the brook

The Solitude of Emperors, by David Davidar

Anshul — Wed, 28 May 2008 15:54:07 +0000

This wonderful novel explores personal stories behind religious fundamentalism in India. A young man, Vijay, brought up in South India, comes to Bombay to be a journalist in a little known magazine. The magazine’s editor, portrayed as a staunch believer in secularism and a deep thinker, heavily influences him. Vijay ends up getting involved in the riots in Bombay soon after the Babri Masjid incident.

To recover from his trauma, the editor sends Vijay back to South India to a town in the Nilgiri mountains. In many ways the retreat is a paradise, yet what awaits there is a reflection of what he has just been through - potential sectarian violence and fundamentalist rhetoric being propagated to achieve political ends. Being who he is, and spurred on by a short piece which he’s reviewing for his editor, Vijay cannot help but get involved and the story recounts the tale of his findings and efforts and their ultimate consequences.

One highlight is the piece which the protagonist is reviewing for his editor - which happens to be titled “The solitude of emperors” - and is about how three great men of India - Ashoka, Akbar and Gandhi - brought massive change in the country. This work, recounted piecewise during the novel briefly describes the beliefs and actions of each of these men, and ends with a wonderfully inspiring call to imbibe and contribute to the greatness of India.

Inhale the genius of this country. Do not discount anything, the transcendent poetry of the Sufi and Bhakti poets, the architecture of Hampi and Fatehpur Sikri and Mount Abu, the teachings of Ramana Maharshi and the Shirdi Sai Baba. Let the plaintive wail of the shehnai fill your senses, the plangent notes of the sarod and the sitar slice through the dullness of your waking life…

…do not neglect to absorb the poverty and violence and savagery of this country of extremes. Experience the despair of the coal miner in Dhanbad, where the very land is on fire, understand the hopelessness of the marginal cotton farmer in Andhra Pradesh, mourn with the widow of the Sikh garage owner who witnessed her husband being burnt alive in the Delhi riots of 1984. Let their pain become yours.

The other highlight is the characters in the book who represent a spectrum of actors in the play of sectarian violence in India and their personal stories. The idealistic and far-thinking editor who realized late in life that the nation needs every bit of help fighting off fundamentalists. The suave politician who can cleverly, even reasonably, argue for the need of religious glory in a country like India. The charismatic misfit and loner who has seen the world and seems to have given up fighting for it. And of course the protagonist who starts off apathetic, but is shaped by circumstances to care about something greater than himself.

A gripping tale, and yet more than a tale because it touches reality so deeply, and leaves the reader with a lot to think about.

The temples of Angkor

Anshul — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 15:24:25 +0000

Is it possible to lose yourself so completely that you find your own source at the other end of the circle? What is the face of bliss? How many moments make up a decade, a century, a millennium? I don’t know the answers, but I can tell you that in the temples of Angkor I started to ask the questions.

Traveling always takes one across physical and sometimes cultural distances, but this vacation was easily the best I’ve ever had thanks simply to the sense of being transported across time. The various temples are anywhere between seven and eleven centuries old; and on many time has clearly left its mark.

Yet there’s a timelessness about many of the better preserved temples - one is very much aware that these monuments have witnessed the course of human events for a time so long that it’s hard for us to imagine. A thousand years ago gunpowder had just been invented, and so had fire arrows.

The temple builders were either Hindu or Buddhist, and it is really a wonder to behold how some things have withstood the test of time. The depiction of the Buddha’s face, for example, is carved on many of the temples’ towers and is instantly recognizable - truly an icon that has stood the test of time.

The setting of the temples - they’re in a huge complex set some distance away from the nearest city (Siam Reap) - which helps in capturing the sense of history. Apart from the tiny stalls that are set up near most temple entrances, the few motorized vehicles, and the fact that you get cellphone signal everywhere, not much about modern life has encroached upon these ancient wonders. There are still vast tracts of land and forest between the temples - and each temple within itself is huge. When I walked the long bridge towards the Angkor Wat temple, I could sense how grand a vision its builder must have had.

In case some of you who know me are wondering, yes, I did take photos; and they’ve been quietly getting their space on my photoblog. Start here, and keep going forward.

My one thought when I returned from Cambodia was this - it’s surprising that a place like Singapore gets maybe five or ten times the tourist traffic as Cambodia; but this was easily the best holiday I’ve ever had in South East Asia. It’s a must visit place - if you haven’t been there, do keep it on your travel list.

The reticent cabbage cutter

Anshul — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 16:30:05 +0000

Cooking for yourself can be addictive. It’s easy after a while, doesn’t force you to think every day about finding food, makes you crave simple food if you’ve eaten out too much, but most of all it makes you do crazy things at times.

