The spirit of life

Over the last few weeks, I was spending increasingly more time on the TED website looking up talks on design issues. It was then that I came across a few projects, absolutely stunning in breadth, undertaking and purpose, so much so that I thought I’d put it up on the blog.

The first one’s called ‘We Feel Fine’, a joint project by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar. It plots the emotions of many people from all around the world through diagrammatic and statistical depictions. The design is beautifully simple and easy to understand and can give you a good idea of what’s happening in the lives of people around you. It rounds of the whole attempt by providing interesting and bizarre metrics. You can find the site here and the TED preview here. (Another interesting attempt that runs along the same lines is ‘I Want You To Want Me‘.)

The second one is an even more vast project both in terms of the kind of man power and technology that went into making it and what it hopes to achieve. It’s called the AlloSphere – a large hollow sphere that it is fit with a large host of microcontrollers connected to a supercomputer. What the AlloSphere does is that it generates various designs, constructions, materials and phenomena on an atomic scale which is then projected as a digital image onto the insides of the sphere. A bridge running along a diameter permits up to 20 people at a time to bear witness to breathtaking views that science devoid of creativity cannot hope to present to us at all. Like JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, the director of the Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology (CREATE) at UC Santa Barbara, says: “imagine architects standing in the sphere and seeing microstructures and atoms arranged in space – what if they could come up with a new construction material?” [paraphrased]. Again, here‘s where you can find the TED preview.

The last one is a complete revolution in its own right and I think many people will agree when I say it’s the Gapminder by Hans Rosling. The statistics chapter in mathematics you chose to willingly forget while in school because it made you sleep in a snap – Rosling changes all of that by drawing old graphs in new ways. His sports-person commentary also adds to the pace of this lecture as he plots countries and ideas onto digital graph sheets. Find the TED talk here.

What these 3 ideas did was open me up to another idea that world is changing like no other. Like Thomas Friedman puts it, “the world is flat!” He couldn’t have been more right. This world is no longer curved around the edges and you and me are no longer strangers. With Jonathan Harris’ ‘We feel fine’, I’ll know what you’re feeling some 1000 miles away as soon as you know what I’m feeling. Kuchera-Morin’s AlloSphere will open up technology that you and me never thought we could have access to. And before you know it, Hans Rosling will have it up all on a giant graph and tell everyone what we did, what we could have done and how well we did it.

The world is no longer yours or mine, no longer subject to one war in one region amongst one group of people contending for one piece of information.  It has been globalized by just ideas. The world is ours, subject to our war that involves our people contending for the control over all information.

Gregarious grammar, garrulous grammar

The following post deals with learning, knowledge and memory. It details the way humans learn language and assimilate grammatical technicalities to form phrases that depict their ideas. It also deals with the aspects of age and mental maturity, and how they affect learning processes.

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Linguists studying the aspects of recognition and cognition regarding languages will tell you that younger children tend to absorb the structure of their native language (or any other) at a rate faster than their elders. You will have noticed that a child of 2-3 years will absorb the nuances of its native tongue in a matter of months – while once adolescence is passed, structured classes and guidance become necessary to do the same. Although this theory is only empirical to me, it is quite established in scientific circles with adequate proof to back it up. I would like to extend this same argument to one more facet of learning: that of expanding one’s grammar to accommodate newer words.

Here, before I continue, I’d like to introduce something called the grammatical circle of words. This circle represents all the words recognised by an individual as being usable on an everyday basis for him or her. To rephrase, these words will constitute a lexicon. The area of this circle will increase rapidly at the younger phases of one’s life, as detailed in the first paragraph of this post. The newborn child will go from knowing no language to knowing one in the span of a year, and the circle will expand from zero volume to a finitely large one. Bracketing this transformation will be a learning period in which the child will learn about all types of words, sentence structures and idea constructions. The act of pointing to an apple and crying will now become replaceable by “I want that apple because I’m hungry.” In this period, there will be a momentum that will characterize how fast the child learns such things. I could define it like this.

A1 = Initial number of words; A2 = Final number of words.

M = [ { ( A2 – A1 ) x 100 } / ( 365 x A1 ) ]

(i.e. Momentum = Percentage increase in number of words averaged over 1 year)

If the momentum is high (over a suitably long period of time), the child will have learnt 500 words as compared to another child with lesser momentum that learnt 300 words (example). My idea is that greater the momentum during this period, slower will be the acquisition of newer words later in life. By this, I mean that if the grammatical circle of words expanded very quickly in the earlier stages of one’s life, it will be more rigid towards the final cognitive stages. Now, let me give my explanation for it.

