Great Poems

Recently, I have been making my poor friends suffer with my incessant (and if I'm honest, I might as well add, disproportionate) whinging about the undependablity of anything in the world, so, when I finally replied with a "Oh I am doing quite well!" to a "How are you doing?" email. I think I could almost hear a sigh of relief from the other end. I couldn't however let anyone think that the world has become any bit fairer, it's just that I had turned more stoic, so I shot back with a poem:

I smell perfection
In my imperfect life
In my random losses
And my random prize
In my changing habits
And new days and nights

The losses are not too big to bear
The prizes don’t bother my pride

My life’s pieces
I could have picked better
I think
But these work as well as mine

A poem full of true emotion, which I am sure my friend couldn't appreciate at all. He replied with some euphemism about artistic sides and what not. So, to him I present him, this Great Poem

A Great Poem

This is a great poem.

How I suffer!
How I suffer!
How I suffer!

This is a great poem.
Full of true emotion.

-- Gavin Ewart

this thing can be done

Today i struggled with a rather badly written report which needed all of my recently lost (due to a bad bout of general flu) and rediscovered concentration power. The report starts by acknowledging an obviously important question, a question which seems well thought out, and seems answerable, if some proper time is spent on it. Unfortunately, time was short for the researchers, and they, in the first two paragraphs, equate that important question with a much less important question. I would have been happy if they answered at least that question, but they equate that question to something else - and then reproduce some information from another website, and don't even answer the third set of questions.

now, having been made to read, one terrible question worse than the other, listed over and over again and more paraphrased (interesting, but known) information irrelevant to any question, just about makes me head to some solace in some kind of inspired perfection, to remind me, as they say, that "This thing can be done."*

Reading David Foster Wallace write about Federer works fine for me,

"It’s the finals of the 2005 U.S. Open, Federer serving to Andre Agassi early in the fourth set. There’s a medium-long exchange of groundstrokes, one with the distinctive butterfly shape of today’s power-baseline game, Federer and Agassi yanking each other from side to side, each trying to set up the baseline winner...until suddenly Agassi hits a hard heavy cross-court backhand that pulls Federer way out wide to his ad (=left) side, and Federer gets to it but slices the stretch backhand short, a couple feet past the service line, which of course is the sort of thing Agassi dines out on, and as Federer’s scrambling to reverse and get back to center, Agassi’s moving in to take the short ball on the rise, and he smacks it hard right back into the same ad corner, trying to wrong-foot Federer, which in fact he does — Federer’s still near the corner but running toward the centerline, and the ball’s heading to a point behind him now, where he just was, and there’s no time to turn his body around, and Agassi’s following the shot in to the net at an angle from the backhand side...and what Federer now does is somehow instantly reverse thrust and sort of skip backward three or four steps, impossibly fast, to hit a forehand out of his backhand corner, all his weight moving backward, and the forehand is a topspin screamer down the line past Agassi at net, who lunges for it but the ball’s past him, and it flies straight down the sideline and lands exactly in the deuce corner of Agassi’s side, a winner — Federer’s still dancing backward as it lands. And there’s that familiar little second of shocked silence from the New York crowd before it erupts, and John McEnroe with his color man’s headset on TV says (mostly to himself, it sounds like), “How do you hit a winner from that position?” And he’s right: given Agassi’s position and world-class quickness, Federer had to send that ball down a two-inch pipe of space in order to pass him, which he did, moving backwards, with no setup time and none of his weight behind the shot. It was impossible. It was like something out of “The Matrix.” I don’t know what-all sounds were involved, but my spouse says she hurried in and there was popcorn all over the couch and I was down on one knee and my eyeballs looked like novelty-shop eyeballs. "

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* Source for the quote:

In the ninth Test match ever played, the visiting Australians were bowled out for just 63 on a damp Oval pitch in August 1882. England managed 101 in reply, and when the Australians (angered by a disputed runout) made 122 to set the hosts 85 runs to win, the match was considered over. But fast bowler Fred Spofforth summoned up what would become the famous Aussie neversay- die spirit – "This thing can be done," he said – and plundered 7/44 to spur his side to a 7-run win. A hush fell over the ground as England’s first home defeat (and to a colony!) sank in, and it didn't take long for a number of mock obituaries to appear in the press, mourning the death of English cricket, whose “body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia”. When England next toured Down Under, their captain (Ivo Bligh) promised to “regain the ashes”, and when he was presented with a small terracotta urn containing the ashes of a bail, the legend was born.

