An old year wraps up, unwrapping a new one; but only in Man's humble measure. Time unfolds relentlessly, indifferent to any measure. This moment is indistinguishable from all other moments but for the note Man chooses to take of it. It is a moment timely as any other to take note of the realities that accompany human vision and those that outlast it, and reflect on how ephemerality itself constitutes Eternity.

Beneath the Moon; Beside the Moon

The scene past the train's window speeds and streams...
My view spans delight's and boredom's extremes.

The full moon keeps pace with each single train...
Motionless, on each frame does it remain!

The world beneath the moon seems quite still too...
I wonder how dusk's plainness my sights drew!

Now, from the void a hill its presence claims...
With the moon it will share but a few frames...

Now, in the distance a forest fire burns!
The staid twilight scene at once florid turns!

The fire, still burning, is first out of sight...
The unfleeting hill flits into the night...

The night outlasts this play of light and shade...
And the traveling moon, unmoved has stayed!

The dark on which just drowsy sights dwell...
Somehow on the mind's eye casts its own spell!

Arvind Iyer

En route from Nashik in the Nanded-Mumbai Tapovan Express
Maharashtra, India
1800 - 2200 hrs 31st December 2009

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 deductive, the philosophy is idealist, the approach is reductionist and the stand is determinist. By contrast, in the in medias res world, the logic is inductive, 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 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 Nanayakkara* 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. Nanayakkara, 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 Nanayakkara 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. Nanayanakkara 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. Nanayakkara 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. Nanayakkara 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. Nanayakkara 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

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

** Dr. Nanayakkara'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!

**************************************************************************************

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.

The Moral of the 'Story so far'
Part 3
-Probability and Providence-

We have heard it said so often that, "Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people". Introspection, the process of placing oneself on trial, is so much more difficult than judging others. Natural curiosity makes it easy for our minds to get interested in other people, even with the smallest effort. With more than average effort, our minds can shift from a passing curiosity in personality traits and quirks, to a keen observation of events in the lives of people, their behaviors and circumstances. Our minds are at their greatest when natural curiosity and persistent observation are both harnessed, by resisting the urge to stick to prejudices or jump into conclusions. It is now that the ideas that drive people and events become clear. A story, especially a true-life story, has something for all minds; small, average or great; because a story always has people, events and ideas: characters, plots and morals. A story harnesses our natural curiosity, sustains interest and keen observation and hence imperceptibly prepares us and makes us attentive to a lesson of life. A moral may find authoritative expression in a commandment or sermon, but the subtle suggestion of a moral by a good story is a more evocative and memorable expression. While a sermon demands obedience; all that a story demands is our natural curiosity and coaxes the mind into seeing something beyond. A moral may inspire through a story, but a moral is not the only way a story can inspire. This is the reason why more people find inspiration in 'The Fountainhead' than in the 'Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology', though both convey the same message and philosophy of life.

What has been written so far may sound like a chapter outline for a proposed book entitled, ' 'How to read biographies'. Even if such a book is written, it is unlikely to teach more than a single good story will; and is unlikely to add anything to the learning of those who have heard many good personal stories. Writing now about a thought-provoking life story I heard recently would not therefore, be out of place. It can bring a narrative concreteness and liveliness to this exercise of learning to examine lives. After all, any discussion between even the most seasoned book-lovers is not just about the history of literature, but is always replete with reviews of recently read books with mentions of interesting episodes or lines. This is about the first talk which I got to attend in person at USC's 'What Matters to Me and Why?' series, the one by Dr. Jeffrey Nugent, a renowned development economist.

