Chronicles of the Crawlin' Croc

Farewell

2009-07-06T01:09:00.003+05:30

It has been a long journey.

This blog started off as the incoherent ramblings of a blogger full of self-importance (and has finished the same way, I hear some of you snicker). I talked of Amitav Ghosh and science fiction, my love for code and my breakup, Greek mythology and the universalist doctrine of Christianity. I talked of my hatred for reservations and why I thought it was the manifest duty of our generation to function as the aggregators and disseminators of wealth.

And, finally, the blog petered to a stop. I had lost my voice. Why? Exhorting others to reach for the impossible, I had compromised on my own goals. Pushing others to achieve their heart's desires, I had neglected mine.

It has been five years since my first post appeared on this blog. Five years of growing up from angsty youth to mature man, five years of yearning to find an independent voice when I had it with me all the while. Five years of seeking desperately to move on from the cliches of modern blogging. Five years might not be an eternity for blogs in general, but it sure feels that way for this one, which is why I have good news and bad news for you folks who are still reading.

The bad news: I've decided to stop updating this blog. Though this will remain in its present form for the foreseeable future, I shall not be posting any fresh articles here.

The good news: There's a brand new blog, at www.anshumanmishra.com (yep, I'm going commercial), where I'll write about subjects that have managed to hold my fickle interest for a sustained period. I still have lots to talk about, but this is not the appropriate forum any more.

See you at my new blog!

A Hundred Miles To Havana

2008-05-26T13:31:00.004+05:30

Note: This is a re-write of a story I had written years ago in college. I've tried to breathe fresh life into the text; I hope and trust you'll enjoy it.

There is fear in us, dark and velvet, enveloping our hearts and minds, whispering insanely in our dreams. Throwing us into the abyss, roaring with laughter as we slip away like tin soldiers from the hands of a dying god.
There is hate in us too, a brooding evil, animating our hands, tapping out the drumbeats to our deepest desires.
And there is love as well, oh yes, a blazing ray of light that sets fire to our souls. Making us believe, against all odds, that redemption is just a heartbeat away.
In equal measures have I felt the dank and musty trappings of fear in the distant reaches of my mind, pinned down the rabid animal that is hate threatening to take over my soul.
And yes, a million moons ago, I was touched by love.
The story starts, as very few do, on a pier.

The sun broke through the clouds as she stepped off the ferry and onto the pier. I watched silently as the gentle waves lapped at the hems of her dress, as the ferryman turned away and rowed off hurriedly.
I stood up and stretched, waved at her to come over.
"You must be the guide," she stated with an air of uncertainty, as she walked across the pier and onto the beach. I nodded shortly. I hadn’t been looking my best, and my clothes had never been something to excitedly write home about.
"What happened to this place?"
I turned around to stare anew at my abode of many, many years. The winding path that led to the village was strewn with sugar-coated candy wrappers, and my eyes caught the glint of jagged metal edges sticking out of the mud.
"I guess people get really hungry around here."
She laughed then, a delightful wave of joy, and the wind fell silent in awe as the sounds of her mirth echoed across the beach.
"I'm Anne," she said and reached out her hand in greeting.
I recoiled in horror and lurched back a few steps.
"Please don't try to touch me again."
And there was a pursing of lips, and there was a steady silence that hinted at a wellspring of anger buried deep. And she withdrew her hand, started walking down the path, staring fixedly at the distant village.

I was quite content to walk alongside her, and we trudged along the path, skillfully dodging the pieces of metal that threatened each time to blow us into bits.
She spoke finally, after a while, hesitation and annoyance uneasily coming to a truce in her voice.
"Did all of this land up here during the Great War?" she asked, as she poked at a metal piece with her foot.
"I'd be careful if I were you," I replied. "It was the First World War actually."
The butterfly of chaos had flapped its wings in a city amidst the clouds, and the thundering echoes of its passage had boomed across this island, as history and legend swept over and greedily embraced all of us. I had fought against my lord and master, commanded my own troops. I had viewed with dread the eerie calm with which was undertaken the merciless slaughter of civilians by the opposing armies. I had proudly given no quarter, nor asked for any, until desertion and attrition took their toll on our meager defences.
And, after the War ended, I had been sent here to seek salvation, if possible, an iota of mercy, if not.
"I knew your father," I said, and smiled as she gasped and stopped in her tracks. "I spoke to him many years ago, when he came to this island. He was an interesting man, a brave man." I paused, unusually unsure of myself, and took a deep breath. "He wanted to bring along his entire family, but you weren’t quite ready for the move yet."
I watched as her tears furiously ripped furrows in the layers of dust on her face, watched as she took out a dirty napkin from the folds of her dress and wiped her eyes and her nose, watched as the heaves and sobs subsided.
And then, finally - "How far are we from Havana?"
I grinned, resumed walking. "A hundred miles, give or take. We’ll stop at the village for refreshments."

The path took us through a sugar plantation tended by a plague of industrious ants, and as Anne chatted away happily about her family and her friends back in Amsterdam, morning slowly made way for late afternoon. The Sun looked a delicious shade of boiled yolk when we reached the ruins and thatched huts that comprised my village. The breeze bent to its thankless task of drying our sweat, carrying to our ears the harsh calls of ravens seemingly perched on every nearby tree.
"We should eat at Ernie's. Everybody comes to Ernie's," I said, savoring already the taste of fried mackerel and a pint of beer.
She gave me a puzzled smile. "It's Rick's, isn't it. Everybody comes to Rick's."
"Different place, honey, different time." I led the way to Ernie's inn, a sorry-looking dilapidated shack that once used to have a real roof, one that rarely leaked during the fierce storms that kept lashing our coast. Ernie's Inn, the sign swinging and creaking outside proudly proclaimed, Estd. 1961. And right below this was a singular coat of arms: a fish leaping out of the open mouth of a bull. Which made me hungrier still.

Anne took off her straw hat as we walked in through the swinging salon doors, and shook the sweat out of her long black hair. She looked up at me and grimaced.
"Ernie!" I shouted out, "There’s a guest with me!"
There was a noise from behind one of the tables in the corner, and Anne muffled a shriek as a woman dressed in black got up from her seat and stared at us.
"It's only Virginia. She’s not all there. Ignore her," said Ernie, standing behind us, armed with a batter and two mugs, scratching his white beard and leering at Anne, carefully avoiding my gaze. "So, what can I interest you in?"
My regular mackerel and beer was served up in no time at all, while Anne decided to feast herself on a green cake that I quite advised against.
It was with a relaxed sigh that I put my legs up on the table and pushed back my chair. Anne kept smiling at Ernie, who seemed happy enough to be at the receiving end of this show of emotion. Virginia sat at her own table and kept cooing and muttering to herself softly.
"You know, it's funny, the way Virginia turned up here," Ernie started off, addressing Anne as he handed me a cigar. I flicked out a pen knife, clean snapped off the cigar top, and lit it. The delicious aroma of tobacco filled the inn. All was right with the world.
"Funny how?"
I grunted and dusted some of the ash off my shirt. "She walked out of the ocean, all drenched and pale. Most people landing up on this island come via ferry, the way you did."
Anne shuddered faintly as Ernie frowned at me. Evidently, I was not supposed to interrupt. I laughed and pointed my cigar at him. "Now, this guy, when he came here, looked like an Egyptian mummy; his forehead was wrapped in bandages. I nursed him back to health."
I caught Ernie with a pleading look on his face. "That's worth a round you owe me Ernie, and you know it."
Ernie took my mug, turned around without a word and went back to the counter to fill it up.
"He's scared of losing his mind, Ernie is," I chuckled, as he pushed my mug back at me and sat down next to Anne. "So's Virginia, as far as I can tell." Virginia tilted her head and stared at us, upon hearing her name spoken aloud. The time had come to roll the dice.
"What about you, Anne? Anything that you're afraid of?"
She looked into my eyes then, did Anne, and the mists of the mind that had obscured my vision scattered away, and I saw, before she spoke, what she was afraid of.
"It's the dark. I'm afraid of the dark. I've always been."
Simple words, softly spoken. I understood, then, perhaps for the very first time, why humans alone, of all of His creatures, had been blessed with the gift of speech.
Ernie saw the look on my face. "You don’t have to go anywhere tonight. Why don’t you stay here?" he told Anne as his hand crept up to cover hers on the table.
I pushed my chair back as I got up, and smiled at Ernie, a smile cold enough to freeze the Sahara, before turning my gaze to Anne. "We should leave for Havana. Now." Ernie withdrew his hand quickly, and beads of sweat trickled down his forehead.
I walked up to the salon doors, peered at the gathering clouds of late evening. A bulbous moon peeked back at us through the bald bark of a dead tree outside the inn, before resuming its presence behind the clouds.
"The weather's perfect for a stroll in the night," I remarked to nobody in particular.
Ernie got up along with Anne, who seemed clearly reluctant to leave. "Perhaps we should -" he started.
The silence of the ravens was a thunderclap in my head as I walked out of the inn without waiting for a reply, followed shortly by Anne and, a few steps behind her, Ernie.
I thought it best to spare Ernie for now. "Go back to your inn, old man," I said, calmly, as my voice rose above the noise of the birds starting to flap their wings, ready to fly off. "Go back and seek your beloved marlin. It’s not your turn today."
The wind howled and the streetlights flickered in the gathering gloom as we watched each other, Ernie and I, a smile on my face, naked terror on his.
Ernie shrugged and walked back into the inn quietly. The inn was to remain in business for another day at least.
Anne stood by the door of the inn, silent as a tomb, watching me walk away. With a faint sense of satisfaction I heard no signs of her following me.
"Do you want to go to Havana?" I said, softly, as I came to a halt beneath a streetlight across the street, turning around and looking at her. She returned my gaze, then, gathering up her reserves of courage, still standing at the door to the inn, willing herself to make a move.
"Yes I do," she said, and we were plunged into darkness.

The darkness lasted for a year, a week, a month, a day, an hour, a minute, a second. The streetlight above my head flickered back into glorious gas-powered wonder, beating back the demons in the darkness chattering wildly at each other.
I stood in a circle of garish yellow light, surrounded by unseen voices that whistled, spoke, laughed, and cried, as the village lay wrapped in a cloak made out of the fabric of Night itself.
I glimpsed Anne’s outline across the road, her back pushed against the wall of Ernie’s inn. She was on her haunches, cowering, hiding her face.
"Can you see me Anne?" I said, and I had no doubts that she could. I raised my voice, "Don’t you want to go to Havana?"
"I'm scared," she called out, after a while.
I stood there quietly, listening to the ravens clawing and pecking away at unseen horrors.
"Do you trust me?"
She whimpered, then, at the sound of a raven choking. "Yes. Yes, I do."
"Come to me," I said, and stretched out my arms. "Come to me, and everything will be fine."
It was with unceasing wonder that I watched Anne as she lifted up her face, watched as she came to a decision, watched as she got up quietly, watched as she closed her eyes and took deep breaths, watched as she moved blindly towards my outstretched arms, ignoring the beating and flapping of leathery wings around her, ignoring the eerily human-like cries of hunger and envy that surrounded her, ignoring the million beady lifeless eyes that noted every step she took, that lusted after the blood in her veins.
She ignored them all, and she walked up to me.
And she collapsed in my arms with a faint shudder.
"Hush," I said, as I held her and stroked her hair. "Hush. It’s all right now."
It was then that she turned up her face towards me, her eyes full of tears of relief, it was then that she stood on her toes and leaned forward, it was then that I felt her soft lips on mine, it was then that I felt the force of her fierce embrace.
We stood there for a second, a minute, an hour, a day, a month, a week, a year.
We stood there for an eternity.
And as we disengaged, gently, she held my hand in hers, and she asked, "So when do we go to Havana?"
And I smiled at her, tears rolling down my cheeks.
And I said, "You're already here Anne. You’ve reached Havana."
And she vanished before my eyes, melting away into the darkness of the night, as my lips struggled to spell out what I needed to say, as I blinked a thousand times in vain to catch a last fleeting glimpse.
And I stood there and I cried, knowing too well that I would never see her again.

There is fear in us, in each of us, a cold fear that binds us to the world and mocks our greatest achievements.
The fear of the dark for Anne, the fear of turning insane for Ernie and Virginia.
The fear of Man for me.
She faced her fears, Anne did, and conquered them, painful step by painful step, the sheer urgency of years fading away as she came closer to her goal.
I have been on this island since the dawn of time. I have stayed here, and have faced my fears too, man by man, woman by woman, child by child. I have faced my fears, as waves of human flotsam and detritus beat down my island on their desperate way to Havana and to eternal life.
I have faced my fears.
The fear of Man’s touch. The fear of his speech. The fear of his laughter and his cries, and his love and his hate. The fear of his freedom.
"What is Man, that thou art so mindful of him?"
It was He who had asked me the question oh so many years ago. Lucifer, He had called me, Lord of the Morning. I was His first, His chosen.
It was He who had cast me out, thrown me down to this very island, to face my fears till the end of time itself.

There is hope in us too, in each of us. And as I walk down the hundred miles to Havana, as I get closer every day by an inch or two, I feel the grace of His gaze, the soft touch of His thoughts.
For is it not said that the meek shall inherit the Earth?
And if He bestows mercy onto all, won’t He bestow mercy onto me?
There is love in us, I know, in each of us. And I know a time will come, when enough souls have been guided on their journeys, when I have faced my fears and conquered them, that I shall be free to enter His loving embrace.
And there will be, nay, there shall be Light.

In Which A List of Books Is Covered

2008-05-22T19:47:00.003+05:30

Here's a list of books that one's supposed to have read; mark those you have read already in bold, those that are on your bookshelf and are piteously crying out for a solid read in italics, and leave the ones you haven't touched with a bargepole (yet) without any markup. I assume, especially for the classics, that only unabridged works are allowed to be marked as read. (Or the list below shall light up in bold like a Christmas tree.)
The list is from Chandni apparently, via Whiny The Moo's blog. Here's some link love: Chandni and Mukta.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina (I believe this is Abhra Banerjee's copy. Ho ho ho.)
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22 (why half bold? Because I couldn't complete the book. Too darn repetitive.)
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion

Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose (Sigh. What a book. I quizzed Amitav Ghosh with points from this book.)
Don Quixote (One of the first books I read on my mobile phone. Geek.)

Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey (I read a translation by T E Lawrence, of Arabian fame. Yes. That dude on the bike.)
Pride and Prejudice (Ebook.)
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel (I've got an e-copy of Collapse with me, which I shall read some day inshallah.)
War and Peace

Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad (I'm counting audio books as well. :D)

Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway (Seriously? I tried reading this once, and then gave up. It's called "opportunity cost"; I have very limited time on my hands.)
Great Expectations (Dickens' best.)
American Gods (Ahh. This book blew my mind away.)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Atlas Shrugged (Read this book just before entering college, like everyone else, and felt vaguely rebellious and anti-authority. Jeez.)
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
Quicksilver (First book of Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. Salute.)
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera

Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum (Takes Dan Brown and whips his sorry posterior from Rome to London.)
Middlemarch
Frankenstein (Read this one in 6th grade. What can I say - in Munger's words, I was a book with two legs sticking out.)
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula (Courtesy my elder brother. Also, The Omen, which was a hoot.)
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys (Sequel to American Gods, not nearly as nice, but you can still find traces of genius here.)
The Once and Future King (.genre this with possible is what to eyes my opened which book fantasy first The. If you've read the book, you'll know what I'm talking about.)

The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984 (My dad's gift to me in 7th grade, when I was leaning towards Communism. He saved my soul.)
Angels and Demons
Inferno (Audio book, narrated by John Cleese! Yay!)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Correction
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (My bro printed out and read the entire book in size 10 fonts. Yes, we are cheap people.)
Dune
The Prince

The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots and Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas (Again, I'm halfway through.)
The Confusion
Lolita (It's pretty funny actually. You should try reading it. Funny as in that weird guy who keeps staring at me at the bus stand, not funny as in ha-ha.)

Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow (What can I say? I'm still trying to understand this. Before you ask, no annotations, thank you.)

The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Now for the list of books I suggest you should read, off the top of my head:

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (If you haven't read this yet, go kill yourself. Seriously. I might be able to help.)
The Agony And The Ecstasy (The closest historical parallel to Howard Roark.)
Pilgrim's Progess
The Decameron (The mother-lode of all framed stories in Western lit.)
The Rubaiyyat (Thank you Mondy.)
The Ramayana (A translation by Rajagopalachari ji.)
The Mahabharata (Again, the Gov-General's translation.)
Theogony (Those savages did have a vivid imagination.)
Fooled By Randomness (It dusts away all the cobwebs in your brain.)
Bill Bryson's Made In America (You learn so much more about your beloved language.)
Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion (Simmons, not Keats. If you need to read one series in the science fiction genre, let this be it. You won't need anything else.)
Endymion and The Rise of Endymion (Simmons, not Keats.)
Contact (Read this from cover to cover, and understand what the word God actually means.)
Small Gods (Pratchett never fails to cheer me up, and this is, in my opinion, his best work [a hotly contested spot].)
Good Omens (Pratchett & Gaiman. What more can I say?)
Midnight's Children (Forget anything else he wrote. This is the best. Ever.)
The Lord of The Rings (Surprisingly missing from the previous list, probably because of the movies. After devouring this from cover to cover, I bought and read each of his books. Yes. That's all the ten or eleven books in the History of Middle Earth series as well. Ask me for personal recommendations from this body of work.)
To Kill A Mockingbird
The Moon and Sixpence
The "Song of Ice and Fire" series
Siddhartha
Nightfall: A Collection of Short Stories (Not Asimov's collaboration with Silverberg, which is a piece of crap.)
Any collection of short stories by Philip Dick (Don't go for the novels. The stories are totally worth it though.)
Borges' Ficciones (Especially The Library of Babel.)
The Sandman Series (The best graphic novel series ever. You'll learn more about history and myth than from a million other books.)
Maus (Chilling rendition of WWII. Why is this special? Google's your friend.)
The Hero With A Thousand Faces
HG Wells' A Short History of the World (Covers everything from dinosaurs to WWI. Surprisingly interesting and readable. Try it out.)

Can't think of any more right now. I'll keep adding to this list. Or perhaps make it a permanent feature.
As for you, reader, consider yourself tagged.

Exodus

2008-04-10T23:07:00.005+05:30

To be honest, let's just say that I was not very surprised with the Supreme Court's judgement regarding OBC reservations. Disappointed, but not surprised. No, not that.
What surprised me though, was the vehemence displayed by people on both sides of the debate post-judgement. Our Esteemed (and Ambassadored) Political Leaders were quick to claim victory, each party generating soundbites stating that they are the sole protectors of the new urban votebank that has been magically brought into existence by court diktat and the sound of a gavel hammering down on a million dreams.
People on my side of the debate (hint: I was against reservations) were quick to state that India will never become a developed country this way, and that they should leave India as soon as possible.
What brought matters to a virtual boil was a debate I witnessed on CNN-IBN, between a young man representing Youth For Equality, and a bunch of politicians such as the formidable D Raja of the CPI. It was fascinating to watch the YFE chap toting out statistics that projected gloom and doom for the nation, all the while displaying a keen grasp of logic, against people whose flea-sized brains kept spewing out a single point over and over again: some person from Andhra Pradesh belonging to a fishing community has ranked 1st in the Civil Service examinations. Good for him.
It was towards the end of the debate that the true nature of our disagreement struck me, when I saw D Raja vigorously defend his standpoint, stating that everybody's playing politics.

The Nature of the Game

The reason D Raja was so agitated, the reason why YFE fought with such gusto, the reason why thousands of people leave the shores of this country never to return, is because of the fundamental nature of the clash between two value systems: one where equality is valued, and one where excellence is.
One where faith and belief are valued, and one where reason and intellect are.
One where history is a towering monster breathing down our necks, and one where history is dusted off with the flick of a wrist.
One where diversity stops at the entrance to one's home, and one where people wish they were American citizens so they could vote for Obama.
One where hearts and eyes are blinded by the glowing beacon of Eternal Revolution, and one where hearts skip a beat upon hearing that Noam Chomsky shall be addressing a local conference. (And if you think they are on the same side, I pity you.)

The value system we have grown up with, that insidious poison which taught us to deem Pakistan to be an expletive, streaming into our ears the xenophobic rant of our glorious civilization having been trampled upon for a thousand years by invaders, making sure we remember our duty to resist such occupation forever with our heart and soul, this value system is the root of the social contract that binds us as a self-flagellating, self-cannibalizing, self-hating society.

Over time, we have learned to smooth out the rough edges. Interacting with people from halfway around the world, we have learned to manufacture an Other for each glorious fragment of our fractured identity that we choose to exhibit at any point in time.

We were thrown out of the Garden of Innocence as children, and we have eaten the Apple of Hatred. Having rejected the value system of our predecessors on this part of Earth, we now need to reject the social contract built on top of a fundamental assumption that guilt is the root of political power.

Reflect. Introspect. Understand yourself. Map your values. And reject the guilt that seeks to own you.

Will reservations hinder excellence? Yes they will. Does it matter? No, it doesn't. The law of the land has spoken out loud, and equality has been deemed to be of a more vital import than excellence. To paraphrase Gandhi, "Leave India to God's children, or leave India to anarchy, but leave."

Isn't this a democracy?

The thing that pains me the most is how fragile our understanding is of what democracy entails. We lay utmost faith in the wisdom of crowds, yet fail to understand that to create a crowd is to discover a common factor that unites the greatest number of people.
We are proud to call ourselves one of the few republics where the Head of State is an elected lady, and yet fail to understand that republicanism enshrines the idea of inalienable rights that a democratic "will of the people" cannot take away.
For those of us trusting the voice of the masses, remember that they were the ones who used to burn "witches" at the stake.
Those of us who fervently believe that the "janata" is always right, remember well the Middle Ages where a majority of people knew for certain that the world rests on the back of a giant turtle.

What will happen?

We were fools to believe in a New India, one moulded to perfection by a booming economy, industrious workers, visionary corporate giants creating nation-straddling behemoths, lorded over by a benign government that created social security for the masses. We bought the Kool Aid of a rising superpower, one that would challenge the fire-breathing dragon to the East.
And yet, at the first sign of challenge, our Kool Aid-dispensing Sakis faltered.
They faltered when the Communists challenged them vis a vis the Indo-US nuclear deal.
They faltered when they were asked to take a courageous stand against China's brutal occupation of Tibet.
And, finally, they faltered and failed where it mattered the most: They failed to nurture India's best and brightest.

What of India? India will muddle along, as always, as the world outside laughs at our petty fights and savage mechanisms of handling them, as the dead hand of Malthus animates the countryside with famines that break one's heart. Does it feel bad? Yes. Can we do anything about it? No.

It's time, I guess, to heed Gandhi's words, and leave India to the people that its society values. Time to break out a new stone tablet with a fresh set of commandments, one wherein are enshrined the basic tenets of individual liberty and the pursuit of excellence.
Time to cross the seas, gentlemen and ladies. I hope you're with me.

Getting Rich, Pt. 2

2007-08-16T15:30:00.000+05:30

(This is in response to the anonymous blogger who posted his/her comments to the previous article. I realized the potency of his arguments and have decided that adequate justice can only be done by re-posting my response as an article instead of a comment.)

Hi Anonymous.

You have misunderstood the purpose of this article. What I am getting at is the fact that a liberal democracy (as opposed to the social or christian variants), for all its flaws, is arguably much better equipped to ensure its citizens have at least a semblance of equal access to opportunity. And it is this very access that is responsible for innovation, and cultural and technological progress, those very broad movements with attendant massive trickle-down effects touching all sections of society. The end result is the creation of a more educated and equitable society.

I am fully aware of the fact that one could justifiably dismiss most Americans as uneducated. Be that as it may, the drivers of the American economy are, surprisingly enough, substantially more educated than one would expect.

Of course, it is patently unfair to posit education as both the pre-requisite as well as the eventual end-result of being rich. Correlation is not equivalent to causality and all that jazz, i.e. just because most economic drivers are educated does not imply that education is a pre-condition to getting rich.

However, one need not believe in the Hegelian creed of historicism and feel doomed looking at the inexorable march towards communism; as an educated individual, one ought to realise that a capitalist form of society is the sole doctrine which has embedded within itself the precious idea of "wealth creation", plainly expressed as the scope of "making money".
Making money and being rich is not the end-goal of human existence; rather, it is a means of achieving a more richly-textured existence during one's lifespan, along with the rest of society. To be human is to derive joy from the interactions one has with one's society and culture; to be human is to explore and push out the boundaries of the known and to fight back the fearsome puzzles of the not-yet-known.

Coming back to the purpose of this essay, I strongly believe it is imperative for our generation to be rich, and to plough back the generated wealth into a bootstrapped next generation which is sufficiently educated, civilized, and cultured, and which makes human existence in the subcontinent much more pleasant and pregnant with possibilities. That is our duty to society, if any; that is our dharma.

Now, coming to the points you have raised:

Your article amply proves the age old saying of "Little Knowledge is Dangerous".
1. Accepted - nation state was a specific European creation created during those turbulent days of 18th and 19th centuries, under the guise of western liberalism - although I doubt to what extent nation states had anything to do with the core liberal ideas of Kant, Adam Smith, etc.

RESPONSE: I shall ignore the ad hominem attack and simply state that classical liberalism is what defined to a great extent, in close conjunction with Westphalia, the modern nation state. It was the liberal doctrine that powered most of the popular revolutions of that age, and which created most of the pillars of modern societies that we take for granted, viz the primacy of parliament, the independence of the judiciary, and the codification of accepted social practice as law. Again, I am not too sure why Kant was included in your list of liberals; Kant was a mystic and a pessimist, one who believed in the eventual fallibility of reason when faced with the unknown. I do not care to share such a dismal view of Man's place in the universe.

2. What do you mean by this fanatical belief in "Liberty"? Have you ever thought about whether you are really "FREE" in any philosophical sense of the word? If I may use John Stuart Mill's words, it is basically the freedom to do whatever one wants without impinging on others' ability to do the same. Do you in anyway fulfill these definitions ? I am not talking about petty day to day activities but more systemic things. This brings us to the title of your essay. Are you willing to enshrine it as the foundation of our society? Are you willing to make the freedom to make money as the only real "freedom" and reduce the populace into dumb consumerist monsters devouring the world's resources - at least that is what one generation of Americans have been able to do quite efficiently. This paramount freedom of the market necessarily undermines all other freedoms - making people like you fanatical adherents to this get rich mantra. I am not suggesting that you cannot think, rather that the whole logic is so compelling that most people fall for it and become willing slaves.

RESPONSE: Liberalism and the utilitarian doctrine share a lot in common; among them is the non-impingement of free acts upon the freedom of others. What I find fascinating, though, is the Left's paranoia about the preservation of capital. (I use capital in its broadest sense.) I have sufficient faith in human ingenuity to realize that issues such as global warming, the depletion of natural resources and the impending collapse of the oil-fuelled economy are best solved in a political framework that encourages entrepreneurial behaviour with its attendant risk-return tradeoffs. A short exercise is in order here: witness the mental association of soot and grime with the cities of the erstwhile Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Capitalism recognizes that pollution leads to sub-optimal productivity; entrepreneurs realize that a business opportunity exists in catering to people who want a cleaner environment more than anything else; a true education makes people realize the numerous benefits of preserving the Earth's fragile ecosystem over the often shoddy benefits of owning a gas-guzzling SUV. All of the above components must exist in order to correct the mistakes of the past and to catalyse human progress. Other doctrines, be they theocratic or left-leaning, fail precisely because they do not take into account the primacy of the free market in regulating the pulse of human life.

3. I don't fault you very much for this essay. Lots of countries have gone through the same phase as India is going through. Look at Latin America - it was once the most radical adherents to neoliberal policies and look what happened to them - a fact that people in that part of the world are quickly realizing. I am sorry to say this, but India seems to be going towards the same direction - 20-30% rich and the rest poor. Only, the misery will be much more with such a large population.

