The Old Man and the City

I am a college student trying to make sense of life in the big city. The whole place is a big, beautiful mess and getting around is one of the worst and best parts of my daily life. I have been here sometime now and still I manage to get lost every once in a while. And it is during these times that I have had the most fun ever in my life. Bumping into strange alleys with exotic shops and houses, meeting new people and long-lost friends and getting to know about life first-hand from the street and its noises directly.

It was during one of these rambles that I met Uncle P. I did not recognize him at first; he looked so old and decrepit and I had never seen that miserable look in his face - he was always smiling and happy and had a twinkle in his eye in the old times when I was still just a kid. He would tell us stories, all beautiful, and recite poems too and do all kinds of fun and crazy things. I and my cousins and all our friends just used to love Uncle P and waited for him eagerly at the doorstep every summer morning as he came down the long country lane from his cottage. No one ever knew who he was or what he did, not even his name, but every summer he would rent the cottage and he would spend everyday with us, fishing, swimming, biking, apple-picking and other stuff.

But now he seemed very tired and it looked like he was carrying a heavy burden. I started talking to him and told him about all the wonderful days he had given me. I had come to college to become intelligent and wise like him and I told him I wanted to be a writer too and write the kind of stories and poems that he had written all those days ago. He listened patiently and after a long time, smiled a little and took me by hand to a grimy window. "Listen, kid. I dont know who you are any more. But that dump is where I live now. This is my sooty, grimy life and this is all I have got. When I was younger, I had a muse and I could tell stories and write poetry. Then, one day, the muse left me and I felt sad. So I wrote more and harder and furiously, seeking sublimation. I thought I will get over all my sorrows that way. But now I am older and know I will never be any less sadder or write anything worth reading any more. I am happy you found what I wrote good and I am happy there is someone in this world who remembers me when I was not like this. But the truth is I am just done and I dont want anything any more. You take care of yourself and be happy. Never try to fall into sorrow and break yourself. Now get going and forget I ever was," he said.

I was pained a bit and sad and tried to talk him into writing something for me. But he just waved the idea away. When I said, "Maybe I will come tomorrow and see if you feel better and will write something," he just replied, "Kid, maybe you will find me better tomorrow but just hope I wont be here tomorrow. That is all I want now - that are no more tomorrows for me. I find today too difficult already." And with that he walked past me into his sad room and shut the door. And I knew he had thanked me already.

Note to self

I have been wanting to say something profound for quite sometime now but dont know exactly what I can say. Everything seems already to have been said and I have nothing more to add. Except maybe this:

This is the one comforting thought to the man in misery -
When tomorrow's sorrow comes to find me, I will not be.

Or is this taken too already?

On a dark night in the woods by a lake

I am bored now so let us try something for fun. Let us walk around the woods in the dark and try to get to the lake. Let us make up a story for ourselves as we go along. There has to be a hero in it and a heroine and we will add a few other characters. There will be a lot of incidents, some funny, some sad, but all interesting, and our hero and heroine will experience most of these. We will place them in some place in some time and we will decide that they have certain names. Or maybe we won't name them. But still we will have to describe them. The hero has to be a tall, fair and handsome guy who steals the heart of every damsel in the vicinity. He is strong and brave and intelligent and knows a lot of things others do not. He can sing, dance and maybe we will use him in some romantic situations with the heroine where he will woo her with the most beautiful song ever sung. And he will write it too. Mind the branches.

The heroine is the prettiest lass ever of course and she is also humble and quiet and intelligent and brave. She knows sewing but can ride a horse with gusto too and sings to the birds in the most dulcet tones imaginable. Of course our hero heard her sing in the woods and lost his heart to the voice before he even saw her face. But that is a different episode and we still aren't done with our characters. So let us add the treacherous uncle who takes care of our heroine and covets the riches her parents left her. He hasn't told her all this yet but there is a magic seal on the treasure chest that only the heroine can break when she is 21. So let us make her a few days short of her 21st birthday. There are wild animals around so stick to the path.