Say I learnt 1,000 words before I was 5. As a child of between 5 and 10 years of age, my circle of 1,000 words will be sufficient to detail to myself and to others what I see, hear and feel. If I find that there is a new experience that seems incapable of being described through the words I already know, I will learn a new word – “ostentatiously gregarious” the 1,001st – to be able to use the language more effectively. At this point, suppose I have a friend whom I’ve known for a long time, and that he’s displayed a larger momentum of learning. At the age of 5, if he knows 2,000 words, then it should suffice for him to not acquire any new words till, say, he’s 15. Growing up together, I’ll find that I’m learning new words at the rate of 10 per year while he is grammatically dormant. Now, at the age of 20, if I find that I need to learn 5 new words for a job I’m applying to, I’ll find it easier than him. Why? Because the momentum which I said bracketed the learning period is still greater than zero for me, so the learning period involved is longer for me than for my friend. His circle will have been completed will mine will still be expanding. I can accommodate, he can’t.

All of this is based on an (empirical) assumption on my part that the learning process I keep referring to happens only once in one’s life. Once it dies out (at an age corresponding to the completion of one’s postgraduate education), newer experiences no longer seem like solutions to remember but problems to tackle. At these stages, what has already been learnt yearns to be put into use, i.e. the application-oriented years of life. If the learning process is spread out through these first 20-25 years, the amount of knowledge is greater than when the process spans about 10-15 years. This could be because what we learn is encoded away in our memories as a collection of sights and sounds. If I were to read in a book the word “gregarious” at the age of 12 and know its meaning through the context of its usage, I will remember it for the next few years only when I can remember the context itself. If I were to encounter the same word when a friend of mine describes someone else so when I am 18, I will remember it for a longer time. The difference in these two cases is that, although the learning period is in effect, the latter is remembered in more forms than the former. When I am 50, there is a better chance of me recollecting something that has a sight, sound and texture associated with it than that which is triggered by the name of the book or a character in it.

When reading a piece of text that seems too hard to remember, one tends to ascribe the whole picture it brings to mind to a memory that is readily accessible by “mugging” it. When this happens, nerves in the head keep firing signals in a particular channel. With repetitive firing, the cognitive system tends to identify that particular channel as one that will be regular use and therefore keep it active. You will be able to better understand this phenomenon when you associate it with some languages in your life whose words you are slowly forgetting because you don’t use them often. Similarly, when a person grows older, his responsibilities also multiply given that fact that he will now have the physical strength to execute them. To supplant this strength, he will begin to use his past experiences as lessons so he learns to optimize his own performance. At these stages, what he has taught himself will now come forth in the form of actions and decisions. The nerves will now begin to fire in those channels that seem most necessary for that supplementation (some lessons will seem more useful than others).

If I had stopped learning new words at the age of 12, then the application-oriented stages of life will set in prematurely, and the nerves will begin to decode rather than continuing to encode. Due to the said prematurity, the necessity to learn a new word because of a strange experience will now tend to be tackled by using older words. So, since I’m 12, I’ll use the phrase “moves freely with people” instead of the word “gregarious”; at the same time, my 18 year old friend will learn it. Analogously, when I am 18, I may not be able to  properly define the word gregarious. The Venn diagram should help you.

The probability of recollection

If an event ‘A’ is associated with both sight and sound, {x,y} depicting the occurrence of the sight-event and sound-event being fired (resp., through Boolean logic), then one of the following will happen when the memory will need to be recollected:

1. {0,0}
2. {0,1}
3. {1,0}
4. {1,1}

Therefore, there is a 75% chance that ‘A’ will be remembered by the person. If, however, an event ‘B’ is associated with only sight (like a word being encountered in a novel), then there is only a 50% chance of its recollection:

1. {1}
2. {0}

Phew! I learnt a lot there!

Tribute to Times New Roman

Times New Roman was my first and longest-serving superheroine. Always called back into action when the overconfident newbie fails to live up to his promises, Times New Roman takes on the challenge without the slightest of murmurs and gets things done. She can’t fly, she can’t see through walls, she can’t halt speeding trucks in their tracks. What she can do is she can make them happen. There is not a hint of arrogance about her, and you can feel her humility boring into you. She does not ask for much; come to think of it, she asks for nothing. Her rewards are her moments – the willful verification of her veracity, the surrender you must enact unto her. She speaks not much, and when she does, she does so beautifully and with commensurate elegance. She compliments the blandiloquence of your imagery, she denigrates the stunted and the deformed.

Times New Roman

Times New Roman was born in 1932, the daughter of Plantin and the ideas of Stanley Morison and Victor Lardent. Times the newspaper was once criticized by Morison himself earlier in the same year, and the administration let him supervise the designing of the new font along with Lardent, who was an established typographer. The outcome of this oft-forgotten project was one of the most ubiquitous fonts of all time, a font that stayed with The Times for over 40 years. A daughter font, Georgia, is also very popular – the one you see on this page (the typographic difference between them is that Georgia has more prominent serifs).

