Category Archive: Uncategorized

You know how things go sometimes. We go about our daily lives, waking up early, having our 3 meals a day, pretending that we are making a difference. You know, the usual stuff. But once in a while, when reading a piece of avant-garde literature or while listening to someone particularly blasphemous, we come across a sentence radical enough to-simply-reckon with. Still, being the selfish self-centered specie that we are, we seldom realize that in this politically correct world that flinches everytime an African American is referred to as black, an infinitive was split right under our noses.

A split infinitive is the linguistic equivalent of the Danish cartoons. It doesn't quite generate the same amount of gasps as if you were to publicly dismiss holocaust as a hoax, but it has drawn boundaries in the English speaking world in a way few other constructs have. At this point, those who are not familiar with the concept might be wondering as to what the hell I am blathering about. I will tell you what I am blathering about.

According to Wikipedia, "A split infinitive or cleft infinitive is an English-language grammatical construction in which a word or phrase, usually an adverb or other adverbial, comes between the marker to and the bare infinitive (uninflected) form of a verb.".

In other words, if you have just made out with the wife of an English language purist who has just wandered into the room and happens to be armed with a 7.62 mm AK-47 automatic assault rifle, here is what you should say:
"I am sorry. It was a mistake to kiss her passionately."
rather than:
"I am sorry. It was a mistake to passionately kiss her."
Might just save you.

I must say that I understand the principal objection of the English orthodoxy against such reckless splitting. I understand that a split infinitive lacks the fluidity of Strauss's waltz and it fails to generate the sustained excitement akin to the active exhaust of an automatic turbocharged V-10 but it has the endearment of imperfection. Its like the noise of a high performance motorcycle engine which gasps for breath everytime you shift up. The discontinuity has its own charm.

More than that, there is an urgent need to reassess our position in a world that is placing increasingly tighter restraints on political correctness. I yearn for the days when men were real men, when every "his" stood alone and the feminists had not woken up to the possibility of whiling away some time by protesting that a "his/her" is necessary for female uplifting, when they were still playing Buzkashi in Afghanistan and when infinitives were being split left right and center with gay abandon.

Anyways, I reckon that there is an urgent need to do something about it. I reckon, we form an activist group and we should fight for the rights of the split infinitive. People nowadays seem to be morally fighting for virtually everything under the sun. Under the umbrella organization I am proposing, we can fight for the rights of split infinitives and Lactobacillus bacteria. Yes thats right, I implore you all to not eat curd :).

Imagine.

Its a moonless night and you are sitting on the banks of a still lake. Alone. Your feet creating ripples on the surface of the water that dance and shimmer in the dark light of the stars. And your hands clutching the moist grass on the sides. All you can hear is the rustle of the leaves as the trees lining the bank sway ever so slightly. All you can see is their dark silhouettes against a darker background and their slight reflections far into the lake. All you can feel is utter aloofness. You look up to the sky and it dazzles in a brilliant arabesque of divine order. Millions of specks painted on the black backdrop. Each silently twinkling. Each helplessly cognizant of its own loneliness. Their combined luminescence failing to reverberate in your eyes as the dreariness of it all weighs on your eyelids and you are forced to look down at the lake again. And it has a deathly stillness to it. Like a deserted home in a middle of nowhere. Like an anachronistic gramophone that is shocked into muteness. Like the quiet reflection of a boisterous crowd.

The scene should have been beautiful but there is something wrong with it. And I cannot put my finger on the reason. Its like an unfinished painting that has nonetheless been framed in a hurry. The underlying sadness is both exquisite and slightly disconcerting. Its a metaphor for life I suppose. Not quite perfect but strangely beautiful nonetheless. And subdued at the same time. The aforementioned scene invites me. Almost sinfully. And I feel like putting down the baggage for a while and resting. With my head down on my bent knees. With the sensation of passing time reduced to the slight movements of my hair in the breeze. And all the excess energy manifesting itself in small motions of my right feet. Slowly caressing the dead water into unwelcome waves.

