South Asia Daily

A short one about Hillary Clinton’s emails and Schrodinger’s Cat

I occasionally play this fun game with myself as to how Schrodinger’s cat (dead or alive or both or not) may unfold in real life. The bombshell disclosure by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director, James Comey that the agency is reviewing some more emails potentially linked to the Hillary Clinton email investigation comes reasonably close to Schrodinger’s cat in this season of harrowing uncertainty. (You have to be a true blue nerd to see how I connected Schrodinger’s cat with Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.)

Quite like Schrodinger’s cat, where we do not know whether the cat is dead or alive—therefore it could be both dead and alive simultaneously—until we open the box, we do not know whether what Comey found is deadly or not for the Clinton campaign until we read the emails ourselves. All you have to do here is replace the imaginary cat with emails and you have a clear parallel in real life of an astonishingly brilliant thought experiment.

There is popular consensus that there is no way we will know before the presidential election is over and result announced what those fraught emails on the disgraced Congressman Anthony Weiner’s laptop/computer might contain. The FBI just does not have enough time in the next eight days to complete the legal process and sift through all of them to reach an unambiguous conclusion.

So we are left with Schrodinger’s feline paradox where the Clinton side can legitimately say that the emails are a minor sideshow while the Trump side can thump their chests in triumph and declare victory and imprison Clinton. When the cat is both dead and alive it is fair to celebrate its survival because the poison did not spill or mourn its death because the poison did indeed spill. Comey’s announcement has handed the Trump campaign license to spill whatever catches the man’s grotesquely fecund fancy. It is already happening.

I wanted to write about one of my favorite themes today, namely dark matter and how the celebrated theoretical physicist Lisa Randall deals with it in her book ‘Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe’. Instead, Schrodinger’s cat leapt out of my mind in a manner of speaking. If it leapt out, it means it is alive but I meant it only metaphorically. So it is still both dead and alive like the emails.

Diwali in medieval times

Princess enjoying a sparkler in the month of Karttika, Unknown, circa A.D. 1750​

Radha and Krishna watching fireworks in the night sky (Unknown)

To mark Diwali today, I was looking for some painting and found these two gems on Google Cultural Institute. Enjoy.

Ab ki baar Trump sarkar

Of all the gratuitous and unfair attacks on Donald Trump the one that most riles with me is against his failure to make Trump Steaks the best steaks in the world. After a careful and thorough examination of the venture that lasted a remarkable two months in the summer of 2007 I have concluded that it was not a failure at all. The decision to close it down was a case of an astonishingly far-sighted political strategy to court “Hindu Americans” nine years down the line.

Like so many of his other nearly Nostradamus-like prognostications he knew that a time would come when his steaks might stand in the way of courting the Hindu vote during a presidential election. He weighed the political stakes that early on and chose to close it down. We are so blinded by our prejudice against the man, who loves both Hindus and India, that we do not see such obvious strengths.

During the course of my research for this post, which lasted an intense 2 seconds, I was quite overcome with emotions at the man’s commitment to his constituents. I mean who does that? Who makes that level of sacrifice? And then came this gem, a campaign ad, endorsed by no less a grandee than man himself. The production values of the ad are of a quality that would attract flattering attentions from the likes of Jimmy Kimmel and attract it did. Check out this segment from Jimmy Kimmel Live.

When I first saw the ad on October 27 I couldn’t believe how well it was done. The most impressive part was that Trump managed to say five words “Ab ki baar Trump sarkar” in just two cuts. In a show of a dazzling command over languages he said “Ab ki baar Trump” without any break. I am told the writer of that memorable line had kept “Trump” halfway through it because that would act both as a beckon as well as a base camp for him to scale the summit of the sentence.

