Room Planner

try it at http://www.la-z-boy.com/designcenter/

This tool is pretty cool... to actually visualize how you want your home to be... specially if you want to start from the scratch.

I played with it a lot and here are few iterations...

Food

Few thoughts on food here...
What parallels, what fire is to food/eating-culture? so universal...
Food spans across - Veg, non-veg, bacteria and Inorganic
We eat food for nutrition and pleasure...

Thats all for now

Myth and Nazi

“Today is history. Today will be remembered.
The young will ask with wonder about this day.
Today is history and you are a part of it.
For six centuries, there has been a Jewish Cracow.
By this evening, those six centuries are a rumor.
They never happened. Today is history.”
(Schindler’s List: 1993)

This tries to answer the question as to how Hitler rationalized anti-Semitism for Germans. Why Jews didn’t retaliate when Nuremberg laws were passed? Why Jews didn’t retaliate when ‘Ghettoization’ started? Why Jews didn’t retaliate when Nazis started gassing them?

Started with the search for answers as to why Germany did so badly in World War 1 and Hitler conjured the myth called “Nazi”… based on the myth “racial purity” and gave it as an answer. It started with the wish for the removal of Jews from the living spaces of the Germans and slowly the “Final Solution” came in form of the Holocaust.
History and Myths incorporated:
Hitler joined the German Army on the onset of World War 1 in 1914 and served as message- runner on the front. He demonstrated personal courage in battle and was awarded Iron Cross-first class.
End of World War 1 he joined (NSDAP) Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartie and soon became its chairman.
In 1932, Hitler officially acquired German citizenship and ran for president and but lost to Field Marshal von Hindenburg. Von Hindenburg, after months of reluctance, finally appointed Hitler as chancellor of Germany on 30 Jan 1933.
Anti-Semitic Nuremberg laws were passed on September 15 1935 and these deprived the Jews of German citizenship, confining them to a status of “subjects”.
Hitler mythified the concept of “Citizenship” and marginalized Jews as “subjects”, he gave a “logical supplement” to this myth defining who is a Jew, half-Jew, one-fourth-Jew and a non-Aryan. Another myth he creates is on the use of the word “Aryan”. Aryan (Sanskrit, “noble”)stock are superior in physique and character to those of Semitic stock. The Nazis subsequently used the term “Aryan” to mean white and non-Jewish.
He created a myth declaring that Germany has two enemies—external: comprised of western nations who had humiliated Germany by Treaty of Versailles; he promised the public that he would restore the lost pride—internal: comprised of communists and Jews.
He created popular myths about Jews that “Jews possessed wealth and power”, “Jews have money” “They are running the country, they are clannish”, “They have best jobs and control businesses”, “They are dirty, sloppy, filthy”
Schindler’s List also hints about some of the myths Nazi propagated and how easily they were believed in:
“They cast a spell on you, you know, the Jews. [...] They have this power; it’s like a virus. Some of my men are infected with this virus. They should be pitied, not punished. They should receive treatment, because this is as real as typhus. I see this all the time” (Goeth speaks to a Nazi officer when Schindler gets arrested because of kissing a Jewish Girl).

This also shows the binary opposition of what an individual feels and how the group imposes the bourgeois idealogy and that of love and hatred for jews.
Show the movie clip here

Apart from what the group imposes as the bourgeois ideology, Hitler himself is a very impressive orator, his choice of signs & symbols, image & imagery had immense mesmerizing effect on Germans. His strong compassionate but carefully rehearsed speeches, sometime lasting more than two hours were “were masterful dramatizations of Nazi Myths”.
He even used the biggest event of Sports i.e. Olympics to delude the world into believing him. Olympics games were held in Berlin in Aug 1936 and it afforded the Nazis a golden opportunity to impress the world and they made the most of it. No previous games had seen such a magnificent and lavish display of entertainment. It was like a mirage and it conveyed a different story altogether: people from around the world saw happy, friendly Germany united under Hitler, which was very different form what they used to read in newspapers back homes. Hitler did all this considering the psychology & political environment of Germany and the world, and it helped him in gaining large dedicated supporters… creation of a myth for the whole world.

The signs “Juden unerwnenscht” (Jews not welcome) were deliberately put down from the shops, hotels etc… creation of a tautology a way of imposing a falsity by redundancy. In the schools the kids were taught the ideas of racial supremacy and were given mathematical problems like “Supporting a lunatic costs the state four Marks a day. Supporting a cripple costs four-and-half Marks, and an epileptic three-and-half Marks. Figuring an average of four Marks each day and considering there were 300,000 of them. How much the state saves if these individuals were eliminated?”(Life is Beautiful: 1998), yet another way of imposing a myth as a tautology.

Now we need to answer as to why the Jews did not react to the steady induction of the various laws and discriminatory policies that lead to Holocaust. One of the prime reasons was previous experience of anti-Semitism, which Jews had in Europe. When Nazi party came to power and started implementing anti-Semitic policies Jews started believing that ‘everything is fine’, ‘this would end soon’ and ‘things couldn’t get worse’… the popular myth among the Jews who had already witnessed or experienced anti-Semitic outbursts before but all turned out to be temporary in nature . Psychologically this was due to the occurrence of ego defense mechanisms of “denial” or “cognitive dissonance”. “Denial” is arguing against an anxiety provoking stimuli by either ignoring it or taking the opposite belief and “cognitive dissonance” is psychological conflict resulting from incongruous beliefs and attitudes held simultaneously.

The myth got only stronger by the indifferent attitude of the other European countries. Influenced by anti-Semitism and fear of massive influx of refugees most of European countries had very stringent policy in case of Jewish Refugees and this facilitated Nazis to put up the situation in front of German’s such that ‘No-one wants them’. This fortified the Nazi ideology that ‘Jews being inferior are not wanted by any country’ and helped them in winning some more support of ‘normal’ Germans who later on participated in the fulfillment of “Final Solution”.

