Federer captures French

Posted by Ankit On June 7th, 2009

In the small hours of today, Federer clinched the biggest prize.

Three years ago, on the morning of June 11 2006, I wrote: "It's 5:31 in the morning and I am sitting in front of the TV having just woken up after an extremely intermittent sleep waiting for the french open final between federer and nadal which is slated to begin in another 30 minutes..."

Three years hence, I got up again at 5:30, hoping to watch Federer achieve what he hasn't been able to for the last three years. All those red eyed, bad breathed, crumpled hair mornings; only to witness Federer getting bulldozed under the bludgeoning Nadal biceps. All that excitement and nervousness only to see him getting crushed over the crushed red brick. But he did it finally. He won the French Open and became the 6th person in history to win all 4 slams, tying in the process, Pete Sampras' record of the highest number of career slams. He didn't have Nadal on the other end but it doesn't matter. While it made things much easier for him, as they say in french - C'est la vie. The greatness of Federer lies as much in his sublime play as in his ability of not getting beaten by arbitrary players at arbitrary stages of a grand slam. To tie his claim to greatness to Nadal's consistency is just unfair. After all, saying that Nadal's presence in the final would have prevented him from winning the French open isn't too far from conjecturing that his absence would have meant Federer winning 3-4 additional French opens. So there we are. After 3 years of my intense support, Federer has finally delivered on what he seemed to promise every time. And I'm happy and relieved, and sleepy.

Good job Fed. To me, you were always the greatest player ever based on your sheer mindboggling abilities but the skeptics need facts and figures. Their mouths are dry and their throats parched until they are fed the global maximas of a statistical plot. Without the numerics of standard deviations and outlying means, your simple brilliance with the racquet was the sonorous sounds of a sonata in vacuum. You have finally infused it with a medium. And I know how much it meant to you. The meanings were dripping down your cheek, for the world to see. Congrats!

Ultra Deep Field

Posted by Ankit On May 26th, 2009

(*Clicking on the above image will take you to a high resolution version. But beware, it's 18 MB so it will take time to load).

The above image is frequently referred to as the most important image ever taken by humanity. It is also a source of very personal and intense emotions to me. Whenever life starts getting cumbersome or I start feeling a tad bit too sad because things seem to be out of control, whenever I start taking myself and probably you too seriously, this is one image which almost shocks things into their proper perspectives. It's called the Hubble ultra deep field.

The hubble space telescope, on September 24 2003, focussed on a completely unramarkable portion of the night sky. It kept looking at the same spot for a bit more than 11 days and produced the image above. Our universe is almost unimaginably vast and the light coming from stars far far away is so dim that to take their image requires collecting light from them for a long time - a very long exposure shot. The portion of the sky that Hubble was looking at was only as big as a 1 mm square piece of paper held at a meter's distance from the eyes but even in this miniscule, unremarkable part of the cosmos, the telescope revealed the presence of stellar matter so brilliant and so numerous - it sends the brain whizzing. Every smudge, every spot, every set of non-black pixels that you see in the above image is a complete galaxy. Not just a star, a galaxy. To put things in perspective, our galaxy the milky way, which is rather a mediocre galaxy in terms of size, contains an estimated 200 billion stars and our Sun is merely an average star. The above photograph contains atleast 10000 galaxies - and all of it in just a faint cosmic whisper. The image is also a snapshot of our tumultous past. It takes 8 minutes for the light from the Sun to reach Earth. This means that every time we look directly at the Sun (if we can) we are not actually looking at how the Sun looks at the present moment but rather at how it looked 8 minutes ago. The farther an object is from us, the older in history its visual signature. The galaxies above have been calculated to be 13 billion light years away (13*1000000000*9,460,730,472,580.8 kms) which means this photograph actually shows how these galaxies looked 13 billion years ago. This is very close to the Big Bang. It is fascinating to realize that we are looking at something so ancient and so proximal to that primordial point of infinite density which by its own obliteration gave birth to a universe whose immense beauty we bask in.

