I become a card sharp!

When Sujit was in KG or Std. I his teacher asked him,'What does your father do?' Sujit thought that she was enquiring about his grandfather and replied,'He plays cards!' He said this because at that time my father-in-law used to play cards for a few hours every Sunday with some of his retired friends.

The teacher was shocked. Poor child - his father is a wastrel!

In the evening, when Jaya went to the school to pick up Sujit, the teacher asked her,'What does your husband do?' Jaya wondered why she wanted to know about me. The teacher related what Sujit had told her that morning. Jaya assured her that there was no such problem and told her about my stroke.

I don't know what shocked the teacher more - the news that I wasted my time playing cards or the news that I am quadriplegic.

Astronomy

Although I read a lot more about evolution, I also read a bit about astronomy - two huge topics that I only get time to skim. The first popular science book I ever read was A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson about seven years ago and it stoked my interest in astronomy (nay, in science in general) by giving interesting pieces of information that I had not thought about earlier. For example, although I had an idea of the distances of the planets in the solar system, text books show them equidistant from each other. This gives a misleading picture which had stayed with me. The reality is very different. As Bryson writes:

... this is a necessary deceit to get them all on the same piece of paper. Neptune in reality isn't just a little bit beyond Jupiter, it's way beyond Jupiter - five times further from Jupiter than Jupiter is from us, so far out that it receives only 3 per cent as much sunlight as Jupiter.

Such are the distances, in fact, that it isn't possible, in any practical terms, to draw the solar system to scale. Even if you added lots of fold-out pages to your textbooks or used a really long sheet of poster paper, you wouldn't come close. On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with the Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over 300 metres away and Pluto would be two and a half kilometers distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn't be able to see it anyway).

I knew something about the solar system but that I was quite ignorant about the things beyond it. I knew the universe is big but didn't have an idea about how BIG it really is. The numbers were mind boggling. Bill Bryson again:

Carl Sagan calculated the number of probable planets in the universe at as many as ten billion trillion - a number vastly beyond imagining. But what is equally beyond imagining is the amount of space through which they are lightly scattered. 'If we were randomly inserted into the universe,'. Sagan wrote, 'the chances that you would be on or near a planet would be less than one in a billion trillion trillion.'

I started reading some blogs on astronomy and loved reading about galaxies, scales in the universe and other cool stuff. Undoubtedly, it helps that I don't have to put out the rubbish. When things get too complicated for my synapses, I can always feast on some great eye candy that illustrate Carl Sagan's words: "We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people."

Being a bit better informed about astronomy and evolution also enabled me to be more discerning about science reports. I learned that whenever terms like 'paradigm shift' and 'scientists have to go back to the drawing board' are used, it is usually an exaggeration.

As an example of the kind of things that interest me these days, here is a discussion with Neil deGrasse Tyson, who has the knack of talking about abstruse topics in a way that makes me want to hear more.

Mukesh Ambani's "peacock's tail"?

Some days ago I saw a news report about Mukesh Ambani's 27 floor house with, among other amenities, a 50 seat theatre where, I suppose he will enjoy watching Slumdog Millionaire. What makes a person build a house so far in excess of his needs?

One of the interesting questions in biology is: Why does a peacock have such a heavy, gaudy tail? It costs energy to make - energy that can be used elsewhere, attracts predators and makes it difficult to escape from them. William Hamilton proposed a theory that is widely accepted: the peacock's tail is a signal of genetic fitness.

So is "Antilla" the name of Mukesh Ambani's version of the peacock's tail, a potlatch-style display of "I can"? Another peacock's tail (this one not belonging to any particular individual but was the brainchild of a group of of movers and shakers) was the recent Commonwealth Games.

In a podcast, P.Sainath, the rural affairs editor of The Hindu newspaper, talked about a grand party thrown by Emperor Nero for the creme de la creme of Rome, as narrated by Tacitus. A problem was that the light was not enough. Nero solved it in typical fashion: he had criminals brought from the dungeons and burned at the stake to provide the lighting. What bothered Sainath was not the cruelty involved but the question: who were Nero's guests? What sort of mindset is required to silently eat the best foods and quaff the finest wines in the midst of all that cruelty? I also have a similar thought: what sort of mindset is required in order to build a billion dollar house at spitting distance from some of the largest slums in Asia?

