Thursday, July 29, 2010
Stringy-1
This universe is 10 dimensional. Which means we are actually holograms of our true selves, projections on this 4 dimensional world. The higher dimensions being curled up can only be probed in higher energies and shorter length scales. Some of these dimensions are compactified. This has strange consequences. For instance we will see the same mass being repeated along the direction of the compactified dimension since there's a periodicity in that direction. In the length scale where these dimensions are actually visible to us, we also enter into the realm of quantum mechanics. Over here there's time traveling, tunneling, and an overall probabilistic interpretation to all the events. Some set-up like the Schrodinger's cat experiment can translate these probabilities to our macro world, and this gives us an opportunity to think what if, our macro-world has been controlled by these strange set-ups? Of course this will do away with determinism, but there may remain some biased-ness towards certain events than others. Things (particles as well as waves) have a kind of fuzzy appearence, which when probed in gives us infinite mass, and other charges. This is when we probe in using the machinery of QFT, something very well established and experimentally verified upto certain energy/length scales. But truly this is the realm of string theory where those nonsenses(infinities) are no longer present. Everything reduces to finite, length and mass, which corresponds to the elusive string. The 1D object which wiggles and vibrates, producing modes each of which correspond to some particle that we see (fundamental particles). The string whose ends may be attached to some D-brane worlds, maybe some 4D world like ours. There may also be totally free strings, and there may be closed ones too. All these varieties give rise to different interesting interactions. Gravity arises from closed string dynamics, which interact very less with the 4D brane worlds we live in, explaining why gravity is weak. Then there are string-string interactions, which manifests itself as QFT in higher length scales. We humans are also built up of strings fundamentally. Surely consciousness can then someday(when we have a proper Lagrangian) be aptly explained, and free will will lose its meaning.
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
IN RESPONSE TO "DEATH by Arnab Hazra"
cold. WARM. dawn. NIGHT. rained. HAD RAINED. Saw into his eyes- dead. DEAD. rajnigandha garland. RAJNIGANDHA GARLAND. i hate rajnigandhas. they are death. they are beautiful. i love rajnigandhas. their smell is the sweetest. beautiful. SICKLY SWEET. four of us, family, weeping. mourning. it rained that day. but not yet. CROWDING IN EVERY ROOM. shrunken body. SHRUNKEN BODY. CLOSED EYES. eyes open. in his eyes i saw nothing, just eyes. CLOSED EYES. BURNING GHATS. animal burial ground. in the interiors of shokher bajar. GANGES. ASHES. dust. It was beautiful. the place. BOLO HORI. hori bol. my noel. my beautiful noel would be buried in a beautiful place. strong noel. brave noel. DEAD. buried beside a mango tree. in our old home we had a mango tree. THREE GOATS TIED TO THREE TREES IN A ROW. life. DEATH. interim. he would sit on the verandah and peer through the branches to the street below.outside. filtered green. Verandah. Closed space. MALA OF THREE BLEEDING HEADS. SMILING. forlorn. shades of green. out to freedom.DEATH.STREAK OF RED DOTS IN HIS FACE. SCIMITAR GOES UP AND COMES DOWN WITH AN UNEARTHLY SWISH. my beautiful noel sleeps beside a mango tree. Salt and lime on his body. The earth will consume his beautiful body. He had suffered too much. DEAD. NIBBLING. BLOOD. RAJNIGANDHA. Rajnigandha. It rained that day.
Noel Bhattacharya, my furry brother. Came to us on 7th December 1997. Came to us on a Sunday. He fell on the 24th of June 2010. For fourteen days he tried to get up. On the fifteenth day he didn’t. Buried beside a mango tree on a rainy Sunday. Drops of tears.
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Death
The sky was red the night my grandfather died.
It was a hot end-summer day, rather uncharacteristically so. It had been raining the few days before that. And it was nearly seven in the evening when Anita, the nurse who had been looking after him for the last few months came up to my mother teary-eyed.
“Dadababu aar nei didi (He is no more)”, she murmured. She didn’t talk much, a rather priceless quality for her vocation.
My aunt broke down. Anita shuffled out of the room.
Run up the stairs. Run down them. Run up them again. Get caught in the middle. “Ok kid, I'll give you a toffee , or maybe even two , JUST TELL ME WHERE YOU KEPT MY GODDAM RAZOR!!!”
Speckles of shaving foam all over my face. Signs of a regular shave badly interrupted.
Mission Accomplished.
