one is conveniently ignored; or reassessed in the very least. And that is the reason why every campy show that you ever watched during your childhood now appears as the pinnacle of creativity. Everyone is in a hurry to grow up as a child. No child actually likes his life. But as adults none of us can help yearning for it. How absurd! I get reminded of Carrol's lines:<br /><br />I'd give all wealth that years have piled,<br />the slow result of life's decay.<br />To be once more a little child,<br />on one bright summer's day.<br /><br />or Jagjit Singh's famous lines from 'Kagaz ki kashti':<br /><br />Ye daulat bhee le lo, ye shohrat bhee le lo,<br />bhale cheen lo mujhse meri jawaani.<br />Magar mujhko lauta do bachpan ka saawan,<br />wo kaagaz ki kashti, wo baarish ka paani.<br /><br />But for all its emotional drive nostalgia is merely an innocuous occupation. In moderation, it may even act as an able vehicle for creativity. Much like anger.<br /><br />Speaking of nostalgia, I was looking at some old mails today and that is, in part, a reason for this post. So much has changed! I can hardly believe how far and removed the past looks now. Even a time merely a couple of years back seems separated from the present by an abrupt discontinuity. Even the memories from the beginning of this year come in an aloof, almost unrecognizable technicolor. Maybe it is a natural fallout of the passage of time. Maybe this disconnect has something to do with the particularly eventful year I have had. I'm not sure if it's a common phenomenon with everyone but I personally never like the person that I was. Which is another way of saying that I would rather be the person that I am today and the position that I am in today than any other. I suppose there are reasons to be happy and contended in such a scenario. But you see, it's a continuous process. Hindsight, for me, has never been 20-20. But I'm afraid that it shall never be.</div>Ankithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17470055340115740608noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22668420.post-49148334506133614562008-09-22T00:09:00.000-07:002008-09-22T01:07:37.678-07:00Comedy<div style="text-align: justify;">I must have said it before but I would like to say it again that comedy is one of the most exhilarating experiences I generally have. It ranks up there with good music, sports, literature and art. I have very limited understanding of these fields but then as they say, 'to each his own'. Interestingly, only very recently I was having a very enlightening chat with a person whom I admire a lot for the breadth of his knowledge upon this very topic. 'Is there an objective goodness and merit in art and literature or indeed any human endeavor'. That's another issue though.<br /><br />It all started with P.G.Wodehouse I guess. To me he is still the master and commander of all that is funny and ludicrous in the world. With his innocent almost farcical plots and queer, idiosyncratic characters he managed to weave a world that was completely devoid of malice and contempt. His was a rosy, shiny world that was forever lost in the benign vision and understanding of pre-pubescence. His stories were lost to our insistent demand of morals and social satire and to some degree, our bourgeois (I like to use this word :)) need for making sense of humanity through the creations of its champions. And then was his language. I cannot even begin to start to expatiate over the quality of his language. Just suffice to say that he was definitely one of the greatest linguist who ever took breath.<br /><br />Oscar Wilde is another. He is funny to me not because he intends to be. He is funny because he seemed to have the measure of the world with such precision. He looked through the haze and glared at the world naked and ashamed in all its glorious hypocrisy, ludicrity and pretense. He was just too damn blunt and too damn right. But that's just me. I admire both his intelligence that frankly speaking most of us can never match and his guts to say things as they were. And when you are so frank and so incisive, things automatically become funny.<br /><br />Then obviously the great satire of Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, John Cleese in his flying circus and Fawlty Towers, Voltaire's Candide, Gulliver's travels, satirical writings of Pope (particularly 'Rape of the lock') and Dryden and many many more. But if there is one single creation that completely tops them all, it's Catch 22. Joseph Heller created something that just makes me go numb. I was talking to a dear friend recently about the book and without even realizing I was gasping for breath after some time due to all the excitement. It's just so bloody difficult to create something that is so imaginative and so stupid at the same time. I mean, it's beyond my grasp as to how he managed to write something that has such brilliantly colorful characters with such glorious quirks in a plot that is so mindbogglingly intense. And that's not all. The story has a freaking moral. It says so much to us. Beneath the ball-bouncing stupidity, there is a huge Huge HUGE eye-opener. I can feel the goosebumps already.<br /><br />We make the mistake of not taking comedy as seriously as we probably take other things. We think it doesn't deserve the respect that something like classical music has. Well, try and write something funny and you will know how hard it is. As with anything creative, a notion that is probably too alien for our disposition, it's bloody difficult. For understanding what makes people laugh, for having gone the distance of developing the linguistic apparatus necessary, and for having the intelligence and creativity to actually come up with something 'new' (how many of us in our sorry existences ever come up with anything new), the proponents of the art remain one of the most venerable artists I can indulge in.