Progress

Posted by Ankit On March 8th, 2010

There is an ancient Egyptian poem, written in the 19th century BC, which translates to:

Had I unknown phrases
Sayings that are strange
Novel, untried words
Free of repetition
Not transmitted sayings
Spoken by ancestors.
I wring out my body for what it holds,
Sifting through all my words;
For what has just been said is just repetition,
What has been said has been said...

-The complaints of Khakheperre-seneb

There are two distinctly interesting aspects to the above poem. The first is the fact that it represents complex ideas similar to what a modern person might have. My notion of ancient languages like the Egyptian hieroglyph was that of a bare-boned, simple linguistic architecture - one which is very utilitarian in nature and hence is very limiting in expressiveness. But the real fact, as attested by philologists, is that the ancient languages and the ones which are used by small tribal communities are much more complex and structured than any language which might be considered modern by our standards. This obviously doesn't mean that they automatically translate into more emotionally poignant passages and verdant verses; that quality depends upon the perception and talents of the writer, and this brings me to the other fascinating point of the poem above. The poet, 4000 years ago, is talking about the triteness of common ideas and he seems to have a condescending attitude towards hackneyed expression. He is lamenting the unimaginative use of language and wishes for novel ideas and words. And here we are, 4000 thousand years hence, all using the same beaten down expressions over and over again without blinking an eyelid. It's not hard to imagine that among us all there might be a poet who dies a little everytime an oft repeated cliche is repeated once more.

What really has changed in the last 4000 years? It is a scientific fact that the size and hence the potential analytical capacity of the human brain has remained a constant for roughly the last 100,000 years. It's vanity to assume that our emotional experiences are qualitatively much different now than they were 5000 thousand years ago. Some of our grandest and most imaginative literature dates back several thousand years (take the example of any religious text or mythology), and yet, and yet, is it just conceit to think that we live in a progressed society? Surely, scientific progress is one reliving metric that indicates that we have progressed. The light bulb in my room gives more than just light - it's a reassuring symbol of the modern age. But beyond the certain boundaries of scientific hegemony, I find it really hard to say if we have progressed. If postmodern human expression in nonscientific domains is taken out of context and presented under an anonymous authorship, it is easy to confuse it with the babbling of a savage and underdeveloped mind. So maybe what progress really means is the intent and vision of a work and not the work itself. Surely, Monalisa is not as grand as the vision of Leonardo da Vinci when he painted it - and John Cage's 4'33" is all about the statement he wanted to make. We measure progress relative to an existing datum. It therefore necessarily has to be aware of history. It has to be about a statement, a stand, a counterpoint to all our existing knowledge. And it has to be destabilizing in nature. So when the Egyptian poet lamented the existing ennui, his stand had the germs of progress - much like the attempts of humans to shake off the dust of historical baggage in any age. There is no qualitative difference between these attempts but progress is indicated by their historical awareness. We might not be emotionally more sensitive than our ancestors but we have progressed in the sense of being aware of history. When we lament on the hackneyed use of language (for example) and wish for something novel, we are actually wishing for something that has not been done in the last 50, 100, 1000, 5000 years. When we (and by 'we' I actually mean 'they' because I don't protest for anything) protest for gay rights, we do it because the protests for the rights of 'left handed people' (I'm not kidding) have already been done...

Damn, you English language

Posted by Ankit On March 2nd, 2010

The teacher claimed it was so plain,
I only had to use my brain.
She said the past of throw was threw,
The past of grow - of course - was grew,
So flew must be the past of fly,
And now, my boy, your turn to try.
But when I trew,
I had no clue,
If mow was mew
Like know and knew
(Or is it knowed
Like snow and snowed?)

The teacher frowned at me and said
The past of feed was - plainly - fed.
Fed up, I knew then what I ned;
I took a break, and out I snoke,
She shook and quook (or quaked? or quoke?)
With raging anger out she broke;
Your ignorance you want to hide?
Tell me the past form of collide!
But how on earth should I decide
If it's collid
(Like hide and hid),
Or else - from all that I surmose,
The past of rise was simply rose,
And that of ride was simply rode,
So of collide must be collode?

