Author Archive: Ankit

The curious philosophy of Wilde

Posted by Ankit On October 4th, 2012

When I consider Oscar Wilde's writings I am forced to admit the existence of very deep seated contradictions within myself, which is weird because by his own admission he was an aesthete - a person mainly concerned with the superficialities of life. He extolled youth above experience and flamboyance above seriousness. He placed life as being secondary to art and traditional morality as mainly the preoccupation of the fogey whose best years were behind him/her. His prose is resplendent with clever paradoxes and his philosophy, at least on the surface, is the philosophy of the jaded super-intellectual who, despite being bored with the world around him, doesn't want it to change lest it might take away the pleasure that he derives by sneering at its incompetence. And this curious dichotomy of an extremely intelligent person both repulsed and morbidly dependent on his environment is not clearer anywhere than it is in his great novel 'The Picture of Dorian Gray.'

Dorian Gray is a young man who has it all. Wealth, social position, beauty and most importantly youth. What he doesn't have is much intelligence. In fact he has just the wrong amount of intelligence. Just enough to be swept away by the deviously clever logic of Lord Henry. Henry is an extreme cynic and is the mouthpiece of Wilde's philosophy in the novel. He likes Dorian for what he represents - the easy success of flamboyance and beauty and youth. He speaks eloquently and leads Dorian astray and convinces him that the only things worth having in this world are those which he already has. Dorian is eventually seduced by Henry's arguments and really believes in the idea that a life based only on pleasure and self-interest is a life worth having. Given his material success and his beauty Dorian can afford such a life too. In the middle of the novel Dorian even figures out how he can sustain his youth for eternity. The novel thus centers around a person who can have all the pleasures that he wants and for as long as he wants - a perfect Wilde ideal - and then asks the question whether all this really makes him happy.

And this brings me to my final point. I think the novel Dorian Gray is special in the Wilde canon because it is the only one which gives both sides of the story. It presents most of Wilde's philosophy through Henry and it also presents its ramifications through Dorian. Therefore, the gravitational center of the story is neither Dorian nor Henry but Wilde himself. This is the clearest that Wilde ever spoke of what he thought of his own curious take on life. Henry is Wilde and Dorian is what Wilde always hoped for but could never be. In fact if you really consider Wilde's writings in their totality you would find a curious undercurrent. His main characters are sharp gentlemen with biting wits and they all display little patience with the banalities of society but they are all fairly conventional people with conventional marriages. Dorian Gray is his only character who lives what Wilde philosophizes and he is the only central character to not have the intelligence to come up with that philosophy himself. Henry who comes up with Wilde's philosophy is intelligent enough not to follow it and thus has a very safe and conventional life.

So we finally come to this contradiction which I mentioned earlier. To some his (or Henry's) take on life is shallow but it is not to me. I think his seemingly ridiculous and shallow generalizations always have a deeper hidden truth, a concise acerbic little social comment by one who is much more intelligent than most. In fact, he is sufficiently intelligent to also understand that acting upon his philosophies would end up in disaster. This is a tacit approval of the very society that he mocks and therein lies the apparent contradiction. Now one may feel betrayed by Wilde's implicit volte-face but this backdoor compromise is the mark of someone who thought deeply. After all, both conformists and rebels in this world are a dime a dozen!

Mechanical watches

Posted by Ankit On September 29th, 2012

It's an understatement to say that I have become fascinated with watches, especially mechanical watches. There is something about the precision engineering of a well made piece, its pulsating mechanical harmony, its artistic idea that satisfies the engineer, the scientist and the artist (to whatever degree it exists) in me. Because a mechanical watch really is a work of art since as an object of utility its pretty useless when compared to a simple quartz watch. Following is the story of the mechanical watch in a nutshell.

