Life is Not About Finding Yourself But Losing Yourself

David Brooks here is focusing on the message of the Srimad Bhagvad Gita as faithfully as Krishna / Vinoba.  The message of the Geeta is universal and one can find it in the words of thinkers like Brooks.  I have always believed that Gita is simply the blueprint for humanity for the time it spends on this wonderful planet of ours.  In other words and at the risk of some degree of oversimplification, here is the scheme of things

Child arrives on Earth => Grows and learns the ways of human society => Understands the message of Gita

and then,

Leads life accordingly => Attains peace of mind for self and others => Departs Earth in the spirit of Geeta

And let me emphasise, in order to understand the message of the Geeta they dont have to sift through Indian classical tomes, this Brooks article would suffice.

***


May 30, 2011


It’s Not About YouBy DAVID BROOKS

Over the past few weeks, America’s colleges have sent another class of graduates off into the world. These graduates possess something of inestimable value. Nearly every sensible middle-aged person would give away all their money to be able to go back to age 22 and begin adulthood anew.

But, especially this year, one is conscious of the many ways in which this year’s graduating class has been ill served by their elders. They enter a bad job market, the hangover from decades of excessive borrowing. They inherit a ruinous federal debt.

More important, their lives have been perversely structured. This year’s graduates are members of the most supervised generation in American history. Through their childhoods and teenage years, they have been monitored, tutored, coached and honed to an unprecedented degree.

Yet upon graduation they will enter a world that is unprecedentedly wide open and unstructured. Most of them will not quickly get married, buy a home and have kids, as previous generations did. Instead, they will confront amazingly diverse job markets, social landscapes and lifestyle niches. Most will spend a decade wandering from job to job and clique to clique, searching for a role.

No one would design a system of extreme supervision to prepare people for a decade of extreme openness. But this is exactly what has emerged in modern America. College students are raised in an environment that demands one set of navigational skills, and they are then cast out into a different environment requiring a different set of skills, which they have to figure out on their own.

Worst of all, they are sent off into this world with the whole baby-boomer theology ringing in their ears. If you sample some of the commencement addresses being broadcast on C-Span these days, you see that many graduates are told to: Follow your passion, chart your own course, march to the beat of your own drummer, follow your dreams and find yourself. This is the litany of expressive individualism, which is still the dominant note in American culture.

But, of course, this mantra misleads on nearly every front.

College grads are often sent out into the world amid rapturous talk of limitless possibilities. But this talk is of no help to the central business of adulthood, finding serious things to tie yourself down to. The successful young adult is beginning to make sacred commitments — to a spouse, a community and calling — yet mostly hears about freedom and autonomy.

Today’s graduates are also told to find their passion and then pursue their dreams. The implication is that they should find themselves first and then go off and live their quest. But, of course, very few people at age 22 or 24 can take an inward journey and come out having discovered a developed self.

Most successful young people don’t look inside and then plan a life. They look outside and find a problem, which summons their life. A relative suffers from Alzheimer’s and a young woman feels called to help cure that disease. A young man works under a miserable boss and must develop management skills so his department can function. Another young woman finds herself confronted by an opportunity she never thought of in a job category she never imagined. This wasn’t in her plans, but this is where she can make her contribution.

Most people don’t form a self and then lead a life. They are called by a problem, and the self is constructed gradually by their calling.

The graduates are also told to pursue happiness and joy. But, of course, when you read a biography of someone you admire, it’s rarely the things that made them happy that compel your admiration. It’s the things they did to court unhappiness — the things they did that were arduous and miserable, which sometimes cost them friends and aroused hatred. It’s excellence, not happiness, that we admire most.

Finally, graduates are told to be independent-minded and to express their inner spirit. But, of course, doing your job well often means suppressing yourself. As Atul Gawande mentioned during his countercultural address last week at Harvard Medical School, being a good doctor often means being part of a team, following the rules of an institution, going down a regimented checklist.

Today’s grads enter a cultural climate that preaches the self as the center of a life. But, of course, as they age, they’ll discover that the tasks of a life are at the center. Fulfillment is a byproduct of how people engage their tasks, and can’t be pursued directly. Most of us are egotistical and most are self-concerned most of the time, but it’s nonetheless true that life comes to a point only in those moments when the self dissolves into some task. The purpose in life is not to find yourself. It’s to lose yourself.

GR: Author's Preface

                                                                   Author’s Preface

The "Author" here refers to Bal Gangadhar Tilak.  Please refer to the post titled "Project Gita Rahsaya" before reading this post.

                   Gita is essentially a treatise for leading an action oriented life and not that of contemplation even as it indicates that both can co-exist.

                   Gita states that a life of selfless action never leads to commission of sin and (even if ostensibly it appears to be the case) ultimately such a doer attains Moksha.

                  The plan of Gita Rahsaya is to lay down the life principles and theories in an order first enunciating them for the lay reader and then gradually elaborating them along with a critical comparison with the fundamental principles of other (mostly western) religions and philosophical systems.

                  Even though we attempt to understand and compare the ideas of Moksha with that of other foreign systems it is to be understood that not only is it difficult to comprehend these ideas through the prism of foreign systems but these concepts are beyond comprehension for anyone. The limits of conventional human knowledge fall quite short of such ideas.

                  Outside of the Indian landscape it is Aristotle who has propounded ideas that we find in the Gita though it is possible he does so in a different context. In any case Gita predates Aristotle by several hundreds of years.

                  The beauty of Gita is not that it is a comprehensive system of cosmic knowledge (Brahma-Gyan) but that what to appears be contradictions between the principles of morality, devotion and moksha are infact not true. In other words for Gita the ideas of contemplation and action are mutually compatible. However, Gita quite unequivocally emphasizes on a life of action or Karma.

                                      “Gita Sugita Kartavya Kimanyeeh Shastravistaryeeh”


(Meaning) Learning and Understanding of Gita is sufficient and even necessary. We then need not carry out a detailed study of all other classical philosophical treatises.

Here Gita is not playing down the importance of the other classics but only gently reminding the student to first undertake the study of the Gita before other classics.

Project Gita Rahsaya

             My affair with the Gita (or Geeta) continues. As the previous entry in the blog shows I had attempted to translate Vinoba’s talks on Gita in English. Indeed I did post my translation of the first chapter. But then apart from the usual laziness I display in completing things I start another thing happened and I had to discontinue the translation. I found the English translation by the same publisher! Silly me, I should have thought of that earlier. Anyway no harm done! Perusing the English Vinoba I felt mine was not too bad an attempt.


             In addition I also stumbled upon an mp3 rendition of Vinoba’s talks on the net. This was manna from heaven. The publishers permit free downloads and I copied all the files on my mobile phone and over the course of the last few months I had the pleasure of listening to the lectures while commuting and at times just before going to sleep. God has been kind. There is one nagging fear. Though quite unnecessary I am sure. I have started to appreciate the message of the Lord and of course it’s a powerful voice. My fear is would I be able to sustain my efforts. Would I have the courage and strength not to stray from the path in face of all obstacles for the rest of my life? Of course Lord himself has pointed out that one should leave all such fears and apprehensions to be taken care of by the Almighty. Sometime back I read an account of a woman from New Zealand who spent some time in Lhasa in the company of a Tibetan nun. The account is inspiring. The author (Claire I believe her name is) many years before she came in contact with the nun had met an Indian spiritual teacher who had advised her to "surrender" in order to experience spiritual bliss. As I read it then the idea appeared quite jaded to me. However Claire at the end of her story indicates that she did in fact come to appreciate the idea of ‘surrender’ in course of her association with the nun and Tibetan Buddhism. The reason I bring this up is that over the last few months I too (at least that’s what I feel) have begun to understand the meaning of ‘surrender’. Gita has shown me the way.

            Coming back to Vinoba, in course of his lectures in several places he refers to Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s Gita Rahsaya (Secret of Gita). After reading Vinoba’s lectures and hearing them several times over the tape I got more curious about Gita Rahsaya (GR) hoping to read it seriously to start training myself in Karmayogashastra. A few days back I was browsing through a book sale near Churchgate station and I stumbled upon GR quite by chance. It was destiny at work I think. However, this is serious stuff. Not only is the volume quite hefty, some 700 pages, it is fine print in Hindi which too is not colloquial but classical. Nevertheless I am pleased. Not only I feel this is the logical next step after introduction of the subject by Vinoba but given the vast scope of the project I would be happily employed for sometime to come.

               You can’t keep a passionate translator down for long. Yes ! I now mean to post my thoughts and lessons from GR on the blog. But this time I am only going to post in a bullet fashion key points which I pick up in course of my readings.



