money in new york

Despite having had a small town, third-world background I think I have unconsciously so, got acclimatized to the city-life. Slowly I see that it is more than just acclimatization that has happened over this decade that I spent in the city. I see things differently now, very different from how I would have when I first moved here. A thing about the big city that bothered me a great deal when I was a kid was the comfort with which city folks set money to be the most important goal in their lives, or judge everything on grounds of money. I used to think that dreaming of big money is really a lot about being superficial. Looking back I think it could have been because of having been brought up in a culture where I was not encouraged to aspire. I was made to choose one amongst the few jobs that were offered to me. Success was achieved by adaptability, not through working to make one's dreams come true. I still feel sometimes that I wasn't encouraged enough to be doing what I absolutely loved to do. Through years of subjugation and colonial exploitation, it was actually discouraged in my circles if someone broke free of norms and started anything with a fresh perspective. When I came to the city, I couldn't help but notice that people were not doing anything halfheartedly. If you were into something then it is so because you absolutely love it or at least convinced yourself that you do. Nobody chases money as such. Everyone is doing what they absolutely love to do. Money is only a measure of how good oneself is. It was surprising to see that dreaming to make money in the city is not at all about being superficial. It was actually quite the opposite.

It was difficult for me to choose what I wanted to do. At the point where I was I felt that I hadn't have enough opportunities or didn't feel confidence about myself to take charge of things - mostly because of personality and partly because of the background. Those two factors might not have been completely unrelated. But with time, I had chosen a way and was willing to make sacrifices for choosing what I loved to do. I remember having loved analysis a lot. When I talked about things they were abstract things - things that most people were not ready to grasp. People didn't like that. I still loved it. A human being rooted in his history and ready to understand his aspirations. I felt a sense of bliss in being that way. I swayed from being a conservative to being a liberal and sometimes a moderate, but all this while I think I maintained a sense of honest curiosity, something that I was made to develop by training in science. An education in science does give you quite a bit of money, but not a whole lot. No matter how good you are at something you have to be entrepreneurial after one point. I don't seem to have the opportunity, but if I am positive, I might grab an opportunity if I see one. But being extremely analytical makes you a cynic and somewhat of a pessimist, mostly because you can't connect with many people. I love this energy and vigor of the city, but because of my very nature I can't lie to people that I don't like making so much money. That usually hinders the process of adaptation to the city life and I think that is where I am at this point.

A friendly Map

I have been working on this idea that I haven't found enough devlopers for. The development is thus quite slow and of course, I haven't been able to get any investments either.

But here is the idea anyways. When you visit a new city (for purely tourist purposes) you have little idea of where your favorite places can be. Of course, it takes time to find out what your favorites are. But what if a friend could tell you where you should go, a friend who has known you for years and understands what kind of places you would be really interested in. If you are an art-lover like me, the friend would've told you about the museums and ongoing exhibition in the city, or may be a journey to the house of a famous architect outside the city followed by relaxing in a neighborhood bar where mostly artists hang out.

Well the idea is to have a website do that for you. networking websites like facebook, orkut already know a lot about you. They know what kind of a person are you and what kind of people you would share your interests with. Even if they don't a little survey can tell a lot about your personality, objectively.

I came up with a clustering algorithm, in order to organize people in different categories. There are no rankings of parameters in the whole algorithms. Everything is based on the distance from individuals. In other words, the algorithm doesn't try to calculate how much you like something but instead it only purports how far are you from a museum lover or a party animal (a distance metric based on the feature vector in the clustering).

One the algorithm discovers your personality - it suggests you what places you should go, fetches schedules from the museum sites and tells you what train to take. If the trains are not running, it tells you what other means you can take. It calculates fare as much as you can and adjusts the costs that you have already given to you. It even takes the weather forecasts and asks you not to go to the park when its raining... and a lot more.

Tell me which real friend would do that much for you..

The opposing argument is one that favors uncertainty. Of course, there is fun in serendipity. Nothing takes away the joy of discovering things that you hadn't planned. But i mean, you can't plan for accidental discoveries and that doesn't make planning worthless.

Hay Bale

Hay Bale
Originally uploaded by rachel sian

Izaura

A woman that sings in João Gilberto's sounds - Izaura - sounds like someone striking a glass gently. If I close my eyes I can see her wavy hairs, deep dark eyes, thin lips, a beatifully carved nose all that.. from just the very deep soothing voice. Wonder how the song tells all that to me.