I am guessing it must be a quietly jovial day at the headquarters of Zee Telefilms when Subhash Chandra finally figured out how to mint the stupidity of millions of fanatic cricket lovers in gold. Alas, his plans with the Indian cricket leagues hit the greedy roadblocks of BCCI , but he had nevertheless shown the imagination strapped bunch of clowns at the hem of Indian cricket how to truly turn this beautiful game into a money making machine. Thus was born the Indian Premier League. And it sucked.

It sucks in the same way Britney Spear feels like molten iron is being poured into your ears. It sucks with the same foulness of a Garfield mocking your intelligence. And it sucks in precisely the same way an Ekta Kapoor feels like she has just installed a juicer-mixer-grinder in your skull which is working overtime at preparing a homogeneous concoction of your gray matter. And there is a reason why it sucks so much.
Warning: Politically incorrect content to follow:

The reason IPL (or T20) must necessarily be bad is because its so popular. Its catering to what Watterson called the Lowest Common Denominator of humanity. And the Lowest Common Denominator of humanity is a sorry mass of stupid homo sapiens. Their demand for non-complex, instant gratification has reduced music to the shambles it is in today. Their inability to appreciate anything even remotely sophisticated has led to the downfall of smart/sensible Television and Cinema. Our generation has seen the demise of the likes of Naseeruddin Shahs and it has forced the reasonably talented A.B. to dance to the tunes of talentless hacks like Himesh Reshammiya. We have witnessed the steady incursion of mediocrity in everything. Everything we have touched, has turned to dust. And we are happy. Because now it can be mass produced, cheaply, and efficiently. And it is just clever enough not to put us to sleep and just dumb enough to be universally palatable. Yes, we have achieved great audiences but we have lost the soul in our efforts. And the same is true for IPL or T20.

To put it mildly, the Twenty-20 format is a joke. The format is too heavily laden in the favor of the batsmen and kills any sort of competition between the bat and the ball. And the seeds of this were sown before T20 itself. The game of cricket began on the path of demise when the no-ball rules came into place. When the power-plays came into place. When the bouncers were prohibited. Suddenly with the bite taken out of a bowler's arsenal, we had stupid talentless freaks like Dhoni straddling around, waving their bats in inebriated frenzy and still managing to keep the scorekeepers busy. I would have loved to see the likes of such modern cricketers face the sweet music of 150 kmph deliveries aimed at their terror stricken eyes. Oh, how much I would have loved to see a few more broken bones and fractured rib-cages. That would have separated the boys from the men. But no, we had to go one step further and start this mind dump of a format called T20. And the last hopes of a game lover like me who just wants to see a level playing field were dashed by the money grubbing corporations.

People would say, "So what ? its a hit". Well, obviously its a hit. That's what pains me really. Because while good art can still survive amidst mediocrity through individual efforts, a game as institutionalized as cricket will find it difficult to breathe when the institution itself is bent upon destroying it. And the public can hardly care less. As long as it has its share of crying Sreesanths and angry Harbhajans and dancing cheerleaders. That's another thing. Importing cheerleaders. Its just sad. I mean, I cannot care less about the moral police (I hate them) but this is not what cricket was meant to be. As inappropriate as cheerleaders are in cricket (from a historical perspective), importing them says a lot about us Indians. I really do not have words to describe how sad it makes me. Its like saying, the game is no more good enough. It has to be supported by sex. Because that's what it is. Sex. Cover up all you want but I would be damned if I do not see through it. The swinging balls are not good enough anymore. We need the swinging bellies. The unadulterated, honest cover drive doesn't appeal to us anymore. We need a bunch of Russian bimbos to get our adrenaline going. We need a complete soap opera on the field. We have even started terming the game as 'evening entertainment'. With all due respect: MY BLOODY FOOT !

My tendency to indulge in periodic episodes of obsessions saw me compulsively listening to the works of Bob Dylan and reading about his life and history. I have noticed that I do not tend to get impressed with the brilliance of music as much as its melody or the competence of its accompanying lyrics. The fact that a piece of music is complicated doesn't really impress me as much as a piece that sounds nice to hear. And if the music itself is spartan, then the lyrics have to be great to leave an impression. And this is where Bob Dylan rules so much. You have to listen to some of his earliest pieces to understand what I'm saying. And by early, I mean his piece from the early to mid sixties. The fact that he still composes music and remains the oldest person to have released a chartbuster ('Modern times' at age 65) just goes on to show that his creativity has not dimmed with age.