Then there is our hero's evil stepmother who wants to get his father's kingdom for her stupid son, who is good at heart but a total nincompoop and numbskull. The father is old and weak and so our son decides to ease his burden by walking away from the kingdom and living an adventure for himself. That is how he comes to the forest and hears the heroine sing. While he is hunting. Or maybe he is just trying to get to the lake to watch the river flow. His friend is with him too. A good friend, loyal and devoted to the hero and also brave and intelligent and with a hundred other virtues. Only a bit hot-tempered so the uncle better watch out. But of course the uncle has his foolish but brawny henchmen who wield the hammer and the axe. Don't go too far out or we will lose each other.

So the hero meets the heroine and they fall in love naturally. They sing and dance and pick flowers and talk and tell each other wonderful stories and blush and kiss and do all the thousand nothings that is normal in these times. Then there is the rain. Though it is glorious and summer, there is a mild thunderstorm and these two have to find shelter in a cave. There they find the ancient witch, a good one, but with only one tooth and dark and grey and wizened and wise and ugly and frightening. She tells the hero and heroine of the story of the heroine's father who was the original king and who had been killed by the heroine's uncle, who was not her uncle actually but a wizard after a scroll in the treasure chest that will show him the way to great things. The hero's father, the general has taken care of the kingdom and good care too but he is a weak man in policy and short-sighted and without glasses too so he can't see clearly and so the wizard's sister has been able to kill the hero's pretty, good and loyal mother and marry his father. These bushes are thorny and dense - take care - but the lake is near.

So the hero and heroine come to know all the truth but they decide to wait the few days - two? three? - till it is time for the Uncle to bring out the chest so the the heroine can open it. The hero's friend will take care of the two henchmen and the hero will take out the wizard using the magic the witch has brewed for him. It all goes well until the wizard brings the chest out and sees the hero's friend disposing of his henchmen. He casts a spell that immobilizes the princess and kills the hero's friend. The hero tries to fight him but is wounded in his heart and so the wizard makes good his escape. The chest lies there and near it the frozen princess and fallen at her feet is the poor hero of ours with bleeding heart and broken spirit. And in time the forest swallows up the place and in the time of the great flood, it is cut off from the mainland and becomes an island in the lake. There it is now, the lake and the strange landmass in the centre of it. It has been a while but atleast the story kept us going. Now that we are tired enough, let us go back and catch some sleep. But no more stories on the way. I have run out of ideas.

The Miserability Coefficient: A Mathematical Theory of Misery

After great thought and deep research I have decided to finally publish my insights into the as yet unexplored field of human misery from a mathematical standpoint. While there have been quite a few books and articles on misery[Sophocles-Hugo, Burton-Beckett etc], there has been a painfully inadequate mathematical development of the subject and this has been felt a pressing need[XYZ Grad Student's life and a million others]. This work will attempt, in the restricted space allowed it, to demonstrate, first that misery needs to be quantified, second that it can be measured and, third that this field is ripe for the publication of a few hundred graduate theses.

Human misery is a well-understood and well-observed phenomenon. Human history documents that the world was begun in misery[Big Bang]. As the world developed and man started finding his voice, it was the cry that came most naturally to him. Even literature began with the tragedy[Greece, Valmiki's shloka]. In fact, a famous poet went to the extent of saying good literature dealt with human misery exclusively[Shelley-Ode to a Skylark]. So the first question that bothers any self-respecting grad student scraping away at the edges of existence is, "How well is the Science of Misery understood? How mature is the mathematics in the area? And how easy is it to publish papers in this field?" Well that was three questions but we have already said the questioner is a grad student. Anyway, the answers to the questions are quite obvious to any unbiased onlooker. Misery has never been studied scientifically, the mathematics is as mature as a teenager with pimples falling for the first girl with a dimple and it is just as easy to publish papers in the field as it was for Einstein to walk away with the cake in Relativity.

