The Lost Book

I inflicted a certain book by a certain author upon yours truly. Said book was The Lost Symbol by the lost Dan Brown. I understand completely that he has done lots of research before writing a piece of fiction as fit to hold water as Labsman Filter Paper TM, whose review is under serious consideration and may feature in consequent posts, but frankly, I'd be more delighted reading those research papers as they were, rather than reading it with a bunch of colourless characters appended as footnotes, shamelessly parading themselves openly inviting Mexican-born Hollywood directors to make a flimsier movie out of it. The book pans out to a five hundred odd pages, every chapter ending with cliched cliff-hangers that made no sense, much like the science that backed his research. The plot revolves around the unrealistic Robert Langdon, a Harvard symbologist who's perfect in everyway, thank you very much. He's a stud, with eidetic memory, a perfect physique, a deep rich voice and is also (Drum roll), a professor(Tada! Applause). Give him a pair of wings and X-Ray vision and voila, Superman's second cousin stepped out of his closet and is out to save the world from evil villains trying to take over the world with the help of a pyramid and objects of similar consequence. The other characters are equally idealised, and I've noticed this with every single book of his, there's always a female, single, eligible and voluptuous, (did I mention superhumanly qualified in their respective fields?) and always around Langdon, dewy and wide-eyed, as he lectures her on abstract symbols and answering questions no one asked. The plot in itself is tiringly predictable, with Langdon and his trusted femme-fatale side-kick running from the security agency of whichever country they step on, an old trusted friend of Langdon thrown in to answer a bunch of more questions and also briefly provide sanctuary for these fugitives even though the charges against them make no sense. The whole running from the government routine, I trust, is a cheap ploy to make the story seem racy and fast-paced. It was interesting in the first book, little so in the second, and downright annoying now. One can't hope to come up with a new novel by just changing the locations and the names of the bad guys. The only change between his previous works involving Langdon and this one is that there's no insane plot twist at the end that would make you go rolling your eyes saying, "Not again". Anyway, Brown delves in the world of the Freemasons, a deeply secretive and childish little club that no one cares about, other than deluded conspiracy theorists who love glorifying small tunneling mammals to mountains. The book also dabbles with Noetic science, as mainstream as alchemy and astrology, among other things. It also talks about providing concrete answers to the most fundamental of questions that have plagued humanity since he started walking upright, ending the book providing vague metaphorical references and rhetoric, something we already know.(Hello? 42 is more definite an answer to life, the universe and everything). I don't blame him for not knowing the ultimate truth, but the least he can do is not jump around claiming to know everything.(By the way, if the secret answer is coded so well that only the best and the brightest can decipher, how did Dan Brown do it?). In the end, The Lost Symbol is just literary evangelism trying earnestly to portray religion as a scientific method, fooling no one whose I.Q is greater than that of a dying jellyfish. On the whole, it's just another hollywood style suspense thriller manufactured by people whose only talent is cheap showmanship aimed at wooing the obese, gullible Joe American.

Annual Melancholy

Ah.. Another year just whooshes out of our hands, as we gear up to face the heat of another one, hopefully not as forgettable(purely subjective) as this one. Being the much celebrated fan of desultory lists that I am, I propose to lay down a certain set of events that have shaped my attitude on life, the universe and everything, whipping me up as a more concrete and credible cynic than I was previously. Let's begin, at the beginning.

* The most unmemorable New year's eve honked my nose and poked me in the eye on 31's December 2008. After politely severing myself from the tripe of a new year's party that the clods in my block of flats put together, with as much courtesy as I could feign, I braced myself to face the fateful evening with literally nothing to do. Being the heart and soul of any party that I am (to be read in a scathingly sarcastic tone), this predicament made me take a sharp breath in and snort at the possibility of not being tormented by dunces who prance around with a full bladder, claiming that's their move, and keep asking me why I don't smile often or laugh at their lifeless punchlines at the end of inane drivel they call jokes. Anyway, even though I was away from such high-spirited magical pony-riding clotheads, my spirits did little to lift itself as I morosely gazed out to Chennai's lifeless skyline from my terrace.

