Karnak and Luxor

A visit to Egypt can be a humbling experience. Big is really "massive" in Egypt, like the pyramids of Gizeh and the temples of Karnak and Luxor with their huge columns and obelisks. Napoleon's scholars calculated that the limestone blocks in the three pyramids of Gizeh were sufficient to build a wall one foot wide and 10 feet high around the whole of France!

The expertise of the ancient Egyptians in the field of architecture, engineering, astronomy, art, sculpture, writing are all there for us to wonder. What we should realise though, is that these were the achievements of a bronze-age culture. Cutting limestone and hard granite into huge blocks for building and carving sculptures in the round without the use of iron tools is an extremely difficult feat. The beautifully carved hieroglyphics, painted with the most vibrant colours is in itself a work of art. Even more remarkable was the living standards of the kings and ruling classes. Elaborately carved and designed chairs, tables, cots, thrones, chests in cedar and other wood, metal craft, woodwork, pottery, jewellery making, all kinds of crafts were highly evolved at a time when most people of the world still lived in neolithic villages.

Western scholars have been judgmental when they dismissed the civilisations of the east as the cult of the dead and have argued that this obsessive concentration on death rituals was the reason for these cultures remaining stagnant and their ultimate eclipse. However, it is to be noted that western cultures have developed only in the last few centuries, while the great Egyptian civilisation flourished for several thousand years with near continuity in religious beliefs and practices, lifestyle and concepts of kingship.GEETA VASUDEVAN The Hindu Magazine Sunday, Mar 07, 2004 About Us

I am my own reader

Writing seems an entirely self-contained activity, work pursued for its own sake. Actually, the writer sets out on a very personal and solitary quest, involving, at least in its intentions, no one else. I am my own reader. In fact, when writing, I am telling myself things. What the writer is trying to do rather is to make sense of life — for herself and incidentally for the reader. It is a kind of self-communing, of which the reader becomes a part. What is ultimately communicated is a picture of the world as the writer sees it, a picture that comes out of somewhere deep within, often taking even her by surprise. It is almost like hypnosis: things one didn't know were there, things one wouldn't have expressed in ordinary life, emerge. It is also a little frightening, being almost like an emotional and intellectual strip tease; there is a sense of standing exposed and bare under the spotlight.

For a writer, as I said, writing is the thing. But in exploring ideas, in teasing and stretching them, the writer helps readers to see what they have not been able to glimpse on their own. It is the writer's imagination that opens out new worlds to the reader. The imagination is a very powerful tool, it has both muscle and strength. I would compare it, not to the butterfly's flitting, but to the eagle's swoop and soar in flight. There is something daring about the way imagination can go into the dark, leap over a yawning abyss and make connections. It is imagination that allows the artist to get to the inner truth, going beyond the facts, behind the presumed reality. "Poetry is something more philosophical and of graver import than history": Aristotle's words. It is the writer's imagination that makes it possible for creative writing to have these qualities. SHASHI DESHPANDE The Hindu Literary Review Sunday, Jul 06, 2003

I read therefore I am

I see readers, and in their gestures the pleasure, responsibility and power that they derive from reading, that are common with mine. I am not alone. In my adolescence, whenever people mentioned my so-called passion for reading, I would always start to bristle. After all, to be known as a book lover — how grotesque. To my hypersensitive ears, it was like being called a eunuch or an old maid; one always hears that faint sneer of disdain and condescension mixed with pity. To be bookish is to be mousy, repressed, a shy wallflower, incapable of getting along with people, dreamy and poetic, helpless in the real world.

Shocking as it may seem, my real "love" isn't so much for reading as for pleasure — it merely happens that learning new things delights me, as do fast-paced stories, imaginative wordplay, and distinctive prose styles. Should I be congratulated for being a self-indulgent hedonist? I certainly wouldn't read books if they were boring, irrelevant and soporific — which is how most high school kids regard the classics of world literature. No, I read for excitement. Everything else is secondary.

It was in books that I encountered the universe: digested, classified, labelled and still formidable. Reading gave me an excuse for privacy, my bed late at night became my safest and most secluded place for reading, in that nebulous region between being awake and being asleep. Many nights I would turn on my bedside lamp and try both to reach the end of the book I was reading, and to delay the end as much as possible, going back a few pages, looking for a section I had enjoyed, checking details I thought had escaped me. In fact, I don't ever remember feeling lonely, my books were good company. The psychologist James Hillman argues that those who have read stories or had stories read to them in childhood "are in better shape or have a better prognosis than those to whom story must be introduced... Coming early with life it is already a perspective on life."

I never talked to anyone about my reading; the need to share came afterwards. Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge. Though I knew myself incapable of making up stories such as my favourite authors wrote, I felt that my opinions frequently coincided with theirs, and (to use Montaigne's phrase) "I took to trailing far behind them murmuring `Hear, Hear'." Later I was able to dissociate myself from their fiction; but in my childhood and much of my adolescence, most of what the book told me, however fantastical, was true at the time of my reading, and as tangible as the stuff of which the book itself was made. The world that revealed itself in the book and the book itself were never, at any price, to be divided. The contents of every book burned within it, blazed from it; located not merely in its binding or its pictures, they were enshrined in chapter headings and opening letters, paragraphs and lines. You did not read books through; you dwelt, abided between their lines and reopening them after an interval, surprised yourself at the spot where you halted. I think I read in at least two ways.

• First, by following breathlessly, the events and the characters without stopping to notice the details, the quickening pace of reading sometimes hurtling the story beyond the last page — as when I read Vonnegut, Maugham, O'Henry or Salinger.
• Secondly, by careful exploration, scrutinising the text to understand its ravelled meaning, finding pleasure in merely the sound of the words or the clues, which the words did not wish to reveal, or which I suspected was hidden deep in the story itself, something too terrible or too marvellous to be looked at.

The second kind of reading — which had something of the quality of reading stories — I discovered in Lewis Carroll, Vikram Seth, Vassanji, Tagore and Nabokov. Reading, to me, set one free, it gave one a freedom to explore thoughts and the world outside the context they lived in. This has its retributions in the political world we live in, from the banning of writers like Rushdie and Taslima Nasreen to the censorship of countless authors ranging from Neruda to Gorky over the years. But not only totalitarian governments fear reading. Readers are bullied in school yards and in colleges as much as in government offices and prisons.

Almost everywhere the community of readers has an ambiguous reputation that comes from its acquired authority and perceived power. Something in the relationship between a reader and a book is recognised as wise and fruitful, but is also seen as disdainfully exclusive and excluding, perhaps because the image of an individual curled up in a corner, seemingly oblivious of the grumblings of the world, suggests impenetrable privacy and a selfish eye along with a singular secretive action. "Books, you have too many books!" my mother would exclaim in frustration. I remember being called a dreamer once by a maternal uncle when he saw me reading, as if my silent activity contradicted their sense of what it meant to be productive or alive.

The popular fear of what a reader might do among the pages of a book is as ageless a fear as men have of what witches and alchemists do behind locked doors. The recent attack by vandals at the Bhandarkar Institute in Maharashtra, is yet another example of destruction of information, of books that demonstrators have no idea about in terms of value and content. Their pillaging convinced no one. Thus reality — harsh necessary reality — was seen to conflict irredeemably with the evasive dream world of books. Demotic regimes demand that we forget, and therefore they brand books as superfluous luxuries; totalitarian regimes demand that we not think, and therefore they ban and threaten and censor; both, by and large, require that we become stupid and that we accept our degradation meekly, and therefore they encourage the consumption of pap. In such circumstances, readers cannot but be subversive.