Bengali and Eastern Hindi

Inspired by Language Log (and at times, being disappointed with its content too) I have started to log my own observations in South Asian languages.

My first observation is a simple one. I remember from my times in Varanasi, that the local dialects used "man karna" a lot. man kare to kar lo, man nahin kar rahaa. I was listening to an excerpt from Sunil Gangopadhyaya's ShreshTha galpa. I found that the same phrase is used a lot in Bangla too. The dialects in Bihar are quite similar to Bangla, but I wasn't aware that effects are reflected into far as Varanasi. The haven't heard this phrase being used in most of the khadi boli dialects and frankly not very frequently in literature either.

Urdu speakers hardly seem to use this phrase. I might theorize that man is not suited to Islamic metaphysics, but that is merely a speculation even though man is a Sanskrit word and has not much in common with Persian counterparts either.

Of course, usually one would find the official Hindi using an excessive lot of loan words from Bengali. In the excerpt itself, words like 'vastutaH','vyApAr','jal','nadi teere' that I hear in spoken bangla a lot, are reserved for official Hindi and are never used by Hindi speakers in their regular language (spoken Hindi would be replete with Urdu equivalents instead).

sanskrit dictionary

A great project. Finally we have a sanskrit dictionary that is really usable.

http://spokensanskrit.de/

A list of other interesting projects:

http://www.sanskrit-lexicon.uni-koeln.de/
http://sanskritdocuments.org/doc_z_misc_subhaashita/

A track of BBC's language

I really have no hopes from Fox News, CNN and such as far as the just use of language goes. The American media openly admits that they want to use connotative terms more than denotative ones, because it is indeed their utmost responsibility to engineer a thought (and not letting the readers cultivate one). A time when I was checking CNN website extremely regularly (probably every two minutes, for a 6 hrs) was when the shooting at Virginia Tech had happened. I had graduated from there only an year ago and I was concerned and dismayed not just because I still had friends studying there. 2 hrs after the shoot out happened, the news agencies had started checking the background of the student. The headlines of all major newspapers were reporting the details of Cho, the student responsible for the massacre. It was unveiled in a matter of minutes by CNN that, " The killer came from Korea at ten". The news item was up only for a few minutes, obviously because of its political incorrectness. But it was enough for me to infer how deeply aberrant our media correspondents really are. Saying that "the killer is an immigrant from Korea" is a lot different from saying "the killer came from Korea" even though the facts are exactly the same. The latter is akin to suggesting that Cho was a killer when he was 10. Him coming from Korea implies that the killers are more likely to come from Korea. Of course most people don't take it that far. But such subliminal manipulation does work most of the time (e.g. in engineering a sense of xenophobia in this case). However this happens to be a very poor example, the reason why the item was removed almost immediately. American media is full of such connotations in their reporting. Most of the times people won't realize that they are being fed the us-vs-them ideology while they are casually reading the newspapers. My own friends have gone from mid-conservative to extreme right just by choosing to be more informed about the world events. It is not hard to find an American who thinks that everyone except some European countries hates America. The propaganda machines once employed in South American and other satellite countries are now so mainstream that it is hard to be unprejudiced about almost anything. I myself have admittedly started to have a skewed view of the Muslim world, after being fed years and years of negative stereotyping.

I had assumed for a long time that the news in Britain and other European countries would be able to survive this extreme right scheme. But unfortunately that isn't the case for BBC. BBC has repeatedly followed the same tactics as major American media over time. I would've thought that this, apart from usual sarcasm was reserved only for the third world countries, but it surely isn't the case, after I started taking a closer look at the coverage of war and economy at BBC. ( For an example on the third-world country, if BBC finds some villagers in the most backward parts of Bihar, India performing a witchhunt, the headlines might be - Indian witch-hunt being curbed by the govt ) . I would try to log more real examples by editing this post, but here are a few recent ones : "Passenger's arm sucked down French train toilet" -Mind you, it is the french train toilet, not the train toilet in France ( but the british have a good sense of humor of course) Two Britons found guilty of having sex on a Dubai beach - The britons were guilty of breaking the law, not of having sex. The preference of word "downturn" over "recession" is actually official for BBC. That might I say, is only the tip of the iceberg. Updated (on Nov 01,2008 ): -- BBC just came up with an item that is very close to the example that I had provided: Pakistan "child wedding" halted -- Food body says 'avoid Irish pork' -- Ancient Persians 'gassed Romans' - As the report says it were the roman soldiers that were gassed. Indian Owl Problem. Apparently Indians like to sacrifice owls for their "black-magic" rituals. I hadn't known about it and still don't know anyone would would do something like that, but according to BBC that is something widely popular in India. Rather funny to see this 16th century style smearing of Indian "pagan" practices.

