Old man, Fermat.

I had seen the old man quite a few times before the day in question. He’d walk in at a brisk pace, purposefully, and make a beeline for the section devoted to number theory. This in itself was quite remarkable. Half the people who visited the math wing were tourists who invariably sat down with the largest coffee table book on cosmology they could find, and most of the rest were the physics bunch — that side of the aisle lacked sufficient seating for their lot. A further minority comprised of those such as myself — dabbling in algebra, analysis and topology. A taker for number theory was the rarest of sightings.

It is possible to reasonably correlate people’s seating preferences with the purpose of their visit – with caveats obviously applying to the availability of their choices. The casual folk tended to pick the ones near the exit, for a speedy escape when they got tired of looking at pictures of nebulae. The laptop fiends optimised their proximity to the few charging outlets available. The crammers went for the so called study booths for a distraction free experience. I went for the most isolated seat that offered a view of the skyline and the eventual sunset.

Our subject was most unusual in this respect too. Armed with his few chosen tomes, he would scout for compatible company: by their profile and by looking over their shoulders. Compatible company referring to people who were likely to be interested in math and preferably not too engrossed in what they were doing. (The old gent loved to hold energetic, extended discussions with his companions, which made him the bane of the librarians.) I satisfied both requirements admirably, but it was to be a while before it was my turn.

---

I was done with math for that day, ’twas one of those days. My idle eye caught him scoping for his books, and my mind wandered into a conjectural haze. Was he a professor? (his wizened countenance suited this hypothesis.) If so, what sort of collection did his department have that he had to travel to a public library to satisfy his bookish needs? Or was the reading just a ruse to find willing students to talk to? Did his college have a dearth of that too? (this, unfortunately is more than likely to be true.) Could he, most graciously, provide me with a Letter of Recommendation? (this was that period of my life when I dreamed of Letters of Recommendation like Swami dreamed of his elysian cycle wheel.)

I was soon to resolve this mystery, for he was making his way towards me, having been rebuffed by a most studious girl, who (I later discovered) was a physics student.

“Have we talked before? Would you mind if I take a seat?” I assured him that I had dedicated the rest of my day to the art of navel gazing. I introduced myself. His face lit up when he saw the topology books in front of me. “Tell me, do you like number theory?” I replied that I did, but deeply regretted that I never got the chance to study it in an academic setting.

“Do you know Fermat’s Last Theorem?”

I cannot recall how I responded to this.

“There are others studying here. And the librarian here is not too fond of me. Let us take this discussion elsewhere.” And so we went to the other side of the floor, which overlooked a distant sea.

---

He had been a bank manager, I learned. A student of mathematics in the sixties, circumstances had steered him away from academia. But after retirement, finding too much time on his hands, he went back to mathematics: this time as a hobby. He was completely taken with Fermat’s Last, which had been briefly mentioned as an unsolved problem in a book he was reading. For five years he had toiled away at the problem, before someone told him that it had been settled almost a decade ago. Wiles’ proof he found to be intimidating and disappointing. “Fermat, was a lawyer. The statement of the theorem is instantly comprehensible. I am convinced that there has to be a proof that reflects this elegance and simplicity.” And thus, he had worked at his own elementary proof for the past decade.

I was quite impressed by his enthusiasm and determination. I was also thrown into a fit of melancholia. A misguided obsession with rigour had exterminated a schoolboy-like aspect in me: I had learnt to venerate the masters and their words. Rightly so, but perhaps a touch too much. I was increasingly convinced that I could, at best, only appreciate and understand mathematics – creation seemed a few ballgames out of my league.

And here was an old man, an amateur, it was just him versus an old problem, and he believed that he could do it. Fermat himself would have approved of him. While it would have been premature or even wrong to sound a eulogy to the spirit of the amateur mathematician, I could certainly see that the spirit had died in me. (Not insinuating that I had turned professional. Someday, I shall, hopefully.)

---

He spent the better part of the next hour explaining the historical lore of the problem, the innumerable stalwarts who had turned their attention to it, the crucial breakthroughs and the false victories. It was like being waylaid by Simon Singh. I could totally see an uninterested person muttering softly, “Unhand me, [you] grey beard loon!”. But I was enjoying it immensely.