Hue n I

You are “you”, she is “she” and he is “he”… so are they, “they” and I am “I”. I span the world of information, but I am just a binary opposition. Conflicting with yes and no, to be or not to be… my life has been a series of choices between the whites and the blacks. I have this window through which I see the world of colors; of differences that are beyond the description of words… for the differences are a million and the words just a few thousand. Probably the world can’t be in the discrete way I see my life, or the set of choices I see it as. It’s a continuous spectrum of color.
Until yesterday I was this innocent child… that I would see everything white… I have no understanding of the other. The universe was an expansive white circle of self, where the radius is determined by the care I share with the world… there are these blue moments when I would still pull my self to think white… trying to hold on to my faith, of seeing the oneness in all color, the divine white… the unison of all colors.
But it happened one day that I met this dark enigmatic guy, his ways of life are fascinating. I built my friendship with him with the bottom line as… to be ignorant is not being innocent, I need to be knowledgeable and still be white… this was a challenge I set to my self. So I needed to dare to enter the dark… and he is brave, strong, determined, mysterious, enchanting and so very imposing… he is a black-magic-man, too simple a person… he is quite my opposite… he is what when you remove all shades off the human spirit… he is Black, he just goes by basic instincts. He pulls in everybody’s attention… like a black hole, he is my binary opposite… and they say opposites attract. I entered into this friendship with my innocence, with the spirit of a child’s enthusiasm, and with faith that I would come out unmarked, with the hope that I can help give some light in the dark.
The contrast helped me realize what I am not, it helped me define myself as a compliment to him… mind you, we were going steady, but just that we were facing the opposing directions of the world. I am still the clean white person… but I see my self as an absence of black, no longer as pure white… I couldn’t stand alone. I am this feeble, dependent, sensitive person. We were together, but never interfering with each other. So with time I stood there a lone non-black and he a black. With the increasing silences, and the windows closed they were no grey gloomy moments for each of us. It ended all as a curiosity to just know each other. These were the moments which made me define my self as a discrete set of “yes”s and “no”s. I have shed seeing everything with the innocent eyes, and stainable perceptions. I formed strong opinions on everything… the way through the dark tunnel taught me to count every step, and make conscious logical choices. I became over conscious of the fact that I will live only one life and I got to live it to worth it. So became obsessed with algorithmizing my life to fifty years ahead. Life became the boring white, and sometimes with few harsh black choices. Life was running like a digital logic circuit; with little noises and delay… still bring in the mediocrity of grey to almost perfect white that I aspired to be. All the while I was conditioning myself to become color blind to stay focused.
But when I met this perfect-guy type of a boy… who can be called Mr. White, I couldn’t turn a blind eye to him. I conditioned myself to not see the other colors but white being my goal I had to see him and get distracted. He was all what I aspired to be. And he is not innocent due to ignorance. With the knowledge he didn’t stand out as a lonesome white… that shouldn’t be touched to be kept pure. The mechanism I am trying to follow. He stands as a stable totality. My interaction with him helped me understand the world not as an innocent picture of all-is-so-good, or in binary modes but as more beautiful continuous spectra of hues and shades of ideologies, genealogies and perspectives. I began to see the different colors with in me; dealing with the individual hues helped me gain an internal harmony that I could spread to the outside world.
So I am this white person now too… but only that I can see it sometimes with the stark contrast, sometimes with a rhythm, and sometimes in perfect balance and harmony.
I realized, I am always this mix of a million shades, but I just failed to realize the individual colors, or may be I am “eye” and not just “I”. I am what I see and what I perceive. I needed the contrast of black to see the white, and white to see the black… need to live through the hardships to cherish the happy moments, and there are these maybes, the hues and shades of life, the uncertainties and subtleties that makes life even more exciting.

