I do

Much obliged, Plum

2012-02-13T03:32:00.000-08:00

“[He] saw that a peculiar expression had come into his nephew's face; an expression a little like that of a young hindu fakir who having settled himself on his first bed of spikes is beginning to wish that he had chosen one of the easier religions.”

- P.G. Wodehouse

The first thing that comes to my mind when someone mentions Valentine's Day is that P.G.Wodehouse died on this day in 1975.He is widely considered to be the greatest comic writer of the twentieth century. I have no trouble agreeing with that. Consider this sentence from 'Carry On, Jeeves':

“I'm not absolutely certain of the facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare who says that it's always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping.”

Or this in 'Joy in the Morning':

I don’t say I’ve got much of a soul, but, such as it is, I’m perfectly satisfied with the little chap. I don’t want people fooling about with it. ‘Leave it alone,’ I say. ‘Don’t touch it. I like it the way it is.’

As Stephen Fry says:

If you are immune to such writing, you are fit, to use one of Wodehouse's favourite Shakespearean quotations, only for treasons, stratagems and spoils. You don't analyse such sunlit perfection, you just bask in its warmth and splendour. Like Jeeves, Wodehouse stands alone, and analysis is useless.

You don't read Wodehouse for the plot which, in many cases for example, would consist of goofy, upper class gents getting into an improbable mess from which they would be extricated by a Spinoza-reading 'gentleman's gentleman'. In the hands of other authors, this would soon become boring. But Wodehouse plays with the words in such a way that age neither withers nor custom stales the hilarity of his descriptions. And those names! How did he think up names like Gerald Anstruther Vail. George Cyril Wellbeloved. Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe (of Matchingham Hall in Much Matcingham no less), Major Wilfred "Plug" Basham, Pongo Twistleton, Dame Daphne Winkworth...

It is said that it is best to avoid reading Wodehouse in a public place because you are liable to sudden bursts of laughter which might make people think that you are off your rocker. I have this problem even at home. I will be lying quietly on the bed staring at the ceiling when I will start cackling like a demented kookaburra on thinking of some absurd situation in some Wodehouse novel and folks at home will think I have lost it. I am a fan of anything by Wodehouse like 'the male codfish, which, suddenly finding itself the parent of three million five hundred thousand little codfish, cheerfully resolves to love them all'. As Lynne Truss says:

“You should read Wodehouse when you’re well, and when you’re poorly; when you’re travelling, and when you’re not; when you’re feeling clever, and when you’re feeling utterly dim. Wodehouse always lifts your spirits, no matter how high they happen to be already.”

Wodehouse has put me in some ticklish situations. I couldn't resist quoting a passage from this article (I remember reading this conversation but I can't recall which book it was in):

At the start of his book, McCrum can't resist quoting a passage that once again shows how beautifully Wodehouse can puncture sententious and over-serious opinions. I can't resist it either. It goes like this. " 'I wonder if I might draw your attention to an observation of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius? He said: "Does anything befall you? It is good. It is part of the destiny of the Universe ordained for you from the beginning. All that befalls you is part of the great web."'
I breathed a bit stertorously. 'He said that, did he?'
'Yes, sir.
'Well, you can tell him from me he's an ass."

Predictions

2012-02-03T22:33:00.000-08:00

It's hard to make predictions, especially about the future", said Yogi Berra (or Neils Bohr or Mark Twain depending on the source). Ask the experts. Learning from the Heart is a book written by Daniel Gottlieb who suffered a spinal cord injury that left him quadriplegic at the age of thirty-three. He writes:

"People look at me and imagine themselves in my position and feel fear. I certainly did that when I was younger. Because of my disability, I have already experienced what most people will as they age. I consider myself very lucky as I listen to my middle-aged fellow humans worry about their losses. All the stuff they fret about now, I already have endured, so I don't have to be concerned. That frees my mind up to worry about all sorts of other things!"

He was right when he said that you can't predict your future very well. If someone had told me before my stroke that I will be a quadriplegic , will not be able to speak, but will not go mad, will read a lot of astronomy and evolution and find them interesting, become more rational, I would have said they were nuts. But that is precisely what has happened.

Of course, I would first have felt a stab of fear at the thought of being locked-in. I would never have thought that instead of keeping on lamenting, I would have preferred to live in the moment. Jaya also never imagined that she would have been able to deal successfully with all the challenges since my stroke. Many people who have known her since childhood have been surprised by her resilience. In Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert says:

Able-bodied people are willing to pay far more to avoid becoming disabled than disabled people are willing to pay to become able-bodied again because able-bodied people under-estimate how happy disabled people are. As one group of researchers noted, “chronically ill and disabled patients generally rate the value of their lives in a given health state more highly than do hypothetical patients [who are] imagining themselves to be in such states.” Indeed, healthy people imagine that eighty-three states of illness would be “worse than death,” and yet, people who are actually in those states rarely taken their own lives.

How we interpret ambiguous stimuli depend on factors like context, frequency, recency, etc. The biggest sources of exploitable ambiguities are the varied experiences in life. As soon as an imagined experience becomes an actual experience, the brain looks for ways to interpret it in a way that allows us to appreciate it. As Gilbert says:

Consumers evaluate kitchen appliances positively after they buy them, job seekers evaluate jobs more positively after they accept them, and high school students evaluate colleges more positively after they get into them. Racetrack gamblers evaluate their horses more positively when they are leaving the betting window than when they are approaching it, and voters evaluate their candidates more positively when they are exiting the voting booth than when they are entering it. A toaster, a firm, a university, a horse, and a senator are all just fine and dandy, but when they become our toaster, firm, university, horse, and senator they are instantly finer and dandier.

Although our brains are very good at putting a positive spin on things, it doesn't mean that we have a Panglossian view of every experiences. Rather, we have a psychological immune system that defends our minds against unhappiness, functioning in a similar way to the physical immune system.

... when we face the pain of rejection, loss, misfortune, and failure, the psychological immune system must not defend us too well (“I’m perfect and everyone is against me”) and must not fail to defend us well enough (“I’m a loser and I ought to be dead”). A healthy psychological immune system strikes a balance that allows us to feel good enough to cope with our situation but bad enough to do something about it (“Yeah, that was a lousy performance and I feel crummy about it, but I’ve got confidence to give it a second shot”). We need to be defended – not defenceless or defensive - and thus our minds naturally look for the best view of things while simultaneously insisting that those views stick reasonably closely to the facts.

When we are stuck with an experience and cannot change it, we begin to change our views of the experience. In Gilbert's words - "We just can't make the best of a fate until it is inescapably, inevitably, and irrevocably ours." There is more but for that you will have to read the book. Edge once asked many public personalities to give their favourite equation and Gilbert gave this equation for why it is so hard to predict how we will feel in the future.

PS: In his blog, Gilbert gives a psychologist's take on The Vagaries of Religious Experience.

Happy Wedding Anniversary to us!

2012-01-27T06:03:00.000-08:00

Yesterday (26th Jan) Jaya and I completed going around the sun together 10000 times.

'Hubble moments' and their consequences

2012-01-23T22:09:00.000-08:00

My feelings on negotiating various 'Hubble moments' that I had mentioned in my previous post are captured in a couple of passages in The Age of Wonder. The first is a description of how Keats combined science and poetry in an exciting way:

Keats likens his own discovery of Homer’s poetry to the experience of the great astronomer and the great explorer finding new worlds.

....Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like Stout Cortez when with wond’ring eyes
He stared at the Pacfic – and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise –
Silent upon a peak in Darien.

Both comparisons turn on moments of physical vision – watching, staring, looking with ‘wondering eyes’. (This was the original manuscript reading, although Keats later changed it to the more conventional ‘eagle eyes’.) Physical vision – one might say scientific vision – brings about a metaphysical shift in the observer’s view of reality as a whole. The geography of the earth, or the structure of the solar system, are in an instant utterly changed, and forever. The explorer, the scientific observer , the literary reader, experience the sublime: a moment of revelation into the idea of the unbounded, the infinite.

The second is poet Thomas Campbell's impressions on meeting the astronomer William Herschel:

Campbell recalled that he felt he had been ‘conversing with a super natural intelligence.’ Finally, Herschel completely perplexed the poet by remarking that many distant stars had probably ‘ceased to exist ‘ millions of years ago, and that looking up into the night sky we were seeing a stellar landscape that was not really there at all. The sky was full of ghosts. 'The light did travel after the body was gone.’ After leaving Herschel, Campbell walked onto the shingle of Brighton beach, gazing out to sea, feeling ‘elevated and overcome.’ He was reminded of Newton’s observation that he was just a child picking up shells on the seashore, while the great ocean of truth lay all before him.

I saw a quote by Steven Weinberg that I liked in this nice post - 'The effort to understand the universe is one of the few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy'. I fall into the following category of people mentioned by Jonathan Rée in Varieties of irreligious experience:

The most important force pushing people away from religion has always, I suspect, been what you might call the problem of scale. The Copernican revolution in astronomy – the celebrated transition from “closed world” to “infinite universe”, and the demotion of the earth from a commanding position at the centre of the cosmos to a supporting role circling one of the less distinguished of millions of stars – dealt a prodigious blow to human self-esteem. But even without the benefit of modern cosmology, our earliest ancestors must have been able to sense the paltriness of their hopes and fears compared with the colossal indifference of everything else. Most of us, in the course of growing up, will have been transfixed by the thought that we ourselves, together with parents and all the other figures who stride like giants through our lives, are of very little interest to the rest of the human race, and of no consequence at all to the ambient natural world. I remember, as a devout schoolboy, being halted in mid-prayer by the thought of my minuteness: God in his greatness was not going to spare a thought for little me or anyone I knew, and was probably bored to tears by the whole human fandangle.

Analysing God's utility function, Richard Dawkins says in River Out Of Eden:

In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. As that unhappy poet A.E. Housman put it:

For Nature, heartless, witless Nature
Will neither care nor know.

It may be argued that it would have been helpful to have some belief in the sense that I would have had someone to blame. But now fulminating about the capriciousness of an invisible omniscient entity seems infantile. 'Stuff happens', as Donald Rumsfeld would have said. Richard Feynman explain things nicely.

The Annotated Origin

2012-01-17T21:34:00.000-08:00

Lives of great men all remind us

We can make our lives sublime,

And, departing, leave behind us

Footprints on the sands of time;

-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Probably no one left bigger footprints than Darwin especially when you consider the explanatory power of an idea. In this convocation address at Case Western Reserve, David Quammen says that 'On The Origin of Species' is a book that 'every educated person should read'. I now tend to agree with this. By this criterion I was almost 40 before I could call myself educated when I heard am audiobook version of the same. (I downloaded it from librivox.com. It is a useful site to know if you don't want to read How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read.)

I just read The Annotated Origin.I wanted to read an annotated version of 'The Origin' since it would give additional information about how Darwin formulated his ides, the pressures on him, what he got wrong, additional comments etc. For instance, the last two lines of 'The Origin' are as follows:

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

The annotation says:

I hesitate to intrude on the beauty of these lines. By necessity I will simply point out a few interesting features and later changes. Note, first that Darwin seems to speak to those perhaps reluctant to let go of their natural theology worldview: despite the reality of the "war of nature" - famine and death - exquisite beauty arises, he urges. His tone is not consoling, yet there is an air of reassurance about the statement. Note, too, the juxtaposition of Darwin's natural law of descent with modification with the law of gravitation. Even the divines of Darwin's time would have granted that the planets cycle on by Newtonian natural law, albeit set in motion by the creator. So, too, Darwin is saying, do life forms continually change - not in a cycle, he would argue, but in response to cycles of geological and biological change, in a grand interrelated system that spins "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful" from perhaps but a single common ancestor. In the second edition Darwin added "by the Creator" to "originally breathed," intimating that a creator may have set this grand system in motion, just as the physicists held for the clockwork universe. Note, finally, that the very last word is the only use of the word "evolve" or its cognates in the book - ironic, given that "evolution" is now synonymous with Darwin's model of common descent by natural selection. In his day the word was more closely associated with embryological development, and indeed Darwin's usage in this last sentence may be invoking an image of the embryo's unfolding developmental complexity, as natural selection endlessly spins out those forms most beautiful and most wonderful.

'The Origin' is worth reading but if it is your first book about evolution, you will struggle to complete it. At least that would have been the case with me. I had to negotiate a number of 'Hubble moments' eg. the idea of Deep Time, by reading a number of popular science books. (Here is a history of Earth in 24 hours.) Earlier, if there was a discussion of Cambrian life forms, I would have had no idea what was being discussed.

Apart from his genius, there is another thing about Darwin that fascinates me.He was born into wealth, had an independent source of income and didn't have to work for a day in his life to support himself. Most people in his place would have wasted their time in trivial pursuits. Darwin went on a five year voyage around the world and then did not move very far from his house for the rest of his life. But he had voluminous correspondence with many leading scientists, gathered copious amounts of data, thought long and hard and came up with a great idea. His privileged life was in contrast to that of Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection.

PS: I was blown by this description of natural selection by Lucretius -

All things, including the species to which you belong, have evolved over vast stretches of time. The evolution is random, though in the case of living organisms, it involves a principle of natural selection. That is, species that are suited to survive and to reproduce successfully, endure, at least for a time; those that are not so well suited, die off quickly. But nothing - from our own species, to the planet on which we live, to the sun that lights our day - lasts forever. Only the atoms are immortal ...

Lucretius lived over 2000 years ago.

The Narrowmouth's tale

2012-01-10T03:50:00.000-08:00

You must be tired of reading my cribs so I thought that I will perk you up a bit by telling you about...frogs. I know what you are thinking - 'How does this guy get such splendid ideas? What next? Millipedes?' Let's just say it is god's gift and leave it at that.

About those frogs. In The Ancestor's Tale, Richard Dawkins writes:

Microhyla (sometimes confused with Gastrophryne ) is a genus of small frogs, the narrowmouthed frogs. There are several species, including two in North America: the eastern narrowmouth Microhyla carolinensis, and the Great Plains narrowmouth Microhyla olivacea. These two are so closely related that they occasionally hybridise in nature. The eastern narrowmouth’s range extends down the east coast from the Carolinas to Florida, and west until half way across Texas and Oklahoma. The Great Plains narrowmouth extends from Baja California in the west , as far north as northern Missouri. Its range is therefore a western mirror of the eastern narrowmouth’s and it might as well be called the western narrowmouth. The important point is that their ranges meet in the middle: there is an overlap zone running up the eastern half of Texas and into Oklahoma. As I said, hybrids are occasionally found in this overlap zone, but mostly the frogs distinguish just as well as herpetologists do. This is what justifies our calling them two different species.

The most conspicuous difference between the two species lies in their mating calls. Both are squeaky buzzes but they differ in duration and predominant pitch. This difference is clearest in the zone of overlap where they meet. In areas where the two species never meet, the calls are more similar to each other. In areas close to the zone of overlap but not quite in it, the calls are more different. But the maximum difference is in the zone of overlap itself. Something is pushing the two species apart in the overlap zone. One reason for this could be due to what ecologists call competitive exclusion. Dawkins writes:

This phenomenon, where two species differ from each other more when they overlap than when they don’t , is called ‘character displacement’ or ‘reverse cline’. It is easy to generalise from biological species to cases where any class of entities differ more when they encounter one another than when they are alone. The human parallels are tempting, but I shall resist. As authors used to say, this is left as an exercise for the reader.

Narcissism of small differences?

PS: On a related note, know how social media magnify hierarchies and collapse social distances?

Shadenfreude

2012-01-06T03:41:00.000-08:00

Sometimes visitors who have come after a long gap will be confronted by the killer question, 'Can you see any changes in him?' At first I used to feel uncomfortable with this question but then I began to derive a perverse pleasure in watching visitors ponder over how to answer the question tactfully.The straight-forward answer to this question would have been to say that they could not see any change. But it is not socially acceptable to give such a blunt answer.

So there will be some standard anodyne responses that will be like the following:

- His skin is glowing.

- His eyes are shining.

- He is looking more alert.

- The little finger of his left hand moves (it always did).

- His legs move when he coughs (they always did).

I will sit impassively listening to the exchanges.

An Anthropologist On Mars

2012-01-02T22:47:00.000-08:00

I finished reading An Anthropologist On Mars by Oliver Sacks some days ago. He tells remarkable stories of people with various neurological disorders and how they dealt with them. For example, there is the story of a Canadian surgeon with Tourette's syndrome and that of an amazing autistic woman.

There is a story of a painter who became colour blind after an accident. This was unusual because a person is usually born colour blind but this person totally lost his colour vision following an accident. Even his dreams were in B & W. He had totally lost the sense of colour. Oliver Sacks writes:

In addition to this medical fear, there was a deeper bewilderment and fear that he found almost impossible to articulate, and it was this that had come to a head in his month of attempted colour painting, his month of insisting that he still ‘knew’ colour. It had gradually come upon him, during this time, that it was not merely colour perception and colour imagery that he lacked, but something deeper and difficult to define. He knew all about colour, externally, intellectually, but he had lost the remembrance, the inner knowledge of it that had been part of his very being. He had had a lifetime of experience in colour, but now this was only a historical fact, not something he could access and feel directly. It was as if his past, his chromatic past, had been taken away, as if the brain’s knowledge of colour had been totally excised, leaving no trace, no inner evidence, of its existence behind.

I also find it difficult to explain certain things. For example, if I suddenly become alright today and went shopping, I would feel as if I was in a different country dealing with a different currency. I sometimes ask Jaya about the prices of some items and the values take my breath away. I have an idea of the inflation numbers but those are just abstract figures and very different from actual shopping experience. I am not sure how to explain this. Suppose a person watches the hour hand of a clock continuously, he will not see it move. But if he looks at the hour hand at two widely separated points in time, he will know that it has changed positions. A person who shops regularly will be like the first person. I am not implying that he will not notice the price changes but the effect will be far lesser than on me. I will be like second person, sampling the prices at two widely separated points in time and I will not know what hit me.

Another strange feeling is when I meet young people who I had last met when they were in junior school. I will not be able to recognize them and they will have only a vague idea of who I am. It feels strange to hear them discussing about whether they should study Engineering or Fashion Design when I had last heard them talk about Cinderella. I feel a bit like Cabuliwalla when he meets Mini on the day of her marriage.

Like most people, the painter described above gradually got used to his changed circumstances. His psychological recovery began when he saw a sunrise with all the blazing reds turned to black and seemed to look like an enormous nuclear explosion and he thought to himself that nobody had seen a sunset like that. Over time, he began to make splendid B & W paintings that could not have been made by someone with normal colour vision.

Although Mr. I does not deny his loss, and at some level still mourns it, he has come to feel that his vision has become ‘highly refined’, ‘privileged’, that he sees a world of pure form, uncluttered by colour. Subtle textures and patterns, normally obscured for the rest of us because of their embedding in colour, now stand out for him. He feels he has been given ‘a whole new world’, which the rest of us, distracted by colour, are insensitive to. He no longer thinks of colour, pines for it, grieves its loss. He has almost come to see his achromatopsia as a strange gift, one that has ushered him into a new state of sensibility and being.

Mind Hacks links to an old video of Oliver Sacks talking about various neurological disorders. Here is a TED Talk by him about hallucinations. He himself suffers from face blindness.

PS: I have partial colour blindness which used to cause some minor problems. For example, titration experiments in the chemistry lab used to be a problem. I could never make out when the colour of the solution changed. I always got the answer wrong and used to get marks only for writing the procedure correctly. I think I did not get any titration experiment for the Board exam so I escaped. I didn't know at the time that I had colour blindness.

Another problem was electrical lab in engineering because resistances are colour coded. I could never determine the value of the resistances so my circuits never worked properly. Again I did not have to make any circuits during the final exam so I escaped. I was one lucky dude.

Following the campus interview in TELCO (now Tata Motors), I had to undergo a medical test during which I learnt about the Ishihara colour vision test and knew that I was a goner. You can try it here. I can see the number in the opening panel - 16. All subsequent panels are jumbles of coloured dots for me.

After that, the closest I came to my colour vision being tested was after the campus interview for Bajaj Auto Ltd. The doctor pointed at a panel and asked me the colour. I said blue. He pointed at another panel and I said yellow. He seemed satisfied with my answers and I heaved a sigh of relief.

I used to hesitate buying clothes as gifts eg., a sari for my mother. I was not sure if she will see exactly what I saw. I must be seeing the world a bit differently compared to people with normal colour vision. I don't know how different. Perhaps they see sky-blue pink. Luckily, I never had this chemistry course.

Christopher Hitchens

2011-12-22T01:24:00.000-08:00

I am late with this news because of my enforced absence from the blogosphere due to lack of net connection. Christopher Hitchens died last week due to cancer, a disease that first made its presence felt in mid-2010.Here is a tribute. Here is his final column for Vanity Fair.

I have not read any of Hitchens' works. I first heard of him as one of the Four Horsemen. I have listened to many of his debates with apologists for religion that are available on the net. I had not heard such plain speaking about religion before and it came as a breath of fresh air. I am sure some believers would have been more than a little flustered by his dismissive comments about their cherished beliefs as exemplified by the Hitchslap, "What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof." He was contemptuous of the false comfort provided by religion even after he was diagnosed with cancer.