* As I convinced myself that the next semester would be better than the previous, my tactics of self-delusion were shattered as a certain gentleman(name not divulged for obvious reasons;actually if you're in my department, you'll know anyway) strutted into our classroom. Apart from staying married to a 70's style projector and pointing fingers at it strategically to impede ideal viewing, he(or she? in tone with said teacher's anonymity, the gender has been marginally obscured, if you're smart, you'll figure it out, if not, you'll figure it out anyway) did nothing to lift our spirits. His classes were ideal for solving crossword puzzles, something I would regret doing a few months later, June, to be precise, and general birdwatching from the vantage point my seat in class offered. The classes were more or less the reason I began to love life as much as I do now (this too, to be read in a scathingly sarcastic tone)

* As that term ended, I promised myself that the ensuing summer would be most idyllic and uneventful. Well, you want one, but you get another. I was coerced into a project at IIT, and shuttling between here and there was a most harrowing experience. Not because, the commute was long, not because we had to work, but because it was like rubbing in the fact that I could have got into this place if only I studied harder. Moreover, I hated to be reminded of the fact that how a campus can be if it's located at the right place. With spotted deer grazing on one side and huge trees dotting the landscape, it was a stark contrast to my campus with dusty heatwaves, prickly semi-arid flora and a unique assortment of blood-thirsty cattle. As much as cows are revered in Hinduism and held in high regard, as far as I'm concerned, cows reek. They are on the top of my list of pests to be exterminated when I take over the world followed by the afore-mentioned professor and a couple more, just for kicks. It wasn't all bad either. Trips to IIT spawned a great deal of ingenious ideas like sniping sitting on an elephant in IIT, and many more. Acquaintance with a professor who wasn't mid-bogglingly dense was an added perk, a rare phenomenon on this side of the world. This made me realise you don't get what you want, hell, you never do. Life stinks.

* A new term, a new hostel, a new room, the same old idiots. This was the running tagline of the new term. My room number being 42 did little to lift my spirits, the hostel building grimly reminded us all of Auschwitz. Barely in the campus, I unscrupulously skived off classes for apparently no reason at all, was at home more than I was in the college. With the swine-flu scares and what-not, it turned out to be quite eventful, as teachers mercilessly appended an endless list of 'a's against my name in the attendance register. As the term drew to a close, I was frequently spotted hitting myself in the head for my past indulgences, dreading the inevitable. Anyway, at the end of the day, the inevitable never happened(irony noted). Moral of the story: My actions have no consequences, I'm that unimportant in the grand scheme of things.

* After pestering my parents for nearly a year, I finally got myself a laptop that wouldn't fry itself trying to add two and two. Noting that my previous laptop was an elaborate contraption involving a glorified calculator and a broken typewriter, it was a giant leap forward. But I still found reason to be unhappy, the reason being, laptop: too little, too late. With hardly a week to spare before my exams, a laptop was the first thing on my list of artifacts designed to wreck my grades. With a great deal of abstinence, I denied myself the temporal pleasures of gaming by stripping my laptop completely of all things worthwhile having. Bereft of entertainment and biting my fingers off for want of a better job to do, I truly appreciated the meaning of the phrase, 'A slip between the cup and the lip'.

Finally, as this year draws to a close, I again find myself with nothing to do, the same old terrace, same old skyline. The same old apes in my block have organised another celebration of mediocrity, cheap street music and second rate events to please no one.

P.S: If I have missed anymore depressing events, feel free to remind me in the comments section as we celebrate another year in the era of utter pointlessness.

