Habijabi

Casual empiricism: the size of tea cups

2006-11-13T17:56:00.000-05:00

Assume that persons in every country need the same volume of stimulants like tea or coffee to make it through the day, whether in Fargo or Faridabad. The smaller your tea-cup, the more breaks you require in order to get your daily quota. So, I dont think it is a coincidence that human productivity varies directly with the average size of beverage containers. The point can be made starkly by comparing the productivity of workers in Chicago, with its Grande Lattes and Calcutta, with its microscopic earthen bhaars. And of course there is endogeneity, with industrious races choosing larger cups and the not-so-industrious types self-selecting smaller ones. While you mull over this theory, I will go fix myself a tea.
Now, where did I put my imported bhaar.

AD 2017

2006-01-17T00:58:00.000-05:00

The department secretary sent out an e-mail today about the distribution of completion times in my doctoral program this year.
I quote:

"4 students completed in 5 years, 4 in 6 years, 3 in 7 years, and 1 each
in 8, 10, and 14 years."

So based on just this year's distribution, there is a 7% chance I will graduate in AD 2017. By that time:

a)I will be 37 years old
b)The 50th anniversary of the Superbowl will be observed (Superbowl LI)
c)Sealed government documents surrounding John F. Kennedy's assassination will be released.
d)There will be a human colony on the moon with its own university to which I can apply for a faculty position. (The government of China has announced it will start sending probes to the Moon in 2017, resulting in a manned Chinese landing on the moon in a few years.)
e)Events in Billy Joel's "Miami 2017/Seen The Lights Go Out On Broadway" song will take place.

I am already looking forward to space travel. (All information, barring own age, courtesy Wikipedia.)

My father's map

2006-01-16T19:10:00.001-05:00

Before I came away to Delhi at the end of the summer of 2001, my father gave me a book of maps of the city. It had one large map as a centrefold, to provide a bird’s eye view and other, smaller ones, on each page, giving details of each grid within the larger map. I took it from him without reflection and packed it into my suitcase, and for the two years I was at Delhi, it stood on the bookshelf at the foot of my bed. I took it down occasionally when there were friends to be visited, and monuments or theatre-halls or restaurants to be placed spatially so we could pay a fair price for the auto-rickshaw rides. Sometimes, on a Sunday afternoon, I would spread it out on my bed to study it. The periphery of Delhi plunged off at the edge of my small bed like a pre-Magellanic vision of a flat world; imagination was stretched thin at Rohini and Ghaziabad; taxis plummeted into a void once the Qutab Minar had disappeared into the southern horizon. And for two years, I planned weekend expeditions and weekday walks within the world of my bed-map, till the roads, gardens and tombs fictionalised on it became real with the flesh of memories and the blood of many rosy sunsets. Looking back, I feel thankful to the person whose small and thoughtful gesture charted for me a new world to discover and love.

Kong: the king of disasters

2005-12-25T18:00:00.000-05:00

Methinks if I should waste any more of my time on this movie after having expended three hours and seven minutes watching it. Just a few remarks. What was Peter Jackson thinking when he looked at the script and decided he could make a movie with it that is so unbelievably long? What were the executives at Universal thinking when they gave Jackson full creative control? The sets, the atmosphere, the camera movement, perspective and color filters all seem to be recycled from LOTR. The dramatic dialogue and the significant silences in between made sense in the epic context of LOTR, but when the main purpose of the protagonists is to capture an oversize gorilla for a circus, the heroic epigrams seem plain ludicrous. The editing is vacuous; why did they need a shot of the starlet's feet as she steps onto the gangplank? What is the earth-shattering significance of that moment in the overall plot? And the human drama just does not merit the attention it has received in this movie, because, oh my god, this is just King Kong we are talking about, not some momentous battle between the forces of good and evil for hegemony over Middle Earth! The gender and race roles depicted are, ahem, interesting: for instance, you will notice that it takes a white girl to tell the native King Kong for the first time in his life that women deserve more respect and are not to be pushed around, literally. About the story line and the action, it all looked like better-done versions of earlier sequences in Jurassic Park or numerous films in the Large-Bug-Attacking-Humans-at-Random genre. Among the nice things, I thought the portayal of the romance between Kong and the lady was sweeter than in any of the previous versions. The finale at the Empire State Building looked better too, with its rosy dawn sky and Kong JUMPING and swatting at the planes, which I thought was very cute and brave of him, given the fix he was in. As for Ann Darrow's attempts to teach Kong a foreign language, I was not impressed. She should have tried the ABCs first instead of trying to start off with an arguably heavy word like "beautiful". Even I would jump off a tall building if faced with such a prospect.

My FM10

2005-12-22T23:01:00.000-05:00

Have sent for my old Nikon FM10 from back home where it has been lying unused for two years. Plan to clean up the patina and start using it with my newer N80. I had a lot of fun taking pictures with the older one in New Delhi. In the winter of 2002 I had hatched a plan to go to Benares to take pictures, knowing well that if I did not do it then, it would probably be years before I got the chance again. The plan remained a plan, but I will post some of the Delhi pictures online.

