Five Years of Solitude

This week I read One Hundred Years of Solitude once again. More than five years after my first time. And yet it was like a first time. I read it in three days and in those three days I could do nothing else. I was bound to my room and my brain was whizzing around in Macondo. The Jose Arcadios and  Aurelianos danced around me, in their fierce, weird madness and quiet strength. Ursula Iguaran sat in the corner, seeing me through her opaque eyes. And the four years of rain, and the many years of sunshine all went through me, like a flood.

Some pictures speak a thousand words. With Marquez, each word shatters into a thousand pictures. The mind is lost, wondering which way to take - this or that? There is no way to describe the sensory explosion that accompanies while you read Solitude. It is orgasmic, and sometimes beyond it. Every bit is precious. Marquez surprises us in the narrative, in the narration, the working of his characters, the lunacy of their thoughts and actions, the weather, the everyday regularity of miracles and the sudden surprises of reality. Time moves fast and slow as he pleases, and the world swivels around his thumb. Such letters!

Will such words be written again? Will a work of art move me ever so much? I wonder, I wait.

Ramblings

Perhaps the smell that comes

from within, is more of fear

than of truth. I wish I could

guess what it means, this odour

that pervades every composition,

this scent distilled from within,

that which floats above in the sky

along with the moon and all the stars.

I see a purple globe

hanging in the sky. Far enough

to twinkle, but close enough to

touch. What is it, is it a future sun?

Or a moon from the past? Or a dream

of delicate dessert to be had

after spoonfuls of  dreary poetry?

Hope, lost in its incandescent thoughts

shining through purple glass,

the perplexed memories of  forever?

This is not a Scarecrow

Three years and running

Three years of PhD over. How many more to come?

It's like being in the middle of the ocean on a scrawny little boat. Plus, the boat is leaking and the compass is not working (Though, to be fair, someone did warn me that the compass was a bit rusty). There are occasional storms and the like, but most of the times it's just unbearably sunny.

Sometimes big ships pass by. At other times there are the aeroplanes.

On some days I wonder if I'm rowing around in circles. Who can tell?

On the positive side, I love the starry night and the blue of the sky and sea. Was it just to see this sight that I came so far from the shore? Perhaps.

A Sign

Here is a sign.

Make what you will of it.
Take what you will.

I shall pretend as if
nothing was ever said;
and you, have never heard
nor read nor seen nor smelt.

With this I give meaning
to a blank page, a yellow wall;
With this I breathe life into
my wings and fly tall.

With this I add colour to
a glass of water bland;
With this I create of the
water another land.

The world will roll on, nothing
has changed. Yet we know
that something has changed.
There was no fire, yet it burns.

Said, unsaid; between the eyes,
passed in glances; like a sigh.
You may have heard it, it was
not the wind: it was a sign.

Spammer Spammer

Spammer spammer full of grace;
Why you keep posting comments
in my place? Thanks for the kudos
And the funny worded praise,
but I know you are a robot, a code
that runs like a rat in a maze.
Spammer spammer full of grace!
If you do it again in my space,
I'll throw a a spanner in your face.

Dedicated to the spam comments on my last few articles.

Chairman Mao's Little Mistake

Sometime in the late 1950s, the Sparrow Campaign took place in China. It was part of a larger effort called The Four Pests Campaign (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign) to eliminate four pests: rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows. Sparrows were to be killed because they ate some of the grain from the fields, reducing the overall throughput.

 

And what happened?Locusts and other insects, whose population was kept in control by the sparrows, suddenly had a boom in numbers. Down they went with agriculture. Famine, starvation, and a complete mess followed.

Not understanding the interrelationships between things is not a mistake of Mao Zedong alone; all of us do it all the time. What prevents us from thinking a bit deeper, from understanding things from different angles, and in detail? I have no idea. IISc has taught me that no amount of education can instil this quality in you(if we assume that what happens in these places is indeed education; that in itself is debatable).

Scratching

I just wanted to scratch
And leave a mark;
But now I am depressed
Thinking of transience, mortality
and the like. Words can kill
I knew, but did not believe.