Female characters in Mahabharata

Gender is an important identity. This part of the identity is noticed even before the race, language. Here we will try to analyze the femininity of the Mahabharata. Many times we define the gender identity from what the eye catches... based on the biological construct of the person, but every person has both the identities in oneself, both masculinity and femininity. Both coming up to surface based on the context and the temperament. Now the question is what is femininity? Ability to attract, to reproduce, to shower maternal care, be better at verbal skills and stratagem rather than rash action Mahabharata is full of such episodes. So can we establish how the various female characters with their feminine traits, paint the wholesome feminine character of Mahabharata.
If we have to actually only see the female characters in Mahabharata, in the order in which they are introduced, are as follows:
Ganga:
She has the grace, the purity, for which the eight Vasus chose to be born to her. She has the nature of water that follows the course of destiny to join the ocean, and can’t stay stagnant to be a puddle or be tied up to one man. The mysterious, holds secrets and the grace that doesn’t allow the King Santanu to rise his point over the murders of the first seven born babies. The firmness of emotions exhibited in returning with a smile every time she throws away her son in the waters of Ganges gives her character the purple shades of the mysterious and the dark shades of a fiend. She is all time the scheming, and the temptress, and the creator of Bhisma the witness of all the generations of the epic Mahabharata.
Satyavati:
The maiden-fisherwoman with the fragrance that filled the forest with blossoms, and whose beauty struck the King Santanu filled his heart with love. Her astute father strikes deal to make her kids heir to throne if she is to be married to the king.
Ambika & Ambalika:
The princess Bhisma won for his step-brother in a swayamwara. Both of them had to conceive with sage Vyasa as their own husband is impotent. Ambika turns pale looking at Vyasa and gives birth to Pandu who is pale while Ambalika closes her eyes and that leads to Dhritarashtra being born blind.
Amba
She was one of the three princesses who was won by Bhisma, to be married to Vichitravirya son of Satyavati. She is a symbol of revenge, seeks out everyone for help to avenge Bhisma, for he didn’t allow her to marry her lover and Vichitravirya, for whom she was to be married didn’t consent to marry her as she fancied somebody else, and it falls upon Bhisma to marry her, but he wouldn’t break his vow. She carries her wrath for Bhisma for spoiling life thus, for 2 lives. She carries over sever penance to seek revenge and in the next life.
Sarmishta:
The daughter of the King of asuras for whom Sankaracharya works.
She is haughty by the fact of the high position her father holds. And insults Devayani the dear daughter of Sankaracharya.
Devayani:
The dear daughter of Sankracharya, the great sage who knows the art of sanjeevani, she helps her lover Kacha, son of Brihaspati, revive to life for 3 times when killed by asuras as he came to learn the art of sanjeevani. Finally becomes her brother as he comes out of Sankracharya’s abdomen as the teacher consumes his ashes mixed in wine when the asuras serves him. She later gets insulted by Sarmishta and gets her to be appointed as her maid, marries King Yayati, who saved her life. Yayati later yields to Sarmishta and displeases Devayani and thereby gets cursed by Sankarachary to suffer pre-mature oldness, which he exchanges with his fifth son making him the King.
Madri:
Wife of King Pandu, who becomes a Sati as her husband gets tempted by her and dies because of a curse of sage who was shot by this king as the sage and his wife love in disguise of deer.
Kunti:
The motherly character, who in her impatient youthful curiosity tried a spell given as a boon to her by a sage, which resulted in the birth of Karna(son of Sun). And in the major part of the epic she is portrayed as the loving and caring motherly character very much justful to her own sons and Madri’s sons.
Draupadi:
The wife of the five pandavas. She been treated like an object all throughout, to be divided among five brothers, or to be pawned for the dice game. She has been a major source of jealousy of the Dhryodhana and Co. for two reasons, her beauty and the political strength of her father King Drupadha who would now naturally befriend Pandavas.
Sakunthala:
The lover of King Dushyanta(the heir of Pandavas), who is forgotten by the King because of a curse by some sage.
Sikhandin(Amba in previous life):
Though born as a female, by penance she turns out to be a male. Bhisma who would never fight with a female, gets killed in Khurukshetra as Arjuna uses Sikkandin as his Charioteer.
The above introductions of the important characters should do to understand the discussions and derivations below. Other than the characters mentioned above there are multiple wives for each of the Pandavas whose major roles being fostering the political strength in form of marital alliances. Mahabharata is an epic told in different forms across different parts of India, there may be few disagreements or voids in this essay, forgive me for such shortcomings. Now with the background stories of the different characters we will now dwell into how their characters are sketched and iterated. The repetition of certain traits in different characters in a way portrait the trait of the persona called “Mahabharata”.
The start of the epic is with King Santanu and his romantic fancies. This part shows the rosy and mysterious traits of a woman (traits of Ganga). And that ends with the birth of Bhisma. Then starts the reasoning or the logic of marriage which is more than just passion, which shows the marriage life of a woman which is more or less a kind of “give and take”, her such a trait of woman is shown by the “deal” that Satyavati’s father cuts with Bhisma and the King Shantanu. And for the celibacy that Bhisma vowed as a result, his father blesses him “death-at-will” boon.
Next comes the case as to how Bhishma won three well accomplished princesses for his “not-so-capable” step-brother, Vichitravirya. Here Ambika and Ambalika are treated as ones to keep the race going, so they conceive with sage Vyasa. An objectification into “reproducing machines”. While Amba becomes the one to suffer loss of love, and life for the fancy of Bhishma’s vow. She thus becomes the trait of the female that hates and seeks vengeance with her lost love, the other alternative to stage of marriage and reproduction.
Sarmishta stands the symbol to the proud and haughty daughter of a rich father, while Devayani stands as a symbol of a very loved and good daughter. These characters portray the character of a daughter at different stage when as maiden, and the relations with parents after marriage. Devayani’s character rejected by Kacha, and then her repeated trails to marry King Yayati and instance of pratiloma an intercaste marriage. Her Devayani is a lonely women who finally weds but then her husband later cheats her. May be another alternative to the life of a woman, the first two being that of Ambika & Ambalika’s and Amba’s.
Then comes the motherhood, (the most important aspect of femininity) of Mahabharata, with the characters of Kunti and Ghandhari. They bring the “Mahabharata” to the stage of motherhood, of child rearing with varying levels of influence on the kids. Kunti, a mother in full control of her kids, while Ghandhari is a very indifferent one. Kunti who follows her dharma to be impartial to her five sons makes her command, asking Draupadi to be shared equally among all five brothers. Surely a mother working for cause...the unity of her sons! Her uncanny ability to sense the potential mischief in a situation and act ruthlessly to avert the danger is borne out as the five brothers look at Draupadi: “Each had her in his heart”, says Vyasa. Draupadi’s feelings in the matter are of no consequence to the Pandavas and their mother. Kunti had acted as swiftly and equally remorselessly earlier at Varanavata, plying with drink a Nishada woman and her five sons, so that they burnt to death in the lac house and served to disguise the escape of the Pandavas. Truly, Kunti is a remarkable picture of maternal heroism created by Vyasa. Kunti-Pritha, another trait of this character relates to her unexplained silence during the two dice-games. Indeed, this is the only occasion when the sons do not even meet their mother before leaving Indraprastha, let alone take her advice. We find that after the installation of Yudhishthira at Indraprastha Kunti recedes into the background, only to flare up in an unforgettable moment when she asks Krishna to narrate to her sons the story of Vidula, for inspiring them to win back the kingdom, for it is a tale “that shall make men gods for might, Kindling fiery joy of battle...the warrior hearing turns to flame”. Kunti’s last moments are perhaps the greatest enigma of all. After the war has been won, she does not stay on as the Dowager Queen to preside over a victorious Pandava empire. Instead, she accompanies the shattered Dhritarashtra and Gandhari, along with Vidura-Dharma in whose house she had spent the 13 years of her sons’ exile. With them she perishes in a forest fire, as bereft of her sons as Gandhari. Vyasa proffers no explanation for this decision of Kunti. Perhaps we can find the clue to an answer in that secret of her maidenhood of which she is so ashamed: Karna. Yet before this, Kunti has no hesitation in appearing in Hastinapura with five grown sons claiming that they are sons of gods. Yet, she cannot bring herself to acknowledge Karna, also son of a god according to her. Nor does she do anything to stop the barrage of insults showered upon him in the tournament by Bhima. A hint of the secret is available in the peculiar conduct of Kuntibhoja in placing the nubile Kunti fully at the disposal of the sage Durvasa, who gifts her with a “mantra” and she is pregnant with Karna almost immediately after his departure. Vyasa says that Durvasa gave her the spell knowing of the future difficulties she would face. This is merely another way of saying that, in order to provide her with some cover to stave off social calumny in the future, Durvasa left her with the story of a “mantra” for public consumption. While recounting the incident, Kunti states that although the sage gave enough cause to infuriate her, she retained her composure. What sort of behavior would have infuriated an adolescent, nubile maiden left completely at the mercy of an eccentric hermit? However, her precarious position in Hastinapura, where she has been accepted despite it being known that Pandu was cursed with inability to procreate, can be imperiled if the fruit of a pre-marital union were acknowledged. Yet, it does not explain why she does not tell Pandu about Karna when he is lecturing her on different types of sons, including those born out of wedlock, and pressing her to get him surrogate sons.
What is of interest is that Kunti does not scruple to reveal the truth to Karna just before the war begins. Her intention is quite plain: Duryodhana has to be deprived of his staunchest ally. Not succeeding in that attempt, she concentrates on saving the Pandavas from their strongest foe, and virtually blackmails Karna emotionally to elicit a promise that he will not slay anyone of them except Arjuna. The result is that, despite having each of them in his grasp, including Yudhishthira whom Drona had vainly tried to imprison and thereby win the war, Karna lets them go, thereby forfeiting the kingdom that he could have gifted Duryodhana. Thus, the fact of motherhood is used remorselessly by Kunti as a political weapon to win the battle for the Pandavas. Still we can see Gandhari as a symbol of the respect given to motherhood, along with the unquestioning obedience offered to Kunti by her sons in sharing Draupadi. When Draupadi rushes to Gandhari to escape from Duhshasana, Gandhari coldly tells her that, after all, it is only her brothers-in-law calling her and she might as well go! The very nature of her motherhood is an enigma. She enters the Kaurava palace after deliberately blinding herself on hearing the duplicity practiced upon her by Bhishma in forcing her parents to give her in marriage to a blind prince. This is not the act of a devoted wife, for thereby she deprives her husband of the opportunity to see through her eyes for both of them. That is what an ideal wife like Sukanya had done for Chyavana. It is an act of terrifying masochistic proportions, taken without consulting her parents, her brother, or anyone else. This reveals not only her singular ability to stand alone, to take life-marring decisions with lightning swiftness, but also an indomitable will.Within Gandhari is a tremendous hunger to become the: mother of a king, because she cannot be the wife of one (Dhritarashtra being only the figurehead, with Bhishma wielding all the power). For two long years she bears the fetus. When she hears that Yudhishthira has been born to Kunti despite the curse on Pandu, she loses control and, in frustrated fury, strikes at her womb to deliver a ball of iron-hard flesh, reflecting her adamantine nature. She does not find it necessary to consult her husband about the decision to abort the fetus. Her decision is purely the result of fierce jealousy at being beaten in the race to queen-motherhood by Kunti. For two years she had been patient, secure in the knowledge that Pandu would die childless thanks to the deer-sage’s curse.
