Growing up is learning the art of silence -Part 1

3 years ago when I was studying about the Dirac Equation, a few months later a question came to my mind as to how would one go about writing a representation of the Clifford algebra for arbitrary dimensions. I somehow felt very uncomfortable with the idea that Dirac was picking up the 4-dimensional representation and it was sort of a magic that it was giving me the spin 1/2. {Today I hopefully understand more about what is going on here given the studies on spin and representation theory that I have done over these years.}

But then at that time I was a kid compared to my present self. I went to my classmate Swarnabho and asked him to explain this to me since I knew at that time we was studying Representation Theory. What I got from him was a load of sarcasm and lecture regarding why I was dabbling in such "hi-fi" stuff when I didn't know basic group theory etc etc etc. But neither for once did he even give me a reference which I could look up. I felt damn irritated. (This was neither the first nor the last time I got some non-sense reply from him. I definitely respect him for his huge knowledge of mathematics but I am sorry to say that I never got any help from him whenever I asked him. I this respect I got tremendous help from Vipul who is definitely one of the finest brains in among science students that I have ever met. )

What this interaction with Swarnabho resulted in was me running down to the computer room in CMI and write a blog about this "characteristic attitude" of mathematicians. This blog of mine irked a lot of people around and rightly so.

I clearly remember the email reply I got for the blog from Nivedita. She lashed out at me. Again rightly so.

Recently when I met Nivedita a few weeks ago I was wondering at the back of my mind whether she was still talking to the author of that blog or to me. I am optimistic.

Surely I did a stupid thing then by writing that blog.
May be that action of mine was more stupid than Swarnabho's enlightening sarcasm.

People live and learn. I am optimistic that I do that too.
At least I am sure I won't write such a stupid thing today! Today such an experience would probably result in a blog post or probably silence.
{I have just gotten used to so many weird experiences about human relationships!}

Deep down I know I am a completely different man today than the guy who wrote that blog then. But then again as Vipul said to me once

"Even if you change overnight, some people will never change how they perceive you"

:D

Its actually so very difficult in life to communicate what one really wants to say and its so easier to send out a wrong image. At one level I believe its just not worth one's time and energy to ensure that everyperson interpretes things correctly. Its probably again that silence can come to the rescue and let one focus energies on ensuring that a select group of people see the right things.

Silence gives birth to selectivity.


This is probably the essence of growing up. Somewhat CMI life forced me to mature faster as a person than what might have naturally happened. Probably it was the intellectually charged atmosphere of CMI in those days and the completely hay-wire courses where in-class comprehensibility was low and various social factors which forced me to grow faster. Today when I look at people from colleges in various other parts of India I feel this one thing significantly as to what a massive impact the challenging environment of excellence in CMI in those days could have on a receptive mind! It sent my scientific maturity of thinking way ahead. {Though I must say that the terrible Physics curriculum of CMI didn't teach me much when compared to the Physics courses of IITK} I absorbed more essential things like global maturity of thinking from the environment than I did from the classes.

What CMI atmosphere did to me in the first year was to kill all possible narrowness that might have existed in my mind and open up my thinking to make it receptive to radically new ideas which students from other colleges would not be able to appreciate readily. It was becoming natural for me to see by the middle of my second year of BSc. as to why one needs the idea of "parallel transport" on curved spaces to make sense of Newton's laws.

The most essential ingredient of this growing up process is the art of silence.
The most important tool that one develops as one grows is the power of silence.

The importance of the moments when you look inwards and think harder through everything and get clarified about precisely what all things you understand and what all you don't. Its a process which leads good results whether the question is scientific or not.

Its about learning when to be silent. Its probably a big thing that I learnt while at CMI that no conflict is ever resolved by speaking or talking or discussing. Its best resolved by thinking silently and then coherently putting down in words and sharing the writing with relevant people.

The identification of the "relevant" is also a part of the growing up process. That as you grow up you learn to pick out from the surroundings who are the relevant people i.e who are the people who serious enough about the issue that they would like to understand the reason and the resolution of conflict. When I was kid in the first year I was full of optimism about this that everybody is interested in questions and issues I am interested in.

Its a useless waste of energy to try to make lots of people see a subtle point about which you are excited about and hence efforts should be concentrated on the relevant people and not communicated via public mails.

Long long ago in the past I used to have the optimism that I can make many people see why I think something is worth thinking about. That something was at times why spin of a particle should be defined by irreducible representations of SU(2) instead of any other "physical" idea or why smoking/drinking alcohol should be banned inside institute premises.

