Jan-4, 4.32 M.Y B.C.

'Those are 7 children you've got,' I told my brother today, only to be met with yet another stare of disbelief and suspicion. He stopped counting after five and refuses to admit that the food he manages is not sufficient for his family. I've told him time and again that I won't always be around to count for him and that he should try to stand on his own feet but sadly enough his attitude is steeped knee deep in orthodoxy. He refuses to see what I see but that's primarily because he doesn't get up as high as I do. And that's precisely the problem. That's the problem with him. That's the problem with his wife. In fact, that's the problem with our entire specie. Sometimes I'm afraid that if we don't try to free up our hands now, we won't have enough time to learn how to eat with knives and forks once they are invented. The best we would ever manage to do is to use chopsticks but how does one eat steak with them? Forget eating, how would one apply soap on his back? There are many issues that one worries about, not least of them being the utter hostility with which my suggestions are met. I think I have mentioned before that I'm not exactly a blast at parties and social gatherings. Oh yes I do manage a conversation every now and then but I just have to pick up the plate in order for everyone to remember errands they need to complete. They have instilled fear about me in the minds of the young ones and those little cretins try to throw rocks at me when I'm not looking - for once I'm happy that their motor abilities are impaired by this institutionalized quadripedalism.

What the world needs now is a bit of a revolution. We have to join hands and rise up to the challenges. Sure our hands are tied now with conservative orthodoxy but this ambivalence has to go if we intend to handle the opportunity which is provided by our increasing reach. Our future, I believe, can be in our own hands. Right now it's merely in our own feet. The world, I hope, would be at our feet someday. Right now it's also at our hands.

It is contemporary in the sense of concerning with the isolation of a man in the modern society. It deals with the sort of isolation which on a superficial level is afforded only by the modern society and is seen to be increasing as technology allows us to be more and more disconnected yet connected. On a deeper level, though, this book is about the kind of isolation which is very much independent of time and age. The isolation of the man who has refused to buy into the common ideals of society. The man who has spent considerable effort trying to hone his intellectual side and, thus, has developed a highly biting sense of contempt towards the mass of humanity who do not appreciate the 'finer way of living.' This mass of humanity, quite understandably, finds such a man unbearable and is only too happy to leave him to his own devices. The desperation that follows this isolation, however, is compounded by the fact that man is, in essence, merely an animal. His animal instincts (represented by the wolf in this book) often clash with his desire to be civilized. The desire to kill, to be unlawful, for sex, and for aggression are in direct odds with his desire to be swept away in the gay abandon of Mozart, Handel, Bach, and the intellectual thoughts of Nietzsche, Novalis, and Goethe. Our protagonist (Harry), therefore, decides that suicide is the only resolution to such a deep seated conflict.

This is where he comes across a girl who seems to be able to read his thoughts and make more sense out of them than Harry himself can. She empathizes with him and gives him an immediate reason to live for. The essence of the book from here on is Harry's reintroduction to the 'indulgences of the bourgeoisie.' Dancing, jazz, sex, drugs - all those activities of the common man which Harry had so much contempt for. The wolf rears its head against the cultural snob every now and then and the inevitable question is raised - 'What is right?' And thankfully the question is left more or less unanswered; or at least open to interpretation.

The book ends with Harry's foray into the very imaginative 'theater of magic.' It raises topics like the profligacy and the simultaneous necessity (even inevitability) of war, the ridiculous duality of our civilized existence in a world which is hopelessly burning, the triviality and the simultaneous magic of 'human emotions' like love,  the chanced nature of our birth and existence, and the ultimate folly of taking oneself too seriously. To my liking, none of these topics are explicitly stated or preached upon but a reader with sufficient intelligence should be able to sniff them out in the brilliant and surrealistic theater of magic. I, with my very limited intelligence, could decipher some broad themes but I am quite flummoxed by the way the book ends. At this point, it appears to me that some characters and ideas of the book have been modeled upon the Bhagwad Gita but my ignorance of Gita prevents me from being able to verify my suspicions.

