Sunday diary : Getting out of facebook

I did it. I took the plunge. I bit the bullet. I belled the cat.

I deleted my facebook account.

The reasons for doing so are numerous. But at the bottom of them all is the desire to take control of my own life. Now I have fewer worries about distractions to my concentration. Fewer worries about editing privacy settings to anything I post or have posted in the past. Fewer demands to take good-looking photographs at every place I go to. Fewer worries that I would miss commenting on sharp status updates of my friends. Fewer misgivings if enough people would "like" the thing I share on my wall. Fewer demands to post "happy birthday, have fun" messages; or if I miss doing that, to post "belated birthday wishes" messages.

In retrospect, I am not missing much out of my facebook account. I don't miss the annoying ticker on the top-right corner, that updates the digital life of my friends in real time. I don't miss their digital gossip on awkward photographs. I don't miss keeping up to the trend on funny videos over the web. I do miss certain events like friends' birthdays, weddings or graduation ceremonies. But seriously, I doubt if I would compensate for my physical absence by a mere textual presence on their facebook walls.

Life goes on. It is surprising how much the stylesheets of facebook have carved my subconscious. Every time I open my browser window, my fingers involuntarily type 'fa..". Every time I get annoyed by somebody on the streets, my mind automatically keeps framing a pithy status update that summarizes the situation. Every time I read an interesting bit of news, I suffer the urge of sharing it on facebook, made all the more easy by the ubiquitous "share" and "like" buttons. But these withdrawal symptoms will subside at some point, and new forms of digital addiction will take over my life.

I still kept my google+ account. This is not because I trust Google any more than Facebook on my privacy. But this is simply because of how little keeps happening on google+.

The few people I follow hardly update their streams (excellent job folks) and it feels so snug and comfy realizing that there is nothing more you need to do to acknowledge the digital happenings of the day. Also for all its faults, google+ (and Picasa) has an excellent interface for sharing photographs. So I will keep using google+ until I find time to install my own web-server, probably powering it through Diaspora* or similar open-source software.

What else in life ? I have a greater desire to know people beyond all the appearances they put up in day-to-day lives. Can digital technology make it easier for us in finding deeper connections with one another ? I will try to explore this angle. One idea I have is to take portraits of people whenever I visit a new city. I will request them that I would take their portraits for my personal travelogue (I carry a pretty neat digital camera), and may be pepper them with a few questions that come to my mind.

"What is your favorite place in this city ?"

"What is your dream destination ? "

"From which countries do your best friends come from ?"

I can record their responses on my smartphone. I will send their portrait photographs later on email. The problem is this requires a lot more guts to do than just silently ogling at the passers by. So I have not yet managed to do this. But at some point, I will try to make this a habit.

Sunday diary

Today I decided to open a new section in my blog called the Sunday diary, where I would just ramble on about simple nondescript things in my life. I hope this will give an inkling about my existence to my friends and pals, even though I don't think I will manage to write a blog every Sunday.

So what's happening in my life ?

Yesterday, I had the sudden urge to eat something really crunchy and fatty, so I made a "gratin aux endives". Endives are a type of salad that are quite bitter in taste. They come from the Chicory plant whose roots are blended with coffee to give its crunch taste. But tasting the leaves, you would never get this idea. I got used to the taste of endives when I was in France, but never cooked them before. But I reverse-engineered the dish, quite successfully I must say. A gratin is any dish with a lot of cream and cheese and baked in the oven. In Grenoble, the local dish was Gratin Dauphinois which was made with potatoes. Now I replaced the potatoes with endives. Since I didn't have cream, I cooked the endives with milk, putting a liberal chunk of butter inside. Once the leaves were tender, I dropped them into a casserole with some slabs of Gouda and Comte cheese, and sprinkled some garlic on the top. As this dish was getting baked, I decided to make some potato fries to give it company. In the end, I had a heavy meal of butter and cheese, and washed it down with some red wine. I was feeling quite guilty at the end of this experience, and thought I would go running the morning.

Hah, stupid me. Sunday had other plans in store for me. Running or going to the gym were of course not included in these plans.

