Better to be Dead than Not to Talk

The following is a passage from News of a Kidnapping, a work of non-fiction by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, about the rampant kidnappings that took place in Colombia under the patronage of Pablo Escobar of the Madelin Cartel in the 1980's and early 1990's. What interests me in the passage of the talkative and inquisitive nature of a Newspaper owner, whose desire to talk at any cost would made him live as a hostage for months!

"Four hours after the kidnapping of Marina Montoya, on a side street in the Las Ferias district to the west of Bogotá, a Jeep and a Renault 18 hemmed in the car of Francisco Santos, nicknamed Pacho, the editor in chief at El Tiempo. His vehicle looked like an ordinary red Jeep, but it had been bulletproofed at the factory, and the four assailants who surrounded it were not only carrying 9mm pistols and Mini-Uzi submachine guns equipped with silencers, but one also held a special mallet for breaking glass. None of that was necessary. Pacho, an incorrigible talker, opened the door to speak to the men. "I preferred to die rather than not know what was going on," he has said. One of his abductors immobilized him with a pistol to the forehead and forced him to get out of the car with his head lowered. Another opened the front door and fired three shots: One hit the windshield, and two shattered the skull of Oromansio Ibáñez, the thirty-eight-year-old driver. Pacho was not aware of what had happened. Days later, as he was thinking about the attack, he recalled hearing the whine of three bullets muffled by the silencer."

I don't know if that was what exactly happened. Definitely, Gabo did not witness the incident himself. And going by his record of colorful journalism, it's always difficult to separate the fact from the fiction in his reporting. But as a talkative man myself, I've always been thrilled by the idea contained in the above passage. It's nice to know of a man who would talk at any cost, inculding when someone is pointing a sub-machine gun at him.

But then when it is Marquez, most of the things are exciting. Even the story of how he wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude, his magnum opus, is interesting to read.

I DIRECTLY quote the whole of the following passages from TheModernWord.com.

"And then it happened: his epiphany. On January 1965 he and his family were driving to Acapulco for a vacation, when inspiration suddenly struck him: he had found his tone. For the first time in twenty years, a stroke of lightning clearly revealed the voice of Macondo. He would later write:

"All of a sudden -- I don't know why -- I had this illumination on how to write the book.... I had it so completely formed, that right there I could have dictated the first chapter word by word to a typist."

And later, regarding that illumination:

"The tone that I eventually used in One Hundred Years of Solitude was based on the way my grandmother used to tell stories. She told things that sounded supernatural and fantastic, but she told them with complete naturalness.... What was most important was the expression she had on her face. She did not change her expression at all when telling her stories and everyone was surprised. In previous attempts to write, I tried to tell the story without believing in it. I discovered that what I had to do was believe in them myself and write them with the same expression with which my grandmother told them: with a brick face."

He turned the car immediately around and headed home. There, he put Mercedes in charge of the family, and he retired to his room to write. And write he did. He wrote every day for eighteen months, consuming up to six packs of cigarettes a day. To provide for the family, the car was sold, and almost every household appliance was pawned so Mercedes could feed the family and keep him supplied with a constant river of paper and cigarettes. His friends started to call his smoke-filled room "the Cave of the Mafia," and after a while the whole community began helping out, as if they collectively understood that he was creating something remarkable. Credit was extended, appliances loaned, debts forgiven.

After nearly a year of work, García Márquez sent the first three chapters to Carlos Fuentes, who publicly declared: "I have just read eighty pages from a master." Towards the end of the novel, as yet unnamed, anticipation grew, and the buzz of success was in the air. As finishing touches, he placed himself, his wife, and his friends in the novel, and then discovered a name on the last page: Cien años de soledad. Finally he emerged from the Cave, grasping thirteen hundred pages in his hands, exhausted and almost poisoned from nicotine, over ten thousand dollars in debt, and perhaps only a few pages shy of a mental and physical breakdown. And yet, he was happy -- indeed, euphoric. In need of postage, he pawned a few more household implements and sent it off to the publisher in Buenos Aires.

One Hundred Years of Solitude was published in June 1967, and within a week all 8000 copies were gone. From that point on, success was assured, and the novel sold out a new printing each week, going on to sell half a million copies within three years. It was translated into over two dozen languages, and it won four international prizes. Success had come at last. Gabriel García Márquez was 39 years old when the world first learned his name.

