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. :)

The Constant Gardener

Somewhere in the mid-nineties.
I tugged at my Mother's sari from behind and won away her attention from work to ask her,"Mother,that tree by the road that runs by the house,it is so magnificently huge.How many years old is it?Was it always so big and sturdy?"
"No,she was a little sapling once.Innocuously delicate and serene,she was brought here by one swarthy gardener who planted her there whence she grows out today.She was then only slightly taller than you.The gardener lovingly tended her.He watered her gently with a sprinkler,manured her and carefully examined her for any diseased leaf or fruit.He did this for many years continuously.After that,the gardener left and the young tree was left alone to face worldly storms.She was quite prepared though.During the first patch of singeing summer,she extended her roots to the other end of the road.With the onset of the monsoons,a hurricane ripped away one of her canonical branches.The wound healed and she grew a new branch.She was home to a wide variety of animals ,from woodpeckers to sparrows.A poison ivy still lives off her.Many years passed and she grew taller and stronger.The canopy of her leaves became so dense that sun rays could scarcely pierce it,and so you had the most impregnably cool shade even during the hottest of the days."
"What happened to the gardener?Where is he?Is he still around?"
"No,he went on to plant many other saplings here in our neighbourhood."
"All of them are big trees,now,aren't they?"
"Not all of them,really.Some couldn't rise to their fullest height,some were trampled by a cowherd,a few got damaged by harsh gusts of wind and still some were stolen,but,that does not matter,many grew up to become the beautiful trees which line our roads today."
"So,is the tree secretly aware that it was once a puny sapling?"
"I don't know I have never thought of enquiring but I think she is.That is why,perhaps,inspite of being so gigantic and powerful,it is so gently humble,providing incessant shade and shelter to all beneath it."
"Yeah,must be"

I was back at school for the foundation day ceremony.The anecdote above(written in a train compartment) is a little tribute to what my teachers have done for me when I was totally in oblivion of my own education.