Given these answers, it would seem insisting too much on too small a point when we say we still have to justify our claim that misery needs to be quantified; but we still intend to do it given it is our first big result. So, misery's importance has been established and now we find ourselves faced with the task of trying to distinguish between the various forms of misery[Burton - Anatomy of Melancholy]. Pain has its own units[Dols] and we know pain is but a very dilute form of misery and all pains are included within the big superset Misery. And anybody knows how irritating it is when, in the midst oif a deep depression, we find someone else who claims he is even more depressed. A measure will alleviate the need for all this and to measure misery, we need to quantify it. Thus follows the first thing to be proved -
MISERY NEEDS TO BE QUANTIFIED

Now, any rational person worth his salt knows that it is never enough to show the need for a thing but, more importantly, we need to show that the need can be fulfilled, not partially or in full measure, but atleast substantially[Nehru]. And given all the literature that math has afforded us over the course of its existence, we know that a measure is defined only on certain things and that we have to be careful what we measure or the cup may overflow[Lebesgue et al with apologies to the Bible]. So, can misery be measured? At first sight, it seems a very daunting task - trying to measure misery. Everybody always claims he is more miserable than anybody else whenever he is in the mood to say so. There even exist some who believe misery is the sole cause and bedrock of our existence, and as such pervades us all, making it an immeasurable quantity, which we partake of every now and then[Cioran, Schopenhauer et al]. But, a closer examination using the most subtle glass of Common Sense, that we have managed to grind successfully after 25 years of constant and unflagging perseverance, has shown that the view hitherto held is flawed as it overlooks quite a few distinctive features that make up the sum of misery. For example, consider the washerwoman[Gandhi - the movie of course] who has to bend down and strike the white cloth on the jagged slab of stone in a polluted river - that is a miserable job blow by blow. On the other hand, imagine a grad student sitting up past 3-4am and hard at work on his laptop, all alone, with no possibility of ever getting to see the sun that beats down on the sweating washerwoman ever, nor ever to be seen by a Gandhi as he squats nearby admiring her whatever, just imagine and you can see that the misery levels are vastly different. This is a rather good analogy, but to be mathematically rigorous, we still need to show that the measure exists on the field of real numbers and that it satisfies a host of conditions[Vague Math Literature]. This, I assure you, has been done, and will shortly be submitted to a prestigious journal. So we will skip the troublesome details and go on to define the measure of misery - the miserability coefficient - while we take for granted that the second part of the paper is established too -
MISERY CAN BE MEASURED

The miserability coefficient that we propose is a simple measure that maps human misery to the reals(chuckle at the pun). After all, most miserable people only imagine their miseries while misery is thrust upon others. The coefficient is defined thus -

The miserability coefficient, denoted by :(, is the sum derivative of all the distillable pain that can be obtained by imagining the worst possible outcome to the most enjoyable event, in the mind. The amount of pain itself is calculated as the logarithm of the squared pain added to a miserability constant that is given to all men at their birth and changes with time according to environment, character, experience etc. Its unit is pains and can take all possible values from the negative infinity to positive infinity, the more negative pains one has the happier one is, with -infinity corresponding to infinite bliss and +infinity corresponding to total despair[Milton's Devil].

The miserability coefficient can be easily measured for simple scenarios and we calculate some. The miserability coefficient of God(if he exists) is -infinity and that of the Devil(again if he exists) is +infinity[any amount of religious literature]. The :( of a grad student typically hovers from between -5(if the said person is hazaar over-enthu) to about +1786.23(this is the highest recorded but is no upper bound and increases with the number of years one spends on research). The Buddha had a :( of +50 pains after seeing four random guys but brought it down to -1234234525.232 after sitting under a Bodhi tree somewhere(the treatment of this subject is an open problem - how to optimally adjust the :( of people). Almost anybody's :( can be calculated quite easily given the past history and all details of their lives and this is left for future papers in the field by enterprising grad students. Further studies will be published shortly.

