Futility

Ever assembled a jigsaw puzzle, especially one of those difficult ones? Suppose you are assembling a 100-piece jigsaw. First you seek out the edge pieces and try to put them together. Initially, all you can do is fit by trial and error. However, slowly, you assemble the edges and start working inwards. Piece by piece you search for anything that matches the inner curvature of the assembled pieces. You know nothing about the eventual picture. You know your knowledge is trivial. You do not expect much from yourself. You allow yourself many, many errors before making the right decisions. In fact, you are certain to make many, many mistakes before fitting the right pieces. But you consider this a fun endeavour. You do not take things too seriously.

You start to get a few things right. Your confidence grows. Eventually a picture emerges. Everything seems to fit. You reach into the bag for the 99th piece and smile. You begin planting a seed of satisfaction in your heart, expecting a happily-ever-after. You try to fit the 99th piece in a certain way and it does not fit. You smile even more. This is your last mistake. You now know enough about the picture to set the piece in exactly the right way. Your heart swells with the haughtiness of achievement. The chances of being mistaken again are exactly zero.

Or so you think.

You fit the 99th piece. The image is nearly complete. Nearly. There is a hole in the middle of the image. It has a unique shape and curvature. You look at it and smile. That hole is exactly the same shape as the remaining 100th piece in your bag. This is the first time you are capable of predicting how a piece fits without looking at it. This is also the first time that you know you have no chance to fail in your expectation. You build up an expectation of what the final piece should be. No, you build an expectation of what the final piece is. Your certainty is unbounded. Your confidence is sky-high. The picture is beautiful, almost. The final piece would make it perfect, beautiful, complete, whole.

You reach into the bag for the 100th piece.

You do not find it. Your smile fades.

There is no final piece.

You search frantically, desperately. In the bag, under the puzzle, below the sofa, beneath the fridge, over the shelf, in the trash. There is no final piece. You cannot seem to find it. It is not in your hands.

When all the pieces were scattered, that one piece did not matter. But now that the picture is almost complete, the 100th piece seems to be the most agonizingly important. If only you knew that there was no 100th piece! Would you have worked on it at all? Maybe not. Can you content yourself with an incomplete picture?

No. The hole in the middle pulls at the core of your heart. Its obvious absence taunts you. It is a permanent mark reflecting your failure to complete the picture. You could not make it whole, even though you wanted so badly to. Nothing you ever do can make the picture whole. You will always miss that one unique piece that you knew all about but could not find.

What happens when the jigsaw puzzle is your life itself?

Some people call this the doldrums. Some people call this maturity. A few others call it random misfortune. Some even call it the plan of a divine entity. What it is, is irrelevant to you. You only know that the outcome is not what you expected. Put up or shut up. Keep searching or quit. Live without it or live in denial. Compromise. Resign to your fate. Pray. Search harder.

Yet, that piece is gone. And you will never ever find it again. It is the one thing that isn't in your life. The one thing that will never ever be. That single irreplaceable non-existent thing that strips everything else of meaning.

How do you explain the nothingness of something? A loud resonating silence. A bright sharp shadow. An absence that catches the eye more than the presence around it. A desolate island in a sea of plenty. An emptiness amplified by the fullness around it. A misery born of hope. A sheer lack of feeling that crushes your soul. Vanity of vanities. All is in vain.

For such is life that what you have already done ceases to matter to you. What you can do might give you hope. What you cannot do might relieve pressure. But what you should have done, but could not do, will prod you from the inside again and again and again until your emotional core is but an empty shell waiting to crack open and crumble under the relentless and futile march of life.

Conference Sessions

Session Chair: Our last speaker for this session is Mr. John Johny Johnson and the title of his talk is "Incredibly Boring Discussion on Extremely Minute Detail of Very Broad Topic"

Speaker: I thank the organizers for inviting me by mistake and I am grateful to be in the presence of so many boring old people. Today I want to show you some very important, but ultimately useless results for the next 45 minutes...

[and on and on]

Speaker: ...and thus we can see that every single experiment of mine worked and my data are beautiful and that my work is highly insignificant. I wish to acknowledge my advisor, my advisor's advisor, my colleagues, the coffee-shop lady and my grandma's knitting needles. I would also like to shamelessly plug my poster which I know none of you are interested in. Any questions?

Questioner: That was a very interesting talk, although I have no idea what the heck you just spoke about. I would like to stand up and ask a question in an annoying voice which I think makes me look really really smart, but actually makes me look retarded. What do you think?