All in all, it's a very good book. Highly recommended.

The book, like other Vonnegut's novels, is about nothing really. I mean, it sort of has an anti war message in its mundane and trivializing portrayal of the bombing of Dresden. It may be called a science fiction novel in its description of the planet of Tralfamadour but the greatest compliment I can give to the book is that it's about nothing and the only thing it manages to do in its 250 pages is babble about zillion small and disconnected happenings and concepts. I am by no means being critical -  because I really believe that Vonnegut, for the kind of writer that he was, appreciated above all other acclaim, the acclaim of being the champion of nothing. It seems to me that he was the sort of chap who looked at the triviality of the world and the seriousness with which people took themselves with an amused look - and the world with all its self-presumed purpose was nothing but a heady dose of entertainment for him. Very much like George Carlin actually. He preaches no morals, sort of believes in predestination, really doesn't have much sympathy for any cause, and doesn't want anything to do with group mentality. He is disinterested with the travails of the irrational humanity but understands that he needs to milk it in order to lead a decent life. And he knows that he is smart enough to jeer at the dumb humans and us humans would love him for it. Slaughterhouse Five is exactly the sort of novel which you expect to come from such a person.

I love the ideas in the book and share Vonnegut's amusement at human irrationality (not to say that I'm not irrational), but a satirical antiwar book, for me, has to be measured against the gold standard of Catch-22, and it just doesn't hold up there. There is a cruelty in Catch-22, an absolute inhuman disgust at human herd-mentality, a complete disregard for so many of our cherished ideals - it's a symphony in cacophony, and S5 is nowhere near. Vonnegut probably never tried to write another Catch-22 and there is no obvious reason to compare the two but I cannot help it. But here is the thing - if I had to ignore the content of the book and evaluate Vonnegut as the avant garde, zany writer that he was supposed to be, I'd prefer Woody Allen over him. Allen is not considered a great writer maybe because he never really wrote seriously, but from what I have read from him, there is nobody that I've read (with the exception of Kafka) who even comes close to how crazy his imagination was and is. The trouble with Vonnegut is that in whichever department I choose to evaluate his brilliance, it is always easy to find someone else who is much better. So it goes (and that's how Vonnegut ends most of his paragraphs).

1 Chicken -> 2 drumsticks + 1 barbecued breast piece

1 egg -> not much, but 2 eggs -> 1 omlette

Speaking of chickens and eggs, I have often wondered which came first. I think we'll have to see if Lawry's setup their shop before Denny's because let's face it, what would Lawry's have made if the world only consisted of eggs? Vice-versa, how would Denny's have made omlettes from chickens? A quick search shows that Lawry's was established in 1938 and Denny's in 1953 which means there were no chickens before 1938 and no eggs before 1953. There you have it - once and for all, a huge conundrumstick solved!

