Dark Chocolate

It was going to be the mundane experience of checking out groceries for the week at a store I’ve been going to for years. It generally starts with a perfunctory nod and mumbled greetings by a person at the counter. Then, as I place the milk and bread on the belt, my eyes would be caught by the cover of tabloids that talk about cheating celebrities and their impending divorces. Then, my mind would jump to the internal workings of places that come up with these stories. I’d imagine the brainstorming sessions at these places and the personal lives of people that work at these places. Do they keep a stash of awkward pictures of each celebrity? I’d wonder. By that time typically I’m asked to swipe my card and express my preferences about the milk container going directly into the cart. All this ends with another nod and exchange of good wishes with the stranger before she moves on to the next customer.

It started off the same this time and would have ended as usual if the packet of dark chocolate had not jumped into the bag as it did. “Wow! Boop – it jumped in there as if it knew that’s where it was supposed to go”, she said. She was elderly but energetic and wore her hair in a manner that seemed to suggest that she did not belong in there. “That’s one funny piece of chocolate. Boop – it jumped in there” she said again. “Somebody could write a story about it. It could become big. Like Harry Potter. She made a billion dollars with that.”, she said. This was not the human robot I was used to seeing. “Do you write?”, I asked. “Yes, I do”, she said. “Stories?”. “Poems and songs. My poems were published in the millennium book of poems. I was one of the selected 100 poets.”

Do we have no use for a poet other than to scan items off a conveyor belt?

Why is our society rewarding me, an engineer, but not her, an artist? She is arguably a better artist than I’m an engineer. I would not make it to the list of 100 selected engineers of my time. The answer, unflattering for me, is not that I’m good or talented but that I’m useful. The world happens to need my skill at this point in time. Born in a different time in history, I’d likely have been laying bricks for her house or fixing the wheel of her carriage. Maybe somewhere in the future that we engineers are building today lies a much different kind of society. One where machines autonomously produce our food, build our houses and keep us healthy. What does one do in such a world? History suggests that we’d continue to toil feverishly in that world too. With all the mundane problems behind us, hopefully, we’d be consumed by creative pursuits. We’d stretch our minds unfettered by physical limitations. Unencumbered by the trivialities that go by the name of  making a living. Hopefully, the ones that are rewarded in that world are the ones that see a piece of chocolate slip into a bag and see a story in it. And are unafraid to share it.

84 kilo bytes of entropy

I obviously was conscious of the fact that I hadn't written anything for a while. But I was shocked to realize that the last one was posted more than 2 years back. I must admit, it was not due to lack of trying. No, it wasn't a blogger's block.

One of the reasons, as I vaguely remember was my idea to pause for a while, take time to read, absorb ideas and process them before I wrote anything. A bigger one though was probably my confusion about the whole purpose of writing. Having given the blog a grandiose title of Making Sense Of It All and having found that it was easier said than done, the very format of a single page with multiple articles, each of which was expected to do its bit for standing up to the challenge of the title was a bit intimidating.

So, I decided to reformat the blog to make allowance for the fact that it is only very rarely that I'm making sense of anything. Most of the time, it is a reflection of jumbled competing ideas in my head trying to grasp this intricate world - sometimes oversimplifying it and sometimes just missing the point.

Like a good engineer, I wanted to backup the blog before I messed with the design template. My first shock was to see that I only had 22 posts in all. A bigger one was when I copied all the pages and zipped them up. The zip file was only 84 kilo bytes long. And I'd guess that most of it was just the html markup.

Less than 84 kilo bytes of entropy? That doesn't sound like a lot. But how does one make sense of this number? I just did some calculations - that's less than 4 bits of information for every hour that I've lived. Is that a fair comparison though? If you zipped up all of JK Rowling's works, or Shakespeare's works or Feynman's papers, how big is it going to be? How many bytes would it take to write down the theory of everything?

How many bytes of entropy would it take... to make sense of it all?

Legroom

It was a box full of underachievers. And I found myself sitting on one corner on the baggage stand. Some of us were packed up there, like pieces of baggage ourselves. We sat on the stand made of strips of wood designed for baggage. And in front of us was another such stand filled with more such people. And real baggage. Dull gym bags of fake brands, stuffed more than to their capacity, were fighting battles on two fronts. One with themselves as the poor material tried hard not to give up despite being pushed to their limits by the excessive stuffing within. And one with the other bags as they pushed onto each other for more breathing space.

They all belonged to different people from different worlds. But as they sat there, stifled, one could hardly help but notice how similar they were. Clothes and food and water. That's what most of them must have. Not more than one of them probably had clothes of the same color and size and make. The bags were all unique in many ways. But in ways that didn’t seem to matter here.

It was midsummer and we couldn’t get the fans on the train to work. Somehow, we seemed to be missing exactly the things which we wanted most. Air. And space. Food could wait.

I could see most people in my box from my strategic vantage point. Some of them, I could see clearly. There were meshes between me and the rest. Most of them were either asleep or trying to get some sleep. Clearly, not all of them were sleepy. But, they were trying nevertheless. Under the given circumstances, there seemed to be little else you could do to forget where you were. To stop trying to avoid meeting the eyes of the person in front of you that you just had a fight with.

The situation had calmed down just then. Moments earlier, a huge man was shouting at the top of the his voice at the young lady sitting in front of him. It was partly a misunderstanding, as it later turned out. The guy sitting beside me was her husband. He climbed down to sit beside her as the man who had been sitting there got off the train. Apparently, the huge man had made a deal for that seat and this person wasn't aware of it. The fight went on for a long time. People tried to help at first, but soon, the voices of the 3 people involved - the huge man, the lady and her husband became part of the background noise that everyone subconsciously ignored. The sound of the wheels, the people fighting and some kid crying - just noise to be discarded or put up with as long as the journey lasted.

Once the fight subsided, I surveyed the crowd from high above. Everyone seemed to have settled down - albeit uncomfortably. The 3-seater below me had 5 adults and two kids dozing off on it. Same was the case with the seat in front of it. The ones on the edges were in such delicately precise configurations that a slight change of angle of their legs or shift of weight of their upper bodies would throw them off the seat. The ones who were not fortunate enough to be seated, made the most of the places they got to barely stand. Their priorities seemed to be to position themselves near the windows or doors to get some wind. One middle aged man, who lost his balance occasionally, was managing to have lunch from a tiny steel box despite his position. Another was taking some load off his legs by shifting it to his arms. He achieved this my holding a high metal hook with one hand. The other hand clutched this one tightly and his head rested on his upper arms as he snored heavily.

