three colours : Blue Red White - liberty fraternity equality

Trois couleours - Bleu/Rouge/Blanc is a trilogy of French/Polish movies directed by one of the masters of modern cinema Kieślowski'.

This was recommeded to me by a close friend long time ago; he said the movies would appeal to my taste of visual narrative. I saw the "Red" part on the TV a few days ago and just finished watching the "Blue" one. If you appreciate eloborate story telling and are easily mesmerised by breathtakingly beautiful shots, then you should make an extra effort to watch this. Other than the superb direction, another reason I liked Blue is because of its music. Possibly after Ray's Pather Panchali, I have seen no other cinema which uses excellent music to enhance the experience but does not let the music come in the way of the movie.

Edit: Not hard to guess, I watched the "White" story soon after. This one is about "equality" and is a soulful story of equality through venegance. Mind the word "soulful" - there is nothing gory about the revenge. I liked this one the best of all three.

Don't Panic

Trident (Booksellers &) Cafe on Newbury Street could easily be labeled as the best cafe in this blue-green planet. But Don't Panic! It is not.

Say, you are in the USA.
Say, today is Labour Day (which in 2009, happened to be on the 7th day of the 9th month).
Say, you woke up with a ravenous urge for omelette and pancake ... no ... pancakes ... and fries.
Now, say today is not Saturday or Sunday (e.g. Monday, which is worse because not only Monday is not an S-day but also just one day after an S-day - I mean what can be more worse).
And you thought ... gee ... I'm gonna hit Newbury Street and just find an all-day breakfast place among the numerous listed-unlisted, famous-deserted, pricey-cheap food places there. After all ... today is a holiday! And brunches are made to be consumed on holidays.

All of this would be good for you ... could be good ... for I, since I am the one writing this whiny blog here, didn't get a chance to try other options, if you arrive at Newbury street before 12 noon.

But brunch is breakfast+lunch, ab initio, so on that eventless day, in USA, having gone to sleep the night before wanting to go to a brunch the next day and having decided that, after looking at yelp and boston-citysearch, walking along Newbury and deciding one among 20 based on some super-cosmic-hyper-complicated algorithm would be relatively easier, for I was more worried about finding the places open on "Labour day" than they serving brunch (if they are open on a holiday, they must brunch - this sounded one of those gotta-be-true statements to me), at about 1pm I walked the entire stretch of Newbury street once forward and then back, walking past restuarants saying that they don't serve brunch on Mondays or their breakfast menu is only till 12, only to find the saviour of a sickening stomach, Trident Cafe (near Newbury St/Mass Av).

Don't try to parse the above "sentence". Don't even bother reading it.

Just remember that if you want a good brunch, you can always fallback on Trident Cafe. For two good reasons. Their (probably bottomless) coffee is really good (take it without milk and sugar) but more importantly, their menu says (only) "BREAKFAST" in BOLD, BLACK letters on the front cover. Now isn't that just good to know ?!

Emotion Reason Justice Law and Human Rights

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen is in Kolkata to talk about his new book The Idea of Justice. I read about the launch of the book in the UK and it was reported to be a phenomenal success. Yesterday's The Telegraph has his interview on some of the ideas he discusses in this book.

I have never seen him in person. That's a shame because he came to my school to give a lecture but I didn't go. All those who went or asked me to go was excited because "he is definitely going to get a Nobel prize". That must not have proved to be a sufficient motivation at that age.

Meeting him is one of the things I would like to do before ... well ... him and a few other people that I am slightly crazy about.

Emotions can be very murky in the court of law. But it would be wrong to blatantly ignore its satanic powers (in the context of justice). I liked his response to the question What is the place of emotions in your theory of justice?

I don’t regard emotion more important than reason, but we do have reason to take emotion seriously.

I wish I had studied about human rights and justice and related matters to be able to see through some of the things he talked about. But as I was reading the interview, I sort of saw 3 different pillars, slightly leaning against one another, that the idea of rights stands on.

(Human) Rights, Justice and Law.

Following is my 5 minutes reflection on these ... what I would have said should the interviewer have asked me.

Human rights are, at least roughly, the rights a person has just for being a human being. The other rights are given to her/him by some law, and that makes HR so special. Think about it ... the concept is amazing yet so simple ... as amazing as Dubito, Ergo Cogito, Ergo Sum.

