Be

2012

2011-12-31T20:39:00.001-06:00

Post-industrial civilization (1932-2012).It was fun (for some) while it lasted. An immense interregnum of anxiety and sorrow will now follow. Let us all seek to comport ourselves with compassion in these dark days.

Purpose

2011-06-05T15:24:00.002-05:00

Doing things for those we love
Driven by memory of those we respect
In the company of those we enjoy

इश्क-ए-हकीकी

2011-05-18T08:27:00.007-05:00

In the beginning, there is chaos
Awareness is a kitten
Playing with strands of thought
Desultorily

First it chases after this one
Then it chases after that one
The yarn gets all tangled
And the kitten gets stuck
And it doesn't care if its stuck
There is no cause to be free

इश्क-ए-मिजाजी is the succulent rat
That reminds the apathetic cat
That there is a point
To its teeth and claws

Then there is the chase, an ardent chase
Sometimes the rat is caught
Other times it escapes
Either way, if the chase is true ,
the kitten is left
In an empty room,
free of yarn

Of what use is the chase
That does not cleanse?

इश्क-ए-मिजाजी: love of some parts of the world

इश्क-ए-हकीकी : love while being in the world

On the persistence of Being

2011-03-05T06:49:00.003-06:00

The reason
this differentiated existence
Endures
and
Recurs
Is that all regret
Is fungible

Doing by not doing

2010-11-01T16:52:00.002-05:00

Little children come play in this field
Sometimes few, sometimes many
The field always remains

Dark night of the spirit

2010-09-29T22:08:00.003-05:00

There is dissatisfaction with fullness
From having seen and having been

There is dissatisfaction with emptiness
From not seeing and not being enough

There is no refuge, save the emptiness
There is no escape, even in emptiness

There is no solace, save in the seeing
There is no purpose, only being

Beyond kensho

2010-08-06T10:00:00.002-05:00

Having found the onion
We now begin to peel it

Some day, perhaps,
the onion too will go

Or endlessly remain

Zazen

2010-05-28T09:08:00.002-05:00

Light the lamp
Burn the moths

Tears for my guru

2010-05-08T10:29:00.006-05:00

To dig all the way into the Self-mountain
One needs the shovel of effort
The trowel of patience
And large buckets of sorrowful tears

As a child, I shed tears seeking my mother
"Why have you abandoned me?"

But they were impatient
And ran away too quickly
As did I

As a youth, I shed them seeking my lover
"Why have you abandoned me?"

This time they stayed long
And led me deep into darkness
And light

Now I shed them for a glimpse of my guru
This separation wounds me
Deeper, oh so much deeper!

So tears are always in plentiful supply

It would be saddening, this state of affairs
Were it not so delightfully amusing
It would be amusing, this state of affairs
Were it not so delightfully saddening

Hobo Chatter

2010-02-24T22:32:00.000-06:00

[10:29:26 PM] Pratyush Tiwary: And how does it feel
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?
[10:31:26 PM] Nisheeth Srivastava: pretty darn good!
[10:31:31 PM] Pratyush Tiwary: yeah!
[10:31:33 PM] Pratyush Tiwary: :)
[10:31:36 PM] Nisheeth Srivastava: :)

Prana

2010-02-09T10:56:00.002-06:00

That which increases most vigorously
The more intensely it is spent
Is prana

Dukkha

2010-01-10T07:46:00.000-06:00

New dukkha;
Always the same
As old dukkha

Carl & Ellie: A love story

2009-12-10T23:14:00.002-06:00

Nothing more need be said :)

Deep space

2009-08-25T14:33:00.003-05:00

In brooding darkness
Storm clouds gather
Nectar falls
Spirit rises to meet itself
In throbbing bouts of ecstasy

Unhappy Independence Day

2009-08-15T17:37:00.020-05:00

On the occasion of remembering India's liberation from British bureaucrats and its usurpation by Indian bureaucrats, I must confess to a pang of sadness. I can best explain its origin by means of the following graph (obtained from the World Bank Report on water in India)

Magnify it and look at it by all means. Its an important chart. Now let us look at another fact, this one drawn from the UN's Climate Report published in 2007. By 2030, i.e., a bare 21 years from now, the Gangotri and other glaciers feeding the Ganga (I refuse to call it Ganges) river will have disappeared, making it highly likely that the Ganga will become a seasonal river and, by the time I seek to be cremated by its side in Varanasi in 70 years' time, will have vanished completely. The India that I will breathe my last in will be an India where the Ganga will have joined the Saraswati and Yamuna as a mythical river.

Setting cultural nostalgia aside, countries throughout the world are beginning to suffer from what is euphemistically called "Limits to growth". For the US, the major bottleneck is one of securing petroleum reserves. Why do you think global warming has become such a big talking point? Because people have suddenly realized how fragile the eco-systems are and have developed a sense of reverence towards Nature? Poppycock! Its because the global warming issue can be used as a narrative to explain and begin the inevitable shift away from fossil fuel based economies to other sources of energy.

For India, the bottleneck is far more severe - in both the logistical and temporal sense. Logistical because water is far more fundamental for survival than oil. People might grumble if they can't drive, they might shout if they have to pay a little bit more for food because transportation costs have gone up. But think of the panic that erupts whenever there is a drought. Now extend that into the infinite future and you will have some sense of the logistical nightmare that is about to erupt. When is it going to erupt? That's where the temporal problem shows up. By most estimates, water demand in India is going to exceed all possible sources of supply by 2020 (maybe 2025).

At this point, gentle reader, you are likely to think, "Demand exceeding supply you say? How fascinating! Note to self: remember this for dinner table conversation." To gain a deeper appreciation of this fact, why not perform the following experiment: perform as many push-ups as you can. When you reach your limit, perform five more. Come back and revisit the phenomenon of demand exceeding supply when you're done. You will then understand the concept better.

In 11 years' time, the Indian economy will start hitting its limits to growth. Any further expansion in industrial water usage would come at the cost of domestic water supply, political anathema. At this point, there will arise crises along multiple dimensions, not least geopolitically, since the Himalayan mountains that supply India with 70% of its fresh water also feed its illustrious and cantankerous neighbors. In the face of rising public discontent, how hard is it going to be for some demagogue to promise abrogating water treaties as a route to political exaltation?

11 years, gentle reader. The India of 2020 is not going to be a land of peace and prosperity, well on its way to becoming a mini-USA. It is going to be a land of turmoil and factionalism, with industrialists trying to cut deals with government to keep their water supply quotas intact, states screaming at the top of their lungs and threatening to secede from the Union unless their neighbors stopped filching what is rightly theirs, and last but not least, a population finally waking up to the fact that the patina of capitalistic prosperity that it has so eagerly accepted is not likely to last very long after all.

What's that you say? China already has a water deficit and is doing fine? No, dear reader, China is not doing fine. The reason China appears to be doing fine is because it runs a current account surplus that will allow it to be a net grain importer. It has already begun running a grain deficit, and that is when it is overpumping its groundwater aquifers and diverting enough water away from its rivers to leave them almost dry. Believe me, the water crisis is going to hit them pretty hard just as well.

There can be no anarcho-primitivist fleeing to the hills here. Back to the basics survivalism won't help when one of the basics is in short supply. Feeble efforts at water conservation and retrenchment of river systems will buy a brief period of grace, but against the geo-physical events that are presently in motion, I fear that all the ingenuity and effort of humanity would fail. And we aren't even making that effort!

And why stop at 11 years? 2050 is not that far away. Most of my readership will have children their current age by that time. Think of the devastation that is likely to result when available water supplies shrink to 20% of their current volume. There is only one word that comes to mind to fit the picture - catastrophe.

Is there anything that can be done to avoid this? Surely there must be something that we could do to solve our problems - the inveterate humanist bleat. At such times I am reminded of the Club of Rome's shockingly honest appraisal of the heart of mankind's problems - too much mankind. What is the problem? There's too many of us struggling to survive with a finite amount of resources at hand.

You must, of course, argue with me here. Fine, chuck the bathing and the laundry (ah! I would be seen as a prophet if this were ever to come to pass). That still doesn't help. 90% of India's water consumption is agricultural. Stop growing food? A sensible partial solution, of course, would be to try and grow less water-intensive crops. But the only way to get farmers to buy into that paradigm is to stop subsidizing their electricity bills for pumping out ground water, doing which is electoral suicide.

You wish to educate the farmers and the voters and the general public about this grave matter so that they may take steps to redeem the situation? Within 11 years? I commend your idealism. Why not take on an even nobler task then? Get people to stop having kids. Reduce the population of India by 50% and observe the peace and prosperity that would descend. Rivers of milk and honey would flow, man would treat his fellow man justly, a veritable Golden Age would descend! You would go down in myths and legends as the redeemer of our civilization!

Unfortunately, there is only this one way to solve this problem - stop population growth. How likely is that? Let alone reducing population, think about the likelihood of even stabilizing the Indian population at its current levels. Impossible! Human nature will do what human nature must do (I would explain this further here, but it would take away from the import of the present writing. Some other time.). It is in the nature of man to perpetrate the tragedy of the commons. That's just the way it is. In my opinion, there is not much to be gained by flailing our hands and invoking romantic notions of victory over the laws of physics and human nature. All we can do is use foresight and planning to sidestep problems once we can see them heading our way. Once our own existence is no longer threatened by a problem, we can try and find palliatives for others.

In practical terms, what can one do to include this rather bleak outlook in one's long term plans? Offhand, I can think of the following general suggestions:

1. If, like me, you're not in India, set the wheels in motion to never have to go back and make arrangements for family members to emigrate just as well.

2. If you are in India, set the wheels in motion either to emigrate, or to settle in the South of India, somewhere near the coasts and one of the rivers Mahanadi, Godavari or Cauvery. Those will not run out that quickly.

3. If your family owns real estate in the Northern Plains, think medium term (3-6 years from now) about selling. Property prices aren't exactly going to go up if the river basins start to dry up.

4. Buy and hold investors among you might want to shorten your horizons and those holding government bonds might want to sell. I haven't explored any investment opportunities that might benefit from water scarcity yet, but I will at some point.

5. Be prepared for major societal upheavals. When I say major, think on the order of the violence during Partition, less rabid, but occurring on a much longer time-scale.

What's that? I am advocating escapism? I am proposing that when the ship is on fire, one depart in haste and not stick around on the burning deck for some sentimental reason or the other? Yes, precisely so.

Feel free to laugh at me and mock my fanciful predictions. If I am wrong and there is no crisis in the offing, I would be very happy to see that the country of my origin is doing well and is stable and prosperous. That joy would likely offset all the derision that I would face in such an eventuality.

Let me state very clearly though, that none of what has been said here has been said thoughtlessly or in jest. I could, as disclaimed above, be a moron who is utterly wrong. I could be an alarmist who is fretting about a problem that will resolve itself when the time comes. That being said, I have written this because I think I am right and that water woes are going to become perhaps the most important aspect of India's existential trajectory within the next two decades.

Researchers who study the limits of growth paint a gloomy picture for humanity in the second half of this century, a time that seems to most people to belong very far in the future, hence not a suitable subject for analysis. Unfortunately, gentle reader, the future is almost here, and the road to this unpleasant future from the simulacrum of cornucopia prevailing today is bound to be a bumpy one. It just so happens that, for geophysical reasons, one of the countries that will suffer most from hitting up against the limits of growth is going to be India, which is why I am forced to observe the 62nd birth anniversary of its rebirth as a republic in such a solemn manner.

UPDATE (21 Jan 2009) It turns out that some of my dire prognostications are based on incorrect data. In particular, the prediction from the UN's IPCC report concerning the fate of the Himalayan glaciers has now been shown to have been false. While I have tried to stay abreast of the climate change propaganda that has been spewed out in the recent past, I had hoped that the main scientific findings, at least, would be free of error. Apparently not.

If the glaciers are in no imminent danger, then the water crisis cannot be terribly pressing. Of course, groundwater depletion remains a concern, but not as terrible an existential concern. I may update this post further when I have had time to think over the implications of the new scenario.

I am happy, though, at the thought that the glaciers still have another few centuries to go.

A song on the six perfections

2009-07-29T12:12:00.003-05:00

I have of late acquired a great appreciation for brevity. Undoubtedly, writing cannot be useful just because it does not take up much space, it must also have some utility. For a combination of brevity and utility, I have not yet come across anything remotely close to what the great poet Milarepa has written,

For generosity, nothing to do,
Other than stop fixating on self.

For morality, nothing to do,
Other than stop being dishonest.

For patience, nothing to do,
Other than not fear what is ultimately true.

For effort, nothing to do,
Other than practice continuously.

For meditative stability, nothing to do,
Other than rest in presence.

For wisdom, nothing to do,
Other than know directly how things are.

Anitya

2009-07-20T00:16:00.001-05:00

The river flows
Rippling and shimmering
In every moment
born anew

Andheri Madhushala - II

2009-06-18T13:54:00.005-05:00

अँधेरी मधुशाला - २

मधुशाला जो जो जाते हैं, सब प्यासे वापस आते हैं
मदिरालय के प्रांगण में टूटे प्याले बिखरे जाते हैं
मदिरालय से मदिरालय फिरने में हम हाला पाते हैं
प्यासे प्याले चूमे इतने, मदिरा ख़ुद बनते जाते हैं

Moksha

2009-05-24T23:40:00.001-05:00

Have you found it?

Yes, I have found it.

What will you do now?

I will go looking for it.

Meditation

2009-02-16T05:07:00.006-06:00

Ignorance to Knowledge

I live in a world of magic and miracles
Where acausal deities rule mercifully
Through some anthropomorphic creed

Slowly, I am killing those gods
One by one I sacrifice them
At the altar of Reason

I now perceive with no bias
I now hold all false lest proven true
No error have I, for I doubt all

Knowledge conflicted

I cannot explain the comprehensibility
Of the universe to my own perception
Reason stands silent, Nature speaks

My spirit is tortured with insanity
Whence existence? Whence knowledge?
Reason founders in a storm of semantics

All questions point to one, `Who observes?'
Half-answers leap out of age-old tomes
Mysterious whispers from forgotten times

Knowledge to Ignorance

I am now a hermit, body smeared in ashes
Mind withdrawing from the sensate world
I labor incessantly with a single thought

Body must be strong and stable, like a rock
Mind must be supple and becalmed, like water
Memory must be purged, ambition lost

I now sit in meditation hours-long
There is no body, no mind, no thought
A dark nothingness embraces my identity

Ignorance to Knowing

The darkness parts with a jolt and I face
A deep throbbing power with no name
Its vibrations fill me with delirious joy

Meditation becomes exhilarating now
Sights, sounds, vibrations beyond sense and thought
I play in a universe beyond time and space

And ever draw nearer to the throbbing thing
Until no play remains, no pleasure, no pain
There is naught, save the throbbing and I

Knowing to Being

Days pass as if in a dream,
The throbbing finally speaks its name
It is Consciousness, the seed of the Universe

Meditation is perpetual now
The throbbing mass of awareness draws me
Deeper into an unfathomable abyss

Lo! There is no more I, no more Consciousness
There is only One, throbbing vibrantly
Sustaining in its pulsation the fabric of Reality

Beyond Being

Words cannot describe it, for memory goes there not
Mind cannot perceive it, for intellect qualifies it not
It broods, the throbbing at the center of all existence

Current affairs

2009-02-14T16:42:00.004-06:00

I have been meaning to write about the economy for a while now, but this expresses everything I wanted to say much more succinctly than I ever could. Thank you, Bill.

From Seeing to Being

2009-02-13T15:11:00.007-06:00

The well of meditation has been deepening continuously in the past few weeks. Every waking minute spent outside meditation appears harsh and unnatural at times. Eyes no longer hold clear vision to be their natural state, ears no longer sense sound, breath flutters gently like a song-bird in a vast hallway. Throbbing in all places along the spine continues intermittently. Vibration and pulsation at crown of head remains almost constant.

Awareness is ensconced in a ball that is light on the inside and dark on the outside. The dark exterior of this ball pushes away fragments of internal narrative arising out of identity as well as extraneous thoughts arising out of perception; keeps them away from mindfulness of awareness.

The walls of ego are crashing into ruin, the halls of perceptive coherence are aflame. There is no hope, there is no despair. There is no desire, no renunciation of desire. There is no knowledge, no ignorance of knowledge.

At the farthest edges of awareness, there has arisen a subtle but monumental shift. There is no longer awareness of undifferentiated reality, there is now awareness as undifferentiated reality.

Consciousness is.

Rest in peace, Dilip

2009-02-05T22:32:00.006-06:00

Dilip Veeraraghavan, receptacle of adolescent socio-political angst, commentator extraordinaire on all aspects of Indian philosophy and culture, ardent Gandhian and inspirational teacher, is no more.

Where his eyes lacked light, his intellect scintillated. The scarce occasions when we would speak of economics, I, in my youthful brashness, would keep trying to prove the infeasibility of Gandhian libertarianism. One day, I told him Gandhian living would turn me into him. He said, `And that thought scares you?' I was cruel; I said, `Yes, it scares me.' He smiled, but I knew it hurt him. Three years on, when now I understand the wisdom of his ways, he has passed into silence.

There was erudition, there was grace, there was simplicity in his demeanor; humor twinkled ceaselessly in eyes fixed always upon infinity. His living example inspired lifestyles of voluntary simplicity in so many who knew him.

As with all lives well-lived, this is an occasion not for sadness, but for silence and remembrance. In memory of one of the gentlest and kindest of men, I embrace both tonight.

Rest in peace, Dilip.

--------------------------------------------------

UPDATE: 10 Feb 2009

The aforegoing eulogy for Dilip was formulaic, impersonal and brief for a reason. It was written not so much as a personal assertion of loss as a message of solidarity with the many who I knew would have been deeply saddened by his passing. It was difficult for me, when I heard the news, to comprehend and process it in an authentic manner instantaneously (I am excruciatingly slow at processing emotion). Now that I have had time to think, I feel that it could be of some value for me to place on record my understanding and appreciation of a true saint among men.

To begin with, I must confess that since I have a very detached perspective towards mortality, Dilip's passing did not occasion much grief for me. If anything, it merely served as a reminder to me of the errant days of my youth when I knew him. It seems hard to believe it was a scarce three years ago that I was frequently in his office, talking Carnatic and western classical music with him. At the risk of sounding cold and heartless, I must further confess that Dilip was interesting to me at the time primarily as a fascinating cognitive science case study. While he was indeed a storehouse of knowledge about Indian history and culture, and was to a large degree instrumental in shaping my appreciation of Tamil Brahmin society, I did not set exceptional store by his erudition.

No, what fascinated me was the quality of his opinions, fluid and unconventional narratives that melted into each other with a strange absence of causal connections. I formulated, in those days, the naive hypothesis that his brain, blessed with exceptional memory and curiosity, was not infected by the need to make the sharp distinctions and categorizations that those with normal eyesight are doomed to make. The darkness that shrouded his existence perpetually had the effect of rendering his inferential mechanism about the world he knew strangely singular and untouched by teleological/theological thinking. The reluctance to ascribe causality to correlative events has become to me, over the years, one of the greatest marks of a deep intellect. Looking back, I find that Dilip possessed this quality to a degree unmatched by almost every other contemporary thinker I have come across (save perhaps Stephen Jay Gould). At the time, I attributed this quality of his to his blindness and did not appreciate its rarity as I do now. (En passant, the careful observer will note in my immature hypothesizing that precise element of teleological thinking that I now have sensitized myself against, and that Dilip was careful to always qualify.) He would mention correlations, and his vast store of knowledge would allow him to find not one but many correlates for almost any socio-cultural datum. He would leave the process of hypothesis formation and likelihood generation to eager theorists like me. I would say something like, `Ah! So you're saying X caused Y caused Z, and resulted in a counter-move A, which in turn led to B'. He would smile and say, `Perhaps'.

At the same time, I conjectured that his love of classical music was an epi-phenomenal proxy for his logical and inferential mechanisms. Since he was consigned to having students read letters and books out to him, the task of perceiving the written word could not be attended with the solitude for cogitation so dear to most intellectuals. I felt that his mind would naturally find deeper satisfaction in the mental stimulation in solitude that music could provide him. At times, I would visit him to find him listening to some Carnatic performance or the other, and would feel envious of his ability to not have to worry about visual stimulation, to perpetually inhabit a world of harmony, rhythm and localized meaning.

At other times, I would pity his dependence on others for the fulfillment of basic daily activities. I would pity not only this dependence, but also his knowledge of the sympathetic figure he must have known he was in the eyes of all who beheld him. It is only now, with distance in time and space allowing less judgmental understanding, that the grace and humor with which he embraced his condition and attempted to set all who interacted with him at ease stand out as marks of a phenomenally self-aware and sensitive intellect.

By rights, Dilip should not really have been on my mind any longer, since my association with him was never really emotional or inspirational, as it has been for others. I find, however, that in the years since I knew him, my appreciation for his character, wisdom and humanity has grown tremendously. As the ultimate futility of reductionist theorizing has impressed itself upon me in recent times, I have often found myself listing people I have known or know of whose intellects have managed to elude this treacherous intellectual trap of conflating representations with understanding and correlation with causality. Einstein and Schrodinger are on that list, as are Gauss and Grothendieck. Tagore is there (though he was hopelessly muddled most of the time, his moments of clarity were blinding and momentous) , and Aurobindo and the unknown authors of the more reasonable of the Upanishads. Dilip is on that list too - my strongest personal influence in favor of avoiding the convenience of causal narratives lest they cloud one's understanding. Thus, unconsciously, Dilip has had much to do with my intellectual evolution from passionate advocacy of possible hypotheses to silent contemplation of the representational structures that convey evidence for or against various hypotheses to my awareness.

And to me, this points to his greatest quality. Above all, he was an honest man. Honest with others, and with himself. His simplicity was the simplicity of a man who had nothing to hide. His originality and wisdom were the consequences of a sharp intellect that owed no epistemological fealty to any but itself. Where others might have chafed at the lack of privacy that blindness enforces, his radiant acceptance of his condition transformed it into a source of spiritual enrichment and intellectual clarity for both himself and those he knew. His humility and compassion arose through a fearlessness that, in turn, arises from a mind at peace with itself and the world.

In a cloud of ego-centric curiosity, I would sit and spin chains of reductionist thought while the Socrates of IIT Madras would sit across from me nodding his head to the faint sound of the veena and to the melody of the synthesis of his own thought with what I would just have told him. I do not regret my past intellectual prejudice, one has to crawl before one learns to walk. Even in his passing then, Dilip has left me a priceless gift, the gift of perspective into my own weaknesses - both past and present.

He has passed into the greater silence - he who could see more than those with eyes, he who could convey more through silence than many with high-flown words, he who was at the same time child-like in innocence and ageless in wisdom, he who changed the lives of all he knew simply by virtue of being a human being.

Dilip Veeraraghavan, I am glad I knew you.

Winter turns to Spring

2009-02-03T15:11:00.003-06:00

Blue sky

Blue sky

Blue sky

The origin of the gods

2009-01-11T10:08:00.006-06:00

Who verily knows and who can declare it, whence it was born and whence comes this creation?
The Gods are later than this world's production. Who knows then whence it first came into being?

He, the first origin of this creation, whether he formed it all or did not form it,
Whose eye controls this world in highest heaven, he verily knows it, or perhaps he knows it not !?

- Rig Veda Mandala 10/Hymn 129

An aspect of Hindu culture that surprises independent observers considerably is the immense menagerie of deities that appears to occupy pride of place in its devotional practices. In no other system of devotional belief does such a large number of gods and goddesses arise. The Vedas are generally cited as the scriptural authority for the existence of all these deities, and the usual explanation attached to their origin is animistic in nature. That is to say, scholars suggest that the early Aryans, like most other nomadic tribes of the time, worshiped natural objects and phenomena as a means to derive predictive power and control over them.

Unfortunately, while this interpretation may possibly be correct as an explanation for the historio-cultural origin of Indian deities, it fails to take into account the subsequent development of the pantheistic monism that underlies Vedanta. Modern day Hindus, therefore, are left facing a piquant predicament: they must reconcile the existence of millions of gods and demons in their religious culture with the triune Unity of Sat-Chit-Ananda that is proclaimed to be the ultimate origin of all that exists. Since the latter concept arises at a later date and appears to be more comprehensive in its understanding of reality, the question Hindus have to answer is, `In what context do we understand our vast array of deities without appearing to be fruitcakes?' Given the unspoken stigma attached to polytheism in Semitic traditions, it may be mildly socially beneficial also to understand the philosophical roots of the polytheism of our culture.

My exegesis here begins from and draws centrally upon an examination of the last two tristubhs of the Nasadiya Sukta (quoted above). The rishi who has composed this hymn suggests that it is not feasible to ask the question `What came before creation?', since the very possibility of fragmented sentience arose after it had come into being. Crucially, the phrase, `The gods are later than this world's production' is best understood by empathizing with the pantheistic solipsism of this rishi's mind - the entire universe is considered here to arise, and to have no existence other than, as a thought of the underlying Creator. I suggest that the `gods' referenced in this phrase can best be understood as occupying the same metaphysical universe as Platonic ideals.

What, you ask me, are Platonic ideals? Platonic Idealism is the school of philosophy that emerges from Plato's theory of Forms. Here, Plato suggests that there exists a realm of ideas that has absolute reality. The reality the human mind perceives is a consequence of the human consciousness' projection of ideal objects into the observer's perception. Thus, when an observer imagines/draws/sees a `circle', he is merely instantiating the Platonic ideal `circle' in his own consciousness. The observer's perception of a `rock' is simply an imperfect reflection of the ideal `rock'. Should you, gentle reader, choose to, at this point, yawn and exclaim, `Boring!', I urge you to consider that Platonic Idealism is the only philosophical theory that justifies the existence of pure mathematics. In the mathematical realm, this is isomorphic to the statement, `Mathematics is discovered, not created'. Similarly, empirical science relies largely on the belief in the existence of an objectively evaluable set of `truths', a philosophical view that draws largely from the thought of Pythagoras and Plato. Thus, if you are a 21st century scientist or mathematician, Platonic Idealism is what brings you your grant funding. Do not scoff at it!

It is tempting for me to take a detour into the subsequent evolution of Neoplatonism through Plotinus' understanding of Plato, but that is too delicious a subject for me to refer to in passing. Suffice it to say that Neoplatonism is the Greek advaita, leading to mystic movements such as Gnosticism and indirectly, Sufism. Having described Platonic idealism and established that it is not a metaphysical premise to be taken lightly, let us continue with our examination of Hindu gods as inhabitants of Plato's world of Ideas.