I woke up quite late today, and after showering, was feeling so lazy I couldn't even cook food. Instead, I decided to go to the Nauwieser Viertel fest and catch some grub there. A viertel in German literally means a quarter, and the Nauwieser Viertel is this area in Saarbrücken that is generally popular with punks, new-age kids, retired hippies and other alternative crowd. I really wanted to live there, but could only find a house in its periphery. Well anyways, the Nauwieser quarter is celebrating its annual summer festival over this weekend. I went there Friday evening and met with Katrin and later with some other friends. By 8 'o clock in the evening, the place was swarming with people. A rough mixture of cologne, marijuana, sweat, fried oil, beer, tobacco and various feminine perfumes was hanging in the air. People had to go underneath each other's shoulders or thighs to get from point A to point B. It was funny to see the youngsters - the guys with preened facial hair and smelling of hair gel, the girls dripping in makeup and sizzling in their clothes - all sandwiched to each other into a viscous human jelly. It reminded me of the suburban trains in Mumbai during rush hour, where Newtonian mechanics gets suspended and Brownian motion takes over. The laws of physics give way to the laws of chemistry, and Boyle's law linking pressure and temperature of a closed system suddenly makes sense in one's head. I couldn't take this  for long and promptly escaped from the fest. But today afternoon, I ventured to go there again, confident that the dispirited youngsters have not yet woken up from their hangovers.

I was not wrong. The whole place was locked in a charmed suspension. The noon was just breaking in, and the shop-keepers were gently rolling their shutters out. I walked along like a king, slowly drinking in the sights : the trinkets on sale, the faint smell of barbecue and grilled meat, the various fastfood outlets selling food from Thailand, India, Hungary, Spain, Italy etc. I settled down to eat the langos, that were recommended to me by Katrin. These are a type of dough patties from Hungary that are deep-fried in oil, a bit similarly to the Indian puris, and served with garlic cheese. I hungrily munched them on, and added on to the guilt accumulated from yesterday.

But the guilt was definitely relegated to the background, as I thoroughly enjoyed the taste and also the atmosphere. I was listening to music at a very low volume on my iPod - dreampop, david bowie, the blow monkeys, heaven 17 etc.; and it felt amazing catching all the notes and rhythm in the very same zone where agitated youngsters were jostling for space yesterday. Hah, bliss.

I took several photographs and then ventured into "Café et al." - another place recommended to me by Katrin. It is a small café selling fair-trade goods, special chocolate and spices, and generally oozing with awesomeness. I went in for some coffee, and asked if they also had some cake to go with it. The owner said yes, they had a home-made cake. I dug in; it was a sort like the French millefeuille, with several layers of fried dough sandwiched with cream. The cream had a faint taste of black pepper- reminding me of the "junnu" cheesecake that my mom made at home. The effect was fantastic, and I was pretty sure this stroke of genius came from somewhere else. So I asked the owner where he came from, and he said Iran. Oh Iran, bless you. I don't know how many times I admired the culinary mastery from that place : a lot of that trickled down into Hyderabad through loads of Iranian immigrants escaping the revolution and settling down to set up restaurants. These restaurants have basically defined the taste of the Hyderabadi biryani (which I woefully miss so much). Later on in my life, I sampled Iranian cuisine several times, and I never regretted one single moment. The man warmed up when I told him I am from India. He enquired what I am doing abouts, and when I told him I have been working here since about 5 months, he said he was greatly surprised by my German skills. This was a bit cheating on my part because my German vocabulary is quite limited and doesn't exceed into anything beyond the introductory parlance. Anyways, the guy told me he makes Iranian food occasionally for customers and that I should sample it sometime. I told him, of course, I will visit the shop again. I left with a box of peppercorns coated in chocolate.

Next to "café et al." is a whiskey shop called "Whiskey Fee". All these shops are open today, quite unusual for Sunday, because of the viertel fest. I walked in and asked the lady that I wanted to buy a single malt. She insisted that I taste a few before making my decision (thank you very much, but I am slightly drunk at the moment in the middle of the noon). I ended up with a highland malt called "Wemyss malts" - it has a slightly sharp taste and aroma. Not the taste I usually go for, but I like it nonetheless.

