The Birthday Blog

Five years ago, I had stumbled into the reality of meeting someone who had told me,

"Didi, mera toh kabhi saal mein janam-din hi nahi aata"
(There is no day in the year which is my 'birthday'!)

He was an Éclair kid - Mahesh. I fondly remember the inquisitive and intelligent eyes of that twelve year old. For him there was no day called his 'birthday' because he never knew when he was born. Neither did his parents. They were too busy in the drudgery of doing manual labour as construction workers. No one remembers birthdays in their world, of course.

I adored him. Deeply.

In the wee hours today, while doing my morning nitnem, reciting Jaap Sahib (Gurbani text) - I discovered something new.

The Guru said, 'Namastang ajaae'
(Salutations to the God who is not born.)
Sikhism believes that God is never 'born', neither does he 'die'. Birth and death are for lesser mortals only.

Mahesh has no birthday. My Lord too does not have a birthday. Enchanting. Isn't it?

***

The song

It’s a beautiful song
My heart sings it.
The trees down the road
Seemed to sing it too.

Did you hear? Do you see?
That plush red tree
At the end of my lane
That understood my vein
The melody arcane
And then jumped in the refrain
Moving its leaves

In an elegant rhythm
Taking my song 

To a higher new realm

That lady on the road
Seemed to catch my song
And smiled widely in turn
Carrying the smile along

I enter my room
It greets me with the song
Welcome back, oh friend!
Let us sing along

A whole new world chimes in
And joins in my glee
The harmonium, the tabla
Add another layer to the symphony

The spring in my walk
Oh! Where did it spring from?
This contentment along the sojourn
Carrying me lightly along

It was you, I know
In whose praise, this song flows
Endlessly, boundlessly
And it still goes

Mathematics – How I fell in love with it?

I have been lucky. Since school, I have had the experience to study from really exceptional mathematics teachers who have made mathematics shape my worldview like no other discipline has. 

It had started with Mr Osahan at school – a man who loved geometry and saw it in every aspect of life. And then Mr Manshant had deeply ingrained the twelfth class mathematics with a crystal-like clarity in me. Things were beautiful and you could see the beauty so clearly.

During undergraduate, I learnt that mathematicians are actually the most imaginative and creative sort of people. They work with things which cannot even be seen by human eye. When I was first introduced to the idea of dealing with an Rn space, I was boggled and quite terribly confused too. I clearly remember Mam Archana’s introductory Linear Algebra classes in college. Suddenly the entire world had changed as if – she talked of groups, fields, subspaces and I could never imagine a picture of the concepts in my head. I had walked up to her after class one day and told her that this was bothering me. It was making me uneasy – those lists of definitions and absence of pictures. She tried her best to persuade me to somehow extrapolate things from the tangible ones, try and imagine things in R3 and then try to assume a parallel in Rn. I was more confused and remained unconvinced for long. Why would you like to do that? It was stupid, I thought.

It was then a chance sitting with my mamu once (who is a mathematics enthusiast to the core), that I saw light.  “Why can’t I see these?”, I had asked him out of deep concern.

He had replied in that calm, unruffled tone - “We can’t see a lot of things in life, but that does not mean we stop studying them.”

“But what does that mean?”

“You can’t see God, but you still study Him, right? How is that? Through His PROPERTIES! Every morning you call Him Fearless, Benevolent, Omnipresent, Omniscient, Fatherly etc – those are His properties and based on those you conjure up an image of Him.

Similarly, you can’t really see a field, subspace – so you try to study them through their properties - a field through its eight properties, a subspace through its own properties. Thus you try to form an idea of how those mathematical objects may behave.”

The argument had satiated my curiosity, suddenly all the linear algebra classes assumed a new, higher role in my undergrad life. I started to revere it like nothing else. It was something transcendental, I felt.

Fantasy worlds with such exceptional properties leading me towards a perfection of sorts, it was a beautiful new realm for me. It excites me still, even more.