Suddenly he was beset by fame. Fan mail, awards, interviews, appearances -- it was obvious that his life had changed. In 1969, the novel won the Chianchiano Prize in Italy and was named the Best Foreign Book in France. In 1970, it was published in English and was chosen as one of the best twelve books of the year in the United States. Two years later he was awarded the Rómulo Gallegos Prize and the Neustadt Prize, and in 1971, a Peruvian writer named Mario Vargas Llosa even published a book about his life and work. To counter all this exposure, García Márquez simply returned to writing. Deciding that he would write about a dictator, he moved his family to Barcelona, Spain, which was spending its last years under the boot of Francisco Franco. There he labored on his next novel, creating a composite monster, a Caribbean dictator with Stalin's smooth hands and the solipsistic will of an archetypical Latin American tyrant. In the meantime, Innocent Eréndira and Other Stories was published in 1972, and in 1973 he put out a collection of his journalistic work from the late fifties, Cuando era feliz e indocumentado, or "When I Was Happy and Uninformed."

Interesting, isn't it?
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Sources:
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/m/marquez-kidnapping.html?oref=login
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/m/marquez-kidnapping.html
http://www.themodernword.com/gabo/gabo_power.html
http://www.themodernword.com/gabo/gabo_biography.html

The Hill of the Dead

During my late childhood and the early teen, my introduction to the World Literature happened through a series of essays written by a very well-read journalist and literary figure in my language. Later, I found many of my smart friends criticising him on the ground that he often did not have much to say of his own, which was true. Even his novels and stories would often drift away to talk about some author (otheriwse unknown and unheard of in my part of world) or his/her work. It was through his works that I came to know about Jorge Luis Borges, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, existentialism, Simone de what's-her-name and many others, and I've forever remained grateful to him for that.

It was through his essay that I came to know about Edgar Lee Masters and Spoon River Anthology. In one of his books (a collection of his essays), this person from my state printed a translation of the poem entitled, The Hill. That was almost 20 years ago; but I still remember the excitement and the depression I felt after reading the poem. Needless to say that, I bought Spoon River Anthology the first time I saw it in a shelf.

Yesterday, I was talking to my brother, and as a part of his usual updates, he told me about the death of 7 different persons in my locality within a couple of weeks, an incident which had brought back to me the memory of my reading The Hill for the first time. Here's the text:

The Hill

WHERE are Elmer, Herman, Bert, Tom and Charley,
The weak of will, the strong of arm, the clown, the boozer, the fighter?
All, all, are sleeping on the hill.
One passed in a fever,
One was burned in a mine,
One was killed in a brawl,
One died in a jail,
One fell from a bridge toiling for children and wife—
All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.
Where are Ella, Kate, Mag, Lizzie and Edith,
The tender heart, the simple soul, the loud, the proud, the happy one?—
All, all, are sleeping on the hill.
One died in shameful child-birth,
One of a thwarted love,
One at the hands of a brute in a brothel,
One of a broken pride, in the search for heart’s desire,
One after life in far-away London and Paris
Was brought to her little space by Ella and Kate and Mag—
All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.
Where are Uncle Isaac and Aunt Emily,
And old Towny Kincaid and Sevigne Houghton,
And Major Walker who had talked
With venerable men of the revolution?—
All, all, are sleeping on the hill.
They brought them dead sons from the war,
And daughters whom life had crushed,
And their children fatherless, crying—
All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.
Where is Old Fiddler Jones
Who played with life all his ninety years,
Braving the sleet with bared breast,
Drinking, rioting, thinking neither of wife nor kin,
Nor gold, nor love, nor heaven?
Lo! he babbles of the fish-frys of long ago,
Of the horse-races of long ago at Clary’s Grove,
Of what Abe Lincoln said
One time at Springfield.