I will not dwell upon trying to prove this hypothesis, primarily because there is no empirical evidence that I can provide that would be deemed sufficient. Had the possibility of finding correspondences between the deities of Indian mythology and abstract concepts in Western philology enthused me, I might have taken up the challenge. However, our hypothesis does not claim such a correspondence, it claims that these entities belong to the same metaphysical `class' of entities. Thus, our hypothesis suggests that while there may not exist a deity of gravitation in the Indian ethos, the physicist's conception of a `law' of gravity is metaphysically equivalent to belief in the existence of a deity. Conversely, while there is no unanimity among Western philosophers over the existence of qualia, the Indian conception of a deity of sensual desire is essentially a universalized formulation of the corresponding quale. Since there is no objective way of analyzing whether people actually `feel equivalently' about an entity, there is no objective way for me to prove this hypothesis. Readers will have to use their own subjective understanding deployed upon subjective anecdotal evidence to verify this (ignoring, if they can, the empiricists' anguished screams of horror).

If we grant this hypothesis validity, the statement, `The gods are later than this world's production. Who knows then whence it came into being?' makes perfect sense. All it is saying is that all representational structures (ideas) arose after the origin of the Cosmos. None of them, therefore, can be projected into individual consciousness to perceive the Cosmos as it was before these ideas came into existence. There is a much deeper story here and has to do with the manner in which the universe comes into existence, but that must await another day to be told. (Yes, I know about Planck time. As I said, I do not wish to bring it up here and treat it partially.)

`Are our esteemed deities simply triangles and trees then?', the perplexed Hindu might ask. The answer is an unqualified `Yes', much as it might upset some cultural and aesthetic sensibilities. What about all the gods and deities that appear in visions to devotees and instruct them in all kinds of activities? Auto-suggestion and self-hypnosis. Christian mystics have seen Jesus, Sufis never see anybody, Pastafarians claim to be touched by `His' noodly appendages (how dare you mock our faith!). Are there separate departments in the supernatural world for every religious group's mystics? Or is it simpler to understand that extreme devotional fervor causes the devotee's consciousness to instantiate objects of affection and devotion with increased realism?

This does not, of course, mean that gods are not real. In fact, this proves that they are. Is a circle real? Is loneliness real? Long after you and I are dead, children will still be drawing circles with compasses. So long as consciousness remains in the Universe, there will be loneliness also. In Plato's vision, the world of the gods was absolutely real; human reality was merely a persistent illusion. In the Vedantic tradition, neither the world of ideas, nor the world of projected images is absolutely real, but since they are all projections of the thought of Sat-Chit-Ananda, they are not unreal either.

`That which is awake in those that sleep is a God seeking to realize Itself in Itself'

Thus, we arrive at an understanding that Hindu gods and deities are simply representations of ideas - that is the entire span of their ontology, no more, no less. Does that mean that the `concept' Ganesha has no more social value than the concept `runny nose'? Not necessarily. There must also be addressed the question of the value of the associated mythology.

One may think of Indian deities and their associated mythologies as art composed over centuries of civilization. Like all good poetry, they draw upon the life experiences of many. Like all good music, it is those fragments of it which speaks of happy endings and tenets of moral behavior that are passed on down the ages over fire-lit evenings of communal revelry. In the process of transmission over generations, they thus attract and become repositories of cultural universals. With the invention of writing, fluid adaptive oral transmission was replaced by frozen written replicas that survived for generations. The poetry became ossified in the spirit of the Middle Ages and is now a relic of those days. Hence it is anachronistic now, and is justly held to be thus by all rational people.

We can see though that Ganesha has more social value than a runny nose, simply because more people find Ganesha to be relevant than runny noses (when they don't have a cold, that is). Ganesha is a cultural artifact that binds a people together in the knowledge of a shared heritage, an extremely valuable object for the stability and integrity of a community. Does the concept of Ganesha, which holds value for a small section of the world's population, have as much value as more universal entities like abstract mathematics and van Gogh's sadness? Probably not. In the case of the specific example below, almost certainly not! While we must be careful not to trivialize the importance of religious tokens, efforts to exaggerate them must also be avoided.

In conclusion, I hope that those who find this conclusion meaningful will be able to understand Hindu rituals and mythology in a more rational and integral context. When a bald-headed priest offers up incantations to an elephant-headed deity, it is possible to see ignorance and superstition. It is also possible, at that moment, to think of the Platonic ideal that deity seeks to project (in this case, `new beginnings') and the cultural detritus the deity's cultural identity tows in its wake and to find value in that reminder.

The Divinity Equation

2008-12-27T13:03:00.011-06:00

Thanks to the vagaries of the Indian educational system, I believe I encountered recurring decimals a few chapters before I encountered fractions at the tender age of six. I distinctly recall the fact that I thought the teacher had a screw loose, since the concept of an infinite sequence of numbers seemed to make absolutely no sense to me. How, I argued, would 0.9999.... be any different from 1? You can't tell them apart, since if you try to, you have subtracted at a finite decimal position of the former, which should be impossible. Of course, by the time we'd gotten to fractions, I had forgotten all about the question. It was nearly ten years later that I came across the idea that

0.9999... = 1

and sad to relate, disbelieved it and had to be shown the proof. Since then, it has become an important part of my repertoire of math problems which I set teenagers in order to provoke some philosophical thought (much to the chagrin of their protective mothers, who would rather I kept my loopy ideas to myself).

The pathless land

Even though I have known the equation for a long time, it was not until very recently that its metaphysical connotations struck me. When they did, I realized that this equation can be used not just as a tool to get children thinking about mathematical infinity, but also adults about the concept of spiritual and existential infinity. This essay constitutes a brief exposition of the latter. Note that I'm not claiming any epistemological truth behind the equation, I am simply using its interpretation as a metaphor to clarify some aspects of the spiritual quest.

As the yogi delves deeper and deeper into the labyrinths of his mind, he receives (or appears to receive) deep clarifying insights into the nature of reality and his own existence. At times, this occurs as a blinding flash of comprehension and awareness followed by a gradual dissipation of the initial certitude of discovery once reason examines it and finds it irrational. At other times, the insight obtained is a rational understanding of previously unexplained insights, in which case, there is a greater sense of achievement, since the insight obtained is communicable. However, the yogi finds that as he goes deeper, the insights keep subsuming themselves, reaching eventually a stage where even the insights of reason seem to lose their certitude, since they appear to be simply statements made at a shallow plane of understanding when viewed retrospectively.

The same applies to the sense of Bliss and Joy the yogi obtains as part of his spiritual practice. Even as he finds deep and fulfilling bliss at a particular stage of his practice and decides that perpetuating this particular state of Being through every waking moment is the ultimate goal of his practice, a few short months later, he attains an even deeper sense of Bliss that makes the previous experience appear epi-phenomenal and ephemeral in retrospect. The continual subsumption of one's own deepest realizations appears thus, to be an important characteristic of internal inquiry.

Somewhat recursively, this particular insight in my own case has caused me to appreciate the significance of what I have called the Divinity Equation. It is conceivable that further practice will make me feel disinclined to speak of it, since the realization that at the moment appears to me to have some value will then appear to be quite trivial. The reason this particular insight seems non-trivial and communicable at the moment is that it appears to connect the normal consensual plane of human existence with the more esoteric ones I tend to deal with these days, and hence may have some value to others besides myself. I must , therefore, speak of it now before greater wisdom and/or laziness cause me to hold my tongue (and pen).

Metaphysics of the Divinity Equation

The desire to seek experiences and feelings beyond one's current state of awareness is the essential definition of spirituality. Lighting incense sticks, chanting, praying, meditating etc are activities that boost spiritual awareness through inward perception. Falling in love, climbing mountains, working professionally in a team, even drunken revelry are activities that boost spiritual awareness through outward perception. At different stages, however, practitioners realize that the goal they seek is too far away to meaningfully achieve and direct their motivations towards less idealistic goals. The motivation towards deeper spiritual awareness can then, with some anthropomorphism of the concept, be summarized by the slogan `God/Spirit/Meaning is near/realizable', while the existential angst, moral relativism and spiritual apathy that results from diminution in awareness is best summarized by the slogan `God/spirit/meaning is dead/unrealizable'.

The Divinity Equation serves to place both these perceptions of the role of Spirit into perspective. 1, the Godhead, is infinitely far away from 0.9999, the aspirant at his 4th (or nth) level of understanding, if one chooses to count the number of steps of understanding one requires to attain identity with the Godhead. This view reflects existential sorrow and relativism in endeavor (`Spiritualism is a sham/cul-de-sac. Life has no meaning'). 1, the Godhead is infinitesimally close to 0.9999, the aspirant at his 4th (or nth) level of understanding, if one chooses to measure the extent to which one has approximated identity when compared to random existence, e.g. 0.5731. This view reflects faith, often anthropomorphized for cultural and historical reasons (`We are made in the image of Divinity/God. We must try to get closer still.'). Depending on one's perspective of reality and one's own place in it, the Divinity Equation can be used to show that God is both Near and Far.

Everyone is a yogi

Both these paradigms arise in every person's life, and are often intertwined. The young lady standing on the edge of the ocean looking into infinity feels the twinge of tears tug at her eyes, and she doesn't know why. It is the tug of the (n + 1)th 9, pulling her on into the vast progression of deeper and deeper insights that would draw her inexorably closer to Unity. The rock-climber perched precariously on a ledge in the Sierras, looking out upon the view beyond the craggy rock face feels the enormity of existence pour down upon him as a thrill of Life and vitality flows through his body. It is the thrill of the (n + 1)th 9, the flow of a purer current of Life than his body-mind has heretofore known, shredding the canopy of his current existential narrative with the promise of the ever-elusive `beyond'.

Think of a rock concert - thousands of bodies swaying in unison, thousands of minds letting go of their social inhibitions in one vast sea of supercharged rage and libido, the urgent spirit of Youth. Think of devotees chanting in an ashram, a shaman leading an incantation, scientists at a conference, all those brief flashes of social collaboration where the individual vanishes into the throb of the social creature that it has birthed. In each and every one of these instances, if there arises a sense of wonder and awe, it is that (n + 1)th 9 worming its way into the hearts of men, thrilling them with the promise of deeper understanding and a greater freedom than they have ever known.

And since all of us have felt that thrill, since all of us have felt that ennobling flash of intuition that makes life, if for one instant, worth living, we are all, in the deepest and truest meaning of the word, yogis. When one looks at oneself and sees 0.9999, there may arise, depending on one's perspective, a deep sense of unease and inadequacy. The solution, the Tao, the path of Raja Yoga, as far as the equation is concerned, is to merely pay attention to those little dots at the end. One of my heroes, Vivekananda, once said, `Not a sheep, but a lion thou art. Stand up and roar.'. Translated into the metaphor of the Divinity Equation, this should read, `Not 0.9999, but 0.9999... thou art. Stand up and recurse.'

When the music stops

The yogi who knows he is 0.9999..., ever growing, ever evolving, ever seeking after the next elusive 9 in all that he does, is already where he is trying to go, he is already the Divinity that he is trying to become, though he doesn't know it. Unfortunately, as soon as he stops to contemplate what he has accomplished, he is going to run into trouble. We have already talked about the two perspectives that accompany an awareness of the finitude of one's awareness. It then seems natural to presume that the yogi who stops to count how many 9s he has subsumed so far is going to end up doing one of two things (a) realize that he is never going to get where is he is trying to go, become depressed, get married and watch TV or (b) find that he is much farther along than the stupid ordinary mortals he is around, grow a beard and begin pontificating and sermonizing.

The former, the sense of inadequacy, loneliness and apathy, is best described by the statement, `0.9999999 is as many levels of understanding far away from 1 as 0.99. Why bother growing? Why bother learning?' It is something the vast majority of humanity believe in their darker hours, some perpetually. Gazing into infinity, in such cases, creates a sense of loss and existential meaninglessness that few can honestly stand. Thus, the young lady gazing at the sea breaks her reverie by transmuting her desire to see infinity into the desire to be close to her soulmate and lover, subsequently transmuted by practical circumstance into calling up her current boyfriend on her cellphone. The young man climbing and gazing at the view transmutes his desire to lose himself into infinity into the desire to take a picture and move on, further transmuted eventually into a desire to put the picture up on his web album to demonstrate his virility and fitness to his peers. The concert-goers, full of the vigor of life transmute their desire to climb the crescendo of music up into infinity into a desire to head-bang, anon into a desire to climb up over their fellow concert-goers and shout loudly.

The latter view, the egotism, is best described by the statement, `0.9999 is better than 0.99', something a preacher might tell his parishioners, or an ecological conservationist might tell an oil-rig worker. The urge to proselytize and impose one's own understanding of reality on others occupies a significant proportion of the conceptual space of most spiritual movements in the world and, in my opinion, is one of the principal causes for the low opinion that rationalists and bright people everywhere hold of spiritual practitioners in general.

The Divinity Equation expresses the irrationality of proselytism and arrogance of understanding very well. 0.9999 believes he is closer to the Truth than all the foolish and superficial 0.99s he sees milling about. `Why won't you open your hearts to the Spirit and let it transform your lives? And why don't you give us some of your money so we can help you do so?', he piously clamors. Viewed from his perspective, he is absoutely right. 0.9999 is closer to 1 than 0.99. However, 0.99 believes that while he himself is really far away from 1, he also sees that 0.9999 is not much closer either. He, therefore, sees little point in listening to what 0.9999 has to say, since the latter's aggressive pronouncements come not from infinity but from the 4th decimal place.

The first of these two errors, the `just 0.9999' error, is the denial of the agnostic materialist, who looks at infinity, then averts his eyes and insists that all those who do not do the same are foolish and irrational, since however large a sequence of 9s they may subsume, they will still be infinitely far away from true understanding.

The second of these errors, the `look at me, I'm 0.9999' error, is the egotism of the spiritualist. The egotism of the spiritually advanced practitioner leads him to impose his view of the world on others, a process that has the advantage of benefiting several 0.99s who may employ 0.9999's advice to reach 0.999, but which has also the disadvantage of trapping 0.9999 at 0.9999, since he has defined and promulgated his view of the world at his existing level of awareness as the Truth and now cannot easily subsume it further without adopting either secrecy or hypocrisy (or both).

However, not realizing the infinity inherent in the Divinity Equation need not necessarily cause one of either disillusionment or delusion. The ability to perceive clearly the beauty of being `just 0.9999', the ability to silently accept the pain of being afloat on a little boat amidst an infinite ocean, is the causal source of all that humans create in the external world that lasts beyond them. It is what drives the tender ballet of copulation, the emotional agony of musical composition and the existential sadness of great literary creation. While there are some who equate artistic and creative endeavor with spiritual awareness, it should be clear from this exposition that while the first arises from a clear and courageous perception of what `is', the latter subsumes the former in arising from a clear and courageous perception of what is and what may yet be. Spiritual awareness will often manifest itself creatively, yet not all creativity will necessarily be spiritual.

The error of advaita

There is one final erroneous perception of Divinity that we can explain using the Divinity Equation. It is the denial of the ascetic, a subtle error in that it is equivalent to the statement `look at me, I know I am just 0.9999....'. This, while obviously an accurate understanding of the infinity of perception involved in the process of spiritual practice, partakes of both the errors we have discussed earlier. From the denial of the materialist, it takes the concept `just' and from the egotism of the spiritualist, it takes the concept `look at me'.

The advaitin claims that reality is illusory and that what truly exists is definitionally unknowable, unthinkable and unspeakable. He further claims, implicitly, that knowing this is equivalent to supreme understanding. It is difficult to pin down the error in this solipsistic denial of the necessity for inquiry beyond a functional understanding of the Divinity Equation using just the equation itself. Therefore, I must introduce the additional metaphysical statement that knowing that there is an infinite sequence of 9s in the chain that connects the aspirant to the Godhead is not equivalent to following that chain of understanding all the way up.

Building upon this latter view, at every level of awareness, when the thought arises, `This is what is', there must and does eventually follow a realization, `But this is not all that is'. This realization primes the quest for the next level of awareness. The `neti, neti' solipsism that follows from advaita would throw away the understanding `This is what is' as soon as it arises using the premise that it will eventually be refuted (with no understanding of how it will be refuted). The crux of the argument here is that unless the negation of the premise is allowed to arise naturally as a consequence of the aspirant's experience of reality, there will be no motivation to proceed further along the sequence, and the aspirant's level of understanding will remain fixed at its existing level, tied down by the metaphysical assumptions of advaita.

Thus, while knowing that there is an infinite hierarchy of understanding is an important part of the spiritual quest, it is also necessary to experientially climb this hierarchy in order to approach a deeper understanding of the true nature of the awareness that sustains reality. While losing sight of the mountaintop can cause climbers to either lose hope and slide down discouraged or set up tent and pontificate where they are, to claim that one can see where the top of the mountain is and hence need not climb up also appears somewhat unfruitful and is, in a nutshell, the error of advaita.

To conclude, from a simple children's exercise in conceiving and understanding mathematical infinity, we have drawn parallels to some of the metaphysical and spiritual issues that occasionally arise in our personal existence as we seek to assign probabilities to the infinite sample space of our understanding. I hope that it may prove to have had some value, if only as a source of amusement.

The Heart of Shiva

2008-12-13T08:51:00.020-06:00

My deep and obsessive fascination with Shiva began as a young child, as the mythology of Shiva addressed the archetype I have always identified with most: the primal ascetic. As psychological growth led me to a more rational understanding of reality, I came to understand Shiva as a primitive archetype corresponding to entropy - hence the appellative mahakala. Shiva came to represent to me the arrow of time, the creative as well as destructive dimension of space-time. Cosmologically speaking, Creation then corresponds metaphorically with the Dance of Shiva, where at every level of complexity, beauty and salience are supported by comparatively large quanta of random permutations at lower levels. Much of my scientific motivation and interest in information-theoretic aspects of physics and biology stems from this metaphysical lemma.

A breakthrough in my understanding of both Shiva and reality was set in motion by my chancing upon an interesting definition of Shiva about nine months ago. Shiva, in some Vedantic tradition the name of which escapes my memory now (UPDATE: Its originally drawn from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad), is defined as `that which is not'.

Shiva is defined as that which is not.

This thought, while innocuously koan-like in its statement, led to much thought and meditation for me, culminating in a post-rational cathartic experience this summer. It has led me very deep into questions concerning the relationship between the Physical and the Spiritual worlds, the one characterized by the passage of Time and the other by the increase in fullness of Joy. It has also brought together the intellectual and Sufi strands of my thought into a rather interesting synthesis of understanding, where Shiva is now the source of the undifferentiated Consciousness that, in turn, is the source of all reality. Not to put too fine a point to it, I now believe that the story of existence can best be told as being a meditative thought in the heart-mind of Shiva. All insights that we obtain into Nature and our internal selves are reflections of the heart-mind of Shiva; the very possibility of comprehensibility arises only because that which comprehends (awareness) is an instantiation of the heart-mind of Shiva.

I raise these autobiographical details to provide context for what follows here. The Shiva Rudrashtakam is a piece composed by Tulsi Das, one of the greatest and least respected intellectual giants of the Indian Middle Ages. It is written in Sanskrit and contains eight couplets in praise of Shiva. I must confess that my Shaivite tendencies caused me to be rather dismissive of Tulsi Das and his typically Vaishnava (dualistic) compositions when I was younger. The Rudrashtakam changed my views. In the course of eight couplets, Tulsi gradually traverses the philosophical spectrum from definitive non-duality to definitive duality in a shockingly elegant manner.

Here, I translate the Rudrashtakam from a completely non-dualistic viewpoint, thereby thwarting, in a sense, Tulsi's noble intent. I contend, however, that it is of some value to regard the Rudrashtakam as a non-dualistic characterization of the nature of Shiva rather than as an explanation of the essential unity of the dualistic and non-dualistic understandings of Shiva. While the latter is more intellectually salient and deep, the former is more emotionally charged and potent as a meditative aid.

Lastly, I am sure some grammarians might take offense at what they might consider liberties I have taken with the language in my translation and metaphysical innovations that I have sought fit to introduce. I therefore emphasize that this is a subjective translation by a scientist in the 21st century, not an objective one by a Vedic scholar. Without further ado, let us delve into it. Most lines are translated individually, making two notes per couplet. The seventh couplet is translated in one place.

Shiva Rudrashtakam

namami shami shana nirvana rupam vibhum vyapakam brahma veda swarupam

We sing of Consciousness: the ontological fundament of the physical Universe, the contemplation of whose nature is the source of inexhaustible Joy. We sing of that which is all-powerful for those who meditate upon energy (latent motion), all-encompassing for those who meditate upon motion (activated energy) and the primal cause for those who meditate upon causation (source of motion-energy).

nijam nirgunam nirvikalpam niriham chidakasha makasha vasam bhajeham

We know that to be Shiva which is the devourer of the interior perception; that which is beyond categories, beyond qualities, beyond causality and differentiation. We know that to be Shiva which is the devourer of the exterior perception, the deconstructor of all narratives of external reality, who exists beyond the physical universe.

nirakaramonkara moolam turiyam gira gyana gotitamisham girisham

We know that to be Shiva that is formless yet forms the substrate for all levels of Consciousness, the generator of Turiya, undifferentiated Consciousness. We know that to be Shiva that transcends all these levels, beyond individuated comprehension.

karalam mahakala kalam kripalam gunagara samsara param natoham

Shiva is that which unfolds both the involution and evolution of the Universe. Shiva exists beyond the realm of physical reality.

tusharadri samkasha gauram gambheeram manobhuta koti prabha shri shariraram

Shiva manifests in external awareness as the perilous, blinding radiance of the mightiest snow covered mountains. Shiva manifests in internal awareness as a formless form verily defined by the reflections of countless rays of light.

sphuranmauli kallolini charu ganga lasaddhalabalendu kanthe bhujanga

From the creativity of Shiva springs the sustenance of all that lives. From the will of Shiva spring all mysteries and death.

chalat kundalam bhru sunetram vishalam prasannanam nilakantham dayalam

All archetypes of physical beauty stem from Shiva, all aestheticism is but the comparison of the percept of the object to the percept of Shiva. All archetypes of morality stem from Shiva, all virtues are judged relative to the anthropomorphized nature of Shiva.

mrigadhisha charmambaram mundamalam priyam shankaram sarvanatham bhajami

All asceticism finds its root in Shiva, all practices of yoga and meditation stem from the desire to perceive Shiva. We sing, therefore, of Shiva, the universally beloved.

prachandam prakrashtham pragalbham paresham akhandam ajam bhanukoti prakasham

The ferocity of storms, the luminosity of stars, the indivisibility of unity are all pale reflections of the potency of Shiva. Shiva sows the Seed for all of Creation, and appears in the perception of all that is created as the brilliance of a billion suns.

trayah shool nirmoolanam shool panim bhajeham bhavani patim bhavagamyam

The thought of Shiva heals suffering through alienation from the Source in the physical, subtle and causal realms. The thought of Shiva is accessible only when thought of the self dissipates through the arousal of Divine Love.

kalatita kalyana kalpanta kari sadasajjananda data purari

The thought of Shiva suspends awareness of Time, it generates deep insights and transformative catharses. The thought of Shiva always rejoices those who seek it sincerely.

chidananda sandoha mohapahari prasida prasida prabho manmathari

The interior representation of Shiva takes the form of supreme awareness and bliss, dispelling delusion. Therefore, we sing and embrace the thought of Shiva.

na yavad umanath padarvindam bhajantiha loke pare va naranam

na tavatsukham shanti santapa nasham prasida prabho sarva bhutadhivasam

A fascination with external categories and causalities associated with them inevitably leads to uncertainty, alienation and unhappiness which manifest themselves as deleterious transactions with the external environment. We sing and remain mindful of Consciousness that moves all thoughts and action so that they may always remain useful.

na janami yogam japam naiva pujam natoham sada sarvada shambhu tubhyam

Self-awareness requires no denominational practices or rituals. The only requirement is a continual and persistent mindfulness of the interior representations of Shiva.

jara janma dukhaugha tatapyamanam prabho pahi apannamamisha shambhu

It is miraculous that finite instantiations of the Infinite can hope to merge with it. We sing, therefore, in the hope of perceiving the heart of Shiva.

Thus concludes the Rudrashtakam, a metaphorical device that always helps me in my meditation and mood. As a matter of fact, during a period of ecstasy in summer, I recorded a musical version that continues to give me joy every time I listen to it. Among other things, it reminds me of the paltry few coins that I earned busking with this in my repertoire at the Vondelpark in Amsterdam.

My very own bildungsroman

2008-11-22T02:31:00.008-06:00

Most young writers write at least one bildungsroman before they are out of their early twenties. Some, like Salinger and Hesse, hardly ever write anything else. I have often berated myself for not having done so while I was younger. I fear my meditative practice has subdued my existential angst and questions to a great degree. At the same time, my completely solitary existence has removed my mind from social contexts, making it difficult for me to frame my ideas in the form of narratives involving people. For these two reasons, I think I am now too old to be able to write `coming of age' literature.

I am happy to say, however, that, apart from poems and songs bemoaning my meaningless existence, I did write something of substantial length as a fiery and vacuous 22 year old: a three act play. While some of the metaphysics in it appears tacky now and some of the pop culture references gratuitous and pathetic, I am convinced that I could not have painted a better picture of the artist as a young man. Reading it three years after it was written, I find it quite unbelievable that I managed to weave in such a large number of events that occurred in the lives of my friends and myself in such a short piece of writing. Unfortunately, this means that several of my readers will find it hard to appreciate many of the parochial references and inside jokes - this is unabashedly a play written by a student of IIT Madras, for his college peers resident in the Godavari Hostel and with several people he knew at the time as his characters. For the same reason, the language is deliberately stilted and `Indian-pidginized' at times to capture and transmit the memory of times and places that have meant much to me.

Finally, and rather interestingly, I wrote this play over a period of two days, having been motivated by special circumstances. These special circumstances were as follows: there was this girl at my college an year my junior who had a sibling pact with me. To her mind, I was supposed to be to her what the Glass Man is supposed to be to Amelie. Her heart was set (for a brief period of time) upon a good-looking young lad in her own batch, among whose many virtues modesty and diffidence played a prominent role. This was intolerable to young Amelie and caused her to shed frustrated tears in my bosom one fine day.

Being a man of action, I determined to bring them together in an elegant manner. Since the kid in question lived in the same dormitory as I and was enthusiastic about theater, I resolved that I would have my dormitory put up a play in the annual IIT intramural competition that would allow me to cast the two young people as intensely passionate lovers. Having decided this, I apprised young Amelie of my intentions and she went away on her tippy-toes strewing roses out of her hat. The question of finding a good script, however, was to cause me some trouble. I could not think of a good idea, so I resolved to write one myself. Hence, this play emerged as an act of almost complete altruism (mixed with a small element of the desire to show off) from the practical point of view.