Yesterday I was feeling mighty adventurous and in the mood for trying something different. So I headed to the grocery store and came home with some cabbage.

What induced me to buy cabbage I do not know. Maybe it was some shred of memory of being advised to eat green leafy things. I don’t believe that I could identify cabbage the day before yesterday if my life depended on it. I’ve been trained to eat, not to remember and identify leaf names. In fact, on my way back I read the label on the packet and it said “Wong Bok” which nearly made me decide to get my head examined. A quick Google, however, assured me that the now ominous oval in my hand was indeed cabbage.

I describe the vegetable as ominous because I was now at a stage familiar to nervous bungee jumpers who, having made a painful climb to the top of some bridge or ravine, now ponder the wisdom of letting mindless gravity take charge of their lives. Here I was, someone who barely knows how to cook an omelette and who forgets how many cups of water are needed for one cup of rice - handling a vegetable that in everything but taste was as alien to me as multilateral diplomacy is to George W. Bush.

Like your foolish but egoistic bungee jumper, I decided to take the plunge. Let me warn fellow non-cooks - all the health benefits you may accrue from cooking and eating cabbage cannot make up for the rise in blood pressure that must occur when untrained folk try and get this herb to behave in the kitchen.

A vague intuition told me that I should probably cut this thing before trying to cook it and so I dutifully picked up a knife. If you want to analyze how to cut a raw food item, I doubt you’ll find anything as unyielding as cabbage. Apples are easy, tomatoes are messy but simple, cucumbers can be dangerous but obvious but cabbage… cabbage is a total mystery. I stood there for a few minutes, knife in hand, my mind in knots about the right approach. I was so bashful you’d be forgiven for thinking that I was planning to ask this vegetable out to dinner. Come to think of it, I was. From a certain point of view.

I managed to cook it somehow; though words cannot express how glad I am that no authorities on cooking were on hand to observe me and laugh hysterically. As for the the result - suffice to say I ate what I cooked and lived to tell the tale.

India: A History by John Keay

Anshul — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 11:05:18 +0000

Something went wrong with this post. I suspect wordpress was hacked somehow.

Looking into it.

Anshul

Fitting tribute

Anshul — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 04:53:34 +0000

I’ve always been slightly at a loss to explain just why I enjoy watching Sachin Tendulkar bat. Peter Roebuck describes it beautifully in his recent column:

Spectators find in [Tendulkar’s batting] the same satisfaction as a mathematician does in a formula. Tendulkar does not indulge himself at the crease. His style is not a style at all, merely his way of scoring runs. Even the apparently cheeky upper cut and the reverse sweep aired yesterday take into account score and field. He calculates and then commits.

Mathematician envy

Anshul — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 09:41:25 +0000

The scene is a hands-on workshop for developing presentation skills. Sixteen teaching assistants have come prepared with a ten minute teaching session on a topic of their choice.

A biologist describes the human genome project. A chemist delights us with the tale of dimerizing a ketone molecule. An Lab TA attempts to convey the intricacies of getting gcc to compile code. On display are powerpoint slides, overhead transparencies, voice modulation, presentation structure, good body language and a dozen other things essential for good presentation.

Then there are the mathematicians. Each one gets up, unassumingly, goes up to the big white board, takes up a felt pen and writes down a proof. Concise and compact, straight to the point, and scientifically unquestionable. The trainer says that their voices are too soft. Others that they spend too much time on the details, not stopping adequately to see how the audience responded.

I am too busy envying them to care. To work in a field where everything starts from a notion of absolute truth lends mathematicians a somewhat magical air. While the real world may reach out for help to mathematics, mathematics itself is above (some say contemptuous) of the real world. Delving into knowledge just for the sake of study is an aspect of scholarship that applied computer scientists rarely get to experience - but something that I dreamed of as a fresh graduate student. Someday, maybe, I’ll sit and study math.

Freedom’s road

Anshul — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 18:45:18 +0000

I trooped down to the Singapore Air Show this weekend. As did others - to the tune of tens of thousands. I haven’t seen a closer approximation to the Kumbh Mela in Singapore.

It was on one extreme end of the city, involving a 40 minute bus ride even after the last train stop; involved over 2 km of queues to get into the bus and into the registration gate, where everyone had to go through airport-like security with X-ray machines and metal detectors and what not. It’s amazing how many restrictions we’re willing to bear in order to have a glimpse of freedom.

Freedom from bonds that bind. To soar limitless. To choose a direction at random from the infinity of space. And to defy the one force that always keeps us down. I’ve always loved flying. I was at the airshow to feel flight, and I wasn’t disappointed.

I caught these jets in formation just as I stepped off the bus. I couldn’t see their antics because I was stuck at security.

