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.

Contemplation

He sat there,rotating his brush between his slender,long fingers,sprinkling his shirt with a drop or two of colour.A gust of wind.A slight flutter of the canvas.A light tinker of the palette.But the brush ,it went on ,unnerved,unscathed,went on from one finger to another,as if in delirium in a prison,as if lost.Other days,the brush would move on its own,paint as if it needed no painter.Like it knew its strokes,under a spell and he remembered the times he had to just hold it and keep looking at it,following it in all its freedom.He then seemed to be in a trance but if people asked him he would deny.He would murmur something weird,something like, I am there but I am not there .

But today was different because he was just there,sitting a couple of feet away,which seemed a mile today.The universe had contracted into the only reality that was him and his painting,yet nothing moved,not his eyeballs,not the window frame,not the statue of Madonna,nothing but his brush ,it kept whirling,its pace dying ,whirling, twirling till it came to a halt .Nothing happened.no sound remained.And,he suddenly became aware of the shiverthat was creeping up his spine,an impending doom?,he thought.

Till he looked around,raced his eye across the wall,up at the ceiling and then again across the wall and up at the ceiling because there was nothing for his eyes to stop at,because he had nothing,nothing save the chair he had borrowed from Mother's kitchen when he decided to leave the house.He had not much money ,when he left and so his childhood aversion for anything superfluously materialistic came in handy and a time came when out of sudden disgust, he even grabbed the bible lying at a corner of the room and tucked it under the cushion of his chair,out of sight.It was too intruding,he felt ,into the divinity of emptiness.

The green,blue,red and all other shades in the palette mixing together ,mixing his memories-Joanna's green scarf,the chocolate violin,Mother's blue skirt ,the orange marmalade of many breakfasts,the black smoke of the chimney seen through the window of his old room.................................He heaved a heavy sigh ,breathed in a whiff of paint and dabbled the brush into the slimy oil of the palette.He loved this act,pretty mindlessly.He could spend entire mornings doing just that,just meandering the brush in the pool in the most fantastic of curves.Sometimes he closed his eyes and took quiet pleasure in the intoxicating ease of movement.It was as if all existence was wrapped up in that quagmire of colour and only he had the power to unwrap it,to give it form and to dissolve it ,just as whimsically, into nothingness.

But today a shade eluded him for a long time and he knew not why.What is it,he thought,the crimson of the setting sun,the bandana of the Brazilian beggar?No, it was ,it was ,it was, Yes,the ceiling of the neighbourhood church.But alas,it was not even that.He frowned and nodded his head vigorously, at some place hoping that the mere shaking of his body would wring out the answer from nowhere.But that did not happen .He knew he would give in sometime and a tear did trickle down his eyes after a while.But he did not give up hope.He felt he should meditate.So he got down from his chair and squatted in the posture his Indian friend Ravi had explained him that day.It was tough.He knew he had to patiently destroy every other thought sneaking around.Only then he stood some chance,after all ,even Ravi was a novice at this.An hour passed.He opened his eyes.He looked at his own silouhette,and calmly lifted the palette with both hands and brought it within the boundary of his own shadow,hoping to discover the shade in the new contrast of the settings.But,nothing emerged.Yet,for some mysterious reason ,he still felt close.Maybe he needed a final dash of chase,Maybe the shade had transformed into a man,an invisible man sitting in that very room,watching him,sniggering with contempt for his foolishness.So,he got up and bustled up and down the room,flaunting the pride that any physical action bestows.

But,he got tired of it after sometime.He sat there and after another hour of silence,he grabbed the brush and pierced his left thumb with its tip.It hurt so much that he soon,began laughing,But he did not dare look at it.Not till he felt something crawling all across his palm and then across his fingers ,till his elbows,like a million ants!

And he looked at it.There it was.There it was ,what he wanted.The red of blood.

In an empty room in the millionaire banker , John Deridan's house,there is an entire wall which serves as background for Blood and Sun.Every Friday ,John locks himself up in the room and stares at the wall for ,people say,the whole night.

