Aaji Joto Taara Tobo Akashe

All the stars that grace Thy skies

Shine within my soul tonight

Thy Cosmos surges in from every side

Pouring into my depths.

Every blossom in all Thy groves

Blooms within my being.

Unbounded joy from horizons afar

Flows through my soul

A fragrance deep

Mingling, merging, gushing forth again

In ecstatic praise of Thee.

This day I heed not any one

I can hear the words of none

The Cosmic Breath

Sings in my heart

Entrancing as the sweetest flute.

Click the button to play the song.
Translation and song are both mine. The photo is not, but click on it for the full impact.

The Official Phoren Glamour Ranking List

Finally! After months of painstaking research and much conversation with non-resident Indians (henceforth, NRI’s) and resident ones, I have successfully compiled the definitive ranking of the various foreign (henceforth, phoren) countries where Indian diaspora are settled.

To provide the necessary background, one must realize that beloved though our country is, it is much lacking in glamour and glitz. Resident Indians who have never left the country sadly shake their heads at the materialistically fulfilling, but spiritually devoid lifestyle of their NRI brethren. Interestingly though, they tend to make a rapid beeline for aforesaid materialistic lifestyle if given the opportunity.

But having successfully transitioned to NRI status, it is considered extremely non-kosher to declare that you want to stay on in the country you spent so much effort moving to. Instead you must always say that you intend to “go back after some years”, where the “some” is very nebulously defined.

On the other hand, actually going back to India is considered even more non-kosher, and causes much shock and awe – like saying you want to drop out of college and then really doing it.

Now, having lived in two phoren countries and then come back to India (shock! awe!), I have also observed that all phorens are not equal in the Indian psyche and some have decidedly more glamour than others. Hence, here I compile a carefully researched ranking for my readership, so that they may choose the level of glamour that best suits them.

So, firstly, the three major criteria that glamorize your phoren land:

1) Wealth and shine: No country is truly phoren unless it obviously has mucho moolah with shiny-shiny buildings, fast-fast cars and big-big highways.

As the brother of my Philadelphia resident friend keeps getting asked, “Aap ka behen phoren mein rahti hai, toh aap Nigeria mein kyon rahte hain?” Clearly, Nigeria is not phoren.

Ditto for Russia, Iran, Brazil, and Thailand (whatever other appeal it may have.)

2) White people: The race of our former colonial overlords must be present in copious quantities to legitimize phoren glamour. Don’t ask why. It’s an axiom.

3) English: More a matter of convenience, but helps fine-tune the rankings as we shall see.

So noooow…without further delay…. we give you the rankings.

Rank 1: Take a guess, anyone!

Numero Uno! The Best of the Best!! Undisputed All-Time Champ!!!!

Introduuuucing…. THE U…..S……OF…..A!!!!!! (Drum roll and thunderous applause)

Nothing, and I mean nothing, remotely compares to the glamour of living in the land of the brave, the free and the morbidly obese.

Even if you live in a nondescript small town of Idaho, the aura of the USA surrounding you will dazzle all onlookers, and allow you to sneer with impunity at Bangaloreans, Bombayites and maybe even Londoners.

Rank 2: UK, Canada and Australia

Presented in no particular order, these are the Salieris to USA’s Mozart – all the right attributes, but not quite there. The NRIs living in these countries also exhibit the mentality of those who have almost reached heaven’s door, but not quite.

So, the NRIs in the US keep talking of “going back home” while applying for a Green Card.

The UK ones talk of going back home while applying to jobs in the US.

Similar behaviour is reported for those in Canada and Australia.

Rank 3: Non-UK Western Europe

So, that means Germany, Switzerland, France, etc. Not Hungary, Poland and all those places.

Shiny-shiny – tick. White people – definitely.

But language. Such a problem, the language. Can’t you possibly move to the UK? Or maybe even, nudge, nudge, the US?

Amsterdam gets a partial exemption since the language of cannabis and red light districts is universal.

Rank 4: Singapore and Hong Kong

Aaaah, we can speak English again. But what’s with all these Chinese people everywhere?

I mean, can you even make out what they are thinking? No, no, definitely not done.

Hong Kong is sinking in status as Mandarin is increasingly becoming the spoken language.

Meanwhile, Singapore has almost risen to rank 3, because of proximity to India and relaxed visa procedures. But the Chinese itch refuses to go away, it seems.

Rank 5: Dubai and the UAE

Immense flash and glitter, no doubt. English speaking - good. Also, Muslim. Long pause.

We are in serious bad news territory here, folks. Whispers of brutal punishments, second class citizenship, Indian labourers treated as virtual slaves. Plus Dawood Ibrahim and links with Pakistan (oh no, the Muslim connection again!).

