Aamchi Mumbai? Really?

Bombay. The city of dreams. Or as they say.

I am from a small town called Firozpur, lying on the borders of India and Pakistan in the state of Punjab. My life has been spent as a nomad, travelling from city to city for a near regular interval of 3 years, owing to the fact that my father was an officer in the Indian Army. I consider myself to be a purely metro guy, spending my adolescence in the beautiful city of Pune. Delhi was always a mystery to me. Friends told me it was the place to be. The aura around it proved too strong to resist, as destiny( or whatever that is) forced me to spend my college life here( I am not complaining! ). I never thought I could have an aversion for any city, since I truly believe that the World is my Country, and Science is my Religion. That was the case until I landed in the city of Mumbai( Or Bombay as the hippies called it) in January 2009 for some purely academic work.

The negatives were overwhelming. Over the years, I gave the city more chances, but mostly I got only disappointment in return.

The weather. It really sucks. Sweating in the winter months of January isnt something you would love. You go around the city covered in sweat and I have to tell you it will get worse. Every Mumbaikar I talked to would say that they get used to it. Well, you would, wouldn't you? After all, if your livelihood depends on this soon-to-be-swamp city. NGC claims that the city would have had drowned by 2050. What do you expect from a city which takes in from the Arabian Sea and throws it back there.

The people. They say the people live in the true spirit of the city. Not meddling into anyone's affairs. Live and Let Live. I say they just don't give a damn. I haven't found ruder people than some folks here in the city. And I must say, even though Delhi isn't considered safe for women, it is definitely a helpful city. The traffic is everywhere. No-one has time for anyone else. For a person like me who likes to travel, this city presents a great deal of challenges. And today as I write this article, I realise I don't have the energy to fulfil them.

As of this day, this city has given me the biggest blow of my life. It has transformed the very people I love. Or I loved. Sometimes in the spirit of your morals and ideologies, you feel that changing the city doesnt mean changing the person. But it does NOT apply here. This city gives you that freedom that you wouldnt get anywhere else. But at the same time, it would take away the very people you thought you knew so well. This is the very reason why I probably get very negative vibes from Mumbai whenever I come here. I sometimes think back into the abyss that has been created, because of what circumstances brought upon me. But then, life goes on. It takes a long time. But it does go on.

Marine Drive and IIT Bombay are some of the best attractions of the city.. Marine Drive gives you the feeling of a free bird just waiting to soar in the sky. But I fear it takes away your true identity, and replaces it with the transient personality, analogous to the waves thrashing Marine Drive's rocks- old waves going, new waves coming. And the cycle goes on.

IIT is the place to be. Academic excellence, research-orientation- something that a physicist like me would thoroughly enjoy. The people make it better. They have ambitions, they have dreams. Not to be stopped by petty obstacles on the way. IITB has a way of living that probably doesnt exist in the entire city.

But are these reasons enough for me to stop this near-pessimistic article? I wonder whether the list will ever be exhaustive. Except the shores of the city and the academia, I doubt ill ever turn back to the Financial capital. Atleast I will try not to.

My friends tell me to give the city another chance. A few people or a few incidents do not define a city. But what would you do with an agglomeration of 50 million people, and particularly the few special ones who meant the world to you, when they give you the cold shoulder? As I write this on my way back to Delhi in an Air India plane, I firmly believe that my metropolitan views have very vividly been shaken.

I shall not miss this place. Only the people. 

Information "Chaos"k

Sorry for the sabbatical. Would mostly attribute it to procrastination, not to forget loads of work :P But will come back to these grave issues later.
Here's an article that was published in the April issue of the magazine New Scientist that just blew me away. I  read it, and i just knew what was bothering me for a long long time- Information Chaos in the world's Kiosk.  Though i have edited and remodeled it for general reading, you might find traces of authorial references in it.



A half-century ago, Marshall Mcluhan wrote: "We are today as far into the electric age as Elizabethans had advanced to the typographical and mechanical age. And we are experiencing the same confusions and indecisions which they had felt when living simultaneously in two contrasted forms of society and experience." His electric age had no email, no web-surfing, no cellphones, much less Facebook and Twitter. Mcluhan was mainly watching television.

