I have just completed reading the code book by Simon Singh and was immediately struck by the elegance of our current encryption technologies and their pervasiveness. The book clarifies how the very fundamental concept of prime numbers lies at the very heart of all our Amazon purchases and our banking transactions.

The fundamental problem of encryption is the following. Person A wants to transmit a private message to person B. This message is vulnerable to getting intercepted by person C but even if it gets intercepted A wants the meaning of the message to hidden from C. The fundamental way in which it can be achieved is by changing the form of the message (encrypting) and transmitting the encrypted message. B receives the encrypted message and if he knows how to decrypt it then he can reverse the process of encryption and gather the original message. If C happens to snoop in on it and doesn't know how to decrypt the message then even though he has the communication, he would not be able to make sense of it. As a very simple example, A might want to transmit two numbers 15 and 20 to B but he adds, let's say 50 to each and transmits them. The encryption in this case is the addition of the number 50. If B knows the encryption function (addition of a number) and the key (the number 50) then he can retrieve the original two numbers. If C doesn't have the ingenuity to figure out the encryption and the key, then he would not know the original numbers. There are, therefore, two distinct problems here. The first one is deciding upon an encryption algorithm and the second is deciding upon a key with which to encrypt the message. Ideally one would want to encrypt a message with an encryption algorithm which is complex enough to render decryption impossible without the knowledge of the key. In essence, the encryption algorithm may be public knowledge but it should be impossible to break it without the knowledge of the key. The simple encryption described above doesn't suffice obviously. If A is trying to transmit something meaningful like say the Fibonacci sequence and if it's known that he has merely added a number to all the entries, a mere trial and error would reveal the original sequence. Precisely because A is trying to transmit something meaningful, the simple encryption would be rendered useless. The second problem is how does B know what the key is? A can also transmit the key but then the key may itself get intercepted. A can personally meet B and give him the key but in the real world where billions of messages are being exchanged every day, personal meetings between senders and receivers are frankly out of question.

A solution to both these cryptographic problems was suggested in 1976 and goes by the name Diffie-Hellman-Merkle key exchange. The first idea is to use an encryption algorithm which is very difficult to undo without the knowledge of the key. The second and more revolutionary idea concerns the distribution of the key itself. The encryption algorithm is a modulo function.  c = a(mod b) gives the remainder c when a is divided by b. 8(mod 2) is 0, 9(mod 2) is 1 etc. As it turns out, if one only knows c and b, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to figure out a. The modulo function, therefore, is a one way function and a good candidate for encryption. The second idea was how the modulo function was utilized to solve the key distribution problem. 'A' chooses 3 different numbers let's say 3, 7, 11. He transmits the encryption function as being (mod 11) where can be any number. He keeps the first number 3 secret. 'B' also decides on his own secret number, let's say 6. Now C, who is snooping, may get to know the encryption function which is public but he doesn't know the private numbers 3 and 6 which were never transmitted. Now A transmits the result (mod 11)=2 and B transmits back (mod 11)=4. Upon receiving 4, A calculates (mod 11)=9 and upon receiving 2, B calculates (mod 11)=9. Both have come to the same number 9 which is the key. C which knows the encryption function and the numbers 2 and 4, cannot figure out the key 9 because he doesn't know the numbers 3 and 6. It can be seen that the key depends upon the secret numbers which were never transmitted and yet, both A and B come to know this key.

The next major development in cryptography was the RSA encryption which is the mainstay of all secure communication today. The above key exchange process still suffers from the fact that there needs to be a two way exchange of information between A and B. RSA does away with this by another neat usage of the modulo function coupled with the headache that is prime factorization. A prime number is a number which is only divisible by itself and 1. While it is very easy to take 2 prime numbers p and q and find r=p*q, given r it is extremely time consuming to figure out p and q. The RSA works by having a public and a private key. 'A' chooses 2 very big primes p and q and multiplies them. He keeps p and q secret but publishes r=p*q. If 'B' wants to transmit an encrypted message to A he uses A's public key (the number r) and uses a modified modulo function to encrypt his message. The function is such that even if r is known, it is extremely difficult to decrypt the message. As long as r is large enough, there is no way to decrypt the message unless p and q are also known (and hence A can do it).