Some phoren glamour remains here, but tinged with darker hues.

Rank 6: Japan

Once a favourite of the older generation, only a lot of wealth and tremendous shine keep it on the glamour list at all. Severe language problems and a worldwide reputation for xenophobia.

Plus, what’s with all the raw fish and cut throat prices, eh?

This is definitely a place where you can tell the visa official, “I intend to stay here a few years and then leave”, without having your fingers crossed behind your back.

So, what do you think? Feel free to suggest fine tunings and alternative rankings, or make indignant comments.

Much Ado About Nothing

Anybody seeking a perfect example of making a mountain out of a very harmless molehill need look no further than the supremely silly "Park 51 Mosque Controversy" dominating the US media nowadays.
Rumours of a vague plan to erect a mosque on Ground Zero - the site of the World Trade Center buildings - have even reached India. It sounded rather unlikely, and I was disinclined to pay much attention to the matter. After all, the US media is always roiled by some storm in a teacup or another, unlike India where we only discuss issues of the greatest import. :)

All this changed when I ran into an old friend, Ameena, on Facebook, after several years.

What follows is a guest post by my sister, Bisakha Sen, written after I reported my e-conversation with Ameena. Read on, and contemplate the idiocy of the human race.

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Musings on Park51

Maybe I should have titled it "Banning Unitarian Universalist churches because you hate Pat Robertson"?
If there is a God that specializes in irony.....this whole mess must surely be laid at His altar !
Till recently, the whole Park51 'Mosque at WTC' was a matter of principle to me, not much more. I have no particular fondness for ANY organized religion, including Islam. However, there are certain religious freedoms in USA. Those religious freedoms cannot be denied to Muslims. And anyway, the site is a few blocks AWAY from WTC, in an area where strip clubs and bars abound -- so its not exactly 'desecrating hallowed ground' to begin with. Plus there are mosques in that vicinity already.What changed things was an email from my brother, a few days ago with a subject line screaming 'UNBELIEVABLE'."Can you believe
it, this is AMEENA'S community mosque that all these (unprintables) are going loony over !"




Ameena. My lovely friend. Looks like a sylph and has a spine of steel. Writer, fashionasta, feminist, passionately progressive, gay-rights advocate, generous-to-a-fault. Who has been known to march out of 'traditional' mosques with her three daughters in tow because the imam had spouted some typical nonsense of 'good women should be meek and subservient' during service! Who can destroy every stereotype you held about Muslims in about 15 minutes of conversation. Who is a dedicated Sufi Muslim herself. Part of a Interfaith community full of free-thinkers of every stripe. My brother visited Friday services at this mosque when he first visited Ameena. He was absolutely enchanted -- "Sis, we had the BEST dancing with chants......sooo much fun". He assured me he had greatly enjoyed conversations with New-age artistic free-thinking types from every background as well, but clearly it was the dancing that truly impressed him ! (side note, this is a community mosque where men and women not only pray together, they dance together !!!).

When we last visited Ameena in New York, we met El-Farouk Khaki at her place. Brilliant, impassioned, extravagantly tattooed and as flamboyant as they come -- El Farouk Khaki is a Canadian activist for Muslim LGBT rights and founder of the 'Salaam', one of the biggest suport groups for gay Muslims in the west. He'd been a guest at the community mosque earlier. We all chatted deep into the night over an endless supply of kabobs -- starry-eyed social liberals imagining days when ALL organized religious groups would be welcoming to all, when imams and priests presiding over exchange of vows of gay/lesbian couples would be a norm, not an exception.
As I now hear the cacophony about this community's mosque, I can't help but wonder -- is THIS why Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin and the rest are up in arms against this community and their mosque ? Are they worried that a progressive interfaith Muslim group that is pro-gay rights will dent their cherished construct of Muslims uniformly being more 'socially backwards' and 'anti human-rights' than Christians of their ilk ?

Ameena wrote to us saying: "Traditional Muslims don't like us because we're hippy New Age types, and now Fox News says we're jihadists dancing on graves of 9/11 victims !" Frankly, I'm struggling to get my head around the sheer scale of the irony ! That opposition to Al Qaeda and Islamist fundamentalism is now taking the form of opposition to a highly progressive Sufi group! What could be a possible parallel ? Opposition to Pat Robertson's followers resulting in demonizing Unitarian Universal churches might come close!

I fear that the average American protesting this community center is getting played for a fool, and Al Qaeda members are hooting with laughter! An article in this week's Newsweek confirmed today that the Taliban are DEFINITELY hooting with laughter (http://www.newsweek.com/2010/08/30/taliban-using-mosque-controversy-to-recruit.html) -- it doesn't get better than this for them! Americans turn on Sufi Muslims --- whom both Al Qaeda and Taliban hate with a passion -- and in process of doing so, America projects an 'anti-Muslim' image around the world that helps Al Qaeda and Taliban to recruit !!!!!!!