Picture Victure

  

Sometimes I just want to fly

Away from the clouds, into the sky;

Fall free and cold and naked....

There is something about grayscale pictures, I always think of them as being slightly cold to the touch, just as I imagine the moon is: made of something soft, cold and white.

 

A little picture of Kathakali, that deadly ( but not so dead) piece of feudal art, where men are of  five different types, but women of just one. And of course, all enacted by middle aged men of varying degrees of plumpness.

 

Yet somehow the colours of the art form still turn me on, make me want to draw in paper and on walls. Above is depicted a call to war ( പോരിനു വിളി in Malayalam)by a villainous ചുവന്ന താടി (a.k.a red beard) character.

Remembering Vivekananda: the Right way (a.k.a Quotable Quotes from Vivekananda)

We all remember Vivekananda as the arise, awake, stop not till the goal is reached man. So I was surprised, a bit (too) unpleasantly, when I discovered some his not so well known words and thoughts.The revelation was shocking, and made me wonder about all the Vivekananda adoration that goes on in this country, especially among middle class Hindus. What amazes me is the process of creation of icons, which whitewashes their lives to create a veneer of respectability and acceptability. Here are a few quotable quotes from Narendranath Dutt a.k.a Swami Vivekananda.

1. On race
"The Hindus believe--that is a peculiar belief, I think; and I do not know, I have nothing to say to the contrary, I have not found anything to the contrary--they believe there was only one civilised race: the Aryan. Until he gives his blood, no other race can be civilised. No teaching will do. The Aryan gives his blood to a race, and then it becomes civilised. Teaching alone will not do. He would be an example in your country: would you give your blood to the Negro race? Then he would get higher culture." (on February 2, 1900 at the Shakespeare Club, in Pasadena, California)


2.On the differences between man and woman
"Now, you see, a woman never drinks wine or eats meat. It was a hardship on us when we were students, but not on the girls." (Delivered at the Shakespeare Club House, in Pasadena, California, on January 18, 1900)


3.On the hardships faced by lower castes
"In India, even the lowest caste never does any hard work. They generally have an easy lot compared to the same class in other nations; and as to ploughing, they never do it."(Delivered at the Shakespeare Club House, in Pasadena, California, on January 18, 1900)


4.On the institution of caste
"The older I grow, the better I seem to think of caste and such other time-honored institutions of India." (from "Swami Vivekananda on India and Her Problems")


5.On the duties of a wife
"Even I, who never married, belonging to an Order that never marries, would be disgusted if my wife, supposing I had married, dared to displease my mother. I would be disgusted."(Delivered at the Shakespeare Club House, in Pasadena, California, on January 18, 1900)


6.On widow burning in India
Vivekananda denied that people burned widows. It was true, however, that widows had burned themselves. In the few cases where this had happened, they had been urged not to do so by holy men, who were always opposed to suicide. Where the devoted widows insisted, stating that they desired to accompany their husbands in the transformation that had taken place, they were obliged to submit themselves to the fiery tests. That is, they thrust Her hands within the flames, and if they permitted them to be consumed, no further opposition was placed in the way of the fulfilment of their desires.(from a report of a lecture at Detroit, United States, in the  Boston Evening Transcript, 5th April, 1894)


8. Caste again
"To the non-Brahmana castes I say, wait, be not in a hurry. Do not seize every opportunity of fighting the Brahmana, because as I have shown; you are suffering from your own fault. Who told you to neglect spirituality and Sanskrit learning?"( excerpted from "Swami Vivekananda on India and her problems")


7.On slavery
"The history of the world teaches us that wherever there have been fanatical reforms, the only result has been that they have defeated their ends. No greater upheaval for the establishment of right and liberty can be imagined than the war for the abolition of slavery in America. You all know about it. And what has been its results? The slaves are a hundred times worse off today than they were before the abolition.
Before the abolition, these poor negroes were the property of somebody, and, as properties, they had to be looked after, so that they might not deteriorate. Today they are the property of nobody. Their lives are of no value; they are burnt alive on mere pretences. They are shot down without any law for their murderers; for they are niggers, they are not human beings, they are not even animals"(Complete Works, Vol.3)

What a load of bullshit has this man said!
How come we all think of him the way we think of him? Beats me.

