India- an 'imagined reality'.

Ever since the Cognitive Revolution human beings have been living in two realities. One is a concrete reality that can be grasped by our senses. For instance the reality I am presently in with my laptop and the coconut tree that stands tall beyond my window.

On the other hand there exists a powerful reality that lies beyond our immediate senses. That is ‘Imagined reality’. Imagined reality consists of legends, myths, Gods and religion-all those things that appeared for the first time with the Cognitive revolution And needless to say that this reality is more powerful than the concrete reality that we are used to. Noah Harari in his Book ‘Sapiens- A brief History Of Humankind’ and particularly in the chapter  ‘The legend of Peugeot’ has skilfully shown how an imagined reality like Peugeot- a corporate car manufacturer was created. In much the same way an ‘imagined reality’ called India has also been created with instrument such as the constitution to which we all owe allegiance.

This ‘Imagined reality’ has enabled us not merely to imagine things ,but to do so collectively. India is ,in fact , a collective ‘imagined reality’.  Harari has shown how collectively we can weave myths such as the biblical creation story.

Notwithstanding a distinct geographical boundary and a concrete map, India is an idea- a collective ‘imagined reality’ as stated earlier.  Without doubt my idea of India may not match with that of yours. Yet we weave collective myth about it and we share them.

 We must nurture this ‘imagined reality’ of our land. And must not allow anything that might distort this ‘imagined reality’. Can we ?

The Art and Craft of approaching your head of department to submit a request for a raise

In a letter to Louise Colet, Flaubert expressed his wish to write a book about nothing, a book that would be held together by the mutual tension of its component parts rather than by its correspondence to any real world.

This is what aptly describes Georges Perec’s small novel  entitled ‘The art and craft of approaching your head of department to submit a request for a raise’.

Georges Perec(1936-82) is a writer of acrostics,anagrams,autobiography poetry, plays and so on. He famously wrote a whole novel without using the letter ‘e’(The Void).

Along with Italo Calvino andRamaond Queneau, he belonged to a movement called ‘oulipo.’ Founded in 1960 this literary movement has a number of mathematicians too as its members that seek to create ‘new structures and patterns which may be used by writers’ in any way they like.

Perec was thrown a challenge of using a computer’s basic mode of operation as a writing device , procedure was sketched out that an employee would need to follow to obtain an increase in pay in some large organization. Then it was broken down into individual steps and laid the procedure out as algorithm , or flow chart. Perec accepted the challenge wrote the book ’The art and craft of approaching your head of department to submit a request for a raise’.

There is no clear cut storyline  in the book as it seems a low level functionary of a large organization summons up courage to meet his head of department to request for a raise. But in the process he seems to have followed the flow chart and ultimately he never reaches his HOD.

The book is a long sentence as there is no comma or full stop. Sentences are refrains and are often convoluted as in page number 40.  I quote:’…you know that he knows that you know and he knows you know that he knew that you saw that he would know that you were about to know…’

As in the Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock the song was never sung , likewise this low level functionary of a large corporate house could never meet his HOD to submit a request for a raise. Like a bull in a press, he simply follows the flow chart and reaches nowhere.

The book is a delightful and intellectually enriching reading experience

Wordsworth's Daffodils

I wondered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils,

These lines from Wordsworth’s Daffodils are so deeply ingrained in us that it is very difficult to read them with detachment. The poem sums up many of the themes that are associated with Romanticism-themes such as subjectivity and imagination.

Although Wordsworth saw the Daffodils long time back , there is a sense of immediacy and involvement. It follows that along with subjectivity and imagination , it is memory that too plays a pivotal role in Romantic tradition in general and in this poem in particular.

Everybody would agree that we can never go back to our ‘good old days’ however hard we are whipped by the strongest sense of nostalgia. The concept of time machine or the theme in ‘Back to future’ are still in the realm of idea. Therefore there is no other option but to ride piggy back on memory that alone can transport us back to the past.

