Author Archive: Ankit

In support of voyeurism

Posted by Ankit On October 12th, 2009

I sometimes get this weird idea that voyeurism should not be seen as the evil that it is often seen as. I often get such ideas when I am sitting in a dimly lit balcony looking at the apartments in the front or when I am walking on the street and the dark night is hindered by columns of well lit miniaturized windows. It is a mistake to link the innocent pleasures of a voyeur with a necessarily sexual motive. Often, they are quite innocuous. We are naturally curious about other people. Maybe in their imperfect existences we try to find some personal solace; maybe in their picture perfect harmonies, we try to forget our own dissonances. Personally speaking, I find the act of looking at a set of lighted apartments mystifying and intriguing at various levels. To think that I am able to look at these people with a vantage point that none of them will ever be able to take advantage of is exciting enough. There those people are, hardly aware of their neighbors, going about their businesses with a robotic monotonicity, and yet I can see them as part of a bigger picture. By being a voyeur, I can place them in the objective, geometric description, and realize that even at a scale as small as a few apartments, there is not much to differentiate them, nobody is particularly special. I understand that they have their hopes and their ambitions, their pains and insecurities, but for now, this is merely a figment of my own imagination, solely a theoretical possibility. But as is often the case, it is imagination which trumps reality, and I ascribe to them emotions that they might never have and lives of such beauty and intricacy that reality often fails to provide. And all of this grandeur, all of these subtle possibilities, such brilliant color, all of it is neatly tucked into a set of some lighted rooms and a few mundane details. Their cozy little existences, indifferentiable from their neighbors, captures my imagination with both their periodical, repeatable, matchbox like boredom, and the dazzling potential that lies within. I find it amazing to think that each little yellow dot on tall skyscraper contains within itself so many experiences, mistakes, glories, hardships, hope, despair, so much life...

And sometimes, if you are really lucky, your voyeuristic disposition might help solve a grisly murder!

Anonymous

Posted by Ankit On October 5th, 2009

Wired.com has an article today on a topic which would appear esoteric to most of us. The respectable portal has as its main article, a primer on a collection of online and IRL (in real life) protests, under the umbrella name of Project Chanology, against the Church of Scientology. It doesn't matter what the Church of Scientology is or what it did wrong in order to invite the disapproval; what is more significant is who carried out the protests and in what manner they were conducted. It is all the more significant in the light of the fact that the same nebulous group of people were involved heavily in helping the Iranian protesters and are now raising their voices against Internet censorship in China and Australia. The group goes by the name 'Anonymous' and their culture is one of the most intriguing facets of contemporary online society. It not only serves as an educational study in the purest form of democracy, and how order results from pure chaos, it also raises very important ethical and moral questions.

'Anonymous' is an offshoot of 4chan.org. The site features various bulletin boards, the most notorious of them being its 'random' board which goes by the moniker /b/. The board is notorious for being highly pornographic, scatological, generally rebellious, irreverent and highly politically incorrect in nature (consider yourself warned). It's presence would have been just another flash in the pan, had it not been the host for more than 5 million visitors per month. The board has the general rule that 'it has no rules' and all members post under the same pseudonym of 'Anonymous'. The fact that there is nothing to identify individual posters allows the best and worst of human nature to shine through. Bad ideas are mercilessly made fun of and cruelly discarded, whereas good ones garner a following so huge that the associated tremors are felt far and wide across the internet. But never is the merit of an idea ever influenced by the reputation of its creator. It's a chaotic world where individual imagination is not bound by the one thing that has done more than any other to stifle creativity - social propriety. There is no one to look up to, no precedences to necessarily follow, nothing sacred. What results is a particularly perverted image of humanity - one unencumbered by social mores, but I believe that it is its most honest image actually, and like all things honest, it manages to shock. In fact that is why honesty is probably made such a big deal of. Not necessarily because it's 'moral' but because we place such a high premium on it owing to its capacity to shock. We know that loftier the principle is, the easier it is to justify not following it. Hence want to keep it and preserve it in a jar filled with formaldehyde and we want to lock it, and we secretly want that jar to never open.  Well, it lies in smithereens on /b/ and human nature, in all its disfigured monstrosity and primal creativity, emerges bare naked therein. The more interesting aspect about the mess that is /b/ is that order does emerge from it. Vague morality and sketchy ethics do emanate where they should have never had to. Coherent debates and funny threads do manage to survive the onslaught of huge doses of mediocrity and listlessness. And every once in a while, as if by magic, an idea is promulgated and a few faceless contributors join hands, and from that small seed develops a small plant which rapidly feeds upon its own nontrivial imagination and swells to suck in its whirlpool, many more 'anons', and we begin to feel its effects in our faraway existences.