And then I walked back home, ruminating on Northern European summers. The skies are overcast, and have been overcast from as long as my memory goes. The spring opened up cheerfully to a bright sun, but the mood of the heavens has quickly turned to melancholy as the summer progressed. The place feels like an inverted pint of Guinness, the mushy air hangs below from the clouds and refuses to go anywhere. As I inhaled that mushy air and looked around to see how small this place is, I had this moment where it all felt so cozy. Ah, bliss.

Little girls selling toys at the viertel fest.

The girls are so adorable I decided to take them another picture.

These little guys are selling ties, but they didn't convince me to buy one :) yet.

The "brunch box im viertel" is another nice shop in this area that makes good breakfasts & brunches. They specialize in takeaways, but I prefer to eat inside as their glass windows soak in a lot of sunlight. A good place to wake up on a Monday, drink some orange juice and then go to work.

Shops selling some trinkets. The outlet on the right is called "Govinda's Vegi" and sells samosas and mango lassi. But as far I saw, there were no Indians working there.

This is the fastfood place selling the Hungarian Langos. Yummy stuff.

These guys are selling some cakes. Katrin and I sampled some chocolate cake here on Friday, not bad but not especially good either. They set up shop next to a second hand record store. I swear I am going to buy some records in that place. Just to make a point about how much I like second hand record stores.

The shop on the right is the Whiskey Fee. But I took this photo for the picture on the left graffiti'd on to the wall. That wall belongs to the "café et al" by the way.

Interesting stuff from "café et al.".

This is where you eat breakfast at "Café et al." I am rather pleased with the auto HDR photos that I took with my iPhone.

Rimpo and the Sparrow

The mind is a labyrinth of mirrors. For Rimpo, this labyrinth is long and narrow - a straight line of a path that betrays no twists. On this path he marches everyday, towards the same point of no becoming. Measured thus against eternity, Rimpo became small and shrunk by the side of everyday objects. The axe he uses to cut wood became larger and heavier. The piece of land he tills became wider. The roof of his hut stood higher and the screeches of the birds above became more distant. And the mighty Himalayas next to his farm, he dares not even raise his eye to.

Rimpo has been living alone ever since his mother died. He has always been considered a dullard in the village, and possessing no great property, he has never received attention from any of the girls. He had his heart broken a few times in his boyhood and then he learnt how to not make similar mistakes in judgement. Life is a slow process of learning how to avoid the traps and the temptations. Along the journey, Rimpo grew hard in his eye and sure in his step. Now that his dear parents are dead, he hardly meets the villagers. They consider his farm at the end of the village as a vestigial organ, a reminder of a time where it was a part of the social life but which has far outlived its usefulness. From beside the farm stretches the thick Himalayan jungle and down below roars the torrent from the mountains. Rimpo and his farm are transparent to the villagers, they belong neither to the village nor to the jungle.

Rimpo knows every sound and color that invade the privacy of his mind. He knows their rhythm just as well as he knows the rhythm of his heart. The roar of the torrent below has a rhythm. The screeches of the birds above have a rhythm. The morning light that shines into his hut has a rhythm, and so does the breeze that comes by nightfall. Into this rhythm, he constructed his life; and into this, he weighs in his every step.

Years passed by without counting, and Rimpo shrank smaller and smaller. Days became seasons and minutes became days. Like an ant that lived for an eternity, Rimpo achieved a patient and non-judgemental gaze over the world, over himself, and over the insignificance of one towards the other. In the labyrinth of his mind, the color of the seasons blended harmoniously into a gray monotone - where yesterday meets tomorrow and where sound meets silence.

One day, this harmony is disturbed by a sparrow. Rimpo watched as it barged in indignantly through the window and started pecking on the pile of paddy grains that lay on the floor. Those pile of grains are his labor over the whole year, as he tilled his harsh land by the stony look of the Himalayas. He needs every grain in that pile for himself, to bear the winters to come. Rimpo knows the rhythm by which he shoos the bird away : how his hand raises up and swats the floor below, how his lips open and a sharp hiss of air whistles through his tongue. But now, he just waits and watches the sparrow. It pecks at the rice, grain by grain, as few as are needed to sate its tiny hunger. It then flaps its wings and flies away.

The sparrow comes again the next day, at the very same time. Rimpo watches it peck the grains and then fly away. He now knows the rhythm, how and when this would happen again. But he cannot let this happen. So when the sparrow comes, Rimpo stands there waiting and addresses it thus.