You get used to it

If you are suddenly struck by what finance types call a Black Swan event, you become helpless, confused, angry and begin to lament like the Duke of Gloucester, "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; / They kill us for their sport."But when Time, The Great Healer, has done enough work you find ways to deal with the new reality and eventually you get used to it.

Sometimes, when I will be sitting on my wheelchair and browsing or reading a book with great interest, I will suddenly feel like passing motion so I will have to be shifted quickly to the bed. Occasionally, by the time the nurse makes the bed ready and Jaya comes to the room to shift me, my metabolic wastes would have made their presence felt.My muscles will stiffen automatically in disgust. (I know it is made of rare stuff but...) This stiffening makes it difficult for the nurse to manoeuvre me around the bed for cleaning the mess thus delaying the whole horrible process.

I found that the quickest way to relax my muscles is to let my mind wander thereby putting me in a state of suspended animation. I will start thinking about some topic that I had read recently for example, the trouble with intuition or inequality aversion or how language shapes thought or how news is made now. While my mind is busy thinking about these issues, I am only dimly aware of my surroundings. My muscles will become relaxed and the nurse will be able to complete her unenviable task quicker. A wandering mind has uses.

Sometimes, when a few visitors will be waiting in the front hall to meet me and I will be about to make my grand entrance, I will feel like passing motion and will quickly have to be shifted to the bed. The protagonist of Five Point Someone, when he finds himself in an embarrassing situation, wishes that dinosaurs were not extinct so that one would come along and gobble him up and put him out of his misery. (Evolutionary biologists will say that dinosaurs are not extinct because birds are dinosaurs but we will let that technical issue pass for the moment.) I also have a similar wish on such occasions especially when the nurse is on leave and Jaya has to perform the duties of a nurse.

Isak Dinesen put things in perspective, “What is man, when you come to think upon him, but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning, with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine?” The roof and crown of things? Tennyson must have been joking.

At times I am so lost in my thoughts that I fail to notice the nurse giving me feeds through the feeding tube. When Jaya asks me about the feeding I stare blankly at her and she has to get the details from the nurse. Even I am surprised that I did not notice something so obvious. I suppose the default network of my brain must be active at these times.

I have realised the wisdom in Duke Ellington's words, "There are two kinds of worries - those you can do something about and those you can't. Don't spend any time on the latter." Most people eventually get adjusted to the whips and scorns of time. Even if it means lying on shit. It is not easy. It doesn't happen overnight . But it happens. In Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert writes:

For at least a century, psychologists have assumed that terrible events- such as having a loved one die or becoming the victim of a violent crime- must have a powerful, devastating, and enduring impact on those who experience them. This assumption has been so deeply embedded in our conventional wisdom that people who don't have dire reactions to events such as these are sometimes diagnosed as having a pathological condition known as "absent grief". But recent research suggests that the conventional wisdom is wrong, that the absence of grief is quite normal, and that rather than being the fragile flowers that a century of psychologists have made us out to be, most people are surprisingly resilient in the face of trauma.

Learning from the Heart is a book written by Daniel Gottlieb who suffered a spinal cord injury that left him quadriplegic at the age of thirty-three. He writes:

I got insight into the process of becoming more dependent when I was reading Tuesdays with Morrie, by Mitch Alborn. When Morrie, the author's mentor, was first being affected by ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease), he turned to Mitch and said, "Oh my God, one day somebody will have to wipe my ass."

When I read that quote my immediate thought was, "You'll get over it, Morrie. I did." Having a catheter and needing someone else to bathe and dress me used to be a horrible indignity. Now all those things are simply regular parts of my life, just as anyone who needs to wear reading glasses or bifocals makes a habit of putting them on and taking them off. Whatever you need today that you didn't need yesterday simply becomes a part of your life.

Later, he writes:

No wonder there is a little comedian inside of me who finds great humor when people unthinkingly say to me, "Sometimes when I think about my life, I just feel paralyzed." I just look up and say, "Sometimes I feel that way, too!"