And a shame it is that his birthday is national youth day. Whatever that is.

Just a little something

Let me write a little something
For old time's sake:a couple of
words, lines, a few mistakes.


It is noon and my mind says,
Listen, it is not the time for poetry
Or any of your ridiculous ideas.


But then the heart insists and
I must sin again, here on this
e-space which neither looks


nor feels like paper. For once
I am composing straight instead
of bothering with books and paper,


the creed of ball pens and HB pencils.
Goodbye to those tools of the past!
Now i am modern and i can feel


the e-heat in me. How many likes
will i get, i wonder, how many will
tweet about me, my words?


How many netizens will let these
words float through their eyes
before their brains wander off


into another dream? The statistics daunt
me, i write for my audience
but no one cheers. But then,


we poets live and die in silence,
though not the silence of the lambs
but the sharp silence of protest.


Maybe i should stop, methinks

i have written too much crap.
Goodbye dear keyboard, for a while.

The Vacuum shaped like You

You are gone and now all i have
to caress is the vacuum.

Thanks to physics i know
that a vacuum is never really empty
But things keep popping in and out,
Small things like atoms, electrons,
and sometimes big things,
like universes and universities.

I know the chances are small,
(i did take a probability course once)
but i keep hoping that one day
from that vacuum you left behind,
You will pop up again
And surprise me.

The Length of my Penis and other concerns

Of late I have been getting a spam mail that promises to increase the length of my penis by four inches. Now I never asked for this in the first place. One must learn to be satisfied with what one has.:-) But the mail comes again and again, alongwith another one about a 25% discount on Viagra. These are, I guess indicative of my demographic. Indian males of my age who have little ( read no ) sexual activity have all these crazy things to worry about. Of course, size is a major male concern across the world, irrespective of country. Of late, the advent of the internet and internet porn has further heightened this. The well endowed gentlemen who appear in this branch of the fine arts often are too well endowed, much to the chagrin of many of the viewers.

Why all this fuss? Penis length, for some, symbolises virility and ultimate maleness. For them, the more of a snake that you have in your trousers, the more of a man you are. However, this is quite a recent phenomenon. In the classical age, in Europe, smaller genitals were considered to be better. One only needs to look at the multitude of statues in marble and stone to study the disproportionately small genitalia of the subjects. Michelangelo's David, for instance. Large frontal parts were considered unrefined and animal. Of late, however, we have returned to and accepted our animal roots. :-)

The word penis is another curiosity. In its Latin root it simply means tail. It started off as a euphemism, a substitute for a word that people were too uncomfortable saying aloud. What the original word was, no one knows. But then, how many people know that? The substitute is now as good as the word - or rather, it is the word.

So why did I write this piece? Three reasons:
1. The mails were so irritating that i wanted to scream.
2. Just for fun, for shocking friends.
3. I just wanted to see how many hits Google will bring me after this. i.e, a short social experiment.

Adios.

Love Song

I wait till i reach a state from which there is no escape but to write.


You are white, so are
your clothes.
But your hair is black.
At your age, it seems alright.
It smells of oil and shampoo
And essence of vanilla
and then there is some other scent
i cannot fix, but takes me
twenty years back, memories
of a destroyed land where
there was a well with ferns and mossy rock,
big buffaloes, large lizards
and birds and frogs and flies.

To Wilhelm on his 447th Birthday

Shall I borrow thy line, William?
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

William Shakespeare died on April 23,1616. But no one knows for sure when he was born, because the only record that we have is of his baptism, which makes no mention of the day of birth.Nevertheless, many people(mostly conspiracy theorists like myself), like to believe that he was born on the 23rd of April, because it gives a poetic roundedness to the life of the Bard.

Below is 'Friends,Romans, Countrymen' from Julius Caesar(1953) rendered by Marlon Brando as Mark Antony. After hearing this for the first time I realized how Shakespeare must have wanted it to be said. Quite unlike what people used to do in school in Declamation competitions - all they could manage was melodrama. But this, this is real Drama!