**Om Ganeshaya Namah**

2010 Vacation

This is my Fav-5 outside the Cellular Jail in Port Blair.  A heart rending place.

Mom, Dad and I on the coral riddled beaches of Andaman.

Inside Amer Fort, Jaipur

Priya and Saumitra monkeying around in Madras Airport.  During the 10 day trip we probably spent clear  24 hours only in airports.

Inside Jaigarh Fort, Jaipur

Dipti and kids at the Qutab Minar

At Humayun's Tomb (my favourite Mughal monument). I like the parrot flying across the photo
at the top!! Good timing by wife.

District Park, Janak Puri and my playground (my backyard)

Another view of the same.  I spent all my childhood playing here, climbing trees, catching tadpoles or just lazying around.  I even penned a few poems here.

Opinion#1 (End of 2010)

                    The blog contains lots of stuff sourced from other sites, NYT, WSJ and whatever else has interested me.  But I am thinking why not pen (or type) which is my own creation!  Wake up sid! So from now on I will post my thoughts here at least once a month.  My friend Martin in New York does the same every quarter wherein he provides an update on his life.  As I said I will try to do this once a month and have decided to call this series of posts as "Opinion".  Rather grand, isn't it? Topics may be anything except professional matters.

In the first opinion piece a quick recap of the last year with a focus on my health.  The start of 2010 was not exactly great when my back pain laid me low for sometime. But after that brief scare the rest of the year passed off uneventfully health-wise.  Professionally speaking the year was satisfying if not extraordinary.  I feel in my current organization I am probably working in one of the best places possible and I enjoy my work thoroughly. 

But I want to wrap this post talking of health matters.  I have a close to 100 year old Bengali neighbour in Delhi and a few years back we were talking and he commented that in his experience with doctors and alopathic medicine he felt that it was always a 50-50 situation.  Meaning thereby that the doctor and his treatment worked only half the time.  I too feel the same.  For example, I am a chronic throat patient with a bout or two of tonsillitis affecting me each year.  And the treatment is usual.  I sadly meet a physician and he prescribes strong antibiotics.   Now this happens every year and it happened in 2010 as well.  The first time it happened I went through the usual routine.  But lo and behold! Within 2 weeks of completing the course of antibiotics and when I should be in the pink, I had the old tonsils acting up again and rather viciously too.  Since I had no choice in the matter I landed up at my ENT's doorstep again.  He was not perturbed or apologetic in the least that his very expensive treatment had completely failed and that too for no fault of mine. But he really got my goat when he suggested that if after taking antibiotics again for 2 weeks the problem persisted I was to return to him for a tonsillectomy!!

I am telling you on hearing the doctor's prognosis something snapped inside me and I decided there and then that I was not going to have his prescriptions or ever think of returning to him. I came back home and launched myself on a week long self medication involving only frequent gargling of my throat with saline water.  And it worked!!  Three months have elapsed and I am still in control of my tonsils. 

Barcelona

December 16, 2010


Barcelona’s Other Architect, DomènechBy ANDREW FERREN

IT’S sometimes hard to have a conversation about Barcelona that does not include the name Gaudí in it. The world is so gaga for Antoní Gaudí — the genius of Catalan modernisme (the Spanish version of Art Nouveau) whose early 20th-century buildings are virtual emblems of the city — that most of his modernista contemporaries go little noticed by tourists.

But if you’re like me, and don’t much like the structural theatrics and unbridled mannerism of Gaudí’s buildings, check out those of Lluís Domènech i Montaner (1849-1923), an under-sung hero of the movement. A journey to the three places in Catalonia where his buildings made a splash a century ago — including Barcelona — is made easier by following the Barcelona Modernisme Route, which was created in 2005. A guidebook and map of the route can be bought for 18 euros, or $23.50 at $1.31 to the euro, at several kiosks around the city, and can be viewed online at rutadelmodernisme.com.

Domènech is often hailed as the most modern of the modernistas, notably for his mastery of lightweight steel construction. Unesco, at least, doesn’t give him short shrift, having designated his most important buildings in Barcelona a World Heritage Site (just as it did with the works of Gaudí). Multifaceted and astonishingly productive, Domènech wore many hats. Besides being an architect and professor (Gaudí was his student at Barcelona’s School of Architecture), he was also a prominent politician and Catalan nationalist and a pre-eminent scholar of heraldry.

For architects, Barcelona at the turn of the 20th century was the right place at the right time. Nineteenth-century industrialization brought tremendous wealth, and between the Universal Exposition of 1888 (for which Domènech created two of the most noteworthy buildings) and the construction of the Eixample — the vast grid of streets laid out in 1859 to decongest the old city — there was a heady mix of civic pride and social ascension in the air. The rising middle class was eager to make its mark on the rapidly growing city, and the new modernista style seemed perfectly suited to this task, rife as it was with neo-Gothic motifs that linked the newly minted mercantile titans to Barcelona’s rich medieval history.

Robert Lubar, an associate professor at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, points out that, much more so than Gaudí, Domènech was influenced by the English Arts and Crafts movement of Ruskin and Morris. “He believed that ‘the complete interior’ served some kind of ethical purpose,” Professor Lubar said.

Domènech’s most “complete interior” is the 1908 Palau de la Música Catalana, a stunning concert hall miraculously shoehorned into a small lot at the junction of the old city and the new. Often likened to a conductor, Domènech knew how to get the best performance from the sculptors, ceramicists and woodworkers who executed his designs. Indeed, nearly every surface inside the auditorium has been adorned with color, texture and relief and, because the walls and ceiling are made almost entirely of stained glass, colored light.

Atop the balcony’s mosaic-clad columns, bronze chandeliers tilt like sunflowers toward the stained-glass sun that seems to float in midair from the ceiling’s inverted dome. The astonishing expanses of glass were achieved with the use of structural steel — invisible beneath so much decoration.

The other pillar of Domènech’s World Heritage status is the Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau (Hospital of the Holy Cross and Saint Paul), set on 40 park-like acres at the northern edge of the Eixample. Heeding the latest theories of hygiene, Domènech envisioned a complex of 20 pavilions to ensure ventilation and access to sunshine. He ingeniously sunk the corridors and service areas of the hospital underground so that patients and visitors in the pavilions and gardens above would feel as if they were in a village — a fantastical one with myriad domes, spires, finials, sculptures and mosaics. Currently, the 12 pavilions Domènech built (his architect son completed the last eight) are being restored; some will become a museum of Modernisme and others offices for humanitarian organizations like Unesco. Until its scheduled opening in 2016, hard-hat tours are offered daily.

With the Modernisme Route’s map and guidebook in hand, you can lead yourself around Domènech’s residential structures in Barcelona, most of which are clustered between the Passeig de Gracia and Carrer Girona. You can stay in one of the grandest of his palatial homes, Casa Fuster, now a five-star hotel, at the top of Passeig de Gracia. In the street-level Café Vienes, you can sip Champagne and admire a vaulted ceiling and a forest of marble columns.

Near the port is the Hotel España, which, though not built by Domènech, had its restaurant, La Fonda España, renovated by him a century ago. It’s just been spruced up and shines anew with Domènech’s strappy wood and ceramic wainscoting, murals by Ramon Casas and a sculptural fireplace by Eusebi Arnau.

Want to see more? Eighty miles south, in the town of Reus, is Casa Navàs, another “complete interior,” which surrounds you the minute you step into the stair hall — a tiny indoor garden of flowers and vines wrought in mosaic, stained glass and carved stone. Throughout the house, the capital of each column features a different floral motif. Most of the rooms contain their original, exuberant furnishings by master craftsmen like Gaspar Homar.

On the outskirts of Reus, the Pere Mata Institute, a mental health hospital begun by Domènech in 1898, was meant to counter the tradition of keeping the mentally ill out of sight. Today you can visit one of the six pavilions, the one that housed “rich and illustrious men,” as the guide explains on the 90-minute tours. The sumptuously decorated men’s pavilion has a billiard room, grand salon and formal dining room. But lest it be confused with a typical men’s club, the delicate-looking leaded glass windows were reinforced with iron to keep patients in.

Upstairs, the rooms contain many of their original furnishings, including clever armoires with basins (and running water) built into them. There were also suites with office spaces (and secretaries) for those patients who still had empires to run.

About 50 miles northeast of Barcelona in the coastal town of Canet de Mar, one can see three charming structures in the space of about 100 yards. Domènech’s mother was from the region and he also had a home here, which is now a museum that displays his drawings and original furnishings. Across the street is the Ateneu Canetenc, once a cultural and political club and now a library.

