blog@Yantrajaal

  A Transcreation of the Nasadiya Hymn Preceding the uncountable, measure had no meaning,      for nothing had stirred, no beginning had begun. [I] Resting within Silence, dreaming within itself,      a vast void hovered, trembling on the edge of desire. [II] In that stillness arose Kāma — a tremor in the boundless,      the Infinite aching to know, to touch, to become. [III] Through that ache She appeared — the Mother,      a reflection in the still waters of Truth. [IV] Her image churned the void, gave it shape and form,      tasted its own sweetness, shivered in delight. [V] With Her delight, She knew; knowledge saw patterns;      from fractal patterns, emerged the Son. [VI] In the matrix of Time — Mother and Son merged in ecstasy.     s entient chromos , rearranged! birthing worlds. [VII] Shiva and Shakti — from desire to deed, from mirage to manifest.      But how...

The world as a product of information image credit :  https://pixabay.com/en/fantasy-eyes-forest-aesthetic-face-2824304/ With social media spewing facts like a firehose, the world today is in danger of drowning in a pool of information. Or as the cynic would say, in a cesspool of fake news because, as anyone who has been on Facebook would know, most what is peddled as news is really alt-news, an euphemism for propaganda and misinformation. In an earlier era of the internet, spam had similarly threatened to undermine the utility of email. Even today, 60% of all mail sent through the internet is spam but thanks to intelligent spam filters, most are trapped and never reach the main inbox. Unfortunately, similar filters for fake news are not yet available and so our social media timelines are cluttered with material deliberately placed to confuse us or to convince us of things that we would not otherwise agree with. IRA, the St. Petersburg, Russia, based Internet Research Agen...

Better standards of living, that many parts of the world enjoy, are often traced back to the renaissance in Europe that freed man from blind bondage to belief and allowed him to fly free on the wings of rational inquiry. These standards of course are defined in terms of material comfort -- food, clothing, shelter, safety and finally the leisure to explore the arts and the sciences. This leads to technical and administrative competence and the emergence of good governance that in turn, loops back to create even higher standards of living. While every society desires this virtuous cycle, those that have aggressively adopted a scientific approach were the ones that have been successful in overcoming or converting others to their point of view. Spiralling out of Europe and reaching out into the depths of America, Africa, Asia and Australia, it has been the triumph of the rational way -- based on facts, axioms, logic and reason -- that delivers material comfort to the population. bo...

The world today is awash in lies and myths, because nothing is what it seems to be. Paid media, biased press -- no one seems to be telling the truth anymore. Is this how it is supposed to be ? As an aside, any analysis of philosophy in India invariably begins with a commentary, or denunciation, of Charbak’s philosophy of extreme materialism -- reenam kritwa, ghreetam pibet! Borrow money and have fun. Now that we have invoked Charbak, let us get along with our thoughts. image from http://thedailybanter.com/2014/03/the-top-10-most-egregious-republican-lies/ There are so many lies floating around that it is not too difficult to pick any three of them. Consider the fallacy of the demographic dividend that has been tomtommed by everyone from an opportunist Nobel Laureate to the semi-literate leftist. The main thesis is that if a country has lots and lots of young people it will automatically become an economic powerhouse. Why? Because young people can work. What it ignores com...

A species evolves when some of its members acquire some characteristics that gives them an advantage in the competition for resources, a characteristic that makes them more "fit to survive" in a hostile and adverse environment. From this perspective, the appearance of language in the animal world was a watershed moment in the ascent of man.  It may not have happened overnight but the emergence of this unique ability   to capture fleeting perceptions and experiences as concepts and ideas in a matrix of grammar and vocabulary and then transmit them for debate and discussion gave such huge evolutionary advantage to those apes who acquired this ability that in effect a new society was born. Language was a very unique skill -- a skill that allowed one to acquire, modify, transmit and disseminate knowledge and information about other skills like hunting, cooking, farming and building shelters. It did not matter which skill was important for survival, a language to talk about...

 I spoke about this unique concept at the Technology Forecast Conference organised by PricewaterhouseCoopers Ltd in Calcutta on 26th September 2013 at the Hyatt. At the end of the presentation, I asked members of the audience to send me an SMS and  vote on whether they thought that there would be an internet of human minds in the next 50 years. 16(+1, added later) people voted YES, 6 people voted NO.

Like the fifth postulate of Euclid, the twelfth chapter of this book has been a source of discomfort both for me as well as for some of my friends and readers. The need to introduce the Divine to plug a loophole in my logic – an inevitable loophole, given the limitations of the Gödel’s Theorem of Incompleteness – was rather irritating and yet it seemed that there is nothing I could do about it. Then I met a friend who alerted me to the existence of a very simple concept that was functionally analogous and one that would allow me to bridge the gap. But does it work ? and have I succeeded in doing so ? That question is best answered by the reader I suppose. Technology has moved significantly since the first edition and nowhere is this more evident than in the area of 3D displays. Direct connectivity between the human brain and a digital device has also improved dramatically but we are yet to reach the level of maturity that is necessary to blur the border between the real and illusor...

