the cultivation of virtues

Last night, Bhajji and I were sitting in his house, waiting for Meera to be fed so that she could be brought downstairs, when, amidst a slew of shallow remarks we both were making about a bunch of things, he said that he was reconsidering buying the Ecovacs because his cleaner had messaged him earlier saying she was coming back into the business. So I offhandendly asked him why and when she'd stopped and he replied that she had been training to be a teacher, completed the course and started teaching in January, but then found the work so hectic for the pay that she decided to quit after a term to get back to cleaning. I had been broadly following news about terrible pay and the intense work hours of public school teachers in NSW since I applied to the M. Teach programme back in 2021 when, also, Rama told me about his flatmate Teagan's stressful work conditions, and I've always had this vague, socialist, slightly David Graebar-Bullshit Jobs-type attitude that there is something wrong about a society that pays and treats its teachers and nurses and muncipal workers worse than it does marketing professionals and consultants and investment bankers, and I probably would have responded with a disapproving tut-tuting and then moved on had I not, the previous night, read Joseph Walker's phenomenal response to Alan Kohler's QE on the Australian Housing Crisis. I cannot recommend it highly enough so please please read it but while I have you here, I will expound on the thread that I found most pertinent to that story. 

One of the reasons, apparently, Australia's fertility rate is falling is because a large number of young people are unable to afford big houses, which are somewhat of a precondition for raising kids, owing to the inexporably rising property prices. Walker's words, "At the individual level, this is frustrating. At the societal level, it’s disastrous.", have stayed with me since and on hearing what Bhajji said, I couldn't stop myself from being vocally alarmed. If a qualified teacher is saying that it is better for her to be a cleaner, which is perfectly rational and fair on her part, then what are the repercussions of this decision, and similar decisions by other teachers, 15-20 years from now. If this was an isolated incident of a particular person feeling she doesn't fit into a role she thought she would, that'd be one thing. But having been reading news reports, seeing videos of teacher protests, I think this is more than one person. An entire community of people, many of whom I'm willing to wager are atleast to some extent passionate and idealistic about the profession, under such stress that it is causing many to leave in droves is a cause for notice in any area of work but it is disastrous when it comes to teachers. Or nurses and other caretakers. With all due respect, an exodus of IT consultants wouldn't have as big an impact on society as it would for teachers or nurses. And yet we've allowed ourselves to arrive at a system where we don't value monetarily those who are fundamental to turning our children into citizens, and caring for us when we're at our weakest. The answer that the market will take care of it is not just an abrogation of intelligence and judgement but also stupendously lazy because it does not account for the social cost of a generation of people- their suffering, the opportunity cost of what could have been, and the impact on the rest of society because of these diminished, for if the purpose of education is to enable a human to flower at their fullest potential, actors- who happen to bear the burden while the market corrects itself.

I can see that I am painting a very deterministic picture and not conceding the fact that individuals have agency, find innovative ways to uplevel themselves whenever society changes drastically. And thank goodness for that. And yet I think those of us who are in a position to atleast attempt to do more, the apathetic middle-class, are failing. In his latest episode on The Seen and the Unseen, Prof. Muralidharan at one point says that development will happen no matter what, that society will continue to evolve. Where those of us who want to do something can contribute, by using our talents and actions, is by accelerating that development so that instead of taking, say, 100 years it'll take 25. Because development means a real improvement in conditions of humans. That means we have to be willing to instead of doing what we've been told to, advertised to, exhorted to, admnonished to, goaded to, feared to, be willing to think, feel and do what we think is right. After years of arguing with myself, and others, into a corner about the basis for any claim of a virtuous act, I see myself going through a phase transition. Not just because the answer doesn't seem to lie entirely in theory but also because I was using that as a pretext to avoid action.

There is another, more important, more visceral consideration. Having been spending more and more time with Anaya and Meera, the future has ceased to be an abstract entity to be used to win an argument, and has become a more concrete reality in which I see them turn 10, 12, 15, going to school, playing in the park, worrying about what their peers think of them, partying, worrying about the climate, war, human suffering, and I feel a sense of shame growing within me on realising that I've done nothing to make their world slightly better. While it is not entirely ludicrous to think that we should shelter our children and give them the best of what we can, it also goes without saying that the larger world will have an impact, that many large-scale events and wider society and environment will decide how they think about their world, their actions, their children. And while it would be hubris, unjustified arrogance and, perhaps, overreach to think that I have the power or the knowledge to make a great impact, I'll be damned if I don't try.

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"Virtues are dispositions not only to act in particular ways, but also to feel in particular ways. To act virtuously is not, as Kant was later to think, to act against inclination; it is to act from inclination formed by the cultivation of the virtues." -Alasdair MacIntyre/ After Virtue

moonstar meanderings

When once asked if how they played depended on their mood, setting, attire on stage etc. the inimitable Indian Ocean replied in the affirmitive, saying, "अगर नहा के गाओ तो अलग बजता हैं, बिना नहाके गाओ तो अलग बजता हैं |", before memorably adding, "और टट्टी के साथ गाओ तो बिलकुल अलग |". Holding onto that powerful dictum, I present to you material sublime:

Compared to making day night day night, this brewed for longer and I found it harder to grasp a narrative bassline that excited me. I started out by wanting to make it explicitly about Japan and then riffing on how it is almost impossible to understand an entire country and its complex history, before coming back to the inevitability of wanting and needing that compressed, imperfect model. But that task was both too daunting and less exciting because I had a rough idea of the complete picture and it was just about putting the pieces together. For a while I wanted to turn into a Zen-ish video but that too fell apart because I felt it was too easy to make a faux-Zen video that signalled depth without to backing it up with truth. 

A major phase transition happened thanks to Prof. Amit Chaudhuri's incredible Finding the Raga, and after spending weeks listening to new music for the film (from Japanese Jazz to Ryuichi Sakamoto and American Folk to Hamir Kalyani), I knew this was going to be Dhrupad too. That then freed me up from wanting to create a video essay, and let me go back to free associating and juxtaposing images, and instead of informing or convincing the viewer, to just prompt them into going off on their own on a slightly unusual (compared to their otherwise day-to-day concerns) path. The birds kind of came home in the last couple of weeks as I read Siddhartha Deb's astounding, brutal, magical The Beautiful and the Damned (which I hope to write about soon). I wanted to make this about the prosaic, the quitodian, the sensual, the anonymous, and I didn't really know if I found that exhilarating or limiting. Which was just as well because it was both, and having that ambiguity created enough epistemic and existential longing to get going. In the midst of this, at some point, my brain also said that I didn't have to make it the definitive Japan diary, and that freed me into pursuing and celebrating my present preoccupations and fascinations. I wanted to call it surfaces&essences to convey that gap between thinking we see and know and understand and truly seeing, knowing and understanding, but I didn't feel confident enough to make that claim not least because I wasn't sure if I was seeing things as they were or was being fooled by a deeper, more problemlatic part of my own mind that was claiming understanding without actually doing it. My eureka moment came in the shower one day when the quasi-poem i am things came to me unbidden, and I knew that the real world and its marvels excited me the most, and that was, for the most part, a genuine feeling. And all this was a way of trying to capture and convey that feeling.

So, yeah, I enjoyed making but have been very reluctant to share it widely. It is a strange, potent mix of arrogance ("I don't make it for others, I don't want to be corrupted by others' often shallow feedback"), self-loathing ("I have nothing original to say and I don't want to waste others' time by my shallow signalling"), shame ("The video clips are crap and I'm a fraud for trying to gain some validation by riding on the soaring wings of majestic artists, primarily Dagar Brothers"), and fear of rejection/ mockery ("What if I ask them to watch it, and they think its juvenile and see through its pretensions"). The few people I've sent it to have come back with comments sweet and kind as well as meh, so I know they're not all lying. 

