Author: DR (Page 1 of 4)

Sunday, somewhere on the ECR

The road runs along the eastern coast, and in places is very picturesque. The sedentary city dweller, out on a rare drive, is tempted to divide his attention between the road and the scenery. This is perilous in the extreme, for the road is famous for homicidal-suicidal-maniacal drivers who attempt to overtake slower traffic by drifting on to the wrong side of the road, and beg death to overtake them in turn. But…but have they forgotten that one only lives once? In this body, at any rate. One may come back as an ant, or an alien, but in this body, this is the only life. That is the theory. It cannot be proven. It cannot be disproven.

A road on the horizon. but it lies perpendicular to the line of sight. There is deep meaning in this circumstance, but I can’t be bothered to decipher it.

Where were we? Yes, ECR, where there are many spots which are deadly beautiful. One stretch where the hordes of city dwellers picnic among the casuarina groves, littering them and doing their best to make them as squalid as their dwelling places; perhaps they no sooner reach this ‘picnic’ spot than they are homesick for the filth and grime of the city?

Nothing new.

A broad swathe of sandy land dotted with the occasional palm tree, other interesting vegetation that one kens not the names of leads to the beach, a strip of clean sand that stretches along the water’s edge. The Bay of Bengal rolls up and repeatedly flings itself onto the sand. This is Sunday, so the beach is crawling with people.

Half finished, frozen in time. Reminds me of my projects.
Perhaps someone is taking a picture of me taking a picture of someone taking a picture.

It is late afternoon, nearly evening, but the day is overcast, twilit. It seems to me that the whole world is twilit, in the uncertain time between pralayam and life as usual. It may be that it is not the world, but me. Be that as it may.

Two trees. There is no need for the path to go between them, but it does.

Somehow, the people seem to be listless, apathetic even. Or perhaps it is me again, my senses jaded. I have seen this. All this is predictable, nothing exhilaratingly new. Nevertheless, the camera may see it differently.

Dated, undated picture.

A bullock is ambling down the road. A cart is following it closely.

On the road to Goa, that goes past Karnala, and other places with names. Mountains moved in the sky, dwarfing and crushing the ones made of rock. The air was crisp.

The ‘thumb’ a cliff in the karnala sanctuary passed by, to my left. It’s like a finger, pointing upwards, as if to say ‘hey, look!’

What, what? Nothing. Just above the western horizon though, rafts of sunlight punched through the rents in the banks of clouds, limning the vast sky ranges. There were green fields and dark rich earth, upon crazy helter-skelter slopes. The road tried to follow with sudden loops and impulsive turns that can be dangerous when you’re greedily trying to take in as much of the countryside as possible.

I took a turn (@##$%^^ that was close) and passed into fairyland. The sun was behind a diaphanous veil of cloud, and an ethereal, gossamer light fell gently upon a suitably fantastical landscape. Even the shadows were less substantial, more ghostly than usual.

It wanted a few minutes for six ‘o’ clock. But maybe this was the true meaning of twilight.

Then I crossed a bridge when I came to it. It took me over a river that took a great lazy curve underneath, turgid with the new rains. There were also neat little plots of ploughed land on its banks, under the bridge. So what happens to the crops when the river overflows?

There is a fruit and vegetable market with a thick, dark grove of trees as a backdrop, right after the bridge. The surrounding farmlands and orchards supply it, I think. They are neat little shops, nothing more than thatch on a couple of thin poles and a rough wooden bench. They appear to belong. There is a long row of them. I bought a Rajapuri, at twenty rupees a kilo. The young woman weighed one. One kilo. How convenient. Nature must know how these things work. Now, this market. Middlemen, we all know, take a bite out of the profits before these things reach the city. There are some varieties of fruits indescribably delicious, that never reach the cities. The middlemen take the truly superior specimens of these fruit and eat them or export them to wealthy societies in underground bunkers. Beware of the middlemen.

I took a turn off the road, to the right (I hate the north side of the road. Always.). I found a villager walking, going where I do not care. I gave him a lift, and asked him where the road went. Dadarpheni, or was that kheni. In other words, nowhere notable. We drove a little way down an eye poppingly beautiful and fairly unfrequented path. It went through a quaint little level crossing and then an endless village, becoming squishy, slimy. The village was mind numbingly squalid. It did not seem to be particularly wealthy. It was certainly not picturesque. Why should such a promising road lead to such a dreary place? Then I remembered. It is the journey, not the destination.

