In Medias Res

-The Other Middle Way-

The renowned contemporary Californian poet Robert Hass performed a reading of his recent works at the Doheny Library in the University of Southern California on March 30 this year. At the start of this event was a distribution ceremony of awards of academic excellence to graduating students in the university's Creative Writing program, fittingly felicitated in the presence of one of the most eminent practitioners of their art. Something I remember with some amusement about this ceremony, is the announcer's repeated description of the students as 'graduating poets' and the impressive-sounding statistics of the 'number of poets graduated by the University in recent years' reeled off exultantly. I remember asking myself, "When did Milton 'graduate'?". Notwithstanding the undeniable accomplishments of the awardees in the ceremony, a 'graduate of a Creative Writing program' and a 'poet' are not the same thing. By the same token, in a less formal context, a 'blog-owner' and 'blogger' are not the same thing. The blogosphere teems with too many blog-owners and too few bloggers. An online report of a survey on blog useage by Caslon Analytics, makes the following sardonic observation, "The 'average blog', thus has the lifespan of a fruitfly", and goes on to add, even more scathingly, "One cruel reader of this page commented that the average blog also has the intelligence of a fly".

Why do so many blog-owners end up trailing off mid-sentence what they begin with such a flourish? And why are so many of the bloggers reduced to compulsive transcribers of small-talk which neither edifies nor entertains, but only exhibits their fright of awkward silences? Is it a poverty of ideas, want of time, cynicism about reception or the result of an unreasonable quest for unattainable perfection? In short, what causes, and what can cure, the dreaded "writer's block", which seems to be unsparing in its affliction of anyone who writes, be they casual dabblers, avid hobbyists or gifted authors? Elizabeth Gilbert, another contemporary American poet, during a 2009 TED talk screened at a USC event, asks in exasperation, "Why is there only a 'writer's block'? Has anyone ever heard of a 'chemical engineer's block'?" An attempt at answer, could begin by saying that a chemical engineer most often knows what is expected in terms of clear specifications, can draw on his training to decide how to meet these specifications, and must meet them within a stipulated duration. But devoid of the problem statements, provisional plans and estimated timeframes which a chemical engineer almost always has, a writer most often does not have the answers to the questions, "What to write? How to start? When to finish?"

As for the first question of "What to write?", it seems to imply an assumption that there should be something to write about, and must be demanded by an occasion. That may be quite a limiting assumption, for in the words of W M Thackeray, "There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write". Even the faintest attempts know what these myriad unknown thoughts of ours are, is worthwhile according to the ancients who held that the most worthwhile pursuit of all is to 'Know Thyself', a motto often quoted in Latin as 'Nosce te ipsum'. Beginnings to answers to all these questions of troubled writers today, can perhaps be found in the aphoristic wisdom of antiquity. Consider the third question of "When to finish?", which writers of all hues never seem to be able to answer; either erring on the side of the excess of hypergraphia producing an abundance of inanity; or by taking parsimony to the point of disease, a disease which they resignedly call "writer's block". The ancients, anticipating this question, caution us, "Nothing in Excess", an aphorism quoted as widely as "Know Thyself", rendered in Latin as "Ne quid nimis". This is the famed Middle Way, an enduring theme in Oriental philosophy as well, and its import ought not to be lost on writers, who instead of aspiring to be prolific or perfect, would do better to seek sufficiency without superfluity. As for the second question, "How to start?", there is an answer in the form of another Latin phrase, less oft-quoted than the previous two, but having its origins in the world of writers: in medias res, meaning 'in the midst of affairs'. To begin at the beginning may not be the best way to begin, the ancients caution, for the beginning itself may beg earlier questions and endless clarifications, losing the narrator both his enthusiasm and his audience. Instead, they suggest, begin at a turning point, a crucial incident which can both trigger a flashback and set the stage for a climax; something that will draw in the audience, suspend their disbelief and engross them in suspense. If you must start bang in the middle of the story, so be it, they say, and this counsel can, in a way, be thought of as the other, less known, Middle Way.

It definitely worked for the bard of the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Iliad begins in medias res, in a battle-camp scene where a tumultuous war of words rages between warriors who almost come to blows; with a wrathful, scornful Achilles a hair's breadth away from stabbing Agamemnon, then commanding the Greeks during the ninth interminable year of the siege of Troy. The bard chooses to begin neither in Sparta splendidly with the birth of Helen of the face that launched a thousand ships, nor in idyllic Ida where the Judgment of Paris eventually sealed the fate of Troy. The Odyssey also begins in medias res, amidst the debauched revelry of egregious suitors ravaging a palace and intent on seizing its queen; as a helpless Telemakos and a Penelope at her wit's end guard their honour in Ithaca in the twentieth of the unendurable years spent waiting for Odysseus, for whose return they are hoping against hope. Again, the bard chooses not to begin at the obvious starting point which would have been the denouement of the Iliad and the sacking of Troy. The Homeric epics begin as long as nine years and twenty years from the real beginnings of their stories as it were, and far from drawing any complaints from readers, draws them into a double mystery presented by the questions, "How did we get here?" and "Where do we go from here?"