With one last point of order, I give you `Maskless at the masquerade'. The point is as follows: when I had written this play, the characters were all drawn from people that I actually knew, with their actual names. To preserve their privacy, I have changed their names here (except Fudu who has the coolest part anyway, and some of my old druggie friends who probably won't care one way or the other). I am rather inclined to give young Amelie's identity away as well as repayment for her asinine behavior a couple of months ago in Vienna. However, since she has given me to understand that her mother keeps trying to look up her daughter on Google in order to assure herself that the apple of her eye is acquitting herself the way all nice `Tam Brahm' girls should, I will desist.

Maskless at the masquerade

Cast

Siddhartha

Dad

Mom

Nerdy stereotype – Qumran Saleem

Lover (male) – Kevin

Lover (female) - Amelie

Pushy stereotype – Shikhar Fonsore

Cool stereotype – Gautam N Asokan `Fudu'

Faceless person

ACT I

(Scene – a typical urban sitting room – sofa set back center, chairs symmetrical up front. Discovered seated – Mom and Dad. Dad is impatiently leafing through a newspaper, Mom is sitting sullenly agitated. The atmosphere is one of an uneasy ceasefire)

Mom: How can you be so phlegmatic about this? Siddhu’s absolutely stopped studying and all you can do is sit and read about random acts of parliament.

Dad: It’s a lot better than having to think about that boy and all HIS acting, for one. (looks up to wall clock) It’s 7 already, and he still isn’t back from his basketball. (Harrumphs impatiently and resumes reading)

Mom: But, don’t you think he’s having some emotional problems, you know, like the ones that psychologist was talking about on NDTV the other day.

Dad: Emotional problems forsooth! What kind of emotional problems, may I ask? Girls? With a face like his, do you suppose a girl would look at him twice? The boy is plain lazy. Spoilt and lazy! If only I had been firmer with him when he was younger …

(Enter Siddhartha stage left, dribbling basketball, gauges the scene, stops anticipating a harangue. Dad dips back into his paper)

Mom: Didn’t I tell you to be back by 6, Siddhu? You know study time is from 6 to 10, don’t you?

(Sid makes an elaborate grimace, then sits on the chair left front and closes his eyes)

Mom: Don’t be insolent, Siddhartha. You know your father and I have been worried about your studies. How can we feel reassured when you spend all your time playing and roaming around town?

Dad: See that, this girl’s got 96.8 in CBSE …. No! No! That photo down there in the corner. Can you think of the kind of competition this generation has to deal with? It beats me. Of course, some geniuses don’t have to concern themselves with that at all, you know? They will loaf about reading novels and playing stupid computer games and marks will take care of themselves.

Mom: Are you listening, Siddhu? Your batchmates have all matured and are taking their work seriously. Your father and I think it’s high time you did the same. These four or five years are going to decide the course of your life, son. You can’t expect to close your eyes and make that reality go away, can you?

Answer me Siddhartha, your father and I have been asking you this since you were in 9^th class. How are you going to get into IIT if you persist in studying just two hours a day and associating with all the under-achievers in your class?

Oh, I know a way to loosen the strong, silent types … yes I do!

(Goes over and pulls his ear)

Siddhartha: Ouch! Oh yeah! I’ll show you …

(Grabs her around the waist and playfully shoves her on to the sofa)

No Ma! Seriously! Can’t we move on from this subject ever? You said it yourself; you’ve been on it for the last four years. Aren’t you ever tired of it?

Mom: I am tired of you acting like a kid, Siddhu. You have to grow up and start acting your age. In five years, you will be …

Siddhartha: Yes I know … a grown man, contributing member of society, responsibilities, duties, income tax returns, blah. Let’s change the subject, Ma.

Dad: How long are you going to keep changing the subject, son? You have to grow up and take charge of your life, haven’t you? Do you imagine you’re going to have us to take care of your needs all the time?

Siddhartha: So what would you rather have me do, Dad? Become a door-to-door salesman peddling soap to start earning my own keep and stop burdening you with having to pay for my food?

Mom: Siddhu! Don’t you dare talk to your father like that. All we want to know is what you plan to do with your life, son. That isn’t a very great imposition, is it?

Siddhartha: But this is so ridiculous, Ma. On the one hand you people want me to grow up and be independent. On the other, you are asking me to seek YOUR approval for what I want to do. Don’t you see how you are contradicting yourself?

Mom: A glib tongue doesn’t put food on the table, son. You can mock us and call us old-fashioned if you like. But don’t forget where our old-fashioned hard work got us.

Dad: Your grandfather was a clerk making 60 rupees a month. And with those 60 rupees he gave me and your uncle an education. And I can never remember ever asking him for anything. You hear me? Those were the days when a youngster would never dream of answering back or staring insolently at elders, as seems to have become the fashion these days. Ah! But I bore you, I am so very sorry. Go ahead inside; your video game must await you eagerly seeing that the two of you are seldom apart.

Mom: Why don’t you show Siddhu that advertisement about that Brilliant Test Series? I am sure it’s a good thing. Have you heard of this before, Siddhu?

Siddhartha: Um … actually Ma, I think I ought to tell you people now. I don’t want to go to IIT. I am thinking of stopping studying for it.

(Stunned silence, Dad puts paper down and then takes it up again)

I’m serious. I don’t see why I should waste my time trying to get something just because it’s hard to get. I don’t know what engineering is. I wouldn’t know a worm gear from a hole in the ground. I simply can’t see what the whole hullabaloo about getting into engineering is about.

Mom: Well? Aren’t you going to say something?

Dad: Who me? Say something? Is there anything left for me to say? Is there anything new in what he says? “Thinking of stopping studying”? When was the last time anyone saw this boy study?

Yes, I understand you perfectly, Siddhu. You and all your generation are a bunch of spoilt brats. We have given you all the comforts of life without your having to make any of the sacrifices we had to make. You people don’t understand the value of money, of discipline, of hard work, of anything except your desire for instant gratification.

Very well, Siddhartha. You know how we are bound to provide for you, and that knowledge makes you arrogant. Go ahead and do as you please. Life teaches everyone, my son. She’ll teach you too. Mark my words.

(Exit Dad stage right)

Mom: Don’t mind your Dad, Siddhu. He’s been tense these days over that Reliance portfolio. But you know, you really shouldn’t scare us like that. What else would you do if you didn’t do engineering? You dropped Bio after 10^th, didn’t you?

Siddhartha: I am thinking of joining the merchant navy or the NDA

Mom: What’s that? The merchant navy? My son sweeping up decks on luxury cruises and pimping for the tourists? Siddhartha, your father is right; you are incorrigible and lazy and a disgrace to the family.

(Flurried exit Mom stage right)

The merchant navy – what are youngsters coming to these days ……

(Enter Qumran stage left)

Qumran: Hey Siddhartha, there’s a quiz at Landmark tomorrow. I’ve been looking for partners. You want to come?

Sid: No man! I am in the dog-house here. I can’t go out more than once this week now and I have a ball-game on Saturday.

Qumran: Oh, never mind then. By the way, are you done with my GEB yet?

Sid: It’s more a journey than a destination, I guess. Nah, just kidding; I’ll give it back to you by the weekend. See you later.

(Enter Kevin stage left, exit Qumran stage left)

Sid: Kevin my man! Come along in and bring the roses back to my cheeks. What is my favorite beatnik up to these days?

Kevin: You know what Sid? The one thing I absolutely loathe about people who drink? They have no taste for refinement. I was reading ‘Catcher’ the other day and my bro came in from some birthday party or the other. And I tried talking to him about it and he started calling Salinger all kinds of names. Blah!

Sid: You were reading Salinger? What was this, about the hundred and seventeenth time?

Kevin: How can you keep count of Salinger’s books, Sid? They are more than literature. They are Truth, with a capital T.

Sid: You should go talk to Amelie. She says the same thing about Ayn Rand.

(Pretends cleaning his tongue)

Blah! I took that intellectual prostitute’s accursed name again.

Kevin: I’m with you on that, people who like Ayn Rand ought to be lined up against walls and shot. Er …. Do you know what Amelie is up to, by the way?

Sid: Ha ha ha! This is so pathetic. Why don’t you tell her you love her, you poor little dweeb? How come the wells of your eloquence dry up as soon as she shows up?

Kevin: Who me? Amelie is a rag, a bone and a hank of hair. Whatever put that idea in your head? And wipe that silly grin off your face.

What? What are you implying? Oh God! You’ve been talking to Keerthi. I’ll murder that empty-headed flibbertigibbet, if it’s the last thing I do.

Sid: Relax man! Where’s the fire? Now, why don’t you tell me about it?

Kevin: It’s all lies, man! How could you ever imagine such a ridiculous idea?

Sid: Well, I must confess I wouldn’t have considered it very likely, but I think we needn’t go into proving the thing any more. Look at yourself dude, you’re positively blushing. If you start fluttering your lashes now, I just might end up kissing you!

(Enter Shikhar stage left, excitedly)

Shikhar: Sid! Kevin! Ah, this is my lucky day. I wanted to talk to both of you.

Sid: Hey man Fonsore. Have you heard the latest about our man Kevin?

Kevin: For the love of God and the fear of my fist, Sid …

Shikhar: Whatever, whatever. You know what they’re doing at Landmark this year?

Sid: Er… selling books, as always?

Kevin: I think he means the quiz. It’s tomorrow right?

Sid: You’ve never quizzed in your life Fonsore, why do you want to start now?

Shikhar: Because, my dear morons, this year they’re giving out certificates of merit to all the participants, not just the finalists.

Sid: So?

Shikhar: So you get a certificate of merit from Landmark for just putting in an appearance, talk about manna dropping from heaven.

Sid: I’ll pass

Kevin: Yeah, me too. Fonsore, did anyone ever tell you what a huge phony you are?

Shikhar: Yeah well, tell you what Kevin, I’ll take being me over reading soppy books and writing god-awful stream of consciousness blog posts angling for ego-massaging comments on blogspot any day. See you guys, got to run.

(Exit Shikhar stage left)

Kevin: What on earth was that supposed to mean? You dig, Sid?

(Enter Fudu stage left)

Fudu: Oh man! I’ve never been this embarrassed in my life, you guys. I swear I’m never going to a play with my Mum ever again.

Kevin: Let me guess, she dragged you to an uber-feminist club and made you watch something loosely based on Fountainhead, did she? You want us to witness your will?

Fudu: No man, it was this stupid slapstick comedy with all kinds of explicit sex jokes.

Sid: Oh mama!

Fudu: Jeez man. And not some subtle double entendre stuff you can pretend to not understand. It was stuff like, “Chinese men have small penis. Ha ha ha”.

Kevin: Brilliant. What did you do?

Fudu: I don’t know man, it was so embarrassing. I am sure she knew I understood everything that was going on. What was I supposed to do?

(Enter faceless person stage left)

FP: Excuse me, could you help me get where I want to go?

Kevin: First left, third right, look for a sign reading something I have no clue about.

FP: Thank you.

(Exit faceless person stage left)

Sid: Yeah man, that happens all the time when we have the TV on. I’ll be watching something on Discovery like a good boy and suddenly they’ll start talking about pheromones and intercourse and sexuality and all that jazz and I won’t know which way to look.

(Lights fade)

Kevin: All hail the mighty remote control.

Fudu: I swear man; I always wish people came with ON/OFF buttons.

END OF ACT I

ACT II

(Scene – Siddhartha’s college room. He is lying in bed reading a novel. Enter Qumran stage left, carrying a large piece of thermocol and a razor blade)

Qumran: Hey Sid! What’s up with you? Mind if I work in your room for a bit? LED is playing loud rock music next door to my room; I can’t concentrate on what I’m doing.

(Sits down and starts paring away the thermocol carefully)

Siddhartha: What are you doing, Saleem?

Qumran: It’s a very interesting thing you know, I drew up the blue-print last week. In a nutshell, I have to reduce the size of this thermocol piece by a factor of four, while retaining all its essential functions.

Sid: Er … What exactly are its essential functions?

Qumran: Well, imagine if you could talk to people and do all your email and surf the web and watch TV and porno movies all on a device no larger than your fist, what would you be like?

Sid: A rather myopic and perverse couch potato with a hyperactive thumb, I would suppose. So is this supposed to be a PDA?

Qumran: The very latest thing. And if I can pull off this particular miniaturization procedure, I am sure I’ll get a patent for it, at the very least.

Sid: I don’t know man. What’s the point of having a Personal Digital Assistant if you end up never wanting to do anything?

Qumran: Eh?

Sid: I mean, you need an assistant when you’re running out of time, right? What you are trying to do is to give people more time, right? You’re trying to make things work faster; you’re trying to make lives move faster. But what are you going to do with the time you save?

Qumran: Simple! I’ll miniaturize the PDA further, and further, till you get nano-PDAs that fit into your body cells and interact with each other and the old human dream of telepathy and telekinesis will be realized. Have you no romance, Sid?

Sid: Well, the way I see it, the only thing all these little ringing things we’ve started carrying around has done is devalue the ideals of conversation and intimacy. What happens when everyone has a cell phone and can talk to everyone else for free?

(Enter Fudu stage left)

Oh hi Fudu, what’s up man?

No man Qumran, the only difference your little toys are making is that they are helping people fool themselves into satisfied complacency better and quicker.

Fudu: Oh boy, has he gone on one of his anti-cell phone tirades again? Relax Sid; we know you’ve had a traumatic long-distance relationship. But you can’t get all of us to go back to making cave-paintings, can you?

Qumran: Exactly! We have to keep moving, we have to keep evolving.

Sid: You think a little box that plays Beethoven and Bach atrociously and distracts you at all the wrong times and places you at the service of every Tom, Dick and Harry every second of your life represents progress?

Fudu: Ok, Sid. Breathe! Face it; you are in cell phone withdrawal. Just don’t talk about it.

Qumran: I suppose that should do for now. I’ll catch you guys later, men. And Fudu is right, you know. Maybe you should join one of those ‘Art of Living with a cell phone and stress ulcers’ classes. I joined one last week so I can chat with my project guide.

Fudu: Why on earth would anyone want to associate with a project guide outside class?

Qumran: That’s how it works, I am told. Vijay who went to UIUC last year told me he did that and ‘put Sundays’ and got a ripping recommendation.

Sid: What’s he mean by ‘put Sundays’?

Abo! Qumran, you idiot! He must have said, ‘put fundaes’, you ass. He meant he went and sucked up to him.

Qumran: OOOH!

Ok, it’s not that funny, you guys. Yeah, fine, laugh all you will. I’m off. See you later.

(Exit Qumran stage left)

Fudu: Man! This beats everything. Actually, you know what, Sid. I think Qumran is onto something good here. My project guide goes to a yoga class. I think I’ll go and join him. At the least, he won’t razz me as badly if he remembers that we squirt water through the nose and do other weird stuff together.

Sid: Yeah right! I’ll go check if mine is into Russian ballet or tap-dancing, I guess. Man, I hate this recommendation hypocrisy on campus. I feel like talking to professors because they seem like interesting people and then stop myself, thinking they’ll think I’m angling for a reco. It’s positively sickening!

Fudu: Well, what if they think you’re angling for recos? You know you aren’t, right?

Sid: Yeah, but I’d hate to be thought of as a sycophant.

Fudu: Ok, whatever man. You’re the one who says he doesn’t care for what other people say, not me. Your trouble, Sid, is that you think too much. Try being superficial, like me.

Which reminds me, you went and scored grass from that Poonamallee place last weekend, didn’t you? You have any left?

Sid: Nah! I just got it for these guys. They’re too worried about that new ACP guy who’s cracking down on marijuana dealers, so Nishant and I went and got it for them. You know I don’t do pot any more man, I told you.

Fudu: Correction – you don’t do any pot until someone in the wing scores any. You did smoke up with Haddi and Srinath last weekend, didn’t you?

Sid: The weekend before the last, and that was in that whole post-GRE unhappiness week, so that doesn’t count.

Fudu: Ok anyway, anyway, anyway … the point is, either do it and be happy about it, or don’t do it and don’t think about it. But don’t do it and then moon about how you shouldn’t be doing it.

Sid: Yeah, I guess you’re right. But bottom line, I’m not doing any tonight.

Fudu: Why not man? It gets you high, no?

Sid: Doh, don’t give me that initiation speech. I’m sure I figure higher on the Dean’s dope list than you after all the pot we did last semester. And I know it hurts the body and mind about as much as watching a stupid movie.

Fudu: There you go, you said it. I don’t get why people are so paranoid about marijuana, you know.

Oooh! Marijuana is a D-R-U-G. Marijuana is B-A-D. Everyone who smokes pot is a danger to society. Man, all these people should go read some Huxley and listen to some Floyd.

Sid: Fudu man, the point isn’t that dope is bad. The point is that dope is pointless.

Fudu: So what is it that has a point then?

Sid: I don’t know. That’s the one thing I want to know – what is the point? If I knew, I wouldn’t need to ask any more questions.

Fudu: So, since you aren’t sure you have a platform to stand on, you can’t really criticize my viewpoint, can you?

Sid: I don’t know about that. I think South Park put my theory in a nutshell when they get Stan to say, “The only bad thing about doing grass is that it makes you feel ok with being bored instead of trying to get rid of that boredom by learning stuff and being creative and all.” You remember that episode?

(Lights fade)

Fudu: Which one was it? Let me see …

Sid: My future self and me: sixth season I think.

Fudu: Oh, that, huh.

ACT II

SCENE TWO

(Scene – a bench in a park stage back center left, Sid is discovered lying on a mat under a tree with a book on his face, he appears to have nodded off)

(Enter Kevin stage left, he is dressed down and is reciting lines from the Rubaiyat)

Kevin: A book of verse beneath the bough

A loaf of bread, a flask of wine – and thou

Beside me singing in the wilderness

(Sid stirs, wakes up and watches the proceedings)

No, damn … she won’t like the reference to wine, and I hate drunks. And besides, they tell me her singing voice curdles milk. She’ll either think I’m being sarcastic, or she’ll get over-enthusiastic and end up singing ‘Hotel California’ and defiling my aesthetic sensibilities. Let’s think of something else … hmm, how does that Byron thing go?

She walks in beauty like the night

Of cloudless climes and starry skies

(Enter Amelie stage left; Kevin can’t see her for the nonce)

And all that’s good of dark or bright

Meet in her aspect and her nose

Oh heck! Why do I keep thinking about her nose?

Amelie: What about my nose?

Kevin: Oh not yours, I was thinking of Cyrano de Bergerac … no wait, I was thinking of …

Amelie: Doesn’t matter.

Kevin: But I was thinking of …

Amelie: Doesn’t matter.

Kevin: But…

Amelie: DOESN’T MATTER, you silly dolt!

(She sits beside him, he squirms and slides to the far side of the bench, then starts sidling closer)

And I have two assignments to submit tomorrow so I can’t stay too long. So, let’s talk.

Kevin: Oh yes, “A book of verse beneath the bough…”

Amelie: Kevin …

Kevin: Er, yes my love?

Amelie: Must you always say things you think I would like to hear? That is so very childish. Now, tell me how much you love me.

Kevin: I love you very much, my love

Amelie: Do you think I am very beautiful?

Kevin: Er, no my love.

Amelie: What! But yesterday you told me you thought I was the most beautiful woman in the world.

Kevin: Yes, but today is Saturday and our “Art of Living with a cell phone and ulcers” teacher has assigned Saturday as the “I shall not tell lies today” day.

Amelie: Ok, that settles it; I shall not see you on Saturdays as long as you stick to your stupid class.

Kevin: I’ll make up for it by telling you tonight all the things that are absolutely true, what say?

But you have to stop being angry with me.

Amelie: Aw, my poor little Kevin-kins. There there …

(They embrace)

Kevin: I don’t think there is anything left for me to say.

Amelie: Tell me this will last forever.

Kevin: Ok, this will last forever.

Amelie: Tell me we shall never be apart, except now when I have my 9.4 grade point average to look after and later when I shall be a high-powered executive running my own software company with no time for the family and a bunch of affairs.

Kevin: We shall never be apart, except now when you have your 9.4 grade point average and later when you shall have your own software company and have no time for the family.

Amelie: Ah Kevin, I am so lucky. I never thought I’d step out of school and find the perfect man for myself at the very first try. It seems almost pre-destined.

Kevin: I should think so. The first guy you ever saw in your life is, without a doubt, perfect for you. Just as you are perfect for me, though I can’t for the love of God figure out why.

Amelie: Ah! This is the relationship I’ve been looking for all my life. I can’t live without you and you can’t live without me. What an overpowering sense of security!

Ah yes! This is love, the one and only love, without a shadow of doubt. Take me into your arms, Kevin … But wait, it’s 10 already, Sweatha is going to be extremely red in the face if I don’t get back and do our assignment. I must run, Kevin-kins, good night.

(Exit Amelie stage left, Kevin sinks back on seat, waits a bit impatiently then scrabbles about for his cell phone)

Kevin: (over the phone) Yes, it’s me, I wanted to ask you, er … have you eaten something, my love? Oh, you have? Then … er… have you enough clean bed-sheets? Oh, you do? Then …er…er… (Coughs and wheezes) I think I have a fever; I’ll get myself to bed. What? Oh no, I’m fine. No, no, I don’t need any medicines. No, I’m not getting any. You’re going to bring some down to me? Oh well, if you must. I’m waiting.

(Exults, exits stage left, Sid gets up and looks after him)

Sid: As Puck would say, “Lord what fools these mortals be.” But why do I have a hard-on?

(Boisterous entry stage right – marching band with tom-toms, cutting capers, bringing up the rear is Shikhar Fonsore, fiddling about with a pencil on a writing pad)

Sid: Who? What? Where?

Shikhar: Oh, hi Sid old man, would you mind moving a little to the left, I want these guys to get their parts pat. Move it people.

(Band starts marching in an Escher knot, Fonsore keeps fiddling with pen and paper)

Sid: But … but, who are these guys? And what are you trying to do?

Shikhar: Oh them … they are QMS coordinators and I’m trying to get ISO certification for our marching act.

Sid: What the … what on earth is a QMS coordinator? And why in heaven’s name would you want to get certification for something you’re doing for yourself?

Shikhar: They do it every year anyway, don’t they? Makes sense to do it properly, right?

Sid: But you do it to give people a chance to untangle their own Escher knots, right? Why do you need to go to all this bother to have some arbitrary auditors to come in and stick a stamp on a piece of paper and give it to you?

Shikhar: It’s about credibility, Sid. We have to appear competent, or else.

Sid: Or else what? We don’t get sponsorship? We don’t get money to do stupid things like build paper bridges that melt in the rain and weird towers that can’t stand up for themselves?

Shikhar: Hey Sid, you think you’ve got it all figured out because you read Nietzsche and all those other constipated old fogies. But what I am doing here is where the real world is at. And you have to get real at some point or the other, my idealistic young friend.

Sid: Not if that reality comprises of getting other people’s approval for doing things neither I nor they care about.

(Enter faceless person stage right)

FP: Excuse me, could you help me get to where I want to go?

Shikhar: Second right, first left, look for a big tree and turn right again beyond it.

FP: Thank you.

(Exit FP stage left)

Shikhar: You just don’t get it do you, Sid? Here I am, trying hard to get Six Sigma going on the ground, and all you do is sit in your room and listen to Floyd and read Kant and criticize people who are trying to be somebody.

Sid: You do know that Floyd moved on from Six Sigma, don’t you? By the way, what is this famous thing? I’ve always wanted to know.

(Sits on bench)

Shikhar: Ah, now you’re talking. It’s a beautiful concept. The fundamental objective of the Six Sigma methodology is the implementation of a measurement-based strategy that focuses on process improvement and variation reduction through the application of Six Sigma improvement projects. This is accomplished through the use of two Six Sigma sub-methodologies: DMAIC and DMADV…

(Sid falls asleep, lights fade)

… Gives us a standard to judge scope for initializing optimization procedures, which help … (voice fades)

END OF ACT II

ACT III

(Scene – a metaphorical setting. Qumran is sitting at a desk covered with thick dusty books and esoteric paraphernalia back left. On top of his books, he has a lantern burning. Kevin is sitting on the floor, front center, with a whisky flask and scribbling in a tattered little notebook. Fonsore is sitting at a table right back talking on a very small piece of thermocol and using it to do a lot of things; he keeps mouthing instructions to a lot of imaginary people. Fudu is dressed like a dandy and is sitting at a dinner table back center, starting from the outside and working his way in. Siddhartha is discovered roaming around with a pillow in his hand, impatiently looking for a place to sleep)

Siddhartha: Can’t find no peace, can’t find no peace …

(Goes to Qumran)

What can I do, Qumran? I just can’t find anywhere to lay my head down and find peace. Tell me, what must I do? Where can I go?

Qumran: I told you before, didn’t I, Sid? Focus, focus is the key. Look at me now; I have spent 27 years of my life designing hetero-junction bipolar transistors. This is living, my friend.

Sid: So, you’ve basically spent your life tinkering around with little boxes that fit into bigger boxes and you’re content with that?

Qumran: It isn’t what you do that matters, Sid. It’s what you feel doing it. I work all the time, look at this lamp burning midnight oil. We are both partners in our lonely toil late into the hours of the night.

Sid: You could be right, Qumran. But, if to burn the midnight oil in the bright light of the day, to lock oneself up in a gloomy attic forever and never see the beauty of the world is happiness, then I fear happiness is not for me.

(Walks off, finds Kevin)

Kevin! What are you doing, you nut! What are you doing sitting here on the street like that? Ugh! Your breath reeks of whisky. When did you take this up?

Kevin! Talk to me, man. What’s happened to you?

Kevin: Eh! Oh, it’s you Sid? Nothing’s wrong, I’m just a little bird, see me fly. Tweet, tweet.

Sid: Get a grip on yourself, dude. You can’t be drunk in such a clichéd way, boy!

Kevin: Drunk! Who’s drunk? I’m in love, Sid, I’m in love.

Sid: Who is it now? Don’t tell me you’re still mooning over that fickle wench! I told you those Saturday night OAT movies would dish you.

Kevin: How does it matter, man? You know what I’ve realized? To be in love, you don’t need to like other people, you know. You need to hate yourself and despise yourself so you feel like looking for approval from others. I can’t begin to tell you how much in love I am Sid, because I hate myself so much.

(Pulls out flask and takes a long swig)

You want some?

Sid: I wish I could, Kevin. Nothing in the world makes sense anyway, so why not knock oneself senseless with this thing that burns and quenches. But this is just another way of fooling myself, another way of trying to cheat Life. I guess I have to keep looking, Kevin, though that burns me even more.