From Darkness lead us to Light

The following excerpt is from a very interesting article written by Jason Overdorf, an American living in Delhi in a very interesting blog called DelhiBelly.

“You can disagree with Godse very deeply and find what he did reprehensible,” says Bhanu Mehta. “But I think as even some of the Gandhians have argued — like Ashis Nandy — there was a kind of internal integrity to what he was doing. If you read his speech at his trial, it's hard not to be in some senses fascinated by the internal integrity of the argument.”

While the article itself is very interesting, I am drawn to the idea of internal integrity of the argument referred in it.

As far as my own take goes, I think it does not make sense to condemn the ones who do wrong for the right reason, or even the ones who do wrong for the wrong reasons - for what good would that do? (For more on how our current system of justice/punishment is really quite ineffective in preventing crime, Clarence Darrow's autobiography called The Story of My Life is an interesting read.) And unless you are God, how on earth will you know whether that person is doing the wrong thing for the right reason or whether you are doing the wrong thing for the right reason?

And then that brings us to another interesting question, does an 'act' constitute a right or a wrong; or does an 'intent' constitute a right or a wrong? I think I remember correctly that Gandhiji while considering this question says it is the 'act'. He gives an example of a mother accidentally poisoning her sick child by unknowingly administering poison instead of the medicine, and then he holds the mother guilty, even though she had no intent to kill, but only to save. My own personal idea always was (and perhaps still is) that the mother is not guilty. However, looking at the 'internal integrity of the argument' above, I am suddenly questioning how far can you take the act to be as right or wrong based on what the 'intent' of the act is?

This reminds me of what Swami Vivekananda says, when once discussing the Law of Karma, No action (whatever be its intent) can be wholly good or wholly bad; and therefore no result can also be wholly good or wholly bad*. I must note here that in this article I am only considering the question that, 'if I have the will to do the right thing, how am I to do the right thing?' How can I know that what I am doing is the right thing for the right reason? How can I know that what I am doing is not coming up with some funny argument with merely internal integrity.

Which, is interestingly, how the Bhagvad Geeta starts (I must warn you, that I have only read the first chapter), but that is how it starts - with Arjuna coming up with an argument which he believes supports his decision of not fighting. Except that he too, like most of us, most of the time, is doubting his decision. And when Bhagvan Krishna tells him that no, his arguments, tho they sound wise, are actually, most unwise; at that point He is telling all of us, that there is something that is a Right and something that is a Wrong. That an argument for the action with internal integrity is not good enough.

But what if an internally consistent argument is the best we can come up with? Perhaps by the time I finish the Bhagvad Geeta, I would have answers to these two questions -
a) What makes a Right action, and what makes a Wrong action?
b) What if the best we can come up with at this point in time is an internally consistent argument for our action?


*perhaps what I mean is "wholly pleasant or wholly unpleasant"

PS: In this article I do not explain my belief in the Law of Karma, in the words of the Bhagvad Geeta as explained by Swami Chinmayanada, and in the words of Swami Vivekananda. In this article I am mostly speaking to myself.

Like Ham and Eggs?

One of my friends mentions that he has the capacity to listen to ideas to contrary to his own beliefs; and since he shares his house with another friend of mine with whom, I believe, he shares hardly any belief, I nod appreciatively. That is, till I ask him, in the few months of house-sharing with this friend, what ideas has he changed? And he replies, “None”.

Another acquaintance has these gems she keeps coming with, “I wonder why are rich people more beautiful than poor people.” On hearing about the KFC food-poisoning case in Sydney she goes, “Oh everything from the west of Sydney is like that – a little worse.”

I think I am enjoying the fact that these two people are starting to date.