Some of us were in relatively better living conditions. The baggage stand on which I sat had 3 adults and 3 bags including me. This was not as much better compared to those seated below us as It sounds. This was because we also had to accommodate our legs on those seats. The ones sitting below could freely let their legs hanging. We had to curl them up and frequently keep changing positions to prevent legs from sleeping - which can be quite painful while stretching them is a luxury you could not afford for the next 9 hours or so. And since the seat was not meant for people, you also had to shift uncomfortably where you sat. It is surprising how much of a burden legs can be when you were sitting up there. The rest was manageable, but legs -they were a pain.

Nevertheless, life up there was far better than that of people seated below. And the ones standing could clearly see that.

My position was typical of my unplanned travels. Despite the sight of the overflowing unreserved compartment from the station platform, I always knew that there would be a niche for me somewhere up there. This was not mere wishful thinking. There is always someone lying down on one of the baggage stands while there is hardly any place on the floor for your feet. And as certain as that, there are always standing people who enviously look at the sleeping person and battle in their minds whether and how to ask the person to sit up so that they could sit too. The sleeping one generally faces the wall and strategically places bags around him to make the place look less comfortable than it is. Worthless tricks in front of a veteran like me. I take pleasure in waking these people up from their fake sleeps.

With sights like these and plenty of time to burn I had little to do but ponder. Was this the most efficient configuration? Could you stuff the same people into the same box in a better way? Or was this chaos the best you could do? Did this apparent chaos really have underlying order? Why are some people standing while the rest are sitting? Did they all just start late? Or does each one of them have their share of moments of hesitations to blame? Why aren't the seats being time-shared? Is that practical at all? Could they possibly stick in a television here to distract the people? How does the old woman selling raw mangoes here pay for her ticket?

For a moment, I thought that the solution was to mark seats with numbers and make reservations. But this was the unreserved compartment and, by definition, that was not allowed. What if a railway official stands at the door, lets one person in at a time and chooses a seat for them or a place to stand depending on their age and physical condition? But who is to decide what the right rules are? I guess you could make a case for making the youngest and strongest stand while the weak and old sit. But that was probably happening already. I did not see any very old people standing. The weak and old were sitting indeed. Probably, all rules which are worth enforcing are already hardwired and don’t have to be enforced at all. But forcibly enforced rules still have to have their benefits, right? A configuration that results from everyone acting in their own self interest can hardly be the most efficient? But what exactly is an efficient configuration? Even if you could quantify comfort, would it be something that maximizes the average comfort? Or minimizes the cases of discomfort? Even if this hypothetical golden sets of rules to arrive at the best configuration was found, would it be far too narrow to make any long term sense? The existing system gives people an incentive to start early. But with trains stopping at stations for only few minutes, that hardly matters. The quick and strong manage to get in first. But they, precisely, should be the people who need the seats the least. So, does the system select against the weak? That isn't as wrong as it sounds after all. Selecting against the weak gives the weak a better reason to book their tickets in advance and not travel in an unreserved compartment. But what about the ones who cannot afford the reservation fee? Should there be such a fee at all?

Connected to this compartment are the reserved compartments, the first classes, the AC s and all. Imagining how much legroom there must be in those compartments makes one wonder more than ever if something somewhere is possibly wrong. The reserved ticket costs less than twice as an unreserved one and the unreserved compartment is stuffed to more than twice the density of a reserved one. And they cost lesser to maintain. Do unreserved compartments make more business sense for the railways? Why don’t we have whole trains of those then? Because you need to accommodate people who belong to different strata of the society? So, there is no escaping from tying boxes of varying degrees of comfort together. The only solution possibly is to get more trains to run. But can we afford to underutilize them? This, after all, is just a problem of few people fighting for limited resources. For some air to breathe. And more legroom.

Overheard in my head

A: I'm thinking of the tip that authors of self help books go around giving people.
B: Which one?
A: When faced with a problem, ask yourself what someone else would do. Someone you admire and think is successful.
B: I always thought that was demeaning. It is as if you'd rather trust someone else's judgment than your own. Like the best you can do is to borrow another person's wisdom.
A: Yeah. I know. But that would be true if you were to actually walk up to the other person and ask for help. This is completely different. Don’t you see?
B: In the first case, you talk to the real person and in the second you seek the help of that person's model in your head. Sounds equally pathetic to me.
A: Think about it. You are consulting the other person's model in your head. Not the person. So, who is the one doing the thinking? You are running his software but its running on your machine. Makes sense?
B: Well, you are running his ready-made software. You have no idea how he made it. That's still no good.
A: Don’t push the analogy too far now. Forget the software example. You can run a program without knowing how it was written. But that's not true here. If you are consulting this person - I mean his phantom in your head - about a problem that you never saw the real person solve, and his phantom in your head produces a solution, isn't it you that really came up with it?
B: But then again, it is his algorithm that you are using to come up with the solution. It is not really yours. You blindly run your problem through his algorithm.
A: Now, that's a better analogy. And I agree with you. To run his algorithm in your head, you need to know his algorithm. And you wouldn’t be running it on your problem if you weren't convinced that it was right. So basically, you are using something that you understand well and something that you know to be a good general solution to the problem. Who cares if the algorithm was borrowed?
B: The point remains that it isn’t your solution. In fact, it's worse than that. You are probably convinced that his algorithm is right not because you can see why it works but because you think this person is successful and he cannot be so if his algorithms didn’t work. So basically, you are running an emulation of something you don’t understand because you have empirical evidence of its quality.
A: That's a hard one to refute. I'm probably oversimplifying this and that's why I'm losing. Let me start afresh. We know that we don't quite think algorithmically. And even if we do, having a clear understanding of someone else's algorithm - clear enough to emulate it - sounds impossible. Atleast extremely difficult. More often, we are guessing their algorithm. Based on our own understanding of everything. So unless we are actually emulating what the other person verbally claims to be doing, your knowledge of the other person's algorithm is nothing but your best explanation for how he does what ever he does. In fact it is your algorithm to produce his results. It is probably nothing like his algorithm. And probably is even way better than his.
B: If it's your algorithm, I wonder what the other person's contribution was at all. All he did was to assert that something was possible? Is that all we need?
A: It seems so. And that's not the end. We consult not one but multiple experts on different problems. Like a swiss army knife, we just pick whoever is best suited to the problem.
B: A swiss army knife of our models of peoples' wisdom. Strange but plausible. To go with it, probably there is a little bit of our original self that does the picking and choosing.
A: What is this swiss army knife but our own self? And isn't it as original as anything? Isn't each one of those phantom people nothing but our own doing? And do all of them have to be phantoms of real people? Can't you have a phantom of sherlock holmes? That would be a phantom of a phantom born in someone else's mind. An army knife of phantoms of real and phantom people. Sounds hardly like me.
B: A chimera of sorts. Interesting.