We don't call it the electric age anymore. We know perfectly well that we are living in the information age. But Mcluhan was right: we are stil experiencing "confusions and indecisions", more than ever before. There is a universally recognised metaphor for our predicament: flood. There is a sensation of drowning, of information as rising, churning deluge. Data washes over us from above and below. One may lose the ability to impose order on the chaos of sensations. Truth seems hard to find amid a multitude of plausible fictions.

Our world is built on the science of information theory, created by engineers and mathematicians in the 1940s, but hard on the heels of information theory have come "information overload", "information glut", "information anxiety, and "information fatigue". This last was recognised by the Oxford English Dictionary in 2009 as a syndrome for our times: "apathy, indifference, or mental exhaustion arising from exposure to too much information, especially( in later use) stress induced by the attempt to assimilate excessive amounts of information from the media, the internet, or at work."

                                             
In 2007, the writer David Foster Wallace coined a more ominous name for this modern condition: "total noicse", created by "the tsunami of available fact,context, and perspective. He talked about the sensation of drowning and also of a loss of autonomy, of personal responsibility for being informed.

Another way of speaking of the anxiety is in terms of the gap between information and knowledge. A barrage of data so often fails to tell us what we need to know. Knowledge, in turn does not guarantee enlightenment or wisdom. It is an ancient observation, but it seems to bear restating as information becomes ubiquitou- and we live in a world where all bits are created equal and information is divorced from meaning.

The past unfolds accordion-like into the present. Different media have different event horizons: for the written word, three millennia, for recorded sound, a century and a half- and within their time frames the old becomes as accessible as the new. Yellowed newspapers come back to life. Under headings of "50 years ago"and "100 years ago", veteran publications recycle their archives: recipes, card-playing techniques, science, gossip, once out of print, and now ready to use. Same goes for every scrap of music and rarities that this world has ever produced. For a certain time, collectors, scholars or fans possessed their books and their records. Their was a line between what they had and what they did not.

That line fades away. Most of Sophocles's plays are lost, but the ones surviving are available at the touch of a button. Most of Bach's music was unknown to Beethoven; we have it all- partitas, cantatas and ringtones. It comes to us instantly, or rather at light-speed.

But this needs coping, to avoid the anxiety and the addictive cycle of craving and malaise. There are mainly two strategies that have emerged: Filter and Search. The harassed consumer of information turns to filters to separate the metal from the dross. Filters include blogs and aggregators- the choice raises issues of trust and taste. The need for filters intrudes on any thought experiment about the wonders of abundant information. When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.

A "file" was originally a wire on which slips of paper, bills, notes and letters could be strund fro preservation and reference. Then came file folders, file drawers, cabinets, and their electronic namesakes. But the irony is the same in all these cases: once a piece of information is filed, it is statistically unlikely ever to be seen again by the human eyes.

When new information technologies alter the landscape, they bring disruption: new channels and new dams rerouting the flow of irrigation and transport. The balance between creators and consumers is upset: writers and readers, speakers and listeners. Market forces are confused; information can seem too cheap and too expensive at the same time. The old ways of organising knowledge no longer work. Who will search, who will filter. We have no Maxwell's demon to help with our sorting!

Because omniscience is a curse. The answer to any question may arrive at the fingertips- via Google or Wikipedia or IMDB or YouTube or the National DNA Database or any of their natural heirs and successors- and we still wonder what we know. Choosing the genuine information requires work. Then forgetting takes even more work.

The Intro.....

 So the world of blogging attracted me. Yes. Influenced by the numerous intellectual and awesome buddies that i happen to have, it was an inevitable step- blogging. So, here iam, ready to fulfil another important task at hand in my life-- thought processing and layout. I might be sounding very technical and direct, but the sole purpose of my blog apart from the obvious ' Food for thought' would be to process and lay out my haywire thoughts into a neat little blog, that would probably help me think in a more organized fashion, which in my life is definitely needed.