Nature imitates Art, and so does History, in that they all unfold in medias res. Alexander the Great began his conquest of the world in medias res, since he had to begin with, and contend with, plans for a Persian invasion already laid by his father, Philip of Macedon before his assassination. The history of the conquests of the world's best-known conqueror, is not one of a dramatic beginning, but rather, of a taking off from where an earlier false start had left off. Rarely, if ever, have any of the 'boy kings' of history had the luxury of being prepared to shoulder the demands of war and peace. Medieval India has the example of Akbar, crowned as a teenager, in medias res in a beleaguered empire in an anarchic subcontinent of warring chieftains; and recent Indian history has the example of Rajiv Gandhi, elected as the youngest Prime Minister, in medias res in a republic under threat, in a subcontinent ravaged by sectarian violence. Most recently, President Barack Obama has been elected Commander-in-Chief in medias res, at the helm during two ongoing wars.

It is not just generals and statesmen, but also those who fight the wars against disease and ignorance, who are denied the luxury of forewarning and preparation, and are left to their own devices in medias res. Researchers seeking the AIDS cure, are always half-way behind the breakneck speed mutations of the retrovirus, leaving the baffled investigators never abreast but clueless in medias res. All higher education begins in medias res. Thanks to recent advances that may revolutionize whole professions overnight, what today are preliminaries in a higher education program typically are several steps beyond the 'beginning' which yesterday's curricula of undergraduate courses prepare a student for. With most higher education programs being interdisciplinary, a student more often than not, is not familiar with the fundamentals of all the disciplines from which his or her interdisciplinary specialization feeds off, and must cope in medias res with the challenge of attaining intermediate competence in fields they maybe beginners in. Almost the entire project life cycle in the Information Technology industry lies in medias res, since all upgrades of business processes are desired to be 'online' without halting any regular operations, 'while the engine is running' as it were, and it is very seldom that software systems are built from scratch instead of being upgraded patch-wise coping with 'legacy code'. In media res is an underlying ubiquitous theme in the narrative of not just organizations, nations and other human endeavor, but also of the origin of our species and race. The story of biological Evolution itself occurs in medias res in a more overarching unfolding narrative of Geological Time, with such disruptive events as colliding asteroids and staggered Ice Ages altering the course of Evolution in unpredictable ways. Adapting post hoc is not an option since Evolution offers no second chances, and if any species has survived, it is because it adapted in medias res.

We can consider the in medias res worldview as the antithesis of what can be called the ab initio world-view. The ab initio worldview is one that assumes that knowledge of beginnings and fundamentals is sufficient to arrive at whatever else we need to know, and that application succeeds theory. In the ab initio worldview, the logic is inductive, the philosophy is idealist, the approach is reductionist and the stand is determinist. By contrast, in the in medias res world, the logic is deductive, the philosophy is empiricist, the approach is holistic and the stand is existentialist. The ab initio and in medias res positions are constantly in dialectic in any evolving body of human knowledge, and a concrete example is the debate about the primacy of Genes or the Environment in determining the human personality. Even the most dogmatic reductionist admits that the maxim "DNA makes RNA, RNA makes proteins and proteins make us' is an oversimplification, for though it is true that the 'master plan' of an organism is contained in the Genes, not everything in the development of the organism in its Environment goes 'according to plan' and the laws of Nature operate in medias res in a context established by Nurture. Laws, in a any science, Natural or Social have an unspoken 'ceteris paribus', 'all other things remaining equal' preceding them. The Laws can seldom, if ever, be applied to the real world ab initio, but only by first accounting for and correcting for, in medias res, all those things which do not remain equal.

Like the Sciences which can really be practiced only in medias res, the Arts are no different. Returning to where we started , this is why poets do not commence or graduate ab initio per se, but engage in medias res in a process of creation, whose beginnings and outcomes should not preoccupy them. Confucius said, "I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand", meaning that however much theory is appropriated ab initio, understanding is achieved only when practice is engaged in, in medias res. Confucius, hailed by posterity as one of the wisest men of all time, considered his own lifetime an unfulfilled one, with his mission of building a new society founded on the edifice of his ethics, unfinished and uncertain. So many great works conceived of by the human mind have not only begun but also remained indefinitely in medias res. For Mahatma Gandhi, the political freedom of India was little more than a ground-laying for the larger mission which Pandit Nehru described as 'wiping every tear from every eye', a mission which to this day, remains in medias res. Returning to the epics of antiquity, Virgil, author of the timeless Aeneid which is hailed as the national epic of the Romans, in his deathbed thought of his work not as a masterpiece but as a draft in medias res awaiting urgent revision or deserving to be burnt if unrevised. Posterity benefitted from the good fortune that his last words were never heeded. Like so many other tormented practitioners of his art over the ages, Virgil seems to have been perplexed by the belief that a work of art is owned, dispensed and disposed by its creator. Were they but willing to accept that their creations are larger than their selves, and every creation is somehow already in progress for them to join for a time, at fortuitous moments not always of their choosing; how less tormented they would be and how much fulfilment they would be able to give their art? It is with this glad and liberating acceptance that Homer begins his invocation which in way counsels every writer of posterity to seek his Muse: "So now, daughter of Zeus, tell us that story, starting anywhere you wish!". So invokes Homer his Muse. So begins the Odyssey...

Turfs and thickets

Reducing to specialists all men of science,
Society commits grave blunders.
While every expert his own tiny turf mines...
Unstudied lie the world's wonders!

Well-trodden paths they repeatedly retrace,
Shunning all unexplored thickets.
Blind to the Unknown that stares them in the face,
Smug they sit in their straitjackets!