Unfair

Auto rickshaws and their drivers in Bangalore are strange economic phenomena. It is worth getting into some details about their business model. They are supposed to take you from point A to point B and charge a fee for it. The fee, being based only on the distance and the waiting time, is something a lowly mechanical meter can calculate. And it does. But the strangeness of the whole affair comes from the fact that what you really pay is the outcome of a complex mathematical expression in which the fee calculated by the mechanical meter is only one variable. Some of the other variables are the population density of the two points A and B, the average annual income of the people residing in those places (as guesstimated by the driver), the quality of the roads connecting the two points, the driver's impression of how much you earn, the number of people you are with and how much better you are at the game of chicken that commences as soon as it is time to pay.

So, I generally ride the bus.

But the other day, I didn’t have the option. I walked up to a parked auto and asked him if he could take me to point B. He nodded of course. But before he could start, he said "It'll cost you forty rupees." . My anger management techniques constantly fail to work. "What, then, is the meter for?", I asked without making much of an effort at being courteous. To which he replied "The meter charge will be 36 rupees, I'm only asking for 4 rupees more." . I had become somewhat of an expert at this and so proceeded to get off the auto. He offered to take me for the meter charge and so I got back in.

Once on our way, he said very gently "If people like you start behaving like this, how are we to make a living?". I'd have told him that I hadn’t signed up to make sure he made a living. I'd have - if I didn’t know how right he was.

It was an ugly truth indeed. Behind the beautiful illusion of greedy drivers trying to suck up all the blood from their unsuspecting passengers, was the simple ugly truth that most of them probably just broke even. They drive rented autos, pay a high price for fuel, live in overpriced rented houses, pay for the overpriced worthless education, have wives that work as housemaids for peanuts, breathe lot of polluted air and die very soon. Yes, this picture is probably not accurate. I've met drivers who can only be described as leeches. The truth remains, however, that the real problem here is not greed.

So, when he said that, I told him how I preferred to ride the bus so as to avoid arguments with auto drivers. And he said that he wouldn’t have asked me for more had he known how fed up I was with his kind.

I returned to the book I was reading - The Enchantress of Florence. Sikri and Akbar and all the elephants and wealth. That must've been some time. But someone had his leg cut off for stealing a pair of shoes. Such punishments have now been replaced with fines and imprisonment. Steven Pinker, Robert Wright and Chris Anderson would immediately point out how much better our times are.

But in front of me was this man with graying hair who just lost a game of chicken with a youngster and lost four rupees. A tiny fraction of how much the youngster would tip a waiter.

Auto rickshaws are only the things I hate second most to get into. The first being shopping malls in Bangalore. And when I do, again, when I'm left with no choice, I find myself getting very irritated at the crowd. The people, what they do, what they wear, what they read (or don’t read) , what they buy and how much they pay - everything irritates me. I probably have experienced too much of the other extreme and know too much about auto drivers to feel a part of it all. To think that the crowd I see is only riding a wave and not reaping benefits of real hard work makes the jobs of the overspending shoppers seem less respectable than the ones of the haggling auto drivers.

The driver interrupted me as I was enjoying Salman Rushdie's dissection of Akbar's psyche. He asked me where I was from and if I was studying or working. I answered and then asked him about his kids. His two kids were in school. They were living in a different town - probably because the education there was not as overpriced. The elder one was good at school but the younger boy was just ok. He said his kids would never study as much as I had because he couldn’t afford. The ubiquitous vicious cycle. I told him that good education was the only passport to a good life and that he should make sure they understood that. Actually, I'm sure he knew it better than I did.

I'm told that scientists have an explanation for why smells are so good at bringing a slice of the past alive. It is hard to not be carried to a different time and space by some smells you didn't even know existed. So it is, for me, with songs. It is probably because I have the habit of playing something endlessly if I like it. And I have been lucky enough to have done that over very long periods of time.

Long lone walks on the snow in Buffalo with a small playlist of favorites. Long hours at work with just one song playing all day. Very long lonely rides on a minivan everyday through traffic with the same songs playing on the radio… the list is endless….

The right smells are rare to come by. That probably adds to the magic. Songs, on the other hand, can be played anytime. I can call upon any one of them from my collection of portals to the past. But there's a problem here -these portals - they cannot be made to order instantly. They, like Andy Dufresne's rocks, need a lot of time and pressure. That's not the only problem though. Every time you play the song, every time you take the portal, you lose a bit of it. The next time, it doesn't exactly take you where it used to. It's as if someone slightly moved the telescope when you weren't watching. And when that happens enough number of times, it just stops being a portal. It is no longer a wormhole. Just a regular song like the rest.

So I try not to take the portals very often. I don’t want to disturb the orientation of my telescopes. I want all of them pointing at the right stars. Probably if I looked through them just rarely enough, they'll remain rightly oriented. Probably they'll bring up the same memories every . And more than anything, I hope that, as I try hard not lose any of the portals to the past, more are being forged for me to travel back to today… some day when nothing will be as it is now.

Blur it all

I have a wish.

I want a movie to be made. A very special one. One that tells a story that spans thousands of years. One in which a year lasts only a second. It shouldn’t just span all the way along the timeline. It should conquer complexity and win over the detail devil. People and places should not be that but stand for populations and worlds. When a person speaks in the movie, it should be much more. It should be the voice of all of humankind. When he laughs, it should, undeniably, be only to reflect the sheer joy of existence. Nothing less. Nothing trivial. Nothing. But a celebration of life. Just that. He would age in the movie, of course. Like the humankind has. Would start off innocent. Lose it quickly. Then get wiser. Later senile.
Certainly, there would be more than one actor. If each one would be everyone, I wonder how that would work. Probably each actor should not be everyone. Probably each one should speak for all men of one kind. But there shouldn’t be many. We don’t want the details. We don’t want to see individuals. No aberrations. No mavericks. We don’t want to see the parts. Just the whole.
And the plot. Well. That would be something. The mother of all scripts. A punch would be a skirmish. A scuffle, a battle. And a murder, a nuclear war. A stroll would be a voyage across the seas. An adventure would be landing foot on a rock in the sky. A mad man would be a nation gone berserk. A population hypnotized.

Details are good. They distract us.

Obelix & Co

The Romans started buying Menhirs for lot of gold from Obelix. I don’t remember the specifics of the plot but the front cover of the Astrix comic book, for some reason, has managed to stay alive in my head. The picture has Obelix in the foreground in his white and blue striped pants looking important and certainly very happy. In the background is what appears to be a quarry where little busy men are seen chipping stone off unfinished Menhirs. There must have also been a bag of gold coins somewhere in the picture.

Obelix, before the menhirs started fetching him gold, loved to feast on wild boar. He hunted them himself. Once he got busy managing his men and blowing the gold, he hired someone to hunt boars for him. Ofcourse, wealth is hard to conceal. And others started making menhirs too. And yet others started hunting boars for them. Very soon, half the men in the village were chiselling stone and the other half were hunting boar for them.