Law is a technical gadget, like the belt that the skinny dude is wearing to protect his modesty. It lacks novelty but boasts of necessity.

Justice is by far the most complicated of the trio. Syntactically it means being just. The fuzziness comes from how to measure justness. I think most people would share the same opinion as A.S., which is also what comes naturally to my mind, that justness is what a bunch of people, in a relatively fair and free way, accepts. There is a lot of unspoken detail here. The interview mentions two classical theories about justice - one by John Rawls (author of A Theory of Justice) who requires the people to be local and the other by Adam Smith whose requirement is based on an impartial spectator (I guess the spectator needs to be a human being ... no kidding ... seriously, rowing the waters of the initial years of The Age of Synthetic Thinking with robots and machines, it is time to think about when does 'an orga become a mecha' (*) ?).

I am more inclined, as much as I could be in 5 mins at work, towards the former idea which is similar to the jury of peers idea popular in the USA. The impartial arbitrator who can, for purpose of argument, appear from thin air and disappear after delivering his verdict, does not interest me, not because it is unrealistically idealist, but because often different communities have different notions of right and wrong. Of course, I agree that human rights are something independent of the community but there is often a tendency to interpret other rights as cousins of some human right just to give it a greater edge.

(*) Spielberg's A.I. - highly relevant for the text in the brackets.

Guest post: Lyricism

I was permitted by N. to post his email in my blog. FYI, chocolate and poetry recommendations from N. are positively commendable. Read below.

So far, only you and omitted I can interest in poetry... It is always hit and miss of course, but that is fine, as long as some shimmer of interest is present. Perhaps what I send you in this email will leave you unmoved. That is fine. But it is strange how most anyone I talk to seems to perceive poetry as impenetrable, archaic, rusty, devoid of substance, and so on. But no. There are things which almost require the language of poetry. Sometimes also alcohol is required to, as you put it, tame soul's demons.

I know little about Heinrich Heine. Except that he was a so-called romantic poet. A lovely little poem (search for Der Asra):
http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/German/Heine.htm

This poem has a particularly interesting history in former Yugoslavia. It was translated to Serbian (call it Croatian or whatever) by Aleksa Šantić, a famous Serbian poet. It then found its real life in musical form, sung in the sevdalinka style all over the country. Of course, sevdalinka, a musical bastard of Turkish, Sephardic Jewish, and Slavic traditions, has nothing to do with German romanticism, which is precisely the beauty of this poem's infiltration into Balkans. It is hard to find a rendering which is as minimalist as I would like, but here is one of the best Bosnian sevdalinka singers:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBACPA6eMsk

It goes on. There was a band called Azra, I daresay the only band with an actual idea, in the 1980's in Yugoslavia. They were pretty much warning of what was to come, when things seemed dandy. Although the band's music was really "rock" , it began in a way as a sevdah band, inspired by that song, and named after it (Azra).

If one were to start somewhere in knowing and understanding what was Yugoslavia, Heine's poem wouldn't be a bad starting point. There is something really interesting about that.

Sevdalinka songs used to be sung in simple inns (called "kafana"), where you overwhelmed your demons with song, plum brandy, cigarettes, and maybe bean stew. These inns are, to my great sadness, disappearing. What is to replace them?

N.

'Tis not just IIT

Flame me for speaking for my alma mater, but when it comes to brand name, there is nothing known as IIT. Instead there are IIT-K, IIT-M, IIT-Kgp...

First, the government wanted to create IITs and they did so. Now Miss M. Banerjee wants to create an IIT for the children of Indian Railway employees. All of them are so sold out by brand values, the buzzword, that they missed the entire point.

An IIT might be created by finding land, creating buildings, setting up infrastructure and finally invoking the coveted IIT Act which grants it the status. Other than the last step, it doesn't really seem any different than setting up any XYZ-IT. A globally recognised IIT brand is created not by the IIT act, but by vision and dedication and takes decades. India has other prestigious universities which have equivalent, if not more, charisma and prestige; only outshined by an infamous bureaucracy and political posters.

I am proud to be from IIT-K and I am also proud to be from RKM-Narendrapur. RKM-Narendrapur college was just recently granted autonomous status. Like IIT, RKM-Narendrapur has built a brand name over several decades.

Imitiation is the best form of flattery. But imitation can only take you so far.

