Chintan – Page 27

A walk down memory lane

Posted by Ankit On August 18th, 2009

Kapili hostel

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

My room was second last on the left

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

The deserted Civil dept. at T.C.

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

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

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

Oh! India.

Posted by Ankit On August 13th, 2009

India, I must admit, is a thoroughly confusing place. It makes one question all that he has come to believe in his cocooned existence in the white-walled penthouse of his ivory tower. But the fact of the matter is, that beautiful white walled penthouse is as essential to understanding India as India itself. Not that I make tall claims about understanding it either. If anything, all that India manages to do is send me on elaborate, star studded guilt trips shadowed by the menacing clouds of self-doubt. I like to think of it as a wild, pulsating nerve the skin from whose top has been peeled off. You can see it throbbing in blood and flesh and it's reality and immediacy has a vulgar nakedness to it. Every thing that you've thought of in well measured doses of rationality and finely tuned environments tends to break apart as soon as you step into this brilliant mayhem. But you need to have built those thoughts in the first place in order to appreciate the causes of their obliteration. And it must be hard to do when the suffocating mass of humanity weighs down on your life, ambitions, relations, and breath like an omnipresent overbearing coffin. But that coffin has floral patterns on the inside and it has a scent of sandalwood and you don't mind much being there and that is the dilemma that is India. It offers you so many opportunities to learn, it is such a great teacher, but like all things worth learning it makes you bleed through your nose. That heartless savant! Where am I going with this? Hopefully nowhere. That would be the best way to summarize my impressions on this trip.

Forster, Vonnegut, India et. al.

Posted by Ankit On August 6th, 2009

I guess it was the apt time to read Forster's 'A passage to India'. Any book that Kowsik recommends demands to be taken with a pinch of salt by me. Not to cast any aspersions on the merits of his choice for his is an extremely keen intellect and possesses a very envious literary repertoire, but our reading habits and general lines of beliefs diverge enormously. This book, though, is a thoroughly enjoyable masterpiece, although I liked it not for being a great story but for Forster's insightful painting of flawed characters set against the Indian background - a background which has been beautifully dissected by an author more observant than most. His language sketches the Indian landscape in surreal, metaphoric shades and nails the famed subcontinental overdrive of emotions to the T. His portrayal of the religious umbrage that clouds the Indian social intercourse is exactly what it should be - drugged at places, euphoric at others. Because it is futile trying to capture that abandon in logic. As much as a nonbeliever as I am, I cannot but respect the primal surge, the self-sacrificial faith that drives religion in India. It is a spectacle that should be described in words as turbulent as the phenomenon itself. Forster's characters are gray, something which is very welcome because real life doesn't have infallible heroes and impeccable mistresses. His characters fall repeatedly to weave a story that actually appeals to one's emotions and sympathy. A very good book all in all.

The other book that I read was Kurt Vonnegut's 'Breakfast of Champions' and found it to be too episodic, too incoherent for the most part. Aware of the author's mighty reputation as a contemporary master of prose, I was searching for vantage points, lookout hills, from which to make sense of the book but I did not find any till about 2/3rds. It seemed to me to be a sorry attempt at imitating Joseph Heller's humor, only less complex. But then I came across a few lines which put everything in perspective and explained away 200 pages of incoherence and arbitrariness:

'I thought Beatrice Keedsler had joined hands with other old fashioned storytellers to make people believe that life had leading characters, minor characters, significant details, insignificant details, that it has lessons to be learned, tests to be passed, and a beginning, a middle, and an end.

As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And the I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abonimable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.

...Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would right about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order.'

As long as someone does something not just because he cannot do any betterÂ but because he believes in it. I actually ended up liking the book.

Finally, India! The source which generates a million thoughts, a billion confusions. You only need to peek out of your window to see the radiant faces on malnourished bodies of sunburned toilers and marvel at the mysterious source that keeps them going in a life that doesn't and will not reward them in a manner commensurate to their efforts. It not only does not give them clean water, decent food, and breathable air, it breathes venom and sucks them dry of their last reserves of life. And yet, and yet... How do they manage their smiles? Why doesn't the twinkle not vanish? In a society where material comforts are on such short supply, I'm actually thankful that religion, with its nebulous promises and abstract goals, has such a strong hold. It is such a reason to live for so many people here. It has ideals which might never be achievable, but at least those ideals would never be beyond one's reach simply because he was unfortunate enough to be born without means. For all its shortcomings - and glaring they are - I'm happy that it's there, at least for now.