Dr. Nugent warmly recounted experiences from his early years, whose unexpected lessons stood him in good stead through his illustrious academic career. He recalled with special fondness the spiritual quest of his mother, who would always explore any question of faith from the viewpoint of different faiths like Protestantism, Catholicism and Judaism; and frequently ask him his views on such topics, eliciting from him frank admissions about their imponderability. His mother's unprejudiced quest continued well into her elderly years and even after she suffered visual impairment. Growing up in New York, Dr. Nugent was an ardent baseball fan as a boy; and according to him, his special interest in developing economies has its beginnings in his trait to root for the underdogs in baseball games. To this day, he says, he finds himself cheering with as much gusto as he would in a baseball match, when he sees a developing economy anywhere in the world make the right policies and flourish. During his college years, he was once required to escort an elderly classmate home after class, who inculcated in him a life-long love for English poetry during their conversations in the walk back. Years later when Dr. Nugent was performing compulsory military service without access to books and entertainment of any sort, this love for poetry helped him form a group of poetry-lovers in his camp who would meet often and each recite a poem from memory to maintain sanity and preserve the aesthetic self during troubled times. He spoke about how he decided on a whim to take an archaic course like the electoral history of 19th century America during his later college years, where he happened to read the classic speech 'Cross of Gold'. This speech would supply him later with inspiration and references for his first tenure-winning paper.

While relating such instances of how things picked up casually along the way came in handy in the long run, Dr. Nugent spoke of two turning points in his career which were made possible by opportunities he almost missed by hair's breadth. The first of these was an offer to perform research in Nigeria, which he was apprehensive to undertake given his newly married status and a general unwillingness to relocate to an unfamiliar land. After mulling over it and even missing the deadline by a day, he decided in a flash to get back to those who made the offer. To his pleasant surprise, they were only too glad to let him come and he spent a very productive time in Nigeria. The second one was an opportunity to fulfil his longtime desire to perform research in Greece. Knowing that an eminent Greek researcher was in town, he had kept a research proposal ready. As luck would have it, he suffered a severe attack of diaorrhea throughout the visiting professor's stay in town, and had no means of reaching him. At the nick of time before the visiting researcher boarded his flight home, Dr. Nugent managed to track him down at the airport. As luck would have it again, a native speaker of Greek happened to be passing by and was promptly recruited by Dr. Nugent as an interpreter to get through his proposal to the visiting scholar and eventually got to spend several productive years in Greece as was his cherished desire. In Nigeria and Greece, he got to learn new languages, make friends for life and grow greatly in stature as an economist of international repute.

After the speech, I had the following question for Dr. Nugent, " You mentioned in your talk how you made a last-minute decision to go to Nigeria and how you could get your Greek proposal through at the very nick of time; both of which later proved to be life-changing decisions. Both of these are experiences where things could have gone wrong at the last moment.
What would you attribute your last-minute decisions that later proved to have unexpected benefits? Are they:
a) fortunate coincidences and a matter of chance
b) expressions of 'Providential harmony' as the more religiously inclined would say
c) a consequence of the fact that people who try out more things and take more chances than others eventually get it right once in a while!Is it true that 'The only way to get a good idea is to get lots of ideas'?"

Dr. Nugent's face lit up and he said that he found the question very interesting. He replied that his decisions were based on an inner conviction that an idea was good and seemed right. At the moment of reckoning this conviction eventually won over the indecision. Most interestingly, he was unwilling to rule out the possibility that some decisions may be 'divinely inspired'. In a later e-mail exchange, Rabbi Susan Laemmle, the Dean of the Office of Religious Life at USC also concurred with Dr. Nugent's views. In her own words, "I think that one of the most important things in creating a good and meaningful life is to listen to your own inner voice -- to learn to understand yourself and what matters to you, and to notice what makes your happy and sad and angry and depressed. And then to take actions that accord with your developing and solidifying inner nature. I do not see this process as primarily a spiritual matter, directed by God, but more of a psychological/emotional/cognitive matter. However, it is not all that cut and dried; since I do see God as connected to, even if separate from, our inner natures. In my view, sometimes things are a matter of sheer luck, and sometimes there is an element of luck -- as perhaps there was in the Greek speaker actually being at the Eastside terminal when Nugent arrived there."