Over the years, with the advent of digital typography threatening to phase out Times New Roman and her cousins, people began to regard the font itself as a symbol of the times past. TNR survived hundreds of wars, two of them devastating most of Europe and Asia. Media persons desperately digging for a story often locked horns with each other over the rights of the content and a newer angle no one had detected before, but the stories always came out through the mouth of TNR. There was something about her that people found hard to resist, a placid nonchalance that also sometimes disturbed the reader with an air of neutrality. Whether it was Marx, Fawkes, Stalin, Hitler, Truman or Gandhi, the Speaker of the wartorn parliament that is this world was always TNR, and rightly so. Stories from all corners, about all kinds of things, quotations uttered by men from splintered political factions – all of them found no favouritism with TNR. It would always be the same distance between the letters, between the words, between the sentences, between the eye that read them and the mind that interpreted them. Tell me, have you ever heard of any such thing as a Communist or a capitalist font? Although that sounds absurd, the designs imbued in the behaviour of TNR answers the question without hesitation. TNR is both. If not more.

Why I pay this tribute is because of two things. First, the digital age has made more things possible – a craftsman does not have to sit at his board for hours on end design each letter. There is the computer that performs all those millions of calculations in a second, and voila! ‘A’ has been sculpted. Times itself changed its font in the 1970s because of this typographic revolution. The second reason is that Microsoft, whose Office Word has long been a close associate of TNR (a relationship advertised by having TNR as the default font), has now introduced a new default – Calibri. Given a hundred more years, Calibri may perhaps prove its mettle. But it can never do what Times New Roman has done.

Dear TNR, I have not forgotten you.

The Emoticon Lexicon

When you’re chatting with a friend over, say, GTalk, you usually don’t mean everything you say. After all, it’s just a chat. You’re not seeing each other face to face and it’s always bound to be casual. So, when you use an emoticon like “;)”, are you really dipping your brows and smiling? I think not. Here’s what I do when I use an emoticon.

1. 🙂 – I’m filling an awkward gap in the conversational gap by indicating that I am smiling; used when the other person might think you’re not interested in what he’s saying at all. So when someone uses this, it might be a good idea to say goodbye.
2. 😉 – I’m indicating that the other person has managed to pique my interest at long last, and that if he doesn’t continue on the same line, I might slip into using :). (Note: When used in the chat within GMail, 😉 becomes a wink, and since it’s all cute and expressive, it becomes more tolerable as a genuinely-intended expression.)
3. 😐 – This is one emoticon which I use when I’m making the same face, and it usually shows up in conversations where honesty is appreciated. I wouldn’t use 🙂 when I’m chatting with my girlfriend if I could use :|.
4. 😦 – Again, another symbol of honesty, but only half the time. The other half, I use it when I’m supposed to be feeling sad but can’t bring myself to empathise that much, like when a freakishly sensitive friend says his girlfriend dumped him.
5. ;( – An emoticon that’s closest to anger IMO. Sad faced and brow-dipped: I use it when I’m sad about something but that it’s either my fault it happened or that I can’t do anything to change it.
6. 😛 – Tongue thrust out?! I don’t think anyone ever does that in real life, and those who do must be very expressive people. But yeah, if I don’t do that in real, why would I do it online? I only do it because of what it conveys – “Really? I don’t believe you, but I seldom can’t believe you. Therefore, I am forced to believe you and subsequently find it quite interesting. Now leave me alone if I haven’t replied to it other than through an emoticon.”
7. :O – A pretty straightforward accompaniment, this wide-mouthed emoticon doesn’t say much else than it’s supposed to.
8. BP – I realised BP was an emoticon only after I used it once to denote ‘blood pressure’ and it showed up highlighted in blue. On close inspection, I concluded that the ‘B’ could be ‘big sparkly eyes’ and ‘P’ would again be ‘tongue thrust out’. But I’ve never seen it used as yet. The first person to do so gets the ‘Dork of the century’ award.
9. B) – Again, waiting for the ‘Dork of the century’.
10. 😀 – This is one good emoticon, I’d say. Expressing laughter when there’s only a weak smile on my face, it makes sure the other person isn’t disappointed by my stolid reaction to his slapstick joke while I get away with being not interested and, at the same time, courteous about it.
11. ;D – I use this emoticon often, and only when I’m talking to someone who is actually really funny. I know I’m being choosy about something so trivial as an emoticon, but it’s habitual. And at times, I can politely indicate to people that I’m not interested instead of strain my brain for a suitable euphemism.

P.S. If you are my girlfriend or a close friend, the above don’t apply to you.

104 days to TEDIndia2009!

Ever since I’d been introduced to TEDGlobal, I was hooked on to it. It’s possible that this one idea to bring together intellectuals from all over the world could top all the other ideas being presented at their tremendously impacting conferences in the fields of technology, environment and design. Although every such conference includes a lot of interaction between the layman and the laureate, it is the famous 18-minute talk of theirs that makes the difference. The TEBGlobal, a series of such conferences usually held in Oxford, UK, attracts thousands of attendees who travel there just to bear proud witness to these talks. As such each intellectual comes on stage and demonstrates, in varying manners, how innovation by the minute could defeat orthodoxy of thought and the oft bureaucratic methods of science, it gradually becomes apparent that some fields of thought, especially those which we had earlier perceived as too theoretical and therefore not fit for further development, are capable of having impacts on humanity much greater than the others. Take the example of Zeresenay Alemseged, the Ethiopian paleoanthropologist, who discovered the 3.3 million years old fossil of the girl Selam (of the species Australopethicus afarensis). In studying her tiny bones, Alemseged sees the points in time at which man began to differ from apes; in studying the hyoid bone in her throat, he sees the beginning of human languages. The study of both these will provide significant insights into how we, as humans, understand language, and why it is the way it is. This is in turn will aid linguists, and that in turn will aid psychologists, and so on and so forth.