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Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_River_Anthology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Lee_Masters
http://www.bartleby.com/84/1.html

Diogenes contra Abrenuncio de Sa Pereira Cao

Two persons from the 4th century B.C. have startled and impressed me: one of them Indian, the other Greek. Both of them were banished from their own land, both of them were scholarly, extremely honest, astute people, and were totally averse to material comforts or greed. The path of each of them crossed with that of Alexander. Both of them rejected Alexander: the aim of life for one of them was to kick the Greeks out of India, while the other, on being asked by Alexander, "I'm Alexander; what can I do for you?" replied, "Please stand aside; you're blocking the sun." One them was extremely cunning, strategic and revengeful; the other was totaly detached to his surroundings. Both were selfless.

They were Vishnugupta (Chanakya) and Diogenes respectively.

Diogenes was an interesting character. He probably initiated the trend of philosophy known as cynicism, the word cynic derived from canine (dog). He insisted on living like a dog on leftovers, wearing rags and carrying the pursuit of knowledge and truth. He was a man about whom Alexander said, "If I were not alexander, I would have been Diogenes." There is even a myth that both of them died on the exact same day: one 33, the other 90! Another legend says that Socrates died on Diogenes' birthday, though some say that Diogenes was born in 412 B.C. and not in 399 B.C., the year in which Socrates died.

In contrast to the other citizens of Athens, Diogenes renounced all earthly pleasures to express his disdain for the folly, pretence, vanity, social climbing, self-deception, and artificiality of much human conduct. He used to stroll carrying a torch during broad daylight, claiming that he was looking for an honest man. According to another account, Alexander found him rummaging through a pile of human bones, an act he explained as, "I am searching for the bones of your father, but cannot distinguish them from those of a slave."

Abrenuncio de Sa Pereira Cao, on the other hand, is a character from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Of Love and Other Demons. The word, Cao, in Spanish, means dog. As explained below:

"He spurns as well the counsel of the freethinking Portuguese Jewish physician, Abrenuncio de Sa Pereira Cao (some dog there, too), who reads books prohibited by the Holy Office, plays the harp to sedate his patients and warns Ygnacio that liverwort, cinnabar, musk, silver mercury, even anagallis flore purpureo will be unavailing: "No medicine cures what happiness cannot"."

Anyone who has read the above book, will notice that Abrenuncio is the only sane character in the entire book. While unlike Diogenes he is not averse to material comforts, he is nevertheless stoic about his physical desires, as is evident when he says, “Sex is a talent, and I do not have it.” It's interesting to note that he's a very good doctor and he knows his job, and the Church actually believes that he can bring people back from death and, thus considers him to be anti-Christ. He's a wise man. He reads voraciously and yet says: "Books are worthless. Life has helped me to cure diseases that other doctors cause with their medicines."

I don't know why, but every time I think of Abrenuncio, I'm reminded of Diogenes, or vice versa.
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Source: http://www.nationarchive.com/Summaries/v260i0023_14.htm
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/articles/051107crbo_books1
http://www.benbest.com/philo/diogenes.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes_of_Sinope
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chanakya
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/15/reviews/marquez-demons.html
http://endeavor.med.nyu.edu/lit-med/lit-med-db/webdocs/webdescrips/garcia.marquez12284-des-.html

In Praise of Ignorance

Anyone who has read In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell, would instantly know that my title is not an original idea (but how many of my titles are my own, anyway?). I read that book about 15 years ago or so, during a phase when I was still trying (or at least, be able to pretend) to be an intellectual. I would quote big guys, and throw their names here and there. It would take me years and the meeting a particular person, whose words would make me realize that most of us who proclaim our love of philosophy actually do so only because philosophy allows us to satisfy our ego by letting all of us think that the view of each of us is equally correct!

It will take me another decade, and the association with a Dutch person (who by then had alreaqdy made a French, card-carrying intellectual read other stuff) that would tell me that I'm as far as from being an intellectual as I 'm from being Rockefeller. He would lend me non-intellectual books to read, and I would slowly deintellectualize myself, and finally one day I would look at my eyes and tell mydself without fear that I was not an intellectual.

However, in spite of that, I already got into the habit of picking up unnecessary, useless information over the years. I continue to do so, and that's what makes me the loser that I'm. Let me explain in it the following paragraphs.

The other day, I went to a dinner party. I won't go into the details. But all I will say is that, when you arrive there, they paste a paper with a person's name on your back, and you need to ask them questions and based on their answers, you should tell them who that person is.