Speaker: That is a very interesting point, for a retard who did not listen. In fact, I wouldn't have time to demonstrate how irrelevant it is to the topic at hand. I would like you to come to the poster that I just shamelessly plugged so that we can waste each other's time in one long torturous conversation made bearable only by the fact that the beer is free.

Session Chair: I guess we have reached the end of the session. It has been a really good session with several unrelated monotonous talks. I am now really sick of standing in front of you and pretending to be interested in any of this. I think it is time we went outside, had free coffee and continued our trivial discussions...

Disclaimer: All people in this article are fictional.

Crazy Nonsensical Poem Made Up On The Spot For Crazy Nonsensical Conversations

The sky is blue,
The water's black.
My words are true
And I'll BE BACK!

(Alternate version, as misheard during said crazy conversation)

The sky is blue,
The water's black.
My words are true
And I'll pay you back

From New Mexico!

Crossroads

Two roads diverged in a wood and I,
I took the one less travelled by
And that has made all the difference.

Mr. Robert Frost, here in his ever-famous textbook poem, is stranded in the middle of a forest with his trail dividing into two. Deciding to take the lesser-beaten path and evading multiple animal attacks, he reaches the other side of the forest with his life, head and all body-parts intact. But the experience moves him enough to write a quaint little poem about it.

There, I've reduced a famous poem about confusion regarding life's paths ahead into a mockery about getting lost in the jungle. Speaking of mockery, let me introduce to you something which almost entirely encapsulates the meaning of the word mockery: ladies and gentlemen, meet my life...

Of course, there are many areas where it seems like a mockery, personal and otherwise. However, today, it is my profession which causes me to mock myself. One score minus seven years ago, wide-eyed and terribly impressed, I said to myself: "Ooooh! I am gonna become a scientist." Probably all I had in mind was mixing things in tubes and making bright colors. Hey, science is fun! Science is getting dirty! Science is the innocent exploration of a baby in the bright blue world!

Later, as waves of idealism poured forth into my youthful years, it was all about how science is the pursuit of knowledge and how contribution to science is the greatest thing a human can do. Small contributions, big results down the ages. The great body of knowledge that humans possess is the most precious thing we have and yet, it is puny in comparison to what the world has known. To paraphrase a Tamil saying, what we know is but sand in our hands and what we know not is as wide as the earth. Blah blah blah! Science was about being a nobleman. Science was a higher calling. Science was a great big thing in the sky which shines out light and gives us energy, power, love, feeling, truth and humanity. (Who am I kidding? I still feel that way most of the time, but just not today.)

Right... Then you go to college. You talk to people. Some guys go on to make the boring big bucks (read: IT jobs). Some, still starry-eyed turn to science. Some, with even more unrealistic expectations, dream of entrepreneuring in science (in an ethical manner! Good heavens, the paradox!). Turns out science is not all magic and in-your-face awesomeness. Enjoyment in science can be a little more subtle than that. It was about being able to master a topic enough to feel good about it. It was being able to teach your friend the intricacies of the problem you just solved. It was about having a bunch of your peers sit around and listen to you lecture because they thought you had something valuable to add. It was listening to someone else talk and genuinely appreciate his work. It was about enjoying the arguments. It was about marshalling facts to your questions. It was about getting good grades in the subjects you genuinely cared about. Oh life was so easy!

Realism aside, you still go for a Ph.D. and after a freaky first year full of missteps and misadventures, you finally settle into a rhythm of not-working every day. Responsibility, work-ethic, graduate-student-frustration-themed-comics and the whole jing-bang. And life is amazing once more. Not only do you get to have fun, you also get to meet bright and intelligent people everyday. People you can argue with over the intricacies of your field and your subfield and your subfield's uncle's subfield. An amazing place where you can agree to disagree and just talk all day, accruing more and more and more knowledge to yourself and humanity. Where having a coffee in a corner is a discussion of the greatest ideas man has ever known.

Balloon. Prick. Boom! Apparently, you also need to do some work by yourself. Duh! If you can talk science, you can do science, right? Not so nice a correlation. You know why? Because doing science is f***ing hard!

Work in science: you need to pick something and think long and hard about it. Pick, pick, pick. Not so easy as it sounds. "Follow your heart" seldom works with love, much less with science. The heart (or rather, the heart of the brain and not the actual heart itself) flies away in a million directions. Am I a biologist? Oh yeah! A structural biologist or a systems biologist? Some combination of both. A biologist or a computer scientist? Some combination of both. A methods guy or a real-problems guy? Some combination of both. And on and on and on until you don't even know what you are.

