ढलता जीवन

जो आज को मोड फिर कल बना दूँ,
बहती नदिया चली जिस छोर,
विपरीत उसके बहाव चला दूँ,
टूटे तारों को फिर से जोड़,
नक्षत्र मंडली आबाद करा दूँ,
तो भी क्या है.

चल पड़ी जिस ओर समय की राह,
मन, मंजिल, राही भी चले हैं उसी प्रवाह,
मुरझाये पत्तों से खिला बागान,
क्यों रूखे मन को लुभाएगा,
विज्ञान का यह समय-यंत्र,
क्यों बीते कल को वापस लाएगा.

उम्र बीती है,
संगणक बक्से का कोई खेल नहीं है,
यादों की बरिश की झंकार,
तूफ़ान की गरज बन चुकी है,
बटन दबाते फिर हो जाए स्टार्ट,
कल और आज का ऐसा मेल नहीं है.

इस मार्ग के अनुरक्षक तुम राही,
तम, ताप, वर्षा, शिशिर हैं सहचर,
लिखे पन्नों पर सूख चुकी है सियाही,
नये पृष्ठ पर नयी कल्पना साकार करो,
जो गरजे बादल तुम पर,
तुम भी भीषण हुंकार भरो.

हर साल जलती होली की जय-जयकार करो,
काल की रचना के हर पल का त्यौहार करो,
हर चुनौती पर हंस कर गहरी सांस भरो,
रात के दृष्ट अँधेरे का अपने तेज से नाश करो,
समय के वेग से तेज अपनी धार करो,
जीवन के उल्लास से मृत्यु को लाचार करो.

Thoughts after Sri Lanka Blasts

The cowardly, heinous and terrible attack on Sri-Lankan people on 21st April 2019 have come in the wake of growing extremism around the world. I was cut-off from most of the outside world in the islands of Andaman when the attacks took place. When I first got to know about the attack late in the evening of 21st after returning from Havelock to Port Blair, the shock of the news laid heavy on me. It is indeed true that the closer a tragedy is to us geographically, the greater its impact on the mind is. Sri-Lanka being a close neighbor to India- and to me personally in Bengaluru, has always held a special place of of tranquility in the mind. It has always appeared to be a peaceful tropical island with not many enemies in the outside world.

Some two years ago, while the unrest in Myanmar on Rohingya crisis was gaining ground and burning large parts of western province of Rakhine, there were incidents of communal unrest in Sri Lanka. The Buddhist majority state practices the Theravada form of Buddhism and grants special status to the Buddhist religion. Communal tension and internal civil war with the Tamil separatists has always kept the people of the island under duress and cultural stress. While the Tamil rights and their integration into mainstream political discourse in Srilanka remains a work in progress, the recent upsurge of anti-islamist group and sentiments has been a cause of concern. Riots between traditionally peaceful groups of Sinhalese and Muslims have become very common in recent years.

It would, however, be unfair to completely attribute the latest terrorist attack to cultural challenges that face the people of Srilanka today. Even more so, since as of 23rd of April, the government of Srilanka is claiming that the attacks were a response to the Christchurch mosque shooting. If the investigations ascertain this claim, it would set  a new precedent of revenge attacks in the world. While the western world has been seen as continuum by the Islamist forces in the past the obvious correlation was seen of cultural homogeneity of the west and revenge of one country’s misadventures has been taken on innocent people of another country, this precedence has not been seen in the east. The cultural differences between New Zealand and Srilanka are so huge that killing innocent Christians gathered for a Sunday Easter mass in retribution for lone wolf attack in some far off island down under seems unfathomable.

Another view dominating the discourse on the preparator of the attack and the rise of islamist extremism in Srilanka is that of decline of ISIS. The defeated warriors of the Islamic State have started returning to their home countries and as history has shown, terrorism keeps changing name while retaining its essential characteristic. If these returning youth with mental states out of frequency with the local population go un-noticed under the nose of the administration, there is a high risk of them taking the extremists ways in their home countries.