Told that we are threatened with extinction, we, today's readers, have yet to learn what reading is. Like the act of reading itself, the history of reading jumps forward to our time — to me, to my experience as a reader — and then goes back to an early page in a distant foreign century. It skips chapters, browses, selects, re-reads, refuses to follow conventional order. Paradoxically, the fear that opposes reading to active life, that urged my mother to request me from collecting way too many books that might not amount to much, recognises a solemn truth: "You cannot embark on life, that one-off coach ride, once again when it is over," writes the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk in The White Castle, "but if you have a book in your hand, no matter how complex or difficult to understand the book may be, when you have finished it, you can, if you wish, go back to the beginning, read it again, and thus understand that which is difficult and , with it, understand life as well." PRIYA BALASUBRAMANIAM The Hindu Literary Review Sunday, Aug 01, 2004

My Passage to Many Indias

The Coexistence of Multiple Realities ALEXANDER M KADAKIN

The Times of India THURSDAY, JUNE 10, 2004

But even before I stepped on the Indian soil, India was ever present in my dreams and imagination. Indeed, even at that nascent age as a scholar of India, it dawned on me that it would be wrong to presume that there was one India. There exist several ethereal and material Indias, blending into each other and simultaneously coexisting in time and space, more often peacefully than not, but at times conflicting. I kept coming to India, each time for a higher post in the Embassy, interacting with more and more Indian friends and familiarising myself with ever new facets.

Every year during those decades I was attentively putting my ear to the barahmasa song performed by India's nature. There followed Indian winters, insufficiently refreshing by Russian standards, but still uncomfortable especially for those who do not have a safe shelter. Indian springs, joyful at the start until they transform into a scorching blast furnace of the summer heat. Every time I witnessed the monsoon I felt reborn in a new avatar, thus getting a somatic self-explanation for the theory of reincarnation. Implanting the various shades of the seasons into my soul, experiencing them during North-South and West-East travels, I have to admit - geographically and climatically the vast India is as surprising as her polylingual and polyethnic multiplicity. I was struck by India's weightless architecture haunted by ghosts and phantoms, rid of history's yoke. No other country has such palaces with timeless architecture. India's culture, unlike currencies, is not convertible.

I could not help processing through my soul everything I was associated with - from the Himalayan saga of the Roerichs to the Nehru-Gandhi family's tragedies and triumphs of Aeschylean or Shakespearean magnitude.

My India spoke to me in various languages which, luckily, I could understand - be it the polished English of Indian diplomacy or the "Hinglish" of informal chats, the "Hirdu" of Hollywood movies or the chaste and refined Hindi of Doordarshan. At times, it could be an intellectual discourse or a soporific pravachana, a shriek of pain or boastful self-praise. I listened to all those voices and often wondered whether they belonged to a single whole or to a polyphonic chorus. Not only the voices. Hi-tech luxuries carried on a bullock cart, agricultural revolution and the ancient plough, jhuggis side by side with glittering skyscrapers, haute couture shows watched by shabby dhoti-clad manufacturers of things fashionable, ahimsa ideals and bloody clashes - could all this coexist in a single flacon? Or even within an individual who could imbibe the 21st century ideas and razor-edge technologies, at the same time ready to fight for the identification of an ancient site? Should I call it contrasts or contradictions? Are these features self-excluding? Are there many Indias?

It took me time to realise that my India is remindful of a human body with its seats of power and intellect and various indriyas. Sometimes the body is guided by reason and sometimes by mere emotions. It might feel rigid in the morning, become more elastic by daytime, get overexcited by evening, and frustrated by night. It fights its own ups and downs, tides and ebbs, high spirits and the blues. It looks different if observed from various angles, and is familiar and mysterious, gorgeous and shabby, pure and impure, and, eventually, it could be either cherished or ruined. I have visited many other countries, but I reserve this metaphor for India exclusively. Or may be this is one more thing that I have mastered in India — to speak by sidhantas and drishtantas: is it a better way to make oneself clear, or to conceal one's thoughts? In any case, it is certainly an acquisition to be packed into my diplomatic luggage and carried back.

To go on with the body, it may, like any human one, be healthy or ailing, beautiful or disgusting, may be mistaken about its own state and feel in good shape being at the same time unaware of a terminal ailment that has already taken roots in it. Still, really challenging is that it possesses a soul which generations of scholars have been trying to comprehend and explicate to others. But this soul encompasses such an enormous variety of traits from the heights of virtue to the depths of vice that the moment one feels capable to form some well defined knowledge, an event comes up to the surface that wholly contradicts the previous notion. Myself hailing from the country which, as our classic poet and diplomat Fyodor Tyutchev said, "cannot be understood by reason but can only be believed in", I have the similar feeling for India though, I must confess, in both cases the strength of reason and belief has been, more than in one case, put under severe test.

How more profound is India's traditional world, where each stone is a hierophant, a sign of the presence of the sacred in our world. Every sunrise here becomes a cosmogenic drama, every woman - an embodiment of the tantric principle of Shakti whose presence is the source of the world's very existence, and could be manifested right up to the election Lila. Behind the exterior forms specific only of India there hides the sublime universal paradigm of the traditional conscience which is totally opposite to the modernistic one, at the same time far more vibrant and wholesome. In purely modern phenomena one sees the same movement of the spirit that one can get from traditional doctrines. The craving of human soul for sacral archetypes is unquenchable, and archetypes are easily juxtaposed with new age constructs. The sacral and the profane coexist.

Once Russian astronauts told me that from the outer space India resembled a human heart. I wish that the hearts of Russia and India forever beat in unison between themselves and the outside world at large.

To paraphrase the great philosopher, Mircea Eliade, have these years made me learn better the magic formulae of this great Indian alchemy? Yes and no. My diplomatic status was both of help and an impediment. It offered and denied me a number of opportunities. Many Indias have escaped my attention. Many voices I was not able to hear and many developments unable to grasp much less to foresee, as India seems to be specially designed by the Vidhata to defy all prognoses and theories, especially in politics - oh no, I've promised. My heart remains here but all my Indias will travel back along with me, needing no extra space in the plane. And new ones will appear when I return. Or is there only one India reinventing, multiplying and reproducing herself many times and each time anew?

Women and religion

By C.S. LAKSHMI

Women's engagement with religion has always been taken as a part of being feminine. Really staunch atheistic women have existed only in the Self-Respect Movement. A woman who decides not to observe the rituals and customs dictated by religion has always been seen as a harbinger of conflict, disorder and pain within a family. This is because, for a woman, religion is not just something linked to a god but a cultural practice that she is supposed to preserve. Despite the influence of the Self-Respect Movement, one of the important duties of a married woman is to continue the worshipping tradition of the family she is married into.

In the women's movement, it was generally assumed that those who fight for the liberation of women cannot be believers because the rituals that are a part of religion and the meanings attached to the rituals bind women in many ways and degrade women in unacceptable ways. Moreover, engaging with religion also meant accepting the divisions in the society based on caste and religion.

But in many of our households, certain symbols of religion casually lay around as cultural objects in the form of a terracotta goddess whose name one had forgotten, bought from a small village temple or a lamp which one's mother had lit all her life, an unusually carved Ganesha, brass Deepavali lamps handed down by the family, a brass candle stand or a rough wooden cross carved by a village sculptor or a Ravi Varma painting of Rama's coronation.