"Dear friend, I am honored by your visit to my humble abode. But I am afraid I cannot offer you enough space and succor for another day. I cannot shield you from the infinity of the world. I am a shrinking man, and soon I will be smaller than yourself. The span of your wings shall soon be greater than the stretch of my arms. Go find a bigger man for your friend, and a warmer hut to bide your winters in."

Then the sparrow replies, "Rimpo, Though you have not seen me much before, know that I am your friend. I am fickle as a sparrow and I do not step into the same door twice. Many people have found me walk in but never paid me attention. But I am as much their friend as I am yours. I hop from garden to garden, from hut to hut and over streams and meadows. I stay not in the same place for long, as I love this whole infinite world. My world is not to be feared. But you do not live in the same world as mine."

"What do you mean ?"

"Often man hears nothing but echoes of his own voice from the past, reverberating from the walls of his memories. Man sees nothing but the reflections of his own character, breaking from the prism of his mind. And man feels nothing but the cold of his loneliness, in the vastness of existence. Every thought that he weaves is a thread to cover himself from this cold. These threads knit together into a shroud that envelopes one's mind. Through this shroud, man cannot see the world for what it is. He cannot hear the world for what it is. And he cannot smell. When was the last time you smelt something, Rimpo ?"

Rimpo tries to protest. He definitely can smell, but does he care for smells ? When was the last time he cared for smells ? He answers, " I do not want to know."

"Smell is the basest and the most wicked of the senses. It is how nature tells man that he is her subject, that he cannot break free from her. Would you like to see the world of smells ?"

Rimpo puts on his shoes and trails the sparrow. As he comes out, he sees that spring is the season and that the Himalayan forest is full of its smells. A million shades of green lay basking in the rays of gold. Through these colors, Rimpo detects a smell that unearths a long forgotten memory from his childhood. Thread by thread, his thoughts get unravelled by the smells, exposing the core of his being to the mercy of nature. The sparrow flies above and guides him through trails that he has never taken in his life.

Rimpo asks, "How big is the world that a man can experience in a moment ? "

"Each man knows for himself. For the most part, a man has but four or five thoughts. They shape his goals and they mould his actions. The long threads of memories that a man weaves laboriously over his life are only felt for their weight, but never experienced in totality. But even this entire weight of memories is mocked for its finiteness by the infinity that is offered by the very moment of now. The mind is a labyrinth of mirrors, and rarely ever does one get to peer outside."

For the first time in his long journey of life, Rimpo sees himself in this labyrinth. And he sees it to be not straight, but spiraling into a thousand loops.

The sparrow continues, "Man becomes a slave for his own habit. Each loop creates an illusion of eternity, masking the finiteness of experience. True freedom is indeed freedom from one's own thoughts and habits. "

Rimpo finds himself now in a forest of Rhododendrons. The trees are in full bloom with colors of rose, white and red. The air is also lighter, the sparrow has led him up a mountain trail into a meadow. Rimpo asks, "Why do you bother yourself with me sparrow ? What makes you love me ?"

"Love is but a realization that each moment in a finite existence has a window towards infinity. When I realize thus, I cannot but feel love for everything in the world. But I should leave you here, my friend. I am but a sparrow and I cannot fly any higher. Beyond this meadow, you need no friend. I bring you here so that you can see what I cannot."

Thus saying, the sparrow flies back into the valley below. In that moment of clarity, Rimpo sees neither the sparrow nor the tortuous path that they have climbed together. Instead he sees a different person that has pored out of his own self - a person bigger than the mountains, and for whose step nothing is large. The labyrinth of his mind is dissolved. He sees nothing but the sun that is shining through his eyes. No mountain blocks his path nor his view. In that tiny window of time where he is truly himself, he sees that he is immortal.

Catching the bubbles of happiness

Happiness is a substance that has some strange chemical properties. For one, it is an extremely short lived substance and disintegrates quickly into the surrounding atmosphere. It cannot be stored in a sealed container either, as it decomposes spontaneously in the absence of light. It has neither a distinctive odour nor a distinctive color. Due to its whimsical and short-lived nature, many physicists have long doubted its existence. A fringe few do so even today.