Perhaps the most satisfying stop in Canet is Casa Roura, a little fortress of a house that is now a restaurant. The facade’s bravura brickwork creates a lively play of light and is further animated by turrets, parapets and gleaming roof tiles glazed in cobalt blue and canary yellow. The old double-height salon with its baronial fireplace is now the main dining room. On par with the rich architectural surroundings is the amazing lunch menu (13.50 euros) — especially the seafood fideua (like paella, but made with pasta instead of rice).

The tour ends where Domènech’s love of medieval architecture may have begun: at his mother’s house. (One of them anyway — the Castell Santa Florentina in the hills above Canet has been in the Montaner family for centuries.) Around 1909, Domènech expanded the original fortified stone house, deftly mixing his neo-Gothic riffs with authentic Gothic architectural elements like columns, portals and arcades “harvested” from a defunct monastery into a modernista masterpiece, one that quite literally spans the ages.

IF YOU GO

IN BARCELONA

For 18 euros, or $23.50 at $1.31 to the euro, a Modernisme Route pack of two guidebooks with maps and discounts for many sites can be purchased at special Modernisme tourist offices in Plaça de Catalunya, Hospital de Sant Pau and Pavellons Güell. Information: www.rutadelmodernisme.com.

Palau de la Música Catalana, Palau de la Música 4-6, (34-90) 247-5485; www.palaumusica.cat. A tour is 12 euros.

Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau, San Antoní Maria Claret 167, (34-93) 291-9000; www.santpau.es.

Hotel Casa Fuster, Passeig de Gracia 132, (34-93) 255-3000; www.hotelescenter.es.

Hotel España, Sant Pau 9-11, (34-93) 318-1758; www.hotelespanya.com

IN REUS

Tours of both the Pere Mata Institute and Casa Navàs can be arranged on specific days through the Reus tourism office.

Reus Turisme, Plaça del Mercadal 3, (34-97) 701-0670; turisme.reus.cat

IN CANET DE MAR

Casa Museu Lluís Domènech i Montaner, Xamfra Rieres Buscarons i Gavarra, (34-93) 795-4615; www.canetdemar.cat. Entrance fee: 2 euros.

Casa Roura, Riera Sant Domènec 1, (34-93) 794-0375; www.casaroura.com.

Castell Santa Florentina is a private home but tours can be booked some Saturdays and by appointment. Riera del Pinar s/n, (34-609) 813-339; www.santaflorentina.com.

Hong Kong (November 2010)

Visting Hong Kong for the first time.  As a matter of fact this is first time I have traveled east of India.  HK is a quite a charming town, a symbol of what capitalism can do for man and also perhaps that all this prosperity, the infestation of high end brands are about all that it can provide.  HK people are extremely friendly and while English speaking is a problem on more than an ocassion when I asked somebody for directions and they either didnt follow me or were not able to tell me ensured that someone who could was brought forward to help me out.  I am displaying three pictures here.  The first one above is the famed Hong Kong skyline.  I took this from atop 'The Peak' and the tall building in the middle is the International Finance Centre 2.  I like the way it stands in the middle of the picture, present but almost surreal.

This picture (or self portrait) was clicked using the self-timer.  I am usually averse to uploading my own pictures on the web but the reason I put this one out is that it rather faithfully displays the signs of impending middle age.  I feel that this picture captures me the way I think about myself.  Appears to be lost and am actually so most of the time!

This one is that of the Tian Tan Buddha perched atop the hills of Lantau Island of Hong Kong.  Again the self-timer came to my aid and did quite a job.  I placed the camera on the ground facing the sky and then placed a folded newspaper underneath it so that it tilted towards the statue.  I had no idea that this was the best angle possible.  Buddha appears to be handing out a pat on my shoulder to thank me for my efforts!!

Satayajit Das is at it again

Debt shuffling will be a self-defeating exercise


By Satyajit Das


Published: July 12 2010 16:10
Last updated: July 12 2010 16:10

George Bernard Shaw observed that “Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history”. Emerging details of the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) bear testament to this.

The structure echoes the ill-fated collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) and structured investment vehicles (SIVs). The head of the EFSF also had a brief stint at Moore Capital, a macro-hedge fund, entirely consistent with the fact the new body will be placing a historical macro-economic bet.

In order to raise money to lend to finance member countries as needed, the EFSF will seek the highest possible credit rating – triple A. But the EFSF’s structure raises significant doubts about its creditworthiness and funding arrangements. In turn, this creates uncertainty about its support for financially challenged eurozone members with significant implications for markets.

The €440bn ($520bn) rescue package establishes a special purpose vehicle, backed by individual guarantees provided by all 19 member countries. Significantly, the guarantees are not joint and several, reflecting the political necessity, especially for Germany, of avoiding joint liability.

The risk that an individual guarantor fails to supply its share of funds is covered by a surplus “cushion”, requiring countries to guarantee an extra 20 per cent above their ECB contributions. An unspecified cash reserve will provide additional support.

Given the well-publicised financial problems of some eurozone members, the effectiveness of the 20 per cent cushion is crucial. The arrangement is similar to the over-collateralisation used in CDOs to protect investors in higher quality triple A rated senior securities. Investors in subordinated securities, ranking below the senior investors, absorb the first losses up to a specified point (the attachment point). Losses are considered statistically unlikely to reach this attachment point, allowing the senior securities to be rated triple A. The same logic is to be utilised in rating EFSF bonds.

If 16.7 per cent of guarantors (20 per cent divided by 120 per cent) are unable to fund the EFSF, lenders to the structure will be exposed to losses. Coincidentally, Greece, Portugal, Spain and Ireland happened to represent around this proportion of the guaranteed amount. If a larger eurozone member, such as Italy, also encountered financial problems, then the viability of the EFSF would be in serious jeopardy.

There are difficulties in determining the adequacy of the 20 per cent cushion. There is the potential risk that if one peripheral eurozone member has a problem then others will have similar problems. The structure faces a high risk of rating migration (a fall in security ratings). If the cushion is reduced by problems of one eurozone member, the EFSF securities may be downgraded. Any such ratings downgrade would result in mark-to-market losses to investors.

Unfortunately, the global financial crisis illustrated that modelling techniques for rating such structures are imperfect. Rapid changes in market conditions, increases in default risks or changes in default correlations can result in losses to investors in triple A rated structured securities, ostensibly protected from this eventuality. Given the precarious position of some guarantors and their negative ratings outlook, at a minimum, the risk of ratings volatility is significant.

This means that investors may be cautious about investing in EFSF bonds and, at a minimum, may seek a significant yield premium. The ability of the EFSF to raise funds at the assumed low cost is not assured.


Major economies have over the last decades transferred debt from companies to consumers and finally onto public balance sheets. A huge amount of securities and risk now is held by central banks and governments, which are not designed for such long-term ownership of these assets. There are now no more balance sheets that can be leveraged to support the current levels of debt. The effect of the EFSF is that stronger countries’ balance sheets are being contaminated by the bail-out. Like sharing dirty needles, the risk of infection for all has drastically increased.

The reality is that a problem of too much debt is being solved with even more debt. Deeply troubled members of the eurozone cannot bail out each other as the significant levels of existing debt limit the ability to borrow additional amounts and finance any bail-out.

The EFSF is primarily a debt shuffling exercise which may be self defeating and unworkable. The resort to discredited financial engineering highlights the inability to learn from history and the paucity of ideas and willingness to deal with the real issues.

Satyajit Das is the author of the recently released “Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives”

Bush versus Merkel

The Telegraph
May 26, 2010


It’s Lehman the sequel, with Merkel as Bush

The big lesson of the financial crisis was that no bank must be allowed to fail. The same applies now to Greece.  As the Queen’s Speech yesterday was overshadowed by yet another meltdown in global financial markets, I was reminded of Her Majesty’s faux-naif remark to the learned professors of the London School of Economics shortly after the failure of Lehman Brothers in the autumn of 2008: why did no one see this crisis coming?
The economists’ official answer, conveyed after another six months of deep cogitation in a three-page letter to Buckingham Palace, was that the economics profession did, of course, see it coming and had warned all along about global imbalances, excessive borrowing and so on. The problem was that politicians, bankers and overpaid financiers did not pay enough attention to the professional economists’ warnings.

The reason I have disinterred this episode is that the learned professors were wrong in their diagnosis of the disaster. The Queen’s question, taken in the context, was not about long-term issues such as mortgage debts and risk-management models. It was about the failure of politicians and economists to foresee the catastrophic consequences of allowing the failure of this one middle-sized bank.