One still found it difficult to step on a book. One did enjoy Carnatic music, bhajans, Christmas carols, some festivals like Id, Pongal, regional new year celebrations, Christmas or Deepavali which meant new clothes, tasty food (even if the women had to slog cooking it), the smell of sugar cane and jaggery permeating the house, the fragrance of a cake cooking in the oven, the flavour of spicy mutton and milk pudding with cardamom boiling on the stove and the smell of flowers and fruits which change the atmosphere in the household for a while. Many of us who had discarded the ritualistic part of a festival did enjoy the food that we cooked or the family cooked or the neighbours sent over.

Over the years, we understood that while religion and the identity it imposed was not acceptable to us, faith was something deeply personal and that so long as faith did not make you look at the other with hatred, so long as it was not imposed on the other to create hierarchies, it was not harmful. However, we did stay away from groups openly professing a faith or a religion. We were still trying to grapple with the issues religion raised when the demolition of Babri Masjid happened and we realised that what was demolished was not just a religious structure but the very foundation of harmony that had been built over the years. Ochre was no more just a colour. Nor was the trident a wall decoration. The Hindu Literary Review Sunday, Aug 07, 2005

Gandhi fought against foreigners and the natives

The Mahatma's Case AMULYA GANGULI

THE TIMES OF INDIA Teusday, October 4, 2005

Even after conceding that Gandhi fathered the nation, Swagato Ganguly has blamed the Mahatma (The God That Failed, Oct 1) for much of India's ills. Yet, in the admission of his fatherhood lies the key to understand the Man of the Millennium. A basic feature of Gandhi's life and politics was that he was not just a freedom fighter like Nelson Mandela. Even as he opposed the British, Gandhi wanted to ensure that the Indians were ready for their freedom. It has to be remembered that the most harmful effect of colonialism was not economic exploitation, but cultural subjugation.

Gandhi's first battle was against this conviction of inferiority which enabled a few Britishers to rule over many Indians. His objective was to instil a sense of self-respect among Indians by making them feel proud of their Indianness. As William Shirer, the author of the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich writes in his book on Gandhi, when he called on the Mahatma, he found him sitting on the floor plying the charkha. Gandhi asked Shirer whether a chair should be brought for him, but Shirer declined and sat on the floor. The episode is symptomatic of Gandhi's politics. He wanted to demonstrate that Indians sat on the floor (and ate with their fingers and had their own dress codes) and were not ashamed of their customs. If the whites wanted to join them, they would have to do so on these terms, and not the other way round.

It is this attitude which made him discard western clothes and tell journalists, who asked him how he felt meeting the King in Buckingham Palace in his meagre attire, that the monarch was wearing enough for both of us. Arguably, in his endeavour to emphasise the distinctive Indian personality, Gandhi took his anti-western stance too far, to the dismay of Tagore and Nehru. But, then, the Mahatma was not a man of compromises. It has to be remembered also that, to him, the fight with the British must have seemed an endless struggle. Gandhi, therefore, fought on two fronts against foreigners and the natives. And the latter had not only to be taught to be self-reliant and worthy of respect by weaving his own clothes but also by cleaning the latrines, a lesson which the country doesn't seem to have learnt even now.

Gandhi may have also calculated that to make his non-traditional attitude towards untouchabi-lity acceptable, he would have to identify himself closely with eternal India through his dress, religiosity and austere lifestyle. An obviously anglicised person such as Nehru wouldn't have been able to do this. In the process, Gandhi had no alternative but to turn his face against western civilisation, a yet to be attained good idea. Had he praised industrialisation and preferred allopathic medicine, he would have been a charlatan to the masses. His was a canny strategy to topple an empire, leaving the future to take care of itself. The writer is a political commentator

Tolerance, acceptance and sympathy.

A SINGLE event helped create a timeless mystique around Swami Vivekananda. This was his address at the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago on 11 September 1893. Even to this day, his address is seen by many as a turning point in Hindu re-assertion and revival. Contemporary votaries of `soft' Hindutva, from A.B. Bardhan to A.B. Vajpayee, swear by the spirit of his message in Chicago. Liberals, leftists and communalists are joined together in appropriating the legacy of Vivekananda as put forth in this address. What was so special about this piece of oration delivered to the `Sisters and Brothers of America'? In a masterful way, Vivekananda addressed three major concerns of nineteenth century India: Hindu identity, Hindu nationalism and an equal `dialogue' between Hinduism and other faiths.

At the outset, Vivekananda categorically asserted the pre-eminence of Hinduism by calling it `the mother of religions'. This claim of superiority rested on the fact that Hinduism was that religion which had taught, and continued to teach, the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. Not only did Hinduism believe in tolerance but it also accepted all religions as true. It had never persecuted, either with sword or pen, and, in fact had given shelter to persecuted sects. Its message was the surest antidote to sectarianism, bigotry and fanaticism. In one deft stroke, Vivekananda defined Hinduism's equation with all other faiths: They were mere children in relation to the `mother of religions', and also were participants in an eternal seminar, where the `tutor' was Hinduism and the `tutees' were all other faiths...

Having dwelt on the theme of tolerance, Vivekananda now started taking other faiths to task. All other religions, asserted Vivekananda, suffer from the fatal flaws of faith in a Personal God, sectarianism, bigotry and fanaticism. This assertion flowed from his formal definition of religion:
Religion is not talk, or doctrines or theories, nor is it sectarianism. Religion cannot live in sects and societies. It is the relation between the soul and God; how can it be made into a society? ... Further, all religions, with the sole exception of Hinduism, depended on the historical veracity of their founders or prophets. This invariably led to conflict. Tearing apart the prophetic tradition, he debunks the very motives of all prophets (with the exception of the Buddha). All prophets were moved by external motives to expect reward from the outside, meaning the material world. Their actions were not unselfish. Their language may have been highly evolved but their intentions were highly suspect...

It was against this background that Vivekananda proposed his theory of Hindu tolerance. It fits in uneasily with his earlier typology of all other religions, except Hinduism, as participants in a process of eventful perfection. The idea of Hindu superiority was also implicit in Vivekananda's attempt to propose such a theory. The first rhetorical step in positioning a theory of Hindu tolerance was, therefore, to refrain from judging other faiths. According to Vivekananda, we tend to reduce everyone else to the limits of our own mental universe and begin privileging our own ethics, morality, sense of duty and even our sense of utility. All religious conflicts arose from this propensity to judge others. If we indeed must judge at all, argued Vivekananda, then it must be `according to his own ideal, and not by that of anyone else'. It was important, therefore, to learn to look at the duty of others through their own eyes and never judge the customs and observances of others through the prism of our own standards. This was the very foundation upon which the edifice of tolerance stood. Hinduism, says Vivekananda, was built on a similar foundation, or to put it more correctly was the foundation itself...

Hinduism was the repository of such tolerance, acceptance and sympathy. The first step towards this admirable goal was to feel that oneness. Once this was accomplished, we would be able to transcend our limited phenomenal world and become immortal. Vedanta allowed this sense of oneness while promoting an infinite variety and variation in religious thought. Therefore the Vedanta lays down that each man should be treated not as what he manifests, but as what he stands for. Each human being stands for the divine, and, therefore, every teacher should be helpful, not by condemning man, but by helping him to call forth the divinity that is within him.

The lofty flights of Advaita were, therefore, of little help to Vivekananda in forgetting the past. History cast its shadow on the whole idea of oneness and fellow-feeling. Hindus must build churches and mosques in India, asserted Vivekananda, despite the hatred, brutality, cruelty, tyranny and the vile language of the Muslims and Christians. He hoped that such proactive love would ultimately win. Yet, Vivekananda could never take that all-important leap into rejecting sweeping racial and religious stereotypes. When he says Muslims, he meant all Muslims, and so with Christians. (The subtlety of the idea of rejecting English rule but not the English had to wait for more than a decade for Gandhi to formulate it.)

