Seekers of Depth and Profundity

In a thought-provoking and stimulating book, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Density, Amartya Sen provides a powerful critique to the current trend of analyzing modern conflicts as “clash of civilizations” or clash between cultures – i.e., the tendency to look at human beings as distinct groups rather than individuals. He argues, quite convincingly, that the “prospect of peace in the contemporary world may well lie in the recognition of the plurality of our affiliations” rather than communitarian thinking that crudely categorizes people into contending groups by assigning them a singular one-dimensional (often religious, cultural, or ethnic) identities.

This omnipresent phenomenon of thinking-in-terms-of-groups reduces people to confined unidimensional space. Be it “the Islamist world” against “the Western world”, the Hindus against the Muslims, the Tamils against the Sinhalese, or the Marathi manoos against the “non-Marathis”, this us-against-them rhetoric is very effective in provoking hatred (that easily gets manipulated by vote thirsty politicians). Why, one would think, this communitarian approach is so popular? Sen explains:

It is not hard to understand why the imposing [communitarian or] civilizational approach appeals so much. It invokes richness of history and the apparent depth and gravity of cultural analysis, and it seeks profundity in a way that an immediate political analysis of “here and now” — seen as ordinary and mundane — would seem to lack.

We are the “seekers of depth and profundity”. We try to find greater meaning and higher purpose in not only conflicts or struggles (as mentioned above), but also in the very existence of life itself.

Which brings me to the topic of my last post (Divine Justice?): how this tendency increases our proclivity towards unscientific convictions. We want to believe that life has a greater divine purpose. But if there’s one lesson that evolution teaches us, it is that the human beings are, like monkeys, fishes, birds, ants, worms, roaches, and bacteria, a product of a random, unsupervised and impersonal process. Darwin’s evolution is a pink slip to the benevolent creator, to the purposefulness of life.

Depressing? It shouldn’t be. Consider the following passage from Richard Dawkin’s Unweaving the Rainbow:

To live at all is miracle enough. – Mervyn Peake, The Glassblower

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

And here’s a short interview between two of the greatest living stalwarts of Darwin –Richard Dawking and Daniel Dennet:

Hallelujah for the universe!

Divine Justice?

The idiotic claims from televangelist Pat Robertson — that the earthquake in Haiti may be a blessing in disguise and is a result of the pact the Haitians made long time ago with Satan to help them against French imperialists (video link) — reminds me of a similar speech made by Gandhi in 1934 to the victims of earthquake in rural Bihar.

On 15th January 1934, a colossal earthquake hit Bihar [...] The death toll was estimated at twenty thousand. Gandhi visited Bihar in March and spoke to the bereaved, destitute and homeless people. The earthquake, he told them, “is a chastisement of your sins.” And the particular sin that he had in mind was the enforcement of untouchability.

Even Gandhi’s closest supporters were horrified. The victims of the earthquake had included poor as well as rich [...] But Gandhi was explicitly blaming the victims, appropriating a terrible disaster to promote his own religious ideas. Nehru, who had been helping the relief efforts in Bihar, read Gandhi’s remarks “with a great shock”. But the most effective refutation came from Rabindranath Tagore, long one of the Mahatma’s greatest advocates. Tagore argued caustically that this supposedly “divine” justice, if such it was, constituted the least just form of punishment imaginable. [From Indian Summer, Tunzelmann]

Behind these types of – possibly noble yet misleading and plain wrong – claims lie the fundamental tenets of religion(s) that demand and propagate the need for a greater (divine) purpose of life and events. Once you give in to the belief that our existence in this world (and the existence of this universe) has a purpose; and explanation that is anything other than natural and rational, you’re in for a whole lot of nonsensical, unscientific, and dogmatic convictions (like God punishes you for your sins etc.) Here’s a passage from an article on Slate by Hitchen:

Earthquakes and tsunamis are to be expected and can even to some degree be anticipated. It’s idiotic to ask whose fault it is. The Earth’s thin shell was quaking and cracking millions of years before human sinners evolved, and it will still be wrenched and convulsed long after we are gone. These geological dislocations have no human-behavioral cause. The believers should relax; no educated person is going to ask their numerous gods “why” such disasters occur. A fault is not the same as a sin.

However, the believers can resist anything except temptation. Where would they be if such important and frightening things had natural and rational explanations?

Indeed, where would they be?

Lunar Eclipse and Lunar Phases

Few weeks ago a close friend of mine (Dev) asked me what the difference between a lunar phase and lunar eclipse is. I thought I knew the answer. But as I embarked upon an explanation, it dawned on me that I didn’t quite understand the lunar motions very well. Alas, all those years I have been looking at the moon… without realizing (and hence, marveling at) how it moved in space.

