Home

Far down in the south,lies a quiet city named Visakhapatnam.And somewhere , in some corner of the town,lies an even quieter street by which stands a house numbered 138-C and every evening ,if you are there,maybe you will find a couple talking over coffee at the balcony,their conversation somewhat drowned in the music of the birds cooing all around.


Its time I went back home.

The rule of the rules,How convention thrives.

When I began ,I had no idea what to write about.I kept asking myself if my blog has really exhausted all topics until ,pretty serendiptiously,Simon and Garfunkel sung out in my headphones-

"From the moment of my birth

To the instant of my death,

There are patterns I must follow

Just as I must breathe each breath.

Like a rat in a maze

The path before me lies,

And the pattern never alters

Until the rat dies.
And the pattern still remains

On the wall where darkness fell,

And it's fitting that it should,

For in darkness I must dwell.

Like the color of my skin,

Or the day that I grow old,

My life is made of patterns

That can scarcely be controlled"

Ever observed a procession of ants walking across the walls?From a distance,it gives you the illusion that its one dashed line stretching from end to end but peer harder,closer and you will discover its wiggling ,actually.A similar experience is when you take a thought shuttle to mars and gaze at earth.It will seem silent,dead ,till the morning prayer chorus at the nearby school will wake you up with a jolt.

Like many of my friends,I too have been intrigued by the effortless and magical and monotonous way convention thrives.I am not exactly your pipe-smoking skeptic(read Russell,if you haven't yet) and for that matter,a large part of me is anesthetized enough to adopt the very stereotypes that I am derisive of.But,this is what I see through the sometimes blinding glare of the obvious.

Self similarity of structure.Two years have passed since I first stumbled across an image of a fractal.Besides its enchanting symmetry,I always attached a mystic value to it.Mystic because I knew the image had something more to convey ,more than its awesome beauty and serenity.And now,I know what it wanted to say-When I listen to some powerful political oratory on television,I get the eerie hunch I am listening to the same guy who came to my hostel,campaigning for elections.True,the words are different and it is in another language,but I can't help but think its the same voice in a new echo and I am sure,you too will agree.Such is the nature of convention,its self similar nature,its ability to replicate itself at all levels,ensuring the smooth transition up the hierarchies of age,class and situations.

Thoughtless over-idolization of the unconventional.Having just finished Philip Roth's The Dying Animal,I take the liberty of using his eloquence to make my job easier.In the book,the narrator describes one his exceptionally beautiful but cerebrally limited female students' reaction to Cubist art-"Art that smacks of modernity leaves her not merely puzzled but disappointed in herself.She would love for Picasso to matter more,perhaps to transform her,but there's a scrim drawn across the proscenium of genius that obscures her vision and keeps her worshipping at a bit of a distance".

No wonder then that extremely ordinary individuals will so verbally harp on the greatness of a Steve Jobs speech without ever getting its real message and wear Che Guevara T shirts without any knowledge of his ideologies.For if you are incapable of making that leap of faith across the sea of mediocrity,you make up by standing in meek but fanatic worship of those who have done so-an unnecessary deification that separates you from the genius of a great idea and keeps you protected in uneventful ignorance.

The mind as the new chimpanzee.Dad once sighed remorsefully on looking at my trigonometry textbooks in class 9,something which he was exposed to,only in college.Compared to the bygone era,all graduate out of high school as scholars.Such is the humongous amount of information compressed into school curriculum.Add to that the way,internet is pushing the human race towards complete knowledge equality and you may be fooled to think that man is once again poised to begin a new era of unprecedented creativity and innovation
Not exactly.

We like to think we have evolved,that we have left our cousins in the trees far behind and to some degree that is true.But a more peculiar thing has happened,as man has reasonably succeeded in the business of a fitter survival,the new chimpanzee is not the body,but the mind.Fifty years ago,this chimpanzee could wrestle with calculus only after college.Today 's preparatory schools have enabled this chimpanzee to juggle with complex mathematics and difficult literature at as early as middle school.Imagination is what I would call the brain of the brain,the mind of this new chimpanzee .It is one thing that really makes humans what they are.Every act of creation ,from a great work of art to a novel mathematical theorem is,in isolation, an exercise in absurdity.Only later does society appreciate its beauty and its applications .And in imagination,man has not progressed much in the last thousand years,inspite of the rise of knowledge,it is still a scarce commodity.The growth in the generation of original ideas is certainly not commensurate with the rapid spread of education.Rather,too much education educates you out of the creative,absurd process.