Silence is the route to resolve the relevant set.

In very simple cases like that of curved space-time I realized as I grew up that not many are interested and in more complicated cases like whether there should be reservations in colleges, even lesser people are interested!

Its a hard fact that the process of growing up teaches you is to recognize that 99.99% of the people around are not interested in things that you might be seriously interested in. And it would be massive foolishness expect any larger fraction of people to be interested! More important the matter is on a larger scale lesser will the people interested in it. But this scenario should not be a deterrent to you pursuing the cause if you are yourself convinced that the cause is important.

This is also again one of the realizations that arise out of silence. The determination to pursue what you think is important regardless of what other people have to say about it. Silence is a tool that helps to not get lost in the crowd.

Silence is a way to take firm decisions.

When I was a "kid" in BSc. if I thought that the teacher in the class was saying nothing sensible the I used to directly say that in the class and object. And hence got into serious trouble. Today I know that this simply doesn't help since me pointing out the trouble doesn't suddenly raise the intelligence or the knowledge level of the teacher (unless of course the teacher is exceptional who appreciates subtle points like say Prof.Amol Dighe in TIFR) and almost always most of the class doesn't see the subtle point. Its a useless waste of energy again.

Today I choose the silent way out of such situations. I simply bunk the class at times or I might send my feedback about the stupid class when I am officially asked for it.

Again silence becomes an artistic tool to fight life.

But then one should be beware of the pit-falls of silence:

1. On should not resort to silence as a mode of communication! Like if I my girlfriend (lets assume one exists and is unique for this discussion!) resorts to silence when relationship is in trouble then the situation only becomes grim. Silence might become the route of further confusion by becoming a gap in the communication. In such situations each side must probably think in silence and write out everything coherently and communicate in writing rather than start shouting at each other.

Thinking and writing frees the mind. (why I blog!) Its an art as to how to use silence.

2. One should not become suddenly silent without trying to sort the trouble! Its as bad a solution as just passing by like a stranger whenever this person with whom you are in trouble with is passing by. Its best to first to be silent and think about everything through and then try to talk with the person and get things sorted and if then things don't work then assume complete silence but by giving a notice to him or her like

"After thinking a lot, I think you are hopeless and brainless and useless talking to. Hence I am becoming silent. Do you have any further clarifications to give before I shut off? "

I have been at both ends of this problem! I would have greatly appreciated if the people who at times assumed silence with me to have given me a notice like the above becoming so! :P

Silence is an important art that one has to acquire while growing up but not at the cost of losing frank honesty.
But then honesty is a very big thing that only nanoscopic number of people can appreciate and hence again through silence one has to resolve this "relevant" set with whom one can be honest without wasting energies.

In a second post I shall dwell on the more complicated issues about silence like should you be silent when you see a crime being committed? Does growing up mean remaining silent to crime just because survival instincts and matured judgement tell you that speaking-up might mean danger to you? Is maturity of judgement only about diplomacy and hence compromise with honesty?

About doing science and research

When mortally pressed for time one compromises with quoting other people than taking time out to coherently report one's own mind. And hence here I plan to put up links to a some exciting writings about doing science and research about which I could myself go on for pages albeit it comes from only 4 years of experience.

{I shall be biased towards Maths, Physics and Theoretical Computer Science since these are the 3 fields with which I have some acquaintance. Its been a long time I have been committed to Physics and flirting with the other two. Again among the other 2, I have been courting Maths for the longest time and have only been looking at from far away at TCS. Eventually I don't plan to meet the day when I shall need to choose! :P}

Hence the job is best left in the hands of the giants like Dyson, Hamming and Atiyah etc:

1. "Advice to Young Mathematicians" by Atiyah

2. "Heretical thoughts about science and society" by Dyson

3. "Birds and Frogs" by Dyson

4. "You and Your Research" by Richard Hamming

5. "Kill the messenger" by Sunil Mukhi


And yes before I sign off I will tell you to watch the movie "October Sky". It really captures the idea of doing research .

The passionate insanity of doing science and research and that addictive feeling of being involved with an idea forgetting everything else.

Curiosities in Computer Science. Can one go beyond finite and discrete data ?

My knowledge of Computer Science is near 0.
My knowledge of Mathematics is epsilon.
Officially I am supposed to know some finite amount of Physics.