In conclusion, we note that we have justified our first and second claims and the third claim has been self-justified by the wealth of open problems still left in the field like - How to determine the miserability constant? How to find the happiness coefficient? What is the maximum/minimum achievable :( given a particular set of incidents in one's life? How can the :( be optimally changed to suit one's mood? etc etc. We intend to work on these problems and, for now, accept the thanks of a large community of people for having thrown open a whole exciting field of research and amusement.

kattrukkoduthap paadathai maRandhuvitta aasiriyarpol
sattre ayarndhEn maattraan puNsirippukkaaLaanEn
nEttriravu veedhiyilE enai kaNdu anjiyavan
indrennai kaNdELanam seigindraan sagikkavillai.
munbE naan kaNdadhuNdu ulagathaar irakkathai
vendraaradi munveezhvar thammadhippai kaattudhaRkku
pinbondru vidhi seivar thiNdaadum kaalathil
sendraarai maRandhiduvOm indruLLAr mattroruvar.
ippozhudhum thayangugindrEn ivarmun naan selvadhaRkku
vazhi ondrum vERillai immakkaL enkulathaar
eppozhudho thaaivayittril seidhuvitta uRavadhanaal
pazhi sollitthirindhaalum ivarpOlthaam vaazhgindrEn.

--Shyam.

Sila nErangaLil sila sindhanaigaL

Thanitthirundha nAtkalai nAn ninaithukkoNdEn
Ninaithu thaNindhirundha vEdhanaiyai thooNdi vittEn.
Varutthathin sigaramthanai therindhu koNdEn
Varum sarithirathin Edugalil idam vagikka
MaRutthu vaitha uNmaigalai meeNdum uNardhen.

KaNdadhu thAn kanavo alladhu
KANbathu thAn verum bramaiyo
En kaNmunnAl niRkkum avvadivam poiyo
Aiyo nAn pithan thAno illai
Ivvulagam enai tholaittha iruLkAdo.

Tholaithooram senRimmaNNil kuruthi sindhi uyir vaLarthu
Tholaindhu maRaindhu piRamAndhar kaNNukkettA veezhvarindhu
Migudhi enum pulithol pOrtthi
Sirippendra sAmbal poosi
Vetki sadaiviritthu
UyirthAndavam Ada Ayatham AnEn.

KeL en maname
Ini kalangAdhe
SenRadhu, senRu maraindhadhu,
Ini meendum vaaraadhu.
Varuvadhu, varavillai,
KaN Paaradhadhu, poruL puriyaadhadhu.
Iruppadhu iraadhu, Meendum varaadhu.
Indre uNmai iruppadhe uNmai
MaRandhuvidu matravatrai.

--Shyam.

PS : Finding typesetting in Tamil difficult - hence the very arbitrary use of English letters to denote Tamil equivalents - will be helpful if someone can tell me the conventional substitutions for Tamil letters in the English alphabet.

Occam's Razor

Occam's razor is a thorn in my flesh. I sometimes get pained with the beautiful and simple statement of intent that the razor is: "Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity." Most of science and philosophy swears by it and it has really worked wonders in clearing up thought through history. When confused, with many possible hypotheses to explain a set of facts, pare away those that rely on excessive external entities and whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth! Basically, it is a whole philosophy, this principle of parsimony - a refusal to believe there can be wastefulness - which has become an aesthetic and ethical theory as well, saying what is wasteful is ugly or bad. Anyway, this has worked beautifully in both information-complete and information-limited systems where we might or might not know everything that is to be known(there are exceptions as there always are but very few on the margin). All that has to be absolutely known is that the system to be analyzed is complete - that there is nothing else that will come in like a deus ex machina and cause radical changes like, for example, a teeny-weeny new fact. This, of course, is a direct consequence of the chaotic nature of life/complex systems, which are highly sensitive to initial conditions and can be affected to a large extent by small disturbances(butterfly effects!). Take the case of Newton's theory of light - it was nice and explained a lot of things until diffraction was observed and suddenly it was no good. And the wave theory(which was actually the older one) went the same way after photoelectric emission and Planck came along. Anyway, the point is, the razor is good when we know what to cut - just throw away the entrails - but if the butcher should reveal a new piece of breast-meat hidden near the leg, what do we do? get a whole new chicken? Scientists and philosophers have embraced the principle so very happily in spite of this basic robustness problem with the principle. Acceptedly the problem arises not internally but as a result of external factors and new data, which can again be carved into a new theory using the same razor. But the fact is we need a more robust principle and, for example, not believe in the superfluity of god just because we have very few facts and invoke William of Ockham vehemently and learnedly!