(Walks off to Fudu’s table)

Fudu, old friend, you’re the one who always had all the answers. Tell me now, what do I do?

Fudu: Whoa Sid! If this is another one of your stupid women sob stories, I don’t want to hear it.

Sid: No man, I’m serious. I just don’t know what to do about anything. Nothing in my life makes sense; I can’t take it any more.

Fudu: Fisk fork for the fish, meat fork for the meat, salad fork for the salad, you’ve got to learn to play the game, Sid. It’s pointless and hypocritical if you are bright enough, but there’s no getting away from it, dude. Face it.

Sid: So are you happy playing around with forks and spoons and making after-dinner toasts. Is that all you ever wanted to accomplish in your life? Is that the best you can do with that sharp mind of yours? Be a droopy, moldy little sinecure?

Fudu: Yeah, a happy, contented moldy little sinecure

Sid: I wish I could believe you, Fudu. But if I did, where would that leave us? Would that mean that everyone bright enough to realize how superficial the natural human plane of existence is should become a little wallflower that sits around and looks pretty, and leave it to the idiots to decide how humanity evolves and progresses?

Fudu: That’s just your ego speaking, Sid. If you ask me, humanity is old enough to take care of itself. Be a capitalist, Sid – if you take care of yourself at the micro level, the big picture will take care of itself.

Sid: I don’t see that happening.

Fudu: That’s because your conceit won’t allow you to believe that the world is going to survive and flourish without your unique contribution. It doesn’t matter what you do or I do, Sid. We’ll all just jump around, by ourselves or through hoops and then die. How does it matter?

Sid: Then why not just die?

Fudu: You’re going to anyway, right? Since that is one thing that is sure to come to you, I’d say it makes more sense to try those things that you’re not sure about.

Sid: You scare me, Fudu, you really do. Some people have to raise their hands to be counted; some people have to believe that they can make a difference.

Fudu: Right. Why does it have to be you?

Sid: That is a choice I make.

Fudu: Then you have to live with it. But if you really want to make a difference, you’ll have to believe something material really matters a lot to you, and I don’t see that happening, Sid. I don’t see that happening, man.

Sid: I don’t see anything happening, and I’m waiting for something to happen and tell me which way I ought to go. I’m not walking; I’m just sitting by the road, waiting for a guide to come by.

(Moves to Fonsore’s table)

Fonsore, you always had the most happening around you always. You always had the most ideas and energy. Talk to me, I’m confused. I can’t see how I can …

Shikhar: I’d love to talk, Sid, but, as you can see, time is money here, and I can never get enough of either. You can take an appointment if you want me to be your mentor, if you like.

Sid: My mentor, eh? Oh well, I don’t really see why not. Here …

Shikhar: Please be seated. Good afternoon, my dear sir. I can see that you have come here through your feeling of ineffectuality and low self-worth. You feel that you are inadequate in fulfilling your organizational role and this causes you extreme anguish. Fear not, with my patented method, “The four secrets of successful sycophantic promotion tactics”, you will get ahead in less than three weeks or else you get your money back. Now as you will no doubt have noticed …

Sid: Er, Fonsore …

Shikhar: That the corporate hierarchy has a very predictable bureaucratic structure …

Sid: Fonsore!

Shikhar: And it shall be our objective to study its strengths and weaknesses …

Sid: Fonsore!

Shikhar: …and … Ouch! What?

Sid: You’re missing the point.

Shikhar: No, no, as my pamphlet on “Successful Logic Obfuscation” conclusively proves, the man in the three piece suit and top hat is always right. You’re missing the point.

Sid: You don’t have a top hat, and I don’t feel inadequate in what I want to do. I don’t have a reason to do anything. Why should I?

Shikhar: Is that a trick question, or what? To get ahead, obviously.

Sid: Get ahead of what? Get ahead of whom?

Shikhar: Other people, of course.

Sid: So, essentially, if you were the only person in the whole world, or if you were cast on a desert island with a volleyball, you wouldn’t do anything at all? Does all that you do depend on what other people’s priorities are?

Shikhar: Ah, Sid, philosophy is a hard addiction to break. When I am the only person in the world, I’ll think about it. Till then, I live in a society, and I will keep trying to survive by being the fittest in whichever game they care to play.

Look at it this way. I do what people expect me to do and get ahead. You don’t do what people expect you to do, and take that medallion of iconoclasm and parade it about for all to see. Don’t you see that you’re just as dependent on other people as I am?

(Sid staggers to front center)

Sid: Yes! Yes, I see what you mean. No, no I don’t see what you mean. Where have I gone wrong? Have I not denied myself the simple pleasures of life? Have I not tried to live by my ideals and looked in every arcane literary nook and cranny for wisdom to fill my head up with? Have I not tried? Have I not sacrificed? Why can’t I find my answers?

Why can’t I feel happy? How can people just choose a mask for themselves and call it a face and live with a smile on it the whole of their lives?

(Moves to Qumran’s table and trashes it as he speaks)

How can a man spend his life cooped up with instruments and gadgets in a dingy room, finding the meaning of his life in long rows of numbers that come and go, finding the purpose of his life in tinkering with soulless chunks of metal?

(Moves to Fudu’s table, repeat performance)

How can a man live for no purpose other than blending in and going with the flow? How can a person not use his mind to do anything other than find pleasure in the present for himself until he has no present? How can people keep toying with forks and spoons all their lives and never know what food is like or for?

(Moves to Fonsore’s table, repeat performance)

How can bits of paper mean more to a man than his body and mind? How can little bits of plastic and sand spin a person faster and faster like a top or a marionette until he finally falls? Why would a man ration his daily quota of peace and happiness if he doesn’t know if he will live the next instant or not?

(Moves to Kevin who’s lying on his side with the flask in his hands)

How long can a man run from himself, drown his shadow in pools of alcohol? How can anyone tie himself up in chains of bondage from head to toe, and feel light of heart and easy of mind? How can love be so beautiful in the soul and so pathetic in the mind?

(Drops to his knees)

And if everyone else can live in peace with their miserable deluded selves and still find happiness, why not me? Oh God, why not me?

(Enter faceless person, stage left)

FP: Excuse me, could you please direct me to where I want to go?

Sid: Directions? He asks me for directions? How can I help you, my friend? I don’t even know which way is up or down.

FP: That’s quite alright. I don’t mind going anywhere you tell me to, just tell me.

Sid: Why would you want to go anywhere if you’d go anywhere I’d tell you to go to?

FP: I don’t want to go anywhere.

Sid: Well, why do you then?

FP: Well, one always has to be going somewhere, right?

Sid: But what of everything you must leave behind every time?

FP: One leaves behind what one possesses, once you’ve left yourself behind, who is left to possess?

Sid: What should I do?

FP: Just stop asking that question.

Sid: Why?

FP: Because, you are the only one who knows

(Lights fade)

Voice (off):

As every flower fades and as all youth

Departs, so life at every stage,

So every virtue, so our grasp of truth,

Blooms in its day and may not last forever.

Since life may summon us at every age

Be ready, heart, for parting, new endeavor,

Be ready bravely and without remorse

To find new light, that old ties cannot give.

In all beginnings dwells a magic force

for guarding us and helping us to live.

Serenely let us move to distant places

And let no sentiments of home detain us.

The Cosmic Spirit seeks not to restrain us

But lifts us stage by stage to wider spaces.

If we accept a home of our own making,

Familiar habit makes for indolence.

We must prepare for parting and leave-taking

Or else remain slaves of permanence.

Even the hour of our death may send

Us speeding on to fresh and newer spaces,

And life may summon us to newer races.

So be it, heart: bid farewell without end.

CURTAIN

Cycles of life

2008-11-06T13:38:00.007-06:00

(I write this primarily in order to rid myself of an intermittent fog of nihilistic thought that arises every time I contemplate the future in the context of my identification with present-day society and the human species. Unfailingly, I begin brooding and digging deeper and deeper into futorological writings, reading frenetically to seek out bright prospects in humanity's future to dispel the existential darkness of the moment. This tends to be a drain on my time as well as being a useless (in the traditional sense of the word) and addictive cycle of repetitive activity. I have resolved, therefore, to put my views on the matter down in print, in the hope that the process will either end my fretting, or at the least channel it into a tangible medium.)

As an avid reader of science fiction during my younger days, I have often remarked at the pedestrian nature of the concepts and gadgetry (though not the literary value) deployed in contemporary science fiction writing. As our understanding of the near impossibility of human extra-solar space travel has gradually consolidated, and as advances in scientific discoveries have declined in cultural significance, writers increasingly have to look to realms of fantasy or sociology to construct their story-lines. An unfortunate consequence of this shift is that the delighful art of peering into the future has been decoupled from artistic imagination and is now the domain of sober scientific speculation either through fitting curves to empirical evidence from the modern industrial period or through seeking predictive power in the present by devising sociological theories of history.

To me, either methodology appears to result in an unfortunate narrowing of focus. In the first case, the predictors tend to be stalwarts of the avant garde of technological innovation (Kurzweil, Joy, Moravec etc), who look upon evolution as a best-case scenario, i.e., they operate on the premise that once technology has been developed, nothing can stop it from being adopted. Their statistical analysis of 50 years of technological discovery leads them to believe that advances will continue to accelerate, leading, in the next few decades, to a situation where, depending on the degree of sanguinity of the predictor (a) scarcity and the need to work will have been eliminated or (b) humans will have been marginalized or exterminated. I suggest that these observers suffer from a sampling bias, i.e., they consider human history in the period before 1800 to have made no contribution to ensuing developments. This arises from the assumption that progress must be physically present and demonstrable to count. A second fallacy lies in the assumption that technological feasibility will inevitably cause adoption. A stark counterexample is the fate of the space program, which has seen no progress in the last three decades through the lack of social incentive. I feel that their predictions, while quite specific, are unlikely to be accurate, since they operate entirely using inductive reasoning and cannot account for feedback effects and other social variables. In the second case, that of sociological analyses, I feel that these observers suffer from the opposite problem, i.e., their models are not flexible enough to be able to make good predictions about the volatile period of human existence that we are living through. While observations regarding social disruption, anomie and commentaries on crime rates, urbanization etc are certainly apposite, these analyses do not have predictive power, since they are based entirely on analogous as opposed to inductive reasoning.

I title this essay `Cycles of life' because the basic thesis herein is a characterization of four stages of existential behavior in all systems that learn to make fewer errors in prediction based on their interactions with their environment. This framework, I then claim, presents a good description not just of an individual human's actions while in existence, but also those of a society's and lastly humanity's. I assign to these four phases of existence names assigned in the Indian Classical system of ashrams since the original system emerges as a special case of the more general model I propose. I first define the ashram framework and show characteristics of systems to which it will apply. Then, I examine the degrees to which it may be applied to entities that we recognize well - the liberal democratic Western culture, the scientific enterprise, less developed societies in other parts of the world, and finally humanity as a whole. By hypothesizing and providing evidence for a parallel between the existential trajectories of humans and societies it becomes possible to draw specific conclusions about the future of humanity in a heuristic and socially interpretable manner, as opposed to empirical methods which, as described above, make severe and dehumanizing assumptions about cultural homogeneity into the future. Furthermore, our mathematical formulation of the generative process affords our model the rigor and predictive ability that sociological approaches tend to lack.

A meta-comment before we begin: I am continually perplexed by what I formulate to myself as the 'dilemma of citation'. It is hard for me to keep track of the observations of technologists, social scientists and philosophers since my reading generally follows Brownian motion rather than a linear scholarly process. At the very outset, therefore, I disclaim all pretensions to originality and virtue in this work and apologize to those whose ideas I may appear to plagiarize throughout this exposition. Since I stand to gain nothing save some emotional satisfaction from the writing, I hereby consider myself to be ethically absolved.

The ashrams of Manu

The Manu Smriti is a Sanskrit text dated to the 2nd century B.C. that contains social commentaries and injunctions as preached (if not necessarily practiced) in India towards the end of the Maurya empire. It has attracted considerable controversy, since it defined and was used as spiritual sanction for the imposition of the infamous caste system. While post-colonially, it is possible to see that the practice was much caricatured by Western interpreters to increment the white man's putative burden, the fact remains that the Manu Smriti remains a controversial reference. Therefore, I wish to clarify that I borrow no ideology from the text, only some convenient nomenclature.

The Manu Smriti divides a man's life into four stages. The first, brahmacharya, is associated with the life of a student: minimal transactional involvement with society, exploratory expeditions and vocational and intellectual learning. The second, grihastha, is identified with the life of a man of the world: extreme transactional involvement, well-established social networks and relationships, sense of duty, responsibility and exaltation of the spirit of hard work. The third, vanaprastha, is identified with the lifestyle of a wanderer: great freedom of movement, lowered sense of transactional responsibility, greater social egalitarianism, increased affinity for simplicity. The fourth stage is called sannyasa, the life of the renunciate, which reflects a complete end to transactional as well as social involvement and a gradual dispersal of the sense of identity, preparatory to its physical cessation. The hypothesis of this essay is that the existential evolution of humans - both as individuals and as communities - proceeds along these broad stages of development. I further claim that this process is characteristic of systems that 'live', for reasons that I discuss next.

To see how the four-fold trajectory is an extremely plausible mechanism for the evolution of living systems, it becomes necessary for us to conduct a gedankenexperiment motivated by computational learning theory. Consider a space of possible outcomes, each of which can affect an agent that chooses them positively or negatively. The manner (positive or negative) in which the agent is affected is governed by the agent's preference relation, which is essentially a collection of statements that the agent stores in its memory to allow it to make choices intelligently. For example, the preference relation 'if hair on fire, then effect of going to movies strongly negative' will allow an agent to choose wisely between going to the movies and finding a bucket of water. It is not known whether all agents are initialized with the same preference relation, but the question is moot, since at every instant in an agent's existence span, it makes choices which affect its preference relation. Thus, it is almost impossible to find two agents with the same preference relation.

Now, if an agent is to survive, it is necessary for it to learn to avoid negative outcomes, a process that is accomplished using both prior knowledge as well as experience of outcomes. The greatest ability for an agent is to be able to generalize, that is, find similarities and analogies between past outcomes with known results and future outcomes with unknown results in order to predict and thus avoid negative effects. Thus, it is not sufficient to merely remember past outcomes, the agent must summarize past experience in a manner informative about the future.

The scenario that I have described here is precisely the state of affairs in the theoretical field of machine learning, where the agents in question are learning algorithms. Substantial progress has been made in understanding the mechanisms of learning in the past decade, and the foundations of learning theory, at least in some simple concept spaces, are quite clear. In the thought experiment that I have constructed, a learning algorithm would behave in exactly the manner a rational individual would, except that its methods for finding similarities between outcomes would be completely statistical and correlational. How would its activity appear to an outside observer?

When initialized, it may or may not have some prior knowledge about the space of outcomes . In the former case (let us call it 'Bayesian Faith') the algorithm's prior knowledge may be inaccurate, in which case, it is going to get knocked around by a lot of negative outcomes until it amends its view of the space to be in conformity with what it observes. In case its prior knowledge is accurate, it will make fewer mistakes and will be relatively more successful than any of its peers so long as it exists in the limited subspace of outcomes for which it possesses strong prior knowledge. In the latter case, which we call 'Popperian Agnosticism', the algorithm will begin from a state of complete ignorance and learn from its mistakes incrementally. While it will take longer than Bayesian Faith in forming its preference relations, it will be able to explore a larger subspace of outcomes and will thereby generalize and predict better. The perpetual trade-off for learning algorithms is one between power and generalizability. Essentially, an algorithm can either choose to have great predictive ability over a set of outcomes that it has a strong hypothesis for, or it can choose to be able to represent all outcomes, but not necessarily be correct in its predictions about them, or be able to interpret and explain them to others.

We now come to the nub: consider a scenario where the space of outcomes can either not be determined by a single preference relation, or the complexity of this preference relation is outside the computational power of individual agents. In several cases, it has been seen that multiple weak learners, allowed to vote using their individual predictions using a simple or weighted majority scheme can learn preference relations well beyond the representational power of each one of them singly. This phenomenon is known in the machine learning community as 'boosting'. Extending our Devil's advocacy further, however, what if the preference relation is beyond the boosted collective learner just as well? Boost the boosters? Hierarchical boosting? It has been shown that such measures will have diminishing returns and that at some point, there will be no advantage gleaned from trying to improve and at that point, the best an algorithm will be able to do will be to make predictions as best it can, with occasional mistakes.

Without entering upon a semantic discussion, I suggest that it is not too outlandish to describe the first stage, where the agent learns using either prior knowledge or through expansive explorations of the space of outcomes as the brahmacharya phase of the agent's existence. Further, the second stage, where the agent (a) combines its preference relations with others in order to make better predictions and (b) uses its learned preference relation to make choices actively outside its domain of learned examples, can be called the grihastha phase of its existence without placing too superogatory an epistemological burden upon either concept.

Where our thought experiment departs from this well-known machine learning framework is in adding the additional constraint of self-preservation to the agents' behavior. Thus, while the unconstrained learning algorithm can settle down into a state of imperfect optimality and continue to function with its best possible preference relation, an algorithm constrained to self-preservation can no longer safely do so under all circumstances. Should the algorithm stop learning or reach an asymptote in performance, the number of mistakes it makes on subsequent decisions stops declining. Given enough time and outcome trials, the agent must necessarily die. Since perception of the viability of self-preservation can be thought of as a function of the magnitude of the agent's fitness, it is natural to see that the agent will have a pre-concept of this eventuality and must do something to ward it off.

At this stage, we must step out from the mathematical confines of learning theory into a more philosophical realm. Certain metaphors and intuitions, however, continue to hold. Assuming that the domain does not allow perfect certainty, the learning agent must either continue to improve its performance or attempt to reduce the number of trials it is making as a function of its life-span. The former case, as several mathematical results show, follows a law of diminishing returns unless the ideal preference relation is within the domain of the learner's capability. This does not exclude it from the possible range of an agent's options, it merely makes it a somewhat inefficient option. The other possibility is to gradually withdraw from the informational game that the space of outcomes plays with the learner, or, at the least, endeavor to do so. This will result in a stage where the agent, now in possession of the optimal hypothesis with respect to its preference relation, can choose to essentially 'play', make random learning excursions across the space of outcomes with little expectation of improvement. The decrease in the prospect of improving upon one's performance will cause a corresponding decrease in the transactional initiatives of the learner. Collective functions learned will gradually decline in value, yet not altogether so; the ones that improve performance significantly will be perpetuated. As a matter of fact, the possibility of sparsification in beneficial collective functions will make it likely that they will be preferred over individual functions learned, since it is in the agent's interests to minimize the number of transactions it makes. For example, if a boosted learner has 20 components and predicts the value of a particular subspace of outcomes with a precision that is almost entirely retained if only 15 components vote every time, effective scheduling will allow all 20 weak learners to make fewer decisions by sitting out rounds in a prescribed order. Again, and this is a major point of emphasis, we claim that this stage will correspond with the vanaprastha phase of the agent's existence.

The final phase, sannyasa, does not fit very well within the learning framework we have devised. Teleological considerations arise and affect the reasoning process (Why do the agents exist? Should the self-perceived cost of the death of an agent tend to zero or infinity as it comes to the end of its existence?) so that the connections to learning theory can no longer be effectively made. Statements made regarding this realm are almost certain to be tinged with ideology, and are hence avoided at this juncture. The only one that we will hazard is the suggestion that, free of philosophical positions, an agent with a mandate for self-preservation, operating under conditions that make its destruction imminent, can no longer derive any self-perceived benefit by operating logically. An open question remains as to whether it should persist in doing so, or attempt to make one of the two extra-logical operations feasible; sublimating either (a) its desire for self-preservation or (b) its perceptual and cognitive facilities that cause it to be affected by the consequences of outcomes. This stage, with its motivationally ambiguous characterization, we assert, may be identified with the sannyasa phase of an agent's existence.

The human condition

Psychiatrists, psychologists and various religious traditions have, at various times and with varying degrees of success, attempted to formulate cardinal principles for describing human behavior and motivations. The fact that all of these hypotheses, several of which are wildly divergent and some of which are quite definitely irrational, have met with substantial success in explaining aspects of human behavior (which is why they survive and flourish) leads one to believe that one compact and rigorous formulation might be as good (or bad) as the next. Here, we suggest that postulating humans as individual and collective agents in our learning experiment leads to a plausible and adequate description of the human condition. We further claim that instantiating these agents with representatives of various belief systems (religious, scientific, cultural) brings forth a large series of social phenomena in an emergent manner, leading us to believe that the isomorphism that we have discovered does actually characterize learning systems meaningfully. We now address each of these claims separately,

Humans as agents

If we posit that humans are primarily driven by the desire for self-preservation and that they do so by interacting with their environment and learning from examples of various outcomes that they encounter, we are claiming no more than a well-established scientific view of the functionality of humans. This part of the argument must, then, pass muster. The sequence of phases that we assigned to the operations of learning algorithms earlier are also claimed to apply here. It is possible, at this stage, to sink into a morass of semantic argument over the incompatibility of the ashram paradigm with some existing system of understanding the human personality. As I suggest above, it is not necessary for different explanatory frameworks to merge, if they make equivalent predictions and have equivalent explanatory power. Representational issues need not (and should not be allowed to) obstruct the flow of reason. Thus, if we are confident that the learning framework is internally consistent, and of the assumption that humans, like all living systems, interact with their environment based on what they learn, then we should be able to proceed further without seeking validation from existing literature. The ashram system was originally developed, as described earlier, to represent stages in human development. From the heuristic description inherent in their definition, it should not require a stretch of credulity to assign the corresponding four phases to humans operating in natural environments.

At this stage, we must make an important distinction. Specifically, the four phases represent behavior of an agent that is rational and more importantly self-aware. Thus, if an agent is oblivious to the existence of its desire for self-preservation, or learning from past negative outcomes, then its behavior will no longer match the expectations of the model. This statement is unfortunate , since it leaves us open to ideological ad hominem attacks (``So Mr Srivastava, not only are you presenting a new science for understanding humanity, you are giving us a new religion into the bargain!''). However, it does follow from the logic of the framework and hence, must be made. An exploration of how the four phases are manifest in people of different psychological persuasions and degrees of self-awareness is a fascinating exercise that I must leave here as an open problem, since discussing it in detail will draw us too far away from our primary arguments. Let me summarize, however, by stating that a framework of information-processing for self-preservation need not be rejected out of hand as a plausible mechanism for understanding human behavior.

Belief systems as agents

We now arrive at the raison d'etre for this essay - the case of the quibbling communities. Predictions about the future of humanity are chiefly predicated on the trajectory of evolution of society, since biological evolution has been rendered almost irrelevant by technological and social innovations. More descriptively, the mating fitness landscape of human existence is now governed predominantly by cultural as opposed to biological factors, which means that biological natural selection is not likely to play a significant role in the scheme of human affairs in times to come. Since memes rather than genes will determine the course of humanity, studies concerning the future of humanity are now dominated by predictions about the interplay between society and technology.

By using belief systems (or communities and/or identities defined based on belief systems) as agents in our learning framework, we recover a process that has, in recent years, been called 'creative destruction', when viewed from the economic paradigm of capitalism. Ideas emerge, if profitable, they are adopted very rapidly until the competitive advantage thereof is eliminated. Ideas that are obsolete are discarded, allowing a socio-economic `survival of the fittest' ecosystem to emerge. Furthermore, fitting the ashram system's four phases to the domain of belief systems can recover Kuhn's idea of progress through the shifting of paradigms. In our case, the traction an agent gains in the space of all agents may be measured by the number of transactions it consummates. As this number declines, the paradigm associated with the belief system the agent represents will gradually fade from view to be supplanted by newer ones.

Let us endeavor to describe the behavior of belief systems in terms of our learning framework. In the first phase, having been initialized with some prior preference relation, the agent will naturally seek to grow through interpreting and learning from social experiments that occur within its purview. The second phase emerges when the agent has reached a critical mass, whereupon it appears in the form of a community with fixed canons and traditions. This is the period when its social utility (measured using number of social transactions) reaches its apex. The third phase commences once the agent's predictive ability begins to reach an asymptote. The ashram intuition would suggest that it gradually decrease its social involvement and expend its existing momentum in exploring nooks and crannies in the edifice of its preference relation already established or in exploring schema of exploration it has heretofore rejected as non-canonical. The crucial element in understanding the subsequent evolution of the agent is in realizing that there is no fixed trajectory that it must necessarily follow. Whereas in the first two phases, a Cartesian detached view of the fitness of the preference relation (with relatively little self-examination) was sufficient for teleological guidance, such objective clarity is no longer optimal behavior for an agent in the vanaprastha phase.

Notice further that, whereas it is not hard to develop an intuition regarding the first two phases of the activities of this class of agent, it is much harder to assess the normative probabilities of its behavior in the third phase. I suggest that this fact is strong corroborative evidence for the assertion that the belief system that we are most familiar with - modern society - is currently at a transition period between the grihastha and vanaprastha phases. Our collective consciousness has not experienced and accepted the vanaprastha phase, rendering the wells of intuition dry in this regard. This is where the abstract theoretical framework I have proposed will assist us in making principled arguments regarding the future, assuming ideal rational behavior on the part of all participants.

The world turns fifty-five

It is perhaps presumptive for one who is less than half that age to assess the existential circumstances and motivations of a fifty-five year old human agent that has successfully navigated its local information domain. Unfortunately, that is precisely what I must now do, thankfully in very general terms. He has developed a strong and well-generalized preference relation and is associated with several boosted communities of agents with varying degrees of commitment. He is likely to be past his prime in terms of economic and intellectual productivity, but will retain much power and influence in the relevant communities nevertheless by virtue of his past performance. Beyond this point, he has several options, all relatively tranquil and all involving a gradual unwinding of his material transactions and a withdrawal into introspective, playful and abstract activities.

Based on the learning hypothesis, I postulate that, among others, the belief system of natural materialism has arrived at a congruent existential state. This, I further claim, manifests itself primarily through the rise to prominence of the law of diminishing returns in two essential domains (a) the social benefit of scientific inquiry and (b) the social benefit of economic productivity. From the description of the vanaprastha phase of the learning framework, it follows ineluctably that the corresponding belief systems will decline in social utility as they enter this stage of existence. Let us now briefly examine each of the two subsidiary claims in light of the physical evidence.