3 Nobel prize nominations for literature affirm his stature as a brilliant master of poetry in as clear a set of terms as is probably possible, although Dylan probably doesn't give a damn about the Nobel. He didn't give a damn when his song 'Like a Rolling stone' was voted the greatest song ever. He didn't give a damn when he was being hailed as a prophet, a messiah of change, as the revolutionary voice of his generation. He didn't seem to give a damn about what his fans thought of him. He didn't give a damn about the press or the government or the society. And he doesn't seem to give a damn now. And I like this quality in him. He has chosen to deal with the absurdity of the world with silence and detached contempt.

Coming to his lyrics, I must say, its probably the deepest I have seen in popular music. To say that I understand most of what he meant to say would be a simple confession of my stupidity and arrogance. So I won't do it. But what I do undertand is breathtaking in more ways then one. Consider the following lines from his song, 'Mr. Tambourine Man':

'Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves,
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.'

Its the most beautiful expression of freedom I have seen. Its simply divine. To analyze it would be doing injustice to the pure feeling permeating the words. Here some lines from his song, 'Its alright ma, I'm only bleeding':

'Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child's balloon
Eclipses both the sun and moon
To understand you know too soon
There is no sense in trying.

Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn
Suicide remarks are torn
From the fool's gold mouthpiece
The hollow horn plays wasted words
Proves to warn
That he not busy being born
Is busy dying.'

Or his lines from another of his song:

'In the dime stores and bus stations,
People talk of situations,
Read books, repeat quotations,
Draw conclusions on the wall.
Some speak of the future,
My love she speaks softly,
She knows there's no success like failure
And that failure's no success at all.

The cloak and dagger dangles,
Madams light the candles.
In ceremonies of the horsemen,
Even the pawn must hold a grudge.
Statues made of match sticks,
Crumble into one another,
My love winks, she does not bother,
She knows too much to argue or to judge.'

Dylan continues to produce songs and averages 100 concerts per year. His style of music seems to have changed. His priorities seem to be different now. His eyes look a bit tired but they still have that expression of amusement at how stupid the world around him really is. I was watching a press interview he gave in '65 and it was funny to see that smile of contempt. That muted, condescending expression. And I saw his interview from 2004 and I felt that not much has changed in either Dylan or the world in his eyes.

So we went on this motorcycle trip but I do not want to bore you with the dreary details. There is one experience that I would really like to share though. I am sure that experience would stay with me for a long time to come.

It was a beautiful mountainous road, perfectly paved, with the green hill on the side with blooming yellow flowers and the deep valley on the other. Several thousand feet down below, the rocky stream was visible and its quietness stood testimony to the brilliant depth. The sky was blue with patches of white fluffy clouds and the sun shone benignly over the black tarmac weaving through the exquisite wilderness. The road curved and dipped and rose and danced as it followed the contours of the terrain. And I had a motorcycle.

The curves were marked for speeds in the range of 30-40 miles but it would have been such a criminal waste if I had followed the guidelines. Do you know how it feels when your speedometer is reading 80 and you see the complete curve ahead ? You could brake and let the steam off but then you would have to be rational. And I hardly am. I downshifted a gear and turned the throttle to induce controlled acceleration and steadily started to lean. More and more. To the extent the my toes were centimeters away from the hard, unforgiving surface. And my face was probably a foot above the yellow line that separated the oncoming traffic. And I could see that yellow line moving past me. Faster and faster. Curving into the corner. Faster and faster. And the oncoming traffic was whizzing past me so close, I could smell the grunt of their tires. And it was all so quiet. Like an eternity soaked in vacuum. It was all so still. Like a painted bird on a painted ocean. And it was all so serene and pure. Like the smell of Rajnigandha and a foggy morning. At this point you don't really have half measures. A hesitation to lean could easily send you flying down the valley. An inclination to break could hurl you into the oncoming traffic. Everything has to work with clockwork precision. And I somehow managed to do it every single time.