A Planet's Plea

I don't know why I'm thinking so much these days, I think it's got to do with all the free time, you know, with this being holidays and all. Anyway, what has been plaguing my mind is the incessant talk about climate change. I know there are many heated emotions involved when it comes to being eco-friendly and all that, but I wanted to say this anyway. What do we know about global-warming? What do we know about weather patterns? How can we decide the cause of climate change when there are close to a million variables involved? We have no way of making sure why our planet is getting warmer. All we do know is that the earth is never stable. It is always changing. The whole universe is a giant cosmic symphony in dynamic equilibrium. There is no reason for the earth to be otherwise. We've had ice ages, four of therm huge, in the past, we've also had intensely warm periods in between. Antarctica was a lush temperate haven once, it was still close to the poles then. Why is it a frozen desert today? We've had mass extinctions, nearly ninety five percent of all species disappeared at the end of the Permian era. It was the worst mass extinction till date, and there is no reason why another one shouldn't happen. Whatever happens, unless the sun dies, or perhaps even then, life will go on. It is resilient. It can adapt, it can evolve. It never stays the same. We've been in this grand scheme of things for a mere wink of a few thousand years. How can we know the sheer magnitude of this ever-mutating planet of ours? We might be in the middle of a mass extinction ourselves, we might survive, we might not. Most probably we will survive, advancing sea levels are the least of our problems. The maximum we lose is a chunk of land creating space shortages throughout. We perhaps might not have vast open spaces, but we'll still survive in a dense closely packed society that's busy and crowded to the point of choking. We already live in such an environment, and we call it the triumph of civilisation, a metropolis. Large cities symbolise everything that will remain under such an event. We already are fascinated by busy roads and glittering skylines, we'd hardly know the difference. It would just seem like a leap in the rate of urbanisation. One might ask, what about agriculture, we'd need vast open spaces for agriculture, I'll tell you, you underestimate human ingenuity. The Japanese are already farming on their roofs, we could do the same. The Japanese economic miracle will be repeated in every country. If you look at it from that angle, it is not all that apocalyptic after all. But then, we have no idea how the earth reacts to the smallest of changes that appear seemingly insignificant. The outcomes have not always been good though. Let me go back to the most favourite example of paleontologists worldwide to show how bad things can go. First, a large meteorite crashed onto Siberian flat lands. This would no doubt kill most life in that region and some around a large radius through pyroplastic fumes and some more in the nuclear winter that follows. This would be one of the day to day mass extinctions like the infamous K-T extinction that killed terrestrial and aquatic dinosaurs. Things would have normalised in a few years or so, with a lacuna of life left behind filled almost immediately with new forms of life. But things didn't end there, Siberia happened to be a weakness in the earth's crust and the meteorite made it a lava trap. One would have seen vast curtains of fire shooting out for nearly as far as the eye can see. Something like Mordor in the LOTR films. Things would have heated up unimaginably at ground zero, obviously, and it would have been a hell in full swing for life in and around Siberia. Besides being instantaneously fried, evaporated, cooked and burnt at the same time, the plumes of dust would have cooled the earth drastically killing off cold-blooded creatures everywhere except near the equator and a radius of tolerant temperatures around Siberia itself. This nuclear winter lasted a tad longer than a normal meteorite crash and because of the volcanic traps, tonnes of carbon-di-oxide were pumped into the atmosphere. By the end of the nuclear winter that followed, which was after a few decades from the impact itself, nearly three percent of the earth's atmosphere was carbon-di-oxide. This would raise global temperatures by five to six degrees celsius. This is almost fatal for every living thing, but not nearly enough to kill almost every form of life. But it was enough to warm up the seas. The oceans then were a minefield of frozen methane, anaerobic life-forms rules the deep seas. The methane was almost instantaneously frozen due to the depth and vast quantities of this toxic gas lay frozen underneath. As the waters warmed up, these glaciers began to thaw, releasing