Chintan – Page 25

Elementary, Dr. Ankit

Posted by Ankit On December 13th, 2009

So now that I'm allowed to officially add the prefix of Dr. in front of my name, it would be interesting to look back and evaluate the 4 years which culminated in this title. Because we do not do it often, stages of our lives which are like liquids of different densities often merge into puddles of muddy water when inspected under the lens of inaccurate reminiscences. And it is for this reason that I want to 'ankit' or inscribe my impressions of this very important temporal chunk while the memories are still sharp around the edges and their flavor still spicy at the tip of my tongue.

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

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

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

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

The Harlot's House

Posted by Ankit On November 27th, 2009

We caught the tread of dancing feet,
We loitered down the moonlit street,
And stopped beneath the harlot's house.

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.

Chess-Men

Posted by Ankit On November 25th, 2009

K: Now that we are standing here, with some time remaining for the battle to begin, I'd like to know how you guys are feeling. It's very important that we act as a unit and everyone does what he's asked for. I remember the last time, because of your sheer incompetence, I was humiliated by the opposing army. You know how it is with me, I've grown old and cannot move very fast. I was disgusted by the sheer contempt with which I was treated by the opposing King, making me run around all over the creation - and at this age too. Humiliating. I don't expect it to happen this time.

Q: My dear, you know what I'd not do to save you. I run around all over the place attacking, defending, scheming, and plotting while you sit there in the corner, brooding over your lost vivacity and locomotion. The least you can do this time is grow, what in semblance would be a pair, and not try to hide behind me. You know how they are. They will 'pin' me down and hunt me and you would be left hobbling brooding with your white age, senile disposition, and pathetic visage.

K: I am the King, did you forget? Would you please be more respectful, especially in front of an assembly.

Q: Respect, my foot - if I had them. You have to earn it. Let's hear what others have to say. Come on P, you are the vanguard of our attack, and the spine of our defense. What do you think?

a P: It's not our place to think, dear lady. I work on the e-file and have never ventured beyond the d or f files without getting chopped down. Mostly I just walk straight or wait. Yes, I wait a lot and try to see the bloodshed around but cannot do much. Mostly I just wait and look around. I work on the e-file. But tell you what, it's not very different from the d and e. I've been there, I know - just a bit quieter. The h-P seems to have a ball. Because the fighting is mostly concentrated at the center, he is generally pretty safe and he has occupational perks. I often catch him peeking over to his right, lost in the vast expanse of peaceful territory. Do you think I can get to work there if I do a good job here?

Q: Oh shut up. You are new and you already have complaints.

e-P: No, no, no complaints. I was just wondering...

Kn: I sympathize with your frustration Q. There is nothing I hate more than an unimaginative, uncreative, uninspiring leader. His movements are bounded and predictable, his grace is utterly ungraceful. He is a sorry study in senile ossification with no artistic leaps of imagination, and no athletic beauty to speak off. His age is over and his ideas are outdated. He is to me what classical era is to postmodernism. As far as I am concerned, I like to relish in unpredictability, to attack with beauty, to fork with elegance, and to chop with surprise. I cannot care less for the K.

R: But we have to do what is asked of us, Kn. Your irresponsible behavior has cost us many a battles. It is frustrating to see you galloping around when we all are working so hard to protect him. You know I find it difficult to be everywhere. I'm not like Q. It takes time for me to get to a place...

B: Look who's talking. You can at least get everywhere. I can only reach half the battleground. And I can't even walk straight. You know how it feels when there is a big, juicy target right there in front of your eyes and the best you can do is breeze past it with threatening eyes. There I am, moving all over the board with my dagger baying for blood, and myself mad with anger, and the enemy just sits there looking at me with the amusement of a child looking at the tiger's cage in a zoo. It's insulting.

K: I know, I know. I understand how it must feel, trying to protect an invalid like me. I'm old and cannot move much. Even the Ps have seen more world than I have. I generally stay at one location unless I cannot even move from there. It's sad but would you protect me this one time? For old time's sake. The bespectacled nerd is back in his seat looking all grim and pensive but I know how he'll begin. Come on, e-P, get ready to move, let the battle begin.

