Chintan

Blog moved

2009-04-19T01:29:00.000-07:00

This blog has moved to:

http://www.ankitsrivastava.net/chintan/

Thanks,
Ankit

God's Delusion

2009-04-08T00:13:00.000-07:00

Orwell on subversion

2009-04-07T23:08:00.000-07:00

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.

"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"

Mexico: Impressions

2009-04-05T01:47:00.000-07:00

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.

So what is Mexico like?

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.

Hopefully I'll stop to reminisce some more for there are such beautiful memories.

"You are a good writer"

2009-03-23T18:09:00.000-07:00

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.

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.

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.

Sorry for being a slacker these last few weeks :).

Science, reality, religion etc.

2009-02-26T00:49:00.000-08:00

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.

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.

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 :).

Mnemosyne vs. Camera

2009-02-08T01:13:00.000-08:00

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.

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.

David Deutsch on TED

2009-02-05T20:33:00.000-08:00

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:

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.

Power of Metaphors

2009-02-03T15:41:00.001-08:00

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.

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.

'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.

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.

Swan Song

2009-01-18T23:07:00.000-08:00

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.

2009-01-04T23:02:00.000-08:00

I was reading 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol'. A few lines worth sharing:

Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word.
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the hands of Lust,
Some with the hands of Gold:
The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold.

Some love too little, some too long,
Some sell, and others buy;
Some do the deed with many tears,
And some without a sigh:
For each man kills the thing he loves,
Yet each man does not die.

-Wilde

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.

Mnemonically speaking

2009-01-02T22:33:00.000-08:00

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!

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.

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 :).

Foggy and Gloomy

2009-01-02T00:57:00.001-08:00

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!

I wonder what to write on
in times of such distress,
with gloomy days and foggy nights
solitude lone buttress.
Specters rise in ghostly dance
from all engulfing mist,
I raise my hand to touch them all,
moisture my mistress.

Memory with its shearing edge
cuts carves clean car-cass,
and chops it to a deja vu
bludgeons it to molass.
And I walk on with eyes put fix
into the foggy dark,
anxiety, nerves, concern, shivers,
trepidation en masse.

Ink in the pen, starts to dry
with careless nonchalance,
in horror do I gape at the
precarious imbalance.
As it tilts here and it tilts there
I'm left to ruminate,
over our hollow rein on life,
self-deluding pretense.

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?

Fry on Language

2009-01-01T18:26:00.000-08:00

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:

"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."

His full post can be found at:
http://www.stephenfry.com/blog/2008/11/04/don%E2%80%99t-mind-your-language%E2%80%A6/

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.

Anand

2008-12-26T10:13:00.000-08:00

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:

मौत तू एक कविता है,
मुझसे एक कविता का वादा है मिलेगी मुझको

डूबती नब्ज़ों में जब दर्द को नींद आने लगे
ज़र्द सा चेहरा लिये जब चांद उफक तक पहुचे
दिन अभी पानी में हो, रात किनारे के करीब
ना अंधेरा ना उजाला हो, ना अभी रात ना दिन

जिस्म जब ख़त्म हो और रूह को जब साँस आऐ
मुझसे एक कविता का वादा है मिलेगी मुझको

which, when translated reads like:

Death, you are a poem,
and you shall meet me; in your poetic promise.

when pain begins to subside in my sinking pulse,
and the pale moon reaches the horizon.
while the day is still in water, and night lurks on the bank,
neither dark nor alight, when it's neither a day nor a night

when the body ends and the soul takes breath,
you shall meet me; in your poetic promise.

----

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.

Oh Lolita!

2008-12-20T20:10:00.000-08:00

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.

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?

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.

Monday grays

2008-12-12T11:47:00.000-08:00

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!

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!

I think another hour would do me good.

Impressions in the dust

2008-11-21T23:21:00.000-08:00

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.

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?

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?

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.

Bronze screen

2008-11-09T06:54:00.000-08:00

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

I see that my tone has reversed. Oh well! time to stop

The amazing traffic

2008-10-27T08:00:00.000-07:00

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 :).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

To Lucknow

2008-10-22T10:38:00.000-07:00

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.

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.

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.

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.

On rants and reminiscences

2008-09-30T21:47:00.000-07:00

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.

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.

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:

I'd give all wealth that years have piled,
the slow result of life's decay.
To be once more a little child,
on one bright summer's day.

or Jagjit Singh's famous lines from 'Kagaz ki kashti':

Ye daulat bhee le lo, ye shohrat bhee le lo,
bhale cheen lo mujhse meri jawaani.
Magar mujhko lauta do bachpan ka saawan,
wo kaagaz ki kashti, wo baarish ka paani.

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.

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.

Comedy

2008-09-22T00:09:00.000-07:00

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

2008-09-19T00:21:00.000-07:00

Only today it dawned upon me that the word 'certain' can be used in two exactly opposite senses. As in:

'I am certain that...' and
'He was referring to a certain Mr. Mullins'

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'!

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.

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.

2008-09-15T01:02:00.000-07:00

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.

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.

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.

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 ?

Well. Too much thinking for a Sunday night :).

The Barman

2008-09-13T22:41:00.000-07:00

Man: Barman, there seems to be something in my shot.

Barman: Well sir, I suppose that is an entirely personal matter.

Man: What do you mean ? It was you who gave me the shot surely.

Barman: What an absolutely rib-tickling idea my dear sir ! I would concede that in my capacity as a dispenser of cocktails, I might be susceptible to becoming more friendly to some than social norms generally allow, but to suggest that I might have in fact presented you with a pair of undergarments is truly amusing.

Man: What? What are you talking about?

Barman: Your short sir, your boxer short. Now I do not want to sound apathetic and callous to your difficulties but I would rather not comment upon anything unnatural and unexpected that you might be experiencing in there. For all the gregariousness that this job demands, I am afraid sir, I draw the line beyond which I have to make small talk over a customer's underwear.

Man: No no you dimwit. I was talking about this shot. This Tequila shot.

Barman: Oh, oh! I am deeply sorry sir. Please wrench off my sideburns and stamp on my toes with steel toed boots for this embarrassing misunderstanding. Is there something wrong ?

Man: Yes there is something in it.

Barman: In what ?

Man: Shot dammit shot.

Barman: Where where ? I didn't hear it ? Is everyone fine ?

Man: What are you talking about ? There is something in my shot I said.

Barman: Well sir, I suggest you contact the department store for a refund then.

Man: No no no. THERE IS SOMETHING IN MY TEQUILA SHOT YOU NINCOMPOOP.

Barman: Then you should have said it earlier dear sir. Rather than taking me on a wild goose chase involving shots being fired in a bar with patrons having questionable items in their undies running amok trying to save their lives, you could just have said, 'Barman, there is something in my shot'. Well here, a sparkling new glass of twinkling beverage, just for my dear sir who, I must say, seems to be a bit woozy today.

Man: Well thanks... Finally... Anyways, can I have the ashtray. I need to dispose off this butt.

Barman: Sir, my wife and seven kids stand testimony to my lifelong interest in the female of the specie but I must say here that I do not see anything wrong with your bottom. I would perhaps go even as far as saying that if ever a popular vote is sought over the issue of disposing off your butt, I would heterosexually vote in to veto the idea.

Man: No no the cigarette butt you birdbrain.

Barman: Oh oh! I am sorry sir. I thought... never mind what I thought. Here take this. Are you comfortable in there ?

Man: Well, the stool has been slightly off color for me I must say.

Barman:...

(Well we won't go any further, if only for propriety :) ).

Mr. Numb Nuts

2008-09-06T19:44:00.000-07:00

Nuts: It would be a matter of immense satisfaction and great mollification to my increasingly dehydrating and, by now, almost parched laryngeal part of the pharynx, which colloquially, I am assuming, is denoted by a 'throat', if you would be so kind as to furnish me with the means and ends for soaking these cracking lips of mine with a sample of di-hydrogen mono-oxygen providentially placed in a receptacle that, in the name of all that is healthy and sprightly, is devoid of agents, known to humanity, for being the root cause of many an ailments.

Waiter: wtf! (under his breath). WHAT ?

Nuts: Oh dear me! I have confused you, haven't I ? Forgive me for this unintended insolence for God may set fire to my ass if in his infinite wisdom I come off as person who has not taken every possible measure left at his disposal at making his wishes as clean as a carriage windshield that has recently been cleaned. That a person as sagacious as you, whose sagacity is dripping from that broad forehead and that puny chest, is evidently befuddled only points to my incompetence and failure, despite my best efforts, at effectively tabling my thoughts across to you.

Waiter: WHAT ?

Nuts: Merely that I would be extremely grateful to have a speck of a soupçon of the most minuscule fraction of that element that flows in such abundance in Nature's warm belly and the municipality's cold conduits. That my appreciation would know no bounds if the sample of that elixir that you would be presenting to me is neither hellishly scalding nor hellishly frigid but hovers around acceptable Rankines and is devoid of its crystalline form for that would not suit my fragile constitution. That I and my forthcoming generations would indeed be obligated to you if...

Waiter: I do not know about God. If your next sentence is longer than 4 words, I would personally set fire to your ass.

Nuts: Water. No Ice... ... ... Please.

On the beach. Again.

2008-08-31T01:22:00.000-07:00

Many of you who have been gracious enough to follow this continuing collection of barely coherent stream of thoughts would be more than familiar with the passion and periodicity with which the Ocean and it's embellishments figure in my ruminations. Time and again, I have let my puny self be overcome by the grandiose view of the Pacific and several times the sorry imagination that I, in a self deceiving attempt, try to pass off as my creative streak has had to rely upon the primal response that that infinite water hole evokes in me for it's subject matter. But then it really has so much to teach us that to just sit there with our minds closed would be doing a disservice to ourselves that only we as human beings are capable of. Sometimes though, the mind does race and it was just one such day today.

You would probably go, 'What a retard', when I say that all the interesting action in an Ocean lies just at the beach. And I am not talking about bikini clad 20 somethings bouncing around playing beach volleyball, although that's always a garnish that is ever welcome to half of humanity (and some more) and I am no exception. Anyways, what I am talking about here is the intense restlessness of nature just at the beach when it's juxtaposed against its placid solidity far from it. Near the beach, the waves break with the fervency of a bunch of children bursting forth the school gate at the final whistle. They disintegrate into a soapy residue culminating in an intense white cover over the dark blue of the ocean below, accompanied with a constant clamoring that serves well to challenge the otherwise stately dignity of the majestic one. And the waves almost seem to be in a hurry like a teenager who cannot wait to reach the legal drinking age. And like the teenager, it's an anti-climax that awaits their enthusiasm. Their frothy disposition and their fickle form, like youth, is a testimony to their shallowness but like youth, their beauty has nothing but their immaturity to thank. Their existence, although trivial and vanishing, nonetheless is brilliant and ornate. Whereas the deep ocean lies constant with the immutability of death itself and in fact with the magnificence of death (or it's romantic idea at least). Deep and bottomless, it's the painted ocean of Coleridge. Mature and sensible, it's everything that Wilde resented and associated with age. The shadows of the clouds and the peeking Sun on the largest canvas Nature can offer. The brilliant shimmers and the pallid blacks with the vanishing ink of a dying day. And all of it so frozen in time and space that you get a feeling that if only you could hit it hard enough with a hammer, rather than fluidly malleabiling, it would break apart with the din of a window pane.

You must have heard the saying that a fruit laden tree stoops whereas one without any fruit stands upright. We have an unfortunate propensity of drawing parallels between nature and life. Somewhere down below I truly dislike this instinct. The instinct of the Western Aesop (fables) and the Eastern Panchtantra. Why I do not like it is a completely different issue but I guess I am also guilty of drawing some parallels here. And for all that I purport, you have my apologies.

Untitled

2008-08-23T01:46:00.000-07:00

She enters the pass-word and passes the entrance, alights the stairs and switches on the lights with a light switch on the switch. She frisks with a brisk approach and whisks the blinds to view the view outside - The moon looks down at her with a mooning constitution and the stars star in his play with a lugubrious inclination, constituting to render a gloomy night benighted with glum colourations. And the dimly woken hours, in the wake of a Friday, still bear a mildly miasmatic manifestation of moldy malt.

Phew!, that took much longer than I had anticipated! Tired. Too tired :(.

P.S: It's titled untitled because I am too tired to even think of a title.

Chocolat

2008-08-18T01:17:00.000-07:00

It's been 2 years now since Gunti and I enrolled in a Verizon contract. I remember voraciously sieving through the Internet in search of a phone set that would stand apart elegantly in a sorry crowd of sluggish, feature overladen mobiles who had the stylistic sensibilities of Frank Zappa on a late night talk show. I wanted a Carla Bruni in a world infested with the likes of Pratibha Patil who doddered and tottered and hobbled and toddled in a senile dance of outmodishness. I sneered at the antiquated anorexia of the Motorola Razr and jeered at the jarring sophistication of the Nokias. It was a time when the world seemed full of possibilities, when the blood was hot and the heart was sanguine, and eyes with that twinkle of possibilities were fixed far out onto the horizon where a new day was struggling to break free from the clutches of darkness... Well, maybe I have become more emotional than the situation demands but it's our loss that we underrate superficiality so much, a topic that we shall leave for some other time, some other day. For the time being, my eyes got fixated on this new model that LG had very geekily and unimaginatively named 'VX8500'. They had a nickname for it too. And I am slightly flushed to admit that in all their campy incompetence, LG nicknamed it 'Chocolate'. Which didn't make sense at all since the phone came only in black. I just wished they were not referring to it's taste. At that time though, the only thing that mattered to me was its seductively glossy screen which lit up in red to reveal a touchpad when you slid it open. What else, I thought, would anyone need in a phone ? Huh.

The phone, I must admit, had a prodigious disposition to begin with and I should have understood then that any effort to tame this wild beast would be an exercise in futility. It had far too much personality to begin with. You see, it had a touchpad as I have mentioned before and not a very good one at that. You slide it open to activate it and all hell breaks loose. The phone, in the hands of a novice, has a tendency of taking him for a nasty ride. It's a bit like Microsoft word. Show them a gesture even slightly miscalculated and they would bite back and take your head off. At the very least they would make you regret your birth. Even today, the matter of actually succeeding in calling the number that you intended can only be discussed in the hushed voices of probabilities. Taking the photo that you desire is asking for too much really. My phone follows the Hindu philosophy in the sense that you can activate the camera but you should not expect it to fire at the right time. It has Heisenbergity inbuilt. I was quite content in playing the second fiddle, you know the stupid sidekick to the hero that is my phone as long as it allowed me to get on the wireless network every now and then. And in the infinite generosity of its magnanimous self, it indeed has allowed me this privilege over the last couple of years. Things have taken a turn for worse though and it is quite evident that a bloody struggle is in offing.

It all started a month ago when my phone, one fine morning, decided to deactivate the 'Cancel' button. Permanently. Now I could not go back. Phone menus became unidirectional and grammatically correct text messages, almost an impossibility. The only way to end a call was to slide the phone back in. A few days later, upon opening the 'Contacts' list my phone started scrolling down ad-infinitum. And I thought: Owwwww! how sweet. It was almost an amusement. It was only a few days back on a sinister moonless night while walking back to home that I realized its menacing plan. I slid it open, went to the 'Recent Calls' and the next thing I see, my phone is happily calling the first number in the list. I hastily disconnected it, tried it again and the same result. Next time, I went to the 'Contacts' list and upon finding itself here my phone promptly went into it's scroll mode and to my bulging eyes, stopped at my adviser's number, probably gave a derisive chuckle, and started calling. I slid it in hoping that it would end the deluge. My phone, waited for a bit in this deactivated position, suddenly woke up with it's touchpad all red with baleful energy, opened the 'Recent Calls' list and started dialing the most recent one, again my adviser. I tried shutting it down with the master switch but it conveniently ignored the commands of the most powerful button and finally I had to take off the battery. For the first time, I was happy that we have not seen the invention of wireless power yet.

Things have gone worse still. It doesn't show me if I've got any new voicemails (which is fine I guess :)). And only today, it didn't show me at least 2 missed calls which I distinctly heard from the next room. Frankly speaking, I didn't even know that so many things could go wrong with one phone until they did with mine. And I still do not know the surprises that fate has for me. Maybe it will start giving me electric shocks. I am afraid of the day when it grows a set of pointed teeth and chews my ear off. If there is one thing I have learned in these last two years, it's that, like Bauna Vaman (for those who get the reference), my phone always has one trick left up it's sleeve.

Peanuts

2008-08-10T00:31:00.000-07:00

I have recently started Charles Schulz's biography written by David Michaelis titled 'Schulz and Peanuts' and obviously, being the smart-ass that I am who just has to have an opinion on everything under the sun, I have one here too. People have often said to me that they do not read autobiographies because they are too pompous. I have read a few and I must say that autobiographies are rarely pompous. If anything, they are too demeaning of themselves. It's the biographies that I find dishonest because they are the ones which are more often than not colored by a partisan adoration.

Moving forward the book, I must say, is not exceptional. From what I have read, it doesn't quite measure up to the linguistic standards I have come to enjoy and appreciate lately but it's a bit like 'Peanuts' itself. What the book lacks in language, it more than makes up in the story it narrates. Schulz's life so uncannily mirrors the world he created, it almost brings a tear to my eyes thinking that a life of such hopelessness and dejection as Charlie Brown's is not entirely fiction. 'Peanuts' is not about ephemeral jokes and vanishing gags. It's not about the punchline in the final panel that we have come to expect from conventional comic strips. 'Peanuts' is dark. Extremely dark. It's about an innocent child's need to fit in and his failures at being able to do so. It's about his unrequited love and his brutal heartbreaks. It's about his constant search for success and his relentless defeats and it's about his almost boneheaded refusal to accept them. It's about his insecurities in a world infested with seemingly self-assured brats and insensitive brutes and cold sweethearts. For a comic strip it shows a pretty dark world indeed. And then it tries to laugh it all away at the expense of the protagonist, Charlie Brown. And we do smile don't we ? But for me at least it's a smile of quiet resignation at being made to realize, quite beautifully, the helpless cruelty of our world.

Peanuts in other words is a bit like the works of that brilliant Russian raconteur, Chekov. People do not like him because his endings are so ridiculously mundane in conventional wisdom. But how brilliant his stories themselves and how poignant their emotions ? It is customary for language to lose it's bite when it is translated from one form to another. We can see it in the crudeness with which we call Kafka's Samsa a 'vermin', a word that still provokes dissent in the camp of German language purists. But the fact that Chekov retains much of his punch even after translation just goes on to show that his stories are so much deeper. In the same way, my appreciation for 'Peanuts' is neither for the language nor for the twists, for it has virtually none of either. It's an appreciation for a bittersweet story that has been well told with frankness and honesty and subtlety. To me, those two dots between parentheses that are Charlie Brown's eyes convey more insecurity than the best actors ever can with a million words at their disposal. To me, 'Peanuts' represents an exceptional example of the kind of creative instinct that has so alarmingly disappeared in popular consciousness. Honest, intelligent art.

Religion's hideous wallpaper

2008-08-01T15:51:00.000-07:00

To quote an incident which in turn was quoted by Stephen Fry; Oscar Wilde, when asked as to why he thought America was such a violent country, replied: "I know perfectly well why America is such a violent country. It's because her wallpapers are so hideous."

It's extremely easy to think of the answer as just a camp remark from a dandy Oxfordian who both excelled and reveled at making comments whose worthiness vested not in their content but in their dazzling form. But as Fry pointed out, it does have immense meaning in the Wildesque concept of rationality. And obviously, no religion, and few humans have come even close to matching the incisive perfection of that intellect that rested on those shoulders clothed in those silk and velvet raiment. In many senses, he was the Albert Einstein of the art world. His stature continues to grow as time passes whilst his contemporaries are reduced to midgets in our memories. He was the irreverent rebel who refused to weigh the world in the balance of conventional rationality. Instead, he chose to invent his own. And how beautiful it all is and how indebted our sensibilities to him.

Anyways, what he meant by his remark was this (again paraphrasing Fry slightly): Nature is absolutely and unreservedly beautiful. It's beautiful in the aridity of the dune riddled deserts and it's beautiful in the frigidity of the arctic wastes. It's beautiful in the vast expanse of the humbling oceans and it's beautiful in the delicate balance of African wilderness. It's beautiful everywhere. Except of course in places where it has come across humans. Humans have done exceedingly well in despoiling this beauty not by being trespassive but by being unimaginative. We have ravaged this elegance by employing mediocre architecture, building ugly factories, creating horrible music and, in general, succumbing to the whims and fancies of the lowest common denominator. I suppose another reason for this remark was the fact that the period was late 19th century and New York still had to wait for another 5 decades to lay it's claim as the center of world art and truly revolutionary music and science were yet to be born in this country. In any case, it was a time when the citizens were surrounded by dull ideas and their duller manifestations and naturally they saw themselves as belonging to a specie that could only uglify that which is completely beautiful. It instilled a sense of guilt and as Freud suggested, this guilt led to a violent disposition. This is what Wilde meant then and my god how very true is it today.

And we see the wheel turning all over again in the form of religious intolerance. The fact that religion today is incapable of delivering artists who could paint another Sistine Chapel with the elegance of Michelangelo or compose another 'Payoji maine' with the aesthetic sensibilities of Mirabai or pen another Odyssey with the grand artistic vision of Homer just goes on to show that God, if at all real, has at least lost all taste. Since morality is hardly a prerogative of religion, in the absence of beauty, all that religion exclusively teaches is divisiveness. And in the absence of contemporary examples of grace and elegance, all that it has to offer is rhetoric in the self-righteous ramblings of cocksure leaders who are the mediocre doyens of the unsure and the unimaginative. And it is these people, who obviously have a screwed up if not completely absent concept of beauty, who have either the time or the inclination or the desperation to strap up an IED and blow themselves up for a notion of paradise that's, to put it mildly, completely fucked up. I understand the need for religion but I cannot grasp it's unreserved, unquestioned acceptance. It will take me the rest of the week to elucidate the number of things I find wrong with it so I would rather pass.

The point is, good art is not a luxury that we can dispense with. We need assurances that we are capable of creating beauty in order of maintaining our sanity and science and art are the two avenues which help us realize that. Religion used to be in the form of a willing and able patron but, I'm afraid, it no longer is.

P.S: Here is Kowsik's reply.

Language

2008-07-21T23:32:00.000-07:00

I have noticed, I'm in complete love with language! And it's slightly scary because I do not think that people take it as seriously as I do. I would even go as far as hinting that there might be something wrong with me in the indulgent pleasures I take in the obscure quirks of language. Let me explain.

It's one thing laughing at a joke. It's an altogether different thing if that joke makes you feel fulfilled. Language does that to me. When I come across something intelligent, a witty play of words, a subtle innuendo, or a masterful exposition, to say that I enjoy it would be a massive understatement. Something as trivial as an insightful double entendre makes the world a better place for me. The trials and tribulations of a world so deeply entrenched in dishonest mediocrity do not seem quite so imposing after all.

It was a bright June morning in mid May when I woke up rubbing my eyes and clicked on my laptop to check my mail. In my inbox was a mail from UCSD parking office waiting to be opened and read. As a general habit, the importance that I give to any mail reduces exponentially with the number of people it is sent to beside me, with mails sent to 2 or more people hardly ever registering in my consciousness. It is only fair to say then that a mail from UCSD parking office to all UCSD students might as well find it's way to Junk for all I care. Anyways, it did catch my attention. It was a very small thing. Their subject had the name of the office itself and it was very smartly called 'between the lines'. I was so happy for the rest of the day. I wanted to tell it to so many people but after the first few who blinked at the complete pointlessness of the whole issue, I gave up. Nevertheless, you get the point.

I love the inherent music that words have. I think that a phrase as senseless and stupid as 'hoversmack tenenbaum' dances and sways with as much beauty as any abstract piece of art. I love the ringing sound words like 'junction' and 'gumption' make in the ears. I love the sophistication vested in the pronunciation of 'boulevard' and 'bourgeois' and I am happy that there was a time when people were brave enough to invent words like flaucinaucinihilipilification.

English is inherently conducive to linguistic manipulations. Comedy based purely on language is inbuilt in English. It's a facet that woefully lacks in so many other languages including Hindi. In fact I feel that linguistic comedy is the most sophisticated form of humor possible as it requires a level of intelligence that is far beyond what is required for slapstic humor and considerably beyond incisive satire. Sarcasm as an art is a subset of the intelligence that is developed enough to dabble sophisticatedly in language. That is why while a 'Yes Minister' can afford to be a brilliant satire without relying too much on language, 'A bit of Fry and Laurie' necessarily has to be a great satire in order to fulfill it's linguistic destiny.

There is a reason why we find bollywood comedy as nothing better than loose stool and arse gravy. Bollywood comedy has never been sophisticated, at least never on a large scale and one of the reasons is definitely a non-conducive language. Our best brains and our best language vests with the creative minds and foul tongues of 20 somethings and not in the wisdom of the balding and the spent. It's in the greasy corridors of hostels festooned with unwashed dishes and unwashed boys that language in all it's majesty finds its true colors. It's here in the hallowed portals of... whatever, that it soars into the stratosphere of brilliance. Too bad that we as a culture are either prude and intolerant or mediocre and non-discriminating. It shows up in our cinema.

I see that I have digressed again :).

Spot the error: Answer

2008-07-19T14:19:00.000-07:00

Well, Nikhil had to get it right. After all it has to do with the history of photography and for all his maniacal insistence on knowing the ins and outs of the trade, it's only expected.

The above image is one of the many in which horses were shown galloping with their legs splayed apart. Somehow, such an image appeals to our sense of speed and agility that we associate with horses so art accordingly imitated our prejudices. It wasn't until the late 19th century that a person named Eadweard Muybridge studied the motion of horses by taking a series of photographs and running them consecutively at a high frame rate to produce an illusion of continuous reality. Here is what he saw:

As you can see, he demonstrated that the legs of a horse, when in air, are never splayed apart. This, incidentally, is the first motion picture ever produced. So there you are.

