Paraphernalia

Clutter

2012-02-14T22:20:00.004+05:30

Dear Most People I Know, here’s a friendly bit of advice,
There is such a thing as having lots and lots of things around, and yet being neat, orderly and not cluttered at all.

There is such a thing as a nearly bare room that’s messy as hell.

To borrow a phraseology from MySQL (you know – the thing to do with databases - those fictitious objects that are jam packed with stuff, and are yet orderly and all that), Quantity <> Clutter.

You know what’s worse than getting stabbed in the guts and bleeding to a slow, inevitable death? It’s having your room (or your cubicle, since I’m corporatized now) called ‘dirty’ after you’ve just spent a week locked in without food and water and air, sorting your monstrous collection of novels alphabetically.

First time I heard such a reaction, being the naturally humble person I am, I assumed I’d missed something cleaning up, and so made a very humble mental note to strive to do things better next time.

Well, humility only gets you so far when you hear the same things over and over again; there eventually comes a point where you stop blaming yourself, and start blaming the other guy.

‘OK, so what exactly do you think is dirty about my room?’ you ask, all bluster and a not a little defensiveness. But before your enemy speaks:

‘By the way, those perfectly sorted piles books in the corner are arranged by genre, and within each pile alphabetically by title. You’re welcome to borrow a couple. Those bedsheets that I’ve neatly folded in ascending order of the hexadecimal representations of their dominant colours, however, please don’t borrow any. I’m running short.’
‘Sorry, you were going to explain why you think my room’s dirty.’

The response will invariably go along these lines:
‘Oh, I don’t know. Just look at all the stuff you have lying around.’

You bristle of course. Understandably.
‘That stuff’s not lying around. Those there are all the writing instruments I’ve got, arranged in increasing order of cost. Those, on the other hand…’

‘Alright, alright. But so much stuff? It looks so cluttered.’

That word, he used that word! That’s the point where you, like all normal people, turn your BeastFace on and bash the other guy’s skull in.

After much deliberation as to the origin of this widespread affliction, I can only conclude that some people’s brains are just wired differently, and I’m being polite here. These people are different in the way three-headed people, two-nosed people and people that have hair growing out of their fingernails are. All hope is not lost, though. I have reason to believe that pictorially augmented repetitive subliminal impartment of corrective information can cure the problem a wee bit. For starters,

Repeat after me slowly: 'This is neat, orderly and not cluttered at all!'

Humour Me Back!

2012-01-10T23:35:00.002+05:30

It’s funny how being funny has become so hard.

Humour’s easy when you don’t have a conscience. A homophobic comment here, a racist remark there, a sexist jibe here and you’re done. The odd anecdotes about fat people and too-narrow aeroplane seats won’t ever go amiss either. There’ll be people judging you, certainly, and people hating you if you take this route, but there won’t be people not sniggering.

Humour’s easy when you’re not prudish because like in everything else, sex sells. You don’t even have to try, really. Why, I distinctly recall chuckling away at my class ten biology teacher’s totally dry description of the human reproductive process. Make that small mental step up to American Pie, and you’ll see the nearly limitless comedic potential here. Pity prudishness is hereditary and contagious.

And then there’re toilet jokes. Everybody disparages them, but it’s astounding how the most tasteless joke about methane-induced global warming can lead to uncontrollable laughter. In a room full of suits. Sigh.

It’s OK if you can’t do any of the above, or even if you’re about as witty as a rock, really, if you’ve got a mouth dirty enough to corrode one. Write up the most unimaginative rant ever, but pepper it with the choicest collection of profanities you can think of, and you’ll have got yourself an audience, and one in splits. I’ll concede a point here. Well, two actually – you can get creative at insulting somebody’s mother, improbable as that sounds, and if you can get creative at something it may even qualify as a legitimate art form. Second, it’s possible that your audience is not laughing at what you said, but at you.

I never could do all of that, but I don’t recall ever feeling witless. Surely you can’t run out of things to joke about? I mean, aren’t there an endless supply of Bong jokes to feed on, for example? There are, and I still regretfully recall the good old days when I could churn twenty stereotype jokes a minute, but I’m cut off now because Kant happened. Yes, Immanuel Kant.

(Did you laugh? Perhaps unintended humour is an area I can work on, because that wasn’t a joke. Wait no, the contradictions are obvious. I can’t work on improving something that can only be mastered by being perfectly awful at it. On the other hand, I can still master just the appearance of unintendedness right? I’d have to hide this from my brain because of course it’s my brain that the ‘unintended’ bit applies to, so I’ll have to wrap my awareness of the fraud in a cloak of subliminality. That’d still… Right, back to Kant.)

Kant said anything you do must be universalizable: before you do something, imagine how the world would look if everyone did what you’re thinking of doing, and if you like that world, do it. You can see the appeal of this idea as a moral guide. You’d never murder and jump red lights, for example.

Anyway, the moment I started putting myself in the shoes of the people I was making fun of, the jokes died. They didn’t struggle and writhe, kicking and lashing for hours before finally going limp. One fine day something switched off, and they were just… gone. Half the light of my world was taken away from me.

The deaths didn’t end there though. At about approximately the same time – or perhaps earlier, too many catastrophes have fuzzed my memories – my ability to crack what I call ‘ignorance’ jokes was flushed down the toilet. The name’s sort of self-explanatory, but if you’re dumb, these are the jokes you tell other dumb people about things you don’t understand, but – here’s the trick – they don’t either.

‘You know – apparently we were all fish once. Then, just like this – cue wild gesticulation that’s halfway between flapping and clapping but ends with a snapping of the fingers – we transformed into us.
‘Har har.’

You could laugh at this joke and still not be dumb if - it's the Jedi nous trick again - you’re laughing at them rather than the joke itself. (Lots of people don’t dig evolution. They probably dig their noses though, snotty lot that they are.)

Even this doesn’t work for me because of er.. compassion. If you want to joke about other people, you cannot be a nice guy. Especially so if you’re laughing at their perceived stupidity. You want an offence-free show? Sorry, that joke’s out.

Wait, wait. What about in jokes? You know, those about memes, xkcd, and that DSA lab on a cold December’s evening. Ah, good old in jokes. Half the stuff I laugh at, I laugh at because I think most other people don’t get it. Don’t ask me to explain. All I know is that this works.

The caveat is obvious: you need an in group for in jokes. If your in-group goes away and you’re stuck with an out-group that only talks Biggg Boss, the best joke about Python swallowing your heart will at best draw blank looks. (At worst: solicitous looks. You know they think you’re a retard.) Naturally, you’ll withdraw gracefully from the conversation and focus on the food, maintaining a sombre dignity all the while.

Alright, here's my last attempt: nonsense jokes. People generally don’t understand the funny in random gibberish but laugh anyway. In fact, I firmly believe nonsense jokes are the perfect jokes. You laugh because you don't get the joke!
Nonsense jokes are like highly specific in jokes that appear ‘in’ to everyone who hears them. It’s hard to spout nonsense all the time and appear sane though, and that's not good for - let me sort out your priorities - your love life.

You see where I’m going here, don’t you? Falling off a steep cliff that’s where. Falling into an endless, humourless dark that’s darker than pitch. It only gets darker when I run into happy, grinning people paragliding who console me with this:

‘You only have to speak a four letter word, son, and you'll get all your powers back. Since you appear mentally challenged I’ll give you a clue. It doesn’t start with an L.’

(Self-deprecation always works.)

September Has Ended?

2011-11-06T10:48:00.001+05:30

I think it's about time I had a blog blog, so I'm going to donate a substantial portion of the next 1000 words or so to blogging blogging.

Last month was a good month in many ways. First, the project I'd been working on for four long months reached an abrupt, if still satisfactory conclusion. Yes, this is the very same platform migration of colossal, Earth-shaking proportions that I've spent a large chunk of my non-work time (I can't even bring myself to put in 'socialize' in there) describing in painstaking detail to everyone who's had a brush with me in the recent past. (You're gladder than I am that it's done, I'm sure.)

It was, from beginning to end, an utterly pointless exercise; ironically, its utter pointlessness may well prove to be its saving grace, because it really was a textbook manual on inanity. The sort whose existence managers will vehemently deny till they're dead standing, but the sort they'll pore over at night till their eyes pop out and their wives begin plotting murder. Well, 100 words ago, I said it was a 'satisfactory' project, and it was. To me. Any immodesty incidental, but all that bad management meant I got myself one hell of an engineering problem to tackle, and nobody to help me out with it. There's nothing geekoid programmers love more than a good, old fashioned silo - just the memory of the sweet, slightly musty smell of nobody-elseness is enough to make me smile.

The Real Engineering Projekt™ brought home a few uncomfortable truths though:

1) All my pretensions towards having a great work-life balance were just that, because the moment I was hit with a problem that needed me to work overtime, I went ahead and worked overtime, bloggingreadingsocializingsleeping be darned. I'm not proud, and especially because I am proud.

2) I might as well live with approval addiction because I didn't really get reimbursed for all the midnight whale oil I burnt. Just a pat on the back, a 'Good Job' and I was happy as a stray dog at midnight.

That's that about work and any attempts to portray extreme joy as bottomless despair. The second big thing that happened last month was: I was at Oasis! Oasis - I don't really have to do this because I have a readership of one, and I'm a BITSian, but delusions make the world go round - is BITS Pilani's annual cultural festival.

I had, as my dearest friends don't hesitate to remind me from time to time, back when I was a BITSian sworn on all the ancient pagan Gods that no force in heaven and hell could make me go back to the godforsaken place again. Yet there I was, all set to hop on to a plane the moment Rakul spoke the magic words ('Lone! Pilani?'). In my defence, going back as an alumnus was cathartic. (I can walk the SWD corridor without peeing my pants now, yay!)

The Oasis trip was very... I really need to clamp down on my fingers here, because there's a huge chronicle in the works right now, and I don't want to take anything away from that. Ah, yes, I promised one last year too, didn't I? Blame those dirty, thin-moustached, Vajra stalking pickpockets for that not happening! It was in that mobile phone that I'd built up a huge collection of notes, secure in the knowledge that with all my memories jotted down, I could flesh out a proper narrative any time. Pensieve-esque, eh? You, pickpocket! At least have the decency to return my notes, will you? Keep the phone, keep the phone. What? The address? You can text it to me, you nitwi.. er, sir!

Then there was the Metallica concert. Now that MegaDave is all chummy with Little Lars, it's no longer quite so sacrilegious, eh? Not that I would have missed it for anything. There's nothing quite like 30,000 like-minded people packed into one place. The bonhomie (and I've never used that word in a sentence before) was palpable, the odd spaced-out drunk notwithstanding. Rain, terrible organization, backpacked people losing their backpacks while I, I, the First Backpacker himself was not carrying one, the fat band manager trying to babytalk metalheads into doing some military drill, it all combined to make the perfect hodgepodge for a perfect Sunday evening out.

Last, I somehow got talked into being part of an in-house film that'll be shown at campus recruitments. It wasn't so terrible as I thought, because I didn't spend 427 minutes doing 800 retakes of me sitting down in a sofa. I'd like to think it was my awesome camera presence that made that happen, but that little voice of reason in my right ear tells me that it was probably because the film makers just couldn't be bothered. But, hey, bad things did happen - for example, I.. I... had make up put on.

So, dear BITSian juniors, if during your placements you happen to see me blathering in a sugary sweet, thoroughly fake (a la 'It's Magic') video, know this for truth: I did it under pain of death!

Roleplaying and CCTVs

2011-10-30T12:48:00.002+05:30

One of those times when you’re feeling lonely and insignificant, when you’re feeling like a rotting bit of seaweed in the cosmic ocean, a pointless collection of molecules pointlessly wondering about doing pointless things, when you’re stuck in somebody’s idea of a spoof of a F.R.I.E.N.D.S rerun, drifting, drifting into the half-sleep of humdrum everydayness, you know what you should be doing?

Waving at CCTV cameras of course.

Getting over post-teen, pre-midlife existential crises was never this easy. Whoever thought the simple act of staring into the vacant, vaguely hostile gaze of a CCTV camera would be so much fun? I’m sure you’ve done it, even if not, ahem, due to such weighty considerations as mine. I don’t really wave at them though; I’m far too classy for that, and it does not quite fit any role playing fantasy involving me being chased down by helicopters throwing burning barrels at me trying to slow my GhostRider-esque trailblazing through the city.

It’s such immense fun looking sneaky when you know there’s an eye in a shiny, white box looking over your shoulder. You have to check your watch for no reason. You have to look around surreptitiously for no reason, and you absolutely have to turn around to give the camera a grim, I-Know-You’re-There look.

I never wave though.

Purposefulless

2011-10-02T11:02:00.004+05:30

Well, I have no intention of turning this blog into a poor man’s The Speaking Tree, but there’s something that’s a bit bothersome and there’s nothing like putting bothersome things down to paper to get them off your chest.

(Also, I’ve been reliably assured that with my classy and tasteful blue theme, this blog won't be mistaken for the Speaking Tree even if I am to paste portions from the Upanishads. In Sanskrit.)

What’s bothering me, and there’s no way of saying this without sounding a touch pretentious, is the whole idea of purpose. I know every philosopher God downwards has sought the Answer, but my question is a little tangential to the Big One: Is it even right to seek a purpose for everything we do?

Alright, alright, hold on to your hats, I’ll clarify that a bit. (After going on and on about Straw Men, I’m sure I’ll be crushed under one toppled by a passing gust of wind if I even think of setting up one.) Yes, there is a purpose to everything we do, if we seek it, even to Facebooking all day, or searching for gold coins in dungheaps, but whenever someone starts consciously thinking of purpose, that’s not what he is thinking of. He’s thinking of that single purpose, an overarching theme that underpins the whole of his existence from birth to death, and forces every action to align to it or be cut out. (That single purpose should be focussed too, it can't just be 'live life' or 'get through the next year or so')

Is that right though, to seek such a thing? Rightness is hard to debate, and this question of purposeful existence seems only to be a spinoff of the classic CS argument of ‘Should my life be spent traversing the tree breadth-first? Or depth-first?’ That, I’ve touched upon more than once in my blogical arguments, so I won’t debate the idea of rightness here.

I’ll just limit myself to this: if you want to enjoy what-you-think-are-enjoyable things, then you have to get rid of the idea of a perfectly purposeful life. There’s one, or the other, but not both. There is no balance either; at least, there is no balance that a rational man would seek. Consider this.

Your overarching purpose in life is to become the best JavaScript programmer in the world. Everything you do must take you towards that end goal, or you won’t do it at all, or feel utterly miserable doing it. You’re talking to your best friend and you suddenly realize that that isn’t making you a great JavaScript programmer, and you stop taking calls at all, because if talking to your best friend is pointless, then so is talking to everyone else. You don’t read the newspaper because it doesn’t make you a great JavaScript programmer. You don’t watch movies because they don’t make you a great JavaScript programmer. You don’t brush your teeth twice daily because that doesn’t help you become a great JavaScript programmer. (Or maybe you do because good personal hygiene can only impact your work prospects positively, and moving up the career ladder can only help you become a better JavaScript programmer.)

There is absolutely nothing wrong with this if you’re happy cutting out the ‘fun’ out of your life to pursue what you think you must, single-mindedly. But, if you think the parts you cut out are still ‘fun’, then everything else isn’t so much ‘fun’ anymore. See what I’m getting at? If you start looking at everything and wondering ‘What’s the point?’ when you really do see the point, and the point is that you enjoy doing it, but regretfully, ‘enjoyment’ isn’t on the list of bulletpoints that qualify as ‘purposeful’, you’re walking a dangerous road. One that has no streetlights and is dark as a coal mine, with more banana peels, venomous vipers and landmines than stones and rocks.

Things become even more interesting when you define your purpose as merely looking purposeful. Or, to narrow down further, you define your purpose as always appearing to do discussable things. I find the whole idea fascinating because, believe me, half the people I meet think this way, at least on occasions, but more importantly because I seem to be picking up the knack. :|

On the face of it, doing only ‘discussable’ things seems a looser requirement than forcing yourself to do only things that’re going to make you the awesomest JavaScript programmer ever. On the other hand, when you start poking around the innards, you’ll see that most things you may do to become a great JavaScript programmer aren’t really discussable, at least not with most people. Reading 100 pages of one chapter of a textbook called ‘JavaScript in 21 Days’ certainly isn’t. Discussability is a vexing thing, you see:

You stop watching movies that you may enjoy but are sure that your discussability group won’t. That will probably just leave you with porn and popcorn.

You stop reading fiction that’s not a love story written by an IIT/IIM grad. Dan Brown and Jeffrey Archer are all right for non-IIM grads though.

You start watching reality shows on TV.

You stop doing things like sleeping because really, is there anything more undiscussable than sleep?

If you’re doing something that you can’t discuss with enough people to satisfy your purposefulness meter, you’re not doing anything at all. This sort of mindset is more entrenched than you may think, because the idea of ‘counter-culture’ is not a true counterargument. If you’re into ‘heavy metal’ and ‘hard SF’, all you need is a discussability group that’s the same, and tra la! You’ve got your fix of purposefulness and you ain't even mainstream.

Blogging, when I think about it with a modicum of objectivity, is just a hacky way of appearing purposeful. Even if there isn’t a man alive who cares what you’re discussing, you can still spew it out into the Internet’s endless maws and pretend that what you’re writing about, which is often simply what you did last night, is actually perfectly discussable.

I hold a dead man to blame for bringing on this bout of unfunny ruminations. Robert Jordan, you may have spent all your life writing 12000 pages of high fantasy, but you’ve no right, no right at all to suck a poor man minding his own business into this quagmire. Ah well, if you haven’t heard of the Wheel of Time, it’s a 13 book monstrosity of an epic fantasy series that I’ve been reading lately. It’s enjoyable, it really is, but if you can find me a roomful of people that will have at least one other person who’s read it, or at least heard of it, I’ll sell you my soul.

I hate thinking of the ‘point’ of reading fiction I enjoy reading; but because I’m stubborn as a blind mule, not finding an answer isn’t going to make me stop. And there’s always this blog post to shame me into admitting that I’m setting up Straw Men to counter other Straw Men that I set up to delude myself.

Right, before I get back to reading, just one last thing. I know I said it’s hard to strike a balance between pleasure-seeking and single-minded purposefulness, but you can always move the goalposts. Redefine what’s pleasurable, but that’s hard I think. Or redefine what things make what you do purposeful. Wee bit easier, how about trying to convince yourself that watching Resident Evil: Afterlife is making you a better JavaScript programmer?

How Not To Make A Point

2011-08-28T19:01:00.002+05:30

Here’s the article I originally tried to critique without falling over, blubbering, in an apoplexy of rage. In the process though, I quickly realized that I, as a fair exponent of Making-A-Point™ without a double barrelled shotgun to back me up, I, who have honed my craft in the minefield of intellectualism called BITS Pilani (snigger away then, I won’t mind) have plenty to say. So much that it wouldn’t be right, or possible, to write this whole post as a rebuttal to just one article.

This post is about the fine art of debating.

What follows is a not very definitive list of the ways in which you should not be debating - a collection of what a pompous few would call ‘fallacies’. Wait, that’s not quite right, because you still could, er.. (Here’s where the voice of my post drops to a hoarse whisper.)

If you, sir, are sufficiently cunning, or know your opponents like a psychic does his audience, these techniques, techniques which have been handpicked from the darkest of manuals and only alluded to as such, if ever, by debaters of old, will help you topple the most unassailable of arguments. I, as Keeper of Common Fallacies, merely lay down what I’ve seen, what you do with it is entirely up to you. To it then!

The Straw Man
Almost all spurious arguments are variations of the straw man. It’s best to illustrate with an example, an application by one of the finest practitioners of this fallacy: Arsene Wenger, manager of Arsenal Football Club.

Fan: Arsene, please spend some cash.
Arsene: Do you want me to spend 100 million pounds on average players and plunge us all into debt?
Fan: No, of course not.
Arsene: (QED.) See, that’s why I won’t spend any cash.

Right, it’s occurred to me that people who’re not into football won’t make any sense of that example, but here’s what it means. When you set up a straw man, you’re changing the argument in some way, to make it easier to counter because you don’t want to, for whatever reason, counter the original argument. Here’s what the fan should actually have said (that’s most likely what he implied in any case):

Fan: Arsene, please spend just the cash we’ve got from sales, and maybe not even all of it, and not on average players, but players that you think are good, not necessarily ‘top quality’, but players who will address the problems we currently have, problems you acknowledged several times in the past that we do.

Arsene Wenger is setting up not one, not two, but possibly three straw men with that one ingenious question, because the fan does not want him to a) spend 100 million pounds, b) buy average players and c) plunge the club into debt.

That’s why the straw man is a powerful tool, because deliberately misstating your opponent’s argument so that you can counter it, and mark it as ‘resolved’ is easy. It’s easy because most people leave things unsaid in their argument, assuming that their opponents will be honest enough to accept and understand their position.

Arundhati Roy sets up a classic straw man and argues it through most of her article, because the movement against corruption that has gripped the nation has nothing to do with one man. Yes, Anna Hazare is an iconic figurehead everyone rallies around, but by bashing his associations, his appearance, his intellect and his personality she’s not doing any of these things:

Proving that the Jan Lokpal Bill is flawed.
Proving that the anti-corruption movement is flawed and/or insignificant.

If your counter-argument is that she’s not trying to prove those things, what is she trying to prove then? That Anna Hazare is not a flawless person, or that some of the members of Team Anna aren’t? I suspect that’s the case, and if by proving one of those things she thinks she’s saying something substantial about the Bill itself, she’s stepping into the territory of Ad Hominem.

Ad Hominem
Ad Hominem is not always a fallacy, but it almost always is. If you find yourself doing something like this, you’re doing an Ad Hominem.

‘What would you know about religion? You’re a liberal.’

Liberals don't have to not know anything about religion, see. Ad Hominem sneaks into debates because of one side’s belief that the other side’s arguments are flawed because of personal bias. It’s hard to argue that any argument does not have some kind of bias driving it; however, as long as the arguments made are logical, and refutable, they should be evaluated purely on their own merits, and Ad Hominem becomes a fallacy.

By any yardstick, the various clauses of the Jan Lokpal Bill are refutable. You can pick up whichever points you don’t like and come up with arguments to show why they won’t work. How is Arundhati Roy – at least she’s articulate in her faulty arguments, the government of India ended up looking like a 12 year old schoolyard bully – refuting anything by casting aspersions on Anna’s character? To be fair though, she does critique some aspects of the Bill itself, when she talks about how it would only create another unmanageable bureaucracy - that's when she makes most sense - but such points are lost in the clamour about Anna Hazare.

On the other hand, there are occasions when Ad Hominem is not fallacious. Take this snippet for example:

A: ‘I don’t think that hurts.’
B: ‘How would you know? You've never even had a fracture!’

Even in this case, Ad Hominem could still turn out to be fallacious, if person A turns out to be someone who’s well qualified to make such a statement; someone who’s never had a fracture, but who is a sports physiotherapist, for example.

Oftentimes, Ad Hominem is brought out in Internet debates, shined to a sparkle, where opponents don’t know enough about each other to make any kind of statement based on the other’s personality/character, but still do, making any such a bad argument every day of the week. Conversations like this litter the Interwebs:

A:‘I think he is right in legalizing marijuana usage, because most studies show that it’s no more addictive or harmful than tobacco.’
B:‘What would you know, kid? You’re probably a twelve year living in your parents’ basement who thinks taking drugs is the coolest thing ever.’

Gems like this are what make trolling the Internet such an enjoyable experience. You could always call out such inanity calmly and clearly, instead of getting sucked into a flame war, but that does not guarantee that you will get anything out of it, because people can always choose to…

Cherry Pick!
I find that this is mostly a problem if you’re trying to have a debate over email, or Facebook comments, or Youtube comments (the horror!) or any medium at all that doesn’t let you do this:

‘Stop, stop. Wait. That’s not all that I said. Answer me this first.’

Right, when you publish a five thousand rebuttal, since you’re human and not a perfect automaton, you may expect that there’s at least one sentence in that thesis that is not absolutely logically sound. You may also expect that your cunning and devious opponents will ignore all of the 5,832 good points you make, and choose to lampoon the one bad point, because you cannot ask them to do this:

‘Stop, stop. Wait. That’s not all that I said. Answer me this first.’

All you can do is sit and fume, or wait till you meet your opponent in the flesh, so that you can punch him in the face. (Oh, wait that’s also a fallacious argument. You could try reasoning it out…)

A:‘There is strong empirical evidence underpinning all four known mechanisms of evolution – natural selection, genetic drift, biased mutation and gene flow. I think, with that knowledge you cannot deny that evolution is happening.’
B:‘Wait man, think? You think? You’re not sure then? If you’re not sure, how can common people be sure about this?’

There’s one exceptionally irritating form of cherry picking that deserves a special mention:
Grammarguments
‘The sun rises in the east. What’re you shouting about, disprove that!’
‘It should be “The Sun rises in the East.”, fool.’

Why not that?
This is a hard one. It is again a form of a straw man, where you’re changing the argument to something more favourable to refutation, but this form is subtle because it applies the innate ‘betterness’ scales (This one’s better than that.) we all have to things that cannot be compared.

When AR asks you why Anna is fighting against corruption, instead of fighting ‘more pressing’ issues like farmer suicides and land acquisitions, you would be forgiven for wondering the same. But it’s a fallacious argument, again. It is, what I would call, an argument from laziness because it’s usually employed by people who don’t want to do anything to stop people who want to from doing something. I’m not saying AR is lazy, I’m sure she’s far from it, but that’s what I’ve seen.

A:‘Where are you going?’
B:‘I’m going for my weekly civic sense meet – we’re going to clean up the streets.’
A:‘Why don’t you first fix the corruption in your workplace man, before doing all that.’

There is always that other thing to do, and no one man, no matter how determined or powerful, can do all of them, and that’s where this argument comes from. It’s fallacious because by pointing to a different problem and asking why your opponent is not doing anything about that, you’re not rebutting his approach to solving the problem at hand. The fallacy is so obvious that I’m surprised sometimes that more people don’t call such bluffs.

Animal welfare activists are often rebuked this way:
A:‘But they’re just animals. Why don’t you do something about the terrible living conditions in Sub Saharan Africa instead, for human beings?’

To me, an analogy with the idea of vocation doesn’t seem too far off the mark. If you were to apply the ‘Why Not That?’ argument to the kinds of work people do, you’d be complaining about the fact that there are salesmen, sportsmen, film stars when everyone should be either a doctor or a social worker, because those are ‘better’ jobs in your eyes. (Catch the fallacy in my argument.)

Metaphors, analogies and thought experiments
Again, these are straw men, but I’ve been burnt so many times by these in my debates that I have to break out a new bullet point just for this lot. While analogies and thought experiments are useful tools for understanding, do not ever forget that they’re but imitations of the original, and so have limitations. If you get sucked into debating an analogy, instead of the original argument, you’ll surely get bitten by a point that would never have occurred in the original argument.

A:‘Politicians are like rabid dogs. They spread misinformation like disease, and must be put down. Would you hesitate to put down a rabid dog?’

But politicians are not rabid dogs, you see. (Right, I could have chosen a better example.)

Anecdotes
I don’t disagree that there are many observations that still have a subjective quality to them, but not everything is subjective, you closet solipsist! You should not be doing this, even if your granddad is the President of the United States:

A:‘An exhaustive survey of half the Universe has concluded that smokers die younger than non smokers.’
B:‘What! Really? My granddad smoked twenty unfiltered cigars a day, and he lived to 120. Nonsense! It’s all a bloody conspiracy, I say.’

I hope, young readers, that you’ve learnt something today. My working memory is small, and my concentration span even smaller, so pray forgive me if I’ve missed out on any common fallacies you may have encountered in your short lives. I see so many of them, you see. Do add them to the comment sections so that I can replenish my ailing memory centres. Until next time, fare thee well, and use your knowledge wisely!

Don't Be A Cynic. Be A Sceptic.

2011-08-28T11:12:00.000+05:30

I hope that it’s just my little bubble of social interaction that’s so skewed, because the thought that the whole world is agog over this article is just plain scary. It isn’t the thrust of the article that really bothers me, if I’m to be honest, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

So many people miss the forest for the trees that it sometimes pays to say out loud what should be obvious. Cynicism is not the same as intellectualism. Many smart people appear cynical to those who simply cannot fathom why they won’t let things be. Why can’t they roll with the status quo, why can’t they, just once, toe the official line? Not all smart people question their way into trouble, but all those who seek intellectual honesty do. That’s really what makes them smart, because what’s the point having a fat IQ on a piece of paper if you don’t ever seek better explanations for things that don’t make sense?

I cannot, in good faith, fault someone for asking questions, no matter how uncomfortable they may be, so for some time I tried to find a way to qualify aspects of cynicism as good. Then I realized that I didn’t have to because there was already a word around, a word that captures everything ‘good’ about cynicism, but leaves about the dogma. Scepticism.

Being a sceptic is about asking questions, it’s about getting up off your cosy armchair and opening the nearest window to look down on the street, because the watercolour painting of the street you have at your desk doesn’t satisfy anymore. But being a sceptic is also about accepting that sometimes, the watercolour painting has got it spot on, and you don’t have to go to the window again for a while.

Being a cynic, on the other hand, if I may just stretch this metaphor a teeny little bit further, is about rejecting the painting as false without ever looking down on the real thing, and sketching one of your own and proclaiming it better, again without looking down on the real thing. Cynicism is not the same as intellectualism, because it’s easy to hold a view counter to consensus but just as rooted in blind belief.

It’s hard for me to say this, but sometimes, the majority view of things isn’t so wrong as one may think. You aren’t always stupid if you agree with a lot of other people. Having said that, everyone who’s trying to break through the wall of haze propaganda has set up all around us, everyone who’s trying to find out for themselves what’s true, is already a step ahead of those who’re happy to go along with the herd. But you can do so much better than this article. Don’t stop here, you’ll only lose that little step you’ve gained and fall back into petty, bitter cynicism.

It isn’t the thrust of the article which bothers me though: I’ve resisted, so far, the temptation to throw a bit of me into the simmering cauldron of gibberish that is what the Internet has to say on the Lokpal Bill. I have a feeling I’ll give in soon, but not yet. What bothers me about the article is how badly it goes about making the points it makes, agreeable or not.

I don’t want it to look like I’m running away after throwing a handful of unsubstantiated criticisms (Terrible article! Bye.) into the mix, but I’ve realized that there’s a lot more I want to say on the topic of debating, and how to avoid/cunningly use fallacious arguments that’s not just limited to this article, and this post is already fairly long, so until another post then.

Back! Back! Back!

2011-08-18T21:18:00.001+05:30

It’s been a while, good readers, and what can I say in my defence but that an old flame of mine decided to seduce me? And that relationships are hard work? Yeah, I didn’t even know I was a miniskirt guy till she went all miniskirty on me, did good old Work. And she’s one demanding mistress too. In fact, I’m writing this cowering in a dark corner of my toilet, nervously glancing at that little slat of light under the door ever so often to see if it’s getting blocked off by something. Like a miniskirted Work’s endless legs.

Right, now that I’ve scratched that particular itch for personalization (I don’t know, every time I go away for any amount of time, I seem to come back with a strong desire to make friends with Wall. Wall is so pretty you know? Skin so smooth, you could lose yourself in it. Mind so calm, you could…) Right, that’s enough of that, I reckon. Back to work.

At the risk of overdoing work puns, what better thing to talk about there be than work itself?

Some of my closest friends have tried, many times, to convince me that I possess great wisdom that far outstrips my age. I have, in all humility, tried to convince them in return that I’m normal, and it is they that have been blessed with way too much foolishness.

