Summer of '17

I started this blog in 2013. Now 4 years later I am going to tell myself how I spent my summer. I could say that it was great and probably it was too. But I, being a pessimist, would go with alright. So what's new.
I joined graduate school. I now think that I am stupidier than before. And I have already stopped reading novella and recreational math.
It was a sudden transition from my non travelling life to a 'frequent'ish traveller.
Since I arrived in Vancouver, I have already travelled to Atlanta, Edmonton and New York City.
I get to see lot of cultures and great mathematicians. But then its like being too close and too far. You can see them, touch them(if they get past your creepiness) but you cannot understand why they are important in the right sense. For most of them I would never be able to grasp their genius and their innovation in their writings because for one I might never be able to read their papers and another that I might be able to see their worth. After all, it takes a genius to know one.
Let's move on.
I did watch and love this series called BoJack Horseman on Netflix. It is very brilliant and dark. Two things I love.
I also attended some concerts which I would never dream of going to. For instance I saw Norah Jones, Bob Dylan (very old) and I am going later this year to a concert of Zakir Hussain (the guy who sells Taj Mahal tea).
I did spend a lot of time reading and researching. Discovered a very small new result.
Hope I can make some more progress in research. That would be the best.

Review of "When breath becomes air"

I recently completed reading "When breath becomes air" by Paul Kalanithi. While knowing the fate of Paul from starting it was a compelling read and it did raise some important points which anyone with "existential crisis" would have thought about.
We as humans identify ourselves to a particular identity and ask ourselves what makes us us. This leads to asking the meaning of one's life and in turn dictates what would one want to do with one's life. People with this strong sense of identification have to justify themselves their existence and their actions. Paul's case was no different.
His search for the difference between life and death and what made death so alluring a concept was crucial
in making his life decisions. He learnt english, philosophy, the workings of the brain to understand what was the
meaning of life and how did death change it. His sense of importance, a hubris, if I might add, of his life is prevalent and maybe even characteristic of humans. What makes me me.
The book offers an insight into his thought processes and mind, the things which make Paul Paul. Having been to the best of the schools in the world, his was definitely a uneasy and questioning mind. This quality is greatly
appreciated in any intellectual school. Most probably because the intellectuals schools has people who themselves were grappled by questions about existence, realism, importance in the promenade of their youths and these questions withered away with age. Not to say they were solved. They never are. One just learns to ignore and even gets comfortable with fat paychecks and easy life.
Paul did not venture into the territory of understanding death after becoming a neurosurgeon. This was the
backdrop in which his the story plays, a real life story. It is accepted that the life of a doctor, a neurosurgeon at that is quite tough. But as he mentions, it was a calling not a choice. Calling is what best justifies the existence of a person who has a strong sense of existence. Existing for the sake of existing is too trivial (and frowned upon) a reason and one needs to do better. Guided by the great minds who have walked the Earth he tries to find his calling too, a justification for his existence.
The story is of sorrow and pain but it is somehow not obvious because of unwavering tone in Paul's writing.
He was steady on the operating table and on the typewriter too, with not too many emotions. A cut two milimeters below can damage and hence one needs to be precise and sharp. It was a beautiful piece of writing.
Also, Paul would have been one of the best doctors around, had he lived. Having snatched everything he yearned to live for, this is a tale of sadness. What goes around doesn't come around. He was living in the future and the future refused to come.
The return to theism was quite spectacular and it give a key insight into his mind. Men are guided by meaning in their lives. For Paul the absence of God meant that the scientific facts were correct but there was no meaning. It was merely a giant machine roaring and moving. His and quite often all the other theists have but this argument for their theism. Our lives would not make sense if not for a higher purpose, a meaning of sorts. We are not ready to accept that there might be no meaning of life. That we are just a stupid lot living and we are all meaningless.
Overall, the book was a good read and it made me look through a different lens of life.