I keep hoping for a happy resolution. Maybe the cacophony will die down a bit, and people will set aside those "9-11 taught me ALL I need to know about Islam" posters, and just be a LITTLE more curious ? Even asking "so who are the Sufis anyway" -- would be a good start! Now that its been revealed that the so-called 'shady Saudi Prince' who MIGHT have been helping with the mosque funding is actually Fox News's second largest shareholder (and among other things, has funded the George HW Bush scholarship at Phillips Academy, MA), maybe some of the anti-mosque protestors will take a small step back and reconsider the possibility that maybe they haven't *quite* been given the full picture ?

If nothing else -- maybe some people could at least start railing against this particular group of Muslims for more APPROPRIATE reasons, like they are "TOO darned" socially liberal, and therefore un-Real-American ?

I can think of no better way to finish this note than with a link from Ameena's own blog, where she talks about her own hope for Park51 leading to awareness and dialogue. Amen to that!
http://ameenameer.blogspot.com/2010/08/why-park51-needs-ayaan-hirsi-ali-and.html

Of Prisoners and Hats

A bored prison warden calls together 100 very smart prisoners and announces that they will be playing the following Sadistic Game.

Each prisoner will be made to wear a hat which they cannot see. The colour of the hat may be black or white. After this they will be lined up in positions marked 1 through 100.
Each prisoner gets to see the hats of everybody in a position higher than his. (So prisoner 1 gets to see all the hats but his own, prisoner 2 sees all hats but his own and prisoner 1’s, etc)

Now starting with prisoner 1, the warden will ask each man the colour of his hat.
He can only answer “Black” or “White”. The answer will be announced on the public address system so that all can hear. The warden, in turn, will announce whether the answer is right or wrong. This, too, is announced on the PA system.
And yeah, by the way, anyone who gets their colour wrong will be executed immediately.
(That’s where the sadism comes in!)
The prisoners are given a day to come up with any scheme they can think of to save themselves.
Question: How many prisoners can be saved for certain?

So, as a first shot, suppose each man simply makes a guess. There’s a 50-50 chance of being right, so on average about half will survive.
But this is not guaranteed. There’s a very small, but non-zero, probability that everyone will be wrong! Guesswork gives zero certainty.

To guarantee that at least 50 people survive, here’s a scheme.
Every odd numbered person calls out the hat colour of the man in front of him. The even numbered people just repeat what they heard from the man behind them.
But can we do better? Yes.

In fact, there’s a scheme which ensures that all but the first prisoner survives for sure!
This is an extremely neat problem, so you might want to think about it yourself.

…………
…………

Still thinking?

…………
…………

Had enough? Giving up??

Ok here goes.
Prisoner 1 looks at the hats of all in front of him. If among them, there are an odd number of white hats, he says “White” else he says “Black”.
Knowing this answer and comparing with how many white hats he can see, prisoner 2 can deduce the colour of his own hat. (For eg: If prisoner 1 says “White” and prisoner 2 sees only an even number of white hats, he can deduce that his own hat is white).
Now knowing prisoner 2’s answer, prisoner 3 can similarly deduce his own hat colour and so on.
Done!
Only prisoner 1 has a 50-50 chance of being executed, but every noble cause needs a martyr.

Let’s Have More Colour:

Flabbergasted by the amazing escape rate, the warden tries another ploy. Maybe adding another hat colour, say, Red will improve the odds (his, not the prisoners’). Of course, he now has to give them the option of saying Black, White or Red in answer to his question, but he reckons that more prisoners will be wrong this time.
Sorry, Mr. Warden, you are still out of luck! Once again, all but the first prisoner get their colour right – this time using some “mod 3 arithmetic”.

The idea is, replace every integer, positive or negative, with its remainder when divided by 3.
So, for example, 9 is 0, 19 is 1 and -1 is 2.
For brevity, for any integer N, we say “N mod 3” to mean “the remainder left when N is divided by 3”.

Now the thing is, you can add numbers “mod 3” – which means simply add the numbers and take the remainder mod 3.
So, (46 + 21) mod 3 = 67 mod 3 = 1

It doesn’t matter if you first add the numbers and go mod 3, or take each number mod 3 and then add. For example:
(46 + 21) mod 3 = (46 mod 3 + 21) mod 3 = (1 + 21) mod 3 = (1 + 21 mod 3) mod 3 = 1

Similarly, one can subtract and multiply mod 3. Division is trickier and we don’t need it here.

