Heartstrings

Words that are tied up with memories so pleasant and painful at the same time that you took them, packed them up, and tossed them in a box somewhere. With just enough deliberate carelessness that you could, in retrospect, think of them as trivial. There are places long forgotten where you, a middle aged man with a weak constitution, wrote your name upon royal cream paper with a J pen. Paper can be consumed by flames, but songs cannot be unlistened. And then it comes on on the radio, preceded by an announcer with a voice that is altogether too bloody cheerful for your taste, and the chords proceed to melt your soul for a while.

Springtime

Or,

Buttercup Festival

Idols of fact and fiction

(This was originally going to be a post about statistics, with pretty pictures; or something about Orwell, but I couldn't be arsed so I just started typing wildly. Perhaps next time).

When I was very young, ("about this high", as people often say), my grandmother would tell me stories from the Ramayan, the Mahabharat, and  about other figures from ancient Indian mythology. I ploughed through Rajagopalchari's translations of both in a couple of days. And I wanted to be Bhishma, who stalled the wrath of Parshuram himself, and Drona, who could defeat the greatest warriors and hold forth on the Vedas with equal ease, and the war-hungry Satyaki of the Vrishnis, who smashed Drona's bow a hundred and one times on the Kurukshetra battlefield. I wanted to be  Harishchandra, and Karna, men who would go to their death to uphold truth and generosity.

And then second and third standard came, and I wanted to be Squadron Leader Trevor Keelor, who shot down multiple Sabres in the miserably under-powered Gnat in the '65 war; and Arun Khetrapal of the Poona Horse who died in the equally barbarous and gentlemanly war where officers were awarded medals based on citations from the other side. And then I read Carl Sagan, and George Gamov, and the war machines gradually morphed into spaceships, and I wanted to be Rakesh Sharma, or Kalpana Chawla, fliers rising above the petty conflicts of this earth. 

And I read about how India had risen from the twin shackles of a backward society and a foreign ruler, and I wanted to be Peshwa Nana Saheb, the last of the Peshwas; Nehru, who went to Harrow, and Cambridge, and Naini Central prison, and who watched over India to the last while struggling to be liked by his people. 

I read about mathematics and science, and number theory and geometry and combinatorics, and I wanted to be Gauss, who wrote things in his notebooks that people would publish papers about after fifty years, and Newton, whose anonymous solution to the brachistochrone problem forced Bernoulli to say, "We know the lion by his claw", and Galois, the twenty-year old who furiously scribbled down what would become the basis of group theory the night before he would be killed in a duel over a woman. I was also busy reading poetry and fiction (for some reason Dickens is, or at least used to be the preferred vehicle of teaching schoolchildren English in the 90s). In the midst of adolescent confusion, I wanted to be John Keats, whose poems were actually readable, and Tennyson, whose verse was incredibly stirring for a clueless innocent boy in the seventh. 

And I read and devoured more fiction, and I was, at once the Scarlet Pimpernel and Athos the musketeer and  Etienne Gerard and Sherlock Holmes and Sherlock Holmes and Mowgli. And then came computers and BASIC and LOGO and green and black screens and keyboards that went clickety-click and Linux, and I was Alan Turing and Neo and Torvalds and Stallman. And more philosophy, and history, and I was Scipio Africanus, who vanquished the much more well-known Hannibal. And Marcus Aurelius, and Socrates, and Prince Andrei Bolkonski, and innumerable others.

I still don't know what I shall be when I grow up.

The Spice of Life

It's been a long time since I read a book that was simultaneously very thought-provoking, and extremely easy to read through. At any given time, I'm generally burning through a bunch of fictional books, (recently, several Alexander McCall Smith books, Middlemarch, and Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town), and slowly leafing through others in bursts of a hundred pages every two weeks or so (War and Peace, Brideshead Revisited). Last week, this series of essays by Chesterton entitled The Spice of Life seemed fated to end up in the latter category. However, about ten pages in, and I knew I would be finishing it off in the next two days.

Like G.K. Chesterton's only other novel that I have read (The Man Who Was Thursday), this contains a mix of light-hearted philosophy mixed with spiritualism, a smattering of thoughts that run very deep, but seem on the surface not to take themselves too seriously. He writes about a series of topics, including writing different kinds of literature ("How to Write a Detective Story"), classic English literature that is all too familiar to those of us who were educated in India in the 90s ("Disputes on Dickens", "The Macbeths"), philosophical observations on real life ("The Peasant"), and suchlike. Some of the ones on Christianity give the impression of Chesterton struggling to find evidence of his faith in random aspects of life. But apart from these, the essays are fairly light and most importantly, pleasurable reading.

 Some choice quotes from the collection. Anyone who likes these will probably enjoy the essays.

