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.

Latest visit at MoMA

This was my second trip to MoMA. It is definitely the best of art museums I have been to. It is classy, appealing and very accessible. This is the first time I got to use my corporate membership (thanks to my job at JPMorgan) so there is some excitement that comes from that.


Anyways, the special tour this time was that of Latin American artists. I discoverd Leon Ferrari whose most drawing seemed to be with some drooping lines and what I might say - blobs. Technically they are called drip drawings. Then there was Gego - Gertrude Goldschmidt - who played around with distorted geometrical patterns. Interestingly some later works of Leon Ferrari appeared to have mixed theses blobs and geometrical patterns. Mira Schendel and Helio Oiticica despite their abundance at MoMA, didn't interest me much.


The Photography tour was especially interesting, because of my recent interest in it. I discovered George Bernard who has this style of introducing some kind of noise (an unsettling effct, rather) in some of his photographs. I thought that was very distinct. Of course, Ansel Adams had those really great shots of geysers being shown at MoMA (old faithful geyser). I saw some shots of these abandoned buildings by Paul strand which are probably the best of the lot. I am not into portrait-photography so much but Josef Koudelka had some of the greatest portraits I have seen. Probably because he uses background to convey some character as well.

On the top floor, the Painters garden (Etchings by Lycian Freud) has some really interesting impressionism-style paintings. Garden in winter exhibits a b&w dense and noisy painting style.

In retrospect, Jackson Pollock has similar characteristics to that of Leon Ferrari but he is a painter , of course and uses color (oil paint) more freely that Leon Ferrari can (him being a publishing artist).

Among some of the striking images were those Jean Dubuffet which had this metallic touch to. Soul of the underground looks like made from cast iron residues, actually. Other than those, there are some fine mesh drawings with pencil by Seurat that are full of grandeur despite their simple means.

Vasil Kandinsky and Martin Puryer were two other new artists I hadn't paid more attention to before.

For a cup of coffee...

It was the first time I have felt so uncomfortable in the new york streets that are always brimming with people. I tried walking to my gym last Saturday and it took me 10 minutes to cross just two blocks. For five minutes I was just standing amidst people with everyone around me probably as desperate as myself, to be just moving forward to their way. But of course, there were people with their kids showing them all the fanfare that holidays bring on the fifth avenue.

This is the picture of the most crowded Starbucks I have ever seen. Except in New york, people go to Starbucks to relax. I remember those fine evenings at school that I spent working on my math problems or writing assignments. The starbucks at new york fail to bring back any of those memories.

on a thought train...

I think thought trains are really interesting things. Some day we should be able to capture our thoughts in a mathematical langauge. I think with increased influence of logic on language, it would immensely help such analyses. We would be closer to understand our language in a way that it maps to the mental images that it attempts to represent.

Once we have a reasonably accurate representation of the sequence of our thoughts, we can define the macroscopic properties that would signify an overall idea, a belief or even a certain philosophy. I have conducted some experiments, and I think the only care that needs to be taken is in the interpretation of results. Any claim on results needs to be logically specified as well. This might be tricky, because the observations themselves are seldom logically defined. That is one thing we need to improve with our language(s).

Why religion won't really matter

Most of what we consider the global terrorism is associated with Islamic activity. It wouldn't be inhuman or unjust to think that Islamic violence is a problem. Even if we don't want to admit that for whatever reasons there are good reasons to think that there are enough that are acting against Islamic fundamentalist probably in more violent ways. Given that, I don't really see the point why we come back to this discussion of whose religion is more peaceful than the other. The problem is way beyond that discussion now. As far as history goes, forced conversions all over the world had a lot of bloodshed involved. The reason I mention it is because it was about bloodshed and greed for power, and not glory and salvation. When you are in a war, why would you let your religion weaken you. Even the respected Hindu Brahmin parshuram (who you think won't eat meat) is believed to have cleared all Kshatriyas (warriors) from this earth not once but twice (a puranic story). So, there goes our hero of this religion of peace and harmony. One could go on talking about the goddesses of retribution and destruction but that is hardly the point I am trying to make. As for Islam, you all are aware that there is an official procedure that Islamic forces followed moving Eastwards (on directions from God the Almighty Himself). Give the tribe a dawa (show them the glory of God, with the kind of fanfare that missionaries do these days) and if they don't accept Islam, fight them till they all die (rape women if you like, but that was strictly optional). There were hundreds of tribes (small ones) that were erased out of memory because they refused to accept Islam - this is no propaganda but known history, which no Islamic historian would deny. The point is that there are heroes with swords and guns you can honor, no matter which religion you are. Thus, if Hindus in India are peaceful and Muslims aren't then its not because of their respective religions but because of the way they have responded to changing times. Modern day Hinduism doesn't really mean a lot, its about selecting your heroes freely and comfortably; aspiring to make a lot of money (worshipping it rather). Needless to say, this has gone down very well with the changing times. Religion means a lot more to devout Muslims, or devout Catholics. So the problem really is that of social conditions, and social choices rather than of religious texts. Why can't we thus, refrain from discussing religion when talking about terrorism? What is really the point in showing what part of religious texts encourage people to kill infidels, when we know that those who commit crimes don't need religious scriptures to perpetrate the crimes anyways?

One possible reason that I think is presented hereforth. If I were a historian (like I thought I would become once) it would have been real important to me to find out how religious texts influence a society. I could have too, derived pleasure from conjecturing that certain modern day practices are mere repititions of some ancient historic event. I could have for example, liked to consider that Muslim women are veiled only because Mohd. once doubted his younger wives, or that Hindu oppression of low-caste shudras is actually some sort of racial strife. It is fun to do so but I am afraid it is of no more use than in coffee table conversations. The point (deriving a from a bit from cultural anthropolgy rather than history) is that the way a society reacts to, remembers or sometimes creates its history is a statement of its own consciousness. It is erroneous to reverse this argument (If I am allowed to be a bit more scientific, it is a chaotic system because people influence other people and yet get influenced by others). Religious texts too, esp because of their historic nature in Abrahmic religions, should be seen as statements of a society's consciousness (and like I said, not in a strictly irreversible and opposite way). That is to say, it is the people who assign weight to their texts and not just the other way. For example, Bible won't mean a lot to many Westerners, so wouldn't grih-sutras to most Hindus, but Al-koran does mean a lot to many of the Muslims. In defence of the scriptures, Abrahmic religious texts refer to the times of Egyptian decline (fall of an evil empire), the great exodus of Jewish people (discovering new arenas), their returning home, the fall of Constantine (another one)and the re-establishment of religion and faith (the primal utopia). The respective societies more or less do think in these terms, despite all the apparent problems that exist in these texts. Bible could be used to justify slavery and Islam could be, to justify rape and murder; still, neither of them can be formulated as reasons for such crimes, even from a totally rational, if not ethical, perspective.