The Grasscutter

I was going down the walkway.Luckily,I was not "thinking".
I was free and pure ,because,otherwise I wouldn't even have cared to glance at" the faceless gardener",as it did not "matter" to me.The man drove the lawn-mower forward with all his might.Sweat dripping from the body,steel merging into skin,he had become one with the machine.He had transcended into a state of divinity.He is just a couple of metres away from me.I can run up to him, and touch him but I can't because he lies much ,much farther,a distance my pitiable eye can't comprehend.

The motor whirred, seeking a certain kind of attention, aspiring, to rise above the din.The freshly cut shreds of grass formed a happy whirlpool above the wheels.I wished I could extend my hands and feel them brushing past my palm.I wished I could bribe the man into allowing me to mow all the lawns of the institute for one day .In that one day,I would successfully purge all ego,all ambition,all pretension,all envy,all angst,all anger.,all knowledge........till the only thing that remains is me.I wish it was that easy.
I feel like flinging the sack slung across my back into a horizon I cant even see . Maybe,I should go and tell him,how he has got the best job in the world but ,there again, I suffer ,from my ridiculous perception that this would make him happy .
Praying fervently that the walkway to the lecture hall would stretch itself to infinity is a more sensible thing to do,isn't it?More sensible than hoping that the insane clock would stop moving its hands around the same circle all the time.

I like to think of all celebrated complexity as,...hmmm.,a kind of a balloon,a giant balloon ,always on the verge of bursting.There is an urgent need to recognize the protective retreat that simplicity offers.
I am getting late for class,but I am already smiling.I don't know why?and I don't want to know.Because there is nothing ,like "knowing".

The sound of the motor is still there.Perhaps ,it is the only thing that can go on .Forever.



Inspired by Arthur Ganson's kinetic sculptures which draw heavily upon existentialist themes.

Tonight I can write

Sometimes you do not want to express them.They are so stark naked,so real,you feel you are discriminating,reducing them to words.The very moment you sat yourself down to write them,a tiny part of the truth dissolves.Instantly.

They are your deepest feelings,the lively throbbings of your poor little heart.

But you want to come out of your own self sometimes.Like an apparition,you want to emerge out of your own being and savour the melodrama of your own emotion.And there comes this sudden realization that your sorry life is no less theatrical.There is an unheard explosion every second.

Every single instance,you bedamned her,you drove a spear through your own heart.Yet you loved the sound of the hammer striking the nail into the coffin.It is a loud,deafening sound.Sound that for an instant,enthrones you as master of the universe,as a man of great consequence.As expected,you die.You bury yourself in the cemetery of quotidian awfulness.You are happy,once again.

Yet,there is an inevitable reawakening at every sight of passionate love.There is obvious moisture in the sands of the cemetery.Even on the sunniest of days.And you wonder if it rained,at night,when you were sleeping............

Some other time the apparition comes back to you.It shoves you into life.The hope for redemption just raised ,its little head.

Another mix of circumstances is needed ,till you finally do what you should have done long before.Only every time you accumulated the sands of courage,they managed to slip out.Some mysterious force filled with shame, always acting.

But,to your surprise,you are greeted by a smile.Smile which jerks you back to life.The old music of the voice,so dear to you,your sins have blessed it with a new cadence of equanimity.Life springs up at the move of every muscle.Head is dizzy with joy.

And you are like,"Can't she xerox herself and give the copy to me.Let the rest of the world relish the original?"

Love,it is a funny animal.

Real Clairvoyance?