A trained eye is not just an eye for detail...
But one that seeks the big picture.
The true Scientist's mind the instinct must entail,
Of hidden truth to conjecture!

Darwin, beginning with the crawling beetle,
To weave Life's story was able!
Experts now must heed his lessons a little,
And look outside their own bubble!

Seeing with new eyes a far-flung island's finches,
He showed how creatures earned their shapes.
Travelling in thought where no man dared few inches...
He revealed Man's descent from apes!

In times when priestly authority was rife,
Sparking debate that still stokes fires;
He brought to light the thread that unites all Life;
A leap of Thought that still inspires!

January 17, 2009
(Times Mirror Conference Room,
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County)

***2009 is the bicentennial of the birth of Charles Darwin and the sesquicentennial of the publication of 'On the Origin of Species'. This year is being commemorated worldwide as 'Darwin Year' in the honour of one of the greatest (as well as one of the most misunderstood, maligned and misinterpreted) scientists of all time whose adolescent studies of beetle populations and pioneering studies of the Galapagos finches, which led eventually to the theory of Natural Selection, are immortalized in the annals as well as the folklore of Science, and need to be revisited and retold urgently to stem the retrogression into unenlightened fundamentalism.

Stargazers and Seafarers

Should pursuit of truth be our only aim,
If some intellectual promise we show?
Or on some business must we stake our claim,
And tend the tree on which money may grow?


Shunning this tree for the Tree of Knowledge,
Thinkers might mock other treasure-hunters.
Complacent in their learning-born privilege...
Budged by nothing are these high-horse mounters!


From stories of how treasure-hunters fared...
It is plain that fortune favours the brave!
Taller than the thinkers who at skies stared...
Stand those who with their hands help new paths pave!


But this means not that all who at stars gaze,
Squander their energies and live in vain!
Their sightings of the Sky helped map Earth's maze,
Their pictures helped sailors reach home again!


Of map and compass bereft, ships are doomed;
Thinker's Mind these journeys possible made.
Sailor's instincts saved the day when storms loomed,
But could they, without maps, set sail unafraid?


The Thinker and Explorer both have their place;
Neither one can solely be called greater.
Together they guide the whole human race...
Harnessing the Mind to conquer Matter!

13th January 2009
(Seaver Science Libary,
University of Southern California)

'In the presence of mine enemies...'
-On wild mongoose chases-

An expatriate student is at once an intrepid explorer and an unwitting exile. Having come to a distant land, one must first of all 'make oneself at home' even before trying to 'make a mark'.Be they visiting scholars in exchange programs, professionals on a sabbatical, recipients of scholarships or simply students enrolled for higher education programmes, they are not only faced with the challenges of meeting their personal quests and beating their personal bests; but are often fazed by the keen awareness that their efforts and earnings are owed to and anxiously expected by sponsors, employers, parent institutes or perhaps parents. For someone like me who quit the clamour of a conventional workplace in my home country, and now on a different quest in the conducive calm of university environs, these concerns are best expressed in the words of Kahlil Gibran, "A seeker of silences am I, and what treasure have I found in silences that I may dispense with confidence?". Having 'come all the way' to a distant land, one is certainly not expected to return empty-handed. I have found it heartening to read about expatriate university alumni of US universities who return to their home countries to dispense their newly discovered treasures with confidence, often by single-handedly pioneering a certain field of research in their countries and sometimes founding research institutes. Today I found an outstandingly inspirational example of what it means to share treasures with one's countrymen.

Dr. Thrishantha Nayanakkara* was a guest speaker today at a talk entitled, "Biomimetic Legged Locomotion and Odor-Guided Behavior for Humanitarian Landmine Detection". I will not expand too much on the title, for my motivation for writing this is not as much the talk but the man himself and what drives him. It will suffice to state that a demining squad needs 'biomimetic legged locomotion' because animal legs are much better than automobile wheels while negotiating densely forested territory where mines are commonly found,that they are interested in 'odor guided behavior', motivated by sniffer dogs who continue to be the most tried and tested means in explosive detection, that 'humanitarian landmine detection' does not mean clearing a minefield by blowing it up and leaving a hole in the earth, but reclaiming the land unscathed. Coming to the man; Dr. Nayanakkara, currently a visiting researcher at Harvard, hails from Galle in terrorism-ravaged Sri Lanka and has a multidisciplinary academic background including a bachelors in Electrical Engineering from University of Moratuwa in Colombo, a doctorate in Systems Control and Robotics from Saga University in Japan and post-doctoral research in Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. As a background for today's talk he gave a brief bloodcurdling account of ethnic violence in northern Sri Lanka raging over the past three decades. Landmines, a staple for guerrillas the world over, are 'indiscriminate weapons' built not to target a known enemy but to wreak blind destruction on perhaps a hapless toddler. Children joyfully treading to village schools have fallen prey to landmines, scaring their classmates from taking the same route the next day, robbing them of childhood education and thus making them susceptible to the canvassing of militant groups. Breadwinners on their way to the workplace have met their end in landmine explosions, leaving families destitute and again susceptible to terrorist recruitment. In four simple words capturing his patriotic and humanitarian concerns, Dr Nayanakkara summed up his description of landmines by simply saying with a grim, sardonic sigh, "I don't like them!". But he did not stop by just 'not liking them'. He chose to draw upon his education in Electrical Engineering, Robotics and Biomedical Engineering not merely to climb pedestals of publications and patents in a pedagogic world; but move right to the war-zone as it were in his professed mission: to rid his homeland of landmines within 15 years. Enriched by an international education, the treasures he wishes to dispense among his countrymen are not treasures shipped from a foreign land. Rather, he is reclaiming for his people the bountiful earth that is their own, but which they aren't able to farm; the schools and shrines which are theirs but languishing in ghost towns. What he is doing is not just dispensing treasures with confidence. From the fiery landmine-infested hell that his homeland has become, he is doing nothing less than reclaiming, fearlessly and resourcefully, the Paradise on Earth which he and his countrymen are justly heirs to. May his tribe increase!