The first claim - decline in the social benefit of scientific inquiry - is bound to ruffle feathers if analyzed deductively. I will, therefore, merely present an empirical argument and pass lightly on. It is a widely held view that economic pricing is a good approximation of social utility in the limit of efficient markets and freely transferable resources. Assuming this to be true (or partially true), let us view the following scenario objectively: the Clay Mathematical Institute has offered a prize of $1 million each for the solution of seven of the most significant mathematical problems extant. These include the recently proved Poincare Conjecture, the metaphysically profound P=NP problem, the incredibly deep Riemann hypothesis and the fiendishly intractable Navier-Stokes analysis. Each one of these, of itself, addresses a foundational issue in our understanding of the physical world and the models we use to describe it. Realize, however, that a mathematician who, by dint of genius and labor, solves all of them and expands the frontiers of our knowledge by an unimaginable quantum would win a purse of $7 million in all (We ignore for the moment, any economic benefit he may derive by assuming that the level of mathematical abstraction required to solve these problems would render the mathematician incapable of functioning very efficiently where his economic self-interest is concerned). Realize further, that the newborn offspring of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were paid twice this amount ($14 million) for the privilege of publishing their first photographs. Without wishing to pontificate in any way, we merely observe that a society that prices its social transactions in such a manner demonstrates a rather low probability of setting great store by scientific inquiry!

We turn now to the second claim - decline in the social benefit of economic productivity. This is a subject of intense debate in the current political climate, where environmental sustainability concerns are finally being allowed a hearing after nearly a century of suppression in favor of capitalistic fervor and economies of scale. The lack of correlation of income with happiness beyond a threshold value and the high happiness rates in some countries with low per capita income are observations that have been made and commented upon by several authors far more erudite than I. I will merely state, therefore, that the claim has significant support from a broad spectrum of empirical evidence, social activism and environmental sustainability theories. In point of fact, with the vicissitudes of the financial markets of the world in the past year or so, mainstream acceptance of the implausibility of sustaining economic growth is growing and alternative philosophies of consumption and living are being examined with wider interest than ever before. The realization that it is important to treat non-renewable natural materials as capital instead of resource has presented much cause for deliberation in public policy in the Western world in recent years. It is not that the circumstances that the modern economy faces are unforeseen and unpredictable, it is simply that the theories that explain economic behavior in such conditions as have now emerged (globalization in an unequal world causing lop-sided supply-demand, decline in availability of natural materials) have not found traction in the past. In short, while there is nothing radically new in the idea that the world's economic models must change to adapt to the change in their environment, the change, in itself, is radical in terms of its consequences upon how people behave and the things that (should) motivate them. It is important to raise this distinction for the following reason: one of the chief responses of capitalistic thought to sustainability theories is the claim that they are proposing nothing new, equating value with originality. The assumption, which follows from the efficient market hypothesis, is that the theory would have been adopted earlier if it had any value. Since it has not, it need not. It is important, therefore, to point out that change in the economic environment represents a change in the space of outcomes, rendering the efficient markets argument and hence the appeal to tradition irrelevant. We thus conclude that there is substantial reason to believe that our second claim is correct.

Validating our two claims in turn suggests the validity of our primary claim, that the belief system of natural materialism, inasmuch as it has governed the manner of thinking of industrial society, is past its prime. Again, there is no originality in this claim, it has been made before and with great vigor by proponents of ecological, environmental, primitivistic and anarchistic points of view. Our contribution lies merely in showing that such behavior is entirely expected of all systems that grow through learning from responses to their environment, and that modern society falls firmly within this framework. Thus, appeals to the glorious future of humanity must be tempered with an acknowledgement of the reality of its ephemeral character compared with the length and time-scales of existence in general.

Just as it is difficult for adolescents to appreciate the existential worries that affect middle age, it is difficult for minds indoctrinated with heuristics designed for the grihastha phase of social existence to attach much value to vanaprastha ruminations. The pop psychology expression for this phenomenon is `mid-life crisis', a mismatch between the desire for continued social utility and an awareness of its diminishing prospects. At this stage, there are several methods of handling one's predicament. One used at times is denial: witness the perpetual quest for immortality, now occasionally modified and expressed as a desire for mind-uploading. Another, more common, is dispersal of identity; the understanding that those who will come later, whether in one's genetic progression or another's will experience and learn what oneself could not. The reasons for this strategy can be explored further in our framework, but are passed over here in the interests of the continued cogency of our main argument. A third attitude, and one seen more frequently in the contemplative cultures of the East than in the extroverted milieu of industrial society is that of explicit vanaprastha, a conscious gradual disengagement from social transactions. The first two mechanisms, while not explicitly vanaprastha in nature, eventually follow in its stead, or are countermanded by external factors and forced along in its general direction.

Conclusion

A large proportion of writing that deals with the future delves into action imperatives and eventually deteriorates into genteel ideological brinkmanship. In this essay we have scrupulously steered clear of imposing any ideological preferences upon the choices that belief systems have made in the past or will make in the future. The primitivist view expressed in support of the claim of diminishing returns on scientific and economic endeavor is an exception in this regard. We qualify its use with the argument that this is indeed a prominent view in the public policy debates of the moment, so notwithstanding its ultimate validity, it remains an accepted alternative point of view. Apart from this, I have tried to keep this exposition free of my own preference relations, in order to address the matter in as general a manner as possible.

The necessity of striving to do so is further accentuated by our conclusion that the belief systems that we have come to accept as normal are gradually transitioning, or are at a stage where there is no logical reason why they need not transition, into an ideologically ambiguous vanaprastha state of low social involvement. Recall again that this does not mean that their activity is diminishing, it means that the social utility of their activity is decreasing, causing society to seek out other paradigms of thought that affect to carry greater social utility. Since much of humanity's existence is now inextricably woven up in the fabric of the existing system, it is essential that a transition, should it occur (or be occurring), be made with a degree of awareness as to its antecedents and possible consequences. Since it is a difficult task to view the evolution of belief systems shorn of individual and collective preference relations, it becomes all the more important to develop a neutral abstract framework to facilitate discussions on such matters. Should my thesis pass muster, I feel that it will make it simpler to understand and interpret the existential choices faced by our unique and complex industrial social structure.

There are two important general conclusions that I draw from this exercise. One is the understanding that deciding the future course of action for humanity is as free and as constrained as the set of choices a hypothetical gentleman approaching his golden years faces. Almost all prospects which avoid needless conflict and stress are pleasant, but it is advisable to choose soon and choose wisely. This is not a particularly insightful observation on face value, but appears to negate the possibility of discovering moral imperatives in favor of any one futuristic paradigm. The second conclusion, if the ashram framework be considered to have some epistemological validity, lies in the observation that both extraverted (technology-driven) and intraverted (sustainability-driven) modes of progress hereon will eventually lead to an equivalent state of dispersal of human identity. While one side of the technology-simplicity argument traditionally derides the other's vision of Utopia as a world of 'soulless automata', the other responds in kind by equating the goal of the former to be the domestication of the human species by stamping out its spark of innovation. In either scenario, loss of identity, the sannyasa phase must necessarily ensue. The same argument can be made for almost every other futuristic scheme (eudaimonia, thought control, cybernetic society) within foresight at the moment. The only difference between all these paradigms, insofar as I can judge, lies in the degree of inward exploration and self-awareness that the respective belief systems will choose to motivate among their adherents. That is the question predictors of the future should be looking to resolve, with the awareness that multiple answers will, in material terms at least, eventually find the same solution.

An evening at False Kiva

2008-10-27T23:22:00.005-05:00

My old friend Pratyush and I spent a couple of evenings clambering around canyons in Utah. The trip was motivated somewhat suddenly and impetuously by the surreal landscape in the photo above, a panoramic view shot from a fiendishly inaccessible cave half-way up a fairly sheer cliff. We absolutely had to go there to see it for ourselves. We went, we saw, and we were wonder-struck. For those that doubt the authenticity of the image, the view was perhaps even more spectacular in person than it seems in the photo. The Universe continues to conspire to amuse, amaze and bemuse me.

Per aspera ad astra

(in our context, this means: over really rough roads to a really large number of stars)

Dropping down from a Utah sky
Thousands of shining
Pin-pricks of light below
Tracing in flights of geometry
Meaning into the desert rocks
`We shall overcome', they chant
In chorus

Playing cavemen in a lost eyrie
In a cleft unsought, untouched by Time
Billions of lamps fill an endless void
Silent. They have no stories to tell
The night resounds with their silent shrieking
`Forty-two', the stars are screaming
`Forty-two!'

Happy Birthday, John Galt

2008-10-02T07:58:00.007-05:00

Every year, at around this time, some Left-leaning intellectual stands up, strokes his beard and proclaims annoyingly, `Gandhi was right. Small is beautiful.' It has become somewhat passe, in recent memory, to take Gandhi's socio-economic views too seriously. Even as globalization putatively improves the standards of living of vast swathes of the erstwhile rural population, it would be a foolish voice indeed that would call out materialism in both its capitalistic and dialectic forms for the canard that Gandhi saw it to be. The mad preacher's birthday takes on special poignancy this year in the wake of the carnage underway in the world's financial system. This panic, we must remember, has been caused for no other reason than bankers refusing to trust other bankers because other bankers were not trusting them because the tangled web of lies called leverage was getting too big to keep tossing around. Workers keep working, factories keep churning, the sun keeps shining, but the wheels of capitalism seem to have gone off the rails, as they seem to do once every decade.

And nowhere is the scene more poignant than in my present adopted land, the glorious land of the free and the home of the brave, who go about bombing people's countries to smithereens anytime they get frightened by monsters under their bed. Familiar monsters too - oil supply, the currency of oil-trade, the cost of sustaining economic growth indefinitely or appearing to do so. The American entrepreneurs' faith in the strength of capitalism is almost touching to observe. As the days of Peak Oil - the irreversible decline in the supply of oil worldwide - come upon us, and as the economy of the country that uses a fourth of the oil in the world sputters, the brave thinkers exclaim, `In every crisis there is an opportunity. We will set up new sectors in our economy - renewable energy, CO2 sequestering, bio-chemo-physico-artistico-nano-technology. The American dream will simply take on a newer shape, as it has always done.' And yet, for all the bravado of the maintainers of the status quo of economic productivity, a refreshing breath of change is sweeping through this land, for while the plutocracy is ever a slave to its own interests here, there are large sections of the general public in the US that constitute without a doubt the most open-minded and intelligent of all the cultures in the world.

Hence, there is a deepening interest in building up economic systems based on survivability and sustainability rather than economies of scale. The organic farming movement may be considered a vanguard in disguise for this change. As the standard of living in the US has reached a gentle asymptote and begun declining over the past couple of decades, the advent of the internet economy has broken the old paradigm of the necessity for hierarchy in production. Intellectuals and forward-thinkers here are increasingly pondering the future and finding that it lies in sustainable semi-rural communities, with a minimum of industrial production and great administrative autonomy. And even as my fellow NRIs flock into this golden land, eager to print professional degrees, mint money and date blonde women, there is a gradual but perceptible shift one finds in the American ethos: away from the alienation of a professional middle class existence and towards a richer and more meaningful life premised on community and small-scale industry. As the internet destroys physical and cultural barriers in communication, and becomes a viable medium for dissemination of creative output, programmers, artists, journalists, authors , musicians etc. no longer need hierarchies to eke out a comfortable existence. The old assumptions do not hold any more in an era that is gradually progressing towards post-scarcity; government and industry are no longer needed to maintain peace. The world's citizens are finally growing into their potential for harmonious co-existence.

There was a village where two factions once put up a wall midway through, because the grand gentlemen who stood in front of them and called themselves `leaders' decided that they were especially and solely chosen by the Great Big Chestnut Tree to lead their followers (and no others!) to a glorious future. Once the wall was put up, both sides had to try to raise it higher to keep the other side from looking over to see what they were doing. So, they told some of the people who had been quietly minding their own business to stop minding their own business and take shifts in building up the wall. While one faction decided to do so by promising to give them a lot of things they did not need, the other one persuaded them by preaching to them the value of honest self-subservience and submissive labor at the behest of authority. The walls have risen higher, but we are now running out of bricks. And even as we do, the villagers are realizing the wisdom of what an old fool had told them long ago. That there is no real need to build walls, only fences for corn-fields and ditches for water. That professionalism is but a euphemism for slavery and that individual freedom and symbolic group identities are incompatible.

That Gandhi was right. That small is beautiful.

Menaka

2008-09-25T05:02:00.007-05:00

I see your form, O Tejaswini!
As a golden fawn sipping
From the stream of Life
That flows eternal
Through the Forest's heart

Ever I desire to pass lightly on
To see, smile and praise
The beauty of the Forest
That dances beneath
Your gently undulating feet

Yet all roads I take today lead me
Away from visions of eternity
In search of your shadow
An exquisite trap indeed
Spun with the very fabric of the Sun

Your face with its mantle of hair
Speaks of rain-laden clouds
Yet walking in the rain
Vainly I seek your face
In vain transports of longing

`Leave your arid cave, O sadhu!
Behold my graceful splendor
As I dance with my eyes
In youth's sunlight,
In deep and secret glades'

Menaka! Menaka! The Forest is aflame
In the throes of my passion
The winds of your beauty
Fan it to a mighty blaze
As it consumes all my tranquility

An exercise in brevity

2008-09-10T00:37:00.005-05:00

A rather prosy haiku, but an efficient way of storing a nice memory. I never use cameras, pestilential contraptions.

Geneva, midnight
Surreptitious skinny-dip
Damn Swiss police

Prem Paash

2008-09-03T16:06:00.012-05:00

My my, look at me go. Devanagari script thanks to this splendid applet.

प्रेम-पाश

ऐसे तो टकटकी लगा कर राह नहीं देखें हम तेरी
नहीं सोचते, याद न करते पूर्व प्रसंगों की हम बेड़ी
पर कुछ दिन दुष्वार जो लगते, पत्थर दिखती है जब मूरत
बहुत चाहने पर भी मिटती नहीं है मन से तेरी सूरत

विस्मयकारी वचन हैं तेरे, समझ-बूझ का नाम न जिनमें
मनो-बुद्धि-अहँकार को त्रप्ति पुनः पुनः मिलती पर उनमें
ब्रह्म-ज्ञान की आकाँक्षा में कहाँ तो पूजा-ध्यान करूं मैं
कहाँ तुझे प्रिय मान तेरी हठधर्मिता का गुणगान करूं मैं

मनः-स्थैर्य की महिमा ऐसी, नहीं विषम अवसाद हैं उठते
पर ऐसा नहीं झुरमुट यह कि प्रेम के सारे दीप ही बुझते
परिस्थितियाँ ऐसी कुछ बनतीं, देखते सारे देव हैं हँसते
अखंड-तपस् के उत्साही के मन में क्या-क्या स्वप्न हैं बसते

काम-रोग-आघात नहीं यह, नहीं कवि का दिवा-स्वप्न-रस
अग्नि-मार्ग पर चलने वालों का है कार्मिक असमंजस बस
कभी-कभी ही क्षीण है होती कल्प-माल के जाप की मेधा
ऐसे ही क्षण में उठती है सन्यासी के मन में दुविधा

प्रेम-पाश से मुक्ति कहाँ है, सर्वोपरि सी इसकी क्षमता
पर द्रढ़-निश्चय-प्रत्याहार पर नहीं है उसका सिक्का जमता
ज्ञानी वही जो ऐसी अपनी प्रेम-रुचि से नहीं है डरता
द्दंदों को आवर्णित कर इन कठिन क्षणों को पार है करता

Transliterated as:

Prem Pash

Aise to taktaki laga kar raah nahin dekhein hum teri
Nahin sochte, yaad na karte poorv prasango ki hum beri
Par kuchh din dushvar jo lagte, patthar dikhti hai jab murat
Bahut chahne par bhi mitti nahin hai man se teri soorat

Vismaykari vachan hain tere, samajh boojh ka naam na jinme
Mano buddhi ahamkara ko tripti punah punah par milti unme
Brahma gyan ki akanksha mein kahan to pooja path karoon main
Kahan tujhe priy maan teri hathdharmita ka gungaan karoon main

Manah sthairya ki mahima aisi, nahin visham avsad hain uthte
Par aisa nahi jhurmut yeh ki prem ke saare deep bhi bujhte
Paristhitiyan aisi kuchh banti, dekh ke saare dev hain haste
Akhand tapas ke utsaahi ke man me kya kya swapn hain baste

Kama rog aaghat nahin yeh, nahin kavi ka diwaswapn ras
Agni marga par chalne wale ka hai karmik asmanjas bas
Kabhi kabhi hi ksheen hai hoti kalpmal ke jaap ki medha
Aise hi kshan mein uthti hai sannyasi ke man mein duvidha

Prem paash se mukti kahan hai, sarvopari si uski kshamta
Par dridha nishchay pratyahara par nahin hai uska sikka jamta
Gyani wahi jo aisi apni prem ruchi se nahin hai darta
Chhandon ko aavaranit kar in kathin kshanon ko par hai karta

Maya

2008-08-19T18:35:00.007-05:00

Whither your artifice tonight, O temptress!
In the deepest hour of night I have risen
To find you sprawled in torpid slumber
Hogging the sheets, as always

Voluptuous you are, for that is your Form
Skilled are your limbs in all arts of Love
Numberless evenings of sorrow turn to nights of delight
As deeply I have felt you, caressing your name

Came I to your boudoir when scarce a youth
Bare chance had I of eluding your lure
Not much I knew of the ways of the world
Knowing you, I sought to grow in wisdom

Grown have I in virility and power and strength
Our nights should have been lurid beyond reason
Yet I wake upon a stone floor at midnight and write
While you nestle in the cushions of your plush divan

No more do I love you, well you know this
But not through egregious folly on your part
Beyond you there is no pleasure, well I know this
Since you alone hold the keys to the doors of my heart

But we've been through this before
I fleeing, you pursuing, ever complacent
For wherever I flee, I end up seeking you out
In different clothes perhaps, a shade younger no doubt

And in the passage of time, in the dark watches of night
All my new lovers metamorphose as I sleep
Back into you, as rivers into the ocean
For you are all I have loved, and will ever love

Jealous you have been of our pleasant young son
Moksha his name, curly rings in his hair
Ever does he smile, and is gracious with all
Long hours I spend meditating on his thought

Fear not, my queen, not your rival is he
Though my waking hours seem at times
To be but endless soliloquies in his praise
I seek not to know him as I have known you

It is not in my nature to bear him that love
Or seek to find pleasure in knowing him well
Calm are his thoughts; with simple truth they are blessed
Happily in his company much time do I spend

Yet he is a mere stripling, innocent and naive
And often I must walk roads, with or without you
That he is too young and blissful to see
Or understand if he saw them, as sometimes he does

I know there is pleasure yet that waits at my call
Nudging you awake for drowsy love best of all
As arbiter of passions, you have no rivals to fear
It is simply that beyond passion some silence I crave

I am a creature of the forest, the scents and the trees
I rise to see the sun, and hear the birds and the breeze
Long have your charms convinced me to be where you are
Amidst curtains of gold and petticoats of plenitude

But ever my thought strains to break loose
And travel along strange roads to the stars
To grow out of old familiar forms and shapes
And to span the universe from end to end

No longer will I flee, as one who feels pain
Yet leave I must, lest my spirit slowly wane
This house of my body holds all that I held dear
And must cherish a while longer, while I prepare

The purpose flight serves is to stumble and fall
Draw up new steps and draw in ragged breath
Take up tenancy in halls new and bright
Find you sleeping beside me as I wake up one night

So now, I bide my time as I work on my plan
To nourish mind and body, with the ego withdrawn
I will not take my leave, till you bid me depart
When you see that our roads lie irretrievably apart

A wooden staff I am shaping to walk with me then
A begging bowl for provender the Spirit may cast
I dream every night of the road under stars
A small, upright figure upon it, blissful at last.

Love, romance and the sadhaka

2008-08-17T00:39:00.016-05:00

I am sad today. Not sad in a bad way, mind you. Sad in a way, though, as I have not been in quite some time. My meditative practice is acquiring a desirable regularity to accompany the vigor that characterizes most things I do. My worldly affairs, insofar as they concern only me, are following a trajectory that should see most of my ambitions resolved and my questions unasked in a few more years. And now I find that the orientation of my spiritual axis mundi is not quite as perfect as I have been hoping it would be.

As children, before the discriminatory intellect becomes operational, we all acquire various desires through our dealings with physical and mental reality on a cost-benefit basis. These may be understood as individual voices in the symphony of one's existence. The purpose of the aspirant to self-realization is to gradually bring these voices to resolution in the appropriate tonic key. Thus, for example, there exists the voice of intellectual ambition which demands a certain level of dexterity in manipulating abstractions before it may be satiated. Similarly, there is the voice of social assimilation, which seeks a degree of parochial acclaim in various social contexts before it may be rendered quiescent. There are voices of envy, voices of hate, voices that plead and voices that resonate.

The greatest wisdom lies in not creating too many of these voices, so that shutting down the ones that exist may be accomplished facilely and at an early date, while the body and the mind of the sadhaka retain sufficient youth to be able to acquire the intense discipline and austerity that is required to walk the path of fire and light. However, once these voices have been created, attempting to ignore them, suppress them, or stamp them out inelegantly (resolving to the tonic too soon, for instance) will lead to instability of purpose which will manifest itself outwardly as hypocrisy and inconsistency. I think there is some reason to believe that intercession by the gurutattva might help matters somewhat, but I am not convinced that this is indeed the case.

Where this matter acquires a personal flavor for me is in the realization, which came to me yesterday, that one of the strongest voices in my own symphony of existence is the one that seeks to love a quiet, thoughtful and whimsical woman and have that love returned. It is moderately interesting to trace the source of this circumstance: a significantly passionate nature , exposure to all kinds of romantic literature as a child, growing up in a middle-class ethos far removed from any pretensions to detachment and spirituality, and strongly mutually affectionate parents.

However, this is not a happy situation for the humble sadhaka. As long as the music concerns oneself entirely, there is some measure of temporal control that the sadhaka believes he possesses in the evolution of his spiritual trajectory. But when a voice that forms part of the music, and a very strong and important one at that, requires the participation of another person, a seemingly insurmountable obstacle arises. It is hard enough to deal with the desires and motivations of one person and sublimate them. Add another cook to the mix, and the resulting broth does not seem to stand much of a chance of gastronomical success.

This obstacle is rendered even more intractable by various existing social mores that hold the relationship between a man and a woman - `love' for short - to be a desirable end in itself, and worthy of aspiration and preservation in perpetuity. It is difficult for me to empathize with this view. It is a set of subconscious urges that create the desire for love, not any intrinsic characteristics of the reality that is Brahman. It is disconcerting and somewhat nihilistic to espouse this view, since it just so happens that the very act of creation in humans correlates strongly with a manifestation of love, and the act of bearing children is premised entirely on the belief that the love is meaningful and will last as long as the bodies do. Nevertheless, realizing and understanding the epi-phenomenal nature of human aspirations motivated by love is a necessary component of a sadhaka's evolution.

Unless strong and sustained efforts at detachment are made in the aspirant's early childhood (which might be the case if the parents are puritanical, self-disciplined or religious in nature), these latent desires will exist and voice their dissatisfaction at the aspirant's continual efforts to disenfranchise them in the course of his mental and physical activity.

I have been feeling a mild sense of jubilation in the recent past through believing that I have finally acquired an appropriate level of control over my libido and have established myself in the practice of brahmacharya, which is so universally lauded as the foundation of spiritual attainment. And yet, it took little more than an unexpected dinner date, free-flowing intelligent conversation, the sight of ringlets of brown hair glistening in the sun, and some subsequent introspection for me to realize how deeply the song of love is embedded in my psyche, and how plaintive and yearning the current mood of its melody really is, notwithstanding my rather successful efforts to ignore it.

The yearning, I fear, is a consequence of the fact that I had the opportunity, some time ago, to resolve this melody, foolishly lost perspective and tried to perpetuate it meaninglessly, and ended up in a state of spiritual apathy and emotional agony as a result. Having replenished my spiritual reserves over the past year or so, I had consciously lost sight of this aspect of my personality, but am now confronted with this past spiritual failure of mine at a time when I feel that I am making substantial progress.

There can be no success in brahmacharya, while the desire for love remains unfulfilled. The physical desire may be controlled, perhaps even controlled in perpetuity, but it will not be extinguished save by great labor by persistently starving the subconscious mind by, in turn, shielding the conscious mind from stimuli that might set off thoughts of love. My sadness is in part a consequence of my realization of the long road that lies ahead, before the subconscious is completely purged, and the throbbing of Turiya is the only music that remains.

I shudder at the thought that the road to Silence of this identity might yet intersect with the karmic trajectory of another. I feel somewhat irritated, `Why must the road be so tortuous and loopy?' and I wonder at the strength of my commitment to the spiritual path, when such a strong desire for womanly affection burns untrammeled in the subconscious. Worse yet, I find that I am not categorically opposed to it. At this stage, I feel I have developed sufficient willpower to turn my mind away and retrieve my equanimity. That is indeed what I am doing in practice. Yet I see clearly that my repudiation of the desire for love is not as complete or honest as my repudiation of most other matters of worldly significance.

However, I take some consolation in the knowledge that the snake that is clearly perceived is a snake that may be safely dealt with, and I hope and pray that my desire for perceiving undifferentiated consciousness is as pure, intense and unalloyed as it appears to be when I don't have two bright gray eyes smiling at me across a table.

Kundalini Rising

2008-08-16T06:11:00.003-05:00

Body heat and sweat right after 25 km run, none
Resemblance of mental state with that right after waking, substantial.
Difference between physical world and dream world, negligible.

Perceptive ability for flowers and wind, intense
Perceptive ability for everything else, ambiguous
Thought, emotion and endorphins, absent

Tingling sensation in middle of back
Ringing noises in crown of head.
Sole burning desire, silence.

The necessity of solitude in meditation

2008-08-09T02:45:00.003-05:00

During the course of this summer, CWI having graciously provided me with spacious and commodious accommodation, I have been conducting an experiment of sorts on the effect of socializing on meditative practice. The problem is as follows: since the final state of meditative repose lies in a realization of the illusionary nature of physical and conceptual partitioning, and whereas progress in meditative awareness is measured quite accurately by the relative subjugation of the identifying principle - the Ego, there seems to be a logical inconsistency in requiring the aspirant to isolate his body and related appurtenances from the rest of perceived reality. The definition of solitude, in essence, seems rather arbitrary and ad hoc. Fundamentally, this problem arises as a consequence of a deeper question: what is the relationship between the Whole and the Individual. What is so special about the Individual? What properties of the Whole cause the Individual to exist in the Singular, not in the Dual, nor even in the Plural?