While Sri Lanka and the rest of the subcontinent mourns the death of innocent civilians today- these timeless societies need an impartial introspection. The civilization problems can’t be brushed under the carpet. The discussion on terrorism and religious extremism must be discussed maturely, sincerely and in openly in public. That’s the only way to defeat cultural hatred and xenophobia.

रंगमंच

के ये जो शोर मचा है गलियों में, इस भोर,
ये जो जुलूस निकला है खूनियों का घनघोर ,
ये जो चहक है चीखों की-कच्छ के वीराने को भेदती,
किसने छेड़ी ये राग,
किसने थामी इस बार,
कठ्पुतलियों की डोर?

 

Are we living a Simulation

Found this comment on Youtube by a user called camelCased really mind fucking. Thought I should  share…

I’m a programmer and all these seemingly philosophical questions “does stuff exist when nobody looks at it?” and “does particle obtain real properties only when we measure them?” really, I mean REALLY remind me of how computer 3D game engines work. In a multiplayer 3D game you have a server which stores game world data and rules. These are essentially just numeric values for some properties of game stuff. Server DOES NOT render any stuff and it even does not process physics rules in game regions when nobody has been logged in. Still, it might run some game logic rules to ensure that some game character properties change even when nobody is looking at them, e.g. aging of game characters, earning money from game deposits in game banks etc. When somebody logs in, fun begins. On the player’s computer a client program gets launched. It downloads deterministic data from the server (“this house should be here because it was there last time, and we want a consistent game not some crazy world, right?”) and resources (textures, 3D models etc.). But if we had enough powerful computers, the client could theoretically generate everything from some “game stuff particles” or using some mathematical functions. Actually, there have been some games with so called procedural graphics but they were pain in the ass to create, thus mainstream game engines prefer to do it the old way with pre-created 3D stuff. So, I’ve logged in and I’m in the game world now. Does all the stuff in the world have to be created and rendered for me? Ohh, that would be such a heavy task for my computer to handle. It’s much easier to cheat and render only the stuff that I look at. Don’t understand me wrong – the stuff I don’t see does not disappear, it still exists in the informational level on the server, it just isn’t rendered for the observer. Actually, in some games if you move through the game world too fast, you might notice that some suff just pops right in front of your eyes – houses, trees. That’s because of lazy-loading issues – the stuff gets loaded only at the last moment when you request it, and sometimes it might be too late. Blame game engine designers for that. Or maybe you need a faster computer.  Now let’s get deeper into this. There is one more exciting thing. The game stuff has multiple levels – so called levels-of-detail. It reminds me the real world with molecules, atoms and subatomic particles. If you are far from some guy in the game, a simplified model of the guy is rendered for you to preserve computer resources. For example, the model might be such that the guy has no nose and no lips, but you don’t care – you are far from him and for you the guy seems real and OK. When you come closer, your application thinks – oh, he’s dangerously close. “I should load the next level-of-detail now – the one with nose and lips and brows and nice smooth skin”. Does it remind anything quantum to you? No? Then let’s pretend, that you can somehow cheat the game and get real close the very last level-of-detail, closer than developers have expected. You look at someone’s skin. It’s blurry and uncertain like an interference pattern. Yeah, the difference from the quantum world is that in a 3D game the skin texture still has predefined pixels, although they are blurred.  But let’s pretend that we have a game which creates stuff from particles instead of pre-created models, and you’ve reached the last level-of-details through some cheating (hacked in-game microscope maybe?). The game would be very reluctant to render any real properties – it would still try to be uncertain and blurry to preserve computing resources, and only if you do some tricky experiments which could potentially put the game in the danger of inconsistency, then the game engine would give up and render the requested level-of-detail for you. Essentially, here’s how a “quantum game engine” would work with its level-of-details. “Oh, man, you were not supposed to see atoms of the skin of this guy. I don’t even know where the electron you asked for is located exactly. Hmm, ok, I’ll launch my random generator and adjust some probabilities to make it seem more real but I won’t do in-depth calculations … here you go, have an electron and shut up. What? You are tearing this electron out of the guy’s nose and trying to run it through slits? Fine. I said, I don’t know where this electron was and how exactly should it behave in this situation, so maybe it will go through that slit… or not. Here you go, an interference pattern. What now? Oh, you put that detector in there… now I have to calculate the exact position of this particle. But don’t even ask for other properties, I don’t have time for that… Oh no. You’ve got the quantum eraser. But I’m still doing my lazy loading. I won’t calculate properties of the particle if I can do just fine without them. If you think you erased a property before looking at the results, then you’re wrong – I didn’t even calculate the property, so you actually did not have anything to “erase”. Oh, you think you did a measurement because the detector was turned on? Ha! The detector is made of the game stuff so I don’t have to calculate its actions if you “erase” the results before acknowledging them, got it? And don’t even think about retrocausality – I don’t have time for time paradoxes, and as I said, I didn’t somehow magically change the property back in time, the property just didn’t have any value at that point but I pretended that it did because you forced me to do so with your experiments. What about quantum entanglement? I call it lazy-loading or load-on-demand. When Alice requests a property, I’ll render it, and also render it for Bob to make the results as consistent as possible, but don’t be surprised if it doesn’t turn out as you’d expect – as I said, I’ll render only the property you asked for and no other properties – I’m trying to efficient with my calculation resources here. Space? Information moving faster than the speed of light? Comon, location is just a number, I can change a property of a particle no matter how far it is. This is how I work at this level.” Ok, enough from me, I guess you got the idea – I’m a fan of some simulation theory 😀  I’ve heard about digital physics by Nick Bostrom and Ed Fredkin but I’m not sure if they are talking about the same things as I did.

