Its gone too far

I, P B, hereby declare that I will not watch, read about, talk about, or in any way encourage the proliferation of any event, product, person or subject that has any connection to cricket in India.

Here's a story.

After much huffing and puffing and tension, my exams finally got over on the 28th of Jan 2008. and then, instead of breathing a sigh of relief and enjoying for a few days, I had a take home exam to do to be sumbitted on the 13th of february for a subject we freshers had been advised not to take on account of its advanced nature (and so of course, I went and took it. I insist on finding new instruments for my lazyness to torture me with). I had reconciled myself to my 10 day holiday being washed out in yet another tense period of wasted time and desperate concentrated work coupled with irritated house-hunting (the latter the courtesy of the VUB housing department), but my parents had other ideas. They had decided that I was working too much (hear ! hear !) and needed a vacation. They dint say it, but they clearly thought I was becoming(?) psycho, sitting in my room all day, eating by myself, not meeting people and generally brooding over a cold grey cityscape and inscrutable equations and growing slowly but surely fatter and balder. (all of which happens to be true) So, when my dad visited me on the 29th, he was quite insistent that I finish my paper before friday (thats today) and go meet some friends in Switzerland over the weekend. the more he spoke of it, the more inviting it seemed, and I promised that I'd do something about it. So, after I got back to my room before lunch on the 30th (I was in Brussels with dad) I promptly took my computer over to Aditya's place (apart from being a splendid chap with a large room, his landlord provides free, fast, unlimited download wifi access) and proceeded to watch some 10-15 episodes of the Xfiles well into the night.

I slept feeling quite guilty. So the next day (the 31st, yesterday) I woke up before lunch and found out that the housing problem had been kind of, more or less, solved, but my internet was not working and my phone was lost. Understandably, I thought myself exceptionally vulnerable to attacks by hi-tech psychopaths and alien abductions, so I spent most of the afternoon fixing my internet and finding my phone (which I had forgotten at Aditya's place obviously) and so on. I gave my nonlinear optics a cursory glance and in the night, settled down for another bout of the x files in my room. By the time I slept I had realized that the time had come for desperate measures.

I woke up today morning and decided that I must go to Switzerland and meet the few friends I had there and take a break (theres irony in there somewhere). I realized (admitted is a better word perhaps) that I'd never get down to work unless I gave myself a fixed inflexible deadline. So the obvious course of action was to book my tickets to switzerland and then make myself finish the needful before then. So I thought to myself - thursday I go to Switzerland, spend friday and saturday there, back on sunday, and next semester starts on monday, so by wednesday, I have to finish my exam, attend a meeting in brussels on monday, wind up my affairs in Gent, arrange for my luggage to be shifted to Brussels in my absence, and make arrangements for Aditya (who is staying in my room for a week because his contract expired in January).

Easy.

So I started looking at the various low cost airlines. I needed to go to Zurich, thats where the chaps are, but Zurich turns out to be an expensive place to fly to. So I was prepared to fly to anywhere in switzerland, and there were 10 open tabs with any number for airports and flights and few were affordable. Finally, I saw a list which read something like

Basel - EUR180
Bern - EUR132
Geneva - EUR156
Zurich - EUR1023
Nice - EUR3

AHA ! I said to myself ! finally ! So I clicked on the last dot, filled in my card details, paid, got my ticket in my mail and as I was about to print it out, I saw something that should have been horribly obvious right at the beginning - Nice is in FRANCE !!!!! its 600km from Zurich ! and the flight is on Tuesday !!

But the deed was done. The gods had spoken. there was no turning back. . . . . since then, I have bought myself a nice medium sized backpack and a good North Face jacket (my first major non food expenses in europe and they wiped out my savings for january) and helped Aditya move to my room and fixed an appointment to wind up my room contract on tuesday afternoon. I leave for Nice on tuesday night, reach there at 10. I'll spend a day or two around Nice I guess and then go to Switzerland either via Grenoble or Milan (I've been to north Italy, so Grenoble seems a more interesting but less convenient option) and my flight back from Geneva reaches Brussels at the exact time that the first class of my next semester is supposed to start. I dont know where I'll stay in Brussels when I get back and what I'll wear to college on the first day, but I dont care.

As usual, I'm in a tight corner, but I can assure you, its a lot better than being rooted in front of a flickering screen in a dark room feeding on cheap vicarious thrills ! I'm looking forward to wide landscapes, the sea, the mountains, the flavours of faraway cities and the winds of foreign lands :-) Should be fun, especially after 4 months of motionlessness :-)

And there is the small matter of doing 2 months worth of work in 2 days, but thats routine. Thats precisely what my Bachelors degree was about :-)

Thats Chitrangada Singh - for those of you unfortunate enough never to have seen her before. Her first movie was the superbly made "Hazaaron Khwaahishein Aisi" (2003) - a movie that lingers in the mind long long after its over. It is set in the 1970's in Calcutta and traces the stories of 3 characters who - in all their flawed tragedy - symbolize the spirit of those times. But the movie goes further than that, it makes the viewer ask himself fundamental questions about his own ideas of morality and idealism. It left me slightly disturbed and slightly sad. I watched it more than a year ago, and it still comes back to me sometimes, undiminished in its power, pain and the aftertaste of melancholy. And the most stunning performace in the movie belongs undoubtedly to Chitrangada Singh. 'The Lamp to the other characters Moths' as someone put it. She carries herself superbly, and is polished, understated, intelligent, sensual and flawed in her choice of men (in my opinion anyway :D ) Shiney Ahuja puts in a splendid performance in what is his debut movie as well, and his character provides the conscience for the movie, an upwardly mobile, ambitious and crude, but faithful and passionate counterpoint to the self righteous, misplaced and ultimately fickle idealism of the well heeled and well off. A movie well worth the time, surely one of the most remarkable movies ever made in Hindi.

