Dangerous Knowledge

I think we all “grow up” when we realize that people don’t always mean what they say or say what they mean, it’s when we start figuring out what people actually mean when they say something.

Growing up takes time. It doesn’t strike you as a blessing on a Sunday afternoon. It is a process that may take years, decades or even an entire lifetime. It can also be viewed as an evolutionary or a neuro-biological phenomenon that is accrued vastly from the sum total of the experiences of one generation, an ideology or world view that they deem worthy of passing on to the next to ensure the prosperity of their lineage.

It is a discovery, a sense of realisation, of knowing something you didn’t a moment ago. The knowledge that comes with it is a quintessential part of human experience. It happens because we are the only species who have an infinite capacity to learn from other’s experiences. It comes at a price that must be paid with innocence. You lose the ability to seek goodness in everything and everyone, or at best learn to exercise it with ever increasing caution.

It cannot be undone, not in its entirety at least. As it is with science, theories you build once will always be under revision in the light of new observations and experiences, as and when you gain the ability to examine the world with more and more sophisticated tools- education. This knowledge does broaden your world view but while doing so it also confronts you with those infinite shades of grey that will forever cloud the ever expanding gulf between black and white.

It makes you question your understanding of faith and trust, making you a lifelong skeptic. You start constructing an invisible guard that you will now wield for the rest of your life, anxiously waiting, searching for people who can patiently, lovingly invade those numerous impregnable walls and manage to get close enough to wield that guard for you, with you. The walls keep getting higher and stronger each time someone fails to do so or surrenders in between.

It is magical how most of life is about sharing human experiences and knowledge but it is a pity how most of growing up is about understanding the perils of the same. I used to find it very ironic how everyone always wanted to be happy- to the extent that they would even be willing to play along with their own overtly pretentious social exercises like gatherings, festivities and celebrations, just to bath in the aura of collective goodness- but still, somehow, eventually end up more bitter and miserable than ever before. After all, why must there be anger, grief, regret, envy and suffering in a world where everyone wants to be happy?

I now realize it’s because of the pleasant delusion that is hope, that no matter how bad things get, we can always choose to believe that they can get better. This belief, although entirely self sufficient and independent of the dangerous knowledge, it seems comes much more conveniently to those who know less. May be it is just a part of the bliss that comes with ignorance but the one thing I have realized “growing up” is that when the long night comes, it is much easier to keep moving along when you do not know what kind of demons stand lurking in the dark.

Thought for the Day

Nothing kills a man more patiently and painfully than having to live with being someone, with a constant realisation that he could have been so much more.

Be it the valiant soldier smothered by guilt, who had fought with everything he had but still spends hours evaluating alternate MOs that could have saved his partner. Or the passionate sportsman kicking himself for the rest of his life, calculating where he could have squeezed in that extra millisecond in the deciding moments of that unfortunate final. The helpless man who struggles towards the end of every month, wondering how he can be a better parent, husband and provider. OR the hopeless romantic trying to make sense out of his first brush with infatuation, ruminating why he can be everything he must be, except the man that he wants to be with the girl.

It is difficult beyond reason, the feeling- an all consuming cocktail of regret, anger, despair and guilt- is too much for anyone to live with. There are moments of utter weakness, when you want to submit to the chaos. There are moments of undying despair, where each passing second is a striking reminder of who you are, and much more importantly- who you are not, who you can never be. There are moments of utter madness, where you are willing to trade every last bit of happiness that remain in this God forsaken life of yours for one more try. It pains even more to realize, eventually, how misplaced and irrational the attempts were in the first place.

It does not lie anywhere near your realms of control. Despite all your strength or wisdom, there is nothing you can do to “fix this”. It is like falling in a bottomless pit. It invades your deepest, darkest recesses, places you weren’t even aware existed inside you. It breaks your pride while relentlessly staring at you straight in the eye, proving conclusively beyond doubt that compared to this, wounds that heal themselves are like blessings of physical pain, for the most permanent of scars always lie within.

Sometimes life will spare you to wander amidst possibilities and search for that one tentative link somewhere among the terribly mangled chains of causality that could offer you some sign of hope for a change in circumstances. It is made worse by the following swathes of self loathing. The irony of it breaks you when you realize you have irrevocably been a part of something that can never be undone, in a universe that boasts of its eternal penchant for change.

The presence of that individual is a constant reminder of how you are forever doomed to be just a worthless fraction of what you could have been. There is little escape from this. Those who manage to do so emerge stronger, wiser men who have now lost faith in some (or many) institution(s) held dear to mankind. They are men who manage a silent laugh when people talk about destiny and how good things are always meant to be.