 

There is one more thing which is somewhat hard to conceptually grasp at first, and I admit, for me also it was hard until I learned to think about information as being primary and all physical being secondary. So, it is not that your hand disappears when nobody is watching it. You have to take into account not only watching but also any other perception and awareness of your hand or any other physical object. Thus, when you are not watching, it is only visual part of information which is no more being rendered. You still receive all the other information aspects about your hand – touch, weight, smell. In the “lazy rendering” reality, your hand does not consist of molecules as long as you don’t take a microscope to find a molecule – only at that moment molecules are rendered. If someone robs a bank, then the robber will know it, hence the information about the robbery will get fixed into our physical world, and thus the money will be gone from the bank. But let’s say, the robber managed to rob a bank and no-one knew about it, but then on his way home his car exploded and everything burned down. So from that moment, there is no more any source of conscious observer in our reality, who knew that there was robbery. Now the simulation is free to do as it wishes – to restore the amount of money in the bank as if robbery never happened or to leave it as it is now. Another way to think about is as you think about dreams. Consider our reality to be a shared, highly stabilized but still dream-like. If you have experienced vivid dreams – or even lucid, controllable dreams – you will know that in a dream things seem to materialize from nowhere as soon as you think about them and go away as soon as you forget. In a dream you might think about a library and suddenly it will “materialize” around you. You can take a book and open it, and you’ll see how the text in the book is being created on the fly. As dreaming consciousness is very confused, most probably the text in the book will change each time you look at it. It’s as if your subconscious “dream machine” is some kind of “probability computer” which computes what is the probability for you to see some specific text, based on multiple probability variables – your current emotions, your past experience. And this dream book does not consist of atoms. It’s easy to accept this idea, because we intuitively know that dreams are just illusion, so it is logically that there exists only what we see (and don’t forget other sensory inputs – feel, touch, hear, smell, taste) but everything else does not exist. But imagine, that in your dream you have a super microscope (everything is possible in dreams) which is capable of showing you atoms of the book. When you use this microscope, your subconscious “dream machine” will be forced to create and show you the atoms of the book because you really expected them to see there, and that’s how dream mechanics work – it cannot avoid creating information which you expect to receive. So, now you have a bunch of dream atoms in front of your eyes. But does that mean the dream book always really consists of dream atoms? Of course not. It consists of atoms only when you – the only observer of your dream – expect to experience the atoms. The more stable is your consciousness during the dream, the more stable will be the world, but at some point your consciousness will take over and the dream will fade away and you’ll wake up in the real world where things are real and consist of real atoms even when nobody is looking (touching, listening, smelling) them. But is this world that real? Is there even possible to prove that it’s not real if it tries to match your (and millions of other people) expectations every second, but everything beyond these expectations is in some virtual probability state? Still, there is this disturbing question – if our real world is capable to pretend to be so real, then why it fails to do so in atomic level? Maybe it’s so on purpose, to give us a chance to think about such crazy ideas. But maybe it’s some limitation of the “reality computer” and it starts to give up on such low scale. It’s like texture blur and pixelation in old games – everything looks nice from a distance, but if you happen to move really close – closer than the game developer intended – you’ll see textures getting blurry and pixelated. Maybe atoms are pixels of our physical part of reality, but as they are being rendered on the fly (thing about procedural content generation in games), they are mostly remaining in probability states unless explicitly asked to become more real.