Besides the obvious humanitarian and patriotic passion which Dr. Nayanakkara brings to his work, the research** itself is cutting-edge and literally operates at the frontiers the robotics and computer science fields(while its results are operational at frontier mine-fields!) Just to give a hint of why this work ought to excite engineering researchers at large, I will just paste here what USC's Viterbi School of Engineering's online announcement listed as keywords for the talk, "Keywords: Field robots for landmine detection, animal-robot cooperation, adaptive control, reinforcement based learning, fuzzy and neural network based control, evolutionary optimization." The requirements of any solution to the de-mining problem is that it must necessarily be unmanned, capable of mobility on soft muddy terrain, capable of navigation through dense vegetation and be able to locate a target with a signal gradient analogous to the sniffing of a dog. I will dwell briefly upon a thought that struck me when Dr. Nayanakkara mentioned one of the remarkable conceptual innovations his group had made. Conventional robots, while undertaking a navigation task, use an approach of 'obstacle avoidance' ie. dodging and evading an obstacle as soon as it is sensed from a distance. The approach he uses is one of classifying 'obstacle impedance' and moving accordingly; so that obstacles are not just dodged but first probed and then possibly pushed aside or even penetrated if their 'impedance' or the constraint they enforce is small enough. A robot operating using obstacle avoidance would stop short on even detecting tall grass in a forest, while a robot using obstacle impedance characterization would know that the grass can well be trampled upon and does not at all represent a barrier. Digressing with an analogy; when we think that a door is locked just because it appears closed and pass it by without even knocking, we are 'obstacle avoiders'. When we are we use a smart approach of classifying 'obstacle impedance', we would nudge even those doors that seem to be closed and find that some are actually ajar and lead to productive encounters. An approach of overcautious withdrawal stalls all advance, and one of alert assessment at every step may reveal paths which were earlier not obvious.

After describing 'obstacle impedance classification' and other innovative features of his mine detection robot, Dr. Nayanakkara described another ancillary area of research,namely, training mongooses to sniff out mines in fields. While traditional sniffer dogs take as long as a year to train and require a human master to accompany it to the life-threatening minefield, mongooses can be trained in as little as two weeks. Who will accompany the mongoose to the field then? Here came the kicker, when he nonchalantly said as if it were the most obvious thing, "We have a robot. We have an animal. Now we tie them together!". While the audience listened astonished, he described how the mongoose 'yoked' to the robot is an effective hybrid system to survey minefields. To prevent the problem of the animal and the robot pulling in different directions, the system incorporates what he calls a 'bargaining mechanism' where the mongoose is trained with Pavlovian methods to respond to signals from the robot when the robot is more likely to be on the right track, and the robot is programmed to respond to feedback from mongoose's movement when it is the mongoose that is one the right track. In a relatively flat field where the robot has superior navigation, this system ensures that the robot pulls and the mongoose obeys. When it is a dense thicket which demands the mongoose's natural skills, it is the robot's turn to obey. Unlike the crude and callous use of live dolphins as minesweepers by the US Navy, the use of mongooses here causes almost no harm to the animal given its naturally gifted nimbleness. Unlike the oft-quoted anecdote about bullocks drawing a motorcar in India (jovially called the Ox-Ford by none other than Mahatma Gandhi) due to the vehicle's malfunction, the mongoose and robot drawing each other is a picture not of subcontinental resource-crunch, but of indigenous resourcefulness. When the state-of-the-art in landmine detection in his country was old-fashioned unreliable metal detectors or more realistically, simply rakes; this pioneering researcher proved how a wild rodent so far seen only as an exotic pet could drive his pet project to unprecedented accomplishment. Indians have a word for this kind of resourcefulness: jugaad, which is vividly described in an article that appeared in the Times of India, which says, "The operative world of jugaad, implying alternatives, substitutes, improvisations and make-dos, is spurred by a native inventiveness steeped in a culture of scarcity and survival."***

The talk had begun of course with a narrative on the horrors of war, and at the end of it, there doubtlessly lingers in mind not just benedictions for Dr. Nayanakkara and his group but an almost urgent prayer for Peace on Earth. A reverie brought to mind these lines from the Bible, which seem so apt and would be so reassuring to those who brave deadly minefields probing for mines with little more than rods, hoping to liberate farmlands and lay the tables of the famished community with the yield of a bountiful, peaceful earth to come.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil:
for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me....

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies...

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life...

