Chronicles of an Eclectic Life: fundaa

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Wednesday, November 04, 2015

Crackin' Intolerance

India is such a huge nation, that to see trash opinions being doled out by the political class, amplified by the media class, and reacted to by the cattle class is terrifying. Intolerance is the latest "in" thing, and we are made to believe that the government that has in past gained huge vote banks on intolerant lines has nothing to do with encouraging these intolerant opinions, and it is not in protocol to give an open condemnation; that this tolerance of intolerant opinions is coincidental; and that we should all agree, without protest, that there is no intolerance in our society whatsoever, and call it a "jolly good day" every waking hour.

Five minutes of listening to these opinions have shut down my pyloric valve. Severe constipation might follow, a psychosomatic response to the verbal diarrhea from these protostomes that encapsulate several prejudices in a pithy dispatch - such viscerally vicious statements should be met with body's autonomous response and nothing else.

People in this country have a very limited thought space, as is, and yet others litter that space with garbage with existential abandon, and make one completely resign to not thinking at all, or giving them a cleanup job that leaves no time to think. It reflects our cultural attitude towards garbage - there is so much of it generated that we just quit thinking about it instead of formulating wise civic policies to handle that menace. Our streets and neighbourhoods reek of it sometimes, but that is okay, we can always insulate ourselves further, and even mislead our guests about our standards of sanitation and hygiene.

The only intolerance we should show is towards time. Time, that is finite, will not wait while we sit and discuss or try to understand the nature of our politicians and our politik, - their understanding of religion, their definition of patriotism, and the ulterior motives behind foisting such retrograde constructs on a contemporary society that is trying to match shoulders with mature, diversified, and tolerant societies. Time wants to talk about progressive concepts, breakthrough research, and here we are squandering our money, and airtime on whose shit stinks more. One could derive through calculations the money circulated in the system over our daily fix of offensive garbage, and wonder how they - the common man - is never in loop of that money circulation, and if such spending could have - rather unjudiciously - simply been doled out to some community in death throes, on the verge of losing their art, their culture, their tolerant heritage, their song and their science.

Even my last hour of the daylight, on the 11,091st day of my life was irresponsibly spent in this reaction. FML. FMP.

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Wednesday, January 09, 2013

Slave types

I hate interaction with the slave class (which covers 90% of the people I interact with). Let me clarify myself - I'm not talking about any particular group of people, but the slave-to-the-money class (a more appropriate term, if you choose to use so); the people who represent themselves as people, but are in fact collection booths with the aim to make the most of the next client. It's easy to notice them in their complete denial of their human qualities.

It could be that reading this one Hindu article on the legendary bookstores (and how/why our society lacks that concept) gave seed to this thought, and my personal experiences of the day - which left me with a bitter taste of "all of it" - sprouted the seed into a thought chain. But one thing to end the day with is lucidity of why I loathe being where and how I am, and an admission of cluelessness if this would ever see a solution. People are people, and worse when they choose to become [the above-mentioned] slaves.

Trip me or kill me!

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Sunday, September 23, 2012

That something is something that

Something that is born always dies. To prove the otherwise, finding something that never dies would obviously satisfy.

But what about something that never gets born - wouldn't that be satisfactory, too? "Something that is never born, never dies." But if that something is never born, how can we give it an existence? - the mere conception of that something will be the process of its creation. Hence it always has to be born, and yet not necessarily die.

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Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Fundamental Units

Can you name the fundamental units of measurement....
did you get all the 7 of them correct? Yes, 7, there are 7 of those. And its one for each, so, of meters and kilometers, only one survives - the meter.
Now that I'm certain that you didn't, and that a many majora won't, consider that the world isn't even dealing with 7 quantities, as of yet, and we already call it so complex. There's some relief to know its not so complex, but there's the climb upto complexity that both scares as well as elates us.

For mirth, I could add that money being a most fundamental benchmark for life, should be adopted among those fundamentals as well. Then there'll be m/kg/s/A/C/mol/cd/$. Money would be the only unit with an entropy, lifelike. That would give us a great snapshot of the history of humankind then.

