Remembrance

Verily, in the remembrance of Allah do hearts find rest. (From the Holy Quran)

Oh me of little faith, how could you have forgotten what your heart already knew?

Emotion

Tell me something...isn't emotion something metaphysical? I mean, can you see it? Can you hear it? Can any of your five senses perceive it? No they can't. You can only see signs of emotion...furrows in your brow when you're angry...or your lips curling upwards inadvertently when you're elated.

If each of us reflects Allah in part, which is a fundamental Muslim belief, then isn't it also true that these emotions that twist and turn our lives also reflect Allah in part?

Allah's anger is mentioned in the Quran, but isn't it also plausible to assume that Allah might also get jealous, feel flattered, be happy, and so on?

A wise elder in my family once said that when you pray (make dua) you should praise Allah in your dua. Allah likes khushamad, he said playfully to us.

Other wise men of the past have said that Allah's love can only fill that heart which houses no other love within its walls. Isn't that another way of describing jealousy?

These are interesting questions and ones that I would really, really like to ask more people of traditional religious thought. Uzer and Niqabi, if you're reading this, I'd love to know your opinions.

Ooty yaar, tu rehnay hi dayeen. :P

Chaos

Some time in the 80's, a mathematician came up with an equation to predict the results of a mass-scale rubella vaccination in the US. Before I delve into that, here's a question for you. What would you predict as the outcome of a mass-scale vaccination?

If you're like me, you'd probably expect the incidence of rubella to fall. No rocket science there. It's the obvious, intuitive thing to expect.

Well, it turns out that things didn't quite happen that way in real life. According to the mathematician's equations, a perturbation to the "system" such as a mass-scale vaccination would actually cause large-scale swings in the incidence of the disease. That's exactly what happened. The incidence of the disease rose in the short-term.

Usually, when weird anomalies like this happen, the relevant authorities dismiss it, attributing it to factors out of their control. In this case, doctors probably would have said that a bad batch of vaccines was to blame. However, just the fact that mathematics predicted that the swings would happen shows that life is not as intuitive as we expect(big surprise). The fact of the matter is that there were no unknown factors...no bad batches of vaccine or medical negligence, or other vague theories. The end line is that the rise in the incidence happened because that's the way nature works.

By the way, the branch of mathematics that proved this is...you guessed it...chaos theory.

So to get to where I'm going...the fact (and somewhat of a tragedy) of life is that our minds think in a simple, intuitive, linear way, and the world around us is extremely non-linear and chaotic. That's why there's always a clash between what we expect and what happens. That's why love never works out the way we expect, why relationships bloom and suffer, why moods rise and fall. Because our thinking is too linear and simplified for this world.

Plato had proposed something similar with his notion of the platonic world. According to plato, our minds are still "stuck" in a platonic world...a place we lived in before we were born and where everything was "perfect." That's why there's always such a clash between our ideals and the world. Between the simplified linearity of our minds and the chaos around us.

My question is...why? Why make our brains misfits for this world? Why the disparity between the fuzzy lands of our minds and the even fuzzier vat we are floating around in?

Rhythm

Everything in life has a peculiar rhythm.

And yet nothing in life fully repeats itself.

And nothing in life is fully deterministic.

For example, seasons come and go in a vaguely predictable way. You know that winter is going to come some time late in the year. But do you know the exact date and time on which winter will arrive? No, you don't. It's not deterministic. And moreoever, has any one season that you've experienced in your life ever been exactly the same, down to the last day, last hour, last puff of wind? Nopes...life is not periodic. It doesn't fully repeat itself.

Such is the beauty of chaos.

Order within disorder.

Jam, and not the apple variety

Nothing like jamming with friends, eh? Except that we meet after so long, months at a time. And usually we only have a few hours to jam. That gap and the meagre amount of jamming time is nowhere near long enough to find the beat. You know what I mean? Every time you start playing together, you always have to spend some time getting ready. Re-learning chords, solos, getting the timing right, and what not. So it's very rare that we get a song down perfectly, just as it should be. Mostly, we just wind up jumping from song to song. At the end, we usually fall asleep or something.