Even when you figure out what it is that you are, there still lies the problem of what it is you want to do. Of course, there are always a million unsolved problems and you tend to choose one you think you know about or care about.

Turns out you don't know enough in ANY of them. There are always a million things to learn in any problem. Edison's hundred different ways of showing how it doesn't work. A counter-example to every example. A counter-counter-example to every counter-example. A tweak here, a niggle there. A beautiful handcrafted Renaissance statue dotted with beautiful spots of beautiful bird poop. A lovely Mona Lisa mistakenly used as a tissue to doodle upon. A viewpoint from which one method is absolutely brilliant and another viewpoint from which the same method is obviously crapshoot.

A million paths down which people have already gone (and probably already eaten by the animals of the jungle). A million ways to feel stupid. A million different things I could do instead.

Many roads diverge in my wood today.

Maybe one day, I will see the difference.

Sitting on a Hydrant with a Coffee

Never give a writer (or a wannabe writer, for the sake of modesty) a cup of coffee/tea and a place to sit and five minutes to ponder. Because then his mind starts wandering and he ends up writing something.

So the story begins. Aforesaid wannabe writer had to pack his clothes before leaving for a month-long trip, complicated by the fact that he also had to move to a different apartment right in the middle of not-being-in-town. These conditions necessitated too much of organization and planning, something said writer is distinctly uncomfortable with. Plus, his nose was feeling weird and there was a mild rise too in his body temperature, which he thinks might become a full-blown fever in a couple of days.

In such a febrile state with plenty to do and little motivation, he decided to forget it all for a few minutes and get himself a coffee. Considering that the weather is on the warmer side resulting in his little apartment becoming a little too stuffy (like his nose), he decided to get his coffee and sit on the fire-hydrant peeping out from under the building walls and watch the traffic go by. And, inevitably, ponder.

Ponder, ponder, ponder! (Heil fellow geek, if you get the Pinky and the Brain reference!)

Having comfortably ensconced himself on said hydrant (albeit not too comfortably owing to the not-so-flat surface that hydrants possess to dissuade people from sitting on them) and having had the caffeine rush and its accompanying analgesic properties, with the cool breeze blowing through his long terribly dishevelled looks-like-a-homeless-person hair and pondering, pondering, pondering, he notices a couple walk out of the building holding hands. A couple he knows. A couple who are too engrossed in each other to notice the hobo-like-writer on the hydrant. An all too familiar feeling of unmentionable emotions hits the writer who then proceeds to not do anything about it as he has learnt to do in the past year. Yet, he proceeds to dispel such notions about the demerits of his inaction, since obviously, inaction is better than bibulousness ("better", implying less harmful to reputations, livers and wallets).

Cars zoom by. As writers have been doing forever, he ponders on the small part the individual plays in the vast cobweb called society (and God is one crazy spider to have built that) and yet the hopeful importance that the individual ascribes to himself in the larger scheme of things, only to be sorely shot down later. Ambulances yell and zoom by. Again, as writers do, he ponders the transience of human life and the meaning of our existence, ephemeral it may be. A car stops at the intersection blasting loud hip-hop music. Now, he ponders how art rescues us from the mundaneness of everyday living making us feel like soaring eagles and when the music is turned off, plop! falls the eagle to the ground, breaking his silly beak. A cop stops his car and looks at him. Now, the writer ponders the suspicious nature of human interactions and bemoans the loss of trust and love replaced with the mad, mad rat-race which makes us worse than rats (which actually like each other once in a while).

Too much of pondering has resulted in an empty cup with only unstirred sugar at the bottom (the writer likes sugar and plenty of it) and a thought hitherto delegated to a corner is now taking center-stage: Pack your damn clothes! Reluctantly the writer leaves his pondering seat, goes home, opens his laptop ponderously and "expresses" it all. Here's to hoping he gets to pack his clothes eventually!

Oh How I Wish

I just came back from a short-story club. We discussed James Joyce's "The Dead" over wine, coffee, ice-cream, baked potatoes, baked peaches, strawberries and a million other delectables. The participants were an assortment of nice people from different fields. The weather was perfect. We were sitting on a rooftop under a red, red moon and it just seemed apt that we should be holding a discussion pondering an author's creativity and purpose.

And then, for a brief moment, it hit me. I fell silent, just listening. Here were a bunch of kids doing awesome things in life sitting around and discussing an Irishman's thoughts from the 1920's. Can it get any better than that? At that instant, I wished it was me they were discussing. I wished it was I who had written that story eight decades ago and that it was my motives and thought processes that were being dissected.