Oh damn these English verbs, I thought
The whole thing absolutely stought!
Of English I have had enough,
Those verbs of yours are far too tough.
Bolt upright in my chair I sat,
And said to her 'that's that' - I quat.

-Guy Deutscher

God and Russian literature

Posted by Ankit On February 26th, 2010

We all understand that it's all a theater, don't we? That the world as we know it is just a cosmic afterthought, a mere divine joke in which a lot of people take their parts far too seriously and the rest of them have a hearty laugh about it. It's like a friendly banter over beer and you just have to look closely enough to realize that nothing really is sacrosanct. So in this world which appears serious but is actually quite ridiculous, every smart theory must have its stupid, trivial dual. Like god for example. Science works its ass off trying to explain every little detail, checks and rechecks itself innumerable number of times, sweats like a pig, and finally has to contend with so much uncertainty that Heisenberg's cat, in comparison, seems like a sure bet. It's the serious explanation but then there's the joker's explanation which is god. 'It's just the way it was intended' and poof!, there goes all your seriousness.

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!

A rant

Posted by Ankit On February 25th, 2010

I went to a show today at the Price Center ballroom in UCSD. It was  a humorous, informative effort at raising awareness about social issues like violence against women in some parts of the world with a distinct undertone of strong feminism. Now there is nothing wrong in advocating equality of opportunity and status between the sexes, the only people who truly find problems with this, I must say, either lack the requisite education or are not smart enough to learn from their education. But as with any other large group of people, feminists are a moronic bunch. Although the show began for me on a wrong foot, I liked some of the acts and the fact that it made me more aware of things which are going on in some parts of the world. It was generally a good experience until at the very end when the hosts, while standing on the stage, asked for those of us who would oppose violence against women to stand up. Now it's dumbass questions like these which make me want to throw up everytime they are uttered by simple minded, overgeneralizing groups of activists. First of all, it's a wrong forum of ask such a question. It's not as if the audience comprised of tribal leaders from Afghanistan who would be expected to have a differing opinion. It was an educated gathering and they were there precisely because they sympathized with the issue to begin with. They all stood up which made me think how many of them would really, actively do something to alleviate worldwide feminine distress. Not many I thought. In fact, a lot of them probably would only do what I would do - try to mend things if something in the immediate vicinity is not right. But until something happens in my immediate experience, I must admit, I have too many concerns of my own to bother with the conditions in Sudan.

Anyway, I decided to keep sitting - not to make a point but because I could not help but think that standing up was such an empty gesture to such a pointless question. Which brings me to my other point. I find that individuals are in general fun to be with, they are diverse and generally smart, and they add much needed variety to life. It's when they start belonging to groups and having agendas they work towards and common goals they fight for, that their company becomes positively unbearable. All our terms that signify such groups are loaded with implicit meanings their members never understood and nuances that most of them were never too smart/careful to acknowledge. Nationalism appeals to the irrationality of individuals and sells them murder in nicely ribboned boxes, religion all but benumbs their power of critical thinking, every group an individual blindly belongs to takes away a chunk of his individuality until all his life is defined by sets of rules, expectations, and duties. And finally he has not brains enough to realize that in this world of subtle shades, there is really no logical place for hard coded laws and bullet points and agendas. Hell, something as apparently positive as 'trying to save the planet' begs the question, 'What the fuck do they mean, save the planet?' The planet will take anything they throw at it and survive. But if they meant saving their own asses, well, that's a different thing. Who doesn't want to do that? My problem with groups, especially those driven by emotions, is that this honesty with oneself is easily lost in all the general bullshit they teach their members. But here is the thing. I do not know of any other way by which things could be done and changes could be  made at large enough scales. If I were to weigh the potential of great change that lies in huge groups of people against the ossification that groups generally do to their members, I would grudgingly accept them as necessary evils - as long as I can avoid being a part of them and their ideologies. Oh! how did I come here? I think I was thinking of a group called feminists.

