...and the internet mobilizes

Posted by Ankit On January 18th, 2012

I think that we have been witnessing something absolutely fascinating over the last few years, periodic examples of leaderless revolutions which build momentum in a chaotic and unpredictable manner and spread to the widest reaches of the world at the speed of thought. The latest example of such an uprising was today's mass internet blackout over two anti-piracy bills (SOPA, PIPA) which the US Congress is currently considering. Thousands of websites went dark in protest and within hours, 4.5 million people had signed a petition on Google opposing the bill. As a result, several members of the Congress who had earlier supported the bill, overwhelmed by the grassroots response, ended up withdrawing their support by the end of the day. Over the last few months, several other immense institutions (Verizon, BofA etc.) were brought to their knees by internet uprisings with a swiftness which could not have been possible even a few years ago. The Internet, with its great reach and democracy, has started to flex its muscles and as a trailer, has begun by being pivotal in the toppling of decades old authoritarian regimes as part of the Arab spring.

I cannot help but think that this is a pivotal moment in history. Not only does Internet's resume already appear impressive, it also promises to be that tool which might usher in true accountability and democracy. And it would do it precisely by being messy and arbitrary. Sure it is strife with stupid pictures of cats and an endless barrage of memes but in its frivolity it gives voice and even legitimacy to the ideas of the next generation - the only ideas which are worth anything when it comes to the question of the future. As the Internet expands to subsume more and more facets of social interaction, the youth which would be the primary participant would start to have more and more say in the proceedings. And from the looks of it, it appears to be a good idea because then the important decisions would be made based more upon the views of a population which would be more educated and informed than it has ever been. Things start to rot when power gets concentrated in the hands of a few. They really start to stink when the powerful also start controlling the flow of information. Although democracy is expected to treat these ills, it's often merely a rigmarole where the elected end up being influenced by the powerful few and they perpetuate their stay at the top by keeping the population uneducated, uninformed, and divided on any number of lines. And in a traditional society they manage to do that because they control the flow of information. But democracy still is the best solution because it at least has the potential of being fair and fruitful. It just requires a mechanism where the elected can be kept on a short leash with the provision of a prompt whipping if they are found to be not performing according to their duties. The Internet, with its deep reach and immense integration across pointless divides, promises to be that short leash.

These are fun times to live through. The old guard seems to have absolutely no clue as to how to control the thoughts and opinions of people on the net. They have tried to make pathetic little attempts only to be promptly wrapped on the knuckles. And with every little victory which the netizens score, it seems that the old economy, old government and the old way of doing business loses another creaking support. I believe that the traditionalists will learn to respond better to the new challenges. There would perhaps be more legislative attempts at limiting the democratic and free exchange of information on the internet. We might even see internet lobbying becoming a trend in the future. Religion was said to be the opium of the masses but that observation is already dated in the modern world whose blind religion, I think, is popular entertainment as dished out on traditional media. As more and more people spend more and more of their time on the net, I believe that further attempts would be made to 'tame' the passion. But given the participatory nature of the net, I think that it's going to require much more ingenuity on the part of the powers that be to pull it of. For now they can only look incomprehensibly at this incongruous mechanism and wonder how much of a transformation they will have to undergo in order to be able to compete in this game whose rules already appear to have been changed.

Looking back on this new year's day

Posted by Ankit On January 1st, 2012

It's a new year! And what better time to resume this sporadic trickle of posts which has fallen through the faucet of this forum for the last 6 years; gushing and ebullient in its infancy and seemingly wise and reserved now that 'I have been through the ropes'. I like, every now and then, to go back to the Archives tab and flip through the pages of personal reflections which stand as milestones in time, revealing the slow and unmistakable transformation that my personality has gone through. In these remnants from the past, I believe that I have a most fascinating and precious lens through which to view the often vague and hazy journey of one's own past but with the unusual brutality and certainty of the written word. All these years in words, all these personalities in thoughts - I treasure this collection more dearly than absolutely anything else.

