Bus-piphany

The post-block phase of a blog is very exciting. It is as if I am a dam, and it is bursting... It is as if I had 500 ml coke with 2 glasses of water since morning along with 2 mugs of excellent coffee and haven't been to the loo since. Bursting, no other word. So pardon my Stephen Gould-ish punctuated posting style, but thats the way this kite flies. [I am rotfl-ing at that last line, the kite one.]

[ still otf ]

[now lol-ing]

hmm... Ok. To some serious stuff. My amateur portmanteau, though lyrically unsound, is fairly self explanatory. I had an epiphany on the bus. About that famous bus incident, a few days back, that sent the entire city in a tizzy for a few hours. 

We are pro-poor, heavily biased. Atleast I am. When Salman Khan [or those inebriated kids] mowed down pavement dwellers, it was easy to gauge which side had the public's sympathy. In the case of Mane, though people aren't on his side, no one is baying for his blood, questioning his morals and/or asking for a law to put all over-stressed, mentally damaged drivers in jail. The epiphany wasn't anything earthshaking, but I realized how pro-poor my biases are. 

It is easier to understand why and how poor people would have such problems. Debilitating stress, usually due to having to worry about food and children problems day in and day out, without respite. They are also more prone to health issues, as their standard if living is, despite everything, less hygienic than their more well off fellow humans. If the issues they have lead to complications, the cost of healthcare and pills and other things is usually prohibitive, and so on and so forth. So it is no wonder when poor people commit such acts of public law-breaking, we say, maybe the poor guy couldn't help it. He/She is deemed guilty, no doubt, but legally, not morally. 

Rich and famous people, surely, also have problems of their own. I remember a fairy tale, where a prince marries a princess-turned refugee [typical story :) ] . To test the validity of her assertion that she is a princess, the prince's mother puts a small pebble on her bed, puts 16 eider-down mattresses over it, and invites the princess to sleep on that bed for that night. The next day, the princess complains of not being able to sleep because of a lumpy mattress, proving to the Queen, that she was indeed, brought up a princess. Assuming she isn't a devious trickster who looked for such a test and faked not begin able to sleep, we come to a very important point here. A poor person would have to sleep on a cactus bed to have sleeping problems, whereas the princess could be disturbed by a piddling pebble under 16 [Sixteen!] eiderdown mattresses. But the result is the same. The magnitude of the discomfort may differ, but the end result is that they couldnt sleep. Now there are of course many caveats, what happens later, after a night of cactus sleeping, is worse than what happens due to the pebble. But the point is, that though the problems different people face seem so different in magnitude to us, the pain caused by all of them is similar. Thats my assumption. 

Even after this, I [used to] think, according to my moral principles, that Salman Khan and those kids are more guilty than Santosh Mane. Why? the crimes are the same... The reasons probably the same [mental imbalance due to the presence or absence of brain modulators]. The kids have been brought up in an environment of affluence, where everyone does their bidding, an environment where it is very difficult to learn that your actions have consequences. I make other excuses to explain their actions, just as I did for the poor. Like having to maintain a certain persona to be a successful actor, &c. &c. &c. In the end, all of them are just that, excuses. 

If, [like Susan Blackmore suggests] we look at our justice system without the framework of a sense of 'responsibility for actions' but through penalty for your actions, as a preventive and containment measure, we can see that both Salman and Santosh were and are, equally guilty. 

I dont know if this a revelation to anyone else, but I will surely keep this thought in mind when something like this happens again. There is a context to crimes, people commit them for many reasons, like stupidity or money or alcohol etc, but whatever the context, we dont have the right to judge them morally. We dont have the right to judge the parents of those kids who mowed down people in the BMW just as we dont judge Mane's family for his actions. 

post script: There are two moral outrages involved here. I am not talking about how we are outraged that the the rich and the famous get away with their crimes and aren't punished for it. That happens, and it is condemnable. 

Writers Block

So, after fairly long time, I am posting a new...

...

Neringa Ramayan part deux

Unabridged. Verbatim. The highly awaited chapter 2, in the story of your intrepid God-person. The One. The Only. 