I used to be amazed at his command over literature and history. He could conjure up quotes and anecdotes without skipping a beat. He was a formidable opponent to debate against. He would have been great to have my kind of conversation with - the kind where I do all the listening and the other person does all the talking. I don't think I would have got bored.

He wrote some articles about prayer, 'cures' and etiquette which struck a chord in me. I could see where he was coming from. I came to know of him about when I was getting irritated with this 'respect' business so I was a receptive audience for his combative rhetoric, accusations of being 'strident' be damned. As Dan Dennett says, there is a time to be rude.

PS: Know who is a hitchling?

Dev Anand, 1923-2011

2011-12-06T05:32:00.000-08:00

Another actor whose songs I love has passed away. I don't recall having seen any of his movies fully but the songs are another matter. He had a quirky, man about town style which is hard to replicate. Here are some of my favourite songs:

I could easily replace these songs with others; there are so many. A pertinent point to note is that all the songs are B&W. Confirms my old fogey status, doesn't it?

‘Kolaveri Di’

2011-12-04T00:44:00.000-08:00

I first saw ‘Kolaveri Di’on NDTV and wondered why a Tamil song was being played in an English channel. I learned that the song had gone viral on Youtube so I downloaded it. Initially Jaya and I were underwhelmed by the song but we slowly became fans. It was everywhere. There was a program regarding it in NDTV which also had a spoof in this tune. It was an item in some program in Sujit's school.I wanted to link to it in the blog and was trying to think of a way to do it. Then I saw that it had even made it to Language Log and thought that this was it.

The old fogey that I am, I usually dig songs written in ancient times or parodies (say, Mohanlal imitating MGR). Now it is ‘Kolaveri Di’ all the way. So what if some of the lyrics don't make sense? As a news item in The Times of India says:

If you haven't heard "Kolaveri Di", you are supposed to be out of sync with the world.

Search for simple explanations

2011-12-01T04:54:00.000-08:00

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this. -- Bertrand Russell

Every year, the literary agent John Brockman asks several public intellectuals to answer some question or another, and posts it on the Internet to provoke discussion. This year's question was "WHAT SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT WOULD IMPROVE EVERYBODY'S COGNITIVE TOOLKIT?" One of the responses was 'Randomness'. It is a difficult concept to accept which results in simplistic explanations for complicated phenomena. In Endless Forms Most Beautiful,Sean B. Carroll writes:

Francois Jacob has pointed out that all of our explanatory systems, whether mythic, magic, or scientific, share a common principle. They all seek, in the words of physicist Jean Perrin, "to explain the complicated visible by some simple invisible."

It was obvious that my sudden stroke would bring forth many such explanations. For example one person persuaded my mother to sell her house by telling her that my stroke happened because there were statues of some gods on the grounds that were not supposed to be there and if she sold the house, I will be cured. One guy wanted to know if I had an implacable foe who could have put some sort of hex on me to cause the stroke. I assured him that there was no such person.

Another person said that I had made many bitter enemies in my life and a few of them had got together and performed some black magic that had resulted in my stroke. Another person told Jaya that one person had wanted to marry her but I entered the scene and spoiled his well-laid plans so he took some steps to put a clot in my head. Mostly people will claim that they were the revelations of some guru with capacious learning who had unparalleled insight into these issues.As Javed Akhtar says:

It’s not surprising that in Pune there is an ashram and I used to go there. I loved the oratory. On the gate of the lecture hall there was a placard. Leave your shoes and minds here. There are other gurus who don’t mind if you carry your shoes. But minds?…sorry.

When Jaya was explaining the circumstances of my stroke to one woman, she was told that many people in the flat suffered from a 'bone problem' which happens if some puja is not done. Doing the puja will solve these problems. A brain stem stroke is due to a 'bone problem'? H'm.

What used to astonish me was that so many people uncritically accepted the idea that you can clot the blood in somebody by mumbling some mumbo-jumbo. This thought is not limited to fringe elements of society. It is mainstream. Education goes only so far and no further in eliminating these superstitions. As Neil DeGrasse Tyson says, education helps to reduce superstitious beliefs but it eventually asymptotes to a non-zero value. (For example, listen to this interview with Father George Coyne. He comes across as a pleasant, intelligent, articulate person but at times he churns out word salad.)

Perhaps I had heard similar things before my stroke but they didn't register with me probably because of two reasons: 1) I usually did not hang around for long listening to superstitious talk and 2) I was not the focus of these talks. Now it was different. I had no option now but to sit silently and listen 'with a patient shrug, for sufferance is the badge of all our tribe.'

I started noticing the Dunning-Kruger Effect only after my stroke. I have been fortunate enough to associate with plenty of very smart people throughout my life. I am not exaggerating if I say that they were rarely as proud of their intelligence as some of these people were of their of their ignorance.I began to understand why Edith Sitwell said, "I am patient with stupidity, but not with those who are proud of it." I learned quickly that it was useless to argue. My best option was to fall back on Reinhold Niebuhr's Serenity Prayer - "Father, give us courage to change what must be altered, serenity to accept what cannot be helped, and the insight to know the one from the other."

Interesting links

2011-11-25T03:44:00.000-08:00

Is Self-Knowledge Overrated?

Have you heard of a “happiness engineer”?

Different perspectives

2011-11-17T22:05:00.000-08:00

I saw a program on the National Geographic Channel a couple of months back about the Ferrari factory. One guy who was working in engine assembly said that whenever he saw a Ferrari car his heart swelled with pride at the thought that he had contributed to its making. Another woman who sewed the leather upholstery said a similar thing. Would I have a similar feeling if I making hundred of the same thing everyday? I don't think so. At the very least, I would have had frequent bouts of trumspringa.

It reminded me of a couple of essays in the Organisational Behaviour book in IIMA. I don't remember the details but the idea behind the two essays was as follows.

The first was by Lee Iacocca who was in some top position in Ford at that time, probably its President. He talked about his exclusive car parking space, how excited he was every morning while coming to the office, about the plush executive dining room and the exotic fruits that are flown in from around the world for the dining pleasure of top executives. In short, he was chuffed with life.

The next essay was by a worker in the Ford assembly line. He talked about the monotony of his job, about the drug pushers in the Assembly line, about the bills that he had to pay, about the difficulties in educating his kids etc. In short, he was not thrilled about his job. The title of this piece was, 'It is the same company.'

That is why I was not convinced when I heard the statements of the workers. I won't be surprised if the workers were coached about what to say in the T.V. program in order to project a wholesome image of the company.

Careers

2011-11-10T00:20:00.000-08:00

When I see people come on T.V. and talk excitedly about the various jobs that they are doing, I tend to ask myself if I would have liked to spend my day doing similar things and the answer would invariably be negative. For example, this type of job will bore me in no time (not the genome sequencing part - that may be interesting.) Many people remind me of the soldier in the marching band whose mother shouts out, 'There goes my boy - he is the only one in step.'

Sometime back, a classmate of mine at IIMA, Rashmi Bansal gave me her latest book I Have A Dream, It was the first book about the business world that I was reading in many years. (It is not strictly about business. It is about many entrepreneurs who work in the social sector. Anyway it is very different from the kinds of topics that I had been reading about for the past few years.) As is my wont, I frequently asked myself whether I would have liked to be in the entrepreneurs' shoes and the answer always was 'No'. I would have felt overwhelmed by the challenges that the entrepreneurs faced and would have quickly given up.

Perhaps I have got used to my slothful existence and reading whatever catches my fancy. As this song says,'Na naukri ki chinta, na roti ki fikar...' Of course I do feel sometimes that I am being an enormous burden for other people although no one has ever said so. I get out of this hole by thinking that I will not help anybody by wallowing in self-pity. As Bertie Wooster would have put the cliché, what cannot be c must be e.

I listen with a quiet smile to glowing accounts of the seduction routines that most corporates put on show for new recruits. Talks of multiplexes, shopping malls, grooming accessories etc. will be rather uninteresting and I will think that people are wasting their time on kiddish stuff. (But I will be psyched by this kid. At that age I would not have started on Enid Blyton.) Perhaps it is all an elaborate rationalisation on my part to hide my envy. Whatever it is, it works.

Actually, since I became interested in reading about evolution, I become interested in jobs connected to it or in related areas like ecology or biogeography and most other jobs seem boring in comparison. (But not if it involves squeezing through narrow gaps.) Not surprisingly, the project that caught my eye in Rashmi's book was Project Chilika for cultivating seaweeds started by a marine biologist, Dinabandu Sahoo. I was interested to learn that he was part of an international team for deliberating on the problem of ocean acidification which I had read about some months ago.

Another project that caught my eye was Super 30 because I had seen a program about it on Discovery Channel. I was also interested to read about Prof. Trilochan Sastry, who joined IIMA as a professor when I was a student there. I didn't know that he had done some remarkable things (while also running a couple of NGOs and carrying out his professorial duties).

There were many tales of struggle and deprivation in the book but none more hair-raising than the one related by Anshu Gupta of Goonj:

Given the lack of excitement in his career, Anshu was getting his 'kick' from other sources. And that story started in 1992, when he wrote a moving piece for Hindi newspaper "Saptahik Hindustan".

"I was a new journalist so I went to old Delhi to look for a story. There I see a rickshaw, and on that were the words 'Delhi police corpse carrier'. So I wrote about this man whose job was to pick up unclaimed dead bodies from the roadside."

The man received Rs.20 for every body he brought in, and a piece of white cloth. Two things he said really shook Anshu; in fact they haunted him for a long time.

The corpse carrier remarked, 'In the winter business is good, sometimes there is so much work that I can't handle it.'

And his five-year-old daughter added, 'When I feel cold, I cuddle a dead body and go to sleep'.

I kept thinking how lucky I had been at most stages of my life. I didn't have the luxuries but I never had to struggle for the necessities or the educational opportunities which cannot be said for the people among whom these entrepreneurs work. I should guard against falling into the trap of privilege blindness. John Rawls also has some points to ponder.

I have nightmares

2011-11-02T06:49:00.000-07:00

In 'Pigs Have Wings'. P.G.Wodhouse says:

It is one of the chief drawbacks to the lot of the conscientious historian that in pursuance of his duties he is compelled to leave in obscurity many of those to whom he would greatly prefer to give star billing. His task being to present a panoramic picture of the actions of a number of protagonists, he is not at liberty to concentrate his attention on any one individual, however much the latter's hard case may touch him personally. When Edward Gibbon, half-way through his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire complained to Doctor Johnson one night in a mood of discouragement that it - meaning the lot of the conscientious historian - shouldn't happen to a dog, it was to this aspect of it that he was referring.

I also sometimes have such Gibbon moments but it is not because I have given short shrift to any particular individual but about whether I should write about incidents that happened before my stroke. Of course, one reason for the paucity of such posts is that I was a nondescript, boring chap who just made up the numbers so there aren't too many incidents that I can write about that will keep you from yawning. Another reason is that it is not the focus of this blog. But sometimes I remember an incident that I can write about and I think, 'Focus be damned.' This is one such post.

George Jessel said, “The human brain is a wonderful organ. It starts to work as soon as you are born and doesn't stop until you get up to deliver a speech.” This is not true for everyone but it was certainly true in my case. Put me on a stage, stick a mic in front of me and have a large audience (say, more than five people) and my brain gets jammed.

In my school, an elocution contest used to be held every year for which each class would send some representatives. I had successfully managed to avoid being selected every year because of my acknowledged mastery in hiding behind the person sitting in front of me. But my luck ran out when I was in Std. IX. For some reason, my English teacher decided that I can do well in elocution. I have no clue what gave her such a bizarre idea.

I had to deliver Martin Luther King's famous speech, 'I Have A Dream'. (Some parts were cut to shorten the speech.) I liked the speech as soon as I read it but the prospect of having to deliver it in front of an audience did not thrill me. I think there was one elimination round before the final, sort of a semi-final. You know how it is - you tend to put your best foot forward in the heat of competition. As luck would have it, this was enough to put me in the final. There would scarcely have been anybody who had received such triumphant news so gloomily.

In 'Right Ho, Jeeves', Gussie Fink-Nottle was in a similar predicament when he was asked to present the prizes at Market Snodsbury grammar school. As the dreaded day neared, he almost became a mental wreck and I could understand why. Wodehouse fans will recall that Bertie Wooster helped out Gussie by the simple expedient of spiking his orange juice with loads of whisky.Plastered to the gills, Gussie gave a performance for the ages which delighted the young scholars at the grammar school. I knew that I will have no such luck.

From what I remember, the day of the competition was bright and sunny. It wouldn't have mattered if it was dark and stormy because the competition was to be held indoors but it would have helped to reduce the size of the audience which seemed to be bigger than usual. I had thought that people would have had better things to do than watch me stutter and stammer on stage but obviously I had thought wrong. I hung around cracking sick jokes while my heart was racing along at an unhealthy pace.

It was at this time that god decided to do his bit for me. If believers had played their cards right in subsequent years, I may have become a militant Hindu. What happened was this: participants wearing glasses were told to remove them before going on stage. I think it had something to do with the glare of the lights on the stage (I am not sure). I did not realise the full import of the instruction till I went onto the stage.

The stage was brightly lit while the rest of the auditorium was dark in comparison. I couldn't make out individual faces. There were a lot of hazy blobs in front of me. If my friends were making faces at me, I did not notice them. If the judges were scowling and making notes, I did not know it. The result was that my tension diminished and the speech went without a hitch. At the end, I did not notice whether there was a thunderous applause or derisive hoots - I was busy making myself scarce. When the results were announced, I had come second.

My English teacher was more disappointed than I was about my not coming first. She had hoped that, like Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!), lo! my name would lead all the rest. She had invested a lot of time and effort into preparing me for the competition. I remember going to her house where we pored over many pieces before she finally decided that this speech suited me. Whatever I had achieved was entirely due to her efforts. As for me, I was happy that I had not made a fool of myself. Of course, I strutted around with a 'nothing to it' expression now that the ordeal was behind me.

If you look at cricket history, you will find that many tail-enders have one knock which they can talk about to their grand-kids - Darren Gough once saved a Test Match for England; so did Danny Morrison for NZ; Glenn McGrath has a Test 50; Jason Gillespie has a Test double hundred... Being a genuine tail-ender in the area of elocution contests, this was my one moment under the sun. If Bertie Wooster has his Scripture Knowledge prize, I had this speech (of course , there must be some embellishments). After this I gradually faded away into blissful obscurity having regained my form in hiding behind the person sitting in front of me. (But my camouflage was not as good as that of this octopus. Not even as good as that of a frying pan. But it used to work most of the time. Except in Std. IX.)

Cloud computing

2011-10-26T05:37:00.000-07:00

This is an old post but I saw the video only recently. Thought you knew about cloud computing? Think again!

Reducing guilt

2011-10-18T01:23:00.000-07:00

I just completed reading The Trouble With Testosterone. ('Just' is a relative term. Actually I completed it almost a month ago. At that time I was in the middle of writing a post and the next post was its continuation.I didn't want to juxtapose this one between those two posts.)

In one essay, Sapolsky discusses the evolution of firing squads which according to him were means of reducing the feeling of guilt on killing a person. In olden times, one shot was often not enough to kill a person. Multiple shots, say five, had to be fired in order to kill a person. If a person fires five shots or five people fire one shot each at the same person, the result will be the same. But in the latter case, a person thinks at some irrational level that he is only killing one-fifth of a person and is able to convince himself that he has not actually killed a person. Sapolsky writes:

Why do I think the firing squad was an accommodation to guilt, to the perception of guilt, and to guilty consciences? Because of an even more intriguing refinement in the art of killing people. By the middle of the nineteenth century, when a firing squad assembled, it was often the case that one man would randomly be given a blank bullet. Whether each member of the firing squad would tell if he had the blank or not - by the presence or absence of a recoil at that time of the shooting – was irrelevant. Each man would go home that night with the certainty that he would never be accused for sure, of having played a role in the killing.

Guilt reduction techniques are used even in modern execution methods.

In the American states that allow executions, lethal injection is fast becoming the method of choice. In states more “backward” about the technology of execution, execution is done by hand. But among the cutting - edge states, a $ 30,000 lethal injection machine is used. Its benefits, extolled by its inventor at the wardens' conventions he frequents, include dual sets of syringes and dual stations with switches for two people to throw at the same time. A computer with a binary-number generator randomises which syringe is injected into the prisoner and which ends up in a collection vial-and then erases the decision. The state of New Jersey even stipulates the use of execution technology with multiple stations and a means of randomisation. No one will ever know who really did it, not even the computer.

PS: Currently I have many new books to read. It often happens this way - for a while I won't have any new books and I will be reading old books that were disappearing from memory. Then a raft of new books will arrive in a few days from different sources, It is like waiting for a bus - you wait for one for half an hour and then three arrive at the same time. The difference is that I can read all the books sequentially over time but multiple buses at the same time are useless for a single traveller.

Ig Nobel prizes for 2011

2011-10-13T00:22:00.000-07:00

For achievements that first make people LAUGH then make them THINK.

LITERATURE PRIZE: John Perry of Stanford University, USA, for his Theory of Structured Procrastination, which says: To be a high achiever, always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid doing something that's even more important.

Now you know why I am so late in informing you of these awards.

Emotional blackmails - II

2011-10-09T06:46:00.000-07:00

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences. - Clive Staples Lewis

Sometimes, people will ask me a series of questions hoping to convince me to meet their favourite godman, playing on relationships and friendships. (They were not unlike Humphrey's lesson in survey design.) I will be in a bind about what to say. It will be a case of damned if I do and damned if I don't. When politicians are asked tricky questions that they find difficult to answer, they say, 'That is a good question.' My version of saying, 'That is a good question' is to sit silently, keep smiling and hope that they won't press the issue for too long.

I have learned that when someone gives you a lot of undiluted nonsense there is a good chance that he is also on first name terms with god. I know correlation is not causation but as one scientist said, it gives a damn good hint. The incidents were different versions of the synecdoche – many small facts that point to a big truth which is that religious superstitions predispose a person to accept simplistic explanations that don’t accord with reality. (Of course I am biased. There is no such thing as an unbiased opinion.)

It is not as if these people are consulting a CIA torture manual for techniques of mental torture. They are all honourable men. (Actually the majority were women.) It is a major success of organised religions that exerting subtle mental pressure on vulnerable people has become a respectable part of the social fabric. People feel that if they don't offer these suggestions, they are being remiss in their social obligations. Bizarre and cruel rituals are accorded sanctity. For example, in one community, a widow has to dress in full bridal finery a few days after her husband's death and remove her jewellery one by one in front of assembled guests in order to signify her widowhood. Jaya was invited to attend one such function but was too horrified by the thought to go.

The unending sequence of quacks smothering me with their gyan and religious cults trying to save my soul and emotional pressures being exerted on Jaya sometimes made me think that Sartre had a point when he made his most famous quotation, "Hell is other people." This being a family blog constrains my language a bit and I sometimes had to eschew the temptation to use more colourful words. Those supercilious, condescending, sanctimonious hypocrites. Ah, that feels better!

That is why (there is more apart from the ones that I have forgotten; I will mention them later) I have no problems when various blind superstitions are criticised and exposed. (The video in the last link reminds me of a similar scene in the Malayalam film Midhunam.) That’s how the light gets in. Some amount of supernatural thinking may be present in most people but this natural tendency is often exploited by unscrupulous people as noted by Spinoza (as quoted in The Story of Philosophy):

Those who wish to seek out the causes of miracles, and to understand the things of nature as philosophers, and not to stare at them in astonishment like fools, are soon considered heretical and impious, and proclaimed as such by those whom the mob adore as the interpreters of nature and the gods. For these men know that once ignorance is put aside, that wonderment would be taken away which is the only means by which their authority is preserved.

I wonder how much of religiosity in India is explained by 'Relative Power' theory. As Napoleon observed,“Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet”

of course, criticism religion invites a bad press. It seems to be a sacred value for some people which leads them to make false statements without any qualms. In this debate, when Richard Dawkins is accused of being 'militant and fundamentalist', A.C.Grayling says:

You know why you see it that way? He speaks bluntly and he speaks frankly and he speaks his mind and you don't like what he is saying. That's why you react as you do.

(On a lighter note, in one interview, Dawkins said that he had read the books of Wodehouse so many times that he knew them backward. One commenter said that anyone who enjoys Wodehouse can't be all that bad.)

When apologists for religion accuse their opponents of being absolutist, arrogant, fundamentalist etc., they sound like John McEnroe admonishing his opponent of scowling at his racquet. In the few debates that I have seen involving New Atheists, they have been far less pompous and preachy than most of those with a hotline to this god character.This blogger has saved me the trouble of writing more. Spare me the halo of piety.

Emotional blackmails - I

2011-09-30T22:59:00.000-07:00

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist. -Salman Rushdie

I remember reading that if people of faith kept their beliefs to themselves and did not fly planes into buildings, the rest of us should not have any problems with their beliefs. That is true of course but it often doesn't happen that way. And when somebody has suffered a stroke, it is to be expected that various suggestions will come from all sides. It is also obvious that Jaya was the main target of fear and guilt induction.