One last thing: usually when I'm done making something, and wrestle with myself between making it more known and just letting it be out there ("గింజకి జీవశక్తి ఉంటే అది ఎక్కడ పడేసినా పోదు" and all that), I arrive, sooner or later, at the question of why is it even out there? Why don't I just save it on my computer and never tell anyone about it? Because its not really validation or attention or fame (however small it maybe) or social change is what I'm seeking. Ofcourse they all do exist but none of them are fundamental. The answer came to me in a conversation with Bhajji after I sent him the link and I was rather pleased for finally seeming to have arrived at a satisfactory, definite conclusion: 

It is that everything I write, film, say, quote, rant about and all that is to find friends, people who share my wavelength. With whom I can sit down on in a cafe on a late afternoon and get lost in expansive, spiralling conversations as the evening thickens around us. That, I find, is not a bad reason to put your rawest, most honest but also the best self out.

రాయమనే కథలే ఓ సంచారి

On most days, I don't really understand what goes on in my head. Sometimes it's nice, when I'm surprised that I know the answer to a question I didn't know I knew. At times it's a thrill when I'm trying to remember the name of a filmmaker and try to go around clicking hyperlinks in my head until, voila!, I suddenly reach the destination. But many times, it's infuriating/ alarming/ exhausting to learn that what I thought, what I was led to believe, was a permanent fixture, suddenly revealed its transcience and simply disappeared. This is as true for interests and worldviews as it is for resolutions and emotions. The latter two I understand, having lived with them all my life more or less. The former two I'm still coming to terms with. 

Let me try to illustrate the point with an example: A month ago, I discovered this wonderful podcast called History of Philosophy. As usual, I didn't just want to dip into it but wanted immerse myself in it, to start from the basics, so I started from the first of over a hundred episodes. I heard 3 or 4. Loved them. I went around looking for essays/ books involved. I felt that I had discovered what it is that I wanted to do, that this was to be my vocation. I imagined myself going back to college to study, impress everyone with my original mind and do tremendous research that would bring me joy and accolades. I beat everyone I spoke to with that hammer for those few days. It also became my stock lens for understanding my world. And as suddenly as it flared up, my interest in that dissipated. I realised I wasn't able to concentrate on the podcast, I had to keep rewinding. Then I spent the next few days cursing my immense stupidity for letting my fantasy take wings despite similar previous experiences. I told myself that I should learn from this experience and embrace who I was. That my interests were varied and the intensity with which I pursued them would ebb and flow. That my primary mistake was my desperate need to associate myself with one thing at the cost of everything else. I was looking for that one thing which would let me escape from the frustrations and consolations of having to keep thinking, keep figuring out, keep updating my mental models. That I was trying to live like an archetype, for the simple reason that it'd cost my less mental energy, instead of celebrating the reality that my being couldn't be reduced to simplistic tropes. I knew that this solace was temporary too but I enjoyed it. I hoped to learn from it and deal with the next crest with more equanimity, all the while knowing that I possibly couldn't hold onto this rock of realization when the next wave inevitably hit with surprise and force. That I'd dive in naively, greedily, because it was too hard to resist the temptation. 

And as if on cue, the next wave, Christopher Nolan's films, hit rightaway. Back to square one of fantasizing and imagining and telling myself that I'd finally arrived at my truth. WashRinseRepeat.

I'm not exactly complaining because I genuinely seem to enjoy this aspect of myself. Truth be told, I'm probably too much in love with myself so its actually a bit of a problem. But I find it interesting at my mind's capacity to shift and change so much while also essentially remaining roughly in the same area. My interests haven't changed drastically- It's still mostly a bit of science, a bit of society, philosophy, art and tech. It's the temporariness and, more interestingly, the intensity that's.. well, what exactly is it?

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I watched a few films in the last few weeks and I've been meaning to briefly write about four:

• Siddu Jonnalagadda's Krishna and His Leela, and Maa Vinta Gaadha Vinuma. I call them Siddu Jonnalagadda's because despite being helmed by different directors, he co-wrote, edited and played the lead role in both and I see enough simalarity between them to claim that they both carry his signature. I thoroughly enjoyed both movies- the humour, the charm, the urban upper-middle class air, the women. I also like how plot mechanics really kick in only, almost like an afterthought, at the end. Viva Harsha is growing on me, especially after Colour Photo, and I love his exchange with Krishna in the pub:

• అన్యాయం గురు ఆ అమ్మాయి
• నాటె జోకూ
• అజ్జా బాన్ చేయాలి అలాంటోళ్ళని
• వాటె.. నువ్వు నేను నూతిలో కప్ప
• వేర్వేరు
• ఇట్సె బొంబై మాటర్ రా ఇదంతా, నీకర్థం కాట్లేదు. ఇట్సె యో.. ఖూ..

• Gaadha was more mainstream in its treatment if not for its plot but I like how things were kept interesting by using Bharani gari character as a framing device. And the idea to cast Fish Venkat as Fish Venkat was gobsmackingly inspired. I also liked the Carnatic tinged music of both films though it infuriates Sravani to listen to this 'debasement'. So I listen to it on headphones.
• Chaitanya Tamhane's The Disciple is a remarkable achievement. I found out about Court years ago, via Moi Fight Club I think, and took pride in the fact that it'd premiered in Venice. When I watched it, I liked it but I thought it was a bit too pretentious. And at that point in time, I was a huge pretentious snob myself (you should see my absolutely ignorant, inferiority-complex-shrink-wrapped-in-superiority-complex comment on BR sir's blogpost about Ship of Theseus to know what I mean. I can't because it literally gives me goosebumps from embarassment) so I suppose I need to rewatch it to make a more upto-date, hopefully more genuine, judgement. I fell in love with The Disciple as I was watching it because it genuinely made me feel, and to a large extent remind similar feelings of ineptitude, what it is to desperately seek greatness. While this would've made it a great film in itself, what drove it to stratospheric heights is the scene in the bar where Sharad hears stories about Maai that he doesn't want to. While I could go into a pedestrian interpretation of how it throws a light on the need for deities, I will refrain from doing that because it'll debase the impact of the film. I will suffice it to say that Tamhane's control was such that my impression of Maai totally flipped after that. I was thrilled.
• I can't remember why I didn't watch Dunkirk earlier, it's probably got to do with my usual grandstanding about how Nolan is a limited director without inspiration, which ironically was probably lifted from Tom Shone's profile of the man in The Guardian, but I watched it a few weeks ago because I knew I was going to get a copy of The Nolan variations. I must say I enjoyed it and I found Nolan's use of different timeframes really interesting. While it makes for great cinema, and that can be a respectable end in itself, I also thought it did a meta-commentary on cinema itself. We tend to remember 2 hours of a great movie more vividly than months, if not years, of our lives. And in that sense technology, both physical and mental (eg: narratives), help us get more bang for the buck. If one way to measure the 'success' of a life is to manage to collate the 'memorable experiences', while understanding that at any point in time we are what we have access to, both within our head and without, then these technologies allow you to pack in more within a life. So maybe there is a way to say objectively that my life is better, in terms of how fulfilling it is and how much I enjoy it, than that of an average person born 2000 years ago, or 15000 years ago, or even 100 years ago. In a way technology allows you to have greater leverage over your immediate physical spacetime and consequently on your agency which must be one of the foundations of a good life. 