So after saying “Ab ki baar Trump” he had to take a break and then in one flourish finish the word “sarkar.” That the line is a takeoff on the Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 2014 election slogan “Ab ki baar Modi sarkar” is quite well known  to Indians and a perfect fit because those Indian Americans who support Trump are also devotees of the Indian leader.They see clear parallels between the two men even though Modi is said to be on the first name basis with President Barack Obama, for whom Trump has displayed such unconcealed contempt.

All in all, this is a winning campaign commercial even though for reasons wholly unintended.

P.S.: This is supposed to be humorous. So if you please.

Storing zettabytes of data on diamonds

Since diamonds are supposed to be forever, data encoded in them would also be forever. That seems to be the logic behind a fascinating new way to store a mind-boggling amount of data the world is creating every year now.

The Smithsonian magazine reports an extraordinary new way to store the ever increasing data being pioneered by researchers Siddharth Dhomkar and Jacob Henshaw from the City College of New York.

The abstract of their peer reviewed piece in Science Advances is quite intriguing. It says, “The negatively charged nitrogen vacancy (NV⁻) center in diamond is the focus of widespread attention for applications ranging from quantum information processing to nanoscale metrology. Although most work so far has focused on the NV⁻ optical and spin properties, control of the charge state promises complementary opportunities. One intriguing possibility is the long-term storage of information, a notion we hereby introduce using NV-rich, type 1b diamond. As a proof of principle, we use multicolor optical microscopy to read, write, and reset arbitrary data sets with two-dimensional (2D) binary bit density comparable to present digital-video-disk (DVD) technology. Leveraging on the singular dynamics of NV⁻ ionization, we encode information on different planes of the diamond crystal with no cross-talk, hence extending the storage capacity to three dimensions. Furthermore, we correlate the center’s charge state and the nuclear spin polarization of the nitrogen host and show that the latter is robust to a cycle of NV⁻ionization and recharge. In combination with super-resolution microscopy techniques, these observations provide a route toward subdiffraction NV charge control, a regime where the storage capacity could exceed present technologies.”

The Smithsonian magazine piece by Jason Daley describes it thus: “The system uses minute defects in the diamond's crystal structure, which can be found in even the most visually flawless of these gems. These imperfections occasionally create voids in the structure where a carbon atom is supposed to sit. Nitrogen atoms also occasionally slip into the structure. When a nitrogen atom is position next to this missing carbon atom, a so-called nitrogen vacancy (NV) occurs, which often traps electrons. Dhomkar uses these nitrogen vacancies as a substitute for the binary ones and zeros. If the vacancy has an electron in place, it’s a one; if it's empty, it's a zero. Using a green laser pulse, the researchers can trap an electron in the NV. A red laser pulse can pop an electron out of an NV, allowing researchers to write binary code within the diamond structure.”

I grant that all this is nearly impossible to understand for most but what is important is that it works.

By the way, just so you know how much a zettabyte is it is 1 followed by 21 zeroes. That is what we produce every year and it is only expected to increase.

I am reminded of two pieces that I wrote on August 17 and 19, 2012 about a technique to encode data in DNA. I republish them today.

August 17, 2012

DNA as a data storage medium

I am as guilty of crowding and cluttering the digital space as the 2,267,233,742 other Internet users worldwide. This blog is just one example of the useless content creation that occupies an ever increasing digital space. After all, what I write is stored digitally somewhere.

This information/content overload is beginning to pose a serious challenge to the digital storage of data. It is in this context that I note with great interest the remarkable new technology of storing data to DNA. A team of three scientists, George M. Crunch, Yuan Gao and Sriram Kosuri report in the journal Science about this new technology.

An extract on the journal’s website says, “Digital information is accumulating at an astounding rate, straining our ability to store and archive it. DNA is among the most dense and stable information media known. The development of new technologies in both DNA synthesis and sequencing make DNA an increasingly feasible digital storage medium. Here, we develop a strategy to encode arbitrary digital information in DNA, write a 5.27-megabit book using DNA microchips, and read the book using next-generation DNA sequencing.”