So she will be told, 'You didn't pray hard enough.' Or someone will coax her into keeping some fast, promising her the moon and at the end of the period when obviously nothing happened, she will be told, 'You didn't fast properly.' Or some people will ask Jaya to do some PT at various temples and when she shows reluctance, they will quickly fire their dart, 'Can't you do even this much for your husband?' If god is part of the conversation, there is a social sanction to say whatever comes to one's head, the emotional state of the other person be damned. And this is to be respected! Jaya could listen to these snide remarks with a shrug in part because she knew that as far as I was concerned, these superstitions 'pass by me as the idle wind/ Which I respect not.' As Rajesh Khanna sang in one situation in the movie 'Amar Prem', 'Logon ka kaam hai kehena.'

In The Trouble With Testosterone, Robert M. Sapolsky writes:

But religion is not just a handful of precepts that form the dominating core of one’s particular beliefs.......Religion is not just a foundation of thought and faith. Nor is it just a set of moral imperatives, or a set of cultural values to be shared with a community. In its traditional, orthodox incarnations, it is also a collection of small habits, behaviours, and prohibitions, a myriad of everyday activities and sayings. “Religion is meant to be bread for daily use, not cake for special occasions,” said Henry Ward Beecher. If the devil is in the details, then so is God, and for the average practitioner, religion is in the rituals and rules of quotidian life.

A stroke is hardly an everyday occurrence so it is to be expected that the suggestions for propitiation will go through the roof. In the weeks following my stroke, Jaya was goaded by the exemplars of piety to do pujas, say prayers, keep fasts (it seems to have become a popular pass time nowadays), visit temples, etc., accompanied by accounts of their benefits and dark insinuations about the harmful effects of neglecting them. This at a time when she was struggling to come to grips with medical terms that she had never heard of and was shuttling between home and hospital because Sujit was less than a year old.

Then there were the horoscope aficionados. There is a mindset among many in India that if something bad happens to the husband, the wife's horoscope is to blame. Every other person found some lacuna in Jaya's horoscope which could be rectified by performing some ritual. I am quite sure that many of these same personages would have been giddy with delight at the wonderful things that they could find in it before our marriage. When it was found that Jaya was not too concerned about her horrorscope (termed by Jaya), attention shifted to Sujit. It was suggested that my stroke was due to some flaw in his horoscope.

I used to frown at suggestions that Jaya meet some godman. I was not going to agree to let her be another pawn in the spiritual supermarket. I had an idea of how these things worked. You will be in an environment where you will be surrounded by like-minded people and intense peer pressure can be exerted. You will be bombarded from all sides with stories of various miracles that are attributed to the amazing powers of the godman. You will be encouraged to participate in the group activities and the value of the group will be constantly reinforced. In this atmosphere of pressure to conform to the will of the majority, the emotionally weak will find it impossible to refudiate the tall claims coming from all sides. It is considered a virtue to target emotionally vulnerable people to sell them religion. Some of these hirsute weirdos may come home and give me lectures filled with terms of obtuse profundity like 'universal energy' and 'bad karma'.

When Jaya meets some new person who doesn't know us, she avoids mentioning anything about me as far as possible. If some stranger asks her, 'What is your husband doing?' she will reply quickly, 'He was working in Indbank.'Most people will not notice that she said 'was' and not 'is'. With luck, the conversation will follow the lines of 'ING Bank? No, Indbank. - Is that Indian Bank? - No, this is its subsidiary. - Is it the same as Indusind Bank? - No, this is different...' By the time all the confusion ends, Jaya would have excused herself.

It is easy to understand why Jaya was reluctant to talk about me. It will be déjà vu all over again - there will be the initial shocked reaction and standard questions which will eventually culminate in a suggestion of yet another quack or godman with miraculous powers (everybody knows one) who they will insist we meet. If they are told that many such people have been suggested to us before and we have met some of them, we will be told that those guys can only talk(!) while their person is the real McCoy.

It is not surprising that Jaya sometimes tells me that it is easier to take care of me than to deal with many people.Perhaps they were giving their suggestions with the best of intentions and only wanted my quick recovery but that doesn't change the reality. The path to hell is paved with good intentions.

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it

Most of these incidents happened a long time ago and Father Time has started erasing memories. (We all experience it in the case of books.) Jaya's memory is worse than mine which is good in a way because it means that she does not dwell on insensitive comments made long ago. The only problem is that it deprives me of some blog fodder. I also would have forgotten many of the incidents if I had not noted them down as and when Jaya and I remembered them. I came across this list of Propaganda and Debating Techniques and felt that many of these tactics had been used against us. Unfortunately, I can't remember the details of most of them.

When someone tells me about a godman with miracle powers whom I should meet, I feel like saying what Rhett Butler told Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind, 'Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.'

Detection of massaged figures

2011-09-26T04:36:00.000-07:00

Did you know Benford's Law?

Bat missiles

2011-09-20T02:30:00.000-07:00

Just finished reading Natural Acts by David Quammen. In it there is a bizarre story about the US spending $2 million during World War II on research into a plan to use thousands of Tadarida brasiliensis, the Mexican free-tailed bat carrying a small payload of napalm for firebombing Japan. It was dreamed up by a dental surgeon from Pennsylvania named Lytle S. Adams.

Seems that Dr. Adams was driving home from a vacation in New Mexico, where he had gazed wide-eyed at millions of T. brasiliensis, like one continuous pelt of lumpy brown fur, covering for acres the ceiling of the Carlsbad Caverns, when news of Pearl Harbor reached him. In first froth of patriotic outrage and desirous of doing his bit, Adams thought of those bats. In less than two months, as the American Heritage article has it, Adams "somehow got the ear of President Franklin Roosevelt and convinced him that the idea warranted investigation." Under the circumstances, "somehow" seems rather tantalizingly elliptical, but maybe FDR needed a little dental surgery and Dr. Adams pitched his idea before the gas had entirely worn off. Next he managed to interest an eminent Harvard chiroptologist (a bat expert, not a foot doctor) named Donald R. Griffin, and before long the National Defense Research Committee had signed on as a sponsor. By now it was known as the Adams Plan. Eventually the army's Chemical Warfare Service, the NDRC, and the navy (no reason submarines couldn't release bats too) were all implicated in the buffoonery.

A test was conducted where groggy bats with tiny parachutes and a load of napalm were dropped from planes. The testing failed due to a variety of reasons and only resulted in the 'waste of innocent animals'.

Yet there was poetic justice. A few other bats, armed on the ground with live napalm units but spared the lethal jump, escaped from their handlers. These escapees flew off toward the nearest buildings - as indeed they were supposed to do, though preferably in Japan - which happened to be the airport hangars. The hangars thereupon burned. So did a general's automobile.

People do become batty in wartime.

Wow!

2011-09-14T06:52:00.000-07:00

From this post , I came across this site which gives many free courses from world class universities.

Smell and taste

2011-09-11T05:47:00.000-07:00

I breathe through the tracheostomy and very little air passes into my nose so I can smell an odour only if it is strong.The limen for smell would be undetectable for me. Jaya sometimes asks me whether I can smell a gas leak or the perfume in a room spray. I will have no idea about these things.I am not the best candidate on whom 'ambient scenting' techniques can be tried. I will not be good in recording an olfactory history. I can't resist writing a bit about evolution here. In Your Inner Fish, Neil Shubin writes:

Humans devote about 3 percent of our genome to odor genes, just like every other mammal. When geneticists looked at the structure of the human genes in more detail, they found a big surprise: fully three hundred of these thousand genes are rendered completely functionless by mutations that have altered their structure beyond repair. (Other mammals do use these genes.) Why have so many odor genes if so many of them are entirely useless?

[SNIP]

Yoav Gilad and his colleagues answered this question by comparing genes among different primates. He found that primates that develop color vision tend to have large numbers of knocked-out smell genes. The conclusion is clear. We humans are part of a lineage that has traded smell for sight. We now rely on vision more than on smell, and this is reflected in our genome. In this trade-off, our sense of smell was deemphasized, and many of our olfactory genes became functionless.

In my case it is doubly true that after my stroke, I have become more reliant on my eyes and my ability to smell has diminished because of reduced air flow through my nostrils.

I don't know how much role smell plays in one's attraction towards food. Perhaps my indifference towards food is because I can't smell most of them. The ones I can smell will probably be too spicy. I don't think my taste buds have been affected. I sometimes eat a little bit of sweet semi-solids like ice-cream or custard or some soft chocolate.

A strange happening over the past couple of years has been that sometimes when feeding is given, I have an expression like that of a person who has just quaffed a glass of some particularly bitter Ayurvedic concoction. It is strange because I cannot taste feedings and I cannot smell them most of the time. Doctors are not able to say why this is happening. Maybe it is just a supratentorial problem. Since it lasts only for a few minutes at feeding time and since, like the description of the Earth in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it is 'mostly harmless', we have not bothered too much about it.

A tragedy

2011-09-03T05:28:00.000-07:00

One of my classmates at IIMA, Ved Prakash Arya died a few days ago after an unbelievable accident, sending shock waves through our batch. Another classmate, Rashmi Bansal pays tribute.

Ved used to sit next to me in class (we had a fixed seating arrangement) and it was fun to be with him. I did not meet him after we graduated. After my stroke, I have not been following corporate news so I was unaware of his successes. I remember a friend telling me that Ved was doing well. The next thing I hear about him is this tragedy. This has come as a huge shock.

Ramachandran's blog

2011-09-01T23:34:00.000-07:00

Via this post on Panda's Thumb, I learn that V.S.Ramachandran has a blog. Alas, he has not updated it for a while.

The Anna agitation

2011-08-29T23:35:00.000-07:00

The arrogance of power on one side and the arrogance of sanctimony on the other side makes for an unedifying spectacle. A reality check is required. I was surprised to discover some tidbits about Anna Hazare in this post in a well-kmown blog.

One persistent thought watching huge numbers of people calling for 'a corruption-free India' was that a majority of them would have had no qualms about paying a small bribe at a million places to get their things done. All of us have been in such situations where paying some 'speed money' helps to move things along and nobody bats an eyelid. In fact if you refuse, you will be ridiculed by those around you as being 'impractical'. Will such a culture change if a new law is introduced? I don't think so.

Changing such a culture will be beneficial but it entails a lot more time, effort and inconvenience than attending candle-light vigils. Small actions do have an impact. It remains to be seen how many will walk the talk. (I am in the rare position of being able to comment without having to act!)

PS: Writing about current affairs (granted I don't read much about it) is a dicey proposition for me. By the time I manage to dictate a few lines, the news would have changed. But I am reluctant to flush all the effort down the drain so I publish it anyway.

Three feeds per day

2011-08-24T04:43:00.000-07:00

'War doesn’t determine who is right, it decides who is left', said Bertrand Russell. It is a nice quote no doubt but the problem is that it has nothing to do with the rest of this post. It seemed a shame to ignore the quote so I decided to put it here. Adds a bit of class to an otherwise ordinary post, don't you think? (I wonder what the half-life of 'think' is.)

Once while examining me, an Ayurvedic doctor asked about my feeding. He was informed that the hospital had provided a chart specifying the contents and quantity of liquid feeds to be given to me approximately every two hours beginning at about 6:30 a.m. The Ayurvedic doctor said that this procedure was wrong and that I should have just 3 meals a day like other people - breakfast, lunch and dinner. Accordingly my feeding timings were fixed at approximately 8 a.m., 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. and the quantity of each feed was increased (I don't remember by how much).

Since I don't feel hungry, I did not feel any discomfort due to the long gap between feeds. I seemed as energetic as before so everyone thought that the new diet was fine. But after a couple of weeks visitors started saying that I was looking thinner than usual and that my bones seemed to be sticking out. The general consensus seemed to be that I was, like, disappearing. Bit by bit like the Cheshire Cat of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Soon people may have started saying that they have seen a person without a smile but never a smile without a person.

Folks at home did not wait that long. They decided to revert to the hospital mandated feed timings and quantity. In a few weeks, I seemed to be looking normal. I was of course unaware of all these changes, knowing about them only from the conversations of people around me.

Thanks for the memories, Shammi

2011-08-18T05:01:00.000-07:00

One of my favourite actors, Shammi Kapoor passed away a few days ago. I don't watch too many movies but I am a big fan of the songs of Rafi, Kishore, Mukesh, Lata and Asha - the Bollywood Fab Five. The Rafi-Shammi combination produced plenty of splendid songs. Here are a few of my favorite 'crazy Shammi' songs:

There are a zillion more songs (I am allowed a bit of exaggeration sometimes) but these will do for the moment. The songs will ensure that Shammi Kapoor lives on in memory.

He was the only Bollywood star I have seen in the flesh. Apparently he was a big computer buff. At an exhibition by Wipro Infotech, I saw a massive guy who looked familiar sitting in front of a computer. I asked some friends and confirmed my suspicion.

PS : Uh oh. How can I forget? I also once saw aamchi mulgi Madhuri Dixit.

Hunger

2011-08-12T01:11:00.000-07:00

In How the Mind Works, while discussing the importance of food, Steven Pinker quotes from Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior:

There are three possible parts to a date, of which at least two must be offered: entertainment, food, and affection. It is customary to begin a series of dates with a great deal of entertainment, a moderate amount of food, and the merest suggestion of affection. As the amount of affection increases, the entertainment can be reduced proportionately. When the affection is the entertainment, we no longer call it dating. Under no circumstances can the food be omitted.

Food doesn't seem to be important for me. I have never felt hungry since my stroke. I am fed every two hours but even if the feeding is delayed, there is no problem. I have no idea what exactly has happened but I don't think it has anything to do with the bacteria.(Talking of bacteria, have you heard of the two bacteria that went to a bar?) It is as if the communication lines between my stomach and brain have been cut so my brain does not get any signals of hunger or satiety.

I remember one doctor saying in the hospital that since I was on a liquid diet I will feel hungry very quickly so my feedings should not be delayed. But exactly the opposite has happened. My feedings have at times been delayed by a few hours mainly because I was travelling but I did not feel hungry. I would have liked to go without food for a couple of days to see if I get any hunger pangs but nobody will agree to this proposal.

The time for such an experiment is probably over. For the past year or so, I have asked for feeding, sometimes before it is time but it has nothing to do with hunger. Many times, before it is time for feeding, my gastrostomy starts leaking and paining. The pain subsides only when the feeding is given. Sometimes the pain is there and sometimes it is not there. It is a bit of a mystery.

Aside: According to this TED talk, there is a second brain in our gut. How cool!

Absence of pressure to conform

2011-08-03T04:31:00.000-07:00

Much madness is divinest Sense

To a discerning Eye

Much Sense- the starkest Madness

'Tis the Majority

In this, as All, prevail

Assent-and you are sane

Demur-you're straightway dangerous

And handled with a Chain

-Emily Dickinson

One major factor that strengthens religion is the pressure to conform. (The post at that link is in response to this interview.) Perhaps that is why Napoleon said, “Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet”. When you are among a group of believers, all of whom tend to think and act in similar ways, it is easier to go along with them than to rebel even if you feel that it is all weird. Going against the group is not easy. If you don't follow the crowd, you face questions like, 'What will the relatives say?'

In Bad Science, Ben Goldacre writes:

'Communal reinforcement' is the process by which a claim becomes a strong belief, through repeated assertion by members of a community. The process is independent of whether the claim has been properly researched, or is supported by empirical data significant enough to warrant belief by reasonable people.

Communal reinforcement goes a long way towards explaining how religious beliefs can be passed on in communities from generation to generation. It also explains how testimonials within communities of therapists, psychologists, celebrities, theologians, politicians, talk-show hosts, and so on, can supplant and become more powerful than scientific evidence.

One of the influencers of conformity to beliefs strengthened by communal reinforcement is group size:

One of the most important factors affecting whether or not people conform is the size of the group around them. Maximum conformity is seen when groups reach between 3 and 5 people.

Add more people and it makes little difference, less than 3, though, and conformity is substantially reduced.

I have a tendency to drift away rather unconsciously when I don't find the conversation gripping. Most people, even when they are not really interested in a conversation, will feel compelled to keep making some polite noises. This is not expected from me and most of the people will not be speaking directly to me. So no one will notice it if I am not all there. Thus even if I am in the midst of a lot of people, I can be thought of as being alone.

Such a situation is conducive to pondering over various subversive thoughts. As I became used to looking different from other people, I became more comfortable thinking differently from those around me.

Prayers

2011-07-24T06:11:00.000-07:00

After my stroke, as expected, some people will come home saying they wanted to say a prayer for me. I usually sat quietly during these interludes (except for that one occasion). I just hoped they landed up when I was lying on the bed at which time I will be doing nothing more productive than watching T.V. I also hoped that they won't come when Tendulkar was nearing a century. This was because many of them wanted the T.V. switched off during their prayers. I don’t know about you but switching off the T.V. when Tendulkar is batting in the nineties is not the best strategy to get into my good books.

I am usually shifted back to the bed at around 9 p.m. Sometimes, at about 8.30 p.m. I will be racing through an article or the last chapter of a book hoping to complete it before I am shifted back to the bed. In 'Full Moon', P.G.Wodehouse writes:

It is a truism to say that the best-laid plans are often disarranged and sometimes even defeated by the occurrence of some small unforeseen hitch in the programme. The poet Burns, it will be remembered, specifically warns the public to budget for this possibility.

Not having taken into account the poet Burns' sound warning, I will be unprepared for the announcement that some well-meaning people have come to pray for me. My best-laid plans being thus upset by this unexpected interruption will not put me in a good mood. I will get irritated and think peevishly of telling them that it is all in the mind. When they troop into the room, I will give them a baleful glare. If looks could kill! But then I will feel a bit guilty because they were nice people who were only doing what seemed to them to be the best method to cure me. And hopefully it won't take too long. But my day was over.

In fact, this was the major problem in handling suggestions of a religious nature. If they had come from obnoxious people, it would have been easy to tell them to go jump. But they will generally come from nice people who sincerely believed in what they said. They wanted to help me in whatever way they could and would have been extremely glad if anything they said had helped me in any way. Some of them will be old people who would have played with me when I was a child and I would not want to hurt their feelings by brusquely dismissing their suggestions. In 'Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog)', the author describes his dog:

To look at Montmorency you would imagine that he was an angel sent upon the earth, for some reason withheld from mankind, in the shape of a small fox-terrier. There is a sort of Oh-what-a-wicked-world-this-is-and-how-I-wish-I-could-do-something-to-make-it-better-and-nobler expression about Montmorency that has been known to bring the tears into the eyes of pious old ladies and gentlemen.

I know that Montmorency-look. It portends trouble. I get the same feeling of apprehension that Clarence, the ninth Earl of Emsworth used to get when his sister, Lady Constance Keeble ('Connie') used to pay him a visit.It was tricky for us (Jaya is mildly religious; I am the hell-bound one) to know how to handle such situations politely. (According to Ambrose Bierce in The Devil's Dictionary, POLITENESS, n. The most acceptable hypocrisy.)

I rely on the fact that most people who are not regular visitors will not be sure what I am trying to communicate. It was said that Humphry Appleby (of 'Yes Minister' fame) 'used language not as a window to the mind but as a curtain to be drawn across it'. My system of communication did a similar job of leaving most visitors flummoxed. That my expressions are more like that of Srinivasan than like that of Jagathy helped increase the perplexity of visitors. Jaya had the tougher task of deciding how to say 'no' in a way that sounded like 'yes'.

During prayers, some become very emotional and teary eyed while repeating certain names or verses which I find curious. The power of metaphors and symbols cannot be underestimated. I heard of a woman who spent the whole day praying in a room, coming out only for her meals because someone in her house was gravely ill. I would be appalled if Jaya got such a brainwave and started leading an eremitic existence.

'Amma'?

2011-07-14T22:46:00.000-07:00

Before my stroke, I could have been classified as an 'indifferentist'. (I still am in many ways. I am just more aware of the deleterious effects of organised religion and the often subtle coercive actions it inspires.) I don't remember feeling the urge to go to a temple on my own but I had no problem accompanying relatives or friends to a temple, church or mosque if they wanted to go to one. While there I would do what I saw other people doing so that I didn't stick out like a sore thumb. But I was more likely to admire the architecture or wonder how those intricate carvings were made. ('Like Michelangelo carving David by chipping away all the bits that did not look like David' as I once heard V.S.Ramachandran say in a podcast.)

Like many people, I enjoyed the social aspects of religion, the meeting opportunities it provides, without bothering about scriptures. The rituals were preliminaries that I had to sit through before I got some good things to eat. I could never bellyfeel them as believers so obviously did. The fun element disappeared after my stroke. Now religious functions were occasions for imploring various gods to perform miracles. I gradually grew tired of sitting like a trussed chicken and listening quietly to the jeremiads and the false promises of cults (not the Cult of Apple). It was all too solemn and maudlin. As Wole Soyinka says:

“One of the things about religion and deities is that many of these Gods have a marvellous sense of humour. This entire creation is a piece of humour; the absurdity of human existence strikes me as a big joke. The deities without humour are the dangerous ones. Deities that represent the solemn, the profound, the grave can sometimes dangerously exaggerate one of these elements, which makes for a lack of balance, of letting the negative take over the positive. It is the fundamentalists who lack a sense of humour and are dangerous. It's important to see the comic side of existence to be able to recognise the profundity of human life.”