-Psalm 23, King James Bible

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* Dr. Nayanakkara's University of Moratuwa page
http://www.mrt.ac.lk/iarc/thrish/

** Dr. Nayanakkara's research and video clips
http://www.mrt.ac.lk/iarc/thrish/research.html

***Link to the article on 'jugaad' in the Times of India
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/398740.cms

P for Playtime

For once, I am playing one of the 'games people play'. For those just discovering the blogosphere, an ongoing fad is a game called tagging. The rules are simple: take a letter of the alphabet, think of as many words as you can, and type out what each word means to you. It doesn't stop here. You need to pick a fellow-blogger and assign him or her a letter too, for the show to go on. That's how I got here, with the letter P assigned to me here...(do visit this to get a hang of what the game is)


At first sight, I had dismissed this as a frivolous exercise, but I then thought that this will be a great way to engage in my liking for collage, as well as for alliteration! Here goes my shot at the tagging game, with triads of words revolving around a certain theme.

It amuses me to start such a contemporary game with something as classical as characters in Greek mythology, each epitomizing a human trait.

Prometheus : The Titan who gifted fire to mankind; the synonym for pioneer
Pandora : The example of unrestrained curiosity and unwitting folly leading to much misery
Pan : The cheerful guardian of shepherds, letting us know that the greatest of us need not outgrow the thrill of merriment

Let us move from Greek myths to English literature, naming three literary works that between them span the entire gamut from the sublime to the ridiculous in the human condition.

Paradise Lost: An epic poem of inevitable human folly, inescapable diabolical cunning and inscrutable divine plans
The Prince and the Pauper: A historical novel on accidents of birth and appearances that are deceptive
The Pickwick Papers: Anecdotes that make a reader both laugh and sigh; presenting humour of all hues with generous streaks of black humour

Let us move on now from words to pictures; to images which have become inextricably entwined with ideas seemingly far removed from them. Incidentally, we move on from books to a publisher!

Penguin: Exotic, distant and often ponderous; like the ideas and worlds in books bearing this age-old well-loved logo
Panda: Endangered and emblematic; a potent and poignant WWF visual of a lurking,looming wildlife void
Puma: Feline fleet of foot, lending its name to shoemakers promising agility and athleticism

Let's watch some feline stances now since they have made their presence felt anyway.

Prowl: This surreptitious, stealthy motion isn't just feline anymore; with stalkers on the loose in our cities and smear campaigns underway in our organizations.
Prance: Strutting the stuff with carefree abandon seems to be the humans' preferred gait as well with ostentation and hedonism becoming second nature.
Pounce: Many of our actions mimic this feline move not in swiftness but in haste, not in finesse but just in force.

Staying with fauna, let us look at some birds which are perennial metaphors which remind of some perennial questions.
Pigeon: Is timidity often mistaken for a peace-loving nature?
Peacock: Is the idea of understated elegance forgotten in times of lavish extravagance?
Parrot: Is all repetition unintelligent and is all originality an improvement?

Speaking of repetition and originality, the discourse of men and nations can be...
Profound: Often what is profound sounds too simple to be so; like the Zen koans, the Confucian Analects, everyday rustic wisdom and every forgotten home-truth.
Profane: Much of what is now sacred began in a seeming sacrilege, and what is now the world's most populous faith is based on the words of the Saviour who called the holiest shrine of his religion 'a den of thieves'.
Profuse: Much of today's discourse by commentators, analysts, experts, madarins and pundits is just profuse, diffuse, voluble and vacuous.

Not all the experts and think-tanks in the world have been able to heal the ills which plague our planet.
Plagues: Don't pandemic bird flue and SARS, and looming smog and acid rain sound eerily similar to the Plagues of Egypt in the Old Testament? It's just that much of it is human doing and not divine retribution.
Pleas: Unheard pleas from war-zones, refugee camps, indigenous peoples on the verge of extinction, communities displaced by industrial juggernauts remain cries in the wilderness possibly presaging a wasteland to come.
Pledges: Pledges deafen men and nations to pleas; pledges in the form of alliances, allegiances, trade balances and treaties which reduce climate change to just the Kyoto Protocol, and genocides to statistics.

It is not often pledges made and promises to keep which drive men though. What drives us mainly is
Profit: 'It's the money, honey!'
Praise: Adulation is addictive.
Pride: A personal ego-trip beats any paid holiday.

Civilization owes much to those who served passions greater than their personal desires, and it is such yearnings that underlie..
Philosophy: The human endeavor which concerns itself with questions more than answers, and more importantly in knowing what makes a question worthwhile and what makes an answer true.
Physical Science: The human endeavor that is relieving mankind from enslavement to the elements, conquering the tyranny of geography, prolonging life by human effort and enriching life with comforts
Philanthropy: The urge for human welfare which addresses the ends of human endeavour while science simply provides the means

Selfish or unselfish, individual or collective; success in human endeavour results from balancing thought and action and especially realizing the subtle difference between what is:
Practical: Whether the situation considered is an actual happening or a thought-up possibility
Practicable: Given an actual happening, whether the change we suggest is possible
Pragmatic: Given an actual happening, and given possible changes, whether we are willing to disregard convention and push limits

For success in endeavours, stopping to think and avoiding pitfalls is as important as 'going for it', as they adages go...
Pause: "Look before you leap"
Pass: "Let well alone".
Pace: "Strike when the iron is hot!"

Achieving success means giving our best at every given time..
Past: This offers lessons, not regrets.
Present: This is the world we seek and all that is in it. Alas! How often do we glimpse just its shadow in the past or its mirage in the future.
Posterity: This should offer hope, not anxieties.