So, back to the prisoners. Once again, the plan is ingenious, but elegant.
Black hats are given a “value” of 0, white hats get value 1, and red hats get the value 2.
Prisoner 1 simply calculates the total value of all the hats he sees mod 3.
He calls out Black, White or Red, if his answer is 0, 1 0r 2 respectively.
Using this, the other prisoners can work out the colour of their hat.

To illustrate, suppose prisoner 1 sees 45 black, 39 white and 15 red hats.
The total mod 3 is: (45*2 + 39*1 + 15* 2) mod 3 = 0
So, he calls out “Black”.
Now suppose prisoner 2 is wearing a red hat.
Then he will see, in front of him, 45 black, 39 white and 14 red hats.
His total mod 3 is: (45*2 + 39*1 + 14* 2) mod 3 = 28 mod 3 = 1
Having heard prisoner 1’s answer on the PA system, he simply subtracts his total from prisoner 1’s total mod 3.
This gives: (0 – 1) mod 3 = -1 mod 3 = 2
2 is, of course, the value for a red hat.
Similarly, prisoner 3 can get his hat colour using the answers of prisoner 1 and 2, plus the hats he can see.
Once again, everyone but the first prisoner escapes with certainty.

Our warden is apoplectic!
To his growing frustration, he finds that changing the number of prisoners makes absolutely no difference. A hundred prisoners, or a billion, everyone escapes for sure, except the first (and even he might get lucky sometimes).
Increasing the number of hat colours is similarly futile.
Given a million colours, the prisoners simply use “mod 1 million arithmetic” (plus some very rapid mental calculation), to get the correct answer every time.
With more colours, the likelihood of the first prisoner being executed increases, but that is small consolation for the jailor who was hoping for some serious body count.

The Seriously Sadistic Game:

Despondent at the high prisoner survival rate, which has made him the butt of prison jokes, our warden e-mails his odious cousin in Tyrannistan, detailing his woes.
The reply is swift: “Turn off the public address system. That’s how we play the game in T-stan.”

Success at last!
Without the PA system, the hapless prisoners have no information other than the colours of the hats in front of them. Every one of them faces the same position as the first prisoner in the earlier game. The only option available is to simply guess.
With N colours, this gives a mere 1/N chance of success. If N is significantly bigger than the total number of prisoners, there is a decent chance that everybody dies.
A dismal end indeed for our highly ingenious prisoners.

The story should end here with, perhaps, a denunciation of capital punishment and wanton wardens, but the mathematician in me has one last question.

What if we play this game with infinitely many prisoners?

You may wonder how that could possibly help – after all, the situation is still the same, isn’t it?
Without any information on what others can see, how could anybody do better than just guess?
All I can say is “Have faith in Infinity and read on....”

Science and Math

My last post was a rather bare bones analysis of mathematics which separated it from the arts and placed it close to, but not within, the circle of the sciences. Given my emphasis on the top-down approach of science versus the bottom up style of math in that post, I thought it might be worth exploring both the similarities and differences with an (admittedly artificial) example.

The scientist does not forever create new theories about the universe. Nor does the mathematician relentlessly grind out new mathematical properties ad infinitum. In both cases, discovery usually starts with observing something new.

For instance, the astronomer looks up on a clear night, and whoa! There’s a new star in the sky! (I must confess I am very partial to astronomy, far and away my favourite science. Aficionados of other sciences can undoubtedly find analogous examples.)

Similarly, the mathematician draws a triangle and all its medians, and hey, look ! They all pass through the same point!

At this point one usually makes sure that the observation is really correct. The astronomer needs to ensure that what she saw wasn’t just a plane, or a comet or something nearby.

The mathematician is also making sure of his facts. Maybe the medians just pass very close by, and it only looks like they go through the same point because his pencil is blunt.

But no, it’s authentic. The astronomer focuses a telescope, calls her colleagues, takes parallax measurements and everything confirms that what is being seen is indeed an object many thousand light years from earth. In fact, a search through the image archives reveals a very faint star, invisible to the naked eye, at that exact location in the sky.

Meanwhile the mathematician has sharpened his pencils, and redrawn the diagram. Nope, no mistake.

Now at this point, the astronomer will not try to pull a brilliant new theory out of her hat. The first several steps are always to see if what was observed, i.e., the “new star”, can be explained within the framework of existing theory.

For starters, it looks like this wasn’t a new star really, but an existing one which has suddenly brightened drastically. Can existing theories of stellar structure and evolution explain how this may happen? Time to solve some equations and run simulations...

The mathematician, meanwhile, doesn’t have the luxury of inventing new theories. Math starts from the bedrock, remember? Triangles are triangles, medians are medians. Their properties are clearly given. All one can do is try to see what consequences follow.

Maybe he can work this out just by calculating side lengths and angles. Maybe not...