Research

Posted by Ankit On February 23rd, 2010

I must say I have been slacking off in the blog department for the last few months, part of the reason for which is my relatively busier schedule as a post-doc. But that's definitely not all. Writing, like sketching, reading, or any other hobby, is just an alternate reality for me. In both ordinary and depressing times, it provides me with a version of life which is neither plagued by the truth of reality nor its sorry limitations. In other words, when the daily routine is just a routine, imagination finds its last refuge in writing. The reason that I have not really been writing or even reading for the last couple of months is that I'm thoroughly engrossed in my current research. My adviser, Dr. Nemat-Nasser, is the sort of researcher I have always imagined good scientists to be like. He has achieved every accolade his field has to offer and has contributed immensely to research, but the twinkle in his eye and the enthusiasm in his voice that appear when he is discussing a new problem betrays how much he still loves the pure, unadulterated joy of trying to understand how nature ticks. His is a very non-utilitarian, almost an artistic take on research - which is the only way good research should be carried out - with its only aim being understanding the subject matter and having almost no stake in the results. It isn't always possible because it's the taxpayer's money which supports research in the hope that its fruits would benefit society. Society, therefore, automatically has a vested interest in results and as a consequence a large number of researchers wither under this social pressure and produce results which, if anything, are of only minor consequences and almost no insight. But there are people who manage to strike a good balance and my current adviser is definitely one of them.

I am currently working on trying to understand how acoustic waves travel in a material which is not uniform. Several interesting physical phenomenon are seen in such materials. If the non-uniformity is controlled properly, intriguing physics like complete stoppage of sound at certain frequencies and negative energy propagation at some other frequencies are seen. More complex materials give rise to other effects with interesting physics. I'll update my research page with more details, in case someone finds it interesting.

Melancholy Maiden

Posted by Ankit On February 5th, 2010

Child of the pure unclouded brow
And dreaming eyes of wonder!
Though time be fleet, and I and thou
Are half a life asunder,
Thy loving smile will surely hail
The love-gift of a fairy-tale.

I have not see thy sunny face,
Nor heard thy silver laughter;
No thought of me shall find a place
In thy young life's hereafter-
Enough that now thou wilt not fail
To listen to my fairy-tale.

A tale begun in other days
When summer suns were glowing-
A simple chime, that served to time
The rhythm of our rowing-
Whose echoes live in memory yet.
Though envious years would say "forget."

Come, hearken then, ere voice of dread,
With bitter tidings laden,
Shall summon to unwelcome bed
A melancholy maiden!
We are but older children, dear,
Who fret to find our bedtime near.

Without, the frost, the blinding snow,
The storm-wind's moody madness-
Within, the fireflight's ruddy glow
And childhood's nest of gladness,
The magic words shall hold thee fast:
Thou shalt not heed the raving blast.

And though the shadow of a sigh
May tremble through the story,
For "happy summer days" gone by,
And vanish'd summer glory-
It shall not touch with breath of bale,
The pleasance of our fairy-tale.

-Lewis Carroll from 'Alice: Through the looking glass.'

How... poignant and pertinent!

Let there be humans...

Posted by Ankit On January 17th, 2010

I was talking to MV about evolution and he recommended a Nat-Geo documentary titled 'The human family tree' for me to watch. To anyone who is interested in knowing about the origins of us humans in a lucid and interesting way, I would also recommend this highly engrossing documentary.

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.'

Orange!

Posted by Ankit On January 13th, 2010

In the screeched symphony of cursive love the ebonimous violas strum their swan songs.

The nervous bows in shivering fits dot the dark with disdainful disobedience and the breathless flute is but the sound of a scratched nail on a blackboard.

There is a Wagnerian march of drums like bullet holes in a gossamer - a lover's doe eyed present promptly tossed aside.

The chorus is incoherent like a sanguine arabesque over surprised charcoal and wails of individual incompetence fill up the ambiance like confused lines of graphite in a novice's sketch.