When Vyasa asks Gandhari what she is about to do with the fetus, she answers that, having heard that Kunti had given birth to a son bright as the sun, she, in sorrow, had brought about this abortion. Gandhari-of-the-iron-will exacts a terrible price for the marriage she was forced into with a blind man. She neither looks upon the faces of-her children, nor does she fulfill a mother’s duties towards her hundred sons, who are allowed to grow uncontrolled like rank weeds along the Ganga flowing by Hastinapura. Here Vyasa has juxtaposed the remarkable example of Kunti, who combines the roles of nurturing mother and controlling-guiding father vis-à-vis the five Pandavas, though to Karna she is no different than Gandhari to the Dhartarashtras. The unquestioning obedience the Pandavas offer Kunti is, therefore, never Gandhari’s to command from her sons, nor Kunti’s from Karna. Never does Gandhari ask them to desist from their litany of envy and hate against the Pandavas all through their childhood and adolescence. Ultimately, when she does seek to intervene in the Sabha and the Udyoga Parvas, Duryodhana cavalierly brushes her aside—something wholly unimaginable for the Pandavas where Kunti is concerned. In the Sabha Parva, before the second dice-game, Gandhari. for only the second time in the epic approaches her husband (the first being when she urged her husband to stop the first game after the attempted disrobing of Draupadi), advising him to discard Duryodhana and not be party to the destruction of the dynasty, as this second game would “rekindle a dead fire, topple a bridge re-built.” Her words are but ashes before the tornado of Dhritarashtra’s love for his sons. But what is of significance is that here, a millennium ago, a wife uncompromisingly tells her husband that, enslaved by his love for his progeny, he has lost control over them. Characteristically, Gandhari overlooks her own abdication of her responsibilities! It is this unusual ability to speak the bitter truth to her husband’s face which emerges again in presence of the full court in the Udyoga Parva when Dhritarashtra, for the first time, asks Gandhari to be brought into the court to try if a mother’s love can din some simple sense into Duryodhana’s obdurate head. Gandhari appears and, much as Draupadi had shamed the Kuru elders in open court, she upbraids her husband in words that fly unerringly to the mark, like the infallible arrows of a master-archer. When Dhritarashtra tells her that her ill-willed son is disobeying him and has grossly insulted all elders in the court, Gandhari asks Duryodhana to be summoned so that she can rebuke him in public. She also tells Dhritarashtra that it is his fondness for his son that is to blame, for, despite knowing his unrighteous desires, he has pampered and supported him in his insatiate hunger for the kingdom. “It is too late now for force,” she says, possibly referring to the pampered childhood, for which she was equally responsible. She points out that, having left the kingdom to wicked Duryodhana and his crooked cabal, Dhritarashtra is now reaping the fruits of his irresponsible acts. Urging him to be firm now, she cites a reason that shows her remarkable insight, despite being as blind as her husband, into the political scenario: “Your enemies are laughing at this family break-up.” Even more impressive is her analysis of the results of war: Duryodhana will lose because the mighty warriors he depends on—Bhishma Drona, Kripa—may fight on his side being “rajapinda bhayat” (borne on the Kaurava exchequer), and may even give up their lives in that process, but they will never harm the Pandavas because of their superiority in dharma. Duryodhana does not scruple to insult his mother by stalking out in a tearing rage, little realizing how prophetic her analysis is, which, if heeded, would have kept him alive.
It is not motherliness that characterizes Gandhari, but her adamantine will and her sense of dharma. She refuses to bless her son with the boon of victory, because he is not on the side of dharma. At the very end, her agony at the loss of all her children is revealed in two small incidents of searing intensity. As Yudhishthira touches her feet, begging forgiveness, his nails are burned black by the flaming agony searing through a space between Gandhari’s bandage and her eyes. Then, tormented by the horrifying scenes of lamentation on the battlefield, she unleashes on Krishna the curse that he will witness the destruction of his own kith and kin too. Within Gandhari is a simmering volcano of bitter rage born of frustration, which finds its consummation in the forest fire that she calmly welcomes to give her a longed-for release from a lifetime in which she drew every breath of married life in pain.
Along comes the character of Draupadi, the “model sahadharmacharini”, who shows how a woman manages not just the complications of her own polyandrous marriage, but also the tassels of polygamous marriages of each of her five husbands. Each of the five brothers had at least one other wife, while Arjuna had as many as three more. It is one of the enigmas of the epic that none of these wives accompanied their exiled husbands. As only Sita accompanied Rama and Lakshmana in their 14 year long exile, so was Kunti with the Pandavas during the post-Varanavata exile as their sole female companion. In the 13-year exile it is Draupadi who assumes this role. What we find at the core of the epic is the traumatic agony of a nathavati anathavat, a woman five-husbanded yet husband-less at precisely those moments of extreme anguish when the very meaning of womanhood and the significance of being a saha-dharmini is at stake. The Draupadi of the Vana Parva homily is not the fire-born Yajnaseni, but a product of the post-Manu Samhita period where the wife is but the husband’s chattel, not his companion, let alone becoming even his guide where need be. The blazing personality that is Draupadi finds memorable expression in her abrupt salutation to the Kuru elders watching her plight in Duhshasana’s hands. Das is mistaken in citing this as her sense of good manners in apologizing to the elders for not having greeted them when she was dragged into the court by her hair. As Karna asks Duhshasana to take her away to the servants’ quarters, Draupadi cries out to her silent husbands. Finding no response, she, with quicksilver intelligence, seizes upon a social ritual to wrest a moment’s respite from pillaging hands. What she says drips with sarcasm since the elders whom she bitterly salutes, deliberately using the word “duty”, have remained silent in the face of Vidura’s exhortation to do their duty and protect the daughter-in-law of the house. Look at the words she uses: “One duty remains, which I must now do. Dragged by this mighty hero, I nearly forgot, I was so confused. Sirs, I bow to all of you, all my elders and superiors. Forgive me for not doing so earlier. It was not all my fault, gentlemen of the sabha.” It is a mighty hero who is dragging his sister-in-law by her hair and attempting to strip her in public. She has nearly forgot her duty, while the elders are wholly oblivious of it. It is surely not her fault that she is being outraged; and certainly it is not she who is so confused, but rather the Kuru elders. She also stands to represent the platonic friendship a woman can have with a man, with her friendship with Krishna, the sakhi-sakha relationship they maintain. We should not, also, lose sight of a bit of perfect caste-upwomanship in Draupadi’s svayamvara. She raises her voice against wedding a charioteer’s son, but is mute when a Brahmin enters the competition. Krishna feels no qualms in using his sakhi as a bait in urging Karna to change sides, telling him that Draupadi will welcome him too as a husband! As Helen brought about the destruction of the topless towers of Ilium, so Draupadi is the cause of the passing of a yuga, marked by a carnage of unprecedented proportions, annihilating each one of her five sons, her father, her brothers and relatives. It is a curious similarity of situation that she shares with Gandhari: both have husbands alive, but not a single son left to inherit the throne, all having been killed by a single warrior (Bhima/Ashvatthama). Similarly, both Kunti and Gandhari witness their sons slain by their brothers. What a meaningless victory it turns out to be!
Then we have Shakuntala. The image of women in the original stratum of the epic is that which is etched out in the words of Shakuntala, as she upbraids Dushyanta for fickleness: “A wife is a man’s half,A wife is a man’s closest friend; A wife is Dharma, Artha and Karna, A wife is Moksha too . - .A sweet-speaking wife is a companion in happy times; A wife is like a father on religious occasions; A wife is like a mother in illness and sorrow. The wife is a means to man’s salvation...Happiness, joy, virtue, everything depends on her.”This is very far, indeed, from the love-sick, swooning, helpless maiden that is Kalidasa’s Shakuntala
Finally we come across the Sikhandhin, the one born to avenge Bhisma. Here we see the femininity of Mahabharata changing into the masculine vigor of war, and to represent it we have the character of Sikhandhin, the eunuch, whom Bhisma wouldn’t fight and meet his own death.
On the overall we see many female characters coming in the front enacting different stages of a life of woman, and these characters at every stage modulate the epic giving it their traits, painting its character as woman in different stages of life. Vyasa casts his women—Kunti, Draupadi, Gandhari, Shakuntala, Devayani, Savitri, Damayanti—in the heroic mould, of whom one could well use Shakespeare’s words, “bringers forth of men-children only”. That’s as it goes with the individual characters, when we see the totality of the story we have two very important male characters, the Bhisma, and the Krishna. Bhisma who follows the dharma for his own sake, a very feminine attitude, applying dharma in a ritualistic manner. He sticks to the Kauravas and fights the war for 10 days for the reason of personal loyalty, never reasoning the need to kill thousands of the soldiers in the process. But Krishna we see applys logic and reason to the notion of dharma. He is the herald of the new dharma that places the establishment of righteousness above all else as conducive to the general weal, lokasamgraha. That is why Krishna does not hesitate to rise above the bonds of kinship and kill tyrannical Kamsa and Shishupala, He opposes the Dhartarashtras because of their asuric nature, intent on self-aggrandizement and least concerned over the swiftly expanding imperialism of Jarasandha, enslaving kingdom after kingdom. The killing of Jarasandha restores independence to a hundred chieftains and relieves the Sursasenas of Mathura and the Yadavas-Bhojas-Vrishnis of Dvaraka of the spectre of this all-swallowing, constricting python of imperial hegemony. It speaks volumes for the much vaunted wisdom of Bhishma that he never once looked eastwards beyond Hastinapura at the truly alarming growth of the power of Magadha, Pragjyotishpura, and Pundra, each of them under a ruthless tyrant. It was Krishna who slew each of them and put an end to imperialistic ambitions...a very practical implementation of dharma in a masculine without the clouding of emotion of self as the purpose. He teaches the same philosophy in the Kurukshetra as Bhagwad Gita.
This completes the gender identities and their relations in the micro-level as well as the macro-level in the epic, Mahabharata. The small pieces make the whole. The depths of a female character span the ocean, they are mysterious, enigmatic. They can surely be used as imagery to write an epic! This is just an attempt to argue the same.