The question of how the failure of Lehman turned a more-or-less normal boom-bust cycle into the greatest financial crisis of all has still not been satisfactorily answered by politicians, establishment economists and central bankers. And now, almost unbelievably, there is a serious risk that the world’s failure to understand the true lessons of Lehman will precipitate another financial disaster.

The key lesson from the failure of Lehman was that, in the midst of a systemic financial crisis, no significant bank should ever be allowed to fail. When an entire financial system is in peril, the cost of offering unlimited government guarantees and taxpayer bailouts will always be much smaller than the losses from allowing any significant bank to collapse. Such bailouts and guarantees may, in the long run, encourage excessive lending and other irresponsible behaviour, but that is an issue to be addressed by regulation after the crisis is over. In dealing with systemic financial crises, the risks of increasing moral hazard are irrelevant in comparison with the certainty of disaster triggered by the failure of any significant bank.
Today exactly the same analysis has to be applied to the risk of Greece or any other European government defaulting on its debts or dropping out of the eurozone. If any such default were to occur, it could trigger a global financial catastrophe even larger than Lehman. Yet the possibility of a Greek debt default or restructuring is being positively promoted by many of the world’s most respected economic and financial commentators. The German Finance Minister has repeatedly suggested temporary suspension from the eurozone as a punishment for the Greek Government’s transgressions. The German representative on the European Central Bank has stated publicly that he voted against the bank buying Greek government bonds. And the leader column of the Financial Times demanded yesterday that Greece must be made “safe to fail”, by preparing the ground for orderly restructuring. Such a restructuring, the FT went on to argue, would punish the German and French banks that were imprudent enough to lend Greece too much money and “whose governments inexcusably prefer to bail them out on the sly via Greece”.

These were exactly the sort of veiled threats, in some cases from the same authorities, heard before Lehman was allowed to collapse. It is hardly surprising that investors are starting to question the solidity of the guarantees against any kind of default that were supposedly provided two weeks ago by eurozone governments and the European Central Bank.


What is truly alarming about the present situation is that the world has so recently seen the catastrophic consequences of using debt defaults in the midst of a financial crisis to punish imprudent lenders. Yet some of the key policymakers and opinion formers seem, like the Bourbons, to have learnt nothing from the Lehman experience and to have forgotten none of their prejudices.

The fact is that if Greece were allowed to renege on its debts, the foreign banks that held €338 billion of Greek debt at the end of 2009 would immediately move to dump their additional €333 billion of Portuguese debt and probably their €1,500 billion of Spanish debt. And who knows how well over two trillion euros of Italian debt would be treated? The plunging value of Greek and Iberian bonds would immediately threaten several of the main French and German banks with insolvency, requiring government guarantees that would run into trillions of euros.

If Greece or any other member of the eurozone were temporarily suspended, as suggested by the German Finance Minister, the consequences would probably be even more catastrophic. The euro would immediately be revealed not as a genuine single currency but merely as a foreign exchange arrangement of the kind that has frequently collapsed under market pressures, for example in Argentina, Thailand and, not least, in the British experience of the ERM.



The citizens of Southern European countries would quickly understand this and would transfer their savings to banks in Germany and the Netherlands, leading to a collapse of the euro project within weeks and the probable failure of every Southern European bank.



Any such upheavals would dash hopes of global recovery from the 2008 crisis and would cause irreparable damage to public finances already on the brink of catastrophe. It is obvious that such calamities must be avoided, almost regardless of cost or whether it sets a bad example to improvident governments or bankers.



Astonishingly, however, the Greek tragedy in Europe is looking more and more like a revival of the Lehman drama. The €750 billion bailout package announced two weeks ago by EU governments is being hedged about with so many conditions and qualifications that it resembles the original $700 billion Bush bailout plan. The 16 bickering leaders of the eurozone seem to be emulating the confusion of the US political establishment and multiplying it by 16. And the starring role of the ideologically blinkered and incompetent President Bush, out of his depth and flailing helplessly in matters of high finance, is played by Angela Merkel.



Even as a long-time sceptic about the euro project, I find it almost impossible to believe that, just two years after Lehman, Europe would make the same blunders as the Bush Administration. But, as we have learnt again and again in this long period of turmoil, the impossible can become inevitable without even passing through improbable.

In defence of WORDS

History for Dollars
By DAVID BROOKS

When the going gets tough, the tough take accounting. When the job market worsens, many students figure they can’t indulge in an English or a history major. They have to study something that will lead directly to a job.
So it is almost inevitable that over the next few years, as labor markets struggle, the humanities will continue their long slide. There already has been a nearly 50 percent drop in the portion of liberal arts majors over the past generation, and that trend is bound to accelerate. Once the stars of university life, humanities now play bit roles when prospective students take their college tours. The labs are more glamorous than the libraries.
But allow me to pause for a moment and throw another sandbag on the levy of those trying to resist this tide. Let me stand up for the history, English and art classes, even in the face of today’s economic realities.

Studying the humanities improves your ability to read and write. No matter what you do in life, you will have a huge advantage if you can read a paragraph and discern its meaning (a rarer talent than you might suppose). You will have enormous power if you are the person in the office who can write a clear and concise memo.

Studying the humanities will give you a familiarity with the language of emotion. In an information economy, many people have the ability to produce a technical innovation: a new MP3 player. Very few people have the ability to create a great brand: the iPod. Branding involves the location and arousal of affection, and you can’t do it unless you are conversant in the language of romance.

Studying the humanities will give you a wealth of analogies. People think by comparison — Iraq is either like Vietnam or Bosnia; your boss is like Narcissus or Solon. People who have a wealth of analogies in their minds can think more precisely than those with few analogies. If you go through college without reading Thucydides, Herodotus and Gibbon, you’ll have been cheated out of a great repertoire of comparisons.

Finally, and most importantly, studying the humanities helps you befriend The Big Shaggy.

Let me try to explain. Over the past century or so, people have built various systems to help them understand human behavior: economics, political science, game theory and evolutionary psychology. These systems are useful in many circumstances. But none completely explain behavior because deep down people have passions and drives that don’t lend themselves to systemic modeling. They have yearnings and fears that reside in an inner beast you could call The Big Shaggy.

You can see The Big Shaggy at work when a governor of South Carolina suddenly chucks it all for a love voyage south of the equator, or when a smart, philosophical congressman from Indiana risks everything for an in-office affair.

You can see The Big Shaggy at work when self-destructive overconfidence overtakes oil engineers in the gulf, when go-go enthusiasm intoxicates investment bankers or when bone-chilling distrust grips politics.

Those are the destructive sides of The Big Shaggy. But this tender beast is also responsible for the mysterious but fierce determination that drives Kobe Bryant, the graceful bemusement the Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga showed when his perfect game slipped away, the selfless courage soldiers in Afghanistan show when they risk death for buddies or a family they may never see again.

The observant person goes through life asking: Where did that come from? Why did he or she act that way? The answers are hard to come by because the behavior emanates from somewhere deep inside The Big Shaggy.

Technical knowledge stops at the outer edge. If you spend your life riding the links of the Internet, you probably won’t get too far into The Big Shaggy either, because the fast, effortless prose of blogging (and journalism) lacks the heft to get you deep below.

But over the centuries, there have been rare and strange people who possessed the skill of taking the upheavals of thought that emanate from The Big Shaggy and representing them in the form of story, music, myth, painting, liturgy, architecture, sculpture, landscape and speech. These men and women developed languages that help us understand these yearnings and also educate and mold them. They left rich veins of emotional knowledge that are the subjects of the humanities.

It’s probably dangerous to enter exclusively into this realm and risk being caught in a cloister, removed from the market and its accountability. But doesn’t it make sense to spend some time in the company of these languages — learning to feel different emotions, rehearsing different passions, experiencing different sacred rituals and learning to see in different ways?

Few of us are hewers of wood. We navigate social environments. If you’re dumb about The Big Shaggy, you’ll probably get eaten by it.

Family gets back tom

There is no need to provide updates, no need to evaluate life on the basis of some shallow criteria. Just some moments spent in quite contemplation, a mind focused on larger goals in life (which I hope is free of sickness and pain) are for me happiness and joy. There will be episodes of misery, of suffering losses, seeing our loved ones unhappy but at such times I will do all I can to reach out, to help out those who I can help and that's about it. After that when I can once again retreat to my inner courtyard where a comfy chair awaits with me ,so does a good book, I will curl up to experience the joy that only a tranquil solitude can offer.