I was in a good mood. It was a saturday evening; there was enough wine for all of us. And so I wanted to play around. I asked them if there was any limit on the number of questions that I could ask. They said, "No", but some of their faces failed to hide the fact that they already felt that I was a jerk. I then made another wrong move; I tried to make a joke by asking "Is he or she a male?" They laughed like hell, and repeated this phrase to one another.

(About a decade ago, when I newly arrived at a University campus, I was the odd man out to many of the local guys. Within a few weeks, I had to attend a cultural evening. After a performance of a mime skit there, the guy sitting next to me, a man with reasonable amount of all-knowing air turned to me and asked, "Hey, how did you like the skit?" I remembered Anrie, who said "If you need to lie, look straight into your victim's eyes", and so I looked into his eyes, maintained a dull face and replied, "It must be good; but, sorry, I don't understand Tamil". My answer made him go ballistic; he immediately repeated my answer to all his friends, turned to me and shouted, "What is this, you stupid fellow? This is mime; there is no dialogue!" Of course, I maintained my look and repeated, "But I don't understand Tamil!")

They told me that this was a famous person, about whom a movie was recently made. I guessed it must be Truman Capote and answered accordingly. They burst out into laughter, and one of the all-knowing wise guys asked me why I made up a name. I tried to reason it out with him, and then another all-knowing guy commented that he never heard this name. I mentioned, Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood and the point that he was Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird; but going by their expressions, I was sure that I was the wrong man at the wrong place.

They repeated that a movie was made about him recently. So, this time I opted for Kinsey, and asked them if the guy in question carried out research on sexual habits. They roared in laughter, and the first wise guy asked me, "Man, where do you get such info?"

(Now looking back, I can see that, for him, it was very obvious that I was a jerk, because he failed to see the fact that while he could read the name on my back, I could not! It's similar to what happens in all many of the interpersonal relationships: people often don't open up, and yet they expect their partner or the other people to understand them and their feelings, which is a totally wrong approach and which ruins everything.).

I sheepishly told him that I thought the guy was Kinsey. Our second wise friend again told me that he never heard this name; but a lady who was present there, saved my skin by saying that she heard this name. Thank God!

It was too much for them, and so they decided to give me hints: "He traveled across the world and his name was assocaited with horses". My first choice would have been Howard Hughes (though I don't know if he was linked to horses), on whom Martin Scorsese recently made Aviator; but I wanted to pull their leg, and so rather decided to answer "Alexander".

Lo and behold! That was the correct answer, after all. They even appreciated my "intelligence".

Later on, when they would throw hints at a girl who needed to guess Cleopatra, and I mentioned that she used to take bath in donkey milk, the first wise guy said to the rest, "Listen to his specifications; donkey milk!!". All laughed.

At that point I snapped off; I retored,."You cannot hold me responsible for your ingornace; go read or check in the internet, and if you can, prove any of my statements wrong." This didn't make things any better either, except for the fact that they were now even more amused with my lunacy.

Later the first wise guy's clue to someone about Julius Caesar was: He lived in the 3rd century B.C. When I pointed out that it was 1st century B.C., he accepted his mistake by saying, "Sorry, it was your guy, Alexander, who lived in the 3rd century B.C." I again corrected him by telling that he was wrong once more, because Alexander ruled in the 4th century B.C. and he died in 323 B.C.

They were not amused!

What does this show? Does it show that I'm smart? NO! All it shows is that I have lot of useless information and, I'm a total bore when it comes to people of the younger generation.

I know, my fate is sealed!

On Why Knowing is Counterproductive...

I often find the story of Adam and Eve fascinating. Growing up in a society with strong feelings of religious affiliation and in the shadow of a benevolent god, I could never surmise why God would banish someone from heaven for acquiring knowledge. Especually when we even have a Goddess of knowledge in our religion.

It was much later that I would learn why the name of the Hindu Goddess of knowledge is the same as that of a (at present non-existent) river, on whose banks civilization grew and flourished a few thousand years ago. That is one of the factors, which taught me about how much devotion this group of nomads had towards their environment, their trees, their earth (One of the oldest scriptures pays tribute to a God, who is present in fire,water,the enviroment and the trees.). I would also learn that my ancient religion demands of me do anything that shows my affiliation to it, and yet regain my claim over it. It would also teach me that a religion that allows almost anything and everything, and lets almost any kind of faith system starting from atheism to polyethism through monoethism, would survive any external onslaught.