RAM. 

"...
anyway, its about time i tell you Ramayana chapter 2.. 
i am a bit bored working today, this will be good time pass...


ok, so let me recap first
Ayodhya city, prosperous kingdom, king has no sons, prays, gets 4 sons, one is our hero ram, ram is trained, just married and a crowd favorite.


So, Part 2: Politics 
if you remember, king dasarath had 3 wives. one of these, Kaikeyi was a really awesome person. Once, in battle, king dasarath's charioteer died of arrow wounds. in a curious turn of events, the young queen turned up and took up the reins and guided dasarath to eventual victory. So great was her contribution that the king said, from here on, i declare you my favourite queen, and i bestow upon you 2 boons, whatever you wish. in addition to being a badass fighter lady the queen was also prudent and intelligent. She said thank you , but i will take a rain check and ask you of those boons later, when and if i need them...


So, thats the back story, and the situation in Ayodhya was generally quite happy happy , with ram and sita accepted to be the successors to the the Raghuwansh ["the clan of Raghu " thats their family name] throne. the mood was overall quite happy with a young and beloved prince about to enter manhood and all that...


now this kaikeyi had an evil servant, a hunchback named manthara. She started poisoning the mind of kaikeyi with tales of some bullshit, but slowly slowly she turned her to the idea that her son, Bharat, should be king and not ram. So adept manthara was at this this that Kaikeyi started thinking that this was her own idea, and it is but natural that her son should be king. After all, she was Queen No 1 and all that. 


Bharat and his half brother Shatrughna were holidaying with their uncles when ram came back with sita and this talk of ram becoming king started. Wasting no time, kaikeyi sought the king's audience and reminded him that he owed her 2 wishes. She asked him to banish ram to the jungles in exile for 14 years and in his place make bharat king. 


the king was flabbergasted, to say the least. How had his fav queen turned evil vamp almost overnight? but more than this was his horror at having to send his own son into exile ignominiously. but a trait of the raghunwansh king was they would always uphold 'dharma' and his word was his word. he had to keep it. 'dharma' is a set of rules you follow, depending upon your station in life. A king is a public figure, a leader of men. keeping his word is one of the most important rules he has to follow. 


so, reluctantly, he calls his son and tells him the thing. Now ram is an even greater person, following his dharma as a prince, listen to your father. so, with a smile on his, saying whatever my father says is correct, agrees to the terms...


Ram went home and started packing. Sita, being the dutiful wife, without saying anything, started packing with him. Nothing he said could persuade her otherwise. Same happened to lakshman, he too left everything and decided to go with ram [poor urmila, lakshaman's wife :( was left alone]


So they set out. so great was the king's sorrow, he died as soon as his sons and daughter in law were out of the city limits. Around this time, bharat came back from his holiday. Expecting the city to be happy and preparing for ram's coronation, he was shocked to see a city mourning. Dual shocks of losing their fav son and awesome king on the same day had rendered the city quite senseless with shock. 


As soon as he entered his chambers, he was greeted with the news by his mother, that she had eliminated his competition and his father was also dead and he would be king. This dude was scandalized! i mean, imagine coming home to this situation!


Poor guy, trying to save his bro from the exile, immediately set out to bring him back. Initially, the citizens were against him, but seeing his distress, they joined him. a large crowd started out in the direction of ram sita and lakshman.


Meanwhile, Lakshaman noticed from afar, a large crowd following them , with bharat at the head. He was enraged, thinking that bharat, not satisfied with just exile , was coming to kill his brothers. ram restrained him long enough for bharat to explain his mission, to try and persuade ram to come back.


Now ram couldnt go, since this was his father's dying order. How could he not follow that? so bharat said, ok. I will run the kingdom in your stead, but i wont sit on the throne. Give me your footwear. He took ram's sandals, put them on his head, and with due honors, installed them on the throne, ruling in his brother's stead for 14 years. [side note: this was noble gesture on bharat's part, but poor ram had to live 14 years in the jungle, without shoes! hehehe kidding...]




thus ends the preamble to the actual adventures of ram , which start in the jungle, which i will continue in the next chapter..


phew! this story takes more time to write than i thought! :) :) :) . but its fun to do it for a friend :D 
..."