Don't get me wrong. I do not look back at the past with a smug glow of self-satisfaction or a vain pat on my back. More often than not, it's excruciating to confront one's own reflection in time. One would hope to have grown through the years, to have a better perspective now than one had in the past, and I am no different. It is, therefore, almost by definition true that looking back I feel inclined to dismiss my own thoughts as merely being products of a time and age which I'm wiser to have left behind. And yet this current personality, for better or for worse, is just a sum total of many such times and ages which have chiseled it through the years to produce what has emerged today. I hope that the winds of change are still blowing and that years from now when I look back to today, I would find myself as 'immature' as I find myself now when I read the things that I wrote many years ago. I have an immense respect for change and for the ability to change and I say it with a certain sense of pride that I'm neither sure what I have become, nor am I certain of the trajectory upon which I'm set.

But things used to be different. Certain unmistakable patterns emerge from the chaotic past. I seem to have started, as all young people do, from a state of utter self-confidence. I knew what was wrong with the world and I believed in the solutions which were in fashion. My world view conveniently emerged from the invisible and heavy hand of religion and tradition. Things were 'not right' and people were 'good' and bad'. The bad ones had to be corrected and things had to be set straight and the romantic idea of the way to do it would often be high on octane. There was very little cynicism, which must necessarily be the case if you want to 'do something'. I believe that I was what would normally be called a 'good person'. I believed less in the ideas of the time and more in the ideas of tradition, which is a little unusual for a young person. Had I continued on that trajectory I'd have run the danger of turning into a stupid reactionary like the ones you often hear blowing themselves up for reasons they don' t have the intelligence to comprehend. As it turns out, now I have an intense hatred for such people, not so much because they end up messing other people's lives but more so because of  how stupid they have allowed themselves to become. I have come to dislike and despise all such 'cultures of beliefs' but I'm too much of a cynic now to be bothered to do anything about them.

From a young boy who had strict loyalties which were dictated by strong beliefs and sure ideas, I have definitely come a long way. There are no more sureties and far less self-confidence. In a certain sense, there is a lot more tolerance but that tolerance is as much a product of expanded horizons as it is a precipitate of cynicism. There was a time when I was very much against social work but looking back I realize that I had chosen to disregard the utility of the whole field based just on my hatred for the smugness and the moral high ground which often accompanies it. I don't care as much now. A social outlook has given way to a more individualistic take on life and I've come to enjoy and appreciate certain facets of it which I have chosen for myself. But I really do enjoy life, which is more than what can probably be said for most people. I'm now, more than ever, in awe of the amazing variety that life offers. I'm excited, more than I have ever been, to learn from its myriad hues and brilliant possibilities.

In that sense I have become an optimist, all my cynicism and all my apathy notwithstanding. A happy new year to you!

Conversations

Posted by Ankit On October 30th, 2011

Looking back at the years spent in UCSD, one thing dawns clearer than any other. I have enjoyed the company and friendship of only those who explicitly offered neither brilliant insights into the grave facets of life nor any secret fountains of wisdom. I have come to despise small and big talk alike and I have ended up deriving all my understanding and enjoyment from what I would term trivial talk. And in some sense that is the most important conversation one can have. It pays heed, in one fell swoop, both to the absurdity of existence which is missed in serious discussions and to the simple joys of life which suffer such a debilitating end at the hands of small talk. Discussions which started with ridiculous topics and disintegrated into wild orgies of inanities, strewn with unspeakable political incorrectness and a lack of consideration for all that society holds dear. And yet those discussions were much more than just juvenile pleasures. They were sharp and intelligent and in their own twisted way reduced life and society of their phony garbs - something that no amount of serious deliberation can do because it is too mindful of hurting sentiments.