Meaning of life

Humans living on this planet have barely arrived about 100,000 years ago, so it would be wrong to say we are owners of this Earth. For that matter even caretaker of this Earth. Dinosaurs have lived on this planet for time periods longer than that of humans and they did not own the Earth or care about it. Most probably, we as species would not live for more than a million years. That is very very less in evolutionary timescales and would not matter to anyone.
We have occupied Earth, created religions, created gods, demi-gods, gods among human, societies, vegetarians, vegans, hippies, music, arts, mathematics, respect, emotions, hatred, sexiness etc. The point being that almost all the concepts/ideals we live by, are anthropomorphic and have no actual significance. For all we know societies could have developed where treating people with kindness was looked down upon. Animals were not allowed to mate. Various bizzare things could have happened. What we are witnessing is a particular kind of society which developed. There was no reason for it to be preferred over other models of society. Being emotional beings, people wanted to give "meaning" to life, "meaning" to death, "meaning" to cat crossing the path. Hell, meaning to everything. We wanted everything to hold significance in our lives coz as humans we are darn special. We are better than other species.
Truth is(in my perspective), lives have no meaning. There is no better reason to live a life than is to start building large temples in the middle of the road.
Given this perspective, that nothing in life is meaningful many people become cynical. They dread the fact that since life has no meaning there is no reason to live and hence one must die. Of course, no reason to live comes with no reason to die too. Some things give us happiness and some things make us sad. Most of this could be conditioned by our society or for that matter evolution too. Helping other makes us feel good because we have been taught that it is a good thing. Feeling envy is bad because our parents have told us so, movies around us, teachers around us. Of course there are other "universal" pleasures. Most people like sweet dishes and desserts. That is coming from evolution. Natural selection makes sure that you like whatever will make your body more active for reproduction. Sweet things inevitably contain glucose which gives energy. I must say that evolution does not work in hindsight. It did not realise that making people such that they like sweet things could have bad consequences. People getting diabetes, impotency and other diseases as a direct or indirect consequence of glucose are side effects of making the body like glucose. Natural selection will act and make people in which these tendencies are limited. That will take a long time. Anyways, I digress.

Noting that point that lives do not hold purpose and our emotions are conditioned or evolutionarily trained we ask ourselves what to do with this long boring life. Should we go kill ourselves or should we write blogs or should we contemplate life or should we read Proust.

This is where the answer is very very simple. Do what you like. Find peace in the fact that nothing is going to matter. Anarchy, corruption, sadness, death hold no more meaning that kindness, greed, love, happiness etc.

Nothing is forever.

Summer of '15

THIS IS A DRAFT AND NOT COMPLETE YET


As the tradition dictates, it is time to write about my (mis)doings of summer of '15. Looking back it seems to be the most peaceful and enlightening one, perhaps the best of all. It is true that every summer I went to place or two, enjoyed delicacies, did some math, met new people, and read a lot of novels, and these were the things that brought joy, which did not happen this summer, which cannot be blamed entirely on me (if one counts people not selecting you). This summer was different, it was a grown up summer, one spent leisurely, without traveling, without many novels, without good food and without much math although I would have to qualify each of these assertions. Going back to the start, I was supposed to go to AFS 2 which was being held in IISER TVM but could/did not owing to the objection of Steven. Thence I started reading bits and pieces of esoteric subjects like algebraic geometry, galois cohomology and logic, although I would not dare say I learnt much or even a reasonable amount. Summer was characterized by long sleeping hours and trying, without much success, to follow a schedule. I must say that I watched a lot of movies, on crime, on science fiction, on absolutely nothing and on many other things. My friends and me decided to organise a logic seminar to collectively learn some logic and we pretty much did nicely which was one productive thing this summer. The peaceful summer days filled with hot air and long hours of sunlight were simply amazing in that there was no one to bother me and I had trained my mind to ride guilt free. I happened to read Kafka on the shore by Murakami and it, filled with magical realism, captured imagination and provided an escape to fantasyland, which was a nice thing to happen.