tonnes of methane into the atmosphere. Methane as we know is twice as effective at green housing radiation as carbon-di-oxide is, and this raised temperatures even further, the last nail in life's coffin, temperatures shot up to nearly seventy degrees celsius in some parts of the planet. One now understands the domino effect that brought a huge cataclysm that almost wiped out life from the planet. But there's nothing we can do about it. If the whole planet burns, we can we go? It is indeed an unsettling thought, but we need to accept the fact that things like these happen all the time. There have been dozens of mass extinctions in the past and the one that might be happening now is no exception. It need never be a result of human activity. We know that only 0.035% of the atmosphere is CO2, and of late. it has risen to about 0.04%. This change is hardly enough to change global temperatures gathering from what we know. But there are plenty of other factors involved. The tilt in the axis is proposed to be the reason for the ice ages and the warmer periods. We can never really find out. The Suns orbit also plays a part, but we don't know what part. It is all really hazy as to why our temperatures are rising, if at all they are, and they need to rise uniformly. Many countries like Iceland have actually cooled. Greenland's melting, So is Western Antarctica, but Eastern Antarctican ice shelves are actually thickening. So global warming is not global in it's literal sense. Even the rate at which it rises shows no discernible pattern, some regions heating up faster than others. This is not characteristic of the greenhouse effect. Winds distribute CO2 concentrations more or less equally on a macroscopic scale and yet changes are visible even over broad vast regions. What we take are small scale readings and average them out but what we really need is a temperature gradient. Even if we establish that the earth is, on a broad scale, warming up, we don't know how much of it is human activity. We have previously tried to rectify changes in the environment, things have only ended in disaster. For example, take the Masai Mara in Southern Africa. Elephant and rhino preservation centres were established. Elephants thrived, rhinos did not. Why? Because both the species were kept in such close proximity that they started competing with each other for resources, elephants were successful, rhinos were not. Moreover, indigenous elephant populations were nearly wiped out due to hunting and local clashes before the park was established, and elephants from other parts of Africa were let loose, most of them young ones of more or less the same age. Elephant society is complex, very comparable to ours, and we did not understand this fact. This made these young elephants grow without a firm check from the other big elephants, which were all killed for ivory, and these adolescents grew into aggressive, bullying males that harassed females and other animals. One of these other animals was the rhino. These animals systematically hunted down the rhinos, reducing their populations even further. This problem was resolved later by importing gigantic tuskers, the old experienced ones, that would act as a stopper to these boisterous out of control adolescents. This problem, however, was resolved so late that rhino conservation is an optimist's dream today. What would have been a normal extiction was just accelerated by human intervention. Who knows, the rhinos might have bounced back if we hadn't intervened. We think preservation is maintaining status quo. We feel that cordoning off lands will stop them from dying out. What we fail to realise is that species disappear all the time, only to be replaced by new ones. We need to understand something before we declare it's broken and try to fix it. I'm saying all this because we shouldn't jump to conclusions about our planet. It is complex, dynamic and chaotic. What we do today will have huge consequences tomorrow. I read something about covering glaciers with a mirror-like material to reflect the sun's rays. I'm very earnest when I say, please don't do anything like it, it'll most probably end in disaster. We have no way of knowing what might happen to a planet that reflects most of the heat back into space. The stakes are very high this time, our survival is questioned, and the best thing to do is let the earth do it's job. Only nature can do it's job the best. Let the world run like it always has, let us bother, like every other life form, about changing ourselves to fit into our surroundings. The other way round only brings about catastrophe. If left to itself, we at least have a chance of survival. It's the only planet we've got, please don't mess with it. It'll spell doom if we don't know what we're doing and nine times out of ten, we don't. Leave the planet alone.