A Sonnet from the Bosnian, Or: A Study in EBB

Not to love thee were sin and blasphemy,
Yet Love finds me reluctant minister;
For of aught I can in troth deliver,
I find nought that would be happy to thee.
Still writest thou of Love and Poetry,
When knowest thou my worth? but consider:
What faded leaves lie here, yellow, bitter;
Still lurest me thou to thy heav'nly tree?
But I begin to falter, my Heart's weak;
Nor God helps me who wrought me so frail
That, when commencest thy dear Love to speak,
I feel awed and pitiful Love makes me quail.
So, take me, if thou wilt, thy vassal meek,
And teach me sweet Love in loving detail.

--Shyam.

A Study in Shakespeare

Shall I call thee fair but surely 'tis a lie
For treats't me thou fair maiden most unfair;
Nor could I call thee apple of mine eye
For absent art thou therefrom through foul and fair.
Or if names name thee false what of my eyes
That see nor beauty nor grace to applaud?
Or my ears that hear no music sweet thy lies?
Or my mind that cannot thy golden image defraud?
Or maybe thou mov'st not in so bleak my ken
But in stronger hearts I see not thy heavenly trace;
Or if thou shouldst feel thyself beyond all men
I see no Gods fight ov'r thy angel-face.
And if thou shouldst think that I love thee yet
Let Love be called blind and I thy forsaken pet.

--Shyam.

hmm.. life.. hmm..

I am getting used to life. Slowly. To cars passing outside my window in the narrow stretch of road that I can see between McDonald's and the Hacienda. To the cars that queue up below my window to order drive-throughs from McD's. To the Waste Management people coming at 4-5 in the morning and making a ruckus just beyond the fence that I can see below my window. To the morning light glaring at me at 11 in the morning and doing what the alarm I set in my cellphone couldn't do - wake me up. To checking mail every now and then and browsing through cricinfo, soccernet, atptennis, espn, cnn and an assortment of news sites. To reading the blogposts of a few friends and commenting on them sometimes. To orkutting ceaselessly, well, not really, but still spending enough time on it checking on the profiles and scrapbooks of lots of people I have no idea about. To having a bowl of cereals at 1-2 in the afternoon for breakfast and then lunch at 3-4 - rice and dhal and curd or maybe a sandwich or two. To the occassional games on my gamecube and the documentaries on History. To going to school late in the afternoon and holding conference calls with my advisor, discussing my research. To coming back early in the evening and calling up people to play football(soccer ye tainted by the greenback!). To getting back late in the night and cooling down with a glass of gatorade or cold water. To eating dinner often after 12 in the night and sometimes at 3-4 in the morning. To sleeping late in the night/early in the morning after a couple more hours of browsing. And then the next day again. I am getting used to life. Slowly.

pOptimism

It is never too dark for the sun to shine through some small clearing in the dense jungle. Never too late for the cock to crow the new dawn after an Arctic night. Everything in its own time and everything even if not when expected, will happen as it has to, as it always has. And even if the siren does not sound when the train enters the tunnel, the little blue light at the end of it will show the way to where we all need to go.

The rest is peace.