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April also happened to be the month when I was able to read/listen/think about ideas that I was able to put together to form a interesting little framework. Now that I think about it, my interest in Nolan's adamant materialism was probably lead by this phase which in turn was preceded by reading about/around Darwinian Evolution in the previous few months.

Here they are:

• I'd been reading Dr. Velcheru Narayana Rao and Dr. David Shulman's extraordinary Classical Telugu Poetry, and as I was going through the long introductory essay, it struck me that  it was probably the first time in my life that I was reading an introduction and exploration of Telugu culture from a Social Science view. They had placed the poets, and by extension their works, in the context of the social, cultural, political and economic conditions in which they lived and worked. Maybe it'd been done before but I hadn't been fortunate enough to come across that interpretation. The little old Telugu culture I had read/heard/was told about had, for the most part, spoken about these mythologies and works of literature as being born fully formed. They were అపౌరుషము. Again, apologies if that's not true, but that's how I saw them. And so they became hard to access, their apparent perfection both uninteresting and hard to believe. This essay, by charting the evolution of the form across the ages, and by creating brief but humanising sketches of the poets helped me get over my bias (that I'd developed as a resistance in my childhood when I was told that these were great but never really learned how they came about) and made me feel grateful and fortunate to be able to access them centuries and worlds away from where they were created. The material aspect of it made them so much more real and precious. I could sense their humanity reaching out from far, far away.
• I discovered David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity in Naval Ravikant's podcast. While I've listened to only a couple of hours of the audiobook, I found his articulation of the Scientific Method quite helpful. Deutsch coins a phrase called 'Good Explanation' which he says is essentially how human progress is/ has been made. So religious concepts, mythologies, folklore, heuristics, customs/ rituals, infact maybe even superstitions, are developed by humans to better understand their environment so that they can thrive. What we call Science, and he argues that Enlightenment is the inflection point, is essentially the best method we have discovered as a species for generating 'Good explanations' about the world. Every theory that comes up not only is not final but in some ways both is created by and subsumes the previous explanation because it had proved inadequate to the task. I found this model of thinking quite useful. Another argument that absolutely floored me was his insistence that scientific discovery, despite its popular image to the contrary, is a supremely creative act. Infact, all theorising is. He says that we don't go around looking for data and then let theory drift up, so to speak, once enough data has been collected but create theories and then go about verifying their validity as more and more observations are recorded. I found this flip absolutely riveting and I think it makes sense in my day-to-day experience.
• In Jonardon Ganeri's essay for Aeon on the Tree of Knowledge, which is a terrific read in its entirety, he writes about how what we generally assume to be laws of living, that are handed down by our parents as traditions, are best understood as methods or strategies that must be applied intelligently. There need not be anything irrefutable/sacred about them. This again was extremely liberating because I had spent years listening to people tell me that one should follow the guru, not everything can be understood via the intellect, that these traditions have been handed over by 'masters' and the like. Nothing against them but now I was able to see that these are probably part of just one method of pursuing whatever it is that you're seeking and so all other methods aren't misplaced or wrong by definition. Limited, maybe. Primitive, maybe. Valid nonetheless.
• From that essay, I discovered the History of Philosophy podcast written by Ganeri and Peter Adamson. I haven't gone past the first few episodes, yet, but I'd made one staggering discovery. That the what we call the six systems of Hindu Philosophy, Samkhya, Yoga, Nyaya, Vaiseshika, Mimamsa and Vedanta actually started as certain methods of understanding and interpreting the world. So, for example, Samkhya started by the belief that enumerating the world was a good method to get started for understanding it. Similarly, Mimamsa was apparently about inference and analogy via argument to understand. Likewise, Yoga was literally about putting various things together and building a more cohesive worldview. A union in that sense of the word. Again, I need to reinstate that my knowledge of this is extremely rudimentary and I could be totally wrong in all this. Neither have I gone back to confirm if this is what was told in the podcast, nor cross-referenced it from other sources. What I'm trying to put across is what I started thinking after listening to those episodes and that I find it useful in thinking about the world.

From what I can surmise, the one common thread among all these ideas has been the material and evoltionary aspect of things.  This, like I stated earlier, probably comes from my cursory readings of Darwinism which I must've sought out in the first place because I was looking for an alternative to more, for the lack of a better word now, supernatural explanations of the world I live in. Not that they are necessarily wrong, it's just that at this point in time, I neither find them convincing nor useful. It could be a right hunch or my limited capability, but at this point in time, they don't seem right.

Sticking to more materialistic, this-worldly explanations also lets me feel pride and a sense of community with other humans. For as long as I sought ways which were either religious or mystical, I felt a sense of inadequacy in being myself. As if I had fallen and had to be lifted by a guru or some such deus ex machina. As if I could only be hauled across by a benevolent deity. This, on the other hand, while making me feel genuine humility at the extent of things I didn't know, atleast fills me with awe, gratitude and belonging with a much larger family of human beings across time and space. I can feel a sense of kinship. I feel less alone, less deficient. I don't know if its the right thing. Except it feels right. And that's my sole compass; Atleast for now.

why write

How long has it been since I sat down after midnight while music played through the earphones and started blogging. Not writing for a deadline nor something I think I ought to. Just the simple act of opening this page and start typing. The most recent image I can conjure up in my head is from, probably, 2014 and I'm sitting in my computer room in Dilsukh Nagar. What might I've been listening to? Maybe The Grand Budapest Hotel OST. Or maybe Shankarabharanam or Saagara Sangamam, my perennial favourites, like I'm doing right now.

I started watching Shankarabharanam earlier in the evening. I don't think I've ever watched the entire film. I've been meaning to write on Viswanath gari films for a while now, especially since I discussed it with the Cinema Kaburlu guys, Chaitanya and Teja, for a video essay and I've been putting it off. Ofcourse, I haven't seen a majority of his films, but the ones I like, I've watched, thought of, spoken about, listened to quite a bit. They would be, in the order of preference, Saagara Sangamam, Swarna Kamalam, Subhalekha, Shankarabharanam, Swathi Muthyam, Swathi Kiranam I think. But what do I write? An introduction, an interpretation, a tribute? I don't know enough to write a study and I'm not preposterous enough to write my take- "This is what I think, its my opinion". I hope I'm not filled with as much hubris yet.

Which has been my biggest fear with the podcasts as well. I recorded a couple of podcasts with Cinema Kaburlu on Trivikram, then I did one on Rohit and Sasi's work despite telling myself not to do it (I just had to do it, I immensely admire Nirudyoga Natulu, Story Discussion 1 & 2 and if this was 2013/4, this blog would've had quite a few posts going gaga over their work) and a few days ago did a recording with Medi Chaitanya on Meheranna's Chedu Poolu anthology as a trial. The reason I told, keep telling, myself not to do a podcast: Its too easy. Nothing against the medium- I absolutely love and admire Amit Varma's Seen Unseen but there's so much work behind every episode and the conversations are of such a high calibre. I don't want to be the guy droning on in a podcast, a bloody uncle who's peloing gyaan because he found the mic. There's a wonderful exchange in The end of the tour where DFW says that he doesn't want to become someone who writes one book and spends his time going to parties and talking about it (scene 96- read it, its articulated way better there). Ofcourse, I've done nothing comparable to Infinite Jest, not even managed to finish reading it, but the even minuscule feedback the podcasts have gotten has made me very nervous.