He then offered to show me his proof. A personal diary was opened, stuffed with scraps of paper containing hand done calculations. His proof lay obfuscated within that book and was intelligible only to himself.
He began.

I must confess that I did not understand a whit of it. The notation was non-standard to say the least (“I have named these variables F,E,R,M,A and T; it’s my small way of paying homage to the great mathematician.”). Assumptions were lathered on unabashedly, new variables were introduced at the drop of a hat. He did attempt to explain a few of the assumptions in the beginning; further in they were dispensed with appeals to reasonableness/obviousness. I was aware that I could be really dense at times, so I bore it and persisted — and soon lost the thread entirely. The proof seemed to lack definitive purpose or direction, there were pages upon pages of mind-numbing manipulations. Several minutes later, I was asked if I understood what a particular line implied. My bewildered look and shake of the head must have disappointed him terribly, for he grew anguished and cried,

“That means the equation has tilted! It can have no solutions!”

I had no clue what a tilted equation was.

---

He had gotten in touch with a reputed, local, mathematician who granted him audience a couple of times. “Professor Bouillablasè is the top number theorist in this country. He was kind enough to guide me a bit, informally. He doesn’t respond to my mails or calls nowadays — he’s a very busy man. I must respect that.”

He had submitted an older version of his paper to a number of journals worldwide — and had received a response from just one, from Japan. Their reply was terse, amounting to just a sentence, but it had filled him with a great admiration for the Japanese. “In one single sentence, they told me what my approach was missing. I have since worked on it, and I think I have fixed it.”

“I am not a crank.”, he informed me sternly,“You do know who a crank is, right?” I nodded and smiled, having been caught unawares — the word had been niggling away at the back of my head. “If there is an error in my work, I would like to be told about it, so that I can fix it.” And so I was invited to critique his proof. I informed him that I was in no position to check the veracity of his work; but maybe perhaps he ought to re-check his assumptions so that he may not have proven the theorem for a smaller set. I soon got carried away and lectured to him at length about journals’ notorious obsession with pedantry, and about LaTeX and arXiv and blogging. I told him to post his problem to Stack Exchange, insisting that the Internet was full of people who would be willing to knock holes in his proof, for free.

He seemed apprehensive of the last bit – “What if someone steals my proof?”

---

It was nearly closing time, and he was in a hurry to get home. We had said our goodbyes, and he’d already turned around and left. I was picking up my stuff, ruminating on the day’s strange exchange, when I saw him coming back towards me. He asked me:

“Do you know why I hang around the library so often and discuss this problem with students?”

I turned and waited for an answer.

I was staring straight into his old cataract-tinged eyes, and I felt uncomfortable. His eyes betrayed his age, and a certain sadness.

He said: “I come here everyday so that I can talk to people about my proof. Sometimes they aren’t interested. Sometimes they are, despite not knowing rudimentary mathematics. It might even be that my proof is correct, and that I do not need to validate it.”

“But — “, he now tapped his breast, “ — the heart cannot bear to keep silent. The heart yearns for a ear to speak to, to share, and to participate. It is a human failing. And I can do nothing about it.” And saying so, he left.

I stood there transfixed, my hairs on end. His words stirred something within me – it resonated with something deep within, something I cannot pin down.
I felt a silent horror.

Perhaps you do not find  this moment particularly disturbing, for my words do a shoddy job conveying that moment and the horror I felt.

Maybe if you had been there, & heard his exact words, staring into his old eyes.
Maybe if you had been me.

Comedy, Divine.

In the far distance,
a beacon, a babel.
For now, that, and silence.
Men stop in their tracks
to stare blankly,
at Chaos: muted.
They think of searing flesh
the inordinate # of fucks they give.
In that flash, they hear his laughter.

An explosion in the sky,
staggering
in its monstrous silence.

The Eulogy Trilogy – II : Fatal Attraction

For a long time, the word was taboo. The idea, however, was not. In the immune recesses of my mind, it flourished secretly, far away from the moral pruning that I was subjected to as a kid. The concept was simple enough, but it was layered with absurd philosophical and evolutionary implications – which an emergent social consciousness conspired universally to label as the crime of the zeroth order.