OK, that’s not quite right. What I have been called is a fretter because I fret and worry about things today that I shouldn’t be worrying about until age forty five. (Until I’m bald, obese and useless, and only then will I have to spend half my life running in one spot just so that I can squeeze an extra hundred days from the Bearded Man Above. Or so popular wisdom holds.) I fret, not openly (because I’m cool), but I do fret about what I eat, and how much I eat. I spend hours agonizing about the philosophical dichotomy between work and play, how it’s all an elaborate illusion, and why I have to believe in it anyway.

Long, long ago when I in my last semester of college, job in the bag, and staring at months and months of blissful decadence, I was not thinking about how best I would redeem my sorry existence by putting in long hours at work. I knew I loved programming far too much to slack off too much at work. The joy of solving a problem, and seeing my code generate a solution out of nothing, would hold far too much allure for me to ever let go just for an extra hour of Facebooking. What I did ponder over, then, was the question of how best to organize my ‘play’ time. I would have to do all these things in my ‘play’ time:

Sleep a scientifically-shown-to-be-healthy eight hours every day.
Write blog posts (like this) that will change the world. Often.
Write short stories, get one published for a billion bucks, retire to that penthouse on Mars.
Run through computer games like Binit’s granola bars.
Read. Read newspapers, books, nutritional information snippets on Marie Gold biscuit packets.
Keep up with friends, so that I won’t die alone, in the off chance that my impossibly brilliant B-plan doesn’t work out.
Talk to girls, because the more (the people who find out about my true awesomeness) the merrier, and also because, you know, that’s why we’re here, innit?
Research that phenomenon called social life that seems to have caught everyone’s fancy all of a sudden. Write a program to manage it for me.

I even thought about picking up a management degree on the side, just to manage all the things I'd have to do in my 'play' time. But I’m happy to report, sirs and ma’ams, that despite a wrong turn or two, I mostly stuck to the plan. I worked hard at not working, and even harder at playing. Until, Work stepped up and decided to play dirty. The rest is well, industry.

I’ve come up for air now, and the world outside smells mighty fine, so I intend to stay up. (By the way, anything interesting happen recently, folks? Must be same old, same old, right? Everyone’s corrupt, nobody’s doing anything, Barca want Cesc, Barca don’t take Cesc, India the top test team in the world, the USofA has a spotless debt rating, blah… Don’t bother, I was just checking.)

How Can He Type? (A Love Story)

2011-07-04T23:40:00.001+05:30

A number of people have asked me how I’ve learnt to type so fast. Often, the question presents itself in the hushed, awed tones of the geeky: these are people who work with computers all the time and these are people for whom speed typing would count as a genuine skill. Also, however, normal people pose this question to me too sometimes, if only with the sort of casual curiosity you reserve for people who can wolf whistle, or people who can do 180 degree splits: an indifferent appreciation for a quirky talent. It gladdens me, though, that typing has become nearly as important as writing in many domains of work, and that the second category of people is shrinking by the day because of that. (My skillz are much more relevant now, yay!)

To return to the original question on how I learnt to type so fast, there’s no easy answer. There’s certainly no magic pill that’ll make your fingers more nimble overnight and there’s no golden serum you inject into your fingers to make them listen to you better. Take what you hear about typing crash courses with a pinch of salt, because it’s all hot air. Like most things in the world, proficiency in typing is all about practice, practice and then some more practice, but with a couple of caveats:

1) You need to learn touch typing, that is, the mad Jedi skill of typing without looking at the keyboard. As you can imagine that’ll double your speed as you aren’t going to waste half your time pausing to verify if you’re typing the right thing. How, you ask? I’ll get to that in a minute.

2) Proper technique is gold. I know people who type fast without the right technique, but I believe that’ll stifle you in the long run.

(On the bright side, I started off as useless as you. And no I was not born with the ability to touch type. There, that should have heartened you considerably.)

I’ll get to the technique part in a bit, but you guys are really asking the wrong questions here. Yes, all you need to do to become a fast typist is technique and practice, but the important question is: how do you actually practise? Practising typing by typing out a list of words twenty times a day is mind numbingly boring, and while it might work, you’re likely to die at 30, you’ll be so scarred by that experience. So how do you do it then? Gamify, of course.

Make learning to type a game: something that’s fun and challenging at the same time. That’s what I did, back during my PS-I (a sort of introduction to an internship I had back in college, after my second year of engineering). I used to think I was a pretty fast typist. I was a regular on DC++ trivia back, and I can safely say that that helped me a lot in improving my touch typing. See, here’s how trivia worked: there would be randomly selected questions coming up every 30 seconds or so, and there would be a bunch of people online at the same time trying to get in the answer first. It was all about speed, especially because questions repeated, and also because some questions were ridiculously easy (20+33=?).

In such an environment, touch typing was the only option. Looking at the keyboard while typing out an answer, pausing for half a second to check what was on screen before submitting it, simply did not work. Gamifying your typing experience forces you to touch type, apart from the fact that it’s actually fun. I don’t know how well DC++ trivia is doing these days, but if a lot of people are on it, join the club. It’s fun even without the whole typing angle.

Speedtest for the solo gamer

What I did during my PS-I was hit this site. Why didn’t I stick to trivia once I’d realized it was doing wonders for my typing speed? Firstly, I was far, far away from BITS Pilani’s LAN, and secondly, I knew, fiercely competitive person that I was, that I would never sacrifice my speed for technique. This site is perfect for the solo gamer: you’re not taking on a hundred other people, the only person who’s challenging you is you, and I loved it.

I don’t know how quickly you’ll tire of this site (I suspect it’ll be a lot quicker than me), but it occupied me for the whole summer. When I started off there, I was doing about 55 Words Per Minute (WPM). While that’s fairly respectable, that’s about a fourth as fast as the fastest typist in the world. Forcing myself to at least try and follow the proper technique (read this for learning about the home row in QWERTY keyboards, and what's a 'proper' technique) dropped my speeds to under 50, but only for some time. By the end of the summer I was easily doing 70 WPM.

Just to cheer you up, here’s what I can do now. That’s more than double what I started off with. (Watch it on mute if you don't like tinny heavy metal. )

Typeracer

This site is the antithesis of speedtest, in many ways. You compete against other people, typos are not forgiven (you cannot proceed unless you correct your errors) and WPM is counted as CPM (Characters Per Minute) divided by 5, to account for variations in word lengths. (Speedtest counts words.) However, I recommend that you not visit this site while you’re still honing your touch typing technique, because it’s frustrating. Very, very much so. It is not pleasantly frustrating like how good games should be, but frustrating in a lethargy-inducing way, the way that'll make you swear on your great grand aunt's grave that you'll never ever touch a keyboard again. I'd suggest that you move on to competing on this site only when you’re reasonably comfortable with your technique and are looking to improve your overall speed.

Even after you’ve achieved a measure of comfort with the words on speedtest, you might still be flummoxed by Typeracer, because Typeracer doesn’t make you type word lists, it makes you type paragraphs. Paragraphs, with – brace yourself - proper punctuation, and - just to reiterate - it does not forgive typos. So, practising a little on Typeracer will improve your real world composition skills much more than a lot of time spent on speedtest.

For context, I started off on Typeracer a couple of years ago, and averaged about 70 WPM. Now I can consistently do about 105. Here’s a video I recorded for er.. motivational purposes. Be warned, I wasted a lot of time on this site, so you'll need a lot of practice to see that kind of improvement, but hey it was college. I’d even call it a productive use of my time.

I know I said I moved to typing with the right technique when I started using speedtest, but that’s not exactly right. It’s not easy to change the way you type overnight: I already had nearly correct technique for my left hand, but my right hand was all over the place, and I never used my pinkies. I think it took me a couple of years to start using my right pinky to type the ‘P’, and even now it flaps up and down like it wants nothing to do with all this typing business. Consciously try and return your fingers to the home row after hitting every key, and without looking, and your job is half done. After all, touch typing is the most intuitive way of typing: you reach for each key with the finger that’s closest to it (only if your starting position is on the home row of course. That’s why typing courses keep banging on and on about that point.) Don't worry if you simply cannot contort your fingers to reach certain keys. Skip them for later, but don't forget that what you're doing is wrong.

And remember, it’s all about gamifying. Any sort of game that puts a price on your ability to generate as many words as you can in a limited period of time, your typing skills come in handy. Here are a few such games I've played in the past, and thoroughly enjoyed.

Multieight is a favourite of mine. Its rules are simple: you make as many words as you can from a eight letter word, in one minute. The bigger the words you make, the more the points you score, obviously.

Boggle also works.

There’s also an app on Facebook called ‘The typing of the ghost’, which is inspired by an unbelievably fun PC game I’ll talk about in the next point. Check it out.

If you can, get your hands on ‘The typing of the Dead’. I think it’s the first and only game that can be classified as a ‘First Person Typer’. (You zap zombies with your keyboard. 'Nuff said.)

Before I sign off, I need just a moment to do one last thing: defend the need to improve your typing skills. Typing shouldn’t be a chore, it should be exactly like writing: a tool you use to get something else done, which in this case is composition. When you’re writing your exams, are you thinking about which finger to move, and in what kind of loopy way, to cross those Ts? No. Typing should be like that, and once you get the hang of it, far outstrips writing in usefulness (at least for composing text). I don’t think anyone writes faster than 60 WPM. It’s quite easy, with a little effort of course (oxymoron!), to hit 80 WPM while typing. I can’t stress enough how much the ability to type fast, and more importantly the ability to touch type - type without thinking - has improved my productivity. (Gah, corporate terms. I rooted around for a better one, but I’m already infected. I guess.) For example, churning out blog posts like this is not a day-long task anymore. (On the other hand, it’s difficult not to hit 20 pages every time I write anything, absolutely anything at all. :) )

Good luck.

Tippity Tap Tap

2011-07-03T15:46:00.001+05:30

Everyone knows that foot tapping is contagious. It’s obvious, right? We’ve seen so many popular culture depictions that follow this theme: There’s a lone guy. He’s sitting at a table. In a, er, cafeteria. There’s a spoon, there’s a tumbler and there’s a knack for a beat, all with our lone guy. Before you know it, there’s a full-scale impromptu cafeteria orchestra, with tabletops, people’s backs and grinding knives passing for instruments.

(No, you actually haven’t seen anything like that? There, that’s remedied, and with a highly er… topical example to boot. Forgive me.) OK, I have never seen it happen, but neither have I seen Gandhi, and I believe what I see on TV more than I believe what I see in real life. Real life is very tricksy you see, I saw my name in a cloud once. What sort of self-respecting reality would have that?

Anyway, my point is that when I saw this person on my company bus tapping her fingers discreetly to some unknown rhythm, noiselessly and safely muffled by the backpack nestling in her lap, obviously in response to my not so discreet head-nodding (a more socially acceptable form of the headbang) to some Trivium riff, I was not surprised. No, sir, not in the least bit was I surprised. Music makes the world go round, right? Music is the only language everyone speaks, and all that, I told myself.

But on a different day, and with a different person, something happened that was surprising - in a mind-boggling way, with emphasis on the ‘mind’ and ‘boggle’ bits. I had seen this person enjoying his music quietly, with only the hint of a finger-drum giving anything away. Meanwhile, a brilliant riff and/or a spectacular solo forcefully wedged a happy knife in my skull, and I was swept away into a mini bus-seat rendition of a blast beat using my hands and legs. My twitching hair swayed in sync with the solo of course. In time, I noticed that this guy was sneaking surreptitious glances at me, and not in the: ‘look at that guy, he’s acting so ridiculous’ way.

It was more of a professional envy. I could make it out from that glint in his eye. (Middle aged gentlemen rocking back and forth to some 60s dirge in obvious orgasmic delight was a clue too, but you know, it was that glint that gave it away.) Naturally, I didn’t take to the challenge kindly. How could that presumptuous fool take on heavy metal, and its unrivalled capacity for energization? I had to enlighten him – it would be a blight on my conscience otherwise – I simply had to correct the error of his ways. So, I began to toss my head from side to side even more vehemently, whilst my feet beat out a furious staccato on the floor. I only stopped, chest heaving, heart aflutter, when I found myself nearly blinded by one of the many knobs and edges that jutted in from the window. To my satisfaction though, a quick glance confirmed that the shine in the pretender’s eye was all but gone now, glazed over in dull defeat. Victory! A truly triumphant homecoming it was, when I got off five minutes later.

I’ll let you use your underworked imaginations to sift out the truths in that story, but writing about it brought to mind another, even more mindboggling incident that occurred sometime back, when my workplace was changed to Bagmane Tech Park.

Walkathons and Cheaters

2011-07-03T15:41:00.001+05:30

For a while (until this happened), I used public transport to get to work. There was a minor problem with that arrangement: the Yahoo! office was exactly one kilometre from the bus stop where I got down, and I had to walk that distance everyday. To put that into context, in case all you fit-as-a-fiddle people out there consider that a piffling amount, people were ready to shell out as much as a hundred rupees just to get an auto driver to make that short trip. Or they were ready to stand around for up to half an hour, waiting for the in-campus shuttles to arrive, rather than attempt the impossible. While I wasn’t exactly drained by the walk, it was a bit monotonous doing the same concrete scenery everyday, and so I did what any sane person would do to suck the ennui out of routine: I gamified it.

I decided that I would walk as fast as I could, and the next day I would walk faster. I honed my technique (tip: use your adductors more than your calves), and began to shave minutes from my times, until I hit my physical peak with a 9 minute end-to-end run. That day, I walked into work, legs on fire, face red and sweaty and I had a hard time convincing people that I wasn’t returning from a workout in the gym.

I did this for over a month, and I soon got used to outpacing any pedestrians in sight during my walkathons. One day though, I met a stubborn rival. This man walked fast (apparently because he was late for a meeting but I’m not convinced) but not enough to challenge my supremacy. However, immediately after I crossed him, he quickly upped his pace to keep up, and when I got stuck behind a group of giggly snail-walking girls a little while later, he smoothly jumped on to the road to jog around the congregation, and overtake me.

Now that was blasphemy. My mind boggled from the implications of the man’s heinous act. It physically reeled. I don’t know if I mentioned this, but I had one simple rule for my walkathons: Never, ever run. Or even break into a half-jog. I could not break that. But this guy, who was a short, balding guy with thin arms and a paunch , slowed down after he established what he judged was a safe gap, and went back to his walking pace, which while blindingly fast, was no match for mine. Little by little, I ate up the intervening metres until I was right behind him, and that was when I played my masterstroke, and did this:

In case my artistic skills did not let the point get across, here’s what I did: Because ultimately both of us had to cross over to the right side of the road (and there was another rightward curve that was going to come up), I decided to use the diagonal and do it at the first curve of the road, so that I could sneakily establish a lead without seeming to do so (otherwise, the man would start jogging to catch up, I didn’t want that). I did so, and at the end of the operation, we were walking in lockstep, only, on opposite sides of the road. I had given myself a strategic advantage: during the next curve, the man would have to negotiate a longer distance than I.

The man however, did not wait for the curve at all. He dashed – yes, he really dashed - across the road, tracing a mazy, diagonal route, and reappeared a few feet in front of me, and continued walking. Naturally, I was flabbergasted by this man, and his blatant disregard for the simple honour of the walking game. How could he run? Again, though, I slowly cut into his lead. He became aware of this, and a quick glance behind confirmed that walking would simply not do it for him, and then he played his masterstroke. He pulled out his cell phone from his pocket. (I resigned myself to an honourable defeat.)

“Yes, sir, I’m coming.” and he sprinted away without the slightest hint of embarrassment.

Small Talk

2011-06-22T18:54:00.001+05:30

It occurred to me, while in the midst of a fascinating adventure in a foreign land - I won't go into the details, if you know about it, you know about it - that I'm really good at something. Something that's not one of the many talents that that desperately vain corner of my brain has catalogued for future reference. Small talk.

I hate the mundane, it's boring. Most things in life are mundane. Therein lies the paradox. But there's a way out, and it's called humour. Make boring things funny, and they just might become interesting. Small talk is inevitably boring relative to anything other than another flavour of small talk. To complete that hasty syllogism, I can make small talk interesting, and ergo, I'm great at small talk.

You've probably guessed where this is going. Take a deep breath and shriek a shriek of joy because you're right. It's about girls. I should be perfect for any dinner table, anywhere, anytime, with those mad skills I've got, right? I should be, except for one small problem. Five minutes into any conversation, I get this inexplicable urge, an itch that's not on the outside but the inside, an itch that seems to become progressively more irritating each time I scratch. The urge, the itch to geek out.

Here I am talking wittily on the charms of bus journeys when I feel the need to bring in some irrational metaphor about the Platonian cave into the conversation. The End. I should probably do something Pavlovian to train this out of me. Like plucking out a fingernail every time I do something like this. Yes, that should work.

Walking In With A Bang

2011-06-22T18:33:00.003+05:30

It's hard being a thinker. Even when you're taking a break from hungering for an end to world hunger, fighting for world peace, straitjacketing narrow-mindedness or ripping out stupid people's voice boxes, you're still thinking deep, profound thoughts. For example, recently I've been obsessed with finding a philosophically satisfactory explanation for one vexing question:

What's that bag doing there?!

People who've seen me around know that I don't even step into a loo without a shoulder bag. Those who haven't, I'm sure you can exercise those rusty centres of your brain that handle imagination processing a little. Why, why, why, though? I used to think it had to do with that pleasant, maternal feeling you get from small objects clinging tenderly to your back. I agree that that explanation is reasonably good - it even fashionably tips its hat towards evolutionary psychology - but then I discovered better.

Wherever I go, I walk in with a bag. No, that's not quite right. One of my pseudonyms is 'N'. I'm not Abhinav, or even Lone because that's too verbose. (Four letters, oh my poor tongue!) I'm simply N. When N walks in with a bag, he doesn't walk in with a bag, he walks in with a bang. Get it? There you go, a perfectly good explanation for why I do what I do. (You can kill me now.)

Luck and Wonder

2011-05-21T13:30:00.003+05:30

Seeing as how real life almost never throws up unexpected surprises, this one really was unexpected. A couple of months ago, on a whim, I decided to try and purchase a subscription to this magazine online. The billing page clearly mentioned that only credit cards would be accepted for payment, and I being of the noble ilk of financial pragmatists did not possess one. But I went ahead and entered my debit card’s details, fully expecting a big, red sign to pop up, politely asking me to stop wasting their carefully rationed time. And thereby ending my spot of whimsical summer pastime of course. Instead, to my utter horror, a pleasant green icon lit up the screen the moment I was done with the done button, informing me of the success of the transaction. My shock seeped away quickly, once my brain clicked into gear and I started on the fine print.

“They didn’t ask for my password/PIN, did they? Ha!”

“Your subscription will be activated once your credit card is verified, and the transaction completed.”

I promptly forgot all about my little dalliance. A couple of days later, I received an email telling me how sorry everyone at Kalmbach Publishing was that they had to cancel my subscription as my ‘credit card’ had failed verification. There was an attached offer to get myself an account with Kalmbach to track all my subscriptions (or it could have been about buying garden fresh pink roses for all I remember), but the sense of closure was so complete that I ignored it and promptly forgot about promptly forgetting all about my little dalliance.

... Until one fine rainy day in the heart of the Deccan, when I stepped out of the house on my way to work. There were two shiny tan envelopes lying there, unceremoniously dumped in Tommy’s half of the portico. If your heart just skipped an expectant beat, that’s just me playing with your mind, because the sight did nothing for mine then. My father had subscribed to every single finance magazine on the planet, and this was probably just one of them. Curiosity (there’s a reason they always wrap interesting stuff in the dullest of envelopes) made me open one of them, and then the other, quickly, because I was to find these inside.

I spent all of five minutes staring at wondrous pictures from the bottomless gallery of the cosmos, before my conscience caught up with me. (I know, I know. I tried the Chinese water torture on the pesky little thing. It didn’t work. It’s probably already barking mad.) I already knew that no money had been deducted from my account because I had checked already, parsimonious twerp that I am. So, it really was an issue of conscience, not enlightened self-interest. Shooting off that polite errata-kind-of-email (“Sir, there seems to have been a mistake...”) to the folks at Kalmbach was easy. I half hopefully wondered if the mail would go into someone’s junk folder and be not read at all, and if I’d get to keep the cake and eat it.

Actually, I still hope that happens, and I will continue to do so until Mr. Year decides to shuffle off into 2012. The many delightful hours I have spent with my two free copies of Astronomy magazine have reminded me that it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything about astronomy. I don’t want to write about sky watching again (this post’s already dragged on, I don’t want to make it a novella), so I’ll make do with a little dash of the something that makes astronomy endlessly fascinating for me.

Wonder.
For me, the most wondrous description that I’ve ever read can, fittingly, be found in a Stephen Baxter novel. I don’t recall which one exactly, but I know it was one of the Manifold trilogy (all of which I encourage you to read). I could wax lyrical on what it is, but I’ll leave that bit to yourselves, pointing you instead to a factual Wikipedia entry on the topic. One of the characters, a sentient squid if I remember correctly, actually gets to see what you’ve just read about, and I’ve been jealous ever since. If only, if only, if only, if only, if only. It would be wondrous, awe-inspiring, humbling and crippling, all at the same time.

Wonder.
Ever since I discovered this site – if you’re interested in the breadcrumbs it was through the description of a Topcoder development contest backed by NASA – I’ve spent many hours just looking at it, and obviously many more monkeying around inside. Again, I won’t bother describing it – check it out for yourselves. The media player takes an inordinate amount of time to load but I promise you it’s worth the frustration.

Wonder
In the May edition of Astronomy, there was an article on detailed simulations of asteroid strikes. A bunch of astrogeeks at Purdue have made this site, and the article had distilled down two of the simulations into a descriptive piece. Here’s a sample: If you were to be about 30 kilometres from the impact site of a 2.4 kilometre wide comet, you’d see a fireball about 60 times the size of the sun. For context, that’s about a third of the sky from the horizon to the zenith. You’d be hit by a wind of speed 1,900 km/h about 4 minutes later. For context, that’s about ~~6 times~~ 1.5 times the speed of sound. You wouldn’t hear a thing as waves of silent destruction would strip the flesh from your bones.

That’s all for now. I enjoyed those wonder pieces so much though, that I’m sure you’ll find me returning to the theme again in the future. If you aren’t gobsmacked out of your pants, and if you aren’t feeling really, really tiny right now, then sorry, you’re way too self-centred to ever be an astrogeek. I mean that in the politest sense of course. :)

Anti-immigration

2011-05-19T22:01:00.003+05:30

Until not too long ago, it made perfect sense. I was secure in my knowledge of its utter stupidity – even entertaining half a debate was this close to insanity. It was so nonsensical it made perfect sense. I knew all those people who were railing against immigration in the U.S. were blinkered fools because, because... Where do I start? To me, the average stereotypical anti-immigration crusader was a blustering, red necked Great White (Fat) Male. (I’ll apologize for the blatant stereotyping later. Can’t you see I’m working on an apology already?) Just another European, with a fondness for guns and the rhotic R, if you compare the tiny sliver of time that America’s been America with all that time we’ve spent not being apes.

By way of researching this blog post I read this section on Wikipedia, and I was astounded to discover that pre-Columbian Americans predated European colonizers by 30 times as many years. There were more culturally diverse Native American groups wiped out by European diseases than political lobbies exist in the USA today. How can, just how can anyone have the gall to even consider turning away immigrants, talking about that shadow thing called American culture?

I read a forum post somewhere ( I looked for it, but I rarely ever bookmark things I’m going to read again, and Google failed me with its over-helpfulness) that almost exactly spelled out the view I held but had never seriously debated with anyone. The first ‘anti-immigration’ response that couldn’t be discarded as a rant simply asked this question:

‘How long do we have to wait, as a nation, before we get the right to define our own identity?’

A fascinating question, one that I failed to wish away with hand waving and bluster. While I don’t particularly care for patriotism as I believe that its unambiguous moral rightness is dangerous and almost inevitably mutates into jingoism, I recognize that people need, and have the right, to choose an identity for themselves. So, yes, American people need an American culture so that the notion of being American becomes something more than just empty words, something more tangible. (But do Americans have the right to censure people who don’t conform to their idea of American-ness?)

My riposte to that riposte though was simply: Already? It’s only been a fraction of a second that they’ve been, cosmically speaking. Should they be already freezing their cultural evolution? They had great intellectuals who drafted what’s perhaps the most forward thinking piece of legislation ever written, in the American constitution. But it’s not perfect and while it tries, admirably, it cannot fight off the creeping lure of religious parochialism. It should be allowed to evolve, and in the direction of greater tolerance. Only new ideas foster evolution, and new cultures bring bagfuls of new ideas with them.

I’ve been banging on and on about America having existed only for a cosmic jiffy, but is that really right? Most free nations as we know them today have been around much less. India, as the slow, lumbering machine that’s always, but not quite, on the verge of grinding to a halt, has only been around for a measly 60 years. And we already seem to have our own idea of a ‘shadow’ Indian culture, an intangible web of intolerance that will find millions of defendants, but only a few who can tell you what it really is. Are we better? Not really. In fact we’d probably fare much, much worse if we were to become as much a hotspot for illegal immigrants as America.

What’s that I can take away from the assortment of thoughts I expelled from my system? That immigration is a more vexing issue than it appears at first glance, and that it's not just unthinking, gibbering morons who advocate stringent laws against it. It is important though that people don’t get sucked into narrow minded rhetoric disguised as American culture because, sadly, most of the self-professed warriors against the blight of immigration that have taken to haunting the Interwebs generally spout various varieties of the very same rhetoric. Being white, Christian and male is not what American culture is exclusively about.

There are many things that we, as a nation, could take away from the American search for identity, because I’m convinced this is a battle that has to be fought in our country, and in the not too distant future. I hope their war ends well, and I hope we take away the right things for our own.

My Friend Mary Sue

2011-05-14T17:48:00.006+05:30

I met someone new recently, and I made a brand new friend. Her name is Mary Sue. Mary Sue is not a person. Mary Sue is a form of literary criticism. Despite the best efforts of their creators, critical diatribes have (mostly) failed to achieve auto-sentience, and so Mary Sue narrowly missed out on personhood. Mary Sue is very, very unpopular. That’s strange because she’s just about perfect. But she is. She’s not just unpopular, she’s reviled. She’s so reviled she has a whole Wikipedia article discussing her flaws.

“A Mary Sue (sometimes just Sue), in fanfiction, is a fictional character with overly idealized and hackneyed mannerisms, lacking noteworthy flaws, and primarily functioning as a wish-fulfillment fantasy for the author or reader.”

But she’s a friend, and while I don’t particularly like all my friends, I like her. How can I not? How can I dislike someone who has a perfect body, perfect face, perfect hair, perfect <you get it>, wears perfect clothes, speaks perfect circa 300 BC Greek, knows twenty three forms of jujitsu and hundred and two languages, someone who beats Olympic swimming record times for a spot of exercise, likes to call herself Ophelia and is all of twenty three? I fear that some hitherto unknown cosmic mechanism to hoover out monumental stupidity will switch on and pop me into a handful of spacetime nothings if I don’t.

Right, now that I have established my firm logical grounds for supporting the delectable Ms. Mary Sue, let me trot out all those hackneyed criticisms and stomp on them. Squash them like bedbugs, and if possible throw them back at the original critics. Make them squirm uncomfortably until they admit to being kind of Mary Sue-ish themselves, and immediately commit suicide on an overdose of principle.

Author self-insertion.
I thought it would be a good idea to get the criticisms I partially agree with out of the way first, so that I’m free to build up my unassailable arguments later. So, I sort of agree with this. Budding authors find it hard to dream up completely new characters, so they take the ones they already know and change a feature or two here, and a name or two there. Who do we know better than ourselves? Actually, scratch that. We barely know ourselves, and that is where the problem of wish fulfilment comes in. Ain’t I irresistible as a slab of chocolate? Look at me, I’m tall, handsome, I’m smart, hunky, I’m funny and I can sing Cannibal Corpse in my sleep. Darn, who put that mirror there? Ah, not a disaster, there was that story I was working on that’s nearly complete, except for the minor matter of er... a protagonist.

I don’t unconditionally go with the criticism however, because of two seemingly contradictory reasons. One: authors have only themselves, their minds to work with. Everything a writer brings out is necessarily a depraved fantasy born in his mind. The devil’s in the details, however, and the talent’s in the obfuscation. How well can you mix and match your characterizations? A good author will still use a character sketch of himself, but he’ll probably patch a sketch of a childhood rival on to it to sow some novelty. An even better author will probably have the ability to portray slices of himself, allowing him to create many convincing characters simply by altering the ‘honesty’ filter he uses to evaluate himself. So, I would argue that it’s not only not better to avoid self-insertion, it’s often wrong. Don’t make it obvious though.

The second reason: people misinterpret all the time. Do you see Palestinians and Israelis sitting together on a beach smoking pot and singing along to Pink Floyd? Do you see bible thumpers and homoseksuals hunting quail together? There, somebody misinterpreted something somewhere. The moment our discerning reader detects a minute sniff of partiality towards the story’s hero, a little hint of favouritism shown by the author, he’ll slam the book shut faster than you can say ‘Wait... !’, absolutely convinced that he’s now reading a touched up autobiography.

On general fantasizing about something or the other
This is an extension of the ‘self-insertion’ criticism, and Mary Sue haters generally club the two points together and simply call them ‘wish-fulfilment’. (I picked up the politest of the lot. Wankery is a cruder but often clearer term.) Remember that little speech I gave when you asked me to describe Mary Sue? Wankery. Good old fantasizing. Again, it’s a really, really fine line. All fiction is fantasy, and an author has no source but his own mind. (There are of course revealed truths which float in from the ether, but I’ve politely decided to refrain from discussing religion, so.)

Do I think anything should fall on the wrong side of the fine line? I’m not really sure - because the things that critics generally put in that basket are things I don’t really mind – ostentatiously exotic things, for example. Like my friend Mary Sue who can speak hundred and four languages. Did I mention she’s one heck of a CS player? People are not really irritated with the idea of Mary Sue in these cases: they don’t like it that despite their best efforts they’ve gone on to finish the book. It’s OK, folks. It happens to the best and the bravest. It happened to me. Fantasy is fine.

Goody Two-Shoes-ness
I know people don’t like perfect people, but in the real world it’s called pettiness and is definitely not a sign of refinement. On the other hand, it appears that when it concerns fictional ‘people’, it’s supposed to ooze sophistication. You absolutely cannot have ‘good’ characters of any flavour in fiction. Goodness is boring. Give me serial killers, rapists and conmen. I don’t care about that guy who’s so snow white he’s never even bribed a cop. Pah! Mary Sues! My immediate reaction to this was (and still is): What?

I don’t want to appear as black-and-white as the evil side, so I’ll bring out the different-people-like-different-things argument: Different people like different things! For every flawed, insecure person out there who wants to read about other flawed, insecure people so that he can feel good about himself, there is a flawed, insecure person who wants to read about perfect people so that he can experience in fiction what he can never achieve in real life. I’ve firmly entrenched myself in the second camp. (~~Even if I’m rather more perfect than normal humans, my perfectness encourages modesty and so I cannot claim it. Sigh, now I’ll have to strike through this whole confession.~~)

What is so wrong about people reading about people they aspire to be like? Having read through many a thread on this topic, I’m convinced that if someone were to write up the story of Jesus Christ and post it to a critic who’s lived in a hole and not heard of the great man, he would get lambasted for not working on his character development, and the word Mary Sue would inevitably figure at some point. Everything’s relative and one man’s impossible perfection is another man’s triviality.