A voice in my head says that I'm unnecessarily complicating what was done for fun and with honesty. But a louder, saner voice I think, tells me that all the good intentions in the world don't mean shit when they're not backed up by serious work and rigorous thougt. To paraphrase Venkat Rao's The Gervais Principle, I'd rather be the sociopath, can accept myself as a loser but never, ever want to end up a clueless idiot. Thankfully, my years of exalting at whatever comes out of my head as inspired are over. Or I desperately hope. Ofcourse, it is a valid question to ask, what this blog is then? Its a semi-public forum where I try to wrestle with my thoughts and express them with as much honesty as possible. I might do this as a journal but I have scattered notes in many places over the years and this blog is a much better organisational drawer. This blog is also sort of a backup: all my "work" is here in case I don't end up creating anything of value ever. My engraving on the beam, a feeble shout to the universe.

These thoughts have been running in my head since the last two days as I've tried to start on Viswanath gari essay. Most of it is plain laziness, a hope that inspiration will strike and drive me, fear that what I have to say is neither original nor "correct", an inability to look seriously at anything I create, but also, somewhere deep inside, a feeling of futility. What difference is it going to make? I'm not complaining, I feel thankful for being able to feel all these things. I've also been meaning to write a couple of Telugu essays to send to Rajanna for Sakshi (one of them is putting together learnings from The Great Derangement, Michael Sandel's Justice, a bit from Fromm and maybe Alasdair MacIntyre), and I have the basic structure sketched but I haven't taken off from there. 

I feel so cut-off from the world (wow, talk about the tyranny of distance), as if all my actions are futile and frivolous, that I haven't found inspiration to put out what's going on inside. The podcast recordings slightly helped I guess. But ofcourse, as the world is tackling COVID, climate change, authoritarian regimes, discrimination and injustice, what is the point of squabbling over the work of a writer-director or interpreting/ cherishing the work of another director? Somehow, I'm unable to summon my old self and respond with a buzzkill remark. I genuinely think right now that, yes, words I write are too less, and mostly self-serving, but I feel obliged to put them out. Not entirely because I'm weak and cowardly and unimaginative and its easy to do that than more powerful actions and all those things; also because they're alive and powerful and important. Because, and I can't find another other way to say this, it's the right thing to do.

epiphany as a service

Last night I had an epiphany. I've been trying to set my life right for years now. Oh, the usual stuff- Be good at work, Maintain excellent relationships, Be knowledgeable of the workings of society, Be kind and generous, Stay Healthy, Make the world better. Summarily, "Live Well". And to this end I've attended lectures, read books, made notes from podcasts, had conversations with successful strangers, filled pages with thoughts and questions, practiced yoga, questioned, lamented. And quite a few other things which I'd do well by forgetting. And yet I've failed. Every single time.

The basis of living like this, according my learnings, is discipline, focus, dedication. Ofcourse I've questioned about why I have to live like this. Why I find those qualities important enough to change my lifestyle. I've never really gotten a convincing answer, not anything that stuck for more than a few days. And inevitably I fall back to my old ways- cursing, cribbing, self-pitying, demeaning myself for my inability to stick to anything- Even things I'd set out for myself to do. I see this as a weakness of the will and even after I've tried multiple mechanisms (to-do lists, agile methodology, yoga and meditation, inspirational mythologies), I've never grown strong enough to live better. A part of me is confounded by my lack of discipline, by the lack of willpower. How do you learn to be strong, brave, good, sincere?

You ask yourself why do you have to be and it seems like the best way to live life. These qualities seem important because lives of many a "successful" person seem to echo that. Someone who's work we deem important enough to learn tips from them on how to live so that we can have equally productive lives- This ideology right here is what I call the engineering mindset. That everything is made up of components and if you optimize all the components, you'll see an "improvement" in the performance of the whole.

A small list of what I mean when I talk about diving life into components:
1. Past, Present, Future
2. Friends, Enemies, Emperors, Slaves
3. Good, Bad, Ugly
4. Happiness, Suffering, Confusion(?)
5. Productive, Unproductive, Hopefully-Productive
6. Physical, Intellectual, Emotional, Spiritual
7. Lower, Here, Higher

They are axioms: Either because we've reached the end and they are the truth, or simply because we're unable to understand where they come from.

Assuming, everything is physics & biology, and that there's nothing beyond, it ignores the interactions between components and the generally fluctuating nature of human desire. So even if that methodology achieves what it initially set out to do, it doesn't really because the goalposts have moved. Quite soon, I'm trying to understand and map the nature of this infra layer. The entire structure of self-help is based on this premise that if you set these components right, inevitably the whole will be a success. This is classic engineering hubris.

Ofcourse, we take into account the factor that we don't have complete information and the conditions will change or infact the goal itself will change. So we devised Agile. Your product (goal) is ever evolving and always in the process of being made. There's an argument somewhere in the deeper recesses of my mind that maps Agile and Becoming Philosophy to the state of dissatisfaction and restlessness millennials are so accused of.

Engineering is the act of implementing knowledge to solve real-world problems. All life advice is basically recursion. And all life advice, unlike useful advice, takes the form of epiphany because in that instant everything seems to make sense. Unfortunately, enlightenment is equally short-lived.

life_advice (current_generation)
{
personal learnings from real-world experience * life_advice(current_generation - 1)
}

So when I'm trying to optimise my life, I might be helping myself but that's only incidental; What I'm really doing is contributing to the human species as a whole. If we live in a Darwinian world, then what is the point of my questioning and realization of this fact? It is either that 1. I'm an anomaly or 2. intermittently questioning assumptions is nature's built-in mechanism to detect and obliterate outdated information.

Point 1 does not really hold true for two reasons: 1. Everybody thinks they're different from the group, so I can't backup my claim of being different 2. I'd have to assume that human consciousness has branched away from nature and is now the most powerful force in the world; And unless consciousness is transcendental, and is there a good reason for it to be?, it is hard to believe we've done to nature what we're afraid AI will do to us.

Point 2 seems more real. But a lot of reading to do in that area- Darwin, Dennett, Dawkins, Complexity Theory, Hofstadter, Pinker's The Blank Slate, Nassim Taleb. (Are there any Indian philosophy books that discuss these topics. I'd love to read them.) So essentially what I'm trying to understand is Where my thoughts come from, and if I, whoever that is, can do something about it.

At this point though, I think life is not, or not just, an engineering problem. True, most daily 'problems' can be solved by adopting this mindset but by definition it means prescribing the ideal state and working towards it. Deciding on the ideal state is the result of agreeing upon a value structure and binding it to time to create realistic expectations, and unless I know where my values come from, if they're arbitrary or absolute, how can I go about acting with conviction on any action I undertake. Unless it just happens. Then, though, there's not much I can do about it anyway.

Tooth lost, Wisdom gained [Presumably]

People do adventure sports on their birthdays. I had my wisdom tooth pulled out. Today morning as I was thinking of my last few birthdays, I couldn't remember what I'd done since the 2011 birthday. I can be assured that that won't be the case next year. My first experience with any sort of surgery, if you ignore that incident where I had my head stitched in the presence of half of IT, has been pretty okay. The jaw's numb because of the anesthesia but the doctor promised pain after it wears out. If it's too bad, I'll do an update post.

As I was sitting on that fancy contraption at the Dentist's, first to have cavity filled in another tooth, I couldn't help but think about this blogpost. I was trying to store my feelings and impressions so that I could vent them out here but I could only think of the opening paragraph. If your only thought during an incident is your framing of the experience for later reenactment, are you really having that experience? In one of his Woody Allen film reviews, Ebert says that the Allen character lives only to talk about living. Even this thought popped up in my head while I was thinking about this post. It's all so convoluted inside that its impossible to have a firsthand, unadulterated, virgin experience anymore. Real is not interesting. And even if it is, it is only because of its association with something we've read or seen before.

.. literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can't anymore. I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script. It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters... -Gone Girl

The helpful thought for which you look is written somewhere in a book -Edward Gorey 

I kept looping four keywords in my head while walking back home: Cause and Effect, Claustrophobia, Cartesian Self and the thoughts of writing this post in the process of collecting material for it. And then hovering over all that was DFW's image (actually Jason Segel in DFW Avatar with that benign smile), which I took to interpret as my ideal image to become: of a genius, self-effacing, interesting, funny, pithy essayist a la the writer of To Consider the Lobster and Other Essays. What a book. He's so bloody alive on the page. I'm pretty sure the Maine Lobster Festival isn't half as good as he makes it out, even after applying Hofstadter Law here.

So yeah, to elaborate on those topics, I don't really believe in Cause & Effect. Probably too little Indian Philosophy, too much Nassim Taleb. As much as I tried telling myself that I ought to take care of my health, ensure I'm not treated like a malfunctioning machine in the future, I also thought of Moni Mama and how a non-smoking, teetotaling, extremely disciplined man had to suffer all that he did. Not only is it unjust in a cosmic sense but also utterly bizarre. That's the thing about life: Heads it wins, Tails you lose. You can never win it, can never figure out the game because its so unjustly balanced against you. Consider them rules sacred and you are constantly tempted to trespass. Take them flippantly and you'll be left adrift in the middle of the ocean.

Yes, I felt slightly claustrophobic because of the close proximity of the doctor and the nurse limited my vision, and their hands affected my breath but it had more to do with my helplessness in that situation. Fittingly, I was reading Venkat Rao's Breaking Smart Season 1 before going in, and the episode I was reading was talking about the eternal ubiquity of the internet and how its almost impossible to get off the grid atleast for a while. For all the good internet's doing (I'm a fan, seriously), I guess it's also making us less nimble in the real world. It's an obvious side-effect but in times like these, when you are in an uncomfortable situation, left with just your thoughts, the pining for a phone or a tablet really shows. There's a fantastic video where Louis CK (that master commentator of first-world urban living) talks about how this connected world is making us feel more secure at a surface level but making us lonelier and insecure deeper within.

The tooth splintered into 3 pieces before they pulled it out and as I saw the blood soaked thing lying on the table, I tried to analyse if that pulled out tooth was taking some part of me with it, but apart from the uncomfortably numb physical void, I don't think I really felt a part of me was gone. Which reminded me of this very interesting Daniel Dennett essay which I'm yet to finish. I was talking to Amma the other day about Zen Poetry (ofcourse, as usual, I presume I know more about it than I actually do) when I mentioned what they say about expanding yourself to envelope the rest of the universe, or annihilate the circle of the self to fuse with the other.. I forgot why I started this sentence (Amma'd come to give medicines and this thought bloody fizzed out). Anyway, thanks to the painkiller and the sedative, I'm dazed, which is why I was able to write all this in a flow after a long time. Writing's become a chore of late, something to live upto and its in times like these, when there's no unnecessary meddling on the path between thought and type, that it feels really exhilarating.

All writing is a frozen capsule of space-time. The reshaping of certain experiences sculpted by the time/ mood of writing. But equally importantly, when the gaze of the reader falls on it, it becomes something else entirely: an indelible fragment of that space-time. We don't write, the writing comes to us. And that's all we know about it. I feel good today, slightly buzzed, masochistically pleased about going through the pain to reach this feeling (Fuckall protestant work ethic is the way of our times), and happy about getting my ass down to blog. Thoughts are fantastic, until they strangle you. Today's not one of those days.

the thing about living

The trouble with great acting is that its an oxymoron. Just like great cinematography. If, when looking at a particularly great composition, I become aware of its greatness, and am pulled out of the context of the film, it's not a great shot anymore. And acting is the same for me. When I'm watching an exquisite actor like, say, Kamal Hassan or Philip Seymour Hoffman, I am so taken away with the intensity of their adherence to the craft that I become more enamored with the actor rather than feel the emotions of the character. I don't know if its my fault, because of late I have been thinking more and more about the artificiality of the artistic medium, or if many people feel the same way, but I'd rather watch a good actor in medium shot going about his thing than a great actor in close up, his face all contorted in pain and potency. When I first read about Bresson's use of 'models' instead of 'actors' to convey an emotion, I didn't really get it. I grew up on a steady diet of fantastically talented classical actors who shouted and cried and roared and laughed on the screen with no inhibitions whatsoever that it was a pleasure watching them. What I didn't realize was that what I was watching was not the film medium but recorded theatre. The difference is subtle but crucial. Theatre, atleast till 19th century, had been associated with mythology and superhuman characters. The literature that fed it was that of epic poems and heroic narratives. I am no more than a novice in matters of the evolution of various art forms, but from what little I've read and understood, cinema, though starting off with the same aspirations, soon realized that it could be more. Two factors shaped 60s and 70s World Cinema, widely considered to be the Golden era of film, where cinema moved from being a low art to high art, thanks to contributions of powerful artists like Bergman, Antonioni, Kubrick, Tarkovsky, Bresson, Scorsese among a host of others. One was the realization that unlike Drama, Cinema didn't have to thunder along to involve the last spectator in the audience. Its power lay in the silence, in the everyday, in the minute, in the serendipitous. All this, thanks to the camera, which allowed filmmakers to show what exactly they wanted. The other major realization came thanks to Kuleshov Effect which showed that the power of cinema lay in its montage. By being able to control the tone and tempo of the narrative, filmmakers seduced the audience slowly into the world they were creating. And thus the central artist of the film was not the actor anymore but the director. Welcome to Auteur Theory.

I started reading Zia Haider Rahman's In the light of what we know, my interest piqued mostly due to James Wood's loving review, and for all that's nice about the book so far, not least its immense erudition and immersive voice, I can't help but flinch at the portions where the author walks out of the story to point to the readers his act of creating the story. I suppose a few years ago, this was vogue. The recurring images of film crew in A Taste of Cherry come to mind and how Kiarostami used them to point to the viewer the artificiality of it all. Initially, I was in awe of this brilliant conceit, like when I came across Calvino's If on a winter's night a lonely traveler where the writer literally guides the reader, but now it only irritates me. I know, I made a short film with friends about friends talking about making a short film with friends, but I'll be the first to admit it's no great idea. If anything, its overused, cliched and lazy. I don't know when this sort of literature caught on, that of writing about a writer's inability to write, but I think its time for us to move on.

The first and foremost requirement of all art is the suspension of disbelief from the audience. We know this isn't probably real, that this was rehearsed and fine tuned and that all emotions that we feel during the course of a film is the director manipulating us into feeling it. And yet we latch on because if only for a few fleeting moments, we want to escape from the prison of our heads and try understanding what it feels to be someone else. Well, it could be argued that even if we were to know what it feels to be in someone's else's shoes, it would still be Us Thinking Like Someone Else. That is what my rational mind tells me, that I can't escape the tyranny of being stuck in my own head. To paraphrase Nietzsche,  it's the unbearable burden of being. But yet, the romantic within me refuses to subscribe to that thought completely. Ebert called cinema a machine that generates empathy. I am a believer in the psychotherapy theory that says that we don't see things for what they are but we project our feeling onto them and see only a reflection of our moods and prejudices ( Rorschach Test ); Which again is what Advaita Philosophy seems to suggest.