The upshot of several years of such discussions is that now I have little tolerance for insipid, utilitarian talk. Religious debates, political allegiances, nationalistic ideas, group mentality, financial advice and many more such 'important' topics have started seeming insufferable to me unless they are being discussed within a satirical framework. And I do not understand how can they not be! Does the illogicality of petty little human obsessions repeated ad-infinitum on this little speck of nothingness we call Earth not even deserve its own chuckle? I think it does and I also think that for precisely this reason satire is the most honest and most fruitful attitude to have while discussing anything.

The only conversations which I can never seem to discuss with sarcasm are those which concern passion because existence of passion ties very well with my own individualistic take on life. Although passionate people run the risk of monopolizing conversation, they are at least honest and original even when they are not engaging, but often the existence of pure passion in a person is enough for me to have an automatic respect for him/her. It is too bad for me then that such people are few and far between.

Farewells

Posted by Ankit On October 16th, 2011

We often take our own natures and predispositions to be more special, more peculiar than those which we ascribe, in an abstract sense, to others. And poisoned by this very affliction I find myself being affected by farewells in a way which to me is more nuanced than how I think other people get affected by them. But perhaps it's nothing more than my own introspective nature coupled with the fact that I have increasingly more amount of time now to think about things, something that I do not necessarily disapprove of.

I find that it is not concrete memories and sure pictures that we miss about people but it's their vague associations with the trivial things that they leave behind which are curiously the most poignant sources of nostalgia. As the world around me presents itself with the same clockwork precision and designed rhythm as it has always presented itself except for some minor omission effected by a departure, I begin to see the particular omissions in darker hues and bolder colors than warranted by mere appearances. I'm amazed by how little things change, how the day is still resplendent with the same glorious sunshine, and the night still bejeweled by the silent moon in the window, how the minutes and hours keep dying off with the inevitability of orchestrated dominoes and how little the natural progression of things pays heed to a new absence. And I almost feel that it's this very cruelty and apathy of time which makes me want to care a little more for sake of the memories. In the surety and blandness of order I feel drawn, almost by sympathy, to those faint marks and distant sounds which constitute all that farewells are made of. Because they are just that - mere shadows of infinitesimal defects in the pristine canvas of life. Jagged edges of time folded on to itself, wrinkles in the space which repeats itself every day.

Smell, nostrils, and averted ugliness

Posted by Ankit On September 14th, 2011

I was talking with some friends today about how the nose senses smell and how one can tell where the smell is coming from when I realized a cute little hypothesis which might actually have some truth in it. It appears to me that if smell were to travel through air in the way sound or light travel, people would have been a lot uglier than they are now! And if you bear with me for just a little longer I'll try to present the arguments which support the case that I have not gone mad.

Both sound and light travel as waves through the air. I may now resort to writing the equation of a traveling wave but that would do nothing but cloud the issue. What is important is that if a disturbance travels as a wave through a medium, like sound and light do, then it is possible to make a measurement of that wave at more than 1 location and say something about the location of the source of the wave. That is why we have two eyes and two ears because if we had only one of each then we would not have been able to determine the location of sources of sounds or the depths of objects. The accuracy with which the location of the source can be determined depends upon the distance between the points at which the measurements are made. In general, the closer they are to each other, the more inaccurate the assessment of the location. Now it is not hard to see how the accurate and efficient evaluation of sounds and objects would have been a winning and desirable strategy in the game of evolution. Therefore nature, being the brilliant designer that she is, has separated our two eyes and two ears by a considerable distance. To my limited biological knowledge, it appears true with all other species but I would be interested to know if this assessment is not correct. In fact, I would go as far as saying that if a sufficiently evolved alien specie were to be discovered on another planet and if it had auditory and visual sensors, they would most probably be in pairs (if not more) and that they would be separated on the 'face'.

