DND notes: Tuck gets drenched

'Let me tell you a story about a strange experience I've had', said Tuck, putting down his cup of goat's milk.

The rest of the unit heaved a collective sigh. Tuck's stories were the worst. They were always long, slow tales from his time at the monastery, interspersed with obscure eschatological jokes. Which he would explain dutifully if not everyone had laughed.

'Oh oh guys!', Chipak interrupted desperately, 'Did you hear the one about the magic rope that was terrible at debating? It tied itself into knots. Hahaha well will you look at the time? Yawwwwn time for bed eh fellas?'
'We haven't even dined yet.', pointed out Gul'dan. He hadn't listened to one of Tuck's stories before.

So Tuck began his tale.

'I had been sent to the forest of Mamui to collect a herb. Brother Cust had fallen gravely ill. Brother Solmyk said that the herb that could cure him grew deep inside forests. I volunteered to bring it. Mamui was the closest large forest to us, but it was still far. Our monastery was in the dry, dusty province of Pariniz. The forest was at the border of Pariniz and the green, agricultural county of Soliniz.'

' I passed through Soliniz quite recently', said Gul'dan ' Quite dry and desolate it looked.'

Tuck didn't seem to have heard him. 'It took two days to reach the forest.' he continued, 'First I took a bullock cart from Kemam to Paripata. That is thirty three miles. But from Paripata to Mamui there was no straightforward way. So I went to Somam which is fifteen miles away from..'

'Wow Tuck I I'm almost giddy with suspense with your fascinating tale!' interjected Chipak, 'I can tell this will be a mighty fine story and not dull at all. But sorry sorry, pray continue. You said you had reached this forest.'

'No, so I first went to Somam' said Tuck and went on to first his journey to Mamui and then the flora and fauna of the forest in minute details even as Chipak felt he would die of boredom.

'After entering the forest, I had to walk for an hour and a half to reach the hilly area where the herb grew. I climbed up and, with the help of the drawing brother Solmyk had given me, managed to locate the herb. I filled my satchel with it. I was about to head back but then I thought, who knows when I will come here again? Let me spend a little more time exploring this place.'

'At the time, brother Solmyk had been teaching me about herbs and their uses. I tried to find the herbs that I had learned about. Whenever I saw something that could be useful or something I could not recognize I took some of it with me. You know, when I went back I had so many herbs with me brother Solmyk joked that he was glad I hadn't brought the entire hill like you know who, haha!'

Gul'dan was about to ask who but Marlowe swiftly elbowed him in his ribs and cut in
'Ha ha ha what a riot that brother Solmyk!' Everyone laughed manically.
 'Who..larious. Very funny!' said Gul'dan, quickly catching on.

Pleased with the reaction to his joke, Tuck continued.

'Now I will tell you about the strange experience that I had. While collecting herbs on the hills I found a cave. I was about to pass it by. Dangerous animals could be inside, after all. But then I heard a strange sound from inside. It sounded like the pitter-patter of rain! I wondered what was going on.'

'I decided to look inside. It was completely dark and I couldn't see a thing. But the sound of rainfall grew clearer. The smell of rain soaked earth was unmistakable. I left my satchel outside and stepped in. Sure enough, it was raining inside the cave!'

Chipak and Marlowe looked at each other. This didn't seem like a typical Tuck tale, this sounded actually interesting. Even Ea, who till then had been daydreaming about Nissa Ben Naga and her fighting enemies together seemed to wake up suddenly. 'Were there clouds inside the cave?' She asked.

'I couldn't see.' replied Tuck, 'It was too dark. I thought I should leave as my clothes were getting soaked. But my curiosity got the better of me. I decided to stay for a bit and try to find out what was going on.'

'A little later my eyes and ears became accustomed to the darkness and the sounds of rainfall. I still couldn't see much but I could hear something. There was a sound coming from deep inside the cave. It sounded like someone sighing or breathing heavily. I tried to walk towards the source of the sound.'

'Strangely, the deeper I walked inside the cave the heavier the rain became. If I walked back towards the entrance it would become light again. Anyway, I kept walking although it soon became extremely difficult to do so. I was drenched.'

