In a silent way

Miles arrives in Malad

2010-01-24T12:16:00.001+05:30

My collector’s box set containing all Columbia albums of Miles Davis arrived on Thursday.

And I just finished listening to The Miles Davis/Tadd Dameron Quintet. These were the May 1949 recordings from the ‘Paris Festival International de Jazz’.

Throughout, I was reminded of Miles’ romance with France. How lovingly he wrote about Paris in his biography; about his friendship with Jean-Paul Sartre and Pablo Picasso; about his affair with Juliette Gréco.

This music is from the time when Miles first stopped thinking of himself as a ‘black entertainer’. With Sartre and Picasso at his side, he was an ‘artist’ among artists. With Juliette, he was neither black nor white. Existentialism ruled among the intellectuals of Paris then. And at 23, Miles had found himself.

No wonder, on his eventual return to racist America, he underwent a huge depression. He stopped snorting and began shooting himself in the veins. For the next four years, a genius was wasted; looking for the next fix in the alleys of Harlem.

The first time I paid serious attention to bebop was a decade ago when I started listening systematically to the complete recordings of Charlie Parker on Verve. An investment well made.

It was then that I noticed a really intense trumpet improvising on Charlie’s lead. I got curious. The liner notes confirmed my suspicion. It indeed was Miles Davis!

I am not gifted with an ear that can pick out individuals in a jam session. But somehow, I have mostly been able to spot Miles; however economical his blowing might be.

Here is the trick: Whether it was 1949 or 1991, Miles has never been heard to play without meaning every note he blew. He just cannot go through the motions without throwing himself bodily into the music he makes. Ask any professional musician and he will tell you how difficult it is to stay fresh with a song that he has played a hundred times to imperfection. Yet, Miles always played without a wrinkle of weariness.

Once again, this Sunday morning, I felt the nobility of that breath. That breath over golden brass.

Two showstoppers in one day

2010-01-20T22:58:00.000+05:30

Here is a very old post that was written but never posted...

I have begun reading The Way of the Cell: Molecules, Organisms and the Order of Life. Frankly I was not expecting anything powerful. It is one of those books that you pick up because you are tripping about its subject matter then. (I have just emerged from Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species and a consequent rereading of Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene).

So when I opened The Way of the Cell, I was foolish to judge before reading, not just the book but its author too. After all, Franklin M Harold is not exactly a household name like Darwin and Dawkins are.

Nevertheless, Harold has stunned me: Twice. That too in the first 10 pages that I have managed so far!

Every now and then we come across books that become difficult to read only because they are so well written. Because they make you stop and wonder so often that you cannot read fast enough.

Consider this showstopper...

‘Like a flame or an eddy, an organism is not an object so much as a process, sustained by the continuous passage through it of both matter and energy.’

Now you see why it is difficult to continue after such poetry, bang in the middle of a lecture on molecular biology.

Physicist Erwin Schrödinger coined the word ‘negentropy’ to describe living matter’s habit of flouting the second law of thermodynamics. Even if you are like Harold, someone who has spent years worrying about bioenergetics, it is unlikely that you would think of flames and eddy currents as serious metaphors for life!

The second showstopper is not actually the words of Harold, but those of Hilaire Belloc. The quotation opens chapter 2:

‘The man behind the microscope
Has this advice for you:
Never ask what something Is
Just ask, what does it Do?’

Now this one was a total digression for me.

I design and run Internet products and services for a living. Very often we quibble too much about the position, colour, size or any such quality of a single tiny feature of a Web page. The devil, truly, is in the detail.

So, the next time the team is squinting through a microscope, pondering over a tiny feature of a Web page, the answer will come from a simple question: ‘Just ask, what does it Do?’

I hope the rest of the book is as rewarding as the first 10 pages are.

Drop of blood

2009-04-26T00:31:00.001+05:30

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

2008-09-27T19:47:00.000+05:30

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!

2007-03-05T11:18:00.000+05:30

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

2006-09-24T22:12:00.000+05:30

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

2005-11-16T17:40:00.000+05:30

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

2005-09-17T21:52:00.000+05:30

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

2005-09-17T21:10:00.000+05:30

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…

The recent posts are in line with the early material

The template has changed, for the better, I think

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.