In a way, my basic question was about the nature of luck. Is luck simply a series of flukes, part of a yet-to-be-revealed Plan of heaven, or is it the sum total of byproducts and unintended consequences of our own conscious decisions? Is it Providence or simply probability? Is it the play of the gods or simply of the odds? This question is one of the many variants of the perennial debate between free will and destiny. The economist and the Rabbi, both very learned and distinguished in their own fields, concur that our lives are mainly shaped by our decisions made when conviction wins over doubt. But they concede that our decisions and convictions may themselves be shaped by unknowns. While they readily acknowledge that there are unknowns, conventional wisdom often does not. There are two common metaphors that usually figure in any debate between free will and predestination. One is that fate deals us cards and it is upto us to play the cards we have got as well as we can. This is like a description of a system in which we have no control over the inputs, but freedom to change the process and hence alter the outputs. This view gives free will the last word. Another metaphor is that all our efforts are the grist of the 'mills of God'. This seems to suggest that we have control only over the inputs and then a larger process takes over. This approach gives destiny the last word. But irrespective of the worldview, we are expected to do our best: play our cards well and supply our best grain to the mills. In practice it really makes no difference if it is free-will or destiny that decides: for in any case all that we have to do is refine our own personal gameplan and avoid whatever goes against the grain.

Without expecting miracles and windfalls, and by taking upon themselves the onus of coming up with the best response to a situation; the two learned respondents to my question suggest that we can actively propose a course of life even if it is not entirely at our disposal. They have freed themselves from both fatalism and delusion, and give a balanced message that avoids both the complacency of expecting Providential guidance all the time, as well as the arrogance of being in full control. This is not to belittle the role of religion in our inner lives. Every great world religion offers its own set of answers to the perennial questions of philosophy, but these answers are not meant to spare us the effort of seeking our own answers. The purpose of religion is defeated if we rely on traditional assumptions instead of assessing each situation on its own merits; or begin to expect miraculous resolutions whenever we err, all in the name of faith. There really is no conflict between religious faith and faith in oneself. When truly practised; both require us to find our own true needs and fulfil them with our best efforts; to examine our own deeds and see if they are true to our values; and not to expect our needs to be fulfilled by fortuitous stars and our deeds to be forgiven by lenient gods.

At the very outset, we saw how seeking meaning in everyday mysteries is the first step to begin understanding our own lives. Then we saw how we can learn best from the lives of others by putting ourselves in their place and examining what stance we would take. Finally we have learnt to take a balanced view of our own role in shaping our lives, which many of us tend to assume is entirely our own, or entirely at the mercy of something beyond us. We started this exercise as an attempt to 'read our lives'. It is said that Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic are the 3 R's of education. We may say that the three R's we must undertake to be able to learn from life are:
1. Research into what we find most mysterious and meaningful
2. Roleplays placing ourselves in the experiences of others and observing our stance
3. Responsibility for decisions coupled with refraining from wishful thinking and unjustified expectations
We have seen how learning from life means not allowing ourself any self-pity, refraining from making condescending judgements or delusional comparisons, not resorting to any convenient beliefs we may grown up with, and dealing afresh with each situation. Giving up so much of what has been second nature to us, and untiringly exercising our intellect, imagination and patience to examine and redirect our own lives seems to be a tall order. However, sustained effort in this direction will allow us to stand tall in our own eyes, and bring more order and harmony into our life; to make it the stuff an inspirational biography is made of.

PREVIOUS PARTS:
Part 2: http://pencilofgod.blogspot.com/2007/09/moral-of-story-so-far-part-2-instances.html


Part 1: http://pencilofgod.blogspot.com/2007/09/moral-of-story-so-far-part-1-mystery.html

The Moral of the 'Story so far'
Part 2
-Instances and stances-

Retrospection would have served its purpose even if we are unsuccessful in elegantly inking our past life. It is enough even if we are able to get some inkling of what the living present means to us. Even if retrospection does not yield the moral of the story so far, it might place in our hands in the thread of the story to come. However, 'looking back' is purposeful only if we also 'look within' at the same time. Retrospection unaccompanied by introspection serves no purpose. Retrospection only provides personal instances, incidents and illustrations to the introspective questions of what we find most mysterious and meaningful: "What matters to me and why?". "What matters to me and why?" is also the title of a monthly series of lectures by eminent professors at USC, sponsored by the Office of Religious Life, currently in its sixth year. In the words of the organizers, this exercise is meant to encourage "reflection about values, beliefs, and motivations". Listening to the lectures in this series is an excellent opportunity to hear leading luminaries in academia, who are otherwise known only by sketchy media reports of their research findings, present vivid first-hand accounts of their own results of retrospection and introspection.