Obligatory links for reference (the wiki pages have all the relevant links):
IIT : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Institutes_of_Technology
RKM-N: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramakrishna_Mission_Narendrapur

last time it bit me

Bummer! Went to donate blood today and was politely told that

Wait 3 years after completing treatment for malaria. Wait 12 months after returning from a trip to an area where malaria is found. Wait 3 years after living in a country or countries where malaria is found.

I didn't realise those stupid flying monsters of Dumdum could have such faaaaar-reaching effects. It will take more than the free T-shirt to cheer me up.

when god abandons ...

Elocution later. First, read this wonderful poem by Cavafy.

The god abandons Antony

When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive—don’t mourn them uselessly.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who were given this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen—your final delectation—to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.

- Constantine P. Cavafy (1911)
Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

Cavafy was an Greek poet in early 1900s. He abandoned the usual notions of
ideals and morality. This one, The God Abandons Antony, is remarkable on two fronts. First, the title ... N. made a remark when he pointed out this poem to me long time ago: "I mean, imagine, when even God, I mean, The God, when The God is abandoning him. The God is whom you reach out for when everyone else abandons you and now even Him ... Shocking!". Can't dispute. Shocking.

The second: the reason I oft visit this poem is the bold tone in which he puts forth his message. Quitting is inevitable - not always, but sometimes and then, it becomes only a matter of time. It takes strength to realise this and even more courage to accept it. Cavafy doesn't mince words in accepting this. He, however, suggests the reader (or Antony, if he could read future) to take the next step boldly and pitch death against his dignity, his identity, his Himself.

On the face of it, the poem is about ... (copied from http://www.leonardcohenfiles.com/cavafy.html):

Anthony, in Cavafy's poem is, of course, Marcus Antonius, Cleopatra's lover. The poem refers to Plutarch's story (Read it) that, when Anthony was besieged in Alexandria by Octavian, the night before the city fell into enemy hands, he heard an invisible troupe leaving the city. He heard the sounds of instruments and voices making their way through the city. Then, he passed out; the god Bacchus (Dionysus), Antony's protector, was deserting him. It is obviously a poem with many layers of meaning; but, I see it as a poem / lesson on how someone must face a great loss (Alexandria being a symbol for a beloved city, woman, past glory, but, above all else, life itself). It is a beautiful lesson on how to face death.

The reader does not have to belive in God. This poem applies to more things in life than merely death. Atheist, mono-theist, poly-theist - does not matter; symbolise God as whatever or whomever one reaches out to when evvvry other shutter is down.

When there is nothing, what remains ? Abyss or Yourself ? Que sera sera.

Proud of you Sri Lanka

Yes, it was not a non-violent operation. Yes, there were civilian casualties. Yes, there might have been human rights violation. But what needed to be done, simply had to be done and was done.

Sri Lanka is officially free of LTTE!

It was a war against terrorists; whatever their cause might be, LTTE is (was) not a peaceful outfit. It killed innocent people, created a local parallel government by force thereby causing political instability and other than their brainwashed members, hardly had any popular support. Their official agenda was to create a separate state; such separatist movements are immediately counter productive to a better Sri Lanka (the geographical territory, not the political state).

Kudos to Sri Lanka. Some years ago, no one would have believed this was possible. This is probably the first complete de-terrorisation in recent times and the most peaceful one. Sri Lanka army and government took every measure to ensure minimum civilian casualties and other disruption. Politics and keen warfare insight ensured large public support among general mass. No major human right violation was reported till now. From what media reports, everything possible was done to minimise stray damage and get the job done, finally, after more than a decade of other unsuccessful efforts to ensure peace.

A peaceful non-violent tactic is always welcome. But that might not be an optiob. And then, behold the rest of the world, then this is how to do it. And this is exactly how you do it. Salut!

Graduates

Just came back from the 27th convocation of the Department of Computer Sc., BU. I try to attend ceremonies like this. All these bright minds in even brighter red gowns remind me what persistence and optimism can achieve and kindle hope for the future. Maybe there is a tomorrow. Maybe the world will be a better place sometime.