Intrigued by the idea I reached out to Dr. Kosuri, co-author of the Science piece who works at Harvard’s Wyss Institute. I emailed him this morning my intention to report the story for the IANS wire. Once I have interacted with him I will report my conversation on the wire as well as here.

In writing about the new technology Geraint Jones of The Guardian touches upon a thought that instantly crossed my mind on reading the extract in Science. Could a living organism be used for encoding data? While I wait for Dr. Kosuri’s response to me on the question, Jones says, “The work did not involve living organisms, which would have introduced unnecessary complications and some risks. The biological function of a cell could be affected and portions of DNA not used by the cell could be removed or mutated. "If the goal is information storage, there's no need to use a cell," said Kosuri.”

Perhaps I am running ahead of myself but the idea of encoding data onto a living organism, namely me for instance, is fraught with technological singularity.

Although I will carry Dr. Kosuri’s full interview tomorrow, here is the bit that relates to whether it is theoretically possible to encode data to oneself. He says, “It is possible, but there are a lot of disadvantages.  First, some of the sequences could be detrimental to the cell and could be lost. Second, because the information is extraneous to the cell's functioning, it's likely to be mutated or deleted wholesale in the long term.  Finally, there is no real use to keep it inside the cell, as the cell or a body wouldn't really know what to do with it.  It's not like we can read our own genomes inside ourselves and learn from it.”

Speaking of data and living organisms, one little nugget that has been widely distributed on the Net lately is about how much data a single sperm carries. I do not at all vouch for the accuracy of this but I have received several emails from friends containing this bit of information. According to this one sperm has 37.5 MB of DNA, which in turn, means that one normal ejaculation represents a data transfer of 1,587 GB in about 3 seconds. There is massive data being flushed down every minute of every day.

 

August 19, 2012

Storing zettabytes on few grams of DNA

Dr. Sriram Kosuri of Harvard University’s Wyss Institute (Pic:http://openwetware.org/wiki/Sriram_Kosuri)

Archival storage of the world’s ever increasing volume of information is reaching a point where it will require a breakthrough technology to meet the enormous need.

Although flash drives and external hard drives have become remarkably efficient and eminently affordable, the speed of vast data creation on a daily basis could make them impractical. What also makes them impractical over the long-term is the sheer physical wear and tear.

As the world confronts 2.7 zettabytes of information (Projection by the International Data Corporation--1 zettabyte is 1 followed by 21 zeroes), it makes perfect sense to look for alternative ways to archive it. A team of three scientists, George M. Church, Yuan Gao and Sriram Kosuri, has done precisely that. They wrote data to Deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA, nature’s astonishingly large data storage system. DNA as we know contains genetic instructions for living organisms.

Hard as I may try I am still unable to fully picture or comprehend how DNA data storage works. Interviewing one of the three researchers at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute was perhaps one way to cover some ground. So I decided to contact Dr. Kosuri who responded rather expeditiously to my questions via email. Reproduced below is the written Q and A between Dr. Kosuri and I. I am writing a separate news story for the IANS wire.

Q: Would you mind describing the concept of DNA data storage as opposed to, say, on a flash drive?

Sriram Kosuri (SK): In terms of the paper (that they wrote for Science), on its face DNA storage is quite simple and has been done in on small scales previously. DNA is a four base code, individual bits (1's and 0's) can be encoded onto the DNA using arbitrary encoding scheme. We chose a simple code where two bases (A & C) correspond to 1 and the other two (G & T) to 0.

There are two main advantages of DNA storage as compared to other forms. First, it's an extremely dense form of information storage mostly because you can store the DNA in 3D. So it's a 3D storage technology and when compared to other technologies (including experimental ones like positioning individual atoms on a surface, or holographic storage), it's much more dense. This is despite major efforts to increase data storage densities in these other technologies over decades. The other main advantage is that DNA is very long-lived compared to existing data storage mechanisms, and sequencing DNA is probably going to be a readable standard for years to come (unlike for example magnetic tape).