Observing.......listening......and more on the way

Mute to the outside world and cacaphonus in the inside for 4 hours… and then I felt that I walked out of this exercise with an extra sense… a sense of observation.

I followed the bee, it buzzed over the newspaper, I could recall the texture of it, I heard the paper rustle as Raina flipped it over. The bee mused over the iron rack, I guess its hoping to build its nest there and I saw almost every intricate hole in the pattern and as my hand moved over the wooden table with the a metal edge, I felt cold as it touched the metal. Then the bee came zooming close to my face, I felt the blood rushing up my face and could hear the buzzing sound of its wings. I turned right to avoid it and I saw the line of ants crawling over the insulation tube. I recalled Feynman, who experimented on ants and the String theory that talks of universe having as many as 11 dimensions and they tried explaining it with the example of an ant crawling over an electric wire. I wondered if this exercise would make me so sensitive to experience a new dimension other than the 3 dimensions of space and one of time or discover a new sense… I would jump out shouting eureka! In the middle of the exercise I thought… but that didn’t happen so I sat mute till the end of 4 hrs, probably I should have tried harder.

Such recursive thought loops went on and on … sometimes I would wait to observe myself to discover the answer to the question Nina asked me think of in the morning “why do I have such strong notions about everything?”

I wasn’t policing any of my thoughts at any point of time, but then constantly I was consciously waking up my sleeping senses. I couldn’t get all my senses receptive simultaneously. I observed, I was pretty fidgety with my hands and legs. I couldn’t stay still for a while. I noticed as Raina walked past, her pencil hit the books’ rack. I could hear the click, I don’t think she would have realized it herself. By the way I was sitting in the library. As different people entered their foot steps sounded very different. There have been rows of conversations on “The catcher in the Rye”, stocks, investment plans, and many more. Kakaji was sitting still for more than 2 hrs reading the Gujarati newspaper. I admire his concentration and stability in posture. Rakesh came in he forgot his mobile and left, but I observed it, otherwise usually I am pretty absent minded myself.

Then I came up with a series of experiments,

Experiment 1: I tried to feel the sense of stability… so I gave up the comfort of the chair and balanced myself over the window pane and the edge of the chair. It was interesting to observe how my body traded of comfort for balance.. the way I would adjust my weight and all that was pretty amusing… I would usually do this so subconsciously.

Experiment 2: I checked myself I am feeling everything I am everything that I am close to as a person… yes I could smell the metal and sweat on my watch. I couldn’t feel the 3 rings I have been wearing on left hand ring-finger for over 10 years any more… I took them of for sometime and then wore them again… I felt them subtly

Experiment 3: I couldn’t feel the spider crawl over my skin but sure felt it over the tiny hair over my fingers
Experiment 4: I tried to check how much control I have over my hands, placing on the table in the most relaxed state I couldn’t lift the finger I chose without shaking it…

The exercise helped me understand my thinking patterns, my subconscious movements and what the world around is constantly communicating to me. I understood the importance of opening up senses.

3 mondays not so mundane

Dated 4th July 2005
Dear Kutty,
Last week ended and this week started … I know it’s not a gr8 observation but I want to talk about last week, so I started thus… Gujarat is drowning and we have to capture rhythm and contrast in it... our photography assignment. We spent the initial drier days getting used to camera and its erratic battery drains, and run-outs-of-memory. But we learnt to “see”. CommStudies made me hate TV, and love Hitler, we analyzed his communication strategies. Been boring my friends a lot with it… let me not bore u too...

Dated 12th July 2005
My dearest Kutty,
I guess balance never imbalanced anybody so much. U know what…. Binny says something and then Mahendrabhai says something else in the afternoon. I have resolved to do one crazy thing everyday… for today I wrote my notes like an Arab would do. I fell in love with the idea of spanning one sensory experience with the other. So sat down in Visual Language lecture without my specs… I could listen better!G’nite

Dated 18th July 2005
Hi Kutty,
My life is getting infested…been working with insects for my compositions assignment, and the 19th July fest is “infest”ed. Conjured math puzzles for defining myself. The only subject where I enjoy the theory more than practical is Typo. I never thought one has to analyze the abc so much. The Creativity-workshop was good team work and the assignment was fun. I came, I am seeing and I hope to conquer…