Chitrangada acted in only one other movie called "Kal - Tomorrow and Yesterday" (2005) which was a well made thriller aimed at the so called multiplex audience. And then she got married to "ace golfer" Jyoti Randhawa and has never acted in a movie since. Mr. Randhawa had better be shaking up the golfing world in a big way soon, because he has taken away the lady who is Indian Cinema's best young actress by a long long way. Had she continued (and she still can come back) she could have been to our generation what Smita Patil was to the last. A beacon of intelligence and beauty in a world populated increasingly with 'item girls'.

She will be missed !

__________________________

ख्वाब तो मैंने बहुत देखे है, लेकिन दिल लगा कर खेले हुए बरसों बीत गए. शब्द बड़ी आसानी से निकलते है मुह से, मन मे महल बड़ी आसानी से बनते है, लेकिन डाव लगता नही है मुझसे, ज़ंग लड़ी नही जाती, मंजिल तै नही कर पता हूँ मैं - लाब्जों की दीवारों के पीछे छुपकर मुकर जाता हूँ मैं. हारना तो मैं जानता ही नही हूँ - मैंने खेलना ही कहाँ सीखा है ! ख़यालों मे खोया, फ़र्ज़ निभाना भूल चूका हूँ मै. बडे दिन हुए सिर उठाके चले हुए - हर मोड़ पे गलत रास्तों पर बिखर जाता हूँ मैं.

"हजारों ख्वाहिशें ऐसी
की हर ख्वाहिश पे दम निकले,
बहुत निकले मेरे अरमान
लेकिन फिर भी काम निकले . . "

I have seen the light

I write this to remind myself of that fact.

Exams, Cricket etc

I've become very bored and too comfortable in the middle of the exams. I liked my subjects while I was studying them, I was excited, but now that the exams are here they have become a drag. I fail to see how performance in an exam can be a good criterion for judging a masters level student's aptitude for research, and they are certainly a HUGE waste of time for all concerned, so I'm very surprised to find the intense, lengthy exam periods these people in Belgium have. I am keen to get done with them as soon as possible and get on to the next semester of learning. I am quite disappointed to find that "careless mistakes" are still very much a part of me, and my math exam which could so easily have been a triumph has left me feeling quite disappointed and a little bit helpless. To be honest, at least some of the lack of focus that might have resulted in the mistakes I made will have to be attributed to my excessive involvement in the tumultuous exploits of the Indian Cricket Team.

There have been reams and reams written about the Sydney match, and I have soaked it all up. I have read every blog, every article and followed every comment and its aftermath. I have seen all the videos on youtube and I have reached the conclusion that the whole matter is too obvious to comment on, and that I have nothing to add to the huge body of material already published (and indeed, is still being published). But, I do support the Indian team, not just because they are the Indian team and the underdogs but because most of them are gentlemen worth emulating in many respects.

I do wish they'd come up with some steely performances and win though. I miss India !


Update (20-01-2008) - Yesterday, they did exactly that ! A magnificent win at Perth !

On Solitude

I have had unparalleled opportunity to be alone with myself and meditate, both upon my life and upon my subjects, and (I regret to say) after making a very promising start 3 months ago I rather tired of my quiet isolation and yearned for the company of old friends and the comfort of old haunts, the warmth of home and the careless lethargy of an unambitious life. The splendid solitude of the earnest savant that I so relished at the outset of this journey became a burden and slowly I wandered from the path of learning, maintaining enough of a hold to keep track but not enough to delight in it. As I have so many times before, I saw the light and somehow, I forgot. I have been competent all this semester, but there was the opportunity to be exceptional, to be inspired, and I squandered it in my indolence, my mind clouded by false concerns and intellectual diversions just engaging enough to hide the damage being done.

Just this afternoon while I mused upon life, I identified "a willingness to be alone" as the factor that separates the definitively ordinary from the potentially great. I then realized that in this semester, that was exactly where I was found wanting. I could, after a point, no longer sustain the mental focus that forms the basis of productive meditative solitude, and it became all too easy to find ways to be entertained and thus not have to think. Being alone induces a state of honesty and introspection that many people find abhorrent, and I - having conquered the daemons of self deceit - threw away for no reason the purity of mind earned over weeks of silent work and thought. I reached the very edge of genius and turned back, unable to maintain order and peace when they were most important.

Genius is a state of mind, and it is earned through sustained meditative work. If I dont get there in the next year or two, I will never get there. There is a definite window of opportunity, I know the path, I have but to walk it, my mind at peace and my voices silent.

I Sea.