My only slight non-trivial brush with CS was with the exciting course that I took with Prof.Madhavan Mukund at my Alma-mater Chennai Mathematical Institute (CMI). Prof.Madhavan Mukund is definitely one of the best 5 professors I have ever seen in IEMS (Rourkela), St.Xavier's Collegiate School (Kolkata), CMI, IMSc, TIFR and SINP. (4 institutes of India where I have spent non-trivial amounts of time).

{Of course St.Xaviers is a special case in this list from where I can hardly recall a single good science teacher. I definitely got some great English and Hindi teachers. And IEMS (Ispat English Medium School), Rourkela is the school in Orissa in which I studied till class 6. I was in Rourkela for 11 years. IEMS had an intensive mathematics and science environment and that instilled in me a love for these subjects right since my childhood. That school has produced many awesome students and its a pity that today that school is crumbling because of government's apathy towards it and lack of funding. I would urge people to collect together to do something for that school which has given Indian some of the finest students in science in the 1990s and the late 80's.}

Prof. Madhavan's course was awesome to say the least. (those unforgettable days when I used to stay awake for days at a stretch trying to do his innovative assignments...I could atleast get a working code ready for all of the questions, though almost always my algorithm was nowhere close to the slick solutions of some of my awesome batchmates like Hrushikesh, Arnold or Preyas.} For me whose only exposure to programming in school was ISC exam level programming with C++, this was an introduction to the completely new world of CS. I always wished that I could take up more courses in TCS but given my professional commitment to Physics I never could get the time to study TCS more seriously, but I keep hoping that someday I shall study more of it. At least I hope to understand someday Automata and Complexity Theory. Little that I see of it from talking to my various friends who work in these fields, I feel they are exciting things to know.

I later sat through another course of Prof.Madhavan Mukund..just listened to the lectures. But anyway thanks to his lectures in the 2 courses, it sparked in me an interest for CS. It drilled in me a basic fact that CS is NOT programming as is commonly and erroneously conceived.

Anyway here I want to talk of some naive thoughts about mine about CS. These are mostly some questions about CS which I have been curious to understand and know but never got the time to do serious reading about them. I am sure most of what I will be talking here will be naive to professional CS people but then I have been filled with childish curiosity to know about a million things since I was a kid. I have no fears to ask questions no matter how naive they are.

I would be glad if some CS or Maths person reading this blog decided to explain these things to me. I have been thinking of these questions for quite some-time but as usual given my primary commitment to Physics I have never been able to do serious reading along these lines and hence have made no substantial progress. All I have is some questions to ask. Let me at least ask them publicly!

So let me begin.

We know that given a linear map between 2 finite dimensional vector spaces one can represent it by a matrix by a choice of basis in the two spaces. A lot of interesting things begin to happen if the linear transformation is an automorphism and then I have interesting structures to play with like the eigenvalue, eigenvector, trace and determinant etc. Now we know that even if the matrix representation is dependent on the basis one can write the characteristic polynomial of this linear transformation and then the coefficients of this are basis invariants. The coefficient of the highest and the first power are most familiar to us by names of "determinants" and the "trace". And the determinant of of a matrix written without the signum function in its defintion is the well-known "Pfaffian". {There are some very exotic definitions of Pfaffnians through graph theory and through differential geometry but I shall avoid all that stuff here}( I shall avoid getting into the complication of differentiating between the minimal polynomial and the characteristic polynomial and whether the field is algebraically closed or not and what its characteristic is. I shall brazenly sweep these subtleties under the carpet so that I can get my essential questions across to the reader. Reader is requested to assume the best case scenario whenever required :P )

{Most common difficulties will arise when the algebraic dimension and the geometric dimension of an eigen value doesn't match but then if one restricts oneself to algebraically closed fields like the complex plane this problem is gone. So kindly do it if you run into problems :D }

Q1. We needed a choice of basis to define these n-basis-invariants (let the vector space be of dimension "n"). Can we define these basis invariants without a choice of basis?

Q2. So isn't it possible to the give a linear transformation as an "input" to a computer program by giving it these n invariants along with their multiplicities? Can't everything that can be known or said about the linear transformation become deducible to the computer as soon at it knows these n-invariants?

I can see this much that one can solve the characteristic polynomial to uniquely determine the linear transformation (upto permutation of the basis) if there are no degeneracies in the eigen-value.

