Drop of blood

My dead uncle sat beside me in the open courtyard of a square wooden house. We looked up at the first floor gallery, dark against the starry black sky of the night.

And without uttering a word, I told him how for a century or more no human had ever walked there. Then she appeared. Dressed in a shroud, like a mummy. Slender and tall. She walked as though she glided, silently from one end of the gallery to the other.

Her face was hooded in a white cape. But I just knew that as she moved her eyes never left me. But I could hardly see the face that watched me.

Up, from the sky, a drizzle began. I could see individual drops sparkling with the light of a street lamp that shone from a corner of the open courtyard. The sparkle, contrasted against the night sky, sparkled even more.

Then I saw that drop of blood.

Comics are books too

I remember saying that when I was about 10. I was not being theatrical. I was buying extra time with a superhero.

Today, I am saying it again...

Comic book writer Alan Moore’s Watchmen is a modern classic. I was expecting a great deal from it. But as is the habit with classics, they vault over mortal expectations, however high.

It happened near the end of chapter 9...

Dr Manhattan is on Mars. His girlfriend is pleading with him to save earth, which is howling for a nuclear showdown. After a lab accident, Dr Manhattan is not human anymore. He is a godlike creature that sees subatomic particles. He can deconstruct landscapes into quarks, one of the most fundamental particles in the universe. More fantastically, he can rearrange matter and energy to form almost anything. He believes humans are of no particular importance to deserve saving. However, he changes his mind and consoles his girlfriend…

 

“Come… dry your eyes, for you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; [you are] the clay in which, the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly.”

 

Now that’s a lot more than *pow* and *bif*, ain’t it? Comics are books too.

Learn the scientific method in 30 seconds!

It is very difficult to explain the scientific method to those who are not very fond of thinking.

I have tried a number of times, and failed.

Gautam is an old friend and a person with great zest for discovering new things on the Internet. A few weeks ago he messaged me a funny flowchart that explains what science is. And it does this in the best possible way, with humour and without jargon.

The flow chart is the work of blogger Wellington Grey. Be sure to check out his other works too. He is cool.

A book and a movie

I just saw Billy Elliot once again. And in a moment of epiphany, I have decided that the movie is an adaptive retelling of D H Lawrence's Sons and Lovers (About & Full Text). Think about it!

The idea of an ideal job

A couple of weeks ago someone asked me to describe my ideal job.

It was then that I realised that in the everyday worries of getting the job done, I have never stepped back to think what it is really that I want to do over a lifetime.

I am guessing many people are like me. As Ashok recently said, “we are biding time”.

But I would like to believe that there is a certain joy in enjoying the work at hand: That some kind of nirvana exists in the “here and now”.

Nevertheless, here’s the copy I wrote to describe my ideal job…


In a world of ever deepening super-specialities, I am an encyclopaedist.

I am at my best when I am catalysing building activity across functions like content, engineering and business.

I am the happiest when I have hit upon insights in my projects that could not have arisen without pulling back of the focus from the everyday bustle of individual specialities.

My ideal job would demand that I dedicate my waking hours to building life-altering products and services in media and communications.

I am the kind of person who would love to roll up his sleeves and jump into the interdepartmental no-man’s-land; to oversee the building of inventions.

I would give an arm and a leg to do a job that allows me to participate throughout the creative process: From weeding through the ideas garden, to drawing the grand architecture, to ensuring usability, to cracking engineering solutions, to testing, to deployment, to marketing.

Also, I think technology is closer to business than to science. So my skin crawls whenever I come across the phrase “science and technology”. To my mind this is an anomaly. If people working with technology do not have as much respect for businessmen as they have for scientists they are doomed. Successful inventions, more importantly, life-altering inventions are the agents of economics.

That is why my ideal job will allow me to participate very closely in the business thought process of the organisation. I regard business to be the one single function, more than anything else, which will eventually help me build great stuff.

Of banias, brahmins and talking computers

My last two posts, about Anita’s pics and Ahsok's blog have been a tad nostalgic. Now it looks like this evening is going to reminisces all the way.

For the last few hours I have been pottering around OCR stuff. And I just stumbled upon some material on next generation input devices. Then I remembered how almost a decade ago I had the opportunity to meet Bill Gates in Bombay and he had then gushed about an impending revolution in the way we interact with our computers.

At a ‘power dinner’ in the beautiful Taj Mahal Hotel, he had promised a hall full of technorati that in 10 years keyboards would be secondary; that we would be talking to our computers.

That prophecy was made in March 1997. If he is right we are just two years away from that revolution and I don’t see how!

Though the Gates meeting itself was not as exciting as I had hoped for, the evening was rescued by then NCST chief Dr S Ramani.

He had lectured me on why India’s caste system is preventing it from creating another Bill Gates! And the fears that are keeping us away from producing a bania-brahimin hybrid. Amusing? Sure! Profound? Perhaps. Read his arguments in the news report that was filed for Rediff.com. Ramani action is towards the bottom of the copy so scroll if you are in a rush.

Ashok is back

Guys, Ashok has resuscitated his Full TP blog!

It had begun to sputter in 2002. And after that fateful Wednesday on October 16 it went dormant.