Philosophical answers to several of these statements appear to leap immediately to mind. However, today, I wish to collate the empirical evidence that my experiment has accumulated. We may be able to discuss their implications in the context of the metaphysical a priori answers that tradition and logic tend to present. A brief word regarding the methodology: being in possession of an apartment with a double bed and a spacious living room, I have, for the past month and a half, offered my living space freely to any and all travelers visiting Amsterdam and desiring to spend their hours of rest and leisure in less alien surroundings than the insides of hotels. My efforts are aided and abetted by a splendid social networking site called Couchsurfing which I joined a couple of years ago. Thus, it has so transpired that my little apartment has taken on the shape and form of a caravanserai of sorts, with lots of young artists, nomads and other self-actualizing individuals passing through the doorway in either direction each and every day. I don't think I've had the apartment to myself on more than five days, of all the time I have spent here.

My experiment has consisted of seeing how much or how little my practice and daily routine have to diverge in order to accommodate other people's wishes, people of various proclivities and temperaments, people of several desires and motivations. The results are quite striking, and quite distinctive. Setting the statistical question of sample size aside (though N ~ 40), I think it is fair to say that most people who reported positive experiences and enjoyed their stay were single young males, while most people who reported negative experiences were attached young males and/or their girlfriends. Single women appeared to not enjoy their time too much, but the sample size for this demographic group is not sufficiently large to draw statistically significant conclusions.

From a qualitative point of view, visitors who enjoyed their time here found the conversations interesting, the sense of calm around the place invigorating and refreshing, and the logistical freedom afforded by an unlatched door and open refrigerator extremely useful. Visitors who did not enjoy their stay found me rude and callous in conversation, the atmosphere in the flat boring and the open door policy annoying and creepy.

From my own perspective, it was refreshing for me to find that my practice proceeded quite smoothly independent of the identity of my guests and their sentiments towards their hosts. A couple of minor points that were of interest follow.

Regarding the question of fidelity of practice, it was found that prolonged conversation acts as a debilitating influence on pranayama. The breath seems much weaker and less inclined to fill the chest cavity as completely the morning after a long evening of philosophical discussion.
The Ego is as slippery and slithery a snake as one could ever hope to find. It is always an interesting exercise to exorcise elements of pleasure in hearing compliments paid to one's way of living. The discriminatory intellect gets lots of vigorous exercise in neutering the extremely creative feints of the Ego during the course of my conversations with my visitors.

This latter point, as a matter of fact, ties in with a more general observation in that positive social interactions seemed to affect meditative practice negatively while negative social interactions seemed to have no significant effect. From the point of view of social harmony and social utility theory, this is not an optimistic result. However, it is quite easy to see why this should indeed be the case. The mind seeks attachment, and attachment is generally a consequence of affirmative experience. Thus, positive social interaction results in the generation of large quantities of stimuli that the mind can attach itself to and grow in volume.

The yogi's task is to starve the mind and feed it deconstructionist versions of material reality, so that its moorings to the affairs of the physical universe may be detached gradually. Friendly conversations appear to proffer dangerous food for the mind to devour greedily and resume its noisy perturbations of the unconscious mind. Negative social interactions, on the other hand, cause the mind to flee inwards and gratefully accept the disassociativity that meditation provides. Thus, perversely from the perspective of the social contract, negative social interactions and social alienation appear to play into the yogi's strategy.

This brings us to the original problem. Can the practitioner be said to be correct in soliciting negative interactions with society to force the mind into subjugation? Intriguingly enough, this is precisely what aghoris and tantric practitioners recommend. An aghori will believe that the subjugation of the mind under control of his identity is worth the temporary discomfiture of the minds under control of other identities, minds which do not propose or desire to be starved at any rate. It is possible also, that the aghori believes that his behavior will stimulate thoughts of depersonalization and disassociation in his correspondents in the aftermath just as well, in which case, his behavior is actually extremely positive, since it motivates his social acquaintances to question the premises of physical existence too.

The greatest joy of writing is that there are times when clarity emerges as a consequence of the process. I did not see this aspect of the schizoid coldness that must naturally develop in a yogi's interactions with the world, but now I see that it is possibly of some social value. The archetype of the spiritual guru, with shining bright eyes and a benevolent message for all of humanity, seems extremely unreal and delusional to me. I am sure that that is precisely the mental posture that a therapist or a healer should adopt, since their mission is to bring psychological comfort to those who need it. But therapy ought not to be confused with the process of self-contemplation. There is always a tenuous link between meditative practice and social utility. Attempting to burnish it using tokens of religious or psychotherapeutic value might bring more social relevance to the system, but is a losing proposition in the longer term, since it will draw several into the practice in pursuit of tangential goals (freedom from stress, social welfare, peace and good will etc).

I now understand and appreciate better, accounts of the temper tantrums and socially unacceptable behavior in the lives of accomplished seekers. While I do not see myself succumbing to temper under any circumstance, I think that is primarily a consequence of my negligible spiritual standing. That is, I am not as yet firmly established in my practice enough to require anger towards infringers upon my daily routine to sustain it. For now, if one my guests is too noisy for me to keep track of the ticks of the clock during pranayama, I will simply stop and let him do what he is doing and start over. I can do so, because I merely have to count up to 48 seconds at any one time. More accomplished practitioners, who have to track thousands of seconds of breath suspension are unlikely to be as stoic if some ill-fated tresspasser broke in upon their silence.

In conclusion then, I find that my desire for solitude is understandable from the perspective of meditative practice. Solitude does not only mean the absence of other people, it also means absence from the desires and complaints of the body and mind. The performance of asanas is an effort at acquiring physical solitude, the performance of pranayama is a means towards acquiring freedom from the processes required in the ingress and egress of breathing, the performance of trataka and similar practices is aimed at sustaining mental solitude for long periods of time. And growing a long beard and ignoring basic social protocol is a good way of obtaining and sustaining social solitude and being free to contemplate Brahman and its manifestation (Hiranyagarbha) and the evolution of its manifestation (quantum mechanics) in peace.

Is progress in meditation P or NP?

2008-07-30T00:00:00.010-05:00

In a whimsical sort of way, I have been evaluating my own progress in meditative self-awareness and attempting to generalize how the process proceeds for everybody else. While the pace of progress depends on several factors - intensity, geographical location, weather, existential circumstances being some of the more important ones - I am intrigued by the following question: is the computational process involved P or NP?

In this short note, I attempt to clarify what I mean by progress in meditative self-awareness. Also, I explain what I mean by computation in this context. This shall hopefully serve as a conceptual framework for future writings that attempt to describe subtler aspects of the spiritual journey. Taking up the question of progress first, it is necessary to define the ideal towards which progress may be made. It is quite evident to me now, in the light of recent developments, that the inner well of undifferentiated consciousness does exist, is as formidable and transcendent as the best descriptions that claim to do it no justice, and is attainable by any person of sound mind and body with a moderate amount of effort. To fine-tune the physical and mental body to be able to sustain the level of concentration necessary to sustain the awareness of this reality seems to be the purpose of all meditative practice.

This effort, however, has to be multi-pronged. Physical fitness is essential, since it is necessary to be able to sit in a compact, balanced position for long durations of time (three hours at least, is the traditional view). Mental calmness is necessary, since the activities of the mind must die down of their own accord when gently nudged to do so (this can take years of patient effort, but becomes second nature in time). Mental vigor is equally necessary, if hallucinatory experiences and auto-suggestive behavior are to be avoided. An intellectual life, a profession that deals with the manipulation of abstract symbols, is ideal to fulfil this purpose.

But it is not only these affirmative aspects of daily living that form part of the preparation. Had these been all, meditative progress would have been in P, since polynomially many trials in the number of relevant parameters (provided they had been identified), would guarantee a monotone approach to the solution (the more you practice, the closer you get). Unhappily, there are other, less stable aspects of the human personality that also need consideration.

The abnegation of passion is the most controversial and least likable aspect of spiritual practice. For me personally, since I have an intensely passionate nature, this has always been a great source of dissatisfaction and discomfiture, not to mention depression. There are several occasions upon which, the path of fire and light appears to be one of smoke and dust, with nothing to recommend it and no logical justification save masochistic self-delusion. Such thought, indeed, has occupied several debilitating hours of my time. Yet, the gradual removal of the fuel that fires the Ego is an extremely essential step on the road to the Godhead.

This process is two-pronged and can be excruciatingly long. The first stage, which some find easy, and some find impossible, consists of conscious mortification of the passionate aspects of one's personality. Austere living and regulation of food, sleep and libido, when inseparable parts of one's daily life, quickly bring about the consummation of this phase for those who are inclined towards the idea of self-awareness. There are, however, several reversions, and most of these are brought about by a revulsion towards the aridity that these austerities cultivate, and which contrasts in such an unflattering manner to the simple pleasures of material existence. This is because there still remains subtle unconscious fuel to feed the Ego - latent desire and inclinations that lie seated deep in the sub-conscious mind and shape an individual's personality. It might appear strange and, in fact, pathological, to speak of the dilution of one's personality, but that is precisely what the second stage of self-abnegation entails. The process here is not one of conscious flaw-detection and fixing; the sub-conscious, by definition lies outside the purview of the conscious mind, however nobly inclined.

One of the most wonderful inventions of the creative human intellect is the mathematical realm of optimization. The philosophical idea is simple: even if you do not know what to do to individual elements of a process domain, if it is possible to define a concept of `utility' in its space, and if this utility function is not completely random in its behavior, then it is possible, with a limited number of trials, to find a point (or trajectory) in the process space that has the greatest utility.

This diversion into mathematical jargon becomes meaningful when one realizes that this is precisely the mechanism whereby the conscious mind can exercise some measure of control over the sub-conscious, even if it cannot manipulate it directly. The sub-conscious trains itself by a process of Hebbian reinforcement - it hangs on to things it likes, and attempts to stay away from things it does not like. Since the definition of likes and dislikes changes over time, is activated at a very early age at which time it is often the dominant discriminatory framework, the sub-conscious mind is often somewhat infantile, anachronistic and chaotic in its operation and expression. Properly channeled, it is the seat of all creativity. Improperly channeled, it is the source of bipolar behavior, psychoses and other unpleasant mental states, descriptions of which litter the psychological literature.

To set this menagerie into some sort of order, the conscious mind can do nothing better than make repeated trials, bearing in mind the utility function it seeks to optimize - freedom from sub-conscious urges, liberation from imperfections of prior perceptions and tranquility and clarity in normal thought. In general, one would presume that this problem is NP, or worse. It seems unlikely, given the enormous variability of the conceptual space that may serve as an abstract model for the sub-conscious, that a polynomial number of trials will be sufficient to provably find the optimal solution. It is not even certain whether an exponential number of trials will suffice, although the finite depth of the branching tree process of perception suggests that this is likely to be the case.

We are now finally in a position to make our second definition, as promised earlier. Computation, in the context of spiritual practice, may be defined as trials that the conscious mind, which has no sense of utility, imposes upon the sub-conscious, which is the seat of perception and utility, but has no logical, or even probabilistic underpinnings. Strictly speaking, it is erroneous to speak of computation complexity in this context since this process is not Turing-emulable in real-time. This can be easily seen since multiple trials may proceed simultaneously, and no utility function values may be returned for long periods of time. However, the metaphor speaks powerfully to the underlying elegance of the task, so we cock a snook at tradition and persist with it.

I have thus described, as promised earlier, the two concepts that allow me to pose the somewhat silly question: is progress in meditation P or NP? I cannot claim that I have the answer yet. Subsequent writings will explore various aspects of the problem, and I have some hope that the answer will be found.

I feel the desire to describe the difference between unsupervised learning and learning from exemplars in this framework, but I feel the certitude of meditative tranquility fading, being replaced steadily by the doubt that characterizes (and should characterize, in my opinion) the aspirant's earthly existence. I conclude for the present then, and will take up this thread anon when the Gurutattva moves me again.

Joy! Joy! Eternal Bliss!

2008-07-18T04:12:00.000-05:00

Fickle song, come back. Don't flee from me
Let all hear of the joy I feel

If the stripe of the great sky river were a string
It would sound shrill to this somber thrum
All worlds colliding with all worlds that have been
Pale to the sound of this Cosmic drum

The weakest harmonics of the Turiya state
Fill my heart with tremendous joy
The Guru fills my soul with bliss;
Like a balloon.

She fills and fills with a roguish smile
She laughs as I gaze at her resplendent face
Awareness swells, an anchored boat in the tide
Casts off moorings to reality, and roams

How I have sought you in life and in sleep
In hours of meditations I have chased you
In countless days of thought I have yearned
To see beyond the veil that you have ever drawn

I still see no more than I have ever seen
But the eye inside needs see no more
I hear, louder than the sounds of the world
The beating of Turiya, the Cosmic drum

Brighter than the splendor of a billion suns
Is the power that lies behind this Door
Once past, I shall no longer be
This coil, in bliss, shall tinker on

But happy fate, it falls to the mortal coil
To squirm in joy at the gates of Void
I thrill, my hair stands all on end
As I wait for Word from the voiceless Voice.

Andheri Madhushala - I

2008-07-16T15:23:00.020-05:00

It generally is considered somewhat poor form for a poet to express satisfaction and joy at one of his creations, the ideal being one of stern service to one's muse and proferment of the fruits of one's toil to society in a detached and brooding manner. I must confess, though, that its been a long time (more than four years) since I have felt so pleased at having expressed my innermost feelings in such a facile and fluent manner.

Unfortunately, it might not mean much to audiences unfamiliar with the original `Madhushala' and the allegorical story it weaves of existential dilemmas and their resolution. The construction is also inspired , in a large part, by the beautiful `Dark Night of the Soul' by St John on the Cross.

At any rate, I am delighted to read and reread it, and I offer to the world the first part of `Andheri Madhushala' with a caper and a flourish. The cadence is the same as that in the recitation of the original by Bachchan.

Path the bahut visham par akhir aa madiralay hum baithe
`Saki, pila ek jaam, bahut hai pyaas', hum aise hee ainthe
Par na dikhe saki ki soorat, na laute goonj deewaron se
Madiralay me to hain, ab kya? poochein hum bicchadi rahon se

Hum madiralay mein baithe, soche the bas ab kya karna
Pahunch gaye madhu-dwar, to bheeshan dhoop se akhir kya darna
Khush the hum akhir dhoomil hoangie avsadit yaadein bhi
Madhu ke pyaalon mein tar hoange saare farz-o-vaade bhi

Rahe madiralay me kuchh din, par dikhi nahin saki humko
Hone lage hatash, ki madira mile nahin hum jaison ko
Saki ka deedar to chhorein, boond mili na madira ki
Hala nahin to pani pee, kahein baki peenewale bhi

Ha, pyale! Tu kya jaane, madira kya khel khilati hai
Tarpa jitna vihval kartee, utna hi pyaas badhaati hai
Mit gayein hain ab sab khwab, hoor si saki hala layegi
Baithein hain mala japte bas, kabhi to madhushala aayegi

Update (Sep 04, 2008)
To my deep satisfaction, I found a neat little applet that allows one to write in Devanagari on the screen. Transliterations are always sad ; they seem to lack an indefinable sense of vigor, as a plant would when transplanted from its native land. Here is the piece, the way it should be

अँधेरी मधुशाला

पथ थे बहुत विषम पर आखिर आ मदिरालय हम बैठे
`साकी! पिला एक जाम बहुत है प्यास', हम ऐसे ही ऐंठे
पर न दिखे साकी की सूरत, न लौटे गूँज दीवारों से
`मदिरालय में तो हैं, अब क्या?',पूछें हम बिछड़ी राहों से

हम मदिरालय में बैठे, सोचे थे बस अब क्या करना
पहुँच गये मधु-द्वार तो भीषण धूप से आखिर क्या डरना
खुश थे हम आखिर धूमिल होंगी अवसादित यादें भी
मधु के प्यालों में तर होंगे सारे फ़र्ज़-अो-वादे भी

रहे मदिरालय में कुछ दिन पर दिखी नहीं साकी हमको
होने लगे हताश कि मदिरा मिले नहीं हम जैसों को
साकी का दीदार तो छोड़ें, बूँद मिली न मदिरा की
हाला नहीं तो पानी पी, कहते सब पीनेवाले भी

हा प्याले! तू क्या जाने, मदिरा क्या खेल खिलाती है
तड़पा जितना विह्वल करती, उतना ही प्यास बढ़ाती है
मिट गये हैं अब सब ख़्वाब, हूर सी साकी हाला लायेगी
बैठे हैं माला जपते बस, कभी तो मधुशाला आयेगी

The Mississippi

2008-05-10T22:18:00.003-05:00

The river flows and I run beside it
An unmoving witness to my motion
The river flows and I stand beside it
A moving witness to my silence

The river; she sings of vagabondage
Of finding love in distant lands
Of rounded pebbles and alluvial flows
And cycles of birth on either shore

The river sings with a cadence ineffable
Of the tranquility of a roving life
The river soothes this oft querulous child
And a rover I know sings back to her

`Vasudhaiva kutumbakam', she murmurs
`Vasudhaiva kutumbakam', I concur
I open my heart to the universe
The universe opens its mind to me.

Blues for Chennai

2008-03-14T00:58:00.004-05:00

'thaalaattudhae vaanam'

This is a Tamil phrase that has stuck in my memory from the time a very dear friend of mine first translated it for me more than two years ago. On that day, I knew that I would write a song that drew on it some day. Two years on, it finally came to me.

The literal translation of the original phrase, of course, is `the sky is the cradle', and the actual context is some sort of sappy love song, but I don't let that bother me overmuch - a poet has the license to frill.

The ocean is my parchment
Here all my stories lie
This little boat serves as my quill
Scrawling letters swirling by

Zenith is my blue inkwell
Flecked with little tufts of cloud
The winds of muse and memory
Sing all my thoughts out loud

But there is something curious
In the songs that I can play
My pen will mark my paper only
If either is murky gray

When the shadows of time passing
Brood deep upon the swell
Or somber clouds of sorrow
Tinge the ink in my deep well

Then songs there are a-plenty
Of fortitude and strength
Perchance, of new wisdom found
On winding roads towards the end.

When the ocean, wellspring of action
Is pellucid, calm and clear
When the firmament, deep azure
Reflects a spirit free of fear

I rock my boat to sing quatrains
of Joy and tranquil staves
The words, they have no meaning
They vanish in the shifting waves

When blue meets blue serenity
And irrevocably unites
There is no thought, no word
To speak of that Delight

And that, my friend is the reason
Why my words are oft sad and bland
And songs, the ones that find those words
Walk on lonely beaches in the sand

In twilight
And under starlit skies.

Short Tales of the Giant Forest

2008-01-13T22:34:00.000-06:00

When I was about eight, my grandparents brought me a gigantic and profusely illustrated book on `America's National Parks'. As a consequence, several of my childhood fantasies had for their setting the russet tinged backdrop of the Sierra Nevada. Also, one of my first general knowledge books was yet another large volume called `The Big Book of Questions and Answers'. The most intriguing image in this book was a photograph of two extremely large tree stems, with a man and a car underneath. It was captioned, `Do red giants really exist?'.

To go to the Sequoia forest and pay homage to the red giants, thus, is a task that I have looked forward to for more than 16 years. Since I am spending three weeks in Mountain View CA, it was a foregone conclusion that one of the weekends would be set aside for this excursion. However, this Thursday, I found that through the machinations of fate, the next couple of weekends would be unsuitable for the purpose. Friday was a deadline day at the company I am consulting, and I could not get away from work till 8 in the evening.

The scene shifts to Saturday morning, and the inevitable mental tussle. Is it better to brave the slings and arrows of 700 miles in a two day time frame? Or is it better to sleep, perchance to dream? Thankfully, the forces of ennui met with a temporary setback, allowing me to sally forth in pursuit of an appropriate steed for my journey.

As luck would have it, my corporate contacts carry some weight at the rental agency, which allowed me to upgrade for free to a Toyota Prius. I shall, at a later point in the narrative, gush exuberantly about the several excellent qualities of this marvel of engineering. For now, it should suffice to say that by noon on Saturday, no obstacles remained to impede my departure.

Setting out forthwith in the afternoon sun, I made good time on Hwy 101, heading towards San Jose. It was when I left the highway to venture upon the CA152 that the instructive portion of my journey can be said to have begun. Past Fresno, I headed east on the Kings Canyon Road. It was now that I realized that this trip was going to turn out to be rather more fulfilling than I had thought. The vista from the highway was absolutely stunning. In the distance the crags of the Sierra were beginning to make their presence known. The road was surrounded by orange groves on both sides, each tree laden down with its eponymous offspring. The road itself was far from dull, twisting and rolling capriciously, its undulations allowing the electric motor on my Prius to deliver more than its natural bang for my buck.

It pains me to confess that I was completely ignorant of the geography of the parks and their location while setting out. Therefore, I was surprised to find that the road was beginning to climb into the mountains, even as the daylight was beginning to fail. Driving in the mountains, however, is a great joy to me, and as the sunset came upon the day, and even as my ecologically superior conveyance bore me deeper into the heart of the Sierra Nevada, I was conscious of a great sense of pleasure stealing over me. Ahead of me lay the fulfillment of one of my childhood dreams. And even as I drove, I could not but feel pleased at the existential circumstances that were allowing me to make this journey. To be young and vigorous is a blessed state indeed!

As my car climbed into yet another turn, the trees that had heretofore obstructed my view dropped away, and I was confronted with a wondrous sight. I am certain that I have not seen many more bewitching views than the one that I now beheld. I know this, for it made me despair at not possessing a camera to capture it, a sentiment that occurs to me once in a violet moon. In the vaults of my memory, since the age of about 16, there are about a dozen images that I have consciously impressed as memories of a lifetime. My modus operandi for doing so is simply to stare at the vision until I know I will not forget it.

I spent nearly half an hour there, on top of a heap of boulders on the side of the road, staring intensely. Picture if you will, the sun setting into a sea of clouds. Those who travel by air must necessarily know what I mean by a sea of clouds - that turbulent symphony of air and water, so much more creative than its earth-bound cousin. Consider this immense sea of clouds moving and shifting around islands formed by the peaks of hills jutting out above. Lastly, allow yourself, as the observer, a vantage point far above this play of the elements and an almost hemispherical field of vision.

As I gazed intently upon this tapestry of light beams on puffs of vapor, I felt a strong meditative urge taking hold. I resisted it, and I found my mind formulating a question quite clearly, `What is so mystical about mountains? What is so cleansing about Nature? Why do man-made objects not evoke such deep emotion?' I tried to think of the answer, but could not find one that satisfied me. I left the rock in a deeply contemplative state.

I reached the entrance of Kings Canyon at about 6 in the evening, in deepening twilight. I had been keeping my eyes peeled for sequoia sightings, but none had as yet appeared. Now, as I passed into the Park, I saw my first one. I will try and recapitulate as honestly as possible, my mental processes at this juncture.

My first impulse was one of amused disbelief, a fleeting thought that my eyes had deceived me into imagining I had seen something I had wanted to see so much, and that sanity would be restored in short order. When that did not happen, the truth started dawning, in the form of the rhetorical question:"That is a TREE?" When I had slowed down and craned my neck to look at the object under consideration to my satisfaction (if not to that of my vertebrae and following drivers), this was replaced by the thought that has governed my mental botanical picture ever since: "THAT is a tree!". Other specimens of flora now appear ersatz to me in comparison with this godly apparition.

How do I describe a Giant Sequoia to you? Take the tallest, most regal of the eucalypti. Give it the ponderous girth of an old King Banyan tree. Shape its trunk with the geometrical precision typical of the coniferae and also impart to the branches and leaves an arboreal legerdemain characteristic of temperate vegetation. Lastly, impart to this fantastic creature that stolid respectability one would typically accord to a venerable old oak. That, I think, would be a fair approximation of a Giant Sequoia.

As I drove farther into the Park, and saw more Sequoia trees, I gradually became conscious of an uncanny fear. These entities do not belong in the same day and age as I. Looking at these trees made me want to look over my shoulder , lest a velociraptor lavish its attentions upon me. This unreasonable feeling stayed with me all of that evening and was never quite dispelled through the duration of my stay.

My first order of business upon entering this area was to fill up on gas. In hindsight, this was a prudent precaution, since the Park area itself does not have any pumps. At this point, it becomes necessary for me to acquaint you, gentle reader, with some of the topology of the region. Very briefly, there are two National Parks, adjoining each other, that are known for Giant Sequoia groves. One, the one where our story is situated right now, is called the Kings Canyon National Park. The other, which the story shall reach eventually, is called the Sequoia National Park. These two are connected by a road called the Generals Highway which runs for about 20 miles. However, as we shall soon see, this road is blocked up with snow during winter, and wayfarers seeking to get from one park to the other have to take a detour.

However, to return to our story, having filled up on gas, I decided to explore one of the Christian camps in the region, specifically near Hume Lake. My expedition however, rapidly assumed the appearance of an instructional lesson in ice-skating, my shoes, for all their admirable qualities, not finding any traction on the sheet ice. Rendered immobile by the inadequacy of my equipment, I was fortunate to find that the local grocery store provides for such situations in the form of excellent strap-on tracks. With a pair of these on my shoe soles, I was soon skipping around. Unfortunately, my visit with the people of the Book was not very pleasant. They looked with extreme suspicion upon my heathen person, and all the breezy insouciance that I could muster was barely sufficient to allow me some semblance of a dignified departure.

I decided to delay no further, and resolved to fulfill my primary motive of visiting Kings Canyon viz. seeing the General Grant Tree. To do this necessitated driving into the forest for a couple of miles into a clearing and then walking along a trail. I accomplished the first without much difficulty, but was stymied for want of a light source in the case of the second. There would not be much point in walking the trail in pitch darkness and coming home to the ignominy of failing to sight one of the largest living things in the world.

Some details are in order here. The General Grant tree is the second largest (by volume) tree in the world. It is also the thickest Giant Sequoia tree in the world, measuring about 40 feet in diameter at its base, and 124 feet in circumference. The largest tree in the world, the General Sherman, is in the other Park, which I would visit on the morrow. Thus, in this trip, I would have accomplished my purpose of seeing both the largest and the thickest living things in the world. The tallest, for matter of record, is a coast redwood tree called Hyperion, which I would also dearly wish to see. Its location, unfortunately, is kept a secret, to avoid the rush of stampeding tourists. Perhaps one day, I will see it.

For now, being at a bit of a loose end, I had to turn in early for want of something better to do. Having taken the precaution of packing in some of my work, I did some of it by the reading light in the car. Getting ready for bed in the back seat of the car, I checked off all the fascinating things about my situation one by one in my mind. Firstly, I was in a grove of Giant Sequoias, a couple of miles from civilization. Secondly, the night sky was bright with the Milky Way and countless stars. In fact, the last time I had seen so many stars was nearly an year ago, while camping in the Black Forest in Germany, a night that I also will cherish to my dying day. Lastly, squishing myself into the back seat of a Toyota Prius under a greatcoat, looking at the stars out of the window, with the view of the sky blocked at places by the looming hulks of three big Sequoia trees, I was feeling completely at home. All was serene, all was beautiful, sacchidananda.!