It was raining heavily while I was standing at the bus stop under the messy hanging flyover in Bangalore. (Why the structure was hanging and not behaving itself like its new born cousins all over the city, I don’t know.) Like all others, the bus stop had colourful ads all over. Advanced web designing. Call centre training. C C++. Advanced diploma in computer financial applications. Need Steel welders (free accommodation provided). Advanced this. Improved that. High value this. Cutting edge that. Wild boar hunters needed.

The village was soon a well-oiled giant menhir making machine. It gulped gold and spat menhirs. The gold percolated. It flowed from the menhir merchants to the quarry workers to the boar hunters. It flowed through tiny cracks. Not so visibly. There were the chisel makers. Chisels need wooden handles. So a crack opened to the lumbers. Lumbers need axes. It flowed further to the village blacksmith. To some mine from there. Back to the boar hunters. Back to the blacksmith. Over to the cobbler. The mason. The tailor…

Some machine. Some parts.

Watch closely and you can see the tiny cracks. It is harder to see gold flowing. A traffic police man has stopped someone. The rain is drowning their voices. But I can see a crack already. The youngster on his new bike doesn’t have the papers. Or probably he does but was over speeding. I see some gold flowing. The youngster is back on the road. The machine is running. Parts that don’t move to the rhythm wear off quickly.

Naturally evolved economies perform better compared to the top-down planned ones. Or so they say. I’m not so sure. They probably produce more menhirs. Probably more gold flows when the machine naturally evolves. But hey, what if the Romans stop paying for the menhirs? No. That’s not the part where we got it wrong. We might never stop making menhirs. But where’s Cacophonix? Where’s his harp? What’s he doing at the quarry anyway?

It is filthy behind the bus stop. And right in the middle is a little shop. Does gold trickle all the way here? I’m not so sure. What are the kids doing out in the rain? And why aren’t they in school? If they’ve been fed, what are they looking for in the dirt? Why are they eating the leftovers?

A nice friend once said that it was alright to accept a bribe as long as it was offered to you and not demanded by you. What a nice thing to say. What a perfectly fair way to cheat! The same message in different flavours has been played to me. By different nice people. In different nice settings. About very different nice things. Menhir merchants, the masons, the blacksmiths, the boar hunters. Everyone. All the nice people. They believe in a simple falsity: It is OK to cheat.

So it was not surprising to see the filth and the shop and the kids. After all, it is the nice people that make up all the nice parts of this machine.

Reponse to comments

This is a response to the comments that I have received for my articles (“God of small things”^[1] and “Down the rabbit hole” ^[2] ) and arguments/discussions that I have had with friends (GH, TTV, AS, AB, EP, BV, SB, DJ, RG, OM and others).

This is what I hear often:

1. You cannot disprove the existence of anything supernatural.
2. So the scientifically correct position is to say that you are agnostic.
3. Since you call yourself an atheist, you are being irrational.

And to make sure that we are talking about the same thing, I looked up the oxford dictionary.

Agnostic: noun a person who believes that nothing can be known concerning the existence of God.

Atheism: noun the belief that God does not exist.

I was interested in knowing whether an agnostic friend of mine believed in God. (I must admit, I still have no idea). His reply was “No.” But ofcourse, he added “I donot NOT believe in God either.”

Bear with me while I digress a bit…

We have a lot wonderful mental phenomena: Dreams, feelings, emotions, ideas, feeling-of-oneness-with-the-universe… you name it. We (humans) have always been wonderstruck by these and have sought explanations. We started off imagining a “mind” that did all the thinking and somehow communicated with the body. That did not explain much but atleast we got started. And then as we started cutting open people and studying what they were made of, we started making sense of a lot of things. Physical phenomena were no longer mysterious. They were still wonderful but no longer mysterious. The same started happening with the mental phenomena. We injected radioactive substances into the bloodstream and studied the flow of blood in people’s brains during different mental activities. We slowly started mapping the brain and realizing that most of what we had attributed to the “mind” was a result of what was happening in the brain. We did not just assume that. We made hypotheses to explain observations and data obtained by studying activity in the brain objectively. We derived predictions from these hypotheses and eliminated hypotheses which did not make correct predictions. We kept the ones that did and improved upon them as we started learning more about the brain. And throughout this process, the role of the non-physical non-detectable mind (which was postulated for want of a better explanation) kept diminishing. Now we stand at a point where only super-mysteries like consciousness are attributed to the “mind”. And since we know that we have only scratched the surface with our studies of the brain, we know that the brain has potential to explain all that and more. In fact the philosophers and the neurobiologists are doing a wonderful job in providing convincing explanations to these “mysteries”.

Ask me if I “believe in the existence of a non-physical mind” and my answer would be “No”. And that is not because science has “disproved the existence of a non-physical mind” but since we have “explained- away” the non-physical mind. Wait. We haven’t yet “explained it away”. But I have enough reasons to believe that it would soon be.

(end of digression, should I say?)

I suppose the parallel is more than obvious. When we knew next to nothing about the water cycle, God was an excellent explanation for floods and droughts. Now we know far too much to make him responsible for any of that. Much like how the non-physical mind has been reserved for the absolutely mysterious (unexplained, not known to be unexplainable) none use God as an explanation for any phenomenon on this side of Big Bang today. Except for selfish reasons ofcourse ^[1].

As far as being technically right by calling oneself an agnostic goes… what exactly are you trying to say? Is your point that the existence of God cannot be disproved? Do you believe in the tooth fairy? Do you believe that Santa Claus exists? Do you believe in the flying spaghetti monster? What about the invisible pink unicorn? Or the teapot in orbit? ^[3][4]

Am sorry, I’d rather be technically incorrect and answer in the negative.

References:

1. http://masoia.blogspot.com/2007/08/god-of-small-things.html

2. http://masoia.blogspot.com/2007/07/down-rabbit-hole.html

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability

4. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/113

Disturbed

This happened before the coffee shop painted itself red for Christmas. And before it replaced its brown cups with more festive looking ones that said “Pass the Cheer”.

The day had been rather uneventful. With the semester coming to an end, projects that would be started and finished on the day they were due were commonplace. It was one of those days. And I was punching keys on my computer over my Grande coffee.

I was sitting beside the large window at the far corner. The chair pretty much faced the wall. Outside, wind was blowing heavily and the campus was deserted. I was buried deep in the program that I was writing when I heard some people settle down at a table behind me.

Have you noticed how they say ‘The way I see it’ here. It was the voice of a professor. Or a PhD student I thought. Student of literature or some such thing. I don’t know. What I did know was that he was referring to what was written on the coffee cup. The coffee shop prints some words-of-wisdom of random people under the heading ‘The way I see it’.