The strength of RSA encryption basically boils down to the difficulty of prime factorization then. As all public knowledge stands currently, the encryption is unbreakable. Despite the tremendous amount of research in the problem of prime factorization there is no fast solution yet. The day the problem is solved much of our daily activities would grind to a halt! I find it fascinating now to think that every time I buy something on Amazon and provide my credit card information, the data is encrypted by what would be Amazon's public key (just a very very big number which is a multiple of 2 very big primes) and the current theoretical understanding assures me that decryption by a third party is beyond all human capabilities.

There is a bookstore in the neighborhood which I ended up walking into today. I do not remember the  name of the place but it's just as well. The place is stuffed with arbitrarily crammed bookshelves which rise up to the ceiling and one has to tiptoe around them for the fear of making one wrong move and bringing the whole place down in an academic tumult. There does not seem to be any rhyme or reason in the arrangement of the books on the shelves either. So while Joyce is found jousting with Zola, art history blends effortlessly into biographies with nary a seam to be seen. The air columns separating the gray ones have the unmistakable smell of stuffed paper and they are colored in sparkling gold-dust as a lone sunbeam finds its way inside the shop and illuminates the suspended dust particles in streaks of yellow. I move my hand through it and the dust is perturbed. A little part of the mighty Sun, which continues to burn away aimlessly in a void, is captured in the contours of the liquid dance of dust. The solar shaft ends on Huxley and a brave new world is prominently called up on stage. Although purely coincidental, a romantic must dream! I stood there wondering if the time of the bookstore is finally up as the brave new world takes over. '21 years,' said the owner when I asked him how long has he had the place. I mentioned that during these 21 years he must have seen a tremendous amount of change. 'Yes,' he said adding, however, that it's merely transitory, as if to imply that the good old days of yesteryear are bound to come back as the wheel of time inevitably complete its rotation. The wheel may be broken now, I thought, as I saw him selling a used book for 54 cents.

Ours is a time of short attention spans and slick surfaces, a time in which the rough and antediluvian presence of bookstores is fast becoming anachronistic. It's a little sad, especially to a nostalgist like me but it does seem inevitable. I do not remember the name of the place but as I said, it's probably just as well.

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane
I was the smudge of ashen fluff--and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky,
And from the inside, too, I'd duplicate
Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:
Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass
Hang all the furniture above the grass,
And how delightful when a fall of snow
Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so
As to make chair and bed exactly stand
Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!

- John Shade (Vladimir Nabokov)

If you read it carefully you'd come to understand that in these beautiful and effortless lines Nabokov is describing the reflection on a windowpane from the point of view of a bug who has just crashed into it. The bug imagines its own smudge on the glass as being alive since it has life and activity to it. The life and activity which it has exists by virtue of the fact that its background, which is the reflection of the sky on the glass, is continuously changing with changing cloud patterns, hence giving the lifeless smudge a borrowed existence! Pale Fire is a beautiful and courageous work. Its structure is highly experimental and when it boasts of prose and verse this exquisite, how can one not stand in awe.

In looking back through the years that have crept away I notice an unusual pattern. Memory which should have been cumulative, building upon a developing brain and an improving consciousness of my own place in this world, is in reality composed of a turbulent flow of images and remembrances. At some places the flow is lucid with well defined streamlines and deep clarity while at others it's frothy, indistinct and pliable to the extent of being uncertain. These patches of screeching clarity and rough disorder are mixed together in an unpredictable manner so that while there are dark gaps in some of my recent memories, some of the earliest ones are scrupulously near and visceral. As I tumble through the jumble of my mnemosyne with the past in flashes over the present, with the half-remembered ghosts of the times gone by reaching out to me in vague images and vaguer impressions of sounds and smells, I see the sepia-tinted world of my earliest childhood standing there, in front of me, quiet and graceful, as if assured that it would survive the obliteration of time by virtue of its own unblemished innocence. In the nonlinear fabric of time which has been scissored and patched and mutilated and half-assedly repaired far too many times,  the earlier folds are still pristinely white and unmarked. And yet if only I try to go far enough in the past this continuous flow of remembrances breaks and sputters and becomes patchier and patchier until it is merely constituted by single images which stand for their barely remembered contexts. The story of life at this point is a postmodern story, with abrupt cuts, incoherent narration and episodic nonchalance.