As I mentioned in my last post on the topic, all clocks and watches have a timekeeping source. In the grandfather clock it is the pendulum and in the mechanical wristwatch it's a balance spring. The Europeans (especially the Swiss and the English) had a huge headstart in designing and making precision mechanical wristwatches with the 2 towering figures of the field being Abraham Louis Breguet and John Arnold. Between the two of them they pretty much invented every important nuance of watchmaking. Everything was hunky dory for the Europeans before the Japanese entered into watchmaking in the 1960s. It was discovered that rather than using a balance spring as a timekeeping source, a quartz crystal can be used instead. Watches made using a quartz crystal would not only be much more simple to make but they would also be extremely cheap and much more accurate than the traditional mechanical watches. Swiss initially decided not to go the way of the quartz and got almost wiped out by the Japanese (Seiko, Citizen) and the Americans (Texas Instruments, National Semiconductors). The Swiss finally caught up in the quartz race through the formation of the Swatchgroup but they also repositioned the traditional mechanical watch as less of a utilitarian timekeeper and more of a thing of beauty.

Master watch-makers would toil away in the Vallée de Joux with their tweezers and their lenses, with their lathes and minuscule files and produce after months and sometimes years of hard-work a single mechanical watch, a stunning piece of craftsmanship and a true labor of love. These watches would have hundreds of microscopic moving parts, precision machined gears, elaborately patterned surfaces (Guilloché), jewel bearings to minimize friction, and automatic self-winding mechanisms. Since it is much more difficult to add additional functionality to a mechanical watch than it is to a digital watch, adding complications became a way to exhibit the artistry of an accomplished watchmaker. And with all those complications and all those gears ticking away in harmony, sometimes the watchmakers make the back and front transparent (Skeleton watch) and the beautiful clockwork of a well made mechanical watch takes its rightful position as a work of art. And you can be sure that horology of mechanical watches is more art than engineering by its vocabulary. It includes fine elegant French sounding names for different complications (Tourbillon, Sonnerie, Rattapante) and the famous watchmakers do their own versions of them. It's like Horowitz performing a Chopin piece or Van Gogh's doing a 'still life'.

And the result of all this is that even though these mechanical watches are not nearly as accurate as a quartz watch that you can get for 20 dollars, they can easily command prices in the high six figure range! And what do you get for all that? The following, for example:

Ulysses

Posted by Ankit On September 24th, 2012

Anyone who has known me for any appreciable amount of time has probably grown weary of my extolling the brilliance of Nabokov's pen. I think Lolita is one of the most dashing English fiction ever written and his autobiography 'Speak Memory' is equally mesmerizing. His 'Pale Fire' just boggles the mind with its multi-layered complex creative form and his translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin is a fine painstaking study in how translations must be done. Nabokov was a renowned scientist, a strong chess player and a well liked professor at Cornell but among his many talents the one that really sweeps me away is his linguistic ability. And yet when he was compared with James Joyce, his reply was simple:

My English is patball compared to Joyce's champion game

And you really do understand why he said that when you read Joyce's Ulysses. Joyce's mastery is in its own category and there is no one who comes close. When I read it for the first time it was nothing but utter frustration for me. Far too many words that I didn't know the meanings of, far too stream of consciousness in style, far too erudite in its allusions. But now that I am reading it again with more patience and with more humility I am beginning to glimpse the genius of Joyce. All great writers break the rules of composition and take artistic liberties with 'proper' form but Joyce seems to make his own rules. His vocabulary is staggering but he doesn't use it to show off. He uses absolutely precise words for complex ideas, feelings, and objects and as if just to show that he doesn't give a flying toss about his precocious lexicon, he mixes those beautiful exact words with completely made up ones. At places he writes in beautiful complex constructions and at places in broken sentences which end in half a word. He captures elaborate emotions and gestures in single words and spends pages following spontaneous lines of thoughts which don't go anywhere. For its rebellious experimental form and for how well it works, Ulysses is the most virtuoso book I have ever read. I don't claim to understand it fully, not even close. But the little that I do understand gives me immense pleasure and satisfaction.

Clocks and watches

Posted by Ankit On September 23rd, 2012

I have lately been fascinated by how clocks and watches work and here is a little summary of what I've found. Timekeeping devices of the current form started all the way back in the 13th century for astronomical and administrative purposes. Many technological advances have occurred since then but the essential idea remains the same. In the broadest of terms there are two main parts of a clock: a timekeeping source and an energy source. A pendulum, for example, is often used as a timekeeping source and the reason why it is an appropriate one is an underlying physical principle. A pendulum of a given length completes each oscillation in precisely the same amount of time. Therefore, by adjusting the length of the pendulum, it can be made to complete each oscillation in precisely 1 second. If we were living in a world where there was no friction and no air drag then that is all that was needed. One could theoretically design a mechanism which would count every oscillation of the pendulum and that would be the 'second' hand and one could design additional mechanisms to 'tick' once for every 60 'ticks' of the second hand which would be the 'minute' hand and so on and so forth.