I do not remember who but someone very eminent once said about the human race that we are what happens when Hydrogen is given 14 billion years - and how poetically beautiful, how exhilaratingly true! This image, on its own, makes me realize, enforces in me, a tremendous appreciation for the beautiful harmony of nature, its melodious evolution. It makes me wonder how pedestrian , in comparison, our own creation stories are, how utterly boring and uninspiring and local any other explanation of our presence. In the mysterious attractions of the black holes and the hellish symphony of the quasars our universe has given us wonders more surprising than any that humans have dreamed of. In its vast empty distances and hot swirling vortices, it has given us puzzles more intricate and beautiful than any other. In its utter and cruel inhospitablity to our life form, the universe has given us reasons to appreciate our balmy little blue planet - a whirlpool of human emotions and ambitions, the host to every conqueror who ever lived and every sinner who ever died, but ultimately a speck of nothingness drifting away silently, quietly, but more importantly, aimlessly into the inevitable arms of posterity.

Farahan

Posted by Ankit On May 19th, 2009

Back in the day, when I used to take Nostradamus seriously and when my notebooks had to have brown covers and flowery, pointless name stickers, I also used to have a friend whose curious character has prevented his memories from being lost in the bottomless pit that is my recollections. Named Farahan, he was curious enough to not have very many friends but not curious enough to not have me as one. I have often gravitated towards those who in their shy, stupid, awkward ways served to provide a little color to an otherwise browned out melancholic background of perfectly raised, cleanly dressed, yes boys. Farahan seemed to have a betting syndrome, if whatever he had can be called that. We were probably 12 years old so it's not that he would don a black jacket, red tie, twinkling leather shoes, and with a cigar in his mouth, usher into the local casinos to the swooning hearts of the fairer sex, open up his briefcase and stake it all on the whims of the rolling dice and the fancies of the shuffled deck. No, I wouldn't say that he had a betting syndrome in that respect. He just liked the plain vanilla flavor of a simple bet. He never had any money so his bets would always be of the form, 'If A happens I win, if not then you'. Very curious at the beginning, I used to ask him,

'What?'

'What!?,' he used to reply with increasing mistrust.

'What would I win?'

At this point he would look at me with the suspicion of someone who suspects his friend of having an affair with his wife, fumble for an answer, and finally finding none, would move on to other topics. And we would drift off in myriad directions, talking about things that 12 year olds who are neither the disheveled backbenchers, nor the bright handraisers talk about, looking out of the window to see the senior class playing and running on the dusty playground below with folks falling down like shooting stars on a night sky - quite randomly but almost periodically. And a voice, lost in the freedom, would quietly say,

'If that guy on that swing falls, I win, else you.'

I would look at him and with half a mind of repeating my desire to know the precise terms and conditions, almost utter that fateful 'What?.' In due course of time I stopped asking him such difficult questions and let him bet on everything from dog fights to the contents of his lunchbox and the boy who would be the first to lower his arms when the class was made to raise hands. Ever the shrewd businessman, he didn't let a single opportunity slip. The world and its complicated entrails reduced to an efficient set of solutions A and B when he glowered upon them with his penetrating vision. And he would win if the result was A and I would win if it was B. Of course, he never won anything and I never lost anything. People kept falling from swings and ants kept getting confused, teachers kept missing classes and they kept being on time, that girl kept having a red ribbon except when she did not have one, my notebooks kept lasting longer than his except when he would tear away one too many of those middle 2 pages, and he kept winning except when I did not lose.

Close Shave

Posted by Ankit On May 15th, 2009

Khatri Bhaiyya asked me if I could drop him at the airport today for his flight to SFO and I said yes. I took the car from K2 and after dropping him off at the airport at about 6:10, started back towards home. SD airport is south of the place I live, about 15 miles away and I-5 connects the two places. At the point at which I entered I-5 North, it is a 4 lane freeway with average speeds generally in the high 70s (mph). I started speeding up and merging in the traffic, changing lanes so that by the time I was in the left most lane I was doing about 80 mph. This was also probably the first time that I had my earphones on and was listening to songs from my phone while driving. As I prepared to settle in for the next 10-12 miles of coasting at the present speed, BANG, and it wasn't difficult to tell that things had taken a turn for the worse.