Among the speakers are the great minds of a generation, minds that were drawn towards to the problems of mankind: scientific and spiritual, physiological and philosophical ; minds that were also indrawn to untiringly seek solutions, remedies, insights, outlooks and wisdom to better the lot of mankind. To hear such minds share their experiences of their inner life in relation with their obvious outward achievements, is perhaps one of the most edifying experiences one can have on campus. It is humbling to see that the process of self-inquiry challenges even mighty intellects such as those of the premier physical and social scientists who address these gatherings. In the audio talks of past speakers available online, I could hear pioneering psychologists and award-winning engineers, professors from the East and those from the West. It was surprising and in a way heartening to note that, notwithstanding the obvious differences in their origins and their callings, they describe their personal journeys in uncannily similar ways. One thing that they all have in common is that they do not describe their journeys in terms of milestones, but in terms of crossroads. Not one talk I heard from these speakers made much mention of their first graduation or first publication or first award. The 'firsts' they did mention were the first time experienced the dilemma of tough choices and the first time they came face to face with the reality of suffering, even in events that to an outsider may have seemed commonplace. Indeed, according to the organizers of the series " Presenters are encouraged to talk about choices made, difficulties encountered, and commitments solidified."

The animals in each of Aesop's fables are different, but they all speak in human voices and have human traits. Every adventure tale, Gulliver or Sindbad, is different, but they all have shipwrecks that throw the travellers off course along unexpected journeys. Each speaker in 'What Matters to Me and Why?" has a different story to tell, but they all are narrations of human nature at its best, and bettering its best in the face of unexpected occurrences and challenging circumstances. The outlines of the personal lives provided by the speakers were of different shapes and forms; but without exception, they all dwelt at length upon character-forming parental influences in early childhood, and personality-shaping experiences of overcoming human suffering. Recurring themes in each personal story are unforgettable times spent with dear ones, unlikely sources of inspiration, unasked for good turns, unexpected turns of fortune and unusual interests that led to unintended possibilities. The universality of the themes provides the backdrop for the uniqueness of each individual instance.

Which one of us can claim not to have had experiences that were unforgettable, unlikely, unusual or unintended? Then how is it that not all of our stories are the stuff inspirational biographies are made of? In a manner of everyday speaking, greatness has less to do with 'what' happened to a person and more to do with 'how' he or she faced it. The answer perhaps lies not in the outer details of the instance, but in the inner stance of the individual. The great ones find their childhood experiences unforgettable because they did not just seek comfort in their dear ones, but also sought within themselves the aspirations to do their dear ones proud. They may have received unexpected favours from fellowmen, but almost always did so by deserving it through their conduct and initiative. They did face unexpected twists of fate, but when they were at their greatest, they saw these as an instruction in patience and forbearance, and not as destruction of hope. They found inspiration in the unlikeliest of sources because of their willingness to be instructed, a lesson they never forgot from their earlier experiences. Greatness is not entirely governed by the uncertainty of instances, coincidences and happenstances; but is attained by taking a certain stance: to stand erect and not rigidly, to stand at ease but not submissively and most importantly to stand corrected when needed. Instead of excusing ourselves for own ordinariness and dismissing greatness as a matter of circumstance, or amusing ourselves with trivial similarities between instances in our lives and those of great ones, we can step closer to greatest within ourselves by learning from the stances they took.

NEXT: Part 3: http://pencilofgod.blogspot.com/2007/09/moral-of-story-so-far-part-3.html
PREVIOUS: Part 1: http://pencilofgod.blogspot.com/2007/09/moral-of-story-so-far-part-1-mystery.html


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* Audio talks of previous speakers in the 'What Matters to Me and Why' series at USC are available in the USC website at :
http://www.usc.edu/programs/religious_life/whatmatters/speakers/past/

The Moral of the 'Story so far'
Part 1
-Mystery and meaning-

Try to read your life so far. Try to see your life so far as an open book in your mind's eye. Do you see the book of your life as a single epic, or is it more like an assortment of short stories with some characters appearing in all of them? Does every story in your book have a moral? Are you the protagonist, a participant, simply a narrator or all of these? Most importantly are you the sole author? Are you the author at all, or are you simply turning new leaves in a book of mysterious origin happening to bear your name? Is the life that you are reading now, one that you yourself scripted, or is it an ongoing play happening to have you on the cast for a while?