Vivekananda derived the idea of a common universal faith from Sri Ramakrishna. In a speech delivered in New York, and subsequently published under the title, My Master, Vivekananda speaks of Sri Ramakrishna's attempt to know the truth of all other faiths ... ... Vivekananda did not experience this oneness of faiths like Sri Ramakrishna. His attempt remained confined to the intellectual plane and lacked the intensity of living another man's faith with one's `whole heart'. Between Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda, the disparity in method to arrive at the same conclusion made all the difference. Like Jesus, Sri Ramakrishna was after all the pure sort, unencumbered by history or context, but immensely rich in experience. Vivekananda was like Paul, the thundering sort, who had to spread the light quickly and effectively. He understood well that religion was not an intellectual activity but an act of realisation. But he was often impatient. Hinduism as a tolerant and all-embracing faith remained for him an aspiration, never an experience. Excerpted from Hindutva: Exploring the Idea of Hindu Nationalism, Jyotirmaya Sharma, Penguin Books India, Viking, Rs. 350.

Friends across faiths

Humra Quraishi

Last spring, I visited a gurudwara for the first time in my life. Why not earlier? I was apprehensive: Would a Muslim be welcome? Contrary to my fears, the experience turned out to be a happy one. It was so peaceful and tranquil in the gurudwara. I was there for an hour with Sikh friends. And then, it struck me how little we know of each other's faiths. What was holding us back? Most of us are happy to consume misleading myths of different faiths. Often I've been told that I don't 'look' like a Muslim. Asked to explain, they admit rather sheepishly that the general impression they have of Muslims is that of a woman covered by a veil, with a bunch of children in tow... At various stages in life, I've had to give explanations and counter-explanations to convince people that Muslims are no different than the rest.

In fact, Indian Muslims follow social customs which closely resemble Hindu ones; yet, stereotypical notions and myths continue to circulate, creating differences between communities. Right from childhood, suspicion and apprehension of other religions gets drilled into our little heads. It seems almost as though you would betray the religion you are born into if you entered places of worship of other faiths. Instead, visiting one another's temples, mosques and churches should be part of growing up — this will definitely broaden our perspective just as reading opens our minds and hearts to other horizons. The 13th century Sufi saint, Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, made it a point to routinely interact and hold spirited dialogues with the Brahmins. Little wonder, then, he could expound a beautiful philosophy that if the Almighty did not make demarcations between Hindus and Muslims, vis-a-vis the outreach of his bounty like sunshine, water, fruit and trees — then, who are we to create rigid barriers of caste and creed?

In God's eyes, all humans are equal. Differences and conflicts are entirely man-made. The best way to bridge gaps and clear doubts is by having more people-to-people contacts between different faiths. A Tamil friend confided that she had thought, all along, that Islam was a militant and aggressive religion, until she heard Maulana Wahiduddin Khan speak and explain that the word Islam means peace. If only religion was not made out to be such a formidable subject, we would be able to look upon God as a close friend and confidante, whether he lived in a guru- dwara, temple, church or mosque, or even if you prefer to see him in nature — in trees, flowers and mountains, for instance. God, the Creator, cannot obviously be confined to small spaces — he is everywhere. Kahlil Gibran said: "And if you would know God, be not therefore a solver of riddles/ Rather look about you and you shall see him playing with your children/ And look into space; you shall see Him walking in the clouds, outstretching His arms in the lightening and descending in the rain/ You shall see him smiling in flowers, then rising and waving His hands in trees...”

God's presence can be sensed everywhere: in the teachings of religions, and simply in every person you come across. Befriend those from different faiths and freely question each other about your respective faiths. This is the best way to clear doubts, most often sown by those who want to divide and misrule. I recently met a Jesuit priest who lives in Ahmedabad. He said to me: "In these days of communal strife make it a point to tell your neighbours and close friends that the essence of each religion of the world is to co-exist in total harmony.” To this, I'll add a few lines from a Bangladeshi friend who provides shelter to stray dogs and cats: "We have two stray dogs and four cats — but they have never fought with one another... they're better behaved than human beings." The Times of India October 26, 2002

Just one diya

More dash than cash: God, in fact, seems to like it simple
RENUKA NARAYANAN

This has to do with grand marble mandirs being considered so vital today. It’s great to strut our stuff as a community, lay up treasures on earth, get ourselves a meeting point that works as belief bazaar, cultural centre and free shrink, plus does brilliant free takeway in biodegradable donas (leaf cups). Even the distant glimpse of a great House of God is electrifying and our highways are lined with shrines that everyone bobs their heads to or halts at for a quick prayer. These visible symbols are important for reassurance, they light up the land with their presence, knit regions through the circuits of sacred geography and give us valid reasons to touch base with interior and outlying corners of the Motherland.

Some of the best stories from religious tradition are to do with temples. Nandanar the beloved Tamil saint pined so hard for a glimpse of Shiva at Chidambaram. Saal Beg, a Muslim devotee of Lord Jagannath at Puri yearned for darshan and wrote the moving song Ahi Neela saila. But with all this justification for buildings, God’s own wishes, if we are to understand our stories correctly, are very modest indeed. Saint Jnaneshwar of Maharashtra says that the Lord is best pleased when worshipped with the flowers of good deeds. Or let’s recall one of Shiva’s nicest names: Asutosh. It means ‘Easily pleased’.

A sprinkling of water, a bel leaf, a flower — these are enough to make the Great God happy, if offered sincerely. Once, when some rakshasas attacked him, he thought they were worshipping Him because they hit Him with branches of bel, and so He blessed them! Take the tale of Kanappa Nayanar, a hunter. He was filled with such love for Shiva that he felt impelled to make an offering as a formal expression of his feelings. In his innocence he spat water from his mouth on the Shivling, threw down flowers from his own hair and laid a fresh kill of deer at the altar. We’re reliably informed that the Lord just loved Kanappar to bits.

With Pitr Paksh going on now (the period of formal Hindu remembrance of ancestors, when no new contracts may be signed, houses or cars bought), it makes sense to remember our soul links. Rather than grand buildings, these stories our ancestors bequeathed us are our real treasure, because they give us a happy, purposeful code of living: It’s not what you’ve got but how you use it that matters! The Vedic people made no temples, only altars that they made and took apart after each yagnya. Let’s cherish our wonderful temples, let’s build new ones by all means. But let’s not forget that baggage-less vision either, or the minimalist chic of just one diya, or just one agarbatti near the tulsi. The Indian Express: Monday, September 30, 2002

Sob Story

Manjul Bajaj

While laughter has long and often been hailed as the best medicine, crying, the other uniquely human attribute has been given short shrift by society. Humans are the only animals who shed tears of emotion. Why do we cry? Are there any physical or health benefits from crying? Plenty, if some researchers are to be believed. Throughout history and in every culture people have cried. Weeping often occurs at precisely those times when we are least able to fully verbalise complex, overwhelming emotions. Scientists feel that weeping is probably necessary because no human behaviour has ever continuously evolved unless it somehow contributed to survival. There are three basic types of tears.

• In healthy eyes, the cornea is continually kept wet and nourished by basal tears.
• The second type of tears is reflex tears that attempt to wash out irritants that may have gotten into the eye.
• The third category, emotional tears, is increased lacrimation due to strong emotional stress or pain. Tears brought about by emotions have a different chemical make-up than those for lubrication.