'I managed to get quite close to the where the sighs where coming from. It seemed right before me, although I couldn't see what or who it was. I reached out. My hands touched something. Suddenly I was overcome with strange visions. I fell down.'

'What visions?' everyone in the group gasped.

'I saw vast green fields.' replied Tuck, 'I saw harvests. I saw groups of people dancing. As I saw these my heart became filled with strange feelings that I had never felt before. I felt glory. I felt deep loneliness. I felt powerful. I felt powerless and incredibly sad. I felt some emotions which I cannot describe in words. Then finally, I started feeling a strange detachment from everything'

'I lay there feeling detached and getting drenched for a while. Then my sense returned to me and I ran for my life. I ran out of the cave, collected my satchel and headed back to the human world.'

Tuck paused to sip his drink. The group wondered if there was a twist in the tale.

'Returning from Mamui to the monastery is even trickier than getting there. You have to take a different route. First you have to go to the town of Mamuk-ok which is forteen miles..'

'Ouch my leg, my leg! Some insect seems to have bitten me! Alas!', shouted Chipak and scampered away on one leg with the apparent intention of tending to the other.
'I think I heard a horse calling me! Great story, Tuck.' said Ea and promptly disappeared.
'Yes, great story Tuck.' said Marlowe, ' Uh, I better check what happened to Chipak's leg.'

'Umm' said Gul'dan, unable to come up with an excuse.

Tuck looked at him and smiled. Here, he felt, was someone who would love to hear more about the details of his travel from Mamuk-ok to the monastery. He proceeded to describe them to Gul'dan.

------------------------------------------

'I wonder what was special about the cave?' asked Ea, after recounting Tuck's story to Nissa Ben Naga, 'I feel like you know the answer. Do you really?'

Nissa remained silent for a moment before speaking.  'Tuck lived in Pariniz, yes. It's a dry, barren land. Did he tell you that the forest he went to divides Pariniz from the neighbouring province of Soliniz?' She asked.

'Yes, he did. He also said Soliniz was a prosperous agricultural province. But Gul'dan said that when he traveled there it was dry and desolate.' Ea replied.

'Pariniz and Soliniz. Same soil, same climate, same everything. Yet one was barren and the other was fertile, yes.' said Nissa Ben Naga, 'Why do you think this was so?'

Ea thought about this for while. 'Rain God?' She finally asked.

'Smart kid. Yes, there was a Rain God in Soliniz. His name was Saparo. He was the reason behind Soliniz's prosperity, yes.' said Nissa, 'Now do you understand what your friend saw?'

Ea's eyes opened wide. 'Oh!' she said, 'Oh.'

'Yes.' said Nissa, 'I think so. When Saparo knew his time on this earth was coming to an end, he went to that cave to die. Gods always do that, yes. They don't want anyone to see them in their moments of weakness and disease. They often lose control over their powers then.'

'Is that why it was raining inside the cave? Saparo had lost control over his powers?' asked Ea

'Perhaps. Or perhaps he wanted to go out with one last rain. He had been close to his end. I believe when your friend touched Saparo he somehow peeked into his mind. He saw the harvests and rain dances and he felt the glory and the power and finally, the detachment, yes.' said Nissa, 'That is what happened. Your friend Tuck unknowingly sat at the deathbed of a dying Rain God.'

What should we believe in?

An age old question in philosophy is 'What should we believe in?' or 'How do we determine the grounds for believing in something?What can we use as a criteria for justifying or rejecting beliefs?' This question has been debated for centuries and continues to be debated. Apart from some general idea about the important schools of thought I know very little about the nuances in this debate, so what I am about to say has probably been said a thousand times before (and refuted and defended and so on). But since I'm not aware of that I'll go right ahead.

I think the question is wrong. The mistaken assumption behind the question-in fact in the language we use in framing the question- is that we have free will. We don't. What this means is that all ' how should we' questions should actually be translated to 'how do we?' Instead of asking what we *should* do, we should (hehe) instead be trying to model how belief formation works. The better we understand belief formation the  closer we would be to clearing the confusion that question causes in us. It would take us closer to the 'answer' to that question.