This brings me to the point of this post. Smell doesn't travel through air like a wave and, therefore, its source cannot be as easily located in space as the sources of sound or light. The only way in which the source location problem can be tackled for smell, it appears to me, is by using its intensity and this is an inherently more inefficient way than by using the phase information for sound or light waves. Intensity processing also doesn't require measurements separated in space. It appears, therefore, that nature could do only so much for smell localization. It bestowed upon its creatures more sensitive noses but their nostrils were packed together because there is no inherent advantage in having them spread apart. And now the final picture emerges. If only smell traveled through space like sound and light do, our nostrils would most probably have been spread apart and what a ghastly scene that would have constituted! With twice the number of independent facial fissures humanity would surely have been a trainwreck, and for all we know it may just be possible that that quintessential fuel of the evolutionary machinery, mating, may have been resolutely refused by all. It would really have been a nightmare!

Sounds of the Tambourine

Posted by Ankit On August 18th, 2011

Though I know that evenin's empire has returned into sand
Vanished from my hand
Left me blindly here to stand but still not sleeping
My weariness amazes me, I'm branded on my feet
I have no one to meet
And the ancient empty street's too dead for dreaming.

and I remember those days when I would go to the beach and stand on the shore, looking at the crimson sunset and the ocean surface upon which it melted into a golden denoument, and the flock of birds in pristine geometric patterns wading across the sky in inky silhouettes against a backdrop of clouds in all hues of orange. I would hear the distant sound of the crashing waves and interspersed within it the faint notes of people patiently looking, waiting for that one moment when sky and the water are separated by the final breath of the dying Sun. I remember being so completely taken by the grandeur of it all that I would feel overcome with an overwhelming weariness and an intense inertia against the idea of being at any other place except that. And I would look on long after the evening's empire had returned into sand having taken with it all of my energy and all my purposes.

I have often wondered what is it about Dylan's 'Tambourine Man' which I love so much and perhaps it has to do with the immediacy with which his lines capture some of my fondest emotions. That a beautiful sunset evokes in me a heavy, even sad feeling more than it evokes fascination is something I could never have been aware of, had I not read it in someone else's words. The final paragraph of the song is the most poignant ode to freedom I have ever read. Freedom not in its parochial sense but in its deepest, most intense form. So fundamental that it escapes both a coherent definition and also the root of its own rebellion but is gracefully manifest in the images which the lines provoke - like the credits of a movie, like a swan song, like the final page of a great book, an afterthought of a dot below an elaborate signature - an ending silent, aloof and contented:

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.

Proust and Reading

Posted by Ankit On August 11th, 2011

In those times when I'm reading Proust or listening to Gulzar do I sometimes feel that my own linguistic inadequacy prevents me from expressing my own thoughts with the transparency and delicacy that I hold so dear in the language of some of the masters. There is something about Proust's prose, for example, which not only tells you, the reader, a story but transports you into the shoes of the narrator himself. From that point onward his fears and happiness, his visual memory, his observations are all yours and you feel being torn apart by grief and by exhilaration, you feel someone else's memory affecting you with such intensity that it comes as a surprise that you are merely reading someone else's account. If only you are ready to be swept away not by the words on the page but by the images those words are evoking, it will become a ride like none other. Your own love stories, not having been put in such perfection of thoughts, would appear bland, your own life, not having access to such sensitivity, would appear worthless. And while you are perfectly aware that there is nothing particularly heroic about his recollections and that there is none of the glamour of adventure that we associate with interesting tales, you are aware that there is something far more poignant about what he has to say. He speaks about life. Imperfect, immoral, nervous and weak life and he speaks about it in the only way it's worth listening to. There is nothing of the blandness of mediocrity, supplicating for your attention and sympathy. His artistry demands attention and you cannot look away.