Free Willie

A few days back, I attended a [highly entertaining] talk, by Susan Blackmore about the link between Conciousness and the Brain. There were a number of interesting questions she raised, and that lead to some [not much!] introspection on my part.

Her talk ranged from "what is conciousness?" to Out of Body Experiences [OBE], to meditation to free will and lots of other things. She is quite a remarkable person who had a dramatic OBE when a young student, which lead her to reject grad studies and pursue a career in parapsychology. After 20 years of unfruitful work, she finally called it quits and turned to psychology and the problems of the mind. She is now a popular person on the Psych circuit, giving talks and writing books. She is the kind of person who has done it all, thus having a different take on many things.

She says that we need to reject our concept of free will. Her thoughts on conciousness and its definition are too complicated to be explained via text alone, so I will leave those alone. Free will, she says, doesnt exist at all. There is no one place, one ME where all your sensory inputs converge, to decide to do things, to have free will. It is all parallel processing, where all your cells do their things, and a big picture emerges.

Emergent behavior has permeated even popular literature. It is the phenomenon that some small and independent modules, with simple instructions, can join up to give rise to properties that are not just a sum of the individual elements, but something more.  This has many examples. Worker ants, each with simple motives and drives, give rise to spectacularly complex colonies. In computation, they use the same concept, that of parallel processing, where many small independent modules come together to solve a problem. 


 In another talk I attended a few days later, [the topic was History and Philosophy of Science] an interesting issue raised by some physicists [I intend to write about physicists and their biology at a later date :-) ]. The talk was about how biology progressed from a observational science, to a descriptive, mechanistic science over the years. The [whats the right word, Talker?] person giving the talk ended with a hint that we were returning to the concept of Vitalism, an unknown force, that makes us living things. The physics people then tried to link the rise of vitalism to similar trends in physics, where mechanistic explanation failed and there was a return to energy and field and those kinds of directions. 


The point of saying that was, that we see a trend towards people using various analogies to explain emergent behavior, using terms like Vitalism and energy and force field [and Quantum mechanics!] which have slightly different connotations, and lead us astray from the actual point. As this post is now meandering away from our original point, Consciousness. The point is, that many independent modules working together can give rise to emergent properties, that defy explanation at first, but could be understood in the context of a coordinated, interacting model, a sort of a societal structure. Another case in point would be human society. The fact that it still stands [especially in countries like India, rife with mismanagement] despite so many failures, is for me, virtually un-explainable just as a sum of all the abilities of one human being seven billion times. 




As she said, there is no central ME where all your senses converge, to have free will. The body does what it does, and thats that. In my opinion, this is just a difference in how people define free will. Now in western culture, the concept of free will is embedded in their major religion, so there is much more discourse on it, and people are more aware of the implications. Not so in our culture, in fact, it is only recently that we started thinking about free thoughts, let alone free will. Anyway, what I mean is, that if the body does what it does, then isnt that free will too? There is no ME to decide what to do and what not to do, but the body is doing that, isnt it? Think about this for a moment. 

Disclaimer: You may or may not experience the moment described in this photo...

Another point that is usually raised by the people who are for free will, is that without it, our society will collapse. As Dr Blackmore correctly argues, in fact our judiciary will be strengthened if we discard the free will concept of "responsibility of an act" and make our laws along the lines of having deterrents to actions that harm people, and the punishment should be according to how useful it will be [ put people in jail if they steal, as it will prevent more thievery, but dont punish juveniles much, as that wont do any good, as they dont understand things as well. ]




To conclude this mishmash of random thoughts, for all practical purposes, we can do what we want, and there is a free will, that follows the spirit, if not the letter of the definition. For most of our lives, we dont [and mostly dont need to] think about how it will affect us, and our actions, but for the times it does, we need to take the many exceptions to freedom of action in that particular context. 