It was nearly eleven by the time all formalities were done with. A hearse waited in front of my house. The house was full by then, relatives and friends crowding in every room. The sickly sweet smell of rajnigandhas filled the air even as a few of the more religious minded muttered prayers under their breath. The shrunken body of my grandfather lay in the middle of the bed. His eyes were closed, a couple of tulsi leaves on them.
For a moment there, as I blankly stared at him, I suddenly felt a twinge of sorrow for the tulsi tree. It was a fledgling plant, just a handful of twigs planted about a month ago. Funny how the mind remembers.
“I planted this tree when I first built this house. And now its roots are damaging the basement roof. So, I’m cutting it down. Which part of it don’t you get?”
“Cutting a tulsi tree is years of bad luck, you stubborn old man!!!”
“I’ll take my chances.”
This was not the first time I had visited the burning ghats. Even as the car neared the burning ghats, the traditional khai thrown on the road by other funeral cars served as a morbid bread crumb trail to the location. A mammoth building on the shores of the Ganga, these ghats are the proud resting place (as the signboards claimed), of Rabindranath Tagore. How getting burnt at a place and then getting your ashes thrown into the river can make that particular place your resting place is something I have wondered ever since I read that sign for the first time. I remember wondering about it again that day.
Dadu used to say that he was out on the Kolkata roads the day Rabindranath had died. There had been mass hysteria as the body of the great man had been carried through the crowded Kolkata streets with millions throttling to touch him. “I got to touch him”, he would recount later, with an obvious pride in his voice, “I lost a shoe in the process, but I touched him.”
Even in the dead of the night, the ghats remain a rather busy place. We reached there at around midnight, only to find it bustling with death (or was it life ?). Every five minutes a truck loaded with mourners and the deceased would descend upon the ghats with their cries of “Bolo Hori, Hori Bol” renting the night sky. Or sometimes, it would be a much quieter lot, shaking their heads in the midst of thick cigarette fumes at the solitary tea shop. We soon found ourselves in a queue for the electrical furnace Number 4 (“Fast or slow?” “Huh?” “Electric or wooden?” “Umm... Electric…”).
“Cummon Kid, Buck up!!! Hurry up!!!”
“It’s not even 6 dadu…”
“Damn right it’s not 6. The Shop opens at 6. You want to stand behind that hag from next door?”
“I honestly don’t care dadu…”
“Well, I do. And I say we run. Cummon now…”
It was a long serpentine queue in front of the furnace. People smoking, talking, crying. Blank faces, happy faces, sad faces. Interspersed with the sleeping dead. Peaceful in their last 4’X7’ space on earth. It can be rather odd starting at dead faces. Contorted in agony of their last moments, or at calm with a lifetime spent. It’s all there.
And also the goats.
Three goats in a village.
Strolling majestically amongst the living and the dead in the ghat.
Tied to three trees in a row.
Feeding on the abundant stale flowers and leaves strewn about the corpses.
A six year old child feeding them a handful of dried leaves.
One of the braver ones start munching on the garland on one of the lesser guarded corpses.
An old man with prickly tiny white hair walks towards them with a huge scimitar in his hands.
It keeps at it, moving from the torso to near the face.
A small spectre-like crowd gathers as the ancient scimitar goes up and comes down with an unearthly swish. The child moves back a step, a streak of red dots on his face.
I couldn’t see the mouth of the goat anymore. Hidden behind the face and the mass of flowers about it, I could but vaguely see what it was that it was chewing on.
The old man is stringing them up, making a mala of the three still bleeding heads as the writhing bodies are carried off by the crowd. They will come in handy in the marriage feast.
I could see it now. The flowers have mostly been cleared up by its appetite. It’s biting at the ear now.
He stands up with a grim smile on his face and the monstrous mala in his hands. He walks towards the child, a thinner red-trail following his path, a path tad different from the much thicker blood red ones leading to the kitchen.
A trail of blood appears at the ear. Sickly red, reluctant to move, but I could see it nonetheless.
Laughing, he throws it around my neck. And tells me to run along, the marriage can’t start without the nitbor.
A summon for the next in line cuts through the slumbering 3 AM air, soon followed by howls of realisation. Other aggrieved sleepy mourners sit up to see what is happening. Or just find a better spot to live through the night.
I grimaced.
“Bolo Hori, Hori Bol.”
It was a hot end-summer day, rather uncharacteristically so. It had been raining the few days before that. And it was nearly seven in the evening when Anita, the nurse who had been looking after him for the last few months came up to my mother teary-eyed.
“Dadababu aar nei didi (He is no more)”, she murmured. She didn’t talk much, a rather priceless quality for her vocation.