Everytime he says Friends, Romans, Countrymen, Lend me your ears, I get goosebumps.

Shakespeare is to be watched, not read.

Against the grain

An alternate look at the whole Anna Hazare episode.

http://kafila.org/2011/04/09/at-the-risk-of-heresy-why-i-am-not-celebrating-with-anna-hazare/

Changes in our Times

Change is here. It is here, there, everywhere.

Little did I know that I would live(indeed, a long word) to see a revolution of the people. But my thesis was flawed. What happened in Tunisia, what happens in Egypt? People have come forth and raised their voice, and towers have come down shattering. Such change is awe inspiring, it is thrilling.

Ode to a Dead Blog

This Blog is so, so dead;
No posts, post mortems,
Words, deeds, thoughts.

No more life that flicks
In and out like the swinger
Of some pendulum clock.

It is dead and done,
Gone forever to the lands
That are farther away than thought.

Ten lines for the dead.

Electronics and The Art of War

A friend once asked me," You are an Electronics Engineer. What is your contribution to humanity?" I did not know what to say and had no retort, because he was a doctor. I mumbled something about the telephone and the internet, but that answer did not satisfy either him or me. I was unsure about the moral credentials of my profession.

Historically, the evolution of Electronics was in close association with armed conflicts all over the world, especially World War(II). Even today the biggest chunk of the funds for research in Electronics and Telecommunications comes from defence and allied organisations. For instance, in India we have DRDO and ISRO. ISRO is not in defence as such, but the importance of satellite communications in times of war( and in times of peace) must not be underestimated. How many spy satellites does India have? Surely, not zero?

Even in classrooms we are reminded of the strong bond between electronics and war. A Prof was once explaining how Circuit A was better than Circuit B: when used in the apparatus for firing at aeroplanes, Circuit A would bring down double the number of planes that Circuit B did, and in half the time."That's how they brought down the Germans in WWII", he explained, looking gleefully at an enthralled audience. The audience consisted of a class of India's most brilliant
students in India's most famous institute. And they were enthralled. I was not feeling buoyed at all; for me, a plane is not just a metal foil rolled out to optimize its aerodynamic capabilities-it is a flying box containing living beings, human beings in fact. But to all others the plane was a metaphysical entity, a problem to be solved. That day I got an inkling of how scientists involved in the Manhattan project would have thought about the nuke. It would have been a paper entity, just numbers and more numbers. After all, it was not detonated in their backyards.

Some people claim that computers and mobile phones have made our lives better. Have they? True, a lot more information is available, cheaper and easier than it was in the past. But that's about all, I guess. These days people have friends who they rarely see (or even call) but 'meet' on the web. The 'human' aspect in relationships is dying out, in some sense. We are all nodes in a gigantic network, with six degrees of separation. Sometimes I think of Communication as some kind of Orwellian device, increasing distances between people while loudly proclaiming that it is decreasing it. Not to mention how all of us have come to become users of technology, though as to how it works, we are absolutely clueless. An electric bulb is a simple device,a nd anyone who wants to learn how it works can do so in very little time. Not so the shiny Laptop or the new multimillionpixel camera phone.

Of course, there are spinoffs. Like monitors that talk to help visually challenged or illiterate people; solar devices that will save power and help keep us going. But the fact remains that they are spinoffs, they are offshoots and not the ends. The same technology that guides a missile to its target can help guide a lost child to her house. But do we really need GPS to move around in our world, in our streets and in our homes?

I am not judging; it is not a question of good or bad. I feel like an instrument of war, and I do not like it.

MIdnight Madness

It is not yet midnight
But soon it will be.
The moon will come and go
But still here I'll be.

When will these wretched exams be over? This place is full of them. And I am flunking them all. I am losing so much sleep and still getting nowhere. And people all around are studying to their death. Sometimes I think IISc is a pressure cooker. Day by day I am being reduced to stew. The madness has begin to show, and it has begun to grow.