Why do people have to play it so safe? Why can’t they just rather say ‘The way it IS?’ He didn’t sound irritated. But he wasn’t exactly at ease either.

Well… probably because they are just not sure that that’s the way it is. All that they know is that that’s the way they see it.

This had to be the professor’s grad student. Student of psychology… maybe?

The man was almost furious now. See? You are doing it too. Why should you say ‘probably’ when that’s what you believe?

Same reason Sir. I’m just not sure. And so I don’t believe it either. I’m just guessing.

Oh come on… you know it as well as I do. We can never be sure of anything. Everything’s a theory. Some just don’t look like it.

I have developed this new way of writing programs. It is called save-the-worst-for-the-last. It works well for me. I spend ninety percent of the time cornering the most difficult part of the program and then I go for the throat. I was in the first ninety percent when this was happening.

How is your thesis on risk coming along?

A third voice? Probably a different pair. This was a student certainly. And he was talking to one too. It is shaping up well. This had to be a PhD student.

It is shaping up quite well actually. I’m using some ideas from the course on Chaos and Randomness. Actually, I think I can explain it to you even if I cut out the math.

This is going to be interesting, I thought. Particularly now that I just had 4 hours left for the deadline to expire and I was nowhere close to completion.

The furious prof was saying…. You know how Feynman once said that we are only sure when we are wrong. Otherwise the most we can say is that we haven’t yet been proven wrong and have no idea if we would ever be.

Yes. But you are missing the point here. I think it is perfectly alright to say that you see something in a certain way. Like it does on the cup here. After all, generally a thing is far more complex than what is seen from different perspectives. And it only helps to know what someone else sees in something.

I was thinking of all my computer science friends to whom this would sound so abstract that they would run away.

Indeed, the prof said. But all this soft talk gives kids the impression that things are all amorphous. That nothing can be said about anything and that somehow making statements which are NOT clear enough is a sign of intellectual maturity.

In the meantime, I missed a part of the explanation of the thesis on Risk.

...the thing is, the student was saying, that it often happens that someone makes a decision that is not the one most likely to succeed. And by sheer chance he happens to succeed. This draws more attention than it ought to and the hasty lot concludes that that was the right thing to do. The symmetric case also is true. By sheer chance, a choice that was most likely to be right proves to be wrong and the same lot quickly concludes that it pays to be wrong.

But that’s not completely nonsensical, is it?

No. The trouble is with criticizing choices in retrospect. We just miss the point that the choice that proved to be wrong could indeed have been the most promising at the time that it was made. Chance is not something that humans have evolved to understand. And that is reason that we miss this point…

The other conversation had begun to smell more of consensus while I wasn’t paying attention. It had also broken free of the cup and leapt into the arena of philosophy of science.

… it is non-falsifiable theories that people are most comfortable with. Because, by definition, they do not have the fear of being proven wrong. Isn’t it ironic that the falsifiable theories, which are more than anything else, likely to model reality correctly, are also the ones that people trust the least?

I heard some shuffling of feet and soon came more voices. One of which said…You know what he says about ownership in The English Patient?

A student? A professor? Philosophy major? I wasn’t getting any better at guessing. But it was looking like I would finish my project on time after all.

Well… he says that he hates ownership the most but later he claims her…

“Sir”, someone called. A woman was standing before me. “We’d love to let you continue your work Sir. But we have to close early today.” “Oh. OK. But why is that?” “It looks like there’s going to be a storm tonight Sir. Also, you see, we have only had you this evening.”

God of small things

When in college, God popped up somehow in a conversation that I wasn’t paying much attention to and a friend of mine said to me, “It’s the kind of thing you like, the question of whether God exists”. She probably knew of the seemingly weird articles that I wrote for an email group then where asking the most important questions was the surest way to becoming uncool. But far from being the kind of thing that I was interested in, I hadn’t once considered spending time on God because my worldview (which I now know is called “naturalistic”) was nice and clean without one.

Lately though, I’ve been watching videos by freethinkers and have begun to notice how many believers I’m surrounded by. They come in all shapes, sizes and colours. I’ve talked with some of them. Some quite moderate. Others not quite so. And I noticed something remarkable. They strive to find a place for their God. They just need some place to put him. If you tell them about evolution, they will tell you that God set it all up. If you tell them about the Big Bang, they will tell you that God sparked it. Some put him in the skies, others in other dimensions beyond our reach, yet others in sub atomic particles which haven’t yet been probed, sometimes they make him the source of strange cosmic waves which are for some reason interested in your life, sometimes they put him in you, sometimes he’s out of space and time completely and sometimes (beat this) above all reason.

Ask me and I’d say this is quite an interesting phenomenon. Why would an otherwise-sane person of normal intelligence (in some cases, super normal) go to such lengths to protect her God? Why would an otherwise intellectually-honest person pretend to not see the unreasonableness? What is in it for them? Why screw their own brain? Why throw away one’s common sense? I think I know the answer.

In Richard Bach’s Illusion, when the Messiah is asked “Do you live in this world at all?” He says something that amounts to “No. Do you? All of us live in different worlds. You think you live in the same world as your tennis crazy neighbour? The Wimbledon started this week and you didn’t even hear about it. You think you live in his world? You think you live in my world?” You could say that Bach was playing with different connotations of the word world. The truth however, is that we don’t live in this Universe. Don’t get me wrong. We don’t live on a rock that revolves around a ball of burning gas. We live in cities or towns or villages where the sun rises in the morning and sets at night. We are not made up of atoms and molecules. We are made of skin and bone and muscles and sometimes you break a bone or tear a ligament. The laws of physics don’t determine anything. The professors at college decide the questions for the test. Your dad decides if your pocket money needs a raise and your boss decides what you work on. The laws of physics are not even important. Rarely do you throw a ball up. If you throw it harder it reaches higher. And whether you like it or not it falls back and not always as expected. We live in, what some people like to call, the Middle World. Neither the big world with balls of burning gas we call stars, nor the small world where electrons flirt with nuclei. We live, in the Middle World.

So much for the middle-ness in size. There’s a middle-ness in time too. You do not live in a world that’s been around for 4.5 billion years. You don’t live in a Universe that might collapse in or burst out. Your Universe started when you were born. And will end the day you die. If when you die, man has unanswered questions, they will remain unanswered for ever in your world. If you die in a battle, the battle never ended for you. There never was peace re-established. If you died before Christ, he was never in your world. If you died without hearing about a beautiful beach on the west coast of Africa, there was never such a thing.

Inasmuch as they would like to pretend otherwise, the God that the believers strive to find a place for is not a God of the gaps, it is not a God of ignorance, it is not a God who created the universe, it is not a God who planted life on earth, it is not even the God in the scriptures. It is the God who runs the Middle World.