It is memory for which I am who I am or you are who you are. All the time throughout our lives we are engaged in creating memory right from the moment we wake up till the time we hit the bed. Memory is what creates our lives’ coherent narrative. What happens just in case there is a suppression of links in the chain of our memory? We cease to be who we are. Just imagine Wordsworth  had a highly fragmented memory? We could never have Daffodils in its present form. Wordsworth might have resorted to meaningless confabulations. It is only for his coherent memory that Wordsworth could write:

   For oft ,when on my couch I lie

   In vacant or in pensive mood,

   They flash upon that inward eye

   Which is the bliss of solitude;

 Daffodils is nothing but the celebration of human memory.

( After reading Oliver Sacks)

On Death and Dying

‘Life is an uncertain adventure in a diffuse landscape, whose borders are continually shifting, where all frontiers are artificial, where at any moment everything  can either end only to begin again or finish suddenly, for ever and ever ,like an unexpected blow from an axe. Where the only absolute,coherent, indisputable and definitive reality is death’. ( From The Flanders Panel by Arturo Perez Reverte)

 Temporality is the fundamental law of existence. Anything that is living today has to die a death sooner or later.  Yet we are so obsessed with the business of living that we hardly situate a thought on death in a narrative that is understood by all. This existential question is often considered as an old age luxury.  It is because of the belief that an awareness about the uncertain length of life may be a hindrance in the ascent of man whereas, on the contrary, many who sense impending death have hastened their contributions to humanity.

 Oddly enough man is the only creature who lives in the perpetual shadow of death. He is the only creature who is aware of death in the scathological sense of heaven or hell.

A quest for death merely for some metaphysical experience is rather rare although our myths are ridden with altruistic suicides. What we ‘modern’ men call euthanasia is still a hotly debated issue across the world.

On the other hand a search for the fountain of youth and immortality has always fired the imagination of everybody. Greek legend tells that Eos, the Goddess of the dawn married a mortal Tithonus. But while the Goddess remained eternally young (Even without using Pond’s Miracle),Tithonus began to age . So Eos begged Zeus to make Tithonus immortal. But Eos forgot to ask for the eternal youth that had to accompany the immortality. Zeus granted her wish. Tithonus became a shriveled cripple who incessantly babbled to himself. Gods became so disgusted with him that he was changed into a Cicada. So it follows that an immortal life without the attendant vigour and vitality is a real curse.

What happens if nobody dies? Saramago has given a very good description of such a situation in  his ‘Death at intervals’. In a nameless country all of a sudden people achieve immortality. Hospitals are full with terminally ill patients ;but they do not die. The patients and their relatives have a harrowing time. People met with terrible accidents yet never died.  Insurance business collapses and the Church became irrelevant as there was no death ; there has to be no resurrection or kingdom of God. Alongside a syndicate emerges who smuggle, against hefty amount, the terminally ill patients to the neighbouring countries so that they die a quiet and unknown death there.

However, in reality nobody can achieve such an eternal life( however useless and boring that might be). The physics of aging and dying tells us that as we age our ‘entropy’ increases in accordance with the Second law of Thermodynamics. Also we age and eventually die because of the ‘oxidative damage’ that the business of living inflicts on our body and mind. If the ‘entropy’ is decreased and the ‘oxidative damages’ can be minimised, human beings one day might not age and die. This idea  is,of course, still in a nascent stage.

A man can die in a variety of ways. Does not it remind us the fact that in a game of Cricket a Batsman can be out in a variety of ways?

Above all a man can kill himself. Sometimes the reason for killing oneself remains unclear. Every man( woman too) has a deep and dark recess of his own self to which access is not allowed. Sometimes a strange fear can be a reason for killing oneself. Jack London committed suicide by hanging himself from the ceiling because every night he dreamt that he drowned in sea and died. He did not like the idea of dying by drowning. So he killed himself in a way he liked ( I found this information in Murakami’s After the quake. So still I am unsure if it is fact or a highly fictionalised account).

Can there be a romantic idea of dying? If there were one, I am sure it is not a sudden ;but one surrounded by dear and near ones. And that too in a ripe age and after a brief illness.