So the family gets back tomorrow and very productive period of introspection has come to an end. But no problem. I look forward to the shrieks and laughter of my children, the loving and thoughtful caresses of my wife and in the background the dim but uninterrupted humming of the rhythm of my life.

Computers taking over everything

JUNE 4, 2010.Fast Traders' New Edge
Investment Firms Grab Stock Data First, and Use It Seconds Before Others.

By SCOTT PATTERSON
Some fast-moving computer-driven investment firms are getting an edge by trading on market data before it gets to other investors, according to market players and researchers who have studied the trading.

The firms gain that advantage by buying data from stock exchanges and feeding it into supercomputers that calculate stock prices a fraction of a second before most other investors see the numbers. That lets these traders shave pennies per share from trades, which when multiplied by thousands of trades can earn the firms big profits.

Critics call the practice the modern day equivalent of looking at share prices listed in tomorrow's newspaper stock tables today.

"It is a rigged game," Sal Arnuk, co-founder of brokerage firm Themis Trading, said Wednesday at a Securities and Exchange Commission roundtable discussion in Washington, D.C., referring to the trading activity, which some call "latency arbitrage."

While legal, the practice pushes the envelope of what is fair, critics say, and raises questions about the advantages some fast-moving traders are gaining in the market.

The SEC roundtable convened executives from trading centers and firms across Wall Street as the agency continues to probe high-frequency trading and the growth of dark pools, trading venues where trades take place away from the main exchanges.

High-frequency trading has come under greater scrutiny since the May 6 "flash crash," when some high-frequency firms along with a number of other active traders withdrew from the market, arguably exacerbating the stocks' swift downdraft that day.

High-speed trading, now estimated to account for about two-thirds of U.S. stock market volume, takes many forms, some entirely proper. Defenders say it reduces trading costs for all investors by adding volume to the market. Latency arbitrage is a type of trading that relies on ultrahigh speeds; it's not clear which firms engage in it or how pervasive it is.

Some firms pay tens of thousands of dollars a year to individual exchanges for premium access to their price feeds, industry players and exchanges say.

The SEC, in a broad review of market structure earlier this year, said information from trading-center data feeds "can reach end-users faster than the consolidated data feeds."

The latency arbitrage trade aims to game the so-called national best bid and offer price on a stock, which sets the price most investors use to trade.

The ability to estimate price moves ahead of the national best bid and offer price, which is consolidated electronically from exchanges, can give traders an advantage of about 100 to 200 milliseconds over investors who use standard market tools, according to a November 2009 report on such trading activities by Jefferies & Co.

An advanced look at exchange data and order flow can provide firms "the ability to forecast future prices" and "make adjustments to their orders in the market or send new orders which are based on this information," the report found.

Some investors are searching for ways to protect themselves. Rich Gates, co-founder of TFS Capital LLC, started becoming concerned about latency arbitrage in early 2009 after a Wall Street bank pitched the trade to his firm.

In hundreds of tests, TFS has found that some of its trades were getting picked off by firms exploiting the time-delay wrinkle. That was costing the firm money.

To learn more, TFS, which manages about $1.1 billion in mutual funds and hedge funds, devised a method to essentially bait firms into engaging in the trade. In effect, TFS proved that some traders were wise to a movement in a stock's price before it happened.

On a March afternoon, a TFS trader sent an order to a broker to buy shares of Nordson Corp., a maker of fluid dispensing equipment. The trader sent an instant message to the broker: "please route to broker pool #2," a request to send the order to a specific dark pool.

The trader told the broker not to pay a price higher than the midpoint between what buyers and sellers were offering, which at the time was $70.49.

Several seconds after the dark pool order was placed, the market price didn't change. Then the TFS trader set a trap: he sent a separate order into the broader market to sell Nordson for a price that pushed the midpoint price down to $70.47.

Almost immediately, TFS was sold Nordson for $70.49—the old, higher midpoint—in broker pool No. 2, which didn't reflect the new sell order. TFS got stuck paying two cents more than it should have, suggesting that some seller knew the higher price was a good deal to nab quickly.

Such trades are "unusually suspicious," said Mr. Gates.

Most dark pool operators say they police investors for improper activities. Liquidnet, which runs a dark pool, had suspended 125 members through 2009 for suspicious trading since its launch in April 2001, the firm says.

Music, Brain and Language

May 31, 2010
Exploring Music’s Hold on the MindBy CLAUDIA DREIFUS
Three years ago, when Oxford University Press published “Music, Language, and the Brain,” Oliver Sacks described it as “a major synthesis that will be indispensable to neuroscientists.” The author of that volume, Aniruddh D. Patel, a 44-year-old senior fellow at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, was in New York City in May. We spoke over coffee for more than an hour and later by telephone. An edited and condensed version of the conversations follows.

Q. YOU DESCRIBE YOURSELF AS A NEUROSCIENTIST OF MUSIC. THIS HAS TO BE A NEW PROFESSION. HOW DID YOU COME TO IT?

A. I’ve been passionate about two things since childhood — science and music. At graduate school, Harvard, I hoped to combine the two.

But studying with E.O. Wilson, I quite naturally got caught up with ants. In 1990, I found myself in Australia doing fieldwork on ants for a Ph.D. thesis. And there, I had this epiphany: the only thing I really wanted to do was study the biology of how humans make and process music.

I wondered if the drive to make it was innate, a product of our evolution, as Darwin had speculated. Did we have a special neurobiological capacity for music, as we do for language and grammar? So from Australia, I wrote Wilson that there was no way I could continue with ants. Amazingly, he wrote: “You must follow your passion. Come back to Harvard, and we’ll give it a shot.”

Wilson and Evan Balaban, a birdsong biologist who taught me about the neurobiology of auditory communication, mentored me through my thesis, which was called “A Biological Study of the Relationship Between Language and Music.” When I defended it in 1996, this was unusual scholarship. The neurobiology of music wasn’t yet a recognized field.

Q. WHEN DID IT GO MAINSTREAM?

A. Not too long after that. By the late 1990s, all of neuroscience was being transformed by the widespread use of imaging technologies.

Because it became possible to learn how the brain was affected when people engaged in certain activities, it became acceptable to study things previously considered fringy. Today you have the neuroscience of economics, of music, of everything.

I published a paper in 1998 that really surprised people. It was the first imaging study showing what happens when the brain processes musical grammar as compared with what happens when it processes language. From what we learned, this was occurring in an overlapping way within the brain. And this was a clue that the neurobiology of music could give us a new path to access and perhaps even heal some language disabilities.

Q. HOW WOULD THAT WORK?

A. One example. There’s a neurologist in Boston, Gottfried Schlaug, who uses music therapy to return some language to stroke victims. He has them learn simple phrases by singing them. This has proved more effective than having them repeat spoken phrases, the traditional therapy. Schlaug’s work suggests that when the language part of the brain has been damaged, you can sometimes recruit the part that processes music to take over.

Music neuroscience is also helping us understand Alzheimer’s. There are Alzheimer’s patients who cannot remember their spouse. But they can remember every word of a song they learned as a kid. By studying this, we’re learning about how memory works.

Q. RECENTLY, YOU’VE BEEN WORKING WITH A SULFUR-CRESTED COCKATOO NAMED SNOWBALL. WHAT PROMPTED THE COLLABORATION?

A. Before I encountered Snowball, I wondered whether human music had been shaped for our brains by evolution — meaning, it helped us survive at some point. Well, in 2008, a colleague asked me to view a YouTube video of a cockatoo who appeared to be dancing to the beat of “Everybody” by the Backstreet Boys!

My jaw hit the floor. If you saw a video of a dog reading a newspaper out loud, you’d be pretty impressed, right? To people in the music community, a cockatoo dancing to a beat was like that. This was supposed to be, some said, a uniquely human behavior! If this was real, it meant that the bird might have circuits in its brain for processing beat similar to ours.

Q. WHAT DID YOU DO WITH THIS INSIGHT?

A. I phoned up the bird shelter in Indiana where Snowball lived and talked to the director who told me his story. A man had dropped him off with a CD and the comment, “Snowball likes to dance to this.” One day, Irena Schulz, the proprietor, played “Everybody” to amuse the abandoned creature. And Snowball began to move. Irena then made the YouTube video, which immediately went viral. Millions saw it.