Victory is hard

It was almost an hour into the ordeal, mildly salty sweat could be tasted from the corner of the mouth and all the souls in the vicinity were fed up of me. It is at this moment that I was thinking of getting up and running away, from all this travesty, somewhere far where I would not be judged, I would not have to prove my competence every single time. Every soul who has claimed fame by means of hard work and perseverance would know that it is at this very moment when things seem to go against you, everyone wants you to give up, and that includes the body itself, that you must not. These will be the deciding factors which will, colloquially speaking, "make you or break you". Keeping all this in mind, I decided to take one more slice of the cheese pizza even though i was full up to the throat.
There was no one in the college who loved pizza more than me. I would never shy away from a chance to have pizza at any time or place. There have been incidents when my whole circle of friends had to eat pizza(of various flavours) only because I thought it was a good idea to do so. I was deep into pizza, hell I even had pizza printed on my pajamas. Kush was really annoyed by my habit of choosing pizza in any new place we went to and it was, mind you, not him who challenged me to eat 4 pizzas in a row, it was his girlfriend, who I suspect wanted to get rid of me. What could I do?
Back to Melisa's , after I had the first slice of the 4th pizza, I was not in a very friendly mood. It is, what I realised, the situation many great people have been and they are great only because they did not listen to pain inside their mind and body, they persevered through the hard times. Well, midway into the slice of the 4th pizza, I noticed some mild distant rumbling, seemed like the sound of a volcano about to erupt, a earthquake, a tsunami or some deep imminent danger about to unfold. The tables were starting to shake and I was almost relieved that the earthquake would save my day, with my nose. Everything was shaking and I couldn't control the my movements, like when you are fighting in air. It wasn't long before I fainted, which could be due to some splinter falling on my body or shock or any of those things which are supposed to happen when you are exposed to something horrific.
Actually, when I woke up I could see my friends forming a circle around me. They told me this bullshit story that I had puked all over the pizza place and I had fainted. Unfortunately, Shailza had taken a video shoot of the whole episode and it seemed these people were true. I was thinking of all sort of argument to make so as to justify my glorification of pizza even though I had failed it as a person.
Since that day, I eat pizza alone and Melisa's had prohibited my entry. Even Lenin was exiled from Russia and should we allow ourselves to forget the travesty of Nelson Mandela when he did everything for love of his freedom.

V for Verbiage

It has been a long time since I posted something worthwhile. As it happens that I am preparing for GRE general test and have to amass a vocabulary of excessive magnitude to be able to serve the purpose well. It is a consequence of this that I came across a flush of words of which I had only heard of and never bothered to decipher them. It was, thus, incumbent on me to imbibe their meanings and contexts in which they appear. To facilitate this agenda, I took a step to collect all previously unheard words and decode them which I happen to come-by in movies, videos, novels and blogs. I could vaguely recall a movie with tons of verbiage and upon googling realised that it was none other than everyone's favourite "V for Vendetta". I am alluding to a dialogue between V and Evey. Lets have a look at the dialogue and its interpretation in light of my knowledge.

V: [Evey pulls out her mace] I can assure you I mean you no harm.

Evey Hammond: Who are you?

V: Who? Who is but the form following the function of what and what I am is a man in a mask.

Evey Hammond: Well I can see that.

V: Of course you can. I'm not questioning your powers of observation; I'm merely remarking upon the paradox of asking a masked man who he is.

Evey Hammond: Oh. Right.

V: But on this most auspicious of nights, permit me then, in lieu of the more commonplace sobriquet, to suggest the character of this dramatis persona.

V: Voilà! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of Fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition.
[[ Although I might appear as a comical man dictating swords, by the circumstances in which I happen to be, I am cast both as a villain and a victim. The mask, as it may look like, is not a display of my arrogance but is a symbol of the now vanished democracy. I have resolved to eliminate all of these corrupt men leading lives of evil, who abuse their freedom and commit immoral and detestable actions]]

[carves "V" into poster on wall]

V: The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta, held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous.

[[The only verdict is vengeance; an action to relieve these corrupt men, not just for the sake of it, but for the value and honesty of those oppressed by the system who have done no wrong]].

V: [giggles]

V: Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it's my very good honor to meet you and you may call me V.
[[Indeed, this soup of unnecessarily complicated words deters even the learned ones but nevertheless it's my ... call me V]]

Evey Hammond: Are you, like, a crazy person?

V: I am quite sure they will say so. But to whom, might I ask, am I speaking?

Evey Hammond: I'm Evey.