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance ( ZAMM ) by Robert M Pirsig is an iconic book on philosophy that has developed a cult following since its publication in the late 1970s. It talks about a man who travels across North America with his son ( see picture above ) on a motorcyle and the description of his journey is interspersed with his discourse on philosophy. I was in high school at that time and did try to read it but failed to get past the first 30 pages. Today, nearly 30 years later, I finally managed to finish it and believe me ( unless you have read it already ) it is well worth the two weeks that I spent with it. ZAMM is an exploration of that elusive 'thing' or 'animal' called Quality whose presence, or lack of, is easily evident but a definition of which is nearly impossible. In his metaphysical inquiry into Quality, ZAMM shows that it lies not in Art nor in Science but somewhere in between, neither in matter, nor in the mind but again somewhere in bet...

The Doors of Perception is an iconic book by Aldous Huxley where, while exploring  the hallucinogenic properties of certain shrubs and herbs, he came to the unusual conclusion that any cognitive sentient has instant and automatic access to all possible knowledge in the universe. However the neural faculties that are expected to process this information and render them useful in a socio-cognitive context are in danger of being overwhelmed by the sheer mass of data -- as occassionally evident in what we refer to as 'madness' -- and so are protected and isolated from the same by the mind that works as a gate or valve that reduces the quantum of information that the brain is eventually exposed to. This mind or gate or valve is what Huxley refers to as the Doors of Perception : that can be opened wider by the use of mental techniques ( Yoga ?) or the use of hallucinogenic drugs -- to reveal a greater amount of "significance" or meaning to the sterile ream...

James Cameron's blockbuster movie, Avatar, about which I have written about in an earlier post , might have unconsciously sparked off a flurry of interest in the Hindu concept of Avatar, which can be loosely translated as a manifestation of -- usually -- the Divine in human form. But the term Avatar first entered the modern, techno-savvy, non-Hindu lexicon through its usage in Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG) like Everquest, World of Warcraft and 3D Virtual Worlds like Second Life. The MMORPG eco-system -- players and builders alike -- treats an Avatar as a digital extension of a conscious human entity, the player, and is used to "manifest" the player's personality and behaviour,  however imperfectly, in the game domain. So there are two domains -- the virtual, digital domain inhabited by the Avatar and the real, physical domain inhabited by the human player -- and these are connected through the "magic" of the MMORPG hardware and sof...

James Cameron's Avatar is old wine in a brand new and spectacularly brilliant bottle. There is nothing new in the plot -- especially for those of us in India who have been following land acquisition battles in the tribal belt -- that pits the indigenous people as the underdogs who are battling to save their forest-based way of life from the clutches of a global ( universal ?) megacorp. Latched on to this main plot is a cameo sub-plot of a cute little love story between two individuals Jake Scully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) from the two opposing camps, which again is nothing to write home about. But what makes the movie remarkable and memorable is the concept of transferring identity and consciousness ( "soul" ? ) across two bodies -- one of which is a genuine human and the other a synthetic Na'vi humanoid. Cameron has referred to this synthetic humanoid as an Avatar which periodically receives -- and is animated by -- the hero, Jake's soul. The...

We come across, and frequently use, the phrase red tape and we know that it refers to the delay that is endemic to the bureaucratic process - but have you ever wondered why is that bureaucrats are so slow in doing things ? Anybody who has visited a government office in India would of course attribute this delay to competence or corruption. More often than not, a little bit of speed money -- the chaipani -- has a magical effect and most red tape disappears. On the other hand, we do know that the best and brightest in the land are hesitant to join the government and so there does exist a certain lack of competence in administrative matters. But let us be charitable for a while and assume that our bureaucrats are indeed competent and NOT corrupt : in that case should red tape not disappear from our lexicon ? But it does not and will not .. and here is why ! You ask a sarkari babu to buy a computer for his office and he ( or she ) will get tied up in knots ! Committees will be formed, spe...

A man is known no more only by his name, address and phone number -- an email address is mandatory on a visiting card that one presents as a part of the process of getting acquainted with a stranger. But the email is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg that represents a person in the emerging, expanding and evolving world of digital relationships. The Internet is a network of computers and more. As technology gets more sophisticated and 'computers' gets embedded into devices and imbibe them with what passes for intelligence, the Internet is being redefined as a network of devices or Yantrajaal : in Sanskrit, Yantra = device & Jaal = web. While this is valuable in itself, and needs no further elaboration, what is even more interesting is how individuals latch on to this web and spin for themselves a new, soft web of relationships -- both with the devices themselves and the software that runs on them, as well as with other individuals who have also latched on to the...