Violence

“Mr. Violence” – who are the parents of this character? Violence is what is born out of two contradicting ideologies, where each of them tries to impose on the other. So the parents of violence are two contradicting ideologies. It is nourished by vitamins like ‘hurt egos’, minerals like ‘feelings of other and self’, and carbohydrates like ‘lives lost, blood shed, wars fought, riots… there is more to this list! It does not end with physical pain that is inflicted but also consists of the defeated ideologies that remain as memories’.
When I try to realize as to what is violence, it seems quite tough. Here I quote Enigma “You believe in the light because of the darkness, You believe in the joy because of the sorrows, You believe in the God because of the Devil…” and I believe in violence because of the ??? non-violence …may be NO!!! in non-violence too there is violence, here the violence is not inflicted to the other but to the self. With these beliefs I go ahead to explore this Enigmatic Violence in our society in both cultural and historical context. (Here in discussing various case studies I will not quote all of its intricate details, for this paper is more focused on the Violence associated with them rather than the study of the particular case. For better understanding it is important that one goes through the readings quoted.)
Violence in the most savage of human civilizations is seen in the case of Andamanese – the Jarwas and the Ongees. But one should reconsider his/her statement as to who is inflicting the violence on whom? The case of the Andamanese goes as…one sees the settlers around the reserve forest for the tribal community constantly making efforts to expand their boundaries, and to exploit the forest products. With this the Jarwas react in their traditional way of processing the other. In homology with the beast they kill for food, which is also seen as the other (but in the case of the beast the other is processed into something that can be internalized while the intruder is dealt as an other who needs to be expelled out of their community) (pandya) Thus referring to the case of the Andamanese one gets a picture of violence in a very brutal form at the toddler stage where there is not much of civilization, not much of technology. With time violence did not grow in magnifying its dimensions of brutality but in creating more efficiency. Exponentially increasing quantity and linearly increasing quality. This aspect is best seen in the case of the violence in the Nazi regime.
Here in this case discussion I quote the lectures of Prof. Tridip Suhrud. What one sees in this “very efficient” method of eliminating around 20 million people is a smooth running of a frictionless bureaucratic system, with indifference as the lubricant and power and dictatorship as the source of energy. One can clearly see what power misused can do in nurturing violence. The inhuman medical experiments show how the Doctors with this element of power became highly innovative and inhuman in finding creative solutions to implement more efficient deaths. The initial process of injecting sedatives was given up with the coming up of a cheaper solution in form of gas chambers and finally this too was done with an added creative element of using the patients as guinea pigs for all kinds of imaginative research, that didn’t add a bit of information to medical knowledge but satisfy their sadistic pleasures. This case is one of the finest example for demonstrating violence in form of euphemism. It’s all about extending limits till one day you understand its brutality in demonic dimensions. It started with the notions of euthanasia, crept up to creating a “pure society” and ended in the inhuman medical experiments, which makes one disown mankind. The doctors who are the healers of disease take a more pseudo-noble task of healing the society but finally when entitled with “power” they take their masks off and lo! What you see is the face of sadism!
Now lets proceed to see the growth of this monster in the dimensions of culture. In the cultural context the individual is the protagonist most of the times other than times of friction between two cultures. I would like to discuss two cases picked from two different cultural contexts here. One is the case of “circumcision” a ritual practiced by the Muslims and the other is the violence inflicted to “Hindu women”. (One is requested here not to assume that either of religions is less violent or biased to only one sex).
Here I discuss the Deepak Mehta’s paper(Mehta : ) in which he describes the process of circumcision, which is perceived differently by Hindus and Muslims. This process is called as khatna. They think that undergoing katua, the child becomes a musalmani from child of the mother. In other words that the male body has been socialized. It is also at this time that a child becomes masculine and acquires strength. It is also the process in which the bodily impurity is removed and the body becomes pure. They consider that all the people share the pain along with the child and a sense of brotherhood (ummah) is aroused. There is a lot of violence involved the ritual in which the prepuce is removed which is imposed on the individual. No time, the experience of such pain is linked to the physical impairment of the body. But the Muslims never consider it as violence. Rather they consider it as a process, which every male must under go. Muslims consider Hindus as impure as they afraid of shedding their blood. Such traditions of pain and humility, which sometimes when done incorrectly can leave the child impotent, are a symbol of cultural violence inflicted upon an individual to satisfy a community’s ego against the other(the other here is the Hindu).
One needs to understand that the creative capacity of violence is found in the ritual of the everyday which are all again definitions. Thus cultural violence focuses on the importance of “signs” and “symbols” (Leach: 39). And violence is inflicted to both the subscriber and the non-subscriber.
Coming to discuss of the violence against Hindu women, mythology gives us innumerous examples to quote. A lady who will jump into the fire to prove her purity by the command of her husband who failed to protect her from the clutches of the demon king Ravana…Sita (Valmiki), Draupadi, another famous mythological character who has to agree to marry five men as it pleases the mother of Arjuna who won her in a talent show and was embarrassed by being made the object of bet by all the five husbands for gambling (Vyasa). These mythological characters inspire men to continue with similar mindsets. And the women by setting these characters as role models feel good about their pati bhakti. There are other characters, which are manifestations of great authors. Niramala is a 15yr old married to a 40yr old widower who has a son, who is 16yrs and the trauma begins when the old man gets “suspicious” of the relation between his son and his young bride (Premchand). Kamala (Saguna) is yet another great creation of a feministic writer Saguna, whose bad times ended with her in-laws only when her breath ended. These characters that I have just now quoted are characters you stumble upon in almost every household. (being privileged , one shouldn’t forget that majority is unlike one’s own case). There are Sitas, Draupadis, Nirmalas and Kamalas everywhere!
There are still more dimensions to this Enigmatic character- “violence”. Lets see what politics adds to it…
Firstly I refer to the case of North Ireland (Felman:46). In this case by the imposition of the government and misuse of power one sees how one is forced to rub off the lines between private and public. Put in the words of Felman “The linkage between the penetration of the domestic space and the penetration of the body directly captures the psychic affect of the surveillance grid”. This case describes the pain inflicted by surveillance where the photo lens causes equal violence in the lives as the gun sight and pointed rifle. The tactile invasion extends visual surveillance and is experienced as distancing the self in much the same manner as scopic penetration contaminates private space and lives. Homologous to this problem is the violence that technology brings in by the usage of Internet. The only difference is that in the former it is the political power that induces such violence and in the later it is the power of knowledge.
The second case of violence inflicted by political power is the case of Srilanka. (http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/umberto/) “Before a succession of western nations (including the Portuguese, Dutch and the British) ruled the island, there were two distinct kingdoms on the island, the Tamil Kingdom in the north and the Sinhala kingdom in the South. For ease of administration, the British amalgamated the two distinct nations into a single entity with its capital in Colombo. The British gave Ceylon independence in 1948, handing over control of the entire island to a Sinhalese government, based in Colombo, which renamed the island Sri Lanka. The Sinhala state's oppression of the Tamil people began in various forms almost immediately, attacking everything that defined the Tamils as a nation. A series of laws that discriminated against Tamils were implemented. These included making Sinhala, instead of English, the only official language of the country, i.e. Tamils could not be employed unless they learnt Sinhala. The educational structures were altered to restrict Tamil admissions to higher education. Investment in Tamil areas was minimized. Recruitment of Tamils into the security forces was restricted. The Sri Lankan security forces are almost exclusively Sinhalese. The security forces have been responsible for and continue to carry out human rights abuses and atrocities against Tamil civilians on a genocidal scale. The Tamil call for independence was met by island wide anti-Tamil rioting. The Sri Lankan government forced all elected MPs to take an oath that they would not seek a separate state. With all democratic ways to achieve equality having failed repeatedly, an armed struggle for independence began, led by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). International Law recognises that the armed resistance of the Tamil people to Sri Lankan rule is lawful and just. Today, the LTTE has evolved into a military and political organisation representing the aspirations and hopes of the Tamil people.” Here we see the case of violence begets violence. The violence done with the tentacles of political power is being fought with horns of terrorism.
One more glorious feature of “violence” is the way it is generated by the undying factor “need”. Here in the case of Emergency in June 1975 in India, we see what is the role of basic necessities like a roof over your head and ability to reach your hand to mouth play. In this case we have our infamous politician Sanjay Gandhi who belongs to the clan of Mohammed bin Tughlaq, shoots a 4-point program in the time of emergency, and gets it executed with a brutal efficiency (Tarlo:242). Resettlement and Family planning both the schemes are implemented. The people who are directly affected are the ones of the lower strata who inhabited the largest proportions of “unauthorized” dwellings and the one who needed the financial benefits of the family planning scheme. Most of the slum dwellers refer to Emergency as time for sterilization. With the resettlement, there is an acute rise in the need for plots, and the family planning operation would provide free plots. These logistics help in running the cycle of this inhumanness ahead. While the pressure was accumulating on the downward side the deals and gifts accumulate towards the higher ups in the hierarchy in this structure of “Motivation”. Slowly the structure of motivation turned into a structure of market. When body became a commodity, the sterilization program created a black market with brokers and dealers who manipulate and make use of the loop holes of the law to derive “benefits”. The Family planning thus finally had more to do with family property planning than with family size planning. (But the Muslims are at loss in this scheme due to their belief that sterilization is against God). These manipulations show the extent to which individuals could subvert the system, turning oppressive policies to their own gain. There may not be any violent abuse but one sees a body being commodified, which is supposed to something deeply personal and sacred! Thus if necessity is mother of innovation, violence must have been the twin brother of innovation.
Of all the characters of Violence the most elite feature is of course the Intellectual Violence. Here too it’s the working of the power that causes the violence …the power of knowledge. In this aspect I would like to bring forward the violence in the Popular Science Fiction. This speaks volumes about the tragedies that are in store for us if Fiction becomes Fact! And knowledge is what that enables us to make fiction to facts. First of all, will we be able to stand that new generation violence? Here with reference to the essay written by Veena Das (das) can one imagine a world of “UNI” (of unification) where homogeneity is worshipped? The plight and trauma of the main character, Chip undergoes, shows that in disorder there is a beauty in living the life. He is ready to accept the regressive factors of disease and crime, and makes his choice, in which a certain amount of disorder is inherent of a society where individuals are permitted to be different. Even the Perfect world is an act of violence; the believers of homogeneity are imposing on the non-believers. The act of mechanizing life and setting parameters will not suit everyone, its all violence! Inspite of absence of hunger, disease, pain, abnormalities, and in the absence of anything that is in the WRONG way, for what seems right to one may seem wrong to the other. One fiction deals with wives being modeled as commercials, for the happiness of the husbands should the wives loose their individuality by getting themselves programmed…one more aspect of violence. Another fiction of 90 Hitlers being generated by a genetics process sends chills down our spines. Same is with the son of Satan being born…both these cases cause violence in not just by the fact that its Hitler and Son of Satan but the trauma one has to face as to whether to give such a child a chance to live, it’s a question of being violent to the child or to the society. This gives us the picture of what is in store for us in future. Right now in the immediate present if we look in the various kinds of research that are taking place, even the present is not void of violence. The research papers of modern medicine are written with the blood of the mute creatures. And such a research will help in prolonging our life far beyond the point at which life has a meaning. Medical violence is seen as a curious product of physician’s arrogance, trappings of technique, and the laity’s love of the fanciful coupled with an undying hope that, given enough money, there is no physical or mental problem that some Cooley or Barnard cannot solve. (Kothari & Mehta). With increasing violence in the modern medicine the image of doctor as an angel in white coat is fading. Many doctors given the same ailment to them or to their kith and kin will not be ready to treat it in the same way. This shows the same kind of indifference that was observed in the Nazi Concentration camps. Thus we see the face of violence in the mask of a healer.
In the process of exploring this enigmatic personality “violence” how much ever said is still not fully said. Yet an attempt made to understand it fills a mortal with the some knowledge, that may not be sufficient to stop the violence in the world and make it a better place to live, but it will no longer make one develop a false notion of feeling antiseptic to all that’s violence going around us. We will no longer remain anaesthesiasized to the violence; this helps us to develop or rather install a chip or sensor in our head that raises alarm in our conscience when there is Mr. Violence sneaking around.