RESPONSE: It takes a lot of meddling with the definition of neo-liberalism to extend it to the form of economy currently extant in Latin America. If you declare yourself a free market solely for the purpose of looting wealth, it is scarcely capitalism at fault. Crony capitalism, for such is what it is, is what exists in most parts of India, and we Indians have much more in common with goons such as Cheney or Chavez than we would care to acknowledge. In fact, it is only in a truly free market that alternatives such as Linux can spring up. As an example of attacking the weak points of the competitor, it is a shining beacon of the open possibilities that capitalism embraces; its proponents barely realize that they are simply pawns in the free market. Having said that, I reiterate - being rich is not an end in itself, but a means to achieving social progress. I have far more respect for Andrew Carnegie, the steel baron who established CMU, than I do for Stalin, who established the famous gulags and concentration camps of Siberia. Capitalism, the resultant drive to be rich and the need to invest in social upliftment is the one thing that can help Indians break through the barriers erected by the Pareto Principle.

4. On a more philosophical note, I would like you to think about this - the tremendous fragmentation that we suffer from, do you think we can be really free with this kind of segmentation? we are constantly torn apart by all kinds of stimuli, essentially becoming slaves of our mind. I somewhat agree with your prescription of an educated person, but I think it lacks a deeper understanding of how our mind works and hence how to "educate" it.

RESPONSE: As you have rightly pointed out, in all probability I lack a deeper understanding of the cognitive process, and of how best to work through it. Be that as it may, it does not give us enough of an excuse to sit back and not do anything. We need to create providers of education that can, at the very least, ensure equitable access to opportunity here in the subcontinent; it is the one thing that we Indians lack. I agree with your prescriptive advice that more needs to be done in terms of finding the best means to educate minds, but, in the absence of such panaceas, we are left with no other option but to at least try and inculcate the best practices that human civilization and culture have worked out.

5. Finally, regarding the optimality of free market capitalism, you have got it badly wrong. When you give the example of Henry Ford, remember his continued success was mainly due to his monopoly in the car market. This is precisely what laissez faire economists would despise.

RESPONSE: I beg to differ with your understanding of Henry Ford's place in the pantheon of the free market. When Ford started his company, there were over a hundred such car makers creating automobiles the same way medieval guilds crafted tools. It is to Ford that we owe the creation of the modern assembly line, with consequent order-of-magnitude gains in productivity; it is Ford who exploited the crucial insight that in order to establish a market for his goods, he first needed to ensure a much higher level of work-life balance among his workers. It is Ford who established the five-day week, instead of the then-standard six days of work except Sabbath, so that families get one more day for leisure. Of course, it was purely selfish capitalistic motives that drove Ford, since he knew that two days of leisure every week would encourage families to go out on trips to the countryside, and this push would consequently expand the automobile market. It is not for us, though, to question Ford's motives, because, yet again, we notice how the pressures of a true free market work in "mysterious" ways to establish a greater dignity for life. Having done all that, however, Ford never managed to gain a monopoly on the American car market, as Sloan and others in General Motors ran away with his organizational principles and, in doing so, created modern management science. To summarize, a monopoly is inherently unstable in a true free market, and there are enough rational agents in such an economy who can wobble, if not topple, the status quo-ism of such a state.

And what is this optimal thing? can you be more concrete? does it really lead to happier people? or is it just pareto optimality you are talking about? what about wastage, over-production, exploitation, ecological destruction? what about the marketplace destroying all semblances of diversity?

RESPONSE: I am not competent enough to answer whether ANY form of economy leads to happier people, though I have a fair amount of doubt and suspicion as to whether communism can do anything of the sort. Wastage and over-production exist in ALL economic systems; they are a consequence of incompetent planning, which at a macro-level is the hallmark of a communist economy. At a micro-level, as management systems get stronger in control and planning aspects, and as improvements such as JIT and Kaizen are introduced in a large scale, such inefficiencies tend to disappear. This is a byproduct of human progress and ingenuity, and one hopes the best for the future. As for exploitation and ecological destruction, a liberal free market based economy consisting of educated citizenry would take more than adequate steps to ensure these evils are stamped out. And, finally, a true free market would ensure adequate recognition of diversity, and place due emphasis on catering to its needs. Witness the huge market that has been brought into creation due to the existence of the GLBT community. Diversity can only be destroyed if people believe it's unnecessary and not worthy of preservation. As long as there is sufficient education in the world, cultural artifacts, if deemed important enough by the market, and if even a single person believes in their preservation, will exist. If not, perhaps they deserve a decent burial.

Getting Rich is a Moral and Social Imperative

2007-08-14T11:33:00.001+05:30

Yesterday found me in Cafe Coffee Day, Koramangala, sitting with my partners and discussing some changes in our proposed B-plan. Caffeine can work miracles with your thought process.

As is usual with such hangouts, a boisterous group of PYTs walked in and plonked themselves on the sofa. We tried drowning out the background chatter and concentrating on what needed to be done with The Plan, but it was pretty tough sledding.

And then the PYT Chat converged on to the latest movie that they had watched: "Gandhi My Father". My ears pricked up as one of them simpered - "Y'know, I never liked that guy anyway. He looked so funny when he walked and all." Giggles. Followed by - "Seriously. Duuuude. What's with that damn stick anyway?" Laughter.

:)

Here's to a happy 60th Year of Independence, ladies and gentlemen.

This reminds me of a chat I had had with one of my friends the other day, when he had awkwardly suggested that "Gandhi was never a saint". In my admittedly biased vision, though, sainthood has been conferred upon far too many people for far less reasons. If anyone deserves to be called a saint, it's Gandhi.

Don't get me wrong. I strongly believe that the nation-state is, at best, an awkward construct, having painfully taken birth alongside modern liberalism as a political philosophy. In most cases, it plays a somewhat useful role in nurturing a consensus approach to matters that affect those rational beings that exist within its stated borders. I refer, obviously enough, to Western liberal democracies. North Korea barely fits my self-serving definition above.

I am all for freedom of expression. The PYTs mentioned in the blog have every right to laugh at Gandhi, for asserting these rights are the fruits of liberal thought. For all those of you who are horrified at the thought, remember, Gandhi himself would have laughed alongside the PYTs. Similarly, I'm all for those of us who believe that all of human life is infinitely precious, and that India has no business killing people, be it Kashmir or Mizoram. Again, I'm fully supportive of those who want to leave India and go abroad, because "dude, life in India sucks".

Liberty cannot be chained and put behind bars. This is what freedom means, even if it means you want to burn your nation's flag as a mark of protest.

What scares me the most, though, is when emerging nation-states such as India fail in providing support to those very people who comprise its raison d'etre, its very basis of existence.

I refer, gentle reader, to the fact that all Indians are uneducated.

You see, there is no educated soul in the country, you and me included.

Of course, we can each trot out statistics which state that 2 out of 3 Indians are literate.

There is, however, a vast gulf between literacy and education. The PYTs in the cafe were literate. You and me are literate (hopefully, or you wouldn't be reading this nor I writing this). The very fact that more than 65% of India is literate is a mind-boggling achievement.

However, none of us are educated.

A solid system of education ought to travel way beyond the traditional cognitive skills of reading, writing, and numeracy, the troika which makes up modern literacy initiatives in this country. To be educated should mean much more than the capability of surviving in a modern society.

To be educated should imply the ability to think and reason, to understand social, historical and cultural contexts. It should inculcate the sturdy habits of self-reliance, especially in the crucial domain of thinking for oneself.

Having outsourced all else, we simply cannot afford to outsource our reasoning and our brains.

To be educated should imply a deeper understanding of humanity's precarious state of existence, and to glory in its achievements, miniscule though they may be when measured with scales grander than those we are used to.

A true education would embrace aesthetics and ethics, the scientific method and history, a knowledge of the world we are living in as well as our place in the greater scheme of things.

We should be able to appreciate the magic of Ghalib as well as the poetry of Blake, and understand why we do so.
We should be able to weep equally when faced with the grandeur of the Notre Dame or the Taj.
We should be able to follow the convoluted logic of Aquinas with the same rigour as we follow that of Godel.
We should not be afraid to analyze organized religion as a human construct, and explore its flaws as well as its fragile beauty.

In the end, a truly educated being would be fully equipped to hold its own in the world, to create wonders of the mind and of the senses, and to mould reality as it deems fit.

We Indians have been badly equipped for this difficult journey, having been shoe-horned into accepting the consensus doctrines of society as to what to do with our lives. That, however, in no way stops any of us from going forth and learning things on our own, and of trying to change our country in whatever way we can.

I am fully aware of the fact that most of you reading this are puzzled as to what any of this has to do with being rich.

To educate a nation of the size of India of course needs wealth on a massive scale, but, more than anything else, it also requires the intellect which has the capacity to create wealth. As the future leaders of this nation, it is not only our duty, but our responsibility to be wealthy, to ensure that we fulfil our primary function as catalysts of wealth concentration and diffusion.

Our generation is uniquely placed to both gather wealth by virtue of our brains, and to utilize the capital thus accumulated in optimal ways to conjure into existence an educated, civilized, cultured and confident mass of people. Whether unconsciously or with due deliberation, this ought to be the single leitmotif of our existence. This is also why I have never been comfortable with the idea of communism - it is a sub-optimal appoach that tends to drag down all of society to a miserable state of forced equality, it tends to rub out important differences which are to be cherished and preserved, and in doing so it ensures that all that is good in humanity is to be stamped upon and reduced to the rubble of empty rhetoric and the bleak nihilism of a beehive. (The pseudo-intellectual theory of dialectical materialism comes to mind.)

A truly capitalist endeavour, on the other hand, with a vigorous free market, would optimally ensure, as Henry Ford and others realized in the early 20th century, the creation of an educated, innovative and entrepreneurial mass of people which can set off an unparalleled chain reaction of technological development and cultural achievement, in the case of the United States having continued unabated for nearly a century now.

It took just one generation of American effort to achieve all of this.

All it takes is a single generation to come together and challenge the status quo, to gather wealth on an unimaginable scale, to use that wealth to seed out providers of education across the nation.

All it takes is a single generation to create a sustainable movement of truly educated people, with a rich cultural, social and scientific context in which they can work their magic.

All it takes is a single generation to realize and internalize the fact that they have the ability as well as the means to do what Archimedes had dreamt of, and move the Earth.

I urge all of you who are reading this, to go forth and create wealth, accumulate riches, and to leave a mark upon history.

Never be ashamed of chasing wealth. Remember this, and remember it well. Being rich is your duty to society, and the one morally upright thing to do.

Carpe Diem, Baby!

2007-06-09T00:12:00.000+05:30

This is a short piece I had written a while ago to motivate myself. You shall get to know the results at the end of this piece.

Human life has always been, in my opinion, a struggle to extract bittersweet juices of meaning from the unyielding complexity of existence. We need Heroes of the grand scale of Michelangelo - and we measure our worth by their admittedly lofty standards of being, trying desperately to highlight the ''repeated" patterns that Randomness, the mysterious sprite inhabiting the deepest recesses of our world, throws at us.

0ur lives have become a tapestry of inspired art, a gigantic totem pole carved in the likenesses (such a cruelly awkward term ) of those we deem worthy of emulation; and so, satisfied by our lifetime's work, we barely notice the millions of other rotten poles and tattered native American tapestries gently swaying and fluttering in the breeze.

Let us not embrace the cosy comforts of well-deserved mediocrity; let us not try to lead our lives by the consensus opinions of society. Let us eschew the well-trodden path, and, for once, choose the road not taken. Let us become, instead, those raging thunderstorms and cloudbursts of unconventionality that have forever threatened to strike down and burn to the ground those sad little poles and sorry-looking rags.

For, as a formerly famous Hero had once bitingly observed - "It's better to burn out than to fade away."

Those of you who are still reading this congealed pile of pigswill shall be glad to know that, as of now, the Crawlin' Croc has taken matters into his own hands, and has parted ways with the Priestesses of Apollo, timing his movements with the second one in Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No.1. If you are direly in need of a pattern to set your life by, even Wagner (Valkyries of course) and Beethoven wouldn't hurt.

Of Dictionaries Sired By Satan

2007-02-06T21:12:00.000+05:30

I'm normally not in the habit of reading dictionaries in my spare time. Not my cup of tea, not my bowl of warm broth, not my daily glass of hot milk. Blah. I've decided, though, to make an exception in the case of The Devil's Dictionary, written by one of America's legendary satirists: Ambrose Bierce.

Bierce foreshadows near-contemporary writers such as DNA (no, I'm not gonna spell it out for you) in the kind of humour he exhibits. Remember The Meaning of Liff? Subtle, nice. Check:

BELLADONNA, n. In Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues.

[...]

CERBERUS, n. The watch-dog of Hades, whose duty it was to guard the entrance -- against whom or what does not clearly appear; everybody, sooner or later, had to go there, and nobody wanted to carry off the entrance. Cerberus is known to have had three heads, and some of the poets have credited him with as many as a hundred. Professor Graybill, whose clerky erudition and profound knowledge of Greek give his opinion great weight, has averaged all the estimates, and makes the number twenty-seven -- a judgment that would be entirely conclusive if Professor Graybill had known (a) something about dogs, and (b) something about arithmetic.

[...]

RESPONSIBILITY, n. A detachable burden easily shifted to the shoulders of God, Fate, Fortune, Luck or one's neighbor. In the days of astrology it was customary to unload it upon a star.

REVERENCE, n. The spiritual attitude of a man to a god and a dog to a man.

And so on and so forth. Read the rest here.

Which reminds me of Samuel Johnson's original dictionary. Remember him? Guy who started the lexicography movement, singularly responsible for more deaths due to boredom than all plagues and famines put together.
He looked thusly:

I had a lot of fun as a kid, reading out snappy quotes from weird dictionaries to my parents. (I had a fairly twisted childhood.) Peruse:

OATS, n. A grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people. [From Johnson.]

BABY, n. A loud noise at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other. [I had assumed as a kid that this was from Johnson, but have lately found out that such is not the case. Ahh well. Another iota of knowledge added to my ever-increasing share.]

To conclude, folks: Can anyone tell me the word for a person who looks up unusual meanings of commonly-used words in dictionaries?
Hurry up, I ain't got all day.