My dear Uncle Sam

I can easily trace each one of my posts to a series of passionate ruminations culminating in the sudden spurt of enthusiasm which finally ensures the "publish post" button getting hit.But,quirkily,when I actually write,I have visions of myself in either of two hugely dissimilar scenes.One is the way Yann Martel purportedly wanted to write Life of Pi-sitting in the veranda of a cottage at a hill-station,notes spread out in front of me.The other is one in which I am doing one of those impromptu speeches(guffaws),setting up the Reality Distortion Field.This will be of the second kind.So,listen and don't read.
Growing up watching Hollywood movies and outgrowing pairs and pairs of Levi Strauss jeans;Using Google atleast ten times a day and idolizing Steve Jobs since adolescence;Fed upon a daily diet of WWE and the like and swearing in with the F-word to look cool.Headbanging to rock and metal and boasting a taste for Pizzas and burgers.Social networking on Orkut and Facebook and falling asleep at night with the Great American Dream in the eyes.
Was I talking about some gum-chewing,skateboarding Yankee punk?No,I haven't finished with my description yet.Reading a mag or newspaper once in a while and recklessly censuring the government for corruption,sneering with rage over "brain drain" occasionally and attending the odd Puja so people admire you for "values and traditions" and the most incongruous feature of all-bashing up America,Americanism and dismissing American culture as vacuous and filthy.
I have the pleasure of announcing the emergence of a new archetype-The confused,insecure urban Indian teen.No,I will not waste all my space eulogizing his virtues,I will focus on one particular idiosyncrasy which seizes me with incredulity and anger everytime I think of it.
I agree that an occasional awakening of patriotism is the easiest way to experience a moment full of self-righteousness.But,to go a step further and rubbish the very influence of a culture in the lives that we all love to live is perfidy of a special kind.And I am not talking of the technological and materialistic advances that they give to the whole world as you could easily refute them as a furtherance of business interests alone.
But can you deny the root of global maxims like "follow your heart","Work hard,Party Harder!!".The philosophy of placing merit above anything else.The spirit of adventure and entrepreneurship.Aren't these all essentially American ways of thought?And boy,don't they bring so much meaning to our lives?True,at first,you picture Uncle Sam as this big arrogant bully in whose inevitable shadow,lies the entire world.But are we saying that the US senate's decisions is a microcosm of every American value?Do we ignore the nationwide uproar they had against Vietnam ?Do we ignore initiatives like Live Aid,OneLaptop per Child, and many others,I cant think of,now?
Recently,I had lunch with Cindy Wang,an undergraduate from MIT(she has come here for some summer exchange program ) and we shared our tales of growing up in different cultures.Interestingly,Cindy was born in China and moved to America only when she was thirteen.So,she had quite an experience to share.It was initially weird for her.Said Cindy, between a mouthful of Chana Masala,"They have a lot of fun,you know.They party,drink..but,they are great people and once you are accepted within their community,they treat you like your own".They do,they certainly do.Mustn't there be some thing special about them,which attracts the most brilliant immigrants from around the world and absorbs them into the fabric of their society.I can go on and on professing about our love for American music and American movies.I could write entire posts about the beauty of American literature(from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Hemingway to Salinger,all the way to Palahniuk).But,I fear I might prejudice my arguments with the more personal of tastes.
Believe it or not,USA is easily the most evolved concept of a nation we can ever have.They have come a long way from the abolition of slavery to being the Land of Opportunities.Obviously we are not living in a black and white world.The colours of racism are bound to emerge here and there in this melting pot of cultures.But,certainly they are far more democratic than we people ,who are still bent upon immortalising an age-old meaningless caste system by legalizing reservation. To recognize the happiness,openness and comfort that Uncle Sam has brought to our lives is to turn a blind eye to a universal truth .We love to talk about globalization ,'cause the very moment we take a look at the way the world is moving,we are prone to feel that we are on a higher plane of thought.But before that we must globalize our minds.We must accept the origin of our inspirations and influences not hide in anti-American schools of thought and defend ourselves with much-hackneyed falsehoods.The fastest way to intellectual independence is to see the truth in all its nakedness and to embrace it wholeheartedly.India is motherland but Uncle Sam is one of the fathers of our minds.Let us acknowledge this once.With gratitude.

Colouring history

He wanted no sadness to be attached to its childhood;He loved its memories,any day of it he remembered now seemed flooded by a still brilliant sunlight.It seemed to him that a few rays from it reached to his present;not rays but like pinpoint spotlights that gave an occasional moment of glitter to his job,his lonely apartment,to the quiet ,scrupulous progression of his existence' -Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged

And a ray reached me too,reached me in my present,reached my psyche, and lit up a room of wonder,of the bliss of discovery,and gave my will the shove it needed to write a post.And so I write.

The shades of black and white are symbols of extremity.Black is the cloak thrown at all things evil.White is the robe,good things are rewarded with.It is perfectly reasonable to temper out the slight cross-cultural differences in the degree of this notion,and I am anthropologically well supported on this.But,what is noteworthy is(if for a moment we shake off the the anaesthetic of familiarity), how the fear of darkness of my game-hunting ancestors(quite some time after he came down from the trees) still pervades every sphere of modern human thought ,disguised as the distinctive emotions associated with the shades of black and white

