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!
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!
_________________________________________________________________
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).
_________________________________________________________________
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).
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