Pain has its own way of teaching you some of life’s most invaluable lessons. It poisons you day in and day out. It changes you in ways that cannot be undone. It makes you stronger, immunizes you for other far worse forms of suffering. You aren’t really better or worse, just someone you never were before, damaged in ways that will never be known to those even closest to you- veiled by smiles and laughs that will always hide much more than they will reveal.

Most of life is having to choose between holding on and letting go. Anything in between is dishonesty, hypocrisy and an ugly compromise. They say time changes everything. It is a lie. Time merely pushes things further into the past, rendering an illusion of change. Choices change things. They are not always nice but they are necessary and you must let go of something in order to move on to something else.

I have always believed that there are no things that are best left unsaid. But there are some that are best left written- words have a kind of indelible permanency which life so does not possess.

The Triumph of Reason

We all go about our daily lives indifferent to the marvel that is life. Studies suggest that based on the initial and boundary conditions of our universe, the odds of intelligent life arising on planet Earth are lower than that of an enormous pile of waste in a junk yard arranging itself to assemble into a Boeing 747! Every once in a while though, some brilliant minds come along and change the way we look at the universe, forever.

Although science was progressing by leaps and bounds under the light of new theories (Quantum Mechanics) and discoveries (elementary particles) in the early part of the 20^th century, we had somehow grown too comfortable with- and hence ignorant of- the most pervasive of all natural forces- gravity. Perhaps it was because of the larger than life image of Isaac Newton, scientific community at large was of the opinion that gravity was understood in its entirety. Proposing that the force which makes an apple fall and the force which keeps planets in motion around the sun are essentially the same was unarguably his life’s work and one of the most elegant ideas of all time.

Albert Einstein was a little known clerk working in a Swiss patent office. Surfing through all the path breaking discoveries during his day job, he realized that although we could measure this force with great accuracy, it was quite embarrassing that we had no idea as to HOW it actually works. How is it that the sun grabs hold of the earth across vast empty space, eternally confining it in a periodic motion around itself?

In 1905, after publishing his work on Brownian motion, photoelectric effect and what we now recognize as the Special Theory of Relativity, Einstein decided to go after this missing piece of the puzzle, something which had apparently eluded even the father of gravity himself. It took him 10 years to perfect the math that would go into the most beautiful idea of all time- the theory of General Relativity.

Einstein blew everyone away by suggesting that gravity isn’t really a force and that time was the 4^th dimension of our universe. Put together with the known 3, it stitches the entire universe together in a 4 dimensional spacetime continuum. Everything exists and happens in the spacetime continuum. Anything that has mass curves spacetime causing objects in its vicinity to move in a predictable manner. Instead of being a property of a body, gravity is in fact a property of the universe itself. Any mass curves spacetime and curved spacetime tells mass how to move!

A 2D representation of spacetime continuum- the relativistic view of gravity.

From time travel to worm holes, this simple idea has had ground breaking implications. It completely changed our understanding of time and the universe at large. Since 1915/16, it has been verified by countless experiments and observations with far greater precision than that produced by Newton’s theory of gravity. One such implication was the existence of gravitational waves.

Much like electromagnetic waves which could transmit radiation (the only other force understood at that time), Einstein posited the existence of gravitational waves. He proposed that when two heavy objects (like super massive black holes or stars) interact, gravitational waves would be generated. These waves, not much unlike ripples in a pond, would travel unobstructed throughout spacetime at the speed of light. However, unlike visible part of the EM spectrum, they would not just be invisible but also too weak to be detected. This was until now.

On 11^th February 2016, a team of scientists working at LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Waves Observatory) in USA confirmed the existence of these waves nearly 100 years after Albert Einstein had first theorized about their existence. They did this by stationing two laser beam apparatuses 3000 miles apart. These 8 km long ‘L’ shaped apparatuses fired laser beams and recorded an interference pattern at the moment of impact. Under the influence of gravitational waves coming from a distant binary star system (two super massive stars slowly collapsing into each other and losing energy by the emission of gravitational waves), these 2 observatories recorded a characteristic shift in their patterns (much like ripples on water cause a cork to bob up and down, only here the disturbance is in fractions of atomic diameter) which was matched at the two laboratories and confirmed.

A schematic representation of the LIGO observatory.