Success!! The astronomer discovers that it is possible for massive stars to explode cataclysmically at the end of their lives. An exploding star might brighten by a factor of 100 billion or more - definitely enough for a hitherto invisible star to dazzle into prominence.

A new observation has been given a satisfying theoretical explanation. She decides to call this phenomenon a supernova.

Our mathematician is also very pleased. It wasn’t trivial. He had to make some constructions, which weren’t at all apparent at the start, and think quite hard. But it’s done and he has a new theorem: The medians of any triangle always intersect at a point.

At this point, our stories diverge. The mathematician’s colleagues have all verified his proof, and he can forever rest easy.

For the astronomer, there’s always a smidgen of doubt. It looks like the theory fits, and all observations match. But it could always be the case that this was something quite different, some hitherto unknown astrophysical phenomenon with the same luminosity pattern. Maybe it was something really wild, like aliens conducting an inter-dimensional experiment.

Nobody knows what the Universe really is and the possibilities are endless.

All she can do is use a principle called Occam’s razor – go for the simplest explanation which fits the facts.

Now what if we don’t have the happy ending?

What if the new star defies explanation? What if the result can’t be proved?

At this point, things get interesting for the astronomer. The first step is to try very hard to see if the existing theories genuinely can’t explain what is being seen. Maybe something obvious is being overlooked, maybe she just has to think harder.

But if the evidence keeps piling up, it’s time to look for a new theory!!

These are the situations that scientists really love – when the boundaries of current knowledge break down, and we begin to catch glimpses of the vast unknown beyond...

The mathematician’s choices are a bit more limited. No possibility of “new theories”. Triangles are still triangles and will stubbornly continue to be so. What he can do is start looking for a counterexample – a triangle whose medians don’t intersect. In this case, the search will be futile because the result is true.

But there are examples of mathematical conjectures which were verified in thousands of cases, but no proof was forthcoming. And then a counterexample was discovered, showing that the search for proof had been misguided all along.

If neither proof nor counterexample can be found, despite the best efforts of mathematicians over many, many years, a conjecture tends to gather fame and notoriety, and sometimes, money. One such example is the Riemann hypothesis, proposed in 1859 and still unresolved.

Currently, there is a one million dollar prize offered for a correct proof or counterexample.

I might have given the impression that the astronomer’s task is simple. Just pull a theory out of thin air and voila!

In reality, it is extremely difficult to come up with a successful new theory – particularly if the current theory is well-established. Not only must a new theory explain the new observations, it must also be consistent with everything that is already known and explained by current theory.

Theoretical physicists know this very well.

The two main pillars of modern physics – general relativity and quantum field theory – are mutually incompatible. If you try to use them together, they give nonsense results.

Over the last two decades, observations have revealed that 96% of the universe is composed of substances whose nature is not described by any existing theory. Observations are also making it clear that the universe began with a huge burst of hyper-accelerated expansion, but once again, our known theories of physics can’t suggest anything which could cause this.

For the past three decades, theoretical physics has been stuck in an impasse with virtually no progress and no successful new theories. String theory has been much hyped as a candidate to take us beyond the boundaries, but it has yet to make a single correct prediction.

Meanwhile, in 2004, mathematics saw the solution of one of the most famous unsolved math problems of the past century – the Poincare conjecture.

Life goes on for science and math – similar but different.

What is Mathematics

Is it a science, an art, or something else altogether?
Most universities give math majors a Bachelor of Science degree. And I am sure anybody who has studied or worked with math would agree that it feels far more like doing science than painting a picture or composing a poem.

Yet a number of mathematicians ardently believe that mathematics is an art. As a friend of mine from grad school used to say, “Science is about the Why and How, but math is about the Wow.” He is echoing the great mathematician G.H. Hardy, (of Hardy-Ramanujan fame) who wrote, “A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.”

The way I see it, the crucial difference between the arts and sciences is the primacy of Truth. One may argue endlessly about whether Tagore’s writings are more beautiful or appealing or resonant than Shakespeare’s, but there’s no meaningful sense in which either can be said to be true or false.
But in science, truth is all. A scientist may use aesthetic appeal as a guide to formulating her theories, but “even the most beautiful theory may be slain by just one ugly fact”. And once that happens, it’s just another discarded theory, of interest only to historians of science.

Truth is central to mathematics as well. A mathematician may formulate the most elegant conjectures, but if proved false, he must discard them. To paraphrase Hardy, a mathematician may be a maker of patterns, but the only worthwhile patterns are the ones which are true. So, I’d say, math is certainly much more a science than an art in terms of its primary objectives.

Theories versus Theorems

So does that end the argument? Not quite.
While truth may be central to both science and math, a vital difference exists regarding how truths are established.

