Alienations of Spring- I


Assam, Ides of March, and the man in the mirror.

The only thing better than a book is the idea of it. Ideas are always so much better, of course. They are immune to inconveniences, slander, friction, wordlessness. Then one fine day, one fine warm day, when you get tired of ambling across that sidewalk in that city you half know, peeking across motor cars to look for that bookstore that you thought existed in this part of town, where your mother bought stacks of paperbacks and brought them home, you suddenly find yourself standing in front of it. And now this is where it all began. Where it all begins. I can see your drink shaking and your face dragging against the carpet floor already, so let me say this, a book, an imprint i.e. and the idea of itself don’t have to be two separate things. They can co-exist, kind of Heisenberg-esque. I knew it existed when I walked into that old(but extremely charming) bookstore that day, and picked up Edward Said’s Culture & Imperialism, that book where Said links colonialism and culture and back connects them to the colonial era writers and their work. And when somebody took it from me and didn’t return, it felt like flesh being torn out. So I had to go get it back.
As we were entering Bangalore, I woke up in the backseat of the car my friend was driving. I had a heavy head and a strained neck from the near perfect roads. I could remember little from my recent past, the anxious hours, the workload, the fights, the ennui. I was looking at a miniature Taj Mahal on the dashboard when it struck me, with a double down. See, it’s not the object or even the idea behind it, it’s what you make of it, and it is what it does. In ’47 we had an idea of a nation. We had these great ideals, of social, political and economic equality, of egalitarianism, of an almost utopian parliamentary democracy. Now, we succeeded at most of those high sounding things. But our failures, so big and conspicuous and uncared for, they make those successes seem like mud roads after a drizzle, melting away into a soak pit, probably worse.
Latest, in the series of cataclysmic apple picking camps by the government, or rather governments in the recent past, has been the Citizenship Amendment Bill. If accidents ever define nations, this is one nation defining whipped cream laden catastrophe. I can punch in a thousand words here and they still won’t justify or un-justify what the administration has perpetrated. That’s because I would be answering the wrong questions. The question of whether to grant citizenship to people from one sect or the other might seem very important, and it is, but the more important question is what are we doing for the and to the people who are actually affected by it? What are we doing to the bordering states like Assam those are affected by it. Civilizations rise and fall across time. But to deliberately sabotage one for extra ballots and bakelite goodwill seems out of the box outrageous. Like in Said’s book, it’s probably more spastic than a steel frame now that we’re haunted no longer by the ghosts of the British or the tyrannical white man, but by the living idea of them. The Indian identity is no longer what Neheru conceived to be, one of every man and woman being equal, but of finding glory in the inequality, and in partisanship. Speaking of Assam, it’s this glorious state, with the landscape, the rivers, the culture, the dance, and the level-headed, some of the most talented people I have met, I could not speak enough of it putting hand to keyboard in a precariously heated room. It’s a state and a people struggling for identity on their own porch. High influx of immigrants, no matter Hindus or Muslims, have rendered the Assamese at risk of being a minority in a land that’s wholly their’s, a land for which they have died multiple times, and got back up multiple times. While the rest of India has been binging on primetime tv, talking about vapid stand-up comedy acts and brandishing their own culture which to be frank makes me want to scream, the North East has been slipping and falling and holding itself together in great maturity and an ever-lasting sense of definite melancholy.
In the collective sense of Indian identity, where does the North East come up? Where does Assam come up? The residents are called all sorts of names, their history is categorically ignored, sometimes laughed at, and cast aside in whims of toxic indifference. The bigger states keep benefiting, with high FDI influx on the back of better infra which in turn was a result of being chosen by the British for their higher relative geo political significance. Rarely do tv series or movies come up, obviously, that show the provinces, that show Assam, in their true glorious colours. They say a nation is judged by how it treats its transient fragile, its outnumbered, its injured. And judging by that standard, we are a nation of cowards who can’t think of anything other than ourselves. As for the book,  and the further goings on, those are for another day’s tale. The clocks have run out of road, and I am off. So long till tomorrow, till it all makes sense.