According to a study by University of Minnesota biochemist William Frey, people report feeling better after a cry. Frey discovered the neurotransmitters leucine-enkephalin (an endorphin or natural opiate-like substance for pain relief) and prolactin (released from the pituitary in response to emotional stress) in emotional tears: The substances were not found in tears shed in response to sliced onions. Studies back the common observation that men and women cry differently. Men cry quietly and their eyes brim with tears. Women, on the other hand, make lots of crying noises as the tears stream down their cheeks. Testing revealed that men weep an average of 1.4 times a month while women cry about 5.3 times monthly. "Until the Industrial Revolution, crying in public was pretty normal, even for men", says Tom Lutz, PhD, "Heroic epics from Greek times through the Middle Ages are soggy with weeping of all sorts. Through most of history, tearless-ness has not been the standard of manliness". The industrial age needed diligent, not emotional, workers. Crying was then delegated to privacy, behind closed doors. People everywhere became more uncomfortable with public tears. Perhaps, it's time to reclaim our tears. A crying club, anyone? The Times of India October 6, 2005

A logic beyond science?

It’s time science and spirituality ended their eternal war.
GAUTAM CHIKERMANE

It couldn’t be without logic—this intricately balanced nature, its geography, its life forms, its civilisations, their interdependence. The laws of nature that physics is discovering existed long before man discovered science. Or defined it. But simply because science today defines itself in one way —it describes a large class of observations and makes definite predictions about future observations—doesn’t mean there’s no logic beyond this definition. Just like the movement, in science, to understanding that it wasn’t the earth but the sun around which planets revolved took two millennia and six scientists to be discovered, from Aristotle in 340 BC to Newton in 1687, maybe there’s some new logic waiting to be unearthed by science that stands beyond its reach today.

We’re on a planet that’s not only rotating on its axis and revolving around the sun, but one that’s constantly evolving, with the rest of us trying to keep pace even as we influence this evolution. Discovering ourselves, our physical and psychological drivers, our arts, sciences and everything in between. In the process, going beyond what we know, to what we don’t: mind and its multi-layered depths, soul and its vastness, consciousness and its timelessness, the all-encompassing spirit and its spacelessness. Concepts science can’t recognise as logical as they stand outside the logic of reason and within the logic of, say, intuition.

Education is partly to blame. We find that we have been trained to look only at the surface. Hence, the focus on one aspect of a much wider possibility. Ignoring the education of the body, for instance, by which death could be conquered. The education of the vital, through which we can understand that perhaps fear and courage are two halves of one whole. The education of the psychic, by which we touch the That lying within us. All of which have their own logics, that don’t necessarily conform to scientific definition. Silence as a stairway to reach these depths, for instance.

Not for a moment am I questioning scientific logic, just wondering whether those conforming to it have their minds open enough to accept the possibility of other paradigms, other logics. The existence of, say, a spiritual logic. Could it be that the scientific temper has seen merely religious seeking through irrational beliefs, and hence is discounting it—and along with it, its deeper, spiritual aspects? Could it also be that it concerns itself only with change and not the Source, the stuff from where it all began? The Indian Express Monday, November 14, 2005 Read comment[s]

Garibaldi and Nehru

Exactly a century ago, Pandit Nehru first walked into this elite public school that takes its name from its location, leaving two years later for Cambridge with the rudiments of an English gentleman's education and a head full of radical ideas that would bring the British Raj to its knees. For, in an accident of history, Harrow unwittingly presented tomorrow's freedom fighter with the ultimate reading list.

As a prize for excellence, the school fatefully selected for the 18-year-old Nehru the first volume of G M Trevelyan's historical trilogy on Giuseppe Garibaldi. It was to be a turning point in Nehru's life. The soldier played a central role in the 19th-century unification of Italy and the rise of Italian nationalism. Garibaldi's example prepared Nehru for the struggle he would have to wage with powerful words and persuasive ideas before the Empire would crumble. Later, Nehru was to record the impact that long-ago school prize had on him. Transfixed by Garibaldi's struggle, Nehru bought two further volumes on the gallant soldier and admitted it inspired in his young breast "visions of similar deeds in India...of a gallant fight for freedom, and in my mind, India and Italy got strangely mixed together."

On Monday, Harrow celebrated its ham-handedness in making that historically fateful gift to one of its greatest sons. Marking the centenary of Nehru's entry into the school with a respectful ceremony redolent of history, Harrow's headmaster Barnaby Lenon declared "Nehru was a role model for Harrovians." Indian High Commissioner Kamalesh Sharma added: "In some way, by presenting the book on Garibaldi, Harrow contributed to the strengthening of the desire for freedom for India that Nehru would later win." RASHMEE ROSHAN LALL [Wednesday, November 16, 2005, THE TIMES OF INDIA]

On Considering the Source

Sources are precious. Original ideas, even more so. The nature of design practice means that we will always, by necessity, need to reference existing information, but in our race to the finish, let's not forget that in the very process of translation — from idea to form, from one thing to many things — we are not obligated to imitate, replicate, and indeed — mediate. Posted by Jessica Helfand

A friend of mine, a painter, recently saw a group exhibition at PS1 in New York in which he was struck by the absence of primary source material. Although intentionally abstract works, these paintings all referenced extremely specific aspects of contemporary culture, most of them heavily filtered through the media. Put another way, these artists weren't abstracting simple forms — natural forms, geometric forms, simple and universally comprehensible forms — but were instead referencing ideas that had already been parsed by various media sources. While on one hand, this work could be said to be mirroring a particular generation of artists who have come of age in a heavily mediated world, my friend was conflicted: does our willlingness to accept the cultural and biographical bias of the maker mean we are also meant to forgive the absence of original ideas?

In the wake of last week's indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the question of where sources come from is on everyone's mind. And while it might be said that questions of national security are not likely to be compromised by a group of abstract painters, the question of source material is, I think, one that deserves a second look. Because it is by its nature tied to the exigencies of public communication, graphic design is perhaps less overtly prone to this type of critique: after all, in traditional practice, there are a series of external transactions — involving clients, budgets and a host of personal and public agendas — that frame the process, if not the actual product of the design itself. Art, on the other hand, does not invoke the same kinds of interpersonal complexities, although there is a long tradition of patronage, going back to the Medicis, that shows the artist does not create work in a vacuum. Yet beyond the obvious — the clients, the curators, the governing factors of economics and what the market will bear — the central question remains: when is an idea original, unmediated — and pure?

Clearly, there is nothing that suggests the notion of pure has any relationship to the world we live in. But at the same time, the idea of targeting original sources — and by conjecture, of seeking original ideas — seems like a goal we should, in all fairness, support. (There's a certain amount of semantic confusion here that easily leads to a kind of involuntary hypocrisy: we want to breathe clean air and drink pure water, but we don't want our art to reference "purity" because that wouldn't be a reflection of the world in which we live.) This is not to suggest that purer is better — but that the notion of a primary source, meaning unmediated and unmoored from a host of other complexities — has become something of an endangered species in our time. Designers, who might be said to embrace a slightly more pragmatic vision of making work and disseminating messages, feel the burden of communicating the complexities of an age in which "pure" resonates as utopian, sugar-coated, and false. (There is also the very real fact that "pure" in graphic design recalls the neutral, overly homogenized, and borderline fascist tone of the International style.) And it's tricky: it's all been done. How can anyone ever use Futura Bold Italic again and not evoke the purview of Barbara Kruger?