Now it is spewing again since September 8.

I wonder what led to the exhuming! (Though I have a suspicion).

Some quick notes…

1. The recent posts are in line with the early material


2. The template has changed, for the better, I think


3. Earlier the kicker read something like: When I have nothing to do I will be writing here. When you have nothing to do you will be reading it.


4. Now it is more serious. Like Voltaire. Like an inside out Voltaire, actually: You may not agree with what I have to say, but I will defend to the death my right to say it :-)

He is good for your mental health. Read him: http://fulltp.blogspot.com/

The ghost of a flaming car came knocking

Have you ever been thinking about something from the past, just a passing incident, and then forgotten about it again, only to be confronted by a picture of that incident right afterwards, just like that, out of the blue?

It was pure chance. I dropped in on Anita’s blog yesterday and the most recent post was a picture of a flaming car on a flyover near Goregaon’s Film City in Bombay.

I remember the incident in the picture very clearly. I had picked her up on the way to work early in the morning and we were zipping over the next flyover when we saw this car, right on top, burning with a fury.

I know rubbernecking is dangerous but there were no vehicles in the rear view mirrors or through the windscreen. So I slowed down. Anita was in a flurry on the backseat, rummaging for her camera. I was quite impressed by the time in which she managed to get the camera out and take the picture. Or was it Firoz in the front seat who took it for her?

That evening, one the way back, we did not see the car or its carcass. No city paper had reported it either. A real mystery!

The bigger mystery

In any case, what scares me now is the computation of the odds that I should be seeing the picture of the flaming car again, a week after I recollected the incident for fleeting moments and then tossed it out of my mind.

Last week I was cleaning up some files on my hard disk and saw a small video file of a carburetor in action. I had downloaded it to see how the butterfly valve really works.

Now that I own an MPFI car, which does not have a carburetor but uses a complex set of sensors and an algorithm to determine the air-fuel mix, I am wondering what that burning car had?

Is a carburetor, with its complexity of moving parts, more prone to going off like a Molotov cocktail? Or is an MPFI system’s fuel injection more dangerous? I wonder!

Any engineers out there who may have the answer?

Imagine there's no countries…

I have a problem with patriotism. I think it is a vestigial emotion. Actually I think it is dangerous.

Usually, I avoid talking about this. It upsets close friends. But I am feeling itchy today.

If patriotism is simply about belonging it could be okay.

But it should not be encouraged.

Even the slightly liberal among us would flinch if someone proclaimed that s/he is ‘proud to be a Hindu’ or ‘proud to be a Muslim’ or ‘proud to be a Christian’, while asserting that s/he could not imagine being anything else.

But somehow we condone the same emotion when someone says s/he is ‘proud to be an Indian’, while implying that other races and nationalities are not really worth belonging to as much.

For me nationalism is geographical communalism.
Some friends have asked: ‘Then who are you?’ Allow me to become introspective here…

Suppose the biology of humans dictates that we seek to belong to some group. Suppose the secondary emotion of patriotism is actually much closer to the primary emotion of love. Then what?

My solution…

1. I can only imagine that we could replace the patriotic emotion with that of belonging to the human race.


2. And then work out of that too with the larger concept of belonging to all life forms on Earth.


3. Finally there can be the still larger concept of belonging to the Gaia, the Asimovian idea of a sentient planet.

Either tomorrow or millions of years into the future, we have a great possibility of meeting beings from other worlds, sentient or not. What then? We may have to belong to all life forms in the universe. Or then we may have to belong to a Universal Gaia, not just a planetary one.

What I am driving at is that if there really is an emotional need to belong, it is best met by an emotion of belonging to as wide a group as possible.

But in the real world patriotism is beyond just belonging…

Patriotism is also about deification. And then it is not just foolish, it is fatal.

Deification exists in law. For instance, the state will not allow you to make mobile ring tones out of the national anthem. Why? A colleague explains that “then it would be just another song”. I say how about some healthy disrespect for authority. I am sure it will go a long way into checking power from becoming absolute.

Remember the Nazis? Could Hitler’s tiny Germany ever have sustained five bloody years against the might of the whole world without tooling with patriotism?

A friend, who is quite patriotic, ironically, loves a song called Imagine. Let me remind you of how it goes…

Imagine there's no heaven,
It's easy if you try,
No hell below us,
Above us only sky,
Imagine all the people
living for today...

Imagine there's no countries,
It isn’t hard to do,
Nothing to kill or die for,
No religion too,
Imagine all the people
living life in peace...

Imagine no possessions,
I wonder if you can,
No need for greed or hunger,
A brotherhood of man,
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...

You may say I’m a dreamer,
but I’m not the only one,
I hope some day you'll join us,
And the world will live as one.

I know that the remarkable Sir John Lennon talks about the ‘a brotherhood of man’. Far from a Gaia, you would say. But at least it is a thought in the right direction. (Or is it left :-)

voices and counter-voices

Here is an incisive post on Elfriede Jelinek, the German writer who won the Nobel Prize in literature for 2004.

It is on Little Arsonist, the blog of a dear friend, who posts anonymously and with the handle icecreamassasin.

Do not let his all lower case world distract you. I know he knows his literature.