I returned to the highway and turned back towards Mumbai, the great stinking cesspool of fervid and stale dreams.

I stopped for a coffee at a place that is so deviant as to serve a rice roti. It’s marathi, you see. Very bad coffee. But they have nice tissue paper. Soft and absorbent, perfect for cleaning helmet visors.

I’m not sure if the following happened:

The road crossed the level crossing and continued on to become slushy, squishy as it passed through a depressingly squalid village.

“I will get off here,” said my pillion.

“Okay,” I said. “Any chance of some tea?”

“Go back to the main road,” he said, a little brusquely, I thought. Considering that I had just given him a lift.

I got off the bike. I put it on its side stand. The man took a careful look at me. Then he said, clearly enunciating the words and also pointing in the right direction: “the main road.”

“It’s alright,” I said.

The man continued to look at me intently. Then he apparently decided to panic. “You must go before the darkness,” he hissed.

He was rather tense. I couldn’t see why, and this made him even more edgy. He put a hand on my shoulder and pushed. He meant this more as an aid to comprehension than as a threat. I stepped away from him, going backwards. “Hey,” I said. And then I said, “hey!”

The man took a long, exasperated look at me, his teeth showing in a rictus of frustration.

Then he turned around and walked rapidly away, merging into the indistinct shapes of the buildings in the village.

I stood there, leaning on the old bike, listening to the bird song. And the crickets. And the wind. The great thunder of a passing train. And then nothing.

I listened more carefully. It was not that I heard nothing. There was nothing to be heard. It’s what you hear when there’s nothing around to make any noise.

Then the light went. Completely, suddenly. The darkness pushed against my staring eyes.

But at last, I began to see again. But it was just my imagination, trying to scare me. “Look,” it said, pointing,. “A dark indistinct shape, floating noiselessly towards you.”

“And there, did you see that? Something on the ground, crawling. It’s standing up now, I think.”

I closed my eyes, and groped my way towards the bike. I touched something hairy at about shoulder level. I stepped back, deliberately. And waited for my heart to stop jumping around in my rib cage. Actually, it was a leafy branch of a tree, of which there were many hereabout, you idiot.

I groped some more. Now where could my bike have gone. I could have sworn that it was within arm’s reach, the last I saw.

My left shin touched something hard and hot. The exhaust pipe of a Bullet after a long and hard ride. I hugged the old bike. The helmet was where I’d left it hanging from a rear view mirror. I started her up. The headlight shone on the hedge of short trees that lined the path. I turned the bike around, trying not to think of the faces. The faces! Staring through the gaps in the trees. Just standing there, not at all bothered that they did not have bodies to stand on. The FACES. Mummy!

I shifted into first gear. Second gear. Third gear. Fourth gear. I wished there was a fifth gear*. The narrow country road, which twisted and turned through corners blinded by the trees growing along its edge, was good for third gear at best. At many places, the shoulders of the road fell away into deep hollows and a gulch or two that passed under tiny bridges on the narrow path. A slight mistake could launch me into the air. And then I would become another face, staring dementedly from the darkness.

But now, I slowed down. Then I stopped, keeping the engine running. I opened the throttle a couple of times. The bike roared. Then I opened it up all the way and turned the headlight deliberately into the surrounding darkness. The faces! White, staring in the light.

The Bullet’s thunder, however, was destroying the eerie silence. The air vibrated. The faces were beginning to melt in the white heat of its light. They crumbled, disintegrated and disappeared.

I stopped the engine. There was the dead silence again. But soon the crickets started up. A train was approaching, with its giant wheezing. The stars silhouetted the trees, and lit the quiet and dark fields with their neat furrows.

Not hurrying, I moved on down the road. I hit the highway 2 kilometres on. A teashop at the turn off to the country road. There were a few customers. I was glad to see them, for here was the solution to the mystery of the faces, and it was simple, as these things usually are. They had left their bodies at the tea shop.  