What I did know was: as the Moon orbits around the Earth, it’s always the same side of the Moon that faces the Earth. This is because the time it takes for Moon to rotate once is identical to the time it takes to complete an orbit around the Earth — 27.3 days. Hence, the Moon has a ‘near side’ and a ‘far side’ with respect to the Earth. We never observe the ‘far side’ from the Earth.

Now, at any given time, half of the Moon is illuminated by the Sun and the other half is dark due to Moon’s own shadow. When the Sun and the Moon are on the opposite sides of the Earth, the entire ‘near side’ is illuminated and thus we can see the entire ‘near side’: this is called full moon (poonam). When the Moon is between the Earth and the Sun, the ‘far side’ is illuminated and the ‘near side’ is dark, so we can’t see the Moon at all: this is called new moon (amavasya). And, the rest of the time (between full moon and dark moon) we’re able to see only a portion of the ‘near side’ — the portion that’s illuminated by the Sun.

Had the Moon revolved around the Earth in the same plane as the plane of Earth’s revolution around the Sun, every new moon would have resulted in a solar eclipse (i.e. the Moon covers the Sun and its shadow falls on the Earth) and every full moon would have caused a lunar eclipse (i.e. the Earth’s shadow falls on the Moon). But that doesn’t happen every time, because the plane of Moon’s orbit and the plane of Earth’s orbit are not the same (tilted by 5 degrees).

Every once in while, the Earth, Moon and Sun get aligned. If that happens during full moon, the Earth’s shadow on the Moon creates a lunar eclipse; and if it happens during new moon, a solar eclipse occurs.

So, that’s the difference between the lunar eclipse and lunar phases. The former is caused by Earth’s shadow on the Moon, while the latter by Moon’s illumination by the Sun (and how much of it we can see from the Earth).

Here’s a 3-minutes video explaining the phases of the Moon.

Related posts: One in a Blue Moon, Happy Leap Day!

ANSWER: Natural Selection

QUESTION #1: Why are there so many more jocks than nerds in the world today?

QUESTION #2: Why are anxiety disorders so prevalent today?

In fact, answer to all “Why are there so many _____ in the world today?” questions is Natural Selection!

[Comics from Abstruse Goose]

No One Talks Like That

In an old post on Sulekha, Abbas Tyrewala (the director of Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na) mulls over the frustrations of a contemporary scriptwriter who’s trying to make dialogues written in Hindi “work”. The subtitle of his article reads: “In which a frustrated scriptwriter attempts to explore and expose the myth of Hindi as a spoken language, in a pathetic display of the defensive instinct towards his stilted film scripts.”

Tyrewala argues that dialogues in shuddh Hindi hardly sound like ‘people talking’. They appear rather stilted and false. (Remember when Dharmendra got on Om Prakash’s nerves by his insistence on using shuddh Hindi in Chupke Chupke?) The logical and empirical conclusion, according to the talented writer-director-lyricist, is that “no one talks like that” in real life.

His assertion, that except for a small quanta of our society (Allahabad?) very few people actually use shuddh Hindi in day-to-day conversations, is kind of obvious, or at least hard to refute. (I don’t claim to have sufficient knowledge on this subject though. According to 2001 Census of India 422,048,642 people claimed Hindi as their mother tongue, but we don’t know how many of them use dialects as opposed to shuddh Hindi.) But I found his comments about the synthetic and scientific nature of Hindi particularly interesting:

Hindi is a language of twentieth century scholastic expression that enjoyed a promotional thrust in the post-independence era — a synthetic language has never been adopted by a people. At least not for significant length of time.

As a result, it has no traces of the idiom, the colour, the richness that stems from a familiar misuse and abuse of words and phrases. It lacks the poignant clusters of words, which in their literal relation to each other mean absolutely nothing, or perhaps something quite in contrast to their understood implications, which may be profound or incisive or just plain silly. These elements are rendered almost impossible by the very scientific nature of the language — it is so fixed and harsh in its pronunciation that there is no question of play, pun and misinterpretation. A certain syllable is that syllable only: unflinching in its dull fixedness, invulnerable to the seductions of creative interpretation.

A lot of this probably applies to Sanskrit – which, even in the Vedic age, was not what has been called a “kitchen language”. (The etymology of “Sanskrit” {perfected, artificial} is based upon an implicit comparison with “Prakrit” {primordial, natural}, the language actually spoken. — W Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternate History) And since Hindi derives much of its form and vocabulary from Sanskrit, some of these might be true for Hindi as well. Hindi, in its pure form, does seem to be afraid of borrowing words from other languages (Urdu, Persian, Tamil, English etc.) and hence lack the organic rawness and casualness that comes from such natural confluence.