Isn't it amazing, then, how perfect professional bands are in their harmony? How many brows must have sweated, how many fingers bled, and voices cracked by the sheer amount of practice? I don't think i can ever get there...I simply don't have that much of patience.

But whatever...it's fun to do! Yagshimas! WA WA WEE WA! Okay, that was random, but we were going crazy with borat today.

Children

If you ask me right now what I miss most about home, I'll probably throw out a lot of random stuff like Mohammadi nihaari, my old friends, and going with my old friends to eat Mohammadi nihaari, and so on. But truth be told - one of the things I get really nostalgic for is the time I spent with my baby cousins!

Children are awesome, aren't they? Masha Allah, they're Allah's bow-tied gifts - little fairies and cherubs they are. They curl their palms around your finger and lead you into their own little worlds, and you wonder why in the name of hell on earth you ever got down or depressed. I've spent so many hours playing games with my cousins, and not as somebody older, but literally as one of them. lol...people who swore on my being a sober guy would glance in and wonder if I had completely lost my mind. One day, my chacha actually got mad at me, saying, "Duffer, ab tumhari umar hai is tarah bachon ke saath khelnay ki?"

But I couldn't help it. It's an addiction. If you've spent time with kids, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about, and if you haven't...well buddy, you've missed out on a lot. Kids have healing in them - that's just the way it is. They take away worries, misery, and dark brooding thoughts. I look at them and their innocence, and I feel cleansed. I also wonder why the heck I always wanted to grow up when I was a kid.

Of course, for all this exciting stuff to happen, the kids have to be good, well-mannered ones. If you're stuck with a couple of spoiled brats who slap your face just to see how you react...well, being cleansed and reborn is probably going to be the last thing on your mind.

The Real You

It's always happened that whenever I met somebody for the first time, or in a "professional" context such as in a business meeting, I'd always think to myself, "this is not what this person is actually like in real life. This is just a facade. A cover. Everybody's laughing and joking and we're all just best pals, aren't we! It's all so fake!" You ever had that feeling?

But I guess the more I think about it, the more I realize that this point of view is just not true. In most cases, people aren't consciously putting up a facade. They aren't trying to act the way they act. They just wind up acting like that, that's all. It's their natural reaction to that particular situation.

Another way of thinking about this is that there's no such thing as the real you, which is a phrase that gets tossed around a lot. I don't think we're like a stage, hidden behind curtains that you have to pull apart with the help of time and trust to the actual person inside. Nopes, I think we're more like multi-faceted crystal, and depending on the social context, we show a particular side. If we're new to the person we're meeting, the crystal shows "the new person" side - we're all proper and formal. However, with time and familiarity, the crystal rotates. The person's personality changes. A new side is exposed. A new epoch begins.

In this case, I guess, the real you would just be the most coveted facet - the one most fun to hang out with, the one most romantic, and so on. This way of looking at things also explains quite well how dynamic our personalities are. Everybody's heard the story of how the relationship between married couples changes with time. But that's just it - I don't think it's changing. I don't think that a person was "good" before and then turned "bad" a few years later. I think all that happens is that marriage explores all the facets, each one different, with its own textures. People don't "change"....they just expose personality traits that happened to be latent before.

In fact, even with people very close to you, I bet you've only touched the tip of their personality's iceberg. There's a whole continent underneath that's just not tangible to you. The world is in a grain of sand, and every person is a universe in himself or herself. This comparison of the universe and a person is so analogous to how a number growing from 1 to infinity can be as massive with respect to the number of decades as a number shrinking from 1 to 0, even though the physical "sizes" of the numbers are so different. Such duality in the universe just blows my mind.

Of course, I could be wrong, or it could be more complex that this - but on five hours of sleep, it all just makes so much of sense!

