Bits from Purple Passages of yesterday.

Taheyra recognized in me the connection we choose to ignore on tubes. She saw past my hardened exterior of the high pressure torch of urban living. It was not just her ability to open up to complete strangers and converse on the deepest levels of the human need for companionship, that made me sit there and listen to her long past sundown; it was the ease at which she made it possible. I was not trying to have a meaningful conversation, I was just having one; enjoying the excavation of my thoughts by a complete stranger, albeit an expert at uncovering layers of dust and mold from nine to five jobs, rush hours and frivolous indulgences.

The Leech's Segments.

Are all our noblest expressions of our spirit just the inevitable realisation of a program inscribed in our DNA?

Word play?

Just another spring Friday, another lazy afternoon coffee or two, gale force winds outside the café but only the sunshine peering through the glass washing up on my back. And the conversation steers to contentment; and why not? Isn’t it these small things, these small moments that define it? But peace of mind, now that is a whole new place to visit. Or so I think.
Are content people at peace with themselves? And are people who are at peace with themselves likely to be content? I think peace of mind is quite separate from contentment. Having peace of mind involves knowing your strengths, using them to improve yourself, surroundings and in general making a dent in the world perhaps. It is also knowing and working with your limitations to minimise their shortfalls. Contentment is being content with both. Not necessarily the same.
I do not understand the motivations of content people, but I see the beauty in being at peace with yourself. People who are content don’t get bothered by injustice, people who are content don’t see the place for change, people who are content don’t see opportunities aplenty. But people who are at peace with themselves know how to choose their battles, they know and understand the motivations to fight them, they take a stance because they are not fighting internal wars. They don’t let their fire burn them. They are at peace with themselves so they can look outwards and question, or appreciate or even; if luxury would have it theorise, improvise and invent. These luxuries are the cornerstones of progress. Contentment is based on this very progress.

Who's doing it?

I have discovered recently that most often what I call ‘lack of inspiration/motivation’ or plain old ‘block’ is a fear for lack of originality.
My thoughts take me to weird and wonderful places but then I come back down feeling that most of these thoughts must have occurred to someone else too, and what’s so profound about mine? More importantly what’s new? I wonder if this is because I spend more time reading others’ thoughts? But then, when I read good work by others I wonder why I don’t mark them down for repeatedness (if it’s punishment enough, I tend to flip a page if THE goes on and on about RAE and funding).
So I have decided (naively I suspect and hope) that instead of waiting for big original ideas, I should just go ahead and talk of the same old boring things that human kind has been banging on since probably Noam Chomsky came up with the new syntax theory. LET’S change a few words to the left or sometimes to the right of the first original sentence and just go on pretending. You know by now where I am going with this one? Yes to the neighbourhood DIY store.
Is it just me or plain old stupidity that is so common that we can’t see it like the smog? Add a bit of a catchy jingle and an inclusive word to the world’s most popular Swoosh tag line and what do you get? Still PLAGIARISM darlings. Well now you know why this blog takes such a while to get updated.

Susan Sontag On Photography.

Like a car, a camera is sold as a predatory weapon - one that is as automated as possible, ready to spring. Popular taste expects an easy and invisible technology. Manufacturers reassure their customers that taking pictures demands no skill or expert knowledge, that the machine is all knowing and responds to the slightest pressure of the will. it's as simple as turning the ignition key or pulling the trigger.

Like guns and cars, cameras are fantasy machines whose use is addictive. However, despite the extravangances of ordinary language and advertising, they are not lethal. The camera does not kill, so the ominous metaphor seems all bluff - like a man's fantasy of having a gun, knife or tool between his legs. Still there is something predatory in the act of taking a picture. To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they neever see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as the camera is the sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is the sublimated murder.

Eventually, people might learn to act out more of their aggressions with cameras and fewer with guns, with the price being an even more image-choked world. One situation where people are switching from bulllets to film is the photographic safari that is replacing the gun safari in east Africa. The hunters have Hasselblads instead of Winchesters; instead of looking through a telescopic sight to aim a rifle, they look through a viewfinder to frame a picture. Guns have metamorphed into cameras in the earnst comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been - what people needed protection from. Now nature - tamed, endangered, mortal - needs to be protected from people. When we are afraid we shoot. But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures.

Penguin Classics, 1977

Girly Science.

Does Science have a gender? Does Gender have a science?

Is this an uncool question to ask in today's political climate? In the days when when we have ample of evidence that girls do just as well in math exams as the boys? Why does the choice of a scientific career come and stall at something as mundane as a math test? what does that have to say about career choices anyways?

Gulab Devi (45) of Harmara village in Rajasthan’s Ajmer district comes across as the quintessential rural woman from Rajasthan. Dressed in the traditional ghagra-choli (long skirt and blouse), Gulab is the sole bread-earner for her four children and her ailing husband who hasn’t had a job in the 24 years of their marriage. Gulab is completely illiterate. Ask her what she does for a living, and she’ll tell you she makes electronic circuits and charges for solar lighting panels. And before you start wondering whether you heard her wrong, she’ll tell you that she also installs and maintains hand pumps, water tanks and pipelines. Not only is she running her household comfortably with her salary from this work, she is also one of the most respected members of her community.
Gulab is one of the many Barefoot Solar Engineers (BSEs) working across eight Indian states (Rajasthan, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, Uttaranchal, Jammu and Kashmir, Assam and Sikkim) to establish solar energy systems in areas where electricity supply is either non-existent or highly erratic. A majority of these engineers, mostly women, are illiterate like Gulab or semi-literate at best. But they talk of transformers, coils and condensers like other women would talk of cooking and sewing. Their dexterity with spanners and screwdrivers is impressive, to say the least.

Probably scientific enterprise is exactly what we in the 'comfortable' world forget to instill in our school children... the fun in exploration, the excitement in figuring out a problem, but most importantly everyday issues that get solved by ingenious scientific enquiry. Instead we keep on bickering about 'gender' representations in one field of science or the other...