Web Comics Roundup (Being the First of hopefully Many)

2007-02-05T21:34:00.000+05:30

I'm alive.
While we're at it, here's one guy's interpretation of life, the universe and everything:

If you liked it, there's more where that came from. Here ya go: http://www.pbfcomics.com/.

And for all the geeks reading this blog, you couldn't go wrong with http://www.xkcd.com/. Here's an example:

Oh wait. There's another one, not as funny, but what the hell, I'm feelin' generous. Wondermark should be thankful for the cheap (as in free) publicity. For the morbidly curious (and with a hidden yet acutely developed sense of schadenfreude), here's an example of Wondermark:

On a side note, I've been doing lots of stuff (no, not that stuff, you dope lord). Time being what it is (a bitch), I've not been able to update my blog in a while. But don't you worry folks. Good times they are a' comin' !!

A Touch of Sunset, A Book, and You

2006-10-02T01:00:00.000+05:30

A lot of people have been very angry with me, for committing the blogger's primal sin: not blogging regularly. To those of you who still stubbornly continue visiting my blog, I offer my apologies. In all fairness, there's been a lot on my mind lately. This post might seem a bit depressing, but, honestly speaking, I'm not exactly bubbly right now.

At the tender age of 7, I became Napoleon.
My dad (always the farsighted one in the family) bought me a book detailing the lives of some famous historical personalities as a ploy to keep me quiet (I was a pretty restless kid). As for me, I promptly fell in love with the idea of conquering Italy, marrying Josephine and coronating myself.
Whee. You marry the girl and you get to conquer the world. What could be better than that? So I practised tucking my right hand inside my shirt and convinced myself that I looked suitably imperial.
For I was 7 years old, and I knew I was going to conquer the world one day.

In due course of time, I grew up (regrettably), acquired the external trappings of rote learning that pass for education in our country, struggled through school, struggled through college, until I finally found myself sitting in front of a computer, hammering out code for a software giant.

What happened to Napoleon?

We think about this for a moment, and then forget it all and stare at a beautiful sunset, Nature's beauty overwhelming our puny senses. We settle down, read a book, and feel at peace with the world.
And, as Scarlett put it so nicely, "tomorrow's another day".
And tomorrow passes its torch on to the day after, and year follows year, until we look back at a lifetime of regret and missed opportunities, and we sigh, knowing that though we've had a good life, it will be over soon, and nobody will ever know that we had ever existed.
This is the nirvana that most of us seem to crave, in thought and deed.

When do we accept the chains that bind us to mediocrity? At what age do we make a Faustian pact with the Devil, selling our conquering egos for 30 pieces of silver?
A few of us will become great programmers, some of us will become brilliant academicians, an insignificant minority among us will become the future business czars of tomorrow.
What about the rest?
What about the artists? The creators? The thinkers?
Will we ever produce the likes of Gandhi? Or will it be just another run-of-the-mill politician out to steal money from the rest of the country?
Will we ever produce another Tagore? Or will our proto-Tagore be buried under the avalanche of Chetan Bhagats being churned out of the Indo-Anglian assembly line?
What about Ghalib? Mozart? Michelangelo?
Or will the silent majority of us be content whiling away our mediocre lives, sacrificing our ambitions to the twin pressures of family and society?

History shall judge our generation by the casual manner in which we tossed out immortality and settled for the tiny things in life.
A beautiful sunset, a book, a bottle of wine.
A lovely house, a lovely wife, lovely children.
Lovely pieces of code being banged out everyday.
Beautiful theories being spun out of thin air, at major academic conferences.
Blow at them, all of them, and they scatter away like the angel-hair they've always been. And Dr. Faustus comes to mind.

Our generation has been the closest to Utopia on Earth. It's a pity we choose to give it all away.

No bread? Let them have cake!

2006-05-28T01:12:00.000+05:30

An example often being bandied about on TV nowadays is that of the humble municipality sweeper, working away at his job through the day, a job that was his father's before him, and his father's father as well. (Strangely enough, a strict patrilinear relationship is often assumed in these examples.) Don't you want such a person to ever grow beyond his present economic status, to ever aspire to reach a greater control over his life? Or do you want his son also to join the family profession, so that you, and the remaining urbanized elitist 10% of India's population, can bask in the glory of "India Shining", you selfish casteist bourgeois titch you. Ah the shame, the shame.
Unfortunately, the above example of the sweeper is at best erroneous and in the worst case deliberately misleading.
This is because you will have made the mistake of confusing "economic" backwardness with "social" backwardness. This is exactly what the pseudo-liberal bleeding-heart armchair social-empowerment activists want, in an India dominated by instant SMS barometers of public opinions.

In a country like India, there is admittedly a significant overlap between these two indicators. However, the issue at hand is whether or not to extend quotas to OBCs, and, unfortunately for India, the UPA administration has decided to base its reservation policy on social indicators.

So why is this a problem? Let me explain. I'm from IIT Kharagpur. In the IIT system there are roughly 4000 seats available in the general category, and roughly 1000 seats available in the reserved categories. We can ascribe a ballpark figure of about 50,000 students applying for the reserved category seats. However, in 9 out of 10 cases, the ones who get in are those who, by the magic of targetted birth and blessed breeding, will:
a. Have studied in the top schools of the country, and
b. Have parents working in the Civil Service, or
c. Have parents working in a very high-paying corporate job or educational institution, and
d. Have access to the best preparatory educational material from the best purveyors of such condensed knowledge nuggets.

On the other hand, the student whose problems the earlier Mandal I reservation scheme was meant to address is barely affected by it. Why?
a. He stays in a village with little or no access to information regarding the IITs and their brand of technical education.
b. His academic preparation is of such a poor quality (courtesy government schools) that even with hard work he will not be able to clear the JEE.

By simple extrapolation, implementation of Mandal II will mean, for us IITians, allowing rich Jats who have studied in posh Delhi schools rushing to Rajasthan to buy fake OBC certificates for 500 rupees and walking in to IIT, with a nearly simultaneous decrease in peer-reviewed academic standards.
Are academic standards necessary? Our dear self-righteous intellectually-challenged JNU breed of social scientists would have you believe that such is not the case, that academic standards are subservient to the cause of social justice, and that in any case, the IITs were set up to provide quality education to the nation, not to some portion of the populace who have been chosen on some arbitrary basis called "Merit" .
Another barb that is directed to the casual thinking bystander in such a situation is: "Why do you resent the fact that some previously disadvantaged person now has equal access to what you were hoarding for yourself?"
Short Answer: Because, as the numbers will show, the previously disadvantaged person in reality is not very disadvantaged at all, unless you count studying at DPS RKPuram grounds for disadvantage. ("You poor little rich kid, you. Awwww.") A strictly caste-based numerical quota is open to so much misuse one shudders to think of them. In fact, I foresee a rich secondary market in caste certificates rivalling the BSE in a few years.
Long Answer: If the JNU jholawallahs would have paid the same attention to academics that they paid to the speeches of Sitaram Yechuri and Brinda Karat, they would have realised that the nature of the problem is that of product differentiation.
Let us step back a bit now and analyze exactly why the quota demand is being raised.
One primary motivation behind the imposition of secondary quotas is that hitherto non-productive sections of society have noticed that the benefits of the New Economy are passing them by, and are going to those who have worked hard to achieve what they have achieved, be they software engineers and enterpreneurs or ordinary BPO workers. Witness the cries of "everyone should have a right to portions of the cake" and "why should the cake be given only to some people; that's not just". Justice somehow magically appears during the cutting of the cake, but was conspicuously absent during its creation.
Let me repeat, the demand raised is this: the cake does not have to be created equally with everyone's contribution; however, once created, it should be split evenly, because, after all, it's not poor Meira Kumar's fault that she was born a Dalit (albeit Jagjivan Ram's daughter, but alas, even that cannot be helped), and would you deny her a piece simply because of her ancestry?
No, but I would deny it to her if she did not work for it. Ancestry has nothing to do with it, and does not need to rear its ugly head in this equation. That's a simple answer, folks, and sums up all the social justice in the world that deserves to exist.

Let us tear away the veils that distort the present conflict, for it is not a fight between the upper classes and the lower classes that we are witnessing, but a deeper fight between that small class of productive humanity which has existed precariously since the dawn of man, and is responsible for every episode of human progress, and that much larger class of bloodsucking parasitic non-productive second-handers, who have reached the positions of power that they hold by leveraging their identities and their grasp over everybody else's conscience.
For those yet not convinced, I ask a few simple questions:
a. Would Meira Kumar be in the position she is in right now if she weren't Jagjivan Ram's daughter?
b. Would Sonia Gandhi be in the position she is in right now, controlling the destiny of one-sixth of humanity, if she were not Rajiv Gandhi's widow? What about the entire Gandhi family?
c. What about Rahul Mahajan? Varun Feroze Gandhi? Sachin Pilot? Akhilesh Singh Yadav? Pappu Yadav? Ajay Kumar Chautala? Naveen Patnaik? What about Dayanidhi Maran? M. K. Stalin? H.D. Kumaraswamy?
Also included in this class are those social workers, media personalities, and intellectuals-at-large who have a deeper need for an underprivileged section of society to exist, since that is what gives their lives some semblance of meaning and direction. I include, with utmost prejudice, all jholawallahs of JNU in this category.

These are the people you need to fight against. For it is they who, by dint of sheer cunning and naked thirst for power, climbed up to the nation's top posts while the productive classes were busy working for their livelihoods and couldn't be bothered.
There are those of us who believe that the quota system is a just punishment for the middle classes who believed they had no stakes in the governance of India. If so, the punishment greatly exceeds the crime, because in the process of punishing the errant class, we are sacrificing the future of India.

Let me get back now to the point that I was trying to make earlier, i.e. why academic standards are important.
1. The reason major corporates flock to the IITs is because the latter produce batches of readily-deployable academically well-qualified engineers who are eager to work and generate out-of-the-box solutions for various problems. This perceived premium over the products of other engineering colleges is what creates this product differentiation, and is the main factor behind engineering majors paying large salaries to IITians. When companies realise that there is no longer adequate differentiation between the IITs and the rest of the colleges, the following will happen:

the pay difference will narrow down to nothing
the reason for the imposition of quotas on the IITs (share of cake which IITians have been eating 'alone') will have vanished
the backbones of institutes of which an entire nation was proud will be broken

2. The main reason why the IITs nurture a sense of success and enterpreneural drive lies in the way social life in their campuses are organized. Now, in all but a handful of the cases, and in fact precisely because of the ease with which they entered IIT, students belonging to the reserved category are prone to decreasing their levels of ambition, knowing fully well that their tag will take them through to any other institution in India. This serves to stamp out any latent feeling of success that they had engendered.
Barely 15% of IIT students enter by means of the quota system. When this percentage will be increased to 49.5%, when 1 out of 2 will have made it into the IIT thanks to the quota system, the corresponding drive for achievement will be severely dampened, and the number of IITians indulging in enterpreneural activities will steadily decay.
Why is this a problem? Because it was precisely due to the efforts of those IITians who aimed to achieve something on their own, such as Vinod Khosla (Sun Microsystems), Arjun Malhotra (HCL, Techspan), Nandan Nilekani (Infosys), and innumerable others that India faced an IT revolution. The ripple effect of this round of quota imposition will be felt 20 years down the line, when the current and future batches of standard-issue IITians would have started making their mark in the world of business, but who will not be present courtesy Arjun Singh.
This scenario will be fine as the IITs will still be serving the nation in the manner defined by Nehru, but that is not what we ordinary Indians had been hoping for. Though there will be greater diversity among the working population of the country, the next IT revolution will be short-circuited, and India relegated to the backwaters of the world economy. For an example of the future of India, one does not need to look far: The sweatshops of dollar-slaves producing Nike shoes are right here in the neighbourhood, inside the borders of Thailand and Cambodia.

I hope this scenario bothers you. What can you do about it? Here's a tip: Go to www.AntiReservation.Org and sign up for any rally in your city. Prepare opinions including the above points in all discussions that you have with members of your local community. Make it a point to write cogent and coherent letters/e-mails to all politicians and media personalities that you know of and can get an email address of. Network. Network. Network.
Work at it. This is the one chance we have, to save the future of the nation and offer our politicians the same choice that was once offered to Marie Antoinette. She, and her husband, chose wrongly. For, against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.

Godspeed.

A Breakup Dissected

2006-04-25T16:34:00.001+05:30

Catharsis has never been my motivation for writing. Though, as a few of you know, my life changed this year in ways too weird to foretell, I suspect a lot of changes are yet to appear, and there are still a few choppy currents to cross before I'm able to anchor my little dinghy. However, after some guys came up to me to talk about my breakup (and their impending breakups), I decided to write out what I went through.
This was a very difficult undertaking for me, especially considering the fact that I had already gone through the phases described below and would have to relive them in order to map out my post completely.
The background: I broke up with my girlfriend in the month of February this year. It was a milestone in my life which changed my character in a lot of ways, and left a very deep impact on my psyche. It hasn't, however, destroyed my faith in the all-conquering nature of love and all the resident emotions that such faith implies.

There are people you meet in life who love you and in turn are loved by you, whose delicate strands of existence are seemingly irrevocably intertwined with yours, and then one fine day all that is left of them is a rapidly shrinking image on the rearview mirror of the soul.
But you still hear the voices and feel them tugging away gently, sadly, at your heart. And you cry softly to yourself, knowing fully well that all that is left of you with them is a faint memory of a dream that was never to be.
You move away from sorrow and jump into a maelstorm of relationships, negotiating your way from sanctuary to sanctuary, hoping against hope that the love you find will trump the one you lost. You mingle with the Beautiful Ones glittering away in the firmament of the heavens, and hope that their green-tinged shadows shall cross the chasms of space and time that lie between you and Her. Your birthday appears and disappears without a call. You gasp at the systematic way in which she deletes you from her life.
And then you cry some more.
And you curse and you rant, and you forge for yourself a heart of iron, never to be broken again.
But iron rusts, and the poison of hatred flows through your veins, and you stop wondering whether she remembers you at all.
And you declare yourself a master of your own destiny, and you concentrate on conquering the world, having failed to conquer your own heart. You bury yourself in work and carve your name on mountaintops.
And yet, in the dead of the night, you hear Her voice, and you wake up in a cold sweat.