LIGO scientists estimated that the black holes for this event were about 29 and 36 times the mass of the sun, and the event took place 1.3 billion years ago. About 3 times the mass of the sun was converted into gravitational waves in a fraction of a second—with a peak power output about 50 times that of the whole visible universe. The detector in Louisiana had recorded the event 7 milliseconds before the one in Washington. Scientists are now advancing on to Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA)- a space based gravitational wave detector to repeat the experiment far away from earthly disturbances.

There are infinite human endeavours but none other quite captures my imagination as the pursuit of truth, the undying efforts of a lone race trying to make sense of a world no less magical than any of our imaginations. It is an endless quest that often breaches the realms of science, venturing into the philosophical, fiddling with the theological and at times- evoking the metaphysical. Its enormous mysteries give purpose to our existence, for even in my thoughts; I dread the day we all come to know all that is worth knowing.

It is the purest and sincerest curiosity, unadulterated by arrogance or authority, for everyone at some time in our lives would have found ourselves gazing at the horizon, questioning how it all came to be. In case you haven’t, take an evening out of your hurried lives, lay back on your arm chair, look up at the night sky and wonder how, wonder why. If you are calm and it is quiet enough, you will be humbled by the sheer vastness of it. The insignificance of your troubles and worries, the utter foolishness of war and violence, everyone you've ever loved, everyone who has ever lived, everything that we have done to this world- all meager inconsequential happenings on a pale blue dot going around a little known star lying in a trivial corner of one among billions of galaxies...

We are all miracles in a wonderland walking through our lives searching for magic.

Musings

I have a poor eye for art. I don't see vast depths on canvasses that people with more eclectic tastes (whatever that means) call 'modern art'. I find myself unable to be moved by exquisite artworks and over the past few years, after most of my friends bought their long cherished DSLRs, I resolved never to honestly remark on any of their work, more so when explicitly asked to. Essentially, I have never been a creative person and cannot tell whether it is an acquired or an inherited trait.

You may say that I write but come to think it's merely an expression of a few related thoughts in the one language that I have managed to understand over 2 decades. Music, movies and books are the only real exceptions where (I think) I enjoy certain tastes and genres which give me a sense of what a human connection to a work of art might feel like. It is with these thoughts and in this light that I must begin today.

Most of my friends were impressed by Tamashaa. And by 'impressed' I mean so much in awe that they either strongly recommended it to unsuspecting users across all social networks or went on to be deeply hungover on it. Some even had a major revelation or an epiphany of sorts (I still tend to have those in exam halls instead of cinema halls). Unsurprisingly, none of that happened with me, although about half way into the movie, I could make fair sense of what the director had intended to get across. In that sense, I must admit it was much unlike a regular Bollywood money spinner and worth some after thought, albeit one that landed the fruit of these thoughts a little too far from the tree.

As one among millions pursuing the infamous 'B. Tech. + MBA' career combo today, I consider myself a self anointed ambassador of the ordinary here. It wasn't always so, though. I spent a large part of my formative years with the belief that I was destined for 'big things'. This belief- far from delusional arrogance- was driven largely by a restricted world view and the kind of innocent optimism that stems from adolescence, and in part by circumstance and causality. It was a time I was far more curious than cautious, confident than circumspect and ambitious than realistic. It took just five words, for the second and last time in my life, to change that forever- 'You have not qualified JEE'.

Perhaps I wasn't motivated enough. Perhaps I didn't slog all that hard. Perhaps my world view wasn't as broad as it should have been. OR perhaps I just wasn't smart enough. As it is with science- the simplest explanation is often the correct one. And just as it is with life- the truth sets you free but first it pisses you off.

The truth was that I was no different from countless other teenagers who were nurturing the same dream, sweating, bleeding and bruising themselves on the way in much the same manner as I did, some perhaps a lot more. The truth was thousands of them were smarter, sharper and more resilient than I ever was. It took some time but denial, anger, depression, bargain gave way to acceptance as I realised why life goals are often called dreams.

It is surprising how convenient it is to believe we deserve so much more than we get. And it is amusing how this realisation can be a constant reminder through life, perpetually distorting the present and all this while knitting a past that will always be looked back upon with far more regret than rejoice. The truth is, for every one of us who 'makes his dream come true', statistically, there'd be hundreds of us who won't. In that sense then, does it mean the rest of us failed?

Growing up, it always seemed that success stories were abundant and all around. That it was necessary to succeed at whatever it is that was deemed worth succeeding at by the people who surrounded you. That failure was an unworthy (at times unfortunate) exception. You had to do it once and you got to be the best or you might as well not do it altogether. Life, it seemed, was binary- discreetly switching between two extremes with absolutely nothing separating the vast chasm between success and failure.