Being a theory student meant I had to be supported as a teaching fellow for most of the semesters. As a result, over the last I_won't_disclose years I have seen two batches of students arrive and leave. I have seen most of them when they were sophomore. It is really a wonderful feeling to see these minds develop and grow and transform over the years, proudly and successfully. They deserve all the claps and kudos showered on them today but a part of me wants to feel proud too. When Bob, who gave the undergraduate speech, mentioned that computer science is all about solving puzzles, I remembered how many times I have mentioned this to my class. Glad someone at least got it right!

Being a smallish department has its advantages, the primary one in my opinion being the camaraderie that develops between the students and the acquaintance developed between the teachers (including us) and the students. Most of the students (including masters students) present today were my students for some course during their 4 years here. And a fair amount of them were in multiple 3 or 4 courses. Wow! I have an embarrassingly poor face memory but still I hung around and tried to meet as many of them as possible. Some of them even came and shook hands with me themselves; that is a nice feeling. Maybe I was not that bad a TF after all.

Computer science is not a hot field any more, not in this country and even not in India. People have realised, little late but still, that the return is not immediate and easy but that it is equally competitive and laborious as other fields. These 40 or so graduates of today will hopefully rise and shine in their career, whatever they might be doing, and spread the message that computer science is still useful, that it may not immediately shelter the homeless but a CS major will not be without home, that it can get you a decent challenging job and that it has a fair role to play in modern day technology, which is necessary whether you aim for world peace or conquest! Although, CS may not be quite helpful in fixing your Internet Explorer trouble.

Sigh... only if the future was equally rosy for PhDs - now that would require some serious brain washing of the industry.

I asked most of the students their future plans. One of the smartest kids is joining a PhD program, in Brown, in crypto ... I am very impressed. Good job, James. Andy took up a job with Infosys and will be training in India for sometime; he wanted to do something different. A brave decision but he has that something in him to go forward and accomplish. Several of the students have jobs in defence companies so they could not really tell me much except that whatever they are doing will not directly kill people. Good feeling.

A biG bIg BIg bIG BIG congratulations to Dr Kyle for graduating with the department research award, finding a wonderful teaching job and and and (yes, you got it) getting engaged! The perfect finish.

Also congratulations to all other graduates as well. This is the usual graduation month ... I saw graduation tent set up at MIT. Universities nowadays provide webcasts for people like us who want to but cannot attend commencement ceremonies. I plan to make full use of them. It is very inspiring to see milestones being reached and dreams getting fulfilled and of course get to see famous honored guests and hear great speeches.

Well... congratulations to BU CS class of 2009! Good luck on your journey. And remember ... quicksort is quick only on average.

A little drop of delirium

Morns and eves are when time plays cruel jokes with souls in solitude. On their journey to earth, the rays of dawn also drag me down from the clouds where I am merrily sojourned. And after hours of being occupied with work, as night approaches, the dark corner of my room brings me back to reality. Enough to drive me mad.

My revolting mind critiques my own actions. Sometimes my actions resemble those who are certified mad. Yet at other times, when I am teaching, window shopping..., my thoughts and actions are cohesive and consistent. Does this make me a mad person? Don't we all act inconsistently in some way or the other? Can I be both a rational and a lunatic? What about the drastic optimistic view ... everyone is out of their minds but me? Questions of life ... the answer maybe 42 yet our ignorance can worst a toddler. My actions make perfect sense to me, and not an iota is without a reason yet I feel I am rowing the oars of insanity to cross this stream of rationality. Could it be that the logic inherent in human heart, the one that we are born with, is different than the one we invented where 2+2 is mechanically always 4.

One evening several months ago, I exchanged a $10-bill for a student rush ticket to a Tennesse Williams' play Cat on a hot tin roof. I was looking forward to a temporary relief from solitariety. Peace remained elusive but I was hooked to the play nonetheless. So much that the next day I watched its movie version and during the next few months, watched all the famous Tennesse Williams' movies. Reading the plays would have been better but I was in a haste to seek answers to certain questions about how our mental state morphs when stressed. In his own life, the master playwriter himself and his dear ones underwent abnormal mental condition. He seemed to possess an unmatched insight to human mind in this regard and I desperately wanted a share of his wisdom.

Maggie (played by Elizabeth Taylor) in Cat on a hot tin roof" was obsessive and impulsive. She was desperately trying to win the struggle of life with a remarkable resistance against surrender. There is life in the character; her gait, her flamboyant statements, her persistence ... she had an halo around her enough to charm Big Daddy and me alike. She was at times almost hysteric, frightened by insecurity, of loneliness, of being "old without money". So she directed all her energy in living, as simple as that. She could be misthought as fragile but to me, she is the strongest among everyone in this play.