These sorts of assessments — of which visual metaphors, messages and meanings drive and are driven by people participating, as makers, in an ongoing repository of visual culture — lie at the cornerstone of a kind of ideological polemic about design versus art. Isn't it all subjective? Who is to say what is original? And how do we know if it is? And why, frankly, should we care?Let's return to the idea of sources. To the designer, "referencing" an earlier style or maker can be seen as a kind of post-modern pastiche. When done with irony, it can be deliriously enchanting — Paula Scher's open gesture to Herbert Matter in a series of posters for Swatch, in the early 1980s, come to mind. Sans irony, we're left with blatant plagiarism, and at the risk of really painting myself into a corner, I will refrain from giving examples. At the same time, we yearn for new visual languages to emerge: so scratchy handwriting replaces the clean alignments of mechanically-rendered type and we applaud ourselves for letting go. We photograph signage on our cell phones and upload images to share online: here, through digital concensus, we sanction our societal acceptance of this itinerant, manmade vernacular form, whereupon it becomes streamlined and secondary, no longer the stuff of impulse, the magic of outsider art.

There is one more piece to take into consideration — and that's the piece that involves reality. One has only to consider the popularity of Reality TV to understand why any of us with a healthy imagination would see the blurring of fact and fiction as material worthy of compelling inquiry. But beyond the seduction of the blur lies the deeper, more pressing question: what does the truth look like? Lately it is easy, too easy, to see reality as something distanced from the truth. Writing of the greater concerns over social displacement and substance abuse in yesterday's New York Times,, a psychiatrist warns that the growth of technology has cleaved us from a greater reality of self. "We say that we are "going" places on the Internet without ever leaving the room. Posted by Jessica Helfand on November 3, 2005 07:09 AM Jump to Most Recent Comment

Yehi Hai Right Size, Baby

Jayant V Narlikar

The Times of India , October 15, 2005

In the 1930s, biologist and geneticist J B S Haldane wrote an article 'On Being the Right Size', in which he discussed several living systems in the context of why they come in the particular sizes we find them in. For example, why can't we scale a rabbit to the size of an elephant? Haldane reminds us that the giants in the ancient mythologies, described as enormously larger than humans, would have perished under this mathematical law. Given the composition of a system, there is a natural size for it. Its overall balances are well maintained at that particular size. If you increase the size of the system, the controlling forces scale differently and lose their equilibrium. As sizes increase the volume-based forces grow faster than the surface-based ones, and vice versa. Which is why babies are in greater danger of exposure to cold than adults.

Even man-made systems are subject to influences that are size-dependent and there is a right size for each system. A famous magazine in the United States went out of circulation because its circulation increased. The decline of the Roman Empire began when it became too big. It became increasingly difficult for a central administration in Rome to control far-flung regions. Likewise, political parties in India find it increasingly difficult to have a national cohesive character. As they seek to expand their influence, they have to contend with local aspirations of regions removed from their central think tank. The result is the politics of coalition. The uncontrolled growth of metropolitan cities is another example. The larger the population the greater the infrastructural problems, which rise in greater proportion than the monetary contribution the larger population would bring.

The atomic nucleus contains neutrons and protons, bound by an attractive nuclear force. This force is basically stronger than the force of electrical repulsion between any two protons, but the force is effective only over a short range. We can build stable, bound nuclei by adding more and more particles, but only up to a limit. When we reach the nucleus of iron, we find that this is the limit. This nucleus has 56 particles. If we add more we start descending the stability ladder. The binding provided by the nuclear force loosens because of the large size — the same problem that brought down the Roman Empire. It is time we learnt from nature that 'right size is beautiful' is a good motto to adopt, especially when we are tempted to grow too big for comfort. The writer is an astrophysicist.

The Search and the Find

Sathesh, one visitor to this blog has requested me to share more about my search and what is it that I have found. He is quoting from what I have written in 'About Me' and asks what I exactly mean by the Truth.Well. It is a long story. But yet it is also a very short story. Here I go then with the long and short of it. By nature of being born to parents who had certain ideas of upbringing, I learnt carnatic music - vocal and instrumental and shlokas and chanting in Tamil and Sanskrit.

I took to reading the books of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother in the 1990s. As Sri Aurobindo has said, when the mind is travelling on a single plane of existence, force of circumstances gives a jolt in some form or another. This jolt came in the form of an auto accident on August 15, 2000, Sri Aurobindo's birthday. A woman seated just next to me suffered grievous injuries while I just scraped my elbow and knee. Getting back to work after four days of leave, for the first time, I had this thought: Why was I spared in this accident. What is the purpose of my existence? It was this question that took me on a path of what is popularly known today as Yoga, Meditation and Spirituality. But even then, I did not go in search of truth, but I was just answering some call and saw myself being taken to all the places and people who were providing me with the answers. When I dithered or just forgot, someone would come to remind me or tell me what to do.

Truth of Existence is a difficult thing to explain. But all the music, all the Sanskrit or anything that I learnt by heart, began unfolding the deeper meanings to me. I now see the same roads, same polluting MTC buses, the same people, the same poverty or prosperity, the same clean or unclean roads, the same everything. But earlier, they were all different and I was different. Now the Truth is - I and Them, I and It, I and Him, I and Her are all one. The person who asks the question is me. The person who replies is me. My answer for Who Am I? will now be - Well, Nothing. If you don't like this answer, I will say, Well, then Everything. It makes no difference. posted by Swahilya at Sunday, July 10, 2005

The Moment of Complexity

Emerging Network Culture by Mark C. Taylor "At pivotal moments throughout history, technological innovation triggers massive social and cultural transformation..." (more)

Editorial Reviews: Book Description
"The Moment of Complexity is a profoundly original work. In remarkable and insightful ways, Mark Taylor traces an entirely new way to view the evolution of our culture, detailing how information theory and the scientific concept of complexity can be used to understand recent developments in the arts and humanities. This book will ultimately be seen as a classic."-John L. Casti, Santa Fe Institute, author of Gödel: A Life of Logic, the Mind, and Mathematics

The science of complexity accounts for that inscrutable mix of chaos and order that governs our natural world. Complexity explains how networks emerge and function, how species organize into ecosystems, how stars form into galaxies, and how just a few sequences of DNA can account for so many different life forms. Recently, the idea of complexity has taken the worlds of business and politics by storm. The concept is used to account for phenomena as varied as the behavior of the stock market, the response of voting populations, and the effects of risk management. Even Disney has used complexity theory to manage crowd control at its theme parks.Given the startling development of new information technologies, we now live in a moment of unprecedented complexity, an era in which change occurs faster than our ability to comprehend it.

With The Moment of Complexity, Mark C. Taylor offers a timely map for this unfamiliar terrain opening in our midst, unfolding an original philosophy through a remarkable synthesis of science and culture. According to Taylor, complexity is not just a breakthrough scientific concept, but the defining quality of the post-Cold War era. The flux of digital currents swirling around us, he argues, has created a new network culture with its own distinctive logic and dynamic.Drawing on resources from information theory and evolutionary biology, Taylor explains the operation of complex adaptive systems in social and cultural processes and captures a whole new zeitgeist in the making. To appreciate the significance of our emerging network culture, he claims, we need not only to understand contemporary scientific and technological transformations, but also to explore the subtle influences of art, architecture, philosophy, religion, and higher education. The Moment of Complexity, then, is a remarkable work of cultural analysis on a scale rarely seen today. To follow its trajectory is to learn how we arrived at this critical moment in our culture, and to know where we might head in the twenty-first century.