Q3. The most naive way to specify an automorphism of a finite dimensional vector space to a computer would be to give it a matrix representation of it. But can't there be situations when it is advantageous to the computer to get the linear transformation as a set of its invariants ? {it saves memory for one thing..in the first way it has to store n^2 data and in the next it has to store n data}

On the same strain if I have a finite group then everything about the group is known if I know its group multiplication table.

Q4. Hence isn't it possible to give a finite group as an input to the computer by specifying its multiplication table?

Q5. We know that in some cases the group is generated by a generator set using some relations. In those cases can't memory be saved by giving the computer an group not as a multiplication table but instead as a generating set and the relations?

Q6. Isn't it possible to input to the computer in this way a free abelian group on a set? Or to get very fanciful, is it possible to make the computer understand the "free abelian group" on a set as a solution to an universal mapping problem?

Q7. Conversely given a table which "looks like" a group multiplication table isn't it possible to write a program to take this as an input and test whether this represents a group? This definitely can be checked in a finite number of steps but I suppose one should be able to come up with a slick algorithm which does this checking in less than that.

Q8. If the above can be done then isn't it possible for the computer to check whether two finite groups are isomorphic given their multiplication table? This again seems to be a finite process but can someone give a slick way to do that?

Obviously the non-trivial question is when the cardinality of the 2 groups are equal. Since we know that there can be non-isomorphic groups of the same cardinality.


Q9. Thanks to Lagrange's theorem we know the possible values of the cardinality of the subgroups of a finite group. Hence given the multiplication table we know the subsets of it that we need to search to detect subgroups of a group. Given any subset of the matrix checking whether it forms a subgroup isn't very difficult.

Hence can't one write a computer program which will take the group multiplication table as an input and then generate all possible subgroups of it?

In the all the above cases the saving grace is that there is a sense of finiteness about the data being taken by the computer whether in form of a vector space dimension or cardinality of a group. But this is where I want to let my fantasy take a bit of flight.

Can't we get computers to get to operate with things which are not finite and discrete?

Apparently Topological Spaces seem to be such a non-finite and non-discrete data unless the underlying set is a finite set.

So we can think of the following possibilities:

Q10. If the underlying set is finite then it should be possible to give as input to the computer the set and the open sets and then ask it to find out, say, whether this Topology is Hausdorff. This seems possible since it is more or less a search algorithm.

Q12. Even if the underlying set is not finite, but say the Topological Space is second countable and further the basis is finite. Then can't this be given to the computer as input?

Q13. Similarly other immediate notions of "finiteness" in topology that might be a good area to try computability would be:
a. If every point has a countable basis of neighbourhoods.
b. If the space is compact.
c. If the space is paracompact.

Q14. Further if the space is not only compact but also can be embedded in some euclidean space and can be gotten as the 0-set of some equation. Then too probably one can try a method of doing topology on it with a program


Q15. We see that the essential trouble with programming topologies is that we don't know of any way to make the computer understand logic which involve ideas like:

a. "For any 2 points..."
b. "Given any point one can find...."
c. "Given a curve.."
d. "Given an open set containing.."

It is not clear how a program can be made to understand ideas of "any" when the number of possibilities is uncountably infinite.

I would be delighted if some computer programmer or mathematician reading this blog can think about these questions and try to come up with ways of bypassing these limitations.

Q16. Can one do some kind of lattice approximation to topological space.
Like try to convert topological properties into lattice calculation?

I know it is a very fanciful thinking. But still can you do it?

Q17. On a probably simpler note I think it would be great if people can collaborate to create a database for Homotopy, Homology and Cohomology groups of known spaces and write programs which can take input like "X union Y" ("X x Y" would be trivial ) and compute these groups for these spaces by searching the database for the groups for spaces X and Y.

The issue of computability has always seemed an interesting question to me. Those questions which can be "programmed" always seem to belong to a different kind of understanding than those which can't be programmed.

Like one can write a program which will take a matrix as an input and will decide whether the corresponding linear transformation is invertible and can also decide if not then how large is the null-space.

Q18. But it doesn't seem to be possible to write a program which will take a function as an input and will decide whether it is continuous or differentiable at a point. It isn't clear how to program the idea of "taking the limits".
And as far as my intuition goes I don't think a lattice idea will ever work here since things can go wrong on a measure 0 space which a lattice can never get to.

One can also try making this following idea computable:

Q19. Given a Lie Group find its Lie Algebra.
Even mathematically it is a hard question unless quite a lot is known about the group in terms of its topology or it being understood as a zero-set of some polynomial ring.