With many such personalities in their arsenal, TED is now beginning to focus on the East, where the economic downturn has had the least impact. Countries like India and China have ridden the slowdown like none else, with many industries still showing massive profits. There is a rising consensus that this cannot be just due to the cheap outsourcing options the region offers or even the low-cost jobs, but due to the diligence of the Indian. TEDIndia2009, the Indian chapter of the TEDGlobal conferences, is now coming to Mysore and will be held between November 1-4 at the advanced training center run by Infosys there. Why I’m excited about this conference is because of the expected topics TED is going to try to handle:

• Which local innovations are destined for global impact?
• Who are the young thinkers and doers capable of shaping the future?
• Can there be economic advancement without environmental destruction?
• Can a pluralistic democracy survive in the face of rising fundamentalism?
• Can we make money and be good? Really?
• What should we learn – or fear? — from China’s investment in Africa?
• Do we have enough water for everyone?
• How do we keep our youth challenged and our aged healthy?
• How can anti-poverty solutions be brought to scale?
• Is there wisdom to be found in traditional medicine??
• Which other ancient traditions can illuminate modern life?

All of this, coupled by the fact that the speakers usually don’t hail from a purely scientific background but also from a partly managerial one, makes it an interesting event to look out for since the answers to the questions above could mean a lot for India as a whole, including its people and the vision it has set out for itself. For further information, check out http://conferences.ted.com/TEDIndia/.

Cubic Venerations

“You know, I’m fed up with all of this God nonsense! Can you show me God? No, seriously, can you show me God? If you can, I’m game. Here, take me with you right now. Show me where he is. Is he in the trees? Is the ‘spirit’ within that gives them life? Is in the sky? Is he the one that makes it look all blue and nice? Or, like Friday from ‘Robinson Crusoe’ says, is he in the animals? Is he what makes the cheetah sprint and the fish swim and the man think? Where is he? Is he in you and me because you say so? Or is he in you and me because that’s why we think, that’s why we know? Or are you now going to turn the other cheek and tell me that God does not exist? That all those things around us are capable of doing their thing because science dictates that they do? That the trees grow because there’s enough mineral and water in the soil, that the fish swim because it’s got fins, that the cheetah sprints because it’s built all dynamic, that man thinks because he has a brain and the mind with it? Whatever you tell me, it will be based on what you know. You can never tell me something you don’t know. You can’t tell me that you don’t know the answer to a question without knowing that you don’t know the answer! There is no escaping your knowledge; the brain cannot ever lie without knowing that it is lying. Even if I’m giving you wrong information without my knowledge, it will be because the brain is not aware of the mistake. If it becomes aware, then it knowingly masks the awareness. That’s all. And now, if you tell me there IS a God somewhere, then you know that there IS God somewhere. How do you know it? Did you hear it from someone like I’m hearing it from you? How do you know that person wasn’t lying? How do you know that the person who told that person wasn’t lying? You can see I could go on and on, and I hope you can also see the point here. You can never know. If there was or is a God, you will not find out unless someone shows him (or her) to you, or if you stumble upon him (or her) while crapping in the woods or something. You can never ever find out for yourself about something unless you have either been looking for it, or you have stumbled across it. There is no other type of revelation possible, and I think you know that from you own life. Even if there is no God, how do you know? Are you telling me that since you saw no one with a halo over the head while crapping in the woods, there is no God? How do you know for sure. Maybe there is. Maybe there isn’t!

“What I’m saying is, don’t waste your fucking time looking for something that might not be there! When you’re sitting down reading the Bible, you’re reading about man being good and man being bad and God correcting all of it and forgiving it and doing magic tricks. What religion has done to you is it has blinded you from your own efforts, from seeing your own capable self doing all those things which apparently some God did! Don’t you see that the ‘love’ pardons and befriends is only a product of man’s intention? Do you need a God to tell you something which you you’re capable of? It’s like having a middleman in business. You know you can seel your products to the customer, but you employ a reseller just because he can do it better, right? Wrong! You employ a reseller not because he can do it better, but because you can’t do things as well as he can. You’re just fucking lazy. With God in the picture, you’re not just lazy, but you’re arrogant, you’re foolish and you’re an absolute retard for ignoring what’s at your feet and looking into the distance.”