Then it was time for the single fighters to show off. I loved this part. Having played more than enough flight simulations in my time, I know these stunts are not as easy as the pilots make them look. It was fun to watch the jet spin in a nosedive and imagine the pilots point of view - where the whole world turns in front of you. Pure power was on the menu here. There were, I think, three different jets that made the rounds, and for a while I was just up there, testing the sky’s limits with them.

Somebody should tell Airbus to fix their marketing department. Yes, you’ve designed the largest aircraft in the world and it is a marvel of engineering in many ways. But the last place you want to show it off is right after an F-16 has shown the world what it can do. It’s like after watching a Ferrari zoom past, you’re treated to the sight of an ox-cart drawn by a cow named Phulwaari on the F1 track.

Finally there were the propeller planes. If the fighter jets gave the impression that they were defying the laws of physics with raw power, these birds were the epitome of grace. Certainly not fast but they flew in beautiful formation. This particular maneuver, where they flew in a backward vertical circle and then veered off in different directions, was simply magical. It was also the only time when the audience as a whole burst into spontaneous applause.

The ground exhibits were interesting too but there were just too many people. Planes pack so much beauty, grace and power; but that gets lost if there are people crawling all over. Much like a delectable chocolate cake doesn’t look as mouth watering when surrounded by ants. Not that I didn’t enjoy seeing them up close. It would have been fun to go see them from the inside but I couldn’t muster up the resolve to get in the queues that that entailed.

So as you can see from the pictures, it wasn’t a very good day for photography. Steel gray skies and too many people to get any real good photos of the planes on exhibit. So I needed my camera fix, and I ended up taking some photographs of the people.

Some people had got kids to the airshow, which was good to see. But too few. People should get their kids to see such stuff. They are the ones who have imaginations deep enough and souls free enough to dare and dream their dreams around the wonderful things they see. They are the ones who will remember a day at the airshow a few weeks, months or even years from the day, and maybe change their lives as a result.

The Giants

Anshul — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 14:55:25 +0000

Visited the Greek Sculptures exhibition at the National Museum recently. Truly artistic and a wonderful experience to look through the exhibits.

What struck me most was the corner in which the busts of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle sat, seemingly mundane compared to the grandeur of the Aphrodites and Athenas (see more exhibition photos here).

Isaac Newton once said, “If I have seen farther than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” These three were pretty much the original Giants - widely recognized as the founders of Western philosophy and scientific thought. Among their many contributions - the Socratic method was the precursor to the scientific method which is practiced to this day. Plato founded the first institution of higher learning in the western world, and Aristotle wrote about a mind-boggling range of subjects; including formalisms of logic that would reign till well into the 19th century. It would be hard to find a legacy greater than theirs.

Book Review: Understanding Exposure by Bryan Petersen

Anshul — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 08:52:49 +0000

I read this book about a month ago. Off the bat I can tell you that Bryan Peterson is an amazing writer, and when it comes to teaching photography technique, I’ve not read a better author (I highly recommend his other book as well, titled “Learning to see creatively”).

I wanted to wait till I’d tried out a few techniques before posting a review. Today, I can confidently tell you that this book is a winner. It has taught me some of the most important things I’ve ever learned about photography. I was slightly embarrassed after reading this book because I realized how little care or thought I put in for most of my photography.

Since I’ve always dealt with automatic cameras (even my film camera half a decade ago was an automatic), I’ve never thought much about exposure - how much light is captured by the camera and in what way - something that is determined by the triplet of aperture size, shutter speed and sensor sensitivity (ISO). Understanding Exposure offers a wealth of insight into the subject, divided by two main themes.

The first theme describes a “correct” exposure is and how to get it. This is mainly about determining the correct amount of light that’s captured in each shot. The automatic metering of a camera can often be wrong for complex scenes - especially those that involve both sky and land - which used to often result in washed out scenes that didn’t look too impressive. The biggest change this book induced in my shooting: I now mostly shoot in manual mode. Even on my compact Canon Powershot A570 IS. And I can tell the difference.

The second theme is about getting the “creatively correct” exposure - and this describes making the right choice of shutter speed and aperture size to enhance your composition. These concepts I was more or less aware of but its still very well explained, and it was good to go through it again.

Of course, the ideas are explained with the help of many photographs from the author’s portfolio. The photographs are relevant and often breathtaking. Overall, this is an inspiring book and has certainly changed the way I shoot. I’d heartily recommend it to anyone who’s getting serious about photography.

The 200th mile

Anshul — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 07:49:37 +0000

Sachin Tendulkar made his 16000th run in one-day internationals today. It just struck me that each run is worth 22 yards (the length of a cricket pitch), and that equates to 200 miles. A long run indeed.

Keep going, Little Master.