The Giant Squid (genus Architeuthis) has been photographed alive in the wild only once (2004) and taken on video alive only once (2006), on both occasions by a Japanese expedition. Giant Squid are the stuff of countless maritime legends, but their existence has been scientifically confirmed only for a couple of centuries (in 1888 to be precise), and attempts to study them have been severely limited by their propensity to die as soon as they are captured. Most of the specimen studied are those that wash up on beaches and are thus in very bad shape. It was once thought that giant squid were primarily delicate drifters which just ate whatever happened to pass by. However, the photographs taken by the Japanese team (with the help of a baited hook) show much more robust and belligerent predatory behaviour.

To me, this raises some interesting issues. In any ecosystem predators tend to be more intelligent and capable of adaption than other animals. Surely, the fact that the Giant Squid is a predator (of a fairly aggressive sort too) means it might have a brain capacity greater than once thought. My speculation is of course, fueled by the fact that they have large and (even in death) disconcertingly conscious looking eyes, and their bodies look very much like the elongated shapes of super intelligent aliens one so often sees in charming sci-fi magazines (which seem to primarily come out of America. A population that has supported science fiction for 70 years cant be all bad !) and thus the whole effect begs the question, what sort of intelligence do Giant Squid possess ?

And it turns out that the brain of the squid is very large and complex and it has a very highly developed nervous system. But what really intrigues me, is that they might posses that faculty to which might be attributed all of human progress - curiosity. Again and again through history sailors have reported squid checking their ships out, even attacking them, far outside their zone of comfort which is deep cold waters. In fact, coming to the surface leaves them very vulnerable to attack by sperm whales (who the squid can only beat by preventing them from coming to the surface to breathe). But squid, more than any other deep sea creature (save the sharks perhaps, who will attack anything that moves) seem to have a fascination for human craft. The encounters of giant squid and human vessels have been well documented in recent years, and even if one discounts the legends (though they were right about the existence of the giant squid after all) there is surely a case to investigate further the cognitive capabilities of the giant squid. Furthermore, if we can be offended by the killing of whales (and everyone here in europe seems to be absolutely outraged by japan killing whales) then surely surely, we ought to extend the same concern to a creature who is certainly a worthy adversary to the whale, and might be just as intelligent. I would love to know the results of any tests that might be conducted on Giant squid in the wild in the future, and their response to various stimuli.

Something in their eyes tells me they're smarter than we think :-) Wikipedia, Youtube and Google yeild some interesting results on them Squid. and the Giant Squid is not the end..apparently there is something called "Colossal Squid" ! :-) I love the deep seas almost as much as space and they are so much more accessible and plausible too !

Surely one of the most fascinating things to explore in the deep sea are the extremophilic lifeforms that live there (and they have been caught on film in a visually stunning but otherwise mediocre documentary. What a waste ! the possibilities for that documentary were immense), under incredible pressures and near hydrothermal vents with superboiled water that cant evaporate due to the pressure. They prove that complex life forms can arise even in areas devoid of sunlight, drawing their energy from deep sea vents that spew sulphur and other compounds that are harvested by sulphur eating bacteria (which are also fairly common near volcanic vents) as well as other larger lifeforms and they fuel a food chain based on sulphur instead of oxygen. A whole new biology which has evolved independently of the rest of the world. And the volcanic vents are many times widely seperated making biological exchange between them impossible, so there might be (and probably are) many independently evolving ecosystems (planets for all practical purposes) under the sea ! When a vent shuts down (as must happen every once in a while) so does one entire ecosystem around it. The sea floor must be littered with them. Arthur C. Clarke envisioned this kind of life on Europa (I dont know if he was the first one) and speculated as to the evolution of intelligence in such circumstances. Why not ? It is a challenging and constantly evolving environment. But of course, any given vent might not last long enough for intelligence to evolve (but then again, who is to give Nature a time limit ?) and it has been speculated that Sulphur based metabolism is not efficient enough to sustain intelligent brains (but maybe our brains are energy inefficient, spoilt by the abundance of oxygen). It is certainly possible.

One does not even need to go deep into the sea to find extremophiles and species evolving seperately from our ecosystem. They can be found in caves, and the way troglobites have evolved, very obviously from terrestrial creatures that went into the caves and stayed there, and how different they now are, is surely a brilliant and dramatically clear illustration of evolution at work ! and america has some of the most remarkable caves. Take the evangelicals to the caves I say, and maybe they will see the light. And their world view is as backward as cavemen anyway. (okay okay, sorry, but I could not resist that) In the deep caves too one sees sulphur eating bacteria and a food chain that has them at its base, though its not as dramatic as the sea based ones. Here too, one sees different species in every cave ! thats evolution.

All this of course, goes some way to reassuring us of the tenacity of the phenomenon we call life, and increases our hopes of finding it somewhere nearby. And if some signs of tool making and intelligence - however rudimentary - were to be found somewhere deep in the sea, it would change the way we look at ourselves, and remind us of our transience. We will be lucky if someone finds the shells of what we once considered our achievements and wonders if they are signs of intelligence.