Time magazine, last year, conducted an online poll about the most influential person in the world (the results are still online). The top position was won by a guy named 'moot'. He is the guy who started 4chan.org. The next 20 places were won by people, the first letters of whose names spell a 4chan oddity. Time magazine, to this date, doesn't accept that they were completely outwitted.

Help?

Posted by Ankit On September 28th, 2009

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Minimalism: 9 and a half lines

Posted by Ankit On September 24th, 2009

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Mozart and Art

Posted by Ankit On September 20th, 2009

I went to a Mozart concert by Orchestra Nova today. The pieces played were:

1. Violin concerto 3

2. 3 German dances

3. Symphony No. 40

As good as the 3 pieces are, Symphony 40 would be instinctively likable because its main theme is a well known tune. The second movement of the symphony was the one that I liked the most. It's a slow, almost sad but very romantic piece which managed to evoke a very tangible scene in my mind. The scene of two lovers dancing on a wooden pier over the ocean on a cloudless night. The sky is shot on the horizon in the shape of the moon and it is bleeding its milky agony on the scarred ocean. The only sounds are the creaks of the wooden floor of the pier as the hard soles and piercing heels of the dancers create rhythmic impressions over its accumulated dust. The dance is slow and intimate now and energetic and primal then and the rest of the universe with all its consequences and concerns has melted into the significance and insignificance of a few mutual gazes and some skipped beats. The two, oblivious of the celestial firmament above and around, dance away to the tunes of an invisible hand and whims of an unseen puppeteer, his gestures sure and controlled, her movements rapturous yet precise. The two ephemeral inky blots move among the mighty company of stars with the confidence of stupidity and the egoism of love but on the dull and permanent canvas of the heavens, they mark their patterns with the brilliance of human will. And it's a beautiful pattern. It is smooth and differentiable where the violins have taken deep breaths and discontinuous where the strings are plucked. It is serene and slow where the music is stringed and agitated and violent in the company of horns. Every now and then, they come close, their hands held together, the sorry moon imprisoned between his palm and hers - when the music goes quiet - and with a tremendous jerk as the crescendo is reached, the other side of the night sky gets drenched in the moonlight.

Mozart might never have intended images to be associated to his music but I feel that the importance and essence of art is not in the creator's intent but in the viewer's interpretation. I have colored his sketchy drawings with my imaginations and probably have gone overboard but art is nothing if not a good lie. Its importance is in its ability of making us invent beautiful false stories. It's actually useless when it is factual. And at this point I get reminded of a beautiful passage by Wilde where he talks about the real utility of art - the capability of inventing lies:

'Art, breaking from the prison-house of realism, will run to greet him, and will kiss his false, beautiful lips, knowing that he alone is in possession of the great secret of all her manifestations, the secret that Truth is entirely and absolutely a matter of style; while Life---poor, probable, uninteresting human life---tired of repeating herself for the benefit of Mr. Herbert Spencer, scientific historians, and the compilers of statistics in general, will follow meekly after him, and try to reproduce, in her own simple and untutored way, some of the marvels of which he talks.'

Red Balloon

Posted by Ankit On September 6th, 2009

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A bouquet of anarchy

Posted by Ankit On September 3rd, 2009

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The inspiration for this would be evident to those who like graffiti art.

GEB

Posted by Ankit On September 2nd, 2009

After days of diligent pouring, I have finally waded across 750 pages of paradoxes, logic, philosophy, mathematics, painting, music, and computation and crossed the checkered flag signaling the end of Hofstadter's 'Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.' Why, you might ask, is this important? Well, in the field of 'intelligent, thought provoking books', GEB has a towering, almost bullying, presence. It is the Don Bradman of 'intellectual' writing. Consequently it manages to scare off the reader even before it begins, partly owing to the lofty goals it sets out in the beginning, and partly because of the sheer thickness that requires negotiation. And now that I am done, I at least want to jot down some of the ideas which have managed to stick, for the fear of losing them again.

What is it about? For a book that deals with issues as different as molecular biology and transcendental music, it has a surprisingly clear and single minded focus. I wonder if anyone who has read it finds that the book is about anything but one single sentence and its ramifications. Epimenides paradox is the sentence:

'This sentence is false'.

No matter how much you think about it, it won't make sense. There is something deeply sinister and pathological about the sentence. But it's just language and language can be easily pushed under the rug. It doesn't bring the house down. GEB primarily tells the story of this dude called Kurt Godel who devised a way of applying this sentence to mathematics in the first half of the 20th century. He showed that for a sufficiently complex formal system (like number theory) there is a way to formulate a theorem which is true in that system and which says:

'I am not a theorem in this system'.