I believe that this is one of the foremost purpose of art. To make life presentable. To free it from its sorry drudgery, to liberate it from its already penned down certainty. Love stories are a dime a dozen but good love stories are few and far between. Human struggle is a mighty boring subject unless it's narrated by a good raconteur. There is no limit to which I would not go in order to avoid listening to the heartbreak of love but if it's the story of Swann, ah, that's a different thing. Reading literature for the story sounds unappealing to me. Reading it in order to gain some life perspective out of it is a positively disgusting idea. I love reading for the style of it and for the fact that through its misty vague glasses the jagged edges of life appear smooth, its torn troglodytic appearance seems presentable, even beautiful, and because life in its original unadorned form is too crude, too uncivilized, and too vulgar to be a satisfactory subject of cogitation.

The Selfish Gene

Posted by Ankit On July 25th, 2011

Richard Dawkins wrote his best known work, The Selfish Gene, in the late 70s and initiated a silent and powerful revolution in the field of evolutionary biology. This was much before when he went nuts and started introducing himself as a militant atheist, writing books with titles like The God Delusion. I personally never heard of anyone who stopped believing in God just because Dawkins told so. If God is a bad idea, which I think it is in a qualified sense, it will slowly be evolved out of the gene pool (or the meme pool to be exact.)

The Selfish Gene, on the other hand, is a triumph of the intellect. It presents the theory of evolution in a way which makes the whole process tautological and the reasoning and the evidence are so beautifully presented that you cannot but marvel at the simplicity of it all. I came to understand that in the general parlance evolution is thought of in completely wrong terms. To think of it as the survival of the individual or the specie is not only simplistic, it's just plain wrong. When we talk about survival of an entity in evolutionary terms, we must at least refer to survival on a time scale large enough for the slow process of evolution to affect. Individuals and groups just do not exist on a time scale that large. The facets which do get shaped by evolutionary forces are traits and characteristics of organisms and they are controlled by gene manifestations in the DNA. It is, therefore, quite logical that evolution through natural selection must act on this small entity - the gene. It is an added benefit that by thinking of evolution in the genetic terms one can easily explain the emergence of altruism and cooperation. Dawkins does it with the delightful example of the Prisoner's Dilemma and other game theory explanations. The gene centric view of evolution also did something which appears lacking in the naive understanding of it: the theory became predictive in a restricted sense, correctly predicting sex-ratios in insect colonies among other things.

It is unnecessary to say at this point that I loved the book and that I would recommend it to prospective readers but I would like to add a qualification here. Dawkins is an exceedingly sharp guy and while reading his book I often got the unnerving feeling that he is smart enough to lead me to believe anything. He is a master reasoner and I didn't know where the boundaries of my belief in him lay. All I could do is trust that he was being rigorous because I never knew what to suspect!

Adieu

Posted by Ankit On July 15th, 2011

K2 is finally leaving the 1 Miramar apartment that I shared with him for a little more than 2 years and I went to see him and my old place for perhaps the last time. I now realize that I have a special attachment to that place because I associate the 2 years that I spent there as the most formative and definitive years in making the person that I am today. More than all my childhood and more than all my college years. It's hard to explain why should such a seemingly nondescript place be associated with such importance. After all it was just an apartment!

Maybe this attachment has to do with the fact that during those 2 years I had the fortune of interacting with some exceedingly sharp people whom I have come to respect a lot. Their smartness isn't necessarily academic but has deeper origins. Wide ranging knowledge, a perpetually questioning attitude, varied interests, views in which nothing is sacrosanct, an almost artistic anarchy of disposition, passion of some form or the other, and sustained intelligence. I believe that this set of people was special and that I would have been at a loss had I been almost anywhere else during my grad studies. For all my cynicism and, as MV never tires to impress upon me, elitism, for all the disconnect that I now feel with conventional social expectations, I do believe that I have learned to derive pleasure from things which have a more personal, more individual, and more innocent origin - and I would not trade it for anything.