Let there be Light

I dont know how else to put it - I have been taken over by science. Physics and mathematics are all I seem to be able to talk about, my thoughts revolve around questions as arcane and arbit to most other people as they are delightful to me - questions about everyday life, and the world around us.....a common one, "How is a rainbow made ?" the answer to that is surprisingly intricate and pretty and hides some nice complexities in a particularly beautiful phenomenon. (wikipedia is quite good on this check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow) Another one, seen as almost trivial by many people is "why is the sky blue ?" that deals with rayleigh scattering, which is the simplest type of scattering and if you want to look deeper into scattering you quickly get into Raman scattering and Brillouin scattering and nonlinear optics (which is my bane this semester).....and then there is the small (and some would say pressing) matter of increasing the efficiency of solar cells and that question takes you to quantum dots, Excitons, and a maze of quantum mechanical equations and greek letters one will despair of ever figuring out (if you have the heart to read them at all).....if you study the subject of light (as I happen to do), you will come across many wonderful phenomena, photonic crystals, mirrors that dont invert left to right, amplifiers that are based on light diffracting off a diffraction grating made by light ! or sound !!!

It is an interesting thing, to stay in "middle europe" - a prosperous and gray city, a class filled to the brim with geniuses as well as arbit characters, a foreign land with a different language and to study light. There is something about light. Not only to man and his mind which pines for it but also in nature. It has been the key to EVERY major theory advanced in the last two hundred years, from maxwell's electromagnetism (which first gave us a clue as to what light "actually was" (if there is such a thing as "actually being") ) through relativity (the postulate about the speed of light being constant along with the postulate of relativity of motion yeilds the whole theory ! ) (and I have always wondered, "why light ? whats so special about the speed of light ? why that number ? does it follow from somewhere else ? why cant gravitational waves, (which (at least so far, as far as I know) are not connected to light) have a speed greater or less than the speed of light ?" and the refinements in understanding make it even less comprehensible, apparently, phase fronts can and very commonly do travel faster than light, but 'information' or 'wave groups' cant ! why ? what is information exactly ? what is the relationship between information and "order" (because surely they are related, I have studied information theory at college and dealt with the concept of 'entropy' but I do not know enough thermodynamics to relate the information theoretical concept of entropy with the thermodynamic one) and what has any of that to do with fundamental limits to speed ? questions questions questions ! but they convince me that light is central to our understanding of the universe and will continue to be so for some time.) and then of course there is quantum mechanics and its connection to light is so well documented that I wont put it down. As a matter of fact, it is convoluted and complicated and dare I say it, "messy" and at the same time is wildly accurate. The universe is strange and and beautiful and unfathomable. It constantly challenges our limited brains (to be fair to them, they evolved to maximize procreation and food intake in a world where everything that mattered was macroscopic and moved slowly so its a little unfair to expect them to be naturals at relativistic and quantum mechanical phenomena, as it is, they dont do too bad - after years of frustration and training :D ) and fills our pitiful imaginations and puny hearts with awe.

Reality is the most wonderful thing we have, and we are given a staggeringly short time to contemplate it, and it pains me to think that the majority of people waste this time being scared of it and forcing themselves and their children to believe crude, simplistic, stupid and harmful stories written by the worst kind of people living in sick societies thousands of years ago. They are arrogant enough to claim that they can explain not just the origin and the present state of the universe, but also its 'purpose'. I am so stunned by the sheer arrogance of it, that I cannot think of a good enough repartee. Anyone who has studied science knows.

I am still a lazy man, and dont study as much as I should, but then there is the universe to think about ! and I miss India and its teeming millions. Europe is a very beautiful place to be lonely in. Very gray in winter, and somewhat similar to that Island mountain in another dimension in "Grimus" by Rushdie.....you can only survive if you are passionate or obsessed about something. Unfortunately in my case, being passionate about something does not imply I work terribly hard for it :D

A brilliant series from the BBC

http://freedocumentaries.org/film.php?id=135
http://freedocumentaries.org/film.php?id=136
http://freedocumentaries.org/film.php?id=137

These are links to episodes 1, 2, 3 respectively of a BBC documentary series called "The Power of Nightmares : Rise of the politics of fear". Wide ranging in scope and with some absolutely brilliant footage as well as superb and startling journalism, it surprises the viewer again and again with its calm maturity. It builds up slowly, and the three episodes really go together very closely, and it ends on an absolutely brilliant note. Made with passion and commitment, I take it to be the revenge of the BBC for the tamasha that started with Andrew Gilligan's report on a "sexed up dossier", reached its lowest, most disgraceful point with Dr. Kelly's "suicide", and ended with the recriminations that followed Lord Hutton's infamous whitewash.

Before you see another news program, watch this.

In a beautiful country of chocolates, cobbled streets, waffles, civilized rivers and quaint buildings I sit in a room and feel time flow past me. I loose myself in the current, letting the past wash over me, knowing that its over and done with. I let visions of the future, multitudinous and fantastic stalk me enticingly, knowing full well how short lived, weak and pathetic they are ! The present ? the present is nothing ! it is a point where there is only awareness of its existence. Everything else is in the past or the future - unreal, immaterial, impotent. They are the imaginary winds of our creation, we unfurl imaginary sails and set forth on fantastic journeys, borne hither and thither by gusts from our pasts and our future. Pull the sails down, and not only does the wind disappear but also the sea. All one is left with is consciousness. The present. The one point, the only point at which we know we exist.

Big Jan and the TdF

Something I stumbled across -

Associated Press
July 11, 2007

Jan Ullrich criticized former teammates Rolf Aldag and Erik Zabel for "acting like saints" once they had admitting their doping past.