However, I had of my own analysis found a reason as to why gaining knowledge leads to banishment from heaven, and that's what is this blog about.

The point is: majority of the people we meet in life are ignorant and, by dint of that virtue they lead a blissful life. As long as one does not have to question esablished norms and logics, one is happy and that comes, to a large extent, from pure ignorance. (This ignorance is not a static quality, but rather a dynamic one. Thus, depending on where one stands, the set of people that appears ignorant would vary. That is to say, to a bookish and informative person, people who don't read a thing may appear ignorant, whereas for a person completely into fashion, a different set of people will appear to be ignorant fools.)

Interestingly, most of the people don't give a damn about issues that do not directly concern them and, so, they lead a very contended life! Thus, for a well-read and informative person, it's difficult to connect to the people around him, because not only they cannot guess what he's talking about, but also that he is totally ignorant of their outlook, opinions and issues that interest them. He proves himself to be a bore to the bone to all the hip people, and he becomes someone avoidable. Eventaully he finds himself alone in his own company, condemned to solitude.

And I think, the above banishment that one faces by knowing more than is necessary to survive, is (metaphorically) the expulsion from the heaven, with which one is punished for eating fruits from the widsom tree.

No History No Cry!* (A Tale of Small Feet and Long Beard)

Does history tell us the truth? Are the people who chronicle history unbiased? Does history help us to develop a rational, logical view of the world? These thoughts come to me whenever I read something related to the past, or each time I read an article that refutes something history had taught us to be true.

As someone once said: history is written by the winner. As I see it, the person writing history - by virtue of his being the winner - can take liberty with the truth, and interpret and chronicle it in anyway he wants.

Let me talk about two specific examples, two persons villified by history to the maximum extent. The first of these persons was a Roman kid from the 1st Century A.D., who grew up with the military, and who used to wear milliary boots and take part in parades. His antics led the military guys to name him "Small Boot". On a later day, he would be the Roman Emperor, finally to be assassinated by his own guards at the age of 29! He was Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus, better known as Caligula, Greek for "Small Boot"

Stories are abundant about Caligula's insanity. History tells us that Caligula used to sleep with his own sister, Drussila. It also tells that Caligula elected his stallion, Incitatus, to be a consul. But are such stories true?

While most present day historians accept that fact the Caligula suffered from serious mental illness after he seriously fell sick, many of these stories are not true.

to be written....

*No History, No Cry was the title of an article by Vir Sanghvi, where he discussed how, according to V. S. Naipaul, the whole Rastafarian Movemernt was a British invention to involve Jamaica in a war that didn't concern them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caligula

The Looney Tune of Tompkins

He applied Quantum Mechanics to solve the problem of Nuclear Structure. He made fundamental contribtution in the fields of Physics and Astronomy (Cosmology), Chemistry (Stellar Nucleosynthesis) and Genetics. After the discovery of the structure of DNA by Watson and Crick, he realized that the sequence of nucleotides formed a code; hence the name Codon. He did pioneering work on RNA. Watson's "Genes, Girls and Gamow" pays tribute to his work and to his influence on him and other workers. He was the first to propose the Big Bang theory. He explained the radioactive decay of atoms and used the theory on the explosive beginning of the universe. He predicted the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. He also wrote a number of books to popularize science. And in spite of all these, the Nobel Prize eluded him.

A man who never took himself very seriously, he once submitted a paper with Hans Bethe's name in it, so that the authors would sound like Alpha, Beta, Gamma. He had no problem sharing his credit with others.

He submitted a paper to the scientific journal Nature (unless I'm mistaken) with CGH Tompkins, an imaginary character from his books, as a co-author. (Nature asked him to remove the name of Tompkins.)

A bronze plaque on a granite boulder at the George Washington University, where he worked for long time, details the scientific and literary accomplishments, whom his good friend Edward Teller described as follows:

"He was fantastic in his ideas. He was right, he was wrong. More often wrong than right. Always interesting; ... and when his idea was not wrong it was not only right, it was new."