I'll be going to Delhi this weekend to meet my best friend - I talk to him once every two months for a few minutes. Next weekend I'll visit IIT Guwahati for the first time after graduation. I hope there will be experiences to speak of!

Dear SF

Posted by Ankit On July 28th, 2009

One fine evening, 2 years ago, I sat listening to a guy playing guitar in a cozy little cafe somewhere in the Golden Gate park. I was drinking a rather large serving of coffee which was paid for by my company for the evening-a girl whom I had made a vague acquaintance with on the internet, our lives crisscrossing at the single intersection of a more than passing appreciation for Audrey Hepburn. She had come with her then boyfriend and under the dim lights of the cafe with a distinct aroma of freshly brewed coffee, we sat there talking about things that I unfortunately do not have anyone to talk with. I dropped them off at their place and finally made my way to the godforsaken precincts of that depressing collective that generally goes by the name of bay area. 2 years have slipped and I have since returned the favor by buying her a hot chocolate in Orange County but I look back at that 1 evening as an experience which changed something fundamental. The appreciation for that elusive variety in life in terms of people who have a different set of experiences than mine, the realization that experiences either come at the cost of stupidity or courage which are often the same things, and the understanding that there is so much to learn and do in life and so much that is fine and beautiful. And every small step towards that misty, sketchy goal-post reveals so much about oneself that it is a loss if one doesn't try.

San Francisco, you did that to me 2 years ago and you did it again this time around. While riding around your labyrinthian roads and psychedelic alleys on my noble steed, while breathing in the salty, cold breeze coming from the Frisco bay, while walking on the congested roads of Haighton Ashbery lined with decrepit smoke shops and bubbling cafes, in the sad eyed fixations of the homeless and the hippy, in the cocksure smoke rings of the eternal dude, in the controlled chaos that you are, you managed to impress upon me, yet again, the virtues of limited pandemonium and the creative possibilities it leads to. And I paid homage to the shining jewel in your crown. Once in a car, once on the motorcycle, and finally while running. Yes I ran across the Golden Gate as part of the half marathon on a misty Sunday morning. While midway across the bridge, I noticed how the two gigantic red cables on either side of the bridge deck rose up and vanished into the fog, holding us all in the phantasm of an embrace, the mighty mighty red bridge suspended in the air with a knot of nothingness. I rode up the marine headlands and looked down upon 'the city'. The great green bay and a vast sea of pastel colored houses as far as the eyes could see, the intricate architectural details on their facades, the gossamery web of emotions of their patrons, all hidden behind a veil of stately calm.

It was only with a heavy heart that I left you and started my journey down South, a feeling that only got exacerbated when I had lunch in the bay area, a symbol of efficient unimaginativity and shortest route boredom. People say that SD is the finest city in America. I'll beg to differ.

Plan for the extended weekend

Posted by Ankit On July 23rd, 2009

I'll be picking up my motorcycle tomorrow and driving up to Ventura on I-5 N. The place is 185 miles from SD and is home to Ameet who has gracefully agreed to allow me to park for the night. He has also, in an act of unexplainable kindness and bravado, agreed to put up with my niggling company over dinner. I'll start next morning and begin on my journey on the famed and beautiful CA-1 highway which hugs the shoreline of the mighty Pacific from Santa Barbara to Santa Cruz through a distance of more than 250 miles. From there I'll head north to meet a friend of mine (Nikhil) who lives somewhere in the bay area but has, till now, avoided giving me his exact address despite my many inquiries. Which basically means that I'll have to indulge in rampant arse kickery upon reaching there. Friday evening would probably be dedicated to golden gate and the beautiful SFO. So would be Friday night and Saturday morning, noon, and evening. Another brave friend of ours, Diwaker Gupta, has shown an unprecedented lack of foresight and invited a whole bunch of us uncivilized halfwits to his very proper home for dinner on Saturday night. He has also promised a whole lot of carbs for the big day. Sunday morning will witness SFO going 'gasp' as a dilapidated bouquet of disintegrating desi dudes will attempt to run up and down its slopes in the hope of completing 13 miles of half marathon agony. The group will include Aneesh, Bakri, Vikram, that bastard Nikhil who hasn't given me his address yet, Diwaker, and yours truly. And even in our awkward dresses and viscous physiques and lethargic dispositions, we'll be gunning for the finishing line with as much vim and alacrity as anyone else. After that... it's a 500 miles journey South.