The truth is, most of us thrive somewhere between the enormous spectrum stretched between Ved and Rancho now immortalised by the celluloid. We are substantially good at a few things that fascinate us but lack that roaring passion to stand out in any one of them. This sense of ordinariness may strike hard against our time honed habit of self appeasement but that does not drive it one bit away from reality. There are those who do stand apart and we read/hear of them all the time but that should come with that same sense of acceptance I mentioned above. Sadly, it is scarcely so.

"Har sapne ki ek keemat hoti hai"- every dream comes at a price. I found it to be truer than most things I heard or read. That price may be time, comfort, fun, health, family, sleep, money, friendship, youth, love, morals or a whole range of other things. Naturally, not everyone is willing to accept or play by such a rude set of terms. A good friend once told me this when I was as confused about life's purpose as I might be coming across right now. That's only because I still am- finding my way through that enormous chasm no one ever told me existed, much less how to navigate. Perhaps that's life in itself.

No, this is not an emotional reaction to a disappointment or a heartbreak. Nor do I intend to say that it is childish or futile to have passions or dreams- there's nothing more lively than that. However, it will always be easier and enormously more convinient to raise your hands in the classroom and say you want to become someone, than to make the necessary sacrifices (I choose the word with great caution here) in order to make that happen. And it is pertinent to make truce with the alternate reality that sometimes, just sometimes, it might still not add up.

There is no fate but what we make and there's no point trying to convince ourselves otherwise. The argument of 'fate and destiny' is just another manifestation of that deluding sense of self appeasement. We may all be heroes of our own stories but unlike the inspiring school teacher, life doesn't owe us an explanation. Most of it isn't fair or unfair, it's just what it is. 'The Rolling Stones' quite appropriately sang-

"You can't always get what you want,

But if you try sometime,

You just might find-

You get what you need."

We do need some education!

Despite all its artistic neatness, the elegantly encapsulated technological sophistication and the very many ways it has twisted the very fabric of our society- changing the way we live our lives- I could never develop much affinity towards the concept of social networking. I think it is deceptive and misleading in the way it is most commonly used, especially in this part of the world. This does not mean that I in any way despise the idea of a digital global society that has made the world so much smaller. On the contrary, I am in utter awe of how well within a decade, a handful of visionaries went on to have an impact on human knowledge that is exceeded perhaps only by the advent of the printing press. What bothers me, however, is the way it is increasingly being used to defeat this very purpose. 

I was lazily spread across a chair in my classroom, sleep deprived, uninterested and aimlessly waiting for the professor to arrive for the next lecture when I came across a post on my Facebook feed-

Despite all my senses forcing me to scroll past it like dozens of other updates, something about this did not allow me to do so. The message on the right seemed like a typically worded pro-Modi sentiment that has swept across mainstream media, especially social networks which have been a major instrument in the BJP success story. The image on the left is in reference to an incident that took place at the recent ASEAN summit where it was alleged that the Prime Minister could not notice the national flag erroneously turned upside down. This Facebook handle lashes out at the faction of the media that brought this to public notice (possibly being referred to as 'they' in the pic) with the justification that the PM had also, allegedly, corrected the flag right side up and asked the photographers to take the picture all over again.

Now I do not know whether that actually happened, for he would also have had to urge his Japanese counterpart to repeat the customary handshake against diplomatic protocol. But what is actually disconcerting is how you have been made to believe something that isn't even overtly right in the first place!

Notice the striking difference in the color of the suit worn by Shinzo Abe in the two pics (some alleged it is because of the flash, but judging by the difference it made to the one worn by Modi, I find it hard to believe). The light intensity in the first pic makes it look like day time. The absolute lack of same in the second affirms it is past sunset. Above all, the bottom left pocket on the Japanese statesman's suit which is visible on the lower pic is absent on the one in the top which is conclusive evidence that the two images are from the same place but at two very different times!

Note that the post has been shared nearly three times as much as the number of 'likes' on it. So you can estimate the number of people it might have eventually reached. Thousands of casual, unsuspecting users like you and me have now been effortlessly force-fed an idea by someone who none of us will ever know. And this is perhaps just one among millions of such propaganda posts endlessly doing rounds on every social media there is, painting, twisting, bending and forming "popular opinions" on everything under the sun- from the Paris attacks and barbarism of the Islamic State to the Dadri lynching and claims of rising intolerance in India.

A 'political enthusiast' on Quora offers the same justification. 60k views, 4.5k upvotes and counting!