Tyrewala’s frustrations as a scriptwriter-who-writes-in-Hindi might have more to do with his own knowledge of Hindi language (or lack thereof) and his personal preferences or biases, but his remarks about the rigidity of languages are applicable to any language that takes itself too seriously.

Related Posts: A Barren Grammatical Exercise, Like an Ever-flowing River

*

P. S. Abbas Tyrewala seem to have found a good balancing solution by writing his first movie Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na mostly in Hinglish. And quite innovatively too. He didn’t just insert English words into Hindi lines, but also translated an English idioms into Hindi: “Aur uske muh mein thi chandi ki chamchi.” (Born with a silver spoon in his mouth.)

The Blue-eyed Islanders Puzzle

I came across this engrossing logical puzzle (on this blog) and really enjoyed solving it. I am reproducing the problem statement with minor modifications here:

There is an island upon which a tribe resides. The tribe consists of 1000 people, with various eye colours. Their religion forbids them to know their own eye color, or even to discuss the topic; thus, each resident can (and does) see the eye colors of all other residents, but has no way of discovering his or her own (there are no reflective surfaces). If a tribesperson does discover his or her own eye color, then their religion compels them to commit ritual suicide at noon the following day in the village square for all to witness. All the tribespeople are highly logical and devout, and they all know that each other is also highly logical and devout (and they all know that they all know that each other is highly logical and devout, and so forth).

For the purposes of this logic puzzle, “highly logical” means that any conclusion that can logically deduced from the information and observations available to an islander, will automatically be known to that islander.

Of the 1000 islanders, it turns out that 100 of them have blue eyes and 900 of them have brown eyes, although the islanders are not initially aware of these statistics (each of them can of course only see 999 of the 1000 tribespeople).

One day, a blue-eyed foreigner visits to the island and wins the complete trust of the tribe. Before leaving the island, he addresses the entire tribe to thank them for their hospitality. However, not knowing the customs, the foreigner makes the mistake of mentioning eye color in his address, remarking “how unusual it is to see another blue-eyed person like myself in this region of the world!”

What effect, if anything, does this faux pas have on the tribe?

Before reading ahead, think about what might be the outcome of this. (The answer is not ‘nothing happens’!)

***

Here’s what happens, you have to figure out how this happened:

After 100 days, all blue-eyed people commit suicide.

I will post the answer in the comments section in few days, but if you do find the answer please share your logic/solution.

[Hat Tip: The Big Questions]

***

Answer: Please see Ramanand’s (first) comment below for the solution. I’ve also posted two additional questions in my response to his comment.

Cultural Pessimism

Cultural pessimism has existed as long as culture itself. Just few weeks ago, I met with some friends over a party who bemoaned how new technologies, like GPS for instance, have made us less “intelligent” as compared to the prior generation(s) that did not have access to such technologies and had to rely on their own intuitions, knowledge and other (non-technical) resources. Although we didn’t talk about cultural or economic degradation, but this “google-makes-us-stoopid” mindset can be observed and generalized into these paradigms as well. The general belief and conviction is that things are going from good to bad, or bad to worse.

In a thought-provoking book The Myth of Rational Voter, economist Bryan Caplan calls it “pessimistic bias”. Virtually every generation has believed that people are not up to the standards of their parents and grandparents. Glorifying the past, and looking down at the present (and the future) is probably going on ever since the first caveman settled in a cave!

It is not improbable conjecture that the feeling that humanity was becoming over-civilized, that life was getting too complicated and over-refined, dated from the time when the cave-men first became such. It can hardly be supposed – if the cave-men were at all like their descendants – that none among them discoursed with contempt on the cowardly effeminacy of living under shelter or upon the exasperating inconvenience of constantly returning for food and sleep to the same place instead of being free to roam at large in wide-open spaces. [From Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity, by Lovejoy and Boas]

In reality, the effects of technology and industrial progress on our collective intelligence, economy and culture have hardly been detrimental. Consider, for example, this question by Stephen Pinker from the recent issue of Edge online magazine:

Take the intellectual values that are timeless and indisputable: objectivity, truth, factual discovery, soundness of argument, insight, explanatory depth, openness to challenging ideas, scrutiny of [perceived] dogma, overturning of myth and superstition. Now ask, are new technologies enhancing or undermining those values?