On the other side of the bed, Brick her husband, presented a contrasting character. After his best friend died, he developed a complex in himself which was partly fueled by Maggie's constant endeavour to grab his attention. His agonized self countered bereavement and depression by drenching his mind and soul in alcohol till he heard "the click!" in his head which he claimed was followed by eternal silence and peace.

In A streetcar names desire, Blanche (played by Vivian Leigh) unfortunately ended up isolated from the world and was desperate to reach out to people, to any bosom that welcomed her. She came to find a shelter at her sister's place. It was interesting to watch the rawness of her sister's husband, Stanley (Marlon Brando), trying to uncover a very deceitful Blanche. Out of fear of seclusion, she was permanently in a mixed state of illusion and reality. Not really hallucinating, but still it is hard to blame her for the "virtual memories" she created for herself. She gave us a sneak peek of what goes on in her mind "I don't want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don't tell the truth, I tell what ought to be the truth. And it that's sinful, then let me be damned for it!"

Katherine Hepburn was stunning as the aged mother Amanda Wingfield whose mystic world consisted only herself and her two children in The glass menagerie . They were both adult yet her obsession for their happiness made her turn a blind eye to pragmatism. Her daughter Laura at first seemed mentally under-developed - always in her own fantasies, playing with glass toys and skipping typing lessons to walk in a park. But as the movie unfolded, her actions seemed perfectly normal to me. Amanda's obsessions, for her son's well being and her daughter's marriage and future, was due to failed aspirations of her own life. She saw her life go from riches to shambles, more spiritually than in a monetary sense, and was terrified of a similarly abject future for Laura. Williams created a magnificent character in her, who wanted to "create truth" the way she though it would be the best. Bravo!

Suddenly, Last Summer calls for a separate ovation because of its dual heroine - Katherine Hepburn (Violet) and Elizabeth Taylor (Catherine). But that aside, this is indeed a strange play about "power and passion" involving characters with, for the lack of better words, a strange view of life. Extremely rich widow Violet created a separate world for herself and her son, Sebastian. An actually separate world, where People didn't speak of Sebastian and his mother or Mrs. Venable and her son, they said 'Sebastian and Violet, Violet and Sebastian are staying at the Lido...'. What an audacity towards loneliness. Sebastian died on a trip where for only once, he took his cousin Catherine instead of his mother. Catherine saw his death, which was dreadful enough to make her "mad" and Violet, out of agony, despair and shy shadow of jealousy, planned out a risky brain surgery for Catherine to erase her memory of Sebastian. The story ended with Violet became insane, probably medically. Earlier in the play Catherine tried to ward-off the visiting doctor by listing the gruesome things she could do to him since she was mad; a fantastic enactment of the classical catch-22 situation involving mad people ... Does a mad person realise he is mad?

The Rose Tattoo is probably the only one with a happy ending. Serafina loved her husband more than probably she could bear; after his death she began living on his memories - rarely leaving the house or dressing appropriately. Call it devotion, call it passion, call it stupidity, call it whatever you like, Tennessee Williams used extremism to his credit to show how some people breast agony. She wanted to protect his memories like her own child and at times, it was not clear whom she is more protective of, her feelings or her daughter Rosa, whom she loved very dearly too. The Sicilian household where the play is set at, has a punctilious air of sentiment, very unlike the traditional western family usually portrayed in literature and movies.

All the "abnormal", if you pardon my usage, women were as much justified in their actions as a dying man in banging on my door at high noon of the night. Their idiosyncrasies were desperate measures for their survival, be it physically or emotionally. Yet, they would not conform to the rules of social behaviour that we have set for ourselves. Rules are general principles, and hence they fail miserably in confronting specific cases. One can choose to abide by the laws or be brave to be branded a madman. The latter group would not be the first to be accused of heresy; they will certainly feel proud to find Galileo Gallili among them.

It is sometimes natural to want to lose our mind. Sometimes nothing makes sense and the world seems mechanical. And if world refuses to grant us the dose of delirium, the only options left are what Brick said in the Cat on a hot tin roof

Mendacity is a system that we live in. Liquor is one way out an'death's the other.