</div>Ankithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17470055340115740608noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22668420.post-9612468534821547172008-09-19T00:21:00.000-07:002008-09-19T01:25:49.594-07:00<div style="text-align: justify;">Only today it dawned upon me that the word 'certain' can be used in two exactly opposite senses. As in:<br /><br />'I am certain that...' and<br />'He was referring to a certain Mr. Mullins'<br /><br />The same word shows both concreteness and ambiguity when used in two different sentences. It is easy to find words which have more than one meanings obviously. They are the bread and butter of the cheapest stand-up comedian and the most brilliant satirist but a word which can convey completely opposite meanings is quite another thing. It's quite amazing really and I would be thrilled to find some more! Anyways, a quite interesting pair of words is 'overtone' and undertone' both of which, contrary to common sense, convey the exact same meaning which again is quite smart I think. Another similar phenomenon goes by the name 'faux amis' or 'false friends'. These are words, in different languages, which started with the same root but came to mean completely different and often opposite ideas. One which readily comes to mind and which is completely beaten to death is the word 'ass'. As we all know, the word means a 'donkey' in Britain and a 'butt' (=a British 'arse' !) in the US. Then there is the word 'preservative' which comes from the Latin præservativum. Somehow the Latin root has morphed into words in different languages like French, German, Spanish, Italian etc. and in all of them it refers to male contraceptive! Quite interesting. Demand is a word whose derivative in French is 'demande' and it means 'to request'!<br /><br />There are a few more interesting words that I recently came across. 'Honorificabilitudinitatibus' means 'being in the state of receiving awards' but obviously it would be quite boring if that was all it had for boasting. It's the longest word in English with alternating consonants and vowels. It was featured in Shakespeare's 'Love's labour's lost' and is a 'hapax legomenon'!!! 'Hapax Legomenon' refers to any word that an author uses exactly once in all his writings. On the other hand, if an author invents a new word which he does not intend to use any further, it's called a 'nonce word'. It should not come as a surprise then that James Joyce was a master of 'nonce words'. He gave the word 'quark' to quantum physics and is mentioned in his irritatingly opaque 'Finnegan's Wake' (I started it but gave up in the first 2 lines). Lewis Carrol has provided so many of these in the form of portmanteaus (joining two words to form a new one) in his entirely lovable although completely nonsensical poem 'Jabberwocky', some of them being- slithy (slimy and lithe), chortle (chuckle and snort), galumph (gallop and triumph) etc. <br /><br />In hindsight, it's a very episodic, disconnected and slightly pompous post. But pomposity was not the goal. It's just that language excites me in the same way that different hobbies excite different people - or at least I hope that they do.</div>Ankithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17470055340115740608noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22668420.post-2459235359097254702008-09-15T01:02:00.000-07:002008-09-15T02:05:25.795-07:00<div style="text-align: justify;">Language poses several important questions to me. I mean several moral and rational questions since for me it is sort of a representation through which other deeper issues of life manifest themselves. And I guess that is quite alright since with every thing that is created by man, language in the process of creation has also been bestowed with his dreams and joys and insecurities and dilemmas. Therefore, the ghetto rap of South Central LA is not just a polluted form of English. It is so much more than that. It's the lives of the people who speak it. It's as much a symbol of their glorious notoriety as Victorian English was a symbol of its proponents' sophistication and to our eyes, their pomposity. Language hardens into an unforgiving brute in the hands of a military establishment and the same language turns into a conniving, calculating fox in the company of the legal. It drips like honey from the mouth of a well educated, well mannered scholar whereas it becomes completely incomprehensible when the speaker is one from the traditionally nether regions of the society. It's like us human beings. Both brutal and generous, both harsh and mellow, both noble and ghastly. <br /><br />The reason I have said all this is to drive home the point that to say that there is one correct form of language is a gross mistake. We might as well say that a person is objectively right or wrong, an idea that has been used far too often by society and its machineries to control and make us do things that no man in his right mind should ever do. If there is no 'right' language, what should we make of grammar ? Believe me the issue is not as trivial as it sounds. Below the banal surface lies the age old friction between rules and freedom. As soon as we understand that grammar is nothing but a set of rules that tries to contain the unrestrained proliferation and mutation of language (which is freedom, metaphorically speaking) the analogy starts becoming clear. <br /><br />Some people argue too easily against the necessity of grammar. They find it too stuffy and limiting. I would have tried to sympathize with their point of view had it not been the case that most of such people say this not because they have an informed opinion but only because they have been too lazy to put in the effort required to understand language. And I am not demeaning them. Their opinions are just like my opinions on American football. Half baked and arm-chaired. But then I do not expect my opinions on American football to be of any value whatsoever. The fact is grammar is as necessary in language as the theory of consonance and dissonance is necessary in music. You cannot expect a child with no musical training to produce tolerable music when given a piano. He at least needs to be told as to which notes go well with which ones and only then will he be able to play anything remotely resembling music. It's only when we know the rules are we qualified to break them and the final result is so much more agreeable then.<br /><br />Human spirit, it seems to me, finds its true liberation when it is made to work under some confines. Given an infinite wasteland it is almost impossible to make a garden out of it but a small patch of land can be very tastefully converted into one. Grammar is such a confine. So are metrical rules in poetry or compositional guidelines in photography or the Wisden in cricket (:)). If we take the analogy slightly further it is not hard to see that human freedom and the rules that limit it are not so antagonistic after all. Beyond the obvious observation that one has no identity in the absence of the other, it might not be far fetched to say that beneath the surface hostility, each one only serves to strengthen the other. History has proved time and again that the greatest geniuses that humanity could offer were produced during periods of censure and formality. There is nothing to revolt against when everything has already been revolted against or in other words when there is complete freedom. What then is the territory of the modern avant-garde ?<br /><br />Well. Too much thinking for a Sunday night :).</div>Ankithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17470055340115740608noreply@blogger.com0