Well, I must confess, not completely. I remember that one of my last thoughts before nodding off was:"The sky tonight has a million eyes. What bliss it would be if there were a million and two." But that is a completely different story; one that is unlikely to ever be told.

It is difficult for me, given the lack of reference figures to identify with, to view my living habits with perspective. I think my nomadic existence in the past couple of years has accustomed me to living lawlessly, out of a suitcase and in complete isolation. For example, in Minneapolis, home is my lab cubicle, where I keep two pairs of clothes, a sleeping bag, an acoustic bass and a basketball. That is the span of my worldly possessions, and I intend to keep it that way. Here, in Silicon Valley, where I am working as a contractor for a month, I have a plush rented apartment on company's money, but prefer to just bed down in my office after work. Staying in an apartment, or any private place for that matter, is a skill that I find I now will have to gradually reacquaint myself with. I mention this in order to place my night's roost in the grove of sequoias some perspective. I did not go far from civilization and sleep in the back of a car driven by the spirit of adventure. I did so because that is the most natural thing for me to do.

The rest of the night was uneventful, apart from periodic adjustments of the car thermostat. Waking up at 6 in the morning, I made my way onto the Grant Tree Trail. Snow was six inches to a foot deep in most places, and my snow tracks proved to be worth their weight in gold. I found, to my regret, that I had passed up an opportunity for an adventuresome night's stay the previous night in the form of the Fallen Monarch.

The Fallen Monarch is a fallen Sequoia trunk of historic significance. It was used by Native Indians as a house, and later was used by the U.S. cavalry as a stable for their horses. Had I but known of its existence, I would not have spent the hours of the night twisted up like a pretzel in my car's back seat. Making a note of the fact for my next visit, I proceeded further. There were a couple of other notable trees on this trail, and they were all pretty substantial. Finally, I saw the General Grant.

To my surprise, I was not particularly impressed by the sight. The base was, of course, 40 feet in diameter, but somehow that did not register with me in a manner that would provoke a visceral response. I had been afraid of this - I have long known that the human eye is a poor judge of volume. I can still remember my eyes popping out in surprise in fourth grade, when I found that a cubic meter of water contains a 1000 liters. Still, this was undeniably a giant. He was about 250 feet tall as well, and one could tell that he was taller than his neighbors, because his was the only crest that was bathed in sunlight, while the others were still in shadow. Since I was the first (and only) person on the trail that day, I took the liberty of hopping over the trail fence and paying him a closer visit.

Feeling the warmth under the bark, I finally sensed the emotions that I had expected. The size of this entity was not particularly impressive by the standards of eyes long used to looking at skyscrapers and other large objects. It is with the realization that this gigantic structure is alive and probably conscious to a degree that true awe sets in. I closed my eyes as I felt the bark, and the first thoughts that came to me unbidden were in praise of Vishnu, the preserver.

Sequoia trees grow so big because their wood is resistant to decay. Even the trunks of the trees that have fallen in the last half a millennium or so still dot the landscape. The only way they die is through forest fires or from tipping over for one reason or another. In a world filled with decay and disease, here is one haven where life can smolder slowly and grow inexorably until it reaches the titanic proportions that evoke our awe now. Shiva, the destroyer, always has the last word. But with the skin of this gargantuan being under my fingers, I realized with a sense of tender affection, the incredible creativity of Vishnu - the Supreme Artist. When he is allowed to work his leela - his web of magic, the results are truly breath-taking to behold.

Nothing escapes the Destroyer's all-encompassing gaze. entropy conquers all. And yet, in the subtle gestures of the Preserver, in the hope that the fluctuation theorems bear, Life carries on indomitable. In its battle against such immense cosmic odds lies its splendor. In its persistently impudent refutation of the Universe's penchant towards senselessness lies its immense beauty. Praise for the Preserver flowed from my lips spontaneously and copiously (though I am quite sure not very melodiously!).

Walking around the circumference of the tree, I realized that I had taken all that I could meaningfully take from this place, and that it was time for me to wend my way to the other Park. Since the Generals highway, as mentioned earlier, was blocked up, it was recommended that I drive back to the entrance of Squaw valley 20 miles, then drive 40 more to hit the Hwy 198 and use that to get into Sequoia Park. However, looking at my own road map, I saw that I could use Route 245 from right outside Kings Canyon Park, and that it would save me some of the distance.

What I did not realize was that the Squaw valley route would have taken me along the plains, whereas this route would entail climbing down from the Kings Canyon ridge and then climbing back up to reach Sequoia Park. It was one of the most entertaining sessions of mountain driving that I have been blessed to encounter.

The first and most important component of what made this ride so special was, of course, the weather. It was a beautiful, balmy winter morning - absolutely clear blue skies and a benevolent sun shining down graciously. Secondly, there were absolutely no people on the road. As a matter of fact, in all that 40 mile stretch, I encountered precisely three other cars, two of them together near the end. For all practical purposes, I could have been the only person in the entire world, merrily whizzing along the twists and turns of that serpentine road as it wound down into some of the most idyllic pastoral country that I have ever seen.

But I am getting ahead of myself. The descent itself was orders of magnitude more enjoyable by virtue of the make of my car. Whereas in normal cars, going down grades is quite pleasurable, in a Prius, the experience is enhanced several-fold. Where normal cars will slow down in the occasional inclinations, causing the driver to have to pump the gas pedal a little bit, the Prius keeps accelerating through those stretches, thanks to its electric motor. For about a ten mile stretch, I did not need a drop of gas, just the occasional judicious application of brakes. Furthermore, on my way down, I was greeted by a drift of light fog, that added a surreal element to the experience until, in all honesty, it appeared to be more of a practice spin in the Need For Speed PC game than a real experience. The quietness of the car engine, combined with occasional stretches of extremely smooth road gave me on several occasions, a beautiful sense of gliding through the air that one typically feels in an aircraft right before it is about to land.

Meadows, green and pristine, dotted with cows, horses and sheep. Groves of orange trees more orange that green, tremendous fields of grain. Out of the fog, I descended into the heart of agrarian California. Years in the future, when I look back, I think there is a great probability that this will be the moment I will look back upon as the one where I accepted this country to be my own. I had thought I would never again experience the tranquility and joy that I had felt in the Himalayan foothills. I was wrong, and I rejoice beyond measure at having been proved wrong.

Rather than persist in annoying my faithful readers with further rhapsody, I think I will not describe in much greater detail my journey on 245 down to 198, thence to Sequoia Park and the last 20 miles of descent into the heart of the Giant Forest. Let me simply place on record that I truly felt like I was 2, that the whole world existed simply for my entertainment, and that it was doing a very good job of entertaining me. The tints of the Sierra Nevada, the unreality of the distant blue-hued snow-capped peaks, the solemn valley of the river Kaweah, the quaint, gabled homesteads and hand-written signboards - it was as if Nature was articulating all my deepest archetypes of beauty in one glorious sonata.

Arriving at Sequoia Park in this tranquil mood, I found that I had to, as stated earlier, drive 20 miles further to reach the famous Giant Forest. This is the largest Sequoia grove in the world, and is reputed to to contain more than 200 trees with a diameter greater than 10 feet. I was pleased to find that there was even fewer signs of commercial exploitation here than at Kings Canyon. About the only human structure in evidence was a small Giants Museum for children, and an information desk. Not finding much to excite my interest here, I drove the remaining few miles to the grove that harbors the largest living thing on Earth - the General Sherman tree.

In light of my rather composed reaction at the sight of the General Grant tree, I was expecting a similar situation to arise in the case of the Sherman tree too. It so happened that I misinterpreted a sign pointing me towards the Sherman tree and mistakenly assumed a nearer tree (at which some equally mistaken tourists were posing) to be the object in question. I was puzzled, since this tree, while quite imposing in stature, was nowhere near as imposing as the General Grant. ``What a rip-off'', I thought, ``Why even that big tree yonder is bigger than this one''.

Critics might accuse me of dramatizing my account, but this actually is how I came across the largest living thing on Earth. As soon as I had finished my mental comparison of the alleged Sherman tree with the tree in the background, I slowly realized that the tree in the background was much, much bigger than any of the others I had seen. Tramping across the snow towards it, my wits slowly realized what my eyes, falling on a signpost confirmed moments later. This was the General Sherman tree!

What a monster!

I repeated this phrase over and over again, as I attempted to come to terms with the magnitude of this vast creature. I think the fact that my expectations from the Sherman had been drastically lowered by my earlier error was largely responsible for the fact that the size of the General Sherman absolutely stunned me. Walking up to it, resting my chin against its trunk and gazing upwards, my most accessible thought was, ``This is not a tree, its a mountain.''

And thus it verily was. Its largest branch, sticking out at a height of about 150 feet, was itself much larger than most trees one would naturally expect to see. Standing a dizzy 270 feet tall, he was not as bulky at the base as the General Grant, but much more solidly built throughout. Even though the General Grant is not to be sneezed at, the difference between the two was viscerally enormous. While the General Grant impressed me no end, the Sherman tree left me giggling in stunned amazement.

I found that I was not alone in my merriment. The tree appeared to have a similar effect on several of the other onlookers. We were unanimous in the opinion that ``That is a big tree.'' The awestruck wonder in everyone's eyes was a joy to behold. I propounded my theory of Vishnu's link to the big trees to a woman nearby, who coincidentally turned out to be an erstwhile ISKCON follower.

I peregrinated gently in that magnificent grove, which houses about ten of the largest trees in the world. I returned to the Sherman, and in an extremely pretentious and vacuous gesture, tried to connect with his thoughts by placing my palm on him and removing conscious thought. Somewhat sheepishly, I withdrew. With my last sight of the Sherman tree, I summoned up all my ancestral reservoirs of animism and offered up a prayer to the Divine for the safe passage into the other life of my grandparents, who are both in frail health now, and to whom I owe as much affection as is usually due only to parents.

There was but one task left to attempt before driving back home - the ascent to Moro Rock. Having read and heard several rapturous descriptions of the view from on top, I had resolved to climb up to it. However, it turned out that the road up to the beginning of the climbing trail was blocked up with snow, and that it was not advisable to venture up.

However, a couple of snowshoers were at that very moment going up the trail, and moved by their spirit, I thought I would try it as well. Of course, I did not have snow shoes, only my pitiful basketball shoes with snow tracks on them. However, I cast caution to the winds and started following their footprints up the mountain.

It was easy going for a while, and I thought I would soon catch up with them. However, soon the snow became softer, and I got my first and extremely arduous lesson in trying to walk on snow. Clumping along as I was originally, I found that by repeatedly sinking my heels into the snow to depths of half a foot and more, I was gravely risking the structural integrity of my ankles. Thus, my first snow-walking lesson was to try and land on the balls of my feet as opposed to my heels, an action more natural while running than walking.

I made steady progress for a while, and then found that the intrepid duo who had preceded me up the mountain were returning. This worried me, since I did not know the way to Moro Rock, and I had been hoping that their footsteps would be adequate guidance for me. At this point, prudence counseled me to follow their lead and return. I tried to place my foolhardy spirit of adventure in the counter-balance, but it could not be bothered to make the effort. Then, interestingly, I thought of you, my readers.

I thought of the gutless story my ill-conceived hike would make if I were to give in at that point, and my Ego demanded that I make some efforts to prolong my struggle. So, I rested for a bit on a rock and then stepped out into pristine, unmarked snow, trying to strike out in the general direction of Moro Rock. I went along for about half a mile and then found a heartening sight - some sort of satellite dish installation. Notwithstanding my assertions to the contrary earlier in the narrative, I must confess that these signs of civilization were extremely welcome to me.

However, on consulting a signpost half-buried in the snow nearby, my worst suspicions were confirmed. I was farther from Moro Rock than at the beginning of my journey, and I had been, at least for a while, been taking a direction almost orthogonal to the real one. This stark condemnation of my orienteering skill gave me further pause, and I wondered if I should turn back.

At this point, the remnants of the foolish, feral part of my nature asserted themselves. ``What nonsense! On we go!''. So, on we went, and it was interesting going for a while. Climbing on slopes populated by sequoia trees, I was able to get a closer view of their upper sections and branch and leaf arrangements. I labored on upwards, feet sinking in the snow at every step, heart pounding with the exercise, and mind calculating the probability of my survival should I lose sight of my footprints on the way back.

Unhappily, my story does not have a heroic ending. Having labored upwards for half an hour, I found myself on top of a hill, and completely disoriented with respect to my own bearings, to say nothing of Moro Rock. At several times during my time in India, I would carry a compass with me, and pride myself of extracting myself from similar situations using elementary sky-reading. In this case, I had no compass, and thus no recourse to trigonometric salvation. I scanned the foliate slopes of the hill for possible traces of a trail, but could not find any. The rush of adrenaline subsided, I retraced my footsteps and arrived back at the Museum uneventfully. I will return to Sequoia Park in summer, and I will climb up to Moro Rock then.

With the afternoon gradually subsiding, I had to choose between idling in the Park and looking at some more trees and driving home on Monday morning, or making a dash for home, hoping to clear the mountains by the time the light failed and arrive home by 9 in the evening. The latter suggestion won out, since it would allow me to finish up this piece before the rush and tumult of the week drew me in again. So, I bid the Park and its out-sized inhabitants farewell and set out.

The return journey was as equally satisfying as the one coming in that I have rapturously detailed elsewhere. Instead of driving down Hwy 198 back to civilization, I chose to drive up the mountain road, Rte 245 once more and to return home via the Kings Canyon Road by which I had arrived. This made the trip 40 miles longer, but that was a small price to pay for the privilege of rolling up that exquisite stretch of countryside again.

One last incident occurred in the mountains, before I bid them farewell for the nonce. Driving out of Sequoia Park, while still high up, I parked my car in a turnout at a bend in the road and paused to gaze out at the Sierra Nevada in all its glory one last time. Sitting on the rock boundary at the outer edge of the road, I finally gave in to my urge and meditated. I sat there with the cool breeze and the hot sun as my sole companions, oblivious to the passage of time and cars. And here, unbidden, I received insight into the questions that had come to me the previous day.

Looking at distant mountains has always triggered odd sentiments for me. It always seems to me that they are calling me. I am quite certain that others have heard their plaint too. The one that calls you to drop what you're doing and come up higher into the mountains, deeper into the forests. I have now realized that this `call' results as a consequence of two sequential actions. First, when the human mind is confronted with existence far beyond its own length- and time-scale, it becomes aware of its mortality. That is what causes the sadness that I feel. Secondly, with the Ego thus shaken in its throne, the Spirit takes the opportunity to assert itself, and reminds the discriminative intellect that It always remains, and that the Ego's mortality is not a cause for concern, since it does not affect the true essence of Being. This results in that sense of cleansing and fulfillment that follows the pang of sadness.

Thus results the music of the mountains, a song that I have heard so clearly since I was ten years' old. Thus, indeed results all music, for is not all music a reminder of the fact that timeless beauty can be evoked in a short span of time? Thus, in its essence, results meaning out of meaninglessness, Life out of thermodynamics, Love out of Death, Being out of Un-Being. The whole story of the Universe is so simply told as a tale of two motifs - the sadness that comes of the finitude of a substructure, and its resolution through synthesis with others of its own ilk.

Hence, as epilogue to this narrative of my little journey: he meditated on a rock wall in the Sierra Nevada on a sunny afternoon, and lived happily ever after.

Of course, but you need to get up first

2007-10-02T23:41:00.000-05:00

Draw the arrows of sorrows from your wounds,
Sharpen them on the anvil of quiet reflection,
And let them fly at the demons that daunt you.

Draw these strings of gloomy thought together
Knot them and coil them in labor and sweat
Take this rope and climb up above your fears

Draw those bitter words and promises broken
In the gentle heat of your tapas let them lie
Anon, press the wine to your lips and laugh

For you will have conquered through submission

The path of fire and light is a daunting one
Be bold, and step forth

An amoral basis for being good

2007-09-15T07:46:00.000-05:00

Perhaps the most iniquitous contribution of post-modern and liberal thought has been the deprecation of Sattva as self-righteous conservatism. The case in support of this hypothesis, however, is strong. Most seekers after spiritual enlightenment appear to have lived decidedly unconventional lives, and there are several extremely pious citizens who can't see wood for their incense sticks.

The question acquires a personal dimension for me when I try to be amoral. On the one hand, I worry about how justified I am in breaking with this traditional wisdom and indulging in proscribed activities (non-vegetarianism, music). On the other hand, I also worry about how justified I am in using this traditional wisdom as a moral basis for rejecting and mocking other proscribed activities that I do not partake in (gossip, frivolity).

Since Sattva is for me, both the fly and the ointment, I have often thought about how it really is related to the search for self-awareness. Today, during meditation, I thought I figured some part of it out. I will try and capture it here, before it fades away into the extra-logical Tumbolia it came from.

Sattva is desirable because it offers the least resistance to my mental conditioning with respect to self-awareness. The phenomenon of conditioning is a manifestation of reinforcement learning. Reinforcement learning operates on the principle of changing priors over possible actions hoping to maximize an expected 'reward'. That is, one is more likely to perform an action (or an action viewed as similar) in anticipation of a reward. At this point, there are dozens of examples from the psychology literature that I could quote to support my point. Instead, let us just cut to the chase and talk about how this impacts the relationship between Sattva and self-awareness.

Insofar as my own experience goes, once circumstantial distractions have been dealt with, the two most significant obstacles to tranquility in meditation are excitement and guilt at being excited. While meditating, I will think of various things, and on realizing this, will try and shut them down as viciously as the guilt associated with the thought will recommend. And it is an oft-quoted suggestion that seekers not clamp down on their thought processes, but let them flit about and die harmlessly.

Given this, I am far more likely to let a mental audition of a bhajan wind itself down than to allow a vision of a pornographic movie to continue. That has nothing to do with their relative moral merits, it has everything to do with the mental conditioning that modulates my personality. If I were brought up in an environment where watching porn was an incentive towards spiritual practice, I would probably feel extreme tranquility imagining Tera Patrick's sensual undulations.

Also, my thoughts are more than likely to be derived from my own experiences and actions. Therefore, thought harmless to my conditioning will likely only result from experiences and actions that my conditioning judges to be likewise. If I wish to preserve a mental sanctum of tranquility, it will be rather difficult to sustain if I do things contradictory to my essential nature.

Shallow ambition and the associated apathy, loud noises and the associated emotions - none of these are inferior in principle. For a child brought up to believe, somehow, that worldly noise and confusion is strongly correlated with inner peace, they would in fact be desirable. The story of Angulimal, a mythical Indian dacoit, is a case in point. To him, killing and maiming was a blissful experience, by virtue of his upbringing and worldly experience. Meditating while focusing on his desire for murder, he attained a high state of self-awareness and was henceforth known as Vishwamitra.

I, alas, have had more conventional conditioning. To be calm under stress, to be active and resourceful: these are ideals that I have grown up with. Therefore, the Sattvic life recommends itself, not by virtue of some objective morality, but as a choice of least mental resistance.

I admit that this sounds like an exceptionally Freudian view, in the sense that I appear powerless to change my conditioning and accept other influences as being equally healthy and rewarding. To me, at least, struggling to escape my conditioning was excruciatingly important at one point, but in its active form simply led to one guilt trip after another, and a lot of time wasted. That was one of the main reasons for me to take up spiritual practice, as an orthogonal and passive alternative.

For the sake of completeness and scholarly reference, I have suggested here that Ken Wilber's distinction between transformation, which to him is analogous to deepening self-awareness - and translation, which he defines as different ways of explaining the lack of transformation to ourselves, is correct but fails to take into account the fact that all translations are not equally distant from inducing transformation. Based on personal landscapes, and I will take the Kantian view and claim that they have a universal template, some translations will be less deleterious towards transformation.

That does not make them transformative in any sense. In the familiar terminology of Christian theology, the spirit seeks to know itself, but the mind-body needs stimulation. If that stimulation gives it strength and endorses its belief in its reality (through exalting sensory perception), then the spirit's task becomes much harder. If, on the other hand, the stimulation is abstract and intellectual (e.g. mathematical), the mind-body's belief in its reality is weakened, and the spirit has an easier task.

I am afraid I have not been as concise with my logic here as I would have liked, and I will certainly revisit this and make changes when my perspective on the issue deepens further. In the meantime, this is what I think, and this is how I seek to construct an amoral basis for being 'good'.

The 'Why-am-I-doing-this' feeling

2007-09-01T01:13:00.000-05:00

Its the warrior's pride, isn't it? To banish the demons of old questions unanswered with gusts of wind through tousled hair.

Its the war against entropy, isn't it? To know that every day I'm somewhere I wasn't yesterday; to know that every day, I have grown by experiencing newer spaces.

Its love, isn't it? And it is the purest love because it seeks to find fulfillment not in the sameness of bondage but in the stillness that comes of freedom.

Its the will of the River, isn't it? To keep on flowing -with the never-ending, ever-tender, sonorously throbbing, joyously sobbing, all-encompassing River.

Bathtub musings

2007-06-15T14:50:00.001-05:00

Yes, I know. Horribly crude. I might end up reworking this sometime. But I'll put it up here lest I lose it.

Hit the start button on the morning shower
A turbulent start to a turbulent day
Today though, I'm feeling lazy
Pull the plug on the schedule; fill up the tub

Imperfections, stress, broken promises
Swept under a glowing tranquil sheet
The ripples soothe, the tensions loosen
Ears throbbing; safe in the womb

Toy ducks, boats and action figures
Dinosaurs and bowls rich in nomenclature
Loch Ness, armadas, occasional maelstroms
The daring adventures of simpler days

Bottle the angst and pull the plug
The mirror is misted, can't see myself
Towel the rivulets from another time off
Back in the saddle, away we go

Epilogue

I have floated a long way in my little boat
Have struggled much to go my own way.
As time makes the futility of those battles clearer
Those moments of the journey turn ever dearer

A minor wrangle

2007-04-07T10:04:00.000-05:00

As a teenager, I was avidly fond of a book called "The Adventures of Captain Wrungel", which documents the fictional fictional (if you catch my drift) adventures of a boastful old sea-dog. In a telling sequence, his beloved boat called "Courage" is mistakenly christened "Rage" when the first three letters are knocked off by the shock of the launching.

At this point in his narrative, Wrungel digresses to expound upon the importance of names and the qualities that they appear to bestow upon their bearers. As a case in point, he recalls the sad case of a schooner called "Tub" that overturned and sank in a very moderate gale.

The reason I bring this up is that I am somewhat irritated by purported authorities on the Web suggesting that the name 'Nisheeth' derives its etymology from Nish + sheet, implying 'coolness of the night'. This unholy conjunction violates all known rules of sandhi AND the tranquility of my Ego. I wish to place a strong rebuttal on behalf of me and all my namesakes.

The name "Nishith" is derived from Nish + ith and means 'the end of the night', or, more precisely, dawn. "Nisheeth" may be considered a variant of the same, but I am reliably informed that this is quite possibly not so.

'Nisheeth', if my authorities, who trace their lineage in the Benarasi Hindi heartland, are to be believed, is a conjunction of Nish + eeth and implies 'the darkest part of the night'. This little nugget of etymological wisdom is my gift to all who bear the name of Nisheeth (I instinctively imagine them to be brilliant, socially inept geeks).

While Nature (and parental whimsy) might have ordained for you a name that simply begs to be rhymed with a scatological term that I will not explicate, the odds are evened here by virtue of the quite dashing metaphor you may associate with it. The next time you're out on a first date, the thing to do is to glower and brood and bring the conversation around to the point where you may break out the "It means MIDNIGHT" line and look properly deep and forbidding.

Peace be

AI to Minnesota !!!

2006-12-10T05:10:00.000-06:00

Dear all

There are very few things that can make me take off my lush beard and purportedly intellectual demeanor and jump up an down like a 10-year old. The most culturally sophisticated of these is the beautiful game of basketball. I will now acknowledge the stylistic influence of a woman whom I have grudgingly had to accept as being my superior in literary expression in the form of some italicized nostalgic meandering.

I have played basketball since I was 11, and have watched NBA games sporadically since I was 17. It would be easy for me to bring up myriad on-court memories - grade-school, high-school, college. But, I would rather choose to talk about a memory that I no longer remember for the event itself, but for the inner fountain of ecstasy that it unleashed on that memorable day.

Kings at Lakers, Western Conference Finals 2002.

The Lakers, like all Shaquille O'Neal led teams of the past decade, coasted through the regular season, and the Kings snapped up home-court advantage by winning the Pacific Division. Now, with the Lakers down 1-2 in the seven game series, losing this one at home would drop them into a 3-1 hole, with two visits to the notoriously partisan Arco Arena lined up.

In those days I used to be a great Shaq fan - there is something innately appealing in the idea of a dominant giant destroying all opposition, then going down fighting in a sea of flames that I instantly connect to. Shaq, of course, wimped out when it came to going down in flames, letting Dwyane Wade carry him to his fourth championship ring last season. However, back in 2002, he was still in his prime, an absolute monster. And his Lakers, supported by the league's officiating, were looking to win their third straight title.

So, my favorite basketball team is struggling, down by 15 to start the fourth quarter. Kobe has had an off game, and the Kings are doubling down on Shaq even off the ball. The only high point of the game, for a Lakers fan, is Samaki Walker's half court heave at the half-time buzzer.

So, I am sitting in bed and exhorting Kobe to get it going. And the Kings appear to be inexorably deep and well-coached. They have no weaknesses, and they are hanging tough with the Lakers. I can remember muttering, "Come on you b*****, give them some open looks". This, please remember, is when I was 18, and thought swearing was cool.

So, the Lakers start coming back. I don't remember how they did very well now, but I think they got a lot of help from the officials. Of course, nothing like the scam they pulled in this year's Finals, but, for those days, it set quite a precedent. What does a fan do when the refs are cheating in his favor? That has to be a tough one.

So, its the last two minutes of the game, and the Lakers are down by 4, and they get a questionable foul call or something, and they are within 2, and the Kings have possession. I am probably making this stuff up, to be honest, I am just building up to the big scene. The important thing to note is that I have steadily been muttering under my breath for half an hour, and the tension is building up.

The Kings run a bad play, go scoreless I think. That was their Achilles heel, those Kings. They were, by far, the better team. But they did not have a go-to superstar late in close games. Webber was an A grade choke artist, Peja struggled under pressure, and still does. Bibby had the gumption, but not the skills to make too much happen. The Lakers call time-out, they have about 10 seconds to get a basket to tie the game, and one of the game's best clutch performers in Kobe Bryant. This is looking special ...... in a humdrum kind of way.