But we live in a world with mechanical losses which means that the pendulum cannot go on oscillating indefinitely without providing additional energy. In the medieval ages I suppose one could have imagined hiring an underling to stand beside the pendulum and give it a 'kick' every so often but it's not a very feasible solution even for an outsourced economy! So we have had to find additional 'automatic' sources of energy. This additionally energy can be provided in different ways. In big old pendulum clocks this was often provided by a falling weight and in the small wrist watches this is done through a wound spring but the essential idea is the same. Since there is a small and finite amount of energy stored in a falling weight or a wound spring it is important to regulate how this energy is transferred to the timekeeping source. This is done through a neat little mechanism called an escapement mechanism which ensures that one doesn't have to wind the clock/watch or change the batteries too frequently.

The whole field of horology can, therefore, be summarized in a few statements. The effort is to find a phenomenon in nature which is periodic and consistent and to keep it going by providing additional energy. Obviously the mechanical implementation is intricate fascinating and beautiful but that is the essence. Wrist watches obviously don't have oscillating pendulums but they have a similar timekeeping source - a mass rotating on a spring. Modern wrist-watches have another more accurate timekeeping source - a tuning fork made of a quartz crystal designed to oscillate at precisely 32,768 times a second and the energy comes from a battery. Atomic clocks have a yet more precise timekeeping source: atoms transitioning from one energy state to another emit radiation at a precise frequency. Since that frequency is constant it may be used as a timekeeping source. Atomic clocks based on Caesium-133 count 9192631770 cycles of the radiation emitted by the energy transition of the Caesium atom and the time it takes for those cycles to complete is equal to 1 second.

Following are some additional references which show the actual mechanisms of a clock:

 http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/gadgets/clocks-watches/clock.htm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDYjUDrCPv0&feature=g-like

Thoughts on buying a watch:

https://www.jenreviews.com/watch/

Downpour

Posted by Ankit On September 20th, 2012

One of the primary downfalls of San Diego having the perfect weather that it has is the perfect weather that it has. Days and nights are beads on one unending rosary stringed by time where some beads differ from the others merely in the slight discoloration which pure chance engenders. San Diegan weather is a fine classical Swiss watch lovingly stashed away in a velvet case. I sometimes miss the inclement whims of the climate. I don’t remember ever seeing the Pacific under the infinite little beats of a downpour and I wonder what sorts of impressions it would make. The flat vast drum-head of the mighty ocean being played upon by the fallen children of the grim sky. Ocean’s white-maned horses whiter still behind the gray gauze of wet threads. The rolling hills of La Jolla disappearing into the distance and with them disappearing all those houses and all those people and perhaps in that obscurity, in one of those vanished houses, from behind a rain streaked window-pane, someone looking at the ocean and through its artificial truncated boundary, in my general direction and also wondering whether falling trees in unvisited forests make noises. Meanwhile the vibrating ocean under the relentless onslaught of the falling drops would sit uneasily in the bowl of the crescent coastline between La Jolla cove and Black’s beach. And since we are merely imagining, let’s imagine a black umbrella fluttering in the petrichored wind, its silvery ferrule cold to the touch and centered within its black dripping fabric, feet dangling over the stone embankment, wet hands gripping the wooden crook-handle, right over left, eyes half closed from the moist wind, trying to make out blunt figures in the smudged ocean.

Quote from Joyce

Posted by Ankit On September 12th, 2012

He pressed his face against the pane of the window and gazed out into the darkening street. Forms passed this way and that through the dull light. And that was life.

A little quote from Joyce's 'Portrait of an artist as a young man'. One of those clever little quotes which make delicate incisions in your thought process and are remarkable both for the gravity of the injury and how innocuous it appears at first. It says so much precisely by saying so little.