* The bike was a Bullet Electra, the year was 2004.

Mirrors

I was reading about ‘mirror neurons’ in V S Ramachandran’s The Tell Tale Brain: the neurons responsible for gauging other people’s intentionality by mimicking their actions in the brain. For instance, when someone reaches for an object, the same action is repeated by mirror neurons of someone watching, though there is a ‘suppression response’ that prevents the watcher from mimicking the action as well. These mirror neurons are also responsible for learning by imitation, empathy, synaesthesia, ‘cross modal abstraction’ (deriving an abstract quality from impressions between sensory and motor maps; metaphors are an example of this) that is the basis for full-fledged or high-level language, and even consciousness (self-reflective awareness).

They may be completely unrelated, but funny how the concepts and the words sound similar to advaita concepts: prakasa vimarsa, abhasa vadha, pratibimba vadha are examples (reality/consciousness is a delusion caused by the reflection of the brahman on the mind). According to pratibimba vadha, all experience is merely a projection of the mind, and reality has no objective existence.  

And Daniel Dennet’s theory of consciousness as something that is not an experience (as in the experience of the colour red, for instance) but just the physical phenomena of wavelengths and nerve excitations. This sounds like the anatma vadha of Buddhism.

If the universe were a petri dish, we’d be invisible under a microscope.

Creativity is discovery

In Carnatic music you can’t just make musical sounding sounds. There are rules, axioms, as definite and immutable as mathematical laws and equations. And just as mathematical laws are ‘apriori extant’, so are the rules of laya and sruti. They are not invented, they are discovered; just like mathematical truths.

“Everything is number,” said Pythagoras.

He found that simple fractions of wavelengths are in harmony; thus the notes of an octave. (Probably not the first or last person to discover this.) Halving the wavelength sounds the same note, an octave higher.

This is a basic truth, and it was discovered, just like the fact that shifting the ‘sa’ by one note changes one raga (for some ragas) into another (grahabedham). Or that there are 35 basic talas which can serve as the scaffolding for the sahitya. Or that there are 72 melakarta ragas.

Or the fact that the raga has an exact shape, a form as constant as the shape of a printed letter, even though it is only auditory, abstract. And manodharma is always true to this raga swarupa, even as the musician creates new phrases extempore. No, not creates but perceives. In all the infinite potentiality of sound, it is already there, the musician merely expresses it.

That is why manodharma is a process of revelation. It can possibly be a route to epiphany. I remember watching T M Krishna sing in a YouTube video, in which his eyebrows shoot up in pleased surprise at one of his own phrases. He was the singer, but he reacted like a listener, because he was not performing, he was discovering.

One meaning of the word ‘raga’ is attraction, or that which you find pleasing. There are some sounds out of the infinity possible that you find pleasing. Just as there are some equations out of the infinity possible that are logical, ‘make sense’. (The literal meaning of manodharma is mind (mano) + natural order or ‘rightness’ (dharma). That which feels right?) Why this should be so, is a mystery, at least to me*. This is part of the ultimate mystery, an aspect of it, or a manifestation of it. To experience it completely (even if you cannot explain it), with deep insight, as you potentially could with a sublime musical phrase, could unravel the whole mystery.

Walt Whitman said “all music is what awakes in you when you are reminded of it by the instruments. It is not the violins and the cornets…nor the score of the baritone singer
It is nearer and further than they.”

What awakes in you? According to Indian aesthetic theory, it is, at its most ideal, pure awareness itself. The theory of ‘rasa’ says that it goes beyond the personal, transcends taste (or vasanas) and “identifies aesthetic emotion (rasa) with that felt when the self perceives the Self.” (Ananda Coomaraswamy in ‘The Hindu View of Art’ from the collection of essays The Dance of Siva. He quotes Vishvanatha’s Sahitya Darpana: “It (Rasasvadana, or the experience of rasa) is the very twin brother of mystic experience (Brahmasvadana svarupa) and the very life of it is lokottara (beyond the physical world) wonder.”)

This aesthetic experience is independent of the theme (whether it is painful or pleasurable) or the quality of the art; It is experienced by one who is ‘sahridaya’: one with a harmonised heart, or with fine-tuned sensibilities. This, I surmise, is sensibility beyond the senses.