And you remember touch and smell, hot breath and hot kiss, smile on face and cascade of wet hair, soft hands and teddy bears.
You think of teddy bears, and you cry.
You cry, thinking of the first time you talked, lying down on soft grass and looking up at the stars above, holding hands and promising to be together for ever.
You cry, thinking of the last time you saw her, looking out of a train and shouting out to the whole world that she loves you.
You cry because you miss the way she hugged you, the way she sat on your lap, the way her nose turned red when she got angry, the way she'd stand on tiptoes to kiss your forehead, the way she'd curl up whenever she got tickled, the way she sneezed, the way she laughed.
You miss the way she talked, miss the way she held your hand while crossing a road.
You miss her like hell, and you cry your guts out. You weep and you curse your own life.

And then, all of a sudden, there are no more tears to be shed, and no more knives to wound your heart.
You look back to the love you had, the dreams that were dreamt, the chronicles that shall remain unwritten, the songs that shall forever remain unsung.
You look back, and you smile.
And you wave, and you mouth out the words: Thanks for everything.

How Affirmative Is Your Action Today?

2006-04-10T11:27:00.000+05:30

The first reaction was: Rage.
Rage against the crooked political system for getting us into this sad state of affairs, rage against the vote-grabbing politicians who would sell their mothers (that too at a steep discount of 50%) just to get that extra 10 votes, rage against the apathy of the intelligentsia who've scarcely mumbled a word or two since Arjun Singh's announcement.

The second reaction was to ask: Why?
Politics is about numbers. Pure unadulterated decimals which decide the fate of a nation. Our political system is organized in such a way that theoretically the three arms of Government, i.e. the Legislature, the Executive, and the Judiciary, balance each other perfectly so as to maintain social harmony while performing the onerous duty of governance.
Or so they say.
The truth is plain and simple, Tonto. But, to get at it, we need to know the root need of all political animals.
Power.
The thirst for power is what drives canis politicianis to unprecedented levels of investment in terms of time and money. The power to decide, as mentioned earlier, the fate of a nation.
Power, in our system, comes through the ballot box.
Now any human with the brain cell of a flea can recognise the inherent flaws of such a system. The burgeoning middle and upper classes have no stakes in the democratic process. Our lives are scarcely affected by the sounds of thunder emanating from Parliament (and the State Legislatures). We live, like we always have, on the surety that "their" decisions will not affect us.
Like this decision, which will not affect us to the least bit.
Me speak truth, Tonto. At most, the (unreserved) middle classes will simply send their children abroad for higher education at the undergraduate level, just like the upper classes. Just like the politicians' children. The entire matrix for higher education leaves one component out of the picture: the lower classes.
Class matrices are always interesting in that issue analyses leads one to amazing conclusions, i.e. the lower classes are going to send their children to IIT.
If only things were that simple.
Because whenever a system exists, there is always some fatal flaw which can be exploited to gain admission. The system can be electronic or social, but the rules of the system are what matter in the end, and the loopholes through which one can push oneself into the system.
The loophole in this system is this, Tonto: The lower classes will not have a say, because the reservation is caste-based, not need-based.
I hope that's spelt out perfectly. Tonto knows I can't spell for nuts. Let me repeat it for the sake of dear-buddy-Emphasis: The reservation is caste-based, not need-based.
It's not tough to extrapolate from this point on. After all, we Indians have always had a natural flair for extrapolation. ("Tendulkar's sniffing today. He's gonna score a century.") Here's my two cents' worth of what's going to happen:

The new Constitutional Amendment Bill will be passed by Parliament. No political party (or politician for that matter, and while we're at it, let's refrain from calling senior politicians statesmen, because they're not. The last statesman was Indira Gandhi, which says a lot about the state of Indian politics, as well as male machismo) will have the balls to vote against the bill, for the OBC vote is crucial to gaining or retaining power.
There will be tiny disorganised protests across the IITs, because the majority of people will not care/be afraid to voice their opinion. These protests will be ruthlessly suppressed by the authorities, who will as a result get a biscuit or two free from the tables of their political masters.
The batches that enter the IITs and the IIMs will be full of rich landed Thakurs and Jats from North India, who will have finally managed to gain a foothold and can arm their newer generations with the latest brands to ensure success in life. If nothing else, a rich dowry is always waiting in them badlands.
The first new batch that comes up according to the newly-sanctioned reservation Act will be ragged mercilessly in all IITs, poisoning relations between batches and ensuring that new batches never feel a sense of co-ownership of the institutes.
Companies will howl in protest and will request that, during placement season, job applicants specify their castes, effectively pruning out "undesirables".
Arjun Singh will have ensured a permanent votebank for his political party - his legacy to the nation will be enshrined in the Halls of Social Justice and Empowerment (if ever there was such a place).
Five years down the line (for the IITs, for the IIMs it's two years down the line), salary offers across these "premier institutes" will plummet, as companies realise that talent and "brains" went out for a toss circa 2006 along with merit and will be returning to Planet India along with Halley's Comet.
Once the juggernaut of India's liberalisation has been successfully halted and chained to a ruminating cow in the fields, elections will vote the NDA into power which will then proceed to bomb Pakistan. Who cares about the damn Economy anyway?

Think, Tonto, think. I urge you. Why are the politicians going forward with this step? Again, I offer a couple of reasons:

It makes good press. As an election sop, reservation policies are always a goldmine waiting to be harvested. (Take that you mixed metaphor you.) Of course, the next step in such a situation is to reserve seats according to communal lines. Competitive reservations have never been so good! While we're at it, we can also provide citizenship to Bangladesh (anyway, half the nation's people stay in Kolkata); I've been assured by certain sources that it's a legitimate political strategy thought of by the Left Front administration in Bengal.
OBC reservation allows significant portions of the populace to gain the two highly-prized brandnames of Indian higher education, at a very low cost. Junior will not have to work hard to get in, because that slimy bastard Merit has been taken to the backyard and shot. Accordingly, the levels of hard work that are required to sustain oneself through a rigorous undergraduate education will be absent. Junior will flunk out in two years, unless Senior calls the Director and applies pressure.
It allows the rest of India to pull down the IITs and the IIMs to their own levels of mediocrity. Gasp. There. I said that. Ms. Dam Buster and her legions of fans will not speak out because to identify with a meritocracy is to commit suicide in Socialist Land. Also, need I say it, there's a faint glow of satisfaction among vast swathes of the Indian population, thinking: "Those guys were flying too high. I'm so glad someone's banned the sky."

The third reaction was to ask: What can we do about it?
This is where the mind falters. I've seen scores of my fellow students here at Kharagpur stop at this stage, muttering that it's not their business and that they will not be able to do anything about it anyway.
Well, for those of you who are thinking along these lines, I have good news and bad news.

The bad news first: You're right. There's not much you can do about it. And I guess you know why. It's simple, Tonto. We, the middle class of India, have sacrificed our voices and our opinions, our ethics and morals, at the expedient altar of Goddess Liberty of America. When was the last time any of us went out to vote (myself included)? Voting is a fundamental duty of every citizen of this nation, one that we have failed miserably to perform. And we plonk ourselves in front of the computer screen and wax eloquently on the Internet. We balk, however, at undertaking any step bigger than this, afraid that the Evil Eye will cast a spell on our glorious shining future.
The good news next: We can still do lots of things. Here's a few things that any of us can do:

Talk to your parents. Generate opinions by inflaming passions. It's the easiest way out there. Once sufficiently roused, ask them to vote with their minds in the coming elections.
Use the Internet to find out the exact procedures on obtaining a voter identification card, and getting your names into the electoral rolls. I'll give a tip here; check out http://www.eci.gov.in/Forms/Forms_fs.htm
Find out details of your elected representative in the Lok Sabha as well as the Vidhan Sabha. These details can be obtained from the Election Commission website as well. Contact them, meet them along with your parents, and ask what they are planning to do about it, and try and convince them to raise this issue in their respective chambers. One can also try to contact the Young Parliamentarians' Association, but I doubt they'll be of much help, having entered the said august institution by holding on to Daddy's dhoti.
Once the third step fails (:)), you can go two ways. The easier way is to give up all hopes of this country rising to meet its destiny, immigrate to America, and laugh at the poor sods who are still stuck in the Land of the Qrazy Fuques that we call India. The harder way is to stay back, and work at the problem. Work on raising this issue at public fora. Work on pissing off the symbols of authority that are waved in our faces to halt all protests. Work on teaching canis politicianis that there is a significant constituency that it has ignored since Independence, and that when this constituency raises its voice, it's time to start listening, or he can wave the next election bye-bye.

I have the same feelings as all of you, namely, disgust, anger, helplessness. All we can do about it right now is speak out, opine, and raise our voices. Just before writing this post, I was looking at some petitions on PetitionOnline!, and was saddened by the response. 20000 votes is not enough to change the outcome of even a single Assembly seat, and we talk of changing the face of this nation.
One can only hope and pray, Tonto. Hope and pray.

And yes, Mr. Arjun Singh, I forgot to ask, how much did you say your mother was worth?

The Mason-Dixon Line

2006-03-31T03:44:00.000+05:30

...Which separated the southern slave-owning states of America from the northern industrial "free" states.
...Which burnt its fiery shade upon the hearts and minds of millions of Americans during the Civil War.
...Which became a symbol of the imaginary boundary between oppression and emancipation.

A lot of my blog-consumers have been complaining, and rightly so, that I have stopped penning down my thoughts concerning each book that I have read. Quite a few of the newer ones do not realize, not having explored the cavernous reaches of my archived posts, that there was a day, not so long ago, when I used to engage myself in writing book reviews.

So why did I stop? The answer is simple, my friends.
Book reviews are boring. Their appeal is limited to a very rare kind of blog-reader, one whose leitmotif of existence is simply to garner knowledge and opine about the world around himself (herself). To such a reader, it is imperative that the reviews be idiosyncratic enough to appeal to the former's tastes of eccentricity and trivia. However, this readership forms a very small core of the overall blog-reading population.
Book reviews on my site were deemed unnecessary and boring by quite a few persons whose opinions I value. Which is why I stopped writing them.

So why am I starting again? Again, it does not take Einstein to figure out that a budding "person who has something to say to the world" (I'm still hesitant to use the word "writer" to describe myself) will die to grasp the opportunity of tubthumping his opinions in the major e-pubs of the world.

The solution I have wrought is simple enough. I have separated my blog into two: one for posting my book reviews, and the other for just about everything else. I believe this is a nice system in that whenever something becomes big enough, I'm sure I'll be flaking it off into a separate blog.
The Mason-Dixon line marks my boundary between popularity and self-satisfied navel-gazing.
So, check out my new blog: http://bibliovile.blogspot.com/ I'm sure you'll enjoy it. If not, now you have two locations at which to post your hate-mail.
Cheers.

The Joys of the Herd

2006-03-22T16:43:00.000+05:30

There was a discussion on our departmental group mail yesterday and today, kickstarted by Siddharth Brahma. Concerning Iraq. I read all the posts and got angrier and angrier. Angry because of the ad hominem attacks on Brahma. Because of the "we-are-so-pragmatic" responses showered by everyone.
Yup. It touched a raw nerve. Especially because everyone knew, in their heart of hearts, that Brahma was right. I am sure Brahma did not need me picking up cudgels on his behalf, but, well, solidarity isn't only for Lech Walesa.

I have often been accused of being a passive bystander, an armchair critic who laughs at people's follies and foibles while peacefully reclining away on soft leather. I guess I needed a guy like Brahma to arouse me from my slumber. To be fair, I have had my own reasons for my lack of participation in such debates, primary among them being my belief that every one should be able to find their own guiding lights, evolve their own personal philosophies of life; there's nothing more insulting to one's native intelligence, and more irritating, than a preacher at a pulpit hammering away at your brain.
But there comes a time when you need to intervene, because the steps you take could have an impact on other countless lives.

We are IITians. We pride ourselves on being called the 'cream of the nation' (come on, I'm sure all of you have had the familiar chest-swell when that phrase is uttered). But how many of us have stopped to think beyond our monthly paypackets, or even beyond the Caribbean paradise island that a few of us would like to buy when we get rich and/or lucky?

"Iraq is far away and doesn't affect us. America will never do this to India anyway. "
Wake up and smell the coffee, people. The Neo-cons are in power right now in Washington. And they have a single agenda - to keep reworking their geopolitical strategy so as to continue harvesting benefits out of conflict.
No. They do not want a new American Century, like the one we left behind, pre-Y2K. Neither do They (the inevitable capitalisation!) want peace and democracy to descend to each and every god-forsaken trigger-happy nation in the world.
Profits. Each cleaning-up contract handed out to Haliburton in the glorious "democratic" nation that is Iraq is worth billions of dollars. This is how the contracting occurs:
1. Haliburton gets a transport contract from the Pentagon, worth $30-40 an hour, to transport resources from one place to another.
2. Haliburton sub-contracts off to tiny leech companies who'll arrange the actual transportation.
3. Leech companies sub-sub-contract to "slave-owning" companies (generally from the Gulf or Malaysia), who employ Indian/Pakistani workers in sub-human conditions to do the actual driving. Costs: $3-4 an hour.
4. American GIs are employed to perform guard duties, and to GUARD THE RESOURCES, not the driver.

Of course, we can all guess what the RESOURCES (TM) in Them Amrikan "magic box" convoys are.

Cronyism. Political corruption of the highest order. A massive collusion between the military-industrial complex and the politicians who will give them the war they want oh so eagerly. Life sure is peachy, isn't it?

Costs: minimal. Yes, some 100,000 eye-raqis have died. But those ragtops deserved what they got. We decent cubicle-stuck Hanuman-worshipping gentle geeks will not have bombs on our tails any time soon. Because, of course, we are decent and are permanently stuck to cubicles. And oh yes, could you nuke Pakistan out of existence while you're at it, please pretty please, because those bastards on the other side so need to be slaughtered.