Snail's Law

Posted by Ankit On July 14th, 2009

On the road

Posted by Ankit On July 14th, 2009

I have been reading a lot lately and the latest book I completed is this gem of a work called 'On the road' by Jack Kerouac. His language is strangely evocative and his stories glow with the sad eyed glimmer of unachievable freedom, they are resplendent with the strange sounds of gay abandon. Underscoring his amphetamined recollections of jazz, bars, girls, drugs, and travels in the bleary swathes of 50's America, what shines clear and foremost is his zest for life, humanity and the country he loved so much. But more importantly, on a personal level, it is yet another reminder to me that it is the ugly, depraved, debauched, and irreverent (not in a hugely antisocial way) side of man which is infinitely more interesting and pregnant with creative possibilities than the law abiding, sheltered, devoid of any worthwhile experiences side. Kerouac describes it as,

'But then they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!"

His prose, at places, is positively fabulous. Words follow each other with nonchalance while magnificent, almost tangible ideas and visions take shape in the background. And the result is an image which is not just supremely beautiful but also seems like the only natural image for the situation. It's, for example, not just the description of a carpet but the carpetness incarnate. He describes the view from Golden Gate in SFO as,

'There was the Pacific, a few more foothills away, blue and vast with the great wall of white advancing from the legendary potato patch where Frisco fogs are born. Another hour it would come streaming through the golden gate to shroud the romantic city in white, and a young man would hold his girl by the hand and climb slowly up a long white sidewalk with a bottle of Tokay in his pocket. That was Frisco; and beautiful women standing in white doorways, waiting for their men;'

It is a peaceful, even a contented vision. A vision he is able to conjure not by being blatant about it but by the repeated use of 'white', a color that is automatically tranquil. He ends with the beautiful lines,

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old,Â I think of Dean Moriarty.'

Colors!

Posted by Ankit On June 26th, 2009

I came across this new iPhone app called Colors (yes, it's American) which is sort of a slightly better alternative to microsoft paint. Except that you have a lilliputian screen to work with as opposed to the 15 inches that you get on a laptop/desktop. Anyone who has worked on Paint knows that it is not exactly 'the killer painting software'. You cannot exactly use it to paint the Monalisa. But that's just you and me, because we suck so much. More talented people have gotten off their asses and done precise that. But that's paint. There is a mouse to work with and the huge screen means that your eyes won't look like the Sun with its corona going bat shit crazy once you are done with your job. But this is Colors. And it's on my phone. Nevertheless, hardly ever to be deterred by a lack of talent, I paid 5 bucks and downloaded the full version. And I have a headache now. Not that I have a masterpiece to show for all these hours. Here is what I painted before things became too complicated:

As you can see it's very incomplete. The droplet looks bearable from a distance. But then almost everything looks bearable from a distance. I have noticed that almost every one looks like my roommate from a far enough distance so distance is not something that I should hide behind. If you can zoom in you would see that a lot of lines have been put just because I could not think of anything else to do. And they do not blend in with the surroundings. Part of the reason is the difficult pixellated control of the small screen but a major reason is my gaping inexperience in making colors blend. As I said I stopped at this point because things became too complicated for me. I have never painted anything in color before this so I have some very basic confusions. But hopefully a pig headed refusal to face one's own incompetence will help in clarifying a lot of those doubts. For now, it's a lot of fun and an interesting challenge.

Intersection

Posted by Ankit On June 22nd, 2009

I stood still at the intersection, hands warm in the jacket's pocket, eyes trying to make forms out of vague apparitions in the inky darkness. It was past midnight and I could not decide which road I wanted to cross. So I decided to just stand there for a while, look at the traffic, and something more-but only if I get unlucky.