“Let’s design an experiment to see if this is real,” I proposed to Irena, who had a science background herself. We took the Backstreet Boys song, sped it up and slowed it down at 11 different tempos, then videoed what Snowball did to each. For 9 out of the 11 variations, the bird moved to the beat, which meant that he’d processed the music in his brain and his muscles had responded. So now we had the first documented case of a nonhuman animal who, without training, could sense a beat out of music and move to it.

Q. YOU SAY THAT SNOWBALL CHANGED YOUR THINKING. HOW?

A. Before Snowball, I wondered if moving to a musical beat was uniquely human. Snowball doesn’t need to dance to survive, and yet, he did. Perhaps, this was true of humans, too?

Since working with Snowball, I’ve come to think we could learn more music neuroscience by studying the behaviors of not just parrots, but perhaps dolphins, seals, songbirds — also vocal learners.

We eventually published the Snowball research in Current Biology. A group at Harvard published a paper right alongside ours in which they surveyed thousands of YouTube videos to see if there were other animals spontaneously moving to a beat. They found about 12 or 13 parrots. No dogs. No cats. No horses.

What do humans have in common with parrots? Both species are vocal learners, with the ability to imitate sounds. We share that rare skill with parrots. In that one respect, our brains are more like those of parrots than chimpanzees. Since vocal learning creates links between the hearing and movement centers of the brain, I hypothesized that this is what you need to be able to move to beat of music.

Q. IS IT DIFFICULT TO FIND MONEY FOR THIS TYPE OF RESEARCH?

A. It easier than it used to be. One of the founders of this field, Dr. Robert Zatorre, before 2000, he never used the word music in a grant application. He knew it would get turned down automatically because people thought this was not scientific. Instead, he used terms like “complex nonlinguistic auditory processing.”

But in recent years, it’s become O.K. to say: I study music and the brain.

A productive day

Well finally I did something I had been meaning to do for a long time. First lets evaluate the progress thus far of the goals we had earlier stated as follows:

1. Read the Fixed Income Analysis book: Progress is good but can be better. Target is to complete reading till ch. 8. I am currently in the middle of ch. 6.

2. Figure out forward trading in forex markets: Not done.

(Non professional goals)

1. Complete my office housekeeping issues: Not done but promise to do it tomorrow.


2. Write an article based on V S Ramachandran's "Phantoms of the Brain": Not done as I lent the book to an interested colleague who has family member suffering from some brain ailment.


3. And just for kicks call the Guitar teacher !! Well I had second thoughts about lugging a heavy guitar around.


4. Minimise eating out:-( This was tough but happy to report only two outings so far and one was really necessary. Actually there is one planned tomorrow as well but its with the office crowd.

But the feather in the cap is that I finally translated in my own words and as per my style the first chapter of Vinoba's Geeta. Loved doing it and practically did it in 2 sittings (3000+ words). I like it.

With this last accomplishment I think we can easily award more than 8/10 in terms of progress. Honestly, if I can complete Chapter 2 of Vinoba before family comes back I would be truly elated. Chapter 2 is not just great in terms of its message but pretty long too, 18 pages compared to just 4 in the first chapter.

Geeta Notes (Chapter One)

Introduction

This is a very rough and approximate translation of the sacred and mighty Geeta . Perhaps I could be a little less irreverent and more religious in my language. But then these notes are not an outpouring of an entranced devotee. If anything, I’ve spent quite a bit of time trying to be more religious, more devout and more like my parents, sibling, spouse and wider family when it came to matter of religion but I’ve failed miserably. But that is another story and we will revisit it some day.

Here I want to tell how Geeta entered my life (after several failed attempts earlier and which failed entirely due to my shortcomings) and that now it has a permanent place regardless of whether I behave properly or not. I think this smacks of arrogance!

So where did we meet? My place of work is located in South Mumbai and I have about 2 hours of commuting each day. From the terminal station (called Churchgate) I often walk to my office- a walk of some 15 minutes. Enroute is a landmark-Flora Fountain and in the nearby public space some two years back the Gandhi Foundation people had set up a small stall selling Gandhian literature. As is my wont, I stepped in and was casually browsing looking for something about Gandhi, his thoughts and people he knew or something that I had not already read. My eyes fell upon this petite book in Hindi- Geeta Pravachan (tr. Geeta Discourse) by Vinoba Bhave. Till that point my knowledge about Vinoba was confined to the fact that he was a prominent Gandhian and that he led some sort of land donation (Bhoodan) movement. When and how this movement started I had no idea. But the book appeared promising and I bought it for Rupees Eighteen (or less than 50 cents). Part of the promise I saw in the slim volume arose from the fact that buying Geeta was, or so I convinced myself, the right thing to do in terms of my religious doctrine. And of course, the remaining reason and perhaps more compelling one at that was it was slim and so could be read easily during my commute. Thus, I came in to possession of my Geeta which I am proceeding to translate in to English entirely for my own pleasure.

I have no delusions of rendering a faithful or a masterful translation of this ancient masterpiece. There are enough and quite impeccable ones available. What follows now is I reading and discussing Geeta with myself and for myself. I am not going to list reasons for why I feel motivated to do so. Do I see this as my calling? Do I think I have understood the divine message in the Geeta perfectly and this is an attempt to circulate it amongst the heathen? Do I believe that Geeta has transformed me and that I am now what Geeta describes a human being should be? Would I claim this translation as my intellectual copyright and use it for any commercial purpose? Do I intend to send links of this document to people I know and try to impress them? There could be many more similar questions but answer to all the questions is a very unequivocal NO.

So without further ado I start with the First Chapter.


FIRST CHAPTER (PRATHAM ADHYAYE)

ARJUNA’S LAMENTATION


Dear Brothers (as narrated by Vinoba),


My relationship with the Geeta is beyond any logic or reason. As my body has been fed and nourished on my mother’s milk so have my heart and mind been even more nourished by the essence of the Geeta. When it comes to the matters of the heart, logic is not enough. Going beyond reason and relying on the twin wings of faith and practice I seem to fly in the vast skies of the Geeta effortlessly. I live in the environment created by the Geeta and it is my life source. When I speak to people about the Geeta it is akin to going in for a swim in this vast ocean of nectar and when I am alone I plunge in this ocean’s depths and stay there.

Mahabharata and Ramayana are our national epics and the characters described therein have become an integral part of our lives. Rama, Sita, Dharamraja, Draupadi, Bheeshma, Hanumana and other characters in these two grand epics have enthralled us through the centuries. While Ramayana is a wonderful verse describing the path of righteousness, Mahabharata is a gigantic and comprehensive treatise on social living. In the latter, Lord Vyasa has composed hundred thousand chronicles with innumerable images, characters and characterizations all of which merge in to a saga without a parallel in human history. Just like we find perfection only in our Creator, similarly we also realize that all human beings have some trait or the other which redeem them despite their numerous failings. This message is clearly brought forth by Mahabharata. Thus while on one hand we see obvious flaws in the divine characters like Bheeshma and Yudhishtira we are also witness to some lofty and redeeming traits in clearly evil characters like Duryodhana and Karna. To me the Mahabharata is an inexhaustible goldmine which we should all loot to our heart’s content for our own spiritual enrichment.


The intriguing aspect is that Lord Vyasa wrote such a grand epic and yet it is not clear if there’s a direct message from him somewhere in it. Throughout the epic we find scores of references to fundamentals of knowledge and philosophy, numerous lectures on morality but is there any part of the Great epic which literally contains the essence of this entire saga? The secret key to the reason for the existence of Mahabharata, does it lie anywhere in the depths of the Mahabharata? Yes, it does. He has placed the essence of the entire Grand epic in the Sreemadbhagvadgeeta or (for us) the Geeta. Since ancient times, Geeta has been considered as the first among the Upnishadas. In fact, the Lord appears to have captured the essence of all the Upnishadas in the form of the Geeta and presented it to the entire world through the medium of Arjuna. Any conceivable thought that enables us to be better human beings and lead improved lives figures in the Geeta. Many a great observer has referred to the Geeta as a treasure trove of righteous living (Dharamgyana). The Geeta itself might be a small part in the vast body of sacred Hindu scripture but it enjoys a position of unchallenged supremacy.

Everybody knows that Krishna narrated the Geeta to Arjuna. It is said that listening to this Great Teacher Arjuna was completely lost in Him that he became undistinguishable from Him. Lord Vyasa while describing this celestial enthrall himself got lost in the message of the Geeta that he too came to be known as Krishna. Thus, the Teacher, the student and the scribe all of them merged in to a trinity that could only be called Krishna. All three entered the state of Samadhi. The readers and followers of the Geeta need to achieve similar concentration.

