I am not saying that the coastal regions of the progressive part of the society are more rational compared to the religious midwest. They have their own concrete beliefs and they also view scientific thought (which, differentiated from mystical thought, is the only form of rational thought) with a cross-eyed skepticism. Their new age delusions are as amusing as the idea of a God who keeps a constant eye on you. They might be having different assumptions but their failing is the same – that their assumptions are final. Anyway, in a country which is segregated in so many different groups of people who have their beliefs sacred, I am amused that the one thing that all of them are deeply skeptical towards is the thing that made the country great in the first place. It is not really science because it is too narrow a term but a disposition towards inquiry. For a country which is seen as the beacon modernity, which must necessarily be accompanied by a welcoming attitude towards change, so many of its people cling on to their provincial notions. Is it true of all societies? Am I being too harsh on America? I don’t know…

Anyway, it has always seemed fascinating to me as to how much we take the brain for granted. From its myriad neurological firings spring our love songs and our cold revenges, in its labyrinthine corridors lurk fascinating undiscovered potentials, and it holds our personalities with the death grip of a few electric signals. With a few fires here and there, it has the potential of changing the perception of reality and how we see ourselves with respect to the reality. It truly is a worthy subject to be curious about. I have always wondered how interesting it would be if I could simulate a condition where the brain is forced to perform in a way in which it is not used to performing. One way to achieve something similar is by tiring it so that it has to make some prioritizing decisions. I figured it would be interesting to see what happens when I tire it, for example, by sleep deprivation. My goal was to go at least 48 hours without sleep and I began by waking from Friday through to Saturday. I noticed that the most difficult hours in my effort to keep awake were between 5 and 7 but there was no major lack of coordination. I did notice that in my effort to play the Moonlight sonata’s 1st movement, I felt much less inclined to complete the more complex parts on Saturday morning than I was on Friday night. I went with Khatri bhai to have an early breakfast on the beach but I noticed that even after just 24 hours it was taking me significantly more effort to engage in rational arguments. I was more inclined to agree with Khatri bhai’s contentions although I did not have much trouble understanding him. It wasn’t until 4 in the evening on Saturday that I could start feeling noticeable signs of mental tiredness. It was a nightmare (!) trying to keep awake through the afternoon and I had started having a slight burning sensation in my eyes. I called Nikhil and asked him if he would come with me to watch a movie in the theater so that I could keep awake and we decided to watch ‘Get Low.’ I rode my motorcycle to his place at 8:30 and we proceeded to the theater. It was then, after 36 hours, that I started feeling a definite incoherence in thought. It was taking me significantly more time to understand what he was saying and to respond to him. My voice was trailing off and I felt like I had to consciously spend effort in order to formulate basic ideas and sentences. My chain of thought would break down and it became an effort even to maintain balance while walking. While in the theater I could not understand the slight accent of the actors when Nikhil could do it easily. I felt definite irritation from the constantly changing lights on the screen. Most importantly, though, I felt the onset of serious palpitations. Even the slightest movement while sitting on the chair would send my heart racing and I had the constant urge to stretch my legs and hands. The movie finished at about 11:30 and I asked Nikhil to drop me home because I did not think motorcycle was an entirely safe idea then. I came back home at about 12:00, having done 40 hours now. By this time I had started feeling serious dizziness and a significant lack or coordination. I tried playing the Moonlight sonata but I kept making the simplest of mistakes. I would forget how to go from one bar to another and the notes on the sheet music just did not make sense. There was barely any coordination between the left and the right hands and my eyes had turned red from the effort. A few more hours (3:45 in the night – ~44 hours) and I felt the kind of anxiety I have never felt before. I had started blinking much more than normal, my fingers were shaking, and there was a constant urge to stretch. I had started breathing through my mouth because I felt that I could not get all the air I needed with each breath. My heart was pounding at a worrisome rate and I could just not fix my thoughts on any one subject. It was then that I decided that there is no way I could make it to 8 in the morning without taking rest. Through the last 44 hours I had not even laid down for the fear of going to sleep and ruining the experiment so I thought I would lay down for a bit. The next thing I remember- it’s 12:00 on Sunday morning. I have very little recollection of yesterday’s movie – I am certainly not sure how it ended, although I was awake through it all and I have no idea when exactly I slept.

I think it was a very interesting weekend. If nothing then it at least convinced me that I never want to do it again!

-D

I really really need to read something non scientific.

—————

Dear friend,

My name is (MR Emmanuel Kone) i am the manager of auditing and accounting department Bank of African, I need your urgent assistance in transferring the sum of ($10.5m us dollars immediately to your acocunt.

upon your reply I will send you full details on how the business will be executed,send me your contact information.