Pardon my digressions,for I think I was talking about a ray.A ray from the past.Come sit with me and we will trace this ray back to its source.This is certainly the era of the cathode ray tube.There is a little kid sitting in his room,watching TV,his colour TV.It is not exactly clear what is widening those gullible eyes or what kind of surprise is holding his mouth open.All you know is that its some black and white thing they are showing.Black allied bombers streaking across the white sky.Or Black debris of destroyed London homes in World War II ,Or Gandhi breaking the salt-tax law taking a handful of white salt in his black hands,Or Churchill's black and white suit as he indulges in oratory.But that is not the object of our visit to this scene.To reach our object,we must go beyond his facial expressions,inside his 7 year old mind and watch silently at the machinations which led to his childhood conceptions and viewpoints."Viewpoint"-quite a classy word,suits better the brooding teenage blogger of today but spare the little kid.What he was doing was far more unconscious and far more innocent.He was making one of his zillion unconscious generalizations,part of that little bag filled with unique, stupid conclusions leading to stupider notions which every one of us remember possessing as a child.Aaah,how I treasure my little bag today.Seriously,childhood is the best time to be stupid and may people reserve all their stupidity for childhood.
So thought our young hero,that the world of yesterday was black and white only.That the universe has acquired its colours over time.And so he extrapolated the virtuality of a war footage to the reality of everything that was beyond the time scales he could handle.So,it was really true that all rivers were black in colour.That women had black lips,black eyes and black hair.That Hollywood actresses of today far overshadow any of those oldies when it comes to sexiness and beauty.That everyone in the West had either white hair or black.That trees had black leaves.And so,had you been born 50 years earlier,you would have had the most austere and monotonous experience one could ever ask for,with everything around you either black or white or with at most some degree of greyness.Waking up in a universe coloured in grey scale!What's more,he even went on to paint every World War and pre-World War emotion.He theorized ,though in extremely vague terms that ,in those days either every one was a Gandhian or like Gandhi or everyone was Hitler or a follower of his.So,the world was a really dull place to live then.Because everyone was either good or evil,just like black, or white.Thus ,the crazy ones ,the eccentric,unpredictable ones,or so to say ,"the colourful ones" were missing.Such was the nature of reality.Nature of Reality -a deep phrase and the opportune moment for another digression.
In the Critique of Pure Reason,Immanuel Kant talks of his beautiful concept of priori."That all our knowledge begins with experience,there is no doubt.But though all knowledge begins with experience,it does not follow that it arises out of experience."Kant says that there are aspects of reality that are not supplied by the senses.These he calls as priori.An example of priori knowledge is time.You don't see time,neither do you hear it,smell it,taste it ,touch it.It isn't present in the sense data that are received.Time is what Kant calls an intuition which the mind must supply as it received the sense data.And so what I described above was the a priori lens through which I looked at anything that was antiquated,anybody who was anachronistic.
And the final act.
I think I was 12 or 13 then.But I remember vividly this scene in Richard Attenborough's Gandhi (which by the way,was a colour movie)in which the paradox which had fooled me for so long,finally unweaves itself.There is a television(in the scene).The colour of the TV frame is something like brown-blue.There are people around dressed up in colourful clothes,some in uniform looking at the ensuing program where they are showing Gandhi being received at London for some round table-conference or something.And lo and behold,scenes in the television are all in that dull,blurred black and white.And the irony is worth noting.In fact,it is shocking to him and his pride in the present,his exclusive present is shattered that very moment.So,the world was colourful even then.Many years later he would come across a beautiful Calvin and Hobbes strip and all his childhood memories would come back to him as he would see how he had once owned those instincts which Bill Watterson brings out so masterfully.
Copernicus stated that the earth moves around the sun.Nothing changed as a result of this revolution,and yet everything changed.To put it in Kantian terms,the objective world producing our sense data did not change but our a priori concept was turned inside out. A Copernican revolution.For me,that childhood revelation that History was just as colourful as is the Present, was a Copernican revolution for my mind. It totally altered my apriori of the past and more importantly,whatever it stood for.The mud is just as brown as it was centuries ago.The sky was as blue as it is today.The rose just as red as it was aeons ago.Beautiful women still had those pink lips and green eyes.(here's cheers to all those beautiful grandmothers)And the world just as interesting ,diverse and just as full of surprises as it is ,today.And so as a whole new future unfolds to me,in all the brilliance of its colours,the contrast of its shades,my awe and respect for history only grows,I never forget that there is a special kind of justice I am ordained to do.There is a job I cant leave undone, The job of colouring history.

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