Sui caedere: the crime against oneself.

I suppose it sparked off as an infantile reaction to a cloudburst at home: “If I were dead, maybe then you wouldn’t reprimand me/make me eat this brinjal crap/some other silly clause.” In retrospect, this brainwave, though certainly novel at the time, is based on the disturbing premise of being around to smugly overlook the obligatory lamenting. Disturbing for two reasons: firstly because breastbeating is NOT a pleasant entertainment by any shot, even if served with a dash of revenge. And even more importantly, the idea of still being around is even more horrific: “<laughter> I’m gone at las… oh snap”.

The first clear and distinct memory of considering it was in the immediate aftermath of my grandfather’s death (I was 11?), it seemed like a rather ingenious way of coping with the grieving process. “He’s dead, here, let me considering leaping off the first floor.” And soon, what sparked off as a simple idea slowly took root as a de facto refrain for the uncomfortable instances I faced – a feud with a friend, an embarrassing event – quite akin to the “I don’t want to live on this planet anymore” meme. Easily said but hardly meant.

I was now on the cusp of a transmogrification – from “maa ka ladla” to angsty teen, the angst being hormonal of course. From a twice-a-day-sandhi-doing, weekly-shloka-class-going, vedam-chanting, daily-kovil-hopping “good” kid (read: freak) to the teen who stayed cooped up in a room and avoided those activities which parents wanted their chamathu tambrahm boy to do. With adolescence came puerile ideologies – I was the first and the last person to invent solipsism (lol). I remember going around making statements like given a gun and given a bullet, I’d shoot myself because that’d solve all my problems at once, and not just any single one. The reactions ranged from “Wow, that’s fascinating!” to “What is wrong with this guy?” Those friends who suffered to suffer above-the-healthy-cutoff time in my company soon learnt to ignore these presumably dreadful trains of thought.

It is ironic of course, that thus far I neither had a worthy cause nor a compelling reason to top myself. Sure, I was depressed (by popular opinion), but if I were to be grilled about it, I’d probably just mumble “I just want to die” – fatally circular logic. I wasn’t yet in the clasp of self hate – I was just enamoured of a cut-throat, instantaneous solution.

So far, just theory. I hadn’t yet met the action side of the coin – I lived on the first floor, and I was convinced of how ridiculous such an attempt would’ve been. Meanwhile, my “reactionary” behaviour sent my handlers’ alarms haywire – I was carted off to two different child counsellors and grilled every once in a while (it was fun, back then). One of them suggested that I be given a punching bag to vent my extra fury (I’m not really sure what I was furious about. In fact, I believe I wasn’t, really). Sure enough, there arrived a pair of boxing gloves (looking professional enough), and an old careworn pillow to serve as the victim. This setup, suspended from the ceiling was the altar of transition – to an inviting void.

This was, I suppose, a purely academic venture, back then. And it was so for the rest of my school era. I wasn’t chronically depressed yet. I was in fact, very, very happy – in a surreal way (I’m not sure what exactly it was, but I was definitely high on something – maybe life). I was eager to go to school (my friends, as ever, justifed my existence), I’d dropped out of the IIT sweatshops (to zero resistance from my parents), Sir Penrose opened up unimagined vistas, and the radio ALWAYS played good music (this is a fallacy – my tastes were terrible back then). I was happy, and I knew it.

School life ended.

College is typically supposed to be a step up into the adult concepts of fun, responsibility (eventually, that is) and refining/redefining your moral outlook. Not in my case. Not entirely the institution’s fault, but it did affect me in profound ways. With an infinitesimal gender ratio (not exactly zero, for the effeminate type was not uncommon), a blanket ban on personal gadgetry, and having to stay cooped up for most of the year without the right to step outside – it was like an Indian version of an Amish monastery. The Gulag is what I call it in fond remembrance.