Book review in Spark magazine

Posted by Ankit On September 5th, 2012

Flamenco Fiesta

Posted by Ankit On September 3rd, 2012

My good friend Natasha invited me to a Flamenco festival over the weekend. The venue was a sprawling property built over a canyon tucked away in the midst of the bustle of the SDSU campus. I could never have imagined that such a place existed in the heart of San Diego. Deeply wooded mini-trails laden with the smell of fallen leaves, illuminated in patches by the puddles of sunlight which had managed to filter through the thick foliage. I walked down one of these trails to reach a clearing upon which was set a singularly bohemian scene. Musicians huddled together practicing and learning from the flamenco masters who were invited to perform. Periodic taps of their feet and their eyes rapt in attention at the fluid strumming of those guitars. And music, in gushes of good natured melody. Women getting up and tapping to the flamenco beats as I sat in a shaded corner over a pleasant cold rock and soaked in the very unusual sensation of letting go. Like those sunny winter mornings in Lucknow when I would be laying outside on the lawn with a thin white sheet on my face. The chirping of the birds and the reassuring distant sounds of the daily household chores and I would lift the sheet up a little and look at the garden with lazy eyes - butterflies on the flowers, a squirrel running up the tree and a general sensation of warm cozy lethargy. A deep breath, letting go of the sheet, and with it, just letting go. There was Spanish food being made and drinks being served, a massage center, and classes on flamenco dance and yoga. People who had arrived from different parts of the world speaking different languages and dressed informally in beautiful colorful clothes, women with red flowers in their hair and flowing patterned skirts playing music, dancing, singing, men lounging about with their guitars and drums and glasses of sangria.

And what conversations! Do you have an interesting story to tell beyond your office and your gym and your beaten to death observations? Do you still remember what it was like to be passionate? I sat mesmerized listening to the stories of the people that I met. I had rose tinted glasses and even though I realized that their lives must also have their moments of mundane concerns, the fact that they could be so passionate about something was immensely refreshing. It's a bit like listening to Feynman even though the talents cannot be compared, but still, in that moment when he is talking about physics with a boyish twinkle in his eyes I feel rejuvenated, optimistic and far less cynical. I met singers and musicians and dancers and they would ask me what instrument do I play - a fish on land. The professional performance was in the evening in a little open air amphitheater. Flamenco guitarists jamming to complex turbulent tunes and professional dancers tapping away on the stage - their graceful, womanly and strong presence against the painted backdrop of riffing tunes. I was deeply impressed by the beauty of the spectacle, having never witnessed something like this live and from such close quarters. The dancers shot quick powerful glances and their hands would be leading their bodies in a fluid series of steps, their feet tapping to the beats of the music in the midst of palmas and shouts of olay from the audience. The juxtaposition of their quiet grace and the intense music was breathtaking. I sat in the middle of it all clapping like an excited little kid as the spectacle unfolded in the green and blue and red lights beneath a quiet dark sky with the circular white moon staring from a corner. And I was thinking about that music and that dance and how happy people were and how free, and I was thinking about the world outside that little temporary commune with its deadlines and its ridiculous grind and its little heartbreaks. I was trying to preserve the image of that little island of unmitigated joy, illuminated in its ridiculous colors, as it lay truncated in a vast dark sea infested with tremendous circular waves borne out of their own vicious logic.

Portrait of a glass of wine

Posted by Ankit On August 22nd, 2012

Someone highly inebriated once said that in wine lies the greatest secret, that all life is fermentation. A small glass sits gracefully on the rough textured top of a wooden table, its heart filled to the brim with the greatest sanguine truth of them all. There is a lamp to its left whose diffused yellow light has created swirling patterns on the foot and the stem of the glass: flecks of deep blacks constituting the shadow of the dark red wine above mingle with the bright strokes of golden brilliance as the light of the lamp is squeezed into nooks and crannies by the unyielding will of the formed glass, and in the translucent surrealism which is the hyperbolic crystal stem there are impressions of the wood behind. If I were to describe these impressions I’d describe them in light vague ideas with rounded corners and soft textures, akin to how the world appears in those dim orphan moments when I have woken up by an unwelcome noise; in broad brushstrokes of confusion, muffled sounds and out of focus vision. The liquid itself is dark red, almost black, and it conforms silently to the whims and contours of the bowl of the glass. It ends about half an inch below the brim of the glass in a thin translucent ellipse where the light of the lamp, having refracted through the walls of the glass, gives up its own essence and reduces the deep black of the wine to a red hue. The glass casts a long dark shadow in which I can barely make out the vague shape of the majestic glass and the forgotten shades of deep reds – perhaps there is a final poignant point to all this, to this 2 dimensional and bland final act to an otherwise exhilarating tale...

