Straddled with bell-bottoms, a chequered shirt and a wavy curly mop of hair, I walk away, turn around and say in pure Ambrish style “Wokay, I yam back”.

Ladies and gentlemen, this blog will now witness a lot more regularity. There has been a fair deal of uncertainty surrounding me in the past few weeks and now the haze is finally clearing.

Some local news: There is a play titled ‘Play Along’ being staged this Sunday at Yavanika. That is the small cosy theatre right next to the RBI building.

Over 2000 schools in Karnataka face the threat of losing recognition from the government unless they change their medium of instruction from English to Kannada.
This is clearly one area which the government should not be stepping into. The role of the government is to govern and not to dictate the future opportunities of the children of the state.
Besides, this ruling creates a discriminatory society. Those who can afford it, will send their children to English medium schools. Those who cannot are given no choice but to send their children to Kannada medium schools. This post by no way means that English schools are better than Kannada schools. The point is that parents should be allowed to make a choice regarding the medium of instruction for their children. This choice should not be forced upon them due to a government which implements such policies purely to gain political mileage amongst certain sections of the voting population.

Some technology news: Google launches a tool to access online information offline. Seems like a great idea, although I must admit I couldn’t quite figure out how the whole thing works.

That is about it for now.

Watch this space, I say.

Martha C. Nussbaum writes a very interesting and detailed article on the possibility of a complete failure of democracy in India.

Her article written in The Chronicle is titled “Fears for Democracy in India“.

Citing the Godhra incident, she points out the systemic rise of the Hindu-right wing and the collapse of the once-acclaimed tolerance of the Hindu religion.

I think Godhra was a national calamity that could have easily been prevented. It is a shame that the people who were a part of this massacre continue to rule in the state of Gujarat.

One of the many interesting points she makes in this article is that the Hindu right-wing ideology is an import of the west, and it does not follow the traditional rules of the Hindu religion.

Excerpts:

M.S. Golwalkar (1906-73), a gurulike figure who was not involved in the independence struggle, quietly helped build up the organization known as RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or National Volunteers Association), now the leading social organization of the Hindu right. Savarkar’s “Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu?,” first published in 1923, undertook to define the essence of Hinduness for the new nation; his definition was exclusionary, emphasizing cultural homogeneity and the need to use force to ensure the supremacy of Hindus.

Golwalkar’s We, or Our Nationhood Defined was published in 1939. Writing during the independence struggle, Golwalkar saw his task as describing the unity of the new nation. To do that, he looked to Western political theory, and particularly to Germany, where what he called “race pride” helped bring “under one sway the whole of the territory” that was originally held by the Germani. By purging itself of Jews, he wrote, “Germany has also shown how well nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by.”

All around, we do see a breakdown of our cultural fabric and our tolerance levels. The recent Sikh outbursts are one such example.

Martha touches upon the positive role of the free press in India and the utter disdain shown by the law and order machinery during the Godhra incident. She makes an interesting point related to the role of the education within the Indian political and social context:

Nonetheless, the emphasis on rote learning and on regurgitation of facts for national examinations is distressing everywhere, and things are only becoming worse with the immense pressure to produce economically productive graduates.

The educational culture of India used to contain progressive voices, such as that of the great Tagore, who emphasized that all the skills in the world were useless, even baneful, if not wielded by a cultivated imagination and refined critical faculties. Such voices have now been silenced by the sheer demand for profitability in the global market. Parents want their children to learn marketable skills, and their great pride is the admission of a child to the Indian Institutes of Technology or the India Institutes of Management. They have contempt for the humanities and the arts. I fear for democracy down the road, when it is run, as it increasingly will be, by docile engineers in the Gujarat mold, unable to criticize the propaganda of politicians and unable to imagine the pain of another human being.

On a visit to the elaborate multimillion-dollar Swaminarayan temple in Bartlett, Ill., I was given a tour by a young man recently arrived from Gujarat, who delighted in telling me the simplistic Hindu-right story of India’s history, and who emphatically told me that whenever Pramukh Swami speaks, one is to regard it as the direct voice of God and obey without question. At that point, with a beatific smile, the young man pointed up to the elaborate marble ceiling and asked, “Do you know why this ceiling glows the way it does?” I said I didn’t, and I confidently expected an explanation invoking the spiritual powers of Pramukh Swami. My guide smiled even more broadly. “Fiber-optic cables,” he told me. “We are the first ones to put this technology into a temple.” There you see what can easily wreck democracy: a combination of technological sophistication with utter docility.