Not bad, especially when this is being said about a person, who had forbidden one of his students from utlizing the famous Complimentarity principle, and on being told by the student that Bohr had routinely used it while he (the professor) had always avoided using it, had quoted the famous Latin saying, "Quod licet Jovi non licet bovi" (What is permitted to Jupiter is not permitted to the ox).

He was George Gamow (1904-1968).
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Sources:
http://www.survivalafterdeath.org/articles/koestler/physics.htm
http://citeseer.csail.mit.edu/499353.html
http://www.gwu.edu/~physics/gampag.htm
http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/biography/Gamow.html
http://www.colorado.edu/physics/Web/Gamow/life.html
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9035977
http://www.gwu.edu/~physics/gwmageh.htm
http://spaceinfo.jaxa.jp/note/kagaku/e/kag10_e.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Gamow

The Velikovsky Code

The Da Vinci Code, an exciting thriller filled with stolen ideas, inaccurate (and/or false) information and wild extrapolation of "evidences" was a book that entralled millions over the globe in 2003-04. During 2004-05, I came across many people over the net, who were only extremely excited to talk about this book and discuss its contents. I tried to talk to many of them about another author who had written books on such topics way back in the 1950s, '60s and '70s; but probably most of the people I talked to considered me to be either a stupid or a spoilsport.

That person was Immanuel Velikovsky, a Russian Jewish scholar who, along with Albert Einstein, was instrumental in founding the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel in 1925. Velikovsky was a multi-faceted scholar; many of his works are, however, often refered to as "Pseudo-Science".

The first book by Velikovsky I read is, Oedipus and Akhnaton. This book caught my eyes when I was sitting in the living room of my Professor, and having nothing to do I was browsing through the book-shelf. Since the title was intriguing, I asked him if I could borrow it, which he let me do, but with a cautionary word that this person often shuffled every Archaelogical information (and thus considered irrevelant by most Archaelogists) though he was an excellent read.

Science or Pseudo-Science, this book opened my eyes to many interesting issues and many things. This book, for example, taught me that Akhnaton (Akhen Aton or Amenhotep IV) could well be the person, who introduced the concept of Mono-Atheism to (at least, his part of) the world. Interestingly, this book perhaps resulted from a paper Velikovsky had written counter Sigmund Freud's views in his paper Moses and Monotheism (and for which Velikovsky had to face a lot of brickbats!).

I also learnt from this book a feature common to many saviors or heroes: A tyrranical king, who embarks on a infanticide, following a divine prediction, to avoid danger; a child separated from his family and drifted away to a far off land for his safety; the kid's return as a grown up to his own land to educate or rule his people etc. Velikovsky mentions Jesus Christ, Oedipus and Akhnaton; but I would also like to add the name of Lord Krishna to the list.

Oedipus and Akhnaton also taught me how close the Indian culture/history was to that of the then Persia. Kings with names such as Asurabanipal and Dusaratta (Dhritarashtra?) would perhaps testify to that fact.

His book is full of parallels between the lives of Oedipus and Akhnaton. I don't know how much of these are true (for example, Velikovksy's reconstruction of Tutankhamen's murder episode is perhaps not valid anymore); but any given day, I would prefer Oedipus and Akhnaton to Da Vinci Code. I enjoyed reading Da Vinci Code, but its kind of blending is not exactly what I enjoy reading.

Hassan Ibn Sabbah: Grand Master of Assassins

Growing up in a small town in a remote part of the country, the only thing to keep oneself entertained (especially for someone shy and awkward as me) was books. And so I read books. Having a brother who read a lot, and a father, who never objected to our reading any kind of stuff, helped me to explore bookstores and books (perhaps it was ok for my mother with whatever we did, as long as we were not bothering her, or getting run over by a car or something like that!).

Added to that was the fact that back then people used to read and so there were a few very quality periodicals published in my language. There were guys writing there, who dared to be unconventional and swim against the wave. Thus at the age of 12, I learned that the whole Shivalinga episode (an insuted Shiva, metamorphising into the burning Shivalinga, and seeking to destroy the world, and a Goddess taking the same of a Yoni, and quneching Shiva's anger etc. etc.) could be nothing more than the mataphor for some Aryan community offering their girls to a non-Aryan leader or king, who went berseck after being assaulted/attacked by the Aryans, to establish peace.