“Alright, fine, I’ll agree with what you’re saying. You’re saying you need something to represent all these symbols, something that provides you with support everyday. Am I right in thinking you want something like a prayer? Like you say all solemn and all problems are solved and your mind fortified? I’ll give you a prayer. Look to yourself. You are young, you are strong. You have a mind, an infathomable mind, which cannot be controlled by any living man. You are capable of thought, which no other beast on the planet is capable of doing. You are here, and that’s what matters. You’re not like the twisted paradox in the ‘future-life’ of an unborn child or the infinite retirement in the eyes of the dead. You’re here, that’s it. What do you have to do? You’ve to live your life. It’s yours, you dumbass. Yours! Not anybody else’s. You’re not going to let anybody tell you what you do or do not deserve, you’re not going to tell anyone those things for that matter. Don’t waste your time. If you need something to waste just to feel vain about it, then it”l happen automatically in the form of the life you’ll be throwing away. No one knows where in space and time come from. It’s just that when we ‘come to life’, we become understandable to others. You wouldn’t want to return to that statelessness knowing you did nothing, would you? It’s an experience in the offing, take it or leave it. There are thousands of billions of such stateless people waiting to be born, but you have the good luck of getting here first. The world you see around yourself is what it is: the world you see around yourself. By this, I mean that that which you see is there and breathing or lying only and only because YOU see it. If I saw it first and told you it was there, you’ll know only because You learnt of it from me. It’s knowledge, conscious knowledge, that’s the greatest determinant of our future. There could be some other hidden parameters too, but since they’re hidden, you needn’t be bothered about it. Now, at this point, I must introduce you to someone.

God

“Meet my God. Yes, I’m showing It to you. Yes, my God is an ‘it’. Not a ‘him, not a ‘her’. It. In fact, my God is a small little cube, all blue and nice. You see those little cubes next to him? Those are his divine brothers and sisters. You might be wondering how I could be so dumb enough to give you all that crap about not knowing and stuff, but this God, I know it’s there because I’m showing you. Now, this cube is my God.  My God can turn blue and then just sit there on the floor. He is my God because I found him. You can’t oppose me there, can you? I know my God exists because he does. He’s right there, see him? And I know he’s my God because my God told me. That’s how I found out. My God chose to pop out of the skies, drop into this forest, and tell me, stupid little me, that he’s God, and that there’s nothing I can do about it. So I decide to do nothing about it. Why is it a cube? Well, I’ll asnwer that with a question, and you answer me that. Why is your God a man? Why is your God a woman? Why is your God a little pig? If God can be all those things, then my God can be a cube. I don’t think God’ds got a copyright there, that he can only and only be an animal. Can my God teach me love? No, I asked him not to, because I can do that on my own. The cube doesn’t have to teach me something I already know or can find out myself. All the cube needs to do is be a God so that you and me can go about doing what we do best. You agree?”

The manifestation of argument in the great political debate

• Argument as government: In all, and especially, the industrial democracies of this world, the implementation of the decisions of the state as a discernible body on the functioning of the society is essentially a product of the great political debate. Even though a party has been elected to power, the basis of the presence of argument during the triumphant party’s tenure is contained in the fact that democracy does not halt at granting the citizen his vote, but at crediting him with having influenced the making of a decision in the senate. In fact, in a colloquial sense, democracy would indeed be perceived as the protection of the powers of the citizen on a national level at the very least. However, the strength of democracy lies not completely in the strength of this protection, but in the manifestation of these powers that have been safeguarded by it. As a result, in my opinion, democracy is not the modus operandi of a state post-polity, but the documented encouragement of debate and contention between different leaders and, eventually, different responsibilities. The face of the governing party is only the face of the nation for other states, but within, it is the citizen and rightly so. Argument, even a non-ideal one, dutifully fosters the inculcation of discipline and morality amongst the most narrow-minded amongst us, and when it is that the future of a burgeoning nation of a billion depends on the decisions of a volatile oligarchy, agreement and opposition are both equally essential in the making of a decision. One cannot afford to pin all of one’s hopes on the mindset of one man.

• Argument as representation of the voter:

The big picture

Drawn above is a simple representation of the electoral process in India. Voters from all over the nation vote to elect the central government, which may be a single party which manages to secure the minimum majority of 272 seats (out of a total of 543) in the lower house, Lok Sabha, or multiple parties that coalesce under the umbrella of a common goal. Once a party has been lofted to the center, a ministry is formed that manages the various portfolios. As I stated earlier, the decision of the citizenry in electing such and such a government is questioned in the senate when argument is used as a tool for decision-making. If the ruling party wins the argument, the investment of the voting populace is vindicated. If the ruling party (or parties) meets with formidable opposition that it cannot quell with sufficient conviction, we the people will have made a mistake, nay wronged.

• What the good arguer has: In his ‘Language and Responsibility’ (1977), noted linguist Noam Chomsky asks only the following from any man who has an opinion:

1. 1. The capability of facing the facts objectively,
   2. The usage of a rational line of common sense,
   3. A Cartesian sense of argument, per se, and
   4. A little skepticism.