The problem with the simulation theory is “Pi”. How would a finite simulator include an infinite irrational number in it. as long as we do not ask the simulation to retrieve X digits of Pi ( where X is larger than the capabilities of the simulator itself), we are good. But to reach that limit we would have to create our own calculator that reaches at least the power of the “reality calculator” itself. I guess, it should be impossible to do that – the number of available digits of Pi in the “reality calculator” might be that large that we would need to use all the physical matter in the Universe to store the previously calculated digits, which means that we ourselves should also go extinct (because we’d have to use our own atoms to store the calculation results), in which case the “reality calculator” could say: “Finally, I can stop calculating that stupid Pi because the conscious observers who requested it have gone for good. Request for Pi was aborted.”

Are you one of us

Growing individualism is a sign of growth in the modern world. An oversized house, an opulent  SUV in city traffic, a taste of art different from all other. Individualism signifies a social order which allows diversity to exist under a common rule of law. A big feat for humankind. What is often forgotten in the victory ballads of individualism, however, is the forced slavery to the idea of “good life” it creates.

In an unforgiving world where your mistakes define you, individualism has left a burgeoning death toll in its wake. While those at top tout the merits of self-ism, the race to pinnacle leaves many exhausted. The promised “good-life” has a dark underbelly that never surfaces in the glittery halls of media. It is sometimes written in the biographies of suicidal comics, the loner ascetics that chased the mirage. Sooner or later, the race of individualism either breaks down the individual or makes him the cause of disenchantment for thousands.

Humans society did not progress on the war cry of the irrational few. The movements, reforms and revolutions that brought us to the present are witness to countless men and women of valour who believed in an idea more than a person. Gandhi was not bigger than his cause, nor was Krishna greater than his teachings. Historians may have deified personalities for convenience of intellectual preaching and embedded it in the minds of the generations to come, the will of the people and their devotion to the idea always trumps the leader. The leader then, is just a symbol of the public will. He derives power from them. The charisma he commands is a reflection of the brightness that glows through society at such times.

Ours is a movement without leaders, without a name and without a holy book. The values of our people shine through the eyes of each of our members. The world will see a new dawn- a world imagined by many but one that existed never before.

A drop of music

It is one of those moments of deep joy. Those fragments of time that are covered in darkness. In quiet music. A lonely night under the clouds masks this dance of victory in a sleepy apartment of a busy city — tired from the day’s run.

What is it about wordless music that touches so deep a chord in our hearts. The memories that awaken, the sadness mixed in past visions, the people that we care for, all canvassed into a painting of fulfillment. Tonight, after a long time I rediscover the power of music on mind.

Drunken confidence is  overpowering and self-affirming.  So it is with music- once you let it touch you. You wish to be at its command- crying, laughing, wallowing in its joy.

No More Revolutions?

The age of social revolution that brought us into the 21st century – the struggles that human endeavor overcame since Industrial Revolution- seems to have passed us. We seem to live in a state of ‘no-more-sorrow’ today where luxury for all has become the drive of governments in the western world. This condition of society , however, makes one wonder of the possibility of social revolutions in modern world of the kind that uplifted a huge population into political consciousness.

