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.

Who is LW?

It is a week since I blogged. Sharmila took ill. And I just didn’t feel like it.

Several days ago friends had come over from work. Lindsay insisted that I play Blues for LW. Actually, the philistine said, “Play that McLaughlin track with the vocals on it!” :-) He likes the tabla bols that are exchanged among McLaughlin, Trilok Gurtu and Kai Eckhardt.

But then he more than made up for it later on by playing us assorted tracks from that damned wallet of his. And yes, giving us a break dance demo at 3 am.

Next morning Kay Kay asked me a question? Who is this LW on Blues for LW? It is good to have a musical dud like him around. None of us self-declared music enthusiasts knew the answer.

So I promised Kay Kay that the answer would be in my next post. And it is.

It is… Lech Walesa.

Yes Kay Kay, Lech Walesa, the Nobel Prize winning Polish Solidarity leader.

Remember the introduction to the track on the Live at the Royal Festival Hall album? McLaughlin mumbles something.

So I slipped the CD in and turned up the volume to as loud as my giant stereo can go. And there was the answer flowing from the tower speakers. Here’s a transcript of what I could catch…

‘We are gonna play a special kind of blues that was written a few years ago (for a man named?) Lech Walesa (the man that they’ve put in jail?). And very nice to see things are going his way. We are all very happy for him. (More Recognition?). More Power. And this was written at the time (???) and it is called Blues for LW’

I was thrilled and saddened at once.

Saddened because I must have listened to this track about say 50 times, ever since 1989, I guess, yet I was never curious enough to find out who LW was.

But human, that I am, I began looking for excuses. Here’s one…

I missed the reference to Lech Walesa because I rarely listen to CDs at their correct volume.

Sharmila and I always argue when it comes to deciding on the volume of music. She keeps it at a level where human chatter can be heard over the music. I play it, or should I say would like to play it, at a volume where all human chatter and ambient sounds are drowned.

I think we owe that high volume to the great musicians. We owe it to them that when we listen to them playing we do not listen to anything else. Give me a break; we are talking about gods like Miles Davis, John Coltrane, McLaughlin…

But Sharmila is quite sure that I am going deaf. And that often I am not able to register what people are saying because of that :(

Maybe she’s right!

Also, I found this guy’s post on an online group for Pat Metheny listeners. He calls himself shiveringgoat and says, “I have all McLaughlins (sic) albums, 'Live at the Festival Hall' is special for me as I was there (Its (sic) me that goes WOO! when he mentions Lech Walesa)...”

Now can you believe that!

Incidentally, the full name of the classic album is Live at the Royal Festival Hall, November 27, 1989. In 1989, Walesa had become the third man to address the joint session of the United States Congress. The previous two were Marquis de Lafayette and Winston Churchill.

Testing an atheist's faith

Ashok posted me a test for determining the trueness of an atheist.

It is on the blog: the Raving Atheist. The blog’s purpose is, ‘An Atheistic Examination of the Culture of Belief: How Religious Devotion Trivializes American Law and Politics’.

A commendable goal, I would say.

However, the ‘test to determine whether someone is truly an atheist’ fails dramatically.

Here is an excerpt that prescribes the test from the blog…

<SNIP>
Ask your atheist to look up at the sky at night and say this out loud: “Hey God, you’re a [expletive]. Do me a favor and give my [wife, baby, mother, father, brother, sister, beloved friend] the most painful, lingering form of [brain cancer/leukemia/AIDS] imaginable and let me watch as they suffer and waste away. You [expletive] [expletive].”
</SNIP>

1. I am not an atheist but I passed the test.


2. Ashok is an atheist and he failed.


3. Ergo, the test failed!

How did this happen?

My position:

1. I am agnostic.


2. An agnostic claims that one cannot know for certain that god exists.


3. I used to fall between the stools of faith and true atheism when Thomas Henry Huxley came to the rescue.


4. Like me, the great biologist found that he was a, “man without a rag of a label to cover himself with”. Unlike me, he formalised his position by inventing a term that spoke his mind: Agnosticism.


5. René Descartes, a complicated friend from the 17th century, once told me that professing faith would be a good option for agnostics like Thomas and I. (The term ‘agnostic’ did not exist then, but René was always ahead of his time).


6. René argued that if I did profess faith, and if god exists, I am set for all eternity, else I am damned.


7. On the other hand, if god does not exist, I am cool.


8. So if I am unsure that god exists, I should quickly grab some faith from somewhere.


9. No René, I am not going to play your game of deception :-)


10. If René had lived to see the domino effect his ideas took by the time they reached my days he too would not have bothered with deception, I console myself. And in all fairness, let me stop ribbing the poor guy, after all his European neighbor, a guy called Galileo, was being condemned around that time.


11. So, I passed the test. Though I am not an atheist. And that is because I don’t care.


12. The test failed me.

Ashok’s position:

1. Ashok thinks god does not exist. He is an atheist.


2. He says that what is inexplicable by science today is assigned to god by many.


3. Ashok will not pass the test because he is squeamish.


4. The test does not take into account the human nature of squeamishness.


5. So the test fails Ashok instead.

I know Ashok for a long time now. And even those who know him for a lesser time can vouch for his intellectual honesty. I know he truly is an atheist if says he is one. But I also know that he is too sensitive to speak aloud even lesser horrors than those prescribed in the test.

Caution: Thomas Henry Huxley is not the Doubting Thomas. The doubting one was an apostle of Jesus.