Time of my life-1

I believe there was a time in all of our lives when we discovered books, novels mostly and we were voracious readers. We read whatever was in our houses, local library, kabadi wala dukan and other places. This happened to me when i was in my 10 th class and a little before that. I father was in Army then and we had a nice library maintained by the Artillery Centre. This was my paradise. Earlier in my 8th and 9th I used to read mostly general knowledge books and Ripley's Believe it or not, its not that I did not know about novels but I always that 'who in the world will have time to read so big stories. I had read short stories, a little long stories which were sometimes boring and then I considered novels as exteneded versions of long stories. That was why i avoided them and chose to read Guinness Records and stuff like that. But then some radical transformation happened with my first novel. I guess it was the Alchemist. Read it in one single night straight. Mostly because the english was simple to understand and the story seemed nice. And also due to the fact that I was religious at that time ,or was it that I became religious after reading Alchemist. Anyways, it was beautifully written novel which was totally unreal ending and which made me laugh with happiness like Santiago was already doing. A possible that I was hooked to it was also that it was set in a charismatic location with the winds and oasis and pyramids and scimitars and a loose boy which did not give a fuck about the world, just wanted to graze some cattles. That novel also gave me the idea to become a farmer in life, which i still am attached to. That was probably my first real novel,if you don;t count Roald Dahl a little long stories which always excited me. He was one fine writer who managed to take the suspense till the end and make it romantically tragic. One which i remember is the story in which they make an automatic grammatizer which writes stories and all. there was this other one in which they catch a lot of roosters by sedating them only to discover them waking up before the owner. These were fun stories and Matilda too. I sort of related to Matilda. Once the first novel was read, all others were like coconut water to me. Kept of reading. Afterthought compels me to mention non-real novels I read before Alchemist like Enid Blyton's Famous Five and Secret Seven. God, those were something. It being a big library, there were lot of Famous Five stories there, possibly all and there was not a single one that I hadn't read. I guess it gave the sense of adventure which every teenager craved for in their lives and it had lot of food mentioned in it like lemonade and cookies in tin cans and stuff which got me to idea of reading enid blyton with something to drink, mostly lemonade or some chocobar to eat. I used to go to this night school for some random stuff and it was far from home, 5 maybe 7 kilometers and I used to cycle back and forth everyday to that place. I always used to go there early and read Enid Blyton in empty classrooms alongside the window with rains pouring. Those were some nice days. But then came lot of Paulo Coelho, this was after Alchemist and each of his novels became shittier than the one before. He talked about random stuff. But there was one good novel which he wrote, called Eleven Minutes. It was about this prostitute in France or Switzerland, who wrote about her life. It was an erotic novel which was a good reason to liking it but it had some really nice stories in it. And it was almost poetic to me. Then the other novel i liked of his was Devil and Miss Prymm. Then I read Dan Brown and most of his novels and came up this brilliant idea that an author pretty much writes the same stuff over and over again. This idea was mainly influenced by Paulo Coelho and Dan Brown and some other people. Then there was this other novel I was hooked to called 'A series of unfortunate events', it was 13 or 16 book collection of short hardbound books which were all there in our army library and don't I remember waiting to issue one book after another after every week. You see we were allowed to issue 3 books per week. Count Olaf I started to hate and I was scared of him, I mean he was such an artist that you would see him appearing until he decided to reveal himself but then Violet and Sunny and other dude were clever and all. I was seriously scared of Count Olaf, the way he killed Montgomery,the herpetologist and the way he deceived people. I really loved Lemony Snickett's collection of books. Strangely i had this idea that i was never able to chech taht he was in jail when he wrote these books. Then came 10th standard and people pressuring to study and what to do with life and all other crap which comes with it. I was so much full of people telling me to get good marks in 10th saying that it was the start of life and what not. The person who came to help me at that point was Osho. He had this awesome collection of books on various topics like Joy, Intuition and other subject which made me really philosophical and religious which is mostly also the tendency when we want to escape our present situation. Osho was a way out. He told everything that contradicted what my parents said and it was nice because i thought that i was not the only person who thought my parents uttered bullshit. Then came the 10th boards, the finals. Did I mention that I got hooked to Harry potter somewhere in my s starting of 10th and was on Deathly Harrows ,don't even know if this title is correct, before my math final exam. and god i so much i enjoyed reading about Hogwarts and the war and Voldemort and his visions and others. That was some great times and those are not over. I have these nice feelings every now and then.Like last semester, I was reading Murakami's, Norwegian Woods before some exam. It was cold winter night and Murakami made a perfectly depressing night. This was all a nice experience. I hope my curiosity to know stories does not die down. I keep on reading. And perhaps contribute some day too.