Beyond Perception ...

"The destiny of man is not measured by material computations"
Sir Winston Churchill

Have you ever wondered why you are what you are ? Though not intended to be overloaded, this has a profound insinuation. We all have small desires in life which flower by the day and get fulfilled by the wink of the eye. Then we incrementally build dreams, which gradually give our life a reason. Well, not a reason, but the reason.

Attainment of the dream often is perceived to imply fruition. The ultimate destination or the state of nirvana as the purists would put it. But does it make sense to believe that this realisation is asymptotic to the ideal state we long for ? Lets think about it.

I am sure most of you would now throw your hands up and wonder if I am struck with the spiritual bug and imagine me sitting under the Banyan tree in a tapovan, floating freely in abstract thoughts. We often talk of abstraction and arbitrariness and how they cloud our normal state of mind. Let me assure you, this is not one of them. I am trying to get at what a normal human being goes through innumerable times a day......

We find ourselves tied in a intricate web of expectations right from the moment we step into this world. You are expected to be a boy or a girl, say and follow the footsteps of your benefactors. Though this is perfectly natural and normal, we unconsciously develop a set of future goals that define what we do now. Again, what future means might change from person to person. We work hard, use our superior intellect and fight .... do all it takes to attain this goal. This goal might be as simple and logical as making money or as kiddish (seemingly kiddish) as kissing Keira Knightley. But what distinguishes them is that the former in most cases does what he does because people around him think that is what is imperative. He looks at examples and models himself according to that. But the latter does it because he thinks he is passionate about what he wants to do and carries on with it. What is significant here is that we are not talking in terms of right and wrong at all.

That takes us non-sequentially to the next level of thought. If perceptions about our goals is what guides us, why is that we make the unforgivable mistake of being myopic at the definition stage itself ? Its a non trivial question to even attempt to answer. And even if we do know unambiguously what we want to do, where is the drive and the energy required to enable us push the destination higher ? Not to make things difficult for us... but to motivate us to rediscover ourselves.

There can be n reasons for this shorting or the goal-push deficit I like to call. And the most important of them is the unexpected bolt of lightning that just flashes, makes us numb and takes away everything that is dear to us. I read a little quote in the speech from Theodore Roosevelt. This quote is about a young man. He was a young lawyer in New York. He had married a beautiful girl, and they had a lovely daughter, and then suddenly she died, and this is what he wrote. This was in his diary - He said

"She was beautiful in face and form and lovelier still in spirit. As a flower she grew and as a fair young flower she died. Her life had been always in the sunshine. There had never come to her a single great sorrow. None ever knew her who did not love and revere her for her bright and sunny temper and her saintly unselfishness. Fair, pure and joyous as a maiden, loving, tender and happy as a young wife. When she had just become a mother, when her life seemed to be just begun and when the years seemed so bright before her, then by a strange and terrible fate death came to her. And when my heart's dearest died, the light went from my life forever"

That was Theodore in his twenties. He thought the light had gone from his life forever, but he went on. And not only did he became the President of the United States of America, but as an ex-President, he served his country, always in the arena, tempestuous, strong, sometimes wrong, sometimes right, but he was a man !

And this is an example I think all of us should remember. We think sometimes when things happen that don't go the right way. ...we think that when someone dear to us dies, when we suffer a defeat; that all life has come to a screeching halt. We think, as Theodore said, that the light has left our lives forever. Not true.I reassert.. its not justice to our thought process.

This is where the strength of our dreams come into the fore. Do we have it in us to withstand the jerks life can create along our sojourn ? It is still interesting to observe that this strength is partly provided by the nature of our goal itself. Thinking big... yes... really big .. takes you so far from the granularity of life that you start to wonder. It is at this point you wonder if the cause you are standing up for is just and noble. And its the love and devotion of your fellow men ... their gratitude for all the selfless sacrifices you have made.... that brings the first drop of tear from your eye and kills the wrinkles on your forehead. Its at this point that you are indifferent to the cold, black breeze of mortality....You only see the pretty, solitary face of all the love in this world personified .... standing in front of you with a fresh rose....

You have left an indelible mark for humanity to follow.....

Gods must be Crazy ..