In other words, he proved that a mathematical system which aims to be consistent (no self contradictions) will not be able to provide proofs for all that is true within that system, and that a system which aims to give proofs to all  truths within it is necessarily inconsistent. If you think about it, a result of this depth does indeed require a 750 page tome to talk about it. I mean, results and theorems in every other discipline are merely humanity's tentative, though increasingly accurate, stabs in darkness. They do and will continue to suffer from our own sensory limitations. Experimental validations of our grandest astronomical theories and minutest quantum ones are merely smudges on photographic plates. On the other hand, theorems in mathematics stand alone, almost inviolable (almost). And a theorem about how mathematics can and will behave should truly count as the towering achievement of human intellect. It should also be seen as one of the greatest contributions to society because mathematics is the language we have chosen to interpret the world in. It is the only tool we have got and it is precisely because of it that society affords us the comforts and leisure which allow us to indulge our creativities, and be sympathetic towards fellow humans, animals, nature.

The book goes on to study the implications of the theorem and its curiously self-referential nature on issues like the mysteriousness of the human mind, the future of artificial intelligence, the meaning and emergence of truth and beauty in artistic creations, the existence/nonexistence of free will, the illusion of intelligence resulting from a system of sufficient complexity, genetic evolution etc. The scope of the book is breathtakingly broad and the fact that Hofstadter makes it all appear coherent is either because he is a depressing genius in deception or because deep down, things should be so. Like Hardy mentioned about Ramanujan's crazy results: 'They must be true because, if they are not true, no one would have had the imagination to invent them.'

I found that the book, despite its content and size, is cheerfully lucid. It has the same 'philosophical displacement' as David Deutsch's 'The fabric of reality' but while Dr. Deutsch assumed that all his readers trace their route back to Einstein and decided to cram everything in 200 pages, Hofstadter is more sympathetic to our vacuity. He has included fictional dialogues between Lewis Carrol's characters Tortoise and Achilles which give a simple-worded, though cryptic, overview of the ideas. And he has shown elaborate harmonies between mathematics, painting (M.C.Escher, Rene Magritte) and music (J.S.Bach) to sustain a general curiosity. But then, he hasn't done all this for the express desire sustaining interest. He has done it because, as you start feeling by the end of the book, there is a very deep connection between such disparate fields. It shouldn't come as a surprise that what we find harmonious in music and beautiful in art, often has deep mathematical associations. When music is bound in meters and beats, and art has familiar geometries, when poetry is enclosed in metered iambs, it seems that a condition for beauty is automatically met. This, as opposed to postmodern art, aleotoric music, which, in order to explain their significance, have to invoke ideas of rebellion, boredom, authority and conformity. Where such deep connections exist between mathematics and art, it is interesting to see how something as profound as Godel's Incompleteness and self-reference commute between the two. And this is what GEB explores, with humor and intelligence.

Jabberwocky

Posted by Ankit On August 29th, 2009

How can anyone have the ignorance to presume that 'Alice in Wonderland' is a mere children story when Lewis Carrol has also given us Jabberwocky. A poem which is often hailed as the greatest nonsense poem ever written and which probably holds the record for the most number of new words introduced into the language for a literary work this short (can you identify some?). Here, I share one of my favorite poems, a work that more than makes up for its lack of meaning with its aesthetic depth, which is a testimony to the primal allure of sounds and the pulchritudinous potential of the written word:

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'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! and through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

"And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"
He chortled in his joy.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

-Lewis Carrol

The poem has been translated into a number of languages but translators were faced with the challenge of inventing their own words since a lot of words in the original poem were entirely made up. Not only did they not have counterparts in other languages, Carrol did not even make it clear what they were intended to mean in the first place. Here I produce a German translation by Robert Scott:

Es brillig war. Die schlichten Toven
Wirrten und wimmelten in Waben;
Und aller-mumsige Burggoven
Die mohmen Rath ausgraben

>>Bewahre doch vor Jammerwoch!
Die Zahne knirschen, Krallen kratzen!
Bewahr' vor Jubjub-Vogel, vor
frumiosen Banderschnatzchen!<<

Er griff sein vorpals Schwertchen zu,
Er suchte lang das manchsam' Ding;
Dann, stehend unterm Tumtum Baum,
Er an-zu-denken-fing.

Als stand er tief in Andacht auf,
Des Jammerwochen's Augen feuer
Durch turgen Wald mit Wiffek kam
ein burbelnd Ungeheuer!

Eins, Zwei! Eins, Zwei! Und durch und durch
Sein vorpals Schwert zerschnifer-schnuck,
Da blieb es todt! Er, Kopf in Hand,
Gelaumfig zog zuruck.

>>Und schlugst Du ja den Jammerwoch?
Umarme mich, mein Bohm'sches Kind!
O Freuden-Tag! O Halloo-Schlag!<<
Er schortelt froh-gesinnt.