I have slippery impressions of our house in Bareilly (I must have been about 4). I see it basked in quiet sunshine behind the prison of its rusting gate. I remember the window behind which I would sit peering out at the barely paved street which would offer, in the dead hours of the sleepy afternoons, the welcome rings of the candy seller's bicycle. In that one simple image of that humble house with its lovingly arranged furniture, I have preserved in my mind the most viscerally felt idea of that quintessential twinkle of hope and ambition and love. That, to my conscious self, is where it all began. That image is, in a certain sense, the fundamental metaphoric building block of the world - the innocent effort of those who don't have very much to begin with towards building a life of some material and emotional consequence, and to do it all with reasonable honesty and morality. The vestiges of that house lingered on in my life for a long time. The oval dinner table was the last to go. But beyond these considerable material echoes which keep reverberating in the sonorous chamber of my memory, what persist stronger than ever are the very human notes of that image, the deep woody scents of the filial attachment and the floral chromatic accents of the sibling relationship.

You know what I had started to think? I had started to feel that I was beginning to lose the passion with which I used to approach literature. I had been reading good books by really accomplished writers and I had begun to like almost everything that I read, which made me think that perhaps that faculty for criticism which I thought I had was beginning to desert me. Reading a lot of good books can become a little boring just like life can be a little too perfect and a dessert can be a bit too sweet. It also lessens the appreciation that one has for a really good work of literature. But thanks to Murakami's 'Kafka on the shore', that latent hate that I reserved for sub-par literature was immediately fanned and I feel so much more alive now.

I know exactly the kind of person who would like the book. A lot of such people must surely exist considering how popular this book has become. I imagine a prototypical fan of Murakami to be a hopeless spiritualist who goes about his/her life believing that there is something supernatural and mysterious that life eventually offers, something that is forever beyond the grasp of science, logic, rationale, or even words for that matter, but at the same time its essence is such that you would be able to comprehend it if only you looked into your own being with courage, determination and honesty. Such people are not necessarily religious but they differ from those who are merely in the thrust of their own irrationality. I feel that they would very much appreciate the open-ended theme of the book with its dream-like sequences, irrationality and elaborate symbolism. They would also like this book because it doesn't really make much sense and somehow a lot of people just love it when things don't make sense, for then they can attribute to those things, their own little interpretation (however inane) and feel special and 'connected with the universe'.

I love good surrealism and imagination. Kafka's 'Metamorphosis' is a book which stands testimony to that. So does Carroll's 'Alice in wonderland'. These works have their own logic and rationale to them. They have their own set of rules which are well defined and then they go about being mad within those rules. It gives a profound sense of tautness to these works and as a reader you never feel being cheated by the author. I believe that the most pleasurable part of a work of art is its struggle against its own boundaries and in the absence of any boundaries it ends up losing much of its charm. And this is what is wrong with Murakami's book. He has disguised what appears to me his own incompetence by implicitly declaring that he won't follow any rules, not even his own. Writing becomes a lot easier for him because neither logic nor completeness have to be respected and at the same time the 'mystique' and incomprehensibility of the book lend themselves to easy adoration by the urban pseudo-intellectual brigade. And to top it all off, the utter blandness of the dialogue is irritating. Whenever the characters are not talking in single sentences, they are describing in elaborately long paragraphs as to how they have no clue what's happening to them. They seem to believe that if only they express their own robotic presence in deep and mysterious sounding dialogue, the need for at least some coherence and explanation can be done away with. And unfortunately it may not be terribly far from the truth either. A lot of people, perhaps impressed by how less the book makes sense, attribute a certain genius to Murakami which I don't think he has. They perhaps forget that a good work of art, however incomprehensible in the beginning, must lend itself to logical understanding if enough effort is put into it and that effort coupled with the eventual understanding of the work is directly proportional to how much pleasure one extracts from it.

My god I despise this book. And yet it has certain passages which have their own poetic beauty. As I said, you may even find the whole book very much to your liking. 2 and a half stars, therefore!