Spotlight Reviews: Write an online review and share your thoughts

Theory of Everything, May 7, 2002 Reviewer: Steev Hise

Mark C. Taylor is among those very rare writers and thinkers who are able to take many disparate disciplines of knowledge and perform a synthesis which creates wisdom. With this book it's evident that Taylor has been thinking about certain heady concepts for at least all of his adult life. Indeed, I've also read an earlier work of his, "Hiding," that touches on some of the same ideas. But with Complexity he has honed his thinking and added even more contributing topics, all zeroing in to our current turbulent moment of history. Taylor's is personal and professional, and it's been developing since the 1960s. It includes a sometimes dizzying array of topics and references to other thinkers, including artificial life, chaos theory, information theory, evolution, semiotics, cultural studies, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Lamarck, the history of the modern university, cybernetics, emergent phenomena, fashion, intellectual property... and more!

Taylor somehow manages to weave a coherent and compelling tapestry out of all these threads, with results I can only describe as profound and inspirational. By looking at recent history and its social upheavals through a lens informed by the latest ideas in these fields, he arrives at a very convincing and intriguing picture of the fundamentally different sort of world we are seeing develop around us right now. Beside the wise observation and intelligent synthesis, though, he also does something else that's very rare with these sorts of projects: he attempts to explain his theory in practice.

Leaves of a Pipal Tree

India is a civilisation of many images, a culture of many visual feasts, a tradition where the visible and the palpable are as important as the oral and the occurrent, where our highest truths are embodied in our kathas and gathas, our songs and stories, where our temples are not only places of worship but equally a gallery of beautiful forms and figures, where myth is as important as doctrine, where ancient memories are full of cherished narratives, where mythic beings are real in many different ways and we enrich our lives by festivals which celebrate events from the lives of our mythic gods and goddesses, and where knowledge is gained as much from itinerant performers as it is from learned discourses and where, when the wind blows through the Pipal tree it is as if we hear the hymns of the Vedas. MLBD Newsletter October 2005

Towards the Black Void

This is the heading of one of the cantos of Sri Aurobindo's Savitri!!!. I just opened the book, saw this heading and named this as the title. However I am really awestruck by the meaning it conveys. According to the big-bang theory, our universe sprang into existence as "singularity" around 13.7 billion years ago. Singularities are zones which defy our current understanding of physics. They are thought to exist at the core of "black holes." Black holes are areas of intense gravitational pressure. The pressure is thought to be so intense that finite matter is actually squished into infinite density (a mathematical concept which truly boggles the mind). These zones of infinite density are called "singularities." So everything comes out of black voids and finally it gets sucked up and destroyed into the black voids. posted by withluvGanesh @ 11:19 AM

Divinity in a stone

Sudheendra Kulkarni
The Indian Express
Sunday, October 09, 2005

On a morning walk along a pot-holed road which was being re-laid, I saw a group of labourers who were about to begin their day’s work. It was obvious that they belonged to a migrant clan of stonebreakers, engaged by the construction contractor. It was also obvious that they were poor, very poor. Tented huts on the roadside, open-air kitchen with the barest of utensils, a baby cradled in a cloth-sling — it’s a common sight at construction sites in India.

What struck me was that before the team began the day’s work, a woman performed a small puja on the stone, smeared it with the auspicious yellow and red powder, broke it with a ceremonial strike and then everybody went about their respective tasks. I asked the woman why she did it. In her own earthy Marathi, she replied, "This is not a mere stone for us. There is divinity in it. This stone feeds us. It also makes your cars run smoothly on the road.

Game theory

ARUNAVA SEN
The Economic times
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 13, 2005

The Nobel Prize in economics for 2005 has been awarded to Robert J Aumann and Thomas C Schelling for their contributions to the theory of games. Game theory is the analysis of strategic choice. It concerns situations where a group of people (called players) take decisions which affect each other. Thus a player can paradoxically strengthen his position by voluntarily foreclosing some of his options. The Spanish general Cortez who colonised Mexico burnt his boats on arrival demoralising his adversaries because they knew that his army could not retreat.

While Aumann has been one of the builders of the formal structure of game theory, Schelling has been one of its inspirations as well as one of its leading exponents. His most important contribution is his 1960 book The Strategy of Conflict, a book rich in ideas anticipating many subsequent formal developments. In a sequence of models, he formulated the notions of “credible commitment” and “brinkmanship”. Schelling has applied game theory to a variety of situations ranging from arms control to environmental policy to racial segregation. Schelling also developed a formal theory of deterrence via the threat of retaliation and showed that it may be more effective if you deliberately leave your response uncertain. His ideas were influential during the Cold War and he even acted as a consultant in Stanley Kubrick’s classic 1964 film Dr Strangelove.

(The author is professor, Indian Statistical Institute, New Delhi)

String theory

Dr Sandip Parimal Trivedi, TIFR
The Hindustan Times October 2, 2005

The new idea was to assume that the basic entity was a string, not a point particle. The string could virate in different ways, just like a sitar string does.The different resulting notes are the different kinds of particles, electrons, photons etc. There are six extra dimentions in string theory. These are believed to be curled up in small size, so that they have not been observed yet. A beatiful feature of string theory is that its differnt facets are closely tied together in tight logical consistency, so that progress in any area leads to ramifications for the whole subject.

Remote Viewers

The human body has no definite beginning or end. It is constantly creating itself, again and again, every day. This means that every minute is a kind of genesis and at the same time an ending in which we give up a bit of dust unto dust. If we are creating ourselves all the time, then it is never too late to begin creating the bodies we want instead of the ones we mistakenly assume we are stuck with.

Every breath you take is a creative act. The molecules in the air are random and chaotic. If they happen to enter into your body, they magically acquire a purpose and an identity. Could any act be more creative?

Consider what happens to a single oxygen atom as you breathe it in. within a few thousandths of a second it passes through the moist, nearly transparent membranes of the lungs. It immediately attaches itself to the haemoglobin inside one of your red blood cells. In an instant, a remarkable transformation occurs. The blood cell changes colour, from the dark blue-black of oxygen starved haemoglobin to the bright red of an oxygen rich haemoglobin, and a stray atom of air suddenly becomes YOU. It has crossed the invisible boundary dividing you from the rest of the universe.

Each of us is balanced between the infinite and the infinitesimal. The same protons found in the hearts of stars, which have lived at least 5 billion years, take up residence inside us. The neutrinos that streak through earth in a few billionths of a second are part of us for a brief instant, too…Remember that you are a flowing river of atoms and molecules collected from every corner of the cosmos. You are an outcropping of energy whose waves extend to the edges of the unified field.

Deepak Chopra

[ET-SQ; Tue-150205]

It might not be so incredible to declare that the compositions of all 6 billion human beings as well as the thousands of other species on Earth are, in fact, indistinguishably intertwined, making us soulmates in more ways than one.

Consider this: When a bacterium, weed, starfish, peacock, dog, cat or human dies, decomposition sets in. in the process, the atoms that constitute the body are released into the atmosphere, and they mingle freely, getting interspersed over wide geographical areas. Some might get reconstituted in a short period of time, becoming a part of another, or the same species. Other atoms continue to free float indefinitely, may be for years or even decades, before they submit to another composition. That makes us all parts of one indistinguishable whole, with each having at least some of the ingredients of the other.