Immanuel Kant says that convention is time-tested and good,traditional rationality is a boon and it is in our best interest to embrace God and religion.I beg to differ slightly.If one is born with the rare gift of insanity,one should channelize it into creativity(in any form) for, in the words of Camus,'Art defies that part of existence in which each individual is no more that a social unit or an insignificant cog in the evolution of history'.
Convention will continue to thrive as it always has,but time and again,someone will find the courage to question it,to flout with it,and all we can hope is that a norm,that was hitherto bigoted and meaningless ,will be replaced by another that makes our lives better and encourages creativity.

Happy Conception,every one!

I am supposed to have been born on the 24th of April in the year 1988,atleast that is what I have been told ,told by Ma,by the birth certificate and by a great many lifeless sheets of paper which seem to attach mysteriously more importance to that day than even I do.Every year,even the shallowest of the acquaintance will bump into me from nowhere to wish me many happy returns of this day and for that moment,a part of me has learnt to delight itself .(Trust me,this will not turn out be as depressing as it has set out to be)

Unfortunately,the amnesia of infancy will never allow me to recollect how it felt to have earthly air whoosh past my naked body for the first time.But,I was not particularly happy to come out of my mother's womb.Ma talks of me being still in sleep when they cut the umbilical cord,still ensconced in eternal ignorance.The suspecting doctor suspended me upside down and had to only slightly pat my buttocks to extract a loud whine-the first assertion of existence.

So,that was the unassuming story of my birth .Perhaps I derive all my quixotic indifference from there.Perhaps I am still really sleeping ,only now will this attitude be cursed as dangerous oblivion.

At home,this day means the cuisine is every bit tailored to my choice,so much so that I barely manage to taste everything,much to the sweet disappointment of Ma.Besides that,birthdays are a quiet affair,a day when you take an added amount of care not to mess up with others so that ,however silently melancholy,it might turn out to be,it does not go down as an outstanding disaster in memory.

That then should explain my inability to remember my friends' birthdays and also my failure to associate due significance to them.Other than finding it somewhat amusing-this celebration for passing by the signboards that the Gregorian calendar carefully keeps erecting on the road called time,a road that only brings us closer to the destination that is death,I have now invented for myself a novel justification that I am using pretty expertly when someone close makes me uncomfortably aware of the guilt of forgetting his(her) birthday-

"The moment of your creation,of existing from non-existence,of becoming something from nothing is not your birth,it is your conception.It is that poignant juncture in time when two happily vagabond sperm and ovum chose to unite,not to execute any special design but for the sheer heck of it.And I think it is a scene so hallowed and serene,that it stubbornly remains one which cannot be recorded by a world that seemingly cannot wait to pounce on you,one that no random outsider can exploit to construct hypocritic bonhomie."

Inspite of all this rhetoric,it is no matter of extraordinary wonder that the above lines should be written by a kid who on his birthday ,kept grinning to himself all morning fuelled by phonecalls from his two schoolmates and then spent the entire evening quietly crying over not receiving even an email from someone he irrationally adores.

Only,I can tell how much joy I bring to Ma when on the 23rd of January ,I wish her early morning .Thankfully,she does not know how Baba ,being very knowledgeable of his son's absent-mindedness has called up a minute ago to remind me of her birthday.

So,the conclusion is ,even if my earnest efforts to remember your birthday don't produce any tangible results,I am making up by wishing you,my dear friends(all the school sweethearts ;),the childhood partners in crime,and now,my iitk buddies) a very Happy Conception for each one of you is so wonderful in your own special ways,that I am happy you existed in the first place.That you took birth ,and were actually destined to touch my life and make it cherishable is an added incentive, a separate source of pleasure.

Be well,all.

On Google in Chinese rooms

"Google reads your mail,we don't",fired the crazily belligerent Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.I just read that Slashdot piece how I read any other Slashdot piece and I was not going to take Ballmer seriously.I am NOT anti-Microsoft,rather I like Bill and his ideas but no,I was not buying into another show of Ballmer-ian insanity.Something for the bottomless dustbin of my mind,that's all.Or, was it?

Circa August 2008.