The windscreen was shattered and there seemed to be glass all around but that was hardly the major concern. What was really concerning was the fact that my complete field of vision was blocked, I couldn't see what lay in front of me and when you are going that fast on a crowded freeway, it's not something that you can brush off easily. The repercussions are almost immediately palpable. The hood, it seemed to me, had broken off the latch which holds it fastened, and driven by the fast winds, had lifted up and smashed into the windscreen. As I said, I was in the left most lane and there is narrow shoulder beside it upon which drivers can stop in case of an emergency. There is a concrete wall about 2 feet high that runs parallel to the shoulder and serves to separate the oncoming traffic on I-5 South. I remember noticing, just before the hood came crashing, that the freeway was turning right not very far in the distance, which meant that I would have crashed into the wall, if I had kept driving straight. It is often amusing to remember your first thoughts and preferences when such things happen. As soon as I heard the bang, my first reaction was to take off my earphones and actually press a series of buttons on my phone to pause the freaking song. Don't know why I did it-was probably saving the battery. But very soon sense prevailed and I realized that doing 80, blindfolded, with traffic all around and an oncoming turn is indeed serious. I pressed the danger lights on, took my foot off the accelerator but didn't want to break hard for the fear of getting rear-ended. In the absence of any frontal visual inputs, my only frame of reference was the wall that was visible on the left. Funnily enough, I didn't want to crash into it not just because it would have hurt, but also because I seriously didn't want the car to get any more scratches. What followed was a delicate maneuver where guided by how fast that wall was moving towards me, I managed to traverse the turn as best as I could and slowly brake to a halt on the shoulder.

I jumped out of the car to see the damage. The hood was badly dented, the windscreen shattered, even part of the roof caved in from the impact. For a while I stood there, unable to make sense of things while cars whizzed past me at breakneck speeds. I noticed that the shoulder was too narrow for the car and the right tires were actually uncomfortably close to the traffic. I probably shouldn't have done that, but I decided that I needed to take the car to a safer place-on the wider right shoulder. The hood won't attach but I, perhaps foolishly, took the risk. I distinctly remember my heart racing crazily, time running painfully slowly. The hood came back on the windscreen again and luck gets all the credit for my being safe after 4 lanes of probabilistic driving.

It's a dangerous situation for anyone to be in. Not just because of the possibility of the worst happening to you but also because if you do manage to survive with not even a single scratch, there is a temptation to see more into it than chance and a bit of skill. I guess it's human to seek reason in survival and the strings of a higher power when the odds seem to be so loaded against it. I would still thank probabilities. But more importantly I would thank the car company which made such a shitty system that even the air-bag didn't inflate (it's a known problem for which Huyndai has recalled the cars). I would be dead meat if it did.

K2, I'm sorry that the car is wrecked. I could only save the scratches on the left. Roli, if you read this, no one who can be unnecessarily worried needs to know.

Self Reference

Posted by Ankit On May 7th, 2009

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Au Revoir

Posted by Ankit On May 4th, 2009

So I guess it's time to say goodbye, isn't it? Funny that it ends here like this. Life, as it turns out, isn't without her share of mischief. But I shall remember you, or at least I hope that I will. Although it's impossible to know how the pawns will move, I would at least like to believe that the dirt of their footprints won't completely smudge out your memory. And my little stash of our bittersweet time together would be strong enough to rough out the amnesia of passing time. But I make no promises. To you, I can only offer the pictorial perfection of a desire. It suffers, my dear, from a fragility which often breaks it into shards as one tests it under the tip of graphite. But desire I surely do, and you will remain my... my, inasmuch as the virginity of my desire is true.

 

I understand that it won't be easy. Neither the fingerprints on the handle nor the sculpted cream are as flimsy as they are made out to be. Afterall it's not the trivialities which bother us but their abrupt endings, isn't it? So when the window goes dark and the sand beside me goes cold, when the beat of footsteps becomes sadly periodic and I grow indifferent to the prospects of ambient sounds, I hope I'll remember you. I hope the small sticker in my wallet and the disgusting bitterness of caffeine would rush in your memories. But let's not be too bothered by hopes and conjectures here for time is pressing on us. Let me take a pause while you speak. And speak in that carefree, enthusiastic flavor which has had me rapt in attention so often and for so long. And I promise to be captivated in your varicolored world as I always did, I promise to be lost to mundane reality. These are the last few minutes and I wish for you to begin a long story, a story of bright sunny days and fresh, pebbled nights, a story of the cup which, until today, was never half empty.

Oh my darling Clementine

Posted by Ankit On April 27th, 2009

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'Oh my darling, Clementine' is an American folk song from the Gold Rush times. It's about a miner's daughter named Clementine who dies in a drowning accident while her lover couldn't save her. Hindi song 'Ae dil hai mushkil' was 'inspired' from it:

Gravity of the situation

Posted by Ankit On April 24th, 2009

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Swimming induced swimming

Posted by Ankit On April 20th, 2009

Khatri bhai, Rasia, and I swam in the ocean today and covered a distance of .8 miles between La Jolla cove and La Jolla shores. The former two have done it before but it was the first time for me. And I  don't now swimming. Needless to say, it was a very educational and thrilling experience. Not a very wise decision, but very enjoyable nonetheless (as so many unwise decisions are).