It began quite well, with the newfound naivete of a voluntary inductee. The novelty managed to last a year. Wherever you go, if you stay long enough and if you stare hard enough, you can definitely see the paint flaking. What you choose to do with such high power vision is what defines you: you could choose to be myopic and indoctrinate yourself in the hope that with faith you can unsee what is obvious – and that this faith will empower what you’re trying to believe into a reality. Alternatively, with a little more wile, you could play along – a follower to all appearances, but secretly objective and cynical. Like a selfaware troll. Or you could, having realised utopia was a lie, cease pursuit and wallow in rudderless dejection. Of course I chose the last – that’s me.

Depression set in, in a more serious sense here. Not just because of all that incompatibility. It felt like being in Mr. Nobody without any of the non-linear plot. The events, the routine, the food: every week was isomorphic to the last. It was a running joke that if someone asked you for the highlights of the day you could just refer them to the corresponding day last week. Everything, even my frustration against this periodic existence, was periodic. It was as if the polar night lengthened to a year.

This sense of bleakness was all I took home post graduation (apart from some superficial knowledge of math). And this time, the edge was never more attractive. Life felt bleh? – go philosophize with a twisted-pair wound around your nape. What did I see? A micro-reason to not die for the next half an hour – maybe a friend I’d been waiting to talk to, a sitcom that I’d wanted to finish, a good meal coming up – sometimes just teetering long enough to feel that the damn contraption hurt, and get off it. Or the most potent reason of all – feel the fear of death, and the asymptotic surge for life.

Micro-reasons, no doubt. Maybe they’d last a day or two, riding on other events and their outcomes. Sometimes not more than half an hour. Minuscule, but effective.

The Escape was now a background daemon. It could be relegated to the background, but not be killed. It cropped up in the chinks – in that lapse after a bout of breathless laughter, when you’re aware that it’s over, when conversations drifted to a topic irrelevant to you, in general whenever you were aware that you were then self-aware. You saw it everywhere, opportunities, shortcuts; eddies in spacetime.

It was a stalemate, and I was okay with it. Until I foolishly blurted out to my counsellor about the aspiring corpse in my cupboard. The therapist-client privilege clause works only if you’re the chap paying for your treatment. I wasn’t, and it all soon dominoed into medication, wrong diagnoses and other twaddle that I pray (as you do) I never stoop to write about. In detail, that is.

Here’s my type for added clarity. He thinks he’s grappling with the weightiest existential problems. There’s an eternal Why in his head that he’s now too numb to probe. He thinks he sees futility in action, and irony in thought. He wishes thought could cease and self-awareness could self-destruct. He envieth the potted plant. He thinks he’s wired with code that is wired to make him feel this way. He worships Bergman because he thinks can relate to the Scandinavian bleakness. He weeps on the rare occasion he watches Harold & Maude, well, because Cat Stevens. And because Maude dies, and because he hasn’t met that someone who tells him what he already knows in a form that he can ingest. He envies the stoic among his friends, the ones whose sense of self worth and personal convictions cannot be swayed by social acceptance. He’s just a nutshell in a universe.

It’s called, thanatos, I believe. I think it’s just a suicidal hipster’s way of saying he’s fatally different.

Which of course, he’s not. It’s just the same fear of death, uttered with a different accent.

Mythologick.

Aeons later and galaxy clusters far, far away, scientists finally concluded, by the machinations of their own arsenals, that a God did indeed exist. This Promethean being, they found, plugged every paradox and mystery they could come up with; handled arbitrarily long sequences of interrogatives, and came up with sensible, scientifically satiating answers every time.

They were most impressed.

Further discourse revealed something unexpected – this Overlord was not a Lord of mercy or morality or goodness-maximizing principles. This Being, was a God of Science.

Some were thrilled. “Yeah! Science!”, some of them said – presumably that class of pseudoscientists who go by the designation of chemists. Several were appalled. “Behind our heuristics, there is a being that plays Maxwell’s demon with us. We feel violated,” some of them said. They held deliberations, and reached a unanimous consensus. (who listens to chemists anyway?)

The Scientific Community was declared Officially Pissed.

And then there were the theists – hallelouiaing in their unassailable triumph over the naysayers. They were buzzed, happy. But not for long. For their victory lap was now marred by the rage of Someone else.

