I was in Calcutta for a brief four days, between the 3rd and the 6th, visiting my grandparents and my aunt who had flown in from Delhi. As usual the weather was disagreeable, and I spent more time sick than I would have cared to. Allergies are terrible. There's something about Calcutta's and Bangalore's weather that I find singularly unfavorable, and not even the quaint, colonial-era buildings that I saw, dilapidated though most of them were, and such a relief from the feature-less, purple-paned bureaucratic buildings that oozed out of the earth sometime in the latter half of the twentieth century, could assuage my discomfort. Still it was a decent outing, and pretty productive, too. I finished three books on this trip, all of which I shall review presently: Salim Must Die, Infinity and the Mind, and A Universe from Nothing. Speaking of colonial-era buildings, I can never tire of mentioning how much I hate these new place names. Calcutta, Bombay, Bangalore, etc. are not only stylish and aesthetically pleasing names, but the only logically permissible names for those noble cities. It can be shown that no process of ratiocination will bring you to their new names. The new names are, in fact, mathematically and philosophically absurd. Like Hinduism and other religions.
Salim Must Die, contrary to the nice things I said about it in my previous post, turned out to be a cheap thriller after all. The kind of book you would read in a public toilet, and leave lying there. Mukul Deva, for all the intelligence he seems to evince in his pictures, for all the prescience unhelpful reviews of his works seem to attribute to him, can't even get American slang right. Maybe he just hates America that much (his tone in places certainly seems to suggest so), or maybe he's really that careless. Everyone knows that Americans say "ass", not "arse"; and Americans don't use the word "trousers", which makes the phrase "getting one's trousers in a twist" sound ridiculous in addition to artificial. Racy? Just because he uses the word "fuck" a lot, and makes allusions to a Chinese scientist lawfully fucking his own wife? (Gasp!) I would be willing to overlook all that, if the plot were not so shallow. It's on the level of a desultory fanfic. Even Jeffery Archer comes up with better plots. Mukul Deva needs to exercise some of his legendary foresight, and give up writing. It's not his thing. But I'm pretty sure he managed to offend sufficiently many people with the abovementioned raciness so that the tolerant and rational and enlightened people of this country will not allow him to publish so much as a newsletter for a secret cult.
Infinity and the Mind was interesting to the extent that I understood what he was talking about, but I'm fairly certain that there was more to it than I was able to grasp, fool that I am. He talked a lot about set theory, and presented the idea that the universe is isomorphic to sets. (Did I use "isomorphic" correctly? Maybe someone who knows more about these matters than I, Kaiser "the Ignorant" Washington, who read books without understanding them, can correct me.) Otherwise there were great parallels with theoretical computer science, which I was proud of myself for noticing. Similar in certain sections to certain things Douglas Hofstadter introduced in Bach, Godel, Escher. (Forgive the lack of diacritics.) Of course, maybe I'm completely deluded, and failed to grasp anything in either book. Hence my hesitation in reviewing it too deeply.
A Universe from Nothing by Lawrence Krauss was an interesting if somewhat disappointing read, though I recognize that part of this is due to the fact that it wasn't intended to be a conventional science book: it was unabashedly a response to religious people who are suspicious of modern science. There were a good deal of things that I learnt about quantum mechanics and the Universe, and some tenuous ideas that I had were corrected and solidified; but in the main, he made himself redundant in repeating the same old idea about "something from nothing". Sometimes it seems as if people write books denouncing religion for the sole purpose of feeling intellectually vindicated, or because they know that the atheist circle jerk is where all the glory is at. Lawrence Krauss appears to be just such a person, though I admit his science is sound. I'd like to read a serious science book by him, one that transcends these meaningless debates and his patting of his own back.
3 comments :
Infinity and the Mind was suggested further reading for two semester-1 courses. I read half of chapter 1, skimmed a bit further, and decided I'd come back to it, but haven't yet. It terrified me, much as GEB does; the fact that I can now admit to the terror is itself progress. I might even go so far as to taxonomize it into my ever-expanding 'terrors of unknown' list someday. For now I'm content to let it lie.
We talked about the set ismorphism thing in one of those classes. Hilbert's hotel came up, and Stephen Wolfram, and digital humanities, and the idea of a fundamentally discrete reality. My go-to anecdote for that class is that we spent three weeks' worth of it on three slides as I asked doubt after doubt and engaged the professor in frustrating circular conversations.
The atheist circle jerk is totally the place to be, and it also isn't, because a pluralistic mind is totally going to be fashionable again one of these days.
One of these days an Indian author will arise who is capable of well-written, well-researched, well-plotted work; someone who can transcend the local sphere, who likes their position well enough to know how to keep quiet about their radical views at table.
I'm going to take my chances and guess that you're currently in the US. If not then the page views from the US that are being frequently recorded of late on my dashboard are from people I don't know, which is actually a strangely comforting thought. I have fans! I know Google is capable of pinpointing their exact locations, and gathering a whole lot more information about them, and am therefore a little disappointed that they're only letting us into the vestibule to their greater machinations.
I don't know whether it would be fruitful to give Infinity and the Mind a second read this soon, and I think I think I might just return it before I have to renew my checkout at the library again. I was however inspired to learn more about set theory. It seems something you ought to know. One of my friends at school is really into this sort of thing, so he'd know where to start. It is, as you've said, terrifying - and a little dizzying, much as contemplations of solipsism tend to be.
My progress on GEB has been meager, mostly because I have to be cautious about being ensnared in his rather rhapsodical prose style. The allegories and the little technical games he plays with the reader are also a little mysterious. Mostly I get thrown by the fact that I'm unable to discern a well-defined theme. Why must I be a layman?
As for Indian writers, I constantly get the impression that they're trying hard to stamp out any mark of Indianness from their works. Which makes people like RK Narayan among the better (or best) writers from this category whose works I've encountered, notwithstanding the self-congratulatory criticisms of his style and use of language by so-called purists. It's almost as if their works are targeted at British or American readers, in a shifty, side-glancey way, rather than Indian readers.
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