There was an incident that happened soon after Jaya and I got married that illustrated my indifference towards religion. While visiting some of her relatives, one of her cousins pointed to a building and said that when 'amma' had come there, the queue had stretched to a couple of adjacent streets. 'Amma'in Malayalam means 'mother' and I thought he was talking about his mother. I knew that his mother had passed away some time back but I knew nothing else about her and I wondered why she had been so famous. I did not ask any questions then, thinking that I will find out about her over the the next few days.

I found out that that he was referring to a religious leader who seemed to have a large following. My in-laws would have been shocked if they had learned that I had no idea who 'amma' was. I am sure someone would have mentioned something about her at sometime but the name never registered. I tend to switch off when matters of religion are being discussed.

Even now I read blog posts and articles concerning religion which I can complete in 10-15 min. Anything longer and I tend to get bored and start thinking of switching to reading about the photosynthetic slug or the the vegetarian spider. (I can listen to a podcast for a longer time. This is because, especially in the afternoon, it leaves the nurse free to do any work or sleep for a while without being disturbed by me for a while.) My main interest in reading these articles and listening to to the podcasts is to get a better idea about two questions:

The puzzle of there being many smart people who are skeptical of god and religion while there are many other smart people who accept it wholeheartedly. This person has a similar interest although he seems to spend much more time on it than me.
Religions tend to have men in positions of power and it devises various methods to subjugate women but women seem to be more religious than men. Why is it so?

I have not read any books that have to do mainly with religion. I don't think I will be able to devote so much time and effort to a topic that doesn't figure high on my list of priorities. When I see sentences like “Things known are in the knower according to the mode of the knower”, my eyes glaze over. So it can be said that I don't know much about the scriptures or the sophisticated arguments for religion. I think most believers don't either. In my experience, the belief model rather than the orientation model is prevalent to a greater extent. I have never been in a discussion where people were talking about the religious views of Einstein.

The straw that broke the camel's back

2011-07-03T22:33:00.000-07:00

In 'The Code of the Woosters', Bertie Wooster says:

A thing I never know, when I'm starting out to tell a story about a chap I've told a story about before, is how much explanation to bung in at the outset. It's a problem you've got to look at from every angle. I mean to say, in the present case, if I take it for granted that my public knows all about Gussie Fink-Nottle and just breeze ahead, those publicans who weren't hanging on my lips the first time are apt to be fogged, Whereas if before kicking off I give about eight volumes of the man's life and history, other bimbos who were so hanging will stifle yawns and murmur 'Old stuff. Get on with it.'

I suppose the only thing to do is to put the salient facts as briefly as possible in the possession of the first gang, waving an apologetic hand at the second gang the while, to indicate that they had better let their attention wander for a minute or two and that I will be with them shortly.

The advantage of a blog is that I can avoid such dilemmas by just giving the appropriate link. Remember the 'Real God' guy? Gosh, you have an amazing memory! I had to read the whole post before it all came back to me.

When the guy saw that I will not agree to the Chennai trip, he suggested later that we perform some prayers at some place they had nearby. I did not object to this since it did not involve any expenses and my presence was not required. So my mother, mother-in-law, sister and Jaya went there for a few days and prayed. One day a woman from the cult asked Jaya if she could see any improvement in me to which she replied in the negative. The woman's reply was predictable, 'You didn't pray hard enough.' She then implied that Jaya was not taking me to Chennai because she did not want me to get cured.

When I was told about this I was annoyed and forbade any further contact with the group. Although the remark was not entirely unexpected, it did not diminish my anger. I could

picture the hauteur with which the woman delivered her verdict, her face suffused with the unctuous self-righteousness and pious certainty that many cult members seem to pocess. (Julia Sweeney gives an account of one such meeting in this TED talk.) Some people think that they can say and and do anything they want if some god is on their side irrespective of the sensitivity and state of mind of the other person.

Some of the cult members came home a couple of times and once wanted to say a prayer for me if I had no objection. I objected so they left. By Zeus, I was not going to listen to their mumbo-jumbo. I think God will forgive me for that one. There is an old joke:

Priest: "Son, do you believe in God?"
Boy : "Father, not when I look at you."

If the Ichneumonidae is often cited as having caused Darwin's loss of faith, it was this incident which made me read a bit more about organised religion. I had been getting irritated by unending suggestions of various rituals which we had to perform. 'Respect creep' was something I started thinking about only after my stroke. As is often the case,only when you experience something do you think about it. This incident was the final straw.

I started reading some articles and listening to some debates on the issue. Debates rarely convince the opposite sides of each other's point of view. The value of debates is that they expose listeners to opinions that they would otherwise not hear since they would be listening to the same bromides being parroted by the members of their in-group which promote in-group fraternity and out-group hostility. Of course it helped that I had not been indoctrinated to any great extent during my formative years. So I did not bristle when I heard statements that did not comport with received wisdom.

I found that a society without god is not exactly dysfunctional. I read about theodicy. I read about why Bhagat Singh became an atheist. I learned that the brain can play strange tricks. (See this talk by V.S.Ramachandran and the discussion that follows. His talk begins at 38:50. I didn't understand anything in the talk before that.) An American Unitarian minister explains what happens in the minds of believers:

That which really belongs to the mind of the reader is attributed to that of the writer. The natural and simple meaning of the words is set aside. Forced interpretations are put upon passages for the purpose of compelling them to harmonize with that which it is supposed they ought to mean. Statements, doctrines, and allusions are discovered in the books which not only have no existence in their pages, but which are absolutely foreign to the epoch at which they were written.

What it all pointed to was what Delos McKown said, “The invisible and the nonexistent look very much alike.” I had never thought about these things. Religion was like a fog all around me that I wasn't too keen on. I was content to go through the motions as expected and leave it at that. I also realised that I would not have read and thought about these things if I had still been busy selling widgets and sitting late in office trying to look busy because the boss would be around. I just wouldn't have had the time. In other words, there would always have been pressure on me to continue to be an exemplary sausage.

You say and do many things not because you have given them much thought but because they play well with people around you. (For example, Miss Indias say that their role model is Mother Teresa.) But as you learn and undergo more experiences,you tend to keep revising your opinions about many issues. If somebody tells you that he hasn't changed his opinions on many issues for decades, he is admitting that his brain has atrophied.As someone said, if you are not idealistic in your twenties you have no heart, if you are idealistic in your forties you have no brain.

I grew fascinated by the concept of shifting the Overton Window. Or, to put it in technical terms, of treating the constraints as endogenous variables.

Note: Most of the links in this post are dated well after the incident which must have happened around six years ago. At that time I was not thinking of writing a blog so I now searched for links that I thought had the kind of information that I remember reading at the time and continue reading off and on.

What an idea, Sirji!

2011-06-24T06:53:00.000-07:00

In Why Evolution Is True, there is an example of the kind of things I like reading about. It describes a method to verify the age of a fossil that had been previously dated by a radiometric method.

There are yet other ways to check the accuracy of radiometric dating. One of them uses biology, and involved an ingenious study of fossil corals by John Wells of Cornell University. Radioisotope dating showed that these corals lived during the Devonian period, about 380 million years ago. But Wells could also find out when these corals lived simply by looking closely at them. He made use of the fact that the friction produced by tides gradually slows the earth’s rotation over time. Each day - one revolution of the earth - is a tiny bit longer than the last one. Not that you would notice: to be precise, the length of a day increases by about two seconds every 100,000 years. Since the duration of a year – the time it takes the earth to circle the sun — doesn’t change over time, this means that the number of days per year must be decreasing over time. From the known rate of slowing, Wells calculated that when his corals were alive - 380 million years ago if the radiometric dating was correct - each year would have contained about 396 days, each 22 hours long. If there was some way that the fossils themselves could tell how long each day was when they were alive, we could check whether that length matched up with the 22 hours predicted from radiometric dating.

But corals can do this, for as they grow they record in their bodies how many days they experience each year. Living corals produce both daily and annual growth rings. In fossil specimens, we can see how many daily rings separate each annual one: that is, how many days were included in each year when that coral was alive. Knowing the rate of tidal slowing, we can cross check the “tidal” age against the “radiometric “ age. Counting rings in his Devonian corals, Wells found that they experienced about 400 days per year, which means that each day was 21.9 hours long. That’s only a tiny deviation from the predicted 22 hours. This clever biological calibration gives us additional confidence in the accuracy of radiometric dating.

It is so much more interesting than just asking, "Were you there?" You can find out more about a slowing Earth here.

Face blindness

2011-06-13T23:19:00.000-07:00

I saw an interesting discussion about a curious disability called face blindness.

Playing dumb - II

2011-06-06T07:15:00.000-07:00

Sometimes people will say some wacky things like, 'All our actions are guided by the spirits of our ancestors.' (Judging by the contents of the conversation, it was not a metaphorical statement.) They will then say, 'What do youngsters know about such things these days'?

When there is a discussion about the relative military strengths of India and Pakistan, emotion is likely to rule the roost and it is not wise to get into an argument. Once I was told that there was a report in some magazine that India had the resources to destroy the whole of Pakistan while Pakistan had the resources to destroy 'only' half of India so in the event of a full fledged conflict India's victory was assured. If I had thought that I just had to say, 'It would be a Pyrrhic victory', and everyone would break out in applause, I might have given it a shot but I knew that it won't be so easy. It is curious that regular folks who have never held a weapon in their lives are fascinated by terrible weapons that cause immense destruction somewhere far away and produce spectacular firework displays on T.V.

Apparently,Daniel Bernoulli thought of the equation that would have predicted my preference for keeping quiet, as per this TED talk by Dan Gilbert. According to Bernoulli's equation, the Expected value, V of an action is given by:

V = (odds of success) x (value of success)

The odds of my being able to convince anybody was very low. It is very difficult to change deeply held beliefs. People tend to tune out disconfirming views. (According to Carol Travis, all of us have a tendency to rationalise our beliefs. I remember reading that we always have a goodly portion of that which we condemn. She also says that the best predictor of memory is one’s current beliefs.) The value that I attach to the success would also be very low. It would take me a very long time to say anything substantial and nobody, least of all me, has the patience to wait that long. It will also waste Jaya's time. I realised long ago that the quickest way to get back to reading about more interesting things was to remain silent.

Thus my expected value for wading into these debates is close to zero and my best option is to keep quiet. (Perhaps it would have been beneficial if I had thought along these lines before my stroke also.) At most times, I try to dictate short sentences omitting many common words, hoping Jaya will guess them. My verbosity is confined to the blog, much to your misfortune!

I am the perfect victim to whom various mythological tales can be told - I will listen quietly with a smile and there was no danger of my walking off in a huff. I had a better appreciation of why Bertie Wooster used to be underwhelmed when Madeline Basset used to tell him that "the stars are God's daisy chain", or that "every time a fairy blows its wee nose a baby is born". Once I was listening to such chatting for over an hour, muttering 'holy shit' a few times because I wanted to watch a cricket match. When I finally managed to get the T.V. switched on, the match had just started - it had been delayed due to rain!

Another situation when it is best for me to remain silent (which I have written about earlier also) is when people talk about business, finance, marketing, etc. I suppose if you are an MBA you cannot escape these things. When a visitor sees me reading a book, he might guess that it is about International Business. If they are told that I sometimes watch T.V., they might assume that I am glued to the business channels. I am reliably informed that my favorite newspaper is The Economic Times. I have not seen it for over a decade. In fact, I rarely read any newspapers these days. I will sometimes be asked for stock tips. If I was asked about the axolotl, I might have been motivated to dictate a few words but about stock tips, the best I can do is say,'I don't know'.

Sometimes a new visitor will come who had never seen me before. He will assume that I am in the depths of depression and will tell me, 'My heart tells me that you will get alright very soon!' I will blink and smile. There is nothing much else that I can do. They will feel encouraged and tell everyone else, 'My heart tells me that he will get alright very soon!' Everyone will nod politely. There is nothing much else that they can do. There will then be 'My friend had...' or 'I heard of a doctor who...' I may be a beneficiary of the identifiable victim bias but it also means that I receive many suggestions of rituals and 'cures' (it has reduced now) from good people who feel compelled to help me in some way.

Playing dumb - I

2011-05-22T05:37:00.001-07:00

There are quite a few situations when it is advisable to listen quietly and not give expert comments. Whoever said silence is golden knew a thing or two.

Some of these situations happen when there are discussions about religion and spirituality. Different people have different ways of coping with a difficult world where luck plays such a big part which provide some amusing (and disturbing) moments for a heathen like me. (According to Ambrose Bierce in The Devil's Dictionary, HEATHEN, n. A benighted creature who has the folly to worship something that he can see and feel.) Sometimes I will not be sure whether people are distinguishing between history and mythology; between reality and metaphor. There will be an innocuous discussion going on when suddenly temperatures will stat rising. I will see Dr. Jekyll for the most part but without any warning I will find myself face to face with Mr. Hyde and I will feel like telling them Boris Becker's immortal words,'Nobody died.'

I heard that a person can gain so much spiritual power that he can even cause tsunamis! (I wonder what sort of person would want such a power.) I once read that you cannot think of anything so incredible that you cannot make at least one person believe it. I increasingly think this is true. People will come up with deepities that will be totally incomprehensible to me. They would have had a tough time with Socrates. In The Story of Philosophy, Will Durant writes:

So he went about prying into the human soul, uncovering assumptions and questioning certainties. If men discoursed too readily of justice, he asked them, quietly, to ti? - What is it? What do you mean by these abstract words with which you so easily settle the problems of life and death? What do you mean by honor, virtue, morality, patriotism? What do you mean by yourself?

I knew that if I had tried to argue, I would have been inundated with an information cascade that would have led to group polarisation where I would have been the only member of one group. As Herbert Spencer once said, 'Like the majority of men who are born to a given belief, they demand the most rigorous proof of any adverse belief, but assume that their own needs none.' And it will all be delivered with an air of smug superiority which irks me so I am well advised to remain silent. When people are confronted by ideas they don't like, they react by reasserting familiar structures of meaning.

When people of faith are around, you often get to see the Dunning-Kruger Effect. They will talk about fantastic things with a certainty that Einstein wouldn't have been capable of when talking about Relativity.Without skipping a beat, they will say that atheists are certain about everything. There will be no danger at all that they will be able to spot the irony. I will try my best to hide my smirk.

There is a peculiar tendency to find scientific explanations and discoveries in ancient texts. Sometimes there will be a mix of scientific facts and fairy tales to produce some bizarre story. For instance, I heard that all the land masses were once joined into one unit which was called India. This gradually split into the various continents so actually the whole world is India! People say such things with such confidence that I begin to develop doubts about what I thought I knew and will try do some checks.

It is astonishing to find people rushing to believe some authority figure without bothering to check the veracity of the information. This same attitude is drilled into kids who refuse to accept the idea that teachers are only humans and could sometimes make mistakes or perhaps they had heard something wrong. They will continue to say the wrong thing saying, 'Teacher said so.'They seem to have internalised Voltaire's warning - “It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.”

It will be amusing to listen to the unconscious competition among believers (of the type parodied in Yes Prime Minister). For example, someone will say that he has visited a particular religious place 8 times while another will say she has gone there 12 times. Many people will talk about how they knew some temple official which enabled them to jump a long queue on a hot day and enter the sanctum sanctorum quickly where 'I prayed to my heart's content'. I will be the only one who will chuckle at the irony.

Losing Speech

2011-05-16T22:42:00.000-07:00

Christopher Hitchens writes about losing his ability to speak.

Psychological factors that reduce stress - II

2011-05-09T06:31:00.000-07:00

I could enjoy reading about various scientific discoveries that I hadn't given much thought to earlier because I don't have the kind of science phobia that Steven Pinker describes in The Blank Slate:

The fear that scientific knowledge undermines human values reminds me of the opening scene in Annie Hall, in which the young Alvy Singer has been taken to the family doctor:

MOTHER: He's been depressed. All of a sudden, he can't do anything.
DOCTOR: Why are you depressed, Alvy?
MOTHER: Tell Dr. Flicker. [Answers for him.] It's something he read.
DOCTOR: Something he read, huh?
ALVY: [Head down.] The universe is expanding.
DOCTOR: The universe is expanding?
ALVY: Well, the universe is everything and if it's expanding, someday it will break apart and that would be the end of everything!
MOTHER: What is that your business? [To the doctor.] He stopped doing his homework.
ALVY: What's the point?

The scene is funny because Alvy has confused two levels of analysis: the scale of billions of years with which we measure the universe, and the scale of decades, years, and days with which we measure our lives. As Alvy's mother points out, "What has the universe got to do with it? You're here in Brooklyn! Brooklyn is not expanding!"

People who are depressed at the thought that all our motives are selfish are as confused as Alvy. They have mixed up ultimate causation (why something evolved by natural selection) with proximate causation (how the entity works here and now). The mix-up is natural because the two explanations can look so much alike.

Another psychological factor that reduces stress is the presence of social support networks. Robert Sapolsky writes in Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers:

Rats only occasionally use it, but primates are great at it. Put a primate through something unpleasant: it gets a stress-response. Put it through the same stressor while in a room full of other primates and ... it depends. If those primates are strangers, the stress-response gets worse. But if they are friends, the stress-response is decreased. Social support networks -- it helps to have a shoulder to cry on, a hand to hold, an ear to listen to you, someone to cradle you and to tell you it will be okay.

[SNIP]

Social support is certainly protective for humans as well. This can be demonstrated even in transient instances of support. In a number of subtle studies, subjects were exposed to a stressor such as having to give a public speech or perform a mental arithmetic task, or having two strangers argue with them, with or without a supportive friend present. In each case, social support translated into less of a cardiovascular stress-response.

I have written about the wonderful support system that I have. Another psychological factor that reduces stress is control which also I had mentioned earlier.

It is said that life is lived forward and analysed backward. I did not know about these things before my stroke. I read this book a couple of years ago and tried to think of the various factors under these heads that helped me to cope with the changed circumstances.

Psychological factors that reduce stress - I

2011-05-04T07:07:00.000-07:00

When an organism is subjected to some physiological stress say, a pain stimulus, it develops a stress response. Two similar physiological stresses can be perceived and appraised differently depending on psychological factors i.e. they can be modulated by psychological variables. A corollary is that, in the absence of any physiological stress, psychological factors alone can cause a stress response. Being familiar with zebras, you are no doubt conversant with all this stuff. So let us proceed to rats.

Take a rat and subject it to a series of mild electric shocks. It has some stress response like an increased heart rate. Let us say the long term consequences of this is measured as some probability of developing ulcers later on. It is seen that this probability increases for the stressed rat. Take another rat and subject it to the same electric shocks of the same intensity and duration. But this time allow the rat to run across and gnaw a piece of wood after every electric shock. It is seen that this rat has a lower probability of developing ulcers. You have given it an outlet for frustration. Discussing this experiment, Robert Sapolsky writes in Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers:

We humans also deal better with stressors when we have outlets for frustrations - punch a wall, take a run, find solace in a hobby. We are even cerebral enough to imagine those outlets and derive some relief: consider the prisoner of war who spends hours imagining a golf game in tremendous detail. I have a friend who passed a prolonged and very stressful illness lying in bed with a mechanical pencil and a notepad, drawing topographic maps of imaginary mountain images and taking hikes through them.

A central feature of an outlet being effective is if it distracts from the stressor. But, obviously, more important is that it also be something positive for you - a reminder that there is more to life than whatever is making you crazed and stressed at the time.

The interest I developed in reading about and trying to understand evolution and to some extent astronomy were my outlets for frustration. (I read more about evolution not because I like astronomy less but because I like evolution more. Both are huge subjects and I have only so much time to read so I have to make a choice.) I loved grappling with concepts that I didn't know anything about. “Not to be occupied, and not to exist, amount to the same thing,” said Voltaire. I tried to keep myself occupied during long sleepless hours thinking about stuff that I was previously unfamiliar with. So when I was not doing anything, I was not really not doing anything. This blog also acts as an outlet for frustration. of course the mother of all outlets was the establishment of a means of communication.

There is an interesting variant of the above rat experiment. This time after each electric shock, let it run across the cage and hassle another rat. Such stress induced displacement of aggression reduces the probability of it developing ulcers. Sapolsky writes:

It’s a real primate specialty as well. A male baboon loses a fight. Frustrated, he spins around and attacks a subordinate male who was minding his own business. An extremely high percentage of primate aggression represents frustration displaced onto innocent bystanders. Humans are pretty good at it, too, and we have a technical way of describing the phenomenon in the context of stress-related disease: “He’s one of those guys who doesn’t get ulcers, he gives them.” Taking it out on someone else- how well it works at minimizing the impact of a stressor.

P.S.: I saw recently that Stanford has just posted Robert Sapolsky's entire Human Behavioral Biology course from Spring 2010 on YouTube! I don't know about you but I am going to

freak out on this.

Courageous neurologist

2011-04-30T23:41:00.000-07:00

Saw this today.

Gosh!

2011-04-25T00:58:00.000-07:00

I am sure you are not looking forward to an adventure like this.

Second blogiversary

2011-04-17T04:33:00.000-07:00

It is two years since we started blogging. There have been times when I have got tired of dictation and flirted with the idea of calling it quits. Then I will think, maybe a couple of posts more. And then, maybe one more post. And what do you know? It has been two years! 'Will I?' is not a bad way to go.