Three simple words can in fact present an entire philosophy of life, which is easier read than practised. This will be a fitting way to conclude.
Pay : Pay your debts...to everyone who did you the slightest favour. Pay your respects...to those who walked before you and paved the way.
Play: Play your role. Play fair.
Pray: It matters not whether we prostrate or join hands. What matters is that we pray!

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Well...to keep the game going
Letter C: Kunal : http://needlessinsights.blogspot.com/
Letter W: Vishwanath: http://venue4venu.blogspot.com/

Postscript: Much as I enjoyed this, I would like this to be a one-off. Avoid back-tagging please!

Pedestrian Poetry
...and Weathered Verse

Poetry has always been seen by most, as the use of language to allow outpourings rather than achieve outcomes; to yield to inward yearnings rather than attend to everyday dealings. To the thoroughly practical among us, who believe in talking less and saving time, poetry has more to do with a play on words when what we ought to be doing is saying it like it is. To those of us with a casual interest, it is still something to be heard and humoured rather than talked about and thought over; literary curiosities to be recalled on occasion for effect rather than for ongoing contemplation of the verses' cause. Even to the connoisseurs, poetry is something to be savoured in solitude, something that lingers in loneliness; and not exactly something that belongs to commonplace conversation even in the most refined of circles.

Poetry is associated with leaps of imagination and flights of fancy, and not the tiring treading and trodden paths of everyday routines. Polite conversation in most walks of life is always made in pedestrian prose, and mostly about things as prosaic as the weather and the happenings of the day. The weather and the happenings of a tiring day did not obviously seem a story of prosaic inevitability to Robert Frost when he wrote 'Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening'. The poem is a brooding reverie and yet not a downcast resignation. It admits fatigue and foreboding of the course of events, and yet whispers the message of purposefulness and promise. It reads like a wanderer's nightly musing, but has lines which are recalled every day by real-life achievers, to whom this poem continues to be a 'thought for the day' and a reminder of promises and journeys that beckon.

While recalling and reciting lines of poetry was once the preserve of pretentious literati, churning out poetry has in recent years become a pastime for self-styled web and blog 'chatterati'. In a way, amateur poetry now is about as commonplace as talk of the weather, and in many cases, just about as edifying. A melange of mixed metaphors, borrowed imagination and incongruous juxtapositions often passes off as poetry simply by merit of the fact that some lines rhyme. The lines of such so-called poetry do not unite like the lines of a painting, do not contain woven narratives and the words they end in are akin only acoustically and seldom united in thought. While one must always acknowledge the yearning for self-expression that lies behind these works; it may be said at the risk of sounding uncharitable, that if the intention of such poetry is to be avant-garde or bohemian, all that it achieves is a sort of literary irreverence; and sometimes the intention itself , by the admission of the very creators of these works , is simply to produce something 'catchy' and 'whacky'. So the thickening verbiage of amateur poetry does not represent a heightening of aesthetic contemplation and expression among the crowds, but simply a 'me-too' plebeian fad, a singing-along of sorts though almost always out of tune.

While rhyme is a poetic device that one is familiar with since the days of nursery rhymes, the indispensability of meter is recognized only with some care. Rhyme is the staple of much amateur poetry so much so that online databases and generating algorithms are now found aplenty to get rhyming words. Once in a while though, one does find in the Internet and outside, people who are willing to explore poetic forms beyond the conventional and hackneyed external rhyme, and are at home with metric intricacies. To be fair, there are to be found among the ranks of amateur poets, people whose work can claim to be poetry in spirit and not just in letter. One popular poetic form in such circles is the Japanese haiku. The English variant of Japanese haiku is a poem of simply three lines; of which the first and third contain five syllables and the second contains seven. While this form is most plain-looking and often shorn of the familiar rhyme, its virtue lies in its undramatic yet ringing revelation, that a seemingly plain truth is not so plain after all, and sometimes may not be truth at all. Here's an apt example for this virtue of haiku, that I found in the description of an orkut community devoted to this form:

The falling flower
I saw drift back to the branch
...Was a butterfly

An undiscerning reader might sneer at the apparent lack of any poetry here, but the essence of haiku is in the imagery and evocation conveyed without a flourish but in a flash, in numbered syllables. The defining characteristics and the triple raison-d'etre of the traditional Japanese haiku were a 'season word' , 'nature word' and a 'pause'. They embody, between them, an unforced awareness of the present movement, an ease of belonging with the time and place, and unhurried appreciation of unnoticed wonders. These aspects of haiku are still kept in mind by present-day enthusiasts. Here is an example I found at the UCLA Asia Institute's haiku example page:

Falling to the ground,
I watched a leaf settle down
In a bed of brown

Without the references to nature and the seasons, haiku would sound vague and vacuous. The season and nature words are in fact as vital as the 'frozen lake', 'downy flake' and the dark, deep woods in Frost's immortal poem. Just those words were enough to convey, without any abstract nouns; an almost tangible feeling of uncertainty, eeriness, acceptance and expectation. Haiku too, uses these words to gently nudge the reader's imagination without hand-holding him through prolonged panoramic vistas. Haiku is laconic yet lively, seemingly combining brevity and vividness.

The limerick is another perennially popular short poetic form, of more Western origin and certainly more light-hearted than haiku. It is best defined by this specimen which I found, again in the description of an orkut community:

What is a limerick, Mother?
It's a form of verse, said brother
In which lines one and two
Rhyme with five when it's through
And three and four rhyme with each other.