The now manifest Entity, was now the most annoyed of the lot. And for a very, very good reason (it had to be a very good reason – He could not undermine His own premise).
The theists had had faith in Him, but had done incredibly stupid things over the ages in this regard – thereby blatantly denying his Doctrine. The Scientists on the other hand, were nimbleheaded and hamhanded about the whole thing – they’d denied Him!

Nope, the Being wasn’t pleased at all. He seethed with mathematical fury; He itched to divide by zero and undefine the Universe. But nein, that was wrong: that wasn’t the scientific method. He took an arbitrary union of all those who ticked him off, summoned his demigod, De Morgan and began the complementation process. The report soon arrived. This was the list of things/people that/who hadn’t irritated Him.

It was the usual – inanimate objects, moss/lichens, tapirs, baby hippos, sloths, Keanu Reaves (“the useless twit”). He even espied a dodo in there. “This database is getting a bit redundant,” He muttered.

And then He noticed, a new entry: some people, who were not Keanu Reaves appeared to have made the list.

These were the people who didn’t give a hoot as to their creator, or anything else for that matter. Paraphrasing Miles Davis, they said “So What?” to whatever anyone ever had to say.

They were the so called Agnostics.

He was awed.
And these, He decided, were the people He wanted to be with. Folk who could shrug it, forget it, sip their tea and worry about irrelevant bunk. Basically, clueless Britlike peoples. Who drank tea.

He was thrilled, at the prospect of being at peace at last. He immediately teleported arbitrarily into one of their neighbourhoods. He sat there for a while and gazed absently at the ground, wondering at this turn of affairs.

His reverie was broken by someone, someone softly hailing “My Lord!” repeatedly.
His face soured. “Gah! Have I blundered? Did I take a wrong turn somewhere?” He spun around, and their eyes met – an aged man, wizened, slightly bent. He kept his gaze, expecting an explanation for this betrayal of afaith.

“My cat”, said the man benignly … “I call him The Lord. I am kind to him.”

The agnostic god burst into a spontaneous smile. This was it. This was where he wanted to be.

He was now happy; perfectly, unutterably happy.

By The Way (guestpost)

Written by V, a friend who has the last alphabet, the last numeral and is encyclopaedic.  Quite literally :) . Reblogged because this is the culmination of me unsuccessfully pissing him off. And because it’s insanely relevant.

The twilight arrives
The world prepares to plunge
Into darkness, Half a world
Refuses to sleep.
The sodium lamps lit,
Red tails flurry forth
The many lives in moving boxes,
I wonder of their trials
And worldly pleasures.
Out of focus,
Those lights speed away
To a world of their own,
Each fighting the watch maker,
Brought up to believe,
That the measure of a life
Is not a measure of happiness.
But alas, that is a reflection,
Of myself on countless lives,
As I stand here by the way.

The Eulogy Trilogy – I

Oh doggone it.

My wired wish for explicatory eloquence can take the back seat. I’ve always wanted to be like those ‘pitomes of perspective, universal wisdom and subtly punned abstractions that one finds online – but let me face it, it’s never going to happen. The only things I’m confident writing about are my very own homebrewn muckups, something I’m sure I am an authority on; despite what the all knowing cheery bastards who’d point me to Anne Frank or Au Hasard Balthasar say. I know I whine, but whynot? This is my goddamn blog.

I suppose I should provide an update on the chronicles of my life. A year ago I’d dropped out of my masters in a selfrighteous fit of something that still confuses me – I remember coining a rather impressive oneliner involving rat races and The Thrill is Gone and a few other cheesy lyric borrowings; but the tragicomic part was that I believed in it, kind of like those incredibly sad people who weep at happy (re)unions on sloppy romcoms.

I spent the rest of last year in an antipsychotic haze, acting as a regular, voluntary, redundant stooge to a psychiatrist, keeping minutes on the sessions – what the whole point was, totally beats me – maybe it was an attempt at infusing some purpose in my life as the SNRIs kicked in. It was mostly palatable, except for the part which involved me being asked to step outside while the poor sods were grilled about their sex lives – that soon got bloody annoying.