I have assumed for sometime now that all art is just a fantasy to provide meaning and narrative to randomness and complexity. I am a fan of well written artist profiles, especially those of filmmakers', and I frequently compare my childhood and growing years to theirs, searching for similarities and attuning myself to the things they did differently so that someday I can be a filmmaker myself. But even while reading it, and though it satiates me at a very surface level, I can't come to believe that their lives could be so neatly divided into episodes. Dreamy childhood, troubled adolescence, young adult age plagued with doubt and existential queries, and finally a decisive moment that makes them realize their destiny and act in way of fulfilling it. When I read that Linklater watched 600 films a year at one point in time, or that Wes Anderson started directing shorts since the age of 8 or that Tarantino watched every film in his video library and writes like a possessed man, I think that's all I have to do be the next big thing. Yet, once I get to emulating them, I'm tormented with all sorts of doubts popping into my head, my mind wavering while watching a film, my laziness while facing an empty page. It is easier to dream of myself as the next big thing than it is to dive deep into myself and understand the basis of my thoughts, ideas, dreams and actions. For all my liking of learning and my curiosity in a lot of eclectic things, I sometimes question myself if I really have enough love for the art/craft to pursue it at the cost of everything else, like a possessed man. Like a true artist.

I often wonder what my are motivations for doing what I do. I like telling myself and others that the end of an action should be the process of doing the action itself. I don't know how that philosophy came into my head, I suppose from a collection of sources ranging from Bhagvad Gita to Sufi Philosophy, and Camus' The Stranger to Zen Buddhism, but I don't know if I believe in it all the time. Well, to begin with, as much as I had a great time making Based on a True Story or while writing 90s Blues, the fact that I started doing it in the first place was because of the romantic notion of the artist in my head. And the fact that I had to let a few thoughts out of my head to make space for more, newer ones. The process of creating in itself is more relieving than exhilarating. The writing just flows at times, but more often than not it is a labour of love, including procrastinations, frustrations and every artists's perpetual companion- self-doubt. For everything I've written or made, I have been plagued by thoughts of audience's reactions and the worth of the piece itself. And it is probably because of these things, that a subconscious switch went off in my head, and I tell myself even if no one likes it, I can always use it as a historical document to see what I was like at that point in time.

Now back to where we started off. What is art and why do we pursue it? Taking that question up another level, what's life for after all? Some tell me I'm here to attain realization and become one with the creator. But what sort of a creator would create me and then see me struggle and fight and ultimately realize that all this is Maya and I should transcend it. Sometimes I feel burdened with the prospect of living and growing into a grumpy middle-aged family man, a life full of compromises and unfulfilled promises, only to see it all go away as I enter the dusk of life. And yet at other times I feel I'm going ahead of myself, that for all my plans and expectations, life's going to happen the way its going to happen in real-life while I'm busy doodling and day-dreaming. The point of it all is still unclear. There's a certain artificiality to real-life as well. Like when you go meta and look at your life through the prism of art and narrative fiction. Both, the most methodical of directors like Kubrick and Anderson, and the free-flowing directors like Linklater and Jarmusch, consciously control as much as they can without strangling the inspiration but no matter how hard they try, they can't point to the source that bids them into doing what they do. The illusion of control is as real as it can get.

Like I said earlier, I detest it when an author talks like a character in a piece. And yet I do probably it because I'm an egocentric git and would like to bring it to your notice that I wrote this piece. But did I? Am I not just a scribe? The original title of this piece was 'the thing about acting' but now after all this meandering, I'm changing it. Because living is acting itself, in the strictest sense of the word. Wasn't it Shakespeare who said, "All the world's a stage, and all men and women merely players"? That man was onto something. And yet the bizarre thing about life is that even when we realize that all this might be a puppeteer's play, we can't decide if that's the real emotion of the actor or an actor playing a character who's supposed to think that.

the grand old man

What a way to spend an evening. Sandeep has always been a remarkably dramatic storyteller with that flair for showmanship; And when that is coupled with his ability to improvise on the spot and wiggle out of any situation his audience throws at him, it makes for a very formidable combination. I had been hearing about 'Gurugaru' and 'GDKmal' since our conversations in Chennai and when an opportunity to meet the man himself cropped him, it was too tempting to let go. And though divine providence tested my passion and perseverance with traffic jams, empty petrol tanks and wrong direction instructions, the fated meeting had to happen when it had to happen. Like the man himself pointed out, "మీరిక్కడికొచ్చింది నెనేదొ చెప్పేది వినడానికొ, విని enlightenment పొందడానికో కాదు. మీరు రావాల్సొచ్చింది, నేను చెప్పాల్సొచ్చింది. అంతె. "

Kasturi Venkata Durga Prasad, which I later found out his name was, is that old man you hear about who's seen life up-close, faced all the hardships firsthand, went through recurring catharsis and is still on his feet, telling his stories to people who are willing to listen. And what wonderful stories they are. The reason I was interested in meeting the man was because of my innumerable questions in myriad areas like religion, philosophy, Vedic tradition and existential burden among other things. But the propelling reason for our meeting was Astrology, జ్యోతిష్యం to be precise, in this case Abhishek's, my skepticism about the whole exercise and a very basic question about incompatibility between Karma సిద్దాంతం and శాంతి పూజలు that are done to placate the impending catastrophe. I didn't even get a chance to pose the question.

As soon as we entered the house, Sandeep told him that I played the guitar a bit, and his idea of a bit is much larger than my abilities by any stretch of imagination, and so after I had explained to him that I couldn't even be termed a novice with my capabilities, the conversation moved into him telling us how he was a self-taught Violinist, Tabla player and a Guitarist. Then he started talking about ప్రణవ నాదం, సామ వేదం, Adi Sankaracharya's ability to heal himself with sound till somehow the conversation traversed into the idea of enlightenment, కృష్ణ తత్వం, an image of Draupadi eating the corpses of Kauravas after the Kurukshetra War, the story of the 3 Gitas ( Yoga Vasistha, Ashtavakra Gita, Bhagvad Gita ), a reinterpretation of the Ramayana in which Ayodhya is the body of a human and all the major characters are symbolic attributes of various Gunas till he paused at trying to figure out how Bhishma was alive for 900 years and still could have missed Krishna killing Kamsa. If that sounds impossibly convoluted, consider that I have forgotten more than half of what he said because of the information overload and that there were still more detours and commentaries on UG Krishnamurti, Swami Vivekananda, the limitations of analytical/logical thought, Tarka Sastra, the origin and the built-in curtailment of  the science of astrology, the fallacies of Software working culture, the genius of Yogis among a host of other things.

It has been a long time since I've had access to ideas so diverse and deep, and probably the first time that they've come in such a concentrated capsule of time. It was so fast, so much, so incisive and narrated with such raconteur skill that everything felt strange, sublime, surreal, like I was high. His knowledge is intimidating but the ease with which he treads it is also endearing. His monologues are a collection of wonderful anecdotes, apocryphal stories and deep insights. There is so much to learn from him, so much to think over, so much to discuss and assimilate that makes me want to go back to his house and listen to him talk all over again. Like he said, "All this might be real or it might not be. That is beyond the point. The point is that there is truth out there waiting to be discovered and that is enough to pursue a life in search of knowledge." I went in with a whole lot of questions and walked out with my head buzzing with more questions. Now, isn't that proof enough to show how extraordinary an evening it was? 

aadat se majboor

It has been about two months since I read Sam Harris' Free Will, which despite being a short read gives a lot to chew upon, and I have been trying to see if his theory fits my version of reality. I have to confess I'm not really surprised to learn that I find it holding on despite any situation I throw at it. In the book, Sam Harris speaks about the lack of free will in our lives and how all of us are prisoners of our pasts, our biological and cultural upbringings, and all that we think to be our choices might not after all truly be choices. My interest in the filed sprung up after I heard Anand Gandhi's TedX talk where he spoke about a certain fungus that enters the brain of an ant and affects it's thought process by regulating it's sensory inputs. ( I highly recommend the talk and the post ). The more I look at the nature of people and see that intelligence is a very relative concept, the more I'm getting inclined to believe that we after all are just a baggage of half-baked ideas and adulterated experience. Though before I go further, I have to take into account that since I'm viewing the whole thing from a very subjective perspective, my view of the issue is coloured by my own prejudices and preferences. It might also be the case that since I have this hammer in my hand, whatever I see looks like a nail. Which again reinstates my belief in lack of objectivity and absolute truth.