To illustrate, consider the General Theory of Relativity. It is the theory that gravity is caused by the curvature of space and time in the presence of matter and energy. Over the past century, the predictions of the theory have been confirmed by dozens of observations and tests – it forms one of the main pillars of our current understanding of the universe.

In contrast, consider the Riemann Hypothesis. It is the statement that all nontrivial zeroes of the Riemann Zeta function lie on the straight line with real part equal to half (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_hypothesis). Over the past century, about 10 trillion zeroes of the function have indeed been found to lie on this line. But all this “observational support” makes no difference – the Riemann hypothesis remains a conjecture, albeit probably the most famous conjecture in mathematics.

On the flip side, none of the confirmations establishes general relativity beyond doubt.
The theory is extremely elegant and has withstood the test of time really well. But the proverbial ugly fact may always show up. In fact, general relativity itself replaced Newton’s theory of gravitation which was considered unassailable for over two centuries before it!

In contrast, if a correct proof is given for the Riemann hypothesis, the hypothesis would become a theorem. One would never have to worry about an unruly zero showing up to topple the edifice, any more than one worries about someone drawing a triangle whose angles add up to more than 180 degrees.

So, whence this difference? Why isn’t it considered adequate to justify a mathematical conjecture by providing a bunch of observations and tests? Conversely, why can’t one prove a scientific theory once and for all?
I will argue that the reason is the essence of the difference between science and mathematics.

Top-down versus Bottom-up

Nobody knows what the Universe really is.
The abstract structure of the universe is hidden from us and we only have access to sensory data about the objects within it – either directly or via our instruments. Trying to figure out this structure is the work of science.

A scientific theory is a statement about fundamental properties of the universe, inferred from observed properties of objects within it.
Of course, not all theories are quite so grand. Most are merely attempt to explain features of a particular class of objects, - say the luminosity of stars. These theories may themselves be based on “deeper” theories – the luminosity of stars, may be explained in terms of nuclear physics, which in turn is based on quantum mechanics.
But ultimately, we want to “get to the bottom” - to work out the ultimate structure of the universe from our observed data.
Science works from the top down.

And this is why a scientific theory can never be proved beyond doubt.
It is ultimately a guess.
We see the surface of the ocean of reality, and try to guess where the bottom is. Our guesses may be very educated indeed, but it is always possible that the bottom is further down, since we can never see it directly. It is even possible that there is no bottom, no ultimate Theory to explain it all.

We can never know with absolute certainty, only with provisional degrees of confidence, always tinged with doubt. We can support our best guesses by gathering additional data, but one never knows whether the next data point will confound us all.

Mathematics, by contrast, works from the bottom up.
There is no doubt at all about what the mathematical entities being studied “really are” – in fact, they are very clearly defined right at the outset. And given the basic properties and definitions, a mathematician tries to work out further properties of the objects of interest.

A mathematical theorem is a statement about properties of mathematical objects, deduced from their fundamental properties.
This is why a mathematical theorem can be proved. It is not a guess about fundamental properties of objects – those are laid out right at the beginning. We already know where the bottom is. The rest is just (?!) deduction and logic.

So where does this leave us?
Given the centrality of “true propositions”, I would place math much closer to the sciences than the arts. However, because of the opposite directions of inference, and the consequent difference in how propositions are verified/falsified, I’d say it’s not entirely accurate to call mathematics a science. But they are so similar, that it makes sense to say “science and math” in the same breath, as people often do.

National Anthem

It is India’s 60th Republic Day today. Even as I write, flags are being hoisted across the country and the national anthem is being sung.

This is, therefore, an opportune moment to put to rest an extremely silly, but annoyingly persistent, ‘controversy’ about our national anthem, “Jana Gana Mana”, composed by Indian poet laureate Rabindranath Tagore. The song was written, so the accusation goes, to felicitate the coronation of British emperor George V. Hence, it should be replaced by ‘something patriotic’.

So, what do I make of this?

My shortest answer is unprintable. A slightly longer answer is, “No, the song was not addressed to George V and ‘Bharatabhagyavidhata’ in the song does not refer to the British emperor, except in the imaginations of the ignorant and/or deliberately obtuse.”

The details of the song’s composition can be found in a delightful little book by Dr. Prabodh Chandra Sen – literary scholar, historian and a contemporary of Tagore.

To summarize, Tagore was asked to compose a song of felicitation at the coronation of the British emperor by a high ranking acquaintance in the Indian Civil Service.

Incensed by this request, the poet stayed awake all night, penning this masterpiece of a song.

It was first sung on 27th December, 1911 at the proceedings on the Indian National Congress.
The British press dutifully reported that “the Bengali poet Babu Rabindranath Tagore sang a song specially composed by him to welcome the emperor”.