Some people mistake Arjuna’s distraction or the sudden awakening of filial love and Krishna’s attempts to shake it off as being the main reason for Krishna revealing the Geeta to him. This is too narrow a reason for the revelation of this supernova of wisdom. Arjuna was an accomplished warrior and no one including Krishna had any doubts regarding his martial capabilities or his certain victory in the battlefield. Nor was any non-violent propensity on part of Arjuna led Krishna to attempt to shake off the former’s sudden contraction of cold feet. In reality, when Arjuna led by his charioteer Krishna finds himself in the center of the battlefield surrounded by four generations of his family members, comrades in arms all willing to cut down each other, he is overcome with a great affection for all these people and in turn starts providing Krishna a critique of war itself in terms of its disastrous consequences for family and society at large.

I am reminded of an anecdote here. There was a very eminent judge who had sentenced scores of criminals to death by hanging. One day his own son was convicted for murder and stood before him for sentencing. All of a sudden the clear and straightforward justice starting citing numerous reasons against death penalty! Hanging is an inhuman form of punishment, such a punishment does not do credit to our society and by executing the convict we summarily eliminate the possibility of improving him and rehabilitating him back in the human society and similar reasons flowed in a torrent from the lips of the learned judge. Not only that, he almost started to defend the convict by suggesting that , “it was a crime of passion” and that, “hanging this man after he has expressed remorse for his deed is a blot on mankind” and so on so forth. Had his son never appeared before him the venerable judge would have continued to mete out the death penalty merrily as before but the moment his son was in the dock he did a 180 degrees turn. This was not based on any noble principles to which the judge was beholden, it was merely his affection for his child that drove him to deliver such polemic against the death penalty and stray from his swadharma.

Arjuna found himself in a similar predicament. Not that the reasons offered by him against war and killing were irrational but at the same time they were not his innermost convictions based on foundations of some core philosophy (darshana). He was merely indulging in dialectics to turn his back on the impending carnage. Krishna was more than aware of this inherent contradiction in Arjuna’s arguments and without reasoning with him point for point he started directly attacking his manifest affection for his family. Had Arjuna turned a complete non violent, he would have not fought despite the revelations but this is one of those ifs which is not answered in the Geeta. Thus we are left with the inescapable conclusion that Arjuna showed signs of irrational filial affection and had he succeeded in warding off the battle he would have only delayed it perhaps with even greater consequences. Krishna’s message and the Geeta is a direct attack on this affectation displayed by men in times of adversity and internal upheavals.

As if it was not enough, Arjuna started talking about renouncing the world and taking to the jungles. But would he have made that transition as easily as he thought? Donning the garb of a sanyasin does not make one and for all we know he would have easily taken to hunting innocent animals in the forest. As a result, Krishna pointed out to him, “Arjuna you are only fooling yourself by saying that you won’t battle. All your life you have fought and won battles without pausing to reflect on the loss of human lives so why today? You are meant to battle and you won’t be able to live without battling. It is your nature and your righteous duty (swadharma).”

In course of his lamentation Arjuna started seeing complete lack of merit in the concept of swadharma. Vinoba states that whether one sees merit in swadharma or not it is in the interest of the individual to still exercise it as it alone is the path to one’s development in a holistic sense. Would such an adherent of swadharma be termed as arrogant? Arrogance in the form of clutching on to some innate idea of swadharma. According to Vinoba, no, such a person is not arrogant. Swadharma is not a good that we may accept it if we see merit in it and discard it if we don’t. In fact, it is as per the person’s size (in terms of his character) . Everyone has their own swadharma. Not only does it change with time, what I perceived as my swadharma ten years ago is not so anymore and ten years later I will have different understanding of my swadharma. Contemplation and experience alter our attitudes and with time we tend to leave behind our older swadharma and acquire new swadharma. Holding on to what I see as my swadharma once and forever is simply being stubborn and is ultimately self defeating.

(Analogy) As a corollary, swadharma is non-transferable. In other words if I perceive someone else’s swadharma as being superior to mine and thus attempt to acquire it I would end up nowhere. Let’s say I admire the Sun. Sunlight is beautiful and empowering. I worship the Sun. Yet if I decide to leave Earth and try to reach the Sun I would soon be vapourised. On the contrary if I continue to inhabit the Earth and try to actualize my swadharma it would lead to my salvation and ennoblement. And of course ensure my survival!

There’s another corollary. If I find another’s swadharma as easier to exercise that too should not tempt me to abandon mine and long for the other. As a householder if I find the burden of raising a family too much I should not seek escape in renunciation of the world. What would happen if I did? I would run away to a forest and there I would start living in a cottage. Soon I would start adding to my comforts there, like a protective fence, a better bed and so on. Thus, I would soon recreate conditions from which I had been meaning to escape all the time. In fact, if I had exercised detachment in my mind in the first place, I would have never felt the need to run away despite all the burdens of domesticity. Ultimately what matters is the attitude, the innate vision with which I see my world around me.

This last illustration begs the question: why did Krishna not lead Arjuna towards the path of renunciation (sanyas) if this is most superior of duties? Of course, the Lord could have done that for what is impossible for Him? Yet he did not simply because such an act would have rendered Arjuna’s human efforts in seeking his kalyana (salvation / ennoblement) defeated. We need to appreciate the fact that Lord has granted us free will. And it is in the interest of each individual to exercise his / her free will and work towards the goals set in this process. Little kids enjoy drawing and painting. They do not like it if a grown up were to draw for them or improve their creations. Similarly, if the teacher were to solve all the problems for the pupils wherefrom would they learn to solve problems, how would they develop their intelligence? Parents and teachers are meant to just offer suggestions and general guidance. And Lord does the same from inside- guide us. That is all he does, nothing more. If like a potter who by heating and tapping the vessel from all sides ensures that it is fit for use, if the Lord too set out to create perfectly intelligent humans then existence would be quite drab. We humans are not earthen vessels, we are sentient beings.

From the above discourse we can safely conclude that the Geeta took birth essentially to vanquish the distractions that we all encounter in the pursuit of our swadharma. Arjuna too suffered from the same malady of refusing to see his swadharma. Thus, after Krishna has concluded his revelations, he asked Arjuna, “Arjuna, have your distractions left you?” Arjuna replies, “Yes my Lord, my affectation has left me and I can clearly see my swadharma.” Whether it is the Geeta’s prologue or its epilogue, the gist is crystal clear- destroy your affectation. And indeed this is the gist of all Mahabharata. Lord Vyasa has indicated in the beginning of the epic, “I am lighting this immortal lamp to vanquish vain distractions and affections from the public sentiment.” What a vision and what stupendous success it has achieved that thousands of years after it was written, imperfect and misguided souls like mine seek and find such clarity and direction in its words.

Arjuna’s role thus becomes very important for us to understand the Geeta. But we have to be grateful to him in more than one way. Arjuna offers us an unique launch pad from which we can seek the Lord’s guidance. Literally translated Arjuna means the possessor of humility (perhaps even naivete). Arjuna did credit to himself by honestly revealing the upheavals in his heart to Krishna. Not a shred of his dilemma (as perceived by himself) he hid from the Lord. This complete surrender actually served to lead him in to Krishna’s sanctuary. To think of it he was already under the Lord’s protection. No sooner had he offered the charioteer-ship of his chariot to the Lord he had in effect handed over the reins of his sensibilities to Him. Lets all too do the same. Let’s not bemoan that Arjuna had Krishna but what about us? Where are we going to find Him? This is not the point. In fact let’s not even debate whether someone called Krishna actually existed or not. This is an infructuous historical discussion. In reality Krishna resides in each and every heart. He is actually closer than we can imagine. He is right here and right now. So let us all stand before Him and humbly declare the filth that is in our minds and hearts and beseech Him – Lord! I am at your mercy; You are my Master and Teacher. Show me the right Path. Whatever Path you show me I shall embark on it and no other. If we were to do this, then that Lord Parthasarathy will become our charioteer too and from his Holy lips he will reveal the Geeta to us and lead us to Victory.

(Vinoba on Sunday, 21st February 1932 & sid on Sunday, 31st May 2010)


***

The Colosseum, Rome

A Wonder From Any Angle
By JAMES GARDNER
What does it take to rank as one of the seven wonders of the world? As a species, we delight in making lists, which is what drove Herodotus in the fifth century B.C. and Callimachus of Cyrene a century later to enumerate the seven wonders in the first place. With the single exception of the Great Pyramid at Giza, all of their marvels have been felled by time. But what seems to have united these monuments was a combination of staggering massiveness, inspired engineering and an iconic simplicity that rendered them instantly legible and rich in symbolic resonance.