Mishra's travel to Hong-Kong - why aren't there enough writers in HK

Mishra finds the answer to be very simple - (In HK)"economic benefit is the core value for all decision-making, and development is the sole ideology." There isn't quite as much inspiration for any artistic pursuit.

Well Mishra certainly is good at defending his well-maintained position on the improper economic growth in Asia. He manages to get his stance through in all of his writings - that the recent development of Asia is not linked to its culture. It really is a sort of clash between its past and the present - the reason why, as he articulates, the recent development of East isn't quite as fulfilling as the era of enlightenment had been to Europe. Thus he finds the paradigm of emerging-superpower(s) to be fundamentally flawed. Sometime he has asserted that the results of this neo-richness can be far more undesirable than a bit of discontent arising out of hedonistic pursuits i.e. when the reconstruction proves to be detrimental to the civilization either through undermining of human rights or with forced continuation of decayed systems.

Except the way he puts these points I do share these views with him. I only wish I had the energy, flair and time as Mishra's to explain that to more people. Here on nytimes travel mag, he talks about the neo-richness of Hong-Kong. He explains how HK has surpassed New York but still longs to produce a writer of international fame.


The Money Pit

He is convinced that,

"a society of such material plenitude would eventually foster spiritual longings that could not be appeased by the mere accumulation of goods — a historical lesson that may be useful to remember as Hong Kong hurtles, as apparently heedlessly as ever, toward the future. "

Red!!!

Red!!!
Originally uploaded by Roshans Album

A great shot. I wonder where this is.

It is hard to find buildings like these. I wish people were being more creative at least when building their own houses. Urban architecture seems getting lost into vapid materialism one bolstered with Home-Depot products and Ikea furniture.

I tend to think that modern architecture tries to please everyone a bit too much and thus like most others who do that comes up with things that are bland and possibly characterless. It could be that it is guided too much by science in its attempt to project a realism that is rationally justified and has minimal attributes.

I don't see anything wrong with minimalism but if people were just a bit more creative and just preserved the idea of building a house and not just buying or acquiring it, the houses would have become more beautiful by themselves. Beauty lies in beholders eyes after all.

Who knows we probably would have escaped the current financial crisis had the idea of a house as a place to live and not to gamble had prevailed.

random bit about Hippocrates

Apollo, the god of healing, fell in love with a human, Coronis. In his absence, Apollo sent a white crow to look after her. When the crow informed Apollo that Coronis loved another man, Apollo's rage turned the crow black.

To avenge her brother, Apollo's sister shot Coronis with an arrow and, as she lay dying, Coronis told Apollo that she was bearing his child. Although Apollo could not save Coronis, he rescued the unborn child, Asclepius. Hygieia, the goddess of health, and Panacea, the goddess of cures, are the daughters of Asclepius.

According to legend, Hippocrates was a descendent of one of Asclepius' sons.

I find it very interesting that a lot of words in our modern languages are based on names of goddesses. Fortuna bears the roots of the word fortune while the word panacea is unchanged both in meaning and form.

In my own native tongue (Sanskritic Hindi) this tendency is much more prevalent possibly due to absence of Christianity or late arrival of monotheism in the area. As I was telling a friend a few days back the word for power is actually name of a goddess and is of feminine gender. Male acquire power by worshipping the goddess. Shakti, the goddess, is power itself, that incarnates herself in every woman.

But that is only one observation I have made from the above note on Greek paganist roots to modern medicine. I would follow up with other notes later...

Thomism by Russell

According to St. Thomas the soul is not transmitted with the semen, but is created afresh with each man. There is, it is true, a difficulty: when a man is born out of wedlock, this seems to make God an accomplice in adultery. This objection, however, is only specious. There is a grave objection which troubled St. Augustine, and that is as to the transmission of original sin. It is the soul that sins, and if the soul is not transmitted, but created afresh, how can it inherit the sin of Adam? This is not discussed by St. Thomas.