Little did they know that what they had heard was an eulogy to the eternal spirit of India, referring to the geographic and religious unity of the country, the oppression of foreign rule and presaging an independence to come!

If you are frowning in puzzlement at this, you very probably don’t know that the song has five verses. What is sung at the flag hoisting ceremonies is the first verse – merely the ‘geographical introduction’, so to speak.

So, here I give you all five verses, sung and translated.

The singing is mine.

The translation is a bit of a ‘family project’. My parents remembered that my sister had done a translation way back. So, late last night, Dad emails me saying, “Here it is.”

Both sis and I take a look at it, and our conclusion was, “Hmm, not that great, needs some serious changing.” In fact, we are both secretly convinced that this might have been mailed to Dad by somebody else, though parents insist it wasn’t.

Anyway, I heavily modify the second and fifth verses, and sis does a complete rewrite of the third and fourth. And after some further fine tuning, we think, “Now it looks decent.”

After all this, I get another email from parents. Turns out that ‘sister’s original attempt’, which we pretty much rewrote, was actually Tagore’s own translation. Aaaah, well !! :) :)

However, what you see below, is our translation of the song.

Listen, read and judge for yourself.




Thou art the ruler of the minds of the people,
O Creator of India’s destiny.
Thy name rouses the hearts of Punjab, Sind,
Gujarat and Maratha, of Dravida, Orissa and Bengal.
It echoes in the hills of the Vindhyas and Himalayas,

Mingles in the music of Jamuna and Ganges,
In the surging of the Indian Seas.
They pray for thy blessing and sing thy praise,
O Creator of India’s destiny,
Victory, Victory, Victory to thee.

Day and night thy call is heard across the lands,
Drawing Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs to thy throne
And Parsees, Musalmans and Christians.
East and West bring offerings to thy shrine,
A garland of Love is woven.
O Uniter of the hearts of all,
Creator of India’s destiny,
Victory, Victory, Victory to thee.

Along that road rugged with the rise and falls of Nations
Which Mankind travels down the ages.
Eternal Charioteer, the thunder of thy Chariot's wheels echo.
Amidst the revolutions of history,
Thy trumpet sounds its clarion call,
Thou guide to all travelers in their paths of peril,
Creator of India’s destiny,
Victory, Victory, Victory to thee.

When the long dreary night was dense with gloom
And the Country lay in a fevered stupor,
Thy sheltering arms held her,
Thy watchful, compassionate eyes bent upon her face.
Against the dark evil dreams of oppression
Did thou protect her, most Compassionate Mother.
Creator of India’s destiny,
Victory, Victory, Victory to thee.

The night dawns, the Sun rises
Over the mountains of the East
The birds sing, life stirs in the morning breeze.
Blessed by the golden rays of thy love,
India awakes again from sleep
And bends her head at thy feet.
Victory, victory, victory to thee,
O Lord of all kings,
Creator of India’s destiny,
Victory, Victory, Victory to thee.

God and Aliens

A very belated Happy New Year to all.
I’m back after a long hiatus, so let’s start on a high note.

Over the past few months, I’ve often been asked “Do you believe in God ?”.
The problem is, of course, that everyone seems to have a different definition of God. However, if you statistically accumulate the various views, (and ignore the obscure or tautological ones), God is generally defined as:
“An all-powerful intelligent Being that created the universe, loves and protects us, and watches over our lives”.

Hmm, still problematic.
To illustrate, suppose you are asked, “Do you believe in aliens?” (being an avid sci-fi fan, I get asked that a lot, too) and aliens are defined as :
“Intelligent beings from elsewhere in the universe who are visiting us in their spaceships.”
See the issue ? Both definitions are conflations of two concepts which are not necessarily linked.
To resolve the problem, let’s split the Alien definition into:
ET’s: “Intelligent creatures elsewhere in the universe”.
UFO’s: “Intelligent creatures who are visiting us in their spaceships”.
Realize that it is perfectly possible to believe in ET without believing in UFO’s. The Alien question is actually two questions in one.
Similarly, God splits into:
Alpha: “An all-powerful intelligence that created the universe.”
Omega: “An all-powerful, loving being who cares about and protects us.”




Observe that when people talk about God, they mostly mean Omega.
It is assumed that God created the universe as well, but the primary attribute is that God cares about us as individuals and a species. All the paraphernalia of religion – prayers, rituals, efforts to live according to specified ‘God given’ norms – are useless if the deity does not care. Additionally, Omega is typically imagined as an enhanced human, complete with very human-like emotions, though one is occasionally admonished that “God cannot be understood in human terms”.