For many centuries, the Colosseum in Rome has been on everyone's list of seven wonders, and it effortlessly meets the three requirements mentioned above. No matter how big you expect the Colosseum to be, in reality it proves to be even bigger. Shaped like a nearly perfect cylindrical drum, it is one of the very first things to amaze the newcomer to Rome, and it richly supplies one of the greatest delights of modern tourism: physical, touchable propinquity to what, before that instant, we had known our entire lives but only through the mediation of images and words. Seen from some distance along the Via dei Fori Imperiali—which Mussolini created in the 1930s to open up such a vista—it stands before you like an incarnated postcard.

That is how most visitors first experience the Colosseum in person. And usually it is the only way they see it, before they actually enter the site. But there is another way, as I learned by accident last summer. I had roused myself at the crack of dawn to visit a noble and undeservedly neglected ruin at the summit of the Esquiline hill, known as the Nymphaeum or Temple of Minerva Medica. It stands on Via Giolitti, next to the squalid railyards of Stazione Termini, Rome's answer to Penn Station. Today most of the Esquiline is off the tourist track, but it holds sundry charms. From the Nymphaeum, on the ancient site of the Gardens of Licinius, you pass through the Piazza Vittorio into the Gardens of Maecenas on the lower Esquiline, where you see the ruins of the Baths of Titus.

It was at this point, as I began to descend the Esquiline's steep southern spur, the Oppian Hill, that I saw in the distance a flash of marble or, more precisely, travertine. I thought nothing of it at first, since Rome abounds in marble-clad piles, mostly from the 19th and early 20th centuries. But as I continued, this length of bright stone, coming into focus as a catenary of composite pilasters, began to expand laterally, until it assumed an awesome, even monstrous size. For a moment it looked to be scarcely more than one story tall. It was only as I continued my descent in the hazy morning light that the structure gradually acquired additional stories beneath those composite pilasters, until my dawning intuition was triumphantly confirmed: I was standing over the Colosseum, looking down at it from an Olympian height nearly parallel to its summit. I was now seeing the Colosseum in an entirely new way.

Terrible things, surely, once happened here, from gladiatorial slaughter to the persecution of early Christians. But that must not obscure the fact that the Colosseum stands for much of what was best in the Roman state.

The location of the Colosseum, built by the Flavian emperor Vespasian and his sons and successors Titus and Domitian between A.D. 70 and 80, was as polemically important as its size and shape. For it rose over an artificial lake that the unbalanced Nero, their imperial predecessor, had ordered to be built in his private residence, the infamous Domus Aurea. To build it, Nero had seized, in the very center of the city, a parcel of land roughly two-thirds the size of Central Park. And beside the lake he erected an enormous statue of himself, a colossus, from which the new stadium would subsequently take its name. Thus in building the Colosseum, also known as the Flavian Amphitheater, Vespasian gave back to the people of Rome what Nero had taken from them. In the process, a symbol of high-handed autocratic excess under the last of the Julio-Claudians became a monument to Rome itself, built by the new dynasty.

In size, beauty of architectural detail and state of preservation, none of the empire's 250 other amphitheaters, whatever their present or former state, can compare with the Colosseum. Even though, for centuries, it had been plundered and stripped for raw materials; even though it has done duty as a fortress and a church; even though half of it was nearly sheered off by a sequence of earthquakes (largely restored by Raffaele Stern and then Giuseppe Valadier early in the 1800s)—the Colosseum still presents itself to contemporary viewers much as it did to their ancient predecessors.

In addition to much else, the Colosseum is the tallest structure to survive from classical antiquity. At 157 feet, it is roughly the height of an early skyscraper, a fact concealed by its great elliptical girth, ranging between 510 and 615 feet. Despite the fact that the Colosseum served a function as pedestrian as Madison Square Garden's, its external ornamentation is so refined, and yet so restrained, as to reflect credit upon the civilization and the dynasty that created it. The three stacked arcades—which rise from Doric to Ionic and Corinthian before concluding in a walled summit with composite pilasters—unfurl with the greatest delicacy and tact. The Colosseum could have been overbearing, but it is not. It could have been fussy and maladroit, but it is not. It is so perfectly balanced, so definitive, that one risks taking it for granted.

That sense of equipoise, so Roman in its restrained practicality, presages the rationalism and functionalism of modern architecture. But, in the U.S. at least, architectural vision is all too rarely expended on sports arenas. And as for the Colosseum's closest structural parallel in New York, Madison Square Garden, the less said the better.

—Mr. Gardner is a critic based in New York.

Day (?)

Why does it always happen that I promise something on the blog (and eleswhere) and then fail to follow it up. Unpardonable. I mean I had stated that I will report daily progress but I havent. Before I proceed to describe the events since the last week (nothing much) lets look at the progress made so far.

1. Doing some professional reading though the pace can be much better.

2. So far have eaten out only twice and tonight almost ordered pizza but then ate some home cooked food. However, as the quantity was not enough at the moment I am trying my best to not think of food (while I can write about it!)

3. Visited a new bookstore near Lower Parel station. Its called Landmark, I think its the same chain which runs the eponymous bookstore in Madras. Well it was quite well stocked and there was a fair crowd. I liked the collection too though once again the latest releases (books already released in NY and London) were not available. By the way I stumbled upon something which was authored by a neighbour in Delhi. After having gone through some pages it left me a little confused about the ideas of the author, though honestly I was a bit jealous that this guy who I thought was good for nothing should be turning author and all that. Later that night I mentioned the book to my father over phone and next day, lo and behold, the author in question calls me up in office to inquire where I had found the book and raving about the circulation numbers. The funny thing- he probably spoke to me after a gap of 20 years. Before he hung up he asked if I had bought the book to which I had to reply with a no and he got a bit upset. I like that.

4. Nothing else to report. Still wondering when I should change jobs. I will but after having lived in Mumbai for almost 4 years I am not sure if I want to get back to Delhi. I mean one thing is the heat. Will visit this bit again.

5. I just have to mention this- read a few James Herriot stories today, maybe for the 35th time. Boy are they good or what. My safe, simple and 100% guaranteed antidote to feeling sad and lonely.

Day 3 (Day 2 sorry)

Apologies for not reporting yesterday. Excuse being that was quite busy throughout the day and finally when I returned by 10 pm was just too tired to work on the computer.

Actually I was at the Brand Equity Quiz , Mumbai round held in Bandra. The subdued tone should be eloquently suggesting to you , dear reader that we (with my team mate from the Bank) didnt make it even to the final round. Hindustan Lever won. I knew the very first question in the final which came to the audience but another guy shouted me down in catching Derek o'Brien's (the quiz master) attention and yours truly just watched the rest of show silently seething with anger.

As for the tasks progress, not much but Day 3 appears promising. Have a busy day ahead at the office where I have to prepare a report on the performance of the US economy for the last 6 months for a meeting of our highest decision making committee. The stock markets continue to trek downhill with the sovereign debt crisis still causing aftershocks post the Greek sovereign debt earthquake. Not that it will interest you but the US 10 year was at 3.39 which is a warning sign. Lets see.

Missing family especially the younger one and from the phone calls it appears that he too is missing me. He is just 2 year but displays a lot of boy kind of qualities and I being the only other male in the household (yes we both have checked each other out) he sort of knows that we are on the same side. Delighted at the thought of raising him (and of course his sister too):-) I have to stop now but will certainly attempt to post something later tonight.

Family's away

Day 1 (May 16, 2010)

Dipti and the babies have gone to her parents' place for 3 weeks. So is this a great opportunity to learn something new (say playing the guitar) or learn professionally useful skills or reading some books that I have been planning to read for a long time. Time will tell. The track record is actually quite sad. On such occasions in the past I have ended up watching movies at all hours almost 99% of the time. The first day this time too was no different even though I did some damage control late in the evening by spending an hour at Bandra's Crossword bookstore just browsing. On return (after downing two gulab jamuns at Brijwasi's on Linking Road) flopped down on the couch to watch Goodfellas for about an hour before my conscience yanked the remote from my grip and switched off the T.V. To avoid this catastrophe from occuring again these notes here are intended to monitor my progress regarding the following goals:

1. Read the Fixed Income Analysis book
2. Figure out forward trading in forex markets

(Non professional goals)

1. Complete my office housekeeping issues
2. Write an article based on V S Ramachandran's "Phantoms of the Brain"
3. And just for kicks call the Guitar teacher !!
4. Minimise eating out:-(

Most Important

Post your progress or the lack of it here everyday!