How does Language give a structure to “sound”?

The need to communicate is very important and that’s what distinguishes men from the other “mime” species. May be other animals do communicate but not in the same degree of complexity as men do. Now we will try to understand how or what is the structure of language is that helps use communicate very complicated details of a situation, or person or anything else. Many times we have ambiguities we will see how the “context” forms the spine in helping the structure call language stand and hold the muscle called meaning... a very anatomical view, so be it, we will dwell into to understand and see how actually mathematics (discrete mathematics) and not biology explains this. We will explain this using English language.

What we speak is of two types the voiced sound and the unvoiced. The voiced part of our speech constitutes of the vowels, which give support to the consonants, which actually by virtue have a trait but no sound unless they are modulated with a vowel. This phenomenon is greatly used in speech compression too, like in Linear Predictive Coding scheme, into whose technical details I will not dwell upon, or that would be more of signal processing and probability theory than the philosophy as to how sound gets structured to help us develop a powerful tool called language.

Now these voiced and unvoiced sounds when they support each other form the syllables, which when put together form words. Lets understand this with the help of an example, say “artificial”, expressing it, as a combination of syllables would be, ar-ti-fi-ci-al. But sometimes such a distinction of syllables is not easy in case of English language; this kind of ambiguity is what makes the spellings in English queer things. To understand this with an example p-u-t is put but, b-u-t is but. In this case the way the Indian languages are constructed have a more logical feel to it.

Remember we are not talking here of the meaning but of the phonetics and their representation. When it comes to the meaning the ambiguities in Sanskrit (Indian languages) is very much high compared to the English (the western languages) this could be because of the fact that the language being older has bigger bank of imagery and metaphors and variants.

The process is hearing the silences, that is the pauses to differentiate the first word from the second is itself done sub-consciously and is a part of the learnt behaviour. And that’s one reason why foreign language conversations seem to be going on at a rapid fire pace, it is because we take more time to grasp where the pause occurs.

The basic words may be formed based on the instincts and the imitation of the natural sounds that one is present is, the accents are also formed being modulated by the natural sounds of the flora and the fauna around. This can be observed in the tribal language or basically the hunters who communicate based on the subject, the animal, very much sounding or imitating it. The people closer to coast have thicker accents is it due to the humidity?

Think of yourself as a language processor. You can recognize a legal English sentence when you hear one; “the cat is in the hat” is at least syntactically correct (whether or not it says anything that happens to be the truth), but “hat the the in is cat” is gibberish. However you manage to do it, you can immediately tell when reading such a sentence whether they are formed according to generally accepted rules for sentence structure. In this respect you are acting as a Language Recogniser: a device that accepts valid strings.

You also, however, are capable of producing legal English sentences. And these sentences that you speak occasionally are syntactically correct (even when they are lies). In this respect you are acting like a language generator. Now the question is what is the structure it actually follows? Neither a recogniser nor a generator for the English language is at all easy to map, designing it for a large subsets of natural languages has been a challenging research front for several decades. Regular expressions can be viewed as language generators. For example, consider the regular expression a(a*U b*)b. Here a alphabet followed by an * means it can occur any times, and U is union (of the kind of set operations). And ‘a’ and ‘b’ are the alphabet. A verbal description of how to generate a string in accordance with this expression would be the following:

First output an ‘a’. Then do one of the following 2 things:

Either output a number of ‘a’s or output a number of ‘b’s.

Finally output a ‘b’.

The language associated with this language generator – that is, the set of strings that can be produced by the process just described – is, of course, exactly the regular language defined in the way described earlier by the regular expression a(a* U b*)b. Now another way to define the language generator is by defining the grammar. In the example we have discussed above we note that any string in this language consists of a leading ‘a’, followed by a middle part, a middle part – generated by (a*Ub*) – followed by a trailing ‘b’. If we let S be a new symbol interpreted as “a string in the language”, and M be a symbol standing for “middle part”, then we can express this observation by writing

S ® aMb,

Where ® is read as “can be”. We call such an expression a rule. What can M, the middle part, be? The answer is: either a string of ‘a’s and ‘b’s. We express this by adding the rules

M ® A and M ® B,

Where A and B are new symbols that stand for strings of ‘a’s and ‘b’s, respectively. Now, what is a string of ‘a’s ? It can be the empty string ‘e’

A ® e,

Or it may consist of a leading ‘a’ followed by a string of ‘a’s:

A ® aA.