Or a more difficult and basic question would be to understand how to give a Lie Group as an "input" to the computer?
The issue here becomes circular since in most cases a natural way to give this data to the computer at least for finite dimensional Lie Groups would be to input a chosen basis in the Lie Algebra as matrices! And that means to solve what I wanted to solve I need to know the solution!

Obviously I am thinking very naively and I would urge CS people to give some serious thought about this question.

And making the above question programmable shall be of great utility to Physics.

Q20. I would encourage computer scientists to look into these questions about general manifolds as well where there is a hint of finiteness to help compute things about apparently continuous and infinite data:

1. Triangulable manifolds (all differential manifolds are triangulable)
2. More hopes lie with manifolds which are homotopic to some polytope.


This was a brief glimpse into my world of scientific imagination about which very few people know.

I hope this glimpse would motivate some Computer Science or Maths person to think along these lines.




PS: I would recommend people to read: http://pauli.uni-muenster.de/~munsteg/arnold.html

PS: If any of you readers have any ideas about how to go about these questions then kindly put the idea in the comment. Let there be an online discussion of the ideas. If something non-trivial can be developed through these blogs!

Some thoughts about elections.

{ This has also been put up at this blog. }


Recently got my legs pulled and jibed at by a senior of mine, Vipul (from my alma-mater CMI and currently at UChicago doing a PhD in Mathematics,) about the stagnant situation of this blog and whether democracy can really be reformed by people who blog about it only once in 2 months.

{ Actually one can look at in this way: I have not been able to put up updates on this blog since I was too busy with my Physics whose professional requirements have been mounting off-late. Hence I was spending more time with Physics. Now is this a bad logic that I have actually been contributing more to the nation by trying to do my Physics well rather than blogging here? }

Anyway thanks to Vipul's comments and pokes, it accelerated the process of me finally writing down some things which I have been thinking of recently. The election round the corner seems to provocate enough number of dinner and coffee table discussions to keep one's mind thinking and hence thought of sharing some of the thoughts which I discussed during these discussions.


1. One thing has always worried me as to whether election makes any sense in a country where most voters are illiterate and are probably have little or no information about the political scenario and the plans of the parties and the larger questions that the country needs to face. Can't really blame the people because if one has to struggle day in and day out to make one's both ends meet one simply can't afford to keep track of the larger questions! The larger issues are simply a luxury when you are not assured of your next meal.

In this situation what is the difference between large number of uneducated/mis/non informed or non-thinking voters voting and voting by a random number generator?

It seems to me that a random number generator will be better since it will be unbiased and might help a better party win in comparison to a corrupt politician being able to "buy" these non-thinking voters by dubious means.

Here one also sees why issues like "caste" and "religion" and "telengana" issue based voting makes such an impact in India. When the population is so huge with no net coherence of thought then if some local issue can cause a local correlation it has large contribution to the net scenario since the rest of the system is anyway randomized! Thats what politicians use, cause local polarization (especially with a non-thinking mass) based in local issues hoping that there is no large scale coherence.

This actually shows why "blogs" are potentially powerful. They can become centers to cause these correlations among a certain section of the population and that can become non-trivial.


2. The point about becoming an effective voter is whether as a voter I am a "thinker" who takes a well-thought decision or a "believer" who goes by the hype and votes for the party which best hypnotizes me into believing in them.

As Vipul put it in a catchy question to me

"Do you think you are believer or you believe that you are a thinker?"


Let us first realize that the essential reflection of whether one is a thinker or a believer is in the way the person makes "choices". Its the process of decision making that amounts to making a choice is what differentiates between "thinkers" and the rest. It can start from simple things like working on a maths question where at every step one needs to think to decide the optimal next step and also in bigger questions like choosing one's life-partner.











Let me try to list out here as to what all a person needs to be a "thinker" apart from the basic minimum intelligence which unfortunately a person cannot change :

1. Freedom of choice.

Unless one has choices there is no use of the ability to think. If one gets excessively constrained that one's choices then there is nothing that the person can do even if he/she can think. Now choices can get constrained by internal as well as external reasons. Internal as in, I fail to see the choices that exist or may be for external reasons where some external force closes choices for me. like as a dalit landless farmer facing the guns of the rich upper-caste landlords, my choices in life are too constrained.

A large section of the Indian electorate is deprived of this fundamental thing as in freedom to choice.

And pretty paradoxically this section of the people who are artificially deprived of choices are the one's for whom a good government might make the biggest difference. Rich businessmen and people in research are probably more immune to political perturbations.