Spot the error

2008-07-18T16:12:00.000-07:00

:) What's wrong in the following picture:

Stereotypical Humor

2008-07-13T11:19:00.000-07:00

I was watching "Hunt for the red October" yesterday with a couple of friends and remember making a lot of jokes stereotyping Russians and Blacks (forgive me for the use of this supposedly derogatory term but the intent to insult is definitely not there). I also remember thinking that had a particular friend of mine been there at that time, he would certainly have commented caustically at our misdemeanor. Which brings me to the point of the post. Most, if not all comedy is about stereotyping.

We do it all the time. Whether we are laughing at the social inadequacies of the geeks or chortling at the mental ones of the blonds. Whether we are sarcastically giggling at the political deficiencies of the ruling class or the herd mentality of the upwardly mobile middle. We stereotype the 'questioning intonation' of the teens as mercilessly as we do the general American obsession with cheese. The relative societal stuntedness of the Indians and the Chinese are as much a source of amusement to us as the unruliness and excessive physical exaggeration of the Italians or the hilarious snobbery of the British. Corpulence is as potent a topic for comedy as excessive thinness and the driving sense of the fairer sex figures as prominently in our humorous musings as the sexual drives of the not so fair.

The point is, stereotyping is most essential to our sense of humor. We need a sort of familiarity with the subject for us to appreciate its ridicule. Imagine trying to make up a joke about an alien blob of gooey substance about which you know absolutely nothing. Although the depth of comedy increases with increasing sophistication, more often than not, at the end of it all lies a good old stereotype. When you have waded through the linguistic tricks and the obscure references, when you have managed to find your way through the intricate forest of jargon, its a stereotype you are more than likely to find at the end. Even as abstract a form of comedy as purely linguistic humor (I am a big fan of which by the way) ridicules and stereotypes our knowledge of language and the way we take it for granted. To say that such a form of comedy is pompous is probably our cry for a subject that we can understand as a stereotype.

I must confess here that we as Indians probably stereotype the most, which again is a stereotype ! But our hypocrisy lies in not being able to sportingly take a joke upon ourselves. On the other end of the spectrum are the Americans who are more than happy to take a joke but who seem to be trying too hard to be political correct for too much of their waking time. But political correctness, as detrimental to a healthy society as it is, is an entirely different ballgame and requires a different arena and a sterner and more acidic tone. So we will leave it for now.

I feel that the maturity of a society is defined, to a huge extent, by the freedom with which it can mock its elements. Stereotyping, therefore, lies at the very heart of a healthy society since it is so intricately related to comedy. It is perfectly acceptable till it's done with the understanding that it does not necessarily apply to each individual constituting the group. It doesn't have to be insulting to be effective but then what is insulting is more often than not determined by the most regressive elements of the society. Those who twitch their brow and purse their lips when they come across an otherwise harmless piece of stereotypical comedy, generally are moralists if not hypocrites. But then I have not known a moralist who was not a hypocrite.

Mr. Malaprop - 1

2008-07-07T00:14:00.000-07:00

Mr. Malaprop:

Oh, yes yes. I remember this place. I have great memories related to this place. This is where I saw my wife for the very first time. I remember thinking, "My God! what a tiny women she is". She was about 2 and a half inches tall, heels included. Of course, it was only after a few days that I realized that it was because she was standing 55 meters away. While sitting next to me on the coffee table, she seemed quite a normal sized human being after all. It was the glaring eyes that made us realize that sitting on a coffee table in a public place is not a very nice thing to do. So we both climbed down and sat on the chairs. Oh! how clearly I remember those first sparks... The overhead wires must have short-circuited due to the recent rains and it did not take long for those first sparks to turn into a modest fire. Things did settle though, and I asked her if she wanted a hot cup of coffee to which she innocently replied that she would prefer hot coffee instead.

Oh! how so very beautiful she was. Her blond hair shimmering in the brilliant yellow sun, her skin glowing with the radiance of full moon on the surface of an ocean, her eyes alight with the twinkle of a thousand stars. I was completely lost in her beauty until she asked me if I wanted whipped cream with my hot chocolate. Slightly confused, I replied in the negative and resumed conversation with the woman who had the distinguishing characteristic of appearing 2 and a half inches tall (with heels) at 55 meters. I noticed that she had a most beautiful plumage of black hair... Then she took out the blond ones and the brunette ones. It seemed to me that she took her job more seriously than it deserved and I was just relieved that she wasn't a heart transplant surgeon.

Yearning for a story

2008-07-03T23:07:00.000-07:00

It's weird that I woke up in the morning thinking about my childhood, specifically about all those stories my grandfather used to tell me as I snuggled beside him in a warm blanket with a white cotton cover on a cold winter evening. With the reassuring knowledge of mother busy in the kitchen and father too occupied to pester me with any more mathematics, and with the ever so imaginative beginnings to entranced escapes which went, "once upon a time", I would look into his bespectacled eyes, old and wearied but fixated somewhere in the distance, continually brimming with excitement as he recounted, for the 100th time, how the prince killed the monster. Once in a while, he would look at the boy, who by this time was completely bewitched, and he would smile ever so gently and pat his head and say, "do you know what happened next". Of course I knew, but it was a million times sweeter if he told me once again. And he would. In the sweet white light of a warm cozy room with the muffled sound of an electric heater in the background, the slightly cold touch of a freshly cleaned pillow, and the assurance that the only person in the world who could save me from doing chores and studying and general parental bullying was sitting right beside me recounting stories: it hardly gets any better.

I woke up in the morning not just with these sweet memories. Sweet memories hardly ever wake you up. I woke up thinking about our, as in our generation's, apparent lack of imagination and creativity. I was wondering, if we are ever called upon to do so, would we have a good story to tell ? It is human to hark upon imagination when our experiences are not good enough. But imagination needs a foundation to grow upon. While my grandfather's generation had religion and social boundaries and superstitions to provide them with a framework within which their imagination could thrive, hardly anything is left to imagination now. Whatever is left is hardly innocent and mostly drab. In the tech savvy world of today, incredibility is associated with the next big thing in mobile communication. And since we have learned to be skeptical about our own incredulity, it's just not good enough. Social and economic freedom have made cynics out of us. In a huge sense it's obviously good, but in a small way it's bad.

It's bad in the eyes of the boy who sat entranced when the 32 statuettes enlivened to dance in the royal courts of Vikramaditya. It's slightly sad that the ponds of yesteryear which supplied an endless stream of wicked witches and haunted trees has gone dry. It's sad that the castles which beheld the most opulent of dances and the arenas which hosted the most brilliant of wars and the daring knights and the stately beautiful princesses and the conniving stepmothers and the obedient sons and the innocent daughters and the helpful dwarfs, they have all withered against the onslaught of time. I distinctly remember this line my grandfather beat to death: "Din beete, hafte beete, mahine beete, saal beet gaye" (days and weeks and months and years went past). And I realize it only now.

Ode to an Ode

2008-06-29T02:09:00.000-07:00

"Freude, schöner Götterfunken
Tochter aus Elysium"

Thus starts the baritone for "Ode to joy" in the 4th movement of Beethoven's 9th symphony. And my god! it chills me down to the bone.

It's monumental. It's vulgarly grand. Its complexity is majestic. Its colour palatial. Its energy opulent. It shines in a resplendent glory of labyrinthine brilliance. Its weight is so imposing, I can feel it crushing my shoulders. Its scale so magnificent, I can feel my body heat dissipating from the tips of my hair. But it's beautiful nevertheless. The 9th symphony manages to strike a delicate balance between blinding opulence and slender fragility. It keeps hovering over the boundary separating the two, forever pulsating and throbbing with the vitality of a sore nerve, forever threatening to explode with the venom of a thousand snakes but always managing to stop at the breaking point of the cord holding it back. Hence, it manages to do things I rarely ever feel. The feeling of being constantly bombarded with genius, with its every manifestation contaminating the very air I breathe, with its every materialization serving to churn my blood into one coagulated lump. I sleep with the sweet lullaby of mild violins until the deep, sonorous sounds of angry cellos wake me up. I float with the divine sounds of flutes until cymbals shoot me down. The clarinets and the bassoons, the oboes and the contrabassoons, all intertwined in a complex arabesque of seraphic order. The deep baritone and the crisp tenor, the mesmerizing alto and the breathtaking soprano, all moving around each other with the simple beauty of a DNA helix. 200 accomplished vocalists of the Berlin Philharmonic, uniting their considerable talents to create a spectacle that is both majestic and heavenly. Every single breath, every single note, every single sound, perfectly synchronized to engender a sculpture that shines with the brilliance of a flawlessly cut diamond.

I am terribly sorry if my limited language could only provide an understated eulogy to this masterpiece of human creation. The piece is more beautiful than my, or indeed anyone's, words could ever describe. Here is a youtube link for the piece but I suggest listening to it on a CD if you can get your hands onto one:

Part 1
Part 2 (The ode to joy starts at 11:05 in this part.)

Chequered and Flagged

2008-06-20T01:26:00.000-07:00

The pieces set gleaming in crimson light
the players sweat o'er impending fight
him taking black, it's me who has the white
who gallantly gallops his gallant knight

He moves his pawn to gain the center stage
and my pawn brings us both on the same page
his knight, my bishop, such a trembling rage
histrionics nettling they do engage

We hunch over the board with faces grave
with fingers twirling hair in baffled wave
I sacrifice a rook in moment brave
he sees through it, oh! what a damn close shave

his mistress now breathing down on my neck
with raging fury, slaps me with a check
I move to left - she eats one from my deck
and leaves behind a battered, rickety wreck

I must wake up before it gets too late
with middling talent, all I have is fate
I march forward, he storms in through my gate
"5-naught", says he and adds, "it's a check-mate"

:(

Gobbledygook

2008-06-19T18:02:00.000-07:00

Attempting as abnormal and arduous an attempt as alphabetical acrobatic - an act aptly askancable. But boneheadedness blinks balkily, barely bothered by balanced but belligerent brethren. Cursing common conceptions-cum-cowardice condemned of a craft culture callously "comme ci, comme ça", conveniently crude. Drained, diluted, and devoid of dare - donning dark, droning, and depressing dreariness- a dame dressed dryly in a dilapidated, dirty dress. Eschewing erudition. Forgoing fastidious fervency, finicky fanaticism for flabbergastingly foolish f-art. Girth girdled garishly by germanely gaudy generations of gall-less greasebags.

Here however - hightime, I instead insisted in the inadvertence inherent in this idiotic invective. Jettisoning jarring jocularity, kaleidoscopic loonheadedness, let me mention - myriad manifestations of mouth-ly ( :-( ) moorings make 'making meaning' monstrously macabre. Hence, I am bloody done!!!

Deeply Fried

2008-06-11T01:09:00.000-07:00

I recently completed the autobiography of the British humorist Stephen Fry titled "Moab is my washpot" and saying that it is one of the most satisfying if not the most interesting books ever to have come under my purview would not be an exaggeration.

Stephen Fry, as most people would be unaware of given our obsessions with all things American, is an extremely brilliant comedian from England. His quick wit is as admirable as his exquisite command over the English language. His encyclopedic knowledge as astonishing as his polymathic disposition, and his relentless success matched only by his depression-ridden personal life. He represents the last of the dying breed of public personalities we associate the term intellectual with and for all his mindboggling genius, his humility peering from behind the superb 'class' that veils it all makes every minute of his appearance a pleasure to the eyes, every syllable that he utters the most satisfying music of perfection, and every point that he analyzes an insightful study into incisive rationality.

The book is great not just because its so honest it hurts. Not even because he describes a life with twists and turns enough to encompass the existence of 5 ordinary individuals like me. The book is amazing because of the sheer pleasure of its language. Every sentence seems perfect. Every word as if chosen after considerable deliberation. Every punctuation has a story to tell, a weight to support. Even the font changes size to drive home the author's point. Words dance and sway in a perfectly choreographed sequence of linguistic acrobatics and every sentence merges so fluidly in the following sentence that you almost do not want to pause at the full stop. Latin merges with French and Spanish and Greek and gobbledygook to spice up the already formidable English. And from behind it all, the sweet and sour memories of an eventful past emerge with the clarity of a dew laden mountain bush against a misty background. Its one of the few books in which the subject matter did not matter all that much, not to me at least. If you will permit me the slight leeway, I would like to compare the charm of the book with music. Not music as in Beethoven's moonlight sonata. But music as in the sound of the grand Piano. Its beauty is akin to the primal attractions of color as opposed to a painting. Its both a privilege and an exhilarating experience witnessing the potentialities of language I never thought existed. Its continuity is numbing and hypnotic. Its flow... well I could go on and on.

Let me take this opportunity for elaborating on a slight diversion. As Wilde would probably have said, though in an infinitely more articulate way, "There are far too many geniuses in the world". I mean look around you. The world is festooned with the likes of them. Running around soccer fields and tennis courts, banging away their lives on the Piano and the guitar from the age of 2, spewing barely intelligible equation in dimensions too obscure to even comprehend, scaling mountains, jumping from cliffs and planes and probably moon, painting the Monalisa in Microsoft Paint. They have come to infest the world in such huge numbers, it has become an ungainly sight. So what makes these geniuses different to me than say Fry or Watterson ? I think it has to do with one's class and principles. Its in one's world view and his rationality, in the way he treats others and in how he stands for the principles he professes. It has something to do with that slightly snobbish idea of elitism. Not material elitism but intellectual elitism. The courage to say, in plain words, how mentally constrained and emotionally prejudiced our lot is. Such brilliance doesn't raise his voice like Carlin does. It merely shakes his head and keeps quiet with the sort of dignity an army commander might have while sitting with a bunch of buffoons from the Parliament. And I see these qualities in both Fry and Watterson and to a big extent, Dylan. Its not just their genius which impresses me. Its their rationality and courage and the will to defy the mores of the society for the love of their art.

The curse of the iambic pentameter

2008-05-26T21:57:00.000-07:00

You pick your pen and scratch your chin a bit
these wretched words frankly just would not fit
you're growing gray rhyming cheater and peter
and stuffing them all in an iambic pentameter

Swallowing your pride with every ending 'love'
with a helplessly crushed creativity you rhyme it with 'dove'
but then 'orange' somehow finds its way to the end
and no bloody word would rhyme howsoever language is bend

And by now you realize that the pentameter is lost
in the quest for rhyme, rhythm was the cost
or maybe you are just not enough talented
your pride is bruised and your ego, dented

All you can do now is write loose verse
with shallow meaning and language too terse
on how you suck at what others are so much better
on the restrictiveness of iambic pentameter

On how the literary world is completely unfair
with some hogging more talent than their share
and sad figures like you barely making ends meet
staring sadly, hopelessly at the sparkling clean sheet

Hoping that words would appear by godly intervention
that 'heart' will find a partner without undue tension
and you twitch your brow and scratch you head
think for a bit and go down to bed.

to split or to NOT split

2008-05-19T16:21:00.000-07:00

You know how things go sometimes. We go about our daily lives, waking up early, having our 3 meals a day, pretending that we are making a difference. You know, the usual stuff. But once in a while, when reading a piece of avant-garde literature or while listening to someone particularly blasphemous, we come across a sentence radical enough to-simply-reckon with. Still, being the selfish self-centered specie that we are, we seldom realize that in this politically correct world that flinches everytime an African American is referred to as black, an infinitive was split right under our noses.

A split infinitive is the linguistic equivalent of the Danish cartoons. It doesn't quite generate the same amount of gasps as if you were to publicly dismiss holocaust as a hoax, but it has drawn boundaries in the English speaking world in a way few other constructs have. At this point, those who are not familiar with the concept might be wondering as to what the hell I am blathering about. I will tell you what I am blathering about.

According to Wikipedia, "A split infinitive or cleft infinitive is an English-language grammatical construction in which a word or phrase, usually an adverb or other adverbial, comes between the marker to and the bare infinitive (uninflected) form of a verb.".

In other words, if you have just made out with the wife of an English language purist who has just wandered into the room and happens to be armed with a 7.62 mm AK-47 automatic assault rifle, here is what you should say:
"I am sorry. It was a mistake to kiss her passionately."
rather than:
"I am sorry. It was a mistake to passionately kiss her."
Might just save you.

I must say that I understand the principal objection of the English orthodoxy against such reckless splitting. I understand that a split infinitive lacks the fluidity of Strauss's waltz and it fails to generate the sustained excitement akin to the active exhaust of an automatic turbocharged V-10 but it has the endearment of imperfection. Its like the noise of a high performance motorcycle engine which gasps for breath everytime you shift up. The discontinuity has its own charm.

More than that, there is an urgent need to reassess our position in a world that is placing increasingly tighter restraints on political correctness. I yearn for the days when men were real men, when every "his" stood alone and the feminists had not woken up to the possibility of whiling away some time by protesting that a "his/her" is necessary for female uplifting, when they were still playing Buzkashi in Afghanistan and when infinitives were being split left right and center with gay abandon.

Anyways, I reckon that there is an urgent need to do something about it. I reckon, we form an activist group and we should fight for the rights of the split infinitive. People nowadays seem to be morally fighting for virtually everything under the sun. Under the umbrella organization I am proposing, we can fight for the rights of split infinitives and Lactobacillus bacteria. Yes thats right, I implore you all to not eat curd :).

Bird

2008-05-11T00:52:00.000-07:00

Perched atop the open cage
ruminating over freedom
nostalgic taste of iron below
and a slightly confused gaze.

she eyes the enslaved liberation
and the illusion of independence,
humanity-her every breath
polluted with myriad obligation.

sorrow masked as hope
punctuating the pursuit of happiness
with sorrow in such abundance
how can I ever cope ?

then she flaps her wings and flies
enters the cage and sings:
this hopeless prison is better
in a world where hope is a vice.

Placid Turbulence

2008-05-06T02:03:00.000-07:00

Imagine.

Its a moonless night and you are sitting on the banks of a still lake. Alone. Your feet creating ripples on the surface of the water that dance and shimmer in the dark light of the stars. And your hands clutching the moist grass on the sides. All you can hear is the rustle of the leaves as the trees lining the bank sway ever so slightly. All you can see is their dark silhouettes against a darker background and their slight reflections far into the lake. All you can feel is utter aloofness. You look up to the sky and it dazzles in a brilliant arabesque of divine order. Millions of specks painted on the black backdrop. Each silently twinkling. Each helplessly cognizant of its own loneliness. Their combined luminescence failing to reverberate in your eyes as the dreariness of it all weighs on your eyelids and you are forced to look down at the lake again. And it has a deathly stillness to it. Like a deserted home in a middle of nowhere. Like an anachronistic gramophone that is shocked into muteness. Like the quiet reflection of a boisterous crowd.

The scene should have been beautiful but there is something wrong with it. And I cannot put my finger on the reason. Its like an unfinished painting that has nonetheless been framed in a hurry. The underlying sadness is both exquisite and slightly disconcerting. Its a metaphor for life I suppose. Not quite perfect but strangely beautiful nonetheless. And subdued at the same time. The aforementioned scene invites me. Almost sinfully. And I feel like putting down the baggage for a while and resting. With my head down on my bent knees. With the sensation of passing time reduced to the slight movements of my hair in the breeze. And all the excess energy manifesting itself in small motions of my right feet. Slowly caressing the dead water into unwelcome waves.

Indian Premier League

2008-04-26T11:24:00.000-07:00

I am guessing it must be a quietly jovial day at the headquarters of Zee Telefilms when Subhash Chandra finally figured out how to mint the stupidity of millions of fanatic cricket lovers in gold. Alas, his plans with the Indian cricket leagues hit the greedy roadblocks of BCCI , but he had nevertheless shown the imagination strapped bunch of clowns at the hem of Indian cricket how to truly turn this beautiful game into a money making machine. Thus was born the Indian Premier League. And it sucked.

It sucks in the same way Britney Spear feels like molten iron is being poured into your ears. It sucks with the same foulness of a Garfield mocking your intelligence. And it sucks in precisely the same way an Ekta Kapoor feels like she has just installed a juicer-mixer-grinder in your skull which is working overtime at preparing a homogeneous concoction of your gray matter. And there is a reason why it sucks so much.
Warning: Politically incorrect content to follow:

The reason IPL (or T20) must necessarily be bad is because its so popular. Its catering to what Watterson called the Lowest Common Denominator of humanity. And the Lowest Common Denominator of humanity is a sorry mass of stupid homo sapiens. Their demand for non-complex, instant gratification has reduced music to the shambles it is in today. Their inability to appreciate anything even remotely sophisticated has led to the downfall of smart/sensible Television and Cinema. Our generation has seen the demise of the likes of Naseeruddin Shahs and it has forced the reasonably talented A.B. to dance to the tunes of talentless hacks like Himesh Reshammiya. We have witnessed the steady incursion of mediocrity in everything. Everything we have touched, has turned to dust. And we are happy. Because now it can be mass produced, cheaply, and efficiently. And it is just clever enough not to put us to sleep and just dumb enough to be universally palatable. Yes, we have achieved great audiences but we have lost the soul in our efforts. And the same is true for IPL or T20.

To put it mildly, the Twenty-20 format is a joke. The format is too heavily laden in the favor of the batsmen and kills any sort of competition between the bat and the ball. And the seeds of this were sown before T20 itself. The game of cricket began on the path of demise when the no-ball rules came into place. When the power-plays came into place. When the bouncers were prohibited. Suddenly with the bite taken out of a bowler's arsenal, we had stupid talentless freaks like Dhoni straddling around, waving their bats in inebriated frenzy and still managing to keep the scorekeepers busy. I would have loved to see the likes of such modern cricketers face the sweet music of 150 kmph deliveries aimed at their terror stricken eyes. Oh, how much I would have loved to see a few more broken bones and fractured rib-cages. That would have separated the boys from the men. But no, we had to go one step further and start this mind dump of a format called T20. And the last hopes of a game lover like me who just wants to see a level playing field were dashed by the money grubbing corporations.

People would say, "So what ? its a hit". Well, obviously its a hit. That's what pains me really. Because while good art can still survive amidst mediocrity through individual efforts, a game as institutionalized as cricket will find it difficult to breathe when the institution itself is bent upon destroying it. And the public can hardly care less. As long as it has its share of crying Sreesanths and angry Harbhajans and dancing cheerleaders. That's another thing. Importing cheerleaders. Its just sad. I mean, I cannot care less about the moral police (I hate them) but this is not what cricket was meant to be. As inappropriate as cheerleaders are in cricket (from a historical perspective), importing them says a lot about us Indians. I really do not have words to describe how sad it makes me. Its like saying, the game is no more good enough. It has to be supported by sex. Because that's what it is. Sex. Cover up all you want but I would be damned if I do not see through it. The swinging balls are not good enough anymore. We need the swinging bellies. The unadulterated, honest cover drive doesn't appeal to us anymore. We need a bunch of Russian bimbos to get our adrenaline going. We need a complete soap opera on the field. We have even started terming the game as 'evening entertainment'. With all due respect: MY BLOODY FOOT !

Bob Dylan

2008-04-08T19:24:00.000-07:00

My tendency to indulge in periodic episodes of obsessions saw me compulsively listening to the works of Bob Dylan and reading about his life and history. I have noticed that I do not tend to get impressed with the brilliance of music as much as its melody or the competence of its accompanying lyrics. The fact that a piece of music is complicated doesn't really impress me as much as a piece that sounds nice to hear. And if the music itself is spartan, then the lyrics have to be great to leave an impression. And this is where Bob Dylan rules so much. You have to listen to some of his earliest pieces to understand what I'm saying. And by early, I mean his piece from the early to mid sixties. The fact that he still composes music and remains the oldest person to have released a chartbuster ('Modern times' at age 65) just goes on to show that his creativity has not dimmed with age.

3 Nobel prize nominations for literature affirm his stature as a brilliant master of poetry in as clear a set of terms as is probably possible, although Dylan probably doesn't give a damn about the Nobel. He didn't give a damn when his song 'Like a Rolling stone' was voted the greatest song ever. He didn't give a damn when he was being hailed as a prophet, a messiah of change, as the revolutionary voice of his generation. He didn't seem to give a damn about what his fans thought of him. He didn't give a damn about the press or the government or the society. And he doesn't seem to give a damn now. And I like this quality in him. He has chosen to deal with the absurdity of the world with silence and detached contempt.

Coming to his lyrics, I must say, its probably the deepest I have seen in popular music. To say that I understand most of what he meant to say would be a simple confession of my stupidity and arrogance. So I won't do it. But what I do undertand is breathtaking in more ways then one. Consider the following lines from his song, 'Mr. Tambourine Man':

'Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves,
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.'

Its the most beautiful expression of freedom I have seen. Its simply divine. To analyze it would be doing injustice to the pure feeling permeating the words. Here some lines from his song, 'Its alright ma, I'm only bleeding':

'Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child's balloon
Eclipses both the sun and moon
To understand you know too soon
There is no sense in trying.

Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn
Suicide remarks are torn
From the fool's gold mouthpiece
The hollow horn plays wasted words
Proves to warn
That he not busy being born
Is busy dying.'

Or his lines from another of his song:

'In the dime stores and bus stations,
People talk of situations,
Read books, repeat quotations,
Draw conclusions on the wall.
Some speak of the future,
My love she speaks softly,
She knows there's no success like failure
And that failure's no success at all.

The cloak and dagger dangles,
Madams light the candles.
In ceremonies of the horsemen,
Even the pawn must hold a grudge.
Statues made of match sticks,
Crumble into one another,
My love winks, she does not bother,
She knows too much to argue or to judge.'

Dylan continues to produce songs and averages 100 concerts per year. His style of music seems to have changed. His priorities seem to be different now. His eyes look a bit tired but they still have that expression of amusement at how stupid the world around him really is. I was watching a press interview he gave in '65 and it was funny to see that smile of contempt. That muted, condescending expression. And I saw his interview from 2004 and I felt that not much has changed in either Dylan or the world in his eyes.

Mr. Tambourine Man

2008-04-04T17:19:00.000-07:00

Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me,
I'm not sleepy and there is no place I'm going to.
Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me,
In the jingle jangle morning I'll come followin' you.