Ullrich, who won the Tour de France in 1997, was one of several riders kicked out on the eve of last year's race after being implicated in a Spanish doping investigation. A sample of Ullrich's DNA was later matched to one of the blood bags in the doping affair. Several former riders of Team Telekom, including Zabel and Aldag, recently admitted they used erythropoietin in the 1990s while riding with Ullrich, who has retired and denies any wrongdoing.

"To carry on working, they need to confess their error," Ullrich said in an interview with L'Équipe, the French daily. "It makes me laugh, because I know they spoke about my case while acting like saints."

Ullrich was particularly angry over Aldag.

"When I heard Aldag talking non-stop about me on radio or on television, I was really outraged by his attitude," Ullrich said. "He made a lot of money because of me. If he found it so dirty, why did he never give it back?"

The former Olympic champion says he just wants to be left alone. "I've nothing to say, my career is over." he said.

Ouch.

The emphasis is mine. Its an unfair unfair world.

Vino is riding with 60 stitches in his knees and elbow, and most people have written him off. Kloden ought to replace him as the team leader for Astana (if logic prevails), but then I dont think he will. When Vino rode with the T-Mobile team for Ullrich with Kloden, he was always a bit of a loose gun, especially in 2005. When there was bitterness in the German team, Vino was alone and understandably, Kloden was with Ullrich. Its a Kazakh team now (along with a Russian or two), people Vino rode with in his youth - for Kazakhistan and the USSR - and Kloden is the outsider. He is way ahead of Vino in the general classification, and surely surely with 60 stitches Vino cant now claw back eight and a half minutes over the yellow jersey in the Pyranese and the two big individual time trials ! and yet all his teammates are faithfully clustered around him while Kloden rides a lonely race. Kloden fractured his tail bone too on a crash on the same day mind you, but he seems to be in good form all the same, seems quite comfortable on his bike. Vino was with the race doctor during the flat 10th stage to Marseilles today, getting the dressing on his wounds changed while still on the bike, hanging precariously on to the doctors car, his leg off the pedal, in tremendous pain. He ended yesterdays big Alpine stage in tears of exhaustion and disappointment.

"I couldn't even feel my muscles," he said. "But the worst thing was to be left behind while there were still 60 guys in front of me... It was a humiliation. I have never liked showing that I was suffering, but there I just couldn't do anything else."

Tough guy. Proud man. 60 stitches.

Logic and Limits go flying out the window.

Raireshwar, Kenjalgad and a jolly good weekend !

I reached S's mama's house in Poona late on friday night (after hitching a ride with a man who turned out to be a newspaper editor fighting for superstition !) only to find that M and N had not reached yet and that nothing had been decided for the weekend ! After assorted arrivals (everyone seemed to be surprised that nothing had been decided) a plan for the next two days was sketched out (hatched ?) with the help of an excellent book called "The Sayhadri Companion". We (four of us) slept at 1.30 and woke up at 5.30 saturday morning and left immediately for a village called Korle in Poona district in the Bhor region. The plan for the day was this - we climb up from Korle to a place called Raireshwar, traverse the ridge to Kenjalgad, climb to the top of that, climb down to Korle from there via a different route and then drive to Mahabaleshwar for the night.

We parked the car in Korle and after a bit of haggling with a local who was to show us the way, we sent him off and were on our way up at 9.15. The weather was cloudy and pleasant at this time and the path was more of a jeep track, so we were all a bit disappointed, having hoped for something rather more adventurous. We reached the top of the ridge at about 10.30. At this point the path went to the left towards Kenjalgad and one to the right to Raireshwar. By now the wind was quite strong and clouds were billowing all around. We walked along the top of the ridge for some time (and took a few photographs and videos - my last for a long time on this trek) and reached a sudden steep ascent upon which cement stairs had been built. Along the razors edge of the mountain, the wind was quite scary and the steps were a comfort. Soon, the steps gave way to 2 flights of rickety steel steps/ladders in a very steep and exposed rock outcropping. The mist around us was very dense now and we could not see much at all. The last part of the ascent was a steep but well marked rock patch with a thick rope fixed to the side. Once on top, we walked along a misty, windy and rainy plateau ( picture below) for quite some time beside lakes, through paddy fields (rice seems to be the main crop of the entire region) before stumbling upon the village temple of Rireshwar. It was a temple and location with a very unique atmosphere which I would dearly have liked to have captured on film, but the weather was foul and it was all we could do to find some shelter and have something to eat. In fact, there are no pictures in Raireshwar and no pictures till we were almost down from Kenjalgad. The most exciting parts of the trek I was unable to photograph because of the rain, I did not want to risk my camera. The temple, (which was a bit like the temples one sees in the villages of Konkan but made of black stone and looked more rugged and weather beaten and less refined - a frontier temple perhaps) as well as all the buildings around it were open and empty. Rows of houses, another temple of similar size, all seemed abandoned. We shared the shelter of one of these with a few dogs (who N felt very sorry for and she wanted to shower them with food but was prevented from doing so by vehement protests from S and me) and had a bit to eat.