There is grandeur in this view of life

Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution. - Theodosius Dobzhansky

One disconcerting feature of studying in IIMA was that (apart from being occasionally sucked into a vicious cycle), everybody seemed to know everything better than me. I then worked in the financial sector which again is full of super brains (at least I thought so till a couple of years ago). So I was always under pressure to keep up with various alphabet soup products so that I don't feel left out of a conversation. This pressure was no longer there after my stroke. My eyes used to glaze over when I used to read some article on finance and I switched to reading something else.

At this time I came across an article on Evolution vs Creationism. I had never heard of creationism and wondered what it was. I found that all it seemed to be saying was 'evolution can't do this or that, hence creationism' which did not make sense. Evidence against one theory is not the same as evidence for another theory. But I couldn't follow their arguments because I didn't know much about evolution so I started reading about it. I soon realised that whatever little I thought I knew about evolution was wrong. As Jacques Monod said, " [A] curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it."

When the penny finally dropped, I could see why T.H.Huxley exclaimed on reading the Origin of Species: "How stupid of me not to have thought of that." After I managed to overcome the semantic gap, I could understand better the various strands of evidence for evolution. Reading about Deep Time, when different creatures were abundant and when they became extinct was cool. Richard Dawkins writes in The Ancestor's Tale:

The human imagination is cowed by antiquity, and the magnitude of geological time is so far beyond the ken of poets and archaeologists it can be frightening. But geological time is large not only in comparison to the to the familiar timescales of human life and human history. It is large on the timescale of evolution itself.

The nature programs on T.V., which were becoming boring, took on a new meaning, When I saw some program about predators and prey, I thought about evolutionary arms races. When I saw a program about bats, I thought about reciprocal altruism. I had not heard of these terms before. Reading about evolution of complex parts or communication in slime moulds was far more interesting than reading about naked shorts or covered puts. As Keats said, "in spite of all,/Some shape of beauty moves away the pall/From our dark spirits" and I looked forward to reading something new about evolution everyday. And I was glad to know that I am not another data point for the Salem Hypothesis.

The Theory of Evolution is beautifully complicated - it is complicated enough to keep me interested but not so complicated that I will give up in a daze. On the other hand if I had started reading about string theory, I wouldn't know what hit me. I remember reading that it dealt with 11 dimensions. I can barely handle three.

I soon stopped reading about creationism because it was so boring. They keep making silly statements like 'nobody saw it' or using weasel tactics. Perhaps they should be answered like this. I loved this email exchange between an evolutionary biologist, Richard Lenski and a creationist. Lenski's second letter was brilliant. Like the author Terry Pratchett, I concluded that 'I would rather be a rising ape than a fallen angel'. There is a (probably apocryphal) exchange between T.H.Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce that took place in 1860. The incident is described in Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea:

When Wilberforece ended his speech, he looked to Huxley. He asked him, half-jokingly, whether it was on his grandfather's or grandmother's side that he descended from an ape.

Later Huxley would tell Darwin and others that at that moment he turned to a friend seated next to him, struck his hand to his knee, and said, "The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands." He stood and lashed back at Wilberforce. He declared that nothing that the bishop had said was at all new, except his question about Huxley's ancestry. "If then, said I, the question is put to me would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means and influence and yet who employs these faculties and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape."

Apocryphal or not, it is a good story.

The electrician

Once when the fan in my room was giving some problems, an electrician was called to repair it. As is usual for someone who sees me for the first time, he asked a lot of questions which were answered briefly. (I was not present during the remainder of the incident. I am relating what Jaya had told me at the time. She remembers it only vaguely now.)

Before leaving, he told Jaya that he knew a pastor who could do many miracles. He would bring the pastor if Jaya gave the latter a donation. Jaya told him that there was no objection to his praying but she will not give any donation. He left a CD which he wanted me to see. It probably contained material regarding faith healing. Since none of us was interested in it, we did not see it.