The major disadvantages are that it is immutable (can't be modified once written), not random-access (have to read the whole thing to get any part), and slow (right now), and thus is more of an archival storage mechanism than directly comparable to flash or hard drives.

Q: The common perception of DNA is some sort of a life code sitting inside a fuzzy, stringy cell. For those would you care to explain what it means to write data to DNA?

SK: Sure; DNA is a chemical polymer; essentially a chain of nucleotides; adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), and thymine (T) in some order. To build it up, you have to string together the sequence you want one base at a time. The process we use was from a company called Agilent Technologies (a spinoff of HP) that uses ink-jet printing to build up such a sequence. Simplified, it's like replacing your 4 color ink jet printer with the four nucleotides, and then building up sequences on individual spots. The limitations of chemically synthesized DNA is that it that there are always errors, and you can't make more than small stretches (>200 at a time), but you can do it in a highly parallel manner.

Q: For instance, is there a cell involved?

SK: No cell involved. It's all pretty well established chemistry. The DNA never sees the inside of a cell.

Q: Can you picture for us what a DNA data storage device, if there is any such thing, would look like?

SK: We do this exercise in the supplement, as shown below:

Large-scale Storage Considerations

At some point, storing DNA as a single large mass with extremely large barcodes is both unrealistic and cumbersome no matter the future sequencing and synthesis technologies. To understand where this trade-off lies, we hypothetically imagine such a data store without constraining ourselves on sequencing/synthesis costs.

A larger 48-bit address (2.8e14 unique addresses) block with a 128bit data block would require 216nt length oligo synthesis, which is already available. Such a scheme would give 1.85e-19 g/bit, which would give 1.48 mg of DNA for storage of 1 petabyte of information (at 100x coverage). This DNA, stored in 1536 well plate, would give ~1.5 exabytes with dimensions of 128mm x 86mm x 13mm.

Reading each well (petabyte) would require ~1 exabase of sequencing, or 1.8e6 HiSeq runs (600e9 bases per run). Thus, we would need ~6 orders of magnitude improvement in sequencing technologies for routinely reading petabytes of DNA information. For synthesis, current Agilent arrays top out at 1e6 features (we need 6.25e13 features for a petabyte); so ~7-8 orders of magnitude improvement in synthesis technologies is required. However, reading and writing costs do not dominate in very long-term storage applications (e.g., century or longer archival storage), and could currently be cost competitive due to the expected lower maintenance costs.

Q: Extraordinary longevity of stored data is one of the major benefits of DNA data storing. Is that one of the considerations here?

SK: Yes. It's one of the major reasons this is really good for archival information. DNA can last for thousands of years in dried form, and is very stable.

Q: What about reading back the stored data? How is that accomplished?

SK: We use the same instruments that people use to sequence human genomes. The process involves using what people call next-generation sequencers in order to read out all the data cheaply

Q: Is it theoretically possible to encode the data to a living organism, say for instance, oneself? If yes, what would be the implications? To me that would seem like a strange form of technological singularity.

SK: It is possible, but there are a lot of disadvantages. First, some of the sequences could be detrimental to the cell and could be lost. Second, because the information is extraneous to the cell's functioning, it's likely to be mutated or deleted wholesale in the long term. Finally, there is no real use to keep it inside the cell, as the cell or a body wouldn't really know what to do with it. It's not like we can read our own genomes inside ourselves and learn from it.

Q: How soon would DNA data storage become a market reality?

SK: It's possible that it is doable now for very specialized long-term archival information needs (>100 years). However, for large scale storage, as we estimated in that pasted text, we are 6 and 8 orders of magnitude away for sequencing and synthesis technology scales respectively. To give perspective, we have seen a similar order drop in the last 10 years or so for both of those technologies. There are many reasons why we might not continue to increase these scales at the torrid pace we have, but if we do keep pace, about a decade.