The boards written in marathi in the area near the temple (which was dotted with remains of old buildings here and there) informed us that it was at this unlikely but beautiful place in this strange old temple that Shivaji with a few of his companions first declared on 22nd October (I think) 1645 that he would fight for Swaraj. I wondered what the people felt then, what did swaraj mean to them ? Did Shivaji ever return to tell the simple village folk of the swaraj he had fought and earned ? Did he really give more freedom to the common people of the Deccan ? The Cambridge University history of the Marathas rejects the notion of Shivaji as a 'Hindu King' saying that he was a maratha nobleman who did what he had to do to come to power and whose armies were a mixture of religions, locals and pathans and villagers from all over which was common to all powers on the Deccan at the time. The author says that all references to him being a 'hindu king' are later additions by hindu revivalist historians and stories of him being influnced by Ramdas Swami and Dadoji Kondev (who were both brahmins) are later brahminical additions made in order to capitalize on the popularity of Shivaji. Possible and fair enough. But then one begins to wonder if Swaraj could have actually meant anything to the village folk of the Deccan. Shivaji was a fort based king, his armies harried his enemies from high inaccessible forts and he did not have a large standing army which could protect the territorial integrity of his dominions. Invaders would regularly sweep through his lands without being able to take all his forts, and be beaten back after periods of harassment by small skilled troops riding down from his mountain strongholds. So he never really provided the majority of villages on the Deccan - the ones which did not lie in the immediate vicinity of one of his more powerful forts, any degree of security but did levy heavy taxes. So what Swaraj did he provide if not a vague religious one ? The notion that one is oppressed by someone of ones own religion and not another although it made little or no difference on the ground. It is a question that the author of the Cambridge University Press History of the Marathas needs to answer.

There were a couple of other boards, one of which told us that in 1642 a poojari named Shiva Jangam was brought to the village to perform ceremonies at the temple and was present when Shivaji made his declaration and that the family still performs the poojas at the temple, while the other board was a reproduction of an edict by Shivaji for the villagers telling them to use the resources of the forest carefully and never to rape it (literal translation). It was still raining heavily and the fog was thick when we started on our way back. We roamed the plateau of Raireshwar for 40 minutes, dashing hither and thither looking for the path by which we had come, wet, muddy and in good spirits. The photo below is a burnt hut (with the bed and everything still in place) we saw while wandering around on the plateau. After we had finally located the right path we ran into a man tending his buffaloes (with the typical protection of a sack/plactic looking like a pointy hood thrown over his head and back) who asked us if we had had food and if we wanted to stay. He had a large house near the temple apparently (which we did not see) and could accommodate 15-20 people. His name was Shankar Jangam from the family of the temple priests. I began to wonder if - in the three fifty years since Shiva Jangam - the family had only progressed as far as Shankar. Shiv, Shankar, Shivshankar etc etc.

We got down from Raireshwar fairly rapidly to the spot where the road led towards Kanjalgad. For sometime the road let through dense insect infested jungle but we reached the village through which the path leads up towards the top of the gad. It was immediately obvious that this was going to be a stiff climb. A lady in the village told us that it was a clearly marked path and that we must not leave it and go into the jungle. "Payakhalchi vaat sodu naka" she said. Bur the path bifurcated into equal halves every 10 steps and we were quickly on a very steep, muddy, slippery patch struggling to pull ourselves up, and it was very obvious that we were lost. After some exploring and scrambling around we spotted the right path which led us fairly smoothly to the top of the shoulder of the mountain from where we could see both sides of the 500 foot cliffs that protected the top of the gad. This is a formation very common in this part of the range, a forested hill with a sheer vertical outcropping of rock protecting a large plateau above. There are generally only one or two possible routes to the top and so these are ideal locations for forts. I wonder if these are entirely natural (they seem quite unlikely) but then, for someone to have hewn them out at that hight seems incredible. We went along the path towards the cliffs facing the side we had climbed from and after a small rocky patch the stunning sight of rock steps hewn into the cliffs, 2-3 m broad, and very slippery. All this while the weather had been merciless and we were all tired and hungry. We reached the top along those steps and found some shelter in a old structure whose roof had partially caved in and had the excellent excellent theplas M (who is Gujju/Kutcchi) had so thoughtfully brought. After a moment of panic in the dense impeneterable fog, we found the steps leading down again and were quickly to the village. The path leading back down into the valley was found after much exasperated shouting from a large troupe of ladies and girls who had gathered to watch us leave (I guess we were quite a sight, muddy and shabby with M and N being highly incongruous in the surroundings) and among them was the lady who had told us the path when we set off to the top. "Ranat gele na tumhi. Sangiltla hota na, ti vaat hitun an hitun ashi ashi jaate te !" We said yes, we had made a mistake and thanked her. The photo above is of Kenjalgad taken on the descent, it looked quite imposing. We climbed down to a village called Yeli and then walked across the pretty pretty valley to Korle. S carried N on his back for some time much to M's (and my) surprise. We reached the car and borrowed a news paper to spread on the seats to protect them against us.