Personally I have always liked Sudhir Kakar’s statement that I always tell my friends who are in medical profession:’ Medicines exists to fight disease; not death. When death comes holding hands with disease, it is the duty of the physician to prepare his patients for its arrival’.

A kind of peaceful and collaborative death.

On The Objectivity Of Science

A handsome man, seemingly  a man of science wearing a white coat appears on the Television screen and tells us how the health drink Horlicks has been found to be immensely beneficial in improving both the health and mind among young children. The visual, in order to back up the claim flashes young, healthy and  noisy children bustling with all the trappings of good health and mind. We the lay people lap up literally  what the handsome man in the advertisement announces because it is deeply ingrained in us that science is always non-partisan. Although it is questionable if the claim can stand to scientific test.

The commercial exploitation of science for its perceived strength of unbiased role(in knowledge production)) can be traced back to 1941 in the Chesterfield cigarette advertisement that depicted  researchers measuring nicotine  and thereby promoting the brand for its relatively low nicotine level.

Naturally questions will arise how science as an academic pursuit can be faulted on this count. It is the practitioners of science who are to be blamed. That is the crux of the matter that I wish to highlight. Those who may view science as a disembodied entity might hold a different viewpoint.

How ideology can privilege one set of scientific hypothesis over another can be found in the claims of Trofin Lysenko(1898—1976)an agronomist from former Soviet Union who argued in favour of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. In other words according to Lysenko mangoes can be grown in coconut trees. His method of mutating crops by ‘vernalization’ was tested in many countries and found to be false.

Interestingly it reminds me Bulgakov’s novel The Heart of a Dog in which a doctor implants a  human heart( other organs too including testicles) into a street dog assuming in the manner of Lysenko that the dog will exhibit behaviour that are human. Unfortunately the experiment goes awry and the dog becomes an intractable menace.  I often think that the novel is nothing but a lampooning of Lysenko’s outlandish idea.

Yet the Lysenko hypothesis found favour with the Soviet regime because it is in line with the party’s ideology. In recent times the Steady state Theory that postulates that the universe has no beginning and no ending and it just is , finds support among the Marxist disciples simply for the reason that it precludes the need for a creator. In both the case I feel the scientific claim here is ideologically deterministic.

‘Forman Thesis’ named after the American science historian argues that the content of early Quantum Mechanics was shaped by the culture in which it was produced. It was the unexpected defeat of Germany in the first world war that prompted the scientists to accept the uncertainty principle put forward by Werner Heisenberg rather than alternate interpretations of Quantum Mechanics.

The title of Bruno Latur’s book’ Laboratory Life:The Social Construction Of Scientific facts(co written with Stephan Woolgar) is a pointer to the fact that even scientific facts can also be socially constructed.

A scientist is not a disembodied entity that toils day in and day out inside a laboratory. He or She is also a human being like you and me and is influenced by what goes around him or her.

In recent times our state has witnessed a massive uprising in the form of public protest against the construction of big dams. Reams of paper have been used in writing in favour of or against the construction of big dams. The whole issue has become hazy for lay people as the discourse has failed to bring about a reconciliation of the opposites.

Expert committees have been constituted that voice both for and against the issue. It will be interesting to see how the uprising is going to influence the scientific truths involved in the issue. Or will  science really remain unbiased?

On the objectivity of Science

 When we talk about Science or Scientist , we often tend to overlook the fact that the word Scientist was coined by the British philosopher William Whewell in 1833. It follows that the scientific geniuses like Newton or Galileo were not known as ‘scientists’ during their lifetime. Although I am not sure by what names they were designated, we can always hazard a guess that they were perhaps called ‘natural philosopher’.

Nevertheless the scientific Revolution with all its ramifications have reconstructed our world views that largely started with the works of Copernicus( On the revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres,1543). With his heliocentric model of the solar system ,Copernicus dislodged Ptolemy’s geocentric model that dominated the science of astronomy for several centuries.