I am not really proud of a lot of things but that memory certainly makes me happy. The feeling is hard to describe. Its the adrenaline rush associated with a gamble of such high stakes. Its the satisfaction at having played the game to your capacity and on life's own terms. And winning. Or at least putting up a respectable performance. It might be stupid in a lot of eyes but the emotion is difficult to explain to someone who has not experienced it firsthand. Its liberating. Its spiritual in some sense. It elevates you, if only for a few moments, above the pandering suffocation and all permeating stupidity and widespread randomness. For those few moments, nothing else matters.

There has been this story going around on the Rediff business section about a new electrically operated car that is being planned to be launched in India at a price of 99,000 rupees. The article, even by Rediff standards, seems short on journalistic integrity and appears to be nothing more than a blatant advertisement of an apparently substandard piece of crap. But the obvious amateurishness of the article doesn't take anything away from the fact that it's hilarious. Everytime I go on Rediff, there is a part of me wishing that it would still have that article so that I could go and have a good laugh at how completely stupid and self-unaware some people can be. And well, Rediff messageboards are always great fun if you wish to find more about how the bottom of the barrel in the IQ market thinks. Here is a photo of the abomination they are trying to pass off as a car:

I do not have words to describe it except maybe, 'You've got to be freaking out of your damn mind !'. I mean look at the bumper. It seems that the designer, not quite satisfied at using a crushed coke bottle for inspiration for the bumper, scratched his balding head, heaved a few discontented sighs, concluded that his creation is not radical enough, and went ahead and provided the car with the greatest idea he could come up with: heart shaped headlights. The car is named 'Tara Tiny'. Tara!. Mr. Tara Ganguly (entrepreneur par excellence) perhaps got inspired by Mr. Ford. He must be a happy man. In a world where the only people who are happy are either those who know precisely how good they are or those who do not know how much they suck, Mr. Ganguly definitely is a shining beacon of the latter category.

Rediff goes on to mention that the maximum speed of the car is 55 km/h which puts it somewhere in the middle of the speed spectrum punctuated by a snail on dope on one end and an energetic cyclist on the other. A few days ago the reported top speed was 45 but maybe Mr. Ganguly got a slight inferiority complex when he noticed that creatures of all kinds including cats and dogs and horses and donkeys and runners and kids and possibly some handicaps kicked his car's ass with a humiliating ease and a disconcerting regularity.

Shown above is another model from the company, unfortunately (personal reasons) named, 'Tara Titu'. I am not even going to start as to what is wrong with the design.

According to Rediff, the only thing that Mr. Ganguly finds wrong with his cars is the fact that they are left-hand drives as "they are meant for the markets in US, China and California,". Notice how Mr. Ganguly implies that California is a country. In a world struggling with the realities of a bipolar distribution of power between US and China, it takes an acute visionary like Mr. Ganguly to point out that all this while we have been ignoring the steady progress of California and lo and behold, here it is now, ready to indulge in some rampant ass-kickery. Move over India, give space Russia, California is the country that will provide the much needed multi-polarity in this world.

Rediff also mentions that Tara has a factory in Lucknow. I am from Lucknow. There is no factory. I am not saying that there 'happens' to be no such factory. I am saying that Lucknow cannot play host to any factory, atleast not a successful one. I mean look at me. I am a representative example Lucknowites. Our extremely slothful nature, a general ineptitude at things mechanical and a severe reluctance at getting off our asses makes us humungously unsuitable for sustaining a factory culture. On the one hand, I am unwilling to accept that the factory could be based in Lucknow, on the other, the photo shown below of the staff at 'Tara International' dwindles my resolve a bit:

I mean, I am not going to demean anyone, but these people do look like the best Lucknow could have offered. They have a distinctive look of confidence. The go-getter attitude, especially found in Lucknowites, that is so necessary in today's cut-throat competition. I think 'Tara International' is after all in good hands. And I stopped being sarcastic when I turned 20 :).

I was reading up on Global warming and the great debate on environmental degradation due to human activities in the last two centuries and one particular point struck me as extremely weird. It seems that this wave of emotional outburst and moral tirades has reduced our ability to actually think rationally about the problems. I mean, there are just too many individuals and groups single mindedly intent on flaring up the sensitive emotional side of human thinking just so that their views are able to garner more popular support. It has almost started to seem like religious fundamentalism or governmental fear mongering. I am not saying that there is no threat. I am just saying that there are solutions and we do not have to tear our hair apart to find them. I am even surmising that, probably much to the dismay of the environmental activists, humanity would survive easily and without much fuss. Lets look at a few specific points.