Simple Explanation

Nostalgia, Cabs under the sun, and Trivandrum.

The psychedelia simmers in the lower tropics when the sun is out, which I love and would die for otherwise, but which somehow restrains my hedonism from going haywire on papyrus extracts, distracting me out of much needed windows. Out of the seven hundred things crossing my mind right now, there is only one of the other kind, and that is red bow restrain. I, and I hate that word more than anything in the world, I become one of those traders in the Brussels underbelly, you know what I mean? So I am awake, maybe too awake for my own liking, I don’t know, you’ll have plenty of time and snacks to judge.

Out of this night now slowly spreading out its velvet tentacles, out of the huge beams of light lighting the night sky across parabolic suspensions in the distance, out of me stuck inside this soft couch, with muscle pain and longings I am not allowed by myself to speak of, I understand there are things that deserve more attention. Irrespective of who opines what. Now, stepping up into that reality in a sentence span, I want it to be about journeys, like I always have. And I want it to about a book, synonymous with journeys. I had to get one back in heady Trivandrum, and for once, I was as interested in the backdrop as I was in the book. We were driving inside Trivandrum in a white suv of some make and model that’s not important enough. To my curiosity most of the vehicles were white, as were the clothes on people, unless they were black, of course. I remember thinking at that point how the colours people wear often symbolises their cities. Kolkata is all dull, plain colours, in stride with the strict history of austerity of the city. Bombay is all way too colorful, you can’t put a finger on it, just like the city, vibrant, and full of joie se vivre. Hyderabad is all garish, extreme colours in some quarters, and extremely plain clothing in others, reflecting a sense of devotion and anarchy, side by side.Delhi is all khakis and kurtas and things around them, tedious colours of bureaucracy. It’s unique in the sense that Delhi has come to define those colors as of deceit and nastily gnarled propagandas, unlike the other cities where things are the other way around, obviously. And the other thing I could not help but notice was that how green the city was. It was as if we were driving in the lower trenches of an ancient Asian monastery, with a damp and verdant settlement shimmering above us somewhere. There were not a lot of young people to be seen, apparently working somewhere else for foreign currency for a state with a long history of overwhelming communistic fervour. It was like the communist party was here forever. It was either them or the church or mosque goers and the guys into garudan thookkam. There were fewer moderates, and all the people at the extremeties of the spectrum had no reason to believe that fancy clothes were important. Not that I agree or disagree with any of it. The work was called The Great Speeches of Modern India, an old timer book, you might imagine. But it was actually written recently, and presented an intimate and hitherto largely unexplored window to the Indian psyche, society, and leadership over the years. It was a book I had enjoyed reading very much, especially after getting back home from the rain or while being stuck in hotel rooms in unknown towns in India. By now the medications are going overtime, and I am half perched on a dusty rug on a wooden floor in a lonesome perch, I have no clue where. I remember the day I landed at Bhubaneswar from outside the country. It was like falling back into a soft, crisp bed after years of unyielding hardship. But soon I had found the bitter memories making eye contact in the dusk with the good ones. There was the friendly heat and sweat and the undescribable twinkling lights in the distance, but I would also see us arguing and fighting underneath those, spiteful. The truth is I would take a good argument or fight any day, but maybe it was the lack of it, the lack of a botheration of a divide, that bothered me anyways. People become so unquestionably important to us sometimes, and when they leave you can’t get your head around it. It’s the inconsistency of the reality, of the algorithm, that plays with your mind, rather than it’s inefficacy. At this point I was not the least bit affected by this, but I decided to fly down to Trivandrum anyways, not just for the book, but for a change of scene.