Neringa Ramayan

Most of you know of my [awesome awesome] penfriend from Vilnius, Neringa Zenkevičiūtė. So, intially, the format of our letters was, in addition to talking about life, culture, science and english, we would each tell each other one story or tradition or festival from our respective mythologies. After the usual descriptions [holi, diwali etc] I hit upon an ingenuous idea. I would tell her the whole of Ramayan, in parts. Apart from being my favourite epic, it has the advantage of being big, so I was set for the next few emails. It turned out to be larger than I expected, and I stopped in between [plan to re-start soon], to be continued later. Right now, I am at the stage where Hanuman finds Sita in Ashok Vatika. Till then, I will paste the [arbitrarily defined] chapters from our email conversations. 

                                             

... Chapter 1: Genesis of ram  [lol]

So, long long time ago, in place called Ayodhya which is in the northern parts of india, there was a wise and great king, dasarath.

Dasarath was a model king, he had 3 wives. 3 wives! you will now ask, how many children :P :P ;) 

but sadly, he had no children. :( 

So, he decided to pray to the gods, and did a big huge pooja...

Out of this pooja (which is done on a yagna or pyre) comes out the fire god...

this guy tells the king, take this sweet and ask your queens to eat it. if they eat it, they will get pregnant. [!]

so, they eat and duly have the requisite 4 kids...

eldest = Ram... then, in order, Bharat, Laxman and Shatrughna.

amongst these, laxman is a big fan of ram.

so, they grew up, learnt the princely skills and in general had a jolly good time.

one day, a sage person came to dasaratha's court. Vishwamitra. He said, some rakshas are doing harm to my prayer and meditation, send you son to kill them. Your son will learn under me and will be of great help to us. With a heavy heart, but the obligation as king, the king sent Ram and laxman with vishwamitra, the kids being in thier teens at this time.

they (obviously) killed the rakshas and learnt a lot new skills and literature under the sage. turns out, the sage and his disciples decide to go to this swayamwar in a nearby kingdom. 

SWAYAMWAR -> 

nice concept, from ancient india. Rich people and royal families, when their daughter had to be wedded, held a public function called a Swayamwar. Here, the family would hold a function, and a yagna [pyre puja]. They set a set of tasks for the possible suitors depending

on the family. then, after a day of festivities, after observing everyone, all the suitors would stand in a line, and the girl would get to choose. Whoever she chooses, would get to marry her. 

so, nearby kingdom, there is swayawar. Being sages, they plan to attend the puja. They take our young and dashing princes along...

the task at the swayamwar is: The king, Janak, has a huge and venerated Bow. This bow orignally belonged to Shankar [one of the three principle gods] and is quite big and heavy. Janak says, any person who can string this bow can marry my daughter.

so, people try... no one succeeds... Actually, most of the people cant even pick it up.. its quite heavy.. 

those who can, can barely do so, let alone string it.

Our hero, Ram, steps up. He picks it up. While stringing it, he exhibits such strenght, that the bow splits up! 

After this, Ram and the daughter, Sita are married off in a lavish ceremony.. [thier parents have no clue... and to top off the wierdness, since laxman is there too, the king marries off his younger daughter urmila to laxman!!!]

anyway, the princes retunr triumphant to Ayodhya and there is much pomp and ceremony and sita generally becomes the darling of the masses...

This is the initial happy part..

the next is a bit of a sad story, which i will relate in chapter 2... 

later

 bye!!!

...

p.s. : All conversations pasted here [verbatim] after taking due permission from all parties involved. :-)

Teaching Experiences

This is first in a series of [potentially] many posts about my teaching experiences, at the great Kendriya Vidyalay, Ganeshkhind. I had a very nice moment at school today, which I would like to share. It is these moments that make teaching here bearable. To learn about the un-bearable things, go to the next part of this post. 