Bill Bryson in A Short History of Everything talks about the pervasive nature of atoms:

Atoms are fantastically durable. Because they are so long-lived, atoms really get around. Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each atomically so numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of atoms – up to billion for each of us, it has been suggested – probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha and Ghenghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name… so we are all reincarnations – though short-lived ones. When we die, our atoms will disassemble and move off to find new uses elsewhere – as part of a leaf or other human beings or drop of dew. Atoms themselves, however, go on practically for ever.

Jahanavi Shandilya

[TOI-CTC; Mon-280205]

So how are we connected, one may ask, with say, the Andromeda Galaxy, which at a distance of 2.2.million light-years, is the most distant object that can be seen with the naked eye? Well, for starters, the fact is that at one time – about 13.7 billion years ago to be precise, when the Big Bang happened – all the stuff that was one day going to make up the Andromeda, along with all the other stuff that would one day make us, were exactly one and the same thing.

Not only that, they were also exactly in one and the same place – the initial singularity; the primordial atom. Nor could they have been anywhere else since there was no other time or place to be in. Then again, we’re connected in another way too. Consider the air we breathe. It’s just matter in a gaseous form consisting of 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, less than one per cent carbon dioxide, some water vapour, dust and pollutants and trace amounts of various elements.
In fact, nothing could be dissimilar to ourselves. Yet once this air enters our lungs it oxygenates the blood, which nourishes the tissues, and once it leaves the lungs it carries away all the carbon dioxide wastes taken from the tissues. It’s safe to say the air around us not only becomes part of us continuously but contains a part of us in it as well all the time. That’s how connected we are.

Mukul Sharma

[ET-SQ; Mon-140305]

Although in the everyday world energy is always unalterably fixed (the law of energy conservation is a cornerstone of classical physics), in the quantum micro-world, energy can appear and disappear out of nowhere in a spontaneous and unpredictable fashion. Or as Richard Morris and Paul Davies put it:

The uncertainty principle implies that particles can come into existence for short periods of time even when there is not enough energy to create them. In fact, they are created from uncertainties in energy. One could say that they briefly borrow the energy required for their creation, and then, a short time later, they pay the debt back and disappear again. Since these particles do not have a permanent existence they are called virtual particles. And even though we can’t see them, we know that these particles are really there in empty space because they leave a detectable trace of their activities that have been very accurately measured and described.

Mukul Sharma

[ET-SQ; Fri-250205]

That Famous Equation and You

By BRIAN GREENE
The New York Times
September 30, 2005

During the summer of 1905, while fulfilling his duties in the patent office in Bern, Switzerland, Albert Einstein was fiddling with a tantalizing outcome of the special theory of relativity he'd published in June. His new insight, at once simple and startling, led him to wonder whether "the Lord might be laughing ... and leading me around by the nose."

In the century since, E = mc² has become the most recognized icon of the modern scientific era. Yet for all its symbolic worth, the equation's intimate presence in everyday life goes largely unnoticed. There is nothing you can do, not a move you can make, not a thought you can have, that doesn't tap directly into E = mc². Einstein's equation is constantly at work, providing an unseen hand that shapes the world into its familiar form. It's an equation that tells of matter, energy and a remarkable bridge between them.

Before E = mc², scientists described matter using two distinct attributes: how much the matter weighed (its mass) and how much change the matter could exert on its environment (its energy). A 19th century physicist would say that a baseball resting on the ground has the same mass as a baseball speeding along at 100 miles per hour. The key difference between the two balls, the physicist would emphasize, is that the fast-moving baseball has more energy: if sent ricocheting through a china shop, for example, it would surely break more dishes than the ball at rest. And once the moving ball has done its damage and stopped, the 19th-century physicist would say that it has exhausted its capacity for exerting change and hence contains no energy.

Before 1905, the common view of energy and matter thus resembled a man carrying around his money in a box of solid gold. After the man spends his last dollar, he thinks he's broke. But then someone alerts him to his miscalculation; a substantial part of his wealth is not what's in the box, but the box itself. Similarly, until Einstein's insight, everyone was aware that matter, by virtue of its motion or position, could possess energy. What everyone missed is the enormous energetic wealth contained in mass itself.

As you read this text, E = mc² is at work. The processes in the eye and brain, underlying perception and thought, rely on chemical reactions that interchange mass and energy, once again in accord with Einstein's formula.

Brian Greene, a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia, is the author of "The Elegant Universe" and "The Fabric of the Cosmos."

The Anthropic Principle

Johnjoe McFadden

The Hindu

Wednesday, Sep 14, 2005

In The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, the Deep Thought computer announced that the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything was 42. Contemporary physicists are finding themselves just as frustrated as the hyperintelligent race of beings who built Deep Thought after discovering that the ultimate answer to their questions turns out to be a set of meaningless numbers. Many scientists conclude that the answers are contingent on biology and the facts of life. Imagine if the values of one or two of nature's fundamental constants were slightly different, say the strengths of forces that hold atoms together. One consequence might be that the Earth's oceans would regularly freeze. Water — essential for life — is unique in being lighter as a solid than as a liquid. So ice sheets float and form an insulating layer that stops the deeper waters freezing. If water was more conventional then the primordial oceans would never have stayed liquid for long enough for life to evolve. But then of course we would not be here to ponder our good fortune.

This is the point of the anthropic principle, which starts from the fact of our existence and then argues backwards to claim that the precise properties of the universe that emerged from the big bang had to be those that made the eventual emergence of humans inevitable. The unique properties of water depend on an exquisite level of fine-tuning of the fundamental constants. So why are these constants just right? Because if they weren't we wouldn't be here. There are lots of other fine tunings. Carbon, also essential for life, is made in stars by the fusion of three helium atoms. It is only due to an extraordinary "coincidence" in the resonant energies of helium, beryllium, and carbon that stars make lots of carbon. Change the resonant energy by just 0.0001 per cent and no carbon. Proponents of the anthropic principle claim it is pointless looking for theoretical explanations for the precise values of the fundamental constants; they are what they are because if they weren't we wouldn't be here. Opponents claim that the principle betrays a lack of imagination for assuming that other forms of life wouldn't be possible. But this is harder to sustain when considering some of the more cosmic consequences of tweaking the constants. If the weak force that binds atomic nuclei had been just a bit weaker, all hydrogen would have turned to helium without making any of the heavier elements. If the strong force had been a bit stronger, the universe would not even have had any atoms.

New research is making even the sceptics grudgingly accept the anthropic principle. A paper by Mario Livio and Martin Rees, the astronomer royal, explores the value of the cosmological constant, a measure of how much energy is contained in empty space. Without this value being tweaked to an extraordinary level of precision, the universe would be filled only with huge black holes or entirely empty of stars. But who's doing the tweaking? Another reason scientists are wary is that it seems to reverse the Copernican revolution and place humankind at the centre of the universe. Even worse, it could allow creationists to bring the G word back into science: a God to tweak all those knobs to make life possible. But if God is needed to tweak the universe's knobs then who was there to tweak God's knobs? Physicists such as Martin Rees and Stephen Hawking prefer another scenario whereby an infinite number of universes exist, each with different values of the fundamental constants. In just a few of them the constants have taken on the right values for the creation of stars, life and evolution.

For a biologist like me the anthropic principle has a persuasive charm. Physicists have long claimed that biology reduces to chemistry and chemistry reduces to physics. But now physics reduces to biology! To explain the values of the fundamental constants physicists have to look not at their equations but at the structure of the eye or the brain or the building blocks of life. Who knows which fundamental constants take their value from the fact that fish had to propel themselves through water before evolving into intelligent tetrapods like us. Biology explains everything.

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
(The writer is a professor of molecular genetics at the University of Surrey and the author of Quantum Evolution.)