I’ll make a minor concession: Even I get put off by absolutely perfectly perfect perfectness. Everyone has a flaw, but it need not always be apparent. The devil is - it always is - in the details. If the author actively tries to impose the idea of his character’s perfectness on us either through omniscient narrative, or through every other character fawning all over our man (or woman), the reader has every right to switch off. The author’s inserted himself into the story again. But what if the perfection is inferred? The author merely narrates all the good things the guy has done, and you, good reader, start to resent his Goody Two-Shoes-ness. You need to get used to yourself. Good people exist. Deeds of great nobility are as readable as deeds of great evil, at least to a not insignificant number of people out there.

Author propaganda
If there’s one thing unequivocally criticisable about a classic Mary Sue, it’s this. Ironically, this is one point that’s almost never raised when Mary Sues are criticized. It’s either so widespread, or people don’t think it’s a bad thing at all. I hope it’s the first.

What do I mean though, by author propaganda? I dislike characters that only exist to transform into words the author’s narrow viewpoints and generally parochial mindset. Let me qualify that: I don’t dislike such characters by themselves, because I know that all sorts of people exist in the world and the author has every right to make a gun-toting drug lord his protagonist. I have no right to draw inferences on the author’s personal life based on merely one errant character, and it’s an even bigger crime to call this propaganda. But when you see a book with twenty five characters, characters from all over the world and various walks of life, and every single one of them agrees wholeheartedly with every single thing our hero has to say, I get put off. I can’t help but trace it back to the author. In Philip K. Dick’s works (his later works, to be fair), Christian theology is correct. It is axiom. It is always vindicated in the end against perfunctory doubts.

It's a Predictable/Boring Story...
Now this is one point that really bugs me. People rail against Mary Sues because they think Mary Sues destroy stories. If there’s a Mary Sue there’s a sense that all confrontations are redundant because she'll win them all anyway, and that’s no fun.

My immediate reaction when I first read something like this was to draw an analogy to the story of life itself. Life starts with birth and life ends with death. There’s never any variation there, the story is always about the journey. Are all lives boring then? Not everyone wants stories that have unpredictable endings. I don’t know how my own life is going to turn out – there’s enough chaos there for me, I want at least my fiction to show some stability. I know real life has no true good and evil, and it’s difficult to point fingers and not become aware of your hypocrisy at the same time. But I crave the guarantee that Good is going to win out over Evil in the end, and it’s only fiction that can offer it. Yes, it is not realism. Of course, it isn’t! It’s all about one man and his depraved fantasies, remember? Some people want endings they can’t guess. Some people don’t.

Harry Potter’s been called a Mary Sue. (It was on a manga fan forum, but in my defence the arguments were reasonably erudite.) Why? Because everything always seems to work out for him just in time, it’s so boring. (Let’s drop the fact that his parents were murdered while he was still a baby. That must have been fun, knowing that he’d have no parental pressure for the rest of his life.) I find the argument cyclic, and I’ll respond in kind. How is it that he always gets to survive? Because it’s his story, friend. Why (or how) would you write a long running novel series about a thirteen year old whose greatest adventure was slipping on a banana peel and whacking his head on a lamp post? We’re writing about his story because it’s remarkable. We’re writing about him because he’s overcome ridiculous odds and emerged triumphant in the end, because he has greatness around him, for whatever reason. We’re chronicling his story as it happened in the past: we’re not blogging about it live. If only everyone learnt to admire greatness, instead of letting their insecurities develop into poisonous cynicism, the world would be a better place.

On the theme of Harry Potter, I find it astounding how many people ‘like’ Severus Snape and ‘dislike’ Albus Dumbledore. Come on, strip away all those cobwebs you’ve build around your convictions, isn’t it just pettiness? Is Dumbledore a Mary Sue? His character certainly seems to tick most of the criteria used to identify one. His perfection is resented, although he isn’t really, if you see the backstory. Isn’t a man who can’t seem to do no wrong more admirable than someone who does, and corrects himself? Maybe not, but I argue that the point is at least debatable.

Look, mama, the world is helping Mary!

Character development, character development. Where would the art of criticism be without you? Because although this criticism is outwardly directed against everything-working-out-for-Mary-Sues-all-the-time, the real gripe is always about some form of character development.

“She's perfect, everything always works out for her, she never learns from failures because she never fails, and that’s boring, and I so hate Mary Sues!”

Yes, if you have a character who knows everything, does everything right, beats everyone and walks away, there’s hardly a story there, so it’s a wee bit boring. But this criticism is often applied to stories where the character already has a more or less well-tuned moral compass, and the story is about his journey in discovering the system, and his own abilities/skills/powers. It is character development, only not the sort you’re expecting, dear haters.

There are people out there who are plain lucky, people to whom good things happen despite their best efforts to mess things up. I have had occasions when this has happened to me, I'm afraid. If it happens in real life, why can't it happen in fiction? Suspend your disbelief, step out of that little pond you think is the ocean. Strange things happen all the time. Take a deep breath, and enjoy your fanfic.

The End

Ultimately a Mary Sue is a stereotype, and like all stereotypes it’s just a handy stick to beat people you don’t like, which is disappointing because some of the criticism has merit. Now though, Mary Sue has accumulated so many traits that there’s hardly any character out there that you cannot call one. And beware! A few even seem to have crossed over into non-fiction. :)

What's in a familiar face?

2011-04-22T20:24:00.002+05:30

I’ve been thinking about this deceptively obvious concept a lot lately, because it’s paradoxical. I’m sure everyone has had instances in his/her life where random people have come up to them and asked:

‘Are you <put name here>’s brother?’

Friends and acquaintances aren’t exempt from this behaviour – the question’s a little modified though.

‘Did I ever tell you that you look a hell of a lot like this person I knew?’

If everyone’s had this happen to them, and if the beholder beholds what the beholder beholds, why all the pondering then? Because I’m convinced that this happens to me more often than other people, and it does not make sense.

There’s no palatable (to me) way to put this but: I have a very prominent lower jaw, kind of a like a gibbon. (I maintain that it’s developmental, brought about by a thumb sucking habit that refused to go away, rather than an inherited trait, but well.) My lengthened jaw might not look out of place at all in a congregation of Africans, but here, it’s rather exotic. Therein lies the paradox.

If something’s different, why do more people find it familiar? I think I know why. If there’s a feature that’s overwhelmingly conspicuous, a feature that’s the first thing people notice about a face, the face will come to be defined by it. Think large, curved noses. Different kinds of faces may possess them: fat faces, thin faces, white faces, brown faces, pimply faces, bearded faces , it doesn’t matter. The moment you see a face with a large, curved nose you think of the last face you saw with a similarly large, curved nose and you go to the owner of the face and say:

‘You look a bit like this karate instructor I used to have. Are you a relative?’

That’s not so bad then.

Grief

2011-04-17T17:19:00.004+05:30

Part 1: The Nothing

So that’s that then. It has served me well, if not for long, like a beautiful woman. I spent most of last week in an indignant huff, and apparent well-wishers expounding on the five stages of grief only made things worse. (Yes, that’s a warning to you. I’m a professional kickboxer and there aren’t many things more kickable than your head.) Maybe this is only punishment for slacking out on one too many Mondays. (Sorry. I promise to be so conscientious from now on that it will border on masochism. There, I said it. Now can I have it back?)

Going late to work on Monday is easy to force my conscience into ignoring. But repeating the same sin on Tuesday is slightly less forgivable. Who knows? Maybe if I had left my house fifteen minutes early, it would not have happened? (Again I warn you. The next person who mentions ‘denial’ or ‘bargaining’ is going to not only lose his head but have it reattached backwards.) Well, it did and after a week’s worth of lamentation, I think I’ve made my peace.

It’s no biggie really, all that prologue-ing really gives the impression that I care too much, which I don’t, so I’ll stop. I lost my phone. To be precise, a-nimble-pickpocket-palmed-it-from-my-front-pocket-while-I-was-travelling-in-a-bus. Prepare to be gobsmacked, fellow Bangalorean bus travellers! For it happened in not just any bus, but in the bus of all buses – the Vajra. There’s nothing much to narrate here because (duh) I don’t know what happened, but I can give some context.

I got onto my regular bus, a high frequency air conditioned bus specially commissioned by BMTC for paunchy, sweaty software engineers, in my usual haze of solitude. Weirdly, because the time then was not on the right side of 10:30 AM, the bus was as crowded as a Lady Gaga concert. I barely got my backside in before I was nearly amputated by a lever attached to the sliding doors, which in its hurry to shut them decided to squish my right thigh.

My reserves of what-I-would-call propriety have dipped alarmingly in the recent past, neatly coinciding with my life as a bus traveller. I shouldered my way into the crowd and those whose propriety still hadn’t been burnt out of them (read: noobs) made way for me as I planted myself solidly in the middle of the concert crowd. Thinking back, that was probably when I first noticed something odd.

It didn’t matter though. My solitary bus journeys are spent in what is best described as a delirium. They’re as close as I can get to sensory deprivation without hallucinogens. Even in that state of mind, I noticed those poorly dressed, skinny Northie-types (excuse my lack of tact, but you know, I lost my bloody phone) who, with their paan-stained teeth, untucked shirts and French pencil moustaches were as out of place on the bus as Roshan Priyadarshi in a guys bathroom. I only barely noticed, mind you, because somebody in the aisle crowd decided to get down just then, and I used the opportunity to muscle my way into the infinitely more comfortable aisle area. That’s it.

That’s really it. There was lots of pushing and shoving going on, but if you think I can distinguish between pushing type A (both hands out, hip attached to nearby seat, head tilted up), pushing type B (hands inconspicuously placed behind back, shoulder leaning forwards, hip muscles working overtime) and pushing type C (one hand thrust, second hand in another’s pocket), you’re wrong. I really didn’t notice a sneaky hand groping my thigh. But, hold, that’s not it. There’s never a story which Lord Murphy does not like to pervert for his silly, childish pleasure, and this certainly was no exception.

I almost always plug in my earphones before I get on to the bus. Metal helps me hit the haze quicker, and I need to hit the haze because that’s the best way to enjoy three teaspoons of solitude. That time though, I didn’t do it. I’ve tried a thousand times over to capture what my state of mind was like then (in fact, if you kill me right now, I think you can use my -erm- analysis to reproduce my mind to the last molecule, to the extent that the first thing I would do would be to finish this blog post, or look for a cybertronic arm to do so) that I didn’t plug in the music, but all solutions lead to Murphy. If I had plugged myself in on my phone, nobody on Earth could have pocketed my phone without me noticing. Absence of metal lifts the haze in approximately 0.25 microseconds - plenty of time to chop a wandering hand off at the wrist.

The rest is well, predictable. It was when I eventually decided to listen to music that I noticed my strangely lighter left pocket. The incorrigible optimist that I am, I immediately assumed that a) it was probably in my bag, b) it was probably in the other pocket, c) oh no, it must have fallen down somewhere (not a disaster as I didn’t see any 120 kg dudes nearby), d) @#$%. I looked around and identified Smarmy Guy texting away on his swanky mobile phone ().

“Excuse me sir... I-think-I’ve-lost-my-phone-can-I-borrow-yours-for-a-minute-I-just-want-ring-it-and-see-if-it’s-fallen-down-here-somewhere-thanks!”

After a critical lookover which I apparently passed, Smarmy Guy typed out the number on his phone himself (no he didn’t hand it over. OK maybe I only partially passed. :/), and confirmed the worst. Switched off. And so I plunged into bottomless agony. Outwardly of course, my face became only blander than ever, prompting people around me (yes, my frenzy had alerted several of my ever-bored neighbours) to ask.

“It wasn’t an expensive phone, no?”

Some last shreds of dignity forced me to lie through my teeth. The effort made my usually awesome baritone voice gain several octaves, and I squeaked back that, yes it was only a cheap Nokia phone. A kind soul advised me to rush to the driver and ‘Stop the bus now!’; which I did so promptly, inspite of my grief induced lethargy, possibly because stopping the bus and checking everyone’s pockets was way cooler than just losing a mobile phone.

I told them. The conductor exchanged a significant look with the driver, who started off with the most ill-timed ‘I knew it!’ rant ever. Apparently, he had noticed this bunch of shady looking folks get in some time back. He had noticed how they had refused to move out of the standing space in the middle of the bus and move to the aisle, and how that made them even shadier. The slightly terser conductor simply nodded away, eyes politely downcast. Unfortunately, those shady looking folks (whom I was already convinced I had seen myself) had got down three stops ago, and there was nothing they could do. He added philosophically:

“It’s gone.”

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

Part 2: The Office

Office was agony, and I choose not to dwell on those painful moments when my colleagues amused themselves heartily at my expense. (Schadenfreude is a fad, I tell you.) I mean, how was it funny? It was just a straightforward pocket swipe. It wasn’t like I had been riding a motorbike when I had suddenly felt the urge to check out my handsome self in the rearview mirror, and had leant over, only for my brand new touchphone to fall out of my pocket and get squashed by a passing eighteen-wheeler. Now, that is lol-worthy. (And honest to Lord Murphy, true. A slightly more sympathetic colleague consoled me with that tale.) Most of what happened at work is better skipped, except for on little discussion on insurance.

“What? There’s. Such. A. Thing. Called. Insuring. Mobile. Phones?” incredulity forcing me into hyperventilation.

“Yes. It’s not easy to get, but it’s there. Wait, your phone wasn’t covered?”

And with that, the merriment resumed.

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

There's part 3, and naturally, it happens at the police station, but since I really need to get my backside off this chair and get some Sunday work done - until later.

Faith Talks

2011-04-05T10:34:00.003+05:30

There I was sitting in the coach of a train with two pretty young women, who just happened to be fresh college passouts bemoaning the complexities of a life in programming. No, I did not take up the improbably perfect cue to rush in and er, steal their hearts. I wrote this instead:

You see, I have my faith. You can insult me, torture me, verbally lash me ten thousand ways from a Venusian Sunday, drag me to an inch from death, but you cannot win. You just cannot, because you will only have won once I’m depleted and broken and I won’t be as long as I have my faith.

Faith is a funny little thing, friend. The more of it you take away, the more strength does it draw from its own absurdity, and the more of it there’s left. Faith’s a cheat code God wove into this silly little game called Life. You’re playing it right now. You’re probably doing well at it. You probably have a lot of faith in something: your ability to win, your ability not to lose, the Great One’s ability to cast you a light on the darkest of nights. Or, you’re in the dumps, tired, broken and ready to quit. Where’s your faith, friend? Faith’s a great sorter-out of things, believe me. Oh, but you already have it, and it makes no difference. You pray to a different stone God everyday but your boss still thinks you’re worthless? Your faith is not faith for faith brooks no impurity. You have sullied your faith, and you can no longer lay claim to its power.

Faith is a strange beast. It is the cause and it is the effect, and there is no contradiction. I’m mildly envious, my prisoner. I’m sure all victory is impossible without faith, isn’t it? For it is only the stirring hand of faith that takes a battle from the obscurity of perpetuity to the finality of war, and beyond to a fitting completion. But faith soothes the losers. It gives the defeated pride, for what is more remarkable, and consequently admirable, than someone who can hold on to his faith in spite of the gravest humiliation?

Yet, is it anything more than a pocketful of moonlight? It defines itself upon its own terms, and rejects rejection through acceptance. It never vanquishes a challenge, no; it absorbs it into itself. Is it infinitely capable? I don’t think so. I perceive that its own substance leaches away each time it broadens its own horizons. Faith is dying at the altar of Science, and Reason. This too it is not unaware of; faithfully does it assimilate Reason into its own self, stretching itself to smooth it away like a pocket of air, a mere trifling nothing like all the upstarts before. But it’s wrong; you’re wrong this time.

As time passes, greater are the parallels I see between my physical incarceration and the one of your mind, friend. Speakers for Reason, do you not voluntarily shackle the infinite capacity of your mind to pursue the myth of understanding? Yes, they’re shackles; you make them so. You have faith in the ability of your scientists to further the cause of Science. You have faith that the cause of Science can be furthered at all. You have faith that the Creator does not have a mean sense of humour. You’ve not banished faith; you’ve only moved it around, renaming things here and there, fooling yourselves otherwise.

Accomplished wordsmith you are, my prisoner. I’m not entirely unskilled at it, but perhaps I need to embrace a little bit of your absurdity to best you in this fight. Every metaphor that escapes the confines of your twisted mind, every syllable, everything you say is only going to strengthen my argument. Is not a man with the obstinacy of ten score donkeys, a man who sticks to his perversions in spite of every kind of recrimination, merely chock-full of faith? Is not a clouded conscience just another obstacle for faith to overcome? Is not every single evil that has been perpetrated over the centuries but one manifestation of one man’s faith in another’s wickedness?

Faith is inclusive. Judgment is not divisive only when it’s divine, and faith cannot pass it because it is of this world. Faith is the glue that binds our little world together. It is the lubricant for the many, many parts of the machine called civilization; it is always present, invisible but there, ready to be used but never forcing its hand. Do you not understand, my warden? Faith is passivity. In it lies its power. Faith is egalitarian. In it lies its power. Anyone can use it, and in any way he chooses. Merely the availability of that thing called faith is enough to keep the multitudes ticking. Misuse is a necessary corollary of power. Where does the blame lie?

You weaken your argument further, prisoner. Sure, a little bit of faith prods our pathetic world along. Just like a little bit of sunshine, a little bit of bovine flatulence, a little bit of faith in the uselessness of contraceptives. What exactly does faith bring to the table here that is unique and irreproducible? What is faith, exactly? Perhaps you will claim, no I’m certain that you will, that it is only the faithless that seek the definition of faith and by definition will not find it. You cower and hide within a vast expanse of nothingness, imagining, willing it through faith perhaps, that the nothingness is an illusion and is actually the vast dominion of faith.

Here I think we must end our jousting, friend. You’ve heard everything I have to say, and I’ve heard everything you have to say. We agree on every point that is made, and yet we disagree. I would reiterate, my warden, that you’re yet to find your faith. You’re lost, even more so because you’re convinced that you aren’t and that the rest of the world is. Is that not the absurdity that you despise?

You have a knack for saying things that are irrefutable, my prisoner. Then answer me this: What is faithlessness? If faith is all-inclusive, then it shouldn’t exist. If it isn’t and it does exist, faith’s work is already done, and always has been, making its own existence redundant. At first glance, an atheist would appear to be the epitome of faithlessness. But I see the weaknesses with that argument. An atheist, you would inevitably argue, has just as much faith as any local preacher, only it’s in the non-existence of God. He merely speaks a language most faithful do not understand. But faith embraces even the non-believer with open arms. You are right. I’ve heard everything you’ve to say and I’m not convinced. I’m perhaps convinced even more so than before that your own arguments serve to weaken your position. Shall we end this sparring and mark it down as a dull draw, for posterity to pass judgment?

Stereotypes

2011-03-28T22:40:00.001+05:30

Meh, that's a stereotypical good versus evil story.
Meh, that's a stereotypical good versus evil story where good wins over evil.
Meh, that's a stereotypical good versus evil story where good wins over evil in the end (and indeterminate things happen before).
Meh, that's a stereotypical good versus evil story where good wasn't always good and evil wasn't always evil, but they sort themselves out and good (who?) wins out in the end.
Meh, that's a stereotypical good versus evil story where some of the good guys go bad midway, and some of the bad guys see a bright, white light and cast off their sinful ways, and some others retire to their Swiss ranches, but good wins in the end.
Meh, that's a stereotypical good versus evil story where evil seems to be winning right up to the point where good does so, obviously.
Meh, that's a stereotypical good versus evil story where good beats the undead daylights out of evil right up to the point where everyone dies in screaming agony, and everyone else goes home sobbing.
Meh, that's a stereotypical good versus evil story where evil casts its evil eye over everything good, pretty and glowing until everything withers, dies and evil rules its kingdom of blackness.
Meh, that's a stereotypical good versus evil story where good appears evil, evil appears good, and the writer is award winning clueless, but one of the two wins in the end, thankfully.
Meh, that's a stereotypical story where stuff happens, and somebody or the other wins in the end, but wait, is that just sheer banality?
Meh, that's a stereotypical something where someone's doing something.
Meh, you are a stereotype, real flesh and blood human being; unexist yourself immediately!

Critics, find a nearby pond and drown yourselves. And don't worry, I'll personally ensure that the pond is not too stereotypical. Purple dye should be novel enough, eh? What'd you say? Drowning's too hackneyed? I'm fairly certain drowning in a purple pond isn't, but just to be on the safe side, you could take swimming lessons first.

PS: Nobody likes a Lorite, ye know? You probably do already. Read, watch and listen a little less then, will you?

Thoughts on the Avatar

2011-03-12T15:06:00.000+05:30

A little while ago, after I finished watching this series end to end for the second time, I wondered just what it was about the show that enchanted me no end. It’s a cartoon, and as a general rule I find cartoons entertaining, but that wasn’t it. Cartoons are fun and possibly the perfect relaxation after a hard day’s work, but cartoons aren’t supposed to make you brood and reflect and write introspective blog posts about them, are they? So, I decided to make a list.

What are the things I like about Avatar: the Last Airbender? (I had half hoped that I would be forced to go back and watch everything all over again just to make the list comprehensive, and that was half the motivation for making one. Why not? I don’t think I’ll become an incorrigible cynic overnight.) Adventure and humour are obvious plusses, and great starting points at that. If the adventure is grandiose and the humour subtle, and the two are not totally disjoint as a pair, they work even better and Avatar: TLA makes full use of this fact. However, they aren’t what make the show uniquely satisfying. As an unabashed cartoon enthusiast, I could recommend a dozen others that hit the very same sweet spot between proper adventure and proper humour, and yet not reach the same heights. How about a story with a well-defined destination that is not stretched to breaking point by the lure of popularity? That’s a check for Avatar: TLA, and surely the X-factor? I don’t think so, at least not the whole of it, not for me.

Perhaps it was the music. In the corroded metalhead (head) that I’ve been blessed with, there’s still a small part that’s a sucker for grand orchestra. It’s not a coincidence that the films that have made the strongest impressions on me in the past are the ones with the most expansive musical themes. LOTR and the early HP films immediately spring to mind, but this is true for every movie out there. Even the dullest of legal dramas has the potential to transform into a heart-warming epic saga with the touch of a few well-directed orchestral notes. Anyway, the point is that Avatar has a cracking musical theme. Simplicity of tune and complexity of delivery are what make orchestral themes work, and are what make them memorable, often to outlast any specific memories from the parent movies themselves. Surely that’s it then? A few epic, climactic orchestral crescendos and I’m sobbing like a baby, is it? I’ll courageously not deny that statement, but again, it’s not the explanation in itself, because like I said, it would work for any medium. You note the generalization, but don’t accept it perhaps. Surely, it’s the unique awesomeness of Avatar TLA’s music that makes it stand apart from the pretenders, and cut a way into my heart? I apologize for sounding like a parrot with a vocabulary of hundred, but I must repeat myself: it is part of the answer but not all of it, and possibly not even most of it.

Was it the usual story of the fight against the odds perhaps? I say ‘usual’ disparagingly, but it’s far from a clichéd theme for me. I don’t think one can, and one certainly ought not to, tire of tales of desperate men fighting against vastly stronger powers – elemental or otherwise – driven by the need for survival, both of their own kind, and more importantly, their ideals. A tiny group of little children battling against a seemingly irrepressible all-conquering army? Surely, that epitomizes any stereotype of the fight against all odds, and consequently lifts Avatar: TLA to cartoon greatness? It’s still not good enough for me, because every adventure story has elements of this theme. In fact, all adventure draws its charm from the age-old idea of the struggle against nature, the most powerful force of all.

I’m sure you’ll agree that the written word is a delightful mistress, and I tend to take a long time to get anywhere with her around. But it is now time to discuss the secret ingredient. The list grew larger and larger as more and more happy memories from my Avatar watching sessions composed themselves into bullet points, and I realized that they all shared a common theme. Philosophy. (Sorry about the attention-grabbing one word truncated sentence that says a lot without saying anything, but it’s perfect here).

Avatar: TLA is perhaps best described as a parable, with bits of fable thrown in. It is preachy, and I understand that for people out there who liked it without caring much for its lessons, it will always be good, but never great. They’ll still adore the adventure, the humour, the music and everything outside of its philosophy, but those things won’t be enough to make it outstanding in their minds. For me, though, every lesson that came my way resonated deeply, and that was what made the story it told memorable beyond its happy facade. What the bloody heck am I talking about? Maybe I’m only retrospectively seeing philosophy in what was just a veg-out fun trip when I actually watched it, right? I don’t think I captured all the points I’m going to make later the first time I watched Avatar: TLA, but I’m pretty sure there were instances during the second iteration when each of them appeared fully formed in my head. You’ll have to take my word for it.

Avatar: TLA is an unending paean for peace. This fact is never lost upon you, even when you’re smack in the middle of the fiercest of bender-clashes. The Avatar is born in the Air Nomads, a great society that has achieved peace with itself and with the external world, and has inherited much of their collective wisdom. The show repeatedly reiterates that no amount of luxury born of conflict is a substitute for the simple satisfaction that can only be found in lasting peace.

Avatar: TLA is a plea for tolerance. People in the universe of Avatar are more unequal than any in our world; there are people with vastly different elemental powers which make them nearly as disparate as beings from different species, and they live side by side with perfectly ordinary people with no superpowers. Avatar: TLA makes a poignant plea for equality in spite of all differences. It argues that no amount of societal differences is enough to choose the path of conflict. It is only a cartoon, but the lesson is humbling.

Avatar: TLA hammers in the point that all life is sacred till it’s wedged in tighter than a moth in amber. The Air Nomads are vegetarians for they cannot bear to hurt the littlest creature that walks the Earth, and inevitably, so is the Avatar. But it doesn’t preach this point unequivocally, and I’ll get to that point later. More importantly, it places an unattainable price on any human being’s life, shown by the Avatar’s final rejection of mortal punishment. It emphasizes that there’s always a way out, a second path of non-violence that avoids loss of life, that’s closely woven together with the need for peace.

What I personally thought was a great touch was the implicit plea for animal welfare. A personal grouse of mine, animal welfare does not even come close to enjoying the same status of ‘nobility’ as the other philosophies I talked about. I thoroughly enjoyed Avatar: TLA’s take on it. Appa, the Avatar’s flying bison, and Momo, the flying lemur are treated as equals, beings that are capable of suffering and whose limits must be respected – the fundamental premise of all animal welfare.

Another deep-lying moral in Avatar: TLA concerns the issue of destiny. It ultimately rejects it, despite initial indications to the contrary, and marks it as an excuse for stubbornness, the easy way out for people who don’t want to think about the consequences of their actions. And as a corollary it strongly espouses second chances. If you think your destiny is to stay as a complete git, you really cannot change, can you? I can’t emphasize how much I hold the ‘it’s my destiny’ or even the more palatable variants ‘it’s in my blood’, ‘it’s my nature’ in contempt. There are inequalities but not merely two of them, good and evil. There are infinitely many of them, and even with worst handicap you can still drag yourself over to the right half of the line.

Last, and an extension of what I just said, is the notion of ambiguity. The word no longer sounds even slightly complimentary, but ambiguity is not all bad. In many cases, as Avatar: TLA says, it’s wiser to accept that there are different ways of doing things, than to strive for the ‘one’ right way. (Perhaps, ‘balance’ is a more palatable word here.) Vegetarianism, which I brought up earlier, falls under this grey zone and Avatar: TLA is big enough to accept that every action is not clearly marked out on an ethical roadmap. However, turning this belief around and applying ambiguity to every action there is, is half the reason why the world is such a mess today. There are fundamental tenets which are superior to everything else, and there are lines which must unambiguously never be crossed. Peace is axiomatically better than war, and a life is always sacred whether it is in the context of war or terrorism.

Ultimately the fact that Avatar: TLA takes itself just enough seriously to not be instantly forgotten, but not so much that it ends up wallowing in its own pretentiousness (most ‘adult’ parables inevitably end up in this state) is what makes it tick. Its philosophy is not flawless however. The unresolved question of whether a perfect democracy is better than a monarchy fronted by a perfectly good ruler is left untouched. What if the Avatar turns out to be a selfish megalomaniac, and uses his almost limitless power to carve himself a vast dominion in the world? Again, it strikes the appropriate balance between knowledge and ignorance. I really hope the next instalment (see this, if you have no idea what I’m talking about) lives up to the high standards of its predecessor.

(On a concluding sidenote, all those Indianisms that litter the series from start to finish do nothing to detract from its awesomeness. An Earth King called ‘Bhoomi’, a sky bison called ‘Appa’, talk of Chakras, and the concept of the Avatar itself? Delightful, for all us insiders.)

Grammar Nazis Don't Like Women

2011-01-22T13:35:00.006+05:30

Everyone who has read more than the odd science textbook is certain to have his very own poor grammar detection system. It’s like Spider-Sense in many ways, except that it’s far more intrusive and irritating, and of dubious usefulness too. It creeps into your psyche to the point where you want to run off with your swords and ,er, pens (they’re mightier, remember?) and impale the offenders under Shakespeare’s statue. If that’s too fanciful for your average grammar Nazi, it’ll at least corrupt your deliberately ignored prejudice circuits so that one misplaced semi-colon’ll transform your mental image of the author completely – from that of a suave, cool, smart, distinguished middle aged gentleman to that of a blithering village idiot.

But I’m not a grammar Nazi. What’s in your mind is just in your mind, and I don’t follow up on my instincts and go and troll a poorly written article’s comment pages. I’m also aware that if I slip up and do that, just once, I’ll be chopped into pieces by the nearest formatting Nazi around and fed to possessed typesetters. It’s only recently that I’ve learnt to resist the temptation to blast my readers with giant Walls of Text, and break my posts into palatably small paragraphs.

Having adequately asserted my middle-path grammar Nazism, I’ll return to the discussion on Bad-Grammar-Sense^tm. Like all sneaky little bullies, it has its own authority figures whom it holds in utter reverence, and it doesn’t take rejection from them very well. If it spots a grammatical blooper in an article by someone it holds to be inferior, it whoops in joy and gloats in the satisfaction of making the world a slightly more readable, and ergo a better a place. But what if someone it believes to be the epitome of good writing hits it with what appears to be poor grammar? And to aggravate things, what if everyone around starts to do the same thing? The poor little thing finally discovers some self-consciousness and goes off to cry in a corner.

The first twinge came, inevitably, through a Facebook application. Facebook applications cannot pick up the genders of the people using them, because default privacy settings don’t let them. So how does an app called What does your crush think about you? say Sonya thinks she’s in love with you? when it neither knows your sex nor your orientation? It improvises and says instead, Sonya thinks they’re in love with you.

If that didn’t overload your bad grammar detection system with sheer cringeworthiness, you are lucky. Apparently so many grammarians have railed against this phenomenon, that there’s even a Wikipedia article on it. The Facebook app event was only a twinge, however, because Facebook apps aren’t particularly well known for being grammatically sound. It was when I started thinking through all occurrences of the singular they that I (or the part of me that the grammar Nazi had annexed) discovered something. It was everywhere.

Think about sentences that use everyone for instance. I think there are at least four in this blog post itself –so there’s no question of it being too arcane a term for discussion. Everyone is a term used when generalizing about a group of people, but as applied to a hypothetical single person, like the variable x in predicate logic. It’s a placeholder for a reference to a person independent of race, nationality, religion or sex, but today it simply cannot be used at all without contradictions. It’s no fault of the word itself – it’s sufficiently generic – the blame lies entirely with English’s inadequate set of pronouns.