For me, that last line summed up in clear terms the status of our current educational policies.
Clearly, a third-party view of your country at times provides you with a greater understanding of the affairs of your own country.

Do read the article, it would be well worth your time.

So, there I am driving my car around during a not-so-busy time of the day.

Noon time and I pass through the congested Majestic area. Traffic signal and I wait patiently. The signal turns green and the car in front zooms away quite fast.
I too press on the pedal and head off quite fast.
The auto behind me does the same.

However, I do not estimate correctly the speed of the car in front of me and hence I have to resort to sudden braking.
The auto behind me also suddenly brakes, owing to my doing so, and stops just millimeters from my car’s rear bumper. In the meanwhile, a motorist who couldn’t control himself rams into the auto’s rear and the auto slightly nudges my car.

Immediately I visualise the next scene. The auto driver is going to drive past my window and hurl vernacular abuses and even probably stop my car.
I make up my responses, with the correct abuses, and am ready to tell the driver that it was his responsibility to look ahead and not ram into my car.

Armed with all this, I eagerly wait for the auto to drive past me.
The auto does drive past me, however the driver doesn’t as much as glance towards me. Despair runs through his forehead, he looks lost and just wipes the sweat off his brow as he passes by my car.

I suddenly feel ashamed of the responses that I had prepared.
I find myself buried under the rubble of day to day cynicism and the sub conscious fight for supremacy. A fight that is, at most times, fought with the self.

Today, God shall be de-throned.

The Devil, in the meanwhile, continues to feel like a jackass (his own admission).

The Monkeys are a confused lot. Never have they faced such a circumstance.

Will they stand through this trial? Wait and watch, is all I can say.

The following is just a thought trying to explain the current situation on this planet.
It, by no means, aims at belittling other species and is neither an endorsement of unfair treatment being meted out to animals.

Our planet is one of the million planets in our galaxy, which is one of a million galaxies in our universe. The entire universe started off with a big bang, as per our current understanding.

Now, the universe, by nature (pardon the pun), is aiming towards becoming a conglomerate of intelligent entities. We say this because this entire orderly chaos seems wanting to reach towards a highly sophisticated stature. This is observed in the way matter and anti-matter align themselves to make conditions favourable for intelligent life.

Earth is a part of this scheme. It has been evolving itself and its inhabitants in a manner that enables it to reach a phase where it is able to contribute to the intellectual capital that the universe is seeking to build.
As part of this, the most intelligent species right now is man. This is ofcourse debatable if you look at certain advanced functions which many other animals are able to perform.
However, on an overall level, man outweights animals in the intelligence department significantly. (Yes, a debatable point based on the definition of ‘intelligence’ and blah blah. But let’s not be a spoilsport yet).

Going by the simple logic that man is the most intelligent animal around right now and the universe is looking to build and hone its own intelligence, it doesn’t make any sense for earth to carry on the burden of having less intelligent animals, which may be considered as by-products of an evolution whose only aim was to produce one intelligent race (in this case that of human beings).

Now that evolution was able to finally produce that one single thread, the other incidental species which got produced on the way need no longer survive. The way nature is playing this whole game is that it is ensuring that its sole hero (the human) is making other animals extinct in a slow but sure manner.

Again, I would like to point out that this is just an attempted explanation of why things are turning out the way they are.

Look around and you see many species becoming extinct almost every other day. The tiger is no longer burning bright, in fact it is burning out. The depletion of rainforests has sealed the fate of many exotic birds. Human supremacy at its best? May be not. But is this according to the plan of the universe? May be yes.

Now we need to look at the part which makes us revolt against such treatment of animals – the human compassion.
Human compassion, the conscience, and the feelings of empathy and sympathy are good enough to make us feel guilty about our behaviour and about our trail of devastation.

Now, this compassion definitely gets in the way of the grand scheme of the universe. Hence, we see a perceptible change in our lifestyles which shall ultimately lead to a complete lack of conscience.