As we were turning inside to the SEZ I could see the old Rajasthani dhaba, and man I could taste the heat in the curry still, and it made my head scratch a fair bit. I could see the sidewalks, which I never thought would finish. They went on forever. And I could definitely notice the belting sun. Even in Winter, it was so much different than anywhere else, it was like a hot, green, glittering, blinding paradise. Shireen ma’am was instructing a bunch of new joiners when I got there. She was so smart she would sometimes pick out answers or say no even before someone said something, the company knew they had a definitive talent, and they had given affirmation to the music. But she was also very subtle, and humble. You could think of it as a very Malayali quality, but although I never quite knew her that well, I sort of felt a lot of her personal qualities came from the reading and a general sense of balance that comes from being around good people. She was courteous and warm as usual when I greeted her, we talked and had coffee during her short break, and she informed me that the book was lost. She had put it in a cab in the city and left, it was gone, her whole bag. I fiddled with the idea of giving it up for a few minutes, before I decided on the inevitable. I had to go for it. I think that’s how it is in life. If you really like a woman or a book, you go after them.

There are 5,000 taxis in Trivandrum. And although I would say they make for pleasant viewing, they were not helping my cause. Why the obsessive neurosis about the book when I could get another one at the store? Let’s say it had sentimental value. Substantial sentimental value, of someone’s handwritten message on the front page. Like a gift. Like the air coming in from the Hudson on in the summer nights on to Baldwin Avenue. How the fuck do you find a cabbie in a pool of 5,000 cabs hustling around a city of more thana million? Have you ever heard of the flow theory? She had taken a cab from Ulloor to Kazhakuttam on the 22nd of October. What if I followed another cab on the same path at a similar time of the day? What if followed 3? 5? The average has to go somewhere? It had to be somewhere. Shireen ma’am reached for her shift at 2. That means the cabbie would have picked someone up from the SEZ who had finished her/his shift, which had just the one company by the way. They would have posted on the company mail had they found the bag on the back seat. So they wanted to keep it, whoever found it. I had to fish them out. Now, if they really read the book, and it was a reader’s read, it meant they were readers. And readers would never,ever not return some else’s stuff. However superfluous it might sound, I had a feeling they had to put it up for sale. And since the bag and also the cards were missing, they likely sold it hand to hand at a used bookstore. All I had to do is get a map showing all used bookstores in the city and hit the big ones in different areas. So I played along and found the book in the third store I visited. As for the person, I had to stand in the morning at the nearest company bus stop and just look at the people who were mounting, and I matched the guy with the store owner’s description, he said he had forgotten to give the bag back when I pulled him up. I wouldn’t have fucked around with him if he was a reader, I couldn’t have. Now I had to turn back to the city. Not the city of the melting beliefs, of the evenings under the purple horizons, or the perfect turnabouts or the cacophonous quiet. It was a place I had come to let go of the things I could not let go of, because of the contentment they presented along with the obvious, obvious misery. I could see it straight now, I knew it was going to be alright.

La Riviere de l’Enchantment

What is it with emotions? Why are we so afraid of them? Why is it that we run away from them, like the dusty sunlight that comes in through bedside windows on winter mornings. It’s an affirmation to our rivers within, and like all rivers, they take and give it back, caress and smite, devastate and bless. And you don’t have to live near a river, you can go to it and dip your toe and come back. The thing is you’re no longer two separate things once you do it, the river becomes a part of you, and you become a part of the existence of the river. You two now know each other, and therefore can’t un-know each other. When I do dare to think about the early morning dew near my parental home, the cacophony on the streets as the town warmed up, the corridors at school I walked to get a glimpse of what she was doing, her braided hair with the hairclip tucked in, the layered, colored stones of the fence I used to jump to play in the evening, I do it as an outsider, like somebody looking at me as I am taking sixty-second breaths to dive into allegedly pearl infested waters. I do occasionally find that person come up with masterpieces, sometimes underwhelmed, sometimes overwhelmed, crawling out to the shore on his knees. However, like all sport, the diving tells me, the other person, that it’s not about the things that get pulled out of that river, but the things that don’t, that make us whole. Just like God doesn’t lie in the temple, or in the mountains or in the surgeon’s scalpel, but in the poor man’s food, in the oxygen that keeps us animated when the air gets thin, in the recovery of our bodies after the surgery has been done. So I don’t dive in much anymore, in fact I don’t even know if I do, I just make sure the things that hold the river together are alright. We know we are there for each other, like old friends, on different drums.