- Bertrand Russell

My love for languages

The thoughts are organized with metaphors. We could metaphorize everything but we draw boundaries around some to form units that can be used generically enough over our other observations. That is how words get formed. There are prefixes, suffixes and prepositions that we use to play with these. Our constructs are logical but our mind transcends them. Languages evolve by letting themselves challenged by the human mind. The language tries to bound all thought and the thoughts keep expanding the language.

A stale and dead language is where people have stopped thinking in; the thriving language is where people are thinking new ideas in.

Languages to me is an imprint of a society - a sink and exigesis of all the thoughts put in to the former by the latter. Lanuage of an era is a snapshot in time of the society. Knowing the language is like reading the blue-print of a society.

Brahman Varanasi

Brahman Varanasi
Oiginally uploaded by shawshots

One of the most captivating portraits I have come across on the internet browsing the photos of the ghats of Ganga.

Journey to past

A land that I hadn't known about - amidst the remains of an ancient civilization - a civilization that still continues to exist but has lost all connection with its past. It retains these remains in the false hope of a kind of revival. But it all never made any sense to anyone. People in this land keep doing their rituals the way they once did in their heydays. But in this time neither the glory nor the faith exists. I was made to walk through these lands and I had fallen in love with its history. The history was fascinating but there was nothing in the present that I could have embraced. It is true that I did absorb a lot from its present with all the time I spent there. But I also knew that there was nothing that would have come out of this love affair with an ancient probably non-existent city. I knew that it would only lead me to perdition and misery if I kept myself connected to the place. There was nothing in this place that I wanted myself to associate with. Still, on that day, a revelation told me that my future is limited (if not determined) by my past in the city. I can't run away from all what I had learned having lived in this abandoned city. I can influence others and be influenced by them, but there is that part of me which is totally owned by my past, that which would always be untouched by anything. My father led this trip to the place that I had never known, the place that holds the key to my future. I want to know about that place much as I want to know about the limits of my own world and my ambitions. My dad started the trip from a familiar place - near a ghat where I was asked to wait for some preparations to happen just like I used to be in the days of my childhood. The hustle-bustle of the city was never pleasant to me but I had learned to sense a kind of music arising out of it. I had actually started missing it from all these years I had been away from this world of antiquity. The next stage of the trip is hard to remember - I was sitting on the back-set of a two-wheeled vehicle - could've been the scooter that my dad used to have. The surroundings seemed bizarre and didn't appear very clear the way my dad was driving this green vehicle. After some time the surroundings started sounding familiar - may be my mind wasn't able to recollect things so fast. But it all sounded familiar now, like it all was known to me, like I was destined to be on this ride. But I still didn't know where I was heading to even though surroundings were all very familiar now - the old temple, the pan-shop, the binding services store, the drawing emporium, the book store, the muslim school, another temple. It all was coming back to me.

The last few miles of this ride were to be more bizarre. There was a steep hill, the one like Kamakhya in Gauhati except that there are no tantrics here. There is no much noise here which makes me believe that there are no sacrifices being done here. My dad still thinks looking at animals being killed is not good for me or anyone. If there were to be sacrifices in this place I wouldn't have been taken here. There is a steep slope and it only becomes steeper as we go further. At some point I wonder if we are still approachable with gravity. But my mind is not occupied by the centripetal and frictional forces right now, I am just thinking about the outcome of this journey. We are in a tunnel of some kind and I have completely lost the sense of direction. I feel weightless and I wonder if I am still limited by the space or the time. I still long for the past, the city even though nothing would've existed if there was no space or time. My dad has not shut down the vehicle and its probably in the neutral gear with its engine still on. That usually means I don't have a lot of time to spend here. I gaze at the walls of the tunnel. I now think its a cave because tunnels are not made of stone any more. I think this must be the end of the tunnel even though I don't see it. This place is so lit up after all. I can now see something written on the wall. It takes time to get used to light when you've been in darkness so long. There was my future inscribed for me, an result from astrology that was lost when I was young. My knowledge of sanskrit and math made me understand that the earlier calculations were all wrong but there was one pundit who had got it right, one who didn't live too long to communicate my future to anyone. It was through some mystical experience that my dad told me that I only I could've uncoded my future. And now I could find it written here in the classic script as if it has been there forever, undiscovered by any one. I can say for sure that it is for me because it spells my mom's and my dad's name right; it mentions the place and time of my birth to reasonable accuracy. It mentions the positions of nakshatras very descriptively. I now realize how fortunate I have been, to have known what millions before me had aspired to know. I came here to know my limits and I have all the answers now. My cynicism would die out like once all hopes died for me. I would die peacefully in an unconscious state. There might be much pain inside of me, but I would never be conscious to feel it. It is hard to say everything that I feel at this point. But it is strange indeed that I am so happy to know about my death. It is much stranger that I feel more optimistic after having known my limits.