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

2005-09-17T19:45:00.000+05:30

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…

2005-09-14T17:48:00.000+05:30

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…

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

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

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

2005-09-09T12:01:00.000+05:30

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?

2005-09-08T17:39:00.000+05:30

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

2005-09-02T16:01:00.000+05:30

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>

I am not an atheist but I passed the test.

Ashok is an atheist and he failed.

Ergo, the test failed!

How did this happen?

My position:

I am agnostic.

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

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

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.

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).

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

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

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

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

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.

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

The test failed me.

Ashok’s position:

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

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

Ashok will not pass the test because he is squeamish.

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

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.

Nonsense as an art form

2005-08-31T22:59:00.000+05:30

Talking about Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I just recall that Sumit Bhttacharya from work picked up an amazingly good deal for the book, hardbound. And at the same Strand book fair where I got my Minsky. He is reading it now.

A couple of days ago I am shooting the breeze with him: “Man! Isn’t the guy mad?! Adams is not even pretending to make sense. No attempt to make subtle metaphor. No nothing. The entire H2G2 thing is one roller-coaster ride into complete nonsense. And yet all of it eventually makes him a genius. And deservingly too!”

Sumit cuts the gushing: “Douglas Adams is to sci-fi what Frank Zappa is to music.”

Wow! That is it! Well put buddy!

Adams and Zappa must be some kind of cosmic brothers. Cool! Huh?

Is H2G2's Marvin actually MIT AI lab's Minsky?

2005-08-30T17:14:00.000+05:30

On Monday morning, two books got me thinking. They were sitting cover by cover on the backseat.

To the left was the nerdy The Society of Mind by Marvin Minsky. And to the right was Douglas Adams’ freaky Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

The legendry Minsky’s masterpiece was there because I had managed to get an improbable bargain for it at the Strand book fair. And it has been with me since. The Guide was travelling to spend some time with Krishna Kumar from work who has only read one of the four parts in the ‘trilogy’.

For Guide fans the most endearing character is, of course, Marvin, the paranoid android. Now I got wondering if Adams had named the android after AI guru Marvin Minsky.

Minsky is equally well known for his adventures with a robot at the MIT’s AI labs. Isn’t he?

As I was nearing office, I was getting really excited and completely convinced that this must be so. And I was kicking myself for how in all these years I never suspected it.

Then I asked the mother of all oracles: the Internet!

First I went straight off to the community site. And found nothing there.

Then I went the Guide’s home. Nothing there either.

And finally I went to the place where all finally go; to the place where we should have gone first and not finally: To the trusty Wikipedia. And there I found the answer…

It was not 42
There was a time when some nerd had claimed on Wikipedia that Marvin, the paranoid android, was indeed named after Minsky. But that is not true.
Wikipedia now has a correction which reads...
…Marvin was *not* named after Marvin Minsky but was, according to Adams, originally named "Marshall" after a friend of his, name later arbitrarily changed to "Marvin" to protect his friend's identity and/or sound less like a cowboy…

What an anticlimax to an otherwise wonderful morning :-(

Analogy is the key

2005-08-29T14:58:00.000+05:30

People take a shot of midday coffee. Ashok takes a puzzle.

A few days ago he called: “Zaki, if you are going to lock your documents in a box with a padlock and get a boy to take it to your lawyer, how will he open it if you never send the key?”

The answer is quite interesting...

The lawyer puts his own padlock on top of your padlock, retains his key, and sends the box back to you.
You now, use your key to unlock your original padlock and once again send the box back to the lawyer with his lock still on it.
This time the box has only the lawyer’s lock on it and the lawyer opens it with his own key.
No key was ever sent out by either the sender or the receiver. Nevertheless, the contents of the box were accessible to the sender.

Isn’t that beautiful?

Even better, this is the best ever analogy I have heard for explaining something called ‘asymmetric public key encryption’.

The Internet uses many additions to and variations of this basic solution when it securely carries your passwords and credit card numbers.

In the past, I have tried to explain public key encryption to numb executives but failed dramatically.

That was because instead of using such an analogy I jumped into “prime number theory” and dwelt extra time on “the assumed difficulty in arriving at the prime factors of a large number”. And of course, how all these prime number properties go into building public and private keys :-(

Now thanks to Ashok’s riddle I should be able to explain asymmetrical encryption in a snap. What a brilliant way to explain a brilliant idea.