Anyway, the reason I was thinking on these lines is that while reading a bit of Dostoevsky, it suddenly dawned upon me that all my disappointment in Russian literature might not have anything to do with its content at all. One thing is for sure though, when it comes to depressing, morbid imagination there is no race which trumps the Russian. No other group of people, as a whole, has inflicted as much misery upon the world as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov together have through their stories of the sad farmer whose wife had an affair. But that is probably not the only reason why I find it hard to read Russian literature (actually I very much like Chekhov). The main reason, I think, is the bloody names these Russians have. 'Bezukhovs', 'Drubetskoys', 'Ekaterina Alexandrovna Shcherbatskaya', 'Pavel Fyodorovich Smerdyakov', 'Katerina Ivanovna Verkhovtseva' etc. I mean, what the hell? Here I am, trying to wade through an already dense plot where commentaries on human nature are getting intermingled with moral dilemmas and plot twists, and suddenly Ms. Katerina Ivanovna Verkhovtseva walks in and I have to spend the next two minutes dealing with her roadblock of a name. Any race which is sadistic enough to name their young one Katerina Ivanovna Verkhovtseva must necessarily be a depressed one. Their tragedies must necessarily be complex and detailed and heroic and there must necessarily be a complete lack of trivial subject matters. The trivial subject matters are for races which name their children Tom and Rob and Dick. For such races, human life is a travesty to begin with, their coffers have always been full and they have never had to face paucity as a culture, hence, their literature is light on its feet. Imagine an elaborate tragedy with backstabbing siblings and cheating wives and death and misery and moral turpitude and imagine its central character named Bob. Just doesn't cut it. Something tells me that that central character can only be named Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov or some other Russian derivative of the same. Well that's my alternative 'god' theory of the difficulty of Russian literature. It kicks in when I don't feel like thinking or arguing because it's all quite pointless to begin with. There is never a resolution to any argument so I might as well have a bit of fun and indulge in a bit of mockery - very much like the god argument. Did I make any sense? Oh dear god, I sincerely hope not!

I have an intense peeve against most of my teachers during my early formative years, a trait that they share with an overwhelming majority of all teachers - they were either too incompetent or too inconsiderate. The fact that they could make 'acquisition of knowledge' boring is almost too difficult for me to comprehend now. Biology, for instance, is a subject that I remember with a special hatred but I also realize that my boredom with it was more a result of how it was taught rather than what was taught. Despite all my formal education then, I have managed to save 'curiosity' from the deathly throes of uninspiring teachers. And I have lately become curious about the origins of humans and what legacy we share with other creatures on Earth. That science decodes the labyrinthine links and interlinks between all existing living organisms today with the help of genetic studies, fossil records, and radioactive dating is fascinating in itself, but I'm more thrilled by what they have found.

Mitochondrial DNA is one of only two parts (The other is Y-chromosome) of the genome which are not shuffled around by evolutionary processes. It gets passed down the generations unchanged. It is amazing that every single one of us 6.7 billions living humans has the same Mitochondrial DNA - one that they have inherited from a woman who lived in Africa about 160,000 years ago. She has been termed the 'Mitochondrial Eve' and is, in some sense, the scientific mother of all humans alive today. Her descendants, in what is termed as the Out of Africa theory, left Africa for the first time around 60,000 years ago and moved on to populate the rest of the world. Starting from Middle-East, South Asia was colonized 50,000 years ago, Australia and Europe by 40, and East Asia (Korea and Japan) by 30, and North America by 16,000 (although this last date is controversial). In their quest for territory, our direct ancestors met the already existing species from the Homo genus like the Homo Erectus and Neanderthals and did to them what we are naturally good at doing - annihilation. I find it amazing to think that most of our early literature which is religious and mythical in nature and derives inspiration from otherwise ordinary battles and natural phenomena concerns but a minuscule fraction of the total human experience. Imagine how much more rich our history and our culture would have been, if only it had the resources to tap into the thousands of stories of hardships and courage that must dot our existence during the last 200,000 years.

Then again, the last 200,000 years is nothing but a slight flutter in the larger story of evolution of life on Earth. It is often naively suggested that we have descended from monkeys. The truth is that all the living species, both animals and plants, are cousins and not one of them has descended from the other. And in this family tree, the closest cousins to us modern humans are Chimpanzees and Bonobos, and the common ancestor to all 3 of us lived about 5 million years ago in Africa. It was a bit like humans and a bit like Chimps but nowhere like monkeys (it had no tail). So our branch of the family tree joins Chimps and Bonobos at 5 million years from now. This combined branch joins Gorillas in Africa at a common ancestor who lived 7 million years ago. This branch of our common ancestor joins the common ancestors of Orangutans at about 14 million years ago in Asia! Gibbons join us about 18 million years, and it is only if we go back 25 million years ago that we find the common ancestor who gave birth to all apes including us and so called Old World monkeys like langoors and baboons.