For the past few months the nurse has been typing part of the blog thus reducing the load on Jaya. She doesn't know English. I look at the required letter on the keyboard and she guesses the correct letter after a few iterations.It has been working quite well and has improved with practice. Sometimes she will press the key too hard and the letter will get typed multiple times but that is part of the game. She doesn't know that some characters require two keys to be pressed simultaneously and I don't know how to convey it to her. So Jaya will type characters like !, ( ), ?, etc. and do cut and paste. Jaya will also type the passages from books, which she can finish in a few minutes. This is my favourite part where I just have to point out the relevant passage and relax.

For typing capital letters, I ask the nurse to press Caps Lock. The problem with this is that I sometimes forget to turn it off with the result that some letters get typed in capital. If a I am lucky, I will notice the error early but sometimes I will notice my goof-up only after a while by which time quite a few letters would have been typed in capitals. Having to delete them all and retype them doesn't put me in a good mood. I can't glower at anybody since it was my bad so I will satisfy myself by glaring at the monitor.

The single quotes have been typed by the nurse and the double quotes have been typed by Jaya. That is all there is to it. I don't know if it qualifies for some peeveblogging but now you know how the sausage is made. If there is some spelling mistake, I don't immediately correct it because it will take too much time for the nurse to position the mouse-pointer correctly. I will make all such corrections when Jaya does the editing or wait for a Spell Check. Sometimes I will miss an error which will not be caught by Spell Check. For example, in this post, the original sentence was:

REPORTER: Will it be right if I put it this way - "Professor Dirac solves all the problems of mathematical physics, but is unable to find a better way of figuring out Babe Ruth's bathing average"?

Obviously the Spell Check did not correct it. I later noticed the error by accident and corrected it. I must have made many such errors for which you would have maintained a diplomatic silence. For all acts of omission and commission, mea culpa.

So thanks to Jaya and the nurse, this blog has entered its third year. And thank you to all readers who have dropped by.

Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers

2011-04-10T04:27:00.000-07:00

I came across the term eudaemonia, the classical Greek term for human flourishing in an old NYT article about a happiness conference. It had some other interesting terms like nachas, "Happiness entrepreneurs" and "Happiness Makeover". But what particularly interested me was that one of the participants was Robert M. Sapolsky, whose book Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers I had read some time back. So why don't zebras get ulcers but humans do? Sapolsky writes:

If you are that Zebra running for your life, or that lion sprinting for your meal, your body’s physiological response mechanisms are superbly adapted for dealing with such short-term physical emergencies. For the vast majority of beasts on this planet, stress is about a short-term crisis, after which it’s either over with or your’re over with. When we sit around and worry about stressful things, we turn on the same physiological responses - but they are potentially a disaster when provoked chronically. A large body of evidence suggests that stress-related disease emerges, pre-dominantly, out of the fact that we so often activate a physiological system that has evolved for responding to acute physical emergencies, but we turn it on for months on end, worrying about mortgages, relationships, and promotions.

A zebra doesn't have all these problems to worry about.

I know, I know you are familiar with all this matter. But methinks it did no harm if you had to read it again.

'Indian culture'

2011-04-01T05:34:00.000-07:00

I am currently reading The Argumentative Indian by Amartya Sen.I was interested to read that 'Indian culture' includes a lot of heterodox views which are often neglected in the current popular discourse.He writes that it is a composite of many influences:

Not only did Buddhists, Jains, agnostics and atheists compete with each other and with adherents of what we now call Hinduism (a much later term) in India of the first millennium BCE, but also the dominant religion in India was Buddhism for nearly a thousand years. The Chinese in the first millennium CE standardly referred to India as 'the Buddhist Kingdom'.

Among classical languages, Sanskrit has the largest volume of religious literature as well as the largest body of agnostic or atheist writings. Indian texts not only contain disputes among various schools of religious thought but also contain debates among defenders of religiosity on the one hand and promoters of scepticism on the other. The Carvaka school of thought had space over the centuries to express their views and was one of the groups invited to attend Akbar's conference of religions in the late 16th century.While analysing the reasons why Western writers tend to give short shrift to Indian achievements in astronomy, mathematics and other secular fields, focusing instead on religious and spiritual aspects, Amartya Sen writes:

Even on religious subjects, the only world religion that is firmly agnostic (Buddhism) is of Indian origin, and, furthermore, the atheistic schools of Carvaka and Lokayata have generated extensive arguments that have been seriously studied by Indian religious scholars themselves. Heterodoxy runs throughout the early documents, and even the ancient epic Ramayana, which is often cited by contemporary Hindu activists as the holy book of the divine Rama's life, contains dissenting characters. For example, Rama is lectured to by a worldly pundit called Javali on the folly of his religious beliefs: "O Rama, be wise, there exists no world but this, that is certain! Enjoy that which is present and cast behind thee that which is unpleasant."

When I read 'The Bhagwad Gita'

2011-03-23T01:27:00.000-07:00

There was a time when I read a substantial portion of 'The Bhagwad Gita'. It was when I was about ten or eleven years old. (I am talking of ancient history here.)

One afternoon I was playing some distance away from my house, throwing stones in the air, trying to see how far they will go. (Apparently the frontal cortex, which keeps our emotional part of the brain from going out of control, develops fully only by about age thirty.Perhaps that is the reason why we do so many daft things till that age.) The sun was shining, the birds were singing and all the other things were happening that novelists write to indicate that it was a perfect day. But as everyone knows, every silver lining has a cloud.

One of these stones took on a life of its own (like the bullet that killed Kennedy) and went and hit a glass sheet in a neighbouring house. Glass sheets have this nasty habit of breaking into a million pieces with an unhealthy noise when struck with sufficient force. This sheet was no different. I stood literally transfixed to the spot, staring at the apocalyptic scene in horror. (If Wodehouse was writing my biography, he would have informed you at this point that something similar happened to Lot's wife when she looked back instead of walking straight ahead.)

The next instant, I ran to my house. Luckily, no one was in the front room to ask me uncomfortable questions about the concerned look on my face. I cautiously parted the curtains and peered out of the window, fully expecting to see a horde of Neanderthals bearing machetes and clubs and baying for my blood. To my surprise nobody was outside. But I was sure that this was just the lull before the storm. I had just seen the film 'Sholay' and Dharmendra's dialogue kept flashing through my head, 'Police coming, budiya going to jail and in jail budiya chakki pissing and pissing and pissing'. I looked around the room wondering what I could do to avoid the long arm of the law.

I saw a copy of 'The Bhagwad Gita' lying on a shelf. I suddenly got the idea that reading 'The Bhagwad Gita' wold keep me out of jail. I took it down and started reading. The left side had Sanskrit slokas and the right side had the English translation. I did not know any Sanskrit and the level of the English was far higher than what a ten year old could understand. But I remembered someone telling me that reading a religious book was good even if you did not understand anything.He was a Daniel come to judgement showing the way out of a very sticky situation.

It was a hard slog. After a few pages I kept the book aside, intending to read a few pages everyday. After coming home from school, I used to read some pages from the book before going to play. My mother must have been pleased about my sudden religiosity but I don't remember her saying anything about it. But I soon started tiring of it. Anyway the police were nowhere in sight. So I put the book back on the shelf where I had found it.

Khan Academy

2011-03-14T01:23:00.000-07:00

Recently, TED posted online a talk by Salman Khan. Not that Salman Khan. This is the Khan of Khan Academy. If you have not seen the site yet, now is the time. A friend brought the site to my notice and it has saved me a lot of time and effort in teaching a variety of classwork to Sujit. Thanks Anitha.

Talking of educational videos, here are some physics lectures. I haven't seen them all. They seem to be good.

Looking back with regret

2011-03-08T04:54:00.000-08:00

We look before and after,

And pine for what is not:

Our sincerest laughter

With some pain is fraught;

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

-from 'To a Skylark by Percy Bysshe Shelley

It was the time when I had just passed from a coveted institute, tweaked my sense of humour, had a good job, was happily married, lived in a good house in Mumbai (everyone who has stayed in Mumbai know how important that is) and was about to conquer the world. At this time, my mother and sister came from Kerala to stay with us for a couple of months. It was their first visit to Mumbai.

One day I was taking them around the city, showing them the sights which they had seen only on postcards (they always look better on postcards). Sometime during the trip, I got miffed at something (I don't remember what it was; it must have been quite trivial) and I started acting like a million dollars. I was in a huff and did not speak much for the rest of the trip. Jaya doesn't remember the incident. Most probably my mother and sister also don't remember it.

In this TEDtalk, Daniel Kahneman talks about the dominance of the remembering self over the experiencing self and that what we remember is the ending of an experience. I remember the unhappy note on which the trip ended but I don't remember the pleasant occurrences that must have happened earlier. (This blog is being written by the remembering self. The experiencing self must have been quite different. And memories can play tricks.)

Oft, when on my cot I lie in vacant or in pensive mood, the incident flashes upon that inward eye which, Wordsworth assures me, is the bliss of solitude. But my heart with pleasure does not fill.

Faking tragedy

2011-03-03T23:42:00.000-08:00

I saw an interesting post about a strange phenomenon called Factitious Disorder.

In which I bite off more than I can chew

2011-02-26T06:15:00.000-08:00

Although the universe is under no obligation to make sense, students in pursuit of the Ph.D are. - Robert P. Kirshner

Although I was not gunning for a Ph.D, after getting some interest in reading about astronomy, I became ambitious and decided to see what cosmology was all about. I found that one of the most recommended popular science books in field was The Whole Shebang. I bought it and started reading it. The preface contained the following ominous lines:

Then quantum chance reared its indeterminate face, as a creative agency that authored the first phenomena of cosmic time. So we are obliged to consider that even the largest systems are ruled by quantum precepts that govern nature on the smallest scales, and that the origin of the universe may itself have been a quantum flux.

This did not look promising. I encountered terms like shape of space, C-field theory, entropy of Black holes,baryon asymmetry etc. and my synapses jammed. There were passages where I thought I understood something followed by fog. There were parts that I understood as well as I did this contraption. The part I enjoyed most was a character sketch of the Nobel laureate, Paul Dirac. Apparently, Dirac was supreme in one area of human endeavour and had no interest or competence in any other area. He was famously taciturn. There was an extract from an interview he gave to a magazine:

REPORTER: Now, doctor, will you give me in a few words the low-down on all your investigations?
DIRAC: No.
REPORTER: Will it be right if I put it this way - "Professor Dirac solves all the problems of mathematical physics, but is unable to find a better way of figuring out Babe Ruth's batting average"?
DIRAC: Yes.
REPORTER: What do you like best in America?
DIRAC: Potatoes.

There was a description of another Dirac incident:

The physicist Jagdish Mehra recalls dining with Dirac at hightable at Cambridge. "The weather outside was very bad, and since in England it is always quite respectable to start a conversation with the weather, I said to Dirac, 'It is very windy, Professor'. He said nothing at all, and a few seconds later he got up and left. I was mortified, as I thought that I had somehow offended him. He went to the door, opened it, looked out, came back, sat down, and said 'Yes.'"

With passages like these, I thought I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. But naive me! I did not realise that the light was from an oncoming train. I soon ran into terms like virtual particles, gauge bosons, Lie groups...and my neurons went on strike. But being a glutton for punishment, I struggled through to the end and managed to survive. If you want to have an idea about the kinds of topics that are discussed in the book you can listen to Dark Matter Rap.

Aside - I saw another anecdote about Dirac in this post:

At the question period after a Dirac lecture at the University of Toronto, somebody in the audience remarked: “Professor Dirac, I do not understand how you derived the formula on the top left side of the blackboard.”

“This is not a question,” snapped Dirac, “it is a statement. Next question, please.”

Punctuality and boredom

2011-02-15T06:58:00.000-08:00

This post about perfectionism got me thinking. (I tend to do it sometimes.) I didn't have the kind of obsession mentioned in the post but I was a stickler for punctuality. If I had an appointment at 10 a.m. I usually arrived a few minutes earlier than the scheduled time. This was not always possible in Mumbai because of the traffic jams so I used to start earlier in order to get to the venue on time.

This habit became a problem after my stroke. When people rang up and said that they would come at a particular time, I would expect them to land up at exactly that time. When they got delayed due to some reason, I would keep worrying and will not be able to focus on whatever I was doing. Nowadays I am much more relaxed when visitors get delayed and carry on with my usual routine. (It is part of the process of getting used to the changed circumstances.) When they finally arrive a couple of hours after the scheduled time, I will grin and think,'Samaj gaya mein...vahi purana...tera bahana...dere se aana aur ye kehna, vaada toh nibhaaya.'

Another post on boredom was relevant to me. In it, Jonah Lehrer quotes Joseph Brodsky:

When hit by boredom , let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom. In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is: The sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface. The idea here is to exact a full look at the worst. The reason boredom deserves such scrutiny is that it represents pure, undiluted time in all its repetitive, redundant, monotonous splendor.

Boredom is your window on the properties of time that one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one's mental equilibrium. It is your window on time's infinity. Once this window opens, don't try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open.

This reminded me of a poem that I had learnt in school - Ode on Melancholy. In it, Keats says that melancholy should be enjoyed by comparing it with beautiful things and not with objects that give feelings of sorrow 'For shade to shade will come too drowsily,/ And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.'

Perhaps I made the connection between the two because both talk of enjoying feelings that one normally tries to avoid.

Faith is not a virtue - II

2011-02-08T23:39:00.000-08:00

Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt. - Clarence Darrow

From my early teens, I was skeptical of considering some people who wear the right uniform as the repositories of all knowledge about Life, the Universe and Everything. Galileo, a devout Christian, said, “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.” I remember listening to a podcast where the speaker said 'progress depends on learning how to reject authority of priests and rulers' or words to that effect. I agree.

Priests will extol the virtues of faith and they will decry the lack of faith in people as a major shortcoming. This is not surprising. Their power and pelf depend on it. They would like as many people as possible to lead an unconsidered life. (This result was not a surprise.) They would have loved the punchline of an ad I came across some time back -'Thinking is such a waste of time!' (I don't know the product - I wasn't paying attention and only looked at the TV when I heard the punchline.)

Whoever first got the idea of putting faith on a pedestal should be regarded with awe. Having people conditioned not to think is a great way to avoid scrutiny. When I see clips of huge crowds at religious functions listening intently to the pious rambling of some guy in a funny dress, I can't help thinking about Einstein's words: "He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice." I didn't think along these lines before my stroke but now that I have had the time to read and reflect, I increasingly feel that religious faith is a problem and not a virtue.

There are way too many poor people in the world and it is not surprising that they unquestioningly accept what their priests tell them. People who are struggling to get two square meals a day or who are trapped in deadly conflict zones cannot reasonably be expected to ponder over the implications of faith. The simplistic explanations of religion that I find so unsatisfying seem to give them some kind of comfort in their daily struggles. What is puzzling is that many people who are much more privileged and very smart tend to think in the same way. The amount of cognitive dissonance that they can live with is staggering.

In this talk by Dan Dennett about some reasons why many people profess a 'belief' in god, one of the reasons he gives is a fear of a 'catastrophic collapse of consensus'. Perhaps this is the reason why some vitriolic comments about 'New Atheist' books have been by people who are themselves not believers. This fear is exemplified by some comments quoted in The Blank Slate (I saw a post last month about the book):

In a scene from Inherit the Wind, the play about the Scopes Monkey Trial, the prosecutor and defense attorney (based on William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow) are relaxing together after a day in court. The prosecutor says of the Tennessee locals:

They're simple people, Henry; poor people. They work hard and they need to believe in something, something beautiful. Why do you want to take it away from them? It's all they have.

That is not far from the attitude of the neocons. Kristol has written:

If there is one indisputable fact about the human condition it is that no community can survive if it is persuaded - or even if it suspects - that its members are leading meaningless lives in a meaningless universe.

He spells out the moral corollary:

There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn't work.

As the science writer Ronald Bailey observes, "Ironically today many modern conservatives fervently agree with Karl Marx that religion is 'the opium of the people'; they add a heartfelt, 'Thank God!'"

Another reason that Dennett gives is the love and respect we have for a lot of religious people. I have not been religious since my early teens so it should be easy for me to criticize religion but it isn't because of this constraint. Most of the people I know are religious to varying extents and I get along well with them. It doesn't feel good to criticize the cherished beliefs of those close to you even if you find them (the ideas not the people) weird. You tend to nod politely and swallow your words.

Faith is not a virtue - I

2011-01-30T05:19:00.000-08:00

"Faith" is a fine invention

When Gentlemen can see—

But Microscopes are prudent

In an Emergency.

- Emily Dickinson

'Faith is good' is a meme (see this TED talk on memes) that I have heard since childhood. An article in The Huffington Post says:

Faith, as Gary Whittenberger wrote in Skeptic magazine, has multiple common uses.

"Faith" may refer to a religion or worldview, as in "My faith is Islam." It may refer to an attitude of trust or confidence, as in "I have faith in my physician." Or it may refer to believing propositions without evidence or out of proportion to the available evidence.

It is this latter use of faith that is incompatible with science.

I also have problems with the third meaning of faith. Believers, whether deliberately or unwittingly, will blur the lines between these various meanings in order to justify their strange tales.

Following my stroke, there was an avalanche of 'cures' suggested to me - powders, pastes, oils, threads, mantras, etc. There being no shortage of gods and godmen in India, there was no dearth of these ideas. Many of these suggestions were given by concerned womenfolk who were in thrall of various godmen and believed implicitly in all their tales. I tried to keep an impassive expression because, as everyone knows, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. (Any resemblance to any real person, living or dead, is purely coincidental.) Moreover, they were nice people who were telling me the most potent things they knew and I didn't want to 'say' or do anything that might hurt their feelings.

I will be told - 'Even your son believes it, why can't you?' Seriously, I should think like a four year old? At that age one would think that the earth is flat. (Perhaps that is the wrong example. You don't need to be four years old to think that the earth is flat.) Though not personally religious, I thought at the time that religion must be shown respect. So I generally kept quiet and listened with a dumb smile. I must have looked like Bertie Wooster listening to Aunt Agatha (the one who chewed broken glass pieces and had babies for breakfast).

I will be told that for these things to happen, I must have faith. Over time, I began to think that 'faith' is a five-letter word for 'anything goes'. It was the opposite of doubt. 'Faith has no reason' seems to be the ultimate get-out-of-jail statement ever thought of. As the former preacher turned atheist Dan Barker said, "Faith is a cop-out. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits". A Hitchslap is in order - "What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof." I have never said it till now. It does not have the same punch if dictated letter by letter.

I used to get very irritated when Sujit used to be told that tying some thread would make him do well in exams. When he was much younger, he thought that this was a good idea: he need not study at all and if he ties some thread, he will get all the answers during an exam. We had to convince him that it was not so simple. There is a get-out-of-jail statement for this situation also - 'Do your best and god will do the rest'.

Saint Ignatius of Loyola said: “We should always be disposed to believe that that which appears white is really black, if the hierarchy of the Church so decides” Such a sentiment is alright for a romantic song but I don't know how a person can hold such a position as his guiding principle in life. It boggles the mind how two such contradictory worldviews can exist in one head. Faith has consequences.

But there are situations when faith can lead to good actions as Robert Sapolsky says towards the end of this speech. (Listen to the whole speech because it is entertaining but the relevant portion is towards the end.)

Aside - In The Song of the Dodo, there is an example of a belief that I don't have a problem with:

In the clarity of a Monday morning, I take another glance at the diamond- shaped highway sign with its TASMANIAN TIGER, NEXT? KM alert. Just beside that one is a smaller sign, which I didn't notice on Saturday night. EVERYONE NEEDS SOMETHING TO BELIEVE IN, it says, Closer inspection shows me a foam-topped mug, and the fine print: "I believe I'II have another beer."

Flying chapptis

2011-01-23T23:43:00.000-08:00

I saw a post about Indian food. The last video in that post is awesome.

Ngram Viewer

2011-01-20T22:49:00.000-08:00

Google has a new tool called Ngram Viewer. It has led to a new field called “culturomics” - the study of culture using vast amounts of data. Here is how these buzzwords came about. For a jobless guy like me, it is fun to key in different words and see their trends. Some interesting ngrams were:

India,China,Brazil - Why is India dipping in the last three decades?
Some management jargon - Oh those MBAs!
Schadenfreude
I saw a list of 100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know. I looked at the graph of a couple of words that I did not know. (There were some words whose meanings I was not sure of but I probably would have guessed them if I had a few alternatives like in Reader's Digest. But I had no idea about these two words.)
I saw a post about the best movie quotes of all time and looked at the trends of some of the movies (not the quotes because I am not sure how to handle the punctuations).
Some poets
Some fictional detectives
Distinguishing real science from fads
Apparently this is the Best Google n-gram yet.
The Science Hall of Fame

But the graphs should be taken with a pinch of salt.

Some random thoughts

2011-01-11T23:55:00.000-08:00

A couple of passages in two books struck a chord in me. The first passage is from Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers:

An overabundance of information can be stressful as well. One of the places I dreaded most in graduate school was the "new journal desk" in the library, where all the science journals received the previous week were displayed, thousands of pages of them. Everyone would circle around it, teetering on the edge of panic attacks. All that available information seemed to taunt us with how out of control we felt - stupid, left behind, out of touch, and overwhelmed.