But owing to its indirect effects on other substances in controlled lab experiments, which are carefully studied, and to its numerous sightings in the wild, the existence of happiness is now established beyond doubt. What still remain controversial, however, are procedures to synthesize happiness and its effects on human beings.

Despite numerous failures in synthesizing it in a lab setting, it appears that happiness forms quite readily in nature and seems drawn towards life forms in general, and human beings in particular. The age of a person seems to be a critical factor in attracting happiness, with young children being particularly susceptible towards catching large doses of happiness when they are outdoors.

The most common form of happiness is that of tiny bubbles that drift in the air. These bubbles are transparent, but they sometimes shimmer brightly in the sunlight due to certain optical properties. The human eye seems to be partially capable of detecting these shimmers, with young children reporting that they see such bubbles drifting and dancing wildly at the corners of their eyes. One is supposed to see these bubbles sideways, as a direct gaze would rend them transparent. A more successful method for catching happiness is by listening.

Since the bubbles of happiness form and dissolve spontaneously, they make a curious crackling sound as they pop. A carefully trained ear can latch on to these popping sounds, and thus lead a person to the source of a large concentration of happiness. People have thus been led to happiness in very unsuspecting and nondescript places - such as the top of a crossroads, or next to a puddle in a stream. Sometimes happiness hangs in a thick cloud around a man carrying a big luggage and sweating profusely. Sometimes it trails the scent of a woman walking tip-toe on a quiet street. Sometimes it lurks behind a group of quarreling kids. And sometimes it flutters around two lovers who are lost in each other. These are by no means an exhaustive list of places where one might bump into happiness, indeed such a list would be impossible to make. With every passing day as the sun lights up the world, huge clouds of happiness condense in the atmosphere and drift around the place. Whether they do so with a pattern or just aimlessly is still open to debate.

When one comes within hearing distance of happiness, a curious manoeuvre can be followed to make the happiness descend directly onto oneself. The efficacy of this manoeuvre has been known in the popular culture, but the scientific reasons behind it are still under study. One is supposed to smile widely and look sideways towards the source of happiness. A simple lip-smile will not do - it should be accompanied by an eye-smile where the eyes glint in the shimmer of the bubbles. And lo, the cloud of happiness swooshes down to one's face and runs up one's nose. The after-effects are reported as widely varied, ranging from a sudden swing in one's step to one sobbing silently. The only common effect seems to be that of a general exhilaration.

It is also hypothesized that happiness is a fundamental ingredient of life, as essential as Oxygen. But the whimsical nature of its interaction with life-forms prompts many scientists to question such a strong hypothesis. If all life-forms need happiness to survive, how would they find their daily dose of happiness ?

We cannot say anything about this yet. But it is generally accepted that happiness is very good for the health of human beings. So we conclude this article by giving some tips for the interested reader on how to spot happiness.

• Memory seems to be bad for happiness. Most people have bad memories that inhibit them from perceiving the fullness of the world around. This prevents them from spotting happiness even when it is lurking quite nearby.
• Happiness appears to be contagious. The more the people one infects with happiness, the likelier that one gets a new dose when all of one's bubbles of happiness pop out.
• As a converse, selfishness is quite bad for happiness. One's happiness won't last for long when one is alone.
• This can be extended to also one's thoughts and actions. The more isolated one becomes, and the more sure in this isolation one becomes, the lesser the happiness that comes one's way.
• Smiles seem to be particularly good at attracting happiness, even when it is several kilometers away.
• Early morning by the sunrise and the early evening by the sunset are the best times to catch happiness.

Reducing Facebook : Increasing Attention

After a long pondering over the problem, I decided today to reduce my time on Facebook - to a visit per every 3 days. Facebook now commands a lion's share of my time spent on the internet. This is natural since I, like any other person, value updates from my friends a lot more than other events. However, unlike a physical visit to my friends that always makes me feel better, a visit to Facebook often ends up making me feel worse and confused. Part of this is due to the inadequacy of virtual communication. But I believe part of this is also due to how stupidly Facebook is structured; and how that constrains meaningful engagement. In the rest of this blog, the reader can substitute Facebook for any social networking website; the problem is similar.