Starting now, you may depend on a more accurate story - the events are seared into my memory. Kobe gets the ball off the inbounds pass from the near sideline. He has Christie on him, I think. He goes to work, ball fakes left, drives right. The limitations of my cheer-leading vocabulary become painfully obvious to me even as I am shouting awkward phrases like, "Yes! Do it, Kobe". What on earth is a man to say at times like these?

Kobe drives past, has an angle for a tricky layup, there are defenders waiting for him in the paint. He goes up, gets hacked on the arm, no foul called, layup clangs off the rim .... The breath is sucked out of me ..... 3 seconds left .....

SHAQ GETS THE REBOUND !!!!!! He has a simple putback from close range !!!! Shaquille O'Neal saves the DAYYYYY .........

He MISSES ........ I yell "WHAT", and the whole colony can probably hear me. There's a scrum for the loose ball, and Vlade Divac swats it away thinking time has run out ..... which it nearly has. By one chance in a million, it goes straight to the man they call Big Shot Rob, whose only basketball skill is his uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time on the biggest of stages.

I remember the words, as in a dream, "Horry ....... for the win", interspersed with the sound of the buzzer. I can't remember seeing the shot actually fall, because I had gone crazy just a fraction of a second before it did.

YES!!!

For the next 10 minutes, I relapse into a state that has only one description, 'primal'. I was shrieking inarticulately, I was jumping about, then rolling about, then jumping about again. I hurt my hand hacking at the ceiling fan, under normal circumstances, I can just about touch it, we have an 11-foot roof.

YES!!!

I have had happy experiences before, and since - several of them of far more moment than a basketball game that I was enjoying vicariously. But none have come anywhere close, in the sheer intensity of response and delirium, as Robert Horry's serendipitous three that pretty much won the Lakers their 3rd straight championship. It knocked the wind out of the Kings' sails, and the Nets from the East never could have offered too much resistance to Shaq-zilla anyway.

The second part of this post details why I chose to torture my readership with this juvenile memory in the first place. It was occasioned by the fact that I have an offer to go to Minnesota to do my PhD. There are three reasons that are threatening to draw me away from my idyllic sanctuary at Max Planck to the Twin Cities.

One of them is Kevin Garnett of the Minnesota Timberwolves, the greatest warrior in the NBA. He is stuck on a bad team, the GM, Kevin McHale, deserves to be roasted over a slow fire. KG leaves it all out on the floor every game, and the result is that the Wolves are never bad enough to get knocked into the lottery too far, and come out with a young superstar from the Draft. At the same time, they are not good enough to contend for a title, in any realistic sense.

Also, with so many young superstars coming into the league in the last few years, it is likely that the window of opportunity for the older stars to win and cement their legacies is over. So, everyone wants KG to ask for a trade, so that he can go to a better team and win a championship before he is too old to be relevant. And he steadfastly refuses, holding loyalty to the franchise above everything else.

I was thinking of going to Minnesota and sharing in KG's battle with the windmills. However, there is change afoot. Suddenly, since this Tuesday, KG has perked up and is relishing his time on the court. I was somewhat surprised at this, until it was announced Friday night that Allen Iverson, the Philadelphia 76ers superstar, had asked to be traded.

If there is a greater warrior in the NBA than Garnett, it has to be the unbelievable AI. Garnett is seven feet tall and has the physical implements to succeed in the NBA. AI is a mite under six feet tall, and yet, is very likely going to go down as one of the greatest players to have played the game. He plays through injuries, he challenges people twice his size every time he drives into the lane. He has fought against his vertical disadvantage every step of his illustrious 11-year career in the NBA. He served as a role model for me, once I realized that I was not likely to grow to 6'6" and be like Mike.

Now, although there is no official pronouncement yet, I find Garnett's cheerfulness really suggestive. Wolves owner Glen Taylor has commented that AI coming to Minnesota is impossible, but I suspect that might be a diversionary tactic to help with negotiations. I think AI wants to play with KG, the two most quixotic figures in the NBA in the last two decades, and win a championship together.

If this trade does happen, you can stick a MN code to any letters you wish to send me for the next 3-4 years.

Fingers crossed .......

Tale of a midnight stroll

2006-10-09T18:22:00.003-05:00

A meeting at midnight

Today in my usual midnight stroll,
I met a kitten shaped like a ball
Wandering, like me, in the chilly air
In the heather beside the sidewalk

She seemed glad to see me

Loneliness

briefly

banished

We fool around in the moonlight
And the old question pops up

Do I need her, does she need me?
Death, father of want and despair,
Casts His shadow upon the night

bemusement ...

The Spirit winks with three thousand eyes
Eternity lies above and beyond
I wave goodbye; she fluffs her tail

The laughter of aloneness is the purest of all
It gushes in peals down the dark hill-side

All the way down .....

2006-09-23T05:58:00.000-05:00

All the way down …

How do I know that I’m not mad?

By rights I should be broken

Raising my fury at circumstance

Or wallowing and cursing fate

No existence; save right now

No refuge except right here

Imbibing deep of the fount of life

It hurts from having to feel so much

And yet today I can feel glad

That I can feel glad for feeling glad

And if this is gladness all the way down

I’m either mad, or have found Love

An year older, an year wiser?

2006-07-15T00:30:00.000-05:00

Hi all,

There was a big question on my mind about this time last year, so I wrote a blues song about it, "Buddha's Twelve Bar Blues". I have had to confront it quite a bit in this past year, but feel that I finally do have an answer for it. I summarize it in a poem called 'Two Loves', that I wrote today. Be well, everyone.

The Question:

Buddha's Twelve Bar Blues

Clouds of peace all around me, rising up into the sky
Tinged a gloomy shade of black, can't you see the reason why
Can't find no peace in this world, till I call this world a lie

Can't find no things to rouse me, no matter howso hard I try
Want no more drink and grass, and their insalubrious high
Can't find no peace in this world, till I call this world a lie

Tried livin' with you people, with tuxedo and a tie
Tried running around naked, playing catcher in the rye
Can't find no peace in this world, till I call this world a lie

Take no truck in holy books, all say that the end is nigh
Do as we do, sinner, before you go to hell and fry
Can't find no peace in this world, till I call this world a lie

All the things I've ever loved, cast a brightness and then die
Love will always break my heart, so I let love pass me by
Can't find no peace in this world, till I call this world a lie

Don't know which way I'm going, or if I should even try
Don't know if I'm still living, or if I just wait to die
Can't find no peace in this world, till I call this world a lie

How can a flower bloom, if the poor old roots are dry
How can the spirit soar, if the mind and body cry
Can't find no peace in this world, till I call this world a lie

The world is such a crazy place, till I firmly close my eyes
Fold my legs and sit up straight, feel the sound of silence rise
Can't find no peace in this world, till I call this world a lie

The Answer:

Two Loves

Two loves I have, both far away
The love within and the one without
Two loves have I, and each alone
Would have devoured me inside out

The love without; with sun and storm
Cleaves two hearts in passion’s sway
The love within, a great ocean’s swell
Enfolds me; but never all the way

The love of my life is an ardent flame
Scouring every trace of moral chaff
The celestial love is a gentle breeze
That caressing; blows the cinders off

The love without is a tender stalk
Floating on currents of circumstance
The love within is the sea itself
Where all rivers end; given the chance

It burns, it calms; it claws, it heals
Her love is frank in its innocence
He listens, and ever keeps his counsel
Speaking with wordless eloquence

They’ll break my heart, time after time
They will stretch me, tax my vigor too
And every time will I rise stronger
And the music of my lute will sing anew

Ever harder they pull, one at each end
The slender strings of my heart’s desire
And yet sweeter does the music sound
As they raise the pitch still higher

The tree of Life’s Heart can only grow
In soil moistened by tears of love
In my garden, it will always thrive
Showering its flowers from above

Two loves I have, both far from me
Yet slowly, towards both, I make my way
I stumble at times, and lose my path
But know that I’ll be there one day

Tolkien's grave is a gyroscope

2006-04-09T14:13:00.000-05:00

Two hours of senseless writing; one click and a defenseless world is exposed to it. Ah the wonders of technology .... I apologise most profusely to the memory of the greatest writer the world has ever known, for attempting to analyse the one chink in his armor - poetry.

Introduction

When J R R Tolkien decided to create his legendarium of the history of Middle-Earth, he took on the gargantuan task of creating a mythology that would carry visceral appeal for any Anglo-Saxon littérateur. Towards this end, he created a veritable menagerie of mythical events and their memories.

If the Silmarillion be an account of the doings upon Middle Earth in the Elder Days, the narrative of the Hobbit as well as the three books in the Lord of the Rings trilogy refers to them as vaguely remembered mythical folklore. In many cases, for greater authenticity, his characters allude to such events through poetry.

While the competence of his poetic expression has been often debated, it cannot be gainsaid that an analysis of his poetry offers us the perfect opportunity to study the use of myths in poetry, with the poetry originating, with exquisite craft and great thought, from the same source as the myth.

Description

As may be expected, the first book of the trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring, contains the greatest number of Tolkien’s poems, as the lead characters are gradually relieved of their naïveté regarding the history of Middle-Earth. The second book has fewer real poems, but still contains multitudes of quoted fragments; there are no complete poems in the third book.

The reader is gradually introduced to the ramifications of the events of the Second Age as the story progresses onwards from the House of Elendil in the first book. The ‘Hobbit’, being prequel to the trilogy, has poems related almost entirely to Nature, expressed in a rather clumsy archaic style.

The first book contains seven complete poems and numerous extracts from other works; these songs are chiefly used to acquaint the reader with the quaint familiarity of Middle-Earth, three are songs by the singular Tom Bombadil. The legend of the Ring, as indeed all the other legends, is mentioned only in small snatches of Elven verse recited by Gandalf and Bilbo.

The second book contains just two complete poems, one an almost Viking elegy to Boromir and the other a very battle-spirited description of Gondor. However, ‘the Two Towers’ is profusely packed with poetic quotations and allusions, and is indeed our primary source of reference for Hobbit and human non-mythic poetry for this essay.

In the third book, the action moves too fast to allow for much versification, and consequently, there are no complete poems in ‘the Return of the King’. Besides, the legend of the Ring is too well known at this stage of the story to require further elaboration. Small quotations of old legends, however, are quite numerous.

The Silmarillion, being the substantive account for the myth of Middle-Earth itself, is a treasure trove for Tolkien’s mythic poetry. However, a study of purely Silmarillion verse would not be able to explain the reasons for Tolkien’s idiosyncratic style-shifts. Such an analysis is only possible when the entire body of work – the Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Silmarillion – is studied together.

Analysis

Syntactical innovation

A perfect example of Tolkien’s mastery of the intricacies of the epic poetry of the Middle Ages may be seen in the following passage from Earendil the Mariner

at last he came to Night of Naught,
and passed, and never sight he saw
of shining shore nor sight he sought.
The winds of wrath came driving him,
and blindly in the foam he fled
from west to east and errandless,
unheralded he homeward sped.

From the plethora of assonant syllables highlighted, it is evident that this is a highly alliterative passage, written in the style of 14^th century ballads that also evinced a similar structural assonance. One hastens to add that this is by no means an isolated example. For a similar passage, let us examine an even more structured alliterative example from Turin’s Fostering

Then the fame of the fights on the far marches
was carried to the courts of the king of Doriath,
and tales of Túrin were told in his halls,
of the bond and brotherhood of Beleg the ageless
with the black-haired boy from the beaten people.

In this passage, it is remarkable that the pattern of alliteration follows a strict 3 to the line syntax. This subtle linguistic nuance, borrowed from Middle English works, is representative of Tolkien’s erudite efforts to imbue his poetry with an archaic feel that mythic poetry requires.

Stylistic differentiation

In Tolkien’s ballads of Middle-Earth, there appear to be three distinctive variations in poetic ‘ability’. On a separate plain, in terms of a heavy infusion of alliteration, impressionism and abstractedness is the poetry of the Elven folk – their myths and Galadriel’s songs. A relevant example would be the evocative “Winter comes to Nargothrond”

The summer slowly in the sad forest
waned and faded. In the west arose
winds that wandered over warring seas.
Leaves were loosened from laboring boughs:
fallow-gold they fell, and the feet buried
of trees standing tall and naked,
rustling restlessly down roofless aisles,
shifting and drifting. The shining vessel

Secondly, we have the folk-ballads of the men and hobbits. These are written in the rough flowery style of Middle Age troubadours, with a heavy stress on assonance and pedantry. A good example in this regard would be the elegy to Gil-Galad in the second book

Gil-Galad was an Elven-king.
Of him the harpers sadly sing:
the last whose realm was fair and free
between the Mountains and the Sea.

Finally, we have the compositions attributed to the characters themselves – the most celebrated instance being Bilbo’s Walking Song of course. These are extremely simple, almost bucolic, in their structure and tend towards an ‘abcb’ structure. Frodo’s lament for Gandalf is a good example in this regard

When evening in the Shire was grey
his footsteps on the Hill were heard;
before the dawn he went away
on journey long without a word.

It seems quite likely that this is a deliberate effort on Tolkien’s part to subtly distinguish between the intellectual capabilities of his characters. Thus, for instance, Gandalf’s brief verses, both composed and quoted, are usually in the first style, befitting his role as a link to the Elder Days. The hobbits’ repertoire is almost entirely described by the third classification. Their own compositions are markedly inferior to their memorized verses; as befits a non-intellectual people.

Elven verse is mellifluous in its cadence and is characterized by a love for trees and stars; their mythic poetry is extremely detailed and subtly haunted by a sense of futility in warding off the ravages of time on their pristine race. A sense of impermanence, fragility and lack of form is also evident in much of Elven mythic poetry.

The verse of the Dwarves, much like themselves, is crudely and roughly shaped, and is gruff in its cadence. While forced rhyming is a natural flaw in much of Tolkien’s poetry, its incidence is rather high in dwarf verse. This might be a coincidence, or it might argue a deliberate effort on the author’s part to suggest the dwarves’ ineptitude for artistic creation.

This suspicion is highlighted by the fact that most of Tolkien’s human (and Hobbit) characters, even the least portentous ones, while perhaps not attaining great heights of poetic creativity, manage to confirm to the basic rules of meter and cadence without too much discomfort.

Where there is an ambiguity in categorization of a particular poem in this regard, it is more often than not reflected in a corresponding ambiguity regarding the related characters in the text. Thus, for instance, Bilbo’s prophetic verse for Aragorn, while written in ‘abcb’ like his other rhymes, carries a tinge of Elven abstraction and presentiment. In the light of subsequent events, this is readily perceived as a device to create uncertainty regarding the Ranger’s identity

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be waken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.

Compositional differentiation

Setting aside the obvious distinction in the subject matter of the ballads of the different races; there are numerous idiomatic idiosyncrasies in the verse of the non-humans that distinguishes it from human verse. The most significant is the use of adjectives or adverbs to open a new sentence, a much maligned pseudo - device for developing rhetorical tension. Thus, “Dark are the waters ………” to Gimli the Dwarf and “Long are the waves on the Last Shore falling” to Legolas the Elf. The linguistic phrasing of human and hobbit verse is much less stilted, and tends to be more descriptive and in the first person.

Perhaps as a consequence of their numerous dislocations, the human memory in Middle-Earth is rather hazy, making epic poetry possible only for them. In comparison, the Elves seem to retain records of their ancient history, thereby negating the possibility of the development of an epic form of verse in their cultures. Whereas Dwarves, facing much adversary and exile throughout their history, arrive at the epic form of their own accord, the hobbits do so only through contact with humans.

Philosophical differentiation

At a higher level, we find that Tolkien’s characters express views entirely in conformance with their assigned personalities. Thus, while Gandalf the Grey exudes prescience and secret wisdom in his somewhat abstruse verse, Bilbo’s songs express an indomitable spirit matching a bright but simple mind. The other hobbits, with the exception of Frodo, who is changed by his encounter with the Ring, follow Bilbo’s lead in this regard.

The most interesting comparison here is between the Elven and human myth songs. Whereas the Elven singers subscribe to a very submissive Semitic view of existence being a delusional dream inching towards eventual dissolution, human poetry in Tolkien’s work, while brushing upon the Semitic aspects of Middle-Earth mythology – the destruction of Numenor, for example – expresses elements of joy in struggle against adversity and at times a masochistic glory in Valhalla-like destruction. In this sense, it is more influenced by Nordic myth than the rest of Tolkien’s compositions.

Summary

In our analysis of J R R Tolkien’s poetry with reference to his legendarium of Middle-Earth, we find that he uses mythology masterfully to provide a framework for his characters to express their views regarding questions very fundamental to the human spirit. In doing so, Tolkien shows very clearly that the greatest purpose of mythology is to provide a detailed sociological frame of reference for analyzing human activity.

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.

Calling Dylan ........

2006-03-27T03:24:00.000-06:00

Well you know, if people are going to keep dropping in on me from space and telling me I am foolish / selfish / lazy / whatever to have given up writing, I suspect I shall have to offer a note of explanation. The fact of the matter is, I have made up my mind to not write if I have nothing to say. My daily experiences are purely empirical evidence; they need to be analysed in perspective before I can hope to make them useful to a reader, right?

I have been thinking about the Hindi Jazz idea for quite a while now; those of you at the Saarang OAT LM thingummy will know that I am trying to channel my composition and guitar work in the same direction. However, this would not have been written unless I wasn't required, (at 12 hours' notice, the sluggard!) to write this as a Humanities assignment for my good friend Condom. Nevertheless, I really believe this is an idea whose time has now come; you, gentle reader, are welcome to prove it either way.

Once upon a time, Einstein was pressed into making an after-dinner speech. He rose dutifully when he was called upon to do the honors and said, "Ladies and gentlemen, I am sorry. I have nothing to say." His host was horrified at his faux pax; Einstein assured him that he would amend matters one day. An year later, his erstwhile host got a telegram from Einstein, "Now I have something to say". He instantly threw a dinner party and Einstein delivered his after-dinner speech.

To quote the great man himself, "Now I have something to say"

Be well, all.

An anomaly in Indian musicology

Introduction

The theory and history of North Indian classical music has been the subject of copious documentation as part of its own tradition by virtue of its hereditary nature. With its assimilation into the hippie culture of the US in the 60s, it has been studied comprehensively by Western scholars as well.

With ‘raga’ rock becoming a sonic symbol of the 60s counterculture, it was only a matter of time before Indian masters would acquire fame for their ‘exotic’ scales and instruments among Western audiences. Unfortunately, this has led to a perception of Indian music as being mysterious and ‘exotic’. As evidence for the foregoing, one need only remember that the concept of ‘fusion’ instantly evokes images of sophistication and musical depth.

Fusion, as a blending of genres, has always been extant in the history of music. The exaltation of Indian classical music as an alien art form; aided and abetted by Indian musicians seeking to capitalize on this niche demand has caused us to lose sight of the evolution of Indian folk music and its integration into popular culture. In this essay, we document the phenomenon of ‘proto-fusion’, the genre that identifies what is popularly perceived as the Golden Age of Indian film music.

Studying pop music

As a rule of thumb, the study of different genres of music is fundamentally based on an analysis of the predominant scales used in its compositions. It is a generally held Western belief that the basis of classical music is the diatonic scale. However, crucially, it is now known that the diatonic scale has never played a role in Asian music. Any study of Asian music has to be arrived at through an analysis of the pentatonic scale.

It should come as no surprise then that the first Western musicians to take an interest in Indian music were pentatonic-based players, who found the tones of Indian music to resemble those of their own native and derived cultures – British blues-rock musicians.

Blues may, with some justification, be considered the universal language of world music. By incorporating the concept of tritone-shifted impure notes into the pentatonic scale, blues opened the doors for folk music to interact with classical concepts to form the vast creative musical universe of jazz.

The universal appeal of blues, it is posited here, bears a direct relation to the spread of Islam. Historically, the only musical culture to use tritones on a regular basis is the Arabic culture. With the Islamic conquest of Africa by the middle of the 11^th century, blues music developed over a period of 500 years as the African diatonic scale interacted with the conquering pentatonic culture in an antagonistic manner to create a chaotic, noisy and extremely emotive genre of music.

The Golden Age of Indian music

History

It is this music that found its way across the Atlantic on the lips and banjos of slaves in the American South. And so, with the emergence of jazz in the first few decades of the 20^th century, when Indian music finally found a stage for itself, following independence and the burgeoning of the film industry, it was to this culture that it looked for inspiration.

A Famous Example

If there is one musical phrase that summarizes the disregarded influences on Indian film music, it is the bebop tune, “My name is Anthony Gonsalves”. The music director, Laxmikant Pyarelal, in one of the many subliminal messages that litter the cinema of this era, pays tribute to his violin master – a Goanese named Anthony Gonsalves. Gonsalves is representative of the many Catholic musical preceptors who imbued the film music of the era with a distinctly Latin feel by drawing on their Goanese Portuguese musical roots.

Musical features

As Naresh Fernandes recounts, “By invoking the name of his violin teacher in that tune in Amar Akbar Anthony, the composer Pyarelal had finally validated the lives of scores of Goan Catholic musicians whose working years had been illuminated by the flicker of images dancing across white screens in airless sound studios, even as acknowledgement of their talent whizzed by in the flash of small-type credit titles.

The arc of their stories – determined by the intersection of passion and pragmatism, of empire and exigency – originated in church-run schools in Portuguese Goa and darted through royal courts in Rajasthan, jazz clubs in Calcutta and army cantonments in Muree. Those lines eventually converged on Bombay’s film studios, where the Goan Catholic arrangers worked with Hindu music composers and Muslim lyricists in an era of intense creativity that would soon come to be recognized as the golden age of Hindi film song.”

The decline

Intrinsic Causes

The Indian film industry (the music industry being a subset thereof) carried the seeds for its eventual decline into mediocrity within itself. The primary reason for this was the societal disapproval of the musical profession in India, as a result of orthodox Hindu and Muslim beliefs. As a result, Indian musicians never acquired the iconic notoriety that played such an important role in sustaining the creativity of American music past the swinging 60s.

Also the Goan involvement in music was also not heavily publicized before 1962 in consequence of the Indian insecurity vis-à-vis Portuguese occupation. As a result, the Goan innovators in the 1940-60 Indian film industry have remained unsung. By the law of diminishing returns, the Goan musicians, circa 1955, decided to subdue their distinctive style in order to survive in the competitive Bombay market.

Circumstantial Reasons

However, the precipitating factor in the emasculation of Indian film music was quite simply the expansion in its size. With a limited core of musicians and burgeoning studio demand, composers’ standards deteriorated; and with societal stigma preventing the rise of innovative successors, film music, save some honorable coruscations of creativity, had lapsed into tedium by the middle of the 70s.

In addition, the Western world in 1975 had entered the Golden Age of British Heavy metal; bands such as Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath had taken the next step in musical evolution by using volume and distortion as a canvas for expressing the nihilistic aggression of the post-Beat generation.

Whereas music in the US had acquired a substantial countercultural market allowing it to experiment and innovate unaffected by market forces; Indian musicians, restricted in their options by the economic crises of 70s India, had to toe the mainstream line. As a result, three successive generations of indigenous musical innovation were lost to creating unimaginative pop music.

The current scene

The current generation marks a turning point in terms of the musical evolution of our culture, and hence, it is crucial for us to understand its musical proclivities in terms of the perspective we have acquired from the foregoing.

All over the country, particularly in the metropolitan cities, small communities of adherents to the Western classic and metal rock counterculture are making their presence felt. These young, upper middle-class Indians, disenchanted with the puerile fare served up to them in their childhood; or influenced by the rare survivors of the commercial era, have taken to the Western cultural ethos with such conviction that it is almost impossible to view them in terms of their natural culture. Their music, their lyrics and their collective attitude is governed by the perceptions of the Western world – the Western world of 20 years ago, to boot.

Now, it is evident that, should such a scenario continue to exist, Indian folk music would be condemned to an unsung extinction in the near future. When the market dictates terms to mainstream music and a foreign culture to the alternative sections, indigenous music is left without too many possible practitioners.

Reasons for optimism

However, there is sufficient reason to believe that, with increasing awareness of our indigenous folk music traditions, change is imminent. A small but growing number of New Age Indian musicians have risen above the dogmas of both economics and iconoclasm to create music natural to their psyche and culture.

Neo-fusion, if we may term it that, is characterized by an eclectic set of musical idioms that are beginning to gain credence in both the film and alternative music industry. While this is partly (and almost comically) a consequence of the counterculture attempting to imitate the West’s appropriation of Indian culture, there are genuine efforts underway to integrate Indian folk themes into music that is technically proficient enough to command respect from the counterculture.

Sufi pioneer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, vocalist Shankar Mahadevan and percussionist Trilok Gurtu were among the first of this breed of Indian musicians. The bands Euphoria, Indian Ocean and Junoon are contemporary examples in this regard. Since the turn of the century, Indian audiences are turning increasingly appreciative of music that they can appreciate both viscerally and intellectually, a phenomenon that seems to bear a strong correlation to the rise of the “India Shining” paradigm.

Suggestions

This new brand of music, while a commendable effort at promoting indigenous music, appears to have digressed somewhat into a commercial direction. With the film industry still borrowing liberally from the Western idioms of heavy percussive backgrounds and power chords, this new generation is also finding its experimentation confined within the realm of the commercially exploitable.

The only possible solution to this over-professionalism and artificiality that permeates our music culture is to understand the story of the three lost generations of Indian music, and begin to compensate for it by patronizing the most recent authentic brand of Indian music at the grass roots level.

We need musicians who can play music from the 60s film genre with the technical proficiency that would inspire young adherents of the Western rock counterculture to seek out the truth about their own colorful musical heritage instead of being disillusioned into blind imitation of foreign countercultures.

The Golden Age of Indian music is lost in the discussion of the combine between Indian classical music and avant jazz; and the plaudits that Indian virtuosos now habitually earn at international performances. It is extremely convenient to perceive music as a performing art and forget that, in its essence, it is a source of ego-less happiness and not adrenalin-pumped self-esteem.

The musician owes a responsibility to society – the responsibility to articulate its deep-seated hopes and fears; the responsibility to be a voice that speaks of things they cannot express; the responsibility to be a window through which an audience can experience familiar emotions in varyingly new perspectives.

It is incumbent upon members of the counterculture – in their roles as performers and members of the audience – to distinguish the Western culture of virtuosic exhibitionism and dexterous perfectionism from the Eastern penchant for rhythmic percussion and melodic improvisation; shed their insecurity regarding embracing their indigenous culture and encourage the resurgence of authentic India folk music – music that describes the Indian culture of today.

Or, in colloquial terms, we need a Dylan or two.