The answer is clear that the new technologies are, in fact, enhancing those core intellectual values. Still, the pessimistic illusion prevails – probably because it has strong roots in the human nature itself. In this decade-old article, Tyler Cowen defends against this myth and explores some reasons behind this wide gap between objective conditions and subjective perceptions:

It is easy to perceive the loss of what we know and harder to discern new developments and surprises. Even if long-term trends are positive, culture may appear to be deteriorating.

Observers often judge present culture against the very best of past culture, causing the present to appear lacking in contrast. But comparing the best of the past against the entirety of the present is unfair. No matter how vital contemporary culture may be, our favorite novels, movies, and recordings were not all produced just yesterday.

The past is always going to contain more accumulated achievements than a particular point in time (i.e. the present). Hence, present almost always pales in comparison to the ‘good old days’. Moreover, strong forms make us “open minded” to paranoid fantasies:

Some part of human nature connects with the apocalyptic. Time and again, pessimists among us have envisioned the world going straight to hell. Never mind that it hasn’t: A lot of us braced for the worst. Whether the source is the Bible or Nostradamus, Thomas Malthus, or the Club of Rome, predictions of calamity aren’t easily ignored, no matter how many times we wake up in the morning after the world was supposed to end. [Cox and Alm]

To end this post on a positive note, check out (1) the Flynn Effect – the consistence rise of I.Q. scores over generations, and (2) this illuminating TED talk (video below) by Stephen Pinker in which he convincingly argues that we are probably living in the most peaceful time in our species’ existence!

If you liked this post, you might enjoy some of my older related posts:

The Myth of Rational Voter

Cognitive Biases and Nudge

Cognitive Illusions

Impatient Intelligence

Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married, but George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?

(a) Yes

(b) No

(c) Can not be determined

***

If you chose (c) as the answer, you’re wrong! Here’s how, and also why:

And the answer is the first option. But over 80 percent of people choose the third option. Here’s the solution: the puzzle doesn’t say whether Anne is married or not, but she either is or she isn’t. If Anne is married, she’s looking at George, so the answer is “yes”; if she’s unmarried, Jack is looking at her, so the answer is still “yes.” The underlying reason why smart people get the wrong answer is (according to the article) that they simply don’t take the time to go carefully through all of the possibilities, instead taking the easiest inference. The patience required to go through all the possibilities doesn’t correlate very well with intelligence.

This is from Cosmic Variance blog on the Discover Magazine.

[If you liked this brain treaser, you might also enjoy A Mathematical Conundrum.]

Vande Mataram

The “dead issue” is brought back to life yet again by some Muslim clerics who issued a fatwa against the recital of Vande Mataram by Muslims. In response, Hindu hard-liners retorted that those who refuse to sing the national song should go to Pakistan.

Two connected but fundamentally different claims are made here: (1) that Vande Mataram is un-Islamic, and (2) that refusal to sing Vande Mataram is unpatriotic. While the former is induced by religion, the latter has national chauvinism written all over it.

We certainly can’t deny the communal and political motives behind such claims, but the falsity of the second claim deems the first one almost irrelevant. In a just and liberal society no one should be forced to sing a song, be it national song or national anthem. If I, for example, find Vande Mataram offensive for religious, personal, ethical or any other reason, I should have freedom to deny its recital.

As Amit Varma has argued in a compelling blog post (link), there are two types of patriotism: one is primarily driven by love, and the other from pride and self-esteem. The first type of patriot doesn’t impose his own love and reverence (for the country) on others. While the second type of patriot demands everyone else to share his fervor and passion. A love-driven patriot may feel bad if others don’t share his feeling, but unlike a pride-driven patriot he wouldn’t get offended by that. Symbolism (like national anthem, flag etc.) and display are very important to the pride-driven patriotism. But they don’t mean much to the love-driven patriot, who adores the real things (like food, culture and music) as opposed to symbols that represent them.

The other concern that this event raises is about the vices of an unbridled democracy. There is a detailed discussion in Fareed Zakaria’s illuminating book The Future of Freedom about this. The first source of abuse in a democratic society comes from the government, and the second source comes from the people themselves. The will of majority can easily transform into tyranny of majority. The will of majority is important, even crucial to a democratic system, but so is the protection of minority’s rights. Democracy is surely a good system, but too much of a good thing can be bad sometimes.

[See my earlier related post: Talibanization of India]

Clarification: It might appear from my post above that I am implicitly approving the fatwa declared by the cleric. I am not. What I am defending is: liberty. If one doesn’t want to sing Vande Mataram, he should not be forced to sing. And same way, if a muslim wants to sing Vande Mataram then he should be allowed to do so as well.

For the interested reader, here’s good summary of issues and controversies surrounding Vande Mataram.