Whenever there is some “breaking news” in the air, the various components of the mass media, especially the news channels on the television, turn to professionals in fields pertaining to the content of the news in order to extricate an opinion that is either valuable by itself or is made so by repeated broadcasts. Why this esotericism? Why can’t the chap behind the desk ask you and me if the country has to intervene in Angola? When the above factors suffice to define the good arguer, why is it that I must be in possession of compatible certification to but profess a one-line opinion? What must be discussed is the content and not my right to discuss it!

• Isolation of power by conserving argument: Arguments can be brought to life by interpreting information, and information is nothing but the lingual interpretation of an event, the interpretation being performed in order to transmit and convey it to people who are unaware of the occurrence of it. The information we assess and digest everyday is proportional as well as dependent on the ideals of the local government, which governs the information that it thinks its people need to come into contact with, and the ideas and opinions of the people around us that constitute the populace in general. With a democratic government ruling the central aspects of the Indian economy, finance, industry, society and other aspects of living and development, the interests of each individual vested in it demands productive work day in and day out. On the other hand, the ruling government, to carry out its wishes, needs people other than those who control its functions to fall in line with their solutions. Due to the embedding of this fundamental rule, as it were, in the roots of the structure of every democratic state, information can only play a greater role in the lives of the people of the state every day. The conveyance of this information happens through the media, viz. print, audio, and audiovisual. The print media includes newspapers, magazines, newsletters, articles, essays, stories and others; the audio media includes, prominently, radio channels; video comprises of information delivered via telebroadcasting, movies, etc. The radio and the television are two modern techniques that have stolen the limelight of sorts from the print media. Owing to advancements in technology, of these two, the audiovisual media is growing steadily as well as quickly, borrowing from the inherently faster conveyance of data, the greater accessibility, and, with the incorporation of a sense of personality, the notion of originality and being specific to a given set of peoples with respect to their ethnicity involved is also born. Therefore, keeping in mind the importance of such a medium, its regulation has to be handled with care and finesse in order to get across your message while maintaining the original intensity of the purpose and the frequency of conveying it. But in a large, immensely populous, and democratic nation like India, apart from the already very many number of television channels, there are many more being operated by political parties. Although this does not constitute any violation of any rule for that matter, using the medium as a method of propaganda is not something I would suggest. You can not initiate and run programs just because it’s there for you to. In a way, it violates the right to information. How? Information is only when it is factual and wholly interpretative in a neutral manner. When you tamper and mess with it in order to get across a message that has been interpreted in a biased manner, it is a misrepresentation of the event that has occurred. You are now putting specific ideas in the minds of the people, ideas that can invariably lead only to a single conclusion. Furthermore, but in a partly trivial way, political propaganda must always begin and end during the time of elections for the local or national government, and must be nonexistent at all other times unless it is being projected via the deeds of those elected to office. Telebroadcasting can not be considered as a deed because it is propaganda itself, and parties that use this as a tool to brainwash the plebian and proletarian population in their favour is wrong. You will notice that now, with everyone around you being highly opinionated about some political party or the other, the ability to think freely and objectively will be on the decline.

Welcome to the city

When you look at a city, it’s like reading the hopes, aspirations and pride of everyone who built it.

– Hugh Newell Jacobsen

There are two opposing schools of thought popular amongst philosophers called teleology and metaphysical naturalism. While the former dictates that we have eyes just to we can fulfill the purpose of sight, the latter has us believe that we can see because we have eyes. If one were to disregard both and instead notice the importance paid to the relationship between cause of effect, one will consequently observe that cannot exist without the occurrence of the other. It is the same with the wishes of mind and the desire it manifests in out actions. Whether or not we choose to understand it, has been present for eons and will inevitably persist. This has been evident ever since mankind, as we understand it be in form and function today, began to group itself into small communities that soon proved to be the fundamental and formative units of civilization. In what can only be termed as a systemic progression that involved man utilizing the natural resources around him, similar communities, which evidenced the possibility (or, to be more optimistic, the presence) of a common purpose of humanity itself, began to get drawn toward each other because of a few reasons. One of these included the fact that since each community had its own set of requirements in terms of the quantity and quality of those natural resources, those with similar demands had similar patterns of migration and settlement. This pattern was also the basis of the formation of little villages, towns and, eventually, large cities.

In India, the four largest cities of Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata are prime examples of such regionalistic concentrations. The population within these cities is very high, especially since the last three are coastal settlements. But once you step outside their limits, the density drops drastically. Although this drop in numbers could have been more gradual earlier on, the high slope indicates that people settling in such hotspots began to fare better economically and, thus, socially, which in turn led to a steady migration from rural to such urban settlements, which in turn led to an unnatural distribution of natural resources. For example, suppose a 1,000 nomads are looking for a suitable place to settle, when they chance upon a large lake. They decide to settle at one point, say Point A. At another point B, at the opposite side of the lake, there is a mountain range at the feet of which flourishes a herd of cows. The community chief decides to send a group of 200 people to B to hunt down the animals, skin them and put them up for trade. The 200 then proceed to settle down at B since it is a more convenient option. Now, there is a possibility of there emerging a propensity amongst those at B to trade their valuables from B itself instead of sending them down to A and then waiting for the return of the caravans. Such a decision seeming a logistically enhanced one, the settlement at B will now exhibit greater and perhaps accelerated growth rates. At this point, those from A will abandon their homes in favor of moving to B. As the settlement grows larger, the group will now, as a second step, seek to minimize the amount of inconvenience tolerated in the procurement of resources. Sitting at B, the people will now travel a particular distance from B, gather the resources and then return home. Since traveling longer distances entailed a greater number of inconveniences, the density of a particular resource will decrease exponentially along a radially outward direction beginning from the heart of the settlement.