And then, I have to tell you about Dr Mohan Singh, a retired mathematics professor who has been my math-smitten uncle’s inspiration. I got a chance to study from him last year – and that too one-to-one. He taught me real analysis and topology. Mathematics would soon blend with theology and leave me all awed at the beauty of it. He is a man who lives and breathes mathematics. It was hard not to get more inspired, more excited, more enamoured by the field.

Once while explaining me a basis, he remarked – “For a topologist, a square and a circle is the same. Because they generate the same topology. If you go and tell this to a man on the street, he might laugh at you. But that’s the truth -a square and a circle are the same.”

Once our topology - theology detours had begun and we were coming to a conclusion that logic is not everything afterall. He gave me examples after examples from the history of mathematics where compromises were made even in a rigorous and seemingly-perfect field like mathematics (especially after Bertrand Russel discovered gaping flaws in Cantor’s set theoretical concepts). Since logic itself was not flawless, the point was that to reach God and when dealing with the domain of spirituality to study the Ultimate Perfection in the cosmos, one must abandon all logic and proceed with submission in heart and that's it.

I expressed deep unease. But then the topologist analogy helped and clarified things perfectly. Just like the concept of ‘circle and square being same’ is illogical for a common man but perfectly logical for a topologist, similarly, what might be seen as illogical in the world of spirituality might be perfectly logical from a higher perspective. After all, it is not the 'absence of logic' but a domain where a 'higher logic' prevails! *

A couple of days ago, at a workshop on bayesian inference, the instructor made a tangential remark somewhere during his lecture. He knew of a guy who claimed to see five dimensions when meditating under a blanket with a flashlight! (Considering time as 4th dimension in the 3-d space is all normal humans can imagine.) Makes me wonder, perhaps there are creatures on other planets who can see higher dimensions beyond R4.

As I think of it, I just get even more wonder-struck!

Wow.

*Caveat: Just to prevent any misinterpretations, when I mention spirituality, I do not mean religion or any superstitions built around them. Spirituality is about recognising one spirit in all human beings and rising above prejudices. On a personal level, I am a serious believer in rationality and feel that I have acquired this trait from my belief in Sikhism.

The Intensity Of Longing

Sharing a soulfully electrifying qawaali by Khusrau : it has held me captive for days, will hopefully grip you too.

Moments, memories and merriment

Reader

I cannot not write this. I don’t think I can do justice to narrating some very tender emotions through words but something still propels me to write, at least attempt a description of some very treasured moments I had a fortune to be a witness to.

Every Tuesday, a group of students go outside the Hanuman temple in Kamla Nagar (in Delhi University) and play with kids on the footpath. These kids go to school but hail from marginalised sections and resort to weekly begging. Tuesday is the day of service at this temple and devotees throng with much zest and sweets. And these kids throng the footpath and chase the devotees to maximise their earnings both in cash and in kind (the prasad).

Every time I come to Éclair, these kids rush to me – with open arms and faces lit with rare joy and hit against me clutching my legs, some hanging on to my arms. In a matter of seconds, I am surrounded by a full mob of roaring, cheering faces welcoming me in this grand way.

However, my juniors who are now the regular faces at éclair would tell me how they have to nudge them from their places on footpath to come, and in my absence, they wouldn’t run to them the way they did on seeing me.

I would try to tell the kids every time I met them how their Oishee didi, Harman didi, Sonali didi and all others who came loved them soo… much, expecting they would return the love to them in the same way.

But probably bonds are always a function of time, a positive function of time. And my reassurances to them would not work.

It has been almost a year now. I have been away and my ultra enthusiastic juniors have been managing Éclair. This Tuesday, before departing for Oxford, I went to see them.

I was slightly before time and Oishee and others had not arrived. They saw me and rushed to me as usual, curling around me. My mom was along and I told them ‘yeh meri mumma hai’ amidst the cacophony and they hugged her too, even harder, in the same mad, violent manner.

Another moment and Oishee, Sonali and Harman arrived on the other side of the footpath. They saw them and guess what…

They ran.