Snow (again)

So I just finished reading Snow, by Orhan Pamuk (who allegedly sounds like a dalmation). The book was actually originally written in Turkish, and the version I read was, obviously, a translation, and a pretty damn good one at that. Snow got Pamuk the nobel prize in literture recently. The story itself is about Ka, a liberal Turk who's lived in Germany for years, and who returns to the small, desolate town of Kars in Turkey. The book centers around the two or three days Ka spent in Kars, and his ventures into love, religion, politics, and his own soul.

I have mixed feelings about the book. There were moments when I simply couldn't put it down, and had to see what happened next. There were other sections of the book that, unfortunately, dwelt too much into politics, and to be honest, that bores the hell out of me. I've never had a good appreciation for politics, and mostly find it too dry. Nopes, human emotion and psychology are what get my gears turning, and I'll tell ya, snow has oodles and oodles of them.

But it's beyond that. Ka, the main character, is a poet, and driven by his emotion, not his mind. In a lot of ways, I'm like Ka, and because of Pamuk's amazing powers of description, I seemed to feel everything that Ka felt. Pamuk, the writer, was holding up a mirror and shouting, "Over here, fucker! This is what you look like! This is what you do! Pretty? Not!" And it's not pretty, no sir...those enslaved by their own emotions are often self-destructive, like giant, flaming stars that wind up imploding into themselves.

And that's the scary thing. There's a logical part of me who scoffs at Ka, calling him a self-lacerating, pessimistic fool. But there's also that writer inside me who smiles with a sad understanding at the way Ka's mental states twist and turn, and secretly knows that his fate could have been no different.

There is heavy snowfall in Kars throughout the novel. In the comfort of my blanket, Pamuk's description of the cold and the snowflakes seems so poetic. Ka mentions once in the novel how strangely silent everything is when snow begins to fall (provided, of course, that a blizzard isn't blowing up your ass). Ka describes it as the 'silence of God.' How beautiful!

Even though the landscape Pamuk sketched of the snow made me want to catch the next flight to Turkey, I've never gotten along well with US winters. I like the snowfall, and even the cold to some extent. What I can't stand though, what freezes my marrow, are the gusts of wind. Icy puffs from the maw of a snow troll they are, and a terrible troll at that. On windy winter days, even seconds spent outside are unbearable. Hell, I'm sure if I took a piss outside on one of these days, it would freeze in mid-air.

The other thing I can't stand is the trees in winter. All their leaves have fallen off by this point, and they look like black, charred death. The winter landscape here in New England is so bleak and...desolate. Like an arctic wasteland. There's nothing romantic or poetic about it, and believe me, I've tried looking. I've been peering my eyes for the last six years.

Anonymity

Even though this blog is public, so many people out there in the world are never going to read it. It's a weird, deliciously ticklish thought. What I'm writing right now is readily available for anyone with an internet connection (and a computer, of course) to see. And yet, blogistan (hell, the net) is so huge that it's very much likely that only the people I've told about this blog will see it. Maybe not even them. I'm a small tadpole in a huge, foaming river and ironically, that gives me anonymity.

So if I write "choohiya khala, your cooking SUCKS! And do something about that hairstyle of yours...it went out of style after Lord Mounbatten's wife hit the fashion scene" there's virtually no chance in hell she's ever going to read it! Or if I say, "Haji Sahib, if you slouch anymore, hunchbacks are going to be consoling themselves saying, 'man, we could've wound up like him, y'know'" Haji Sahib will have to find and read it first to kill me :P.

Ahhh, it's such a nice, snug feeling! Catch me if you can!

Feedback

This is all on hearsay, but there was recently a singing competition on some Pakistani channel, and Mekaal Hasan was one of the judges. One of the girls sang terribly, and yet she had no idea how badly she sounded (probably something like a cat being neutered). Well, Mekaal sahib wasn't exactly one to pull punches. He told her that one of the aspects of being a good singer was to be able to "hear" onself sing. Apparently, if the girl had been able to do this, she would have stopped singing a long time ago. But again...I didn't see the show.