We as a nation are entering a new phase in our relations with the rest of the world - a major policy shift which needs to be evaluated and re-evaluated at each step. As a nation which will soon have the greatest value on Earth in terms of human capital, we need to honestly step back for a minute and ponder the following questions:
1. Do we really need to support a group of people (not the entire American nation) who are hell-bent on destroying entire countries purely on the basis of adding zeroes to their figures of wealth?
2. Is the hatred that we feel for the Other ---- (insert appropriate other here) so deep that we would not think twice before slashing their throats?
3. Are we really no different from animals?

I offer no solutions, no opinions. Life isn't that easy, friends. Sit back and think. Analyze as you will - pragmatically (Bhadra, et al), or with a hopeful dose of idealism (Brahma). The resulting opinion is not what matters. What will matter, and you will realise this later, is that, for maybe the first time in your life, you will have thought rationally about an issue larger than the 70 kilos of protoplasm that constitute you.
Think. And let the horrors of war hit you. Do not be misled by the sight of the almighty greenback. Because if the latter is the Pied Piper of Hamelin, realise what that will make you.
Rats.

Run The River

2006-03-09T23:00:00.000+05:30

This is a short-short story I wrote as part of the Inter-Hall Creative Writing event here at Kharagpur. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it.

Memory is a capricious mistress. Serving no one's cause but her own, she skillfully intertwines the affairs of men and gods. Of all the Olympian muses, she is the one to fear.
And yet, tragically, it is to her wiles and wicked mazes of the mind that I must submit. For, without the crutches of memory, a man must remain helpless.
I used to run the river those days. Times have changed; giants no longer roam on Earth, and the chimerae and unicorns have been relegated to the dusty decaying realms of myth. We live in a world where a miracle is butchered every day, where the wonders of science wound our highest flights of fancy.
I could tell you of the giants of industry I met, I could pour forth stories about Prometheus stealing the iron forges of the gods, I could whisper into your ear the infinite patience of Atlas. I could tell you of Rockefeller and Ford, of Gandhi and Lenin.
But I won't do that.
I could, but I won't.
For memory, that very infinitely capricious muse, gently nudges me towards a tale often told, a tale of heroism and love, sung aloud in campfire-induced drunkenness.
A tale which has never been told like this.

Running the river was a job which took away all your time, leaving you exhausted and spent. At the end of the day, all you could ever want was meat, bread, and a jug of ale. At least I did.
I used to frequent this restaurant, tucked away discreetly in Hell's Kitchen. A quiet place, kept that way by sensible management who knew exactly what a river-runner wanted. Peace, food and a bit of entertainment on the side. It was a perfect place to relax after a hard day's work. I knew the owner, a short chubby Greek going by the improbable name of Atlas Stephanopoulos, for the only thing I saw him lift was his finger, imperiously directing his workers.
Atlas was a smuggler.
He was many other things as well, but his reputation as a trustworthy human trafficker was firmly established eons before I knew him. If you wanted someone to come to America, Atlas was your man. Of course, it was always easier when the person in question himself wanted to come. In such cases, matters were generally handled with a ruthless efficiency that surprised nobody who knew Atlas.

It was a fine June afternoon. I had taken a day off, my first in years of service, and had decided to spend my time at Atlas's restaurant, drinking myself into a silly stupor.
I was halfway into my sixth cup of ale, and was desperately trying to convince my co-worker that the jug was the root of all evil, and should be smashed to the ground as a favour to society.
Someone snatched the jug away from me. I turned around, ready to square off for a bar-room brawl.
It was Atlas, and with him was a young man fresh out of tears, grim determination blazing through his still-damp eyes. I looked at Atlas, raised my eyebrows.
"He's my nephew, fresh from Crete."
The joys of a familial existence having always eluded me, I nodded out a lukewarm welcome and turned around to continue my intellectual banter.
Atlas sat down in front of me, with a soft satisfying plonk.
"I need a favour. And you will help me."
It was enough to make me laugh.
"I'm just a poor old river runner," I said, wiping tears of laughter from my eyes. "How could I possibly help the great Atlas? And why would I?"
Atlas stared at me, the way we stare at people talking loudly in restaurants. And then, glanced softly at his nephew.
"Sing," said Atlas.
And he sang.

And he sang then, oh yes he did, of longing and lament, a song which pierced the heart and cleared the mind. A song of love and innocence, of olives and plums and the smell of fresh Greek soil, of the hunt of the boar. He sang of sunshine and death, and the slices of life stolen away by Chronos.
He sang, and the afternoon melted away into the growing darkness of the night.
After a while, I sensed that he had come to a stop. I stared at Atlas.
"What do you want from me?"
"I want to meet the Boss," he said, and smiled, a slow secret smile.

Those days, I used to meet the Boss very infrequently. My sole job being running the river, my only meetings with him were during times of crises and flooding, when ferrying became the most important job in the world.
I met him in his lair, a high-rise Manhattan apartment. I told him of Atlas, told him about his nephew, told him everything.
His wife was intrigued (and, after all, who wouldn't be, at the thought of a soulful Greek singer).
They agreed to meet Atlas at his restaurant.

I shall never forget the day as long as I live.
For it was at Atlas's restaurant that I saw his nephew sing again.
I saw the effect on the Boss.
I saw his worries melt away.
I saw his wife crying openly, when he sang of unkept promises, and stare at her husband.

And when it was all over, and the Boss was pleased, he looked at the nephew of Atlas, and he asked unto him what he might desire.
And the lad replied.
"Hear me," he said. "I have just one favour to ask."
"And what, pray, is that, soulful Cretan?"
"I ask but this, mighty Hades, that Eurydice, my wife, be returned to my side. For I am Orpheus, son of the Lord of Dreams, and in this manner do I beg a favour of kin."

Hades smiled, looked at Persephone. I felt with naked fear the stab of pure evil in his glance.
"There will be some conditions," he said.

The rest is a tale oft told, by bards and sages.
But this was exactly how it happened, that fateful sultry June night.

And though the chasms of reality swallow my world day by day, though memory, Calliope, and the rest of the muses faintly shudder when Olympus slowly turns to sand, though Zeus and Poseidon still grieve over the fate of humanity, this story shall remain with me.
For the world has changed beyond recognition, and appearance imperceptibly blends into the shadows of thought.
I shall remember Hades, remember Persephone for ever.
I used to work for him once after all.
The Styx might have dried away and turned to vapour, but I shall always remain Charon.

And forever in my memories shall the Song of Orpheus and the roar of the river, the barking of Cerebrus and the deadly orders of Hades be preserved.

My Blog, China, and the Rest of my Life

2006-03-01T19:15:00.000+05:30

It's been a while since my last post. A dark wind has blown across my life over the last few weeks, and punched holes in the picture I had painted of the world and its future and a tiny little me in it.

Certainties have been made uncertain.
Trust systems have broken down.
Faith and religion have been shattered.
For what I have always held dear is lost, maybe forever.
But the rest of my life awaits. I just hope it's worth the effort of living it.

So, on to the future! The perceptive reader must have noted the fact that I have added many shiny new features (SNFs) to my blog. Notice, for your utmost amusement and pleasure:

A Shout Box!
A Hit Counter!
A Blog Roll!
A Subscription Service!

The last SNF being solely for those unfortunate enough not to have discovered the wonders of Bloglines. Explore, and gain nirvana.

I have recently had the marvellous fortune of having a set of delightfully lovely ladies praising, and thus publicising, my blog on various fora. To all such damsels (and you know who you are), I doff my hat in gratitude, and make a promise to kneel in prayer a.s.a.p.

So what about China?
Hehh. Hehh. Hehh.
Exactly.

Running Code!

2006-02-07T13:49:00.000+05:30

Have you ever felt the indescribable joy of creating hundreds of Java classes, all of the form of tiny gems of code? The delight that courses through the body when various objects come together and work in concert to create pre-planned emergent behavior? The feeling of being in the 'zone', of being one with the machine, of creating a new form of poetry/art/music?
Sigh. To program is to drown in beauty, to be caught between the lofty peaks of abstraction and concreteness, to derive joy from complexity as well as simplicity.
And, sometimes, just sometimes, to live is to rejoice in the mercy of the Big Mainframe out there.

Gothic Psychedelia: The House on the Borderland

2006-02-06T23:28:00.000+05:30

I finished the second book on my handpicked list about a week ago. This was William Hope Hodgson's The House on the Borderland. And I realised why, in spite of the travesty that was The Night Land, Hodgson was consistently ranked one of the best Golden Age science fiction writers.

The tale begins quite slowly, with the engaging account of two Englishmen visiting Ireland, with the sole intention of occupying themselves with fishing and camping. In their quest to find the perfect place to set up camp, they come across a village whose inhabitants do not speak English. Camping next to the village, they find a strange castle-like building in ruins. And thus the scene is set, for a classic Gothic tale.

Pure Gothic horror has always had its steadfast adherents and worshippers; I count myself among them. The macabre goosebumpy feeling that one gets upon mentally picturing an abandoned house, with furniture creaking softly in the light, and a gibbous moon hanging across the striated cloud-filled sky, is one which is unparalleled. Wuthering Heights, Kidnapped, Frankenstein - the monopoly for Gothic tales has always been tightly clasped by the classics. This book surely deserves to be ranked along with the best of this genre.

STYLE: The book, thankfully enough, is written in a style reminiscent of the masters of literature, without any specific harnessing of form peculiar to read and impossible to digest. It was an easy read throughout.

DEVICES: Present in this book are the classic elements of Gothic horror. To begin with, we have the recently discovered manuscript, written by some recluse/initiate with access to deep secrets of the cosmos. The recluse (for such is the term employed by Hodgson) writes calmly and clinically, though the subject matter of his journal is anything but, as the reader discovers soon enough.
We find next the abandoned house, in the middle of dense foliage and overgrown gardens. A sense of dull fear shimmers through the pages which describe the house and its surroundings, and one can almost hear the quite-close sniff of a hidden pursuing 'beast'. The abandoned house is one of the stock images of Gothic horror, one found in nearly every book belonging to this genre, and the diligent reader would discover a wry reference to this fact by the author himself, as is shown in the following passage:

Reaching the ruin, we clambered 'round it cautiously, and, on the further side, came upon a mass of fallen stones and rubble. The ruin itself seemed to me, as I proceeded now to examine it minutely, to be a portion of the outer wall of some prodigious structure, it was so thick and substantially built; yet what it was doing in such a position I could by no means conjecture. Where was the rest of the house, or castle, or whatever there had been?

I went back to the outer side of the wall, and thence to the edge of the chasm, leaving Tonnison rooting systematically among the heap of stones and rubbish on the outer side. Then I commenced to examine the surface of the ground, near the edge of the abyss, to see whether there were not left other remnants of the building to which the fragment of ruin evidently belonged. But though I scrutinized the earth with the greatest care, I could see no signs of anything to show that there had ever been a building erected on the spot, and I grew more puzzled than ever.

One can almost imagine Hodgson chuckling to himself as he places the house in his fictional Ireland, at a place where no building had ever been erected before.

The other piece of the Gothic puzzle that falls into place with ease is the appearance of the Other; in the case of this book, this is in the form of alien gods, mysterious spirits and implacable pit-demons. The abyss which forms the central theme of the book keeps reminding us of the limitless depths of darkness to which the human form and psyche can descend.

NARRATIVE: Psychedelia. There is no other word to describe the book. Hodgson was, if nothing else, one of the greatest hippies never to have been a part of the Swingin' Sixties. The loss is keenly felt, for, as one goes through the book, the feeling invariably arises as to how close the visual metaphors are to the mind-expanding reality-de(re)constructing pharmaceutical-induced visions that PKD and members of his ilk explained to us so breathlessly. For, in major portions of this book, the author describes journeys of the recluse into distant realms of space and time, of the death of stars and the whirling away of the Earth into infinity, of magically towering images of ancient pagan Gods and buildings of quartz. Read this book for its mystic descriptions of the passage of time alone; it's worth the effort.

PLUS POINTS: Plenty. In fact, but for the decisive but unsatisfying ending which left a slightly disappointed feel for the text, the rest of the book was a study in rigorous construction of classic horror, while also being the very picture of modern fantasy.

BOTTOMLINE: A beautiful book, one worth treasuring for a long time. It surely deserves an easily accessible place in the huge canon of the world's classic works of literature.

I have started reading, and am mid-way into, the next book on the list.

The "Cadaeic Cadenza": A Work of Genius

2006-01-28T20:23:00.000+05:30

I was browsing through Wikipedia, trying to teach myself something new, and came across an article on "Constrained Writing". Basically, in this form of writing, the writer constrains himself (herself) by various means and rules, such as:

the usage of acrostics
the prohibition of certain letters (such as e), known, engagingly enough, as lipograms
the usage of certain letters in every word (reverse lipograms)

There are various such rules; however, the one work of sheer genius that I came across is the Cadaeic Cadenza, by Mike Keith. It's available online right here: The Cadaeic Cadenza. For a hint as to what it contains, look at the first word "Cadaeic", and try and get the pattern.

Moments such as this are what life is for!

The Night Land: A Partial Review

2006-01-28T15:21:00.000+05:30

Imagine, if you will, a future so distant that the very existence of the Sun is but a legend of ancient times, where the last dregs of humanity live in cowering fear inside a single Pyramid reaching 7 miles into the heavens, surrounded by monsters and half-breed mutants.
Imagine a million years of silence emanating from the Last Redoubt (for that is what the Pyramid is known as), and the host of silent Watchers of stone waiting for the last defences to collapse so that the faint spark of humanity that lies within can be finally extinguished.

Thus lies the basic premise of William Hope Hodgson's "The Night Land", a novel which I've just finished reading. And more than anything else, I have found it to be pretty disappointing. Let me start at the very beginning.

STYLE: Hodgson uses stilted prose like a crazed dwarf swinging a greataxe. He literally bludgeons one to death with his over-use of the literary styles of the late 17th century.

DEVICES: Considering that this was one of the first science-fiction novels ever written (1912), belonging to the Dawn Age of Imperial SF, one can sympathize with his choice of subject - the last citadel of Noble Humanity being battered down by the savage Hordes of sub-humans, a theme which has been tackled in various subtle as well as non-subtle ways by writers such as H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, the recurrent theme of the Others. Hodgson, however, cannot be forgiven for his misuse of the tacky literary device of being "warp-zoned" to the future in a dream. Yes, matey, the hero simply dreams of the far future, in such utter vividness that the mind boggles. Literary devices and constructions such as this should be tackled, nailed to the ground, and shot in the head with extremely fine-caliber rifles.