A R Rahman’s Spiritual Canon

A R Rahman has experimented, quite successfully, with myriad musical genres. But when it comes to spiritual songs, he likes to leave them untainted by not adding a lots of bells and whistles and rely heavily on the core melody itself.

I don’t think any other music director (in Bollywood, if not in India) has given us more “spiritual” songs than the maestro. I like to call them spiritual songs, as opposed to religious or devotional, because although majority of these songs have either Islamic or Hindu flavor, I find them universally appealing and elevating. Here’s a list of my favorites from this genre:

Khwaja Mere Khwaja – Jodha Akbar

This song was dedicated to the Hidalwali (Saint of India) Khwaja Ghareeb-un-Nawaz, and was rendered by A R Rahman himself. He one mentioned in an interview that this song is very close to his heart, and you can feel his sincerity in the way he has sung this beautiful song. The soul stirring instrumental (Oboe) version of this song gives me goosebumps every time I hear it.

[Trivia: The lyrics of this song were not written by Javed Akhar - who wrote all other songs of this movie - but by someone named Kashif.]

Arziyan – Delhi 6

Backed by harmonium, tabla and continual gentle claps, this mesmerizing qawwali is like an ode to the Islamic culture of Old Delhi. Javed Ali, along with Kailash Kher, does full justice to Prasoon Joshi’s meaningful lyrics and A R Rahman’s magical tune.

Piya Haji Ali – Fiza

This was the first Sufi-style qawwali that A R Rahman composed for a movie. For Khuda ke vali (God’s friend) Haji Ali, to be specific. Shaukat Ali’s beautiful lyrics give a glimpse of how Islam, the monotheist religion, has blended with the local cultures in India: Yahaan hindu muslim sikh isaai faiz paate hai.

[Trivia: This song was performed by Ghulam Mustafa brothers, Srinivas and A R Rahman. Can you identify which lines are sung by Srinivas?]

Apart from the obvious Sufi semblance, muqaddar/taqdeer/kismat is another connecting link between the aforementioned songs: Arziyan (Marammat muqaddar ki kar do maula), Khwaja Mere Khwaja (Bekasoor ki taqdeer, tune hai saNwaari) and Piya Haji Ali (Bigadi kismat aap ke dar par saNwarti hai).

Al Maddath Maula – Mangal Pandey: The Rising

Unlike the three songs mentioned above, this one has a high tempo, an adrenaline rush and a dark tone of impending calamity. Murtuza, Qadir and Kailash Kher sing this song with a fervor, with intermittent devout spine-tingling calls to maula by A R Rahman.

[Trivia: Murtaza and Qadir are the same Ghulam Mustafa brothers from Piya Haji Ali. They also accompanied A R Rahman in Tere Bina from Guru, and rendered some beautiful lines in Chupke Se song from Saathiya.]

O Paalanhaare – Lagaan

There are actually two versions of this song. One sung by Lata Mangeshkar and Udit Narayan, and the other with an additional female singer. It’s the latter version that was used in the movie (to distinguish the lines picturized on Gauri and Bhuvan’s mother). But I prefer the former one, with Lata’s aging yet divine voice accompanied by mellifluous flute and subtle sounds of temple bells. Here’s the version that was used in the movie.

Noor-Un-Ala-Noor – Meenaxi

Written by the great painter and inept director, M F Hussain, this addictive qawwali raised a controversy because some Muslims got offended (I think the song uses a phrase from Quran to praise the beauty of a mere mortal: Meenaxi). And guess who are the singers of this qawwali? Murtaza and Qadir again!

Man Mohana – Jodha Akbar

As I wrote in my review of Jodha Akbar’s music, add Mira’s pangs of separation (from Krishna) to Radha’s passion (for him) and you get the recipe for this devotional song. The way Bela Shende has rendered this bhajan - her unflattering voice and command over the highs and lows of the song leaves you wondering why she doesn’t get more offers as a singer. (Isn’t Kangna Re from Paheli is her only other song?)

Ek Tu Hi Bharosa – Pukar

Lata and A R Rahman joined hands only seven times, and the result is always breathtaking. The tune of this song was originally composed for a concert in Malaysia and later used for this movie.

Zikr – Bose: The Forgotten Hero

This song is something else! I can’t really describe the elevated sense of euphoria that it evokes. One shouldn’t merely listen to this song, one should experience it. Since I am not a religious person, I attribute the effect of the song to the music (as opposed to its meaning).

Ishwar Allah – 1947 Earth

The secular message of this melancholic number is in the form of a series of questions to the almighty. It’s played in the background when the  end-credits roll, and I think that was a perfect way to end this movie – a story of savagery and violence narrated by a Parsi girl.