Essentially, Mekaal was talking about feedback...the ability to return an output of a system back to its input. At lower, subconscious levels, we use feedback all the time. Our eyes use it to adjust their focus. Our ears use it to change the tensions of our eardrum. Our nervous system uses feedback to know exactly where our muscles are in space, relative to the rest of the body. When you're steering your car, you're using feedback to adjust where you're going. The list can fill the damn yellow pages and more.

However, at a conscious level, the use of feedback is comparatively much less, probably because it requires conscious thought to train oneself in the beginning. The girl with the voice of a thousand nails on a chalkboard is one example (lol...I have no idea why I'm dissing the poor girl. I mean, I haven't even heard her sing fergodsakes). But I think, to some extent, such feedback is essential for becoming a better person. Essentially, if you're aware that what you're doing is bad, you have a chance to stop doing it. If, at some level, your thoughts are being fed back into your brain, you have an opportunity not to think sin. But for all this, you need to be aware of these things...you need to have some level of feedback, whether conscious or sub-conscious, real-time or post-processed.

Otherwise, if everything is "open-loop" as it's called in engineering, i.e., if there's no higher-level feedback, I'll remain stuck in my habits, spiralling in a vicious cycle that continues forever.

Snow

A few lines from Snow, by Orhan Pamuk. I don't have the book in front of me, so this is from memory...

Happiness and good poetry can exist together only for fleeting moments. After this, happiness will either make writing coarse, or the weight of one's own words will make happiness disappear.

Pamuk...you da man.

Tagged!

I've been tagged by Niqabi, so here goes....

Height: 5'8
Color: dunno....light brown? Whatever the desi color is called
Piercing: none
Tattoos: none

Right now time: 4:57am (yep...can't sleep :))
Mood: Pensive...about why the hell I can't sleep
Taste: Bad...morning breath
Weather: cool, and yet not freezing my keister off
Bad habit: Procrastinating
Current crush: Quite a few
Biggest regret: Giving up writing for almost four years is the first thing that comes to mind
Perfume(s): Brut aftershave? Just anything I can get my hands on, really
Thing I want to do: Get a book published in the US

Favourite
TV show: Don't have cable :) But probably a comedy like Seinfeld...or family guy! What the deuce!
Book: crime and punishment, and the harry potter series
Non alcoholic drink: diet coke
Milk drink: How about just plain milk?
Brand: none
Color: red
Emblem: Chand and Taara
Perfume: None.
Designer: None
Chocolate: Twix and snickers!

Have I Ever
Broken the law: Didn't turn my A Levels teacher over to the Singaporean police when he spat in public over there. Booyah!
Misused credit card: Nopes
Skipped school: tonnes of times
Fell asleep in the shower/bath: No...don't have a bath, and well, is it even possible in a shower?
Had children: No
Been in love: Yes
Been hurt: Plenty of times.

Random
Have a job: Yes...electrical engineer, at your service.
My CD player has what in it right now: A cd filled with weird african instrumentals
If I were a crayon, the color: red
What makes me happy: A nice, home-cooked meal.

When/What Was the Last
I got a real letter: Two years ago, from my baby cousin
Got an email: From Sunil, who's convinced Dev looks like Nick Lachey
Thing I purchased: Pancakes!
TV program I watched: Family guy, I think
Movie I saw in the theaters: It's been ages...Inside Man, I think.
Hugged: Ages and ages ago
Place I was an hour ago: In my sheets, trying to fall asleep
Song heard: Peera Ho...Khalid Anum
Phone call: Aditya
Was depressed: Two days

What Comes to Mind When I Hear
Car: Honda Civic...my trusty steed
Murder: a 12" saber
Cape: Cape cod, definitely.
Cell: cell phone
Fun: Gup-shup and general chillaxing with friends
Shoe: hush puppies
Crush: Jennifer Aniston (yeah yeah, she's old, but what the heck)
Music: Joe Satriani
Love: Ishq
Chalk: school

5:22am...time for Fajr.