Ancestors of other species join us as we keep going back (New World monkeys at 40 mya, Tarsiers at 58 mya, Lemurs etc. at 63 mya) and we finally reach the K-T boundary - 65 million years ago. There is a thin layer of Iridium present all across the world at a depth in the Earth's crust which corresponds to a time 65 million years in the past. While Iridium is rare in Earth, it is common in meteorites. The Chicxulub crater is a titanic impact crater - 100 miles wide and 30 miles deep - buried below the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico and it has been dated at 65 mya. And the last fossils of terrestrial dinosaurs date back to 65 mya. It was only after the K-T boundary that the age of mammals began when their dinosaurial predators went extinct. It is weird to think that had that meteorite not impacted the Earth and wiped off the dinosaurs, humanity might not have had the chance to begin. On that fateful day 65 mya, all of our ancestors all across the world most probably went deaf and blind from the catastrophic impact, and were hanging in there by the skin of their teeth - all they could perhaps manage was to live long enough to reproduce - but that was enough...

If you really think about it, even 65 million years is but a small drop in the ocean of galactic time. As someone very smart once said, 'humans are what happens when you give 14 billion years to the hydrogen atom.'

I remember a Friday evening, much like many others, in visions of blurred lamps, svelte waitresses, sumptuous portions, and intoxicating aromas, in a Mexican restaurant in La Jolla downtown; I was sitting with some friends and someone asked a general question to the effect of, 'which were your most satisfying/memorable years?' In the gushing spring of romantic nostalgia, my friends remembered their school times and college times with sad, hollow eyes fixed into the distance, as if trying to grope for a memory hopelessly lost to the brutality and crudeness of passing time. I remember being disconcerted to find that I was the only one who rated my time doing the Ph.D as the most memorable. This is not to say that I don't remember my earlier years with fondness but if the metric of one's life's worth is how much one has grown as a person as a consequence of the various experiences one is subjected to (which is probably the most important metric for me) I would be hard pressed to think that my cocooned, illiterate, spoon-fed earlier time would rate higher than the more recent one. Yes, there is a lot of nostalgia involved, and if someone were to ask me during one of those infrequent periods of depression, I would probably crave for the innocence and simplicity of the times when chocolates cost a fraction of a dollar but in saner times, I realize that it is better to live with the realization of satisfaction and the knowledge of a changing person (hopefully better) than just being happy in hindsight. And it is scaringly easy to get bottled up into a sedentary useless waste of the gift of human intelligence - one just needs a TV with a cable connection, a remote, and a couch. In a world infested with the perils of easy comfort and blessed with a body which has an evolutionary inclination to avoid all risks/experiences once the basic necessities of survival are met, I feel happy that I was able to keep alight a slight flame of adventure and curiosity. Mnemosyne, in her supple grace, fills me with pride with images of 150mph on my motorcycle's speedometer, golden gate's deck in fog, distant sands on the bank of La Jolla shores, graphite streaks on paper, discordant notes of ivory and ebony, intellectual satisfaction of being the temporary but sole possessor of a secret of physical reality, and of having had relations with vibrant interesting people.

I am happy that somewhere along the way I ditched religion and understood, within reasonable bounds of uncertainty, that it is a sham of massive proportions, no better than other frauds which exploit human gullibility and his need for 'believing' like homeopathy and other 'alternative' balderdash. The skepticism and cynicism which came with reading masses upon masses of mediocre publications at least instilled enough intelligence for me to realize when a really stupid person is bullshitting. But it has not yet instilled enough intelligence for me to call out on the bullshits of smart folks. Richard Dawkins might be making things up, Nabokov might just be horsing around - I realize that I am yet not intelligent enough to know but I at least have the doubt which lacks in a 'man of faith'. I like to think of life as a long and winded struggle for demanding more and more intelligence from those who are smart enough to swindle you. It's the least that we simple people can do for our own intellectual ego. What is important is to have that doubt and I owe this doubt to the last 4 years which saw innumerable discussions with some really intelligent friends, and painstaking but ultimately enjoyable and humbling studies in physics, intelligence, evolution etc.