Limericks have from the beginning been the staple of 'nonsense verse' and wikipedia chooses this very apt example to begin:

The limerick packs laughs anatomical
Into space that is quite economical
But the good ones I've seen
So seldom are clean
And the clean ones so seldom are comical!

Unlike the picturesque and penetrating haiku, limericks range from the ridiculous to the ribald, though they can also be made satirical or sardonic. Both forms, though so different in cultural context, have in common their status as everyman's poetry over the ages; and most works in these forms are anonymous. Mostly composed on a whim as if in play; any profoundness in these works, even if intended, is always understated. One thing both these forms are free of, is ponderosity. In haiku, sensations are more important than the sentences. In a limerick, levity is as important as brevity. If it were simply about words and numbers, one could always compose an abstract haiku or a sombre limerick, but such an exercise for its own sake would result in verse that appears incongruous and unmoving to audiences who are familiar with the traditional associations of these forms. Staying within the cultural context means that one can exploit more fully the possibilities of a form, and produce work that lends itself to wider sharing, with readier enjoyment and appreciation.

Haiku impressed me as a far Eastern form that is now well-practiced in the West, and as an Easterner now in a western milieu and clime, that is the form I choose to pen my impressions of an ordinary winter evening in southern California.

Taking both my hands,
The cold both greets and bids farewell;
When palms press in warmth.

Claiming sleeves fully,
Sunken by palms in pockets;
Arms can't swing and wave.

Feet outrun the cold,
Borrowing from wind its speed;
To catch breath indoors.

Seen from the window,
Blackberries are pale acorns;
Painted by dusk's brush.

Sunshine is hidden.
What falls now is darkness but...
It isn't night yet.

Sight yields to eyelids.
The hands feeling unseen cold...
Yield to the blanket.

If haiku seems apt for such a quick sketch of the surroundings and nature, limericks are apt for sketching the quirks of human nature. A professor from Pennsylvania visiting my university recently, remarked that you know you're in California if it's 50 degrees at night and you still see someone in gloves! Here is my take on winters that seem colder than they are!

Shivering folks in woollens wrapped
Why, when the wind's just mildly flapped?
It's fear's chill blast...
The weather forecast!
By wind in print these folks are trapped!

By the weather report winter's defined
Though mercury's not dipped you'll find
Heaters' fuel burnt,
Here's the lesson learnt
Winter too is a state of mind!

So there, we have explored and experimented with two simple poetic forms, while still talking about the weather. Lest we think that we have begun to understand poetic meters, let us look back to what the timeless scriptural poem of India, the Bhagavad Gita has to say, incidentally also about the weather. Originally written in chaste Sanskrit in impeccable metric composition mostly in the Anushtup meter, it was rendered in metric form in English by the poet Edwin Arnold in 1885. This masterpiece is one of the most genuine presentations of Eastern thought to the Western world, in poetry that preserves the grandeur of the original. Here is a verse from the translation:

Thy sense-life, thrilling to the elements_ _
Bringing thee heat and cold, sorrows and joys
'Tis brief and mutable! Bear with it, Prince!

The thoughts of another age and civilization seem to be so effortlessly captured by the poet in lines of precisely ten syllables each, in a meter which, innocent of prosody as I am, daresay appears to be the iambic pentameter. Living as we do in a busy world where one can lose count even of the syllables of a haiku, caring not which syllable is short and long, and cutting every long story short... iambs such as these, in their austere majesty, are monuments in themselves, to timeless epics and forgotten sciences, set in poetry that is towering and transcendental in comparison to which, in the words of Emerson, ' our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial'.

Founts of Wisdom

"And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing."

That is what the exiled forest-dwelling Duke Senior in Shakespeare's As You Like It, had to say, about lessons the most ordinary of natural surroundings have to offer, if only we turn our eyes and ears to them. The Duke calls this outlook of life that sees good in everything, one of the 'sweet uses of adversity'. Human nature demands either the thrill of novelty or the promise of reward to recognize the good in anything; and we are so often dismissive or plainly unaware of the good in what is familiar and commonplace. It is only in times of loneliness and lessened accomplishment; where all our experience is confined to the commonplace; that most of us manage to see the good in things which we would have commonly taken for granted. It is only with some training that we are able to overcome this limitation of human nature; and are able to see new lessons in not only the novel, but also the familiar; not only in the inviting, but also in the innocuous; not only in hard times when we are forced to make virtues out of necessities, but also during the few vacant moments in the busiest of times. A bustling university campus is not exactly exempt from public haunt as the Duke's wilderness, and a student on his toes does not usually stand gazing at the many fountains on campus the way the Duke's retinue would have at the brooks. Fountains in this day and age, to most people mean dispensers of soft drinks. Even so, while passing by the many fountains on the way to the campus at different times of the day, I somewhat fancifully see the fountains spouting philosophies of life, somewhat like how the Duke saw books in brooks.