Scully, debugging.

Probing code and life choices. Capitalism and idyll and buzzing ad lib. Let there be rain.

 

The carpet was Aegean Sea. Golden medallion motifs on Tyrian Purple, hand weaved with intricate velvet. Shipped in from Otago, where the landlord’s son taught at the university in the gloriously bucolic Dunedin. The walls were paradise palm, leaves of magnolia dashed over ivory white, a throwback to an era when the night sky was there, still. After a millennia of inebriating Monday morning incense at temples, eating delicious pea curry by the street out of Organic leaf-bowls, reading newspapers in the winter sun as a recreation and waiting on forever for the BSNL modem to connect, we had a girl from the town in the valley. Probably not the first one, but she might as well be. And as much I would like to loiter in the headlong indulgence of a certain John Steinbeck, this is where the story sheds it sedate cadence and goes out of its way to go boom, like a meteor hurt, and takes over west end like the red part of Manchester on game night. She was sitting on a history of disquieting pain and an endless penchant for good programming. Sweats cold and the muted cries for help at dawn were the muses of the towns gone by, at least for now, and the road to be traded was out there under a workbench, lounging under the Pacific sun, crisp. The cab driver was an elderly white man. He did not speak any English. Each thought thought over infinitely, guarded, looked, protected, cursed.

The heels and the hues of her now distinct invincibility glided her through the sidewalk, meticulously cut hedges, the wide elevator, symmetric furniture sets, nauseating air fresheners and disingenuously drab urban utilitarian architecture into the project ODC, an all consuming concoction of human trepidation and Jungian struggles thrown into a mish and mash of highly efficient, even impressive, computer systems and apparent intellectual pursuits. An issue came waltzing in, as her anxiety had warned before hand, and before she even knew it, and by good habit, she put everything she was thinking of on the dark side of the moon and delved into the problem. It’s all the same isn’t it? Whether you bat or act or quiz or debug. You can practice all you can but when the moment comes, you just let it go and watch your brain do its thing. More or less. The program was behaving as if it was on imported produce straight from the great state of Jalisco. A not insignificant portion of the requests were throwing 500 internal server error. Logs were seen diligently and it was found out that codebases were switched while the code was imported.

Log statements were put in like IV fluids and the problem went. But, and this is where the boat sails, when a part of the instrumentation was removed, the program started behaving erratically. The error came and went, like a bunch of phase separated sine waves superimposed and clamped out and stuff. Too complicated? Think about the woman. She kept looking at it, looking at it, looking at it, the log files dancing before her, yet not revealing their colors. What would she not do to see the back side of them, and may be she would be sufficiently amazed and relieved, life affirmed, new. The sunlight was coming in through the window onto her desk now. She longed a walk. Down the elevator, cream cupcake and coffee. A look into the concrete horizon, conscientious disenchantment, more power. What was she doing here anyways, and what is all this concrete and electrical wires and the jargon trucks and complicated, convoluted writing. What happened to plain old love, and doing things as you pleased. What happened to telly with mom, to Maggi and comfy track pants and a stable future working for the government. Why this obsession rash called nepotistic altruism , this thoughtless abomination thrown in by the imperial powers of the past to make us play fetch in circles wanting super sweet gelato all the while. She had an inflamed throat for more than a week now .She hated gelato now, didn’t even have a chance to have it before the throat got bad. She put the coffee mug on the promenade and ran back. How is it that she had an infection while a lot of people who consumed a ton of that stuff did not have it? Sampras watching his feet move around flushing meadows, act of genius? Genius in rebellion.