A scenic drive to Wai (which has some old and pretty riverside temples) and then to Mahabaleshwar (we gave a couple of garrulous villagers a ride to Bhor too). Some excellent sandwiches and pizza at Mapro and some very average rooms in the MTDC resort. The next day started comparitively late with a brilliant breakfast of Makai patties and frankies at Hirkani dhaba and then a walk to Arthur seat (3 hrs, and for much of the time we were convinced we were lost). It was raining heavily throughout and we waded through calf/ankle deep water at regular intervals. The jungle was dense on all sides and the mist added a lot to the atmosphere. (In the photos where its misty, nothing at all can be seen ! so none of those are put up here) Mahabaleshwar was very misty overall, making driving tricky. After much walking we reached the parking lot for Arthur seat, and found that we had been walking along "The Lady Willingdon Gallop". We started walking down the main road back to where we had parked car and were given a lift by a chap playing Himmesh songs very loud. We reached the car and started back, and had excellent Pithla Bhakri at a place near Poona. Then we dropped the girls to their transport back to Mumbai, while I went to S's mama's house, freshened up and then S and me went out for dinner like old times after which I took the 11.00 Asiad back to Aurangabad and was home at 4.30 today morning.

Ideal weekend.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Moshin Hamid

I finished the book in one sitting. The narrative is fast and often subtle, but overall, the book is slightly disappointing. The characters are not as consistent and well fleshed out as they could have been and the author does not tell us anything new about ourselves. The plot and the setting too are fairly ordinary, and only interesting because of the prevailing political and cultural climate in the world. The book is raised above the common by its form (which is flicked directly from Albert Camus' brilliant and disturbing novel The Fall) and the portrayal of how Pakistanis view themselves. The viewpoint is quite unabashedly Pakistani (which is one of its assets) and the author's longing for his homeland can be clearly discerned in the various slightly boastful references and idealizations that are bound to creep into the writing of a proud man living in a society that does not give his roots their due.

The entire book is a monologue, one side of a conversation between an American and a Pakistani at a roadside restaurant in old Lahore. The Pakistani man is telling the American his story and most of the novel is a flashback, with occasional charming descriptions of the market around and the passage of time and one particularly gruesome description of the food that they order. The American's responses are to be inferred from what the Pakistani man is saying - exactly the form Camus used in The Fall.

The story too borrows form The Fall insofar as it describes how an outwardly successful and happy man is drawn by his mental daemons to give up the life he has built and choose a completely different existence. The main character, Changez, is a young, Princeton educated star employee of a elite valuation firm and the novel is the story of how, post 9/11 and all that quickly followed it, it became impossible to separate the personal from the political and public. Hamid's protagonist and his reasons are nowhere as subtle as Camus', and thus are easier to appreciate. The author strikes a chord when he describes family life in Lahore, and Indians will easily understand how the protagonist feels when his country is slighted by a successful New Yorker. In his concern for his people when war with India looms after the attack on the Indian parliament, for the first time, I saw how 'they' see us - bigger and always threatening to swamp them and their identity. The response - a mixture of bravado and anxiousness - rang true. The picture the author builds through small descriptions tinged with regret of his once wealthy family slipping slowly but surely into relative poverty in the new economy will resonate, and somehow reminded me of Agatha Christie's post war novels with their descriptions of old families in rambling houses which have seen happier days and are now difficult to keep up.

However, the author never really displays the depth that would have given the reader an insight into the events shaping his country and the mind of his protagonist. He does not build a compelling enough case at the intellectual level though perhaps at a purely emotional level one can understand why his protagonist does what he does. The book is a tightly constructed saga of the symptoms of a complicated global malaise and their effect on one man's life. It owes a lot to the suspense the author builds surrounding the two men in the restaurant and how the tension in the atmosphere increases as the story nears its conclusion, night falls, the market empties and the the two are quite alone - almost.

I think the author wanted the two threads - the one in the present in lahore - and the one in the past to meet at a point with interesting results. Both narratives are quite interesting in themselves, but they dont come together compellingly enough. All in all, the book promises a lot but does not quite reach the heights it could have, it does not cut deep enough.

Certainly worth a read.

Contrasts

I could not sleep that night. In that remote, impossibly beautiful place, with my head throbbing painfully every time I moved, cold, uncomfortable and overawed by the sheer scale of everything around me - the mountains, the sky, the silence - I walked slowly around camp, alone, (which is when I took the photo that accompanies this post, the only star in the sky) with my puny headlamp, thinking about a city I have never lived in.

I grew up in a medium sized industrial town in the underdeveloped interiors of the Deccan plateau where the roads are broad, the houses large, things are well spaced out and the people gentle - the very definition of respectable middle class suburbia. But the city I missed that day was not the city I knew so well and liked so much, it was a city I actively detested and avoided, like all those around me. The old town, with its tiny gullies and overcrowded, overflowing garish shops, the open drains, the thick smell of chaat, gutter, cowdung and sweat gathered over years and years, the food, the temples, the burquas and the chatter ! The vibrant, colourful, bustling city full of verve and dash and spirit and devoid of the antiseptic snobbery I have always practiced.

In that moment of cold loneliness I longed for the proximity to other human beings that the old town enforced, the impossibility of ignoring the outside world, it bombards every faculty one has with insults, invitations and paradoxes. From beautiful handiwork to the cheapest chinese goods, from the ultra conservative to the inextricably mixed up, it has everything. Cows and horses in houses smaller than my room off a street narrower than my bed, a colony of temple brahmins under the wall of a white mosque, a girl looking wistfully far away into the distance from a window overlooking 10 feet of road and a thousand people.

Uniformity is the curse of the modern world, the sheer life that one can feel coursing through the tiny unkempt streets of the old quarters of even the smallest towns cannot be matched by the myriads of sleek cars that whizz - in all their air conditioned arrogance - along the eight lane highways we are taught to be proud of.