2. Relevant and correct information.

This is the next step. I have enough intelligence to think and say I have choices but still I need some substance to start thinking on. An Economics Nobel Laureate simply can't think about a question in Quantum Theory unless she/he knows enough Physics. <>

Thats the basic kind of problem a large section of the Indian electorate faces. Many simply can't afford to get time to get themselves informed about the parties and the larger issues since they have their first priority to arrange for food! Who cares about what happens to the nation when I am hungry and have no food to eat? And another considerable section of the population simply doesn't care to find out though they have lots of resources since either they are too busy with their profession or busy hanging out at the malls. Somehow given the kinds of lives we live cocooned inside research institutes worrying day and night about courses, assignments, exams and science, politics and larger questions of India seems pretty distant.







Given that large sections of the population don't cast a well-thought vote..I don't know what sense democracy makes in a country like this.




Now there are 3 sides to see in this:

1. If everybody is busy with his/her life striving for professional excellence isn't that by economic ideas an optimal state for the country? How does it then matter whether each person is thinking about the future of governance and larger national questions since anyway every person is trying for professional excellence?

May be the above idea can be put in analogy with the idea of economics that "we get our bread because the baker wants to make profit". The idea is that such a set of people is creating "positive externalities" for each other and the system is thus progressive and then why would anyone need a government? Somehow isn't it possible for such a system of "self-optimizing systems" to show some kind of spontaneous large scale collaboration like what in statistical physics is called "self-organized criticality"?

The associated idea is that a single man's vote is irrelevant to the election since one vote cannot make difference to the future and the energy and time needed to spend to inform oneself and vote knowledgeably is huge. And at the end of all this research the party for whom this party voted might not win. Hence the "net payoff" in this process tends to 0 and hence this makes no economic sense for a person to drop commitment to one's profession and educate oneself about the larger national issues.

So why should anyone vote?

2. When every person is trying to achieve personal professional excellence then everyone is tending to get into a tunnel vision where one is slowly missing the larger picture and anyway people are only going to create positive externalities only locally and not cause large scale collaborations to happen.

This is where the government chips in with an external view of the larger picture to cause macroscopic reallocation of resources to optimize its utilization by the entire population as opposed to the only local optimization that you and I can cause.

Hence one needs a good government.

3. Education and ability to think brings in with it a sense of individualism and independence of thought. How likely is it that a set of such people will show cohesion and coherent thinking? Why hasn't it happened that all the good students across the various world class institutes in India like CMI, ISI, IIT, TIFR get together to form a party which will surely have an average IQ and education billion times any other existing party?



The question is where does the market equilibrate between these 3 competing factors? Can a government have this global ability to cause large scale optimization by macroscopic rearrangement of resources? Can a government be expected to have enough insight and information to cause this?

If the answers to the above question is "no" and if anyway most voters are "non-thinkers" (and hence 1 thinker's vote counts for nought) and even economically it makes no sense to try to be a "thinker" w.r.t voting, why should I vote or worry about casting a good vote instead of doing Physics and Maths properly?

Holi at TIFR

Coming from a relatively highly sophisticated and silent and gentleman/womanly atmosphere of my Chennai Mathematical Institute holi at TIFR was a culture shock.

Back in CMI Holi used to be a very formal affair where some of the guys used to dab a pinch of gulal on each other's face. Mostly it was arranged by my batchmate Jigar. Only last year Holi at CMI took a slightly more vibrant tone. But still it was quite an organized thing except for the last minute efforts by my great friend Atul to throw mud on each other and add some new "colours" to the event.

But then last year in CMI, I believe the defining moment was when one of my batchmates went to put colours on another girl in CMI and she sharply replied back "You dare do that and I shall slap you hard". And she went back to her academics shutting off the colorful frenzy outside.

Hence Holi in CMI for the sake of self-respect remained mostly a guy's affair.

Hence I had a completely new kind of Holi here at TIFR. They dug up the ground to create a huge mud pit and then people were thrown into it irrespective of age,sex and position in TIFR. { After CMI I was actually pretty surprised to see such enthusiastic and uinhibited participation of the female sex in the Holi chaos. In TIFR they were quite instrumental in initiating the funny mayhem! }

The students went and caught each of the profs and held them up by feet and hands and threw them into the mud pit. And then everyone kept splashing mud on each other. Some of the profs said "no" and their decision was respected and some who said "I don't want to" got held by legs and hands and dumped into the mud pit. :P

Obviously I too got thrown in and it was quite fun to get drenched in mud by so many people. And the I also joined in the process of throwing mud on others! :)

I have been shedding many inhibitions over the last 2 years and I shed this one today. I am a highly freed person and I don't restrain myself from trying out something unless the action runs the risk of destabilizing my thinking or damaging my health or others. Hence I don't drink alcohol or smoke but have danced at parties and balls.