You can either say his or you can say her but how do you stay faithful to your gender agnosticism? You can’t. Back in the good old days when women were chained to kitchen platforms in case they decided to trot off to work, you could get away with saying

Everyone likes to think he is happy.

with the he as an acceptable placeholder for a person of any gender. Not any more, in the world of aggressive gender equality that is today. He has got back its lost aura of masculinity and the modern mind refuses to accept it as ever referring to a woman without condescension. What’s the alternative then?

Everyone likes to think he or she is happy.

Fortunately, people quickly realized how supremely awkward this form sounded and dropped it soon enough. Some went back to the old system of using male descriptors exclusively, with lengthy disclaimers calling it purely a formatting convenience, no discrimination intended. Others found an alternative.

Everyone likes to think they are happy.

This form was acceptable in every way – the only group of people who it offended were the grammar Nazis, and that was a bonus. It slowly pervaded mass literature and through sheer pressure of ubiquity seeped into elite publications too. It unavoidably impinged on the consciousness of grammar scholars, and they reacted in one of two ways. Some of them predictably ranted and raved against the dilution of a noble language, and called for the heads of all practitioners of this sacrilegious form. A few however took it surprisingly well – they understood the limitations of the language – and even went on to become crusaders for its mainstream acceptance. Slowly, the ‘singular they’ spread through the English writing world until newer generations of grammar Nazis started to add involuntary exceptions in their own firewalls. Until Facebook, of course, when it all came crashing down.

My Pretty Little Problem

2011-01-08T18:35:00.003+05:30

After I published this, Binit pointed out that the chart represented the pinnacle of self-consciousness. You’re so self-conscious that you can’t think without second guessing your intentions. I pondered over this for a little while before I found myself saying aye – the great man was right as usual. A couple of months before the thoughtomaton chart, I had written this, and it suddenly became apparent to me as I recalled that piece that self-consciousness was just another manifestation of approval addiction. No, they aren’t interchangeable terms, because a desire for approval has a much wider range of symptoms – for instance, approval junkies often display an associated desire for other people to conform, be approval junkies themselves. (Of course, give such people guns and/or the sanction of religion and you've got yourself a mighty good explanation for today's problems.)

A little bit more analysis, and I found myself recanting my earlier assertion partially, because self-consciousness is not driven solely by approval addiction. A hazy term called perfectionism drifted uninvited into my mind, from a school memory of a teacher’s testimonial. (Abhinav’s a perfectionist.) Seeking perfection can make you self-conscious too, and as perfectionism exists only in your mind, it’s probably a healthier driver for self-consciousness. But is perfectionism itself driven by approval addiction? (Endless cobwebs face me how many ever I hack and slash, or is it that there’s only one and I’m turning on the spot?) Possibly, for a desire for approval, rooted in the basest of humanity’s psychic mechanisms shows its hand everywhere. But, not necessarily. I believe, or at any rate I would like to believe, that an isolated desire for perfection – a knowledge that there exists better and I can achieve it - is possible and is a satisfactory answer for the question of existence.

Self-consciousness, whether driven by approval addiction or by perfectionism, is not always bad. Isn’t it a societal definition of propriety that stops a majority of us from baring our midriff and gyrating maniacally every time we hear ‘Sheila Ki Jawani’? (Sidenote: That example strongly begs the question as to why it’s wrong in the first place. A very valid question for which I refuse to accept that there’s an axiomatic ethical explanation, but please accept for the moment that it’s merely a metaphor for self-consciousness/personal propriety being a necessary cornerstone for civilization itself.) Writing – as I’ve said in the approval junkie post - needs a fairly strong dose of self-consciousness. Not so much that you don’t publish your post after composing a 5000 worder, or worse, not so much that you don’t write at all, but enough to not post mindless drivel twenty times a day. (Sidenote: I’ve noticed a surprising vein of opinion that holds that publishing ill-formed, grammatically egregious, poorly spelt life lessons is somehow less cold and more familiar, and consequently more appealing, than a similarly informative but well written piece. Needless to say, I disagree.)

Philosophy is probably the only discipline founded in science where being self-conscious is not totally unacceptable, as I disparage gently in the thoughtomaton chart. Philosophy is big enough and broad enough to accept lines of inquiry originating from intellectual insecurity. Everywhere else, rightly, it’s just a waste of time and ability.

When you move away from intellectual self-consciousness and into the domain of the purely physical, it’s even harder to find any uses for self-consciousness. Take the example of guitaring for example. Muscle memory and self-consciousness simply do not mix. In fact they loathe each other so much that the moment you find yourself becoming even slightly aware of the beauty of your fingers’ dance, they shut up shop and go back to being the tree branch claspers they were always meant to be. Bye, bye, laboriously learnt riff.

It occurred to me as I mused over ways to rid myself of this debilitating affliction, that self-consciousness belongs to that unique class of problems that go away if you simply refuse to acknowledge their existence. Politicians have, since time immemorial, tried to pigeonhole their problems into this category, and that is probably why we’ve to work hard to convince ourselves that any such even exist. Think about it though: the more time you spend ruminating over self-consciousness, the more time you’re spending aggravating the problem. Yes, you’re two levels removed from the ordinary definition of self-consciousness, but self-consciousness it undeniably is. And so I’ve got myself a pretty little problem I can never solve, as I can never unacknowledge the fact that it's there.

Messiah Complex

2011-01-06T23:49:00.000+05:30

Is there any better way to start off one’s day than by playing saviour to a horde of people in desperate need? Every day I see these pockets of terrified office goers cowering in corners, seeking others of their ilk, like – excuse my arbitrary metaphors – a handful of BITSians facing a Viking army. All the while, their eyes rove restlessly, trying to pick out their Messiah in the corporate uniformity that surrounds them; The One who will put an end to their helpless suffering. That’s where I step in.

I take one look at my watch and contort my face into mock shock at the lateness of the hour. Immediately, and in response, I step forward into the mire, heedless of the untold dangers that beset my path. The roving eyes settle on me hopefully, and the feet attached to the roving eyes take cautious steps behind me. I suddenly stop, as if struck by a soundless bolt of lightning, and the tentative followers are no longer tentative: they scamper back to safer ground, corporate propriety be damned. The Messiah (me) laughs inwardly, for what good is a Hero without a sense of humour? Everyone needs job satisfaction after all.

I plunge back into the ravenous beast’s gullet, steely determination knitting my brow, and this time there’s no going back. The sheeple trail a couple of steps behind, hesitant again, but this time with their fear mixed with doubt, because they aren’t sure if I’m helping or merely – excuse my arbitrary puns - pulling their leg.

Fearlessly I dodge the minions of Death Himself, manifested as variously coloured, sleekly geometric monsters as they hurtle harmlessly past. In the process, I seem to grow and transform into an impenetrable bulwark against harm for my puny followers. I raise one apparently innocuous hand in the direction of one monster that has made the grave mistake of falling into a collision course with my unstoppable march. This one is dirty, and huge. It’s several times larger than me in fact. But I’m the Messiah, and there’s no force in this hellish microcosm that can impede me. The minion almost trips over itself trying to stop in time to let me, and my band, pass.

There is an opposite bank to this river of fiends, and it’s in sight now. Ungratefulness is but a tiny little subset of opportunism, and all sheeple are bestowed with ample amounts of the latter. They skip ahead of the Saviour – the disrespectful wretches – but equanimity is a job hazard, and my face smoothes itself into an almost eerie serenity. It’s just a day’s work after all, helping people cross the perpetually traffic choked road to the EGL office.

New Year Resolution

2011-01-05T23:51:00.001+05:30

If I am to be totally honest with you, I’ll have to admit a couple of things. One, that this is not a post about a cheery forget-me-in-a-week list of resolutions and two, that I had completely forgotten about our favourite New Year’s Day tradition until a couple of days afterwards. In fact, while the rest of the world was busy salivating over the birth of another diseased year, the overwhelming love and joy in the air manifesting itself in clamorous commercialism, I was busy catching up on spare sleep. The story, as I regaled anyone who cared to listen the day I got back to work, was that, having faithfully stayed awake till 11:45 in the night, I was struck by a passing gust of soporific wind and swept into instantaneous sleep. Irony must flow in my veins, because I woke up half an hour after midnight.

It was only when I dragged myself to work on a lazy Monday morning, and stared bleary-eyed at an article on Y!’s internal communication website that I had partially helped draft, that the thought sowed itself back into my head. My grogginess was quickly dispelled after a couple of lines of ‘What Campus Hires of 2010 want to do (or don’t) in 2011’ – mortification has a way of doing that. I picked out my name in one of the middle paragraphs, and, sinking into the stupor you sink into when you recall doing something but can’t recall why, read my comment about hoping that 2011 has something better in store in matters of electronics and the heart.

The article by itself might not have had any effects beyond a mental retch or two, but a little while later I found myself reading Sharkey’s nice piece on change, and the combination of the two pushed my unwilling brain into the pleasantly optimistic, vaguely naive state that precedes resolution-making. It didn’t end there, however. That happy state of mind was smoothly absorbed by the background flux of solitude-induced depression that I always seem to carry some amount of, but which had peaked then after the Christmas break, and the result was a polluted, bastard child of the resolution-making process.

Many times I get the strongest conviction that I don’t really know anyone, and can’t be bothered to. This isn’t some egotistical/narcissistic mechanism where one won’t think of others, because that’ll mean taking one’s mind off oneself. It’s simply an indifference towards the need to make human connections. When this chain of thought first formed itself in my mind, I immediately felt the need to explain myself to the doubting half of my head. Of course I knew what my best friends were doing, of course I knew how they were doing and of course I knew what was happening in their day to day life.

A moment’s reflection cut through that delusion. I only had a vague idea of what my closest friends were doing, and I really had no idea what some of my acquaintances were doing at all. The painful part was that I was – at some subliminal level – aware of my indifference, and had made efforts in the past to remedy it by asking. I had heard, and I had forgotten. Instead, I find that my mind is perennially occupied with the irrelevant musings that populate this blog - some semi/pseudo scientific claptrap, and some pretentious philosophizing that would make Bertrand Russell turn in his grave, and some impersonal, meaningless mental juggling that doesn’t really impact anyone or anything. I understood my own state of moroseness enough to see that this argument, behind sheer laziness, is the biggest reason why people love dramas over science documentaries, for instance. For most people, the effort required to sustain relationships is more satisfying than some intellectual shadow sparring.

At that point, I made a resolution of sorts. I will make an effort first, and if I still find that connecting with people is too painful, I can go back to being the indifferent brain-in-a-vat anytime. This blog will see more personal chronicles (there’s an Oasis chronicle which has been on the backburner for a couple of months, after 2000 frenzied words which haven’t got me beyond the Delhi airport yet), and I won’t hate instant messaging like a warty plague.

It occurred to me, a couple of days after my temporary bout of self-loathing passed, that my five hundred word resolution could be distilled down to one crisp sentence. I will log into google talk more often.

The Incident On The Bus

2010-12-26T21:17:00.000+05:30

I still maintain that it was just another bus ride. Although, scratching around for excuses in light of the events that followed, I concluded that there was a first I could attach. It was the first ever time I had travelled on a bus. From Brigade Road. Alone. In a green Big 10. Not terribly convincing is it? Right then, it must be Fate and Her indigestion issues again.

It had been a fruitful Saturday morning. Not only did I get to meet some old school friends, but I got to watch a visually orgasmic ‘Tron: Legacy’ at the same time. Ah, the light cycles, the discs, the Grid, the pocket fighter jets and Quorra; I can ramble on for a bit like this, but obviously this is not the event. Only halfway through a lazy Saturday at the end of the cheapest 3D experience one can get in Bangalore, we asked ourselves –

‘Why not make a good day even better?’

So, we found ourselves sitting in a mildly alcoholic smelling corner of this restaurant called Three Quarters Chinese. Though the excellent food justified it ultimately, we found our own choice perplexing initially as we quickly discovered that none of us really liked Chinese food. How were we to make amends for our hastiness? Why, by making a unanimous decision on where to have dessert of course.

Mama Mia, it was. We noticed belatedly that it was a bit of a ‘healthy’ eating place – every ice cream counter was plastered with helpful signs like ‘96% Fat Free’ and ‘You can eat 20 scoops of this and still look like Kate Moss!’ However, we’d already settled down with our ice cream cups (After Eight for me) and more importantly, we’d had our attention drawn to a shiny new – unmanned – Foosball table in the corner. So, we spent a good hour showing off our skills at the table for the ladies. No, seriously. There were a bunch of girls laughing their tinkling peals of laughter standing by the side, but it might have been a case of laughing at us than with us. Sigh. Anyway, with our stomachs full to bursting point and our hearts glad, we went our separate ways. A short uneventful journey later, I found myself home and plopped in front of a TV watching ‘Beverly Hills Chihuahua’. The End.

Well, not quite. If that had been the case, you would be seeing a blog post a day on the flavour of toothpaste I use to brush my teeth. We did go our separate ways – Advaith and Aditya went off to catch an autorickshaw, and I went looking for Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood PC. Wait, was that the spark that ignited a raging wildfire? Was that the mote of dust that upset the delicate churnings of Chance’s gizzard? Maybe, but you can’t really fault me there, can you? It’s only Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, you know! I didn’t find it though.

There’s a point where Brigade Road sharply changes. Where the short stretch of supermetropolitanism with its fashionable women, emo kids, swanky cars and counterfeit watch sellers trying to hawk their wares speaking a charmingly affected English ends and the robotic routine of the real Bangalore with its indifferent crowds and colourful bustle begins. That’s where I got onto a bus. A Green Big10 that would take me to within a kilometre of my house.

I can’t really remember the exact instant when I noticed him. Obviously, I can’t then tell you when he boarded the bus. Perhaps he got on at the same place I did. Maybe he took a while to notice the suggestive look in my eye and make his way over to give one of his own. I’m not sure but when a middle aged Muslim gentleman with a healthy paunch drapes himself all over your shoulder, you cannot help but notice eventually.

First, I passed if off as the crowded bus syndrome. Let me clarify that distasteful concept a little. I had, some time before, observed remarkable similarities between an overflowing bus and a mosh pit. People change - dramatically - from their usual touchy selves where they maintain a foot wide bubble of personal space and shrink away violently at the merest hint of trespass to near about the exact opposite, when put on a crowded bus. Just like in a mosh pit, they push and shove for no reason and take no offence when someone bigger and better comes along and does the same thing to them. They paste a vaguely doped glassy look on their faces and deep into their eyes, just like in a mosh pit but without the hallucinogens, roll their sleeves up and make a straight line dash for that last empty seat. I should love that right? Being the unabashed metalhead that I am? Where’s the metal, man, where’s the metal? Without it, I don’t just want a foot of personal space, I want two.

It quickly became apparent to me that this was more than that. There are lines of propriety, good people on a crowded bus, even for you, and this man was crossing them with gay abandon. I decided to fight back. Pretending to pick up something up from the floor, I bent down for an instant, and when I came back up I sat a little more slouched than before. Using every inch of muscle in my shoulders, and the bones too if that can be done, I squared my shoulders with a sharp jerk.

The idea, of course, was that with that act I would drive a painful wedge into the persistent paunch, and hopefully get rid of it for good. It didn’t work and in the middle of the bout of helpless frustration that ensued, I realized one thing. That man had the paunch. Historically speaking, I have spent roughly twice as much time being a chubby, paunchy fat kid than the emaciated coder-nerd of college. So, I should know a bit about perfectly reflective stomachs. Yes, there comes a point in any path to obesity when your paunch achieves the optimum level of restitution. It drapes over the waist just right: it achieves just the right amount of flexibility to not jiggle around embarrassingly in moments of activity, to not – on the other end of the spectrum – be so hard as to give off a mortifying impression that it belongs to a bodybuilder: it becomes the shield of all shields. Throw a punch at it, and it will roll it around mockingly and throw it right back at you with twice the force. Worse, it acquires the consistency of the stickiest glue, with disastrous results as you’ll see.

What did that mean in the context of my shoulder charge? One, that my shoulders hurt a fair bit from the effort, and two, that I was now wedged in a rigid Yoga guru posture with no hope of going back to a more comfortable slump. The paunch had oozed around my shoulders to occupy the recently vacated space. I decided to take a look up at my relentless persecutor.

I found myself looking into a heavily lined, ruddy face adorned on top with the orthodox Muslim’s cap. His cheeks were covered with thick, poisonous looking copper coloured hair. There was no moustache. It wasn’t a pleasant sight. The man looked down at me - this might be retrospection colouring my account - but I could have sworn I detected a note of glee in that face of bland evil. I looked away quickly before - the horrors - he might develop an inclination to start chatting.

I spent the next ten minutes pointedly staring out of the window, in the process making the guy occupying the window seat uncomfortable. In a futile attempt to take my mind off thoughts that involved me being sold off as a camel dung cleaner to some rich Arab, I thought about the giant tub of After Eight ice cream that lay near my feet. I forcefully wondered how long it would last without melting and if my grandmother would like the minty taste. It was supposed to be fat free, right? Perhaps even my mother, who was on a diet, could enjoy a bit of it. Something broke my laboriously constructed chain of thought. He was saying something!

I pretended to not hear and ignored him until the insistent tone in his voice became too much to bear. When I looked up however, I still couldn’t hear a thing he was saying, because my brain temporarily shut down from the stench. Even the memory’s enough to make me gag. As an unenviable collection of nicotine (and whatever the hell else) stained teeth induced in me a strong urge to shut my eyes tightly, at the same time a powerful whiff of what smelt like stale dead fish rotting for a month mixed with fermented garbage juice seeping from a year old corpse, assailed my stunned nostrils.

‘What?’

‘Time?’ he said, pointing at my watch, and tapping his wrist for emphasis.

‘Five o’ clock.’ The expression didn’t change. ‘Paanch.’ I clarified with finality.

Incredibly, that snippet of conversation did bring me some respite. For about ten minutes, because then everything became a whole lot worse. The dude in the window seat decided to get off! My petrified brain failed for the second time in quick succession and instead of coming up with a brilliant on-the-spur plan to make a quick getaway, I limply moved over to the window seat. The man took the aisle seat. As my brain slowly recovered from the shock of proximity, I brought out all the tricks in my manual on ‘How to make it patently clear that you are not to be disturbed?’

I held my head in my hands and rocked back and forth as if in the throes of a painful headache. Chronic migraine, if he were to ask, but if I were to give that reply then obviously all was already lost. I narrowed my eyes to soporific slits, and stretched and yawned as best as I could in the cramped space without touching anything. I opened my cool touch screen phone and stared importantly at the wallpaper for a minute. I checked my watch repeatedly; I synchronized it with the phone stares to hopefully let everyone know that I was late for a meeting, and fretting about it.

Maybe it worked for a bit. It was, by definition, a stop gap solution and stop gap solutions cannot, beyond a point, well, stop gaps.

‘Where are you headed?’ he said slowly.

I knew my tinnitus act was getting a bit trite, but I decided to employ it one last time, and ignored him. The voice did not rise a jot, but the insistent tone returned and despite myself, I turned my head towards him slowly. The metaphor that popped into my head at that point was that of a condemned man’s walk to the electric chair. A laboured sort of slow, world-weary and inevitable as a baby’s bawl. Why, you with the poor short term memory, wonder. Did I mention the stench? I think I was as close as I could get without slipping into a dead faint.

‘Er, Silk Board.’

‘Where’s your house?’

‘Er, near Silk Board.’ My house was in fact a couple of kilometres from Silk Board, but I had decided that the time for evasiveness was past and the need of the hour was for some aggressive falsehoods.

‘Really?’ he asked with as much surprise his inflection-free voice could generate. ‘I live there too. Which road?’

I resisted the temptation to bash my skull against the grilled window and die in screaming agony. Why oh why did I have to pick Silk Board of all the places in south Bangalore? Banashankari. I could have said Banashankari and he would immediately have understood that I was using Silk Board as merely a transit point, and maybe the conversation would have shortened itself a tetchy little.

‘27th Main.’ I replied randomly.

‘Were you with your friends?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sunday’s a holiday for you?’

‘Yes’. What I really wanted to say was ‘Sunday isn’t a holiday for which space aliens?’ but I was restricted by my limited Hindi speaking skills.

‘So, are you in school or college?’

‘College.’

‘First year or second year?’

‘Fourth year.’ An involuntary snicker made its way into that statement.

He lapsed into an unpromising silence. I dared a glance at his profile: his unblinking serpentine eyes were busy boring a hole in the front seat. I sensed respite and allowed my thoughts to drift towards home and my dogs who would be eagerly awaiting my return. A leathery paw slithered quietly through the air and landed on my left thigh.

An involuntary shudder rippled through my body. You can’t really blame me for that, can you? I was flabbergasted. This time, my brain didn’t shut down in protest, it went into overdrive churning out explanations for this latest outrage. The first and the most obvious one concerned repressed homosexuality. Here was a man, who by all appearances was a faithful follower of a religion that hangs men for *liking* other men, with his hand on my thigh and squeezing it menacingly. The next thing he said immediately suggested another explanation.

‘We have a hotel in that area.’

‘OK.’

‘You should come tomorrow.’

‘Er...’

‘You said you were free right?’ in a monotone that lacked the slightest hint of a plea.

‘Not really. Tomorrow’s not a holiday for me. Besides, I have other plans.’

The second explanation, of course, was that this was some kind of scouting mission for human suicide bombers. I have, many times in my life in post-college Bangalore, been asked if I was a Muslim. Obviously, people who didn’t get metal fashion mistook my chin beard for religious symbolism. If I were to make the mistake of being seen anywhere near the hotel I would probably not be heard of again until someone in Palestine got splotches of me on his shirt, and that shirt accidentally ended up in a DNA laboratory cross-referenced with my blog.

‘Here, take my number. Call before you come.’

‘I don’t have a pen.’ I said lamely, fully aware that I could just as easily type out his number on my cell phone. Thankfully, the thought did not occur to him.

‘Give me your number then.’

‘Er, all right.’ I made no move to say or do anything. The groping hand continued its explorations and discovered my left hand, which was immediately locked into a loose grip.

‘Nice watch.’ He intoned neutrally, pointing at my shiny wrist watch. ‘How much did you pay for it?’

‘About 1000 bucks.’ I undervalued it about seven times, but still I wondered if I quoted too much, because the man immediately smiled a little. The stench impinged itself, unsubtly yet again, on my consciousness. He said nothing and looking out through the window I noticed that I was then only two traffic signals and three bus stops away from my destination. I resolved to get down a stop early.

As I’m writing this blog right now, obviously I’m safe, sound and undefiled, if slightly sheepish at my apparent sensationalism; but when the man (who’d claimed earlier that he lived near Silk Board) followed me to the door as I prepared to get off at the wrong stop, I feared the worst. A misplaced sense of confidence born out of four inches in height advantage and four months of gymming evaporated in an instant. I leapt off the still moving bus as soon as the doors opened and, mentally ascribing every condition on Earth that slows down a man’s pace to him – arthritis, allergies, old age, stupidity, I shot off at top speed towards the my bus stop, not once looking back. I don't think I took a breath for half a kilometre - I only relented after I got onto the second bus and confirmed that he wasn't on it by some devilish miracle and he wasn't running after it like a film hero trying to catch up. Whew.

(B)east of the Web!

2010-12-21T22:11:00.003+05:30

To answer your question, occasionally dear Facebook, Multieight’s what’s on my mind. I vividly recall a similar word shuffling game we used to play on the same site – there we had to make as many sensible words as we could from a single eight letter word, just as in Multieight; only we weren’t taking on other people while we were doing it. There would be a bunch of us playing the game together – first there would be me hunched over the keyboard hitting any key I could reach. There would be some people shouting out whatever words they could pick out, and there would be some other people shouting back that those words were already taken. And then there would be some surprised onlookers wondering what the fuss was all about.

That game was (and is) simply called ‘Eight Letters’ – obviously the creators of these games are not big fans of creative nomenclature – and as it wasn’t broken down into 10-round matches, each session would easily drag on for an hour or more. Plenty of feverish effort later, we would mess up Level 50 and end the game; we would be sad for a bit, console ourselves, pat each other on the back, and we would start all over again.

Fun times, but as I found out when the itch for the shuffle began to gnaw at me again recently, ‘Eight Letters’ is not really cut out for solo brain-recharge sessions. Multieight is though – each match lasts for 15 minutes, and I’ve observed that the effort required to beat other good players over the 10 one minute rounds will necessarily drive your sleep away. The perfect corporate freshen upper then? Well, not if you play five matches back to back.You'll then be too fresh to get back to work.

I’m three weeks and about fifty matches old now, and fairly good at the game, so the time is ripe to share some observations. (One note here though: if you still haven’t played the game, go play about twenty rounds, and then come back here!) Of course some of these things are not only self-evident, but also known to me from my ‘Eight Letters’ days. Like the fact that as soon as you type in a word, you have to, with minimum delay, type all of that word’s anagrams immediately. Easier said than done, but you can, as I did, start with four letter words. As soon as you see ‘tire’, you have to, almost reflexively, type in ‘rite’ and ‘tier’ afterwards. As you get better at this, you’ll even stop allocating brain cycles to this anagramming step. As soon as you see ‘tire’, you’ll start looking for other words, while your fingers drum out the known list of anagrams almost unconsciously. You can then move on to auto-anagramming five letter and even six letter words.

In Multieight, auto-anagramming has another positive side effect. As you type out a word, the letters that comprise it rise up graphically from wherever they are in the full eight letter sequence at that moment, and the remaining letters are moved forward to form an unbroken unit. After the word is submitted, the used letters are appended back as a single unit at the end of the unused letter sequence. What does all that mean? Every time you submit a valid word, you are shuffling your eight letter set! Shuffling always helps because you are giving yourself a better chance of netting bigger words, perhaps even the full eight letter word.

There’s another thing that you should learn to do reflexively, and that one’s probably easier than auto-anagramming. If there’s any eight letter set that has an S in it, you will have a bunch of words whose plurals can also be submitted. If you punch in ‘tire’ for example, and there’s an ‘s’ somewhere in the set, you should immediately enter ‘tires’ too. In fact, you should probably be working with 5 letter anagrams constructed from ‘tires’, but simply pluralizing any word that you can is a good first step. Similarly, if there’s a ‘d’ in the list, there’s a good chance that you can generate past tense forms of words pulled from the eight letter set. Taking the example of ‘tire’ again (don’t get ‘tired’ of it!), you can and ought to immediately punch in ‘tired’ as soon as you are done with ‘tire’.

The game’s called Multieight for a reason - the eight letter words are bloody important! You’ll see this for yourself as you get better at the game, but if you miss out on getting at least one eight letter word, your chances of winning the match will be hit heavily. There is no general formula for identifying eight letter words – you do need healthy amounts of skill, luck, practice, or a combination of each – but some patterns become obvious over time. If you see the letters i-n-g in your word list, there’s a good chance you are looking at a eight letter word that ends in –ing. It is also quite likely that there are *multiple* -ing suffixed words that you can generate quickly. As –ing itself takes up three letters, if you can pick out such words they will be six, seven or even eight letters long, giving you easy points by the sackful.

But beware the lure of the eight letter word! Only after getting my hands burnt repeatedly have I realized that it’s not lucrative enough and often even counterproductive to stop generating small words and dedicating all my time to picking out the eight letter word. Like I said earlier, the smaller words shuffle the set too, and that *might*help you identify the eight letter word. If you are a fairly fast typist, and you have mastered some anagram sets, you can type out a sequence of four or five letter words that give you the same number of points as one eight letter word in the same time. Easier said than done though, as even now I find myself looking for the eight letter jackpot instead of typing out the auto-anagrammable word sets I see right in front of me.

That’s enough theorizing, here’s a six letter auto-anagrammable word that’s a big favourite of mine: you really should see my eyes light up like streetlights when I spot this one: MISTER. In about ten seconds I will have got Timers, Timer, Miters, Miter, Smiter Smite, Merits, Merit, Remits, Remit, Times, Time, Mites, Mite, Tires, Tire, Rites, Rite, Tiers, Tier, Tries, Site, Rimes, Rime, Mires, Mire, Miser, Trims, Trim, Emits and Emit. Obviously there are more, but I had told myself I would stop the second I paused to think, and here I am.

Incidentally, if you spot one of the nicks ‘LoneRanger’, ‘RegnaRenol’ and ‘Geriatric’ on Multieight, you can safely assume that that’s me (unless I’m doing terribly of course). Before you run away to get high on word shuffling, here’s a parting thought, an eight-letter word that seems to produce more juice the more you squeeze it: REVERSED. There seems to be no end to six, seven and eight letter words you can make from it: play on!

Divine Thoughts

2010-12-01T00:10:00.003+05:30

Another post on philosophy is long overdue. (Is that a cringe I see?) There are a couple of things I want to flesh out my thoughts on, special pleading being one of them, but I've decided to dedicate this one to God.

No, I did not see a surreal light fill my room, and convert overnight. Forgive my little guilty pleasure, because I put that in just to shock. I’m talking about the God of the philosophers, of course, a God that has been disparaged by innumerable religious figures over the ages as a mere abstraction and nothing more than a plaything for logic crunching philosophers. (That does sound about right.) The God of the philosophers has to, first and foremost, make sense. We should be able to realize Him through pure application of reason. One of the implications of that statement is that we should be able to prove the existence of God through a perfectly logical analysis.

And so I bring up the first of three well known historical proofs for study: the teleological proof, or the argument from design. This proof was very popular in ancient times as it appeals strongly to intuition. It can be paraphrased as:

“It is evident that there is design (or structure or purpose) to the Universe. That mandates a designer, and that designer is God.”

It is very easy to back up this claim with analogies. Can you imagine a car forming itself? No, it has to be built by human hand. Can the intricate machinery of a watch assemble by chance? No, only a watchmaker can use his skill to guide the numerous parts into place. And so the argument gathers force until it eventually ends in the inevitable comparison with the impossibly complicated machine called the Universe. While support for this argument has dropped off in modern times, continued promotion of theories like Intelligent Design indicates that teleological thought is not quite dead.

But what’s wrong with the teleological argument itself? (On a sidenote, I’m not documenting all for and against arguments here. I’m just putting in whatever’s occurred to me so that I can stoke a debate and encourage readers to explore the concepts themselves.) The first thing, obvious to any student of science, is that apparent complexity, in the form of a perceived regular structure for example, can arise out of simplicity. There are innumerable examples in scientific literature, but here are a couple which spring immediately to mind: swarm intelligence and protein folding. Swarm intelligence is the production of complicated macro behaviour by a collection of simple ‘swarm’ agents. It looks like it’s tailor made to shoot teleology down, and it is.

I dislike the argument from design for another reason: it's usually a cop out. If you don’t want to try hard enough to find a consistent explanation for a natural phenomenon, you simply assert that it was designed. A modern version of the teleological argument cedes ground to Science a little, and accepts that the Universe may be governed by a set of ‘unintelligent’ laws, but maintains that those laws have been designed (perhaps to ensure that humans arise?) This is very close to the First Cause proof of God (which I'll talk about later), and so I’ll hold on to that thread for now. There are more difficulties. Even if you accept the premise of teleology and agree that a supernatural ‘designer’ exists, it does not prove that that designer is God. Or that that designer is one entity – it could be that there are a bunch of deities out there taking turns playing snakes and ladders with reality. It does not guarantee that the designer of the Universe possesses attributes traditionally associated with God , like omnipotence (our designer God simply needs to be powerful enough to force order on the part of the Universe we see), omniscience (teleology does not say anything on the designer God’s foreknowledge), or omnibenevolence (that’s perfect goodness, and there’s nothing on this either).