I have started hearing a lot of hue and cry over specie extinction recently. At this point, I would like to point out that during the past 550 million years of Earth's history, there have been 5 major extinction epochs. One of these epochs (Permian-Triassic) managed to wipe off 96% of all marine and 70% of all land species. We are currently in the midst of the Holocene extinction event (started about 13000 years ago and continuing) and it is estimated that 50% of all living species will be wiped off by the end of it (including those due to human intervention). The more startling fact is that 99% of all species that ever lived on Earth have become extinct and humans have contributed to only a very small fraction of them. We would be stupid to not realize that there have been far greater forces at work than human threat to the environment and specie extinction is quite normal but life manages to sustain itself nevertheless. What's more important to realize is that specie extinction, if directly resulting from human intervention, wasn't a luxury that could have been avoided. We have all bartered biological diversity for personal comforts and social 'development' and I think that's a fair enough price and now that we all live in our temperature controlled apartments and drive our air-conditioned cars, we should probably stop crying about how things could have been different.

Similar is the case with global warming. The problem here is that we probably do not know what we want to solve. The fact that stringent treaties like Kyoto protocol have to be put in place now indicates somehow that the situation is already out of control and we are only trying to delay the inevitable. Unless we stop all emissions, we are only adding to the greenhouse stock. Maybe we never had a say ever. I mean, when the hoopla started in 70s about global warming maybe it was too late even then. But the situation is hardly pessimistic. Humans differ from all other species in their ability to adapt wonderfully, in their capability of using their knowledge for survival. I am surprised that while so much effort is being spent on trying to reduce Global warming, hardly any effort is being made in the direction of defining a new paradigm of survival where the effects of Global Warming would be seamlessly incorporated in the system. To even think that we would somehow not burn up most of the fossil fuels, especially considering the stakes in the present geopolitical scenario, somehow seems stupid. Given that it's not going to happen, nothing is going to stop us from worsening the Global warming situation to as bad a state as possible. Now that we know that its going to happen sooner or later, why not start preparing for it now ?

Finally coming to environmental activism, I must say that a lot of it is needed in the sense that it enlightens the general masses about their surroundings, but beyond that, it seems to act like an impediment, mainly because it frequently fails to realize that the present situation was never an option for humanity. Neither will the continuous degradation of biodiversity be. It wears emotional glasses when a pair of coldly rational would do perfectly fine. In a sense, it hinders us from making peace with some inevitabilities and in the process, delays the scientific process of human adaptation to changing evolutionary paradigms.

The rains have abated and the weather of San Diego has become clement enough to finally allow me to loaf around on my motorcycle in a T-Shirt and a pair of jeans. I seem to be waking up from my hibernation and have started going to the beach again as part of my daily ritual and it was especially beautiful today.

Have you ever closely examined the moment when the sun is about to be engulfed by the immense ocean ? It shines in a deep orange, almost red glow, like a shimmering crystal on a reflecting surface. The red gives way to dark orange and light orange and mild pink mixed with ominous gray till it all dissolves into a monochromatic harbinger of impending night. And the ocean sizzles in a bright silvery dance with the waves breaking on the shores with an almost unwilling mood. And the slight muffled sound of the infinity beyond and the sweetly cold winds stroking your hair with the indulgence of an entranced lover. And spots of clouds glowing in shades of red, spotting an otherwise perfect horizon with silhouettes of groups of birds painted on the sky with black against the dying sunlight. And the ocean, majestic in its glory and confident of its immutability, prepares to sleep.

And it all seems so fickle but so educating nonetheless.

The notion of this planet playing host to such beautiful diversity, such magnificent colors, such a brilliant gamut of human experiences in a universe that is witnessing such a tremendous game of death and destruction is almost too romantic to resist. It almost manages to calm things down, shows that beauty can only spring from destruction. Much like creativity springs from pain. Shows that even if things are fickle, and mutable and ultimately vanishing, they are nonetheless beautiful. Shows that even if this illusion suffers from a debilitating futility, its an illusion worth living nonetheless.