Mein Kampf in reading Mein Kampf

No matter how much people reel and gag when you say you haven't read any of the classics, just keep in mind, classics are books everyone appreciates, but no one reads. I realised that when I tried reading what the most celebrated mass murderer of all time called his autobiography. Let me be frank, it was a tad more interesting than trying to see wallpaper dry. He goes on and on about things he hates like the communists, Jews, the Austrians, Jews, the Poles, Jews, the French, Jews, etc. Much as I admire his strong will of character in hating entire communities to the point of saying we'd be better off with millions dead, there must be a rational reason behind such animosity. His chapters about the commies, as they're affectionately called in the West, are slightly short of shockingly abusive. Not that I'm particularly fond of communism, in fact, I'm as hard lined against that system as any next door chap, I have my reasons for hating communism, them being, to the best of my knowledge, pretty rational. But what Hitler does here is that he completely demonises communism, calls it a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world, and glorifies them as manipulative megalomaniacs when they're just deluded simpletons who believe what they're doing is good for the society. He provides no concrete reason as to why communism wouldn't work, he never tackled the problem scientifically, pointing out the flaws in that form of society, but merely used the strongest words in the German vocabulary to mention how base communism is, and so elaborately does he punch in negative adjectives, that it pans out at least a dozen chapters in his, well, let's call it a book. His fractiously dogmatic views over anything even remotely non-German is quite tiresome, his irrationality over idealising things into pure good and quintessentially evil is even more trying. He's even more prejudiced when it comes to the Jews. Much as they, as I would understand, would provoke jealousy in the poorer masses owing to their success in finance and banking, it is no reason to kill them off. It sounds ridiculous when he says, kill the Jews, and create employment. By that logic, anyone could shoot all poor people to eliminate poverty. Slum clearances in the third world would be a breeze. All one has to do is set fire to one. It clearly is not a practical solution to handle the great depression. Not that the other countries handled it well either, Russia was immune to everything external due to its closed doors policy, USA was the worst affected, Britain and France, together, had half the world under their direct control to offload their debts onto. The colonies were the worst affected, but who'd know the difference if there's a drought in the Sahara? All I'm saying is that electing a hard-right mentally disturbed radical with an out-rightly professed controversial racial policy was the stupidest thing the Germans ever did, after signing the treaty of Versailles. His policy of employment for men alone is even more laughable. His reason for the Great Depression was that women are given lower salaries than men for equal work, which made large companies prefer women over men for employment thereby reducing the average income of the economy. This, he says, can be avoided by denying the woman's right to work. The concept of equal wages for equal work didn't enter the darkest corners of his scary mind. One couldn't blame his time for his views; the concept of gender equality was very much in vogue in the other western nations in the twenties. His foreign policy was the only acceptable idea of his, something that Germany should have done in 1900. Challenging the then superpower was something that Hitler believed as foolish and he sounds most earnest and sensible when he says one shouldn't overtly oppose the hegemony of a country that rules the world, but ally oneself with it. It was a good idea, Germany would have played the role Japan and near the thirties USA played. Such a Germany would never have irked the British and the French Empire, it would never have united the two most powerful countries in the world in an alliance against a country that is barely a century old. If only Bismarck thought the same way, we'd never have the world wars and well, who knows, we'd be living in a completely different world. His policy of British appeasement, we do know it was mutual, in the early thirties and at the same time driving a wedge between Britain and France was a masterstroke when it comes to stragteic diplomacy. He managed to stall a war, though with a lot of effort and foolish patience from other world leaders, that was unavoidable for nearly ten years. As much as these achievements may be, he was not and will never be regarded in the future as an able and diplomatic ruler and statesman. However efficient he may be at the art of war, peacetime government is played by different rules, and he would be clearly inept at handling a peaceful Germany that is split asunder and defenceless against heavyweights like Britain and France and at the same time battling the biggest economic crisis known to man that originated from the other side of the pond without a single colony to push deficits onto. I firmly believe, to this day, he'd be better off in the German army as a mere General or a Lieutenant than in a podium spreading dangerous ideas onto the impressionable. That way, Germany would have gained a valuable soldier and the world would have done without the horrors of holocaust. People with such extreme views are very dangerous and should never be given power. Throughout history, extremism and chauvinism of any kind has lead to nothing but bloodshed, one could quote numerous examples right from the christian crusades to the modern jihad. The funnier part is, I read the English translation, written by an Englishman, and therefore, you can expect France to take the flak for Germany's errant militaristic expansionism. According to that gentleman, France was the reason Germany felt so insulted and threatened after the First World War; France sought the independence of Catholic Rhineland and Bavaria to form a Catholic block from France to Austria dismembering Germany to counter British influence in Europe, as if European politics of the twentieth century was dictated by religion. As absurd as that notion sounds, it also reflects on the British view of events before the war.
I know I don't have to prove that his methods were flawed, it's just that it really astounds me as to just around half a century ago, people didn't know it was wrong to kill six million Jews just because they were all over the place. Trust me, as an Indian, I know how it is when people are all over the place. Anyway,the book was rather long and the narrative anaesthetic, but it is the most illuminating book from that period. It is one of the most informative books I've read. He provides a glimpse of the inter-war period like no one else; the first person view of a man-made international calamity is the best window one can look into for unadulterated information. It is not a book you read to while away time. Bottom-line, it's as descriptive as a history textbook but quite sadly, only just as interesting.