I'll take some photos and see if I can convey what I mean, if I can capture some of the atmosphere on film. I'll try.

Lies

A word which describes everything. What we accept as the truth is only what we want to believe and what follows (through meaningless sophistry also of our choice) from what we believe. The basis as well as the structure of all arguments and discussions about people, ideas and the 'real' world are fairy tales which we seem unable to escape. Even the most trivial, unnecessary statements are falsifications, very often deliberate. Every thought we think about anything external to our minds is a gross simplification which has no connection to anything that 'actually is' and is designed to fit in with all the other mental illusions and constructions we have already manufactured in the past. And so we painstakingly build our castles of delusion, walls and rooms and halls and corridors infused with joy and loss and pride and tears and jealousy and faith and laughter and everything we ever felt, with the power of our agile minds we place stone upon carefully fashioned (unreal and arbitrary) stone, join and reinforce them with the mortar of our (imagined) relationships and satisfy ourselves that we have lived.

Write again

I wrote something on another blog not so recently, and this is the link.....

http://hivaatdoorjaate.vox.com/

I'll dump "lit" stuff here, and write more of a personal diary sort of thing there. Lets see, I have not written in such a long time, I no longer know if I can. I find it impossible to write without some target audience in mind, and the person who was always the audience in my head, who always (inside my head) judged my writing, a person with impeccable taste who possessed the beautiful economy and elegance of expression I yearned for, that person has overgrown blogs and writing of this sort. I dont think anything I write, however good, will make any impact on the lady (for I must confess that the person is a Lady) in question. Writing well is just not an accomplishment that has any value in the world we inhabit now. In college, second year, it seemed terribly important to be articulate and be noticed for it, now its just irrelevant. Achievements are larger now, and are metered in Rupees (and present value of future cashflow is taken into account too). No longer is a tightly constructed, evocative description enough to impress anyone. Nothing short of a successful published book will draw any but the mildest response. And anyone who reads the painfully garbled, neverending and boring sentences of some of the posts preceding this will know that I will never (without strenuous practice and study) attain the grace and lucidity that a good author must possess.

The early posts on this blog, the first 7-8, showed some promise, I still think one or two of them to be good and enjoy reading them again. After that the writing became labored and contrived. It lacked flow and direction and cohesion. It lacked purpose. I only write well when I write for her, and not always then, but I'll try and write anyway because it is something I enjoy doing, and who knows, perhaps - after many days and hours of editing and rewriting - I might be able to produce something that would once again entertain her, give her something to smile about, perhaps a nice way to pass the time or take a break. Maybe I'll grow to write well enough to write to her again someday, and in that hope, I'll write again.

I'm finally home and as a consequence am feeling more peaceful and comfortable than I have in a long, long time. With peace and comfort comes a strangely easy and wonderfully pleasant lucidity. Take away physical discomfort and let a chap feel removed from the turbulence, the trauma and the wild moods and extreme views brought on by the skewed perceptions, lonely unfamiliarity, unnecessary discomfort and exaggerated pressures that seem to go with hostel life and what you are left with is the only healthy kind of philosopher - the kind who finds philosophy stuffy and redundant. Take away the emotional biases and duress - mental as well as physical - that cause opinions to crystallize into sharp weapons causing injury to oneself as well as others, and it becomes remarkably difficult to decide one way or the other about most issues of note. The clarity bestowed by peace makes it possible to perceive just how astoundingly complex and subtle the world is. People turn out to be multi layered and faceted, geographies more intricate and histories more interesting, the past difficult to judge and the future a lot more varied and promising.

Thus, everything having become an object of infinite wonder, it becomes next to impossible to write about anything.

I'm still around - struggling, thinking, searching, happy, miserable, ill, worried, looking for peace, for reassurance form a world that's built to disappoint, getting things done, keeping it afloat, excited sometimes, bored mostly, appalled that the universe is unkind enough to exploit every weakness, every anomaly, every mistake one ever made and extract the market price. That is the only universal law I've experienced. No one gets away with anything. You been a bad boy ? Whether you knew it or not, whether you accept it or not, you will suffer. So will I.

We pay for the things we defile and degrade - including ourselves - and we pay for believing too much and we pay for believing too little. A price is extracted for every happy moment experienced, every good day, every piece of fortune, every favour taken, every minute spent wallowing in self pity, every dark thought, every task postponed and every promise broken.

To appreciate beauty in peace and languor without losing vigour and valour, to feel free without having to rebel, to be happy without self deceit, to face a just universe and see oneself reflected in it with a steady, unflinching, critical and honest gaze . . . . . . . .

And therein lies a tale.

To be blank inside
With the remnants of promises made
Dreams woven
Lingering uncomfortable shadows
Tugging persistently
Like ghosts that wont let go
Reminding, painfully painfully
Of a world that had meaning
A life that had faith
Smothered by thought
Textures so subtle and fascinating
Flattened by knowledge
The magnificence of the universe
The insignificance of man
The arbitrary nature of decisions
The vagaries of fate
Textures erased by the flamboyance of creation.
Leaving serene emptiness
A long life to be led
Sleepwalker in a marathon
Saddled with baggage
Cheered by friends
Called ever forward by spirits
One more step one more step
One more step
And therein lies a tale.