It was a confirmation of sorts. The reason I wanted to be a writer played out right before my eyes. I want to leave behind something that would enthrall an audience of ten assorted people a million years later. That, for all intents and purposes, is immortality. Language is beautiful and man shall always be amazed at how another man chooses to express his thoughts and emotions in words. Such an appreciation transcends time as we know it. Immortality.

Sigh!

Where do our symbols come from?

By accident, I stumbled on the Wikipedia page for the letter Q and how it's current form originated. I ended searching out other letters and realized that a majority of them originate from one of the earliest known written material in the world: Egyptian hieroglyphics. As language progresses, the symbols cease to mean any physical thing and therefore become more and more abstract. Only the most ancient languages have their symbols refer to physical objects. Here's a list of hieroglyph-inspired alphabets/numbers/symbols commonly used in English:

(Letter - Hieroglyph - Tip to imagine)

A - Head of an ox - Invert A and you see two horns.
B - Cottage - A side-on B is supposed to look like the floor plan of a cottage.
C - Staff sling - Add a long straight tail and it looks exactly like an ancient staff sling, which is a sling attached to a long stick.
D - Door - Imagine a hinge on the flat side.
E - A man with arms outstretched - Try putting your arms in front of you at different elevations. Lift a leg too.
F, U, V, W, Y - Mace - The mace became a Y symbol (try closing the two upper arms with a loop) in Semitic script, from which other letters originated.
G - Came later. (Old Latin)
H - Fence - Close upper and lower ends with lines and repeat the formation.
I,J - Arm - Easy enough. Extend your arm.
K - Open Hand - Fingers jutting out of a common center. There are 4 arms jutting out in K.
L - Shepherd's crook/staff - Like a long walking stick with a curved notch at the end for holding.
M - Water - Ripples!
N - Snake - While writing N, write without making sharp turns.
O - Eye - Easy enough. Pupils and irises are round.
P, Q - Cord of wool - Imagine a ball of wool with a little thread extending on two sides (start and end of the thread). Now cut off one end.
R - Man's head - The top part is the head and the stalk is the neck. The little slanting line could have been a beard or a later modification.
S - Spine - The spine is an S! Go anatomy!
T - Came independently. (Proto-semitic, like a plus symbol)
X - Possibly came later (Ancient Greek)
Z - Came independently (Proto-semitic, two horizontal lines)

Now the numbers came from India and Arabia.
0 - A small 'o'. Represents nothingness, so probably came from looking at a hole.
1 - Horizontal line, became curved, notched and finally vertical.
2 - Two horizontal lines, became linked and then curved.
3 - Three horizontal lines, linked and curved.
4 - Came from a cross or plus symbol(4 lines), now join the top left points.
5 - Very weird, has looked like 3 and 4 in the past. Probably came from a mirrored 3.
6 - A vertical rope with a loop in the middle. Bottom part disappeared.
7 - Curved staff, later became very stiff.
8 - Looked like a loose 5 and then curved back.
9 - Started off similar to a question mark without the dot ? Later became the 9.

The mathematical and punctuation symbols had very late origins. However, I try to document them. I just considered the ones on a standard QWERTY keyboard.
+ came from & which represented addition and - came from ~ which was probably written over m to represent minus. Earliest known print in 1489 by Johannes Widemann.
x - William Oughtred in 1631
= Robert Recorde in 1557 used it in math. Came from //
~ ' Started off as marks modifying other letters
& Ancient Roman, with the letters E and T written together
! Introduced in 1400s as "the mark of admiration"
# No idea. Earliest use was probably in music.
* Star or flower? First used by the early printers to print dates.
< > Angled brackets came first, later becoming greater-than and lesser-than symbols. Also gave rise to (). Soon, [] and {} showed up.
' and " possibly came from < and <<
/ and // were the early dividers. / became , and // became = and then -
@ Possibly ancient mercantile language, similar to our "at the rate of"
$ Came from a slash through 8. Or possibly from an S (which may have fused to a P to indicate Spanish Peso). Or possibly from fusing S and U (silver unit). Even ancient possibilities are fusion of the Roman H and S, Greek God Hermes' staff carrying intertwined snakes
^ Quite modern "hat" over symbols. Earliest use was as "insert" symbol during proofreading.
% Around 1600s the words "per cento" were written with an upside-down P and cento below it. Cento became o and the whole thing became %
? From Latin Quaestio meaning question, abbreviated to Qo. Q written on top of small o.
: Came from two pricks in the paper. Around 1600. Gave rise to ; to denote a lesser pause.

Yes, I did have a lot of free time! ;-)