 So, belief formation. Contrary to what many of us who subscribe to rationalism would claim we do not actually believe in those things whose truth has somehow or the other been proved to us. I for instance, don't believe in God but believe that the Andes Mountain exists though I haven't seen either of them. Presumably if I did go to South America I would find out that they did exist, but I  haven't and still believe in it. So how does my mind actually acquire beliefs?  

 A realistic model will of course be complicated but here's a simplistic I go about gathering experiences and in my head I try to make a pattern out of them a them - a sort of a model of the world. This happens unconsciously. If I get new information that fits with what I already know, then that information goes right in. If it doesn't, I'm doubtful. It could be that the pattern needs to be changed, or that the new information is 'bad'. How does my mind decide?  It would depend on how much of the model in my head I have to discard or modify to fit either way. If somebody told me, say, that there are bunnies in the moon, then I would be unlikely to believe him. 'Cause believing in that means letting go a lot of the picture I've built up - what supports life, how the environment on the moon is and so on. While not believing in it I only give up my assumption that my friend has not been smoking up. One could probably represent this model in terms of networks.

 This process goes on in our heads mostly without us noticing. The model here is an ideal one in the sense that the mind described looks at all new information and judges how well they fit into its existing world-picture and decides to accept or reject the information based on that basis. We can call this the 'rational model'. Many minds do not try to do this and can have inconsistent beliefs. Also minds will differ with respect to the complexity of the judgement they are capable of performing in a given time. This will generally result in different levels of 'irrational beliefs'.

The origin of this way of belief formation is I think evolutionary. The person who has made a consistent model of the world from information received would obviously be more likely to survive than a person who is unable to do so.

 The way Science evolves is I think pretty much the same as the process described above, except that now  we are talking about beliefs held by a community instead of a single individual, and the community tries to 'rational' ise the process in the above sense. That is to say, new ideas coming in can be said to be given an 'acceptance-value' based on how well it connects with or differs from other ideas. Of course different scientists will reject or embrace it with different degrees so one is speaking here of an average 'acceptance value'. For competing scientific theories, those that will connect most dots will tend to be favoured. The point here is that belief formation is science is not essentially distinct from personal belief formation, it is the distillation of the same process.

Adventures of the Insti Dog

It was a summer afternoon, and the Sun was, as they say, beating down on the Institute. It was hot even in the shade near the Institute’s reception area. Too hot, Blackie decided with some reluctance, to continue sleeping there. Cursing the Sun, she blinked a bit and looked around. She wondered if she should move a little more to the inside and try to get some more sleep, but an easy mental calculation told her that it wasn’t worth all the effort. Getting up slowly she wagged her tail a bit and looked around.

 It was lunchtime and grad students had began crawling out of their hiding places. Blackie looked as they passed her by, mostly thin spectacled men in Bermuda shorts and worn out tees. Some of them had the glazed look of those who had gone far into the depths of one of nature’s profound mysteries and found that there wasn’t a paper in it. Blackie sympathized with these kids. In fact, she had come to regards herself as one of them.

 One of the students was approaching Blackie, with an apparent intention of petting her. In no mood to socialize, Blackie looked down and pretended to be lost in thought. This trick worked and the student immediately walked away, also looking down and pretending to think. This practice of mutual looking-down-and-pretending-to-be-lost was, Blackie had observed, almost a social convention among the researchers here. She felt happy having done it right, it made her feel part of the community. But  it's not just the manners of researchers that she had adopted. Research itself interested her now.

 Once there was a time when Blackie was happy to just eat, sleep and be petted by folks. She did not ask for more from life. But her time in the Institute had just changed all that. Just eating, sleeping and being loved by random individuals is, she recently came to realize, no life for the intelligent dog. There has to be something more - pursuit of some higher goal. Something pure and beautiful.  Maybe the Mysteries of Nature.  Maybe creating abstract worlds from imagination. Research, and not  those creamy biscuits with nuts in them, should be the goal of one’s life. Blackie pitied the street dogs who spent their days just eating, mating and barking. If they only knew the beauty of Algebraic Topology, Blackie thought. Algebraic Topology was Blackie’s favorite subject. It was one of the abstruse problems of the subject that had been occupying her thoughts recently.