Tim Burton's Doodlings

Posted by Ankit On November 18th, 2009

I came across this article from Wired and got fascinated by Tim Burton's sketches/drawings. I have included here the ones that I liked the most. If you want backgrounds on the images, better just go to the Wired article. But it's a hassle moving across pages to view all the images,

[Show as slideshow]

...and now that the gallery functionality seems to work, off to writing the wretched tome which seems to extend like the wings of the Gaussian distribution along its fringes!

Nabokov on Dostoevski

Posted by Ankit On November 17th, 2009

"My position in regards to Dostoevski is a curious and difficult one. In all my courses I approach literature from the only point of view that literature interests me - namely the point of view of enduring art and individual genius. From this point of view Dostoevski is not a great writer, but rather a mediocre one - with flashes of excellent humor, but, alas, with wastelands of literary platitudes in between. In 'Crime and Punishment' Raskolnikov for some reason or other kills an old female pawnbroker and her sister. Justice in the shape of an inexorable police officer closes slowly in on him until in the end he is driven to a public confession, and through the love of a noble prostitute he is brought to a spiritual regeneration that did not seem as incredibly banal in 1866 when the book was written as it does now when noble prostitutes are apt to be received a little cynically by experienced readers. My difficulty, however, is that not all the readers to whom I talk in this or other classes are experienced. A good third, I should say, do not know the difference between real literature and pseudo-literature, and to such readers Dostoevski may seem more important and more artistic than such trash as our American historical novels or things called 'From Here to Eternity' and such like balderdash.

However I shall speak at length about a number of really great artists - Â 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!

Lord of the Flies

Posted by Ankit On November 11th, 2009

It was one of those moments of lucidity when you abruptly realize that most of the time during the last 10 days that you did not spend sitting in front of the computer screen in the lab were spent sitting in front of the computer screen at home. And then you read a bit of Calvin and Hobbes in which Watterson talks about 'letting the pandering idiocy of televisionÂ liquefyÂ our brains' and you realize that the prominent differentiator between our generation and the last is the mode of 'passive entertainment' it offers. So I decided to shut down my laptop and pick up a book.

I read Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury but do not exactly have a lot of good things to say about it. When you have read dystopia of the level of 'Brave New World', and '1984', 451 seems lacking in a lot of respects; but I don't intend to talk about this book anyway so we'll leave it right here. I read some stories by Kafka and if you want to read what creations a brilliant, messed up mind can create, it's hard to find anything better than 'Metamorphosis', 'In the Penal Colony', 'First Sorrow' etc. And then I read William Golding's 'Lord of the Flies' and my dear god, what a brilliant book it is!

It's a story of some British school boys who get stranded on an island amidst an unnamed nuclear war raging in other parts. They begin by trying to make sense of their deserted new home and bringing some order to the chaos which has ensued after their plane crashed on this island. There are no elders to maintain decorum so they end up forming a loose organisation with a chief and sketchy roles for everybody. It's a story of how the initial attempts at civilization fail completely and anarchy sets in. It's a story of how humans are invariably cruel when not bound by social mores. It's a story of the essential darkness of human nature and all that is scary and despicable about it. And like Orwell's 'Animal Farm', the brilliance of the book lies in how believable the descent into chaos is. While reading it, the most prominent emotion I felt was, 'My God, I know where this is going. There is no other way a normal human being is going to behave.' Because I am aware of how humans have behaved in history when the thin veneer of civilization was taken off their restless, twitching souls. Because I'm aware of Milgram's and Zimbardo's experiments, and our inevitable roots in animality.

The fact that it's a story about children only makes it more believable. What they have in innocence is more than amply balanced by shaky morals and a pliable, fluid sense of right and wrong - ideas which can be easily molded for better or for worse. I think that a normal human being living in normal peaceful times comes across the cruelest peers during childhood. It's not surprising then that the subject of this book is children.

The language is beautiful and imaginative and so realistic and urgent that it's actually a terrifying, uneasy read. Fear grips you like closing foliage of the dark deserted island, and speaks to you in the very voice of the lord of the flies himself.