Probably we will one day find out how energy can pop out of nowhere and create a universe. Probably we will shatter electrons till they give up. Probably String theory would be falsified. Probably not. Probably we will figure out a way to duplicate the brain. Probably the materialists were right all along. Probably not.

But matters in the Middle World are quite different. Not everything in the Middle World makes sense. And there is little reason to be optimistic about what we would do here. You run into old friends on the streets. Some meetings change your life. Some blunders shatter it. Little decisions estrange your loved ones. A bad job sometimes is the best thing that happens to you. You break your leg on the way to an interview. Your archrival gets the job. You end up in a better job and she goes bankrupt. Chaos rules. Things make sense in hindsight but while looking into the future, there’s just one thing you are sure of – that it is going to be nothing like you imagined – almost certainly.

It is an extremely attractive proposition to have someone run the Middle World. Especially if this person who runs it loves you no matter what. Sometimes the course of your life seems to depend on what you do. But largely, he makes sure it goes like it ought to. Things might not look very promising at times but of course, he runs the place. You’ve got the boss on your side. So chill.

Discussions about God generally involve things like the beginning of the Earth and the beginning of life. The truth however, is that I’m yet to meet a believer who can honestly say “I thought and thought about the beginning of the universe and I found God to be a satisfactory explanation.” Or “I didn’t believe the scriptures first but after lot of reasoning, I concluded they were right”. What is more likely is that you would hear something like “You know I wasn’t sure at first, but then last summer I really really wished that this would happen and it DID” or “Praying gives me peace of mind”. It is not the beginning of the world or the evolution of the eye that makes people believe in God. It is the chaos of the Middle World.

Whoever thinks that science will one day get rid of God simply doesn’t know his utility. We might figure it all out but we would still need someone to run our Middle world. Someone to salute before you start your car because you don’t know what could be around the corner. Science might bring the big God down. The one who sparked the big bang and planted life of earth. But the God of small things, the master of the Middle World will remain invincible.

Out of Range

Dear Sir,

I can imagine the look on your face. In fact I can almost see you walking towards your door reading this while holding something else that might have arrived in the mail. Like your utility bill or something from the tax people or your telephone people or the internet and television guys. It must have been a while since you saw your name written by hand. And I don’t think you recognise my handwriting. As long as I stayed there with you, all the writing that I’ve done had been by punching keys on your computer. I haven’t punched any keys since then.

I don’t know if you expect me to apologize for the manner in which I left. I do not feel sorry. I know that you have missed me. But I still don’t feel sorry. You must have been shocked the day I left, by what you saw when you got back in the evening. You must have dropped down and cried. I used to try not to think of all that. But now… it makes no difference.

I’m not writing this to tell you why I left. Both of us know it well. I’m writing this to tell you what happened of me. To show you what a man can will to do. What a man can afford to live without.

This place I live in is quite far from the nearest town. I don’t quite remember how far it is. I’ve been there only once. I built this house all by myself. Remember how I always wanted to do that? It isn’t quite complete. I think I can fix it before winter. It is in the midst of some fields. I don’t grow anything here now. I don’t intend to. They tell me that sunflowers would fetch nice money. That’s partly the reason why I don’t intend to.

I’m sure you remember the days when you taught me to use the computer. I’m sure you remember how good I was at it. And I’m sure you remember how I got hooked to the internet. I sometimes have trouble believing that was me. I had to check my mail before my morning cup of tea. I would rather blog than talk to you. I would rather ramble through the internet than take a refreshing nap. I wasn’t me.

And Sir, you told me that it was the birth of a new level of consciousness. You told me that the internet was the earth becoming self aware. You likened me to a neuron in my brain. You said that it was not the neurons themselves but their collective behaviour that made them conscious. You said that the internet had to happen sooner or later. You said that if not for computers there would have been something else. You said that man would sync with man in ways unfathomable to one human brain. You said that people would stop thinking for themselves. You said that collective behaviour was an emergent phenomenon. You said that rise in complexity was at the heart of evolution. You said that we all would become one. One mind under one world government living one life. And I know you believed that. I’m afraid you were right. I realised it too. I would still not have left if it was not for the RFID.

I need to finish writing this before it gets too dark. That’s because I don’t have electricity here. No telephones, no computers and internet and no mail boxes. I don’t get utility bills. I don’t have a house number. That’s because there are no houses here. The fields are all mine. I have no papers to prove it. But they are all mine.

I wonder what you thought of me when you came home that evening. It was my fault. When you told me about the RFID, I thought it would be a nice thing. You said that they would embed this small electronic device in my arm and I would not have to carry any identification documents any where. I could pass through security at the airport without flashing my passport. I could get on buses without flashing my season pass. It all looked so nice. I should have asked you. I should have asked you if they could find out where I was with that thing. No. YOU should have told me. You should have told me that if I decided to drive off to the park one day, their computers would sense the anomaly. You should have told me that I could be tracked by their computers. You should have told me that their computers would know what was normal for me to do and what wasn’t. You did not. You said it was necessary. You said it was for my own good. You said that everyone needed it for their own good. You chose it for yourself. But I care about my freedom. I wouldn’t have chosen it for me. If it wasn’t YOU giving me the half truth.

I know. You probably think that it was stupid of me to have ripped off my left arm that day. I wonder what crossed your mind when you first saw it lying on the floor. I wanted to leave a note. Then I decided it wasn’t necessary. I could have pryed the little thing out of my arm with a knife. But I didn’t know where exactly it was. They did not tell me where they put it. They did not even leave a scar. I don’t care anymore. I had to lose my arm to get rid of the goddamned thing. Atleast, I have something you don’t. Freedom.

In case you are wondering, I run a small place here. I haven’t named it yet. I thought of naming it Out of Range. But it was all too obvious. This thing is attached to my house. I sell some home made food. But that’s not what they come for here. They do not drive all the way for the home made food. They all come to get out of range. They get something here that expensive restaurants deprive them of. There is no wi-fi here. They cannot check their mails. No mobile network covers this place. They do not get alerts on their blackberries. They cannot charge their iphones here. And they all look relieved. Young couples come with their kids. When it gets dark they try to find the constellations. Some kids play with the candles. Others come with friends. They talk for long hours. I don’t charge them for that. Sometimes we play games. But mostly we are happy just being there. Old men love it. They hate the food. But they come back for it.

No one has ever asked me about my arm yet. Some people smile knowingly. I don’t know how many of the people who come here have those things in their arms. I don’t know if they are being surveyed from the skies. This is as far as I can get. This is as much as I can hide. I don’t know how long this will go. I don’t know for how long I can stay unplugged. One day this place might no longer be out of range. One day they might put that thing back in me. Until then, I’d live my free life. I’d be all human.