At almost the same age, I also learned that in pornography everyone wants sex, and everyone is happy. It would be much later that I would read an article by Dom Moraes (perhaps in Debonair or Playboy) where he analysed the changing pattern of pornography over the decades in the context of Bill Clinton- Monica Lewinsky saga.

At that same period, I also read a biographical novel based on Omar Khayyam. Years later, after reading Rubaiyyat by Fitgerald, I would notice how this novel was more or less a translation of Rubaiyyat; but the author never claimed the novel to be his original work and so, I don't consider him a plagiarist. I rather feel obliged to him for introducing me to Omar Khayyam in a rational way. In addition to being the poet that we know him as, Omar Khayyam was also a scholar: a mathematican, and an astronomer who corrected Ptolemy's calendar, and who, inspite of making three fatallly accurate predictions, never accepted Astrology as of value. He was also a broken-hearted lover.

But I'm more grateful to our author for introducing me to another, more colorful character though his novel: Hassan Ibn Sabbah, who has been a subject of fascination to me ever since.

A classmate of Omar Khayyam and a brilliant student, Hassan Ibn Sabbah later went renegade and controlled a group of killers, who assassinated people of imporance for political reasons. He was the "First Grand Master of the Order of Assassins", as they say. The word, 'Assassin' derives from his name. Many people seem to connect 'Assassin' to 'Hashish', an intoxicant Ibn Sabbah apparently fed to his followers; but most probably this is just another Urban legend.


He taught his followers to infiltrate any organization, to deny their faith if necessary, and then to kill whoever opposed him. To most, he is a ruthless killer; but to me, he's a little more than that. If I remember correctly what I read somewhere long ago, he was more intelligent as a student than the others including Omar Khayyam; but someone fortune didn't favor him, and the resulting frustration made him the guy he would later become.

I cannot say that killing is something appreciable or, that he's my hero; but if what I just wrote is true, I feel sorry for him. And perhaps many other people, who saw people less smarter than themselves reaching higher positions, would also feel the same way for him.

However, it is not easy to tell what is truth and what is lie, when one reads about such issues. Most of the world view on Hassan Ibn Sabbah is based on Marco Polo's account, whose work I will never consider to be authentic. I read his "Travels", and his documentation is more like Antonio Pigafetta's account of the south America, where Fantasy took an unlimited flight! I would personally like to (at least partially) believe the line of argument presented in the website, http://www.inter-zone.org/hassan2.html . I will discuss why I do so, when I will write the blog about Caligula, another historical character regarding whom the fact is very difficult to separate from fiction.

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Sources:
http://www.inter-zone.org/hassan2.html
http://www.geocities.com/skews_me_too/assassin.html
http://www.alamut.com/subj/ideologies/alamut/etymolAss.html
http://www.geocities.com/skews_me/assassin.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Hassan-i-Sabah
http://www.insteadof.com/TerrorAttack/p32.htm
http://www.nndb.com/people/043/000031947/
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=Omar%20Khayyam
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=Hassan%20I%20Sabbah
http://www.ismaili.net/histoire/history06/content600.html
http://www.inter-zone.org/hassanpages.html

The Importance of Going Insane!

I first read about Vashisht Narayan Singh in 1994/95, when a National newspaper published his picture (with a dishevelled look and unkempt beard) with the headline, "Mathematics Genius Found Begging". Prof. Vashisht Narayan Singh, who had a doctorate in mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley (UCB), had disappeared in 1989 after resigning from his job at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) because it was not challenging enough for him, and was found unkempt and destitute on the streets of a Bihar town by a relative nearly three and a half years later. When I tried to do a google search with his name today, the hits that came up showed me that apparently he's still undergoing treatment for acute schizophrenia. "He has regained the ability to shave, bathe and feed himself, but they express doubt about whether he can ever regain the amazing prowess he once displayed with complex mathmatical equations."

Incidentally, 1994 was also the year, when a schizophrenic from USA was awarded the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, (popularaly, though perhaps not completely accurately, known as the Nobel Prize in Economics) based on his work on game theory, things he had done during his graduate studies. His name was John Forbes Nash.