So I was going along the corridor, when I saw a very small kid, about 1st standard, standing with the doe eyed look only very small guys and gals can give. As I went to him, he gestured towards his untied shoe-laces, and asked me to tie them for him.  There is some un-describable, ummm, not joy per se, but feel good feeling, which comes from helping the young of the species.  As I was helping him, he asked innocently  [whats the word for निरागस in english? innocent just doesnt cut it], " तुम किसके पापा हो ? " In any other circumstance, this would have been a normal question, but coming from him, I found a wierd [विलक्षण] happiness from this exchange. Cant explain why, but I am sure you understand. 


These moments are few and far between. Most of time is spent in trying to get 9th standard kids to not talk and pay attention in class. I am afraid, by this, that I have surely become the laughing stock of all the three 9th classes. Doesnt matter, as long as they pay attention. Also, after the exams, it doesnt feel as if it makes a difference, whether I teach or not. The good students get good marks, the average average, and the bottom kids remain at the bottom. The only difference, which I think is maybe made, is at the average level, some kids might have studied more, but that is undetectable.




This teaching affects me a lot. If the kids are perky and lively in class, I am high all day, if they are noisy and make a lot of noise etc, then I am irritable all day long. Also, it drains a lot of my energy going to school and all that. I am just looking for these few moments, which make the entire effort worthwhile. Also the cheque that comes at the end of the month :P

Sommeil Anormale

Why french? Meh, who cares. We are here to talk about my abnormal sleep behavior. I am not sure if it is exactly abnormal, not having observed other people much, but there are some features to my sleep, that if they are normal, God save humanity... :)  [ok, not something that drastic ]

As some of you [Read 'Samit'] know quite well, I [used to] suffer from night terrors. This is something, wherein I would wake up screaming like a banshee on steroids, keep at it for about 30-40 seconds, waking everyone within earshot [and a few beyond] and promptly fall asleep again, oblivious. Sometimes, I would wake up on account of the hubbub around me and realise what has transpired. A few apologies later, everyone would return to bed, no one except me enjoying a sound sleep. 

We even consulted a doctor, who said it was nothing detectable. A few pill regimens later, I am seemingly cured. Though it did recur about 6 months later, once I kinda figured out a pattern to it, it straightaway stopped. This reminds me of a problem our old Maruti 800 once had. It just stopped working, and wouldnt start without a vigorous push, 3-4 times on the Pune-Nashik highway. Back in Nashik, the mechanic saw the car, noticed nothing was wrong, asked Dad to start the car, and it started, like nothing ever happened. Though it stopped, we were never quite sure when it would crop up again, the problem, and we would be stranded. 4 years of use, till we finally sold it, we could never take the "Ghost Problem" out of our minds. My affliction (?) is analogous. It hasnt recurred in over a year now, but I can never sleep easy, knowing it can happen.  

Why am I writing about this? Just yesterday [yesternight?], a most singular series of events [ah! Sherlock holmes :)] took place. I love Mumuryache laadu [whats it called in english? puffed rice flakes?] and my mom gave me a huge bag full of them. As Rahul [The Rote one, my room-mate] was also interested in them, the bag was open, right next to my bed. I woke up in the middle of the night, and for some reason had a craving for those laadus. I ate a half laadu, just like that, half asleep, and immediately fell asleep again. The wierd thing is, this thing repeated itself 4-5 times, and I ate about 5 big laadus [they are pretty big, bigger than golf balls] through the night. When I woke up in the morning, and realised what had happened, in addition to loads of laughter, I got an upset belly. 

Again, why am I writing this? No reason. I just finished grading 160 papers, almost at a stretch. Was super bored, and this is something I am doing just before I hit the trenches, for another [hopefully un]eventful night. Good night to all of you!

Tum aa gaye ho, noor aa gaya hain...

A momentous day in my life. Today, [rather, yesterday] I received the first cheque from my teaching gig [unexpectedly, on time!]. Just a small matter of eight thousand and a few odd rupees. Huge in terms of value though. Apart from a few hundred rupees from assorted awards, quizzes etc, this is my first real earned money. Khari kamai. 


Yay. 

p.s.: I had to grade 160 papers today. Damn Friedman and his dratted no free lunch .. :-|