Though I know that evenin's empire has returned into sand,
Vanished from my hand,
Left me blindly here to stand but still not sleeping.
My weariness amazes me, I'm branded on my feet,
I have no one to meet
And the ancient empty street's too dead for dreaming.

Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me,
I'm not sleepy and there is no place I'm going to.
Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me,
In the jingle jangle morning I'll come followin' you.

Take me on a trip upon your magic swirlin' ship,
My senses have been stripped, my hands can't feel to grip,
My toes too numb to step, wait only for my boot heels
To be wanderin'.
I'm ready to go anywhere, I'm ready for to fade
Into my own parade, cast your dancing spell my way,
I promise to go under it.

Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me,
I'm not sleepy and there is no place I'm going to.
Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me,
In the jingle jangle morning I'll come followin' you.

Then take me disappearin' through the smoke rings of my mind,
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves,
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach,
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves,
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.

Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me,
I'm not sleepy and there is no place I'm going to.
Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me,
In the jingle jangle morning I'll come followin' you.

-Bob Dylan

Leaning for life

2008-04-03T15:01:00.000-07:00

So we went on this motorcycle trip but I do not want to bore you with the dreary details. There is one experience that I would really like to share though. I am sure that experience would stay with me for a long time to come.

It was a beautiful mountainous road, perfectly paved, with the green hill on the side with blooming yellow flowers and the deep valley on the other. Several thousand feet down below, the rocky stream was visible and its quietness stood testimony to the brilliant depth. The sky was blue with patches of white fluffy clouds and the sun shone benignly over the black tarmac weaving through the exquisite wilderness. The road curved and dipped and rose and danced as it followed the contours of the terrain. And I had a motorcycle.

The curves were marked for speeds in the range of 30-40 miles but it would have been such a criminal waste if I had followed the guidelines. Do you know how it feels when your speedometer is reading 80 and you see the complete curve ahead ? You could brake and let the steam off but then you would have to be rational. And I hardly am. I downshifted a gear and turned the throttle to induce controlled acceleration and steadily started to lean. More and more. To the extent the my toes were centimeters away from the hard, unforgiving surface. And my face was probably a foot above the yellow line that separated the oncoming traffic. And I could see that yellow line moving past me. Faster and faster. Curving into the corner. Faster and faster. And the oncoming traffic was whizzing past me so close, I could smell the grunt of their tires. And it was all so quiet. Like an eternity soaked in vacuum. It was all so still. Like a painted bird on a painted ocean. And it was all so serene and pure. Like the smell of Rajnigandha and a foggy morning. At this point you don't really have half measures. A hesitation to lean could easily send you flying down the valley. An inclination to break could hurl you into the oncoming traffic. Everything has to work with clockwork precision. And I somehow managed to do it every single time.

I am not really proud of a lot of things but that memory certainly makes me happy. The feeling is hard to describe. Its the adrenaline rush associated with a gamble of such high stakes. Its the satisfaction at having played the game to your capacity and on life's own terms. And winning. Or at least putting up a respectable performance. It might be stupid in a lot of eyes but the emotion is difficult to explain to someone who has not experienced it firsthand. Its liberating. Its spiritual in some sense. It elevates you, if only for a few moments, above the pandering suffocation and all permeating stupidity and widespread randomness. For those few moments, nothing else matters.

Tara International

2008-03-23T09:54:00.000-07:00

There has been this story going around on the Rediff business section about a new electrically operated car that is being planned to be launched in India at a price of 99,000 rupees. The article, even by Rediff standards, seems short on journalistic integrity and appears to be nothing more than a blatant advertisement of an apparently substandard piece of crap. But the obvious amateurishness of the article doesn't take anything away from the fact that it's hilarious. Everytime I go on Rediff, there is a part of me wishing that it would still have that article so that I could go and have a good laugh at how completely stupid and self-unaware some people can be. And well, Rediff messageboards are always great fun if you wish to find more about how the bottom of the barrel in the IQ market thinks. Here is a photo of the abomination they are trying to pass off as a car:

I do not have words to describe it except maybe, 'You've got to be freaking out of your damn mind !'. I mean look at the bumper. It seems that the designer, not quite satisfied at using a crushed coke bottle for inspiration for the bumper, scratched his balding head, heaved a few discontented sighs, concluded that his creation is not radical enough, and went ahead and provided the car with the greatest idea he could come up with: heart shaped headlights. The car is named 'Tara Tiny'. Tara!. Mr. Tara Ganguly (entrepreneur par excellence) perhaps got inspired by Mr. Ford. He must be a happy man. In a world where the only people who are happy are either those who know precisely how good they are or those who do not know how much they suck, Mr. Ganguly definitely is a shining beacon of the latter category.

Rediff goes on to mention that the maximum speed of the car is 55 km/h which puts it somewhere in the middle of the speed spectrum punctuated by a snail on dope on one end and an energetic cyclist on the other. A few days ago the reported top speed was 45 but maybe Mr. Ganguly got a slight inferiority complex when he noticed that creatures of all kinds including cats and dogs and horses and donkeys and runners and kids and possibly some handicaps kicked his car's ass with a humiliating ease and a disconcerting regularity.

Shown above is another model from the company, unfortunately (personal reasons) named, 'Tara Titu'. I am not even going to start as to what is wrong with the design.

According to Rediff, the only thing that Mr. Ganguly finds wrong with his cars is the fact that they are left-hand drives as "they are meant for the markets in US, China and California,". Notice how Mr. Ganguly implies that California is a country. In a world struggling with the realities of a bipolar distribution of power between US and China, it takes an acute visionary like Mr. Ganguly to point out that all this while we have been ignoring the steady progress of California and lo and behold, here it is now, ready to indulge in some rampant ass-kickery. Move over India, give space Russia, California is the country that will provide the much needed multi-polarity in this world.

Rediff also mentions that Tara has a factory in Lucknow. I am from Lucknow. There is no factory. I am not saying that there 'happens' to be no such factory. I am saying that Lucknow cannot play host to any factory, atleast not a successful one. I mean look at me. I am a representative example Lucknowites. Our extremely slothful nature, a general ineptitude at things mechanical and a severe reluctance at getting off our asses makes us humungously unsuitable for sustaining a factory culture. On the one hand, I am unwilling to accept that the factory could be based in Lucknow, on the other, the photo shown below of the staff at 'Tara International' dwindles my resolve a bit:

I mean, I am not going to demean anyone, but these people do look like the best Lucknow could have offered. They have a distinctive look of confidence. The go-getter attitude, especially found in Lucknowites, that is so necessary in today's cut-throat competition. I think 'Tara International' is after all in good hands. And I stopped being sarcastic when I turned 20 :).

Global warming and Environmental activism

2008-03-01T01:18:00.000-08:00

I was reading up on Global warming and the great debate on environmental degradation due to human activities in the last two centuries and one particular point struck me as extremely weird. It seems that this wave of emotional outburst and moral tirades has reduced our ability to actually think rationally about the problems. I mean, there are just too many individuals and groups single mindedly intent on flaring up the sensitive emotional side of human thinking just so that their views are able to garner more popular support. It has almost started to seem like religious fundamentalism or governmental fear mongering. I am not saying that there is no threat. I am just saying that there are solutions and we do not have to tear our hair apart to find them. I am even surmising that, probably much to the dismay of the environmental activists, humanity would survive easily and without much fuss. Lets look at a few specific points.

I have started hearing a lot of hue and cry over specie extinction recently. At this point, I would like to point out that during the past 550 million years of Earth's history, there have been 5 major extinction epochs. One of these epochs (Permian-Triassic) managed to wipe off 96% of all marine and 70% of all land species. We are currently in the midst of the Holocene extinction event (started about 13000 years ago and continuing) and it is estimated that 50% of all living species will be wiped off by the end of it (including those due to human intervention). The more startling fact is that 99% of all species that ever lived on Earth have become extinct and humans have contributed to only a very small fraction of them. We would be stupid to not realize that there have been far greater forces at work than human threat to the environment and specie extinction is quite normal but life manages to sustain itself nevertheless. What's more important to realize is that specie extinction, if directly resulting from human intervention, wasn't a luxury that could have been avoided. We have all bartered biological diversity for personal comforts and social 'development' and I think that's a fair enough price and now that we all live in our temperature controlled apartments and drive our air-conditioned cars, we should probably stop crying about how things could have been different.

Similar is the case with global warming. The problem here is that we probably do not know what we want to solve. The fact that stringent treaties like Kyoto protocol have to be put in place now indicates somehow that the situation is already out of control and we are only trying to delay the inevitable. Unless we stop all emissions, we are only adding to the greenhouse stock. Maybe we never had a say ever. I mean, when the hoopla started in 70s about global warming maybe it was too late even then. But the situation is hardly pessimistic. Humans differ from all other species in their ability to adapt wonderfully, in their capability of using their knowledge for survival. I am surprised that while so much effort is being spent on trying to reduce Global warming, hardly any effort is being made in the direction of defining a new paradigm of survival where the effects of Global Warming would be seamlessly incorporated in the system. To even think that we would somehow not burn up most of the fossil fuels, especially considering the stakes in the present geopolitical scenario, somehow seems stupid. Given that it's not going to happen, nothing is going to stop us from worsening the Global warming situation to as bad a state as possible. Now that we know that its going to happen sooner or later, why not start preparing for it now ?

Finally coming to environmental activism, I must say that a lot of it is needed in the sense that it enlightens the general masses about their surroundings, but beyond that, it seems to act like an impediment, mainly because it frequently fails to realize that the present situation was never an option for humanity. Neither will the continuous degradation of biodiversity be. It wears emotional glasses when a pair of coldly rational would do perfectly fine. In a sense, it hinders us from making peace with some inevitabilities and in the process, delays the scientific process of human adaptation to changing evolutionary paradigms.

Fleeting Euphoria

2008-02-27T22:56:00.000-08:00

The rains have abated and the weather of San Diego has become clement enough to finally allow me to loaf around on my motorcycle in a T-Shirt and a pair of jeans. I seem to be waking up from my hibernation and have started going to the beach again as part of my daily ritual and it was especially beautiful today.

Have you ever closely examined the moment when the sun is about to be engulfed by the immense ocean ? It shines in a deep orange, almost red glow, like a shimmering crystal on a reflecting surface. The red gives way to dark orange and light orange and mild pink mixed with ominous gray till it all dissolves into a monochromatic harbinger of impending night. And the ocean sizzles in a bright silvery dance with the waves breaking on the shores with an almost unwilling mood. And the slight muffled sound of the infinity beyond and the sweetly cold winds stroking your hair with the indulgence of an entranced lover. And spots of clouds glowing in shades of red, spotting an otherwise perfect horizon with silhouettes of groups of birds painted on the sky with black against the dying sunlight. And the ocean, majestic in its glory and confident of its immutability, prepares to sleep.

And it all seems so fickle but so educating nonetheless.

The notion of this planet playing host to such beautiful diversity, such magnificent colors, such a brilliant gamut of human experiences in a universe that is witnessing such a tremendous game of death and destruction is almost too romantic to resist. It almost manages to calm things down, shows that beauty can only spring from destruction. Much like creativity springs from pain. Shows that even if things are fickle, and mutable and ultimately vanishing, they are nonetheless beautiful. Shows that even if this illusion suffers from a debilitating futility, its an illusion worth living nonetheless.

How about that smell of humid air ? The smell of a dying day and an enthusiastic night ? The smell of an infinity clinched in the grasp of a fleeting moment ?

Nature and Mathematics

2008-02-17T01:49:00.000-08:00

I was watching a video on the Hubble space telescope (indeed very geeky) and there were a few very interesting thoughts that came to my mind. Its not that I was not aware of this line of reasoning but maybe I never developed it to any appreciable extent. The more I think about it, the more astonishing it gets. Let me explain.

The first thing that struck me in the video (90 minutes documentary) was the immense forces at play on a universal scale, the almost incomprehensible extent of the universe and the unfathomable distances and time scales involved. We are all very aware of this aspect of the universe. The next thing that caught my attention was the immense cosmic dance giving rise to supremely exotic phenomenon occurring almost with a mundane regularity in the universe. From the devilish grasp of Black holes to the concept of cataclysmic Supernovae and immense energies of the Quasars to galactic collisions, nature plays the game of destruction and beauty at a level we can hardly comprehend and she plays it with the virtuosity of a Horowitz gently stroking the keys of a grand Piano. But these were not the things that impressed me the most about this video. It was something else.

Einstein once said that the most surprising thing about nature is that it's comprehensible. And if you think about it, its rather disconcerting and very astonishing. You see, nature is not obligated to make sense. The fact that a few equations on a piece of paper can accurately describe phenomenon as weird as gravitational lensing and stellar implosion is nothing less than startling. I do not have much idea about Quantum theory but I have read a bit about Einstein's gravitation and all I can say about it is that its a triumph of human intelligence. I do not want this to be a geeky post so I will go straight to the essence of it all. The only assumption in Einstein's theory is the constance of the speed of light. Its hardly a theory of physics. Its pure mathematics. Its just a geometrical statement. And whats seriously weird is that the final equation was found by a guess since there are infinite other equally correct such equations. Einstein's equation just happens to describe the universe with a scary accuracy.

I find it strange that nature and mathematics are such close bedfellows. Why is it all so simple and so logical ? Why does nature dance to the tunes of purely mathematical laws and relations ? I am not sure if I am communicating this idea well enough. You see, mathematics is a very rigid discipline in which if a+b=c then there is no way a+b=d unless c=d. If, on the other hand, we represent two physical quantities by a and b and then try to find a+b, nature is not obligated to give us c as an answer, but it does. An example would be the conservation of energy. Saying that energy is conserved in a physical system and that 2+2=4 (always) in a mathematical system have a deep connection because we have chosen to describe nature via mathematics. But in the end they are two very distinct entities. The fact that we never see a violation of conservation of energy and that we never find that 2+2=5 somehow signifies a deep inter-dependence of the most basic natural laws and the most fundamental mathematical tenets. And this thinking rests on the sole fact that physical reality and mathematics form two ends of a very interesting spectrum. While physical reality is the ultimate truth which does not depend upon anything else for its sustenance, mathematics is the sole discipline which does not seek to explain anything and which does not depend upon any other science. Everything in between including physics, chemistry, biology either serve to explain the physical reality or emanate from mathematics or both. I find it interesting that the two fields which are just not obligated to be connected end up getting so closely tied together. Which makes me think that if there is such a thing as an ultimate truth, an ultimate reality, the only way it will be found would be in the abstract dance of purely mathematical symbols. And when you think about it, you would wonder if its all too obvious that within the infinite relationships between purely mathematical concepts, there would be one relation that would be the statement of the ultimate truth. Its just that humanity is just not intelligent enough to zero in on it, as yet.

Addendum: Well, thinking a bit more upon the topic, I have realized a rather grim possibility. If we take it that nature and mathematics are closely tied to each other and that all natural laws, howsoever deep, are ultimately expressible mathematically, we will soon reach a dead-end. A brilliant mind, with the name of Kurt Godel, gave a landmark theorem called the Godel incompleteness theorem which proves that a mathematical system cannot be both complete and self-consistent. In other words, a mathematical system that seeks to explain everything must necessarily be inconsistent and vice-versa. I wonder if it has ramifications in our understanding of reality.

A Meta Argument

2008-02-14T20:11:00.000-08:00

I had a very interesting discussion with a close friend recently in which the issue of needless consumption leading to excessive waste generation came up. I agree with the idea completely but then we stumbled upon a facet of the problem that was much more interesting, atleast to me. The question is, how do you define needless ? To put it succinctly, since this is not what I want the subject matter of the post to be, there is no way we can say that what a third person is consuming is excessive when we ourselves indulge in so many things which are not strictly needed for bare survival. Like our laptops, and cars and automobiles etc. If these things are not luxuries to us then a fourth television set should not be a luxury for person X. Expecting others to cut down on consumption when we ourselves can survive on a lot less is hypocrisy. But the bottomline is this, increasing needs is the other face of the coin we call 'development'. Its not that we cannot live within lesser means, its just that we choose not to and its a basic human tendency. We personally choose a level of comfort that we are not ready to give up for 'social good' and 4 televisions happens to be as honest a level of comfort for person X as a motorcycle or an expensive mobile is for us. So its futile to think that we can save the planet (I am not too bothered) by reducing 'excessive consumption'. There are two problems with this expectation:

1. There should be an objective measure of excessive consumption which there is not.

2. In the absence of such an objective measure, some self-righteous people decide that 5 cars is excessive or gas guzzlers are excessive and expect others to cut down on their luxuries when they themselves and not ready to cut down on their own. And this is just not morally right (well, I am using morality loosely).

So either we should come up with an objective measure of excessive consumption or we should take it for granted that 'excessive consumption' is inevitable and goes hand in hand with development. Therefore, if someone wants to save the planet, he should probably stop urging others to reduce their 'luxuries' and focus his efforts on other solutions.

But what if we decide to formulate an objective measure of 'excessive consumption' and this precisely is crux of these ruminations. Is it even possible ? Its not possible because we are trying to apply the cold impartial scissor of objectivity to something as subjective as individual personal comfort. There obviously cannot be a rational equilibrium state to this problem. What is possible is a sort of an arbitrary uniform law forcefully putting down a random limit on consumption. But we are not talking about random arbitrary laws here. We are talking about rationality. So the bigger question is this:

"Are there problems to which there are absolutely no rational solutions and is it in our own advantage to realize it so that we can tackle our problems more efficiently and realistically ?"

According to me, thats how it should be. The above discussion was just a small part of a bigger issue. Although I neither have the intelligence nor the energy to prove a humongous number of things decisively, I am pretty sure that most of those things will never get proven because of their inherent subjective nature and I will gracefully admit defeat right now than go on.

Random Thoughts

2008-02-09T20:45:00.000-08:00

I thought I should better stop writing on these topics but this was in the drafts so might as well publish it...

I have been writing so much in the comments that I thought, might as well write a post out of it. Before proceeding though, we will have to come to some common ground from which we can draw further conclusions. As Nitin pointed out in the rather long discussions in the comment section, the tenuous and rather arbitrary beginning of society seems like a good starting point.

I feel that man is only intelligent enough to realize his many problems but not intelligent enough to formulate decent solutions to it. The moment he realized that he was more intelligent than the animals around him, he started thinking of himself as something special and this is precisely the thought that screwed the situation for centuries to come. He came up with the concept of society because he despised having to live like animals. He came up with religion because he needed to be told that there was a purpose to his existence. He formulated civic laws because he was ready to sacrifice individual independence for relative social harmony. He invented morality so that individuals could be checked beyond the point where public laws were applicable. And all these laws together finally became such a complex network of rules and codes that they became firmly entrenched in our psyche. And look at what all these laws are doing to us now.

If you look at the stark naked basic of the problem you would realize that man's greatest inventions have become his greatest frankensteins. By definition, society would function only when its constituting individuals are made to work for social good often without their desires. How do you do this ? Its very simple. You create a universal ideal for him and then relentlessly make him realize as to how far he is from attaining that ideal and what a waste his life is it till the time he has reaches it. There is ofcourse no ideal just an illusion of one. So now we have religion with its ideals of spiritual moksha and heaven and hell, economy with its ideals of Richard Bransons and Hugh Hefners and A&F models, society with its ideals of 'good citizens' and 'give more than you take' people. And together they do a brilliant job at keeping every individual ever unsatisfied. He is always running towards one of these ideals. And yes, as an aside, the society functions relatively smoothly and we are made to think that we are progressing although no one basically knows what progress means and to what direction we are going really.

Progress is another term that gets to have a free ride in our society. Its a cloak behind which people hide their competence of ignorance. 'Progress' with respect to what ? Is there an absolute measure which says that we are progressing ? Is Iraq progressing after the US invasion. Would you call Las Vegas, a highly progressed society ? Does economic prosperity for most mean progress ? Or spiritual peace ? Do we have less problems now than we had 2000 years ago ? Have we found permanent solution to even a single one of those ? Are these supposedly progressive acts just minor ripples in an otherwise degrading society? I do not understand when people say that 'I know that we are progressing'. Had they said 'I believe that we are progressing', it would have been fine, because in the end thats all there is to it. Belief, faith, unmeasurable and unquantifiable and unverifiable.

I see that I have tried to say too much without bothering to make a coherent statement. So I will try doing it now. Why is it necessary to realize that the concepts of good and bad, of morality and ethics have a lot of arbitrariness to them ? Why is it necessary to realize, and with enough force, that life is basically purposeless and its not something to be frightened of ? Because people basically take things at their face value without thinking enough about them. Things are good and bad only because of the random initial conditions. In a Hitlerian society, maybe we would not see murder as such a bad thing. Once you realize this, you would also realize that you are not really obligated to do anything for anyone else except yourself. Your obligation ends at the point where you comply with the society without becoming a hurdle. You would also realize that there is nothing special with people who choose to live in a way that is considered 'good' by the society. You would realize that the guilt that society tries to build up in you, because you are not leading an 'ideal' life is pointless. Even those who think they are being 'good' are as deceived as you are. In a sense even more deceived because maybe they think there is a purpose to all this when there is none. The only motivating factor for your actions should be your own selfish desires as that is the natural flow of things. As I have said time and again, I do not have problems with any line of thought because its quite a futile effort anyways. What I have problems with is when someone clouds his judgement by social expectations. I have problems with people trying to find meaning in Koran or Gita or Christ or Swami Whatever. I have problems with people wanting to do things because others are doing them and not because they want to do them. I have problems with people not asking themselves enough hard questions.

But in the end, I should also say that nobody should give a damn if I have problems. Who knows, I might be wrong. Who knows, it might be me who needs a complete revamp in his beliefs someday. But I would like to think that I am atleast not afraid of the possibility.

Let me ask you this. What's it going to take for you to completely change your deepest ingrained beliefs and are you subconsciously insecure of the shattering possibility ? So insecure infact that given rational arguments and concrete evidence, you would turn your face away ? Nobody owes an explanation to anyone else but I feel that everyone owes one to himself.

On Social Welfare

2008-02-02T12:50:00.000-08:00

Continuing on the last chunk of ruminations, I still want to try to find out if there is anything that a human does completely selflessly. If we hope to find selflessness, something that I doubt, we have to look towards closer human relationships, maybe even blood relations or very close friendships. For now I will look at social welfare.

The concept of selflessness when applied to unrelated humans runs contrary to everything that evolution stands for. Man like every other animal is an outcome of a bloody battle for survival through the ages. Society has acted as a mellowing influence but the basic human tendencies of fierce competitiveness and a pugilistic attitude once the question of survival arises remain thinly hidden. I am frequently surprised to see the number of social workers because its not something that I expect logically to happen since it appears to be a contradiction in the natural working of things. And I start wondering as to how many of them are driven by guilt. A guilt which hammers in the realization of the gap between haves and have nots and mixes it up with a social expectation of an ideal state where this gap is narrowed. I am not accusing anyone of anything but I just want to ask a few questions. Why humans as a specie should try to narrow this gap ? Is it because we 'have' the capability or atleast the illusion of the capability ? Why can't we take it as the natural working of things where 'survival of the fittest' would finally takes charge of affairs ? I just want people to ask one question to themselves. When you see the picture of a poor child suffering from malnutrition, do you feel a sense of deep, overwhelming sorrow unaccompanied by any other emotions or is that emotion somewhere mixed with the feeling of relief that you never had to go through all this ? If its the latter, then your next reaction probably is the feeling that this is an unfair world where on one hand some people can live such an easy life, of which you are a part, while on the other, some have to undergo such hardships. And this is precisely where I feel that guilt sneaks in unannounced. Guilt is a derogatory word but I do not mean to use it that way because our notions of good and bad seem overwhelmingly arbitrary. What I am pointing out is that if the reason for social welfare is self-guilt, then its hardly selfless in the strict sense of the word. I am not demeaning anything or speaking against anyone because I realize the stupid ego-trip that really is, but I just wanted to make an observation for a strictly academic purpose.

The Selfish Man

2008-01-31T22:50:00.000-08:00

One of the reasons for not posting anything worthwhile in these last few days was an internal thought process that got kickstarted in me about a month back. During this time, I was busy trying to make sense of all the non-sense that suddenly started to glare mockingly in my face as I tried to reassess each and every thing I ever believed in. Reality to me appeared not worthy enough for a thorough analysis given its inherent randomness and futility but I found that only by realizing the magnitude of its worthlessness can it be dealt with the respect (or lack thereof) it deserves. It would be all too immodest for me to say that I have figured things out to any appreciable extent but I would not hesitate from mentioning that its atleast a start in this futile journey (because in absolutely terms, its not worth the effort).

Frankly speaking, it now seems amusing to me as to how many things we as human beings take for granted without ever questioning their rationale. How many times have we ever, with open minds, asked ourselves any of these questions:

What if there is no god and the religion I believe in is nothing but a confused heap of outdated rules ? What if the sole purpose of something as sacred as my religion is just to keep me eternally unsatisfied so that I can be made to work for the "greater good of the society" in a "moral" way. When did I start taking the tenets of morality for granted and why did I never question as to why exactly murder is such a bad thing ? Why is killing in the name of religion more justified than murder for selfish interests ? Is the reason behind considering marriage so damn sacred just an artificial human weakness given birth to by a social structure that itself is arbitrary ? Why is penitence both physical (in the form of dieting, fast) and spiritual considered desirable when the body is a perfect working machinery to begin with and the concept of soul stinks to such high heavens ? Why does working for society or animals or poor people give me such a high moral ground that I at once forget the fact that the only reason that is driving me to do social good (if I am not stupid) is my own inherent selfishness at deriving satisfaction from it ? Which brings me to the point of this post.