NARRATIVE: Or the lack of it. Hodgson describes, in excruciating detail, how the Hero (whose name we fail to discover) walks from one place to another, over a matter of fifty pages. Fifty pages of descriptive prose concerning how scared he felt, how tired he was, how the grass was long and the night was dark, until one wishes that the Hero would simply get discovered by one of the ScaryMonsters(TM) and get eaten. A fitting end to one of the most boring characters to have ever graced the pages of a novel.

POSITIVE POINTS: A lot. Which is why the disappointment, simply because I had expected much more from someone considered to be one of the greatest writers of science fiction. One catches glimpses of sheer genius in some parts of his prose, for example in the extract below:

Before me ran the Road Where The Silent Ones Walk; and I searched it, as many a time in my earlier youth had I, with the spy-glass; for my heart was always stirred mightily by the sight of those Silent Ones.
And, presently, alone in all the miles of that night-grey road, I saw one in the field of my glass--a quiet, cloaked figure, moving along, shrouded, and looking neither to right nor left. And thus was it with these beings ever. It was told about in the Redoubt that they would harm no human, if but the human did keep a fair distance from them; but that it were wise never to come close upon one. And this I can well believe.
And so, searching the road with my gaze, I passed beyond this Silent One, and past the place where the road, sweeping vastly to the South-East, was lit a space, strangely, by the light from the Silver-fire Holes. And thus at last to where it swayed to the South of the Dark Palace, and thence Southward still, until it passed round to the Westward, beyond the mountain bulk of the Watching Thing in the South--the hugest monster in all the visible Night Lands. My spy-glass showed it to me with clearness--a living hill of watchfulness, known to us as The Watcher Of The South. It brooded there, squat and tremendous, hunched over the pale radiance of the Glowing Dome.
Much, I know, had been writ concerning this Odd, Vast Watcher; for it had grown out of the blackness of the South Unknown Lands a million years gone; and the steady growing nearness of it had been noted and set out at length by the men they called Monstruwacans; so that it was possible to search in our libraries, and learn of the very coming of this Beast in the olden-time.

The passage extracted above reminds me, somehow, of H. G. Wells at the peak of his writing.

BOTTOMLINE: How I wish that Hodgson had been gifted with the power of story-telling to match his visionary imagination. How enriched literature would have been!

As for me, I'm on to the next novel. Will get back to you as soon as possible.

A Semester-Long Spree

2006-01-25T03:38:00.000+05:30

I just finished reading A Trillion Year Spree, by Brian Aldiss, a work which outlines the history of science fiction as well as the books which led to its current state of development.
I'm impressed.
And, as a young orphan once so pitifully queried of an eviller, crueller generation: "Please, Sir, can I have some more?"
So, I made a list of the books that I need to read during the course of this semester. The entire list consists of over 50 books, which is why I've broken it into more digestible list-chunks of about 6-7 books each. Sadly enough, most of the books that I plan to peruse are not available in India. The only solution thus left to a penniless semi-literate subcontinental geek is to download 'em tomes off IRC.
In any case, here's the first list-chunk of books that I intend reading. Let's see how quickly I'm able to finish them. After I finish one list, I plan on posting reviews of each book, most of which I guess will be painfully personal.
But then, such is life.

Without further ado, here are the books:

The House on the Borderland, by William Hope Hodgson
The Night Land, by William Hope Hodgson
The Trial, by Franz Kafka
The Castle, by Franz Kafka
Star Maker, by Olaf Stapledon
The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers
The Inverted World, by Christopher Priest

Symbiosis

2006-01-03T01:42:00.000+05:30

Urban legends portray the surrealist painter Dali as one possessed by inner demons who haunted him with their nightmarish visions. Dali, they say, employed one particular method of capturing his dreamscapes - before a painting session, he apparently used to go to sleep in a particularly uncomfortable position, with a plate in his hand. Soon, he would be dreaming, his muscles would relax, and the plate would clatter down to the floor. Dali would then wake up hearing the noise, and with the dream fresh in his mind, would start painting.
Inspired by this example, I tried setting an alarm clock to wake me up at 3 a.m. in the night, a calculated four hours of sleep guaranteed to give me inspiring visions upon which to base a story. I woke up to a fleeting impression of blinding snow and skeletons. I got up, wrote the story which follows, and then kept myself awake, because I was too scared to fall asleep again.

We sit facing each other, Timmy and I. I stare at Timmy. Timmy stares right back, eyes bright, gleaming, the smell of tobacco and nervousness mingling. I make the first move.
"That was a nice one, Timmy!" He gives a faint smile, stares right into my eyes.
"Thanks", he says. Turns back, looks at the window.

Snow, falling gently, without a care in the world, regardless of sun and shadow, of the change of seasons, of happiness and sorrow.
Regardless of man itself.
Dr. Zhivago, anyone?
I laugh, a hollow sound echoing through our room. Eyes whip back; Timmy stares at me, uneasy, very uneasy.
"Where is Jakobssen?" I ask.
Yes, Jakobssen, the famous explorer, the first to stay alone in an Antarctic cabin for a year and still emerge unscathed, intact.

Timmy laughs, a bitter laugh. Makes my hackles rise, that kind of a laugh. Sick.
"I don't know."
And Timmy walks out of the room.
Something's wrong.

*****

Still no sign of Jakobssen. Could he be in danger? I look out the window.

Snow, whipping the ground outside into a raging sea of white, clouds of crystal forming all along the cabin.

And then Timmy walks in, a food packet in each hand. "Here's your lunch," he says. Perfect day for a hot lunch. I sit down to eat, measuring carefully each word that I am going to say.
"What's wrong with you, Timmy? Are you feeling all right?" I gently touch his shoulder with my left hand.
Up he goes, like a rocket, yes, jumps up and away. Eyes popping out of his sockets, tongue hanging out, panting. "Don't you ever touch me like that!"
I stare at him. Heck. It's his problem. I continue eating my lunch.

Timmy sits down again, far away from me. I feel eyes boring into me, that odd sort of feeling you get when you walk down a deserted corridor at midnight. Eyes, some hostile, some friendly, most cold, very cold, hating the warmth of your soul, yet seeking it like a moth seeks a flame.
I shudder, continue eating.

*****

It's my turn to check the barbwires. Outside.
I walk all around the compound, checking for holes.
Polar bears can be very dangerous, especially when cornered.

Three days have passed by. Still no sign of Jakobssen. Nervousness grips me like a vise. Timmy's still acting strangely. Yesterday, he refused to sleep in the same room with me. He says I scare him to death sometimes. Hah!

The snow storm outside has decreased considerably. I come inside, sit back, take a deep breath, and think. Why has Jakobssen not returned yet? What could have happened to him?
And why is Timmy behaving so strangely?

I stare out of the window at the snow.
Snow, pure as winter's heart, sublime, melts-when-you-touch-it. Tasteless, odourless, harmless. God's infinite mercy tickling our fur-caps.
And everything clicks into place.

Jakobssen must have got into some danger. Something life-threatening.
And Timmy suspects me.

*****

It happens quite suddenly.
Here I am, lying on my bunk, sleeping, dreaming of a land far away where there is no snow, no darkness.
BANG!
I get up with a start. And a shadow passes, right behind my ears. Sweep.
Quo vadis?

I lift myself off the bunk. Quietly put on my socks, tread gently towards the door of my room. Still swinging.
Something just went out of my room.
Or went inside.

I turn quickly, pick up the seal-skin lamp, watch carefully. No one inside.
Strange.

I walk out of the room, into the corridor. Quietly open Timmy's room. It's pitch-dark, not a single sound from anywhere. I hear the soft snore of a tired soul sleeping soundly. I light the lamp.
The snoring stops.
There's no one inside.

*****

Snow, softly getting crunched under my snowboots. Human beings, turning pure snow into puddles of dirty slime. I give a grim chuckle, walk on further.
I finally see it.
A big hole in the barbwire, cut cleanly, about the size of a man. I stumble back.
Stumble back and fall.

A grave. Somebody's grave. Somebody's empty grave.
I climb out, wheezing and panting.
Look at a piece of wood stuck to the ground.
"Armaund Jakobssen, 1878-19__."

The truth dawns upon me.

*****

Rush back into the cabin, panting.
Timmy's sitting on the table. Eyes big as saucers, full of terror.

I give him a big grin.

"Thought you could hide it from me, Timmy?"
"What are you talking about?"
"You killed him, didn't you? You killed Jakobssen, didn't you?"
"Are you feeling all right?"

I see the lie written on his face. So, pull down my snowpack, take out a rope, and look at him.

*****

We sit facing each other, Timmy and I. I stare at Timmy. Timmy stares right back, eyes full of terror. Staring at me, staring at my hand.
Staring at the Peacemaker I'm pointing at him.

"Why did you do it, Timmy?"
Probably the hundredth time I've asked him this question.

And finally he answers, with a smile, sad, mysterious, a smile of death.

"Because I was always jealous of you, Armaund."

Why is the Peacemaker in my hand shaking?

I stare at my right hand. Bits of skin, still clinging on to gleaming white bone, skeletal fingers snaking around the trigger..

I look outside. Snow. Always.
Snow. The pi and iota of my life. The biggest fundamental constant..

I look back at myself. Six months inside the ground can get anyone out of shape. Hmm. But I have a job to do.

A Peacemaker's a very good gun. Very effective. Very silent.

*****

We sit facing each other, Timmy and I. I stare at Timmy. Timmy stares right back, eyeless sockets mirroring mine, lack of nose coupled with mine, earless skull just like mine.

I look out of the window.

Snow, falling, gently, beyond the puny hopes of humanity, colourless, odourless, noiseless, tasteless. Pure. Nature shall win. Eventually.

Dr. Zhivago, anyone?

*****

Covenant

2006-01-03T01:03:00.000+05:30

Here's a short-short story I once wrote, imagining how it would have been, in a perfectly fantastical world, to woo Her like in the good ol' days, when men were men and did their own wooing with a rose.
Of course, like the mystic yarn spinners and campfire story-tellers of yore, let me assure you of one thing: this is exactly how it happened, give or take a few details.
The story starts, like many others of its ilk, in a House.

I walked out of the House, hoping against hope that this would be the day. Looked up at the sky, and stared in disbelief. Clouds. Ponderous, heavy, gray.
I chuckled. Broke into a grin.
For every cloud has a silver lining.

I walked along the Street, staring at people going by. Cycles, buses, motorcars - the finished magic wonders of our post-modern Age.
Finished is right. Our lives, devoid of meaning. The little joy that we feel, like dew before a roaring sun. And still the merciless Road goes on and on.
Save me Bilbo, my heart cried that day.
Oh yes it wept.
The Road led me on and on, through shanties and skyscrapers, through sparkling boulevards and stinking garbage dumps, through playgrounds and graveyards. Busy people with busy lives.
My City had it all.
It set me wondering then, as I traipsed along a path set in stone. Set me thinking of the choices taken by the Road as it worked its winding way through my City, of its blatant eagerness to see the latest movie. Of the inherent taste of necrophilia exhibited by its burrowing through, nay bisecting, every cemetery.
Do roads remember people? After we have trod across them, worker ants without a moment to spare?
I'm sure this Road did.

And so I walked that day, driven by a desperate desire, peering at every face that zipped past. Searching, searching.
Ask and it shall be given unto you. Seek and you shall find.
I saw Her finally. Standing under a pink umbrella (of course).
Thank you Road, I cried out. Gave a whoop of joy.
Went up to Her, out of breath, panting.
"Excuse me ma'am," I said, gasping for air.
She turned around, looked at me, calm, considering.
I went down on my knees.
Eyebrows arched up. Almost instantly.
My face was out of control, emotions breaking through and bubbling out into the open.
"Will you marry me?"
A crack of lightning.
A raindrop fell on my cheek.

Road. Pointed out my goal, took me so-close and yet-so-far. I started walking back to the House.
Dejection does not come naturally. You have to work at it, pick away at your heart.
Slush. Downpour. More slush.
Somehow reminded me, so weirdly, of rich dark brown filledwithcreamygoodness...
Chocolate.
It was a regular thunderstorm, thumping the Beaufort scale into a wriggly earthworm of figures. The pitter-patter of tiny raindrops turning into a roar, a fusillade of tiny droplets hitting the ground with vengeance. A million Cains hitting out blindly.
It was a regular war. And Earth was getting ready to surrender.
I reached the House. Shut myself up. Opened the refrigerator. And grabbed -
Chocolate.
It was the first day, you see.

A pattern was forming. I could feel it.
An Oracle I became, mysticism and hope mingled with a Cassandra-sense-of-foreboding.
The priestesses of Apollo would have approved.
Life became obvious. Against the laws of nature, against the laws of Earth and Man, against entropy itself, the jigsaw puzzle of my life was aligning itself rapidly, forming a statement which I refused to read.
And so it went.
Walk. Road.
No!
Road. Walk. Slush. House.
Chocolate.
And the gentle draughts of Morpheus.
On and on and on and on. Just like the Road.
Was Bilbo trying to help me out there?

I walked out of the House, hoping against hope that this would be the day. Looked up at the sky. And stared in disbelief.
White, flying in the rain. (How how how?)
It was a dove.
Dropped something into my hands and flew away. (Where where?)
I looked at my hands.
Chuckled. Broke into a grin.
And shook a fist at the sky.

There She was. The same pink umbrealla. The same intrigued look on Her face.
And yet, there was something different.
"Excuse me, ma'am," I said, confidently.
She turned around, looked at me, a slight smile on Her lips.
I went down on my knees.
A sigh escaped from Her lips, almost involuntarily.
I looked up at Her.
Pulled out my hand from behind by back.
"Will you marry me?"
And I gave her the Rose; the petals so perfect, raindrops glistening shyly.
She smiled.
"What's your name?" she asked. (Oh, couldn't you guess it?)
"Noah," I said.
"How long has it been, since you started?" (Oh, she knew it, she knew it all along.)
"Forty days and forty nights."