As soon as the people were coming out of the pit there was a water shower arranged for them to clean up and thats where the consistent pranks started. People were too drenched in mud to see whether the other guy was pouring mud or water. So as soon as someone got out of the shower cleaned he/she was welcomed with a bucket of mud water on him/her.

The argument was simple "You are not allowed to be so clean"

There were a few visiting French scientists in the Physics department and they too got thrown in. One of our physics profs went to them and explained to them:

"You have to do nothing at all. Just go and sit in the pool and close your eyes and ears. The rest will be taken care by us. This is annual ayurvedic treatment festival in India"

They happily enjoyed the "ayurvedic treatment"

One of the profs had boiled a lot of beat-root to create pink colours and that was given to the children in the campus to play with. Nutritious and non-toxic colours for children.

And there were obviously colours but they took an obvious back-seat and there were liters of "Bhang" and sweets for everyone. The girl who was distributing the Bhang found a nice excuse to be not thrown into the mud saying "I am busy" :P

I steered clear from such suspicious liquids. :)

Weird questions? May be not.

Walk into one of these glassy and glossy malls which throng most of urban India and of the many things the one thing in particular that catches my attention are the abundant number of "couples" that I see moving there. Pairs of guys and girls in the age group of around 17 to 30.

(Disclaimer: I have no experience of having been to any place ever in my life with another girl. I have neither ever been on any date nor have I ever asked any girl out. My maximum experience in these directions is to have danced with some girl at a ball or parties or dandiya. So all that I am writing here stems from what I observe around me.

Further it will be apparent that all my discussions are biased towards the heterosexual relations since I don't have much understanding of the homosexual relations. Of course this bias is not because I am against homosexuality but simply because I have never interacted with any homosexual. Along the similar lines my discussions also completely exclude eunuchs since again I have no interaction with them and hence a lack of understanding of them. Of course homosexuals and eunuchs are very much part of the human society and ideally any human issue should also include them but somehow this wretchedly biased society has so surgically excluded them from the mainstream that so many people live all their life with no understanding of them but only filled with socially grown repulsion for them for no logical reason. )

These couples are seen hanging around in the Barista or the Cafe-Coffee Day or any of these kind of hangouts. Its such an amazing phenomenon that is happening around me that has always baffled me. How come these pairs of guys and girls happen to meet and like each other? How many of these pairs are in love? How many of these pairs are just bonded by sexual attraction for each other? How many of them are just having a casual time out with the other and how many of them will end up living together for a life time? Anyway to begin with it seems that an highly improbable statistics has worked in their favour that they found a person to go out with!

Let us focus on that section of these couples which plan to have children and set up a family in the conventional sense. From what I get to hear and see around me it seems that this section is pretty large. And what I also infer from what I hear from others is that the guys involved in the relationship are pretty keen to have children. (I am not aware as to what is the general feminine standpoint but I have heard some women say that for the stability of a relationship it is important to have children. For some reason beyond my comprehension many guys feel this instinct to have children and have a family. Note: this feeling goes much beyond just sexual drive. I somehow don't seem to comprehend why 2 people in love can't just be happy living together without having children.)

But somehow again by some weird statistics these things fit together and many of these couples marry and also have children and probably their children will also fit into these statistics and they will also feel the need to marry and have children and somehow this cycle keeps going on. And the weird thing is that this instinctive cycle is not just restricted to the section of people I started out with who had out in the malls but cuts right across all social, economic, linguistic or cultural divisions.

A large section of the people right from the people living in deadly poverty in the most terrible slums of India to the richest and the glamorous of the society...this one instinct equalizes them all...the instinct to have children and to set up a family..the instinct to have a next generation with a hope that my son/daughter will have a better life than mine and will live a better life than mine. The guy in the slum dreams that his son will have a good job and will have a house of his own and the guy leading a large business group dreams that his son will take the business to new heights.