Every sane person is selfish.

and this can be proved very easily. The reason you do any particular thing can only be one of the following:

1. You like the job.
2. You are forced to do the job.
3. You are stupid.

If you like the job then it basically means that you are running after the satisfaction that you glean by doing it. The fundamental structure of this satisfaction is the same for a scientist or a social worker or an evangelist or a freaking animal rights activist. If you are forced to do a job then you probably have something else at stake that would give you satisfaction. A software engineer who curses every minute that he spends in his stuffy cubicle is doing it because it affords him a lifestyle he desires. The saffron brigade fights the Muslim warriors on the streets of Gujarat because it gives both of them the spiritual solace of religious uplifting. Only in the case that you are stupid, do you do something completely selflessly and I have a lot of respect for such people because they might be stupid but they are not dishonest. Everyone is selfish. Its the natural law. Every sane deed is selfish. But the problem is that along with being selfish, people are curiously dishonest about it. They try to see reason where there is none. They try to look for purpose where there is zilch. Every one tries to assume a higher moral ground where there is just a vast uniform plane of ego-hurting equality. Somewhere down below, I feel that no one is so stupid so as not to realize that it is their own selfish interests that's driving everything they do but most of us are too dishonest to accept it. And I am not saying its bad as dishonesty is just a child of an arbitrary system of rules we call morality but it would be nice if for once you stopped deceiving yourself and atleast be honest about your dishonesty.

Why suddenly this discussion ? Because I have seen people taking decisions driven by the illusion of 'higher deed'. I have seen people foolishly arguing for their beliefs and trying to put down those with conflicting beliefs when they do not realize that beliefs of all forms are nothing but social conditionings and come to think of it there is no system thats completely devoid of stinking bullshit in the form of unverifiable faith. So here is my advice for those who care to take it:

Admit that you are selfish or admit that you are stupid.

Once you are clear on the point above, things would be much clearer. You would do things because you want to do them and you would love the experience. Or maybe you would do things because you are forced to but the pain would be less. You would never do things because there is a higher moral ground, a higher purpose, a selfless hero-factor to them.

Review: Santa Claus conquers the Martians

2008-01-21T23:28:00.000-08:00

Here is the deal. Don't watch it. That's it. That's all there is to it. If you respect your intelligence even a wee bit, if you cringe at the sight of mediocrity, if your blood is susceptible to boiling from ham-acting, this movie would easily give you a heart attack. On the other hand if, like me, you are a connoisseur of cheese, if in almost a masochistic way, you derive pleasure from the pain that a brain-liquefying piece of cinema inflicts over your personality, this movie is almost the culmination of the insistent human endeavor for reaching the abyss of creativity and meaningfulness.

The premise of the movie is very simple. Martian children, cooped up in their Martian homes watch Earth television programs and they happen to develop a liking for Santa Claus. Their Martian parents are now left with no other option but to kidnap Santa himself and bring him to Mars. While they do manage to take him hostage, Santa, contrary to his benign image, then indulges in rampant ass-kickery reducing the technologically advanced Martians to a bunch of carol-singing, incessantly-laughing, toy-loving sissy boys.

The technical ineptness of the movie is almost numbing. The Martians are imagined as dark skinned creatures but apparently the director did not have enough money to hire a make-up artist skilled enough to uniformly paint a face black when given a clean slate. The result is a bunch of sorry looking Martians who look more like the regular variety of Earthlings who have only partially recovered from a recent bout of Chicken Pox. Their sorryness is only exaggerated by their sorry costumes. Skin hugging green vest with skin hugging green pants and skin hugging green shoes and skin hugging green underwears worn over the skin hugging green pants. As if their costumes were not already hilarious enough, the director, in a rare moment of genius, makes them wear a helmet with a semi-circular antenna which apparently does nothing except become an impediment when changing clothes. They also have a Supermanesque cape and they have something written on their chests in English because obviously, English is the most widely spoken of all Martian languages. The cardboardiness of their spaceship screams at you face and the cheap boxiness of their robots shouts for your critical attention. At one point they have a polar bear and the only way you could be more convinced that it's really an actor (not even a good one) in a costume was if he just came out of his costume and shrieked 'Hey look at me. I am not a polar bear. I am an actor'.

Santa Claus's workshop in North pole has the self descriptive sign board, very imaginatively saying 'Santa Claus's workshop'. Inside this godawful place, we see a bunch of stupid elves churning out stupid toys with Santa trying to save this shipwreck of a movie by uttering nonsensical jokes which try to tickle your jugular vein almost in a pathetic begging kind of way. And you don't laugh because you stopped laughing at mere moving images at the age of 2. Here for the first time in history we meet Mrs. Claus. A run of the mill, blood sucking, authority wielding, staple middle-age housewife who made me remember that sorry figure of Hindi comics who had a brain faster than a computer but regardless got pillaged by the monster of a wife he had by the name of 'Bhaagwan' (Chacha Chaudhary).

Anyways, in summary, looking back, while moving ahead, in retrospect, taking the cushion of hindsight, having matured for the experience, to put it in a few words, jettisoning verbosity for the benefit of the innocent reader: 'This movie might just be the most heinous atrocity committed on the human intellect after Jim Davis'. Here is a link, if you are to watch it. Its the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version, therefore, bearable:

Santa Claus conquers the Martians (Part 1 of 10)

Inheritance of Loss

2008-01-02T23:37:00.000-08:00

At this moment I have absolutely no idea what this post is going to be about. I have simply no clue as to what is it that I am going to say in the space following. The only reason I have even begun writing this post is because I kind of like the title and at this juncture, its meaning appeals to me in a way few things ever do. So here is an idea. Why not write about the title. Not on the title; just about it. After all, as fight club mentions, we are all god's middle children. The only thing our age has inherited from its illustrious past is loss. Not wars. Not revolutions. Not genius. Just the mediocrity of a meaningless existence. We have inherited the loss of everything grand. On a social scale, we have the blame of inheriting the loss of a more fundamental beauty. On the individual, we are culpable of inheriting a life marred by petty aspirations and pettier indulgences. On the personal, the continuous withering away of the social scaffold which struggles to maintain the illusion of purpose of an otherwise purposeless life. Come to think of it, life is just a collection of chronic realizations of its futility uniformly interspersed with elaborate deceptions we call social discourse. And it is when this social discourse starts creaking beneath your feet that you begin to realize the humungous gravity of it all. The numbing hopelessness. The debilitating defeat. The crushing misery. The cruel sense of isolation. And it gnaws on your sensibilities and rationality while you vainly try to maintain the false facade of composure. It nibbles at your capacity of tolerance till you cannot take it anymore. This loss mocks your strength and brutally laughs at the hollowness that fills your skin. It eats at the glimmer of your eyes, the quintessential symbol of human hopes, the last bastion of resilience, the quiet face of the will to stand. And it makes a rubble of a human being whose life does not have anything to show for its vivacity than its ability to breathe.

In hindsight, it seems like such a stupid post. I will anyways publish it. If nothing else, I at least like the images it evoked. Makes me believe in the saying that things are never so bad that they cannot get any worse. And herein, optimism, if only for all the wrong reason, springs supreme.

Vitamin D

2007-12-10T13:06:00.000-08:00

So lately I have been employing my rather precious time pondering over life's imponderables. In this relentless quest for the ultimate truths, I have been helped, in no small measures, by the numerous intellectually stimulating discussion that I have had with a number of my friends in the recent past. Having attained enlightenment, (Oh!, did I forget to mention ? I attained it last Friday) I now feel that I have equipped myself with the weapons necessary to take the puzzle of life head on.

So I was ruminating over life last night when I happened to stumble upon a dark realization. This reality check was initiated by the critical insights of a friend of mine and since then, I have duly torn the issue to tatters through acute reasoning and precise logic. The fact of the matter is this:

Sunlight does not contain Vitamin D.

Surprise surprise ! I am sure, like me, you would be evaluating your beliefs right about now. I am sure, like me, this truth has shaken your worlds to the very core and left you all speechless. Everything that you have been taught till now, everything that you believed in till now, each one of them now has a gray hue of uncertainty, isn't it ? I mean, if the almighty Sun deceives with such vulgarity, imagine the fickleness of human relations. Imagine how fragile the illusion of life itself when the fundamental axioms of nature have come under the scrutiny of suspicion.

Anyways, don't worry. Its not as if you do not get Vitamin D from sunlight at all. You see, I always used to think that somehow Sunlight is filled with Vitamin D and it keeps showering us mortals with ample amounts of it during the day. I never saw a reason to believe otherwise. Vitamin D in sunlight is one of those esoteric topics, you never really give much thought to. You just take for granted that Sunlight gives Vitamin D without really bothering your already bothered self with higher questions like "How" and "Why". Its not one of those problems which could cost you your dinner if you failed to fathom it properly. So like the herd-followers that we are, we seldom question the veracity of our beliefs. We keep living our lives, earning our breads, cursing our fates, brooding over our problems, and all this while we somehow never seem bothered by the fact that Sunlight might after all not contain Vitamin D. As it turns out, although Sunlight does not contain Vitamin D, it synthesizes it by reacting with our skins. I would like to say "Potato Potaato, Tomato Tomaato" but that would just be freaking ignorant.

So this notion set my thinking machinery in motion and I was forced to consider some highly relevant questions. What about animals ? How do they get Vitamin D with all the fur they have ? Do they not need it as much as we humans do ? The only way a dog can get Vitamin D is through its nose and I am not even sure that its nose is competent enough for the job. In either case, the size of the nose doesn't make too strong a case for effective manufacturing of Vitamin D. What about small kids who have a much smaller surface area to show to the Sun ? Do obese people get more Vitamin D ? Are the skinny models relatively Vitamin D malnutritioned ? Should Vitamin D be considered legal grounds for public nudity ?

As you can see, enlightenment has its flipside. Once the trivial issues of life are sorted out, what remains is truly mindboggling, the above musings form just a part of which.

On Morality

2007-12-02T09:13:00.000-08:00

I have recently been accused, and in no mild terms, of being too frivolous for most of the time when I seem to have a hidden talent for decent rationality. I have recently been sort of reprimanded for indulging my interests far too much in stupid incoherence when I could as well have given thought to something a bit more important. Although I still feel that this conception is entirely unfounded and that I never intended anyone to believe that I have even a shred of rationality, I have decided to give coherence a shot, a decision that is not in the least based on a few recent events.

So the question posed to me was, "Is morality a subjective notion ?" Before venturing into this I would just like to mention here that I have immense respect for the ideas of the person who asked me this question and if my musings appear contradictory to his, I might as well be at fault. Anyways on to the subject.

The question needs population to be separated into two distinct wholes. The ones who do have principles and try to live by them and the others who make them up as they go, living each moment for its own worth, trying to keep their eyes shut towards the weightier issues. No one group can claim to have a superiority over the other since in the end its the six yards of ground that consumes them all and no amount of thought and principle can change the fact. This distinction is necessary on the other hand because morality being a principle of life matters to one group a whole lot more than the other. And it is this group I specifically want to talk about. I believe that everyone has a sense of whats right and wrong but their thresholds differ so that given a situation, a few would find themselves in much more discomfort than the others. This argument would make it sound as if morality is a subjective notion which to some extent it is but only if you do not consider the impact of society in its implementation.

Sadly so, but man has become so dependent on social support, he has had to build up the framework of society to keep everything in place. In his quest to hide his own insecurities, he has made rules which define acceptable human behaviours. Religion is an example where the system has made rules which guide a person in difficult situations. It acts like a lighthouse for those who do not possess the rationality to differentiate right from wrong in subtle situations. All men, not being created equal, need an authority of some kind to tell them what is acceptable behaviour. And it is here that the objective nature of morality springs supreme. Its just another word for social conformance and that is not a personal idea. To a certain extent, everyone is bound to it or atleast supposed to be bound to it and those who do not adhere to it are seen as asocials in the least.

But the story doesn't seem to get over here. Let's take the case of religion. What about those few who can take their own decisions. It is allowed for them to be atheists. Shouldn't individuals be allowed to have their own set of moral principles ? I feel that morality is a mixture of subjectivity and objectivity for most people. While society puts bounds on the objective nature for the whole of humanity, each individual gives it his own flavour by deciding his own thresholds. For example, morality says you should not steal but lets face it, to some degree we are all thiefs. The only thing that separates us is the threshold we have on our own morals which dictates what we find harmless theft and where we draw the line.

Finally I come to the most important part of this discussion, a line of thought that has been inspired by the person who asked me this question. What about those few who have a radically different notion of morality vis-a-vis the rest of humanity ? Is it allowed ? More importantly, is it acceptable ? Intelligence and rationality, in this world, can act as double edged swords. While one of their edges serves to sharpen one's view of reality and provides oneself with the independence and creativity of thought, at the same time it's other edge cuts through the strands holding that individual to the fabric of society. I think its allowed (except in the most extreme of circumstances) but since by nature man is a social animal, his independence is just another name for sorrows to all those who are attached to him. I cannot say how much I hate this notion and how difficult it is to accept it, especially now, but that I think is the truth. One's notion of morality cannot be radically different from the unimaginative view that everyone else holds and if it is, it just means a kind of social ostracization. But then here is the deal. No one achieved anything by being conformal. There is a reason why every single original thinker's personal life was a mess. Conformity can give you a secure and assured life but as someone said to me the other day, 'might as well die'. Its fine till you define a set of rules and try to abide by them. If you have chosen to define your principles as different from those of the masses, do not try to weigh your actions in the currency of the latter. Its futile and it can only bring pain. What needs to be realized is that your actions are bound to create friction between you and the others since you have chosen to live and think differently. Its better to be prepared for your share of sighs and tears. For these people there should not be any half measures since it would only screw up things completely. Either they should not cross the starting line, or they should go the whole nine yards.

I believe I have spoken beyond my means and I am sorry if any of it comes as being too stupid or too pompous. I am not used to rationalizing and might as well have gone wrong. I think it is much easier for me to argue when I know I am obviously wrong. Then, I atleast do not fear criticizm since I know the futility of criticizing a view criticizing hot chocolates around San Diego. Its tormenting though, when your innermost ideas are up for merciless analysis of outside world.

The vicious circle

2007-11-27T18:02:00.001-08:00

So now that I have stated quite plainly as to how dissappointed I have become at the hot chocolate quality that is being dished at various places in San Diego, I would go ahead and try to describe as to how fate has conspired against me in a cruel way and has forced me to drink it day after day.

So I go to cafe vita and I am there minding my own business, standing in the line, waiting for my turn. And I am looking at the guy next to me and from the looks of it he looks to me like a guy who, on principle, hates skim milk. He seems like the guy who would gladly give his thumb away for a good cup of fat rich, cocoa abundant hot chocolate. He looks like a guy who has his heart in the right place. If given a chance, he would much rather jump off a cliff than be made to drink a substandard piece of chocolate beverage. So I obviously sympathise with him and I am just hoping that he does not order a hot chocolate since there are few things worse in this world than watching an innocent hope getting mutilated. And I am saying to myself, god please save him from this cruel realization, this harsh truth, this malignant reality. And then he says, "Can I have a hot chocolate please" and I could feel my eyes getting slightly moist.

Anyways, thats not even the point. Its me next and I have resolutely decided that come what may, its not going to be hot chocolate. If its the day of the armageddon and nuclear warfare has wiped out all the beverages in the world and Cafe Vita is the last place thats still serving something drinkable and that something happens to be just hot chocolate, I would gladly slit my throat and embrace the sweet respite of death. So with determination in my eyes and resolution in my clenched fists, I move ahead with my mind set on the goal in the distance. One hot cup of plain coffee. And I reach the counter and there is this lovely girl there and before I could speak anything she goes, "So, the usual ?"... Now I don't think I am particularly easy to convince but I have a slight weakness. I am suseptible to the whims of 50% of the human population if only their wishes are accompanied with an affable smile. Thats exactly the reason why I have a bank account in a bank that gives me .5% interest on savings. Thats precisely the reason why I had a phone connection during the first year in US with a service that did not even provide connectivity in my house. So I am in this huge conundrum here. Its my principles against my temptations. Its the grand war between good and evil, morality and weakness and while I am chewing over this great big issue, looking all the while like a deer in a headlight, she takes my confused silence as a sign of consent and goes about her task of preparing that godawful drink for me. And I can only stare at her in despair for I know that I have been caught in this never ending cycle here. Next time she wouldn't even have to ask me the question "So, the usual ?". She would just have to give that look of acquaintance and I would melt into a malleable whole. She would just have to smile and I would be forced to say yes. Thats the whole problem with this world. People are unaware of how strong their unsaid, unintended signals can be. Or is it just me and my habit of reading between the lines ?

Thats not all. The girl at Cafe Vita doesn't even wait for me to order now. The one at Fairbanks starts preparing hot chocolate even if she spots me at the horizon. And the one at Roma has gone ahead and decided whats best for me. And its not hot chocolate, its some godawful drink called Cafe au Lait and by the holy mother of god, I have never had it but somehow she thinks that I am the kind of person who would drink Cafe au Lait. So everytime I go there, she gives a smile, says "the usual ?" and brings me a Cafe au Lait. Seriously, this 50% of the population is killing me.

Euphoria

2007-11-18T18:11:00.000-08:00

Lets see if you can picture this. Lets see if I have the talent to recreate even a part of the magic with words.

You wait impatiently at the red signal flanked on one side with a Ford Mustang and on the other with a Chevy SUV, the size of your motorcycle hugely dwarfed by those of the cars around you. You stand on the lane marking with barely a few inches between you and the cars on your either side. You can almost smell the grunt of the Mustang and touch the intimidating power of the SUV. Its 2 seconds to green and you shift your motorcycle into first gear with the clutch reining in the 100 horsepowers waiting restlessly to burst forth at the slightest command of your right hand. You rev up the engine by holding the clutch and providing a slight throttle. You rev just so much that the bike creates a graceful grunt revving along at about 5000 rpms, the range where it is designed to deliver its highest power. 3-2-1 and you release the clutch fast enough so that your bike acts like a slingshot. With an acceleration that almost lifts the front tyre off the ground and pushes you off the bike, you zoom forward like a well directed bullet and then you see the rear view mirrors with the cars appearing like 2 small dots in just a matter of a few seconds. But power often is blinding. You push it so hard in the first gear that it starts making a loud groan and then you push some more until the revs almost start hovering around the redline. At this point, you shift into 2nd repeat the whole procedure, the 3rd, 4th, 5th and by the time you reach the 6th gear you either run out of road or run out of guts to push it harder than 110 mph. And all this happens in a blink of an eye barely taking 8 seconds. And those 8 seconds define a euphoric state of being when nothing else matters in the world, when you are ready to put your life at stake for a surge of the adrenaline punch, when you keep hovering over the edge that separates life and limb from a mangling catastrophe and in those 8 seconds you are ready to play the game on life's own terms. In those 8 seconds you choose to ignore the whats and ifs of the situation.

Intense concentration elelvates you to higher plane of consciousness where everything seems to move slowly.You are then moving so fast that the pattern of white strips marking lane boundaries dissolve into one single line. The wind is so unforgiving that it is ready to push you off the brink at the slightest possible lapse. Tears from you eyes are flowing so fast that they evaporate before they can reach the ears. And then you lean forward ever so slightly to hide behind the small windscreen in the front so that you and the bike now form an aerodynamic whole. And then you accelerate some more and you look down to see the black tarmac running below the bike in a frantic hurry. And it looks all so real. Its not like a car. Its the cruel hard road thats moving just a few inches from your toes. Touch it at those speeds - and you will be news in the morning papers next day. Then you look ahead to see a sharp curve and with irrationality defining everything you do, you accelerate yet again. You accelerate till the point where you know that going any further would make effective braking impossible and at that point you leave the throttle and push the brake paddles as hard as possible without sending your bike in an uncontrolled slip. And while all this is going on, you lean into the curve more and more and more and finally your toes touch the road and you suddenly realize how close you grazed past an accident. You straighten the bike thinking this is crazy and that you would never do it again. But then you see another curve far in the distance and your eyes lighten up and your right hand, subconsciously, starts rotating and you know that you have to get this right yet again, hopefully for the last time.

Although I believe that knowledge and experience are overrated, I infact have learned something from this. It feels so good because its a metaphor for a good life. Not knowing where you are going. Not aware of the consequences of your actions. Not worried about life's various buggings. Not being responsible for anyone else. That moment has its own life. It stands apart from the baggages of the past and the future. That one moment of the present stands free from the tentacles of life.

Meanwhile, I don't nearly drive like that. Atleast never with a pillion rider. I am infact a very safe driver :)

The death of hot chocolate

2007-11-17T14:48:00.000-08:00

Here is the deal. The art of making a good cup of hot chocolate is painfully dead. It is dead in the hands of Cafe Roma, it is sadly perished in the premises of Fairbanks and it is lying in a blood spattered carapace in the fresh battlefields of Cafe Vita. Believe me, I don't want to carry the mantle of the agonisingly precise clairvoyant that I am generally considered (*smug glow of self-satisfaction*), hence I shudder when I see my theory of increasing 'isotropicity of mediocrity' taking shape in the various walks of life.

This new theory is like the second law of thermodynamics and so far, I have failed to find even a single exception. Much like "Sadi Carnot" predicted that left on its own, the universe would move from a more organised state to a disorganised one, my theory says that in the absence of proper punitive measures and in the presence of an illusion of free will, humanity is apt to move from a creatively rich state to a relatively mentally dead one. And it happens because there isn't really a free will anywhere but only an illusion of one. If you look at the history of human civilization you would see something very peculiar. Creativity has seen surges of genius during small phases of time. While art flourished in leaps and bounds during Rennaisance in Europe, music for examplt saw a peak in the quality of content beginning the later part of Mughal era till the first part of the last century in the Indian subcontinent, and science had its heydays during Galileo/Newton and then finally culminated with a bang with the advent of Einstein and the brilliant assortment of minds who gave rise to elementary physics. There is something common to all these times. The greatest feats in human creativity were never carried because of social support or need but despite that. It was a result of the free will that failed to acknowledge the immediate needs of the masses and didn't bother itself with the petty details of incremental developments that is so necessary for the sustainence of the society. We start witnessing mental decay when free will is replaced with just its illusion. Its free will in the theoretical sense of term. Its just a word and frankly not of much use. While free to do whatever we want, its rare that we muster courage enough to disregard social norms and actually carry out our heart's desires. Anyways I have digressed quite a lot.

What I want to point out here is that the decay of the art of making good hot chocolate is a perfect example of increasing mediocrity and the fact that its equally prevalent in atleast 4 different cafes in San Diego just goes on to show that this mediocrity suffers from a debilitating isotropicity of space. Risking being termed a geek, the quality of hot chocolate in general seems to be a function of two variables. While it is symmetric in space and hence can be adequately represented by spherical coordinates, it seems to have an exponentially decaying dependence of time. Qualitatively speaking, a good hot chocolate is more than just a mixture of milk, chocolate and sugar. In-fact it would be a mistake calling it a mere mixture. Its like a compound wherein the whole becomes larger than the sum of its parts. While I am at it, let me just give this new compund a symbol (M6C2S : 6 parts of milk mixed with 2 parts of chocolate and 1 part of sugar) so that it could finally take its rightful place under the sun. It has a denser consistency than mere milk but falls well short of the disgusting solidity of a smoothie. Making it from 2% or fat free milk should officially be declared a crime liable to be dealt with capital punishment. In fact making anything with anything other than the full blown fat rich milk should atleast carry a penalty of 500$. While I am at it, lets just ban fat free milk and propose a resolution for burning up all the soy fields in the world so that people have better things to piss off their times with than making vegetarian chicken, low fat milk and meat-like vegetarian burger patties. I see that I have digressed again but then thats how chaos works. Thats how incoherence earns her bread and butter.

Feeling Weak

2007-11-13T01:39:00.000-08:00

Its 2 in the night and I cannot sleep because I slept for the most part of the day today. So I thought, hmm, what shall I do ? Lets see how honest I can be with myself and try to jot down my own weaknesses. I am sure, with the amount of matter that would be available, I will get bored and go down to sleep before I am even half way through. So here it goes, a hopefully honest analysis of myself:

1. I think I am a bit of a cynic. Especially when it comes to new aquaintances. For me, every new person I meet basically is a pain to begin with unless he or she proves otherwise. People have pointed out my amazing ability at nitpicking small faults with everything under the sun. On the brighter side, it doesn't take a lot for me to change my first impressions and I believe, I get on pretty well with most of the people for a small duration of time and a small number of people for most of the time i.e. once I come to know them better. As far as other things are concerned, I have extremely strong likes and dislikes. My opinions on my dislikes are in many cases so concrete that I am generally not able to see their good points. Yes, opinionated would be the word. Extremely highly opinionated. Close mindedness can also be associated with me.

2. I am a loner. There is no way I can indulge in team activities or work with a group of people towards a common goal. I find it extremely suffocating. While I am at it, let me just say that I pretty much suck at every quality an average manager should possess. Team Building, leadership, and all that jargon those MBAs use. And its not even that I feel sad at it. There is a sense of wicked happiness at knowing that I suck at those.

3. Emotionally weak. I have this stupid habit of letting my heart do the thinking in important matters of life, something that has more than once landed me into trouble. I try to put up a facade of being emotionally secure but honestly speaking, if people think that way, only my acting needs to be commended. Which also makes me a bit of a hypocrite, I guess. But then I guess, everyone is a bit of a hypocrite in some way or another. I try not to be one in most matters and in this particular one, I can atleast take solace in the fact that my hypocrisy does not harm anyone else.

4. Possesiveness and Jealousy. I generally do not care about most of the things in the world. I certainly do not possess these feelings when it comes to anything material. And by anything, I mean absolutely anything material in the world. But there have been cases when I surprised myself at how jealous and possesive I could be and how detrimental I could be for myself.

5. I think I have bipolar disorder. Or thats what I would like to believe since it sounds so cool. Anyways, what I was really trying to say is that I have huge mood swings.

6. Most of whatever I say is junk. I somehow manage to maintain a consistent state of incoherence despite being absolutely teetotal. I have this vague feeling that we all take life too seriously so in my quest of correcting things out, I am contributing in my own small way towards a more meaningless future, mainly by maintaining a largely chaotic state of thought most of the time.

7. I am a narcissist. Hence this blog, hence the other blogs. Most importantly, hence this particular post. Even though I am just talking about my weaknesses, there is the guilty realization somewhere of the saying: Bad publicity is better than no publicity.

Feeling sleepy now. Will probably complete the list if I have enough enthu left.

