December season's reflections of a midsummer escapade

What if Garcia-Marquez had been brought up a Tam Brahm? That is the subject of this experimental fiction piece.

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Gopal-Giridhar Madhusudhan looked out of the window, idly, about to roll over and go back to sleep, only to recall the promise he had made to himself this time: to get more out of the trip. It was his seventh visit back to Chennai in as many years. Each December, he had returned, if not from a faithfulness, then from a simple, acknowledged, fear of loneliness in the darkest weeks of the year.

Over Gopal’s first few visits, he had not wanted much, content to laze around in his parents’ home, get driven around, and generally fed the middle-class version of a dream vacation. In later years, he became a more conscientious vacation planner. Once, he accumulated culture-vulture oomph meticulously, attending every lec-dem session in the December sabhas, downing cups of filter coffee with dhonnais of steaming hot kesari in the mornings. Another time, he collected greenie points from wildlife trips. From a Valmik Thapar rant, through discussions with a friend about RFID collars for endangered species and the ethics of it, he had chalked out and executed a trail through Sariska. Yet another time, he sought free-spirit points by doing unplanned road trips through a randomly chosen region, performing informal case studies of microeconomic behavior. This year again, he had set himself such a goal. He would later realize that each vacation’s goal could succinctly be summarized thus: to get a sufficient dose of ‘wholesomeness’ out of the December visit to last him through the next sterile winter.

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Gopal sat down, pen in hand, fresh coffee by his side, lighting to his satisfaction. He wrote:

Creativity is not a faucet.

That same tired witticism he had picked up from a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip. Not very creative. This was not some e-mail to a junior.

Lately, Gopal had been exploring the effects of the environment and elaborately designed mood scenarios on writing quality, the null hypothesis being that no morbid or weak thoughts could be forthcoming from the nourished, fresh-coffee-equipped soul, on a satisfactorily-lit Chennai morning. He wrote again:

"I'll give you 30 seconds in heaven", she said. "What, literally?" he retorted, faking a nervous laugh, by now. "Yeah, my name is heaven". He was snubbed.

No, no that’s not right. That’s terrible. He was snubbed? Snubbed? Staccato. Faking a nervous laugh? More like trying too hard and not enough altogether at once. No flow. My name is heaven?! Stand-up comedy? He scratched it out and tried again.

“I’ll give you 30 seconds in heaven”, she said. “What, literally?” he retorted, trying on a macho, assured laugh. Wrong move. The ‘Wh’ came out high pitched. He kicked himself internally, but it showed and she laughed. In future recountings of the incident to himself, he would always stress that her laughter was knowing and amused, a laughter of the eye, an ‘I get you, and that’s cool’ signal rather than an exposing, sarcastic laughter. “Yeah,” she replied with a blank stare, quickly checking her impulse to flash a smile, “my name is heaven”. Her future recountings of this moment were fond, and slightly self-congratulatory on account of her spontaneous naughtiness.

Better already. The drama was unfolding neatly. But the punchline had moved too far away for a reader to make the connection. But at this point Gopal checked himself. Too much academic writing, reader simulations, paragraph conjunctions. Humbug. More importantly, this was far from morbid. He seemed to be deviating from the task at hand. Was the null hypothesis undeniable? He tried again. Directness with two esses.

He had fucked a whore, bought himself a ticket to intimacy, barely conscious of the possibility of future remorse. He would later learn to describe this moment as a signing away of his 'claim to have always strived for the greatest good'.

Big deal. That came out just preachy, not morbid.

The aesthete in him made him cringe. The coffee had lost its steamy nip and the sun had risen too high. Imperceptibly at first, but unmistakably, he felt crippled. This was his third day in a row attempting to sketch the same scene. It was going to be yet another sultry day of inaction.

More books

Stuff I have been snacking on.

Sustainable swimming beaches in Chennai

Chennai has a large coastline. However, there are hardly any clean and safe swimming beaches. This is largely due to fishing settlements in many inner city beaches. The fishermen do not have access to clean toilets. So, they use the sea as a toilet. This is especially common at dawn, when one would ideally like to go for a swim before it gets too hot.

Another problem caused by the fishing settlements is the inability to build coastal roads through these settlements, leading to congestion in narrow lanes forced to become arterial roads (e.g. Anna Street connecting Kalakshetra colony and Marundeeshwarar temple).

