Depicting Venice

We recently got back after a vacation in Venice.

GrandCanal.jpg

Everything one can say about Venice – past, present, future – appears to have been said by Italo Calvino in Invisible Cities – his masterpiece that defies classification (and even, perhaps, description). After reading those pages, anything I can put down seems hopelessly commonplace; I wonder if it is worth attempting a sketch of either the city or the book.

When words fail, pictures come to the rescue. We captured images of Venice in plenty; the albums listed below offer a thematic view to this city of all cities.

Gondola Magic

Systems in Venice

Bridges in Venice

Venetians unmasked

Puppetry of the mind

The first time the couple came to our house, I was wearing what I usually wear at home during winter: a loose, bright orange sweatshirt. It wasn’t the best of attires and I didn’t like it much, but it was warm and comfortable, so I wore it often. Too often, perhaps.

The next time, I met the couple outside our house, on my way back from the local supermarket. I was wearing the same sweatshirt, and being a bit uncomfortable about its appearance, I was conscious of it. Second time same sweatshirt, I told myself.

Then yesterday, I was at home – with the same sweatshirt on – when the couple came home. Oh no! Not this orange outfit again.

My wife served tea, and we were having a nice conversation with them, when, for some reason I shifted to another chair.

“That must be quite comfortable, isn’t it?” asked the lady, pointing at me.

“This?” I asked, holding the sleeve of my sweatshirt, and continued “Oh yes! That’s why I always -”

“No, I meant the chair.”

“Ah, the chair. Yes, yes, it is very comfortable. Bought it from IKEA, actually….”

Later, after they left, I described all this to my wife and we rolled over with laughter. The human mind, after all, is capable of playing some interesting tricks. At such times, we are puppets acting by the rules of our subconscious.

The Connection factor

Last week I was at it again: hopping from one blog to another, sifting through streams of consciousness emerging from hyperlinked text bound to anonymous identities, searching for nuggets of gold, for literary gems that will not embrace print and find glory, and yet, in their own small world will entertain and edify.

After wandering a while without much success, I encountered Unratiosenatic, where, after reading a few engaging pieces I stumbled upon this one.

The beginning, addressed as a letter to another blogger, conveyed the promise of something novel: a form within a form, a genre within a genre – in this case, a missive within a journal.

I read on, intrigued by the writer’s openness, and even though the postscript clarified some things, my curiosity to know what prompted the letter made me turn towards the blogger to whom it was addressed. A few more engaging reads later I found the post that triggered the letter.

The posts that stood alone were good, but these two had something special about them – they talked to each other, they connected two disparate threads of existence in a way that gave new meaning to each. And for the reader, observing this connection from a detached frame of reference was a bit like watching, with fascination, a conversation between two strangers revealing their innermost thoughts to one another.

It made me think about the beauty of this medium, the elegance with which it lends itself to enable connections between independent sources of thought. I also thought about the power of TrackBack, a technology that would, by permitting connections in the reverse direction, allow a reader who came first to the post in RandomRiting to navigate backwards to the letter in Unratiosenatic.

And then there was the epistolary angle.

Like journals, letters reveal subliminal elements of existence that are difficult to grasp from day-to-day conversations, but they go beyond journals in portraying an intimate picture of a relationship. Take for instance Franz Kafka, in Letters to Felice:

Just look, how many impossibilities there are in our letters. Can I remove the flavour of nauseating false generosity from my request that you write me only five lines? That is impossible. And is my request not sincere? Certainly it is sincere. And is it not perhaps also insincere? Of course it is insincere, and how insincere it is!

If we read because what we can experience first hand is limited, then reading letters would fill, partially, the void created by relationships we cannot have in our lives. And like online journals, letters exchanged online would give glimpses of lives that can reveal and instruct.

So there I was, on a working day in the middle of a busy week, sitting up well past midnight poring into this exchange between two people who were strangers until they ‘met’ on the web, thinking about how the confluence of technology and open-cultures made all this possible, when I heard my wife call out.

“What are you doing, so late?!” she asked.

“Er..well..browsing.” I replied. Somehow, the word – browsing – seemed too casual to be associated with the activity I was indulging in.

“What are you browsing?” She persisted.

“Connections.” I replied. “Connections between people.”

That sounded more appropriate; it was about connections, after all.