Gist

2007-11-10T15:35:00.000-08:00

If thought is food for the brain, I must say, the last few days have been quite sumptuous for my malnutritioned mind. Through intense deliberations and numerous arguments, through myriad paths of reasoning, and diverse ways of logic, I seem to have realized whats only very well known about life already. While Descarte set the stage on fire by his cogitation on the trustworthiness, or rather the lack of it in most matters pertaining to life except one's capacity to doubt, I have formally come to the conclusion, 'Why bother ?'. Put in other words, it simply means what each one of us is subconsciously aware of but are too chicken to admit, i.e. 'It does not matter'. Not only does everything not matter, the worse part is, driven by the higher intellect that we as humans have been gifted with, we just do not want to face this cruel fact.

And how did I realize this ? Simple. I just went through the history of human civilization and did not find even a single human being who was born before 1890 and had not died by now. Countless philanthropists, numerous criminals, innumerable literateurs and poets and leaders, thousands of philosophers and saints, all of them just withered away against the winds of time. Sure we remember a lot of them by what they did but at the risk of hurting our collective ego, might I just add here, 'So ?'. Human life has this cruel habit of wearing rose tints on its glasses. It smears the truth that is painfully out there and gives us a misplaced sense of self-importance, and creates for us a cruel illusion of a higher purpose for which a mortal being should aspire. Our narcissistic indulgence, often bodering on vulgar self-occupation, has created this elaborate stage where we are led to believe that since we have a higher capacity of intelligent cognition as compared to say a monkey, somehow our purpose here on earth should be higher and nobler than the lesser creatures who primarily live to feed and reproduce. We often tend to ignore the argument that had these animals possesed the intelligence to invent slightly better means of intellectual pastimes, they would probably have lived their lives for things more than just food and reproduction. Come to think of it, we all do the same. We have invented pastimes our intelligence allows and are happy to live through our lives on them without even thinking about why we should be living the way we are. Thats exactly what animals do. Nature, as the great leveller she is, makes us all equal in this subtle way wherein each of the species on this planet just keeps doing what it knows best, completely unconcerned about the weightier issues of 'What and Why'. And then she acts like the unreasonable hag that she is and punishes humanity for its intelligence with its painful realization of its emotional suffering.

All this intelligence that we are so smug of, only goes into making our lives more miserable. Of all the human faculties that our intelligence has engendered and that have led to his sorry state, I believe there is none more cruel than hope. It keeps driving us like a horse with a carrot tied in his front and we keep running after that carrot week after week, month after month, year after freaking year. True, the carrot keeps changing but the thing that never changes is its capacity to delude. Somewhere down below it makes us all believe that we are working towards a better life, never actually realizing what that ideal is. And it is only natural. In this constantly flowing world, it is only appropriate that our ideals are also fluid. Hope deludes us in the guise of love, it decieves us in the garb of wealth, misleads us under the viel of fame and tricks us in success. And it does it all so cruelly and laughs all the way at the fool man makes of himself.

So what should man do to circumvent this conundrum? How should life be led? Now that we have concluded that the worth of our lives is no pricier than that of an earthworm and no cheaper than the greatest leaders, how exactly should it be led ? On a scale as cosmic as our universe, it is only a folly as blinding as narcissism that can make us believe otherwise. I think that the least that we can do is to live in a way that makes us happy. Its sounds pretty simple in theory but alas, human mind has developed to such a complexity, it refuses to accept things so simple and untangled. There are so many issues cluttering the space between our ears, it is hard to fathom how such simplicity could be comprehended. Even if we do realize it, our social considerations have placed such tight restraints over our souls, it is often next to impossible to put our noble intentions in practice. Perhaps we can all live a better life if we just realize that its not going to matter in the end. It does sound awfully pessimistic but who said that the rules of life could not and should not have been written in the Shakesperean way of a shattering tragedy. Realization of truth can never be termed pessimistic. It is merely intelligent and like all things intelligent, it has an underlying sadness. Its like a dying flower. Its not the flower that is sad. Its the idea of its dying that is sad and that idea is nothing but a child of our own intelligence.

नाउम्मीद

2007-11-05T00:34:00.000-08:00

तेरे ग़मों की डली बनाकर ज़ुबाँ पे रख ली है देखो मैंने
वो क़तरा क़तरा पिघल रही है, मैं क़तरा क़तरा ही जी रहा हूँ

इन आँखों की खामोश सिलवटों में, लबों की शर्माई करवटों में
रुकी हुयी एक आह दिल में, ज़हर मैं कितना जा पी रहा हूं
... मैं क़तरा क़तरा ही जी रहा हूँ

वो दिन जो मेरे करीब आकर, नज़र मिलाकर था तूने देखा
ये दिन जो यादें सिसक रहीं हैं, मैं फिर भी सपना वो सी रहा हूं
... मैं क़तरा क़तरा ही जी रहा हूँ

झुलस चुकी इस शाख पे अब मायूस ख्वाबों की राख बस है
तड़पती साँसे अनसुनी सी, कहानी चुप अनकही रहा हूं
... मैं क़तरा क़तरा ही जी रहा हूँ

--------------

कविता की पहली दो पंक्तियाँ गुलज़ार की हैं । बाकी मेरा छोटा सा प्रयास ।

New Blog

2007-10-26T20:03:00.000-07:00

Well I finally came around to starting a new blog (have been planning it for quiet some time now) that is going to concern exclusively with Calvin and Hobbes. I cannot even begin to explain how much I have learned from Bill Watterson. I just hope this new effort would not succumb as another victim to my lethargy:

Comic Relief

Rain

2007-10-23T13:39:00.000-07:00

Do you remember the time when barred from going out, you watched the rain pour down heavily on the closed window panes, spattering and sputtering on the sill, and covering the world on the other side of the glass in a white turbulent haze? Do you remember the cold seeping through the small crevices at the edges of a less than perfect window? Do you remember the ever so slight hiss that accompanied the damp wind as it tried to force open the only obstruction separating her from you? And the thin sheet of fog that further blurred the view of an increasingly wetting world outside. And the water droplets that formed on your palms when you tried to wipe it off. Do you remember the smell of the wet earth as it filled your senses on a monsoon day? With the trees swaying in a gay abandon, recently formed puddles of water getting irritated by the non ending rain, muddy, deserted streets playing host just to scared, dripping street dogs and rickety old tea shops brimming with people looking impatiently for the rain to subside. Do you remember the black umbrellas and the blue raincoats and the old translucent plastic sheets covering the top of 'rickshaws' and 'thelas'? And the rythmic sound of water beating down on the tin tops of indefinitely closed neighbourhood shops, finally finding its way through nondescript pipes and crevices and brinks into the rivulet that became of the already monsoon battered market road? Do the muffled sounds of a dazed town breathing slightly for a life punctuated by a merciless downpour still ring a bell? And yes, the smell again. The smell of wet earth. Do you remember that? The smell that permeated the gray, hazy, cold atmosphere painted with constantly dripping arabesque. And the blurry outlines of children wearing wet Baniyans and battered shorts creating ruckus in the muddy puddles. What about the pleasantly menacing sky with the nimbostratus clouds in a constant fight of supremacy against sunlight. And the tingling of cold, wet water as it poured down on your face while you tried to look up to the sky with half open eyes. What did you see then ? Was it just the rain ? Or was it the sight of independence. An infinite joy breathing within the confines of a few moments.

Comics to the rescue

2007-10-13T20:10:00.000-07:00

After considerable deliberation and thinking it has occured to me that the most serious issues in life are more efficiently dealt with by the most trivial of mediums and seemingly the most simplistic of perceptions. I have seen that knowledge and information beyond a point have a way of muddling up facts, smearing up connections and finally blurring up conclusions into an incoherent mass of half baked opinions. Experience, although a worthy teacher, more often than not, only serves to consolidate ideas already seething with subjective bias. In a world too messed up with complex opinions, I find that the most intelligent observations and the most heartfelt commentaries occur in mediums deemed too stupid for intellectual discussions.

That is why I feel that comics have such an important place in society. They are not expected to be the mouthpiece of rationality and social change. They are not expected to be intelligent commentaries on economic problems and moral regression. No one expects them to speak thoughtfully on matters pertaining to religion and humanity. That is precisely the reason why the field is infested with idiots like Jim Davis but the fact of the matter is that only because comics are not obligated to be any of the above, their creators have the freedom to make them all of it and more. And in the past, atleast some of them have taken it upon themselves to make their creations more than just slapstick humor.

One that obviously comes to mind and to which I have alluded a number of times previously is Calvin and Hobbes. With the deft social commentary on issues as varied as the hypocritical nature of modern artist to man's complete failure at preserving the purity of planet Earth, C&H manages to speak much more than those bloated politicians and conceited economists. With Calvin, Watterson on one hand manages to evoke the nostalgia of simplicity, purity and innocence and on the other paints a lighthearted yet grim pictutre of a world increasingly getting encroached with degrading morality. He speaks about the evanescent nature of life with the same wit and tone as when he recounts Calvin's simple flirtations with Susie Derkins. He derides a whole generation caught in the celebrity obsession, ruefully talks about the encroachment of privacy by reality shows and silently snubs the go-getter, high octane, win-or-die attitude that drives today's economy. All in all, Watterson speaks with the detachment of an outsider and the sadness of someone who has lost all hope, and he manages to bring some really dark issues to light. He makes you (atleast me) think about our misplaced priorities in life, and he does it all in a very matter of fact, straight in your face way.

The other comic that seems to be too intelligent to be recommended just for 6 year olds is Peanuts by Charles Schulz. With the extremely simple drawings lacking even the most basic ornateness, Schulz delineates the most tender of emotions. Watterson himself once said of Schulz: "We recognize ourselves in Schulz's vividly tragic characters: Charlie Brown's dogged determination in the face of constant defeat, Lucy's self-righteous crabbiness, Linus' need for a security blanket, Peppermint Patty's plain looks and poor grades, Rerun's baffled innocence, Spike's pathetic alienation and loneliness. For a "kid strip" with "gentle humor," it shows a pretty dark world, and I think this is what makes the strip so different from, and so much more significant than, other comics. Only with the inspired surrealism of Snoopy does the strip soar into silliness and fantasy. And even then, the Red Baron shoots the doghouse full of holes.". Schulz has managed to inspire a whole generation of cartoonists and made them realize the possibilities vested in the simplicity of the quill brush lines. He has managed to elevate a supposedly trivial medium to an art form just by his gifted insight and tremendous creative ability.

Finally comes Krazy Kat by George Herriman. Actually I am not familiar enough with the strip to speak intelligently about it but I have read quiet a lot about it and am intending to read it some time in the future. The strip was syndicated way back in 1913 and it ran in newspapers till 1944. Although widely regarded now as the most intelligent and poignant strip ever created, it did not see popularity till the later half of the century. The premise, although extremely drab and monotonous by present standards, nevertheless gave the artist enough room to create lush landscapes peppered with ornately poetic language and subdued yet deep emotions of unrequited love and absolute apathy.

I find that human ego is too much of a detriment today to find common grounds over social issues from which a clearer perspective could be gained. Spurred by the prejudices accumulated over a lifetime, people become far too inflexible to yield even a yard of ground to opposing views. In such a case, I'd rather just let the flights of fantasy of Calvin take me to a world thats much more simpler, much more truer, much more honest and frankly speaking much more in-tune with me.

2 issues bugging me

2007-09-16T00:57:00.000-07:00

Since I am moving to this new apartment, I have a few things that I need to do. Now you guys might not find these very important but believe me, some of these things have been driving me nuts.

1. There are these 2 trees just in front of our balcony (we have the ground floor). Actually they are not very tall. The taller of those is about 10 inches tall so I am not sure if you can call them trees. I have plans of buying an easy chair and putting it in the porch so that I could relax while looking at the scenery in front. I have a vague feeling that those wretched trees might block my view. Some people have dismissed this as paranoidal fear pointing out to me that my line of sight would probably lie significantly above 10 inches from the ground but I am not buying that. Even if I agree that they would not interfere with my leisure now, who knows what they might be upto say 5 months from now. Who is going to stop them from growing say 2 feet tall? What will I be supposed to do when they spread their deadly tentacles to occupy the best portions of the porch ? I think I have to act and I have to act fast and with purpose. I have to wait for an oppurtune moment in the dead of the night and wrench them out of the ground when no one is watching and then cover up my tracks. But then I also have to think about the repercussions when the neighbours suddenly one fine day find a garden with two less trees. Maybe I will need to pace myself. You know, take one leaf out every night so that no one will notice this extremely gradual withering. 2 months of hard work but lo and behold: a clean, unobstructed view. Me:1 Nature+Miramar Apartments: 0. Actually there are two more trees after these two but they are just too big for my expertise. My ego is big but just not big enough to confront them so I will satisfy it by pulling out the smaller ones.

2. I have recently noticed that my new cereal bowl is far too big. I mean, its garangutan. It almost holds the whole box of cereal. For the quantity of cereal I eat, I need to throw stones in the bowl so that the milk and cereal may come up (like the crow did). Its not just that. The bowl is so big, it takes 5 minutes for the cereal I throw in to reach the bottom and 3 minutes for the sound of 'thud' to come up. So I need to wait for 8 minutes after I throw the cereal in before I could make plans of eating it. Nothing serious but I find that a bit inconvenient.

Well, this is all that is bugging me now. I am sure you will all agree that these are really important problems and would drive any sane person nuts. Each one individually is challenging enough to require the undivided attention of a normal human being. Together, they are almost killing a sub-intelligent creature like me.

Blue

2007-09-12T17:33:00.000-07:00

Well, I am in one of those blue moods again. Maybe its the conference I am attending. I somehow become much more aware of the futility of it all when I see a bunch of middle aged over enthusiasts vainly trying to impress upon the audience as to how their work is fundamentally different from that of all those who have walked on the same path before. I keep listening to all these presentations and after a certain amount of time, it just becomes all so monotonous and routine. Novelty gives way to boredom. Technology starts looking mundane. Every other plot becomes that much more incomprehensible and the technical jargon effectively blurs out whatever little meaning that the author was trying to communicate in the first place. I have formally come to the conclusion that Conferences suck. There are far too less people really interested in getting something out of the presentations, myself not being one of them. Most of them are there just to increase their contacts by that despicable act of 'Networking' and I am not in it even for this. Which makes me think, Why am I really here. I do have a presentation tomorrow but mostly its the advisor on my throat. If only I could get out of attending any future conferences.

The best part of the trip has been my visit to San Francisco which I think is the main reason for the blueness of my mood. I drove upto the Golden Gate bridge, spent some time in the shivering wind, staring down at the water below, met a friend in a lovely little cafe, had a little chat and then drove back to Palo Alto, which being part of Bay Area (Silicon Valley) sucks by the way. Anyways, the fact is, somethings are just so perfect, they leave an aftertaste of desire for more. They make you re-evaluate your priorities and make you wonder about the worthiness of your life. The trip to San Francisco was so perfect, I do not even want to go and present tomorrow.

It has sporadically occured to me, but I feel that most of us are not doing enough with our lives. We could certaily do with a dose of refined culture, a sprinkling of a bit of art, you know, the good things in life. Our lives lead paths which are too well defined to allow for the excitement that results from unpredictability. Our daily routines are far too rigid and I wonder how exactly am I able to spend every other day with the exact same schedule, without anything special to look forward to. Somehow, we have managed to become so subservient to the monotonicity permeating our routines, we have actually become immune to its cruel realization. We forget how much more we could pack in every single minute. We tend to overlook the fact that, well, its a continually passing oppurtunity, a priviledge that we get just once, and its slipping from our fingers with every passing minute. Its high time we (or atleast I) stop living just to eat, just to fulfill the next deadline, just to burn the day's quota of calories, just to see who gets thrown out of Indian Idol, just to complete another day because lets face it, if we ever try to look at the big picture, it will be plainly apparent as to how priceless each day could be and how mercilessly we are wasting them away.

Maybe I am wrong. Maybe its just because I am in one of those blue moods today :).

Ramblings of the dazed and the exhausted

2007-09-04T00:39:00.000-07:00

Well, I am sitting here in this Air-India flight bound to LA. It has just taken off from Frankfurt which means that 8 hours of the stipulated 18 hours of torture is over.

Delhi airport this time was unbearable. Huge lines, faulty baggage scanners leading to delays, inefficient flight staff which meant the average standing time in a queue consisting of 5 people was atleast an hour and airport roofs dripping under the effect of the recent torrential downpours. The flight started late by about 2 hours which is a harbinger of inconveniences to come as I would most probably miss my LA-SD connection and since that connection is the last one in the day, I would probably have to spend the night in the airport unless I decide to drive down to SD in a rental car.

Here in the aircraft, things don't seem to be much better with one of the Air-Hostesses almost slitting my throat open from ear to ear when I asked her for a clarification over some confusion regarding the immigration forms.

"Yes ?"
"Actually, I need the other form too.", I said with a sheepish almost guilty smile.
"But I just asked you. You just needed one form then. How come you changed your mind, huh ?"
"Actually, I did not hear you clearly and when I do not hear something clearly, I just say yes. I am really sorry. It won't happen again. Please don't slit my throat open from ear to ear."
"OK. Better beware next time.", and with this she gave me a glimpse of her hatchet, its sharp edges gleaming with an evil shine, its countenance barely hiding a grisly longing for human blood.

So I have decided to shut the hell up and read the newspaper I had bought at the Delhi Airport. OK, its Times of India so I should probably not call it a newspaper. The headlines are boring and to a high degree stupid. Their take on Sports sensationalistic at best and their coverage of local issues miniscule to say the least. Page 3 seems to have the highest amount of action. I have noticed something very peculiar about the Page-3 of TOI. Why does it always come on Page-2 ? Anyways, I look at the polls for today. 7% have replied 'Can't Say'. I cannot believe what kind of a stupid answer is that. Why does anyone have to go through the pains of booting up his computer, connecting the internet, launching IE, opening his mail, and then sending an email response to TOI poll with an opinion of 'Can't Say'. If you 'Can't Say', you might as well 'Not Say'. When you come to look at it, its just a 'Yes' and a 'No' question. How difficult can it be ? Roll the dice and take your chances. Unless your answer could jeopardize national security over socially irrelevant and intellectually insulting questions, JUST SAY IT. I cannot believe that all these serials and news shows on TV are running polls where their third option is 'Can't Say'. Way to piss off your six rupees. Just send them an SMS at premium rates with your choice as 'C'.

Actually I had a lot of things in mind but I seem to have forgotten all of them. So I will just stop here. While on the flight from Delhi to Frankfurt, there was this nice lady sitting beside me who teaches Yoga in Oregon and had gone to Pune to learn from a guru. It was nice talking to her and the 8 hours did not seem all that long. The remaining 10, I am afraid, are going to be excruciating.

Catch-22

2007-08-28T02:04:00.000-07:00

I cannot believe that I had not read this ass-kickery of a book till now. I always had it with me but could never proceed beyond a few pages. A mistake, I would say, since this is one of the most original, shrewd, cunning, shamelessly direct, directly morbid, and morbidly hilarious pieces of text ever put together. Yes, its the pinnacle of dark humor. Its a novel like no other. Its rationale is so insanely sane, you would have re-evaluate the rose tint on your glasses thats smearing away the cruel and unjust world around you.

The book is set in an American bombing squadron stationed in Italy during the end of the second world war. It mainly follows the life and actions of its main protagonist named Yossarian who is paranoid because it seems to him that everyone is out to kill him. The Germans are trying to bomb his plane and those who are not trying to kill him directly are trying to do so indirectly by sending him on more bombing missions so that the Germans could bomb his plane. The problem with him is that as soon as he finishes the required number of bombing missions before he could be sent home, his commanding officer increases the required number. In this grim scenario, the only way by which Yossarian could avoid getting killed is by feigning physical or mental illness and spending his time in the army hospital and wait for the war to get over. In this pursuit he approaches the army doctor to see if he could be grounded if he could prove that he was crazy. Its here that the full import of Catch-22 is presented before the reader:

" There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

"That's some catch, that Catch-22," he [Yossarian] observed.
"It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed.

"

The book is a masterpiece of circular logic and hilariously dumb scenarios. It moves effortlessly between numbing absurdity and grotesque reality. Through its characteristic frankness which often borders on revolting intimacy, it makes you see the futility of a world gone wrong. Heller has woven the throbbing and pulsating images of dying children, utter devastation, crass commercialism, and mindless patriotism with perseverance, honesty, morality and purity. And he has done all this over the backdrop of a language that is brutally funny and frighteningly incisive.

Yossarian, as it seems to me, is the second most insane person in his squadron. But he needs all his insanity to grasp the magnitude of the insanity of war itself. Just like the way you need to be stupid to appreciate Ekta Kapoor, you need to be crazy to realize the futility and absurdity of nations fighting against each other over arbitrary non-geographical boundaries. When you come to think of it, man hardly seems to be the most intelligent animal when he has screwed up the situations so completely.

Swami and Friends

2007-08-17T11:05:00.000-07:00

I have lost count as to how many times I have completed 'Swami and Friends' by R.K.Narayan, but having some free time to dispose, a nice sunshine to bathe in and a comfortable swing to lie upon made me remember one of the true pleasures of life: reading a good book on a lazy afternoon. So I picked it up and started all over again.

For starters, its a very simple book which moves episodically through the life of a 10 year old. The book is the reflection of the adult world in the eyes of a child. It recounts the 'case of the Mondays', elaborates upon the draconian system that is primary school, dwells upon the incongruity of adult actions in the eyes of a child, nostalgically reminds us of the innocence that permeated the friendship of our youth, and tells us a story of small pleasures and big disappointments. As far as I can remember, its the only book that never fails to bring a tear to my eye in the end and I have had my share of maudlin texts. What others fail to evoke in their elaborately ornate languages, this book accomplishes in the honesty of its portrayal of friendship and the heartbreak that accompanies its termination. The last chapter deals with Swami saying goodbye to his friend Rajam who is boarding a train for good. Due to some misunderstanding, Rajam has not been talking to Swami but Swami always remembers the good old days they had together. Swami brings him a book which Rajam takes. He tries to say something but his last words are drowned in the whistle of the starting train. Swami and his friend, Mani stand watching the train go. One of the last paras goes like:

Swaminathan and Mani stood as if glued, where they were, and watched the train. The small red lamp of the last van could be seen for a long time, it diminished in size every minute, and disappeared around the bend. All the jarring, rattling, clanking, spurting, and hissing of the moving train softened in the distance into something that was half a sob and half a sigh. Swaminathan said: 'Mani, I am glad he has taken the book. Mani, he waved to me. He was about to say something when the train started. Mani, he did wave to me and to me alone. Don't deny it.'
'Yes, yes,' Mani agreed.
Swaminathan broke down and sobbed.

There is nothing illustrious in the writing, but somehow it manages to strike at the very core of my heart. Maybe, its just appealing to the basic human need of friendship and his weakness and despair at finding himself at loss of it. I don't know. What I do know is that while we have been desensitized to the whole notion of fragile emotions by the reckless onslaught of commercial media, while we watch another news item depicting the suffering of a human being with the cold stare of a manager firing his employee, while our feelings get stretched and trodden and abused and manipulated by greed and consumerism, it doesn't take a lot to wake up to simple beauty.

Sometimes, I wonder, why are we being treated with the sensationalism and the violence and the gore and the immorality that's seeped into every fiber of today's entertainment ? Why do we need to feel violated in order to feel entertained ? What's the need of prying into others' private lives to justify our own miserable existence ? I guess its too late to make a fuss. Mediocrity, it seems, is here to stay. In the quest of satiating the palate of the lowest common denominator, its a shame that we as a society has had to give up simplicity and intelligence.

Letters from India: The Traffic

2007-08-17T00:13:00.000-07:00

Well, its been raining like crazy here in Haldwani. The mighty gods of downpour haven't gotten tired after a relentless onslaught that has lasted more than 15 days straight. Added to this, the fact that I have had a mild fever has prevented me from leaving my house and going on strolls down the roads of the town a lot.

Most of my visits have been to the local market with the barber shop being my most regular flirtation. A head massage at a mere Rs. 10 is a real steal and another 10 for shave with a thorough champi doesn't hurt either.

I have a TVS scooty here. Weighing at a mere 20 kgs (I guess), I sometimes wonder if its going to hold up to all those gusts which are the hallmark of these mountain areas, but it has performed just great till now. You have to leave the country for a long time and drive in more controlled regions to appreciate the skill that is required to drive on one of these market roads. Its almost magical how order springs out of utter chaos, how maddening mess gives way to self regulated patterns. At first its all scary. The honks, the trucks at sniffing distances, the odd cars springing on the road from nowhere, the dogs, the cows all jostling for their 2 yards, the seemingly infinite traffic jams. But its funny how everything resolves itself. And you don't really see anyone caring too much. They just sit there on their lunas and cycles and rickshaws and cars, all stuck in that small area, but hardly anyone gets flustered enough to start throwing tantrums. Yes, the honks are blaring with the continuity of a bass guitar in a rock concert but thats more a way of saying, 'I am still waiting but please, do take your time'. Nobody expects anyone to go anywhere. Nobody CAN go anywhere unless someone just evaporates. But the horns keep blaring, as if to break the monotonicity of the static harmony that has resulted from the extreme pandemonium. And you wait and wait and wait until you see a glimmer of hope as the vehicle in front of you moves just so slightly. Really, the exhilaration of seeing that one movement beats the joy of most of the achievements of an average human being. It takes time but somehow it all starts to make sense. The crowd helps each other to start two lanes each going in the opposite direction. The sun starts to seem more benign as even the wind starts to sway the adjoining trees. Slowly but surely the huge mass of humanity divides itself into two portions, each grazing past each other with the proximity of two finely cut blocks of magnets and the speed of a turtle on a crack. It takes another 10 minutes but I am off, my scooty blaring its throat out at a healthy speed of 30 kmph.