It is disturbing to realise how conveniently mainstream media can forge and destroy popular opinions. And it is appalling to see how almost anything that suits some whims can be passed of as "news". Our ever decreasing attention spans and diminishing will to reason will only make it easier for such people to build a world where the very notion of fact and truth is a myth.

Belief, it seems, is a luxury we can no longer afford!

I have the political opinions of a 7 year old who recites the national anthem every morning in his school assembly ground. But such an "Orwellian nightmare" still seems like a genuine possibility. Seeing how uselessly we have cruised past pressing issues like corruption, women safety, bans, beef and now intolerance, all in the past 1 year, it only seems fair to assume we are mere puppets and the strings are wound around the fingers of those who care as much about us as we actually do about these issues.

Another instance of how mainstream media reported one comment taken utterly out of context just to generate a flashy news bite-

And here's what had actually happened. A reporter had asked Priyanka about a solitaire ring she had been wearing recently, to which she had replied- "They (media) made a big deal out of it, but I buy my own diamonds. I don't need someone to buy them for me. When a guy comes into my life it will not be for diamonds, it will be not for cars, it will be nor for homes. A guy will be in my life only when I'm wholly crazily in love. I don't need a guy for anything except a children. Don't jump to conclusions because of my jewellery”

At times I sincerely miss those days when I could trust what I would hear and believe what I would see. The vagaries of life have long deprived me of that innocence and luxury. They have made me suspecting of everything and everyone. But then there are times like these which make me wonder that perhaps it is an enormous virtue which, apparently, many of us are deprived of.

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

The Last Airbender

How can you smash back to back sixes of the first 3 deliveries of an ODI? Or score 280+ runs in the first day of a Test match? Have a strike rate in excess of 80 in Test Cricket? Get to a 300 with a six? Or get there twice and then come agonizingly close to a record breaking third, only to be dismissed caught and bowled by a delivery that you might as well have negotiated with your eyes closed!

And yet that's Virender Sehwag for you- the only cricketer who could remove all the bravado about the game and reduce it to its bare essentials- see the ball, hit the ball. That was as easy at it could get and perhaps all that was really needed.

Watching him take guard for India, alongside Sachin in the 2003 World Cup is not just some of my earliest recollections, but one of my most loved sights in the gentleman's game. For me that was- as someone has said in a different context- like having 'a surgeon at one end and a butcher at the other'. Watching the entire team crumble around him as he worked his way to 85 odd runs in the final against Australia was heart rending. Nearly everything else about his career though has been nothing short of delight.

As a much feared player who demanded singular strategies from opposition, he introduced a distinctively entertaining brand of batsmanship. With him at the crease, you always knew something was bound to happen and this very excitement associated with his game constituted the heart of sporting entertainment. Experts would throw terms like 'hand-eye coordination' to paraphrase his unique abilities. I always believed it had got to do a lot more with the way he approached life in general. As a typical Jat, born and brought up in the outskirts of Delhi, blatant straight-forwardness was his way of life. As someone who always went for the runs without ever worrying about form or conditions or opposition, one could always sense that in his batting. This inherent regret-free-no-holds-barred attitude was as much of his strength as- perhaps- his weakness.

At a time when much unchecked westernisation of societies has complicated relationships, it shouldn't be surprising that we could learn much about life and simplicity from Virender Sehwag's approach to the game of cricket. His devil-may-care attitude on the field, his blatant disregard for the conventional, his near indiffernce to landmarks, his the-ball-is-turning-and-its-too-long-to-get-old-so-let-me-just-send-it-out-of-the-park approach (FYI it did happen- in international cricket!) and above all this near non-human manner to let go of all of that at the fall of a hat are all attributes we can do well to bring into our lives.

Much has been said and much will be as he announces his retirement, in his own seemingly nonchalant manner. As unforgiving as the game is, very few are fortunate enough to say goodbye at their best on the field, fewer still bid adieu amidst all the fanfare that we saw being accorded to the very greatest of the game. Something makes me feel Sehwag was never the person who would have cared much about all of that, for theatrics and drama were never his strong suit. He wasn't a Sachin who was born to play cricket, or blessed with the unflinching commitment of a Dravid, or the leadership and flair of a Ganguly, or the much reserved masterclass that was Laxman. He was Sehwag- distinctive in his own right and yet among the very best of Indian cricket.

Hope he has all the joy and excitement in his life that he gave to all his viewers.

PS- Beta beta hota hai, baap baap hota hai. Par ye beta bhi baap se kuch kam nahi tha!