Born into privilege

2005-12-22T22:25:00.000-05:00

I finally watched "Born into Brothels", the documentary film about the children of Calcutta's red-light districts. I had the uncomfortable feeling while watching it that I knew all the characters, had walked past them on the streets, or had sat beside them on the bus and had somehow not noticed the human aspects of their existence. They had all become part of the indistinct and largely ignored background in the canvas of My Idea of Calcutta. For the first time, I saw english subtitles translating bengali expletives and real characters using turns of phrase which I have heard around me all my life, in very unfamiliar contexts. The idiom of their expression and the texture of their lives captured in film seemed to mock me, pointing to the fact that it took an American documentary to inform me about a way of life which has always existed under my very nose. Last time we spoke, Ani insisted it was a typical "westerner shoots eastern squallor" routine. Well, yes. But is there very much else that is noticeable to a westerner in Calcutta? She has seen the pretty Victorian buildings in better shape in England; there are more cultural events in Ann Arbor any given year than in Calcutta; and there are broader rivers, prettier bridges and more ecelectic cuisines to be found in all the continents. Sometimes, cliches exist with good reasons. So the experience of watching this documentary was moving, very different from what watching a similar one about the brothels of New York on National Geographic might have been.

A curse

2005-12-22T13:49:00.000-05:00

Today I curse you; that you may encounter on your chosen path a stranger with whom you will rest and talk at length under a pin-holed firmament ablaze with destiny. He will make you drink his poison and put you to sleep; beseeching you to awake soon, for the hour of journey is at hand. The potion shall make you dream of phantasms in which you are one again, before the time the mirror cracked and scattered you across the night sky of oblivion. But then you shall awake at dawn, or late in the afternoon when the sun lies aged on the moss, to find the stranger gone, the taste of his poison fading. With a leaden heart you shall resume your travels. But your scurrilous phantom-selves will haunt you to weariness, smirking that you believed in their corporeality in the innocence of your slumber, demanding of you the conquest of that lost realm of unity.

Central Calcutta

2005-12-22T13:22:00.000-05:00

Later that day, I wrote in a cathartic letter to a friend who has never seen Calcutta, a rambling description of the path that took me everyday from my home to the university.

“While I was in college I took the subway everyday from south Calcutta, where I live, to central Calcutta. Central Calcutta. The bridge between the new, upstart south and the timeless north. The gradual transition is noticeable as you travel down Central Avenue, the main artery between the old world and the new. The facade of buildings change from modern to early nineteenth century or older, and lanes and by-lanes explode on either side, disgorging rickshaws and people so that traffic is slow. Then the road narrows, the din ceases and suddenly you are in the moribund peace of the north. It is like travelling onwards on a great river that empties into the calm of a greater delta. As in a delta, the river gets fragmented, and a multitude of channels emerge; old, thin and finger-like, they stretch into the space between the aging buildings with easy sociability while the laughter of street-children and triangular political festoons flutter in the wind. The subway, bearing me across half the city, disgorges me into this chaos. I walk up the stairs to emerge into bright sunlight. I see a long line of squatting plumbers and locksmiths, waiting to be hired. Then on to Gandhi Road, with its rows of wedding-band musicians, in red coats and hats with fluffy pom-poms, getting ready to play the latest Hindi film song hits on trombones and trumpets, the men sedating their tired lungs with a smoke while polishing their brass instruments till the passers-by could comb their hair reflected on their glorious convexity.” How I missed, that day, the delicious sights and sounds of a great, big, living, disorderly city; disorderly, like life itself.

September twenty sixth

2005-12-22T12:38:00.000-05:00

September twenty sixth. Yesterday, I jogged from my house to the department in the morning for class. Near downtown, I passed a large hotel, with its windows glinting in the early slanting sun. There were cars moving on the street. Down the road, the dew-washed parking lot of a church stood in the shadow of the spire. As I looked at this scene I suddenly knew why I miss living in a large city. It is the certain knowledge of the existence of unknown spaces beyond the visible scene that makes me love cities. With a city, its intimacy with your senses can never end and can be advanced effortlessly to successively deeper levels. Not so with smaller spaces, where purely sensory possibilities are exhausted faster. When I looked at the church spire, I had a sad feeling of the certainty of what lay beyond. I jogged on.

Escape to and from reality

2005-12-22T12:21:00.000-05:00

I am being followed. Time and again, at bus-stops, and public-library restrooms, I feel furtive eyes on me. The eyes will not leave me alone at home and I suspect that little by little they are discovering the keyholes of my mind. I have to plan an escape, and no better way to avoid their detection than to make the plan public, for the eyes will not think of looking there. Never. They operate differently. There are two kinds of escape that I have been thinking of. I could pretend I was very busy with the diurnal rythm of my life; this is difficult, as it involves displaying attention to a lot of mechanical, clickety-click detail that would normally pass through this seive-like consiousness used to self-indulgence ; I will have to collect and sift through the objects, find a continuing pattern and force them into a tenuous chain of reason, all in one seamless, unreflective act of living. It is like climbing in a world of uncertain gravity, and here you make your rope as you go. Here, you can only pray as you climb higher that you know the right direction or that you wove your ropes well in case you have to turn back. The other escape I have been thinking of is to open the trap door and jump in. This is simpler and hence the more often used. But once you are in, there is no telling what you will see inside, because in the underworld you make your monsters as you go. And they are only as terrible as your own fears are.
But escape I must. So, which will it be, Caradhras or Moria?