Q: Your work led to the storage of 5.27 megabit of data, which is 600 times more than what had been achieved earlier. How was that accomplished?

SK: The main thing we do is that we are able to leverage the massive cost and scale advantages of next-generation synthesis and sequencing technologies while overcoming their limitations, which is that they can only read and write short pieces. Thus we make many short pieces, and each short piece has an address that lets us know where that data goes in the whole data stream.

Q: How does this technology potentially change computing in general?

SK: Well it's mostly a concept paper right now. The real concept that this paper brings up is that we can continue on a path to try to improve data densities on existing technologies to get to the densities we display with DNA, or we can work on getting DNA storage technologies scaled and cheaper as an alternative path.

Tawang again in focus in India-China discourse

Barely days after the U.S. Ambassador to India, Richard Verma visited Tawang and triggered strong Chinese disapproval comes the news that the Dalai Lama will visit the border region between the two Asian giants in March next year. The Hindu newspaper has reported the Dalai Lama’s upcoming visit to the contested region, which China calls South Tibet, after he was invited by Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister Pema Khandu. There are reports that the Indian government has approved the visit.

“The Dalai Lama has been invited to Arunachal Pradesh for a fortnight-long visit during March 2017, when he is expected to visit Tawang, Itanagar and the eastern districts of the state,” an official of the Khandu government was quoted by the newspaper as saying. The official also said there was no special religious significance attached to the visit.

It is tempting to read in the two developments a deliberate move by the Narendra Modi government which feels thwarted by Beijing over its recent efforts to become a member of the Nuclear Suppliers Group and incorporate Pakistan-backed terrorism as a crucial theme in the multilateral forums. It is expected that Beijing would respond to the proposed visit with its now familiar revulsion and derision.

If it does indeed take place the visit will be his second one in recent years. The last time he visited was in November, 2009 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of his exile in India. There were the usual objections to the visit from Beijing even then. While Beijing has been consistent in opposing any engagement with the Dalai Lama anywhere in the world at any official level as a matter of policy, cumulatively it is hard to quantify specifically how such visits/interactions damage relations in real terms. China scholars have pointed out that the country has long institutional memory and it can institutionally act on a grudge even after decades. In the particular Indian context, while there is a thin veneer of bilateral pragmatism on display by China, there are occasions when Beijing makes its displeasure unambiguously clear to India. Its steadfast support to Pakistan despite the latter’s many terrible transgressions over the issue of cross-border terrorism is one example of that.

On the particular issue of Tawang being a disputed region, while Beijing describes it thus, India has consistently called it an integral part of the union. China may find the Verma visit a little more galling than the Dalai Lama’s because notwithstanding its rejection Beijing has been long accustomed to the Buddhist master’s free movements within India. The presence of the top U.S. diplomat plays entirely differently within the dynamic of stepped-up relations between India and the United States.

First US ambassador visits Tawang and China frowns

From left, U.S. Ambassador to India Richard Verma, Assam Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal and Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister Pema Khandu. (Photo courtesy: @USAmbIndia)

It is bad enough for China that anyone from India at all visits Tawang, a contested stretch of the border region with India in the latter’s northeast. It is hardly surprising then that when the visitor happens to be the U.S. Ambassador to India, Richard Verma. What adds to the optics is that Verma is of Indian origin, his parents having been born in India.

It is for the first time that a U.S. Ambassador visited Tawang, which is part of the 90,000 sq km territory that China claims and calls it South Tibet. Verma visited Tawang, described it as a “magical place” and posted pictures on Twitter on October 21. “Stunning mountains & wonderful people. Terrific visit to #ArunachalPradesh for the #TawangFestival. Thank you Tawang for the hospitality,” the ambassador tweeted much to Beijing’s chagrin.