However, I didn't know anything about Game Theory or John Nash until 1997-October, when a friend of mine who joined recently into the PhD program in Economics, and shared the same dorm as I, just for fun wanted to teach the basics of Game Theory to a non-Economics person. He was brilliant as a tutor, and he explained me in very easy terms what terms like "Prisoner's Dilemma" meant! Even today, I remember vividly his casual remark about Nash, saying that "The guy who invneted this stuff, went mad."

It was in 2002 that I watched, "A Beautiful Mind", the Hollywood version of Nash's biography, that too incidentally. What in that movie interested me most was Nash's talking to his imaginary friend and his dealings with imaginary KGB(?) agents.

Just after that, I read a translated short story by a Japanese author, whose name is something like "Nakajima Attushi". I cannot vouch for the spelling, because I read it in my mother tounge, and due to the vast difference in phonetics, one often cannot correctly transliterate a name into English (for example), unless one already knew the name in the original language. No, I did a google search now, and based on the hits, his name may be Nakajima Atsushi. I remember the author of my discussion died very young, a fact that matches with Nakajima Atsushi's!

I did some more google just now, and now I'm sure that Atsushi is the guy, because the title of the story I was going to mention would, upon loose tranliteration, be "The Expert" or "The Master", and Atsushi indeed has a story entitled so.

The story tells us about a guy, whose sole aim in life is to be the best archer in the world. To ahieve this feat, he would undertake any mission, and endure any sufferibng. But as he grows mature, he starts instrospecting his actions, and starts realizing things more clearly. And after he has really become the best archer, finally comes a day when he fails to recognize a bow placed in front of him.

This is one story that has had a lasting impression on me.

And then I read about Syd Barrett, one of the most innovative guitarists and founder of the psychodelic band, Pink Floyd. A vulnerable man with trusting nature and inability to say 'no', he was given LSD without his knowledge by so-called friends, as the book The Dark Stuff mentions. Not that he did not do drugs on his own, but either way the final outcome was that Syd Barrett ended up being a schizophrenic, who at one point failed to recognize his own composition.

Another person who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia is Kurt Gödel. One of the significant logicians of the 20th century, he published his most important result at the age of twentyfive. His fundamental proof that language and logic are not only incomplete, but are unable to be made complete had fundamental impact on varous brances of knowledge. A man who refused to eat anything cooked by anyone except for his wife (he would not even eat anything of his own cooking, due to his paranoia), Gödel died of starvation when his wife fell seriously sick and could not cook for him.

Then there was this German Professor, who after witnessing a coachman whipping his horse, ran out of his hotel room into the street of Turin in 1889, embraced the horse and burst out crying. (Kundera, in his introduction to The Unbearable Lightness of Being, mentions this story and states that perhaps the person was apologizing to the animals for all human cruelties towards animals since time immemorial). He would spend the next 11 years in insanity, during which period he would write immumerable letters, until his death in 1900. In some of the letters written during the early phase, he would sign off as "Dionysus" and "The Crucified", and in the latter ones, he would mention his identification with God. He was completely unaware of the growing success of his works. This was the story of Friedrich Nietszche, perhaps the most misunderstood philosopher of all time.

The common point in all these cases is that these guys were all immensely talented people. And when I think about that, I feel that it won't be such a bad idea to turn into schizophrenic, after all. How interesting (or odd) would it be to wake up one fine morning and failing to recognize myself, and to engage in animated conversation with a bunch of imaginary friends! Or to fail to recognize my own words, my own handwriting!

But then, the chance of that happening is very feeble, because it will take me at least many rebirths and subsequent lives to achieve their level of talent, if at all!

So I can go on living without any worry or fear whatsoever that I would ever turn into a schizophrenic!
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Sources:
http://listserv.nodak.edu/cgi-bin/wa.exe?A2=ind9307&L=telugu&F=&S=&P=1574
http://www.newkerala.com/news.php?action=fullnews&id=12525
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forbes_Nash
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakajima_Atsushi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syd_Barrett
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Godel
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/comparative_literature_studies/v041/41.4shigetoshi.html
http://www.worldcatlibraries.org/wcpa/top3mset/5dee8ad2682a3311a19afeb4da09e526.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche

Note: Apparently, the short story "The Expert" is included in, The Oxford book of Japanese Short Stories by Theodore William Goossen (Publisher: Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).