I got this feeling many times. In school, the library was this wonderful place which had splendid story books that gave you hours of pleasure. Then you go to college and the library will be filled with journals and books bearing intimidating titles. Serious People will be poring over these books with great concentration. Was I intimidated much? You bet! I will also try reading these books but will not be able to get past the first couple of pages.

There will be whole books on topics that you had thought had been adequately covered in one paragraph in the textbook that you had been using. There will be a rack with the ominous sign 'New Arrivals' where new books with strange titles will keep arriving and disappearing every week. I will wonder who read these books and survived. (There are people who do incredible things. I saw a list of The 100 Most Beautiful Words in English and the first word itself I did not know, among many other words. It is disheartening, I tell you.)

The other passage is about the Nobel laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar in E=mc²: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation:

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was renowned for keeping a calm exterior, but internally: "I am almost ashamed to confess it. Years run apace, but nothing done! I wish I had been more concentrated, directed and disciplined." At the time of this lament he was twenty, and it was but one year since the sea journey where he'd peered into the catch-22 from E=mc², which, along with other work, would ultimately lead to the understanding of black holes.

When I read books on evolution and astronomy, I often think how the authors know so much. At the end of the book there will be a plethora of books and articles listed as recommended reading. I will wonder when they got time to read them and more importantly, assimilate them. As Mortimer J. Adler said, " In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you." And they also have to spend time on a day job. Did that guy called Isaac Asimov really exist? He wrote so many books on so many diverse subjects that I wonder when he slept. And I start thinking like Chandrasekhar: 'I should not have wasted so much time.' As Kushwant Singh says:

Over the years I have discovered what enormous energy silence creates, energy that socializing and useless chit chat depletes. You have got to train yourself to be alone. You have to discipline yourself to follow a slavish routine.

A major difference is that Chandrasekhar had the thought at 20, I had the thought at 40. What is it that Jimmy Connors said about experience? " The trouble with experience is that by the time you have it you are too old to take advantage of it."

More communication snafus

2011-01-02T04:40:00.000-08:00

When I read about mondegreens, I realised that I also had been stumped sometimes by such auditory glitches but unfortunately I cannot remember any, except for the confusion between 'about' and 'above' which happens frequently. I will frame a sentence containing 'about'. I will dictate 'abo..' and Jaya will guess 'above'. I will hear it as 'about' and blink affirmatively. When the sentence is over, Jaya will stare at it in incomprehension and I will wonder what was so complicated about it. When I examine it, I will realise what the problem was and make the necessary correction.

Dictating mathematical notations could cause problems. Once I wanted to dictate a²-b² = (a-b)(a+b). I began : 'a square...' and immediately ran into trouble. Why? That was because Jaya started wondering why I was telling her about a square when the problem had nothing to do with squares or rectangles or any other shape. After much rolling of eyes, pulling of hair (figuratively speaking), stiffening of muscles and cough induced due to frustration, Jaya will guess what I was trying to dictate. I had thought that I would be able to solve the problem in fifteen minutes but here I was having just got started. I will realise later that the confusion could have been avoided if I had dictated 'a power two minus b power two' or 'x square minus y square'.

'You won't understand'

2010-12-24T00:31:00.000-08:00

'A genius ...Elusive, delicate but lasting. He created such a credible world that, sadly, I suppose, never really existed but what a delight it always is to enter it and the temptation to linger there is sometimes almost overwhelming'- Alan Ayckbourn about P.G.Wodehouse

Once during physiotherapy, I suddenly started laughing. The physiotherapist thought that it was about something to do with the exercises so she asked me what it was about. I wondered what to say. This was because at the time I had been reading 'The Code of the Woosters' and had suddenly remembered a funny scene in it. Bertie Wooster had gone to Stiffy Byng's room to pinch an incriminating notebook but was set upon by her dog which made him jump quickly onto a chest of drawers. Sitting on this uncomfortable perch and gazing down sourly at the dog who was sitting on the floor and glaring at him, Bertie muses:

I remember Freddie Widgeon, who was once chased onto the top of a wardrobe by an Alsatian during a country house visit, telling me that what he had disliked most about the thing was the indignity of it all - the blow to the proud spirit, if you know what I mean - the feeling, in fine, that he, the Heir of the Ages, as you might say, was camping out on a wardrobe at the whim of a bally dog.

It was the same with me. One doesn't want to make a song and dance about one's ancient lineage, of course, but after all the Woosters did come over with the Conqueror and were extremely pally with him: and a fat lot of good it is coming over with Conquerors, if you're simply going to wind up by being given the elbow by Aberdeen terriers.

Trying to to explain this to someone who is not already familiar with the story and the writing style of Wodehouse would have been an impossible task. Wodehouse fans know that nothing much happens in his novels and the fun lies in the way he plays with words in order to describe the absurd situations that his characters find themselves in. If I had tried explaining it, it would have taken an hour and the effort would have fallen flat. So I chose the easy option and dictated to Jaya,'You won't understand'.

Since then whenever I laughed for no discernible reason, the physiotherapist will look at Jaya, smile knowingly and say,'You won't understand'.

It only adds

2010-12-17T04:38:00.000-08:00

Some people think that unweaving the rainbow reduces the charm of the rainbow. I belong to the opposite camp. Before becoming interested in reading about evolution, I would have had only a vague understanding of what Richard Feynman was talking about in the beginning of the video in the previous link. Now I have a better idea of how the co-evolutionary relationship between flowers and their pollinators give rise to complex adaptations. In Unweaving the Rainbow, Richard Dawkins writes:

There is an anaesthetic of familiarity, a sedative of ordinariness, which dulls the senses and hides the wonder of existence. For those of us not gifted in poetry, it is at least worthwhile from time to time making an effort to shake off the anaesthetic. What is the best way of countering the sluggish habituation brought about by our gradual crawl from babyhood? We can't actually fly to another planet. But we can recapture that sense of having just tumbled out to life on a new world by looking at our own world in unfamiliar ways.

In Climbing Mount Improbable, Richard Dawkins writes:

The genes of an elephant or a human, like the genes of a virus, can be seen as a Duplicate Me computer program. Virus genes are coded instructions that say (if they happen to be parasitizing an elephant): 'Elephant cells, duplicate me.' Elephant genes say: 'Elephant cells, work together to make a new elephant, which must be programmed in its turn to grow and make more elephants, all programmed to duplicate me.' The principle is the same. It is just that some Duplicate Me programs are more indirect and longwinded than others.

To put it another way, as Samuel Butler said, “A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.” I loved this new way of looking at living creatures which I was not familiar with earlier. It was like suddenly being able to see the second view of the Necker Cube. Reading about evolution and astronomy gave me some idea of Blake's words:

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

But Blake was a mystic and would have written his lines to mean the opposite of what I thought they meant. It is ironical that when I can't physically move an inch of my own volition, my mind delights in traversing vast expanses of time and space. The late George Carlin seems to have been a man after my own heart. (But my interest doesn't extend to a desire to own celestial bodies.) This is the type of conversation that would have me all ears even though some of it is beyond my level of incompetence because, as Feynman says in the video in the first link of this post, there is a 'difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.' (Note: The discussion has nothing to do with what the good professors at IIMA slogged to drill into my head.)

What is it like to be 'locked-in'?

2010-12-07T03:34:00.000-08:00

There is a well known philosophical paper called What is it like to be a bat? It is not so much about bats as about the impossibility of knowing fully some state unless you are yourself in that state. You may know all about echolocation but you will not be able to experience the world like a bat unless you are yourself a bat. I won't be able to understand exactly the thought processes of writers who are slowly losing their mind. And I won't be able to understand the experience of someone who has had a stroke in a different part of the brain. (For example, see this TED talk.) The same goes for being 'locked-in'. There is something ineffable that you will never be able to get.

Take for instance the first time I sat upright after my stroke. I felt as if all my internal organs were hanging down limply as if they were attached to the body wall by sheets of muscles that were limp like the membrane of a pricked balloon. I don't know how else to explain it. The feeling lasted only for a few seconds and has never happened again. You will not be able to simulate the feeling because I suppose the relevant muscles are involuntary.

In The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker writes:

The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard. The mental abilities of a four year-old that we take for granted - recognizing a face, lifting a pencil, walking across a room, answering a question - in fact solve some of the hardest engineering problems ever conceived ... As the new generation of intelligent devices appears, it will be the stock analysts and petrochemical engineers and parole board members who are in danger of being replaced by machines. The gardeners, receptionists, and cooks are secure in their jobs for decades to come.

The same is the case with being 'locked-in'. Reading or blogging don't drive me up the wall. That is reserved for the ant in the pant or the mosquito in the middle of the night. You will not be able to understand why time appears to pass slowly when someone removes the railings from my bed and no one stands nearby. (It does not happen every time.) You will have only a vague understanding of my reluctance to travel.

Whenever someone tells me that I should do this instead of that, I am reminded of an incident that I had once heard. The wife was sound asleep when her one year old son gave her a good bite. The wife awoke in a daze and in pain and gave the child a whack. Hearing the commotion, the husband came into the room, heard the whole story and admonished the wife - 'You should know some child psychology. How will a small child know that its actions are causing pain? He was only being playful.' The wife listened quietly. A few days later the boot was on the other foot.The husband was sound asleep when the child gave him a good bite. He awoke in a daze and in pain and gave the child a whack. Hearing the commotion, the wife came into the room, heard the whole story and asked him,'What happened to your child psychology stuff?'

Miscellaneous incidents

2010-11-24T05:00:00.000-08:00

My last post gives me the opportunity to segue into a post about a couple of incidents involving Sujit (and not involving me).

Many words have multiple meanings depending on the context, which confuse kids. When Sujit was in std I, he had a lesson called 'Early Man'. When Jaya asked him what it meant, he replied,'It is about a man who gets up early.'

One of my physiotherapists wanted to learn Hindi so that he could converse more easily with some of his patients who were more comfortable with Hindi. So he joined a class for spoken Hindi. When he came home after attending the first day's class, Jaya asked him what he had learned. He said,'It was about first person, second person, third person'. Sujit did not understand him and asked,'Which person were you?'The joke did not end there. The physiotherapist did not hear it properly and replied,'I was the last person!'

This physiotherapist was very keen on learning new Hindi words and he would keep asking for Hindi translations of various English words. Once during such a conversation, he suddenly said,'Can't see'. Jaya and I looked around wondering what he couldn't see. After some discussion we realised that he meant khaansi - the Hindi word for cough.

I become a card sharp!

2010-11-16T22:56:00.000-08:00

When Sujit was in KG or Std. I his teacher asked him,'What does your father do?' Sujit thought that she was enquiring about his grandfather and replied,'He plays cards!' He said this because at that time my father-in-law used to play cards for a few hours every Sunday with some of his retired friends.

The teacher was shocked. Poor child - his father is a wastrel!

In the evening, when Jaya went to the school to pick up Sujit, the teacher asked her,'What does your husband do?' Jaya wondered why she wanted to know about me. The teacher related what Sujit had told her that morning. Jaya assured her that there was no such problem and told her about my stroke.

I don't know what shocked the teacher more - the news that I wasted my time playing cards or the news that I am quadriplegic.

Astronomy

2010-11-08T23:43:00.000-08:00

Although I read a lot more about evolution, I also read a bit about astronomy - two huge topics that I only get time to skim. The first popular science book I ever read was A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson about seven years ago and it stoked my interest in astronomy (nay, in science in general) by giving interesting pieces of information that I had not thought about earlier. For example, although I had an idea of the distances of the planets in the solar system, text books show them equidistant from each other. This gives a misleading picture which had stayed with me. The reality is very different. As Bryson writes:

... this is a necessary deceit to get them all on the same piece of paper. Neptune in reality isn't just a little bit beyond Jupiter, it's way beyond Jupiter - five times further from Jupiter than Jupiter is from us, so far out that it receives only 3 per cent as much sunlight as Jupiter.

Such are the distances, in fact, that it isn't possible, in any practical terms, to draw the solar system to scale. Even if you added lots of fold-out pages to your textbooks or used a really long sheet of poster paper, you wouldn't come close. On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with the Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over 300 metres away and Pluto would be two and a half kilometers distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn't be able to see it anyway).

I knew something about the solar system but that I was quite ignorant about the things beyond it. I knew the universe is big but didn't have an idea about how BIG it really is. The numbers were mind boggling. Bill Bryson again:

Carl Sagan calculated the number of probable planets in the universe at as many as ten billion trillion - a number vastly beyond imagining. But what is equally beyond imagining is the amount of space through which they are lightly scattered. 'If we were randomly inserted into the universe,'. Sagan wrote, 'the chances that you would be on or near a planet would be less than one in a billion trillion trillion.'

I started reading some blogs on astronomy and loved reading about galaxies, scales in the universe and other cool stuff. Undoubtedly, it helps that I don't have to put out the rubbish. When things get too complicated for my synapses, I can always feast on some great eye candy that illustrate Carl Sagan's words: "We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people."

Being a bit better informed about astronomy and evolution also enabled me to be more discerning about science reports. I learned that whenever terms like 'paradigm shift' and 'scientists have to go back to the drawing board' are used, it is usually an exaggeration.

As an example of the kind of things that interest me these days, here is a discussion with Neil deGrasse Tyson, who has the knack of talking about abstruse topics in a way that makes me want to hear more.

Mukesh Ambani's "peacock's tail"?

2010-10-27T01:40:00.000-07:00

Some days ago I saw a news report about Mukesh Ambani's 27 floor house with, among other amenities, a 50 seat theatre where, I suppose he will enjoy watching Slumdog Millionaire. What makes a person build a house so far in excess of his needs?

One of the interesting questions in biology is: Why does a peacock have such a heavy, gaudy tail? It costs energy to make - energy that can be used elsewhere, attracts predators and makes it difficult to escape from them. William Hamilton proposed a theory that is widely accepted: the peacock's tail is a signal of genetic fitness.

So is "Antilla" the name of Mukesh Ambani's version of the peacock's tail, a potlatch-style display of "I can"? Another peacock's tail (this one not belonging to any particular individual but was the brainchild of a group of of movers and shakers) was the recent Commonwealth Games.

In a podcast, P.Sainath, the rural affairs editor of The Hindu newspaper, talked about a grand party thrown by Emperor Nero for the creme de la creme of Rome, as narrated by Tacitus. A problem was that the light was not enough. Nero solved it in typical fashion: he had criminals brought from the dungeons and burned at the stake to provide the lighting. What bothered Sainath was not the cruelty involved but the question: who were Nero's guests? What sort of mindset is required to silently eat the best foods and quaff the finest wines in the midst of all that cruelty? I also have a similar thought: what sort of mindset is required in order to build a billion dollar house at spitting distance from some of the largest slums in Asia?

You get used to it

2010-10-20T23:44:00.000-07:00

If you are suddenly struck by what finance types call a Black Swan event, you become helpless, confused, angry and begin to lament like the Duke of Gloucester, "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; / They kill us for their sport."But when Time, The Great Healer, has done enough work you find ways to deal with the new reality and eventually you get used to it.

Sometimes, when I will be sitting on my wheelchair and browsing or reading a book with great interest, I will suddenly feel like passing motion so I will have to be shifted quickly to the bed. Occasionally, by the time the nurse makes the bed ready and Jaya comes to the room to shift me, my metabolic wastes would have made their presence felt.My muscles will stiffen automatically in disgust. (I know it is made of rare stuff but...) This stiffening makes it difficult for the nurse to manoeuvre me around the bed for cleaning the mess thus delaying the whole horrible process.

I found that the quickest way to relax my muscles is to let my mind wander thereby putting me in a state of suspended animation. I will start thinking about some topic that I had read recently for example, the trouble with intuition or inequality aversion or how language shapes thought or how news is made now. While my mind is busy thinking about these issues, I am only dimly aware of my surroundings. My muscles will become relaxed and the nurse will be able to complete her unenviable task quicker. A wandering mind has uses.

Sometimes, when a few visitors will be waiting in the front hall to meet me and I will be about to make my grand entrance, I will feel like passing motion and will quickly have to be shifted to the bed. The protagonist of Five Point Someone, when he finds himself in an embarrassing situation, wishes that dinosaurs were not extinct so that one would come along and gobble him up and put him out of his misery. (Evolutionary biologists will say that dinosaurs are not extinct because birds are dinosaurs but we will let that technical issue pass for the moment.) I also have a similar wish on such occasions especially when the nurse is on leave and Jaya has to perform the duties of a nurse.

Isak Dinesen put things in perspective, “What is man, when you come to think upon him, but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning, with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine?” The roof and crown of things? Tennyson must have been joking.

At times I am so lost in my thoughts that I fail to notice the nurse giving me feeds through the feeding tube. When Jaya asks me about the feeding I stare blankly at her and she has to get the details from the nurse. Even I am surprised that I did not notice something so obvious. I suppose the default network of my brain must be active at these times.

I have realised the wisdom in Duke Ellington's words, "There are two kinds of worries - those you can do something about and those you can't. Don't spend any time on the latter." Most people eventually get adjusted to the whips and scorns of time. Even if it means lying on shit. It is not easy. It doesn't happen overnight . But it happens. In Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert writes:

For at least a century, psychologists have assumed that terrible events- such as having a loved one die or becoming the victim of a violent crime- must have a powerful, devastating, and enduring impact on those who experience them. This assumption has been so deeply embedded in our conventional wisdom that people who don't have dire reactions to events such as these are sometimes diagnosed as having a pathological condition known as "absent grief". But recent research suggests that the conventional wisdom is wrong, that the absence of grief is quite normal, and that rather than being the fragile flowers that a century of psychologists have made us out to be, most people are surprisingly resilient in the face of trauma.

Learning from the Heart is a book written by Daniel Gottlieb who suffered a spinal cord injury that left him quadriplegic at the age of thirty-three. He writes:

I got insight into the process of becoming more dependent when I was reading Tuesdays with Morrie, by Mitch Alborn. When Morrie, the author's mentor, was first being affected by ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease), he turned to Mitch and said, "Oh my God, one day somebody will have to wipe my ass."

When I read that quote my immediate thought was, "You'll get over it, Morrie. I did." Having a catheter and needing someone else to bathe and dress me used to be a horrible indignity. Now all those things are simply regular parts of my life, just as anyone who needs to wear reading glasses or bifocals makes a habit of putting them on and taking them off. Whatever you need today that you didn't need yesterday simply becomes a part of your life.

Later, he writes:

No wonder there is a little comedian inside of me who finds great humor when people unthinkingly say to me, "Sometimes when I think about my life, I just feel paralyzed." I just look up and say, "Sometimes I feel that way, too!"

There is grandeur in this view of life

2010-10-10T06:24:00.000-07:00

Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution. - Theodosius Dobzhansky

One disconcerting feature of studying in IIMA was that (apart from being occasionally sucked into a vicious cycle), everybody seemed to know everything better than me. I then worked in the financial sector which again is full of super brains (at least I thought so till a couple of years ago). So I was always under pressure to keep up with various alphabet soup products so that I don't feel left out of a conversation. This pressure was no longer there after my stroke. My eyes used to glaze over when I used to read some article on finance and I switched to reading something else.

At this time I came across an article on Evolution vs Creationism. I had never heard of creationism and wondered what it was. I found that all it seemed to be saying was 'evolution can't do this or that, hence creationism' which did not make sense. Evidence against one theory is not the same as evidence for another theory. But I couldn't follow their arguments because I didn't know much about evolution so I started reading about it. I soon realised that whatever little I thought I knew about evolution was wrong. As Jacques Monod said, " [A] curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it."

When the penny finally dropped, I could see why T.H.Huxley exclaimed on reading the Origin of Species: "How stupid of me not to have thought of that." After I managed to overcome the semantic gap, I could understand better the various strands of evidence for evolution. Reading about Deep Time, when different creatures were abundant and when they became extinct was cool. Richard Dawkins writes in The Ancestor's Tale:

The human imagination is cowed by antiquity, and the magnitude of geological time is so far beyond the ken of poets and archaeologists it can be frightening. But geological time is large not only in comparison to the to the familiar timescales of human life and human history. It is large on the timescale of evolution itself.

The nature programs on T.V., which were becoming boring, took on a new meaning, When I saw some program about predators and prey, I thought about evolutionary arms races. When I saw a program about bats, I thought about reciprocal altruism. I had not heard of these terms before. Reading about evolution of complex parts or communication in slime moulds was far more interesting than reading about naked shorts or covered puts. As Keats said, "in spite of all,/Some shape of beauty moves away the pall/From our dark spirits" and I looked forward to reading something new about evolution everyday. And I was glad to know that I am not another data point for the Salem Hypothesis.

The Theory of Evolution is beautifully complicated - it is complicated enough to keep me interested but not so complicated that I will give up in a daze. On the other hand if I had started reading about string theory, I wouldn't know what hit me. I remember reading that it dealt with 11 dimensions. I can barely handle three.