In the little prince,there are some amusingly queer images of tiny asteroids ,about the size of a hostel bog,each inhabited by just one human being and nothing else.One asteroid is ruled by a king,another bears the burden of a man who counts and records the position and number of stars in the night sky,a third belongs to a tippler who just keeps drinking all day.What strikes me most is the remarkable simplicity of their lives.An isolated man in the middle of nowhere is no more interesting than a deserted ant walking up a spotless,white wall.But just increase the number of men(in our hypothetical situation)by one,and you see the birth of friendship and war.Now,throw in a woman,and you witness the beginning of competition and betrayal .Keep doing this till you have over six billion sources of confusion swarming on ,in this silently constant spectator called earth.The obvious ,yet routinely eschewed question is to ask for an underlying cause which bears some semblance of an explanation to the complexity of human thought and emotion.Is there a unifying pattern in all love,war,treachery,cooperation and partnership?Can a group of human beings be really studied like the pieces of your chessboard?The momentary adaptation of a particular emotion to be deemed as the most profitable move?Can a continual observation of a group yield results akin to the study of ant colonies by social scientists and optimization experts(All Genetic Algorithm guys will know I am talking about ant colony optimizations)?

A certain school of mathematicians say the answer lies in game theory.Lovers of the movie "The Beautiful Mind" might feel I am about to tread upon repulsively arcane stuff, but all I wish to do is to provide a little window to a distant probability.To those who are not fully aware,game theory is to consider a situation,identify the players the options available to them individually and to then calculate the set of choices which lead to the maximization of profit for a particular player or the entire group.The not-so-pleasant part is that it most often,leads to complicacies whose resolution demands some really tricky mathematics.It has been used everywhere from sports to politics ,from the dynamics of relationship to animal mating and breeding habits.Recently,one of my closest friends( he is in BITS Pilani),was involved in a start-up where they use game theory based models to simulate behaviour ,to be used for recruiting employees.

One of the most shocking and for me,the most interesting results out of game theory application was W V Quine's mathematical derivation of morality from self interest.To rephrase it loosely ,is to say that it is the inherent selfishness of man,which leads him to maintain a moral code,or to say it ,in the mercilessly candid game theory lingo,being "righteous" ensures highest payoff.(Oh! my dear philosopher friends,can you hear the echoes of Nietzsche?,So,we finally found something,concrete,that was beyond good and evil ;))If I have managed to stir up your curiosity enough,I direct you to this absolutely brilliant excerpt from Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene where he shows exactly why nice guys finish first.Dawkins has his characteristic style of making complex ideas seem almost pedantic!!!In this article,he explains game theoretically,how being nice is usually the dominant evolutionary stable strategy,ensuring your survival and the subsequent passage of your genes to the next generation.A little contemplation really justifies this viewpoint.The human sense of morality has to be a product of evolution.We did not sleep a savage gorilla one night to wake up with a halo around our heads the next morning.
Even love has failed to avoid the scanner of game theorists.To quote from an article that appeared in The Independent, Saturday 5 April 1997, "The glorious irrationality of the emotion called love? Not at all, according to new research. Your choice of lover has subconsciously been made coolly and rationally, based on a mathematical model - similar to how job applications are processed - which analyses the best mate you're likely to get."And you thought love is blind ;) ?
Having long harboured this secret ambition to learn the nitty- gritties of game theory and experiment with its application in real life situations,I finally took a first baby step this summer, reading Thomas Schelling's Strategy of Conflict supplemented by a collection of Harvard lectures on game theory (so as to not to miss out on the flavour of the mathematics producing the conclusions).Brilliantly written ,Schelling(he is the Economics Nobel) elicits his observations with tons of fascinating examples ranging from military policies to dilemmas besetting chain smokers trying to quit.I highly recommend it to interested readers.So,next time,you are the latest prisoner of an old,familiar dilemma try breaking out by turning to the last page of your notebook,constructing a neat matrix and filling up the cells with your options and payoffs.Who knows u may find your doubts melting away in a trifle?(excuse my due frivolity with Mathematics ;))
What with all this renewed vigour in game theory research,we are looking forward to a day when Elliot's famous clairvoyante Madame Sosostris would foretell the future,not on the basis of a random pick of a Tarot card but out of the apparently mysterious,yet stubbornly logical travails of game-theoretic calculation.I see signs of a God,in atleast some of his promised prescience,in the lost notebooks of John Nash. :)