There, that’s enough of bashing that proof I think. In fact the only thing that the argument from design has going for it is its intuitiveness. Once the self-evident nature of the argument is brought into question, and in this day and age where science has taught us to routinely doubt our own intuition it will be, it simply does not hold any water. That leads me to the second proof of God I would like to table for discussion, one that’s far less easy to hold in contempt for me, because it is the one that conclusively shattered my rigid atheism. The cosmological argument would appeal to many a scientific reductionist because it neatly sidesteps the domain of science. I’ll paraphrase Thomas Aquinas’s formulation here:

“Every effect has a cause that is different from itself, for it does not make sense for an effect to produce itself. That cause may be held to be the effect of another cause; a simple extrapolation of this argument produces a chain of cause and effect pairs that must stop somewhere because an infinite sequence of these is meaningless. I’ll call that First Cause, the uncaused cause that can exist stably exist in isolation, God.”

I think you can see why it would appeal to the scientific reductionist (I think I’m more or less one). It dovetails into the unspoken modern science assumption, that drives research into the Theory of Everything and the like, that everything in the world should be explicable from a small set of fundamental laws. Who made the physical laws that govern the reductionist Universe of today? As you can see, this is not too different from the modern formulation of the teleological argument I talked about earlier. Some difficulties that are applicable to both become quickly apparent.

Why should we stop at that particular rung in the cause-effect ladder? We could as well say that the Universe’s existence is the uncaused cause, the first cause. The Universe is, and no one created it. It seems unsatisfactory, but is this statement any weaker than the one you get by stepping up in the cause-effect chain? Secondly, does it even make sense to talk of an ‘uncaused cause’? (Who designed the designer?)

These are vexing questions, and I’ll take refuge in mysticism. The First Cause is the uncaused cause *in our domain of reasoning.* The First Cause is not an ultimate beginning, but it is as far as we can go in our understanding of the Universe. In some sense, *our* God is only a part of a broken bridge to a higher dimension, the final pylon which we cannot cross. Obviously, this is at odds with the supremely powerful and perfectly aware God that classical theology expects. Our mystical God still needs a Creator, but we pass the buck to the inhabitants of the higher reality, perhaps one where our God is only a humble citizen, protesting that we’ve reached the limits of our understanding.

I’ll move on to the third proof, the ontological proof. Both loved and scorned in equal measure over the ages, this argument is more formally logical than the other two. Maybe it’s the ponderous wording, or maybe intuition evolves over the ages, but I found St. Anselm’s original version (you can read it on Wikipedia here) painful to grasp. Hopefully I can simplify the idea through my summarization.

“We can intuitively understand the idea of ‘a thought than which a greater thought cannot be thought’. Not only can we understand the idea, we can conceive of the existence of such a thought: therefore such a perfect thought (instead of saying ‘a thought than which a greater thought cannot be thought’ each time, I’ll contract it to this) either exists only in the mind or in both the mind and reality. It cannot exist only in the mind, because then it would not be a perfect thought; for a greater thought would be one that would exist both in the mind and in reality. Since we accepted earlier that we can conceive of such a thought, the perfect thought must exist in both the mind and reality. The perfect thought is God.”

OK, I will hesitantly admit that it’s likely this argument can never be made unconvoluted. If the weaknesses in the argument are apparent in my paraphrasing, I urge you to read the original, it is far more tangled than this. For me the chief difficulty lies in the presumption that we can actually think of the perfect thought (I’m still using the earlier contraction). Can we? Even if we think we can, I’m unconvinced that there’s an impersonal standard that can be applied to each person’s idea of the perfect thought. Since the whole argument hinges on this assumption, the rest of it’s all a bit of an air-castle really. There are further difficulties. Perhaps you’ll wonder how any sort of logic can prove the reality of a thought. After all, it’s just a thought, right? Actually this argument is invalid once you accept the premise that you can think the perfect thought: the logic that follows is perfectly sound. The problem is still the premise of the perfect thought.

Another potential difficulty is the assertion that the thought that exists in both reality and the mind is *greater* than the thought that exists only in the mind. It does appear to make sense, but again it has a self-evidence that I’ve learnt to mistrust. OK, I don’t really want to get into a debate on the reliability of the reasoning machinery of the human brain, so I’ll let that one pass. Going back to the issue of the perfect thought, there’s another way, a far more damning way, of looking at the issue. The ontological proof makes existence a property of perfection, meaning that if we can think the perfect thought, it has to exist. This way of formulating what the proof is saying makes it lean even more heavily on the first assumption, and is quite close to a proof Descartes quoted.

“The idea of a perfect being is clear and distinct to me, as clear as numbers and shapes. How can the perfect being be perfect without existing?”

To me the ontological proof sounds suspiciously like, “I think God exists, so he does.”, which is of course nothing more than another argument from personal feeling. I need a debate, people.

"Hey, I like my last name!"

2010-11-28T17:58:00.006+05:30

I know I mentioned this in my earlier post, but I didn't get to talk about what I really wanted to talk about there. As usual, I went off on a tangent - the whole theology thing was supposed to be covered in two lines - and I was forced to break this out into a new post for the sake of readability.

What I'd wanted to talk about was the whole issue of a woman being forced to change her last name after marriage. 'Forced' may not be the right word to use because I'm not sure if this system is backed by law. Nevertheless, it is overwhelmingly prevalent everywhere in the world, and saying there's no choice at all is a fair approximation.

In a world where the curse of patriarchy is slowly being weeded out, I'm hopeful this practice will soon take its rightful place in the rubbish heap, because it's plain silly. Just take a step back and review it for a second. Forget ritual, forget tradition, forget the comfort of doing something everyone else is doing. I think you'll see it for what it is. Inanity wrapped in prejudice wrapped in tradition.

Simply doing away with the system is unhelpful, because the concept of a family name itself is quite sound. I think it makes perfect sense to have a unique name to identify all members of a family. If the father's name won't do, how do you get yourself one? I see Occam smiling, because the answer borders on the obvious. Make a new one. Since we all love ritual, we can have a naming ceremony, similar to the one that happens when a baby's born, to choose a family name some time after marriage.

Philip K. Dick

2010-11-28T17:28:00.003+05:30

Following a link from Sharkey’s blog roll, I came across this blog post. I think it’s impossible to be an author and not have some traces of your philosophy seeping into your characters. Once you accept this premise, you start seeing the author in everything the characters say. And if what the characters are saying is something you strongly disagree with, no matter how good the story or the presentation may be, you can’t go through with reading the book. This seems like a major hurdle to picking up areading habit, but for one thing: there are few things I reject off-hand, very few things that I feel don’t deserve even the slightest amount of ponder-time.

Theology is one such thing. By a nitpicker’s lexicon, theology is just the study of theistic thought. But like all definitions that try to accommodate every one of those darned hair-splitters, it’s almost never used in that sense. The theology I’m talking about assumes Scripture to be literally true, and then weaves a rich science around that assumption. Don’t think I’m being prejudiced by picking a bone exclusively with Christian theology: every religion’s theology is equally meaningless in my eyes - rendered inconsequential by its necessary narrow-mindedness. Perhaps a good analogy would be a hypothetical manual on surviving UFO abductions – such a text does not dispute the veracity of an abduction claim, it takes it as axiom; and then goes on to compile a very scientific literature on ways to extricate yourself from one. Funny, you’d say, but harmless, right? Humourlessness, driven by an unshakeable conviction among its students that what they’re doing is changing the world, plagues theology, and that’s where the analogy breaks down.

What does theology have to do with novels? Philip K. Dick. A man who gathered little or no recognition in his lifetime is today considered one of the greats of SF. As an SF connoisseur myself, I felt it would be a shame if I didn’t pick up at least one of his books. And so I did, and I was repulsed. Dick’s stories are set in worlds where Christian theology is not just another theology – it’s the only one, and more irritatingly, a strong conviction is foisted on you, and I can’t help but trace it to the author, that it’s right. I guess I deserve a mild amount of credit, because despite the theological literalism that dripped from every page, I not only finished that novel, but having talked myself into giving Dick another chance, I picked up another one. I’m labouring through ‘The Divine Invasion’ right now. It has a stunning premise, and Dick is one hell of a story teller, but it’ll take more than that to overcome that chitinous layer of parochialism I can’t seem to scratch away.

Fight Noise With Heavy Metal

2010-11-02T21:45:00.001+05:30

You might not know this but I'm afraid of balloons. Deadly scared. The fear that any given balloon will burst at any given time is so overwhelming that I'm paralyzed into a cycle of recursive fretting - sweating cold and chewing off my fingernails. It's probably an extension of the same hypersensitivity, but I simply cannot stand the sound of pressure cookers hissing either. As soon as the tell tale whine of an impending whistle hits my ears, I bolt to the furthest floor I can go, as fast I can.

Now with that introduction, and a little extrapolation, you can maybe imagine how much I've grown to dread Deepavali. Hold! Your task is not yet done. Take that visualization, multiply the agony thousandfold, and that's how poor old dogs feel during our favourite noise festival. My pet dog Betty is racked by a never-ending paroxysm of shivers throughout the two or three nights of celebration. There's a wild look in her eye and she barely recognizes us anymore. She tries to hide under sofas and beds, inside the refrigerator and inside my wardrobe but there's no escaping the torture. It's scary. I dispensed with the noisy firecrackers a long time ago ( I didn't need any persuading!) but there's only so much I can ask my neighbours to do. (You! Cut down on the bombs. Please.)

That's when I discovered something. Betty is completely at ease in my room even during the worst of the explosions. The reason? Heavy metal therapy. People who know of my balloon-phobia have often asked me how in the world I can be a fan of heavy metal. I think it has something to do with a low tolerance for sharp, concussive sounds versus a higher tolerance for loud, but uniform sounds. She's doesn't bat an eyelid, sleeping peacefully, in the middle of very loud grindcore blasting from the speakers a few feet away. Of course, the heavy metal cleanly masks the sounds of all the firecrackers going off in the background. Peace.

Face Testbook Cricket

2010-10-13T23:28:00.004+05:30

One average office day very recently, I sat at a friend’s desk watching him follow live cricket scores online. He would open up a terminal screen, code for a bit, look perplexed about something perplexing to me (the code always looked fine), do a quick alt+tab, check the score on cricinfo, alt+tab back to the terminal screen and well, repeat the cycle all over again. If it had been a T20 match, I wouldn’t be writing this blog post, but it was a test match (you all know which one), and we all know how test matches go. Probabilistically speaking, it is fairly unlikely that the score will change in any way (runs, wickets, the number of pigeons snoozing in the rafters) during the duration of one minute that separates successive score checks. But this fact never bothered this friend of mine – he took pleasure, I’d like to think, from the thrill of expectation. A sense of optimism that that lottery ticket will eventually come good for him– not entirely misplaced because the wicket eventually falls and the run is ultimately taken.

This whole ritual sparked off an entire row of lightbulbs in my head because it seemed – so darned – familiar. I wasn’t a fan of test cricket, so amnesia could not explain the déjà vu. Then it struck me.

Facebook.

Facebook’s just like test cricket. Before all you avowed test cricket haters jump on my back, I’ll make a solid case for my statement. How many of us ‘occasional’ Facebookers haven’t been tempted by the little red notification icon on the top left corner of the screen? Tempted to check if someone, somewhere (come on, there are 861 of you, one of you should be saying something to me?) had decided to post something on my wall. Or if I’ve just posted a smashing good status message, at least a handful of that 861 would have liked it, right? I refresh the page, alt+tab to stare vacantly at another screen for a bit, alt+tab back and (hopefully) take in the blissful sight of the little red icon. Ah, peace. For about a minute. A few other folks would have seen my status message by now, surely? No? That’s all right. I’ll be back in a minute.

Every web company out there with half an eye on social networking has spent a hell of a lot of time and money trying to understand how users spend so much time on one web page. What’s driving all that engagement time? I only say - fellow primates, you should just follow some test cricket.

The Inevitable

2010-10-07T23:30:00.002+05:30

Something occurred to me recently. There’s something inevitable about the evolution of my musical tastes. Something linear, something algorithmic, something destined. My mind drifts to the first time I listened to Linkin Park’s ‘Crawling’ – almost eight years ago – sitting in the exact same spot I am now. I switched on the cassette playing walkman, started the track and settled down for a peaceful session of bookreading, only to be interrupted by something alien. The E.T. kind of pleasant alien, not the Alien kind of alien. I immediately waddled over to my sister’s room and shouted out, ‘You’ve got to listen to this!’

‘OK,’ she said. ‘What is it?’

‘Listen to it. There’s something so ooooh about it!’ I added, with a delighted shiver of my spine for emphasis.

She did. The song started off with a few seconds of quiet churchpipes. My sister looked inquiringly at me. Then Chester Bennington happened. A full throated scream pierced the all-too-fake calm; my spine considered another shiver in response to the tinny residue leaking from the earphones.

‘So how was it?’

‘It was OK.’

My sister was of course being my sister: passively receptive to new things, and supremely non-committal to in the face of intense scrutiny. That’s a very useful life skill to cultivate but that’s not the point of this story. The song is. Rather, my reaction to the song is. If you knew today’s me and you had a decent time machine, you would have concluded that I always had metalcore in my blood. But wait, I am getting ahead of myself again. This is not where the story starts. Let me start at the real start.

English music. How did that happen? To be perfectly honest, after scratching around in the dustiest corners of my mental closet, I can’t recall anything before Backstreet Boys. Blue. Kylie Minogue. Robbie Williams. You get the idea. I probably wasn’t born before that. Am I being pretentious? I don’t think I am because English is the closest thing to a native tongue I have. I think in English. When I speak other languages, I often find myself translating from English (or transliterating – with hilarious results, especially when I work my magic with proverbs). I can appreciate a Hindi song; I may like the vocals, I may like the instruments, I may like the tune, but I will never find myself humming a riff to myself or singing a verse out loud. It simply cannot sink that deeply in.

Rock music. I know I mentioned Linkin Park, but unlike most rock fans my journey into this fascinating land does not start with Linkin Park. It starts with Nickelback. In fact I even remember the song that single handedly lifted me out of my comfortably unquestioning existence in the endless stream of pop music dished out by the local radio stations. ‘How You Remind Me’ made me spend hours wondering what exactly I liked about the song. It couldn’t have been Chad Kroeger’s harsh vocals. Yes, the chorus was reasonably catchy, but not exceptionally so. Right? Surely, surely, it could not have been the fuzzy growl of the electric guitars? How could anyone possibly like that? I soon found myself looking out for songs with that exact same instrumental sound. Radio failed me in about a week, so I moved on to haunting neighbourhood music stores. A unified ‘rock/pop’ section did not particularly simplify matters for me, but hey, I knew Nickelback.

So began the era of alternative rock. It’s occurred to me how right I was to use the term ‘evolution’ to capture the changing form of my musical tastes. Like biological evolution, everything changes – newer and weirder creations are constantly produced, and like biological evolution, the ancestors don’t always die out. Although I listen to such songs much less frequently these days, I still love alternative rock. I still find the likes of Seether, Linkin Park, Papa Roach, Three Days Grace, Trapt and Staind just as good to listen to today. In fact, Nickelback’s just seen a revival on my playlists. Cheers for rock music, but my story doesn’t end there.

Metal. My metal journey started just as unambiguously as rock music’s with Megadeth’s ‘Countdown to Extinction’. When was this? I think this transition happened sometime in 2005 when my sister (again) with uncanny prescience gifted me a cassette of Megadeth’s iconic album. Now that I’ve listened to all of their albums twenty times over, I can safely say that there’s no better introduction to metal for a rock music fan than this album. It perfectly straddles the thin line between the vocals-driven but guitar-supported sound that alternative rock fans expect, with the guitar-driven but vocals-supported sound of metal. And how does it do that? A handful of songs on the record quickly quench the longtime rock fan’s thirst (and stop him from throwing away the cassette in the gutter), and a handful of others grow on him slowly – starting off as incidental ‘other’ songs on the album and moving on to become favourites.

And no, my journey does not end with Megadeth either. If musical interests are always partitioned from a fixed piece of land, then thrash metal would take away a large piece of property. And I’ve always wondered why. What could I possibly enjoy in listening to a goat’s bleat (yes, there’s no better way to describe Dave Mustaine’s singing) accompanied by painfully high pitched keening on distorted guitars? (I’m not really sure, but I have a few ideas. Let me finish the story of my evolution before I sew up all the loose threads though.) And then there are the chugs. There are a lot of chugs. Even metal fans are ambivalent about chugging – some of them think it’s metal’s equivalent of ‘cheap thrills’. Not for me. The atomic clock precision of the palm muted riffs that are characteristic of all thrash metal – I simply could not get enough of it.

By now, even rock/pop sections in music stores could not satisfy the strange new beast that my musical taste had become. (I defy you to find me a ‘metal’ section in a Planet M!) It was only to become weirder though; because that was about when I discovered unclean vocals. Or growling, to be more precise, because the term ‘unclean vocals’ is a generic radio-friendly term for something not very radio-friendly. I think Amon Amarth was the first melodeath band I listened to. Melodeath was probably a step down the evolutionary ladder in terms of the instruments: musically it was a lot more melodic than the metal I had grown used to. But all the shouting in thrash metal paled in comparison to the sheer, unbridled aggression of the throaty growls emanating from the hairy throat of a modern day Viking.

OK, so I discovered death metal, albeit a watered down ‘pop’ version of it, but death metal nonetheless. Should I stop now? Certainly not. There’s still unclean vocals part 2 left. What do you think of a 5 minute song where every single spoken syllable is enunciated with a lung bursting scream? Scary? Welcome to the world of metalcore. I actually listened to a number of metalcore bands at the same time (and liked almost none of them: they were again a step up the anti-melodicity graph), so it’s difficult to credit one song, or even one band, for sucking me into the genre. I’ll stick with two bands that had the earliest impact – Parkway Drive and Bring Me The Horizon. They’re by now means the sickest screamers out there, but I listened to them first and this is my story.

There are a few subplots involving a few other minor players – progressive metal is one; punk rock is another - but my story is more or less finished. Again, to reiterate what I said earlier about evolution, this is not a linear story – every song I listen to every day creates a new branch in the tree. I don’t even know which one’s the trunk anymore.

There’s still a denouement left though. I’ve talked about all these diverse threads of musical interests, the major branches in my evolutionary tree, but is there a single rule that binds them together? Is there an explanation for the fact that my tree has moved deeper away from the conventional notion of ‘melody’ with each passing moment? I think there is. It has all to do with what I expect of music. What do I want to feel when I listen to a song? Do I want to be soothed? Do I want it to be a minimally intrusive background to my work? Do I want to feel love? Do I want to feel anger? What I think I want in my music is, simply, energy. I want my music to lift me up when I’m down. I want my music to lift me up when I am up. I want my music to make me want to jump up and down in a delirium of frenzied excitement. I want my music to be like the sound of a gunshot in a library. There’s more energy to a song with an electric guitar than a song without it. There’s much more energy to a song with blazing fast solos and lightning quick rhythmic chugging than one without them. There’s a hell of a lot more energy to a song with endless lung bursting screams than a song without it.

Is that all though? Dance tracks have a lot of energy. I mean, people dance to them! I don’t really like dance music though. Why’s that? Perhaps I don’t want my melodies wrapped in melodies, so to speak. A melody is a melody independent of the instrument that delivers it. Why not make the medium harsh? It’s quite likely that this explanation is absolute hogwash, and it’s either peer pressure or random coincidence that’s made me choose one ‘harsh’ instrument over another. (I think of trumpets – I can’t stand them, but I can’t objectively claim that they’re less soothing to the ear than distorted electrics) It’s also likely that I’m a diabetic trying to stay away from the sweets. Whatever it is, there you have it – a chronologically ordered sequence of snapshots from my musical life so far.

Autumn Skies in Bangalore

2010-09-20T22:42:00.005+05:30

It's been a while since I posted an astronomy update, but you can't really blame me. I'm stuck in Bangalore after all. Like all major cities, Bangalore suffers from severe light pollution, but I should be used to that now, having been here all my life. (Pilani, I'm afraid you've spoilt me.) It's the perennial cloud cover, however, that's truly unique, and truly irritating. Can't our friendly neighbourhood rain gods do clouds in the morning and crystal clear skies at night? Ah well, you can't have everything in life. Besides, things can't be all that depressing - I am writing this blog post after all.

Jupiter. Our beloved gas giant will probably be the only object you will see on an average Bangalore night this month, so I'll start off here. Jupiter's reaching almost Venus-esque levels of brilliance at the moment, and cloud cover or not, you cannot possibly miss it. There's no question of confusing it with Venus either. Just as the evening star follows the Sun down West, Jupiter rises majestically in the East. Don't mistake it for a distant streetlamp/UFO/low flying aeroplane!

Before I proceed further, however, there are a few points I need to clarify. What is my time period of observation? 8 PM - 9 PM. This information is important, because the sky will look completely different at, say, 3 in the morning. Don't worry about sticking rigidly to this timeline though. Thanks to light pollution, there's no point trying to locate objects close to the horizon, meaning that all targets must already be reasonably high in the sky at the time of observation. High in the sky = takes longer to set, so an hour here or an hour there shouldn't affect things drastically.

How long will this post be relevant? About a month or so, I reckon. If you're wondering why this is the case, think of the Earth's revolution around the sun. Think of it as occurring inside a giant enveloping celestial sphere in which all stars are embedded. The movement of the stars relative to the Earth's motion is trivial as they are so far away (relative to the Earth-Sun distance), so the celestial sphere can be assumed to be fixed in space. Obviously as the Earth moves through the celestial sphere, constellations high up in the night sky today start to set earlier and earlier, and 'hidden' day time constellations start to rise earlier. Also, one month in Bangalore terms translates to about five days worth of cloudless nights, so better get your autumn astronomy fix real quick!

Since I started off with Jupiter, the obvious choice for next-up is Fomalhaut. Fomalhaut is what can be called a Southern star; meaning that it lies closer to the South pole and never ventures too far away from the Southern horizon (in the Northern hemisphere, of course). In fact, I don't think it can even be seen from the skies of Pilani (which of course, lies about 20 degrees further to the North). It lies southward of Jupiter, to it's right, and can also be easily identified as there are no other bright stars in the vicinity (it's sometimes called the Lonely Star of Autumn.) Fomalhaut, to some extent displaces Canopus in the sky, as the two stars lie on opposite sides of the South Pole.

If Fomalhaut lies southward of Jupiter, northward lies the Square of Pegasus. The Square of Pegasus is often called the asterism of autumn. It's a flattering moniker as the Summer Triangle (I'll get to that in a minute) is still way more prominent. It isn't particularly easy to spot. Even with sparse cloud cover, I needed a couple of minutes of night vision strengthening to locate it, and even after that I could pick out only three of the four vertices of the square. It's not a perfect square but the arrangement of the stars is quite suggestive, and you should be able to 'guess' the position of the fourth star. Interestingly, the brightest star in the square - Alpheratz - actually belongs to the constellation Andromeda, rather than Pegasus.

The Summer Triangle is easy to spot. It covers a large swathe of the Northern sky, with Altair lying highest in the sky. Vega is probably the easiest of the lot to identify. As the second brightest star in the Northern celestial sphere (after Arcturus) and fourth brightest overall (after Sirius, Canopus and Arcturus), it shines brightly, a lone jewel in the North. (I seem to be referring to a disproportionate number of 'lone jewel' stars and the like, but that can't be helped. Autumn is disproportionately starved of bright stars.) Vega was actually the North Pole star about 12000 years ago, and will be so again another 11000 years in the future. It has been extensively studied by modern scientists as well because of the dusty proto-planetary disc that surrounds it. Altair is quite distinctive too, as it forms a visually close knit pair with the second magnitude star Tarazed. Vega's constellation is Lyra, and Altair's (and Tarazed's) is Aquila but other stars in these constellations are quite faint, so there's no point looking for distinctive 'shapes'. Cygnus the swan is different. Deneb, the third vertex of the Summer Triangle belongs to this constellation. One side of Deneb, you can spot a near-collinear sequence of five second magnitude stars that won't require too much imagination to be visualized as a flying bird.

In the Southern sky, tending towards the West, lie two of my favourite constellations. Sagittarius and Scorpio. Scorpio is probably easier to identify with the bright orange dot of Antares an easy marker. Westward of Antares, you should be able to identify a canopy of three fairly bright stars that make up the pincers of the scorpion (or the head of a cobra, as it's always seemed to me). Eastward of Antares, you should be able to pick up a long chain of stars that slowly climbs into the Southern sky and merges with Sagittarius (the sting of the scorpion). Sagittarius has the distinctive shape of a teapot: but if you are unfamiliar with the constellation, an unexpected orientation of the teapot may throw you off.

You can see the square of Pegasus in the first picture. The second shows the summer triangle. it has been rotated to ensure that it matches what you'll likely see in the sky. The third picture captures Sagittarius and its teapot shape. The fourth picks out Scorpio, but Sagittarius is there in the frame too. See if you can spot it.

On Being Petty

2010-09-05T23:24:00.001+05:30

First, there is the good. It is as rare as it is beautiful, but it exists. The good is pure and clear, unclouded by the taint of weakness. It’s true that good people are often disliked – but I think this is no more than an orphaned dislike born out of inevitable feelings of inferiority. Most people however worship the good and revere good people. Whichever way you lean, it is never in doubt that you are leaning. Then there are the truly bad people, the rotten apples in a truck full of Australian imports, the ones crawling with malice, the rapists, the serial killers, the politicians, the sadists, the wife-beaters. The evil that marks each cannot be denied, yet it seems to me that amidst it all there is a paradoxical honesty. These are people who look bad, sound bad, speak bad, and are bad. Is there any way you can look at a racist slave trader, and feel something other than an unadulterated, honest disgust? (No, you don’t count, descendent of Elizabeth Bathory!)

Somewhere in the middle of the good-evil spectrum lie these folks. These are the sort of people who'll pretend to forget your name when the exact opposite may be closer to reality. These are the sort of people who’ll count each time you call them an idiot, file it away in an alphabetically ordered mental cabinet, and at an opportune moment - when you’ve run into some hard times, suffered a heart attack perhaps, dying in a car crash maybe, mauled by a polar bear in Madagascar perhaps - that’s when they’ll give it all back. It won't matter that the perceived slight is likely no more than a part of some drunken banter; they won’t care a whit as long as they get to feel happy calling you by your middle name, and then calling you an idiot.

These are the people who’ll remember that occasion when you accidentally stepped on their foot in a crowded bus. They’ll wait for another bus, another crowd, and deliberately stomp all over your shoes, all the while with a benevolent smile on the face. The carefully combed hair of the respectable citizen, the myopic glasses that speak of industry, the austere solemnity etched into every line, they'll be there, but don't be fooled! Thankfully, such people have been few and far between in my life. Although, (there’s a caveat, there always is), they seem to have taken up some of the best vantage points. No names of course, that would be just like them. These people are not insecure enough to properly turn towards a life of waste and malice. Nor are they instantly dislikeable go-getters. They are definitely not the altruistic sort either. In fact they are too colourless in their lives, too insignificant, to ever be more an unlikely concoction of molecules, cosmically speaking. Perhaps this is what drives their little world of Karmic retribution.

These are the sort of people who’ll jump queues only where it won’t really matter. Not at movie theatres, not at concert gates, not at bank counters but at hostel canteens. It beggars belief how such superficial acts can hold any sort of significance, but then again self-confidence is a mysterious thing. These are the people who won’t look to massage their egos with some hard work, a promotion and a new car; instead they’ll get their kicks from being the last ones to hold out on dinner plans. This Saturday? What frightful bad luck. They’ll have work, they’ll have meetings, they’ll have deadlines, they’ll have girlfriends to please, when in reality, they’ll be cowering in some dark, dingy corner of a forgotten attic, plotting their next unnoticed triumph. These are the petty people.

The thing about these folks is, by virtue of most of their plots and intrigues being petty, it takes a while to even notice them. And then you’ll hate them. Terrorists you can fight, arsonists you can jail, but the petty people, there isn’t a thing you can do about them. Any riposte you think of will be just as petty as the original thrust, and you’ll have to make do with chanting your principles under your breath. Sigh, there’s another unresolved problem I’ll have to try and sleep off.

Critical Convergence

2010-08-25T01:15:00.000+05:30

At some unknown time in the distant past, the foundation was laid for critical convergence in movies. By the time I got my first dose of big screen escapism, the insubstantial idea of the ‘ideal’ film was well entrenched enough to be walking away with very substantial Oscars each time. Just chew on this for a moment: what would the critically perfect film look like? It would have very few characters for starters- offering plenty of scope for ‘character development’. There would be lots of conversation and minimal action. There would almost certainly be a traumatic experience of some sort underlying the protagonist’s role. It would have a narrative pace that would tick over slower than a blue whale’s heart, and it would almost certainly have been made on a shoestring budget. Humour would be rare, absent or accidental; any speculative or fantastical elements would just be absent. This movie would hit critical convergence with ease.

Would I watch such a film? I could describe several improbable circumstances which conceivably might force me to, but the short answer is no. In fact my ideal movie would pick the opposite of most of the ‘design’ choices made in the earlier description. But that’s not what I want to discuss here, because films today have achieved critical convergence to the extent that almost no prominent genre-limited critics exist today. Instead I want to talk about the same phenomenon, still only in the nascent stage but moving fast enough to make me fret, in the field of computer games.

Everyone knows Role Playing Games are the in thing today. It’s likely that even your average non-gamer has seen an online ad for at least one MMORPG flashing promiscuously in the sidebar, and in a completely unrelated website. But a lesser known fact is that critics love RPGs too. Like before, let me start off with a question: what would the critically perfect computer game look like? It would be an RPG yes, and possibly an action RPG, but not necessarily. Its gameplay would be non linear and it would have more side missions than anyone could care to count. It would have an absurdly complicated plot, and some sort of a dialogue based mechanism to manipulate it. Everything in the game world would be ‘explorable’. There would probably be an immense amount of character customization available.

Again, would I play such a game? Probably yes. In any case, the answer’s not an immediate no, because my design choices match the critically perfect ones in a couple of cases. No game is made worse by increasing the explorability of the in-game world, for instance. What’s worrying, however, is that no one seems to like the old fashioned game with the set-in-stone one path storyline anymore. For me, a significant portion of the ‘kick’ associated with gaming comes from simply progressing through a game. Non-linear gameplay often clouds the sensation of progress, leaving me dissatisfied even after hours and hours of play. Also, I do enjoy a bit of character customization, but why does every game need to have truckloads of it? I would love to play an action RPG that has awesomely depicted environments, but little or no character customization (weapon upgrades, skill upgrades, level upgrades, you get what I’m talking about). And then there are the dialogues – I wonder if I’ll ever get used to them? Right now I hate them like the Nazis. I really don’t care about altering the plot a tetchy bit by spending half my time watching my characters talk to each other.

Computer game criticism hasn’t hit critical convergence yet, but history suggests that it’s only a matter of time before it does. Is there anything at all that can offer, if not a cure, an alternative to this process? The answer’s an easy one: genre-limited reviews. Music today has become so diverse that the process of criticism is almost exclusively genre-limited. Although it makes it harder for you to find the right reviewer (rather than the right review), it works. I know that the review of a metal band on a metal review site will be fair, because there’s no prejudice against an entire genre there. It isn’t like people automatically judge metal music out of 7 because the popular opinion is that it’s not nice to listen to. I just hope that a genre based criticism culture grows quickly in the computer gaming scene. If it doesn’t, and it goes the way of cinema, I’ll be left with only one alternative. Pick the genre, and choose randomly from all that fit.

The Hope

2010-08-24T22:59:00.000+05:30

There was once a time when everyone who fought against slavery was thought a crank.