{Why isn't it possible to explain to that poor guy living in the slums that if you don't have enough money to support yourself properly then how do you hope to bring up a one more child? I simply don't understand how these simple logic get washed by this weird instinct to pass on the genetic code! This instinct is unexplainable to say the least.}


{ I am deliberately using "son" here since I can't forget the extreme gender inequality that India has where the society is light-years away from looking at men and women on equal footing. Indian society commits a million crimes against women everyday germinating from the thousands of years old gender bias ingrained into it. Unless the women in every home actually start realizing and fighting for their independence and equality in their own family then this male chauvinistic society of India is never going to change and it will keep teaching in the books to children "Mother cooks food for the family". I just hated this statement in the books right since I was in kindergarten. My mother was first my teacher and given that she is a doctor she was also the first medical help. She taught me basic geometry (much before school taught me these things in class 6, my mother taught me to construct the incircle and circumcircle of a triangle when I was pretty young and all mathematics till I could start reading things on my own from class 3 or 4 and of course taught me a lot of biology. In no way can I imagine my mother as the one "who cooks food for the family". And of course she almost saved me from various things that were beyond my control and could have potentially completely jeopardized my life...things that I can't share here. And later in my life it was to my mother that I disclosed and cried when my fist serious love in life crashed...it is just amazing as to how much I could share with my mother that I could go and tell her of one of the biggest disasters in my life when I lost my first serious love.


How many of these girls that I see hanging around in the malls if they become mothers later in their life will be mothers like mine?


And coming back to that cycle that I was talking of. It seems to just go one without any rhyme or reason. And then this society will complaint that the world is getting polluted, that plastic is choking this earth, that there is less space to live etc. etc. Every generation comes in full of this instinct to pass on the genetic code and then what follows is simply a consequence. And definitely human beings haven't been built to adapt to nature but has a weird piece of brain attached on the top of the shoulders which comes up with all possible ways to bend nature to fit its needs and obviously nature back fires. And yet this society keeps producing new human beings who with every passing generation will live in more and more polluted earth and in smaller and smaller boxes that chequer the cities.

And then given this unstoppable cycle of reproduction, the society goes in search of producing more life sources from lesser and lesser raw material and will keep growing more and more sophisticated industries and more and more genetically engineered seeds to grow more crops out of less land. And then this cycle gets to the limit of its recursive stupidity when we keep expanding the cities and keep eating into the the crop lands and convert them into industries and keep complaining that resources are going down.

On one hand we keep reducing the available land to cultivate and on the other hand we come up with weirdly engineered seeds to grow more out of less land. Isn't it obvious that this process of indiscriminate expansion will only backfire.

Every generation will see pairs of couples populating the glossy malls and using up watts of energy to run these huge AC malls and guzzling gallons of coke in plastic bottles without any thought as to what will happen to the plastic. And these couples in the malls give birth to another generation of couples who will again populate the newer and probably bigger malls in the next generation and will drink more gallons of coke and will throw the plastic bottles.

Why are we as a society collectively failing to prevent this stupid recursive cycle of reproducing purely driven by illogical instincts and then producing more plastic waste and reducing crop land and increasing industries and then eating genetically grown food.

Why can't we stop this mindless circle?

Why does falling in love and sexual attraction have to lead to increasing the population?
Why do these fundamental emotions have to lead to self-destruction of the society?

Just an imagination...

Just a few random thoughts. Apologies for the lack of grammatical correction or organization or attempt at coherence.

Imagine:

a cold day with snow all around and frost on the window panes and the mellow dew sunlight filtering into the room through that..and sleeping on a soft white bed under large white quilts the entire day...and green meadows outside over which a black stallion is riding by.

and far away is faintly visible in the fog a series of blue mountains with moss green vegetation on it..and far away one can see some houses where people are cooking porridge and the smoke is rising through the chimneys into the blue sky shadowed with cotton like clouds...and sleeping in the wooden room while thats what the world outside is.

and the only thing that disturbs this melancholic silence is the quaint tune of the flute of the shepherd who has taken his flock of sheep to graze on the pastures on the hills and somewhere far away there is a water fall...the faint sound of water falling onto the hard rocks and frothing up in its desperation to break the rocks...and you sleeping in the bed happily disturbed by these sounds

something exists because humanity strongly believes that it is true

sheer force of imagination can make abstract things tangible reality.

its just like the concept of God. like love, like the end of the universe .. people just believe in these things strongly without any proof of their existence

and these look real to many people.

Its just like suddenly believing that one particular man can change the world. Just like falling in love hoping this lady will change life.
Its temporary insanity and yet we continue to imagine and err.