From left, U.S. Ambassador to India Richard Verma, Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister Pema Khandu. (Photo courtesy: @USAmbIndia)

The visit had the festive cover of the annual Tawang Festival where Verma was the guest of honor. But for China, it was an affront especially because it involved an important diplomat. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang was quoted by Reuters as saying that Beijing was "firmly opposed" to the U.S. diplomat's actions. The spokesman went to the extent of saying that such actions would "damage the hard-earned peace and tranquility of the China-India border region".

"Any responsible third party should respect efforts by China and India to seek peaceful and stable reconciliation, and not the opposite," Lu said during a regular press briefing.

"We urge the United States to stop getting involved in the China-India territorial dispute and do more to benefit this region's peace and tranquility," he said. He also pointed out that China and India were handling the matter  through talks.

The Indian response was crisp. “The US ambassador visited Arunachal Pradesh, a state which is an integral part of the country to which he is accredited. There is nothing unusual in it,” said Ministry of External Affairs spokesman Vikas Swarup.

Such visits are never impulsive and are preceded by considerable planning between the U.S. mission in New Delhi and the highest levels of the Indian government since they involve a region like Tawang. From the Indian side it is a deliberate move aimed at China which has recently thwarted some of New Delhi’s diplomatic moves, including membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and making terrorism a key part of the discourse among BRICS, a grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa which had its summit recently in Goa.

Diplomacy has historically been about land along borders and which country has the rightful claim on it. As fraught moves go, the presence of a U.S. ambassador in a contested region like Tawang is a fairly effective one as evident in the Chinese reaction although I am not sure if it serves any long-term purpose. At the same time though not all diplomacy is about its long-term consequence. Sometimes it is just about asserting control through such occasional short-term moves.

Tawang happens to have a strong Tibetan connection because that was where Tsangyang Gyatso, the Sixth Dalai Lama (1683-1706), was born. He is an unusual presence among the 14 Dalai Lamas in that he pursued sensual pleasures and led a life of wine, women and poetry. As I mention in my book ‘Dalai Lama: Man, Monk, Mystic” “Despite his indulgences the Sixth Dalai Lama remains a hugely popular figure in Tibetan history. Tibetans judge his frailties differently and argue that his decadence was deliberate, aimed at testing their faith and sincerity.”

Some tangential non-sense about upheaval at Tata Sons

What use is it being a journalist if you cannot access private phone conversations? I have just accessed one between retired Tata Sons chairman Ratan Tata and ousted Tata Sons chairman Cyrus Mistry. It is newsworthy because of Mistry’s unceremonious exit as chairman of the $103 billion conglomerate Tata Sons. Admittedly, it was a very short and cryptic phone conversation. Here is the transcript.

“Cyrus, this is Ratan,” says Ratan Tata.

“Sahebji,” responds Cyrus Mistry with a familiar Parsi greeting.

“Ta ta,” Ratan Tata says.

“I know. How can I not?” Mistry replies.

“No, just ta ta,” Ratan Tata reiterates.

“Why do you repeat that? I know who it is,” Mistry says somewhat intrigued.

“No I mean ta…..ta as in goodbye. You are gone. Fired. Booted. Sacked,” Tata clarifies.

“Oh….” says Mistry.

The conversation ends abruptly.

P.S.: This is not a real conversation. None of this actually happened at all.

***

Since my newspaper office, during my initial years as a journalist in Mumbai, was a short walk from the Bombay House, the hallowed headquarters of Tata Sons, I used to visit it occasionally. I had friends working there in senior positions.

The Bombay House had the feel of a certain anchored-ness that can only come from very old money. It was not the sort of place where questions about return on investment (ROI) rent the air. On the contrary, it was like a sedate government office, only better appointed in terms of furniture and other fixtures.

Speaking of ROI, I am reminded of a piece I wrote about Ratan Tata and his Twitter account on February 1, 2015. That bears repeating today. This is what I pointed out yesterday on Facebook in the aftermath of Mistry’s sacking.