"Let it be understood that I write this article as one wholly conscious that he has failed to write a detective story. But I have failed a good many times. My authority is therefore practical and scientific, like that of some great statesman or social thinker dealing with Unemployment or the Housing Problem."  (How to Write A Detective Story)

"Now secular education really means that everybody shall make a point of looking down at the pavement, lest by some fatal chance somebody should look up at the lamp. The lamp of faith that did in fact illuminate the street for the mass of mankind in most ages of history, was not only a wandering fire seen floating in the air by visionaries; it was also for most people the explanation of the post. If a low cloud like a London fog must indeed cover that flame, then it is an objective fact that the object will remain chiefly as an object to be bumped into. I am not blaming anybody who can only manage to regard the world in that highly objective light. Even if the lamp-post appears as a post without a lamp, and therefore a post without a purpose, it may be possible to take different views of it. The stoic, like the tramp, may lean on it; the optimist, like the drunkard, may embrace it; the progressive may attempt to climb it, and so on. So it is with those who merely bump into a headless world as into a lampless post; to whom the world is a large objective obstacle. I only say that there is a difference, and not a small or secondary difference, between those who know and those who do not know what the post is for." - (The Religious Aim of Education)

"In this connection I think the educational arrangement about holidays has long been a ludicrous mistake. Holiday tasks are a mistake. Home-work is a mistake. Give the boy or girl less holidays if you think they need less. But be sufficiently businesslike to get the best out of the boy or girl for whatever concession you make to them. If you can excuse anyone from work, you can excuse him from worry. Leisure is a food, like sleep; liberty is a food, like sleep. Leisure is a matter of quality rather than quantity. Five minutes lasts longer when one cannot be disturbed than five hours when one may be disturbed. Restrict the liberty in point of time; restrict it in point of space; but do not restrict it in point of quality. If you give somebody only three seconds' holiday - then, by all the remains of your ruined sense of honour, leave him alone for three seconds" - (On Holidays) 

The more you learn..

This post of Aniket's made me think about why I don't write a lot any more. For a bit more than two years now, I have been twelve thousand miles away from the delightful, cosy little city I was born in. Working, laughing, and falling into twin extremes of joy and sorrow in a place halfway 'round the world which is unbearably muggy for four months of the year, and freezing cold for the rest. (In fairness, fall in Michigan is beautiful, I'm not exactly doing it justice. Nonetheless.)

When a lot of new vistas open up to you, there is a certain kind of apprehension about writing about your experiences. There is a story I remember reading as a child; that when Huygens first saw that Saturn's rings, unattached to the planet but still somehow floating around it; he was pretty terrified. He didn't think of it as a triumph of discovery, but wrote it down in a notebook in a couplet in Latin or something. I have never bothered to check on this story - it's delightful even if it is untrue, and makes for good dinner table conversation. (Incidentally, "smart" phones destroy these anecdotal soundbites, but that is a topic I shall touch upon another time). So anyway, I am but a kind of Huygens - trying to make a bit of sense of things which I realise I have little idea about.

The more you learn, the less you write. Or do you? Is it better to rust away while growing wise under the patina of the years, or is it more meaningful to polish up your writing, put your thoughts on paper, "get it out", as I remember an article by Churchill in the Reader's Digest saying? I think I might be practicing a bit more of the latter henceforth. Just not enough to get boring.

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Linux users these days

Speaking of which, while browsing the ubuntu forums the other day to resolve a kernel panic issue, I came upon a gem of a post from someone that went something like, 

"I really hate how they wasted time teaching us LOGO at high school when they could have been teaching us useful skills like using Word and Excel"

I can only hope it was a troll looking for a reaction. Otherwise, we're well and truly doomed in 2012.

Trip to Meijer Sculpture Gardens and Grand Haven

On Deaf Ears

In the final chapter of his famous book, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Gandhiji ends with a moving and thought-provoking farewell indeed.

"Identification with everything that lives is impossible without self- purification; without self- purification the observance of the law of Ahimsa must remain an empty dream; God can never be realized by one who is not pure of heart. Self-purification therefore must mean purification in all the walks of life. And purification being highly infectious, purification of oneself necessarily leads to the purification of one's surroundings.

But the path of self-purification is hard and steep. To attain to perfect purity one has to become absolutely passion-free in thought, speech and action; to rise above the opposing currents of love and hatred, attachment and repulsion. I know that I have not in me as yet that triple purity, in spite of constant ceaseless striving for it. That is why the world's praise fails to move me, indeed it very often stings me. To conquer the subtle passions to me to be harder far than the physical conquest of the world by the force of arms. Ever since my return to India I have had experience of the dormant passions lying hidden with in me. The knowledge of them has made me feel humiliated though not defeated. The experiences and experiments have sustained me and given me great joy. But I know that I have still before me a difficult path to traverse. I must reduce myself to zero. So long as a man does not of his own free will put himself last among his fellow creatures, there is no salvation for him. Ahimsa is the farthest limit of humility."

Makes me wonder : We call him the Father of the Nation, but how much of Gandhiji's precepts do we actually even think about putting into practice? Do we ever even make the slightest effort towards trying to reach "the farthest limit of humility"?

Based on my experiences, specially for the last seven years or so, I would say that we do not. We pay lip service to the Father of our nation, and are possibly committing a far greater mistake than those who do not agree with his teachings, or are ignorant of them.