Equally important is the work of Andreas Vesalius( On the workings of the Human body,1543) that explained the human anatomy with considerable accuracy.  

A beginning was made that enabled human beings to understand his body as well as the universe and the inexorable march of science surged  ahead that received further momentum with the arrival of Galileo and Newton on the scene.New discoveries and inventions in Science began to play the most crucial role in furthering knowledge,driving economies and shaping cultures.  Bacon in his monumental work 'Novum Organum'(1620) went to the extend of branding printing,  gunpowder and compass as inventions that transformed literature, warfare and navigation.   Scientific study of every conceivable phenomena under the sky with its emphasis on instrumentalism, empiricism and above all falsifiable hypothesis came to acquire the status of an absolutely objective academic discipline. Everyone started to believe that science is objective and unlike humanities beyond personal whims and caprices.

This was the view about science for long. But is science really neutral?  Can science and scientific theory  ever be influenced by ideas of culture? Language? Or ideology?

I shall try to throw some  light on it in my next post.

The Power Of Fiction

WE all love to read fiction. And many of us have tried our hands at it. Some are phenomenally successful. Some are just hopeless storytellers .

Fiction is basically the art of telling lies. The fulcrum about which the story of a narrative  rotates does not (or hardly)exist. In fact Picasso once went to the extent of telling us that all art are false.

In his essay entitled ‘The sense of an Ending’, Frank Kermode defines fiction as ‘something we know does not exist but which help us to make sense of, and move in the world’. In other words the  fictionality of a given narrative is taken for granted and in fact many a time in our day to day discourse  we invent different fictions to help us out of problem and also to perpetuate the existence of our self-serving interests. This is also to mean that arguably we need to create  fiction for the promotion of a particular idea and also the person who remains behind that idea.

A case in point is the story of the apple involving  Sir Issac Newton. It is believed that Newton’s discovery of  gravitation was occasioned by the fall of an apple when he was sitting in a contemplative mood. But many have contested the story including the celebrated Science historian I.B.Cohen. Many argue that the story of the apple is merely an invention by historians with French writer Voltaire often cited as the chief suspect.  J.B.S. Haldane , an outstanding British Biological Scientist went to the extent of suggesting that ‘the story of the apple’ was a capitalist propaganda. Nevertheless it is a beautiful story and it has helped popularise the concept of gravitation and also  the man who is behind it. Many hold the view that such a beautiful story should not be destroyed by a ‘quest for historical accuracy’.

Even the history that we read as textbooks can border on fiction. History is basically a ‘personal construct’ as the past we ‘know’ is always contingent upon our own ‘present’.

Many doubt the existence of  medieval  Ahom general Lachit Borphukan and the narrative in which he murders his own maternal uncle for the dereliction of his duty. Often it is cited as an example of a story getting influenced by the killing of Kanch in Krishna narratives.

Nevertheless the ‘story’ has helped keep alive the Assamese nationalism –a ‘story’which is invoked in time of crisis. A ‘quest for historical accuracy’ may be ill-advised in this case.

There are many organisations in Assam whose survival litany is the story of the ‘step-motherly treatment’ meted out to the state by the centre.  But the level of corruption that the state is steeped in presently and also the astronomical grants( compare it with other states) that the centre has given to our state lead us to question this view. Besides should one go by the newspapers’ reports, one is more than consternated by the amount of money that has gone back unutilised. Nevertheless it is largely a convenient fiction that guarantees the survival of many organizations.

Leaky Gut Syndrome is not a recognised medical diagnosis. Yet lot of fictionalised accounts about the ailment are doing the rounds just for the sake of selling alternative medicine. Nevertheless this ‘fiction’ is useful and  has helped thrive a business.

Examples abound.

Fiction is a part of that power which eternally desires evil which eternally desires good.

Reference:
Hopes and Impediments by Chinua Achebe
The Universe  by J.P.Mcevoy
Re-thinking History by Keith Jenkin
The history of the siege of Lisbon by Jose Saramago