For me the bigger Mistry than Cyrus's abrupt departure is this:

In a little over five years since Ratan Tata joined Twitter, he has tweeted 121 times. That is about 1.8 tweets a month.

And yet he continues to have 6.29 million followers.

Incidentally, since I wrote the following post, he has added a niggardly 11 tweets; 10 if you count one spurious tweet that was deleted.

My calculation suggests that for every tweet Tata has added 263636 followers.

Now that is some staggering return on investment!

FEBRUARY 01, 2015

I might yet fully comprehend quantum physics and the behavior of subatomic particles before I would figure out why anyone follows anyone else on any social media, particularly Twitter. With 118 followers built up since 2009, I should be officially declared defunct. I am in no position to sit in judgment over others on this subject. I do so merely because I chanced upon Indian industrial tycoon Ratan Tata’s twitter handle @RNTata2000. It was suggested to me this morning by Twitter as someone I might like to follow.

Tata was, before he retired chairman of Tata Sons, India’s most respected businessman. His Tata family has a long history of having built the country’s industrial backbone. He joined Twitter in April, 2011. Since then he has tweeted 110 times as of this morning. In a little over 1400 days that he has been on Twitter, he has posted 110 tweets, which works out to be one tweet every 12 days or so. Notwithstanding such sparse presence on an inherently frenzied medium, Tata has 3.44 million followers. That makes me wonder about what it is that these 3.44 million followers got by following him so far and, more importantly, what it is that they expect to get in the coming days and weeks and months and years.

In keeping with his public temperament his tweets are perfectly anodyne such as “Was Inducted today into the National Academy of Engineering. This has been a great moment for me!” on November 16, 2013 or “Wonderful to see US & India come together in a bond of mutual friendship and trust. Both charismatic leaders deserve great credit and praise” on January 26,2015.

For someone of Tata’s standing, he could at least consider a daily management tip or suggesting new business idea or encouraging young Indians to ask him questions or just tell great anecdotes from his business house’s long history. Not that following someone on Twitter is an arduous task that requires lifting tons of weight but a point must be reached when the followers feel compelled to ask “Why am I following this person?” 110 tweets in nearly four years? One would have understood if those tweets were truly profound and fraught with cryptic clues to the mysteries of the universe. Check this one from April 24, 2012, out, “Should the Media pursue sensationalism & misinformation rather than upholding their responsibility of reporting news factually?” It is not really a choice, is it now?

One would expect to see from him at least occasional flashes of the wicked sense of humor that the Parsi community, to which Tata belongs, are famous for.

P.P.S: I have since added 27 Twitter followers.

Munch’s Girls on a Bridge to be auctioned

Edvard Munch’s Pikene på broen (Girls on a Bridge), a 1902 canvas, will among the major impressionist and modern works to be auctioned by Sotheby’s on November 14 in New York.

The auctioneer has not released an estimate for this work but it is safe to guess it would be some million dollars. An accompanying description says, “Girls on a Bridge, one of Munch's most widely popular and acclaimed motifs, was painted during one of the most turbulent periods of his life. The image of a cluster of young women, huddled in a secretive mass between two points of land, resonates with explosive tension. Like van Gogh and Gauguin before him and the Expressionists after him, Munch often uses color not for naturalistic description but to convey authenticity of feeling. Understanding the world as a place of agitation and stress, Munch makes that vision literal; the emotional states that concern Munch are often disruptive – anxiety, jealousy – but he also knows quieter moods, like melancholy and loneliness.”

It is possible that Munch had all of those things in mind as described above. But then it could also be that he had none of those in mind and just painted it without any particular intention. Either way it is a remarkable piece. There is another one in this series where we see girls standing and leaning on the bridge and looking at the river. That is not being auctioned, of course.

The painting has an extraordinary explosion of colors which all come together in a rather unexpected way. Looking at this work I had to do something of my own this morning. Hence the digital work below titled ‘Monks in a forest’.