Measure for measure. I looked up at Her.
"You haven't answered my question."
She looked at me, held my hand.
And the rain stopped.

I walked onto the Road with Her.
"Where's everybody gone?" she asked, surprised. Staring at the empty City.
I glanced up at the sky, smiled at -
VIOLET. INDIGO. BLUE. RED. And a touch of YELLOW.
It was a pact. A covenant.
Between me, Her, God and Bilbo.
And the Road of course.

Of course, caveat emptor and all that... a vast chasm of space and time separates us from each other; we still haven't had a chance to re-populate Earth.
As for me, I'll try beating Methushelah's record.

First they took away our rockets...

2005-10-15T04:04:00.000+05:30

I look at the world around us and I marvel at the artifacts of our thought, at the God-like powers of creation and destruction that have been harnessed and yoked to the chariot of industrialization. I pause to think of the men who brought us here, whose fantasies fired our imaginations - the campfire yarns spun by Homer, the tragic laments of the Arab poets, the satirical verses of Dante, the simplistic tales of Chaucer. Will our generation ever produce their equals? For ours is a choppier ocean of metaphor, and the ships of our intellect have yet to chart it fully. I fear, though, that the engines of our imagination have sputtered to a stop, never to start again. And I guess I know why...

First They Took Away Our Rockets...

...our spaceships, our glorious interstellar voyages. It's all been done now.
Then they snatched away our nuclear holocausts, the horrors of mutation. Thalidomide became a shared nightmare, a piercing scream of reality which one had hoped no one would hear.
Silently now, they sneaked up on us, clubbed us sore, and gleefully ran away with our advanced AI. We nurtured, then, in vain, our nightmarish visions of plastic realities, which again were cruelly taken away and morphed for prime-time entertainment. (Vanilla Sky, anyone?)
Our turn of phrase, our too-clever-by-half imagery, our vividly imagined psychotic turns and madnesses, are all gone. What, then, ye gods, of the bards and poets? What of the breathtaking flights of fantasy, of writers dominating the landscape of our thought with tales of heroism and nobility, of the conquest of the unknown? The entrails have been read, so have the tea leaves. A dark brooding bleakness dominates our mental landscape. The spectre of science has throttled our frenzied fantasies.
Now, robots are on the march, instant communication halfway across the globe is a reality, and men shall walk on Mars by 2018. Technology, the mischievous daughter of science, will cure our ills, rid our all-too frail society of its ailments, its social cancers. And man shall be free, finally, rid of its troublesome burdens of meaningless productivity and the metaphor of the worker ant. What shall we do then, casting our Olympian glances on a world where no one has to work for food, where ultimate leisure is the birth-right of every soul?
What shall we do when the very tools that make us human have been snatched away? When the fountain of our race's youth has run dry? When the very act of creation and imagination is an unnecessary drudgery, laboriously produced by the dregs of society?

There's a shuddering evil thought that continually gurgles inside my head, that we, as a race, have become too mature to indulge in such unseemly activities as dreaming and imagining. Our visions have become an embarassment, our myths viewed as an infantile attempt at clawing our way upwards into a stronger, more powerful, realm of intellect. We shall soon discard the crutches that supported our first baby-steps towards conquering the rest of the universe.

Because Man was not meant for Earth alone.

The Philistine Manifesto

2005-10-12T22:11:00.000+05:30

There are times in a man's life when the fight to preserve his intellect and sanity becomes imperative.
It was one of those times.
I had a chat with one of my friends from school the other day, a chat on the Net like no other. It was clear to both of us that our opinions about each other's tastes in books and music could only be plumbed by bathyscapes. He scorned Eco, mocked PKD, praised the heroic efforts of Sidney Sheldon in bringing literature to the masses.
Sufficiently incensed, I thought to myself, what if all the people like my friend here had a hidden agenda? And the feeling grew increasingly stronger within me, of an unknown heaving mass movement amongst the literate, but not educated, populace, a teeming movement of people ready to break down the boundaries erected by cultural education. How would these people motivate themselves, I thought, once the campfires are lit and the faces are aglow with the throbbing sensation of doing something worthwhile?
And so, with the purest of motives, I have decided to give to them a manifesto which they could call their own, one sure to warm the cockles of their hearts and ignite the fire in their (pot) bellies.
Here it is, in its pure, unalloyed form.

The Philistine Manifesto
by Anshuman Mishra

The written word is but a palimpsest for meaning, they say, a surface covered with the hieroglyphical daemon-children of our creativity. Our thoughts, like evil worms, slither across and burrow through the crevices, nooks and crannies of the text that we compose. It is from the honeycomb structure of our writings that men gather the supposed fresh and sweet experience of new ideas. Structure, in its multi-faceted forms, in its various cuts and angles, is what gives rise to meaning. Or so they claim.
But what, then, I ask, of translucence? What, then, of clarity, of the sinful nakedness of an idea yet to be experienced and comprehended? How do we gather unto ourselves the glass pebbles of truth that encompass the very way in which we define our lives, when all we have are tools made of sand? How do we rescue the dainty damsel that lies deep inside the castle, fiercely guarded by the twin dragons of Intelligence and Creativity? Carpe diem, I say! Let us peel off layer by layer the external trappings of erudition and circumlocution, let us unravel the tangled web of metaphor and similes, let us take a hammer and anvil to the chains that bind meaning! Let us free the original kernel of pure idea that lies at the pulsating heart of every statement that we compose, let us tear down the delicate strands of excessive verbiage that surround the jewel that we seek!
We care not for quantity and complexity --- a pithy remark would do in the place of a fable, a short story in the place of a long one, a 'Ha!' instead of a sarcasm-drenched comment. The beauty of direct experience is what we crave, the only one which ought to exist. So, let us raze to the ground the mighty citadels of the intelligentsia, for it is their duplicity and treachery alone which is to be blamed for letting matters come to such a pass! Let us all be modern-day Savonarolas --- let flames rise from books which need to be read twice, a just punishment for the long periods of struggle and torment that each of us had to undergo!
Let us cut down the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil! Let us slay Intelligence and Creativity, the twin dragons that have forced us to pray at the altar of Technology. And let us rejoice aforehand, since the battle between us, the strong armies of darkness, and them, the meek and effeminate bearers of the arms of Civilization, is one whose result is not hard to foresee. For we shall smite them with our clubs, pin them down with our poison-tipped barbs! We shall hunt them down one by one, and celebrate each kill with gusto, until the day arrives when we can look at the horizon and see no trace of evil, when the land will be unsullied and pure, cleansed of all sorrows once inflicted by Man. It is then, and then alone, that we shall rest, for our appointed task will be over, and we shall finally be free --- free of the power of Logos, of complex expression, free of thought itself.
It is towards that glorious future that our armies should march, for the day is not far when our grunts alone shall resound through the thick forests of Earth.
Amen.

A brief aside here. I sincerely hope the intended audience recognizes the mirror that I have held up to their intelligence.
And to you, anonymous friend-from-school, muse of my demented little mind, I dedicate the manifesto written above.

A Tryst With Amitav Ghosh

2005-01-26T14:00:00.000+05:30

Yesterday I had the privilege of meeting and interacting with Amitav Ghosh, renowned writer of English literature (he hates being labelled a 'Commonwealth' or 'Indo-Anglian' writer).

For quite some time now, IIT Kharagpur has been organising, under the aegis of the Humanities and Social Sciences Department, an annual Tagore Memorial Lecture in the month of January. This lecture has been delivered by many eminent personalities culled from the fields of science, art and politics. This year it was the turn of the famous author of The Calcutta Chromosome to speak on The Embattled Mind: Surviving A Fractured Society.

The programme started on time in the Netaji Auditorium, though the crowd that had gathered was spread pretty thinly. There were quite a few professors in attendance, though some questions were raised in the minds of the audience as to how many came to listen to the talk and how many turned up just to ogle at the writer. Some local Bengali scholars started the proceedings with a song rendered in the style of traditional Rabindrasangeet, after which there was a brief introduction by some "dignitaries". The Director spoke at length about Prof Ghosh's depth of intellect and wide range of interests in the field of literature, all the while reading out from a prepared text. (As we shall see later, he wasn't the only one to do so.)

Amitav Ghosh, who is a Visiting Professor at Harvard, took to the stage and started the talk with a foray into the world of information technology and how it has changed modern India. He reminded us that the future that we are creating has an "implacable gatekeeper", "computer literacy". Warning us of how we are willingly participating in the disenfranchisement of millions of our fellow Indians, he steered the talk towards the direction of parallel economies. Prof Ghosh pointed out that the Abu Ghraib prison tortures were symptomatic of how the jailers (soldiers in this case) were basically encouraging prisoners to emulate the American prison system of peer humiliation and assault. Moving on to slavery and disenfranchisement in a broader sense, he talked about the Anglo-American slave trade and how, if a slave managed to escape to England, he would be free, since "the smell of English soil is the smell of freedom".

Prof Ghosh was extremely critical about the nature of imperial peace, remarking that India was one of the very few nations which actually managed to grasp the tiny window of opportunity in the last century. This window, lasting for about 30 years from the 1940s to the 1970s, was the only period of any consequence in which the Pax Anglo-Americana was in retreat, and it was only during this period that such large-scale decolonisation and establishment of independent institutions of science and arts could be performed. An interesting idea. Quoting extensively from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, he urged us to figure out how far we must go for the pursuit of liberty and freedom - is it acceptable to destroy an entire people just for the sake of an idea?

Finally, Prof Ghosh talked about the recent tsunami and the massive humanitarian crisis it has engendered. He sketched for us a brief look at the life of a tsunami survivor who has lost his wife and one of his children. Especially interesting was the way in which the survivor managed to cope with his losses. Prof Ghosh ended his talk by pointing out the parallels of each scenario - how an embattled intelligence will survive in a hostile environment.

After the talk, Mangal, Sash and I managed to stake out some space around Prof Ghosh. I had prepared some questions, some ideas which we wanted to discuss with him. The questions were as follows:

Prof Ghosh, up till the advent of the Gutenberg Printing Press, the illuminated manuscript was the major form of expression in Western thought. Now, however, it is just another artifact of the Middle Ages. My question is - will the book, as an object, suffer the same fate? Or, alternately, where do we draw the line between the physical and literary natures of a book? What defines the "book-iness" of a book?

Prof Ghosh, we have had till now two revolutions in the realm of the expression of ideas:

The transition from the spoken form to the written form (invention of writing), and
the transition from the written form to the printed form (the printing press);

Each such revolution has brought with it tremendous social upheaval.

My question is - what do you think will be the next such revolution and what will be its attendant impact on human society? What, in such a case, will be the job of a writer?

Sadly enough, the answers were not what I had expected. Pat answers are traditionally associated with journalists, socialists and brain-addled teenagers. I was unpleasantly surprised to discover the same trait in Mr. Ghosh.

The answer to my first question was - "No. I do not believe there is anything sacrosanct about a book. You must be knowing that I recently won the Frankfurt E-book Award." Great. That's all the philosophy I get.

The answer to my second question was - "I sincerely believe we are entering a period of great chaos and a collapse of civilization seems imminent." Ehh?

I hung up my boxing gloves, smiled at him and turned back. Sash was next in line - she asked a pretty interesting question in her own right. Her question was:

Sir, there exists no word to describe the hatred of men, though there is a corresponding word for women. Do you think women have consistently been prejudiced against and denied a voice, and is this prejudice built in to the structure and semantics of the languages that we use?

Before Mr. Ghosh could reply, however, out jumps a lady from the woodwork, delivers a smart quote from Shakespeare, and gets a pat on her head from Chromosome-guy. Sash and I stare at each other, grimace in unison and back off.

To conclude, Mr. Ghosh spoke well, reading from an already prepared speech, with minimal audience interaction. I guess we can't have our cake and eat it too. Maybe sometime later, when we have achieved stable positions in life, the time shall come when we can interact in a more positive layered sense. Till then, Mr. Ghosh, here's to your walloping of the Commonwealth!

To the Glory of the Sun!

2004-11-17T17:33:00.000+05:30

It's been a long time since the first post. A lot of bytes have passed through the fat cables of the Internet since June, a lot of work done in the meantime, and yet I still haven't introduced myself.

Allow me to correct this slight. I'm a senior student at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India, pursuing a major degree in Computer Science. I love my girlfriend, my parents, my laptop, my stuffed dog (affectionately called "Doggu"), fried chicken, and my tattered copy of LotR, though not necessarily in that order.
And yes. I'm a geek.

Information yearns to be free, straining at its bonds in an eerily anthropomorphic manner, which is why I have decided to indulge in an interesting experiment, wherein I give vent to my feelings about everything happening in my life. I hope my gentle audience shall allow some sarcasm to seep through their overused senses.

Make love, make gcc, make gentoo, make everything except for war.
Peace on you.

I got administered!

2004-11-14T15:41:00.000+05:30

Three months of working out through the night, sleeping off the entire day, endless rounds of coffee at the canteen. All for an examination given by a bunch of people with as much social skills as a penguin invited to the annual get-together of the local school of salmons.

My friends, I have just been administered the GRE Subject Test in Computer Science on the holy day of November the 13th (unfortunately a Saturday), and, believe you me, hell hath no fury like scorned and mocked-at academics.
In the course of these three months, I had to study:

Algorithm Design and Analysis
Automata Theory
Digital Electronics
Computer Architecture
Operating Systems
Compiler Design
Computer Networks
Programming Methodology

And certain other topics which belong to the wider realms of miscellania. I sure hope I get something out of this test, at least a decent assistantship at some university. Let's see how everything goes.

Settled in!

2004-06-23T22:16:00.000+05:30

Yessirree! Got the blog sorted out finally. It's the curse of a modern society, the availability of too many options. Too many choices, too many settings to tamper with.

Well, what do we have here. I guess a brief explanation is required.

Muggermuch (n):
1. A person who studies a lot (mugger much). [Colloquial Indian usage]
2. [Hindi] A crocodile.

I'm sure that explains a lot of things.

And yes, to ensure that you're getting the biggest bang for your buck, attach a thermonuclear device to your pet reindeer.

Zat's all folks!