San Jose

San Jose
Originally uploaded by anuragr

The half-moon beach in San Jose is the first beach I have been to which is misty all through the year. It felt very different partly because of the amazement that it is to get to a beach with green water and dusky sand after driving for hours between clouds and mountains.

Summer in New York is great as usual, but I still miss the snow (My apartment in the pic).

Newcastle cast

The whole star cast of NewCastle at Tribeca film festival.

to nothingness and back...

The only form of existentialism that I have gathered is probably due to the sense of disconnection I have felt. It reasserts itself when I watch Bergman or read Camus. It arises due to the disconnection from my own surroundings - this perceived meaninglessnes of all relationships feelings and passions. When you have been disconnected for so long then your newer connections happen to be mere make-beliefs - making up a consciously chosen or sometimes a conceived reality. You get involved in people, their activities and lives even though you realize at all times that they all mean nothing. A certain goal or a certain requirement (not necessarily yours) was what drove you there and it would have no significance after the fulfillment (not necessarily yours). What then is anything for? With no love, passion and emotions what really separates life from death. Kierkegaard says that we judge others' emotions with rationality but don't want others to do that for our emotions. Its not just selfishness it is the inherent paradox in rationalization of human needs. If everything is just needs and fulfillments, where is the space for emotions? My short encounter with Christianity does try to achieve an answer. I think that if God (despite the vagueness and ambiguity that is associated with it) is not believed to be the prime motivator of everything one tends to lose the belief that we are capable of changing anything in this world. Everything becomes deterministic - past determines the present and the present determines the future. Everything is need and fulfillment - the emotions become a matter belief - one like that in God Himself. One's connection with God in all its innocence is a strong force that maintains the essential adherence to the dynamics of this world (whatsoever little we may understand of it). With belief in God, we believe in ourselves and tend to feel the control over this world. It might all indeed be fake but it is what works for most people. For the most part, believing in God is only as incorrect as believing in oneself.

However this is far I can get with existentialism. Existentialists (those that I have known) tend to deny rationality yet continue to harness what rationality provides. There lies a hypocrisy. But so would be the case with those who deny emotionality on one hand (in all their actions) and then just assert "God" on a superficial level - just by saying the "words" but not really believing in any of sense of them. Giving a name to the problem is never a solution. Saying that "God" governs everything doesn't free us from the responsibility of understanding the order of this universe. There is a hypocrisy in considering knowledge as solely determinable by rationality but still having beliefs or asserting a spiritual power. Any belief that we hold has to be seen in actions as well. Thus our actions and institutions should reflect what we believe. There are problems, in leaving beliefs as the residue of ratiocination. For me rationalization could be inadequate but it definitely isn't unnecessary. We need rationality to understand things however we do need to understand what we believe or admit that we do believe. Our institutions need to give way to our beliefs for their own sake. Rationality is essential for our understanding and it probably is the only medium we can trust upon (it would be paradoxical to say it isn't so). Yet we do need to acknowledge our beliefs and prejudices that we choose to live with. It is not "wrong" to have a perspective, I think; but to admit the perspective is as "right" as we can be.

with inadvertence ...