To them with the same fervour and even more, shouting ‘Didi,Didi’. A whole sea of cute faces leaving their prasad at the temple and running to ones they love so deeply. Surrounding them, pulling them, shaking hands, shaking them.

I can’t express the exponential joy of witnessing the scene – the joy of witnessing a love bud sprouting, the joy of seeing a whole coterie of people expressing their innermost feelings. Its as if something flows across individuals through those gestures – some divine vibes as if.

And then while they played dog-and-the-bone with Harman and Sonali as team captains, I noticed the cute Roshni clinging on to Harman caressing her arm with her hand occasionally while watching the game.

You know what, these kids don’t really come to éclair for just the sweets or the fun of playing games, they come for love – for the sincere care and affection, for having someone who listens to them and brings out the child in them after all the hardships of living in poverty.


…

Okay, I feel really incomplete. I started writing this post to describe that scene of kids running shouting Didi, didi. I doubt if I conveyed the intensity of that scene in its true form. I feel like an old worn-out Kodak camera that could not capture a beautiful scene of nature through its tinted lens. In search of a DSLR which can capture those moments better. Somebody like my friend Priyanka Dass Saharia would do an amazing job capturing it with her writing skills. Or probably writing isn’t a good idea, can anyone actually go and capture the scene with a real video camera?

It happens every Tuesday.

Around 5 pm.

Outside FMS.

Opposite Hanuman Temple in Kamla Nagar.

You should go see it for yourself, really :)

Some pics from that day, of the eclair class in progress.

The Priming Effect

I have had enough of this academic existential crisis and thought I had grown out of it after the Michaelmas break. Questions like 'what is economics? why am I here exactly? what good will it be to anyone?' had sprung up in oodles, caused a lot of furore and I had finally conquered them after a month-long introspection. Things made much more sense in the Hilary term and my mind could see the interconnections, intricacies and interrelations in my discipline more vividly and clearly than before. Things from the real world and the classroom had started to come in sync, life moved so beautifully smooth until this morning when Bang! I am hit with the biggest revelation.

All this while I had a sleeping hypothesis deep down that the discipline I was studying was having more subtle priming effects than I could imagine. I was aware of it, so I was always guarding myself against the ill effects, but a lot of my fellow friends in the economics circles were starting to become more self-centred and stingy. I do not blame my friends, they have been blinkered by approaches that sound perfectly rational and logical and have ended up internalising them.

I had once read somewhere about Amartya Sen, that he was known as an ‘economist with a heart’ – The metaphor had struck me and stayed with me all along college, I knew before undergrad that the discipline I was entering into was going to prepare me to be ‘heartless’. Somehow in the scheme of things, I was destined to meet Aleesha – my closest friend in college in whose company, I was able to put economics, ethics, morals in different compartments of my mind and carry on with the business of life. Those ideals never mingled, so no disturbances were created.

Of late, I was struck by the fact, that I had certain kind of tender emotions and completely selfless motives but my friends were just not able to understand! Especially now at the postgraduate level, I am forced to doubt myself at times, I just don’t reason the way the milieu around me does and I call up Aleesha often only to be reassured that I am not an oddity afterall.

Going down the memory lane, I remember complaining to one of my EcoSoc friends once in undergrad college, how the Economics Society had become more like a ‘Politics Society’. If you happened to stand near two ecosoc people at any random point in time, you were quite likely to hear bickering about a third ecosoc member, a very generous outpouring of jealousies and backbiting than any discussions about economics.

Do you notice something? All these friends I allude to in the previous sentences, were economists. ‘Strange correlation!’ I always thought in my head.

This morning I got to know that the relation was causal. My professor referred to it in her lecture today and I have been quite perturbed since then.

The finding is that economics and business majors are more likely to resemble homo-economicus than students from other majors. One explanation is that repeated maximisation exercises with agents who are self interested utility maximisers, make economics students more likely to mimic the behaviour in real life. Those lagrangians, hamiltonians had such grave impacts on people – I could never imagine.