In many ways, driving in India is much safer than driving in America. The obvious reason is the speed. When your highest speed is just 40, you can hardly expect grisly mutilation as your fate, if caught in an accident. But more than that, its the lack of a surprise element in the Indian context, which makes driving here so safe. Once you have driven here for 2 or 3 days and had your share of perpendicularly darting dogs, suddenly springing motorcyclists thinking they have a jet pack, reckless car-drivers thinking... well hardly, you kind of stop taking things for granted. You view every corner with the suspicion that would have done Sherlock Holmes proud. You see every street animal as a potential trap, specifically placed at that location to start moving at the worst possible time. You hardly have to ever look into the rear view mirrors as you can always take the presence of another driver right by your throat for granted. No need to look sideways too, since that space too would most probably be taken. Might as well put a cello tape on the horn and be done with the responsibility of pressing that darn button every 2 microseconds. Where are the surprises ? I say, you have to be a real 'good' driver to screw up here in India.

Letters from India: Additude

2007-08-10T07:18:00.000-07:00

I cannot believe how much attitude these advertisement guys are trying to pour into each one of their creations on the Indian television. I am pretty sure that they have the innocuous aim of just wooing the yuppies (yo!), but have they no regard for me who just shudders out of goosebumbs whenever another such stupid creation presents itself on the TV ?

Wherever I see on the TV, there are dudes doing things which cool people ought to do, you know speak incoherent Hinglish, sport spiked hair, wear skin tight Baniyans so that their bulging muscles dance indecently in front of your eyes. And then their are the girls, again indulging in cool stuff highly associated with gangs of 21st century teens like rolling their eyes, breaking into a dance at the least possible prod and generally behaving as if each one of them is the last girl in a world that has just suffered an atomic war that has selectively wiped out all the other girls. Some cases in point:

There is this ad about the new CBZ motorcycle. Those at the drawing boards wrecked their brains and figured this thing: If the old CBZ model had a 150 cc engine and the new CBZ has a 160 cc engine, which is the one word which would appropriately describe this humungous, almost brilliant leap in technology. Nevermind that Royal Enfield has been consistently churning out 350 and 500 ccs in India for like a millenium, a 10 cc increase over 150 can only be done justice with one word: Xtreme. So like the morons they really are, they have gone ahead and called it CBZ Xtreme. Notice how they have omitted the E in Xtreme because proper pronunciation would not let their product get registered on the limited comprehension radars of 20 somethings and who knows: a CBZ Extreme might after all, not turn out to be as Extreme as Xtreme. With this much of Xtremity, I expect nothing less than a machine that breaks window panes with its sound, regularily breaks the sound barrier, and produces fumes of aqua regia in place of the regular exhaust of CO2 and CO. No it does nothing of the sort, and I am pretty certain doesn't hit anything more than 120 kmph (Pulsar 180 doesn't). Xtreme. Let me just say: My Foot. Thats not all, the model driving the bike proudle says: Thinking is such a waste of time. I would say it would be. For the demographics you are targetting, it would be a surprise if the overhead produced by thinking doesn't fuse their brains into one clogged lump. Thats what these people selling products would have us believe, that thinking is a waste of time. What next, take out our wallets and courier them to you if only you rope in king khan telling us that it would be a cool thing to do ? There is another bike ad in this regard although its a bit less obnoxious. I think its Apache from Honda. Everything is fine with the ad and I like the look of the bike but I just wish they would have refrained from projecting an extreme image of the rider replete with the bad boy image, leathers all over, and chicks going ga ga all over him with the guy himself employing most of his time wheeleing and stoppeing the bike.

Then there is all this talk about forming gangs. Not groups of people who share common interests but gangs who do all the cool stuff. I think Airtel has an ad regarding this. There is a gang of dudes who like racing toy cars in abandoned garages. Their carefully manufactured images include, tight fits, spiked hair, and guess what, tattoos reading 'Tom', 'Dick', '&', 'Harry'. Real ingenious I would say because the whole notion of tattooing is so naturally cool and new as the number of people who have resorted to painted hair or pierced navels or tattoed bodies in search of a unique identity still dwindles at a mere 200 million worldwide.

The bottom line is that its not the product I have problems with but rather the things they are being projected into. As always, I have problems with the irrationality of cultivating a personal image based on corporate whims and secondary expectations, a trait that the media is propagating extremely carefully.

Letters from India: Media finds a new low

2007-08-04T02:45:00.000-07:00

I would never have thought that it was even possible. After the immense wave of mediocrity that swept the Indian media in the wake of the mentally retarded shenanigans which were the hallmarks of idiots like Ekta Kapoor, I would hardly ever have thought that things could go any worse from there. Believe it or not but they have. Just when you thought that in an era of mindless and cheap entertainment, mindless and cheap entertainment could not get any more mindless and cheap, they surely have. Ofcourse there are some saving graces, islands of creativity teetering on the brink of exhaustion in a sea marred with popular acceptance of sub-par creativity but all in all, its a sad story.

News channels have yet again fallen down in the quality of their contents. While the front page of Times of India routinely features atleast 50% space as advertisements and 30% of the space with news like 'Man in Jabalpur pays 10 lakhs for a special Phone number' or 'Owners of these fancy numbers once sold Chole Bhature' in bold, other papers, traditionally held in a bit of respect, have started following suite. News channels like India TV keep themselves in business by sensationalizing every bit of trivia happening in the country. Of late, the news that has hogged all the headlines has been the conviction of Sanjay Dutt in the Bombay Blasts. It seems news channels have opened up temporary offices outside the jail in which he is housed. We are being fed with every little detail of his life. What he eats, where he sleeps, the gory details of his toilets, his minimalistic attire, how he is being treated like a normal person. The last bit of useless information that made into the category of 'breaking news' was about Sanjay Dutt feeling a bit of pain in his chest. News Channels, seeing the potential of taking the viewers for a ride, immediately organized for expert panels of medical practitioners, each of them trying to predict his illness and its repercussions. Similarly, there was this case of a child of 17 being beaten to death by his class teacher. You wouldn't believe but news channels prepared elaborate animations depicting how the teacher might have beaten him. They reached his home and started pestering his moaning mother with retarded questions like 'How do you feel'. Everyone in the village from his friends to their relatives to the school janitor to the dogs and cats had their 15 minutes. Its news journalism at its most heartless.

The saas bahu genre is holding its post strong in this battle of sanity versus insanity. From what I could make of off the discussions in my family, Tulsi seems to have died (or changed). I would say, about time now. People in our world generally die off when they reach an age of 125. But Baa seems in her frolicking best. Rolling around merrily at a ripe old age of atleast 200. There are atleast 2000 characters per serial and I am guessing, atleast 5000 such serials on Star Plus alone. And each of those 5000 serials tries to dish out another concoction made out of the same old stories of revenge and betrayal and love and hate and vamps and bahus doing pooja every single day. Grandaughters have started looking older than grandmothers, women viler than your average Hannibal Lecter, audience more numb than hippies on LSD.

Every channel now has a host of reality shows. Most of these shows are concerned with young and budding singers and I must say they are a helluva talented bunch. But then these shows go ahead and try to use their brains and add emotions and reality bites and behind the scene footages to dilute an otherwise perfectly good idea. Anyways, its still better than anything else on the conventional channels. The one good thing that has happened is a dedicated channel for cricket. Now I can sit in front of the TV all day like the mindless couch potato I am.

Letters from India: Air India - Hostesses et. al.

2007-08-03T03:22:00.000-07:00

Before leaving for India, some of my good friends tried to do what every good friend should do when he comes to know that I am flying from Air India: make me nervous by recounting their horrendous experiences while flying with the carrier. Their rants usually were thinly veiled in statements like : "the food is great and they give lots of it too, afterall it never reaches on time" or "you will never miss a meal since the air-hostesses will wrench your ear if it comes to that if you do not wake up to eat it" etc. So I said to myself, well, how bad could it be, huh ? I mean, I am not someone who is especially famed for the size of his appetite and the expanse of his tummy. Neither am I a particular stickler for punctuality. And all that drivel about monstrous air-hostesses should really be an over-exaggeration of minor inconsistencies. Needless to say, and contrary to my expectations, my flight with Air India was more than interesting. Let me just mention the good things with Air India and be done with them in the begining:

1. The food is good.
...
...
.

Now that I have painfully listed all that was commendable with the service, lets get on with the more interesting part:

For beginners, there is not such thing as a young, beautiful Air India hostess. You might as well find unicorns roaming around in your backyards before you get to see one of those female mythical creatures who are supposed to serve you murg mussalam, look below 45 and occupy an Air India flight all at the same time. Thats the stuff legends are made of. I might as well, someday, tell fabled stories about young stewardesses serving in Air India to my grandchildren. Anyways, they were over the hill, hopelessly face-painted, frustrated aunties who do not find it inappropriate to snub passengers at the slightest possible pretext. There was this one guy who was sitting beside me and the lady came over to ask him if he wanted some water. He said no so she moved on. I do not know what happened then but the guy stopped her when she had moved ahead and asked her for water again. She turned back, took a glass, gave it to him alright but not without an expression which said "Don't you dare do this again and if you do, might as well provide your eye balls in a platter since I will anyways gouge them out of your freaking sockets". I am not exaggerating when I say that I almost choked out of fear. He would have done all this one more time had I not caught his arm and force his head down to damp the last syllables of his fateful sentence "Can I have the Orange juice". I swear, she turned, and her eyes were blood shot and I almost caught the glimpse of the hidden hatchet. I would have given him up. Seriously, I want to live. I would have given him up but maybe she did not hear the full sentence. She just saw my fear stricken eyes and the dude beside me struggling in the grasp of my arms, gave me a menacing look, and silently creeped ahead. If ever there was a guy who had a near death experience, it was me. And I am not exaggerating.

Then there were all these ill made informational videos coming on the 'SHARED' television sets in the plane. The most notable among those videos was the one where they tell you how to wear the life jacket and inflate it. My bullshit detector went berserk when it showed a young air-hostess. And she was smiling too. I instantly realized that this particular video was not meant for this particular flight and began to watch them with a more objective eye. They were all smiling and laughing while strapping on the jacket. Now I am not an expert on human emotions and expressions when subjected to conditions of extreme stress and tension but I find it hard to believe that someone would be rollicking merrily when told to strap on a life jacket because the plane will have to make an emergency landing on the Atlantic Ocean. I never get it. How come all these emergency informational videos and posters show self-assured, happy people? By definition, an in-flight emergency instructional item refers to a time when you would do well to rein in that useless smile of yours and try to do something more important like, um... I don't know, maybe SAVE YOUR LIFE. But no, even the kid is laughing in the video. Which brings me to the kid who was behind me all the time blasting my ears off. How much do they weigh ? Maybe 40 pounds ? I don't know, shouldn't they be counted as extra baggage ? How come I dragged my 50 pounds baggage from the domestic terminal to the international in LA (atleast 15 miles) just to find that I had to check it in and the people behind me got to bring this 40 pound shrieking machine right into the plane ? Please for god's sake, atleast put them in the compartment above... Hee Hee Hee... Just kidding...

Seriously speaking, it wasn't all that bad really and I do have this obsessive compulsive disorder of adding a bit of spice to everything. Life would be too darn drab, if it were to be coloured just with the monotonicity of reality.

Diversity in Diversity

2007-07-17T00:00:00.001-07:00

Of late, I have employed a major portion of my free time sifting through some of the most admired and creatively endowed creations of American cultural history and there is something that strikes me as very odd vis-a-vis the same scenario in the Indian context. It seems that the regional/social/economical diversity that permeates the very air that we breathe as Indians has had delitereous effects on the national consciousness as a whole.

The effect I am talking about here is a lack of a unified national cultural history in the Indian context. The lack of marker points down the memory lane of the 60 years we have been independent. These marker points ought to have been produced on the artistic radar had we not been such a hugely divided society. Subjectively speaking, the only field which does tie the Indians together and makes them forget the petty divides of religion or economic status seems to be cricket. And as expected, the silent jubilation, the subdued enthusiasm which wells up the eyes of my father when he talks about the 1983 victory is the same with any person who had the fortune of being a part of history at that time. It does not matter for him if he is from Southern India or Northern India or Eastern or Western. These are the marker points I am talking about. Events in the history of national consciousness which make its citizens feel a greater sense of bonding among themselves. Sadly for a country as diverse as India, we as a population have proven to be woefully inadequate at identifying/producing those unifying experiences.

America, even though its a relativey young society, nevertheless boasts of a strong artistic tradition (atleast in the 20th century) which is shared evenly among its people. Experiences ranging from the rocknroll era of the 60s to the advent of blues and jazz and rock and others. A rich Television culture which seems to have deteriorated now but which used to be much more intelligent and informative and humurous back in the 60s to the 80s (I have been watching reruns of the great Johnny Carson, letterman, family sitcoms like Bewitched etc.). A tradition of various sports (the choice of the sport notwithstanding). A movie industry which produced some really great works before it got infested with talelntless freaks. A decent tradition of literature and a brilliant culture of science and technology. The achievement of America does not necessarily lie in reaching these milestones but it lies in building a national character which identifies and takes pride in all this. Not as segregated people but as citizens of the same country.

It must be noted that I am not demeaning any culture, far less pitting Indian against American. If anything, I have always maintained that Indian culture has had far more depth and beauty than its American counterpart. But I feel sad if I have to think of 5 events in Indian history when I felt sort of proud and happy at being a citizen of India rather than being a Northie or a UPite (the wars not counting) and I find difficulty stating even 2. Its both sad and amusing at the same time when I read the comments on a Johnny Carson video. People from remote areas of the country, in their 50s and 60s, share a collective nostalgia about him starting back in 1962 all the way upto 1992. Its refreshing to read the sentiments of the middle class, middle aged Americans on the video of Don Mclean singing about the Chevy. I wonder if there is anything we as Indians can remember so fondly.

To wrap it up, I understand that language is but one of the most important factors involved here. I understand that diversity has played its part here but thats not the point. There has to be a set of causes to any effect. What I am sad about is the effect.

Letterman's best videos

2007-07-14T02:43:00.000-07:00

As most of you might already know, David Letterman has been one of the most proficient late night talk show hosts during the last 2 and a half decades. He hosts the late show on CBS nowadays but prior to 1993 he used to be the host of Late Night with David Letterman on NBC. I just love his earlier shows from 1983 to 93. I love his act more for mindless and often very innocent entertainment than for any intelligent humor. Of late he seems to have become more politically angry and has stopped doing the antics which made him cutting edge during the start of his career. Anyways, here is an incomplete list of the letterman clips I could find on Youtube. As I said, its mostly just mindless innocent humor. If you are looking for something more intelligent, Dave is not the way to go:

1. Dispensing hot towels at a bus station - Larry 'Bud' Melman

2. Rena Smaha and her monkeys

3. Dave visits Taco Bell

4. Excursions

5. Dave interrupts the Today's Show

6. Letterman visits the GE building

Passion

2007-07-12T22:32:00.000-07:00

Its one of those perfectly fine days when your time is passing by without too much of a hassle, when nothing particularly startling happens to break the pleasing monotonicity. Its one of those days when you suddenly ask yourself a very simple question. Or atleast I sometimes do: Is there anything 'really' worth spending my life for ? Its obviously one of those tantalizing questions which prod you to think a little deeper but which, at the same time, make you vaguely aware of the fact that if you still do not have the answer to this question somewhere in your gut, you might never really be able to find it. It makes you painfully cognizant of the truth that if you have still had to ask this question to yourself, you might probably just have followed the tide till now. As painful as this knowledge might be, it certainly doesn't stop one from asking the question itself. If only for a purely academic, even futile purpose, nobody should be unfortunate enough to lead a life without ever being courageous enough to stare the stark truth in the eye.

So here I am once again musing over this conundrum. Not that I think I can find an answer. Just because sometimes it feels nice to think that while everyone seems to be passing another day, another week, another year trying to meet the deadlines, shaping their future, climbing up the ladder, I am somehow vaguely aware of the futility of it all. If I remember correctly, Watterson, through his mouthpiece Calvin, once said:

"The problem with people is that they don't look at the big picture. Eventually, we're each going to die, our species will go extinct, the sun will explode, and the universe will collapse. Existence isn't only temporary, it's pointless! We're all doomed, and worse, nothing matters!"

As painfully vestigial life is, it no doubt has to be led. Thats not the worst part. The worst part is that most of us lead hating it. Not hating in the 'I am suicidal' kind of way. But just in the 'It sucks' kind of way. And this is where the question rears its ugly head. There is only so far you can go pretending to be happy before you are forced to verify the authenticity of the facade.

Frankly speaking, I have only met one person in my life who was definitively able to answer this question for himself and I did learn something very important there. Its called passion. Not in the Orkut Profile sense of 'I am passionate about reading and hiking and sports and movies........'. But in the more muted sense of way. Such a passion becomes something so personal that it seems kind of vulgar sharing it with the society on as futile a stage as a social networking site.

Anyways, being a graduate student I often come across people who are constantly bargaining away their time for meeting deadlines and studying hard. I am not saying there is anything wrong with that. I just hope they find the effort worth the investment of something as precious as life and that they seriously enjoy doing what they do. If thats not the case, I hope that they are atleast trying to do something which makes them happy for a considerable portion of their day.

As far as I am concerned, I must say I cannot pinpoint one single thing I could devote my life to. I envy those who have an answer. I am just trying to find it for myself. It might be music (even though I suck and it doesn't matter). It might be Physics. It might be something entirely unrelated. Or it might just be the fun of exploring uncharted waters. Its certainly not money. Its certainly not a lot of scientific publications. Its certainly not a plum job. Life is too priceless to be wasted on things so ephemeral. And its too worthless to be spent doing something "meaningful".

Greatest game of chess ever played

2007-06-22T12:50:00.000-07:00

Depicted above is widely regarded by many greats like Kasparov, Capablanca etc. as the most brilliant game of chess ever played. The game was played in 1851 between Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky. The two greats locked horns in this informal game which was played in an official tournament in London during a break.

In this game Anderssen sacrificed a bishop on move 11, both rooks starting on move 18, and the queen on move 22 to produce a checkmate which stands unparalleled in its brilliance.

The moves of the game with small annotations (source: Wikipedia):

White: Adolf Anderssen
Black: Lionel Kieseritzky
Opening: King's Gambit, C33

1. e4 e5 2. f4

This is the King's Gambit: Anderssen offers his pawn in exchange for faster development. Although this was a common opening in the nineteenth century, it is less common today, as Black is often able to eventually equalize development, so White will be down in material.

2. ... exf4

Kieseritsky accepts the gambit; this variant is thus called the King's Gambit Accepted.

3. Bc4 Qh4+

Black's move will force White to move his king and White will not be able to castle, but this move also places Black's queen in peril, and Black will have to waste time to protect it.

4. Kf1 b5?

This is the Bryan gambit, named after Thomas Jefferson Bryan. It is not considered a sound move by most players today.

5. Bxb5 Nf6 6. Nf3

This is a common developing move, but the knight now attacks Black's queen, forcing Black to protect it instead of developing his own side.

6. ... Qh6 7. d3

With this move, White now has solidified control over the critical center of the board.

7. ... Nh5

This move threatens Ng3+, and it protects the pawn at f4, but it also sidelines the knight to a poor position at the edge of the board, where knights are the least powerful.

8. Nh4 Qg5

9. Nf5 c6

This simultaneously unpins the queen pawn and attacks the bishop.

10. g4 Nf6 11. Rg1!

This is an advantageous passive piece sacrifice. If Black accepts, his queen will be moved away from the action, giving White a lead in development.

11. ... cxb5?

12. h4!

White's knight at f5 protects the pawn, which is attacking Black's queen.

12. ... Qg6 13. h5 Qg5 14. Qf3

Anderssen now has two threats:

* Bxf4, which will trap Black's queen (the queen has no safe place to go),
* e5, which would attack Black's knight at f6 while simultaneously exposing an attack by White's queen on the unprotected black rook at a8.

14. ... Ng8

This deals with the threats, but undevelops Black even further — now the only Black piece not on its starting square is the queen, which is about to be put on the run, while White has control over a great deal of the board.

15. Bxf4 Qf6 16. Nc3 Bc5

An ordinary developing move by Black, which also attacks the rook at g1.

17. Nd5

White responds to the attack with a counter-attack. This move threatens Nc7, which would fork the king and rook.

17. ... Qxb2

Black gains a pawn, and threatens to gain the rook at a1 with check.

18. Bd6!!

With this move White offers to sacrifice both his rooks. Huebner comments that, from this position, there are actually many ways to win, and he believes there are at least three better moves than 18. Bd6: 18. d4, 18. Be3, or 18. Re1, which lead to strong positions or checkmate without needing to sacrifice so much material. The commercial version of the chess-playing computer program Junior recommends 18. Nc7+, followed by Re1. Garry Kasparov has pointed out that the world of chess would have lost one of its "crown jewels" if the game had continued in such an unspectacular fashion. The Bd6 move is unusual, because White is willing to give up so much material.

18. ... Bxg1?

It is from this move that Black's defeat stems.

19. e5!

This sacrifices yet another White rook. More importantly, this move prevents the Black queen from protecting Black's g7 pawn — in fact, the Black queen will not be able to easily return to defend Black's king at all. It sets up a dangerous possible attack, 20. Nxg7+ Kd8 21. Bc7#.

20. ... Qxa1+ 20. Ke2

At this point, Black's attack has run out of power; Black has a queen and bishop on the back row, but cannot effectively mount an immediate attack on White, while White can storm forward.

21. ... Na6

This move was probably made to counter 21. Nc7, which would fork the Black king and rook, and it prevents the bishop from occupying c7 as part of a mating attack, but White has another dangerous attack available. 20...Ba6 is a much better try.

22. Nxg7+ Kd8 22. Qf6+

This is a queen sacrifice, on top of the earlier sacrifices of a bishop and both rooks, and Black cannot avoid taking the queen.

22. ... Nxf6 23. Be7# 1-0

At the end, Black is ahead in material by a considerable margin: a queen and two rooks, plus the advantage of having both bishops, while having only one fewer pawn. But the material does not help Black. White has been able to use his remaining pieces - two knights and a bishop - to force mate.

How to kill a mouse

2007-06-20T23:18:00.000-07:00

Here is a step by step procedure for killing that mouse that has been pestering you at nights for so long. The inspiration for this is a real life incident that took place at one of my friends' house. He happened to trap the mouse in a small enclosure but now he is hanging in the dilemma of what to do with it. The mouse has been sitting in that dark enclosure for a few days now (I guess) and apparently it has become extremely annoyed at having been kept deprived of any food whatsoever. He expresses his anger by nibbling at the enclosure's wooden interiors. There is another twist to this story. A moral one. His roommate doesn't want to kill the mouse. So here is the situation in a nutshell:

The Cast: 2 roommates. 1 mouse.

The Scene: Mouse trapped below a table. All exits closed. Its dark inside. And lonely. The mouse is infuriated at this blatant disregard for rodent rights. He starts polishing the wood of the table. Roommate 1 who happens to share the room with the table which stands on top of the mouse who is nibbling gets crazy by the constant sound of dentine workout. He cannot take it anymore. But he cannot do much. The other roommate doesn't want to kill the mouse. And they sure can't let him go.

The Dilemma: Should they kill him or should they take the humunguous risk of trying to open an exit and catch the mouse so that they could throw him out ? Should they feed him ? What if he comes back again ? And with vengeance ? What if he nibbles through the table and comes out in the open to set matters straight with the two ? What if he bites through the floor and falls in the room below ?

My stance is that the mouse should be killed and killed fast. Opening the exits and trying to catch him is far too dangerous to be considered as a possible option. He might run away and who knows what all possibilities might present themselves to him as means of getting back to his captors with interest. The shoe rack, the cupboard, the foodgrains, the linens are all possible targets. And it is only too well known how devastating a pissed rodent can prove to be. The only option is to kill him and here are some of my suggestions as to how to do it. We have all seen rodent killing baits and sprays but all those methods seem to be too demeaning for a mouse that has suffered so much. His death should be special:

1. Concentration Chamber: Get some of the stuff Hitler used to use and pass it below the desk. Close the exit, wait for 20 minutes then open to find the mouse dead. Even if he is not dead, I am sure he would atleast be inebriated in which case you can get a hold of him and throw him out. Make sure to bang his head with a spatula before throwing. This will ensure that even if he gets back to his senses, he will have no recollection of what has been meted out to him and by whom. You do not want to be in his bad books.

2. The magic: This is a very delicate technique. You will need 2 swords. Start from the left edge of the table. Make a hole just big enough so that you could insert a sword into it but not big enough for the mouse to come out. Insert one sword upto the end. Move a bit to the right and carry out the same procedure with the second sword. Now take out the first one and insert it to the right of the second. Keep doing it till one of your swords touches something soft. Once it does, give it a final violent push. The mouse is dead. Now on with carpet cleaning.

3. The deathly workout: Take two gongs and place them on two opposite sides of the table. Ring one. The mouse startled, will run to the opposite side. Go to the opposite side and ring the other one. The mouse will run to the previous side. Keep doing this all through the night and the mouse should be dead by the morning due to exhaustion. The mouse might be intelligent but its not that you have nothing going for you. You have more expendable fat.

So here were my kickass techniques for killing a mouse. If nothing works out you can atleast transfer your pains to the apartment below:

Dig a trench in the floor all around the table. The trench should be big enough to see the ongoings of the apartment below. Open the exit. The mouse runs out and falls through the trench in the house below. All done. You have a ruined floor and carpet but you also have the satisfaction which only comes from seeing someone else endure the pain that has resided in your butt till now.

Taste of Potassium Cyanide

2007-06-19T23:13:00.000-07:00

I was wondering today. What would Potassium Cyanide taste like ? Not that I am going to try to find out anytime but I am just driven by the basic human weakness of inquisitiveness. Afterall even a miniscule dose kills in less than 15 seconds. Is it even possible to determine its taste ? I know it smells like Almonds but how would one determine the taste ?