To understand this, we first have to go to the earlier times of the web when Yahoo was the dominant search engine. In those days, the home page of the search was cluttered with thousands of news snippets and gadgets. This distraction of attention was clearly annoying when the user had a definite purpose - to search for something. Then Google came along and introduced the clean search page that has become the standard for all search engines today. With Facebook, we face a similar problem today, but which is deeper and more menacing. The culprit is the destruction of one's attention.

I have blogged earlier about how the very nature of the internet (the hyperlink) shatters one's attention. This problem is manifest at a higher order on Facebook, which requires the user to post status updates in 420 characters or less. "What's on your mind ?" Facebook asks. Either you have something interesting on your mind which is often impossible to convey within the character limit, or you say something uninteresting and reaffirm to yourself that your life is boring. The end result is frustration. The replies from your friends, and your replies in return are necessarily shallow, owing to the character limit. But even if it is scarce, you do enjoy the positive feedback when it comes. Mostly, this comes from your friends clicking the Like button on your status updates or on photos. This marks the high point of your Facebook experience, and you get addicted to it like one gets addicted to coffee. The day is not long when neuroscientists shove people into an fMRI machine with an iPad in their hands, and measure their neurotransmitter levels when their friends click the Like button, and thus proving the obvious and getting their paper accepted in Science. But I digress.

The reason for the seemingly inane 420 character limit is simple : the guys at Facebook.com have no better ideas on how to pull updates from your various friends into a single webpage. So they push all and sundry in uniformly sized packets, and clutter them onto your face, knowing well that you will be watching that page several times a day. Thereby, you surrender your most valuable resource - your attention, to Facebook which destroys it completely.

Here, I should write something about attention, a topic few people are aware of. Often, people who talk about it are cognitive psychologists or new-age meditation practitioners. Both the groups outdo each other in scaring an unwitting reader to his wit's end. I will try to introduce the problem in a more straightforward way : imagine that you are shaving to a mirror. If your mind gets distracted for a second, you might end up with a cut on your lip. Luckily it doesn't happen often, since the impulses in your muscles get accustomed to these lapses of attention, but sometimes they cannot cope and you end up with a bloodied lip. As a second example, think of yourself baking something in the oven and taking the dish out. If your mind is distracted, you may end up with a burn on your fingers as you absentmindedly touch the hot grill. Or think of the scenario where you are leaving for work in the morning and keep your keys somewhere - so that you can grab your coat, bag or something else. It can happen that you forget where you left your keys, and spend several minutes frantically searching for them. The problem in all these examples is that you are not fully attentive in your present moment of experience.

These lapses of attention can cause more serious trouble. When you are working, you might miss hearing something very pertinent to the discussion. If you are a researcher like me, you might miss a crucial point in a paper that you are reading. If you are a computer programmer, you might miss a bug in the program. People who are normally competent can underperform because they are not "fully" present.

In eastern religions, especially Buddhism, being present in the "now" is considered a highly virtuous thing. People spend several years trying to improve their standing here, through practicing rigorous meditation. It is said that one whose attention is perfect feels a supreme happiness. I don't know about that, but I think being attentive to your own mind is quite similar to being attentive to the surroundings. A man wearied by fatigue or illness may not appreciate a magnificent natural scenery when it passes before his eyes. Similarly, a man whose palette is ruined by unwise food choices may not later appreciate the sublime taste of a wine. Starting with a clean slate is important for perceiving the fullness of an experience. This is also true for perceiving one's own mind - and for experiencing one's natural creativity. A man with low attention will not be creative and will succumb to the habit of yesterday. At a practical level, this will reflect in him being boring and not funny. At a deeper level, this causes an existential crisis and panic.

I think it is ineffective to speak of attention in the absolute - either there or not. It is better to speak of attention as a finite resource that can be measured. Then it becomes money. It can be invested and greater rewards be earned. Or it can be squandered and the person becomes poorer than before. There is an old saying, "time is money". But I think it is missing the point. One can have plenty of time, but still make nothing out of it. What I think was meant there was that "attention is money". When one is more attent, one saves time; and with the saved time, focuses attention on something more important. Just like with money, one can be rich in attention by cultivating good habits and by investing wisely.