1.Age…………………….

(2)Residential adress………………….

(3) occupation………………..

——–

Now I’m not a stickler for formalities and I no longer get worked up over missed apostrophes and dropped letters but this! This, my friend, is completely unacceptable. It’s unacceptable because while Mr. Emmanuel Kone seems to be making a business proposition to me, it seems that he is taking my business far too lightly. Maybe it’s the effect of the yuppie generation with their demand for instant gratification, their short attention spans, and casual weekdays. Maybe it is a precipitate of a culture hopelessly addicted to the quick fixes of easy technology but to think that such an ill prepared mail with such glaring grammatical errors will secure my favors for Mr. Kone is nothing less than preposterous. And it’s not just the grammatical errors which I find supremely disturbing. Here are my other objections regarding the mail,

1. I’m not your friend.

2. I’m generally suspicious of people who have round brackets in their name. They remind me of Charlie Brown. Not that Charlie Brown had curly brackets in his name or was suspicious. In fact being suspicious of people who have round brackets in their names and getting reminded of Charlie Brown are mutually exclusive events. But I thought I’ll mention this while I’m at it.

3. I doubt if there is a Bank of Africa. I have graver doubts about Bank of African.

4) That your list is inconsistently numbered bothers me.

But more than being just a train wreck of a mail as far as consistency and grammar are concerned, it has deeper philosophical implications. The world as we find ourselves in today is getting increasingly less appreciative of individuals. As our population inches towards the 7 billion mark, every single one of us matters just a little lesser than what he used to. In times of such grave objectification, can we not  expect a slight indulgence even from those whose only source income is our own gullibility? I find it insulting that someone whose only job is to write purple proses, lace our clarity in sugar coated dreams, and appeal to our humanity and greed with rosy visions of dead people with irrational wills is not willing to spend the requisite effort at cooking up a decent story. Mutual respect, while long dead at the hands of the virtuous, has now lost its final haven in the debauched.

I have fond recollections of Burkina Faso where rich men died in plane crashes. How wonderful! Death has the notorious habit of being mainly superficial except when it happens to those who are completely unrelated to us – in which case it often generates sympathy. But in Burkina Faso, death was beautiful and benign. Rich men were getting killed in plane crashes and their money was being left to me. Millions of dollars were sitting at the doors of the Burkina Faso bank, palpitating, waiting impatiently to be transferred to my account if only I replied. I never did of course, mainly because I was not a dumbass but it was nice being pampered like that. That such selfless and inexplicable good could exist in the world was always a hypothetical notion but there was something good about its fake honesty. Mr. Kone, you disappoint me. That you expect me to be a retard and give you my bank account  number is insulting enough. The fact that you expect it all without putting in any effort from your side is just plain wrong.

——-

p.s. There is actually a Bank of Africa!

Inside, above the din and fray,
We heard the loud musicians play
The “Treues Liebes Herz” of Strauss.

Like strange mechanical grotesques,
Making fantastic arabesques,
The shadows raced across the blind.

We watched the ghostly dancers spin
To sound of horn and violin,
Like black leaves wheeling in the wind.

Like wire-pulled automatons,
Slim silhouetted skeletons
Went sidling through the slow quadrille.

They took each other by the hand,
And danced a stately saraband;
Their laughter echoed thin and shrill.

Sometimes a clockwork puppet pressed
A phantom lover to her breast,
Sometimes they seemed to try to sing.

Sometimes a horrible marionette
Came out, and smoked its cigarette
Upon the steps like a live thing.

Then, turning to my love, I said,
“The dead are dancing with the dead,
The dust is whirling with the dust.”

But she–she heard the violin,
And left my side, and entered in:
Love passed into the house of lust.

Then suddenly the tune went false,
The dancers wearied of the waltz,
The shadows ceased to wheel and whirl.

And down the long and silent street,
The dawn, with silver-sandalled feet,
Crept like a frightened girl.

–Oscar Wilde

Blinded by his razor sharp wit, it is easy to forget what a magician Wilde was with words. How exquisitely he has used ‘automatons’, ‘quadrille’, ‘saraband’, ‘marionette’, and cigarette’! Without being specific and direct (a trait only worthy of those who cannot do better. In words of Wilde himself, ‘a man who calls a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.’) he has painted a dying, decadent, smoke infested, blurry, immoral and stylish picture. And then ‘Love passes into the house of Lust’ and slowly and beautifully, ‘the dawn, with silver-sandalled feet’ creeps like a ‘frightened child’.

This is what I enjoy in literature, as in anything else in fact. This urge and ability of making things more beautiful, more luxurious, more delicious, than mandated by mere utility. This is probably the essence of being human – that our luxuries and our necessities are indistinguishable at their confluence.