Prolonged absence, Rabindranath Tagore and Walt Whitman

2005-11-13T12:10:00.000-05:00

I am finicky about presenting english translations of Rabindranath to those who do not know Bengali. I have never read a truly gratifying (english) translation of any of his songs or poems. A chinese lady I met the other day told me that it used to be quite fashionable in her country to quote Rabindranath in letters between intimate friends. This gives me hope. Those of you unfamiliar with Rabindranath Tagore could read this insightful article by the economist Amartya Sen.
As for me, the unfinished posts on my edit-list have been piling up for a while now. But on the bright side, I discovered a poem in Leaves of Grass that pleased me to no end, for it gave me a glimpse of what a truly accurate translation of Rabindranath might read like.

A few lines from the song "Ei to bhalo legechilo" by Tagore:

"Durey jawar kheyal holey,
Shoba-e moray ghirey thamai:
Gayner akash, shojne phuler hathchanitey daakey amai.
Phura-e ne bhai khacher shudha,
Nai je re tai durer khuda.
Ei je eshob chotokhato,
Pai ne eder kulkinara
Tuchho diner gaaner pala,
Aajo amar hoyni shara."

And the poem from Leaves of Grass which is my ideal of a transalation of these lines:

Beginning My Studies

Beginning my studies the first step pleas'd me so much,
The mere fact consciousness, these forms, the power of motion,
The least insect or animal, the senses, eyesight, love,
The first step I say awed me and pleas'd me so much,
I have hardly gone and hardly wish'd to go any farther,
But stop and loiter all the time to sing it in ecstatic songs.

I ask you...

2005-10-24T01:48:00.000-04:00

Have you ever been haunted by an ineffable unrest in the evening, when the shadows lengthen and you see around you visions of alternative worlds? Worlds that might have been had you chosen differently, or had the eyes to see. Do you ever fear that you are blind and you do not even know the particular variety of blindness that affects you, so that you will go through your life not having known what you have missed, oblivious to whole universes that are just a touch away? Have you heard the exquisite lament of worlds that have gone to dust because you failed to look up; worlds that live and die in glances and whispers; worlds that are made and unmade by the dust that rises when the wind blows; the world of rhythm and purpose beyond your own making, intersecting and mingling with your own interpretation of reality, the connections waxing and waning, like the phases of the moon, in rhyme with the beating of your heart?

Street art in Singapore

2005-10-17T00:32:00.000-04:00

Unknown artist. Medium: coloured chalk on stone pavement.

Morbid outpourings: aaaaarghhhh

2005-10-16T23:58:00.000-04:00

Discovered an entry in my diary, written last year during an unhappy period in my love-life. Am reproducing it here verbatim. Its vehemence surprises me now. Mellower me smiles.

"The problem with two dissimilar people deciding to spend their lives together is that they kill each other off over time. Each is unable to appreciate the other’s spontaneous joys and therefore poisons them with his own incapacity to participate in them; this induces guilt and desolation, throttles the unpremeditated happiness that characterizes true life and reinforces the sense of loneliness with which every human being is born, for which, ironically, lifetime companionship is seen as a remedy. The way out is an acceptance of the fact that people are different. To mould someone in your own image is to destroy what you loved and replace it with an idol for self-love; a kind of lifetime project to substitute, in gradual degrees, the object of your affection with an image of yourself, so that in the end what remains is just you and your reflection in the mirror you built. The one with the stronger will succeeds in this endeavour of transformation. Love therefore reduces to an exercise of predation for the partner with the stronger will, and an act of unconscious self-cannibalism for the one with the weaker will. If the wills are evenly matched, the result is mutually assured destruction of the true bonds of understanding, resulting in an utter and complete withdrawal from each other."

Dilemmas while constructing ideals: a fly

2005-10-16T22:01:00.000-04:00

There has been a fly in my apartment since yesterday. It has been buzzing around, alighting on food and on the tip of my nose at times, getting in the way of my perambulations and has generally been a pain even in the absence of the proverbial ointment.

It is afternoon and after my siesta, the time is ripe for visions. Watching the spent tea leaves being churned in the sink with an almost cosmic grace, beatific thoughts brings tears to my eyes. I envision the world and human nature as it should be. Without fear, and with knowledge and enlightenment; without war and famine and with cool, sunny days throughout the year; without hatred and fur coats; a mass of humanity at peace with nature and harbouring love towards all living things. A world where everyman retains an acute sense of reality without losing his finer instincts of constructive dreaminess. Love and peace; sugar, spice and everything nice. With one exception. The fly has to go. The fly has no place in my scheme of love and good things. I look around for the cleaner-spray: sticky, and toxic to tiny, spontaneous beings who spend their while droning in single-minded celebration of life.

The fly is gone now and my vision for the betterment of the world is well on its way to being fulfilled.