Very highly recommended. But you might want to read a bit of Wodehouse after that, just to feel good about humanity :).

I wish...

Posted by Ankit On November 5th, 2009

In these horrid times of set schedules and clock-work precisioned timings, I, more than any other time, dream of a world devoid of all logic and rationale. A world anarchic in thought and color. With discordant notes permanently in the ambiance following gallant, glorified sonatas and garish, illogically colored sky. A world where sunset is ugly and drips like molten lava from the mottled horizon over an ocean made of infinite amount of cheese. A world where an artist closes his eyes and creates his own realities, confident, smug, proud, completely immodest realities. And in which he lies which such conviction that the lesser gifted mortals actually see his imagined stupidity in their logical world. A world where cars and men are stationary and roads slip beneath their feet and silhouettes of birds are morbidly pinned to the canvas of the firmament. Where every sign which says 'No Graffiti' is painted upon and buildings follow the crazy architecture of German expressionism. Where roads wind in endless loops, grass is liquid red in color and varicolored clouds spell beautiful words like cerulean, dulcet, azure across the sky. And where the Sun rises from random directions at random times and night is declared when the hour hand of the great clock strikes the next digit in the approximation of pi. Where paintballs come out of AK-47s and bullets from toy guns and where tank guns shoot alternately from the front and back so that the whole damn thing has to be rotated after every shot.

A world where love comes in cigarette packets with a warning of health hazard on the cover and fairies and cupids and angels are burnt in Salem. A world where musicians create pieces of inordinate silence and murderous chaos. A sarcastic, brutal, warm, loving and honest world. Sad, depressed, creative, exultant, and hollow eyed. Wrinkled to its very bones and yet insane to its spirit - constantly vibrating, pulsating, shivering with nervous energy, ready to break forth in one dazzling display of silent, thunderous, colorful orgy.

Hmph... or maybe I should just get the damn thing done with and not wish for Armageddon.

Dissertation woes

Posted by Ankit On November 3rd, 2009

Oh blast! This thesis writing business is really beginning to rile me up now. Because, you see, it's a whole lot of charade to begin with. Like any sort of bookkeeping, because that's what it really is, it's one daunting, limitless ocean of morbidity that is wetting my feet as I take my first steps with the intention of wading across. And to reach the land on the other end, I have but a skiff with a spatula for the oar. There is no humor involved and I am not allowed to make it interesting. I cannot write sentences like, 'While the academic world was nestling in the arms of its own complacency, it was hardly aware of what was brewing in one man's mind.' I have to be chronological and am not allowed to keep the best for the last - I cannot build it all up towards one nerve racking, palpitating sentence, 'Yes, my dear Mr. Hamilton - you've had it all wrong. Please have a seat for the shock of it all may be too hard for you to bear.' There is no room to exaggerate, to metaphorise, to embellish, to dream, to give voice to the passion that one does indeed feel sometimes in academic research.

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

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

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

The Golden Gate - Vikram Seth

Posted by Ankit On October 25th, 2009

A bittersweet lovestory it's in verse
of hope and sadness, jealousy and loss,
of love which always has hateful obverse,
set against the lovely Francisco canvas.

Language at once both beautiful and wise
set in the tetrameter's confines,
a work as evocative as Monet,
unflinching rhymes, and refreshing sonnet.

Through joy and sorrow the characters drift,
like the unsure antics of fog and mist,
the Golden Gate often is in whose fist,
A belated thanks for this thoughtful gift.

To read it, I remember you had willed,
That promise, dear, today stands fulfilled.

P.S: The book is in iambic tetrameter but since I have no feel for it, the only thing I could manage was a pentameter. It's a good book, highly recommended.

Linear Least Squares Fit

Posted by Ankit On October 24th, 2009

...it's the stuff Ph.D. dissertations are made of, as I am in the process of realizing :). How little our world would have made sense if Least Squares fit wasn't around? It's philosopher's stone, panacea, and elixir, all ground into one Euripidean 'deus ex machina' incarnate for grad students.