Trivia

These days Life’s uneventful,
Work absorbing,
Leisure elusive,
Weather insipid,
And all I can write is Trivia.

About Norah Jones’ latest tunes
ringing in my ears.
And half read books on the bedside table
gathering fine dust.

About missed chess matches in the last weeks
that won’t enter my journal.
And the trip to Venice lying ahead
that will merit a blog.

About the Proof we sought
at the RoadSide Theater.
And the dinner that followed
at a place we frequent.

About the reader who reads
first with patience,
then hope,
then concern,
and finally despair,
Arrhythmic lines filled with Trivia.

A Question of Pain

Some days back I read an article about a girl who had a rare genetic condition that prevented her from feeling any pain. As I read the first few lines, I found myself thinking, “Lucky Girl, isn’t she?” It turned out the opposite. Lack of painful sensation meant she would do really harmful things to her body without realizing it: she had scratched one of her eyes so badly that it now has to be surgically removed. Pain, the article echoed, is something that is good for us; it protects us, and we seldom realize this. How true, I thought.

Today, on my walk back from work, I found myself thinking about this article again. What the girl could not feel was “physical pain” – pain as a result of some bodily harm. How would it be, I wondered, if there were a condition that would result in a human feeling no “mental pain” at all?

Continue reading “A Question of Pain” →

Temple Visit

We visited a temple in Stuttgart last Sunday – our first temple visit in Germany. The chance came when my wife learnt – while talking to a relative – that they were visiting this place; she immediately jumped and expressed her wish to join. Me, the chauffeur, had no choice but to agree; absence of religious inclinations do not play a role in such decisions.

It was a thirty-minute drive to the relative’s place (where their six month old baby greeted me with a warm, wet feeling as soon as I carried him), and another hour to the temple (which was prolonged further by the exit we missed in the middle of a conversation). When we reached our destination, it was around seven in the evening.

The street was in the middle of what seemed like an office district, with tall, closely spaced buildings wearing a deserted look (it was Sunday, I told myself). The temple itself was in the basement of an office complex: an open area with pillars in between, it wore a look of a car park hastily converted into a place of worship. Despite these initial impressions, the place felt like a temple. I was filled with the same sense of devoutness I experience when I enter a temple in India. The melodies playing on the speaker were loud yet soothing; it somehow felt calm and familiar.

While the others were offering their prayers to different gods, I took a look around. Apart from us there were only a few other people. Mantaps – crude, but patched up with colorful paint – had been erected at different places, each hosting a different murti. On some mantaps rough figures of gods were carved out of the cement structure. The place was clean and well maintained, however. It appeared to be the result of dedication and commitment towards building all this and keeping it going. Funds were clearly lacking, but devotion was not.

After aarthi, teertha and prasada, we proceeded towards the exit to collect our shoes. There, my wife struck up a conversation with a lady who seemed to be from the family that managed the temple. After a few questions and answers in Tamil, the lady said something that made my ears turn alert.

“Would you like some vadas?” she asked.

I felt my tongue turn wet. My wife hesitated, but even she couldn’t hold herself for long; she nodded. The lady passed on a word to a temple caretaker, who soon returned with a large plate of hot vadas. He packed them neatly and handed the packet to us.

The drive back was faster. There was little conversation, and we missed no exits.

Book of Uncertain Knowledge

“If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis that all things are made of atoms…”

You have probably come across these lines by Richard Feynman. Now assuming we had the luxury of sending across not one sentence but one book to the next generation of creatures, which one would you choose? My vote would fall upon John L. Casti’s Paradigms lost. Its value – in the context of this enterprise – lies in addressing important issues about which we do not have conclusive answers yet: origins of life, search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, quantum mechanics, artificial intelligence, human capacity for language, and genetic basis for human behaviour. Each of these six topics merits a book in itself, but Casti does a great job of condensing these diverse and controversial subjects within a single volume while covering the different sides of each story in the form of a jury trial, before finally playing judge and pronouncing his verdict.

I first learnt about this book about a decade back, and I’ve kept coming back to it from time to time. Each chapter can be read independently, and that makes it managable in parts. Currently I’m reading the chapter on the unique ability of humans to communicate using language (and the theories surrounding this capacity, with Noam Chomsky dominating the initial pages). I hope to discuss – in the coming days or weeks – this topic in greater detail.