‘Monks in a Forest’ by MC

Bob Dylan, Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel prize and existential absurdity

There is some poetic justice in the discomfiture that the Swedish Academy that awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature to Bob Dylan is feeling over his indifference to it. A committee member has described Dylan’s silence over the honor as “impolite and arrogant.” Well, if you look at it, indifference to societal norms has been Dylan’s entire creative career. So no surprise there.

In a way Dylan’s indifference is somewhat reminiscent of the French author and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s rejection of the same prize in 1964. Sartre, of course, is known for many philosophical constructs but is best known for L'Etre et le néant (Being and Nothingness), 1943,  which the Nobel Prize’s official biography described as “a massive structuralization of his concept of being, from which much of modern existentialism derives.” Existentialism is one of those ideas that many talk about without quite getting a real grip on it. It is about the nature of being and absurdity of existence. That’s the best I can sum up in a single line.

Coming back to Dylan’s indifference to the honor, I think it has to be seen from the standpoint of existentialist absurdity. He did not seek the prize. Having been conferred, should he feel obliged to at least acknowledge it? From an existential point of view all prizes are nothing but some laudatory citation on an expensive piece of paper written in cursive inside a frame. They often carry some money, which is the operative part. Most poets do need the money that comes with the prize. Perhaps Dylan does not.

I am not quite sure what to make of Dylan’s silence. Is it “impolite and arrogant”? Sure, it is in so much as means that someone made a gracious gesture towards you and you do not have the grace to acknowledge it. However, if that gesture is the very consequence of a career-long display of living outside the norms, then one should hardly be surprised at illustration of of living outside the norms by not acknowledging.

Let me paraphrase Sartre. If the Swedish Academy found Dylan worthy of the Nobel Prize, it is because he is worthy of it. Within the Academy’s experience, his worthiness is not an aspect of its image Dylan’s, rather it is a feature of his towards which the Academy’s consciousness directs itself.

So if Dylan continues to be silent on the Nobel Prize to the extent of not even rejecting it like Sartre did, we can do nothing about it. We can put it down in the column of existential absurdity.

The future has already happened

It has been a long time since I spun out bogus hypotheses. It is always fun to embark on one. For one, it keeps one’s mind sharp. For another, it creates an impression of something intellectually challenging. Even a superficial scrutiny would destroy these hypotheses. So let me get to it right away.

The future has already happened. It is just that we are catching up with bits of it every passing moment. By that reckoning, we have already died and we are just going through the experience of life to get there. There is something unsettling about the idea that we are living what has already been laid out.It destroys our notions of free will.

It is not my case that there is no free will. There is in the everyday, operative sense of the word. The illusion of free will arises because of the vastness of choices that we think we have. For all practical purposes, this vastness of choices makes us think that we are part of an unpredictable system. That system is unpredictable to us from our vantage point.

This is where what I have been trying to sort out in my mind for a while kicks in. What if the universe that we live in is actually a quantum world of a much bigger universe? What if we all are quantum particles? That could explain a lot of the bizarreness that we often experience within and around us. That could also explain why we think there is indeed free will. As quantum particles we think we do precisely what want irrespective of consequences. We exercise free will. We can act both as particles and waves—wavicles as described by Arthur Eddington in 1928. We can interfere with ourselves while going through the double slit of existence.

If we are quantum particles we do what we do without bothering to be resolved in a particularly identifiable way. Until, of course, an outside observer looks at us. That is when the wave of potential paths—vastness of choices, if you will—collapses into one. What’s all this go to do with the opening line “The future has already happened”? I am not quite sure. I wrote it because it sounds reasonably clever. Now I am struggling to connect it with the second idea that ours could well be the quantum world of a much bigger universe.

At this point, I am not able to take a big enough leap to somehow connect the two ideas which developed simultaneously. So what do I do? The wisdom is in ending the post right here with the rider that at some point soon I will return to it with an explanation.