Take care.

Down the rabbit-hole

The notepad that you use on your computer to edit stuff is a good example of an editor. It is a program that allows you to write things on the computer. The letters that you type out are reflected on the computer screen and then saved as a file. An editor is a computer program like any other - a sequence of instructions written by a human programmer specifying what has to be done when the keys are pressed and how things have to be displayed and saved and the like. The point is that it is a computer program. What you see on the screen is what the program does. Programs, which I described as being sequences of instructions to the computer, are written by human programmers using editors. (So notepad was written using an editor)

I was on the way back after losing a racquetball match (least unusual) and walking beside the lake towards our lab. I do not know for certain if it were the ducks or the breeze that caused me to ask that particularly inappropriate question. How did they write the first editor program? I was in a light mood, you can see. Well… by pencil on paper I’d say, said my friend who’d won the match. And? How did it get on to the computer? I could hardly help asking. They must have scanned and OCRed it ofcourse he said. Being in an equally light mood helped. That was a wonderful answer. An OCR or an optical character recognizer is a horrendously complex program that recognizes written characters and makes it understandable to the computer. Wait a minute, I said. But how did they write the OCR program? Suppressing a laugh, he said, You shouldn’t ask such questions.

Thankfully, we were both kidding and it all ended in a hearty laugh. The specifics of the programs that came before notepad happened were not really important. It also didn’t matter that we did not know the real answer. What ever that might have been, it had to be something simpler than the OCR. Infact, punch cards were programmed by punching holes on cards. And you didn’t need already punched cards to do that. And there were a hundred other ways to input characters and record them. It didn’t really matter.

I went on a walk later that evening near the other side of the lake. Quite unusually, I saw a white rabbit with pink eyes. There was some weird deliberation in its ways. There was something about it that made me follow it. It might have sensed it. It ran soon towards the hole. I persisted. Surprisingly enough, the hole was quite big for the rabbit. Infact, big enough for me. And that was how I ended up in the rabbit hole.

I was only momentarily in the dark. Before I knew it, I was falling into what I thought was a bottomless pit before my bottom hit the bottom of the pit. I miraculously survived. Probably to meet a man who was at this coffee table. Before my lips could part, he said with a gentle smile- I’ve been waiting for you. I embarrassingly got up brushing off some hay that I had fallen on.

Without saying a word, he pushed a thick book towards me. It all was rather spooky and I didn’t think this was a place where you asked questions. He looked at me, and then at the book, as if asking me to read it. I opened it. It looked like a normal book. Except that for a book of its size, it started rather abruptly. In the beginning, the OCR was used to write the editor, I read softly, as if proving to him that I indeed was interested. I looked up. And he motioned me to carry on. Rabbit-hole or not, I don’t continue when I don’t understand. I said, it doesn’t make sense. Why not? he asked, not bothered in the least. I wanted to say isn’t it obvious, you moron.

Rather I said An OCR, is a program too, right? He agreed. How did they write it without an editor then? I asked, without sounding arrogant.

He sighed as if saying not another moron. He started: You see, a program is only made of 1s and 0s. I nodded. An OCR is a special sequence of 1s and zeros. It was there in the RAM (that’s computer’s memory, for the uninitiated) all the time.

But, I interrupted, how could it have got there in the first place?

He continued, not bothered at all, You see, it HAD to be there and it was. This book doesn’t talk of when it was not there. Obviously, it was always there.

It was my turn to explain now. Dear friend, you see computers did not always have keyboards. They did not always look like they do now and they did not always need an editor to program.

He jumped at the last line - You see you said it yourself. They did not always need an editor to program. So they would have written an OCR without an editor.

I counted to 10 and then started. An OCR, my friend is a program that is a thousand times more complicated than an editor. It is more likely that they would use an editor to write an OCR program rather than use an OCR to scan in an editor program. Infact, we have no OCRs good enough for the job now.

He jumped at the last line again. There, my friend, that is where you are missing the point. If there were not OCRs, how did they write the first editor program? Moreover, this book says it.

I wasn’t sure what he was made of. I thought he was a moron then. But I wasn’t expecting to lose an argument to a moron. I did lose though.

I started afresh: Computers did not always look like this. These things with keyboards and all are pretty recent.

He interrupted, You are wrong again my friend, this book says that the first computer was an Apple Machintosh and it came with an editor and more.

But Sir, I said almost dramatically, I know for a fact that that’s untrue. We have pictures and books about older computers. Infact we still have many around, though people don’t use them anymore.

And have you seen any of them?

Well sir, I’m afraid I haven’t. But Sir, it certainly could not have been the OCR…

He interrupted. Tell me, aren’t computers prone to stray magnetic noise?

Yes Sir. If they are of sufficiently high intensity, they can even flip some bits.

Exactly, my friend. So you see, it is not impossible for the OCR program to have existed in the RAM.

And how is that Sir?

Some magnetic noise might have switched the bits in the RAM exactly to create an OCR program.

But Sir, that’s extremely unlikely. In fact Sir, that is almost impossible.

I like that word son, he said, triumphantly. The word “almost” I mean. That means that you cannot say for sure that that did not happen, right?

No Sir, I cannot.

So it is perfectly plausible that the OCR program was created without using an editor. And that an OCR was indeed used to write the first editor, as this book says?

Yes Sir, it is not impossible.

And you have personally not seen any of these old computers without keyboards, have you?

No Sir, I haven’t.

I don’t know if it was triumph I saw or relief in his eyes as he left with his book.

I walked back to where I’d fallen and looked up the hole. This place was too far below. And I missed the lake and the ducks and the breeze.

Some holiday

Blame this on the statistical machine translation project. Or on me, if you like. Depending on how much you like to treat man as being an instrument of the world. Pardon the mood. Blame it on the book I’ve been reading – Sophie’s World. Or on me, if you like, like I said before.

Correlations are what I’ve been pondering about for a few days now. Unlike a lot of boring mathematics, this is easy to understand. Guess it is best summed up by the story of the old woman who thought that the sun rose because her hen cried. She is not to blame. (At least not more than ultra modern women who play lines like ‘He is a typical Piscean’ and ‘That’s not surprising. She’s cancerean’). Not many steer clear of the correlation-causation fallacy. If two things consistently happen together, you conclude that the one that precedes causes the one that follows. Sounds logical. Evolutionary psychologists would say that it is not you but mindless evolution that is to blame for the fallacy. We’ll come to that, probably.

This is not so much about the correlation-causation fallacy as it is about spurious correlations. In situations where guessing is all that is possible, it might not be a sin, after all, to conclude causation from correlation. (As, is the case in our project, the details of which I decided the reader deserves not to be subjected to).