Initially, research had found out that this could be the result of self-selection i.e. it may be the case that only ‘selfish, dishonest’ students chose to study economics. But later findings (especially the paper by Lopez-Perez and Spiegelman) reported significant treatment effects meaning that it is the teaching of economics and the learning that is occuring that explains the selfishnes (the problem of endogeneity is tackled using political affiliation as an instrumental variable in this paper).

I have strange feelings at the moment. Isn’t it a shame? The models were meant to be benchmarks and I was always reassured by my professors in undergrad that economics does not rule out altruistic behaviour, you can always incorporate it in the utility function of the agents. Unfortunately, those cases have ended up being side-lined to just some ‘special cases’ in the literature, analysed by behavioural economists only.

Seriously think its time for some change.

Disclaimer: Written by an economics Mphil student with no 'selfish' motives.

The link to the Perez-Spiegelman paper can be found here.

Raag Malhaar

D-8 Allnutt South.

It was a furnace – the west facing room would receive the burning afternoon sunlight, the walls would absorb them so perfectly and retain their imprint till the night, reflecting it on everything and every being inside the room. Sometimes, the overhead fan seemed like a saviour. Sometimes, it felt like the villain, spreading the heat in the room more evenly than before. Even buckets of water sprinkled all over the room would make no difference.

I would try my best to keep my calm. But the heat would become one of the rarest of the rare reasons why anger would well inside me. Especially in the third year, when I would see it as a symbol of injustice. My preferences had not been respected even though I had deserved to get a room of my choice, based on my merit in the college residence. But in those days, anarchy ruled, nobody cared and so I was, stuck.

I would whine and fill pages after pages of my diary sometimes, only to be reminded by my own self that it was fine. After all, I only would say in my morning prayer every day ‘Whatever You do, is good for me’ (Jo Tudh Bhavai Saee Bhaleekar) and then complaining about the state of things later in the day was like being double-faced.

And so my mind would wander over to tangents, for hours after hours – afterall what was the good hidden therein, of me being unfairly allotted the hottest room of the block?

As it was programmed, the good unfolded very soon as my search for it became more and more intense over days. It unfolded so beautifully, so perfectly.

I had started playing harmonium in second year after a long interregnum of 6-7 years. The gap perhaps made the activity more enjoyable and meaningful. I would experiment with different ragas, some of them would just rise from within, I had left them dormant in my memory for long. From one, another would emerge, and another and still another and I would be entranced by the compositions that would come out of my fingers, so effortlessly. I would be surprised at myself– was it really me playing?

One of these hot, whining afternoons, I remembered a small note of Malhaar (the raag known for causing rain!) that I had learnt while young. I started experimenting and recreated the whole sthaai and antra. Youtube helped and I found an amazing shabad sung by Bhai Nirmal Singh* – It said:

Baras megh ji, til bilam na laao

(Rain down cloud, do not delay)

Although I used to sing raag malhaar when young, the same hymns, the same compositions never had the same kind of resonance back then. Now the raga would emerge out of the depths of the sultry heat, I could feel the power of every word. As if my entire soul would cry for rain, for an escape from the furnace. It was pure joy!

Sometimes I would sing for hours altogether and then look back after a while and an eager neighbour would be sitting on the other end of my bed  enjoying the music and pressing for ‘one more’. Once, out of sheer coincidence (was it?), it started raining. I was too elated...

My harmonium had become like an air conditioner. 

It cooled my soul, my thoughts, my perspective on everything. I can never forget the peace I felt in those heated afternoons, they were the coolest ever!

Thanks to the heat, I understood real meaning of raag malhaar and the compositions in my scripture. Thanks to the heat, I found a terrific way of dealing with my anger and complaints.

Today, a friend shared this ‘miyan ki malaar’ youtube link on facebook (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7R4kdCi1zY)– and it brought back a whirlwind of old memories and triggered this post while the lovely malhaar is still playing in the background.

They continue to elate me. All smiles.

*Bhai Nirmal Singh's Baras Megh Ji link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7BVWrrEOFo