Has this exercise in imagination now prepared you to write your autobiography? That is an unfair question, for choosing what is worthwhile to include in a daily diary itself is hard enough, let alone knowing after a brief reverie what was truly significant in an entire lifetime. Writing an autobiography is not merely an extended exercise of recalling and retelling personal events. It is not just the summary of the experience of one person, since you were a different person during each experience. The prattle of the child you were, the bluster of the youth you were and the assured convictions of the wise man you may now see yourself as; all compete uproariously to dictate the narrative. You must hear out the versions of all the different persons you have been over the years. It is almost as if you are a detective at a crime scene piecing together a version of the event from a dozen eyewitness accounts from the incidental kid, the casual youngster or the alert passer-by. Or you are like a general who must decide on a single course of action based on reports from a troop of scouts who vary in their training and daring. Or you are like the director of a research laboratory who must referee results from several young researchers differing widely in acumen and application, before you declare your conclusions. Your vision of yourself and the description of your life will depend on whether you view your life as an urgent mystery, an ongoing battle or as a quest for meaning.

Great autobiographies the world over seem to be products of such a line of inquiry. To Mahatma Gandhi, the Father of the Indian nation; life was a series of urgent mysteries of ethical choices, an ongoing battle against inner weaknesses and a quest for the Truth which to him is indistinguishable from God. To the Dalai Lama, a modern-day apostle of non-violence; life begins as a mystery of his own identity as living god or leader of men, an endless battle against tyranny and a quest for freedom in exile, peace in a troubled world. To Helen Keller, the classic example of triumph of the human spirit; the world itself was a shrouded silent mystery and life was a battle against deprivation, which stirred in her the quest for an 'understanding which bringeth peace'. To Dr. A.P.J Abdul Kalam, India's former scientist-president, intellectual life began by childlike wonder at the mysteries of flight in the sky, progressed through student and scientist life battling against financial, bureaucratic and institutional constraints; and inspired a quest for the development of India into a superpower - a vision that inspires a generation of young Indians today.

Longfellow says "Lives of great men all remind us, we can make our lives sublime, and, departing, leave behind us, footprints on the sands of time." While all the inspiration from the life histories of great men and women may not be enough to help us make history ourselves; it can in the least help us tell the sublime from the ridiculous in our own personal histories. Rather than asking self-pitying, self-defeating questions like "Why did this event have to happen at all?" or "Why me?" during retrospection; we may learn a lot more about our lives and ourselves by instead asking the questions, "What do I always find most mysterious?" and "What is it that gives the things I value the most their meaning?" Rather than mulling on our peculiarities and musing over our precariousness and predicaments, we will learn to read and write our lives better if we always remain aware of the mystery and eager for the meaning.

NEXT: Part 2: http://pencilofgod.blogspot.com/2007/09/moral-of-story-so-far-part-2-instances.html 

Sketches on rainbow slate

-Grandeur...grit...and greed-

The road travel route from Southern California to Southern Utah's Golden Circle of national parks, traces a transect cutting across contours in physical maps and borders in political maps. It is a journey from America's fruit basket through its southwestern deserts, in a road passing through California, Nevada, Arizona and Utah. In fertile California, we see Nature's grandeur. In the arid Mojave desert with mile upon mile of stubborn shrubbery refusing to wither away, we see Nature's grit. The plant kingdom has established outposts in the rockiest of canyons and a toehold on the steepest of cliffs. The trees though, seem to be wary guests or harmless intruders in the impregnable sandstone canyons at Zion National Park and Bryce Canyon National Park at Utah.

While seen as impenetrable overbearing cliffs when seen from below at Zion, or while seen as an impassable chasm from the vantage points at Bryce; the canyons establish an inescapable presence, proclaiming their permanence to mankind. The cliffs which to our eyes seem permanent, are merely the sands of geological time frozen in a momentary stillness of sandstone in a landscape that was once seafloor and then sand dunes. What now is seemingly an adamantine landscape is to the Forces of Nature the most yielding earth, gorged on and gouged out by the unyielding persistence of the Virgin River. Charles Lyell, one of the greatest geologists of all time and one of the first to suggest that the earth's surface is not 'set in stone' but is being endlessly recast, vividly describes in his 'Principles of Geology' the contest between subterranean Fire and flowing Water; Fire making mountains from the molten rock underneath and Water laying them low. We can witness the most dramatic shows of strength in the battle between the Forces of Nature, most grandly in a canyon. Astronomy is said to be a humbling science, a constant reminder of mankind's irrelevance to the cosmos. Even without looking skywards, the geology of the earth at the canyons is an inescapable and humbling vision of our own impermanence and insignificance.