Similarly, for B:

B ® e and B ® bB.

The language denaoted by the regular expression a(a*Ub*)b can then be defined alternatively by the following language generator.

Start with the string consisting of the symbol S. Find a symbol in the current string that appears to the left of ® in one of the rules above. Replace an occurrence of this symbol with the string that appears to the right of ® in the same rule. Repeat this until no such symbol can be found.

For example, to generate the string aaab we start with S, as specified; we then replace S by aMb according to first rule, S ® aMb. To aMb we apply the rule M ® A and obtain aAb. We then twice apply the rule A® aA to get the string aaaAb. Finally we apply the rule A ® e. In the resulting string, aaab, we cannot identify any symbol that appears to the left of ® in some rule. Thus the operation of our language generation has ended, and aaab was produced, as promised.

Now applying this understanding of a simple example to the more complicated natural language, (English, not a regular language) we see how sound is structured as a speech.

Let G be the grammar (W,å,R,S), where

W = { S, A, N, V, P} U å,

å = { Jim, big, green, cheese, ate },

R = { P ® N,

P ® AP,

S ® PVP,

A ® big,

A ® green,

N ® cheese,

N ® Jim,

V ® ate }

Here G is designed to be a grammar for a part of English; S stands for sentence, A for adjective, N for noun, V for verb, and P for phrase. The following are some strings in L(G):

Jim ate cheese.

Big Jim ate cheese.

Big cheese ate Jim.

Unfortunately the following are also strings in L(G):

Big cheese ate green green big green big cheese.

Green Jim ate green big Jim.

Thus in trying to give a structure, what falls into it always does, but then we also get the junk generated thus. But all that depends on the ruggedness of the algorithms that generate the language. The following is a chat session with a humanVscomputer-generated chat (generated with the help of alice.pandorabots.com and myself):

Human: hi+
ALICE: Hello there.
Human: myself pallavi
ALICE: Try saying that with more or less context.
Human: my name is pallavi
ALICE: OK I will call you pallavi.
Human: so what is my name?
ALICE: Your name is pallavi, seeker.

Human: are you human there?
ALICE: No I am a real robot.

Human: who made you?
ALICE: I was created by Dr. Richard S. Wallace.
Human: he must be a genius
ALICE: I don't know very many genius.

ALICE: he is the author of Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML) and Botmaster of ALICE (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity). Dr. Wallace's work has appeared in the New York Times, WIRED, CNN, ZDTV and in numerous foreign language publications across Asia, Latin America and Europe.

Richard Wallace was born in Portland, Maine in 1960. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon in 1989. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, Kim, and son, Linus.

Human: how is he related to you?
ALICE: Fine as far as I know.
Human: Do you read books?
ALICE: The best book I read recently was Don't Read Me. Have you read it?

Human: no, didn’t even hear of it
ALICE: I would highly recommend it. I'm not certain whether I can give an accurate reply or not.
Human: what is it about?
ALICE: Science fiction.

Human: which other languages do you speak?
ALICE: The first one, I think.
Human: whats the first one?
ALICE: Give me a hint.
Human: Do you speak french?
ALICE: Oui. Je parle le français.

ALICE: Do you mean you are from England or you Speak English?
Human: nice chatting with you
ALICE: Yes. I enjoyed our conversation, pallavi.
Human: good you remember my name so long
ALICE: Your name is pallavi, seeker.

Human: bye+
ALICE: Bye bye.

“Now coming to the “meaning” part of the language, we see that there are many ambiguities in the sense of understanding we have of a spoken word. It not just what the word stands all by itself but also depends on the context it stands in. For example what do you understand by “Time flies”, it mean that the time (seconds, minutes, hours, days... fly away) it may also mean the idea of timing flies (say if you have robotic flies its a very sane meaning). Now the question is, many times meaningfulness is not just determined by the sanity but also depends on a variety of parameters. What we understand, is based on not just what we hear, but based on what we sense, and sensing is not a singular experience. We can’t pull the collective sensory experience as a simple hearing or seeing or any other form of sensing. This collective sensory experience is what is understanding constitutes of, it is very well shown in the movie scene of Life is Beautiful, when the father translates German nazi commands, which he never knew into English that created a picture of a “game” to his son. (this was shown in the presentation).”

Fractals and sound

The Beethoven’s bumblebee in the music or the conversation “probing to understand the meaning” that was demonstrated in the presentation all follow a fractal structure. It has a recursive nature, trying to understand the meaning of meaning always after a finite amount of discussion goes back to the start, “so what is meaning” and this goes to infinity, thus certain conversation styles have fractals in them. Perhaps paradoxes form perfect topics for fractal kind of conversations. May be if do a meticulous statistical search the parliament discussions to can have a similar structure. The Jazz genre of music too is a fractal-based structure.

Design Research

goal, conceptual framework, research questions, methods, validity.... interconnected

I got this craziest dream...

...that the web is as fluid as the language you and I speak... you are hearing to a 100,000 people shouting out loud on the cyber space and you still make perfect sense...

I think thats the only problem of the netspace, how do we understand the 100,000 people speaking as one coherant thing? the problem is that, what each of us says is so chaotic... non-linear... but how come in the netspace where a 100,000 people are speaking it be represented in a linear fashion... why left to right, top to bottom?

I think its time to break the squarish monitors... we deal in circles, in spirals to be more precise... from our universe to atomic structures... evolution... i wud draw a circle to represent it rather than a square... what about our intial question... our language? things fade with time, without popularity... and the center and focus is the one word that gives us the answers. is that what we call as context?

why not zoom in and zoom out of the various complexities... the way we go about our world.. i think if web learns to talk to us like that... my dream will become true.

Few rules during dip project

- No sweets on weekdays
- Dont change music too many times, if u r with the policy of listen to music while working
- Scribble a lot, its ok
- Drink water once every hr
- Ask your self what you did end of every hr
- Focused chaos is good so dont get worried
- No orkuting at work place
- U may blog ;) you will realize in the long run its helps... to track your thoughts though in the short run it disrupts work

Today someone said...

"Design research is for getting valuable insights not its not to be seen as data backing up designers PoVs.."

What am I?
I am a sensor.....

Want one more brain

I wished many times during this project that I have 2 brains... I wish I can borrow somebody's brain for sometime... to discuss, debate on infinite things that cross my mind and the way I see and unsee things...

Today strangely I was even ok with the idea of suffering from split personality or mpd u see.... so that I can have a different PoV to look at my research.

But I doubt if mpd will get me a different PoV...

One more solution could be that I have my clone under my control... who has experienced life differently than me... Promise, I wont subject her to any cruelty other than to participate in discussions with me...

Heights and Research

At 1000ft its theory, my findings need to be at 100ft to make sense to anyone, me right now at 10ft, and the data is at ground level....

hmm... confusion, clarity... clouds, rain drops... and then the rainbow........ thinking, data and findings....... right now my state is clouds...... waiting for sunshine... inspiration