How much I admire Ayn Rand

Posted by Ankit On August 13th, 2012

Not at all.

Now what is it that makes great characters and a great story? And why is Ayn Rand such an awful writer? I have often wondered why my bile starts boiling at the thought of some writers who are so widely regarded. Ayn Rand is one such writer. The interesting thing is that when I actually read The Fountainhead at the age of 15 I was completely enthralled by it. I was swept away by the character of Howard Roark and saw in him all that was pure about the human spirit and noble about the human struggle. I saw in him what most people see, an inspiring and uncompromising man who was ready to go to any lengths of sufferings to stay pure to his own principles and just like other people I hated the mediocre world which was being an impediment to him in his pursuits of perfection. I saw the world in the black and white colors that Rand wanted from her disciples and I really did believe that pure characters like Roark existed in real life and even if they did not exist, I felt that Roark was an ideal which must be aspired for. What a bunch of bollocks, I have since realized.

I must say that Rand must be admired for the success that her creations have achieved but if one really wants to talk about her on artistic terms, she must be flayed and with vengeance. So what is it that really makes a great character?  George Carlin, in one of those rare moments of overt sympathy, once said that you can see the universe in everyone’s eyes if you really look. I really do believe that each one of us is potentially a great character just waiting for our stories to be told by a competent and observant enough storyteller. What makes each of us fascinating has less to do with what we end up saying in conversations but has so much more to do with all that we never mention. What we say and what we feel are tremendously dependent upon a host of factors that would be hard to list. From our general upbringing to specific instances in the past, from the current company that we keep to our economic situations, there is almost an infinite number of factors which go consciously or subconsciously into explaining why we chose to keep quiet when a heated discussion on, say, the Palestinian conflict was going on. We snicker in disapproval and we are smitten with envy, we applaud inwardly and we dismiss with contempt but often we say only those things which would keep the wheels of social interaction in motion. We think about betrayal and we think about the ghastliest of things and we often do not mention all the sentimental love that we feel for the fear of ridicule. Against this background of the tremendous emotional turbulence we try to put up a face which is proper and graceful and strong and self-confident. Some of us are better than others at hiding our imperfections and some are better able to ignore the presence of such imperfections but they are present in all us and those character flaws are precisely the interesting bits in each of us.

Who wants to hear the story of the perfect being? We heard it a few times in the past and they still plague so many of us with their unreasonable ideals. The really great characters, I feel, are the flawed ones and especially those who are confused and contradictory in their flaws because that’s what people really are like. The great characters differ from boring people in the conviction that they have but they often do not understand the repercussions of acting upon their convictions. They are driven by true passion, just like Howard Roark, but there is none of that pathetic moral high ground in them which Roark seems to suffer from. Unlike Roark, they are not faced with a world whose sole purpose of existence seems to be stopping them from achieving their goals. They live in a world which is merely and appropriately apathetic and which has other characters as ‘right’ as them. They lead lives which are unfair to them despite all their best attempts and which often do not even compensate in the last few pages. Ayn Rand, on the other hand, creates easy worlds which appeal to our easy sympathies and automatic ideas. She creates worlds for those who want merely an escape and who are fine with missing all the variety and all the color of real life for the certainties of the simple stories which we have been fed with since time immemorial.

I hate her books so much that I had to rage delete my accounts from Orkut and Facebook because of all the people who had Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead in their favorite books list. Rather than going around the city and bashing kittens to take my anger out, I thought it was just better that I ignored that such people actually existed. There, I think those few lines of irrational anger make me incredibly interesting. I’m just waiting for a Tolstoy now!

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