Somehow over last few years without making any conscious attempts I have been able to tell if any word has germanic roots or not. It is not a hard thing to do, if you are a linguist / etymologist; but for what I am, an "enthusiast" at most, it should be considered no less than an achievement since its done so inadvertently. In retrospect I started working on my English vocabulary about 4 years back, when I felt my vocabulary was too limited and its only use had been to translate my thoughts from my native language - Hindi. I took a more sophisticated way towards improving my vocabulary, not because the crude way of memorizing the words painfully was too easy for me, but rather because contrarily it was impossible for me to remember word-meanings ever since my childhood days. Since memorizing dictionary meanings was neither feasible nor interesting for me, I took the rather long way. I just took the OED and traced the whole history of a new word. I could then understand that when someone makes vitriolic remarks, s/he is actually just reusing the medieval sense of throwing vitriol. Obviously vitriol is sparingly used in modern English, but the word 'vitriolic' is quite common and when used could be considered a sign of your command on English language. I rather naively, observed that almost all sophisticated words (esp those "power" words from law, politics and economics) in English had to have latin roots. Romans didn't just have better armies than Germanic tribes, I thought - they also had a more organized language. Latin grammar easily would have prevailed all over Europe. For English, however this was an uninformed speculated generilization. English was transformed more because of the French invasion (Norman conquest of England in 1066 by Duke William II and the subsequent replacement of the Anglo-Saxon rule). Anglo-Norman and Anglo-Saxon languages then combined to become what was later to be known as Middle-English. A lot of English words thus show roots in French. I was excited to observe that all English words ending in -ive were directly (or rather shamelessly, I thought) borrowed from French words. Old French positif, affirmatif were brought into English (and modern French) as positive and affirmative respectively, for example. This was just one of the many observations that I made by myself.

All this was enough to make me feel deeply interested in the French language. While learning French I realized that the old French mostly used the corresponding Latin words almost unchanged. An improved French vocabulary eventually enriched my knowledge-bank of Latin roots too as a result. This wasn't over yet. My interactions with a few other enthusiasts on an online community whetted my appetite for Indo-European etymology. I was thrilled to observe that so many of Sanskrit words (Sanskrit: mother of most South Asian languages) shared roots with Latin words. With later studies in Latin grammar, I discovered that the grammatical similarities in Latin and Sanskrit were even more conspicuous. This was inexplicable for me. I thought that Tower-of-Babel could be the only possible answer to such striking and profound similarities. Then this crazy idea came to my mind - to see if there could a sanskrit way of speaking latin- and hence speaking English too. After researching a little bit, I realized that it isn't just possible. The way words are formed, they follow a certain path in history. There are metaphorical and allegorical remarks that go into formation and popularization of a word. I might choose a parallel in another language, but that doesn't necessarily reject or isolate the history of the word in the source language. That explains why I always felt uncomfortable with certain words in Hindi that were translated from English (some Biblical words especially) but didn't make any sense in the native language. They were just transplants of unknown origin and always failed to make the same impact as the original English word.

Smithsonian

Who knew that Kongorikishi (Aka nio) was the one to protect Buddha while the latter's visit to India. Who even knew that Buddha would have to be "protected" in his own birthplace - the place that he first preached at. It took me a visit to this museum at the Smithsonian to realize all that. There is this beautiful tall statue of Kongorikishi and his brother, who ruled the two kingdoms in Japan, and helped Buddha in spreading his message.

After taking a look at this fabulous collection of Asian arts in the Smithsonian institution, I visited other museums in the area. All of these museums are free to public. Looking at these museums you can easily tell that they still don’t run out of funds at all.

I took special note of Thomas Wilmer Dewing, a nineteenth century artist who has some naturalist expressions of the female. It was quite interesting to see Algernon Charles Swinburne advocating the oil paintings of James Mcneill Whistler which promoted a euphoric stance in philosophy - aestheticism.

“Frida Kahlo” painted by Alfredo Arrequin was captivating. After looking at some of these great paintings by John Alexander, I would start to consider him one of the greatest painters of our times. His allegory of double life has been used in a lot of paintings (the most simply depicted in his work – the man of two lives) (http://johnalexanderstudio.com/main/prev/106?page=4 )

Jasper Francis Crospey was the land scape artist for the day. The other most interesting landscape artists was Robert Duncanson. Angel by Abbott Handerson Thayer appeared to be the most accurate depiction of an angel to me so far.

The real size piano by Thomas Wilmer Dewing is enchantingly beautiful. So are his other paintings. The landscape by Albert Bierstadt was a surrealistically pleasant depiction of nature’s beauty. One cannot expect this kind of a reality except in fairy tales.