And music perhaps is the aesthetic experience that works best as this “point of departure to the absolute” (Ananda Coomaraswamy) for “it has no signification apart from itself” (Alan Watts in This Is It).

The purpose of art is to lead you to the experience of rasa. And the larger purpose is to show that all life is experience of rasa. There is no other signification to it. Why should there be, when this is it? All of it? It is that simple, like a gooseberry in the palm of your hand.

*This ‘one (or few) that works, out of an infinity (or nearly uncountable number) of possibilities’ is a common theme for anything to do with life, beginning with DNA – this molecule is the only one out of uncountable possibilities that can duplicate and reproduce itself efficiently (with minimal errors) in the real world (experimentally demonstrated by molecular biologists Stephen Freeland and Laurence Hurst).

Passivity

Reading is not passive. You have to actively apply your mind to convert the symbols on the page into words and the words into meaning. Two dimensional representations of concepts on the page (written words) result in images (both moving and static) and abstract thoughts in the mind. Even audio works like that – music or spoken words or audio books (you often vocalise the words that you read). I’m not sure how art and photography work, though I guess they’re not passive either – you take out more than is apparent in the picture.

Simple thought – the process of sitting quietly and thinking, is sometimes passive, sometimes active. The background chatter, thought without volition – passive. Ideation, imagination, planning, conceptualisation, meditation – active.

But video is different. You are passively consuming the moving images on the screen; there is little time or need to process them. That is why reading stimulates the mind, and video numbs it. The Internet is even worse, because your mind is manipulated and led to consume content passively, and you’re not allowed to apply the mind for sustained periods of directed attention that result in learning, insights, creativity, new neuronal connections.

Now the web 3.0 is coming, we are told (I was reading The Spatial Web by Gabriel Rene and Dan Mapes). With AR, everything you see will be tagged and loaded with information. You never see anything without passively consuming content that someone else has deemed fit for you to ingest. With VR, you will go further; you will be immersed in it, without having to make an effort to imagine, think.

I’m no luddite – AR especially is alluring. Imagine being stuck with a broken-down bike on a lonely road; an AI in the cloud sees the bike engine through your AR glasses, and walks you through the repair, with coloured arrows and interactive, dynamic exploded diagrams overlaid on the physical engine. (“Not clockwise you idiot, you’re tightening it! Anticlockwise.”) Or you look at a person and their FB profile appears, hovering over their head. (Yes, creepy.) It’s like gnanadhrishti, giving you the power to see sookshma loka.  

But what does it do the mind? In the movie WALL-E, humans become obese and incapable of moving on their own because machines do all the work. That is unlikely. What is far more likely and alarming is that human minds become incapable of thinking on their own because the web (connected, all-pervasive AI and distractions) does it all for them. And I think this has happened to a great extent already with web 2.0.

Exploration in the age of sitting

It is easier to wander in the real world than in the virtual world. For all its boundless possibilities and its absence of distance, it is quite limited. There is the small portion of the Net which could well be called the ‘known web’ to which most humans are mostly confined. And there is the rest of the Net. Vast, unexplored, trackless wastes that no one has got around to visiting and rating. For you see, the virtual world is for communities. For herds. People tend to congregate here, connect. Everyone goes to the sites that other people are going to. Everyone does the things that are done. That is why much of the Net is still virgin territory. Uninhabited, undiscovered. The age of exploration is not over.  But the question is, is there anything worth exploring?

The Kardashev H Scale

What if the Kardashev Scale were applied to individual humans? The amount of energy you can harness and expend determines your quality of life (only in the material realm, and not the actual experienced, cognized life?)

Let’s call this the KH Scale (Kardashev-Human). For instance, Type HI would be someone who can afford to escape the earth’s gravity well. Space tourists, billionaires, such like. Type HII are people who can extend their lives well beyond mortal spans (say, two or three hundred years) and expend the energy needed to do that. Type HIII, people who can live indefinitely, bend laws of physics, so they can harness and actually use galaxies’ worth of energy. They could be dematerialised intelligences or entities who need all that energy to power their vast thought processes. Though what those thoughts might be I cannot conceive.

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