I soon stopped reading about creationism because it was so boring. They keep making silly statements like 'nobody saw it' or using weasel tactics. Perhaps they should be answered like this. I loved this email exchange between an evolutionary biologist, Richard Lenski and a creationist. Lenski's second letter was brilliant. Like the author Terry Pratchett, I concluded that 'I would rather be a rising ape than a fallen angel'. There is a (probably apocryphal) exchange between T.H.Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce that took place in 1860. The incident is described in Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea:

When Wilberforece ended his speech, he looked to Huxley. He asked him, half-jokingly, whether it was on his grandfather's or grandmother's side that he descended from an ape.

Later Huxley would tell Darwin and others that at that moment he turned to a friend seated next to him, struck his hand to his knee, and said, "The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands." He stood and lashed back at Wilberforce. He declared that nothing that the bishop had said was at all new, except his question about Huxley's ancestry. "If then, said I, the question is put to me would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means and influence and yet who employs these faculties and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape."

Apocryphal or not, it is a good story.

The electrician

2010-09-29T06:25:00.000-07:00

Once when the fan in my room was giving some problems, an electrician was called to repair it. As is usual for someone who sees me for the first time, he asked a lot of questions which were answered briefly. (I was not present during the remainder of the incident. I am relating what Jaya had told me at the time. She remembers it only vaguely now.)

Before leaving, he told Jaya that he knew a pastor who could do many miracles. He would bring the pastor if Jaya gave the latter a donation. Jaya told him that there was no objection to his praying but she will not give any donation. He left a CD which he wanted me to see. It probably contained material regarding faith healing. Since none of us was interested in it, we did not see it.

The next day he came again and said that his wife had fallen ill and his son had met with an accident. He said that this was because Jaya was not 'allowing' him to 'help' me. Jaya didn't know how to respond. He seemed to be implying that we were somehow responsible for his troubles. She told him that we were sorry that he was having problems but we had nothing to do with it and sent him away.

I have met many such people with creative ideas - one person said that I should sleep in the front hall near the entrance because it was the best place according to 'vaastu', another person said there is a ghost roaming around my room (those who intend visiting me later need not be apprehensive - this was in a previous house), a person who could 'look into the future' tied a couple of ribbons to ward off evil spirits, one person said that I should not use AC because it will affect blood circulation, another person said that I should not sit for long in front of the computer because radiation from the monitor might affect my brain, another said that my room should be painted red because longer wavelengths of light stimulate the neurons of the medulla oblongata...ok, I am making up that last one but you never know what you might get. (All sorts of unlikely objects get lodged in the brain without being deliberately put there.)

Conditioned by such experiences, I look warily at any unknown person who comes into my room. I get the same feeling of unease that Bertie Wooster used to get when some young pest announced hat he was looking to do his good deed for the day. Some people will relax quickly after they see me and start talking about normal, everyday matters. Others will keep looking doubtfully at me and I can see that they are thinking very hard about ways to help me - a 'help' that I will dread.

I can totally identify with the street artist, Banksy's plea: "I need someone to protect me from all the measures they take in order to protect me."That is another skill that Jaya has honed through years of practice.

The truth in the lie

2010-09-19T23:07:00.000-07:00

We may not doubt that society in heaven consists mainly of undesirable persons.-- Mark Twain

A quadriplegic in the neighbourhood is the cue for various religious cults to crawl out of the woodwork and offer a plethora of miracles. A guy belonging to one such cult wanted Jaya to go to Chennai to meet his leader. Jaya told him that if I agreed to the the trip, she would go. She also told him that in all probability I will bury the idea not praise it. He wanted to meet me but knowing that I would not be interested in listening to the Deepities, Eulerian bluffs and different versions of the Courtier's Reply that these guys are adept in giving, Jaya tried to discourage him from coming home. But he was confident of his persuasive abilities and insisted on meeting me so finally Jaya relented.

He came into my room sporting a big smile - beware of Greeks bearing gifts or in this case, smiles. (Bernard helpfully informs us that the Trojan horse was actually Greek.) He tried to ingratiate himself with me with standard statements - How are you? You look healthy. You will soon be alright... He then told me that god moves in mysterious ways his wonders to perform. Having been given this stunning revelation only about a million times before, I listened to him with great interest.

He assured me that his god was the 'Real God'. (Another guy told me that he will do a 'strong puja' for me. Have you come across this term before?) Apparently he (or she or it) could perform miracles that would leave lesser gods gaping in awe. He told me about the crippled man who could walk, the child who was cured of leukemia and such standard stories. I tried to stare unblinkingly thinking that he might take my blinks to mean that I had agreed to send Jaya to Chennai.

When he showed no signs of leaving, I tried to think of some way to politely show him the door. I looked frequently at the clock hoping that he would realise that I was not interested but he was immune to such hints. He appeared determined to make me see the light and it looked as if he would leave only after achieving his objective. Wodehouse fans will recall that Balaam's Ass had a similar temperament.

I suddenly had an idea. It is said that a tide comes in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. I was confident that this idea was that tide and lost no time in taking it at the flood. I indicated to the nurse that I wanted to pass urine. After she bolted the door, I indicated to her that I was fibbing. If you prefer a bit of syllabic stretching, I indicated to her that I was being economical with the truth. She understood what was on my mind and laughed.

I waited for ten minutes before allowing her to open the door. When people leave my room after they have met me for a while, they usually don't come back. But as Sherlock Holmes says in The Sign of Four:

.... while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician.

I knew what the average man will do but what this individual will do was anybody's guess. Like Jeeves, I tried to study the psychology of the individual but this did not ease my trepidation. There was the lurking thought that he might return to impress me with more yarns about the amazing prowess of his 'Real God'. It was too early to crow,'Elementary, dear Watson.'

But after a couple of minutes Jaya came and calmed my fears. Apparently he had left soon after he came out of my room.

Mosquitoes

2010-09-14T23:44:00.000-07:00

I want to sleep

Swat the files

softly, please.

-Haiku by Masaoka Shiki

Many scriptures say (so I am told) that god has made everything on earth for man’s benefit but when a mosquito bites me in the middle of the night the benefit is not immediately apparent. When we shifted to our current house which is on the third floor, I thought I was rid of the scourge of mosquitoes. Surely those tiny wings are not capable of scaling such heights? But I rejoiced too soon. Third floor is not a challenge for mosquitoes.

The tip of my nose is a favourite piece of real estate for many mosquitoes. I will hope that a few shakes of my head would encourage them to leave. But hope is not a plan. Since I could not brush the mosquitoes off of my own volition, I had to think of some other way. At night, I sleep on my left side and a row of pillows is kept against the railing so that my head and legs don't hit it if I cough. I will move my head up and down and strain every sinew to irritate my tracheostomy. This will induce a bout of cough which will make my head hit the pillow and make the mosquitoes fly away. (I never knew that the acceleration and impacts of my head caused by bouts of cough could cause head injuries.)

Some of the mosquitoes that fly away might settle on a part of my body where I cannot disturb them. (There is a word for the part of the body where one cannot reach to scratch. Who knew?) By now I will be too exhausted to try and stimulate another bout of cough and see what happens. At such times I will have no option but to be another link in the food chain. Unlike D.H. Lawrence, I am not 'mosquito enough to out-mosquito' them. I will only hope that they will not leave me the baddest of all Apicomplexans as a parting gift. (I came across this expression last month and thought that it would be fun to make you click that link to find out what the hell I mean.)

I can understand Alfred Russel Wallace's feelings about the living conditions in Wanumbai in Indonesia (As quoted in The Song of the Dodo):

"Instead of rats and mice there are curious little marsupial animals about the same size, which run about at night and nibble anything eatable that may be left uncovered. Four or five different kinds of ants attack everything not isolated by water, and one kind even swims across that; great spiders lurk in baskets and boxes, or hide in the folds of my mosquito curtain; centipedes and millipedes are everywhere. I have caught them under my pillow and on my head; while in every box, and under every board which has lain for some days undisturbed, little scorpions are sure to be found snugly ensconced, with their formidable tails quickly turned up ready for attack or defence. Such companions seem very alarming and dangerous, but all combined are not so bad as the irritation of mosquitoes,"

On second thoughts...centipedes, millipedes, spiders, scorpions...h'm. Enduring stings is not a 'happiness skill' that I am eager to cultivate. I wouldn't have liked to be in the room when Bill Gates pulled this stunt during a TED talk.

Mosquito mavens will be chagrined to learn that at one time, I thought that a world without mosquitoes would be close to the best of all possible worlds. But that doesn't seem a good idea.

A typical day

2010-09-07T23:40:00.000-07:00

By about six in the morning, most people in the household are up and about and I will also be up by this time. Danny Nevrath said,"The only problem with the speed of light is,it gets here too early in the morning." I don't have this peeve. I am usually up much before the others.After some exercise, feeding, sponging etc., I watch T.V. or lie quietly for a while during which time the nurse finishes her daily activities. By about 11 o'clock, I will be shifted to the wheelchair after which my day really begins.

By this time on most days I would have tried to exceed memory limits (no doubt unsuccessfully) - some word meanings have to be checked, I will get some ideas for future posts, there may be something to show Jaya, etc. I will quickly take the appropriate actions before I forget something. After that I will begin my usual mix of browsing and reading books.

Dwight D. Eisenhower said, "In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." Similarly I also make plans but am alive to the fact that none of them may work out because of some unforeseen developments. For instance, one day I thought that there was plenty of time to publish a post but my plan was scuppered by a telephone call just then informing us that a few relatives were coming for lunch and Jaya had to run to the kitchen to prepare something.

Sometimes when I will be reading something about the economics of climate change or about 'useless inventions' or listening to some political humour, Sujit will ask me some doubt in his homework. I will try to clear his doubt to the best of my ability. I will also try to find some diagram or video on the web which can simplify my task. Often I will first explain to Jaya who will then explain it to Sujit which takes time.

Sometimes the nurse will be busy in some other activity and will not be free to manipulate the mouse for me. If I can predict these times, I will switch to listening to some podcast. Sometimes the interruption happens too quickly for me to react and I will have no option but to sit quietly and admire the monitor. A problem with audio is that I may miss part of it because of the sound of a passing truck or some other disturbance.

I will be shifted back to the bed at around 9 p.m. In the ten hours since I was shifted to the wheelchair, if I get to read for about four hours, I would have had a good day. The remaining time would be spent in physiotherapy, helping Jaya in her work, helping Sujit or sitting idly because the nurse is busy with other work. By about ten thirty the lights are switched off as everyone goes to sleep but don't be surprised if I think about The Cupertino effect or about the impact of Wikileaks for a while before I gradually drift off to sleep.

I once heard a podcast in which the speaker said that life is about finding a balance between chaos and order - if life has only order, it is boring; if it has only chaos, you become neurotic. I had a balance between the two before my stroke. After the stroke, for a time, there was more of chaos. Now there is another equilibrium between order and chaos which has been working well so far.

Knowledge and certainty - II

2010-08-27T07:28:00.000-07:00

Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow;

He who would search for pearls must dive below.

- John Dryden

Once, when some painting work was going on in our house, a painter stood in my room watching the physiotherapist give me exercises. He asked many questions about my stroke and said that he had heard that if you got a cracking sound when the fingers or toes are pulled, it meant that the limb was normal. The physiotherapist said that it was just the sound of air bubbles popping in a fluid in the joints and was not of great significance. But the painter refused to accept the explanation and started pulling my toes.

I wondered how a person who probably knew nothing about the functioning of the human body could argue so confidently with someone who had studied about it for years. The physiotherapist said that this happened frequently in the hospital. When he would be giving exercise to a person, somebody will come up and say that some other exercise should be given.

Over the years I decided on a rule of thumb for making out whether a person knew what he was talking about. He will use words like 'it depends', talk about side effects, likely complications, failure rates etc. As David Quammen said in The Boilerplate Rhino:

Having had many chances to study scientists as they study nature, I've seen that science itself is a fallible human activity, not a conceptual machine-tool, and that while accuracy and precision can be easily achieved, validity and meaning cannot. The imperfections and constraints vitiating scientific knowledge stand as a warning about the limits of other sorts of knowledge - even shakier sorts - including that based on eyewitness experience. Moral: We live in a tricky universe, and it behooves us to be just a bit provisional about our convictions.

Carl Sagan wrote in The Demon-Haunted World:

Humans may crave absolute certainty; they may aspire to it; they may pretend, as partisans of certain religions do, to have attained it. But the history of science - by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans - teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us.

We will always be mired in error. The most each generation can hope for is to reduce the error bars a little, and to add to the body of data to which error bars apply. The error bar is a pervasive, visible self-assessment of the reliability of our knowledge.

On the other hand a person with a tenuous grasp of the subject being discussed, being unencumbered by any knowledge of the subtleties involved, will try to sell you lemon juice giving you 'hundred percent guarantee'. As H. L. Mencken said, "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."

Unfortunately it seems that we’re swayed by confidence more than expertise.(I know, I know you are not one of those. It is about others.) Many people also have a poor grasp of probability. (I am not very good at it. I keep getting surprised by the answers to various questions.) Perhaps Arthur Benjamin's suggestion needs to be considered.

Knowledge and certainty - I

2010-08-14T07:39:00.000-07:00

The fool thinks himself to be wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.- William Shakespeare

Among many cognitive biases (apparently most people - not you of course - have ‘bias blind spot’) is The Dunning-Kruger effect which is the phenomenon whereby people who have little knowledge systematically think that they know more than others who have much more knowledge. One curious aspect you may have noticed is that they tend to become bosses. Charles Darwin knew about this illusion of confidence and said that "ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge". In Bad Science, Ben Goldacre said:

Today, scientists and doctors find themselves outnumbered and outgunned by vast armies of individuals who feel entitled to pass judgement on matters of evidence - an admirable aspiration - without troubling themselves to obtain a basic understanding of the issues.

Later he says:

I spend a lot of time talking to people who disagree with me - I would go so far as to say that it's my favourite leisure activity - and repeatedly I meet individuals who are eager to share their views on science despite the fact that they have never done an experiment. They have never tested an idea for themselves, using their own hands; or seen the results of that test, using their own eyes; and they have never thought carefully about what those results mean for the idea they are testing, using their own brain. To these people 'science' is a monolith, a mystery and an authority, rather than a method.

The arrogance of ignorance is often seen when you have a medical problem.(This is exacerbated by distrust of Big Pharma due to Marketing-Based Medicine and other machinations.) If you cut your finger and the doctor prescribes an ointment, the servant will scoff at it and say that the best cure is a paste made by crushing the roots of a particular plant. If the doctor advises 3 weeks' bed rest for a bad back, your cousin's friend (who is a brilliant Chartered Accountant you are told) will tell you with evangelical insistence about a protein drink that can cure all aches and pains within a week. Being a brilliant CA doesn't qualify you to give medical advice.The transfer of expertise from one area to another often has errors.

People who have got their medical knowledge from dumbed down news reports will speak with great confidence about cures for various problems.You will be told,"My father was given a particular piece of advice for some ailment and now I am being told something else for the same ailment. These guys don't know anything." But all errors are not equal.As the physicist Richard Feynman once wrote, science creates an “expanding frontier of ignorance” where a discovery leads to more questions which lead to more discoveries.

Which hospital?

2010-08-04T05:22:00.000-07:00

Once Jaya had to stay over-night at a hospital to look after a relative's child because nobody could stay due to various reasons. That evening, when the physiotherapist came, he asked me the name of the hospital to which Jaya had gone. I didn't blink for any name that he mentioned, which puzzled him.

If everyone took his cue from the noted intellectual , George Bush and said "I don’t do nuance", communication with me would have quickly reached a dead-end. But this physiotherapist was made of sterner stuff. Like Sherlock Holmes' dog that did not bark, the absence of my usual communication meant something and he was determined to get to the bottom of it.

He tried to think of hospitals that he had missed. He wondered if some hospital had an unusual name but realised that whatever it was, I should have been able to dictate it. (He had some familiarity with my communication system.) He wondered whether the hospital was outside Coimbatore to which I replied in the negative. He might have found a Watson-like computer useful but not having access to one, he asked Sujit to try his luck. Sujit tried his methods but was unsuccessful and he concluded that I was playing the fool.

Suddenly the physiotherapist had a thought and asked me: Do you know the name of the hospital - yes/no? I blinked for 'no' - I didn't know the name!

Repartee

2010-07-25T06:35:00.000-07:00

When asked, "How do you write?" I invariably answer, "one word at a time." - Stephen King

For a similar question I will have to answer,"one letter at a time." As you can guess, this is not the best method for indulging in repartees. In The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Jean-Dominique Bauby wrote:

But my communication system disqualifies repartee: the keenest rapier grows dull and falls flat when it takes several minutes to thrust it home. By the time you strike, even you no longer understand what had seemed so witty before you started to dictate it, letter by letter.So the rule is to avoid impulsive sallies. It deprives conversation of its sparkle, all those gems you bat back and forth like a ball - and I count this forced lack of humor one of the great drawbacks of my condition.

In the early years after my stroke, when a splendid retort occurred to me in response to some comment, I used to think that this was an opportunity to get a few claps. I will start dictating my comment to Jaya. After ten minutes, I will wait for the applause. None would be forthcoming. The problem was that no one had the patience to wait reverently for my gem and had been talking about other things with the result that they had forgotten what it was that I was responding to. I will try to remind them of it. Fast forward ten minutes and again the claps will be conspicuous by their absence. The problem this time would be that people would have forgotten a few words from my comment. As everyone knows, a repartee minus key words is as witty and charming as a weather report. Maybe a special computer would have been able to decipher the layers of meanings in my riposte but in the world of real people, it was a miserable failure. By now, knowing that the inordinate delay had killed the punch in my repartee, my initial enthusiasm for displaying my perspicacity would be on the wane and I will wish that I hadn't started the whole thing in the first place. But I will have to plod on because everyone would be curious about what I had thought of. I will accept whatever interpretation anyone puts to my words, my only indention being to complete the damn thing as soon as possible. After the mess gets over, I will wish that I could, like Little Jack Horner, sit in a corner in order to lick my wounds in peace but since this option is not available, I will continue to sit quietly and smile for the sake of the optics.

Steven Pinker said, "In our social relations, the race is not to the quick but to the verbal..." , which is doubly true of repartees. Initially I was eager to show that my mind was functioning as before but now, since most people know that I am a bit better than one of the wax statues at Madame Tussauds, I don't mind keeping quiet. Sometimes, a pithy remark occurs to me in response to some statement but chastised by the memory of the earlier disasters, I resist the temptation to give in to my delusions of wit and wisdom. Heywood C. Broun said, “Repartee is what you wish you'd said”. I am sure he did not say it thinking of a patient with locked-in syndrome.

Framily

2010-07-12T07:54:00.000-07:00

I once read an article about Christopher Reeve where he said that a tragedy brings out the best or the worst in a family and he was glad that it had brought out the best in his. I will say the same except that along with the word 'family', I will include the word 'framily'.

Anyone who reads this blog will know that Jaya has been like a rock. The task of a caregiver is unenviable. Sujit quickly accepted the idea that a person can be physically decrepit and mentally normal. Family members and relatives have been uniformly supportive. I have often been surprised by how much time they have for me. I sometimes feel like Julius Caesar: "When Caesar says Do this, it is performed."

My friends have always been ready to help me. When I was about to be discharged from the hospital, I heard about some obscene amount in the bill and I wondered how it will be settled. I learned later that a lot of friends had contributed to settling the bill. I keep hearing horror stories of people getting bankrupted because of some medical emergency. I have never had to contemplate such a nightmare. I came across a Greek proverb which said - "It is better in times of need to have a friend rather than money." I got lucky. Money is a double edged sword. Unlike Oliver Twist, I don't get looks of horror at my temerity when I ask for more.

The doctors, physiotherapists and nurses have also been very understanding. They have no problems answering my queries to my satisfaction. In the initial months after my stroke, when I was more cantankerous than I am now, when the nurses used to be bemused by my dumb charades, I used to think darkly, "Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain."But of course, I was being uncharitable. It is not easy to understand the actions of a guy who couldn't speak and whose facial muscles were not very mobile. It took quite a while for me to realise this. Though wisdom oft has sought me,/I scorned the lore she brought me.

And what do I have to do in return? Sometimes I may have to listen to conversations that I may not be interested in. Sometimes my request may have to take a backseat because something important has cropped up. Sometimes my communication may be misinterpreted and I will have no option but to bear it with a patient shrug. Sometimes I will laugh at jokes that I may not have understood properly - I may be feeling too lazy to ask for clarifications. I will laugh because I see others laughing.

Too little payment for so great a debt.

Early morning wake-up call

2010-07-05T07:46:00.000-07:00

Religion has good and bad aspects. The tendency of people to think that anything and everything that is religious should be docilely accepted by everybody whether they like it or not does not sit well with me. You will have loudspeakers blaring religious music in the middle of the night or a place of worship springs up in the middle of a road but no one will protest.

One night, I woke up at around one thirty to pass urine. Producing a few grunts to wake somebody up takes a lot of effort and my sleep goes for a toss. I usually get back to sleep in less than an hour but that night, sleep eluded me. I tossed and turned (figuratively speaking), thinking about this and that. You know my methods. Apply them. It was around five (I could see faint shafts of daylight), when I finally dozed off. Almost immediately (it was still quite dark outside), I was woken up by loud noises. In my hypnopompic state I thought someone was being murdered. When the mist finally cleared, I realised that it was a religious procession, the crowd oblivious to the fact that their raucous behavior was causing a huge disturbance.To say that I was annoyed would be an understatement. It was more like a sneaky hate spiral.