After that stint, on the unarguably most eventful birthday of my life (and that does include my unfortunate advent), I was conned with the help of a very dear nanbaen into being admitted to a psychiatric facility – for a course of regular, good ol’ shock therapy and mindnumbing medication. I spent three months re-enacting One Flew Over – fighting the Ratcheds and even staging a remarkably dumb escape attempt. It would have certainly been a memorable incarceration, were it not for the issue of  “short term” memory loss that typically accompanies being buzzed in the head.

I suppose the shit worked, because three months later, there I was bug eyed, benign, and vaguely amnesic. The most unfortunate byproduct was being re-infested with that cruel pest called hope. In a stroke of genius and convenience, I reapplied to that very same eminent university I had escaped from, and set myself up for a historic rerun of my former fiasco.

This time the spirit trajectory stayed steady for a month or so – sure, the old demons were there – but they were kept in check by a hectic routine, and aathu samayal (mom was around, then). Soon enough, I had no choice but to sustain on a diet of Subways (gah) (she left) – but things were still okay. I tackled the daily optimisation problems (planning and timing the routes between classes, and scheduling the coffee/Subway breaks), and came up with suboptimal solutions; I nearly filled in the Venn diagrams of the folk I shared classes with – so that with a single glance around me I could discern what I was in for (before the prof walked in, that is); I attended the bi-weekly classical recitals religiously and wept at the Great Masters (and at a Guadagnini; all silently of course); I whistled audaciously all the way home in the hopes of improving my lung power for a clarinet I intended to buy; and oh yeah I did buy a century old, nearly flawless French clarinet off the web – in the hopes of playing the chromatic glissando that kicks off Rhapsody in Blue; I actually made progress with Ulysses, and even relished it: the list does go on.

I guess the joke’s pretty obvious now ^, but I really did siphon healthy time and effort into the academic doohickey – I reverently lugged home hefty tomes of relevant literature, pored over them in the hopes of something clicking, to no avail (it’s the age of touch ‘omie!). Suboptimal should’ve been my middle name. But for the record, I did try. I’ll swear by all the gods I don’t believe in.

With all this unstable equilibrium lurking about, there surely must materialise that impartial, stoic, restorative nudge that whacks the bajesus out of the balance – all in the name of entropy and the Supreme Fascist. What is truly and most tearjerkingly beautiful is the way this return to the abyss is played out. If it were me, I’d have chosen/expected the discovery of booze, a long term illness or the promise of louwe and the resultant heartbreak (yes, I do dream beyond my means) as the modi operandi. There was a much more elegant solution, in my view worthy of being in the PFTB, that panned out.

They gave me a recess week.

Genius, right?

Leave me to my own devices, in a room and alone, and I will go Darwinian and kill myself. I stopped short of it. And butchered my career instead.

FAQ:
♦Is this an exaggeration of said events?
◊   Yes. n00%, n>2. In real life things were far more depressing, myopic and claustrophobic (starts weeping). For more references to reality, kindly refer to the next douchebag inquirer.

♦You can’t seriously blame your institution for giving you a week’s vacation! Don’t fool yourself. You were suboptimal, incompetent and lazy. You were scared senseless by the tests scheduled next week and you were behind on submitting thos…
◊    Dear mindvoice. STFU. You are not allowed to stray anywhere outside my head – where I can molest and subdue you with prescribed anti-schizophrenia medication. Now, get back in here, darling.

♦Ah, very funny and all that. But what worries me is the title – a trilogy? What have I ever done to you to deserve this infliction? Do I have to regret being a #niceguy and having subscribed to your posts?
◊    Dear #niceguywhomIknow (I will find you and I will gill you, if you unsubscribe); the prospect of piecing together two more posts strikes just as much terror in me as it evokes horror in you. But have hope: I have a sacred tradition of starting something and not following through – the next installment maybe the last. Or maybe even this one. #innocuous :)

Perpetuum Mobile

Oh for an ounce of meaning
And a pound of purpose,
The joy of the twain- in step:
Purpose sprouts into meaning
And meaning doth regress
A loop eternal, it be
Unceasing, billowing,
Fair enough to fire a lifetime,
Perchance even two: for each
may find the other’s sorrows
their brunt to bear; the joys
theirs to upkeep;
In concert, in tandem:
Man’s conception of
Perpetuum Mobile.