There was once a time when everyone who fought for women's rights was thought a crank.

Today, most animal rights activists are looked at as cranks.

Obama Bashing

2010-08-23T23:20:00.000+05:30

Every morning at work, the first fifteen minutes of fighting dreariness are spent on Google Reader. A small fraction of that time is spent on feeds from Snopes (if you haven’t heard of Snopes, I urge you to check it out); and a significant portion of that small fraction is spent on reading an article that debunks yet another Obama hoax.

With even a superficial analysis, one can identify features common to all these hoaxes. An example is a persistent insinuation that somehow Barack Obama is less American than the rest. (He’s born in Hawaii? What sensible American is born in Hawaii? Wait, his father is Kenyan? Is there anything more to be said?) There are a couple of points I find incongruous at best (and repulsive at worst) about this view. First, how is being of German, Dutch, Irish or even English descent ‘better’ than being of Mexican, Kenyan or Indian descent? Before anyone answers, I have to hastily interrupt, pointing out the rhetorical nature of the question, and mumble something about the R-word. Here’s Snopes link 1 illustrating my point. Comprehensively debunked as this email hoax might be, the Snopes folks might now be looking at taking a breather from the usual business about alien abductions and levitating monkeys and concentrating on Barack Obama full time.

Then, there’s the Islamophobia. Every Republican worth his salt has cried himself hoarse about BHO’s middle name and its implications. (The use of the distracting acronym BHO – which for me always expands to Browser Helper Object and nothing more– appears to be a thinly veiled ploy to draw attention to this point.) Barack Obama and friends have, of course, cried themselves hoarse pointing to the mountains of physical evidence that plainly contradicted that belief, to no significant effect. Tinfoil hat status quo, one would think. But then happened the Ground Zero Mosque incident (follow the link for details, like how it’s not exactly a mosque, and how it’s not exactly at Ground Zero), where Obama committed the most unforgiveable sin of them all: he stood up for the secular right of people to follow a faith of their choice. (He later half took back his statement, saying it was only said in a general sense, and not in reference to anything.) With little to cheer for the American population, I’m sure that the Muslim jibe, nothing more than a faint drone up till now, will quickly rise to a cacophonous roar.

One disclaimer before I proceed with my rant: I’m no Muslim apologist. I’ve been known to be heavily contemptuous towards conservatism, and there isn’t a religion with more conservatism than Islam. Wait, let me qualify that. There isn’t another religion where conservatism has as much clout as Islam, for all religions have their share of retrospectophiles. Yet, through our petty stereotypes we successfully obscure our liberal values and give in to the temptation of narrow mindedness, and effectively become them. Protect the ‘moderates’, let them live a harmless life in the service of their God. Fight the conservatism, yes, but not through conservatism, it only fuels it. A very valid dilemma may rear its head at this point: if I fight conservatism through tolerance, won’t that only empower the not-so-moderate conservatives out there? Yes, certainly, and here’s where I think we should let go of a bit of our pacifism. Just wishing him gone won’t make the Big Bad Bogeyman go away after all. (Sidenote: A whimsical thought interrupts my ruminations. If there’s one thing that’s true about a religious conservative, it’s that he’s never going to agree with another religion’s conservative. So let them fight. Liberalism is founded in egalitarianism, and can afford to watch as the conservatives destroy each other. Right? Not really. At the end of it all, you’ll have one angry murderous beast ready to fight to the death for its ‘ideals’ on one side, and a bunch of saintly pacifists on the other side. I don’t like the odds.)

Another theme common to Obama bashing is woven around the accusation that he’s something of a chronic liar. Speaking of politicians and honesty in the same breath is dangerously close to causing an instantaneous spacetime singularity, but in this case, I feel the criticism is strongly coloured by blind propaganda. Here are links 2 and 3 for perusal. All I can say is: we have enough lies going around already, we don’t want lies about lies to muddle things further.

I know I said earlier that I won’t bring up the R-word, but how can any discussion of Obama bashing do without it? It’s undeniable that there’s a strong undercurrent of racism underlying most of these Obama hoaxes. (Here’s a random hoax that plays with the stereotype without actually having much to do with the topic.) What do black people know about the Great White American ethos? Somehow, conservatives have talked themselves (hypnotized, psychedelic drugged themselves) into believing that tolerance for difference is just political correctness. As a consequence, you get the odd joke about political correctness destroying the world from the precious few conservatives with a sense of humour there are. Dear Retrospectophiles/Great White Males – we’re not being politically correct when we ask you to treat poor African children with dignity, and if you think otherwise, sigh, we haven’t progressed that much since slavery.

Then there are statements so ridiculous that even listing them here would be embarrassing. I vaguely recall some conservative propaganda about Barack Obama’s ‘Yes, We Can’ badges and the lighting on his speeches hypnotizing people into voting for him. For more like these, refer to this.

Barack Obama probably took over the reins of the country at the worst possible time. A shattered economy, pointless wars on multiple fronts, and a country where half the population believe that calling slavery an abomination is political correctness, can anyone fix that overnight? Ironically, if I were to criticize Barack Obama for something, it would be his overly ‘centrist’ approach to everything. Don’t mollycoddle the neocons too much, you won’t get anything done, they’re called conservative for a reason! Let’s not forget how historic his election really is, even if the USA already has. Perhaps we won’t really appreciate the fact until we’re three hundred years into the future. Give the man a chance. There are only so many pieces a teacup can break into before no amount of glue will put it back. Give the man a chance, I say.

The Approval Junkie and I - Closure

2010-08-21T15:32:00.002+05:30

The Epilogue
The very first time I type the 'approval junkie' quote after writing a long ramble about it, I break my speed record. Here's to approval junkies, and Parkway Drive's Carrion playing in the background. Peace.

The Approval Junkie and I

2010-08-08T21:25:00.004+05:30

Prelude: The Site

At some point during my third year of college, I discovered this site. You can see for yourself: its concept is as brilliant (and perhaps unique), as it is simple. Who would have thought something as mundane as learning to type could be made so interesting? That is one aspect of it. The other aspect, the one I found much less surprising, was the fact that there were so many people out there who actually wanted to learn to type. I had, at the very dawn of my Typeracer adventure, already constructed the necessary arguments to analyze, and justify, this phenomenon. People who happened to observe me engaged in this particular activity were immediately subjected to defensive diatribes on the pressing relevance of computer skills in this day and age. It’s completely true, of course, that everyone needs to know how to type, and how to type quick. It may even be of more practical significance than learning to write. However, no one said I’d have to do it this obsessively. It’s completely unnecessary to improve my typing speed from a 95th percentile to a 98th percentile, sitting on the site three hours a day for a month. Such a pursuit is frivolous, unless...

Sidenote to the Prelude: The Game

Games always sell, because they satisfy two very fundamental human desires: to get one up over your neighbour, and to not get hurt when beaten (physically that is, I really can’t say anything about mental fragility).

Chapter One: The Quote

There’s another thing that’s great about Typeracer. It makes you type quotes, and not just any quotes at that. Quotes that make you cringe, quotes that make you laugh, quotes that make hillbillies turn in their graves, but definitely not quotes picked up from a lawyer’s manual. And there was this quote that resonated so deeply with me, that I brooded over it long after the race was done. The quote is hyperlinked, so you can read for yourself, but let me paraphrase it anyway:

We do what we do, because we’re all approval junkies.

Even with a superficial analysis, I’m sure most of us can come up with any number of instances to back this claim. Most conformism (think anything from keeping your hair short to not wearing black to eating burgers only at Mcdonald’s) is, by default, approval addiction. The classic case of the neighbours, conformism at its despicable best, is well documented by J.K. Rowling with her portrayal of the Dursleys. (Every day a fresh incident pops up that proves that such portrayal is far from hyperbole, but each time I manage to get shocked.)

What is interesting is that many acts of seeming rebelliousness are nothing but targeted forms of conformism, and therefore, approval addiction. Heavy metal sub-culture is an excellent case in point. The overwhelming need to appear like a metalhead, and seek the approval of other ‘cool’ people, is just as strong as it is rare. I pick the example of heavy metal, not to deride it, but because it’s something close to my heart. Any strong, niche, fan culture can serve just as well. Like Geekland, and its population of the stereotyped computer geeks. This is one stereotype no self-respecting ‘victim’ ever tries to break free of. All geeks are approval junkies: it’s just that we don’t seek the approval of the average Joe.

Some more introspection, some more generalization, and I realized I was fast running out of things that could unambiguously be classified as not approval addiction. Take for instance, the phenomenon of ambition. I cannot deny that there exist people who truly wish to make a difference to the world. (Sidenote: I haven’t seen any, but that’s no counter-argument. I haven’t seen Mahatma Gandhi either.) Most people however, work hard and move up the organizational hierarchy, not because they care about the organization, but because they can buy that luxury sedan that will finally win their neighbours' approval.

It was only the other day that something happened at work; an incident that simply strengthened my conviction that I was already firmly in the grip of this addiction. First, some background: At work, I have a mentor, who helps me get up to speed with the way the company works, and I have a manager who I report to. One fine morning, my manager came up to me, and told me that my mentor had a high opinion of me, and that he hoped I would live up to that. It so happened that I’d already developed a strong sense of admiration for my mentor and his technical skills, and it also so happened that I was at that point suffering from a bout of lethargy. Needless to say, any laziness promptly vanished, at about the point I realized I had someone’s approval to seek.

Is it all bad though? It is a fear of disapproval, something that almost always accompanies a desire for approval, that often drives quality in my work. I read a blog post multiple times before I post it, tweaking this and that, because I know there are people out there who’ll read it and judge me on its merit. Code that I submit for review will inevitably be better than code I write for myself. Having said all that, it seems to me that a life driven solely by a pursuit of approval, is a life not lived at all. Things that define who you are: your appearance, your mannerisms, your habits, should never be dictated by others’ judgment. Otherwise, it will be a quick descent into the bottomless pit of insecurity.

There’s one issue that falls on the borderline, something with which I can play the Devil’s Advocate with ease, and that’s the issue of being nice. Diplomacy. Tact. Politeness, or whatever you want to call it. Not too long ago, it was obvious to me that tact is necessary for civilization to work. You cannot have a bunch of people living together, interacting every minute, being rude to each other all the time. It simply does not work that way. Looking at it through the clouded lens of an approval junkie, it’s apparent that most people are not nice because they care about a smoothly progressing civilization. They’re simply afraid of disapproval.

"Because we're just monkeys wrapped in suits, begging for the approval of others."

Sheep Dogs Can't Jump

2010-07-22T20:02:00.000+05:30

Commander Shepard, the captain, the soldier, the noble warrior, the saviour of the human race. Commander Shepard, the bane of evil in the galaxy, the mighty Spectre. Is there any way at all that you can halt the march of so colossal a figure?

Put him in a closed pit, one with walls no more than a foot high, and let him be.

You can make the pit as big, as small, as round, or as square as you want. Actually, you can even give him as many weapons as you wish, and make them as powerful as you possibly can. RPGs, bazookas, sniper rifles that do twenty rounds a second and don’t ever overheat, omnigel that rains from the sky, everything’s legit, as long as you can stuff it all in the pit along with him.

Just put him in a closed pit, one with walls no more than a foot high, and let him be.

Truth

2010-07-20T23:39:00.001+05:30

Roses are red.
Aha, but you can find yellow, white and even green roses if you look hard enough.

The sky is blue.
Not on Mars, it isn’t.

Men are skirt chasers.
I foresee evolution trying its hand at making us hermaphroditic.

George Bush is stupid.
There is a non-zero chance that a microscopic alien ship will lobotomize part of his brain, and accidentally improve brain function.

The Earth rotates from West to East.
It is not inconceivable that a collision with a large asteroid knocks the Earth so far off kilter that its direction of rotation is reversed.

The Earth revolves around the Sun.
It might be captured by another star during the merger with Andromeda galaxy.

The Universe is.
It will either collapse into nothingness in a Big Crunch, or expand away to such uniformity that it would be akin to nothingness.

Arsene Wenger will not sign anyone.
Arsene Wenger will not sign anyone.

The Fountain of Age

2010-07-20T23:07:00.005+05:30

It was one of those inconsequential debates that make up the bulk of conversations you have at home. Naturally, it started with the moustache.

At one point in the discussion, I proclaimed loudly that moustaches made people look old. (I can’t quite claim a lack of bias here: I loathe bushy things sprouting from the lip). My mother loved them, and by way of a retort, pointed out that the lack of hair makes a person look even older. This comment was a well-aimed barb at yours truly, but it did make me wonder. What is it that makes a person look older than his years? Here are a few thoughts.

1 Mous T. Ache (Read: Musty Ache)

Lip fuzz has been the favoured form of facial adornment for generations of Indians. This is baffling, because it is apparent that moustaches throw up several functional obstacles. The impediment to erm, romantic activity is obvious. I have also observed that if a certain level of bushiness is achieved, it will result in a perpetual itchiness in the nose that is impossible to get rid of. Sufferers often try to remedy the symptoms through nasal excavation. The impact of this vocation on social life has been well documented, painfully. A more tactful solution would involve flicking relentlessly at the bridge of the nose. It’s quite all right if you look like a pompous fool swatting imaginary flies, as long as you look strong and manly right?

People with moustaches tend to spend an inordinate amount of time tending to them. As pruning too much (shaving accidents) and pruning too little (you don’t want to look like this) are both equally unacceptable, such solicitousness is maybe excusable; but the brand new professional in me is obliged to bring up the word ‘productivity’ just to make a point. (There, that felt good.)

Besides, (excuse me, I’m stubbornly persistent) moustaches make people look old. Ten year olds can’t grow moustaches right? Only real men can, and by default, real men are older than ten year old kids.

That seems to me to be a Q.E.D. worthy list of cons, but you only need one pro to send them all back to jail. Virility. The moustache maketh the man. The fuzzier the hair on your lip, the more children you will produce, and the world will be a better place. Blessed be the man who conceived of this remarkable concept; I can only assume he had blisters on his upper lip and could never get a clean shave. Well, ideas are like viruses wrapped in Velcro. They are infectious and they stick.

Interestingly, the length of a man’s hair was once a sign of virility. Today, all that a brave comet will get are jibes about homosexuality and the effeminate mind. More on this in the next section, but the moral here is: Believe in the power of change.

Agification Potential: 5-6 Years

2 <This head(ing) lost all its hair>

There was once a time when haircuts were not only deemed unnecessary, but frivolous. Have you even seen a Jesus Christ film where Jesus had a crew cut? Long hair was, of course, associated with good old virility back then, and we all know how big a draw that is. That no longer works today, and I’ll try a different tack.

It is an utter (Fascist) fabrication that long hair requires more maintenance time!

OK, I might concede that long hair that’s not quite Dave Mustaine long might, but then it really isn’t long enough, so that’s that. How many panes of glass exist that aren’t thoroughly abused by short haired men for a comb-in-the-back-pocket touch up? How many toilets have been forced to shut down because they budgeted out mirrors and fostered suicidal tendencies in deprived young people? How many apparel labels have gone bankrupt because they thought removing back pockets was cool? If you have waist length or even shoulder length hair, gravity is your comb, and since gravity is always around, productivity quickly follows. As a perk, there won’t be any more getting embarrassed by one way glass.

That rant might appear significant, given that my argument links hairlessness with perceived age, but I have to admit it’s tangential at best. Long hair does not work, and not just as an anti-aging agent. In fact, I’d wager that most people would take baldness and a penalty of five years over the social stigma of long hair any day. On a sidenote, if I’ve suggested in any way that long hair might be used to hide baldness, put that thought out of your head, before it ferments your brain and turns it into slush. Comb-overs died in the eighties, I’m afraid.

So yes, the amount of hair on your head is inversely proportional to your perceived age, as long as it ain’t too long. Historically speaking, people have always viewed hair loss as an inevitable symptom of aging. It is absolutely pointless to bring up arguments about how life is stressful today, and that stress causes baldness, or how random road accidents that cause bumps on the head require a shaved head. Twenty something and have no hair? Get ready for uncledom.

Agification Potential: upto 10 years depending on the extent of hairlessness.

3 Corpulence: Persistence :: Turbulence: Existence
Before I launch into some observations, a couple of caveats are in order. First, (I have to put this one on the table), there is the potentially anomalous phenomenon of the baby face. Those amongst the clan of the obese who are lucky enough to be blessed so, are likened to chubby, cherubic babies, and you can’t really go further down the age spectrum than that. A couple of pointers for the corpulent who want to go this way: try absolutely everything to get flawless facial skin. Ignore snide comments about being sissy. Get rid of every single strand of hair from your face; get a laser/ultraviolet/<buzzword here>operation done if necessary. When memory fails, just remember: Babies don’t have facial hair! A thinning thatch might actually come in handy here; you should also get the Superman-style lock of hair on the forehead if possible. If desperate, you might even consider getting all your teeth removed. If things don’t quite work out even after this, there’s a reason why I think this phenomenon is mysterious.

However, with due respect to long caveats, it is extremely likely that if you are fat, people automatically upgrade your age. Why? Perhaps because weight gain is generally a marker for the end of childhood. If you are no longer piling on inches vertically, what’s the body to do with the obscene amounts of food you are ingesting? This mindset may be out of place in the television/computer era that is today, what with obesity in children hitting the roof, breaking through to the next floor and looking for the next roof, but I suspect such perception is not quite voluntary.

Agification Potential: upto 10 years, depending on the level of corpulence.

There are many, many other factors that contribute to perceived age but these are clearly the ones that affect the greatest number of people the most. A yet-to-crack male voice at thirty, or wrinkling at twelve, or producing salt-and-pepper hair at twenty, might be just as good at agifying, but are infinitely more exotic. Besides, this post is quickly rambling on into obscurity, so I’ll part with one thought:

If you are bald and/or fat and/or have a splendid handlebar moustache, there is only thing you can do. Forget everything I've said, and just be Cool.

Farmland Park

2010-07-03T23:52:00.004+05:30

I wasn’t very impressed. This place was supposed to be so top secret that the only people who knew about its location had collective retrograde amnesia. The CIA wing in the Al-Qaeda you ask? The Martian invasion of 1977? The underwater Neanderthal colony off Mauna Kea? Amateurish attempts at concealment, I thought everybody knew about those. This was the real deal, and it was just a dingy shack in the grasslands. Welcome to Farmland Park.

The non-descript (the adjective I’m forced to abuse) man who sat in the only chair in the room grinned from ear to ear.

“You see, we save the world on a daily basis.”

He must have caught my contemptuous sneer, and his grin grew even wider, and possibly met at the back of the neck.

“We watch Frank Lampard. We dictate what he does, we dictate what he doesn’t. Simply put, we live his life for him. And we save the Universe in the process.”

I hadn't quite grasped the scope of that pronouncement yet, and my only thought was to wonder if the man did this sort of thing often. My journalistic instincts bristled at that thought, and I wondered if the silly looking man in the raincoat (raincoat?!) was a trained martial artist and could snap my neck before I could ask to go to the bathroom. Besides, he seemed to have an uncanny knack for pre-empting my questions.

His voice grew sombre; this was a voice that left no doubt that whatever would follow would be very profound indeed.

“Every once in a generation, an anomaly is born. It can be anything (in fact, the last one was a toilet seat), and it is slightly inconvenient that this time it’s a human being: Frank Lampard." He paused for effect. "What is this anomaly, you wonder, and how bad can it be?"

"I’ll spare you the details; it suffices to say that anomalies are very powerful, and very lethal. If the flashpoint of the anomaly is not identified and nullified in time…” His voice, if possible, grew even more sombre at this point. I could feel the profundity turn the air in the room foggy.

“… the Universe will disappear in a soundless explosion of millions of wiggly space-time thingies!”

I couldn’t help it. I laughed. But I was a journalist, I was getting paid well for my job, and I had to ask the questions. I asked him about the flashpoint.

“Ah, that is the question, isn’t it?” All the melancholy had disappeared, and his 360 degree grin was firmly back on. He cleared his throat, laughed to himself at some amusing memory, cleared his throat again, and continued.

“Frank Lampard cannot score a goal in the football World Cup!”

This statement perplexed me more than any hogwash about the Universe. Football was one of my few vices, and I had to admit that I had a couple of uncharitable thoughts about Fate when that goal was disallowed. (I’m English, but I guess you’ve already worked that out.)

“I see that you begin to see. Indeed, do not go by appearances. We have resources, and a lot of them, and we have had to strain them to breaking point to keep this lovely little world of ours intact. Let me tell you something… “ He paused, reconsidered, tittered, and said, apparently tangentially, “What would you say is the role of Frank Lampard tactically?”

I gushed eloquently about his superb awareness, and his knack for scoring, his intelligence and his never-say-die-attitude, and how he was the best box-to-box midfielder in the world. At this point, he cut short my rant, chuckling happily to himself.

“Box-to-box?” He chuckled again, with what seemed to me to be a hint of malice. “Who but the English would think someone who makes five yard passes, and runs around from one penalty area to the other talented? I’m not calling you stupid here, simply misguided. It wasn’t easy repeatedly publishing articles calling defensive mindedness beautiful, when it was so obvious it wasn’t. Just swamping the media proved to be insufficient; we took to conversational level lobbying. Even that wasn’t enough, it turned out. Eventually, we were forced to…” He looked around surreptitiously as if to check for eavesdroppers.

“… use our time machine.” At this point, he set off on a misty-eyed recollection of the delightful bloody mindedness of 16th century England, which I choose to skip from this narrative.

I had to put an end to the pedantic and remarkably unhelpful gloating (OK I admit it. My pride was a wee bit hurt.) I asked the man how they actually stopped Frank Lampard from scoring. Surely, working on the national psyche would do nothing to help here? Did they put jell-o in his World Cup boots or something? I chuckled at my resolve in the face of adversity, cracking jokes and all. He seemed to have been waiting for just this question. Again. He promptly broke off an anecdote about 17th century English women, and how prudishness was just about the last thing on their minds.

“It’s not been easy. Remember 2006? Frank Lampard missed a lot of chances. Most of them were worked out with slight aerodynamic modifications to his boots, and some jell-o in the socks(?!), but there was this occasion, I’m sure you’ll recall, when he blasted over from something like three yards. That was a toughie. We had to bring into play our remote controlled crossbar lowering mechanism. It turns out we didn’t quite get the hang of that particular device, what with a similar incident occurring this time around as well. We undershot a bit, and the ball crept over the line. Nasty, but not irreparable. One of our agents in the stands reacted quickly, and chucked a scarf in the linesman’s face. He even added a few insults about the poor official’s sister for insurance, I hear. FIFA aren’t going to do anything, because well, they have all been custom grown by our biologists from pieces of mould. It’s a wonder they can talk at all.” He sniggered for a moment and then lapsed, inexplicably, into an impregnable silence.

Stunned as I was, I decided to try and employ some of my journalistic loquaciousness to try and get him to talk. His expression only became progressively more sullen, and the grin receded back to looking ear-to-ear. I gave up and lapsed into a hurt silence of my own. Eventually, and I’m convinced my mute protest had nothing to do with it, he started to talk again.

“You lot are stupid you know, really stupid. Frank Lampard is a smart man, a genius even, and surely if a man of that intelligence cannot score, no one else in the team can? And if no Englishman can score, aren’t you lot monumentally dense to think they'll win the cup?” He appeared to shiver at the thought, and I decided to keep any retort about the man’s debating skills to myself. He marched on relentlessly.

“Your cluelessness helped keep our operation running fairly smoothly. But the imbalance we had imposed on the Universe was far too great; we had to do something to set things right, or we would have created a fresh anomaly ourselves. Hence, the Frank Lampard of the Premier League, the Frank Lampard with the hatful of goals, Frank Lampard, the fox in the box." He winked obnoxiously.

"I assure you, it’s far harder helping the man score than to stop him from scoring.” Astoundingly, throughout this piece of invective any sane man would classify as ‘vitriolic’, his grin resolutely stayed plastered.

“Still, we saved you all, didn’t we?”

Then, something unexpected happened. The Rolling Stones’ ‘Sister Morphine’ started to blare out from hidden speakers in the wall. (Up to that point the most technologically advanced object in the room had been my fountain pen.) The man’s grin had fallen off, and he suddenly looked quite harried, mumbling to himself incessantly.

“That Mick Jagger! We wined him, we dined him. We made him rich, we made him popular, and he still won’t let go.” He must have noticed my incredulous expression because he explained himself, “Don’t you see? He’s even more powerful than us. And we don’t even know what his agenda is, or even if he has one.” I was still baffled.

“He was there! He was there at the USA match supporting them, and out they went. He supported England and they crashed out. And Brazil! Unbelievable, we thought at least they were beyond his influence.We’re not even sure who his agents are, and how many of them there are. We don’t know what technology he’s using, and how advanced it is. He’s rich and powerful, and we made him that way.” At this point, he was positively whining. “He’s a dangerous man!”

I can’t quite say that meeting went well, but I came out of it with a glow in my heart. The English will always fight back, even if the Universe has to go down as a result! Come August, come another season of the EPL, we'll show them who the Men are! Here's to the best league in the world!

PS: It was Mick Jagger's toilet seat.

Cricket Phenomenology

2010-07-03T17:49:00.001+05:30

"Phenomenology suggests that any sport that is not purely luck based, if played for a sufficiently large period of time will become tactically non-different in complexity from any other sport."

T20 cricket is/will be just as smart as test cricket, and far more entertaining to boot.

Sidenote: Non-difference is this delightful term I picked up from an Indian philosophy text. It is supposed to imply an equality of different things, at some exalted level far beyond our petty minds – something like ‘twice infinity is non-different from thrice infinity’. Don’t blame the ancients for a lack of mathematical rigour, that example’s all mine.

The Shotgun Method

2010-06-30T20:50:00.000+05:30

I don’t particularly like thought experiments. I can’t deny that they have their uses: they make excellent explanatory tools – who wouldn’t love mechanics of solids re-imagined as a first person shooter game? Besides, Albert Einstein used them. Where they do fail for me is as debating tools. Innumerable times has good ol' Binit (who’s a closet Sophist, I tell you) employed a thought experiment to cleverly chop the wings off a delightful flight of polemical fancy. (Can you imagine that?) Having said that, I have to, I simply have to, make an exception for the shotgun idea.

The only really satisfactory visualization I’ve come up for the rigid monotony of existence is that of a hostage situation. Most people go about their lives as though they have a loaded shotgun flush against the sides of their heads. I’m done with college, but the first example that comes to mind to illustrate this is the shotgun about exams. You don’t want to mess up an exam, because if you do, you’ll mess up this course, and if you mess up this course, you’ll mess up your grades, and if your grades go south, so do your job prospects, and you’ll just have screwed up your life. This chain is incredibly tenuous. A simple argument along the lines of “It’s just an exam!” should be enough to break it apart. But it doesn’t. Most people I know aren’t clairvoyant, and most people I know can’t see far enough into the future to really fear the outcome. Ergo, the shotgun. Everyone knows what a shotgun an inch away can do. (Perversely, the phrase ‘interior redecoration’ springs to mind.) The fear of a shotgun is palpable, imminent. It’s the only kind of fear that’ll work as a substitute for actual interest.

What will really happen if you ignore that exam? Nothing, of course. The quanta of change will always be too small to appreciate, and you’ll go into free fall in no time. You’ll eventually beg for someone to hold that shotgun to your head again. The problem is you can only call the bluff once. Think of those optical illusions where you resolve a dog in a garden from what initially looks like a featureless splotch of black and white. Can you go back and unresolve the featureless splotch? Also, It’s not just one gun that’s pointed at your head. Why don’t you drink? Does it really make sense being a perfect teetotaller when you’ve been living off junk food for years? Not to me, it doesn’t. Will you look significantly fatter if you eat that extra packet of chips? I doubt that. Yet, it’s one shotgun that’s served me well for a long time (sadly, it was recently buried under a wash of corpulence). Will it matter if I write this blog post now? Why not tomorrow? Or the day after? It’s not like I have a legion of admirers threatening suicide. It doesn’t take a lot of thought experimentation to find a shotgun for just about every activity there is. And it doesn’t take a lot of thought after that before you start to ask: ‘How many more bluffs will I call before I realize that life is a bluff itself?’

(That was a bit too melodramatic for my taste, but I’d typed that into an empty text file in a particularly poignant moment, and I had to bring it in somewhere). At that point it occurred to me that this analysis is dangerously close to the existentialist concept of angst. The shotgun is, in a sense, a response to the heady sense of freedom. There’s only so many times you can appreciate the fact that there’s nothing really that stops you from doing what you want, only so many times you laugh conformity and danger in the face, before you descend into madness. Ergo, the shotgun. Ambition and purpose are most certainly life’s biggest bluffs, but necessary ones. I’d prefer a life with an army of shotguns pointed at my head over utter pointlessness anyway. Besides, I’m about to start a job, and that calls for at least a double barrelled shotgun, doesn’t it? Preferably sawn-off, and not more than a couple of inches from the temple.

One for the Caste System

2010-03-31T22:59:00.003+05:30

Here’s news that’s not quite news. India has once again backed away from attempts to classify the caste system as a type of discrimination.

“Inclusion of caste in the definition of racial discrimination is completely unacceptable. We reject the notion that caste falls under the rubric of racial discrimination”.

I agree with the sentiment here, I really do. Firstly, the notion of race is very difficult to define in reality. Perhaps Blacks and Whites have sufficient physical dissimilarity to skirt around these difficulties; what about Indians and Sri Lankans? How about racial differences between North Indians and South Indians? Or, to get to the point, what about people belonging to different castes? I agree that any position that maintains racial differences in these cases is biologically untenable. The interesting thing, if you read the article carefully, is that the issue is not about racial discrimination at all. The title of the UN report is “2009 Draft principles and Guidelines for the Effective Elimination of Discrimination based on Work and Descent”. It’s pretty long winded (but only middling in terms of the usual bureaucratic guff you see), but it doesn’t mention the word ‘race’ anywhere, does it? The Indian government played the oldest card in the warfare game – they picked the battleground. Going by that title, there is no way that the caste system cannot fall under the purview of the corresponding UN committee.

There was another thing I found disconcerting about that news article. We just sounded a lot like China in a few places! Here are a couple of relevant snippets:

“Besides how can anyone seriously suggest that India’s fight against caste based discrimination will be helped by international attention on the issue? Are we a closed country where debates do not take place and correctives not applied?’’

“It will just muddy the waters instead of helping us remove this evil. Imagine the reaction when U.N. bodies begin accusing India of being intolerant to the weaker castes. Progressive people who are working to end this will become sidelined if there is uproar against foreign advice.”

Now those are dubious statements. I’m sure it wouldn’t have escaped your notice that such a viewpoint can be easily extrapolated to justify several generally condemned ideas. The idea of a state controlled media, for instance. If we, as a nation, know that we are free and fair in our administration, why the hell should we let external opinion ‘muddy’ our internal affairs? Let us show the rest of the world that all is fine and dandy, and we’ll fix our own problems. That sounds almost exactly like a friendly nation we know. Besides, allowing the world to condemn the caste system would make many of our legislative achievements look like blinkered jokes. I’m talking about reservations of course; while their apparent usefulness is unquestionable, it would not be wrong to classify them as a form of reverse discrimination. That would really muddy some waters.