There have been a few experiences which have taught me things about myself that I would never have learnt in the daily course of existence. And I am sure that this should be true for anyone. These specific instances bring out unsuspected qualities, sometimes unforeseen shortcomings by virtue of the fact that they demand a little more than normal and put the individual under more stress than he generally faces. Today was one such experience. I'm quietly proud of my performance. Not because I did something extraordinary (in fact it's quite a mundane achievement) but because I didn't think I had it in me to swim the distance. Having never done a standard lap and equipped with  only a very basic swimming competence, I was quite afraid to take the plunge. The wet suit was said to provide some floatation and the flippers, some efficiency. But as soon as I entered deep waters, I realized why people drown in the first place. Panic is the cause but what set panic in my case was the fear that I didn't have the stamina to sustain the effort that I was spending just to stay afloat. I saw that the coast was just 20 meters away but wasn't even sure if I could make that. I called Khatri bhai for help and he asked me to relax and paddle slowly and I would not drown. Seemed to work. Once it became clear that this small effort would keep me afloat, .8 miles seemed to be separated only by the will to do it. Several times along the course I took in salty water and realized that panic sets in easily if water gets in your lungs, but by then I had enough confidence. After swimming for an hour and a half we finally made it to the end. Khatri bhai and rasia could have done it much faster but my thanks and apologies for bearing with me :). The last thing that I realized was that to do a .8 miles swim you only need to have will power for .4 miles. The rest is just a compulsion.

Book review: Einstein

Posted by Ankit On April 19th, 2009

I recently completed Walter Isaacson's biography of Einstein titled 'Einstein, His life and universe'. At 600 pages it isn't what you'd call a quickie but it's a casual read owing to the simplicity of the language. The author has been the chairman of CNN and the managing director of the Time Magazine, credentials which do not comfort your skepticism as to his ability to do justice to the life and ideas of someone as technical as Einstein. So although there were words of praise from Brian Greene (host of the brilliant NOVA documentary Elegant Universe) and Murray Gel-mann (of the quark fame), I had my doubts to begin with. And added to that was my general dislike of biographies. I have always felt that biographies are, in general, more disingenuous that autobiographies, primarily because the author of a biography is someone who is already enamoured by the subject of his writing. It is hard for him to be objective and easy to fall into the trap of idolizing the person whose biography he is attempting. In addition to this, when it comes to someone like Einstein, I personally want only to be concerned with his ideas, his philosophies, and his achievements. A good biography, on the other hand, needs to supply a lot of other information like his childhood, his affairs, his family; sadly the things I have no interest in knowing. It's a very good biography in this sense and I cannot blame it for being so.

There are some very good aspects to the book though. Anyone who is writing Einstein's biography should be ready to get down and dirty with his physics. And Mr. Isaacson shows just the resolve and he even succeeds in his effort to a large extent. I remember Feynman said once that there is a difference between knowing 'inertia' and understanding 'inertia'. And the author of this book seems to understand the physics well enough to put it all in a very coherent causal framework where you do actually get the full import of Einstein's genius story. You understand how Galileo, Newton, Poincare, Lorentz, Maxwell, Minkowski, Hilbert, Reimann, Grossman, Bohr, Shroedinger, Pauli, Rosen, Podolski and their theories fill into the larger context and how they affected Einstein's vision. And you do get a decent feel (probably about as good as popular science can provide) for his crowning achievements, the special and general relativities. But the most important part of the book is its emphasis on Einstein's imagination, as opposed to his knowledge, as being the reason for his success. One cannot understate the non-empiricism of Einstein's science. He never did science because he found an experimental reading he could not explain with the existing theories. His were always flights of imagination and childish curiosity. What would I see if I travelled alongside light matching its speed? Can a man tell the difference between gravity and matching acceleration? The book captures this subtle playfulness brilliantly.

It's definitely recommended for anyone who wants a general idea of the man and his science. It''s a very good and thorough biography, the reason why I had to skim through a lot of material. And it describes events of paramount importance in scientific history with the urgency and respect that they deserve. I would have wanted to read more about his philosophy but I guess a 'biography' is the worst place to look for it.

photoHis last words

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