Too bad that even though money is so engrained into our lives, yet among our core insecurities is so far fetched a fear in the mind (to the unshrewd mind) that it isn't realized as one. Probably that is what people define 'maturity' as, honing that sense which makes us believe in something [wait, wasn't that religion's role?] I can see myself being uncomfortable with it, so by deduction I can assume myself immature.... which is what I surely am.
That means my theory works! - if you want proof then flip the screen around and try typing "You're the DUDE §"

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Sunday, July 08, 2012

Dead Spaces

Am living in ancient times. When i try thinking of the stories associated with my present dwelling - of what I should call this door-equipped stack of concrete blocks - to induce some nostalgia about the lives in 'those old days', I come to the conclusion that things weren't any different. We are/I am still living the lives of 1980s. Technology is absent in the spaces we occupy.

We pull on an iron grating to make way for us to enter into a narrow hollow concrete block, then into another larger concrete hollow. These hollows are coated with cement and a layer of paint, and constitute a "room" - though the paint doesn't ruin our clothes or peel off so soon these days. There's also a standard cot to lie on, standard mattresses, standard bedsheet, standard pillows. A standard study table, complemented with a standard wooden chair, and a standard 4-level bookrack in its adjacency (the modest elegance of these wooden articles feel alien to the room, though).

We don't interact much with our spaces. We don't utilize them for anything beyond the traditional (almost primitive) use for security and shelter. How long will this continue?

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Sunday, June 24, 2012

Dying With Wings

There's a fleet of single purpose sexual missiles, briefly converting the 107.507 square inches of my laptop screen into something akin to both, a warship - crashing, landing, docking, - and also as a mating platform. In some time, a few of these sexual missiles will accomplish - in a process of quick and violent mating - the task that genetic code has entrusted them with. The prize of their victory will be death; the failures will die too - there's no escaping the law.

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CM Number

Everyone knows the Erdos Number

How about a
CM number: the blood distance from the Chief Minister of the current state you find yourself threatened.

Usage:
"Oye chhod de mujhe, chutiye, mera CM number 3 hai."
"ओये छोड़ दे मुझे, चूतिये, मेरा CM नंबर ३ है |"
("Oye chestnutass, leave me facken alone, my numbar is the 3")

In the Dilli-UP territory, everybody claims a CM number of 4 or less, though they are rarely speaking the truth.
In Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, marital union is legalised by plastering on the banners, next to a photo of the couple, a creature of CM number <= 4, in a pope-pose i.e. "let these two children fornicate with my consent".

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Wednesday, May 02, 2012

Noida's Suspect X

The Aarushi case (aka Noida Double Murder case) is in the headlines again, unsolved (and unexplained) even after, like, 100 yrs of investigation (or mis-investigation, should I call it?). Dentists have never suffered back this much - Aarushi's parents, dentists (and the prime suspects in this murder primarily due to lack of any other viable theories), have already been strangled by the media, and are at the crest of infamous-ity. They have faced all kinds of allegation, as if they were held hostage in a Rakhi Sawant talk show. Talk of karma... route canals you give, route canals you get. But, humour aside, I'm startled at the reciprocity of this public to Aarushi's parents' suffering. To believe they/we sided against Manu Sharma. I'm proposing a theory that either we enter some mental arrest when things come coated in a shade of gray - the panicked pigeons that we are, or that we relegate our thought process to our darling media to such an extent that we are rendered incapable of independent thought.
To anybody who begins to look at me with a raised eyebrow must understand that the investigative process finished inconclusive, and the code of law doesn't judge based on public opinion.

What connect I could find with the aforementioned investigative boo boo, is a novel that I'd just finished reading: The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino. Higashino, who's been dubbed "The Japanese Stieg Larsson" (right on the book's cover), turned in a good investigative fiction with this one. Its an easy read, albeit with a slightly convoluted ending that needs some dedicated attention span.

I have no intention of giving a full book review here. Where I want to arrive at is [a character in the book, a physics prof] Manubu Yukawa, sort of a Sherlock H, the genius that ultimately nails our Suspect X. There are chapters when he, despite evidence being overwhelmingly convincing, tread cautiously, often against the tide. See where his investigation comes from, and its a relief to know that somebody can put a coherent narrative around such an healthy process of deduction.

Seeing Aarushi's case unsolved makes me cringe. Seeing her parents being swallowed in the wide mouth of speculation makes me cringe even more. Seeing people that pretend to be blind to the underlying corruption that saw destruction of evidence and collusion of the law with the lawbreakers makes my biceps wither.

PS: wanna read the book? just ask.

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Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Thus Spake Baba Damdama

"Give me, woman, thy little truth!"
"Thou goest to women? Do not forget thy whip!"