However, the fishing settlement can be empowered with a tremendous resource right at their doorstep. Waves. Small scale offshore wave energy turbines can be installed in each such settlement. A fraction of the energy generated can be used to power low cost housing for these settlements. The rest can be traded in the energy market. The proceeds can go towards funding low cost housing, and a sanitation system, followed by beach beautification.

So that the fishermen can remain economically independent, we need an NGO to fund the setting up of wave turbines, which the settlement can own or part-own with an energy company.

A derivative product can be structured around the risks (the energy company giving the knowhow and equipment for wave turbines needs high waves, the fishermen need low waves).

If this can be piloted in a handful of beach-kuppams in Chennai, over time the beach can become clean. Beautification projects can be started, and people can feel safe to go for a swim without fear of diarrhoea.

Obviously my suggestion is very lazy and naive. It does not take into account the cost of setting up wave turbines, their energy output efficiency, the ability to integrate the generated energy into the local grid and how the energy market works. Oracles, please help me work out the details in the comments section.

For more info:
http://indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/content/ocean-wave-power-generation-concept-trial-orissa-and-other-coastal-states
http://www.thehindu.com/2009/06/05/stories/2009060558970400.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chennai_Elevated_Expressways

New acquisitions

Some new acquisitions from Landmark over Diwali:

Instantaneous and lagged seasons

Helsinki is certainly a four-season city. I have often been asked which is the best season to visit. To this question, I often give monosyllabic answers after considering and discarding some very long and unsatisfactory answers.

It struck me that of the four, perhaps the season that is experienced with least immediacy is spring. Whereas summer, fall and winter can be experienced with great immediacy, the experience of spring critically depends on the winter that is ending (the input or the moving-average component) and its experience (the state or the auto-regressive component).

So, I would call spring a causal, auto-regressive moving-average season, a lagged season and rank it as the least interesting when experienced instantaneously.

On neologisms

While coining a neologism, especially in science, but also generally, here is a checklist that one could adhere to:

1. It should sound less jargon-like than the jargons it is composed of: "Jargon added is jargon halved" effect.

2. It should be fresh, but not just frivolous and as far as possible, intuituve.

3. Once defined, it should have a greater sense of immediacy, and home-in on the concept faster than the definition itself. In that sense it should be focused. However, it should be more than focused in the following way. The definition should remain fresh, such that on re-reading the definition, and definitions of terms used in the definition (recursively), it should evoke a richer, diverse cloud of related ideas and thus contextually situate the neologism.

4. It should have a quality of being used by the 'in-crowd', in a manner that the anxious 'out-crowd' wants to understand what it means and start using it in sentences.

Building on the brain

I came across this piece in the latest issue of Neuron.

John P Eberhard. 2009. Applying Neuroscience to Architecture. Neuron 62:753-756.

Basically, it is a promo piece for the author's latest book Brain Landscape, which advocates architects to apply findings of brain imaging to their design of schools, hospitals, public spaces, old age homes and memorials. Eberhard is the founding President of the non-profit Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture, established in 2003. You get the picture.

Why have ideas such as these and other low-hanging fruit (neuroeconomics, neurocinematics) become so popular these days, without anybody bothering to address how neuroscientific knowledge (such as: the prefrontal cortex is involved in decision making) is not completely superfluous to knowledge from conventional psychology and the behavioral sciences (such as: natural light improves class grades) as far as application domains (such as architecture) are concerned? Note that I do not dispute the fact that such neuro-marriages may be intellectually stimulating.

The saving grace is that it wasn't called neuroarchitecture (not to be confused with neuroarchitectonics: the beautiful and painstaking characterization of brain anatomy in terms of cell types, synapse densities, tissue properties, relative thickness of cortical layers, vasculature etc. etc. which early 20th century greats like Cajal and Brodmann pioneered).

I'm not arguing for traditionalism, I'm not arguing for scientists to be conservative with their imagination. On that contrary, I am disappointed that out-of-the-box thinking falls so dreadfully short of the mark. Why can't we be more original? It is not as though fresh insight and imagination cannot be applied to traditional stuff of the brain such as anatomy, hemodynamics, connectivity, learning, memory etc.

What next? Neuromusicology, neuromarketing, neuropublishing, neurojournalism, neurolaw, neuro-neuroscience? Up for grabs. Quick, before somebody else.