Events which indeed are related would appear to be correlated. Not surprisingly. But when only finite number of observations are made, there is a good chance of observing correlations among unrelated variables (Can’t help quoting the ‘Typical of a Piscean’ line). In fact, you are more likely than not to make such an observation. The chance of making such observations only reduces as you make more and more observations. Inasmuch as I would like to avoid words of wisdom, Truth prevails over time and spurious correlations die out and only the true ones remain when a large number of observations are made. The trouble, however, is that you might need to make a conclusion even when you have not made enough observations (seen enough of life) and like I said, a couple of spurious correlations will make their way into your system.

Now, spurious correlations would certainly explain some odd coincidences that occurred recently. And if they don’t suffice, we’ll call upon the the-idol-was-in-the-stone argument. The latter, if you are not familiar concerns the sculptor who, upon being asked about his creation said that all he did was to merely expose the idol in the stone. How would you counter that? You can see anything you want in a stone. Well… almost anything. Like in your observations.

Well….well… for starters, I was reading the chapter on Karl Marx and the exploitation of the proletariat while my Grandmom was telling me about a small family here. The woman works part-time in a teashop for Rs. 50 (a dollar and a quarter) a day and the man chops firewood for a living. I must have got to the proletariat revolution part when she said that we’d have to sell off some of our land because we weren’t using it and the government wanted them to be owned by people who could grow something there.

I wasn’t paying much attention to what the neighbour was telling my Grandmom. I was reading about this dangerous idea of Darwin. Simple, small but consistent processes over time can create a world so wonderful that man had to create God to explain it. (Time and pressure, that’s all it takes - Andy, Shawshank Redemption) Thanks to the cocktail-party effect, it was when I was reading about the uniqueness of individuals and ‘random errors’ in cell division (something central to Darwin’s idea) that I paid attention to the discussion going on in the background. It was her two kids that she was talking about. One of the boys studied really well and was on his way to win some kind of a scholarship and the other one had trouble retaining what was taught to him.

After a good dose of Darwin and genes and genealogies I decided I needed a walk. It was really hot and so I wore a mundu (a variant of dhoti, not worn like one though). When I asked my Grandmom if I was wearing it the right way, she said ‘Oh….just like your grandfather used to’.

The next chapter was on Freud. Natural instincts suppressed and locked up in the basement to conform to unwritten rules, the constant tension between desire and guilt…. I could not agree more. Buses here are pretty fast and certainly not the best place to read a thing. But I discovered that a particular position of the bag on my lap and my elbow on my bag absorbed enough shock to limit the vibrations of the book just enough to let me read. The window helped. I could look out. I saw two nuns standing by the road.

I was glad Gaarder shared my views about new age worthless philosophy that I’ve come so much to abhor… not least because of the pseudo-scientific theories I’ve seen people on orkut proposing. And the examples of nonsense books that he provides… are perfect: Life After Death? The Secrets of Spiritism, Tarot, The UFO Phenomenon, Healing, The Return of Gods, You have been here before, What is Astrology? That was almost exactly when my uncle showed me a photo album. They were photos taken during a jathakam kodukkal ceremony. That’s the ritual performed where a book (traditionally a bunch of dry leafs with markings) which predicts all major events in one’s life exchanges hands. And if you lived in this part of the world, you better make sure these things are done like they ought to be done. You never know what the gods might resort to if they are displeased. Gaarder drives the nail home with one line while talking about the list of books he mentions and the kinds of ideas they represent: “The difference between real philosophy and these books is more or less the same as the difference between real love and pornography.”`

Room for cream

The queue is unusually long. Generally there are not more than 5 people. And now there are more than 8. I am never here at this time. It is nearly 9:00.

Meantime, just a few thousand kilometres away, on a nondescript street in the suburbs of an otherwise buzzing city, Shivanna expertly manoeuvres his bicycle around the stones piled up by boys who had to quit their game of cricket last night because the neighbourhood doctor made a fuss again. Leaning on the compound wall, Shivanna called out ‘Aallu…’ as the little boy came out to the gate running as usual clutching 15 rupees and wearing his navy blue school uniform trousers and a clean white vest.

There was probably one less person at the counter because the queue was moving rather slowly.

Not very far from Shivanna’s street, Mr Pandey settled down with the morning newspaper and a cup of coffee that he had managed to fix for himself. The milk had boiled over as he had gone to answer the telephone call. It wouldn’t have been as bad if it hadn’t been a wrong number. And if Sivaram hadn’t been at the door soon after to borrow the spark plug cleaner again. Why didn’t he just buy another scooter if his failed to start every morning? Or a modest spark plug cleaner at least. He could’ve used more milk in his coffee.

Who ever had designed this place was a fox. He placed the pastry showcase along the length of the queue. I’m not hungry. I just need some coffee. Let’s see… 3 more people between me and the counter.

A little more than 8 hrs by train from Mr Pandey’s city, Bijumon ran barefoot on the tarred road. He wouldn’t dare try that at mid day. Madhavettan flashed a broad smile and he returned a grin. Biju wouldn’t stop today to chat with his son like he had done the previous day. The milk van had come and collected all the milk before he could reach. Today, he didn’t have to try hard to read the board that hung near the closed milk booth. ‘Thozhilaali samaram’ – one of the few things he could read - ‘Worker’s strike’. As he headed back home, he suddenly realized that he didn’t have to have his regular glass of milk. He ran up to Madhavettan’s house to chat with his buddy.

Can I help who's next? The cute one asked.
Yes. Could I have a tall coffee?
Do you need some room for cream?
Yes please.

I don't hate no double negation

I didn’t get no sleep last night. And I haven’t got no time today. My head ain’t no good for work now. And I haven’t got nothing useful to do until my class which ain’t starting not in another 2 hours. The talk I tried listening to now was not dislikable for the rest but for someone who needs as much sleep as I do it wasn’t no likeable. So out of the blue I think not from nowhere dawned upon me this idea of sitting in this coffee shop and writing about double negations. And it ain’t no bad idea coz the caffeine, the hazelnut, the people, the music and Microsoft’s colourful wrigglys are keeping me from not sleeping. Some are red and the one’s that aren’t no red are green. And I don’t see no blue ones. I checked up wiki on the use of ain’t. And wiki said it ain’t no good. But for something on double negations, I don’t think there’s nothing as good as ain’t. For if it ain’t for ain’t double negations would not be no good.

It isn’t the least disinteresting how with all the false statements you still don’t find it impossible to read. There must be some sentences here that aren’t no syntactically wrong and even lesser that aren’t plain nonsense. But a bag of nonsense can make so much sense. A bag of nonsense can assert that a bag of nonsense is no nonsense. Guess I don’t hate no double negation. Not never.