 Two Post-Docs came out of the entrance, speaking among themselves.
‘ .. This is my fifth post-doc… no job offers yet, no......nowadays my father's second hand furniture business seems not to be scoffed at ..'
' I just heard that my college crush just had her second divorce.  I am not getting my hopes up this time though..’
Together they looked at Blackie.
‘ Look at that dog, man. No worries in the world.’
‘ Yeah, just eating and sleeping all day long. Wish I had a life like that.’

Blackie though was vexed. She thought she had the solution to her problem, she could feel it in her head, but the it kept just out of reach. She tried again. Vague images rose in her mind and tried to fit in with each other, as in a jigsaw puzzle. And she almost had it –  the full picture with all the parts in right places –almost. Then it was gone and she was left with the jumbled pieces again. At times like this Blackie wondered if  research was much of an improvement on her previous pastime : chasing her own tail. 

And then she had an epiphany.  Just when she thought it was pointless to try anymore and given herself over to a contemplation of  the leftover bones she was going to acquire from the canteen a little later, the completed image just popped into her mind. She had got it !These are moments when you feel like telling someone all about your idea. While dancing the Tango. While smoking a cigar.

                                                                                                                             

Just then the Professor of Algebraic Topology  came out of his office and started walking towards the canteen. He had  been sleeping in his office, and had just woken up from a  bad dream. He had dreamed that he had transformed into a medu vada. Then someone put chutney on him and gave him to that black dog that stayed in the Institute, who started happily nibbling at him.   The Professor knew that when he was a little more awake, he would think of the dream as being very stupid. But at the moment he felt a strong animosity towards Dogs and medu vadas.

Here's the man who will understand me, thought Blackie, watching the Professor walk out. I would like to see a reaction on him. Bet it would blow his mind. Bet he never thought a mere dog would solve this problem that he himself could not. He caught up with the Professor and started explaining the idea to him, almost choking with excitement.

‘WOOF WOOF Woof Woof Woof. Woof Proof Woof WOOF WOOF!’

This proved to be too much for the Professor.

 ’Aaaargh! Help! This  infernal dog won't leave me alone! Guards!Take this crazy animal away from here!’

 ‘ Well there's no need to be like that just because I got there first.’  said Blackie. Pausing to give the Professor a look of mild reproach, she gracefully scampered away. 

Remembering Rahul Basu

Professor Rahul Basu passed away today. He had been one of our senior professors. He had obtained his PhD from SUNY, Stony Brook and afterwards joined IMSc, Chennai where he worked as a scientist till his untimely demise. An expert on Quantum Chromodynamics, he worked on Phenomenological aspects of High Energy Physics. Professor Basu was highly regarded as a teacher, he taught Quantum Field Theory in IMSc and was often invited to teach short courses at various Schools, most often SERC THEP Schools.

Outside his work, Professor Basu's interests were many and varied. An admirer of Orwell, he maintained a blog where he offered his insights on various contemporary issues. The blog will bear testimony to his deep interest in humanity and the liberality of his thought.

Professor Basu also maintained a blog for sharing interesting recipes and a guide for eating out in Chennai.

I had always wanted to know Professor Basu better. Unfortunately we had spoken only a few times. He had a great sense of humour. He once described the Rock Garden of Chandigarh as 'Jackson Pollack gone mad', a description I shall always remember. I heard tales of his extreme generousity.


In IMSc he had a reputation among students of being a strict and demanding teacher. Students who slacked lived in fear of being subjected to his sarcasm. 'I am harsh in class' he once conceded in my presence. I believe it was his way of making sure that the students worked hard.

Our longest interaction was when I went to him to discuss the possibility of giving Coffee Mugs with the IMSc logo to the new batch of students as a welcome gift. He told me where I could get Coffee mugs and showed me a new design he had made for the logo. When I was leaving he offered to accompany me when I would go to this shop, should I need help. I was touched by his offer.

I regret that I did not know him better.