In the noonday sun, the cliffs glisten with a myriad hues of sandstone, with streaks and swirls of white, black and red rock. In the setting sun, this play of colour makes way for a shadow play on the cliffs. The sandstone of the cliffs is a metamorphic rock, formed when sands of the primeval deserts were compressed by layer after layer of accumulating sand. The encrustation of minerals and oil within these layers has streaked the rocks with blackish and reddish hues, earning it the name 'rainbow slate.' The rainbow slate has been the palette as well as the canvas of the geological masterworks here, where one can see rock that is swirled like water, molded like clay and pleated like fabric by the elements that shape them. One of the notable sights at Zion is the Checkerboard Mesa, where the accumulating layers of rock form horizontal lines and vertical fissures complete an unbelievably perfect checkerboard on the cliff which creates disbelief in the fact that no human hand carved it. One can almost exclaim to the cliff in William Blake's words " What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry?". While Blake wrote about 'seeing the world in a grain of sand', here we can almost see a world in sandstone. We see worlds in red, white and black rock which are older than the histories of the exterminated Red Man, the exploring White Man and the enslaved Black Man and will outlive all of them.

To a geologist, a place like Zion or Bryce canyon is a holy ground where wonders never cease. To an artistic observer, the patterns on the rocks seem to give shape to the most fanciful visions and uncannily resemble strange animals and people. Artists and sculptors can find innumerable shapes and forms to stimulate their creativity. Psychologists will find in the rocks patterns which stimulate as much thought and association as any inkblot test. These are rockfaces where one can actually see faces in the rock. To the Native Americans who were the first human inhabitants here, and who too must have wondered what immortal hand framed these symmetries, the rocks are sacred. The cliffs are to the Navajos what Olympus was to the classical Greeks and what Kailasha is to the Hindus. Mountains the world over are shrines older than the religions built around them. In India, the lush tree-bearing lands reveal nature in a nurturing motherly aspect; while in the land of the Navajo Indians, the cliffs reveal nature in a more forbidding overlordly aspect. Whatever the manifestation, the grandeur of nature has shaped the life of men in both matter and mind. The diversity of the flora in India made the ancient Indians at the same time deeply reverent and curious of the life-giving properties of plants, and thus was born an ethos respecting natural cures and environmental protection, which offers valuable lessons to the world community today. The rocks and deserts in North America challenged explorers to a conquest of the tyranny of geography; and the history of America would not have taken the course it has, but for those intrepid explorers who braved it beyond the impassable cliffs and claimed the wilderness for civilization and the enterprising engineers who built roads through the seemingly impenetrable barriers and found hidden treasures of mineral wealth.

Las Vegas occurs on the route via Nevada from Southern Utah to Southern California. After the sights of the natural wonders, Las Vegas is an assault on the senses and sensibilities, a rude return to current civilization in its most decadent aspect. After sights affording contemplation of Nature's bounty, Las Vegas is the very picture of human greed. Greed is only presence here and there is neither grandeur nor grit; for all the grandeur is make-believe and all the grit is foolhardy. Overlooking the casino-lined tout-infested streets are garish replicas of world wonders like the Great Pyramids, the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty; seeming to proclaim that here's the world and it's all yours if you are greedy enough. The blinding pyschedelic neon lights on the casinos and clubs are lights that lead to darkness; which the unscrupulous and unwary are condemned to. If the American Dream is to stretch the limits of human possibility, then Las Vegas reduces it to just pushing one's luck. If American cities and corporations are built to make the most of human strengths, Las Vegas has been built to exploit every human weakness. If America is the world's greatest marketplace for goods and services, Las Vegas is a fair of evils and vices.