Graph depicting density of resources

(The curve will climb up again, exponentially or not, once the distance from a particular settlement is large enough to ensure that no inhabitant will have ventured in those parts.)

Now, points A and B can be compared in real life to any one of the following pairs:

1. Rural and urban settlements: With the onset of industrialization, almost everything that man used – from the tools in manufacturing to the vehicles in procurement – leaped a giant leap from singular primitivism to a point where he could now put together different tools to make one ‘supertool’ that handled more than one job. With the forerunners being the automotive and shipping industries, other smaller manufacturers and, subsequently, their competitors were forced to switch to machine-labor. In the example above, the lake can be compared to the factories and warehouses that enhanced the availability of these machine parts.
2. Developing and developed nations: Similar to the first case, a developed nation has more resources – whether in terms of money or otherwise – to offer anyone who wants a shot at them. One good example would be how skilled software engineers from south India migrate to the Silicon Valley: the Indian has the skill, and the US has the resource.
3. At a simpler level, points A and B can be alternatively compared to summer and winter capitals of some states.

Now, at this point, cities employ the basis they have in the availability of resources and begin to flourish as economic hotbeds. By this, I mean that cities as a whole begin to realize the fluency its people will begin to have in terms of trading in resources other than the ones with which they established themselves. Up until this point in time, the inhabitants will have concentrated on developmental activities. Once it becomes evident that the resources circulating within the city have become self-sustainable, the limits of the settlement will begin to expand – in terms of size, population and, most importantly, as a new source of resources. Now, what will happen is something like ripples on water. This city will now behave like the lake, drawing skilled people towards it, simultaneously rejecting those who seem incapable of surviving in its environs (like the abandonment of A).

So, we have seen how a community is born, how it grows to become a city, and how a city itself begins to attract people from different parts of the nation. However, ultimately, what does a city represent in a non-utilitarian sense? How does it contribute to humanity as a whole instead of just to the nation that harbors it? If you go through the previous paragraph, you will find that the answer is simple. A city contributes to humanity as a whole not by giving away something that belongs to itself, but by manifesting the triumph that nestles silently in the nudges that it gives us when we think we have lost. In other words, a city is the first image that comes to mind when you might speak to me of humanity as a whole. When you might tell me that there are always some people who will find it in them to help me selflessly, I will think of a city first. In fact, when you live in a city, you will realize that it is just more than the shelter it first took form as. It transforms itself, blind to the eye and shielded from the piercing gaze of the mind, gradually consuming our sorrows for nutrition and purifying the air around us. We ignore it as it speaks of a mind of its own, and we shun it when it rains the day we leave for a different city, when the roads are bad, when we almost miss the flight we’ve to catch, when we finally board the flight and find that the journey has been delayed for an hour due to bad weather, when we land in a strange place later to find no friendliness lingering the air as it once did…

On the dominance of art

This is a thought I had a few hours back, and thought I’d put it down in order to see what else I discovered along the way.

Where is art? Art, today, is broad. I’ll save you all the jargon and leave it at “omnipresent”. Furthermore, it is discernible to the human eye not through the straightforward impact it has on the human mind, but through the interpretation it is often subjected to, the kind of interpretation that enables it to yield an inadvertent variety. There is art in a little girl’s frock that I might not see but you might. There is art in what seems like “noisy music” to the ardent death metal fan. One can only opine, but one can’t ever judge on the beauty of things. As an absolutist, I do believe that art has an absolute form, but I also believe that humankind can never produce it. To me, this ‘absolute art’ lies in our creation, our form, our purpose, and the meaning we come to infuse in our respective individual existences.

What is happening? Before I digress further, let me come to the point. The first argument I have to make is on the commercialization of perspective. By this, I have to borrow some ideas from the capitalist economy. In such economies, demand and supply are the primary influencing factors. The best way to vary their effect on the market is to alter the elements that generate them in the first place: the products, and the money. Both the producer and the purchaser handle them in sufficient amounts, but in capitalism, greater power is given to the purchaser. Similarly, in the world of art, we have landed up in an age of inevitable commercialization of all things beautiful (or not). These could have been due to various reasons, many of which I am incapable of pursuing, but it is indeed that because of one phenomenon: art forms of one type seem to have larger markets than art forms of another – as opposed to a reduced disparity some decades before.