I am searching, in this staccato, for that little note of assurance, that one single pure crisp nod of familiarity. In the sea of disfigured, bobbing, cacochromic monstrosity there must be svelte orange streak, but it's so hard to find.

And it has happened before, I remember. That metaphorical orange streak of lost memories has preserved in its embrace entirely different drawings - beautiful perfect drawings in my mind but which always melted away when their feathered edges met the iron fist of reality.

You know how, in the mind's eye, mountains are perfect triangles, rivers perfect splines, houses perfect clown hats and Sun a perfect circle... And how that orange streak is perfectly beautiful, smart and loving? Huh...

En route Houston

Posted by Ankit On December 22nd, 2009

It's the fourth day of the trip and I have decided to take a day's break at my friend's (N V Pavan) place in Houston Texas. We go back to the IIT days where he was the volley captain, sport secretary, and subsequently President of India gold medalist and all my academic achievements during college were due to the fact that he did not consider them worth fighting for. And for all his brilliance, he has been a disgustingly humble fellow! I have covered about 1600 miles till now and my phone has a nifty little feature which tracks and records the trip in real time,

Tracker

So how has it been? Tiring as expected. And mesmerizing as expected. Anyone who has done any sort of road trip in America knows how magnificent the American landscape is. Its sheer size and almost profligate geography is humbling and because of the fact that the country extends into such a wide spectrum of climate and space, its landscape has a stunning variety that would be hard to find in a smaller country. In east California, the morose, unforgiving desert extends to the point where it is clipped by the sky and every now and then a confused, spatially anachronistic hill rises and seems to question its own existence. In New Mexico, the scale of this insanity is extended so there are places where a straight road starts from a mountain and ends into another 20 miles away - like a cursing, reluctant interpreter between two persons who not only do not speak a common language but don't even like each other very much. At such places, you get the feeling that the American landscape has molded itself to be a better representative of the simple, direct, and strictly utilitarian nature of the American West. Her geography offers no frills in the same way that her work ethics are efficient and honest.

But as soon as I started to gloat over this ingenious connection, the geography gave way to a stunner of a road. Between Las Cruces New Mexico and Roswell lies a winding ribbon that was more beautiful and exciting than any other that I have driven on. Beautiful green mountains with proud upright pine trees, and svelte silky lakes with hints of snow on their banks. The sky, a sprightly shade of blue with flourishes of snowy clouds for good measure. And in this perfection of nature's effort, man has carved his own little squiggly lines - his tarmacic creations like perfect curves of graphite on a flowery, scented paper.

The I-10 in Texas passes through a surprisingly beautiful landscape. I was expecting more like hundreds of miles of unending, depressing desert but was pleasantly  surprised to find vast arenas of green table-top mesas. And as far as the eye could see, they were studded with windmills in a periodic formation of almost devilish contraption. Imagine driving on this fast beautiful road with these giants towering on all sides, their visage that of a grumpy old man, and their rotating mechanical hair standing up in a fit of rage. The road for a long part consists of two lanes in either directions - one lane is white in color and one black - and how stunning this little visual trick is!

Ending it with a Bang!

Posted by Ankit On December 19th, 2009

Although I haven't felt quite the same sort of feeling of exhilaration and release after crossing the doctorate milestone that a lot of other people might get, it's a distinct milestone nevertheless - one that punctuates a significant chunk of life, and eviscerates from it a tangible, heavy piece of warm, throbbing time. If only life could be compartmentalized into such convenient boxes of 4 years, it would quietly, happily, and anticlimactically end by the time the lid on the 18th such box is opened! Unfortunately though, future doesn't promise such beautiful little milestones, neatly tucked on to the side of the highway, so any that we do get needs to be celebrated for what it is. So I have decided on my small way of marking the occasion, like a quiet little break on the banks of a river - except that it's not going to be quiet, or little and there is no river. There would be a car and significant amount of driving during the next 12 days. Here is a link of the trip that is in the plans,

Trip Map

Hopefully a lot of experiences are in store!

Loading...
X