The normal code path and the patch code had the Opcode cacher in common. After a bunch of tests, they found that identical source files were resulting in distinct sets of compiled operation codes, causing the strange behavior. A further look into the cacher, and the problem exposed itself, almost smiling with a sense of accomplishment, as she would later describe it. Multi-tenancy was the blight, with space conservation being done by the system by caching a set of operation codes, compiled, for all the set of users. That was the end of it, absolute path made its way into the whole thing, and the identical files now hashed to separate cache locations. The lead was impressed. She was done for the day. Oil in hair. Call to mom. Evening reading. Soy latte. Rapture.

Joyce On a Compiler

Dublin, Post-modernist fixations, and coding.All while looking for a Cricket store that does not sell mobile plans.

 

The finest way to desecrate a study of jest is to overdo it. So I will put the copper pan on the slow cooker and unfold my palms on it to conjure something that is not bland, for once. When James Joyce’s Ulysses was published it was still about twenty years till the first computer came out. A throwback to an era of mass disenchantment and factionalism in colonial Ireland smarting under a state of revolution, Ulysses acts like a stylized mirror to the Freudian alleys of Joyce’s melting pot of delicious dichotomies. When you start to code as a teenager, the first thing you notice is the chaos, the blaze of the undefinable, and the seemingly trivial, which resonates Ulysses in a way it resonates Ulysses. While a work of unbridled, all encompassing genius, it’s virtually unfathomable and practically unquotable, and has more things working for it than working against it in the sea of literary referentialism. A set of perfectly good code can look incomprehensible when you finish write it, but if you have done it right, and you know that it works, then it does not matter if it does not sense to the uninitiated. The truth of the pudding is in the eating, as Dr. Sen would say.

At this juncture I would like to take the liberty of delving into everyone’s favored breakfast muse at present, the libertine mazes of Indian polity. A microcosm of sapiens and ideas myriad and incongruous, much like Joyce’s Dublin, it seems to spiral away every time Ulysses spirals in on social morality and keeping societal differences and sensibilities together. If you set a loop to decrement the count on the step-by-step veering of the Indian political system away from the civilized as the counter for Joyce’s Ulysses weaves in steps of a unit, you would get exactly zero. Speaking of mathematical analyses. A system with a million variables at play, you cannot come to think it would ultimately fail because of the bias of the programmer just for some particular functions whose ideas seem likable on the first look. A code is logic and math, and each has more to do with human consciousness than most people like to believe.You cannot run away from either when you are trying to write an effective code, and they must come together well, a lot like Joyce’s references and stylized writing in Ulysses. It must make sense here and now, and past versions and interpretations posit little value. Unlike the political system in India, stuck in a tangle of propaganda of slumber from an era gone by.

The characters and the settings in Ulysses struggle to co-exist as the novel begins, but by the time it concludes, they seem almost eerily at peace with each other. A set of code can be ill assorted and out of place in the beginning, but if you match your algorithm for your logic, and care to check for all the dark corners and loose drawers, take nothing for granted, and code with a cool mind but a warm spirit(a la Giovanni Trapattoni, Sean St Ledger, Henry and the Le Hand of God), with dexterity and joy, you can get surprisingly good balance,functionality and efficiency out of it, just like Joyce did. It can contain a thousand library calls again like the thousand references in Joyce’s work of post-modernist exemplar, but it can still be spectacular in its own way of working towards an outcome of utility and gusto. The Indian political system on the other hand, dare I say it, rewards circuitous pursuits of malice and elaborate swindling as a virtue. It is the coding embodiment of what programmers would call rancid programming- slow, not caring for feedback, incredibly biased, blaming others, reinventing the wheel all the time, and caring the least for non-functional requirements. It glorifies corruption and blatantly laughs at sects or worse, takes advantage of them, literally poles apart from Ulysses,which is so self conscious that it actually sticks these things as satire on the shamrock Irish wall. So since this the first blog entry and it’s the holidays, without going further afield I would say, as I look for lacquer for the duke cricket ball along the wine colored sea-waters of the Mid-Atlantic, let the new year and new codes be more Ulysses and less South block. Bon Appetit.

cover image source : http://www.slate.com