How about that smell of humid air ? The smell of a dying day and an enthusiastic night ? The smell of an infinity clinched in the grasp of a fleeting moment ?

I was watching a video on the Hubble space telescope (indeed very geeky) and there were a few very interesting thoughts that came to my mind. Its not that I was not aware of this line of reasoning but maybe I never developed it to any appreciable extent. The more I think about it, the more astonishing it gets. Let me explain.

The first thing that struck me in the video (90 minutes documentary) was the immense forces at play on a universal scale, the almost incomprehensible extent of the universe and the unfathomable distances and time scales involved. We are all very aware of this aspect of the universe. The next thing that caught my attention was the immense cosmic dance giving rise to supremely exotic phenomenon occurring almost with a mundane regularity in the universe. From the devilish grasp of Black holes to the concept of cataclysmic Supernovae and immense energies of the Quasars to galactic collisions, nature plays the game of destruction and beauty at a level we can hardly comprehend and she plays it with the virtuosity of a Horowitz gently stroking the keys of a grand Piano. But these were not the things that impressed me the most about this video. It was something else.

Einstein once said that the most surprising thing about nature is that it's comprehensible. And if you think about it, its rather disconcerting and very astonishing. You see, nature is not obligated to make sense. The fact that a few equations on a piece of paper can accurately describe phenomenon as weird as gravitational lensing and stellar implosion is nothing less than startling. I do not have much idea about Quantum theory but I have read a bit about Einstein's gravitation and all I can say about it is that its a triumph of human intelligence. I do not want this to be a geeky post so I will go straight to the essence of it all. The only assumption in Einstein's theory is the constance of the speed of light. Its hardly a theory of physics. Its pure mathematics. Its just a geometrical statement. And whats seriously weird is that the final equation was found by a guess since there are infinite other equally correct such equations. Einstein's equation just happens to describe the universe with a scary accuracy.

I find it strange that nature and mathematics are such close bedfellows. Why is it all so simple and so logical ? Why does nature dance to the tunes of purely mathematical laws and relations ? I am not sure if I am communicating this idea well enough. You see, mathematics is a very rigid discipline in which if a+b=c then there is no way a+b=d unless c=d. If, on the other hand, we represent two physical quantities by a and b and then try to find a+b, nature is not obligated to give us c as an answer, but it does. An example would be the conservation of energy. Saying that energy is conserved in a physical system and that 2+2=4 (always) in a mathematical system have a deep connection because we have chosen to describe nature via mathematics. But in the end they are two very distinct entities. The fact that we never see a violation of conservation of energy and that we never find that 2+2=5 somehow signifies a deep inter-dependence of the most basic natural laws and the most fundamental mathematical tenets. And this thinking rests on the sole fact that physical reality and mathematics form two ends of a very interesting spectrum. While physical reality is the ultimate truth which does not depend upon anything else for its sustenance, mathematics is the sole discipline which does not seek to explain anything and which does not depend upon any other science. Everything in between including physics, chemistry, biology either serve to explain the physical reality or emanate from mathematics or both. I find it interesting that the two fields which are just not obligated to be connected end up getting so closely tied together. Which makes me think that if there is such a thing as an ultimate truth, an ultimate reality, the only way it will be found would be in the abstract dance of purely mathematical symbols. And when you think about it, you would wonder if its all too obvious that within the infinite relationships between purely mathematical concepts, there would be one relation that would be the statement of the ultimate truth. Its just that humanity is just not intelligent enough to zero in on it, as yet.

Addendum: Well, thinking a bit more upon the topic, I have realized a rather grim possibility. If we take it that nature and mathematics are closely tied to each other and that all natural laws, howsoever deep, are ultimately expressible mathematically, we will soon reach a dead-end. A brilliant mind, with the name of Kurt Godel, gave a landmark theorem called the Godel incompleteness theorem which proves that a mathematical system cannot be both complete and self-consistent. In other words, a mathematical system that seeks to explain everything must necessarily be inconsistent and vice-versa. I wonder if it has ramifications in our understanding of reality.