Now when I was looking for answers to the questions posed by Harris, I came across UG Krishnamurthi's The Mystique of Enlightenment in which UG argues that we can do absolutely nothing about enlightenment, that it is simply a biological phenomenon and that if and when it has to happen, it will. And after that I looked around the biology of a human, more specifically the nature of the brain, the physical manifestation of ideas and emotions, the really thin difference between living and dying to the point where right now I'm pursuing the meaning of being human and if we are Biology or just Chemistry. ( All this from bits and pieces of Richard Dawkins, VS Ramachandran, Mary Roach and conversations with two young Pharma students, Dheeraj and Ravie ). Unfortunately, or probably not so much, since I'm juggling between all these things, validating and verifying all these non-concrete ideas in relation to the influence of art and if reaction to it is just a bunch of secreted hormones, I have not been able to gain any deep insights. All I have, therefore, is a post that is just a collection of haphazard thoughts.

Or maybe those thoughts are not so haphazard. I can see that all of them follow a pattern. And everything I learn now is contaminated by my past experience and will affect anything I will learn later on. Taking it further, I can also claim that I learn something because what I once did has paved a path for me to learn this now. Which means that what I was once has shaped me into being what I am now. But right from the moment I was born, I have always been reacting to what life has given me; my genes, my family, my environment which in turn have made me choose ( sarcasm intended ) the path that I have walked upon so that I have turned into this unique being that only I am in the entire universe. And this is what surprises me the most when people are not happy with where they are now and say reflectively, " If only I hadn't done it back then". If they hadn't done it back then, they wouldn't be here right now repenting, right, but then they could not have done otherwise because that was the only thing they were capable of doing back then. Or maybe it's that they have to repent now because its the only way they can react. This is what is so annoying about arguing for a concept this abstract; every statement I make is irrefutable but also indefensible. A lot similar to talking about someone like God. Either you intuitively get it or not. ( Shit, that statement is like a mini time-bomb ).

Imagine a series of infinite universes, multiverse if you like, stacked one on top of other, and of the two choices you have every moment ( that's all we have really- to do this or not do this ), another universe is created with the choice I didn't make. Actually, such a system would be wilder than we can imagine because for each of those choices we didn't make, there stem out two other choices and so on and so forth. Anyway, I turned atheist a few days ago. Now, that doesn't make sense because when you look at my birth or upbringing or cultural influences, I have been surrounded by the idea of God. Then isn't it a truly free decision I turned atheist, defying my past and surrounding? Come to think of it, it really isn't that surprising. I have been trained in Rational Thinking, in a lot of ways I am surrounded by bad interpretations of mythology which don't match up to my idea of reality, I have been following closely the work of Four Horsemen of New Atheism, I don't really find a need for God and very importantly, it has helped me overcome childhood fear of ghosts and Pretatmas because like Amma pointed out, I took what she taught me and inverted it head-on. ( She always told me not to be scared of ghosts because where there is negative energy, there will also be positive energy. When I don't believe in the idea of Positive Energy aka God, my logic tells me there can't be demons either ). Will I be atheistic for as long as I live? I don't know, but speculating from what my past record has been, I'm not too positive on it. I might come across a Spiritual Scientist who might manage to convince me, or find a real need for God and have my prayers answered, or simply wake up one morning and realise that science's reach can go only so far. What I will be I can not know until I'm in that situation then.

Hang on, is that statement not illogical? If I'm a prisoner of my past and can't get off my rail track no matter how much I try ( infact, I can't even try getting off the railway track because that's the only thing I know; just remembered this brilliant hypothetical situation I read  that all of us are prisoners and just because we don't even know it's a prison, we can't even contemplate that there exists a world outside of our walls ), why can't I predict my future? If we take into consideration the paths of all things that live in our world and calculate all their intersections and repercussions of their actions, then we can map out our futures precisely but otherwise, it is simply beyond the capacity of our imagination. All of us are trapped and we can only be ourselves. So just take it easy. Is that frightening or liberating? I guess how you look at it depends on what your journey has been like so far.

messed up chaos

The funny part is, I never know what are the inspirations for my new ideas. Like I was telling Kaushik and Vikranth three days ago, a man is a combination of experiences and environments processed through a slightly original idea of a mind. Okay, before I forget, let me tell what in the first place I'm here to write about. I was listening to James Gleick's Chaos and in between two files, it stuck me that if there is something really called Butterfly Effect, then pursuing it to unravel the chaos would take us further away from the absolute truth because in the process of trying to uncover something, you are altering quite a few variable which somehow contribute into the process as a whole and the noise made whilst this process of discovering would change the outcome of the experiment of the radically. I don't know if I'm making any sense but here's what I've been thinking in brief. You are part of a system, so all your actions will affect it. And so, as long as you are within the system, you cannot dream to understand it as a bird's eye view because,

1. that too would be still within the system; imagine a circle which leans into itself and you have a never ending spiral.

2. the kind of changes that would be made to the interdependent variables because of your process of trying to look in would change the system further away from all that you are trying to look at in the first place.

This is as lucid as I can get. I'm not even past 1/7th of GEB but since the moment I've begun reading it, all my writings have been carrying that baggage around. Hang on, is me writing about the way I write similar to the Incompleteness Theorem because I cannot critic my writing through my writing. And yea, I discover Jackson Pollock today. Boy, are those paintings awesome. Especially the "being in the painting part". Got me into thinking of Ray Bradbury's concept of writing, not thinking. Of how I am far too involved while writing to be really considering what is to be written and what is not. Like Pollock says, I am nature. You are letting an impulse drive you, a state of subconsciousness which just knows what word is be entered right after it's previous word. Because, shit, I just broke my rule. I paused.

--

It's funny how I just realised that both the act and the result of painting is called Painting.

The Big Brain Theory

Ok. I have had this idea since a very long time and its high time I convert it into a full featured article. Now, what is The Big Brain Theory? Wait. I just googled the Big Brain Theory and found out that this is the name given to an absurd theory by cosmologists. This article has got nothing to do with it. This term has been coined by me. Anyway, the basis of this theory is that there exists a huge brain(or rather mind) across the universe or existence and all people's individual brains are connected to it. Puzzled? Lets say, the world wide web is a huge brain which contains all the information(read knowledge) in the world and each of our brains/minds are like tiny computers which have tiny storage capacities and which get the information when and how they need.

I don't even know how I stumbled across this idea. Maybe I read it somewhere. Or maybe I was thinking about something else and my mind took me upto this theory. I don't know. But ever since I have been thinking about this, it seems somehow true. This is more of a philosophical argument I suppose. Anyways, keeping the philosophy and metaphysics at bay, I'll try to 'reason' it out.