Iam a proud undergraduate student of the The Department of Engineering Physics, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Writing has always been a mode to express the thoughts within, but the last two years have not been very liberal to me, owing to various reasons, due to which my style of writing, my ideologies, my way of expressing my deep intentions and desires have considerably altered. I now fear that if not modulated, the " Thoughts Within" would not be of any help to anyone, most importantly not to me at all. Therefore, in an effort to  be of a help rather than a liability to this world, i, Gourav Khullar, 18, am doing my part by expressing my perspective towards this rather awkward but awesome thingy called LIFE.

The blog has been named that way for a specific reason. I feel its a natural way of harbouring the rebellious and rational thoughts of some one who's iconic Batcave is his Mind ( and the Batman being my fav. comic character.)
So,The Rationalist's Batcave is aimed at free-thinking, rationalist ideologies(Captain Obvious!), liberal discussions, and definitely some crap talks on how this particular Homo sapiens lives his life. For the future readers of this blog, i would just say...umm....

Cheers:)

Here is my first official article for this blog of mine. And i felt that the perfect entry was not a new thought process or theory or opinion or belief....but a pre-written post that i once penned down to express what i was feeling during a very critical time.....when both personal and student phases of my life were in turmoil i would say. It was written on Facebook and posted through my profile on 06th September 2009. 

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=133326530994

I feel the post, in the core of it, still represents the essence of my ideologies, of what drives me forward at times, of what keeps me frm staggering in my path of the ambitions i have laid down for myself in the coming years.

For the reference,Pradeep sir n CM sir have been my teachers at Bakliwal Tutorials, my 2nd home in class 11th n 12th....who are like brotherly and fatherly figures to me. I would say that i have had the luck and opportuniy of studying at IITs due to these great intellectual n knowledgeable people. Kudos to them:)

What I want from Life.....

by Gourav Khullar on Sunday, 06 September 2009 at 00:56

My teachers at Bakliwal tutorials, with the students

Sitting and listening to Pradeep sir can be an amazing Experience....specially if u acknowledge the fact that his lectures are soo filled wid information and data with such few written material! Listening to ChandraMohan sir can literally be a very practical and rib-tickling joy ride that each of his student will agree wid....cheers:)....but there is one thing that is common in the way both teachers teach......wich is what i really liked.....:)

Both Pradeep sir n CM sirappreciate the fact that whatever they teach their students...is actually the original work and hardwork of hundreds of great minds that started working since time immemorial....they know the fact that its da hardwork f our ancestors all over the world that we have so many laws just written and taken for granted in todays world!

Victor Grignard, Allesandro Volta, Euler,Michael Faraday, Isaac Newton,Albert Einstein, js to name a few.....these men had a thing in common.....all worked hard selflessly...in pursuit f their goals...and after achievin them....became immortal in the Sands Of Time......

It has been Pradeep sir n CM sir who made me realise what i want to actually achieve in dis life iv been given.....M1 Lecture..4th september 2009, 7:37 in mah watch....sir was talkin about the Simpson's Rule for Numerical Integration...named after Sir Thomas Simpson,a gr8 English Mathematician.....and he js said...it was due to the efforts of this guy that Areas under the curve used to be calculated earlier....

And it suddenly dawned on me...this is what i want....after all those chem lectures...those Named reactions...those Laws named after Gr8 people.....this is what i desire....that i do somethin worth my life! i achieve smthn in life so that my name is also engraved in da Book f Time like these amazin ppl! all i want to do is....do smthn in this life so that people remember me...be it whatvr...Khullar's Law....Gourav's Rule if you may.....whatver...but smthn wid wich the world remembers this odd human.....:)

Moreover...i promise to work for it...to toil for it...so i do not disappoint the people that hav unending Faith in me...who expect only the best for me....thank u fr ur support:)...coz i promise i wont let u down.....

So the jist is.......100 years frm now...i wish...maybe sm kid in high school shall chant my name a day before his exams and say......Why the Hell did dis idiot Make this Law!!?!?!?:P

Cheers:)