People have said that some guys have tasted diluted form of KCN and experienced a bitter taste but I can easily refute this theory. This theory just does not hold water. Why would one drink a diluted solution of KCN in order to determine its taste ? I mean, if 300 mg is needed to kill a person, why would one need to dilute it with water in order to find the taste. Why not just take, lets say 50 mg of undiluted KCN and be done with it ? Diluting KCN in water will only serve one purpose - Making it harder still to determine the taste with certainity. Most of these stories must have been the brainchild of some idle nincompoop grappling with the properties of solutions in physical chemistry trying to apply his half baked ideas to practical applications like this.

So here is my advice to all those who are willing to stake their lives for a better informed society : Try KCN in a smaller dose. I would say 1/5 of the fatal dose. If you are lucky enough, you would be able to tell the taste. There is just no point trying to dilute it with water and then wondering why the hell does the solution tastes like distilled water. The result also depends upon your sensitivity of taste. Mind you, if you cannot taste it, you were just not cut out for it. Don't go 'Well lets have one more spoon and see what happens'. It doesn't have to be an ego point. If your friend performs better, well, tough luck. Don't swell your chest and go 'My mom said if someone can do it, I can too'.

Anyways, I digressed a bit. I was thinking of making a movie plot which would revolve around this special property of KCN. The movie would be 3.5 hours long. It would start with a happy family. Everyone would be leading a perfect life until one fine day the husband discovers that his wife is cheating on him and tension starts to simmer beneath the surface. The wife suspects that he knows. They constantly indulge in quarrels which by the way screw up the children completely. Depression coupled with midlife crisis forces the husband to evaluate his life. He starts looking for ways to make sense of his life which he thinks is going waste. What could he do to make a mark in the world ? How would the world remember his name ? How can he bring a meaningful change to society ? Such are the questions pestering him when he comes upon this unsolved problem of the taste of KCN. Perfect ! He doesn't wanna live anymore. How better to die than dying for the betterment of the society. He figures:

"If not in life, I would be worth atleast in death' (Melodramatic music. Glycerine. Flashbacks of his wife and children).

Ecstatic at this ingenious plan, he moves ahead to bring it to fruition. Last 10 minutes of the movie. He has to tell whether KCN tastes sugary or salty. He has the bottle in his hands. He has a pen in the other hand. A pink coloured, scented paper is lying just below the pen. Orchestral music is slowly reaching a crescendo. There are beads of perspiration on his head. He weighs his judgement again. His children float in front of his eyes. Then his wife. His home. His dreams, happy times. Then the sullen faces of all those millions who lead an unfulfilled life unaware of the taste of KCN and die with only one wish- What the hell does it taste like ? In that moment of intense judgement he decides to die for the social good. He takes a spoonful and transfers it to his mouth. Sudden convulsion grips him instantly. He starts shivering, choking, writhing in pain. He takes the pen and in that last moment of intense concentration writes something down... Police arrive the next day and see the paper. Whats it gonna be. Sugary or Salty? Sugary or Salty? Sugary or Salty? The paper reads:

S

Hu ha ha ha. Hu ha ha ha. My revenge against all those suckers who leave the most important details of a movie 'to the discretion of the viewer'. My foot. How about this ending. Not only is it a kickass story, it also makes sure that millions of manhours are wasted all across the world. Next time when a bunch of friends come out of a David Lynch atrocity, they could atleast console themselves by saying:

"Atleast Lynch didn't pull off a Srivastava"

Telephonically stunted

2007-06-14T23:53:00.000-07:00

I don't get it. Its not that I am a particularly retarded human being woefully inept at social mannerisms. Neither am I especially ignorant in matters pertaining to general knowledge or literature or sports etc. so as to find myself perennially at loss of ideas during a normal conversation with another person. I am not really identified as too much of a geek who finds it difficult to initiate and sustain a face to face dialogue. But give me a phone with another human being on the other side and I just run out of ideas to talk about in approximately the first 13 seconds.

I don't understand what people talk about for hours together on a telephone. I have never been able to fathom the mysterious ways of those who tread the murky waters of a telephonic conversation with the ease of a fish in water. For me atleast, there are few things more excruciating than a telephone call from a distant relative or a friend I have hardly been in touch with who sees the present call as a means of whiling away his 20 minutes just because they could not think of anything better to do. The call starts with the innocuous looking:

"Haan to kya chal raha hai ?" (Wassup?)

My heartbeat for one... but don't count on it. I just heard a vein pop in my head when you asked this question. What the hell does it mean anyways. Nobody who asks anyone 'Wassup?' really wants to know 'Wassup.'. There are few phrases more futile than 'I want to live life to the fullest' and 'Wassup?' beats it by a mile. The moment I hear this question, my life functions automatically go into hibernation. My brain sends all the vestigial body functions to sleep, my heart starts beating at half the normal rate, my body temperature drops by 3 points, my digestive system goes into a nap and I start burning fat instead of food. After that I enter one of those zenlike states where I am only vaguely aware of what the other person is speaking and my awareness serves only to help me answer his questions in rhetorics and more questions.

But some of these callers are becoming shrewder by the day. After putting up with my answers mainly consisting of 'Oh!', 'Great!', 'Well thats good', 'What?' for about 15 minutes, they somehow realize that I might not be giving the attention they deserve so they come up with something that any self-respecting individual would do. Direct confrontation:

'Saale, tu sun nahin raha hai kya ?' (ARE YOU NOT LISTENING ?).

At which point I have to kickstart my machinery, accumulate what little I had assimilated in the last 15 minutes, pass it all through a series of logic gates, come up with the most likely topic that the other person would have been discussing, decide my opinion on it and confidently retort:

'Hain ????' (translates into 'Whats that?' but with much more cluelessness.)

The conversation goes downhill from there and the only thing worth looking forward for me is the sweet sound of 'Click' which signifies that the 3rd degree has stopped.

Its not that I do not want to talk to people, its just that I do not have enough things to talk about on a telephone and I just do not find it interesting or stimulating enough. Most of my outgoing phone calls fail to cross the 1 minute duration mark. I cannot explain how many times I have to fight with myself before finally deciding to pick up a call which I suspect would last more than 5 (barring from very few people. Till the last count the number was 3.).

And as if all of this was not bad enough, they have gone ahead and provided voice mails to every phone. Now I cannot even say 'oh your number is not stored in my phone so I couldn't recognize the missed call and you know with all these spam callers nowadays I do not generally call back to unidentified numbers'. They will listen to this baloney with all the patience in the world and come up with the atom bomb:

"And the voice mail ?"

They hardly understand that their voice mail is probably 78th in the line of unheard voice messages since October 2006 and it would be awfully impossible for me to sift through all that junk to get to that particular message i.e. if I remembered my voicemail password in the first place. Unless Apple comes up with iPhone with the random voicemail utility and unless I become mentally senile enough to once again get blinded by all that glitter and end up buying one, doesn't it sound a bit harsh expecting me to listen to the 78th message after listening to 77 ? I know it does.

Well anyways, the bottom line is that the quality of a successful telephone conversationist is woefully lacking in me. In a world where teenage girls go yammering away for hours non-stop on the phone, discussing their pointless antics, where aunties swell up the telephone bills discussing how Mr. Sharma's daughter was seen with that other guy, where guys beat the 'unlimited calls' rule to death romantically swooning over every syllable that pours in from the other side, where the right hand spends more time near the ear than its politically correct place, where the normal position of the human head is now being described as 'slightly right to the line of symmetry', here I am with a cell phone with hardly any sign of wear on its number pad constantly chewing over the eternal question:

"What do they talk about ?"

Bye Bye Miss American Pie

2007-06-10T00:30:00.000-07:00

'Bye Bye Miss American Pie' is an epic song from Don Mclean and I must confess but I must have listened to this song which runs for upwards of 8 minutes atleast 50 times in 2 days. As beautiful as the song is inasmuch as its lyrics and melody are concerned, it also gives an amazing insight into the rocknroll era of the 50s, 60s, and the early 70s of American music scene through its varied allusions to various milestones along the musical history. This is one of those songs which make even the harshest cynics go silent. There is just nothing in the song that is not perfect and desirable and beautiful. The staunchest of critics of American culture can only bite their nails and maybe point out to the length of the song in a last ditch effort of coming up with atleast some criticism. Nevertheless, on with the post.

First of all, you can listen to this song here but I suggest getting some perspective of what is being said in the song before actually listening to it in order to appreciate it better:

Miss American Pie

The song represents the point of view of singer Don Mclean through his childhood and into his adulthood and his take on the changes through which the musical scene of America underwent begining 1950. The song is primarily an emotional tribute to Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and Jiles Perry Richardson all of whom died in an aircrash in the February of 1959. Buddy Holly was an exceptionally gifted singer who made waves at about the same time Elvis Pressly was making America gyrate to his pulsating tunes. He is considered one of the greatest proponents of rocknroll and despite dying at a very young age of 22, still regarded by many to be as good if not better than Elvis. He defined an age brimming with rebellion, an age bubbling with the revolution of creativity, nicely iced with a varnish of simplicity and innocence. Aspects which are woefully missing in today's music. One song that I particularly like is:

That'll be the day

You see what I am saying. What the song lacks in the clarity of audio and the sophisitication and aural power of the instruments, it makes up in a sincere dose of emotion and passion for music in the singer (Holly).

Don Mclean, in Miss American Pie, gives a tearful tribute to the genius which died young. He terms this particular day, The day the music died, a phrase that has entered the popular lexicon now. Here are the lyrics to the song. At the end, I have listed some of the allusions mentioned in the song (marked in bold) and their place in American Music history:

Lyrics:
-------

A long, long time ago...
I can still remember
How that music used to make me smile.
And I knew if I had my chance
That I could make those people dance
And, maybe, they’d be happy for a while.

But february made me shiver
With every paper I’d deliver.
Bad news on the doorstep;
I couldn’t take one more step.

I can’t remember if I cried
When I read about his widowed bride,
But something touched me deep inside
The day the music died.

So bye-bye, miss american pie.
Drove my chevy to the levee,
But the levee was dry.
And them good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye
Singin’, "this’ll be the day that I die.
"this’ll be the day that I die."

Did you write the book of love,
And do you have faith in God above,
If the Bible tells you so?
Do you believe in rock ’n roll,
Can music save your mortal soul,
And can you teach me how to dance real slow?

Well, I know that you’re in love with him
`cause I saw you dancin’ in the gym.
You both kicked off your shoes.
Man, I dig those rhythm and blues.

I was a lonely teenage broncin’ buck
With a pink carnation and a pickup truck,
But I knew I was out of luck
The day the music died.

I started singin’,
"bye-bye, miss american pie."
Drove my chevy to the levee,
But the levee was dry.
Them good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye
And singin’, "this’ll be the day that I die.
"this’ll be the day that I die."

Now for ten years we’ve been on our own
And moss grows fat on a rollin’ stone,
But that’s not how it used to be.
When the jester sang for the king and queen,
In a coat he borrowed from james dean
And a voice that came from you and me,

Oh, and while the king was looking down,
The jester stole his thorny crown.
The courtroom was adjourned;
No verdict was returned.
And while lennon read a book of marx,
The quartet practiced in the park,
And we sang dirges in the dark
The day the music died.

We were singing,
"bye-bye, miss american pie."
Drove my chevy to the levee,
But the levee was dry.
Them good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye
And singin’, "this’ll be the day that I die.
"this’ll be the day that I die."

Helter skelter in a summer swelter.
The birds flew off with a fallout shelter,
Eight miles high and falling fast.
It landed foul on the grass.
The players tried for a forward pass,
With the jester on the sidelines in a cast.

Now the half-time air was sweet perfume
While the sergeants played a marching tune.
We all got up to dance,
Oh, but we never got the chance!
`cause the players tried to take the field;
The marching band refused to yield.
Do you recall what was revealed
The day the music died?

We started singing,
"bye-bye, miss american pie."
Drove my chevy to the levee,
But the levee was dry.
Them good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye
And singin’, "this’ll be the day that I die.
"this’ll be the day that I die."

Oh, and there we were all in one place,
A generation lost in space
With no time left to start again.
So come on: jack be nimble, jack be quick!
Jack flash sat on a candlestick
Cause fire is the devil’s only friend.

Oh, and as I watched him on the stage
My hands were clenched in fists of rage.
No angel born in hell
Could break that satan’s spell.
And as the flames climbed high into the night
To light the sacrificial rite,
I saw satan laughing with delight
The day the music died

He was singing,
"bye-bye, miss american pie."
Drove my chevy to the levee,
But the levee was dry.
Them good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye
And singin’, "this’ll be the day that I die.
"this’ll be the day that I die."

I met a girl who sang the blues
And I asked her for some happy news,
But she just smiled and turned away.
I went down to the sacred store
Where I’d heard the music years before,
But the man there said the music wouldn’t play.

And in the streets: the children screamed,
The lovers cried, and the poets dreamed.
But not a word was spoken;
The church bells all were broken.
And the three men I admire most:
The father, son, and the holy ghost,
They caught the last train for the coast
The day the music died.

And they were singing,
"bye-bye, miss american pie."
Drove my chevy to the levee,
But the levee was dry.
And them good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye
Singin’, "this’ll be the day that I die.
"this’ll be the day that I die."

They were singing,
"bye-bye, miss american pie."
Drove my chevy to the levee,
But the levee was dry.
Them good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye
Singin’, "this’ll be the day that I die."

---------

Allusions:

The day the music died: February 3 1959 when Buddy Holly, Valens and Richardson died in a plane crash.

Miss American Pie: Probably refers to the expression "As American as a pie" and in essence points to the innocence and idealism of an idea that is vintage American.

Chevee and Levee: Chevee or Chevy again refers to an idea that is distinctly American by pointing out the Chevrolet brand of cars. levee represents a body of water and driving beside it represents an ideal and a beautiful journey. Finding the levee dry signifies the dirth of happiness, a dystopian scenario.

'Jester' and 'moss grows fat on a rollin’ stone': Jester refers to the great Bob Dylan and the line 'moss grows fat' signifies a reducing popularity of Dylan's music. The paragraph refers to the time when Elvis's (alluded as King) popularity was decreasing and his place was being taken by Dylan (Jester)

lennon: lennon obviously refers to the rise of the Beatles. By the way, the name Beatles is again a tribute to Buddy Holly whose band was called The Crickets.

The birds: Refers to the period where the American band the Byrds became momentarily famous. This was a time pregnant with tumultuous changes. The Jestor (Dylan) is referred to as being sidelined (due to a motorcycle accident).

sergeants: The Beatles, who were changing the scene of American Music from rocknroll to classic rock, seen by many contemprories as a musically diluting effect and something that would ultimately lead to the corruption of the innocence vested in the music.

Oh, and there we were all in one place,
A generation lost in space: Woodstock '69. Certainly a defining moment in Music history. Considered by many to be the most powerful statement of the counterculture thriving in the 60s. A generation lost in space refers to the excessive usage of drugs by the generation and more broadly refers to the hippie culture.

Oh, and as I watched him on the stage: Refers to the Rolling Stone. This paragraph particularly refers to the Altamont Free Concert which was held in SFO in '69 and was being touted as Woodstock West before it ran into immense mismanagement leading to 4 deaths and several injuries.

No angel born in hell: Refers to Hell's Angels, a group which was given the responsibility of the security for the concert. Fights between the audience and the group led to violent incidents and this concert is widely regarded as the turning point when drug abuse and violence reared their heads in the Rock scene of American Music. This is the point to which the loss of innocence in Music is attributed.

girl: Refers to Janice Joplin, widely regarded as the greatest White blues singer who died a premature death due to accidental overdose of heroin.

So here it was. My take on a beautiful song. English afterall is not that drab a language :). Meanwhile, if you like Miss American Pie, listen to this gem by Don Mclean. Its a tribute to the Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh:

Vincent

Unusual Wikipedia articles

2007-05-29T20:14:00.000-07:00

And by interesting, I mean KickAss...

These are the titles of some of the articles that once used to be on wikipedia until someone had the shortsight of terming them as irrelevant and stupid. Personally, I feel that its an infringement of the basic human right of expression and knowledge. More so because of the very important topics these articles dealt with:

3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286208998628034825342117 :This was the title of the article which apparently redirected to the article for 'pi'. The editors thought that no one would be knowledgeable enough to put the above string into the search field in order to search for pi. Moreover, anyone who knows pi to such precision probably won't need a wikipedia article for learning more about it.

2. Alternative Rock: This article wasn't itself deleted but the entry describing it was. It said: "Alternative rock is the rock which is lying near the other rock that you are watching". Pretty smart, eh?

3. Does not link to Hitler: This article aimed to link to every page on the Internet which did not link to Hitler. Aim high, I say.

4. Guide to: Blowing Your Nose & Getting Dressed : This article gave a step by step tutorial on how to blow your nose. It catered to the special needs of a whole range of nose blowers. While on one hand, rank amateurs could learn how to blow their noses from scratch, experienced nose-blowers could also take something away from the wealth of information contained on this page. Too bad it got deleted for there are far too many young ones now who have no idea how to blow their noses and have to depend on the mercy of the adults to teach them the secret art.

5a. List of notable people who have been stung by jellyfish
5b. List of jellyfish who have stung notable people

6. List of people who are alive or are dead : Basically a census of the WHOLE FREAKING WORLD.

7. List of people without names: This article did not have even a single entry. I wonder why...

8. List of those who are "far left" according to Bill O'Reilly : You would appreciate it more if you knew just how big a bonehead Bill O'Reilly of Fox News is. Just to give you an idea, this article would have been as big as "List of people who are alive or are dead" except for Bill O'Reilly and George Bush.

9. Mirwin's prototype of synergistally rationalized collaboration as an example of developing liquid resources from ambient commons in USA, tailor as required: Sounds like the title of an average scientific paper. Entirely incomprehensible. After a few years I have understood that the academic status of a journal paper in the eyes of the beholder does not lie in its comprehensibility but rather its incomprehensibility.

10. Polydimensional industrial bio-cosmic psychology of microscopic bacterium: Or in simpler words, Psychology of a bacteria.

Infomercials - The zenith of creative ad-making

2007-05-28T03:20:00.000-07:00

Before saying anything, let me just make it clear that there is no sarcasm in this article. In fact, I would just go ahead and say that I never say anything sarcastic. I didn't even know the meaning of the word sarcasm till I looked it up in the dictionary a few moments back. Now that things have been clarified enough, I will get on with the subject matter:

"Infomercials kick ass"

Infomercials (paid programming/teleshopping) are those advertisements which generally hunt for their prey after 11:00 and run for the better part of atleast half an hour straight. The basic structure of every infomercial ever made has always been the same:

1. An over-enthusiastic guy who has invented something completely irrelevant that is able to perform a completely unnecessary task in just seconds. It doesn't matter if his contraption sets you back a fortune just for inserting a nail in a wooden frame, or for illuminating the inside of your purse, or for turning your kitchen into a personal butcher shop. As long as it saves you seconds of hard work, the over-enthusiastic dude keeps on yammering about his wonder product NON-STOP.

2. Another guy who has no idea what the hell is going on. He keeps on posing the over-enthusiastic dude completely arbitrary questions and keeps on performing his part of a humunguously confused guy to the hilt. Frankly, he doesn't get it. If the infomercial had been a government, this guy would have been George W. Bush presiding over the Iraq evacuation bill in the congress. He manages to keep the audience (me) interested in the ad by periodicaly uttering cliched and evidently rehearsed exclamations. "Oh! Wonderful! Now I can cut these potatoes in a fraction of a second". "Oh! Great! now I can look into my purse even in the dark!", "Oh! Brilliant! Now I can remember where I placed my keys". At this point of time, I generally start banging my head on the wall till I get a concussion.

3. Most of these infomercials generally have an audience as well as if trying to console the TV viewer that he is not the only moron in the world who watches such shows. There are atleast 22 more. All of them have a vaguely interested look which lies somewhere between that of a philosophy student who accidently finds himself in a statistics class (or for that matter anyone who finds himself in a statistics class.... including statistics students) and that of a person, high on dope, trying to decide what's it going to be next: Cocaine or Marijuana. They keep asking their retarded questions just to keep the flow going and just to give us a break before the over-enthusiastic dude starts again on his memorized speech which he has already blurted out verbatim for atleast 9 times.

After about 20 minutes of sincere salesmanship, the guy who "doesn't really get what the hell is going on" gets it. With the eloquence of a Venkatesh Prasad finally realizing that he is a spinner in reality, he stumbles to the light at the end of the tunnel, the hard way. At this point of time the O-E dude gives a smirk of triumph, turns to the camera, points at his product, and gets onto the financial issues with the promptness of a doctor elaborating his fees after he is done diagonising you. Oh! I can get a knife, another knife, a blue plastic jar, a food grade plate and a host of other things free if I order in the next 10 minutes. Oh! how lucky!. I am sure I am the only one getting this. Oh! how was I ever going to live a fulfilling life had I not come across this brilliant offer!.

I am generally in awe of the OE-dude and his kickass product till I see the whole informercial repeat itself. It generally takes me till the end of the repeat show to realize that when they gave me that incredible offer last time on the condition that I order it in the next 10 minutes, they weren't really telling the complete truth. At this point of time, I generally become suspicious that maybe, and I am just spitballing here, maybe those people give this offer every half and hour every day. And whats worse I have started getting a feeling that it might not really be an exclusive offer. Oh my god! I just had a brainwave. What about those internet adverts where they say that I am the 1 millionth visitor and I win a free iPod. I hope they are genuine.

RAP

2007-05-20T13:56:00.000-07:00

I don't know how but I landed on this wikipedia page today about an American rap singer called Snoop Dogg. I remembered having had some discussion about this 'artist' and his history with Khatri bhai a few days back so I got reminded of him instantly. I really admired the way the singer had mispronounced his name as 'Dogg' instead of 'Dog' because lets face it, proper pronunciation is overrated and hollow personalities lacking ioatas of characters all around the world find it difficult to express their empty and worthless ideas without the constant gnawing fear of getting exposed as shallow without riding on the crutches of a mauled and bleeding language (...not a generalization). I came to know that this guy had been charged with many crimes including murder and I really felt bad for all that he had gone through. I felt so sympathetic at one point of time, that I almost forgave him for all the shootings and muggings and killings that he might have done and that I was almost ready to forget about all those years this social evil spent driving his limo and living in his palatial home when he should have been rotting in a maximum security prison in some corner of the US and I almost was ready to turn a blind eye towards his blatant lack of musical talent because I know that in a world pestered with singers of the caliber of Paris Hilton and Himesh Reshammiya, there is only so far I can go pointing fingers at individuals before realizing that its more a trait of the society in general than segregated ineptitude.

Nevertheless, that's not even the point. My point is this: Rap is not music. Period. Wherever I go, I see people wearing extreme t-shirts, the size of their father's, tilted caps, shorts precariously hanging from points way below where they were meant to be, speaking god knows what language, their hands constantly moving in gestures which ought to ooze the word COOL but only managing to reinforce what I already know about them: STUPID. These are specifically the kind of people who listen to RAP sung by people with names like Snoop Dogg. It doesn't take Einstein then to figure out the minimum intellectual requirements required to realize the overwhelming stupidity of such kind of music. Even when Baba Sehgal during the 90s was pouring hot metal into the unsuspecting ears of Indian public in the form of the crime against humanity that were his voice and talent, I, probably a 15 year old, could tell that this could not be music. I am inclined to say that that probably was the golden age of RAP (and Eminem) and it has only gone down since then (if it was possible).

There are atleast two requirements for a good song:
1. Good music
2. Good vocals
In the absence of one, the other should more than make up for it. Like instrumental music (especially classical) or Rock. Nevertheless, the problem with RAP is that it does not have any good vocals on one hand and on the other, their proponents are just not talented enough to produce good music even. They try to make up for this lack of talent and quality in the form of raunchiness of the video and a general potrayal of hipness and coolness. Open minded people would like to give RAP the benefit of doubt but since I am not one I would just say that its crap and anyone who likes it enough to follow it closely should evaluate his life right now. Its the sound monkeys make while fighting for the last crumb of bread. Its the sound you hear when someone scratches his nails on the blackboard or screeches a rusted iron piece on a concrete floor. Things like RAP, gothism, drug culture etc. should have been boycotted long before and the only reason they survive is because of the need of some sections of the society to potray themselves as depressed and rebellious while they forget that life is a struggle for most but while most people have chosen to put up a brave face, they have chosen to take recourse to aesthetics by labeling themselves as oppressed and sidelined.

Chacha Chaudhary

2007-05-11T23:15:00.000-07:00

Its one of the series of homages to those eternal comic strips which punctuated an average day in the life of an average Indian kid about 10 years back. That was the time when kids had better things to do than getting their brains liquefied by the idot box watching mindless soaps and even more moronic movies. This post concerns that great character : Chacha Chaudhary. Nostalgia is a great deluder. Irrespective of how mindless those comics seem in hindsight, they were a joy to reckon with in the bygone era and my perspective is coloured both by a pining love for the dying genre and a humourous take on their sheer artistic ineptitude which by the way did not seem to matter then:

The Protagonists:

Pictured above is the main protagonist, an octagenarian with very matter of fact look as if he is just done saying "I told you so". He differs from all other superheroes in the sense that he does not have to wear his underwear over his pants in order to indulge in rampant ass kickery. His main weapons are his sharp mind and huge coincidences which the writer tries to pass off as somehow resulting from his ingenuity. His mind purportedly works faster than a computer although with the computers of that age slothing away at a few megahertz, I would hardly take that as a complement. Mr. Chaudhary supposedly never locks his home but then only a suicidal psychopath would dare break into your home also when you have a wife like:

When Bhaagwan is not busy preparing truckloads of food for her family, she is basically known to pass her time beating the hell out of Chacha. One of her main weapons is a belan (which in more civilized homes is used for preparing rotis) and this is one of the few times in her life when she was photographed without one.