At the cost of sounding immodest but at the demand of honesty, I would have to say that the journey en route to the Ph.D was never too stressful. It might be attributed to an easy going adviser but it should not be attributed to mediocre work. And the fact that I liked bits and pieces of the work a lot made it all, quite uncharacteristically for a grad student, memorable.

Yes, it was a memorable trip, the last 4 years. In its white watered wake, I have lost most of my friends and relatives. When I stand aloof on the quarterdeck and look down into the turbulent waters of the past, I see them in vaguely recognizable images of camaraderie - the distance separating us is not just temporal but is made of a fundamental difference in outlook, which is not to say that one's is better than the other but that they are different. But this is a chasm which is probably harder to cross than any other. So I stand on the quarterdeck and instead raise my gaze to the beautiful horizon, the artist's horizon. The Sun will go down in a few moments, completing a chore it has kept doing for the last 5 billion years in a universe that has existed for a few more. I get lost in the vastness of it all and the next obvious question of the meanings of our lives and contributions. There are visions of enormous explosions across mindboggling scales until the first bacterias take breath in an insignificant part of the inhospitable world. They replicate and mutate across ages and give rise to the first humans about 200,000 years ago. And in another 200 millenniums these humans are closer than ever to understanding what the holy fuck happened! If this quest is not grand then what is? It is made up of small contributions from different individuals across centuries. The simple beauty and ultimate purpose of wanting to understand how the world ticks. I am happy to have made a very small contribution in this grand scheme of things - not related to elementary physics yet furthering our understanding of a small subset of physical reality... Good times, surely.

In the golden lightning
of the sunken sun,
O'er which clouds are bright'ning
thou dost float and run,
Like an unbodied joy whose race has just begun. (-P.B.S.)

No, I am not allowed to do any of it. Rather, I must worry about how to expand the amount of my work so that it at least appears as if my last 4 years have not been completely squandered. At 66 pages currently, and with hardly a hope of going beyond 150 (doublespaced mind you), my contribution hardly appears a gushing spring of knowledge. It's more like a gentle, dying trickle from a broken tap in the middle of a parched desert. And Masters students routinely clock 200. I think I'll have to fiddle with the spacing, and tinker with the font, adjust the margins, and tamper the text in  order to post such gallumphing figures.

Maybe I am exaggerating but that is one peeve that I have with the whole process of 'growing up'. There is something behind this that I feel strongly about and often feel saddened by. It's that we do not exaggerate often and well enough as we grow up. This ability of making things up from thin air, adorning it with beautiful false ideas, coloring it with dazzling deceitful colors, it not only leaves us to some extent as we grow older, it also suffers as we develop a condescending attitude towards it. And  as this vitality shrinks within, we are left predictable, and immobile, all our ideas fossilized into useless sediments - just reminders of times gone by. And some of us  go on to produce Ph.D. dissertations so bland, it's more fun a watch a glacier melt.

...and it would be a crazy happy world. Truth would only be a matter of one's imagination. Fallacies would be the only consistencies and no professor would be smug. People would be generally confused and disoriented and no one would bat an eyelid when sold 5 oranges after paying for 6. It would be a chaotic world with its unsure zombie like citizens walking around on crazy Mobius strip shaped roads. The principle of mutually assured destruction would cease to exist because no one would be sure if 10,000 is greater than 1. Hence countries would stage preemptive nuclear strikes and finish off this stumbling, hobbling world and the rest of the universe wouldn't give a damn.

But there would be advantages, definitely. If somebody asks you what would you do if you had a million dollars, you can simply say that you don't even need a million dollars. And yes, quantum electrodynamics would probably have a believable premise.