However I shall speak at length about a number of really great artists –  and it is on this high level that Dostoevski is to be criticized. I am too little of an academic professor to teach subjects that I dislike. I am very eager to debunk Dostoevski. But I realize that readers who have not read much may be puzzled by the set of values implied”

-Excerpt from Vladimir Nabokov’s Lectures on Russian Literature.

For someone like me who doesn’t think much of Dostoevski (actually even hates his writing to some extent), Nabokov’s assessment was a fun read. As much as I admire Nabokov for his literary chops, I think I admire him more now for the clarity of his thoughts!

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.                                                                                                           -Ankit

That was the time of sensible television. A time when TV shows not only did not suck on a universal scale, they even managed to be good and informative. Unlike the present crop of mind-melting, skin-evaporating mediocrity of general entertainment, the shows then were infinitely more sensible. But sensibility is hardly the seed of imagination. It’s probably an impediment. So in an age when there weren’t gazillion cable channels, when newspapers actually delivered sober, to-the-point news, when Bollywood was still writhing below miles of suffocating mediocrity, and when sport was just sport and not the athletic equivalent of a mardi gras parade high on coke as it is today, a young boy’s imagination didn’t have much to take refuge in except between the 32 sheets of colorful mindlessness. At Rs. 5 a copy, ecstacy didn’t come cheap but it was atleast legal. And oh! how I loved the touch of a new comic. How I adored that laminated cover with those gripping images which were always specially drawn and were much much better than any that you could find inside. Not only could you not find images as good as the cover image, you could not even find anything inside the comic that bore any resemblance to the cover image. But I used to love those laminated covers and I can still remember the steely touch of those two staple pins which bound the comic together and stood out like welcome, sweet pangs of pains in a smooth life full of happiness. I knew that they would come to signify the 16th page, the page of destiny in many ways – that is the page that is destined to be opened if you hold the comic on its edge and let go, and that is the page where things start getting really complicated.

I often tried to delay the actual reading of the comic for as long as possible, forever scrutinizing the images on the front cover and reading the junk on the back. But once inside, I let myself drown in the hurricanesque bombardment of crazy ideas, thinly held plots, highly strung storylines, amphetamined dialogue, and grotesque characters. It was a world where men were probably born with six-packs and where ladies routinely gave Barbara Millicent Roberts a run for her money. In a highly conservative society like ours at the time, it was surprising to see how much tittilation went unaccounted for in a comic book meant for children. In our generation’s appropriately less neurotic attitude towards sex, I wonder if a small contribution was made somewhere in those pages; because there was hardly another outlet.

There was an abundance of violence too but it was too ridiculous to be taken seriously. Unlike the comic books of Japanese and American origin, ours never managed to scare. Even the action ones were essentially happy and never made me feel gloomy. It meant that while on one hand I could always be assured that the good guys would win in the end and that their paths, although torturous and bloody, would never be dark and realistic enough to affect me negatively, on the other, those comics failed to speak in an entire language of human emotions. In fact, one of the very few imaginative failures of those comics, like the failure of Bollywood on a much more universal and sustained scale, was their assertion that good guys always win in the end-an assertion that is not only wrong in real life but also a huge creativity jammer, an unnecessary, restrictive assumption.

Western comics, while much more sophisticated and imaginative on the scale of ideas and plots and dialogue and drawing, fail to match the brilliance of the Indian superhero. One reason for this is a pig headed refusal on the part of the Indian comic artist to acknowledge the existence of anything akin to the laws of nature. While his Nagaraj can produce snakes from his wrists without being apologetic and explanatory about his past, Spider man cannot produce so much as a thread of web without having to explain his trip to a museum and the structure of DNA. Since we as readers have chosen to be more gullible, they as artists have chosen to be more imaginative. Their imagination manifested itself in whackier and whackier characters unless the logical evolutionary endpoint was reached in Chacha Chaudhry whose power, despite what the comic would have you believe, was controlling coincidences. Chacha Chaudhary, despite his benign and almost stupid facade, was nothing less than an evolutionary singularity. Once you start controlling coincidence, you start questioning the very basis of our language, our ideas, our knowledge and civilization. There is nothing in the western comics which rivals his bad-assery.

I miss those innocent little nuggets of dreams. I’m almost led to frown upon the things which keep the average child occupied today. But I’m also aware of the eternal folly of it. Childhood, by virtue of its irrevocable loss and foggy distance, is automatically nostalgic. And it sweetens the associated memories out of proportions. Years from now, I’m sure, the dark, humid, smarmy nights spent playing War of Warcraft will be spoken off in words as laced in maudlin nostalgia by today’s 12 year olds as those with which I remember the 32 paged respite.