More than just meeting such intelligent people I associate the place with being a roller-coaster of an emotional ride. Some windowed lights which never really extinguished, scattered shards of promises, caffeinated memories, a slowly swinging gaze into nothingness, surreal stories with abrupt endings, hope in the glass and aural disappointment, full moon and cloudy skies. Periodic taps on the plastic table, phantom impressions on the grass, cold touch of iron and rustle of concrete, a melange of academic woes, the reassuring release of a single shot, some sketches half sketched, and some stories half told.

I entered the place for the last time today and was instantly aware of its distinctive, although extremely faint, smell. And the past came rushing back to me - in flashes, more vivid, more immediate, more real than reality itself. The present had been deformed, disintegrated, and dismantled to give way to the form of reality that I felt so nostalgic about. And I fit the missing pieces, very indulgently and very carefully, with nuggets from my recollections. That faint smell which I knew so well reminded me of a few lines by Proust:

'But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.'

Good luck K2. I had a good time :).

All Greek and Latin

Posted by Ankit On July 9th, 2011

The other day I was talking to a Greek friend of mine when I realized, perhaps for the first time in my life, that there exist people in this world who actually use symbols like , etc. to communicate! I was so completely overwhelmed by this realization that I ended up spending the next half an hour imagining the various trials and tribulations that such a race must have to go through. It appeared to me, following almost as a corollary (!), that these people must be good at mathematics. That the sweet and elusive harmony of algebra which is buried somewhere deep within the machinations of the Greek alphabet must be transparent to them. By extension, obviously, these people must have a headstart in every other field which has chosen to express some subspace of this real world in this alphabet. This must evidently lead to unrealistic expectations from the young ones and it must invariably happen that every so often when a Greek is born whose genes may have mutated to not be automatically receptive to the Greek alphabet, thus leading to his subpar performance in mathematics, he must end up leading a socially isolated existence for the rest of his life. It would be a bit like being born an Indian and not being able to tolerate spice, or being born an optimistic Russian, or perhaps being born a centipede but with 99 legs. Even if we are ready to gloss over balance, such a centipede, I imagine, would try to fit in a society made up of centipedes but would be immediately frowned upon once the other centipedes count his legs. In much the same way, a Greek with subpar mathematics skills would find it difficult to justify his existence if he doesn't understand the function.

Then I started thinking about how the Greek alphabet is used by non-Greeks to express mathematics. It seemed to me that there exists an automatic and unsaid hierarchy of mathematical symbols in academia and one is expected to catch on to it without ever being explicitly told. People in academia tend to use Roman letters (a, b etc.) only to represent trivial things. Roman letters are likely to be used in a construction like, 'if a+b is 2 and a is 1 then what is b.' Such a construction is obviously primitive and no self respecting academician would ever accept to knowing the answer! The only people who still think seriously about such constructions are number theorists and that's only because they make the problem a tad more respectable by bringing in in the mix. Now I do this too. I do tend to use the lower case Roman alphabet for the most trivial of things - well mostly explanatory text. Then come the capitalized Roman letters which, on their day, may be used for vectors. But when it comes to higher order tensors it's got to be Greek alphabets. Lower case Greek alphabets for the garden variety order tensors but upper case ones for the most hardcore of equations which, as a corollary, must always be taken with a grain of salt.

Sometimes I wonder what the human society would have done without the invention of these symbols. This alphabet which is the mathematical equivalent of 'Here, now take me seriously,' has had a constant presence in most if not all serious scientific papers in the fields of maths, physics and engineering. I wonder how the Greeks actually deal with this problem. I asked this to my Greek friend and she thought for a bit and replied 'we use the Greek symbols for all the trivial stuff and the Roman numerals for some of the serious things.' 'Do they also walk on their heads?' I thought. I was completely stunned at this final revelation and was left reeling at the thought of reading one their papers. It would be a bit like the story of the boy who cried wolf. There was a boy who mischievously cried 'wolf' one too many times for others to believe him on the one time when he cried honestly. And there may very well be a Greek who mischievously said things were important one too many times for me to believe him on the one time when things actually may have been important.

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