Compare the people now with those of our earlier generations. The value systems which were in place have changed radically. Kids no longer have the same sense of belonging to their parents as their parents did when they were kids.
The society is tending to become more and more individualistic. Yesterday, it was me and my family, today it is me and my spouse, tomorrow it will be me. Probably the kalyug also referred to such a society. Again, this paragraph is debatable. But, it explains the current snapshot of the human social structure.

Hence, this entire path of seemingly destructive behaviour of human beings might actually be a march forward in building an intelligent universe.
Then again, maybe this is all crap and the universe probably doesn’t even know about mankind’s existence amidst its vast plethora of heavenly bodies.

Seemingly related to my previous post.

A book review of James Gardner’s The Intelligent Universe.

Excerpts:

Gardner sees our planet — our galaxy, even — as part and parcel of a vast transterrestrial community of intelligence. He posits, quite powerfully, that
the seemingly unlikely biological evolution of our planet is not the result of chance and evolution, but of a cosmic reproductive cycle, a “coming alive” of the Universe.

The capacity for the universe to generate life and to evolve ever more capable intelligence is encoded as a hidden subtext to the basic laws and constants of nature, stitched into it as though it were the finest embroidery into the very fabric of our universe. A corollary–and a key falsifiable implication of the Selfish Biocosm theory — is that we are likely not alone in the universe, but are probably part of a vast — yet undiscovered — transterrestrial community of lives and intelligences spread across billions of galaxies and countless parsecs. Under the theory [Selfish Biocosm hypothesis], we share a possible common fate with that hypothesized community: to help shape the future of the universe and transform it from a collection of lifeless atoms into a vast, transcendent mind.

That would probably be my next book-buy.

You may believe that we are the only ones in the Universe.
You may believe that God made the entire Universe (yes, the entire place) only so that mankind can thrive in one remote corner of it on a speck of dust (which is earth in the cosmic sense). (For reference, our galaxy is almost on the edge of the Universe).

However, what is difficult to understand in that case, is why would God have made the ‘entire’ Universe? Was it really needed? Wouldn’t the solar system alone have done the job of ensuring mankind’s survival?

Moving on, why the Universe at all in the first place? Why not just a plain void? Better still, why not nothing at all?

Good night, ladies and gentlemen.

A proponent of free-trade, Alan Blinder, is up against offshoring of American jobs as he writes in this article in the washington post.
It is interesting to see that an economist finally has decided to abandon Adam Smith and David Ricardo.

Excerpt:

I’m a free trader down to my toes. Always have been. Yet lately, I’m being treated as a heretic by many of my fellow economists. Why? Because I have stuck my neck out and predicted that the offshoring of service jobs from rich countries such as the United States to poor countries such as India may pose major problems for tens of millions of American workers over the coming decades. In fact, I think offshoring may be the biggest political issue in economics for a generation.

For these same forces don’t look so benign from the viewpoint of an American computer programmer or accountant. They’ve done what they were told to do: They went to college and prepared for well-paid careers with bountiful employment opportunities. But now their bosses are eyeing legions of well-qualified, English-speaking programmers and accountants in India, for example, who will happily work for a fraction of what Americans earn.

Keynes would probably nod in agreement.

Link courtesy: Arts & Letters Daily

Although I am quite sure that no readers read this blog anymore, here is an attempt to revive this virtual estate.

I haven’t been busy in the actual sense of the word, but I haven’t been free either. Life post b-school has been of a higher whirwind-ish nature than during b-school. But, I am loving it.

With a lack of coherence and ability to make proper sentences/paragraphs at this time of the day, I write down a series of words and phrases of the recent past:

Bangalore, homecoming of sorts
Glad. Extremely glad.
Traffic, pollution. Still glad.
The guys, the coffee, the late nights.
The day-time loafing.
Baristas and Coffee Days and Java Cities.
Blossoms and books.
Bowling.
Plays and scripts.
Introspection.
Speculation.
One day trips.
Net cafes to Dial-up to broadband.
Tea and balcony and rains.
Kannada, accented (as per others).
Auto rides.
Long walks on church street.
Temple visits.
Home food.
Idli vada at the darshinis.
No blogging.

Enjoy, ladies and gentlemen.
Life rocks.

—————
Off the topic, but just in case anyone is interested: arXiv:0705.0147v1 [quant-ph]