It's both an epic excercise in futility and complexity. Cars waltzing to the whims of an inductive loop, slowing, stopping, and moving as the night is painted crimson, red and green. Stretched over a large enough time, the repetitive nature of this excercise evokes an almost derisive smile. A shake of the head. A shrug of the shoulders at the robotic predictability of modern life. The grunt of the engine as it is restrained, its eager supplications, and the euphoric release-and the neon periodicity reflected over a blurred asphalt. I have driven cars on my share of solitary nights through my portion of deserted intersections. I have, on some of such occasions, wondered about the pedestrian who is seen crossing the road at such an hour-his motives and destinations hard to fathom. I have seen in him a pointlessness. I have often juxtaposed him against myself and felt bemused-purposefully sitting in my car, although temporarily stationary, my right foot is only waiting for the green signal. And then I'd leave him far far behind and when I'd be miles away crusing toward a purpose, a destination, he would have covered just a few steps. And the neon lights would be shining on his back, prodding him to move faster, coloring his shirt in stamps of uselessness.

Standing at the intersection, I was aware of both the roads. But I decided to just stay there for a while, look at the daubs of paints. In the background of lighted buildings, amidst the complexity of vague forms, reflected in false colors on the beguiling road, almost everything assumes the outlines of your desires. And you cannot make out the identity of things in this madhouse of impressionistic chiaroscuro, until you are certain of its lifelessness. Late night walkers move in elongated shadows and you can almost tread over their heads. Headlights shine rudely on your eyes just as you are trying to make a red spectrum correction. I stood there for almost an hour, trying to make out discernible figures in moving objects. I stood there, trying to identify the figure I did not want identified. Do you not walk at night these days? Or have you finally managed to blend in the background?

Rock Bottom

Posted by Ankit On June 16th, 2009

The other day I rode to the Harbor island with Rasia. It is a stretch of road along the SD harbor, lined with stones to keep the water at bay (there, water, I return your metaphor back.) There, sitting on the rampart lining the manicured ocean, looking at the naval botches on the fluid raiment, I became aware of one of my deepest sorrows. Staring intently at the horizon I said,

A: Dude, you know what disappoints me the most?

R: hmph (No.)

A: See all those huge stones, those heavy rocks?

R: hmph (Yes.)

A: One of my biggest disappointments in life is that I cannot pick most of them.

R: eh (?.)

He was looking at me sideways, waiting for me to realize that that's not a valid reason to be sad about and smiling in that incongruous, patronising manner which suggests that it' time you get your shit together and start making sense. I, on the other hand, was genuinely surprised that the sheer number of things-rocks and cars and trees and elephants- that are unpickable in this universe is not enough to make someone sad. Those huge things just sit there unblinking and unmoving, insulting your ego, challenging your resolve, smug in their cognizance of the fact that try as hard as you might, you won't have any displacement to show for your decreased energy. You walk in this world with a merry gait and a jolly hop, confident of the path, sure of the destiny, until you come across a rock, trip, and fall down. You look back and see one of their ilk-those vain little brats which won't move. That one single speck of niggling pig-headedness serves, unflichingly, as the very physical reminder of all that is massively bigger, heavier, taller, deeper, hotter, faster, stronger, sharper, and better than anything that you can personally deal with in nature. No wonder then, sitting on that harbor that day with so many of such rocks surrounding me in their immobile derision, I felt small.

I tried to pick a small one up but had massively underestimated its density. I tried to push it but it won't budge, and I thought-friction. There is a reason why friction was taught so late in our mechanics courses. Because it screws up an ideal world. That ideal world in which Newton dreamed of things which moved continuously until they were stopped and things which sat there until they were moved. Friction came along surreptitiously one day-and some of the things stopped budging. And a lot of them were rocks which looked at me with scorn as my toes dug deep in the ground. And the garden of eden of waltzing trees and pirouetting mountains and shimmying elephants coagulated into an inflexible mass of rigid proportions.

Am I being too pessimistic? Not really. I'm actually optimistic. I'm optimistic about the number of such unpickable things. I'm hugely optimistic. I'm deliriously optimistic. But then, language is such a whore... These chains of thoughts. I need to get some sleep.