The next day he came again and said that his wife had fallen ill and his son had met with an accident. He said that this was because Jaya was not 'allowing' him to 'help' me. Jaya didn't know how to respond. He seemed to be implying that we were somehow responsible for his troubles. She told him that we were sorry that he was having problems but we had nothing to do with it and sent him away.

I have met many such people with creative ideas - one person said that I should sleep in the front hall near the entrance because it was the best place according to 'vaastu', another person said there is a ghost roaming around my room (those who intend visiting me later need not be apprehensive - this was in a previous house), a person who could 'look into the future' tied a couple of ribbons to ward off evil spirits, one person said that I should not use AC because it will affect blood circulation, another person said that I should not sit for long in front of the computer because radiation from the monitor might affect my brain, another said that my room should be painted red because longer wavelengths of light stimulate the neurons of the medulla oblongata...ok, I am making up that last one but you never know what you might get. (All sorts of unlikely objects get lodged in the brain without being deliberately put there.)

Conditioned by such experiences, I look warily at any unknown person who comes into my room. I get the same feeling of unease that Bertie Wooster used to get when some young pest announced hat he was looking to do his good deed for the day. Some people will relax quickly after they see me and start talking about normal, everyday matters. Others will keep looking doubtfully at me and I can see that they are thinking very hard about ways to help me - a 'help' that I will dread.

I can totally identify with the street artist, Banksy's plea: "I need someone to protect me from all the measures they take in order to protect me."That is another skill that Jaya has honed through years of practice.

The truth in the lie

We may not doubt that society in heaven consists mainly of undesirable persons.-- Mark Twain

A quadriplegic in the neighbourhood is the cue for various religious cults to crawl out of the woodwork and offer a plethora of miracles. A guy belonging to one such cult wanted Jaya to go to Chennai to meet his leader. Jaya told him that if I agreed to the the trip, she would go. She also told him that in all probability I will bury the idea not praise it. He wanted to meet me but knowing that I would not be interested in listening to the Deepities, Eulerian bluffs and different versions of the Courtier's Reply that these guys are adept in giving, Jaya tried to discourage him from coming home. But he was confident of his persuasive abilities and insisted on meeting me so finally Jaya relented.

He came into my room sporting a big smile - beware of Greeks bearing gifts or in this case, smiles. (Bernard helpfully informs us that the Trojan horse was actually Greek.) He tried to ingratiate himself with me with standard statements - How are you? You look healthy. You will soon be alright... He then told me that god moves in mysterious ways his wonders to perform. Having been given this stunning revelation only about a million times before, I listened to him with great interest.

He assured me that his god was the 'Real God'. (Another guy told me that he will do a 'strong puja' for me. Have you come across this term before?) Apparently he (or she or it) could perform miracles that would leave lesser gods gaping in awe. He told me about the crippled man who could walk, the child who was cured of leukemia and such standard stories. I tried to stare unblinkingly thinking that he might take my blinks to mean that I had agreed to send Jaya to Chennai.

When he showed no signs of leaving, I tried to think of some way to politely show him the door. I looked frequently at the clock hoping that he would realise that I was not interested but he was immune to such hints. He appeared determined to make me see the light and it looked as if he would leave only after achieving his objective. Wodehouse fans will recall that Balaam's Ass had a similar temperament.

I suddenly had an idea. It is said that a tide comes in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. I was confident that this idea was that tide and lost no time in taking it at the flood. I indicated to the nurse that I wanted to pass urine. After she bolted the door, I indicated to her that I was fibbing. If you prefer a bit of syllabic stretching, I indicated to her that I was being economical with the truth. She understood what was on my mind and laughed.

I waited for ten minutes before allowing her to open the door. When people leave my room after they have met me for a while, they usually don't come back. But as Sherlock Holmes says in The Sign of Four:

.... while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician.

I knew what the average man will do but what this individual will do was anybody's guess. Like Jeeves, I tried to study the psychology of the individual but this did not ease my trepidation. There was the lurking thought that he might return to impress me with more yarns about the amazing prowess of his 'Real God'. It was too early to crow,'Elementary, dear Watson.'

But after a couple of minutes Jaya came and calmed my fears. Apparently he had left soon after he came out of my room.