I used to come across such behavior when I used to travel in trains. Some pilgrims will enter the train, make a lot of noise waking up sleeping children, empty the water tank, dirty the compartment, etc. "If you prick us, do we not bleed?", is the thought that occurs to me at these times. Believers by their actions seem to suggest, "We are as like to call thee so again, to spit on thee and to spurn thee too and for thus much mercies we demand your respect."

Being a devotee of Schrödinger's God, I am ok with 'strident' atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris criticising religion at every opportunity. They are not 'just' preaching to the converted. They help to shift the Overton Window.The Internet has helped push the issues they raise from the sphere of deviance to the sphere of legitimate controversy. For people who think that their atheism is like religion, James Randi has a quote: "If atheism is a religion, then not collecting stamps is a hobby." If some people don't like their combative tones, too bad. As Dan Dennet said:

“I listen to all these complaints about rudeness and intemperateness, and the opinion that I come to is that there is no polite way of asking somebody: have you considered the possibility that your entire life has been devoted to a delusion? But that’s a good question to ask. Of course we should ask that question and of course it’s going to offend people. Tough.”

You can see that I am not thrilled about having had to listen silently for over a decade to Miss India beauty pageant type twaddle about how religion is great. I had more exposure to religion after my stroke than I had had before it and I didn't like it at all. Folks at home know that I am not religiously inclined but it was news to many visitors. Religion comforts many people but I find it boring, which used to leave many nonplussed. Some people could be very persistent in pushing their antediluvian ideas. I soon realised that arguing with them would be as frustrating as asking Senthil about the second banana so I generally kept quiet. Of course, the believers I meet are pleasant people who genuinely want to help me and are very far removed from the fundamentalist types one reads about in newspapers. But I often felt that many of their thought processes were circumscribed by impregnable mental walls whose foundations were laid in childhood. The reluctance to let go is difficult to overcome.

Recently I read The Emerging Mind which describes an interesting experiment on a split-brain patient:

We also tried testing the personality and aesthetic preferences of the two hemispheres independently using the same procedure – namely by training the right hemisphere to communicate ‘yes’, ‘no’ or ‘I don’t know’ non-verbally to us by picking one of three abstract shapes with the left hand. Imagine our surprise when we noticed that in patient LB the left hemisphere said it believed in God whereas the right hemisphere signaled that it was an atheist. The inter-trial consistency of this needs to be verified but at the very least it shows that the two hemispheres can simultaneously hold contradictory views on God: an observation that should send shock waves through the theological community. When a patient like this eventually dies, will one hemisphere end up in hell and the other in heaven?

Sleep

2010-06-26T01:39:00.000-07:00

Imagine a middle aged man reading about carnivorous plants or about the QWERTY keyboard in the middle of the afternoon when everyone else is relaxing in the arms of Morpheus. You will be justified in thinking that he is batty. Jaya sees me reading about some brain research at a time when she can barely keep her eyes open and reaches a similar conclusion. She can't do without an hour's sleep in the afternoon and never tires of telling me that a nap makes you smarter.

The brain stem has something to do with regulating sleep patterns. My stroke seems to have reset my body clock so that I need less than four hours of sleep a day. I suppose anyone living so long without proper sleep will have medical problems but I seem to be fine. I don't sleep a wink during the day. At night, the lights are switched off at ten thirty and in the morning I get up at five thirty. In that period, I am awake half the time. My sleep is not continuous. It is broken into three or four chunks interrupted by long periods of wakefulness.

My habit of reading books and articles, especially on subjects that I knew very little about before my stroke, has proved beneficial during these wakeful periods.(Groucho Marx knew the value of books- 'Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.' But you won’t have the same view if you read a book like Woody Allen read ‘War and Peace' in two hours after attending a speed reading course and said,’It was about some Russians.' Of course, I am assuming that the reader doesn't suffer from alexia.) I may think of something that I had not understood in a book that I had been reading. I may think about brazil nuts, about double standards, about Saturn, about Indohyus...(I am a really weird guy I tell you. You won't find too many respectable MBAs pondering over extinct tetrapods at 2 a.m. It takes all kinds to make the world.)

And when I get tired of the heavy stuff, I transport myself to Lords Cricket Ground where I score a brilliant unbeaten 123 to take India to victory on the final day of a pulsating Test Match. All the thrilling ingredients will be there - Dravid and Tendulkar will be dismissed for ducks, I will have a broken finger, it will be a seaming pitch...(Discerning readers would have noticed that my heroics happen in a Test Match. I am a connoisseur of the five day game so I won't be playing golf shots in T20 matches.)

Computer and internet - II

2010-06-20T05:15:00.000-07:00

Two years after we purchased the computer, my brother-in-law decided that we should go in for a broadband internet connection. This was an important decision for me. At that time I did not even know that a broadband connection was so easily and cheaply available. It went a long way towards obliterating what Richard Dawkins called ‘the anesthetic of familiarity’ which used to bore me to death. It enabled me to escape to the blogosphere where, to quote Bertrand Russell, 'one, at least, of our nobler impulses can escape from the dreary exile of the natural world.' Till then I was the perfect couch potato spending my time watching inane programmes and reading news of the "he said she said" variety or just staring at the walls. And of course, listening to halfalogues.

In an interview, Harsha Bogle said that you should surround yourself with people smarter than you so that you keep learning something. I meet plenty of smart people but the problem is that the conversation will not flow. They will not be sure if I am interested in the topic or about my responses. I will not say much because it takes too much time and because Jaya will be cut-off from the conversation during that time. I found that reading blogs written by very smart people was a good substitute for these conversations that I cannot have. Moreover, I could choose blogs on my current areas of interest which would not interest most of my acquaintances.

So I read quite a few blogs on evolution, some astronomy, some neuroscience, a science magazine etc. (Etc: A sign to make others believe that you know more than you actually do.) When I want something light, I look at a few eggcorns or admire a few kitlers... I am more like the Romans than the Greeks. Blame it on my inner capuchin monkey. (I remember reading that a generalist knows less and less about more and more while a specialist knows more and more about less and less.) Now you know how I get links. The nurse knows where to click the mouse on the screen so I can read without constantly calling Jaya.I just have to shrug at the occasional mouso. Don't think I read all posts in the blogs that I have mentioned. I rapidly skim the headings and read the posts that pique my interest.

I don't frequent social networking sites like Twitter for reasons that another blogger has specified. Another reason is specific to me. I have to get someone else to do my work for me so when Jaya is free I get her to type things that are higher on my list of priorities. Apart from indulging in a bit of "ambient awareness", I don't spend much time in social networks so I don't suffer from social network fatigue.

Aside - Every year, the literary agent John Brockman asks several public intellectuals to answer some question or another, and posts it on the Internet to provoke discussion. This year's question is "How is the Internet changing the way you think?"

Computer and internet - I

2010-06-07T05:05:00.000-07:00

About a couple of years after my stroke, we bought a computer with a dial-up Internet connection. There is no doubt that my extended mind has helped me in adjusting to life

after the stroke. It has been very useful in the specific task of writing this blog.

Before starting the blog, I had made a list of topics that I could write about. I have kept adding to it since then. Whenever I remember some incident, whenever I get an idea about how to express something, whenever I saw a relevant paragraph in a book or a link, I made a note of it. Over time this initial skeleton of random jottings has fleshed out into a useful aide memoire. Before I start a new post, I look at this file and think about how to convert the inchoate jumble of ideas contained therein into something readable.I take regular back-up of this file and even keep a copy in my gmail account. (Now you know how paranoid I am.)

The cut and paste functions seem to have been made specially for me. I have used it frequently to reduce the time required for dictation. (I remember seeing a quote that if you copy from one, it's plagiarism; if you copy from many, it's research. I assure you that I was only doing research.) I wonder how Wodehouse used to write his novels. A phenomenal memory must have been part of his genius.I need to only remember a few keywords of a quote or a poem and I can find out the exact words in a few seconds of Googling.

You may have noticed that I have more links in my later posts than in my earlier ones. This is because I keep coming across links that I can use. There is also the thought that someone may get interested in a link and discover something that I may not be aware of. I have the time to waste and thereby provide links, a luxury that you may not have.

The Internet obeys Sturgeon's Law leading to fears of agnotological Armageddon. I am fairly confident of being able to separate the wheat from the chaff most of the time and while information overload is a problem, I prefer it to information drought. But I find it a problem reading long tracts online.I am the only person in the house who welcomes a power cut.The resultant discomfort due to sweating is offset by the concomitant benefit of being able to read a book without the distraction of wanting to switch on the computer and click on something.

Aside: You can find some Googlefreude here. New technology is always viewed with suspicion by the older generation.

Oft repeated sentences

2010-05-27T05:31:00.000-07:00

Quacks of different types seemed to sing from the same playbook. Many people also gave me the same arguments. Some of the dialogues that I remember hearing ad infinitum from various quarters are:

"You have tried everything so why don't you try this also?"
It is "scientifically proved"- One person told me that one should not eat anything between 9 o'clock and 11 o' clock (whether morning or evening)." It is proved in biology." "By who? Where? How? Nothing was mentioned which would have helped me to check what it was all about. Once I was told that it was "scientifically proved" that food turns into poison during a solar eclipse. I was shaken but did not stir. (There seem to be alot [sic] of superstitions about solar eclipses, most of which I did not know.)
This is a "natural product" and has "no side effects"- Jaya is very reluctant to add something to my feeds that somebody suggests even though they will say that "it will not cause any harm". You never know what it might contain and how my body would react. I often see on TV people suffering some irreversible neurological problems after eating something that a local godman or his minions had given. But I never saw a follow-up programme about what happened to these criminals. Most probably they got away scot-free.
It is "ancient wisdom"- It would seem as if the ancients had discovered everything worthwhile and people were wasting their time since then. Some ancient cures have been shown to be effective but that doesn't mean that everything that is called ancient is great. There were many great ancients but they were great in their time. As Newton said, "We see farther because we stand on the shoulders of giants."
Eating something or the other will "boost your immune system".

I realised early on that my counter-arguments will have precisely zero impact. I was hopelessly out numbered and would have only appeared as a stubborn Rumpelstiltskin. Anyway it would have taken too long to say my piece and I preferred to listen silently.

How to remove plaster

2010-05-14T06:41:00.000-07:00

In a TED talk on cheating, Dan Ariely talks about his stay in hospital after suffering seventy percent burns. The nurses thought that it was less painful to rip off the bandages from the skin than to remove them slowly. Ariely thought that the nurses were mistaken. So he later conducted some experiments and concluded that ripping off the bandage was more painful.

Like Ariely's nurses, the nurses in the hospital where I was admitted thought that ripping off a plaster was less painful. When I saw this video, I told Jaya to try removing the plaster slowly. I did not feel much difference between the two methods probably because there is only one plaster to be removed and definitely because my skin is not tender due to burns.

In his book Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely writes about irrational behavior by people who think they are in charge. There is another interesting TED talk by Dan Ariely. He also writes a blog.

Energy

2010-05-03T07:34:00.000-07:00

Energy is a word that is used in combination with many other words to produce many sciency sounding terms. Thus you get positive energy, negative energy, transcendental energy, universal energy etc which nobody explains in terms that you can understand.

Once a person asked me,'How much energy do you transmit to those around you?' I did not know what I was supposed to answer so I asked him what he meant by energy. But as so often happens, by the time I finished dictating my question to Jaya the conversation had moved on to some other topic. When Jaya asked him my question he just smiled and continued talking about something else.

This reminded me of what Carl Sagan said in The Burden of Skepticism:

Occasionally, by the way, I get a letter from someone who is in "contact" with an extraterrestrial who invites me to "ask anything." And so I have a list of questions. The extraterrestrials are very advanced, remember. So I ask things like, "Please give a short proof of Fermat's Last Theorem." Or the Goldbach Conjecture. And then I have to explain what these are, because extraterrestrials will not call it Fermat's Last Theorem, so I write out the little equation with the exponents. I never get an answer. On the other hand, if I ask something like "Should we humans be good?" I always get an answer. I think something can be deduced from this differential ability to answer questions. Anything vague they are extremely happy to respond to, but anything specific, where there is a chance to find out if they actually know anything, there is only silence.

Holistic

2010-04-29T07:57:00.000-07:00

I grew wary of the word holistic because quacks of every persuasion began their spiel by saying that their treatment is holistic. And what do they mean by this? They will say that they "treat the whole body." Fine, but what does that mean? They will say that they "treat the main cause of the disease not just the symptoms as conventional doctors do." And what does that mean? They will say that their medicines will first extract the bad things from the body and then they will do good things. (Rough translation from Malayalam). Their bluff and bombast used to resonate among many but my thoughts are illustrated by an American expression: 'Where's the beef?'

Some Ayurvedic doctors prescribed tonics that I was given when I was a child when I was told that they were for general health. I think there is some difference between a brain stem stroke and general weakness. Some told me that their medication was ineffective if given through the feeding tube and for them to be really effective, I had to swallow them. Obviously no one told me why this was so. (If these guys had come after I had started this blog I would have definitely asked the reason and posted their answers.)

Woody Allen wrote a short story called The Gossage—Vardebedian Papers in which one character said :

How curious your last letter was! Well-intentioned, concise, containing all the elements that appear to make up what passes among certain reference groups as a communicative effect, yet tinged throughout by what Jean-Paul Sartre is so fond of referring to as "nothingness."

I had this same feeling of "nothingness" when I listened to quacks. I was not interested in listening to tales of how their treatment proved beneficial for arthritic patients or how they had cured some 'paralysed' patient. Not one of them told me how they treat brain stem strokes or even whether they had ever seen such a patient. I don't want to belabour the point but they wanted me to be impressed by anecdotes of people getting cured of various unrelated ailments.

In Bad Science, Ben Goldacre said (he was talking of nutritionists) :

... I would argue that they lack the academic experience, the ill-will, and perhaps even the intellectual horsepower necessary to be fairly derided as liars. The philosopher Professor Harry Frankfurt of Princeton University discusses this issue at length in his classic 1986 essay 'On Bullshit'. Under his model,'bullshit' is a form of falsehood distinct from lying: the liar knows and cares about the truth, but deliberately sets out to mislead; the truth-speaker knows the truth and is trying to give it to us; the bullshitter, meanwhile, does not care about the truth, and is simply trying to impress us:

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction... when an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

Gosh, it is one year!

2010-04-16T06:06:00.000-07:00

Our doubts are traitors, And make us lose the good we oft might win, By fearing to attempt.- William Shakespeare

It was on April 16th last year that we published our 1st post. The idea of a blog had been germinating in my mind for a while but I had kept postponing starting one thinking that it was a bridge too far. But Jaya coaxed me into overcoming my initial hesitation and has since been assiduously taking down my ramblings thus enabling me to bask in reflected glory. Our frequency of posting has come down a bit in recent times because Jaya is doing some online work which has commensurately reduced the time available for blogging.

Blogging has made me read some of the old books in my collection and links that I had saved long back. Quoting from them has enabled me to kill two birds with one stone - firstly, it means that I have to dictate fewer sentences and secondly, I can indicate what I read nowadays. I am glad that the links that I had saved on a whim have not gone waste.

It is said that behind every successful man there is a surprised woman. I must admit to being as surprised as Jaya that we have reached this far. I have not been very active in commenting because I don't want to keep ragging Jaya to act as my amanuensis when she has many other hats to wear. I hope you don't hold that against me. And we hope that our blog is not content-free. (Mark Twain was of the opinion that only presidents, editors and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial "we". I don't belong to any of these categories but I am sure that you understand my use of the royal pronoun.)

Job's comforters

2010-04-11T07:45:00.000-07:00

We were told about a miracle doctor whose USP apparently was that he ate part of the medicines that he prepared for his patients to see what it does inside the body. (I am not making this up.) Jaya is usually not interested in meeting such guys but sometimes social pressures are such that she has to meet some of them. From the accounts that I heard, the trip was a complete waste of time.

As is usually the case, the clinic was located a safe distance away from civilization. The medicine-man told Jaya and company about his splendid cures which included treating a badly deformed guy who is now fit for undertaking long treks. He said that he had been a 'bad' man who had turned over a new leaf after reading some scriptures. He gave a candle and asked her to 'pray from the bottom of the heart'. He told her to keep my medical reports for prayer in a particular room in the clinic from where she was not supposed to remove them.

After some meditation he said that I had had the stroke because I had hurt God. He said that he could see a cross in his imagination which meant that I had hurt the gods very badly. Jaya happened to mention that I was fed through a tube in my stomach which probably gave him an idea and he claimed that he could see a lotus stem floating in my stomach that...(Jaya forgets what exactly he said. And yes, lest you have any doubts, this was an adult speaking.)

I thought he told something about a previous life but Jaya doesn't recall it now so it must have been someone else. That person said that I had killed a couple of people in a previous life which had peeved a few gods who decided to give me a brain stem stroke in this life. All you folks who had interacted with me in various places, did you ever suspect that you were fraternizing with a cold blooded killer?

If I tell you that these were only two of the whacky ideas that we got, you can guess how much imagination many people have. And if these guys are thriving, you know what a receptive audience they have. P.T.Barnum made an underestimate when he said that there is a sucker born every minute. You can say that this was my stroke of insight during the past decade.

Telephonic blessing

2010-03-29T07:15:00.000-07:00

The only piece of magic I had seen (not counting the stage shows where the audience knew they were being fooled but could not figure out how the magician did it) was in the 1986 Football World Cup. Diego Maradona disappeared from one end of the field and materialised at the other end leaving a bunch of Englishmen in a daze in various parts of the ground and kicked the ball into the goal. Maybe it was a camera trick, I don't know. But that was an insignificant prank compared to the promises that many quacks made to me.

We were recommended a person who was reputed to be the healer of last resort, someone who treated patients who had made conventional doctors throw up their hands in despair. He came home with a couple of his acolytes - a nondescript guy who did not look capable of such great things. But looks can be deceptive, I suppose. Jaya explained to him in a few sentences what had happened to me, a routine that she had become familiar with by now. He said that it was nothing to worry about, he knew what had to be done.

He asked Jaya to bring a glass of water over which he muttered some mantras. He then told her to tell me to drink it. (This often happened with quacks. They seemed to mistake me for one of those statues at Madame Tussauds and doubtfully relayed their instructions to me via a third party.) She told him that I could not eat or drink anything. He said that this was not a problem, she just had to place a drop of water from the glass on my tongue. (He had blessed it, you see.) She did as she was told. The great man then gave her his phone number and asked her to call him every day taking care to place a glass of water near the phone. He would bless the water over the phone and she had to place a drop of it on my tongue and I will soon improve.

I read somewhere that you cannot think of anything so fantastic that you cannot make at least one person believe it. I think this is true. Before my stroke, I had not realised how easy it is to fool people. (Just for fun, try answering the question in this video. Then read this.) I am no longer surprised by internet scams. Under the excuse of that catch-all word called faith, you can make claims that one would have thought would make a child skeptical. People will succumb to dysrationalia if they are desperate enough. The other day I saw on T.V. some crazy guy jumping around like a possessed pogo stick pulling women's hair and it was claimed that he was curing devotees! In Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters, Donald R. Prothero says:

Ironically, most humans are already equipped with a skeptical filter for such con artists in many parts of life. When we bargain for items, or negotiate a price or a contract, we expect the bargaining to be somewhat adversarial and tricky. We are constantly on the lookout for someone who might cheat or shortchange us. We are bombarded with commercials everywhere we go, yet our skeptical filters tend to screen out most commercial appeals, just like a good spam filter on our computer keeps our email from being overwhelmed by junk. Caveat emptor - "let the buyer beware" - is a slogan we normally live by in such negotiations. Yet when it comes to claims that appeal to our sense of mystery, or to our need to connect with the unknown or with dead loved ones, humans readily suspend these skeptical filters and will believe (and pay for) almost anything, as long as it makes them feel better. That's when we are marks to be swindled. The world is full of con artists who will take your money and violate your trust by appealing to your gullibility - if you let them.

Touch therapy

2010-03-18T08:13:00.000-07:00

Among the many charlatans who promised to restore me to in statu quo ante was a guy who said that he was an exponent of what he called 'Touch and Heal'. He said that every person suffering from any ailment had a particular spot in the body which had to be pressed lightly for some days and he will be curred. He was the acknowledged master in finding this spot. He claimed that he had cured many patients who had ailments that had defeated the best doctors in the land. He assured us that he would not do any manipulation which might hurt me so he was given the go-ahead.

He placed one of my legs on a low table nearby and carefully studied my toes. It was funny watching four people standing quietly and looking intently at my toes. In Ode on Melancholy, Keats says:

Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

This guy had emprisoned one of my legs and was feeding deep, deep upon my peerless toes. He finally straightened up and said that he had found the solution. He told Jaya that she should lightly touch a spot one inch below (or was it above?) my navel everyday for a few seconds and I will soon start improving. Apparently the most propitious time for performing this bit of prestidigitation was 9 p.m.

Reason, as Bertie Wooster often said, tottered on its throne.