Es brillig war. Die schlichten Toven
Wirrten und wimmelten in Waben;
Und aller-mumsige Burggoven
Die mohmen Rath ausgraben

-Robert Scott (courtesy: Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid)

I wonder if there is an Indian language translation...

A walk down memory lane

Posted by Ankit On August 18th, 2009

Kapili hostel

Kapili hostel

Has it really been 5 years? It's hard to believe that 5 years have elapsed since I took the last meal in Kapili's mess hall. The taste of rajma, rice, and fried potato chips is still fresh on this tongue. These ears are still abuzz with the insistent din of 100 unwashed, uncouth, uncivilized IITians eating their lunch together under the high ceilings of the Kapili mess hall. I visited my old hostel. I stood in front of my final year room. It was locked. I looked closely and noticed a slight dent on the bottom left side of the steel lock. Oh yes, it has been guarding the room for the last 6 years all right. That dent was the result of a particularly frustrated afternoon. I stood looking at it for more time than a mere lock deserves. I was thinking about how bloody familiar that lock seemed. I knew exactly how easily the key would slip into the notch and how smoothly it would rotate clockwise. I knew precisely what sound it would make while opening and I could accurately visualize how it would bounce off after opening. Deep down inside, it hasn't really been 5 years. Not if such trivialities are so fresh in my mind. How I wished I had the key so that I could open the room and walk barefoot over its dusty floor or jump over the unmade bed and slide open one half of the huge window and from between the iron bars, look out far into the distance at the green mountains. How I wished I could thrown open the balcony door and let the bittersweet wind blowing down from the mighty Brahmaputra create slight flutters and ripples and crackles on the used newspaper sheets covering my small wooden shelf on the opposite wall and how I wished I could make patterns on the dusty screen of my barely used computer.

P1020008

My room was second last on the left

I walked down to the transit complex. That was where the academic stuff happened. It's deserted, now that everything has moved out to the new and bigger academic complex. I have clear memories of walking into that same complex for the first time 9 years ago. There used to be 2 big halls, H1 and H2, as soon as you entered. At least they appeared big then. With the furniture removed and the human bustle quieted, they seem to have been cut to size. I walked down the corridor on the right which leads to what was then the library. You don't have to know that there used to be a library in place of the empty space. The humid smell of bound books that still permeates the air there is enough of a hint. When time has razed down structures, ambitions, and characters, it has failed to obliterate the memory of knowledge. I walked down to the erstwhile bastion of the CIV2K class, a sequence of rooms which constituted the concrete testing lab, environment engg. lab, faculty rooms, and the computer center, and I stood there looking at the lonely corridors. In front of my eyes were swimming the scenes of my friends, staff members, faculty, and other students frenetically going about their businesses - the sounds of doors opening, pleasantries being exchanged, curses being hurled, the sounds of heavy machinery and printers and faxes and keyboards, the vision of people getting in and out of rooms and the sorry and hilarious sight of me and my batch-mates getting ready for another unbearable lab session. And I blinked; it all disappeared, melted away into the silence which fills every single fiber of the transit complex's ghostly existence today. The building has quietly transited into the inevitable arms of nostalgia.

The deserted Civil dept. at T.C.

The deserted Civil dept. at T.C.

I walked to Rubul's tea stall which lies just outside the campus. The place is bustling with activity now and it took me a considerable amount of time finding the shop which sold the best tea that ever touched these lips. The place has been considerably upgraded but the secret formula, it appears, is safe. I met a lot of people who used to work in different capacities when I was there. The cleaning staff (Naveen, Ganesh, and Amjad), the photocopy guy who had a thing for all the girls, the canteen staff (lambu and others), the mess workers; everyone recognized me, and very lovingly and graciously arranged for me to have the mess lunch under the high ceilings of Kapili while I talked to some of them about the changes in the intervening 5 years and what they felt about them.  I didn't even have to get the food myself, and for once, rajma, rice, and fried potato chips didn't taste as bad as they used to.

I visited the faculty members and was surprised by how differently I was treated. Where there used to be contempt, there was respect. They even went as far as saying that our batch wasn't really a troublemaker. I took offense at such an offhand remark because I know how hard we worked at being complete jerks and how much we sacrificed. We earned our bad reputation honestly and squarely and I personally cannot see it being diluted, much less forgotten. The talk went well and the enthusiasm with which it was received, the lack of knowledge which exists about the topic and the practical/social utility which the research holds has given  me some new ideas.

I came back to the guest house tired and exhausted, packed up my stuff, and arrived at the reception to return the keys. I had made some long distance calls, and had a few meals during my stay so I inquired  how much I would have to pay. "It's all taken care of sir," he said, "The bill will be sent to the department." I couldn't help smiling. Maybe 5 years have indeed passed. The world seems to have turned upside down.

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