Alpha is a different entity altogether. An intelligence that created the universe could be infinitely mysterious, utterly alien. Such a Being may be totally indifferent to us carbon based life-forms in our obscure corner of a typical galaxy. It may not even notice our existence. Religious literature, being overly anthropocentric, provides few examples, but think of the Overmind in ‘Childhood’s End’, or Olaf Stapledon’s ‘Star Maker’.

Distinctions similar to Alpha and Omega have been made in the past. Religious philosophies, especially in Hinduism, make a distinction between an ‘impersonal’ and a ‘personal’ God.
Alpha would roughly correspond to Brahman, and Omega to Ishwara.

Ok, then, what do I believe? First, let’s face the facts.
There is no concrete evidence for Alpha, Omega, ET’s or UFO’s.
Anyone claiming to “know that God exists” is either using ‘know’ as a synonym for ‘strongly believe’, or confusing belief and fact.
I’m not about to provide any such evidence either, I’ll just say what I believe and a bit of why. So, here goes.

I don’t believe in UFO’s.
The idea that intelligent extraterrestrials are flying all the way to Earth, only to remain in hiding and get occasionally spotted by unreliable witnesses, strains my credulity to breaking point. UFO-believers typically offer arguments like “maybe they are trying to stay hidden” Sounds more like an excuse than a reason – why would they, after coming so far?
Usually this degenerates into “Who can fathom their purpose?”. Still an excuse (and one which we shall see again).
I can’t prove with 100% certainty that UFO’s don’t exist, but I can’t do that for the Lochness Monster either. But it’s clear to me that the evidence is strongly against them.

I don’t believe in Omega.
There is just way too much unfair misery in the world. Start with the recent disaster in Haiti and continue with all the natural disasters that have struck in this century alone. Add all the horrors of history – the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge, the Partition riots.... Now continue with the countless cases of individual suffering from birth defects to cancer to unfortunate accidents. This list goes on ad nauseam.
Just does not make sense in a world where Omega is out there to love and protect us.
Once again, excuses abound. “God is testing us”, “Bad karma from previous births”, “All works out for good in the end”, and finally, “Who can fathom the ways of God?”.
We saw this before and I am not convinced. It really looks like people believe in Omega despite the evidence rather than because, just like the UFO-maniacs.

I believe in ET’s.
Our galaxy alone has 400 billion stars. There are about a 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe. It is becoming clear that most stars have planetary systems orbiting them. Molecules of life are abundant in interstellar clouds. Plus, it is entirely possibly that life may be based on completely different chemicals from terrestrial life.
None of this proves that ET’s exist. Maybe the odds of life forming are incredibly low, low enough to make it improbable despite all the stars out there. Maybe life happens, but it remains at the level of bacteria with overwhelming odds. But the existence of ET’s is at least consistent with the evidence.
Still, why believe without proof ? Because I like the idea!
I find it incredibly depressing to think that Earth is the only place in this incredibly vast universe to have complex life-forms and intelligence. If the evidence points overwhelmingly in that direction, I will have to accept it.
But all the evidence so far is consistent with the vastly more appealing picture (to me), of a universe where life and intelligence are commonplace, where we are but one voice in a cosmic symphony. So, I’ll stick with it until forced otherwise.

I believe in Alpha.
We live in an amazing universe “rich beyond measure – in elegant facts, in exquisite interrelationships, in the subtle machinery of awe”. Our investigations of the universe reveal a profound and elegant underlying order that continually challenges the imagination and ingenuity of our brightest minds. The depth and intricacy of the cosmic order frequently leaves our best scientists with a feeling of “rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection”.
To me, it seems entirely plausible that Alpha “breathes fire into the equations, creating an universe for them to describe”.
Once again, this is not the only possibility. The mathematical order of the universe may just be a ‘brute fact’, admitting of no further explanation. Alternatively, our universe might be a tiny part of a far bigger Cosmos, where natural laws self-organize and emerge like galaxies and ecosystems.
But yes, I personally find that elegant though the laws are, I am disappointed by the idea of “All that is or was or ever will be” being merely the working out of an algorithm that could perhaps be written down on a T-shirt.
Much more appealing to me is the concept of our universe as just one creation or manifestation of a numinous and ineffable Alpha, a mysterium tremendum without beginning or end.
Nebulous, imprecise, unverifiable – I know. But, hey, this is a belief, not a scientific hypothesis. And it is consistent with all the facts so far (though not implied by them).

Finally, a related question – Am I religious ? Short answer: No.
While religions pay lip-service to Alpha and occasionally come up with evocative poetry
(eg: The “Om Purnamadah Purnamidam” shloka of the Upanishads), their primary concern is Omega and how we can relate to Him/Her (never “It”). Doesn’t work for me.

Addendum: Throughout this piece I’ve quoted liberally from Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking and Einstein. Any reader of popular science will recognise them at once. If you don’t, what are you waiting for? Get reading! :)