The image says it all. Sabu is from Jupiter... ... ... I will let it sink in... ... ... So then, Sabu is from Jupiter and Jupiter being n times larger than Earth, it is inconceivable that its residents are of the same size or lesser than those of Earth. But there is something we did not know about their sizes before Cartoonist Pran decided that humanity was mature enough to face the truth. Jupiter residents change sizes as you can see below:

Sabu eats 108 rotis, 12 kilos of Halwa and drinks about 20 litres of Lassi in one meal (Source:Wikipedia) and when he gets angry there is a volcanic explosion on Jupiter which all makes sense because he is from Jupiter and a volcano erupting on Mars would be too ridiculous to believe. As if the notion of volcanic activity on his homeplanet wasn't corny enough, Cartoonist Pran goes ahead and draws a small volcano on the side whenever Sabu gets angry. Now how are we supposed to believe that its the same volcano and not one of the millions which would have been spewing fire had Jupiter NOT BEEN A GASEOUS PLANET ? "Nevermind Logic: Corn is up for Grabs". Meanwhile Chacha also has a dog named Rocket. And oh by the way, he is vegetarian... whatever that means in a canine context.

The Antagonists:

No its not Gabbar Singh, its Gobar singh which effectively translates into "Dung Singh". Its like his mother left him no chance. I can almost picture his parents at the time of his christening. Hmmm... what should we name this filthy, hairy sack of flesh and bones... Hmmm... how about kachra (garbage)... no not degrading enough... how about Gobar !!!... and they rejoiced at screwing up their child's life. Whats more astonishing is the fact the Mr. Dung went on to opt for Dacoity as his career. New rule: anyone named Gobar isn't allowed to be a dacoit. How are people supposed to take him seriously. No wonder that his only achievement in life is being famous for getting his ass repeatedly kicked by an 80 year old. His accomplices include Dhamaka singh and Palita Singh. As unfortunate as the name Palita is even for a real Palita (what does it mean anyways), its almost a crime against humanity when used to denote a person. Its one of those words which do not mean anything and if you think about them long enough you will realize how inhumanely funny they are. Its like Tinda or Albuquerque . Now whoever came up with that one.

Pictured above is one of the most devilish characters ever to adorn a cartoon strip in India. Make way Mr. Chumba, move aside Mr. Kirgi, here comes Raka. Everything about Raka is NO JOKE. He likes to ruin people's days for no reason at all. One moment you see him walking on the road minding his own business, another, he picks up a car and munches it up with all the ingredients inside. That is how badass he is. No wonder he remains one of the few characters which gave me sleepless nights during my childhood. The other being that lady from Ramayana who gets up from the ocean and tries to eat Hanumaan. That was way too scary.

This was too much fun. I should probably review specific comics from Chacha.

An ode to C&H

2007-05-07T21:40:00.000-07:00

Even now, when the days are lenient enough and the nights are warm enough to provide room for nostalgia, I sometimes remember the innocence of childhood. I still like to drug away the pointlesness and cynicism of youth by the LSD of those old memories. Even if for just a few moments, the relief is both palpable and welcome. Things did not make much sense then. There wasn't much motives to my actions and much regret at their results. The joy of doing something was neither clouded by the apprehension of failure, nor the expectation of success. Victory was only as sweet as failure was bitter. None of them managed to tax the tongue too much. Just left a barely discernible taste of abnormalcy.

That is why I like Calvin and Hobbes so much. The comic strip is a glowing testimony to those good old times. Calvin, with his tantrums and hyper-imagination and wierd philosophies (well, not so wierd really) and pointless activities. Hobbes with his warm friendliness and innocuous cynicism and maturity and immaturity. And between these two, a cosy little world which bred the most daring of imaginations, the most astounding of inventions, the most maddening of antics and yes, the most piercing of insights into the real world.

"The problem with people is that they don't look at the big picture. Eventually, we're each going to die, our species will go extinct, the sun will explode, and the universe will collapse. Existence isn't only temporary, it's pointless! We're all doomed, and worse, nothing matters!", said Calvin, and seldom have I heard someone else hit the nail on its head harder. To even think that our presence has a higher motive seems so self concieted at best, especially when you look at the tiny speck that our (humanity's) existence occupies in the grandest scheme of things. Human motivation, if driven by a distant goal of achieving immorality, will fall over its head. Rather, it should just be driven either by passion or a question of survival. Both of them are illogical and hence apt for a life which itself is illogical.

Throughout the strip, we can see a pessimism that is so necessary for leading a fulfilling life. Unless the realization that everything that we indulge in will come to a naught doesn't dawn upon us, we would always be crying at every failure and prolonging the celebrations at every small success. Unless we come to see the truth behind the phrase "Keep climbing", we probably will keep on screwing up our lives trying to climb the imaginary ladder where our position is decided in the eyes of the beholder. That is why I like it when Calvin says "I hate to think that all my current experiences will someday become stories with no point." or "The secret to happiness is short-term, stupid self-interest!" or "Reality continues to ruin my life.".

There is a subtle but a very important commentary on our misplaced priorities as adults in the whole strip. Phrases like "It seems like once people grow up, they have no idea what's cool." or "Childhood is for spoiling adulthood." seem so much more relevant when you are in one of those blue moods (The only time, I think, when your thoughts are not clouded by unnecessary trifles). The strip is replete with strong social commentary throughout like "You know how people are. They only recognize greatness when some authority confirms it." or "Happiness is being famous for your financial ability to indulge in every kind of excess.". Its a reflection of Bill Watterson's mind, one of the few persons I really admire for his integrity and his love for his craft. In a world infested with people who are all too ready to sell their principles and morals at the slightest possible pretext, Bill Watterson chose to stand for the integrity of his first love. And it shows in the quality of the strip.

A cop caught me tonight

2007-05-04T23:36:00.000-07:00

Well this is the first time and I am so proud of my performance.

I was coming back after watching the friday night movie from the college, you know, minding my own business, driving the kickass machine that is my motorcycle, clocking well above the speed limit, breaking stop signs left right and center when this cop started flashing his lights indicating me to stop. Normally I do not really care for flashing lights but I just had to stop when the cop took out his loudspeaker and started blaring into the dead of the night. I steered to the side and stopped. He, looking like an agreeable man, came up to me with a notebook in his hands, noted my license plate number and called it out into his wireless. A lady on the other side confirmed that the bike in question belonged to a Mr. Ankit Srivastava. Now I am not one who gets flipped out easily but the thought of all those grim scenes from Shawshank Redemption sent a chill down my spine. My fears were not entirely unfounded as you will learn later. Here is the conversation that took place between me and the cop:

Cop: Please put your bike on the sidestand, sit in the driver's position and keep your hands in front of you.
Cop: Now Mr. do you know why have I stopped you ?
Me (nervously): Well I broke a Stop sign...
Cop: ...and ?
Me: (Vigorously trying to figure out what more did I do wrong) I am not sure...
Cop: Please put some more effort
Me: (in one breath) and overspeeding
Cop: Thankyou... now do you know that you were way above the speed limit and I had to press my gas upto 100 just to catch you ?
Me: (Thinking : can you please stop lying ? I wasn't above 50) I am sorry
Cop: I also drive bikes and I know how easy it is to reach 60 mph. How fast can you go from 0-60?
Me: (Is it a trick question? Anyways...) 4-5 seconds (conservatively).
Cop: Can I see your license ?
I hand him my car license afraid that since I just have a temporary motorcycle license, the cop would know that I am not allowed to drive in nights and I might have to spend my night in a maximum security prison festooned with smelly, bulky criminals. I congratulated myself for this brilliant plan.
Cop: Can I see your registration ?
Me: I don't have it with me.
Cop: Hmmm... Can I see your insurance ?
Me: I have the temporary one but not the permanent. Its at my home.
Cop: Hmmm... So lets summarize here:
1. You were overspeeding
2. You broke a stop sign
3. You do not have your registration
4. You do not have your permanent proof of insurance
I can easily hit you up for something upwards of 500$ but it won't teach you anything will it ?
Me: (thinking: is this a trick question. If I say yes then you would slap the fine and if I say no, you will hit me with something harder. So I did something that any intelligent doctoral student would have done: kept mum).
Cop: Now I am going to run this license of yours and if I find no violations I would perhaps let you go but if I find any previous violations, I would fine you.
Me: OK (at this point I was really happy since I knew that I did not have any previous violations. The cop goes back to his car and I am almost ready to put the keys back to my ignition so that the ordeal could finally end. The cop comes back looking grim.)
Cop: We have a slight problem here Mr. I hope you know that for driving a motorcycle in California, you need to have a motorcycle license.
Me: (Shit!!!) But I do have it. ( I take it out and hand it over)
(He looks at me increduluously and says the next time a cop catches you on a motorcycle SHOW HIM THE MOTORCYCLE LICENSE !!! )
Cop: This is a temporary driving license. Are you allowed to drive at nights ?
Me: No... but... ahem... I was working late in the lab and it got dark... and... well... its once in a full moon situation.
Cop:
5. Not allowed to drive at night.
Me: (Quiet)
Cop: I am what you call a good cop so I will let you go with a warning. Next time you are caught with so many violations, you will atleast get a ticket for about 800 and your bike will be towed away and your license will come under jeopardy.
Me: (Not able to believe my ears. What did he say ? He will let me go ! After I have had 5 violations, 3 of which pretty grim !!!) Thank you so much officer.

So that was it. My first pullover by a cop and it was nothing less than a miracle that I came unhurt.

Greatest movie that shall ever be made

2007-04-27T00:01:00.000-07:00

Okay, so here is a brilliant plan. Now that Hollywood is so out of ideas that it has started giving screentime to actresses like Paris Hilton and Bollywood keeps harping upon those lachrymose scripts expecting people to cry buckets at every tear that drops down king Khan's eyes, I have decided to make a blueprint for the greatest movie that will ever be made if the directors out there have any grey matter left somewhere in those small skulls after years of dishing out substandard scripts. So here it goes, a movie that will kick so much ass that I have decided to name it:

CAST:
Main actor - A gigantic lizard with menacing red eyes and a husky voice.
Main actress: Aishwarya Rai
Supporting actor in a comic role: Shahrukh Khan
Supporting actress in a comic role: Smriti Irani (of Tulsi fame)
Others: Ram, Shyam, Gopu, Dayaram, John Doe, Jane Doe, Michael, Ivaturi Surya Satya Subramaniam Shyam Sundar Sandeep.

I haven't exactly decided what the flow of the movie will be but I have some basic ideas. The movie starts when the lizard is roaming around happily when it happens to step upon Aishwarya Rai who is busy trying to dish out another one of her performances in a movie where she tries to fool the audiences into believing that she has an iota of acting talent. There - thats her only scene in the movie. This scene will be so intense that the Academy will have to go to Aish for the award titled 'Best Actress in a dying scene under the feet of a fire spewing reptilian monster'. Nevertheless, the lizard gets a taste of human flesh here and turns into a maneater not necessarily because it liked what it had but out of spite because Aish gives him a stomach ache. Its here that the ass kickery really starts. He starts gulping down generic people. The movie will showcase, in gory detail, every bite that he takes, every munch that he enjoys, every bit of fodder that he eats. US marines, meanwhile will bring all the tanks and the ammunition enough to blow up a small city and use it on the lizard only to find out that his skin is made up of extra-durable scales and their weapons are of no use whatsoever (how convenient). John Doe, the US president, meanwhile, will ruminate over the possibility of nuking the monster. As intense as the debate would be regarding the potential loss of civilian life, the overzealous generals of US army will come to the realization that all this is happening in Tehran and being American fighters, they don't necessarily have to care about the lives of of those who dwell in that uncivilized part of the world as it isn't quite the same. They nuke the monster only to find that the ensuing radioactivity has made it deadlier by giving it the ability of breathing out life threatening carcinogenic gamma rays. So here we have a monster, spewing a heady mixture of gamma burts and fire. Such a malicious concoction turn entire populations into flesh eating zombies, you know the ones with strange expressions on their faces, hilariously disfigured bodies, burns everywhere, walking at .2 cm/year, wide open eyes like these:

There -the reptile has an army of its own - Lizard - 1, United States of America - 0. For comic relief, Shahrukh Khan, Karan Johar and Ekta Kapoor will be shown crying, running and basically getting their stuff ruined by the lizard and the zombies. This will be shown in all its magnificient detail. SRK and co. being chased in supermarket. SRK and co. being run down in streets and alleys and roads and water and air. SRK and co. being followed up the stairs, down the stairs. SRK and co. trampled over, thrown down a building, shot at etc. How utopian !!!.

Thats how it will end. I am not really one for happy endings but this will have one. A crying SRK and a dilapidated KJ and EK will give audiences hope and happiness. They will feel contented while walking back to their homes holding the hands of their loved ones, for a change relieved that there is justice in the world and although too late, there is atleast one storywriter who truly understands how to write a good and just story. Hence, I would rule all over the place.

The allure of not reading, among other things

2007-04-16T23:10:00.000-07:00

At the cost of inviting incredulous gasps from my much learned friends, let me admit today that I have never read Godfather nor have I seen the movie ever. Infact, I have not read the book thrice and have actually not seen the movie atleast 4 times.

The first time I did not read the book, I was in my 11th class when my friend gave it to me and he just wouldn't stop praising Mario Puzo and almost forced my head into the preface. I was not really a fan of fictional thrillers back then (I am not even now but there was a phase) and my repertoire primarily consisted of the canon of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (4 times complete). Sitting in the back seat of those monotonous and frankly quite pointless science classes, I usually tried to while away the time sifting through the hallowed pages of the book. There was something about it that always made me stop at about the 20th page. The 2nd and 3rd time I did not read the book was when I had all the leisure in the world while I was in the 3rd year of my undergraduate course. I started with the best of intents and managed to reach the all time high figure of 43 but gave up there. While shifting through some old stationary, I happened to come across the old book which has stood against me like my own personal Holy Grail, my own Shangrila to discover. I turned the pages and all the forgotten memories came rushing back. I could see the scribbles of Physics equations up-till page 20 and the dog eared parchament up-till page 43. The paper had turned a bit yellow and the binding a bit loose. I looked at it, thought for a second, chuckled, closed and placed it from where I had picked it up.

This brings me to the point of this post. There is a wierd sense of achievement in not doing something. While happiness and satisfaction are the residues of monumental achievements, there is this queer sense of pleasure in not succumbing to a particular temptation, especially when that course of action has been largely followed and highly advised by the world. There is no dearth of mountain climbers or dancers or snowboarders. People have pushed the limits of x-games and life threatening activities. But here I am, snugly cosying in my warm blanket admiring them but never wanting to be them. We often do not admire the resolve of the non-snowboarder. We choose to overlook the sacrifice of the bloke who chose to spend his life testing banking softwares in a cubicle when he could much rather have become a shark catcher. It is not easy to not fall down to the temptation of living the life of motoGP racer but then who is going to listen to the wail of the customer who has been wrongly charged 122$ on his credit card ?

My case is similar. I could have read the book and seen the movie. I could have felt exhilarated at the panache with which Mr. Corleone plugged the lead in another skull or thrilled at the awesome command exhumed by Mr. Brando. I could have been a better person, more wiser in life, much more aware of life's possibilities, another book wiser, a film more experienced among other things but why ? Why should I ruin my perfectly clean slate ? I know the book and the movie are brilliant to say the least but I have my virginity (for lack of a better word) to defend. Its the same reason I do not drink. Earlier I had made myself believe that there has to be some higher/nobler reason as to why I do not drink but its a lie. I just never happened to drink and now I do not want to tarnish my perfect record by succumbing to 2 drops of temptation. There are so many people who drink and I have absolutely no problem with them but now I have become far too stubborn to join the ranks. Its a quirk of human nature which forces people to behave irrationally in this fashion and everyone has them. It can be annoying and frustrating at times but such idiosyncracies surely add differentiating tinges to an otherwise monochromatic facade of individual character.

P.S: Trying to play Moolight Sonata (Beethoven). You can listen to this beautiful composition here:
Moonlight Sonata

Things to ponder

2007-04-16T00:34:00.000-07:00

Here are some things which have so often in the past, perplexed me and forced me to ruminate over the nature of life and reality and what not:

1. Donkey : Whats that expression on a donkey's face ? Its like, he is perpetually trying to solve an immensely difficult problem, his eyes fixated on the ground below, his jaws constantly chewing upon the last bit of garbage he ate and his posture unperturbed by the inconsistencies of weather. He doesn't care whether you stand there watching his medidative self. He doesn't give a damn about the dog that is shouting himself hoarse. The only thing he really seems to care about is that immediate problem at hand. And he thinks and thinks and thinks. I am not sure if he is ever able to solve it but after much meditation, you see him walking away, contended, satisfied and visibly happy.

2. Why do adults use illogical language in the presence of babies ? You see a perfectly normal couple who would otherwise easily make it into the list of homo sapiens but give them a baby and my god, all hell breaks loose. The lady will start with "oomchhs" and "aaafs" and the man will start making monkey faces. I just dont get that how is a baby, who is inept at understanding normal language, expected to understand a language which even fully grown adults cannot ? How can distorted, ghastly faces make him feel happy ? It happened to me once. I was in presence of a 1 year old baby and I, like a perfectly well mannered gentleman, shook his hand and asked him how he was and everyone started laughing. Wierd.

3. "Every rule has an exception" is a paradox. Does this rule have one ?

4. Snails : Where are they going seriously ? No, seriously. You see ants moving and you know that they are going to their home and they will most probably reach it. You see snakes move and you think maybe its a prey. But where are the snails going ? You see a big open ground which has nothing but harsh concrete for meters and meters and you see a snail in the middle of it all and it is moving in one of the generic directions at .03 mm/hour and you wonder, WHERE THE HELL ? There should be a new rule which will prohibit movement if you move less than 1 mm/s because of the humungous futility of it all.

5. In a disaster flick, how come its always the case that all those who survive at the end also happened to be the main characters and had the bulk of the screentime ? Why don't you ever see that generic cabdriver survive ? How come its always the minnows who die ? If ever I get a chance to make a movie, I will make one which will primarily consist of a giant lizard eating up main characters. Just when the audience would be forming their theories about who of all the heroes and heroines should live, my lizard will come kicking asses everywhere and finishing up all the important stuff in one gulp. Rest of the movie will comprise of generic looking people running here and there with the lizard munching away with fun and frolic and in the end I will show 10 people who had nothing to do with the movie previously, killing the beast and celebrating. Yes, thats how it will end. It will be the victory of the average joe over celebrity worship, nepotism, favouritism and partiality. Man, the movie would rule all over the place.

Enough for now. I think about many more things. Saving them for later.

Something Beautiful

2007-04-09T20:08:00.000-07:00

After so many days, I feel like writing something beautiful. Since my writing does not permit me to venture beyond my own limitations, I shall try to compensate my shortcomings by writing about something beautiful.

Deep down, I somehow feel that beauty does not differentiate between the agent through which it is expressed. In its purest form you cannot compartmentalize its domains. Neither can you objectively analyze its effects nor can you explain human susceptibleness to it. It stands there on its own, totally unaware of the thousand entranced gazes probing it, entirely ignorant of the million senses soaking it. Pure beauty has a sense of timelesness to it. An infinity constrained in the limitations of the border of a photograph if you will. It refuses to die of age and it haunts and enchants at the same time.

The beauty I am talking about does not concern an intricate piece of art or an elaborately ornate model. Its simpler. Much simpler. Its the allure of the smell of wet earth after the first monsoon rains. Its the enchantment of hearing Vande Mataram on a lazy morning. Its the seductiveness of a pair of especially beautiful eyes brimming with innocence and helplesness. It breathes in the magnetism of a foggy evening walk along the Mall road of a hillstation or a beautiful piece of music or even a breathtaking display of nearly superhuman atheletic ability. It reaches to you from the bichromic depths of a black and white photograph depicting an old dilapidated house and cries for your embrace in the hollow expressions of a mother whose child is dying of malnutrition. Its the nostalgia you feel when you walk on the familiar campus of the school you went to 8 years ago. Its the pain which the searing heat of a summer afternoon on the deserted roads of a sleepy town brings. Its the satisfaction which a starry, full moon night provides when you sleep out in the deafening silence of the rustic embrace of your village. Its in the myriad colours of a dew drop and the pointlesness and innocence of the stolen glances with you loved one. Its in the tones of a familiar tune, in the crescendo of a brilliant opera, in the consummation of love, in the commencement of estrangement, in the glory of nature, in the infinite human creativity, in the small details which we miss often, in the celebration we call life and the final parting of death.

Stop Please

2007-04-04T23:40:00.000-07:00

So India lost against Bangladesh and was kicked out of the world cup in the first round itself. Agreed that it was worse than pathetic watching the team surrender meekly to Sri Lanka without ever looking as if they could give them a fight. Conceded that the players have let down a nationful of emotionally charged affocionados and accepted that in the pale shadow of an illustrious past, the senior players mirror the agonising death of a beautiful dream. But stop, please stop.

I have been diligently following the stories that have been building up after the world cup debacle and I was confused as to who is really to blame. Was it the coach or the senior players ? Greg Chappell, or Dravid or Tendulkar ? On one hand, Chappell was voicing his reservations about the attitude of the senior players, on the other, effigies of Tendulkar and co. were being burnt in Gujarat. On one hand, Sharad Pawar was giving hints about an impending fundamental change in the team, on the other, newspapers were dissecting the last shreds out of the team's performance. At this point of time, I was thoroughly convinced that the defeat had among other reasons, the attitude of the senior players. All of this changed this morning when Tendulkar hit out against Chappell for his comments. This is all I need really. Tendulkar saying it.

I am ready to believe that Tendulkar is far from what he used to be. I am also ready to concede that he might never attain all that he promised as a youngster but I shall be eternally damned if I ever question his commitment towards the team and the nation. The problem with the country today is that far too many teens have a much more vociferous and credited opinion than they deserve. They comprise a generation that has not woken up in nights to watch Tendulkar score a century only to find India losing by 15 runs because everyone else in the team was just a spectator. They comprise an age that has not been heartbroken at watching Tendulkar struggle to score a century on the day next to his father's death. They haven't felt the rush of blood while Tendulkar alone braved the fearsome Aussi attack in the midst of a desert storm. They haven't been witness to the neutering ceremony of greats like Warne and Qadir at Tendulkar's hands. Neither have they lived those 10 years when this man alone carried the burden of expectations of a billion without ever seeming to be high and mighty and conceited and proud.

This generation belittles Tendulkar and praises Dhoni. It incriminates Sachin and celebrates Sehwag. I just want them to open their mouths when Dhoni makes a century at Perth against bowlers of the caliber of Mcgrath. I just want them to shut the hell up till Dhoni is even able to make a doosra from a top spin out of Muralitharan's hands or till Sehwag hits 1900 runs in one calendar year. I just want them to keep their wretched mouths closed till the time people like Dhoni stop whoring themselves out to media and start to really think about their country and the game.

So if you say that Tendulkar probably hasn't done as much as he should have or that he hasn't won enough matches for India or that his best years are past him, I will listen with a clenched fist and subdued voice of dissent. But if you ever question his commitment and motives, leave me your address so that I could come and beat the hell out of you. If you have never seen Tendulkar struggling with cramps against Pakistan to bring India close to victory (within 15 runs), you frankly have no right to bitch. As for Greg Chappell, I am thoroughly convinced that he is an _______ (yes, that's right, that's the word).

U.P. roads kick ass

2007-03-28T21:52:00.000-07:00

Look at the third paragraph of this article :

http://in.rediff.com/money/2007/mar/29speed.htm

For the convenience of the reader, I am replicating the lines here:

"While Haryana and Rajasthan have fixed a limit of 90 km on highways for cars, the UP government has not specified any limit."

So, now that all those of you who have had the misfortune of taking birth in any other state than Uttar Pradesh are thinking, what to make of this sentence, let me drive the point home with all the force it deserves:

"U.P. roads kick ass !!!"

Huh... speed limit is for wimps. UP does'nt even have a speed limit on its roads. UP is like Germany and its roads are like the famed autobahn. The only thing that controls the speeds of the vehicles in UP is the cold fear that the possibility of a sudden death brings while you are going at 20 km/hr maneuvering around strategically placed potholes and stray dogs and cows and negotiaing drunk drivers and looking out for men sticking their heads out of their Marutis to shout at the rickshaw with a flat tire in front, cyclists trying to slither into that 23 inches you forgot to fill in between your vehicle and the one in front, ladies driving their lunas and scooties in manners which makes you believe that god is almighty and luck all powerful, aunties fighting with the autodrivers for the last rupee he tried to charge them more, half naked kids trying to sell you everything from flowers to corn to peanuts. I can safely say that there is no other state in India which presents so many challenges to a driver and places such high demands on the performances of the vehicles. Lest you disbelievers jump upon my ass and try to kick it, I am presenting some hardboiled facts to support my view:

Seriously speaking, there is only one state which presents any sort of challenge to UP in this field and that is Bihar. States like Maharashtra, M.P, southern states, Punjab, Haryana have far too docile roads and the bottom line is that they just do not kick the requisite amount of ass. For ages, the residents of these states have been using the euphemism of defining their roads good. Let me just clear the slate now. ACCEPT THAT YOUR ROADS ARE BORING and YOUR PEOPLE, WIMPS WHO CANNOT DRIVE ON REAL MACHO ROADS. NE states have pretty 'good' roads too and the only tension you have there is not related to stray dogs and cats but stray bullets and frankly speaking that should not be a worry since you just cannot outmaneuver those. Same is the case with J&K but you can add the small dangers of landmines too there. Orissa would have been a worthy candidate but then I don't think people of that state are wealthy enough to buy vehicles. Now that everyone is walking on foot, how challenging can that be ? So now we come to Bihar. Bihar would really have kicked all the available asses if there was not this one problem : BIHAR DOES NOT HAVE ANY ROADS !!!. Even if you are extremely generous and are ready to grant the status of roads to intermittent asphalt patches which seem to be lying here and there between two major cities (does Bihar have cities ?), I am not ready to grant the status of vehicle to bullock carts.

So I win. UP roads are the best of all. A fine blend of transportability and adventure. I say, what are the giant auto-manufactures doing. Don't they see what I see ? Why are they wasting their millions building elaborate testing facilities for their latest car models. Come to U.P and if you car can survive the roads there, it can survive anything that the world has to offer. Hell, U.P. even gives great possibilities for crash testing your vehicles. Too good to be true, huh ?