I can picture at least 6 faces in Indian media who regularly come and talk on the talk shows talking a lot more at the usage of the above lines, that come from a 19th century classic ("Thus Spake Zarathustra", by Fakir W Nietzsche). Yes, Nietzsche (hereafter referred to as N) was known to be a misogynist. Its nothing surprising, though, his perspective has been a recurrent one through history and cultures. There's always the occasional ruffle in media over incubation-chamber analogy of the female specia. My (narrow) anthropological finds, though, make me believe that the modern society (American?) seems a little better - see how Maroon 5 and James Blunt can change the world for the good!

Some other great anti-pickup lines from the same chapter:

: Everything in woman is a riddle, and everything in woman hath one solution—it is called pregnancy.
: Two different things wanteth the true man: danger and diversion. Therefore wanteth he woman, as the most dangerous plaything.
: Man shall be trained for war, and woman for the recreation of the warrior: all else is folly.

I pretty much LOLd at every ~~line~~ word up there.

What makes me even more fascinated with this perspective of N is its resonance with that of holy men across the holy Himalayan circuit (as much of it that i've seen i.e. Hardwar, Rishikesh, Kedarnath). Nothing better to start with drawing parallels than how the book starts:

When Zarathustra was thirty years old, he left his home and the lake of his home, and went into the mountains. There he enjoyed his spirit and solitude, and for ten years did not weary of it.

That makes N your average Baba Damdama (Baba = holy man) that you find sprawling all over the lower Himalayan tract. They (holy men) have little veneration for anything but their own philosophy, much like Zarathustra. They are filled to the cup with misogynistic takes on anything concerning the...uh...gyne. They make the male species seem like some divine mutation, out-of-line with regular evolution.

But those folks and my old roomie aside, we have good faith that the leading generations will not think likewise.
That is because soon after independence, Jawaharlal Nehru commissioned a scientific study to put an end to this woman-vs-man debate once and for all...
The average woman was found to have an IQ of 3 pigeons. The average man was comparably smarter, about 5 pigeons.* Don't be surprised - pigeons are smart and were considered appropriate benchmark at that time.

This performance - which makes 'venerate' a synonym to 'torture' - is no reason to make any gender generalisation.

* In marital union, however, their (man-woman's) combined IQ surprisingly reflected a huge drop, to an average of 1/2 a pigeon. This fact of an average Indian pigeon outsmarting an average Indian couple, is why pigeon was denied the status of national bird. The Peacock was chosen (though later studies proved that even the Peacock outsmarted the average Indian couple, it was too late to retract the Peacock, as our handicraft industry had already put this bird on over 1,80,000 export items - as the reader should know, that handicrafts lobby is very strong here in India, only next to the mixing-blood-in-ketchup lobby).

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Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Life Averages

Divine Comedy begins at the halfway junction of Dante's life, which, guess what, is not 50, but 35 years. This comes from the biblical life expectancy figure, that was 70 years (Psalms 90:10).
Since childhood, we've been led to believe the commonality of 100. People turn 100, then they die. Can't understand where the dumb figure of 100 came from - is it our decimal number system?, or were we brought up on an overtly-simplified treatise on life (100 sounds way more exciting than, say, 72, or 99)?

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Delhi prostitutes

UPDATE: Prostitute at my doorstep.

Funny condensation filaments - that seemingly jut out from the fields along the R. Yamuna to my left - make a convex shield-sorts above me. I occasionally gaze up to collect and make whatever i can of this fascinating sight that reminds of aerodynamic flow, and pedal along, and eat some more of the road. Surprises to the common man returning home tired, as a cyclist zips by, whistling to signal his approach.

Surprises to this cyclist, as his eyes steal a scene from the city's underbelly: a couple of prostitutes (ugly and man-like, as be the norm), sticking out from the dense grassy growth along the road, not far from Akshardham (to think that religion and sex don't mix, hah!), seemingly fixing their rates with a couple of freight-auto-wallahs, one of whom looks a boy of mere 12 (but at least somebody's compensating for me by starting out early; 'maintaining the balance', as we say).

Insert King Crimson's choral verse to "Ladies of the Road" here:

All of you know that the girls of the road
Are like apples we stole in our youth.
All of you know that the girls of the road
Been around but are versed in the truth

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Rough cuts: Innovation and Education in India

Post-Brahma, India has had no creators. Only slaves. Production en-masse.
Watching The Social Network for the third time - second time in the same day - I couldn't help but wonder if innovation needs anthropological studies, to see how culture and the culture of innovation go hand-in-hand. D and I agreed to a common envy for Mark Zuckerburg, and also cursed our low-key college days at NIEC that now makes us feel kinda losers. But I bet that even the IIT-ans feel the same way. After all, India is a huge sweatshop: we dont invent, we replicate. (really cheap, too!) All the 'young talent' that graduates in this country, is a bunch of jerks. We don't have any Angel Investors here, because nobody wants to invest in a bunch of jerks.