She was sitting on the shores of the Marina Beach in Chennai, seemingly indifferent to the mellifluous waves. There was a latent bonding between Her and the waters. I hope I had the words to put them down....

Her childhood was not picture perfect. In fact, far from it. She wasn't interested in bedtime stories and fairy tales like Her friends. She had a flair for estimations of all kinds. Her innocent smile of relief after Her small predictions came true was enough to light up Her mom's face. She did everything in her capacity to supplant a seamless world into her Daughter's psyche.

After completing Her honors in Statistics, She resisted Her temptations to take up what the industry had to offer. The Massive Waters of this planet had always fascinated Her. Never did She miss an opportunity to visit Kanyakumari in the pretext of seeing Her relatives. Her uncle doesn't remember a single occasion when She didn't ask about the way waves and tides behave when three seas collude. She even spent a fortune to participate in a deep sea diving adventure with Her collegemates. Somehow it seemed that the Waters beckoned her in their own passive way.

She decided to pursue Masters in Ocean Engineering from IIT Madras. With an unmatched academic fervour, She worked on turbulations on the surface of water bodies with specific emphasis on analysing and predicting under sea disturbances. Her paper on cyclones and employing recursion to establish their relationship with southwest monsoons received international recognition.

But there was something that kept telling Her that she was probably moving in the wrong direction. Yes, things which She had tucked beneath the layers of Her intellect for years. Time was ripe for Her insticts to take over and explore the path till it hit bottom. It was about a study of the Bay of Bengal that She had undertaken as a sophomore. She had arrived at results which seemed to indicate heightened activity at an area 50000 km north east of Port Blair. On comparison with the data from the Met Department, She could detect a cycle of activities in the Pacific Belt...... yes..... that was the area Her data converged to....

But if you are a research associate from India, credibility is considered alien to you. There were no takers for Her findings ...neither from the Universities nor from the US Met Office. It was dismissed as "a typical case of megalomania". She did feel disheartened, but She had time; about 200 days was Her guess. She would keep trying, atleast to prove that there are alternate methods to predict natural sea-borne disasters (Yes..She was sure this was going to be unprecedented in scale).

It was with these myriad thoughts that She found Herself lost on the seashore. She had never been out of Her house at Mylapore beyond 10:00 pm... till today. But Her mental wranglings brought Her to this place at midnight and She was musing for about five hours now. She somehow felt that it was a War of Wits between Her and the Ocean. And almost instantly, Her results did not sound logical to Her.

Suddenly, Her heart missed a beat. She had forgotten all about a preliminary sub-division of Her calculations. And it had to be divided by the present distance factor of 10. Yes, by Jove, the distance must then be 5000 km, not 50000. And the time at hand would reduce proportionately too ! She felt a cold tremor run through Her. She just hoped that it wasn't too late.

But late it was ! Fatally late. Almost immediately when this realisation dawned on Her with the first rays of the sun sneaking from the horizon, She saw the waves raise and cover the sunlight. No, it was not an ordinary high crest. The sea was moving in.... She did not remember walking into the beach at all...but She felt surrounded by water. Maybe She was drowning, but She did not care. She saluted the Almighty and her favourite Waters for outsmarting Her by seconds. Yes, Nature is always too smart for mortals. Gracefully accepting the verdict, She disappeared into a fading melancholy..........

She looked to the sea for hope and inspiration.
She looked to the sea to dream.
She looked to the sea for peace and sanctuary.
She looked to the sea to be free.
And there She was, as free as she imagined.....


The above depiction is based on a true story, the life of a person I knew about. Yes. It was the Fateful 26th of December, 2004. The Boxing day Tsunami showed the world what Nature is capable of. Some might think that Vandhana is incredibly unlucky. But I feel that it is people like Her (Yes.. caps for my respect) who still make us nurture the hope that we can bank on our superior intellects to survive and preserve our race.

I heard from a friend at IITM last week that The US Met Department confirmed Vandhana's turbulation predictions last year which pertained to a series of hurricanes hitting the West Coast now. Though Katrina and Rita were not unexpected, her findings are now studied by an expert commitiee.

It was my pleasure knowing Vandhana; though for a brief period. I am still trying to translate my deep sorrow into a celebration of victory.... the victory of the seamless Human Mind over Nature.

I name and dedicate my first blog to Her.