The comparison that comes to mind when one sees a peaceful society are the opium wars in China. While the populace is blissfully unaware of their own sufferings, the institutions in power carryout a dirty war for control over trade. In such a setting of mist and sedation, it is difficult for a people led revolution to gain strength. The local population is usually awakened by an outsider as was in case of Indian Freedom Struggle- where most of Indian leaders were educated in western ways of life and were hence able to demand the same for their Indian kin. Another factor that is important in any social movement against the establishment is the feeling of actual repression by the people. A people that actually feel threatened by the state in their basic rights will find ways of countering any power no matter how insurmountable it may appear. The state itself is aware of it and therefore it provides institutions to channel and address the grievances of its people. Democratic societies of modern age have been successful in providing important institutions to address these concerns to a large extent and that has seen a large number of people that feel integrated into the ideas of nationhood. In a successful state administration, the feeling of alienation should be minimal and the faith in institutions must largely be strong throughout people of all strata.

The recent emergence of technology however, has given a different flavor to our established notions of power distribution socially and representation of political aspirations through elections. On the one hand- technology has in many ways allowed inter communication and facilitated organized voicing of common concerns by people that were before this unheard. It has given a vent to their everyday frustrations and debates between strangers often end up clarifying rather than usurping each other’s stand and meeting a common ground. On the other hand, the ownership of technology makes it difficult to trust it in times of actual social/ human crisis. Since the media and internet are in almost total control of governments and large corporate houses that have a stake in stability of the existing socio-economy, the ideas that are allowed to reach the common citizen and, certainly more dangerously, her own ideas that are disallowed to be spread through censorship may put reasonable doubt against technology .

The recent so-called revolution of Arab Spring are a case in hand. The lack of social institutions in the Arab world gave rise to popular discontent that brought people together through technology that actively supported voicing of concerns. But the way the events unfolded hereafter put major question mark on the people driven nature of the movement. There was little that the people gathered in Tahrir square did. While the camps and crowds did protest for months, the actual game of power struggle and, thereafter, power transfer was played by world powers. In the end, the “social movement” didn’t perhaps deliver what the people actually wanted. It mostly established puppet governments as a temporary solution to satisfy the people and powers that be.

 

Development of democratic institutions will define the stability of societies in times to come. How successfully a government is able to address the aspirations of its people is dependent on how inclusive the people feel inside the boundaries. Technology in that way could be seen as an institution as well- though not controlled by the government. It is a kind of rebel institution where ideologies are introduced to people. It also allows people to voice their opinions and maintain calmness when they lose sense of belonging and associate with like minded groups. Going forward, the control of internet will define its status as a mere communication and knowledge platform versus a potential tool for social revolutions. The odds today are greatly with status-quo.

Timeless History

Which histories are more difficult to write? While the lack of reliable sources plagues our explorations of the ancient pasts, the present is troubled by an overload of information surrounded by a political environment that has embraced the historian just as much as it has the reader. Also lingering is the unsolved questions for which any historian will have to resort to her moral/political judgement. What Nehru writes in his books, in the given political scenario of his time, is markedly different from what the imperial historians or the modern day historians will write of the ancient Indian civilisation.  In historical writings of more recent phases (such as the freedom struggle)- which bear a great weightage on any nation state- the challenge is even greater since the political environment is much charged up, and the rulers define what questions are legitimate.

During my college years, I had practiced the old saying- just learn your lessons from history without glorifying it. While I do largely agree to it, my recent readings of history have made me a little skeptical of lessons learned. Often what is taught as history is some person’s wet dream. Even the ancient past, that looks so far away from us that in our beliefs it could not possible touch us, haunts us through it murky ghosts. The nature of Hindu society, the Hindu-Muslim relations, and the status of Shudra in Varna system being some of the questions that need a modern political solution than the tainted justifications by historians.

The Aryans of early Vedic years were largely a pastoral people and gave little value to dates. Perhaps they knew of the futility of keeping record when men made the same mistakes in every day and age. Perhaps, then, the stories and parables of the ancient kings (even though untrue) are the only useful lessons  we can draw out of our pasts, the rest is just political manifesto.