Education-wise India is in a stalemate. Every education in India has a political context.
Take an example of PhDs: that the way PhDs are done is an insult to the academic process. Most people who enroll for a PhD do have their PhDs successfully finished, but it isn't because they end up learning on what they started their research on, but because they end up learning the exact science of 'successfully finishing a PhD in India'. Yes, 'Successfully finishing a PhD in India' needs inclusion as an official course in our Universities, since most will actually end up with that for majors, going through the same curriculum of:
- bending over to superiors,
- false co-authorship of papers,
- twisting outcomes,
- adjusting to external expectations,
- and basically just "doing as they're told".
We make friggin' Nobel Laureates of such people! Hah!

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Thursday, December 23, 2010

Your closest friend is yet to arrive

250,000 years back, in the Pleistocene Era, evolution decided to fix the limit to our social relationship capacity - the radius of people and relationships that we could keep a track of. 25 years back, the nuances of genetics further narrowed the same capacity for me. 18 years back, research put these facts public, and their observation on our social dynamics further limited and cleaved the extents of our relationships within those capacities.
So it happens that our neocortex volume determines that capacity, which averages to about 150 for us human primates (mine should be lower, as empirically observed). A mesh of 150. Among these, a narrower - say, 50 - that hang dearly; 20 that stick close; and a mere 5 or 6 that resonate at our exact frequencies and talk our talk, whom we call our closest friends.

Even if we stretch our limits, or you claim to have a larger Neo-cortical region than I do, you could take your active social relationship limit to 250. Beyond that, new relationships are either futile, or end up displacing the existing ones. But even that calculation is weak, as we never know whom we might bump into and find endearing one of these days of our remaining lives, and have the need for inclusion in our nexus. That one person could potentially be your life partner. Or your best friend. Or your idol. Or your second-born's Godfather. Or even your third life partner, if you've divorced twice. Or your fourth, if after your third marriage you realise you really have an affinity to the same sex which is why your earlier commitments failed... you get my point.

Henceforth, how do we even begin to reserve space for our future relationships that would blossom, sans the guilt of pushing another to an inferior level, and also one on the fringes of that 250 limit completely outside? We need a 'Tatkal' quota - where one could just find a seat in our Neo-cortical Garib Rath.

The mention of our railways brings the fact to mind that this is India, where the great Indian art of 'adjust' has had the people cram their social lives with faces and more faces and the warmth of a thousand handshakes that they would never remember. Everybody claims to know every third person in a social setup, which makes their claim all the more dubious, or only hints at how degraded they assume a human social bond to be. More likely that person's just bluffing; their claims would fail on the mere premise of the time budgeting problem involved in maintaining anything like that monstrous social circle - we could be spending up to 42% of our lifetime in mere Social Grooming, which is highly disadvantageous in today's post-tribal societies. Imagine the drudgery when you find it all wasn't worth. "The lesser the merrier" seems to be apt for this age. I don't wonder why I respect my reclusive friends, who maintain a narrow social group - its only an appreciation of their humbling and evolved mean gene strategy. Everything else is petty subsistence.

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Chronicles of an Eclectic Life

Wednesday, November 04, 2015

Crackin' Intolerance

Wednesday, January 09, 2013

Slave types

Sunday, September 23, 2012

That something is something that

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Fundamental Units

Sunday, July 08, 2012

Dead Spaces

Sunday, June 24, 2012

Dying With Wings

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

CM Number

Wednesday, May 02, 2012

Noida's Suspect X

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Thus Spake Baba Damdama

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Life Averages

Tuesday, October 04, 2011

Delhi prostitutes

Sunday, October 02, 2011

Rough cuts: Innovation and Education in India

Thursday, December 23, 2010

Your closest friend is yet to arrive

Sociobabble

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Zeitgeist

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Wednesday, November 04, 2015

Wednesday, January 09, 2013

Sunday, September 23, 2012

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Sunday, July 08, 2012

Sunday, June 24, 2012

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Wednesday, May 02, 2012

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Tuesday, October 04, 2011

Sunday, October 02, 2011

Thursday, December 23, 2010

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