In between a very jovial dinner,a friend remarked how weirdly humorous the Internet had become-He had received some kind of a break-up email from his girlfriend,and despite the obvious bout of dejection that followed,he could not help suppress a wry smile when he saw the algorithmically generated accompanying ads-'Makeupwithyourgirlfriendnow.com','haveabreakup?wearehere.com' and what not!(I don't remember the names exactly.Neither did he.But they had the same spirit).I instantly imagined him-there he was ,in his room,all solitary and heartbroken and out of the blue,his dear laptop coming out of its usual inanimateness,comforting him ,directing him to sites that may offer him a solution.He had found solidarity(read your Camus?) in the computer!!!

He brought me back to reality when he grumbled,how the very next moment he felt like busting his poor laptop into pieces!

And then,it all came back to me.Every time you send a 'gmail',Google's servers read it,process it with Natural Language Processing Algorithms and publish relevant ads along with the mail to the receiver.If that is not spooky enough(merely some keyword classification shit,is that what you are thinking?),as there is rapid progress in the area of semantics and knowledge representations,we are almost already at the point where even obscure euphemisms and metaphorical expressions will not escape the algorithmic scanner and even your most private and innocent thoughts would be subject to the machine's ruthless perusal.

I realized that embedded in all this debate about Google's privacy policy ,was a more fundamental question,one that is looming so large on our collective future,that sooner or later,it would spare none of us with a direct confrontation-the difference between man and machine,is there any?

John Searle is perhaps the world's greatest living philosopher.He teaches at Berkeley.In 1980,he attempted to answer this question using his infamous Chinese Room Argument-(the italicized explanation is from wiki)

Searle requests that his reader imagine that, many years from now, people have constructed a computer that behaves as if it understands Chinese. It takes Chinese characters as input and, using a computer program, produces other Chinese characters, which it presents as output. Suppose, says Searle, that this computer performs its task so convincingly that it comfortably passes the Turing test: it convinces a human Chinese speaker that the program is itself a human Chinese speaker. All of the questions that the human asks it receive appropriate responses, such that the Chinese speaker is convinced that he or she is talking to another Chinese-speaking human being. Most proponents of artificial intelligence would draw the conclusion that the computer understands Chinese, just as the Chinese-speaking human does.
Searle then asks the reader to suppose that he is in a room in which he receives Chinese characters, consults a book containing an English version of the aforementioned computer program and processes the Chinese characters according to its instructions. He does not understand a word of Chinese; he simply manipulates what, to him, are meaningless symbols, using the book and whatever other equipment, like paper, pencils, erasers and filing cabinets, is available to him. After manipulating the symbols, he responds to a given Chinese question in the same language. As the computer passed the Turing test this way, it is fair, says Searle, to deduce that he has done so, too, simply by running the program manually. "Nobody just looking at my answers can tell that I don't speak a word of Chinese," he writes.
This lack of understanding, according to Searle, proves that computers do not understand Chinese either, because they are in the same position as he — nothing but mindless manipulators of symbols: they do not have conscious mental states like an "understanding" of what they are saying, so they cannot fairly and properly be said to have minds.
According to John Searle, biology is necessary for "understanding" of language. A man made machine (say, a computer) may appear to understand, but actually does not understand.
Neat ,really neat,but a careful look may reveal otherwise.The philosopher needs to be doubly cautious not to mince words ,more so when using such unassuming,everyday words like "understanding",for in philosophy,it is always the most banal of words that acquire the profoundest of connotations,to the point that their meaning is ultimately declared unclear.I feel we must have a close look at what "understanding" really means in view of the common Internet user.When my friend,first came across the ad,his immediate reaction was the urge to break into the laptop into pieces.

Should he be blamed for his reaction?

Are Google's engineers trying to say that knowing the entire process behind the generation of such outrageously pin-pointed ads is 'basic consumer awareness'?

I think what they are forgetting that "understanding" something fundamentally means agreeing with a perception and taking the conscious and unconscious decision to formulate further action based on that perception.If gmail ads are creating the perception of intrusion of privacy,it should be deemed as intrusion of privacy.

So,do not expect the common Gmail user to do a John Searle analysis everytime they send an email.

Am I asking Google to stop its gmail ad program and be ready to loose money?That is another difficult question.Frankly ,when I come to think of it, it is a small price and an even smaller compromise(think of the 1 GB space) if we look at how thoughtlessly we have forsaken our own privacy to all things 2.0 and so ,the word privacy itself ,has seen its own gradual redefinition.

Is man relegating himself to a machine as machines gradually get more human?

As the hedonist of a mankind takes to the seductive highway of technology,this is going to be just one of the many unsettling questions that he must either face or turn a blind,callous eye.

PS:the picture is a nice caricature of the Chinese Room thought experiment.