I'll give you two examples of why I believe it is true. One, if you have ever experienced deja vu, you'll know that your mind surpasses all known theories of time and space. There is a difference between dreaming and deja vu. The primary one ofcourse, is that dreaming depicts the psychological state of the mind. If you have been thinking a lot about something one day, you will most probably dream about it in your sleep albeit with your own modifications. Deja vu is more of that feeling wherein you actually see those images which are in no way related to you or your past. Its more like you are seeing things which you don't even know exist.

And two, have you ever noticed that your neighbour in the class blurts out the exact same answer which you have been framing in your mind? This has happened to a lot of people. I read somewhere years ago that this is a scientifically proved phenomenon. Its that every brain emits waves and when two brains are in close proximity, communication or transfer of information takes place. Sounds more like wi-fi, doesn't it? This ofcourse happens when your brain is in a very high state of energy and is beyond your control. As yogis and psychologists say, your brain is infinitely capable and that is why it is out of your control at times.

Anyway, if you look at the above two examples, two conclusions can be drawn. One is that mind is not confined to the time-space equation. And two, two brains can communicate. I have just taken the theory a bit further and this is what I propose. God or no God, when the universe was created, it was created for a reason. It was created because it was triggered by some other action. If we call this energy, it is the energy which is the cause of genesis and the sustenance of life. This One Big Brain or One Big Mind is just a metaphorical form of all the energy combined in the universe. Something, I suppose, like ether but with much more occupied area. Anyway, so all of us are a part of that huge Energy Sphere. So, it means that you can have all the knowledge in your universe in your mind or rather be the entire mind. Its that simple. So, when you have deja vu, you are looking into someone else's account of whatever has happened and when you can 'read' your neighbour's mind, it means that the both of you are searching in the same 'shelf'.Its more like two people google a question and click on the same page. And maybe, this theory has been thought upon by someone else and I'm probably using his resources right now. Probing 'his' part of the Big, Big Brain there is.

If you have noticed, I used a lot of computing terms in here. That isn't voluntary. They are the best examples I could find. Maybe someday, when we can successfully program the human mind into a robot, we'd know the secrets of the universe. This is that I call Open Source Programming(read Thinking).

God does not play dice with the Universe, you are right Mr. Einstein...Pattern Recognition

Every action in the universe follows a pattern. There is no such thing as "random". I stumbled across this brilliant idea today. Ok, an idea, if not brilliant. So, how did I get this idea? Well, according to my theory, that would be because there was a certain pattern to my thoughts which enabled me to come to this conclusion, right?

I was talking to Sravani the day before yesterday when she said she wanted to sell me a guitar, 'coz I was going to guitar classes. Then we come to talk about whose guitar she had to sell and why. That guitar incidentally belongs to her uncle who is a multi-faceted person and stuff. He is really good at painting, singing, flying, guitar and a lot of other stuff. Now, my all-time idols list includes Leonardo Da Vinci. And that is because he was a polymath. I have a huge reverence for multi-faceted people and I always wanted to be one. So, I was thinking about how I can be so very versatile and which fields really interest me. Some of them include painting, sculpting, mathematics, music and stuff. This all happened the day before yesterday and I go to sleep with all these thoughts in my head.

The next day, yesterday, I woke up at 5.00 in the morning. Period. Yeah, I really did wake up at 5.00 and in the morning too ;). Anyways, I can't go back to sleep and so I come online to download a game. The paper arrives at 6.00 and my eyes fall on an ad of a maths website which offers free maths tests. So, I decide to take it to let myself know my mathematical prowess. One of the questions in the test include finding the volume of a cone. I don't remember the formula and so I google it. The same page contains the formulae for the volume of a sphere and a cylinder. I get the formula, finish the test and score a miserly 6/15(yeah, I admit I'm pathetic at math). Over and Out.

Now, in the college bus everyday, I read a book. I was reading Richard P. Feynman's autobiography of anecdotes since a few days and had been trying to emulate him. I wanted to have his curiosity and problem-solving perseverance. So, I start thinking of trying to solve an easy problem or rather, question a well accepted formula. Put in a few words, I wanted to be The Paradigm Shift-er :D. So, the morning's test comes into my brain and I start thinking about the volume of a sphere and how scientists concluded on it. Could it be proved wrong? How many ways were there to prove it? and such stuff. All day yesterday, I had been working on it and even by night, I was going nowhere.

I still had it in my mind today morning when I woke up and I really wanted to get really good at mathematics and stuff. And I got onto the attic today morning to get my old Intermediate maths TBs. I came across a 10th class math textbook which had Ramanujan's face printed on it. Now, I'm a huge Srinivasa Ramanujan fan and I've always wanted to be like him. And then I was thinking about how he could make up equations in his mind about complex issues. The word "equations" stuck to me and I started thinking about Einstein's Theory of Relativity and how he tried in vain to deduce the Unified Theory. Now, the Unified Theory has been the one dream of Scientists, Mathematicians, Philosophers and Sages through the ages. To put it scientifically, it is but just one "equation" which satisfies all the patterns in the universe. And then I started thinking about one of my favourite Einstein quotes: God does not play dice with the Universe. I just love that line. Its like mankind's take against God and that we have a way of finding out God's mind. Anyways, Santosh comes in just then and I forget about Einstein and his theories.

I don't remember any of it until almost 8 hours later I'm playing Snakes & Ladders with Kunni. I was throwing dice and then I recollect that Einstein's quote(about God playing dice). And then I think that I want to be a really cool mathematician and stuff and thinking of math, I fall into probability and the dice and the coins problems. I suddenly have this gut feeling that the probability of getting any number on the dice is NOT 1/6. It depends on the numbers which I got previously. That means, they follow a certain pattern and the probability is not same always. Let me put it this way: Lets say, 99 people jump off a 10 floor building and all 99 of them die. Then if I say I wanna try and jump, people will tell me that I would definitely die because the probability of me dying was 100% and to live was 0%. Let us assume that I jump and yet I live. Then, it means that I have altered the entire statistical probability. If someone else wants to jump off the building after me, his probability of dying now would just be 99% and of living would be 1%. That is a considerable shift, ain't it?

So, all I'm telling is, everything in the Universe is characterized by experience which is nothing but whatever we saw already happen. To put it bluntly, Experience is nothing more than previous Statistical Data. You can't alter the existing data but you sure can shift the near future so that the farther future's experience is much different. I know I'm confusing you with all this muddled explanation, so I have another example. Everything looks inorderly and random at a very tiny level but at a macro level, it looks all clear and meaningful. For instance, if you were the size of an electron, the extremely fast motion of electrons in a rock would mean nothing to you and the motion would appear random. But if you, as a human, look at the same rock, it appears immobile and rational, right?

Let us consider this: You are walking on the road with a bunch of flowers in your hand and you drop the flowers, why? Because someone riding on a cycle hit you, Why? Because he was trying to avoid this guy who was being chased by the police, Why? The police was chasing the car because he was speeding, Why? Because his wife had just given birth to a baby and he was in a rush to reach the hospital. And eventually, it turns out that you are actually going to the same hospital as the guy's wife because she is your sister and you are going to give her those flowers. Now, what would you do after this incident? As you don't know what actually happened, you curse the bicycle rider, pick up your flowers and move on. Now, change your view form that of a character in the happening drama to that of the audience(I know, Shakespeare's rhetoric (connect it to All The World's A Stage :P)).Imagine you are flying outside the Universe and look at all this. All this seems logical to you, right?

That is what I have been talking about. There is a relationship among all the things in the universe. There must also be a pattern to Prime Numbers. Just because we haven't found it out yet, doesn't mean there is no pattern. I don't know how to prove this theory but I'll do it one day.

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For the next one day after reading this piece, you will try connecting all the things and find a pattern to your actions :P.