My aunt broke down. Anita shuffled out of the room.
Run up the stairs. Run down them. Run up them again. Get caught in the middle. “Ok kid
Speckles of shaving foam all over my face. Signs of a regular shave badly interrupted.
Mission Accomplished.
It was nearly eleven by the time all formalities were done with. A hearse waited in front of my house. The house was full by then, relatives and friends crowding in every room. The sickly sweet smell of rajnigandhas filled the air even as a few of the more religious minded muttered prayers under their breath. The shrunken body of my grandfather lay in the middle of the bed. His eyes were closed, a couple of tulsi leaves on them.
For a moment there, as I blankly stared at him, I suddenly felt a twinge of sorrow for the tulsi tree. It was a fledgling plant, just a handful of twigs planted about a month ago. Funny how the mind remembers.
“I planted this tree when I first built this house. And now its roots are damaging the basement roof. So, I’m cutting it down. Which part of it don’t you get?”
“Cutting a tulsi tree is years of bad luck, you stubborn old man!!!”
“I’ll take my chances.”
This was not the first time I had visited the burning ghats. Even as the car neared the burning ghats, the traditional khai thrown on the road by other funeral cars served as a morbid bread crumb trail to the location. A mammoth building on the shores of the Ganga, these ghats are the proud resting place (as the signboards claimed), of Rabindranath Tagore. How getting burnt at a place and then getting your ashes thrown into the river can make that particular place your resting place is something I have wondered ever since I read that sign for the first time. I remember wondering about it again that day.
Dadu used to say that he was out on the Kolkata roads the day Rabindranath had died. There had been mass hysteria as the body of the great man had been carried through the crowded Kolkata streets with millions throttling to touch him. “I got to touch him”, he would recount later, with an obvious pride in his voice, “I lost a shoe in the process, but I touched him.”
Even in the dead of the night, the ghats remain a rather busy place. We reached there at around midnight, only to find it bustling with death (or was it life ?). Every five minutes a truck loaded with mourners and the deceased would descend upon the ghats with their cries of “Bolo Hori, Hori Bol” renting the night sky. Or sometimes, it would be a much quieter lot, shaking their heads in the midst of thick cigarette fumes at the solitary tea shop. We soon found ourselves in a queue for the electrical furnace Number 4 (“Fast or slow?” “Huh?” “Electric or wooden?” “Umm... Electric…”).
“Cummon Kid, Buck up!!! Hurry up!!!”
“It’s not even 6 dadu…”
“Damn right it’s not 6. The Shop opens at 6. You want to stand behind that hag from next door?”
“I honestly don’t care dadu…”
“Well, I do. And I say we run. Cummon now…”
It was a long serpentine queue in front of the furnace. People smoking, talking, crying. Blank faces, happy faces, sad faces. Interspersed with the sleeping dead. Peaceful in their last 4’X7’ space on earth. It can be rather odd starting at dead faces. Contorted in agony of their last moments, or at calm with a lifetime spent. It’s all there.
And also the goats.
Three goats in a village.
Strolling majestically amongst the living and the dead in the ghat.
Tied to three trees in a row.
Feeding on the abundant stale flowers and leaves strewn about the corpses.
A six year old child feeding them a handful of dried leaves.
One of the braver ones start munching on the garland on one of the lesser guarded corpses.
An old man with prickly tiny white hair walks towards them with a huge scimitar in his hands.
It keeps at it, moving from the torso to near the face.
A small spectre-like crowd gathers as the ancient scimitar goes up and comes down with an unearthly swish. The child moves back a step, a streak of red dots on his face.
I couldn’t see the mouth of the goat anymore. Hidden behind the face and the mass of flowers about it, I could but vaguely see what it was that it was chewing on.
The old man is stringing them up, making a mala of the three still bleeding heads as the writhing bodies are carried off by the crowd. They will come in handy in the marriage feast.
I could see it now. The flowers have mostly been cleared up by its appetite. It’s biting at the ear now.
He stands up with a grim smile on his face and the monstrous mala in his hands. He walks towards the child, a thinner red-trail following his path, a path tad different from the much thicker blood red ones leading to the kitchen.
A trail of blood appears at the ear. Sickly red, reluctant to move, but I could see it nonetheless.
Laughing, he throws it around my neck. And tells me to run along, the marriage can’t start without the nitbor.
A summon for the next in line cuts through the slumbering 3 AM air, soon followed by howls of realisation. Other aggrieved sleepy mourners sit up to see what is happening. Or just find a better spot to live through the night.
I grimaced.
“Bolo Hori, Hori Bol.”
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