PS: The term racism has become an umbrella term for discrimination, a fact that the Indian government conveniently distorted to support their stance. Under this generalizing assumption, yes, the caste system is racism. Also, there's more I want to say about the deep-rooted Indian tendency to cling on to our 'culture' in totality, but that should be a post in itself. :)

Why I dislike the idea of Universals

2010-03-31T05:49:00.008+05:30

I’ve been exploring a lot of classical philosophy lately, and I have been pleasantly surprised, repeatedly, to note the depth of learning and erudition of most of its practitioners. It seems to me that today’s perception of philosophy as a head-in-the-clouds occupation for vagabonds who can’t do much else cannot be further from the truth. The sheer logical elegance of many schools of philosophy completely belies the pre-scientific origins of their dictums. In modernity’s contempt of philosophy, I also see a touch of denial. Who would want to admit that such heady speculation is beyond his faculties? It would be much simpler to pretend to be the admirable Busy Man. Anyway, the unfair treatment of the noble art of philosophy is not quite what I had in mind for this post – it is the issue of Universals that I want to talk about.

The idea of universals is fundamental to Plato’s philosophy. Some schools of Indian philosophy that have strains of realism, like Vaisesika, have this idea too. What exactly are universals? To put it simply, if you see a monitor in front of you, the physical form of the monitor is not all that there is to this observation. There is an abstract notion of ‘monitor-ness’ that lies outside of the physical form you see; the real, tangible monitor you can see (and touch ,or smell, if you desire) is just a materialistic shadow of this ‘idea’. Plato also believed that all physical objects are fundamentally flawed. Your LCD monitor is different from my LCD monitor because both are different caricatures of the same idea. You can argue that the idea of universals is just that: an idea. A logically elegant and fascinating one, admittedly, but one that exists only in the mind of the philosopher. Here’s where realism stirs up the works. All universals, according to Plato, are real. They have an existence independent of their occurrence in our chain of thought, in some supra-universe that lies far beyond our powers of perception.

My grouse with the whole concept is that most illustrations of the existence of universals degenerate to comparisons of animals. The argument usually goes something like this: See that cow yonder? There is a fundamental bovinity to all creatures that look like that. Your mind captures this idea when you think of a generic cow, and not the specific cow chewing up your lawn. I smell something cyclic in this argument. The reason we call them cows in the first place, is because we perceive some physical similarities in certain animals. Arguing once again that cows share a certain abstract similarity is a tautology. One more key point that makes me critical of the notion of universals is the fact of evolution. Evolution tells us that physical similarities between animals are not discrete: apes and humans shared a common ancestor that looked a little bit like both, and a little bit like neither. So much for the universal idea of an ape. You can of course reopen the argument by claiming that every single animal in evolutionary history has a corresponding universal. If that is the case, why does the idea of extinct animal X always follow the empirical discovery of its fossils?

Application of the idea of universality to man-made objects is a little bit more perplexing. How’d the first person to make a chair come up with the idea? The problem here, again, is that realist philosophers see discreteness where there is none. Did humans just sit on the ground for centuries, until one fine day they discovered the magical chair in a flash of inspiration? Reality is less romantic. The modern lounge chair has progressively evolved from the piece of deadwood that seated Adam. I might be wrong here, but the theory of Universals, at least when applied to physical objects, is complete junk.

There are other aspects to the theory of Universals that are much harder to dispute - the neurological idea of qualia for instance. Is there redness because we label the colour of apples so? Or is there is an idea of redness that exists independently; something that a blind man who has never seen apples can perceive?

A Critique of Criticism - Part I

2009-12-15T00:56:00.010+05:30

From around the age of two, I have always wondered why critics hate the movies I love. While my views have tempered a bit with age, there are still several points on which I feel I can criticize the critics. For starters, why do critics hate CGI? There are a couple of reasons I can think of. First, almost all critics are conservative. There are a number of movies which weren’t particularly liked by the critics of their era; but time and a pair of history-tinted spectacles have ensured that today’s critic has an entirely different view. Ridley Scott’s ‘Alien’, which received average reviews when it was first released, is hailed as a science fiction classic today. I wonder if critics hated the first colour movies, or even the first ‘talkies’. CGI and animation are relatively new to the party, and despite any artistic bonuses they might offer, will inevitably take some time to be digested.

You might hear some critics argue that special effects detract from the emotional experience of a movie by taking time away from the actual actors. The part about taking time away from the actors is true (only if the movie has any live actors), but the argument about emotions is debatable. I would argue that most critics are looking for ‘personal’ human emotions over something generic like awe or wonder. The reason I say this is that most of the time, special effects convey awe in a way nothing else can. Imagine there's an apocalyptic movie in which you have an asteroid crashing into the Earth. There are two ways you can show something like this. The ‘personal’ way would be to show the lead actor/actress with his/her hands over his/her mouth watching as the big, yellow fireball in the sky gets steadily larger. The ‘impersonal’ way would be to use heavy special effects to convey the sense of worldwide destruction that such a catastrophic impact can produce. It’s inarguable which one the critics will like. My point is simply that there are people out there who prefer the second option; people who don’t mind feeling awed and humbled by sheer scale; people who don’t mind impersonal views of disasters that are, by definition, impersonal. The average movie-goer can of course pick a side and stick to it, but critics can’t and shouldn’t.

(continued in part II)

A Critique of Criticism - Part II

2009-12-15T00:50:00.007+05:30

Here’s what Roger Ebert has to say about the noble art of criticism.

'When you ask a friend if Hellboy is any good, you're not asking if it's any good compared to Mystic River, you're asking if it's any good compared to The Punisher. And my answer would be, on a scale of one to four, if Superman is four, then Hellboy is three and The Punisher is two. In the same way, if American Beauty gets four stars, then The United States of Leland clocks in at about two.'

That’s absolutely perfect. That’s exactly what you expect critics to do. Is it hard? Very, very much so. People have entire genres of films they despise, and critics are people too (I think). However, it is their job to be objective, and if they cannot do it, genre-based reviews (like in music) may be the best option. You might often hear a critic call a movie ‘brainless’. Invariably, such a statement will be followed by a disparaging remark about popcorn. This kind of criticism is so clichéd that it makes my head spin; and the ironic thing is that it’s usually directed against (supposedly) clichéd movies. What is a brainless movie? If you make a thorough study of all the films that have been called brainless by critics, you will most likely come to the following conclusions.

Most action movies are brainless.
Most big budget movies are brainless.
Most horror movies are brainless.
Most romantic comedies are brainless.
Most commercially successful movies are brainless.

The obvious conclusion you can draw from these observations is that audiences are brainless. Let’s ignore the veracity of that statement itself, and concentrate on the observations that led to it. Why do critics dislike action movies? That’s an easy one. Critics want ‘real’ cinema while most audiences are escapist. I’ve often heard my mother wonder why she should go to the theatre to watch movies like ‘Jail’ (the Hindi film) when she only wants a break from her problems in real life. I think most critics do understand this point. It is just the fact that they are incorrigibly elitist that prevents them from ever praising a ‘properly’ escapist film without qualifying the praise with the ‘popcorn’ jibe. Most of the vitriol poured on popular movies (by the later critics of course) smacks of elitism. Here I cannot help but be reminded of Dan Brown’s ‘The Da Vinci Code’. One of my school friends, on a whim, had picked up this ordinary looking book, when it was still a relative unknown. I borrowed it from him soon enough, and the first thing that hit me when I opened the book was a deluge of rave reviews. Most books manage to dig up one or two positive reviews and plaster it prominently on the front page, but any experienced bibliophile can tell the difference between a critically acclaimed book and a not so critically acclaimed one (the ubiquitous ‘bestseller’ tag notwithstanding). This belonged to the first category; the fact that the first few pages were adorned with dozens of glowing reviews was an excellent hint. A good number of years later, when the movie adaptation was being made, I was surprised to see that many critics had gone back to review the book and suddenly found it very poor. Among the usual criticism of the ‘plot’, the ‘dialogue’ and the ‘characterization’, I found some rare gems about the egregious grammar and Dan Brown’s simple mind.

(continued in part III)

A Critique of Criticism - Part III

2009-12-15T00:43:00.008+05:30

At the risk of contradicting myself, I have to concede that there is truth to the ‘brainless’ argument, even if the actual wording itself smacks of elitism. There are many people who go to the movies and make a conscious effort not to think. However, I think that such people are being more escapist than ‘brainless’. On the other hand there exist a vast number of what I like to call ‘thoughtless sceptics’. These are the sort of people who see our hero climbing a mountain and ask, ‘That’s so not possible. I so hate this fake, brainless movie’. They might go on to wonder why a passing thunderstorm or a bored eagle doesn’t simply knock him off his precarious perch. I find this sort of criticism more stupid than anything else; most such people are not thinking it through. It’s much more exhilarating, at least for me, to try and construct a plausible scientific foundation to support such events.If everything we once thought was impossible stayed impossible, I think we’d still in our deerskin clothing wondering if using iron for making tools might be a good idea. There are people who can walk on walls, and there are people who can jump from the second floor of a building and walk away.

‘Why does the underdog always win?’ Another similar question and if possible, one asked in even more incredulous tones goes something like, ‘How does the hero always survive?’. I think it’s time to talk about that oldest of cinematic themes, the story of the survival against all odds. Is it that hard to conceive that in any natural disaster, there will be at least one survivor whose fortuitous escape may reveal a compelling tale? I have to admit that the ‘survivor’ trick is used more to thrill than convey anything ‘real’, but the argument still holds.

More often than not, thinking a film through is a personal choice. There are many ‘artsy’ films that provoke absolutely no mental debate in my head; and there are many ‘popcorn’ movies which actually do. Does this say something about the film? Not really. Let’s talk about the movie 2012, for example. I found some things in the movie very thought provoking. or example there is the plot driven ethical dilemma of ‘Who to save?’, a question which continues to remain relevant no matter how many times it is asked. Then there is Roland Emmerich (the director)’s personal favourite, the philosophy I have dubbed ‘The Great Equalizer’ - a global catastrophe that levels all differences between ‘First World’ and ‘Third World’ countries, the economic egalitarian’s utopia. If you've watched 'The Day After Tomorrow' you'll recall how the U.S. government is forced to request the Mexican government for help; and in 2012 itself, the tiny contingent of mostly 'First World' survivors, sets sail for Africa.

(continued in part IV)

A Critique of Criticism - Part IV

2009-12-15T00:33:00.007+05:30

‘What do you mean critics are irrelevant? They definitely aren’t. I read every single review and do the exact opposite of what the critic suggests.’

It was quite surprising to read views like this on the Internet, considering I held such views in the not so ancient past. I do realize now that it’s just a knee-jerk reaction to reading negative reviews of movies I like, because I really do like films in general. I love science fiction and enjoy action and horror movies. If I’m feeling unusually poignant I wouldn’t mind watching an Oscar drama. At the other end of the emotional spectrum are the romantic comedies, and no I don’t hate them. I can even stand spoofs when I’m feeling really miserable. I suspect that others who profess to hold such views have similar opinions. The real issue here is the legion of critics who pride themselves on the level of acrimony they can achieve with a pen (or a keyboard). It only makes people wonder (often justifiably) if all these critics are just failed film makers themselves.

In a few situations, critics positively labour to make themselves look silly. If a movie stretches beyond the magic figure of 120 minutes; many a critic’s mind will turn to sludge. Dazed and battered, the critic will reach for his laptop and rant about the ‘complicated’ plot and the ‘excessive’ length of the film. OK, two hours being on the shorter side for the average Indian film, we might be better acclimatized, but when even the great LOTR movies cannot escape this criticism, surely something is wrong? I suspect, once again, that this is more to do with the conservative nature of the profession than anything else.

The issue of derivative works is another critical chestnut, and can be summed up as follows,

All science fiction movies are Star Wars/Star Trek rip-offs.
All fantasy movies are LOTR/Harry Potter rip-offs.

Accusing Christopher Paolini’s Eragon series of being derivative makes a smidgeon of sense. It is greatly influenced by the LOTR universe, but I would still argue that the world it creates is sufficiently unique to discount that argument. But calling a film like ‘The Dark is Rising’ a LOTR rip off is hilarious. There is absolutely nothing in common between the two except for the fact that they are both fantasies. Imagine calling every romantic drama ever made a ‘Gone With The Wind’ rip off. I would also argue that the imagination required to construct a detailed and internally consistent alternate universe, be it in fantasy or science fiction, constitutes a greater achievement than writing a moving tale of your own experiences. Don’t get me wrong here. Most critically acclaimed novels are excellent. They are acclaimed for a good reason: they tell great tales of human emotion. What about great tales of human imagination?

To be fair, the really good critics know their stuff, and to a large extent, have achieved a sense of objectivity. The real problem is that criticism is so easy; any twelve year old with a keyboard and a cynical worldview can do it. The hallmark of a good critic, in my opinion, is greater tolerance, and not the inverse. Before I end this rant, here’s an absolutely delightful conversation snippet that I overheard in the theatre where I watched 2012. It’s between a little girl and her little brother, with a late cameo appearance from their father, and is one reason why I did not immediately discard the ‘brainless audience’ hypothesis earlier.

Girl: What if it really happens?
(She is referring to the idea that the world will end in 2012, of course.)
Boy: Then we will all be dead.
(At this point, the boy says something surprisingly profound.)
Boy: We live together, and die together.
(OK, fascinating, but they are kids, remember? Nothing surprising there.)
Dad (in the next seat): It MAY happen, you know. It may happen.

There you go, it’s already got people thinking.

Kill in the name of ...?

2009-12-01T02:05:00.003+05:30

We all agree that racism is wrong. It makes no sense to say that black people are inferior just because they don’t get freckles in summers. The commonly espoused argument against racism goes something along the lines of, ‘We are all human, and all humans are equal’. Admirably egalitarian, and something I wholeheartedly agree with. Then there’s sexism. It’s another blight that’s being slowly drained out of mainstream culture. There’s a long way to go before we can say we are completely free of these evils, but they have at least one thing in their favour. They have been recognized as social evils.

The funny thing is that there are a host of ‘attitudes’ in the world today that should be, using the same definition of discrimination that drives concern about sexism and racism, marked for eradication. Instead, many of them have no pejorative connotations at all and are often viewed synonymously with positive intangibles like ‘virtue’. The ones that are viewed unfavourably, have legions of apologists working tirelessly to change precisely that fact. Take for instance, that entity called patriotism. Yes, we have terms like ‘jingoism’ that are supposed to represent patriotism gone bad, but I wonder – Does patriotism inevitably lead to jingoism? Patriotism seems to be even more discriminatory than racism. At least racism has a certain amount of biological basis for differentiation. How can you justify wars between India and Pakistan, or the skirmishes between Pakistan and Afghanistan? Often, cyclically, patriotism ends up being both the cause and the consequence of large scale conflicts.

Arbitrary geographical boundaries that exist nowhere but in the minds of parochial men and women, partition the planet into countries, and fuel patriotism. And patriotism justifies military conflict. Military conflict has developed a culture of its own which, interestingly, revolves around the noble ideals of virtue and honour. I find this ironic, because stripped of all the obfuscation, military conflict and war are just people killing other people. Military conflict actually legitimizes murder – something which racism and sexism, at their worst, never dared to do. In fact war crimes have a strong element of racism and sexism, but cloaked in a veneer of ‘honour’ are often glossed over.

Then you have things like the caste system. It is racism, plain and simple. You don’t even have to construct allegorical arguments to reduce one to the other, like in the case of patriotism. The caste system does not quite have an aura of pure virtue like nationalistic pride, but does not have too much going against it otherwise. Here, once again, India proves itself to be a nation of apologists. Any attempts at change are viewed as an unpardonable attack on our ancient culture.

All the forms of discrimination I’ve talked about (and the countless ones I haven’t) can be reduced to the biological human need for herding. Human beings are social animals, as is often mindlessly repeated, but the implications of this simple statement are staggering. Moving one step up the herding pyramid from the caste system, you have the idea of religion itself. Isn’t that herding too? In recent times, there have been several outspoken opponents of religion, but on the whole, the worst thing that it’s believed to be is a personal quirk. However, even in today’s enlightened times, religion’s capacity to discriminate has not diminished appreciably. It has definitely become a lot more subtle, however. Christians criticize the intolerance of Islam, and point to their own religion as the solution to this. Muslims point to the Christians’ criticism and call upon fellow Muslims to band together against the ‘outsiders’. Hindus point to the bickering of both Christians and Muslims, throw in a few snippets about science in the Vedas and the Big Bang and advocate Hinduism as the most sensible of the lot.

Unless we evolve a hive mind or swarm intelligence, we probably can’t do away with herding. Religion, you have to admit, has probably been the best herding algorithm so far. It has many things going for it – it teaches many people all they know about morality and it fights existential thoughts of purposelessness through rhetoric on the Afterlife. But it’s still herding, and with the associated baggage. The only way to do away with herding, or at least push it to a higher level in the pyramid, would be to instil in all human beings a sense of global identity. This is not as impossible as it seems. Just notice how patriotism, and the need for a sense of identity in the aftermath of globalization, has brought together a collection of ideologically and linguistically disparate, fiercely independent states called India. Unfortunately, this argument requires the existence of a multi-planetary* universe, one in which the population of Earth is striving as one for attention and resources. We don’t have one at the moment. Even if we did, the same principles of jingoistic pride would push conflict to inter-planetary arenas.

Sometimes I wonder if Facebook is the only hope we have.

*- I am referring to planets where sentient civilizations have arisen, like on Earth.

A Blow to Pride

2009-11-16T21:27:00.004+05:30

Have you ever wondered about the number of ‘intelligent’ people you see in the world around you? There are the stratospheric achievers everyone's heard of – world changing scientists, canny politicians, mega rich CEOs. Then you have the smart ones in the classroom you see everyday. There are the inevitable people by the roadside stalls that offer scientific opinion on everything from cricket to extramarital affairs. After a tiring day, you decide to relax with a cup of coffee and a pinch of Youtube, only to run into more of humanity’s finest on the comment pages. If you give a thought to the stunning number of apparently knowledgeable, smart and witty people you e-meet on forums/discussion boards/anonymous chats, you will inevitably ask - How many of these people are there?

As a true computer enthusiast, I decided to go number crunching. There are 6.7 billion people in the world today. Suppose, for the sake of mathematical argument, we pick IQ as the measuring standard for intelligence. Mensa International, widely acknowledged as the finest collection of bigheads on the planet, sets a cut-off percentile of 98 for membership. You may be a member, and you may feel proud that you are a unique and gifted person, being among the top two percent of the human race. You may even have resorted to the odd instance of snobbery.

But what is two percent of the world population in cold, hard numerals? About 135 million. That’s a whole lot of ‘intelligent’ people running around! If the numbers don’t impress you, here’s a comparison. The population of Karnataka is about 53 million. If you add to that the population of Andhra, which is about 76 million, you get near about 130. That means that if you packed all the intelligent people you could find into Karnataka and Andhra, you could give Pride (and his first cousin Ego) a hell of a blow.

In such a world, you wouldn’t even have to look beyond your next door neighbours to find someone smarter than you. You could of course pass this off as a statistical anomaly. A walk down the road to the grocer’s, and the sight of the assistant using cubic equations to track finances would soon remedy that little blip. Your likely next step would be to pick up a scruffy looking passerby and challenge him/her to a verbal duel on the ethical implications of the Iraq invasion. I suspect that a rebuttal replete with references to all the popular war forums on the Internet would be a bit of a dampener. With your unique intellectual perspective on politics suddenly worthless, you might attempt to turn to sport (an analysis of the physics behind Roger Federer’s success, perhaps?), computers (twenty reasons why you think Twitter will end up becoming a part of Facebook) or women (sigh, they just don’t deserve you). The results won’t be significantly different. Changing tack, you might then try,

‘Have you heard of xkcd?’

The other person might enthusiastically engage you on the topic of Stallman jokes and the Number 42, at which point, Pride would choose to hibernate for the rest of the summer. This wouldn’t work for too long, as Pride is well known for being, well, proud, and would wake up to ask,

‘Surely there can’t be two statesful?’

A long hike from the West Coast to the East Coast would ensue. Despite repeated repudiation (about every two miles perhaps) of your conviction, you would march on, your thoughts going back to the unaccounted five million (oh yes, you are too smart to miss out on the fact 135 minus 130 is indeed equal to 5). You would reach the East Coast, swim off it and exult in joy on seeing a young woman calmly drowning on a leaky boat. It just cannot be possible that that woman is doing something smart, right? Then you’d realize that the young lady was merely exploring the exciting blogging possibilities offered by a sinking boat. Pride would go into a self-inflicted coma, taking Ego along for the ride.

There is a point to all that humorizing. The overrated nature of ‘raw’ intelligence, and all the associated yardsticks cannot be emphasized enough. But they are merely overrated, not wrong by themselves. The same, however, cannot be said about the people who hold these results to be gospel and use them to judge people. I think such people would find this article on working memory, and its implications for the concept of ‘raw’ intelligence eye opening. The second point to all this is, 'It's never bad to make fun of yourself, right?'

Heightitis

2009-11-08T13:10:00.003+05:30

If there’s one thing that afflicts humans universally, transcending petty boundaries of religion, skin colour and deodorant choice, what would be it to be? Before someone points out that it could be ‘music’, and before I bash that person’s skull in, I would like to point out that music is not likely to be an affliction. It is of course that vexing question of height. As someone who isn’t particularly tall, but also not particularly short either, I have not been too concerned about my height. But this isn’t true for most people. I’ve noticed that people who consider themselves short adopt several strategies to fight this conclusion. One trick that is rather popular among the celebritocracy employs creative use of footwear. A careful examination of the likes of Tom Cruise will reveal that they are rather under rated stilt walkers. Platform shoes are somewhat exotic however, and I think that most normal people will settle for really big sports shoes.

Another popular trick is the stare-into-infinity-at-about-three-feet-above-your-normal-eye-level trick. The strange thing about this trick is that most people who use this do not seem to be aware of it, with the funny end result that they believe themselves to be speaking eye-to-eye with six footers. If you consider this little charade the ‘active’ version of height combat, the passive version is just as funny – there are people who shrink themselves in the company of taller people, leaning against the wall ever so slightly, just enough to give the impression that if they deign to straighten up they would tower over you. In reality however they would barely have dropped a couple of inches. Some people shun the physical aspects of height combat, and embrace the psychological. A sample conversation would go something like this –

Short Guy:
‘How tall are you?’
Tall Guy: (a bit too honestly)
‘Dunno. Maybe about 5’ 9’’?’
Short Guy: (an expression of complete shock on his face)
‘No way, man. You might not have measured yourself since third grade or something. Because I’m 5’9’’, and you’re a bit taller than me.'

Tall people play a similar game with slightly different rules. They just cannot get the issue of height out of their heads, and believe that looking gawky is the ultimate sign of superiority. How many times have we all been in superb form in debates, a word or two away from the piece de resistance, only to be interrupted by an inconsequential comment about height? You don’t need to go as far as debates to experience this. Even an ordinary conversation about a just finished exam can be rudely interrupted by a statement like,

‘Dude, I can look over your head!’

There is a good side to all that worrying about height. Good posture. As someone who, by the time he started worrying about posture, was biologically too deformed to do anything about it, I can vouch for its importance. While I cannot be sure of this, I think the fretting over height is a bit less pronounced for girls. Weight, on the other hand, is an entirely different matter.

Wikipedia

2009-11-04T14:22:00.006+05:30

The only possible conclusion I can draw after scanning through hundreds thousands of pages on Wikipedia is this:

Any article that has been edited enough to satisfy all the experts will, by definition, be completely incomprehensible to everyone else who's not one.

Post Script :-
Of course there are several other conclusions that can be drawn from the same act, but as they go along the lines of 'Dude, you can't possibly be that jobless!', have been discounted as being too injurious to self-esteem.

In the Eye of the Storm

2009-08-30T13:12:00.004+05:30

I’ve loved astronomy for as long as I can remember. And for nearly the same amount of time, I’ve wondered about people’s fascination for astrology. The truth is that anyone who revels in the cosmic ballet of planets and stars, stars and galaxies, galaxies and supermassive blackholes – the vast, cold, beauty of the Universe, will find astrology petty and inconsequential. Unfortunately, by that very definition, such people are hard to find. If you are seeking an explanation, look no further than good old anthropocentric ego (I’ve discussed this phenomenon here), and a human centric view of the Universe that no amount of astronomy can dispel.

What is Jupiter? Many people might say that it is the planet (or the thing, for the less knowledgeable) that will make me have a fight with a loved one today. Or, if you and I read different horoscopes, it is the reason I will get new clothes today. For me, Jupiter is a planet, a gas giant so large that it can encompass all other planets, and a gas giant so beautiful, with its multihued bands of clouds. For astrology, such things as gas giants cannot exist without a human-specific reason. It harks back to the days when everyone believed that all heavenly bodies were distant lights revolving around the Earth. Perhaps, they were divine lights expressing the mood of the tenants upstairs, and had to be interpreted thus. Today, we know otherwise; we have seen a Universe 10 billion light years in size – yet we cannot let go of anthropocentrism. In almost all religions, human-like figures are Gods, responsible for the whole of creation. Doesn’t that just smack of conceit? We cannot even claim to be a microscopic speck in the universal flotsam. I sincerely hope that alien civilizations will be discovered in my time: that should throw a rather large spanner into the works. Or maybe not. The aliens may then be a) considered the scions the (human) Devil, to be loathed and avoided; b) considered the scions of the (human) God, to be feared and worshipped; c) completely ignored.

There’s another way of putting the idea of human centrism. Think of a story, and the characters in that story. How would you view it? Is the story secondary, purely a property of the characters it contains? Or is the story paramount, with the characters simply parts of a rich tapestry? Obviously, the first is anthropocentrism, and you will immediately see its pervasiveness. Is there a critically acclaimed film, for instance, which falls entirely in the second category? I think many people simply take themselves too seriously. The breadth of cosmic vision that delights, fascinates and ultimately motivates astronomers, makes most people withdraw into a shell. The more of the Universe we see, the stronger the shell grows, and more constricting. There’s another thing about anthropocentrism that is interesting, and almost paradoxical. It implies an external locus of control. If personal destiny is impacted by a supernova 10000 light years away, then how do we know that every time we decide to take a shower, a black hole somewhere isn’t quietly gobbling up its partner? Put this way, it sounds ridiculous, but modern astrology isn’t too dissimilar.

The whole idea reminds me of a sequence in that astoundingly good novel series ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’, where people are tortured and driven to insanity by an instrument that reveals to them the sheer depth of their cosmic insignificance. Perhaps such an instrument is exactly what the world needs.

On conservatism, environmentalism and all things green

2009-08-18T13:10:00.004+05:30

Environmentalism is rather hard to justify, one would think, for someone who calls himself liberal. After all, there’s always the word ‘conservation’ lurking somewhere in all the green, just out of sight. But is it really? The issue here is the inadequacy of language, rather than something philosophically contradictory. Conservatism is not conservation; it is more of a refusal to roll with the times, a mindset that views any change in existing structure as an impending catastrophe. (Or if you want me to put a more positive spin on the definition, conservatism is being traditional.) This definition can easily put conservatism at odds with conservation. Let me give an example. Traditionally in the US, people keep firearms, ostensibly for personal safety. Today, as crime levels spiral, gun control activists seek to impose restrictions on gun procurements; one might think that such activists are being rather conservative. Politically speaking, however, they are liberal, because they are suggesting something that goes against the norm. Environmentalism is similarly liberal in a conservative way. Remember, there was no environmental movement fifty years ago.

Why bother? This is the obvious question asked of environmental conservation’s proponents. Things went along jolly well for four billion years; why start worrying now? The late George Carlin was a well known environmental sceptic. He wondered, in his charmingly cynical way, how human beings could be so conceited as to believe they were capable of destroying planet Earth. He was referring to the commonly cited ideal of the stereotypical environmentalist – ‘Save Planet Earth!’ The Earth didn’t need any saving, he claimed, it was only self-preservation that drove environmentalism. It’s perfectly true that the Earth doesn’t need saving; good old Gaia has survived ice ages, asteroid impacts and nuclear explosions. (On a sidenote, what exactly comprises the destruction of the planet? Will boiling off all water into space do OK? Or do you require it to break apart into a thousand chunks?) Again, the seeming contradiction here is due to language. When an environmentalist wants to save the planet, he is, more specifically, talking about life on the planet. Humans are life, and consequently are part of an environmentalist’s agenda, but that’s not all. I fail to see how concern for rainforests and endangered species can be driven by self-preservation. And therein lurks another argument, which can again be paraphrased as: Why bother? Let endangered species rot, we’re smart and we’ll inherit the planet, scorch the Earth and let all twenty billion of us live happy lives. Some people even compare human-caused extinctions to carnivorous animals’ kills. No one complains when lions hunt deer, right? We’re just doing the same.

We can’t do that precisely because we are smart. Everyone knows humans have superbly evolved brains. These remarkable instruments have helped us produce generations of delightful music. They have enabled us look so far into the past as to the see the birth of the Universe. They have produced reams of literature, and helped us build structures that dwarf us in size. It’s superbly hypocritical to seek to emulate less evolved animals whenever we want to evade responsibility for our actions. Humans have to be responsible, because humans can be responsible. We have the capacity to destroy life; that is inarguable. Extinction rates are nearly hundred times the pre-human era average. Environmentalists are not technophobes, they are not asking us to shun modern life and revert to dwelling in the forest as hunter-gatherers. All they are saying is that we should exercise some caution. If environmental ethics is so important, why doesn’t my religious text say so? More importantly, why wasn’t it there fifty years ago? Er, I think there were slightly fewer people back then.

The Great Evener called Society

2009-07-26T15:54:00.002+05:30

Some time back, I found myself wondering about the self-regulatory nature of markets. Many free market advocates have applied this concept to weight their arguments. Today, of course, in light of the global recession, this argument will sway fewer people; but it remains correct, I think. A self-regulated entity will inevitably oscillate between good and bad states, precisely because it is self-regulated. Anyway, this got me thinking about something else, something far more primeval than market forces and something that is similarly well regulated. Human society.

Why aren’t smart people good at everything they do? OK, before I continue, let me clarify my usage of ‘smart’ here: A smart person is one who has better processing skills (or understanding potential or grasping power) than average. This definition is neither complete nor completely accurate but I merely intend to use it in this sense, not generalize. Returning to the question, if a person has superior grasping skills, then won’t he be able to use this to become better at say, socializing? Can he not use his superior understanding to realize that women are attracted to strong men, and use this knowledge to gym his way to romantic success? A smart person should be able to play sports better because he can analyze situations better, right? Yet the stereotypical image of the college geek, of a rail thin person with fat spectacles, whose brain temporarily vacates premises in the presence of a pretty girl, and someone who can play enough football to trip over one, remains accurate more often than not.

The levelling process begins with school. Notice how the smart guy in school is battered into accepting his complete uselessness in any matters approaching romance. He withdraws into himself, with the unfortunate side effect that his socializing skills only become poorer. The levelling isn’t limited to the ‘smart’ person: the school bully is universally assumed to be a dunce with the emotional depth of a lamppost. The likely end result of an ensuing social evolution would be that the school bully indeed turns out that way. A similar view is held of pretty women. All they can do is coo and compare nail polish colours, right? I have a rather controversial observation to make here. Sometimes smart women do dumb themselves down to conform to the stereotype. Again, we see the great evener at work. The levelling works the other way too. People absorb confidence from things like personal appearance or wealth, and this confidence frees their mind. A confident person can be much more effective at what he does than someone doubtful, hesitant and conventionally ‘smart’. The levelling never stops, and strives ceaselessly to maintain equilibrium in a chaotic world.

Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells

2009-07-19T11:53:00.005+05:30

Once upon a time, in a place far, far away, there lived a man. Superficially, there was nothing special about him. He went to work in a big shot software firm just like everyone else, he paid his taxes just like everyone else and he went to the temple on alternate weekends just like anyone else. But he suffered from a peculiar ailment. Everything in the wide, wide world either disgusted him, or offended his delicate sensibilities. He would see the long haired young man, with his low slung jeans and moan loudly at the deplorable decadence that had crept into human culture. He would see the billboard advertisement showing a couple in close embrace ostensibly selling jeans (again!), and moan loudly at the deplorable decadence that had barrelled into human culture. He would see the young woman chattering away on her cell phone, oblivious to the fact that that day was the Holy Religious Day of Silence (as ordained by Book X, Chapter 9, Sentence 666), and moan loudly at the deplorable decadence that now seemed to have nuked its way into human culture. Once done moaning, he would start wondering, with rising apoplexy, why those dunderheads in government didn’t moan along with him. They would have done something about this shocking state of affairs. Just when he would get down to calming down, he would hear someone on the street describe the latest punk rock sensation in lurid f-word filled terms, and his fury would swell again. He would open the window to remonstrate with him, only to be hit by a cloud of smoke from the aforementioned punk rock fan. It wasn’t the fact that smoking was a recognized killer that would offend him. Oh no! He was a card-carrying member of the neighbourhood cigar club himself. That honour would be reserved for the observation that the smoker was a woman. His face would turn the colour of overheated beetroot, and he would close the window before he scorched the entire neighbourhood with the force of his righteous indignation. Work would occupy him temporarily, but his sensibilities won’t be kept down for long. On the way home, he would shout at a stationary driver for having the temerity to park his car in a nondescript corner of the street to replace a punctured tyre. He certainly wouldn’t notice this of course, he would assume that the guy was simply texting his morally deplorable live-in girlfriend. At home, he would switch on TV to watch something sensible (like Fox News) only to be offended thoroughly by the latest reality show on offer. He would alternately fume at the ungodly clothing and speech of these people, and smile at the knowledge that an especially painful section of Hell awaited them. A thought would occur to him. What sort of monstrous influence can such TV shows have on the unspoiled mind of a hypothetical child? Finally he would decide that matters would have to be taken into his own morally pristine hands. He would compose a letter to the Editor lamenting the falling standards of morality and the rise of ungodliness, and explaining how beating up women in pubs was actually the only solution to this menace. He would fall into a reasonably restful sleep. The barking of dogs would wake him at dawn, and he would moan loudly at the deplorable decadence that made human society adopt these mangy, flea-ridden creatures as pets…

P.S. These are the people I'm talking about. Why do I think these people only increase in number everyday? I hope to hell they aren't evolutionarily favoured.

A Defence

2009-06-03T17:53:00.005+05:30

Atheists are arrogant.
This oft repeated dictum epitomizes the concept of atheism for most people. Why so? The simplest explanation is the most general one: people don’t like people who are different. If the rabble decently believes that a (benevolent/vengeful/indifferent) God exists, then why do those people have to go out of the way to be different? They are atheists (and deliberately different); ergo they are arrogant (to think they are better than the rest). I consign this argument to the same wastebasket of Nonsensical Generalizations that includes rubbish like ‘Long haired guys do drugs’ and ‘Austrian women like steamed cabbage’. These generalizations are simply a mechanism for people who are insecure about their incapacity to be different, to prop up their egos by crushing those who actually are different. Maybe we are all Communists at heart? Incidentally, the celebrated philosopher Ayn Rand is an atheist. In an interview where she espoused this view, the interviewer asked her if she ever wondered about the possibility that humans may not be smart enough to understand God. The unspoken corollary, of course, is that atheists are arrogant enough to preclude this possibility. This argument is incredibly self-defeating. In any scenario where God is beyond human comprehension, logically, atheism is the best world view you can get. If you cannot understand God, how can you embrace any theistic religion that purports to reveal the word of God? On the other hand, a theistic religion-free world view would do just fine too. I am still waiting for one though.

Atheists are hypocrites.
For me, any accusation about anyone’s hypocrisy regarding anything at all is meaningless. In a world of ones and zeroes, everyone is a hypocrite. Some people are merely less hypocritical than others. Cynics say that no atheist survives a life threatening situation: the atheist will inevitably go down on his knees praying for God to save his worthless life. Well it’s possible. I wonder how many devout God-fearing folk denounce an indifferent God when an offering of coconuts does not turn a profit. Non-hypocritical people aren’t the ones who are perfectly non-hypocritical: they are those who fight hypocrisy the hardest. Hypocrisy is an easy allegation to make against people who are trying to do some good. The people who make these allegations, the ones who rot inevitably in the anonymity of inaction, know that these barbs actually sting. Atheists can be hypocrites, but no more or less than any theist.

Atheists have no morals.
This argument is founded in the belief that religion is essential for morality. Many religions base their code of ethics on the judgment of a wrathful God. While this is motivation enough for someone to stick faithfully to the idea of morality advocated by such a religion, I think such superficial morality does more harm than good. Many things held moral by ancient religions are simply abhorrent today; the status of women in society and racism are examples. Similarly, some other things that religious texts consider immoral, like homosexuality and premarital sex are far less taboo today (as they should be). Religious texts have no code of ethics governing the environmental movement or animal welfare. These two ideals are close to my heart, and their absence is quite glaring. From this perspective, it seems that atheism offers one a chance to embrace a broader, more modern and less dogmatic code of ethics. Again, the whole argument would work just as well with a theistic religion-free philosophy. Benjamin Franklin was a practising Christian, but did not believe that morality and ethics are inextricably linked to religion. While some tenets of religious morality might be outdated, it cannot be denied that there still exist several that are and will continue to be relevant. Won’t atheists be deprived of these and turn to immorality? Fortunately today, an atheist is the embodiment of the rejection of dogma. It is unlikely that such a person will not evolve a personal code of ethics through constant introspection. The only lasting solution, however, is to bring ethics to the classroom. The study of ethics and morality as a science should make people open to the idea of constantly evolving notions of good and evil, and right and wrong.

First Cause

2009-06-03T17:44:00.004+05:30

I think that if any war drags on for long enough, no side can claim victory. A ceasefire has just been declared in the mother of all wars – the question of the existence of God. I have vacillated more on this topic than a politician before the polls, so it’s a welcome break. So who wins... Theism or atheism? Neither, as it should be in any self-respecting tie. In an earlier post I argued that the necessity for a First Cause implies the existence of a Creator. First Cause is born out of inductively applying the question ‘why’ on the observed universe. Why do we have seasons on Earth? It’s because the Earth's tilted on its axis and presents itself at varying angles to sunlight as it revolves around the Sun. And why does it do that? It does so because the force of gravity compels it. And why does the force of gravity compel it to do that? Is it because the divine Creator has ordained it so? Unless you are hopelessly closed minded, you can see the problem with this explanation. Why does the divine Creator do what He/She/It does? If the answer is that the divine Creator has to obey different laws of a different universe, again the reason for the existence of those laws can be questioned. The theory of the First Cause has been proposed for only one reason – to put a halt to this infinite recursion. There must be some occurrence which happened just so– it did not have a reason to do that, or, with a nod to mysticism, the reason is beyond our comprehension. All other events ensued. With a simple sleight of nomenclature we can label the First Cause, God. There’s a problem with this theistic idea that did not strike me immediately. If the First Cause is being chosen arbitrarily (the First Cause could be the creator of God or the creator of the creator of God), then why don’t we stop before we even get started? We can say that the existence of the universe (and the associated laws of physics) is the First Cause. Again everything else ensues, but without God. Simply by removing one level from the recursion of whys, we have moved from theism to atheism.

I might have led you to believe that allusion to a First Cause is inevitable with the current understanding of our universe. That’s not entirely true. If the Big Bang occurred, and the universe began with it, then you need a First Cause. But what if the universe did not have a beginning? Many scientists, alarmed by the ‘creation event’ implied by the Big Bang, sought other explanations for the existence of the universe. A quantum theory of gravity could offer a potential escape clause: it can remove all singularities, meaning that the universe could have existed forever, making a ‘creation event’ a bit redundant. A question still remains. Even if the universe could be completely described in terms of a small set of physical laws, why does a universe that enforces these laws exist? Are the laws, as Stephen Hawking puts it, so compelling that they bring about the creation of the universe?

Life, the Universe and the Everything

2009-04-02T00:28:00.008+05:30

Paul Davies’ ‘The Fifth Miracle’ threw a spanner into Carl Sagan’s (and my) magnificent cosmic vision of a universe teeming with life. He simply asks one question- Doesn’t this vision mean that physical laws are rigged in favour of life? Is it possible that the physical laws themselves or some other ‘life’ laws that operate at a higher level are designed to make the spontaneous origin of life an inevitability? If your answer is yes, then you are a biological determinist, and you are only step away from that unutterable blasphemy called religion, and a supernaturally ordained universe. Davies espouses a school of thought I haven’t been exposed to previously. He believes that everything in the biosphere can be explained by natural selection and Darwinian evolution; but this implies that there must be a first living creature from which everything else evolved. For some scientists, the leap of reasoning required to visualize the painfully slow workings of evolution is not too different from one required to visualize the spontaneous origin of life from inorganic chemicals. Davies doesn’t agree. He claims that the probability of a primordial soup of chemicals (self) organizing themselves into something that can even satisfy the most lax definitions of life is too low. If indeed the most miniscule of miniscule probabilities was hit here on Earth, then we won some kind of once-only cosmic lottery. It won’t happen again. Time, which is conveniently used to explain the many counter-intuitive machinations of evolution, is far less useful here. Current models predict that life originated almost immediately on planet Earth, in an astronomically insignificant few hundreds of millions of years. On the other hand, evolution was given the best of four billion years to weave its magic. The point to be taken away from this argument is that life being so unlikely couldn’t have occurred more than a handful of times (or only once); if you believe otherwise, you believe that the laws of the universe are somehow rigged to favour life, and you are a biological determinist. Carl Sagan (and others), who worked so hard to eliminate any traces of supernatural trimmings from our understanding of the universe, actually implicitly champions a theistic world view!

My chief grouse with this approach concerns the conclusion that biological determinism is the only way to explain a universe full of life. I’ll illustrate with the example of galaxies. We can see the beautifully ordered structure in a spiral galaxy, and ask – Are the laws of the universe rigged to produce this? The answer is yes, simply because we can see a spiral galaxy. We know that life exists because we do, and because we know that, in some sense, the laws of the universe are rigged in favour of life. I have a solution to the problem of rarity of life. It uses a theory called panspermia which claims that terrestrial life is of extra-terrestrial origin. If panspermia is possible, (Davies believes that it is, and explains it in an engaging chapter on life shuttling back and forth between early Earth and early Mars on the back of meteorites) then life may have originated in an exceedingly small number of places in the Universe, but may have been carried to many other planets and stellar systems. Since we don’t have a fix yet on mathematical estimates for the likelihood of spontaneous chemical generation of life, the frequency could be something like once in each galaxy. Occam’s Razor lends itself to a simpler explanation, of course, if we are determined to hold on to the view that the universe is flourishing with life. The origin of life isn’t as rare an occurrence as we believe, and if the figures suggest otherwise, the figures must be wrong. There’s another caveat here. Is it possible that there is any phenomenon in the universe that is so astronomically improbable that it will occur only once? Yes, if the Universe is finitely large and has a finite life span. Then life can be one of these Special Ones. Interestingly this is an argument against biological determinism; life is just rare, not cosmically determined. There could other such phenomena, like a star system where 135 stars are held together in mutual gravitational attraction. As it is beyond our current capacity to test this uniqueness hypothesis, any differences are purely ideological.

Reading John Gribbin’s ‘Stardust’ is much more palatable for my stubbornly romantic idea of universal life. And for a while, I was actually reading both at the same time! John Gribbin fleshes out the astronomically prevalent view that we are the stuff of stars (rather obese and short lived ones, but hell), and just as surely some stars cook themselves into supernovae, life must arise. If anything, Paul Davies has ensured that I cannot satisfy myself with this cozy outlook, in the face of contrary (probabilistic) evidence. It’s possible that we are alone in the universe, and if we aren’t the others are so far away that it is improbable that we’ll meet before either of us self-destruct. Nothing, however, in the long and mostly satisfactory history of scientific endeavour suggests that we are barking up the wrong tree, and that we might need a fundamentally novel metaphysical law to explain away the existence of life. Here’s where I make a leap of faith. I predict that we will discover independent (not through pesky panspermia) extra-terrestrial life in the near future, probably in the Solar System itself. That will of course mean that the universe is full to bursting point with life, simply because we have seen so, with our ridiculously tiny observing powers. If we don’t conform to that, then we have to update our counter-theory to a much more inane one: it’s not the Earth which is unique, but the entire Solar System.

A Crash Course in Amateur Astronomy - Lesson I

2009-03-03T22:48:00.013+05:30

Do you know which direction is north? Anyone who wishes to become an amateur astronomer must have a good idea of compass directions. As this post is very BITS specific, it’s easy to the four directions using known landmarks. If you look in the direction of the Clock Tower, you are facing north; correspondingly if you look towards the temple it’s south. East is the direction you’d be walking, if you take the Institute road towards the IPC/Workshop. Now that we’ve established which direction is which, let’s talk about planets. In February, two planets will be very prominent on opposite sides in the sky. If you look towards the west any time before 8 PM, you’ll see (what seems to be) a star so bright that it’s been mistaken for a distant street lamp (by me). That’s good old Venus. I couldn’t help but notice that Venus sat high in the sky on the night of the 14th of February (I reserve any thoughts on implications for blossoming love). As Venus sets in the west, Saturn rises in the east. For an appreciably large duration of time you can see both Venus and Saturn in the sky. To find Saturn, face east and slowly turn your head upwards (still facing east). One bright star near the horizon (which doesn’t flicker and seems faintly yellowish) will immediately capture your attention. That’s Saturn. Continue looking higher. Further up in the Eastern sky, you’ll find two bright stars relatively close to each other in the sky. One of them is Pollux (the star with the reddish tinge) and the other is Castor (looks white, but it’s actually a six star system, incredibly), the two main stars in the constellation Gemini.

You might see another bright star in the east (again, with a distinct southward bias) that lies higher in the sky than Saturn, but not as far up as Pollux and Castor. That would be Regulus, the crown jewel in the constellation Leo. Regulus is a very interesting star. It spins so fast that its equatorial radius is 32% (or something like that) more than its polar radius.

Before moving to another celestial direction, I'll talk a bit about what the eastern sky would like later in the night, say around midnight. Obviously it is only the eastern sky that changes with time, and if you are up at midnight, you will notice an extremely bright star sitting near the horizon (but not too close). That’s Arcturus of the constellation Bootes. At the same time, if you look towards the southeastern sky you will see another reasonably bright star, again quite close to the horizon. That’s Spica, the crown jewel in the constellation Virgo. A word of warning here – the bunch of visually close stars that you see near, and a little higher in the sky than Spica, is actually another constellation called Corvus.

Now look south. Very close to the horizon lies Canopus (look for a bright star which seems to be flickering and changing colours quickly). Canopus is hard to spot because the horizon’s obscured by buildings and it never rises high in the sky. Let me take a short detour to explain why that’s the case. Everyone knows that the Earth spins from west- east, as everyone can see that the Sun rises in the east and sets in the west. But every star in the sky too rises in the east and sets in the west; more specifically, every star in the sky revolves around the North-South axis. Canopus being very close to the South Pole makes small revolutions around the N-S axis, while Polaris (the pole star) barely moves at all. One way to catch a glimpse of Canopus is to walk along the institute road (or the parallel road with the Gandhi statue) while looking South in the direction of the temple. Through gaps in the shrubbery, you can spot Canopus. Although Canopus is technically the second brightest star in the night sky, its true brightness cannot be seen in northern latitudes (Pilani’s around 28 degrees above the equator) as it’s affected strongly by the 'horizon haze'. Basically this means that stars near the horizon appear dimmer and flicker more, simply because they're closer to the lights of populated areas, and the associated wash of light population. Also, in the South lies the brightest star in the sky, Sirius. It’s easy to spot as it outshines every other object in the sky apart from Venus and the Moon. Sirius looks brilliantly white, and its parent constellation Canis Major can also be identified quite easily. Sirius seems to form one vertex in an approximately quadrilateral structure (the body of the dog); and there’s one lone star outside the quadrilateral which forms the tail of the dog.

A little higher in the Southern sky lies a very well known constellation, Orion the hunter. Orion has a host of bright stars, and the three stars which comprise the belt of the hunter are bright, visually close to each other and particularly easy to pick out.

To identify Orion, look south in the direction of the horizon and slowly turn your gaze upwards, still looking south. You’ll soon spot the belt. Now use the belt to form a trapezoid structure (of four bright stars excluding the belt) with the belt-stars in the centre. The bright reddish star on one vertex is Betelgeuse and the other bright white star on the diagonally opposite vertex is Rigel (the other two vertex stars too are bright but these two are noticeably brighter). The vertex star on the same side as Betelgeuse is Bellatrix (remember Harry Potter?) You’ve just picked out the body of the hunter.

Actually the constellation is much bigger, and includes fainter stars that form the arms of the hunter and the bow, but this will do for all those people without a 20/20 vision. Follow the line formed by the belt and a little distance away from Orion, you’ll spot another reddish, bright star. No it’s not Mars (as it’s been often mistaken to be). It’s Aldebaran, the eye of Taurus the bull. Follow the line formed by Betelgeuse and Bellatrix, in the direction of Betelgeuse and you’ll spot yet another bright star. This star looks white and is called Procyon; it’s a part of the constellation Canis Minor (the little dog). It’s time for some constellation trivia. Orion the Hunter is supposed to be fighting Taurus the bull, and is accompanied by two hunting dogs, Canis Major and Canis Minor.

I haven’t yet figured out a line pointer for this star, but since we have eliminated most other conspicuously bright stars in the area it should be easy to identify. It’s Capella and it usually lies high in the sky (all references to position are with respect to an assumed base time of 8 PM) near Orion but towards the north. Sirius, Procyon, Pollux/Castor, Capella, Aldebaran and Rigel form the Winter Hexagon. Sirius, Procyon and Betelgeuse form an approximately equilateral triangle called the Winter Triangle. Here’s some interesting information about Betelgeuse. Betelgeuse was like the bogeyman of astronomy when I was younger. Its size intimidated me. Betelgeuse is so large that its radius is something like 1000 times the radius of the Sun. If that doesn’t invoke any horror, here’s some imagery. If Betelgeuse were to be placed in the middle of the Solar System, its body would extend to cover the orbit of Mars!

To the north now… In the north lies the most famous constellation of all time, the Big Dipper (or Saptarshi, or Ursa Major, or the Great Bear, or the Great Question Mark). Unfortunately, its distinctive shape becomes prominent only when it rises high into the sky late in the night (again due to its brighter stars being obscured by horizon haze).

Then we can use the famous line pointer formed by its top two vertex stars to pick out Polaris. But at 8 PM, you can pick out another favourite constellation of mine, Cassiopeia. If you stand facing the Clock Tower from the Institute Road, Polaris will lie to its right in a relatively uncluttered portion of the sky, while Cassiopeia will lie to the left. Cassiopeia has the distinct shape of a W (inverted actually, from here in Pilani) and resembles the line structure of pentane (as it’s usually drawn).

Capella lies high in the northern sky. When Ursa Major rises, it will be in the North East, or, using our earlier notation, to the right of the clock tower.

Evolution - I "The Problem Is.....?"

2009-02-13T17:35:00.009+05:30

It’s the good old question, isn’t it? Evolution or Creation… In its January issue, the Scientific American published its own (200 page) take on the question. It’s evolution, SciAm concluded, in no uncertain and rather lengthy terms. Before embarking on an (endless) voyage into the actual topic, let me address another question that bothers me. Why is this debated at all?

If I were to pick a topical scientific theory to debunk, purely on the basis of its understandability, my choice would certainly not be evolution. Perhaps it would be quantum physics. Evolution would have to undergo plenty of evolution before it can even compare on the counter-intuitiveness scale to quantum physics. Or it might be cosmology. It’s one thing telling people that stars are born, belch fire for millions (or billions) of years and die, but quite another showing them the process in action. It’s highly unlikely that you, me or our great-great grandchildren will see anything different from the bright yellow star we see every day. Do the good intentioned scientific-theory-bashers stand up, raise their hands and say – ‘But I can’t see it happen! It can’t be true…’ No, there isn’t even a whimper. And like quantum physics and cosmology, evolution is strongly supported by empirical evidence. Why, then, is evolution scornfully rejected?

Despite my many protestations to the contrary, I already know the answer to that (rhetorical) question. Evolution concerns you, me, God and the human race. Science can chug away, filling in holes in our understanding of the universe. It’s a good deal; everyone gets TVs (and televangelists), refrigerators and Playstations. But when impudent little Science steps on the toes of religion (and anthropoid ego- see footnote), things change. Evolution reduces human beings from the Chosen ones to just another species. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Evolution proclaims that we are all descended from hairy, filthy apes. (Anyone smell racism here?) Evolution has the cheek to imply that the world may be millions of times older than what some religions claim. Evolution even suggests that the biological diversity around us may have arisen without a supernatural controlling power.

One of the most common arguments made against the validity of evolution concerns its ‘intuitiveness’. ‘Can you possibly imagine fish on land flopping their way to getting a pair of legs?’ they ask with tones of pure indignation. Human intuition is precisely that. It’s Human. It’s a mixture of knowledge about the environment shared by all humans and an individual’s personal experiences. It would be stupid to expect us to possess intuition that can grasp timescales of hundreds of millions of years when our life spans measure a measly hundred . Evolution is not all that counter intuitive when you look at it from the point of view of natural selection. A mutation that favours your chance of survival will have a greater probability of being selected. ‘Survival of the fittest’ (a phrase that has filtered down to colloquial usage) is often used to paraphrase the concept of natural selection.

Anthropoid Ego - my pet term for the notion of human supremacy; the tendency of human beings to think that they are the rightful inheritors of the planet. Anthropoid ego can be held accountable for a major part of the environmental degradation we see around us; it shows its hand in everything from global warming to animal extinctions.

Part two continues here, don't go anywhere!

Evolution - II "The Scientific Arguments"

2009-02-13T17:29:00.005+05:30

Another argument raised against evolution concerns emergent complexity. ‘Is it conceivable that purely random changes lead to greater complexity all the time?’ One point to be noted here is that natural selection often reduces complexity; natural selection can eliminate a part for you if it doesn’t necessarily improve reproductive fitness. ‘Ha!’ Creationists exult, ‘Then a guiding hand that directs life towards complexity must exist!’

Actually, complex organisms are by no means the most numerous. Single celled organisms comprise ninety percent (or something like that) of the biosphere numerically. Insects are far more numerous than mammals, and so on. As organisms become more and more physically complex, their numbers seem to decrease. Perhaps, a conservation of the population-complexity product exists for all species (which still begs the question of how to quantify complexity).

Also, (unbeknownst to many people) natural selection is not the only causative agent driving evolution. There’s another phenomenon called genetic drift where purely random mutations accumulate in populations over time. Obviously if the populations under consideration are smaller, the effect of genetic drift is greater. In many cases genetic drift becomes just as important as natural selection in directing evolution. Other scientists have argued that complexity arises randomly when there is no selective pressure. A copying error may cause an organism to duplicate large parts of its genome, and natural selection might choose for new, beneficial functions to these genes. Also, despite their debatable meaningfulness, many complex evolution simulating algorithms have actually reported observations of increased complexity in the system.

‘Irreducible complexity’ is yet another concept propounded to debunk evolution. It’s a top down approach which starts off with a complex organism and proceeds to progressively chop off parts of the organism. The moment you obtain an organism that doesn’t ‘work’ anymore, you have reached irreducible complexity. Life around us, the argument goes, exhibits irreducible complexity; so evolution, which claims to build up a complex whole from simple constituents must be wrong. This argument is less inane than it sounds; it is, in fact, the core principle behind the theory called ‘Intelligent Design’. To counter this argument one has to see that DNA base pairs don’t always code something (the so called ‘junk DNA’); sometimes useless base pairs accumulate in a species, until through another mutation they join with existing genes to encode a new and complex feature of the organism. This combining of functions to produce a new one can happen with non-junk DNA as well; then the old genes are like scaffolding that is only retained till the construction is completed.

A fourth argument against evolution asks why we can still see apes around us, when we are supposed to have evolved from them. This question really doesn’t make sense to me. Evolution, by definition is a random process. It favours mutations that help an organism’s chance of survival. If some apes mutate slowly and produce a ‘stable’ species called human beings, then we merely have a new species. Evolution doesn’t go back and scrub off apes from the face of the planet simply because they are higher up in the evolutionary tree than homo sapiens. Had that been the case, we certainly wouldn’t have any bacteria around us.

Part three's here.

Evolution - III "The Not So Scientific Arguments"

2009-02-13T17:23:00.009+05:30

However, people who try to debunk it aren’t evolution’s only opponents. A far more dangerous category of people don’t try to debunk evolution; instead they try to portray it as a theory under threat (I call them ‘doubt farmers’- they sow the seeds of doubt). They would have us believe that evolution is, in reality, one of many scientific theories that can explain the diversity of life, and that it does not represent the dominant view among biological scientists. ‘Evolution is only a theory, it’s not a fact’ they thunder.

Anyone who has done anything primary school science upwards can see through that claim. If you really want to split hairs, you’ll have to agree that nothing in science is a fact. More evidence supporting a theory will only increase its acceptability, but no amount of evidence is enough to truly make it a fact. On a more practical note, theories with far less supporting empirical evidence than evolution have been accepted as facts (anything in a primary school textbook would support that claim). The more articulate of these doubt farmers try to compress two centuries of research in evolution into an umbrella term called ‘Darwinism’. If they can portray ‘evolutionism’ as a cult, rather than a science, creationism can be presented as a valid alternative to it.

Scientists are guilty of this too, usually unintentionally. Darwin’s book on natural selection ‘On the Origin of Species’ is often recommended to readers, not because they want to spread Darwinism; but simply because the content is fleshed out in a non technical, intuitive way. Contrast this with something like Newton’s Principia, the pioneering work on mechanics. Why is it not recommended to physics students? The Principia is not only a highly arcane book, but it’s written in Latin.

Finally, when all else fails, anti-evolutionists turn to character assassination. ‘If you’d known Darwin, you would have despised him.’ I have no idea what Darwin the man was like, but several aspects of his personality have been documented, like his opposition to slavery and his insistence on acknowledging Alfred Wallace as the co-postulator of the theory of natural selection. Anyway, if people try to counter criticisms of Darwin’s character by showing counter-evidence of his good nature, they only risk playing into the hands of the creationists (SciAm is particularly guilty of this). The temptation to idealize Charles Darwin as an iconic scientist and an impeccable human being must be resisted. February 12, 2009 marked the bicentennial anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth. It is a historic occasion, not to celebrate Charles Darwin the man, but to celebrate the remarkable theory that changed the face of biology.

The final section in my evolution discussion: part 4 is here.

Evolution - IV "What About Us?"

2009-02-13T16:34:00.006+05:30

Many people who are otherwise comfortable with the theory of evolution balk at the thought of human descent from primates. It might seem naïve to assume that defining human characteristics like music, humour and culture have evolved in tandem with a rapidly growing brain. For me though, the intuitive ‘stretch’ needed to imagine this evolution wasn’t too much different from the sort that produced primates from bacteria. The point of contention for me, concerns abstract human perceptions like ethics and morality, which often vary across even small time periods. Are these ideas modified through some sort of cultural evolution? We can view the entire human race as one giant information processing machine, with ‘culture’ the data model in use at any instant in time. The theory of memes argues, in fact, that concepts of biological evolution can be extrapolated to a similar theory of cultural evolution. Or, on the other hand, are cultural concepts hard coded biologically? I came to the conclusion that cultural (and not biological) evolution is responsible for variations in cultural ideas. Immediately I came to another tangential conclusion that biological evolution of human beings had all but ceased. Our bodies (and brains) are, physically, no different than those of the Stone Age humans. Globalization was my favourite explanation for the end of human evolution; if the entire human race is always connected, how can some humans evolve away so much that they no longer retain reproductive compatibility with the rest of the human race? The human notion of the dignity of life seemed to me, to actively counteract evolution. Evolution selects against people with brain disorders; but human ethical tenets demand that we provide extra medical care to such people. I was surprised (and pleased) to find out that this idea was the dominant view among evolutionary biologists (including Stephen Jay Gould) until recently. However, recent studies on human skulls (by John Hawks and his team) show that human evolution rates have actually risen to up to a hundred times over the historical average. The reason for this is actually quite intuitive once you get past the mandatory mental gymnastics. Large populations favour quicker spread of evolutionary changes forced by natural selection, simply because larger populations can produce more offspring that inherit this evolutionary bias. Early human beings did not have the capacity to break down milk beyond a certain age, as the production of the enzyme lactase stopped during adolescence. However a mutation in the human genome switched off the gene that controlled lactase production, with the result that people with that mutation could drink milk throughout their lives. Today that mutation is no longer the anomaly but the standard. Accepting the fact that human evolution is alive and well brings up inevitable questions about the future of the human race. Will the future human world look like an X-men comic strip? I think that humans will evolve away from specialized physical machinery, rather than towards (so much for the X-men idea). It’s unlikely that human evolution will force us to grow a pair of wings; what is more likely is that our limbs will become vestigial, or completely disappear. The reasoning is obvious: a pair of wings do not improve our evolutionary fitness when we already have aeroplanes and helicopters. Similarly, hands and legs may be selected against if we build machines that perform the same function, better. On the other hand, if some catastrophic event happens to destroy a majority of the human race and break the world’s landmasses into separate islands, evolution will work differently. Maybe in that scenario, we might even evolve the long sought for pair of wings.

Existentialism!

2009-01-18T22:34:00.003+05:30

A very surprising thing happened today. I found a name for a particular set of beliefs I faithfully subscribe to (and vigorously sermonize for anyone who cares to listen…). It concerns the notion of hypocrisy; and the term is Existentialism. OK I’m not sure if I think that we are like ants wading through a meaningless universe (a fundamental Existentialist worry), but the concept of existence over essence (a basic tenet of this philosophy) makes a lot of sense to me. Simply put, is a person’s character is pre-ordained? Strangely enough, this might be one of those rare questions where religion and science can actually give the same answer. A yes. ’Genetics is the key’ says the deterministic scientist, while naturally, religions will claim that the person’s past deeds or the Entity Above are the only factors. Say there’s a person X who’s been pre-programmed (‘his essence’) to have unspeakably violent thoughts all the time. This person X tries really, really hard to change the person that he is, maybe even to the extent that he never raises his hand in anger. Now the non-existentialists (and some of you) might argue that the person is being a hypocrite. He’s having all those raunchy thoughts, after all, and he can’t really change what he essentially is. Let’s make the argument even more forceful. Person X becomes a preacher now, devoting his life to spreading the message about the fundamental goodness of humankind. ’Hypocrite!’ All the former fence-sitters join the screaming throng quickly enough. I find this idea extremely disturbing. To me, it seems to be a genuine attempt to block the efforts of the only people in the world who are trying to change for the better. Of course, there’s no way I can repudiate evolutionary psychology completely (I’m not trying to); it seems obvious that certain people are genetically programmed to be a bit more violent/ funny/ impatient/lustful than the rest. The point here is that the concerned variables are not set in stone. They are strongly stochastic, and strongly influenced by culture. It’s even possible that one strong willed individual can eliminate the concerned (dangerous) trait through ‘cultural evolution’. Another fascinating aspect of Existentialism is how humanistic it really is. The whole idea that a person is defined only by his actions, nothing more and nothing less, screams ‘Humanism’. Is this concept that disgusting? Come on. Give the ants a chance…