The first fountain I see is one at Mount St Mary's College, en route to the USC campus. The fountain here is within a small well, and on it's inner wall are engraved the words, "Seek the good, the true and the beautiful from the Fountain of all Life". The sentence at first sight seems too much of a platitude even to merit mention. Most of us will stop mid-sentence and tell ourselves that it goes without saying, that we must seek good and avoid evil. When we ask whether 'any good will come out of this', we generally mean whether any pleasant outcome, mostly reward or recognition will come out of this activity. Most of us also have strong opinions about what activities and associations any good can come out of, and hence we have our own mental models of 'good people' and mental lists of 'good books'; and societies have an idea of what 'good professions' are. This way, in our mental landscape, there are some landmark sources of good, call them fountains of good if you will. Similarly we have also mapped out the 'roots of all evil'. Are good and evil so clearly separate and disparate in origin? How often have we found good and evil arising out of the same source? The best of role models have chinks in their armour, and no person among those we may hold in the greatest contempt can be so depraved that he lacks a single virtue however buried in vice. The most memorable of experiences might have a tinge of regret over a missed opportunity to have made it still better, and the bitterest of experiences might have hidden lessons that stood us in good stead later. Good and evil are intermingled in the stream of life experiences, and do not spout from two separate fountains. There is only one Fountain of All Life, as the engraving says. The wisdom of life, it says, is not in clinging onto something as good and dismissing something else as evil, but in straining and gleaning what is good in every single thing. The mythical Indian Swan, which can drink just the pure milk out of milk diluted with water, is a vivid Oriental motif of this view. The Swan does not fly far in search of its elixir, but finds the same in a seemingly impure source. Likewise, we too will be wise not by wandering to 'good places' or waiting for 'good times', but finding good from whatever we face here and now.

A more ornate fountain is the one facing the splendid Doheny Library building. This fountain has a pedestal set upon four figurines like the caryatids of Greek antiquity. A figurine bearing an infant represents Home, one making a gesture of giving represents Community, one with praying hands represents Church and one with an open book represents School. Atop the pedestal is a dancing nymph reaching for the sky. The fountain illustrates in sculpture all the foundations for raising human society to newer heights. Mahatma Gandhi, Father of the Indian nation, presented his entire nation-building program through his Ashrams which were self-sufficient in the needs of the family, community, religion and education. In his writings, he describes how the boundaries between family and community vanish, how labour in the Ashram and the words of wise ones can themselves be an education in their own right and how adherents of different faiths can engage in collective worship. The kibbutz movement in Israel is perhaps the most well-known attempt in recent history to unite home, community, church and school into a single collective institution. However, it is now almost a thing of the past since any overarching institution that tends to subsume individual talent and aspiration has eventually yielded to change. We must remember that the central tenet of even Gandhiji's seemingly collectivistic social engineering experiments was the individual volunteer's inner resolve and devotion to truth. Likewise, even as the global community today experiences greater connectivity and more collaborative activity; order will be maintained only by individual responsibility and cannot be enforced by an institution. Progress will still be driven by individual genius, however much it may be facilitated by the right institutions. Like the figurines in the fountain which set the stage for the nymph to take flight, and do not nestle the nymph in a tight embrace; the truly beneficial social institutions are those that create conditions suitable for individual achievement, without binding enterprise and imagination by convention and tradition.

Outside the majestic Mudd Hall of Philosophy, stands another fountain bearing the inscription, "O stream of life run you slow or fast, all streams reach the sea at last.". This might sound like a defeatist message to some, who may think that it is pointless to take pains to be skilful and speedy when eventually the fruits of all efforts will count to nothing. To others, this very message infuses a sense of urgency, that we must when we still can , be our most sparkling and agile selves and infuse grace however fleeting into all our movements. The message, often forgotten, is to keep in mind even when things are streaming along smoothly and speedily, that any state of affairs however desirable, lasts only for a time. Likewise times of difficulty and stagnation also pass. The wisdom of life seems to be to pay utmost attention to the course of each stream of thought and action, while at the same thing acknowledging the uncertainty of the fate of each stream as it rushes into the sea of endless possibility. This inscription, in a way, both inspires action and tempers ambition, and has a message similar to the more oft-quoted "Do your best and leave to God the rest!".

Perhaps the most prominent fountain at the northern entrance of the USC campus is the one at Gavin Herbert Plaza. This one bears no inscription and does not proclaim any philosophical message, but in its own way is proof of the fact that a gesture may be worth a thousand words. The Plaza bears an unconventional sculpture: a juxtaposition of tall blocks that seems to be a cubist expression of a human hand with an upraised finger. The popular interpretation is that this is a well-known offensive gesture aimed at a rival institute. This somewhat profane interpretation, which might even have been the intent of the artist, is however not what strikes me most about this public artwork. What is impressive is that the artist operating with such minimalistic motifs as straight-edged stone blocks manages to convey an image as intricate and distinctive as a human hand. The evocations and associations caused by this assembly of stone blocks are illustrations of how the aesthetics and acceptability of any artwork are shaped as much by the intent of the perceiver, as by that of the artist. That such an artwork, carrying an irreverent meaning for most and an abstract meaning for others, lies on a university campus is proof of the fact that the sublime and the ridiculous often coexist in proximity in the most well-meaning of human endeavours. Again it is upto us to choose either, just as we are to choose the good from the intermingled Fountain of All Life. Even those plain fountains that bear neither inscriptions nor sculptures do have a message. That the planners decided to install those fountains at all, instead of leaving the parkways unadorned, speaks of an innate human urge to look beyond bare necessities, create things of beauty and offer some comfort however fleeting to travellers one might never see. In the mild gurgling and cool whiffs around the plainest of fountains, I find reassurance, that there have been men who valued art enough, to create these spaces that can calm weary minds and occasion contemplation.