Klimt’s ‘Golden Adele’ (1907), sold for $135 million

What is the effect this has had? This has led to the generation of strong influences that, more often than not, decide how many people look at a specific form of art. Take up the example of paintings and pottery. The great auction houses of London, Christie’s and Sotheby’s, are known to have sold paintings for upwards of a few million pounds. Has anyone ever heard of pottery being sold for that much? Why not? Ignoring a possible anthropological difference, the quickest conclusion is that the difference in demands is immense. Why is the demand immense? Because the works are valuable and provide for easy investment options. Why are they so valuable? Because their predecessors too held the same kind of value. And where did they obtain such values? From the people who bought them, the people who existed in that period. Although times have changed, perceptions have been held on to, often not in keeping with the contemporary conditions.

And what has this led to? In order to capitalize on what looks like an eternally growing market, artists will now begin to focus on paintings more than anything else – often irrespective of what their interests are. The utilitarian demands of life do surface at some points, and they cannot thus be blamed. Although what is happening cannot be termed a ‘crime’ and someone taken to task, this biased focus will magnify down the line, ultimately threatening to completely vaporize the market for a form of art that does not yield monetarily.

What can we do? If the effect is widespread, we can only make a difference over long periods of time. However, at the same time, we have no right to tell others what to appreciate and what not to appreciate. If you ask me, what we can do is make people aware of such effects. Instead of subduing the dominant art form, we can nurture the growth of the ignored.

Do Communists really have no class?

It is always easier to understand the reasons that will compel a person to assume a neutral stance in an argument, but have you ever wondered why people in general haven’t been able to tolerate bias? Ask yourself that the next time you pick a fight with a friend. If someone intervenes, you expect him to be either neutral in the judgment delivery or biased in your favor. When the latter happens, your opponent will deny the judgment.

• Observing the flowchart, you can see that from the presence of a set of laws that can effectively establish eventual governance, there arise the two fundamental and integral concepts of justice and equality. The law must be able to recognize and punish wrong-doings, and the law must treat all those who bow down to it equally – these, by definition.
• With equality comes freedom. In order to further elaborate on the relationship between the two, let me give you an example. When a group of people are free to think and do as they please, if one amongst them is endowed with a greater number of rights than all the others, then the rest of them will, in essence, be denied that one “special” right. That is not equality any more, is it? Reversing this process, if one were to define equality itself based upon a certain group of common rights and duties, then the presence of those rights and duties will indicate the presence of freedom.
• Just as the human mind comprehends the external world in different ways, the freedom it senses is interpreted in different ways. Importantly, there are the freedoms of thought, action and worship. The doings that arise out of the exercising of these permissions will always be constrained by the law, for it is because of the law that they have come into effect as tangible principles. Metaphorically, it is like trying to see smoke. If you attempt to view it in the darkness or against gray skies, it will be futile. But against a bright white sky, it will be visible in its full glory. In our case, freedom and equality are like the smoke, and the law is the white sky.
• When a government is instituted (irrespective of the methods through which it came into power), it means two things: (i) the nation will now have a leader or a group of leaders whose job will not only be to lead the citizens, but (ii) also to be able to claim responsibility for any of the nation’s actions per se. Although this group of people will still belong to the society at large, the state they will now build and constitute will be a separate entity because the end goals of the bodies will be different. For the society, there will exist a subconscious tendency toward on overall betterment in terms of those currencies the world around them employs to measure one’s extent of success in life. In other words, when more money is equated to greater success, the society will function towards that success by trying to acquire that much money. As for the government, it will come to define its own successes in order to establish the nation as a whole as the manifestation of a particular idea on the world map – and the accomplishment of this will again involve ‘peer perceptions’.
• When an installed government finds it desirable to adopt the same principles as its constituent societal model does, then it assumes a stance of neutrality. Again, to establish a metaphor, let’s take up relative motion. When two cars moving on a highway are doing so at the same velocity, albeit one greater than the other, and with no acceleration, the distance between the cars will be the same. Similarly, with the state as the first car and the society as the second, zero acceleration and equal velocities will ensure that the spacial disparity between them is only indicative of the number of processes involved in the transformation of the goals.

And now that I have explained the flowchart, can you answer the following question(s)?

Is this need for equality an inherent compulsion, or does the human psyche derive such a requirement from some mysterious source around us? Is this behavior natural, or has it been acquired through evolution?

I ask because the ‘equality’ box in the chart has been my self-discovered source for all that I have written. Assuming that this equality does not exist, I will be forced to assume that there do exist some people who favor a tyranny. That will bring into effect the varying degrees of powerplay, the even more numerous power equations and, ultimately, the non-democritization of electoral processes. Therefore, I have this next question:

Is equality a prerequisite for democracy to function? If so, why does it seem to be so immensely manifested in theory – as in to which finally predominant effects does it play a prominent cause? And if equality is to be observed and practiced, why does the Communist line of thought fail so miserably? Is it because of the greater number of capitalist nations in the world, or is it because something is terribly wrong with itself?