Of all the five senses, hearing is the best friend when it comes to attention. This is because one's mind is completely focused on the incoming sound signal, and steps together along with time. This automatically reinforces the attention of the listener, and the attention-money thus earned can be spent on other things. These days, I listen to radio podcasts when I commute to work. They always make me feel better. When it comes to the sense of vision, distraction is easier. But this becomes a friend when it is coupled with the more stabilizing sense of hearing. So the second tip I have for you is to see things that you hear (either externally or internally in your own mind) for stretches of long periods of time. It does good to follow this in other senses as well : hearing, touching, seeing, tasting and smelling (each reinforced by the earlier one in the order). This rules out flipping channels on TV, browsing without a goal on the internet, or coming back to the topic of the blog - spending time on Facebook.

Facebook is essentially the opposite of meditation. Metaphorically, one is giving all the attention that one earned during the day (and in one's sleep at night) in a bowl to Mark Zuckerberg, who then spills it all over. One's mind is very similar to one's house : it periodically needs cleaning and keeping things in order. It needs open windows so that sunlight and air can pass through. But this shouldn't mean the trash from the entire city should be poured in. So I decided to let this happen just once every 3 days. This is a hard decision for me to take, as I am a single person in a foreign country and do not have many other respites for filling this vacuum. I do crave for the "like"s from my friends, and I am quite worried how long I will stick to this policy of limiting Facebook. But give it a try, I do nonetheless. Here is me hoping for an increased attention. :)

An atheist guy goes to Malta

If you haven't yet seen this video on youtube, please see it. It is one of the funniest jokes I have seen. I see the narrative in this video as a metaphor to how conflicts happen between human beings - often due to misunderstanding.

Human languages are one of the most wonderful things in the universe. The expressive power in them is hardly matched by anything else. However, they still help us only in a limited way to communicate our deepest sensations and emotions. The language that runs in my head is hardly the same as that which runs in yours. To make things worse, these languages evolve rapidly over time. Is it possible to peek into the soul of a 12th century man, and experience the world as he experienced it ? I doubt if it is possible.

Languages have several layers to construct meaning - at the very outset is the vocabulary that maps sounds (words) to activities and ideas. Then there is the layer of syntax that encodes the relationship between these words. Then exists the layer of semantics that gives a specific meaning (amongst many) for a sentence from the words and the relationships between them. Beyond them, lies the layer of pragmatics which understands a given sentence in its broader context, how it is uttered etc. There exists possibilities for confusion in all these layers. And all these layers put together may still not express the very emotions a person felt before speaking.

Let me illustrate this. Imagine that I see colors very differently from how you see them. For example, every time you see "blue" I see "red", and vice-versa. Both of us would agree on how we give labels to these colors, i.e, we call the same set of objects as red. But in whichever language we might use, we will never be able to communicate the discrepancy that exists in our world-views. I first thought about this problem in school, when I heard about color-blindedness. A color-blinded person will see red and green objects similarly, and will get to know about his problem only when somebody else tells him about it. However, if I am suffering from the "color-swap" problem I mentioned above, I will never figure out that there is anything wrong with me. Being a kid that I was, this thought gave me a very cold chill in my spine. Much later in my life, I discovered that this issue is well-studied in philosophy and is called the problem of "qualia". Philosophers discuss (or dismiss) them in a very detached and nonchalant way that I find bemusing.

Considering these many layers in a human language and the endless possibilities in which we can confuse each other up, it is may be no surprise that we humans fight angrily at every other thing. What prodded me to write this post today however, is the growing debate about atheism in our society. Often this debate degenerates into funny conflicts, of the sort where the Italian guy goes to Malta.

Atheist guy : Sir, I think it is a bad thing to f*ck on the table.

Theist guy : But I really want a fork on the table, Sir.

Neither of the parties would agree on what words like consciousness, free-will, freedom or God means. And neither of them would know what they meant thousands of years ago when these words have first entered into our lexicon. I would consider this debate as just nonsensical fun, but for the presence of real evil idiots in our amidst.

Evil Idiot Theist guy : But my religious book has ordered me to indeed f*ck on the table, Sir.

I think as long as there are these evil idiot theists amongst us, I think atheism is the way to go !

** For the nerds amongst you, the color-swap (qualia) problem is actually a problem with a rotation in the color space. This rotation ambiguity (in the perception of H,S or V channels) cannot be recovered by communicating in human languages alone.