Category: The World

Sun Rise Sun Rise!

We stood there waiting for the sunrise over the Grand Canyon. 

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We had driven up there the previous evening in what felt like 20 degree weather. The moon lit scapes around us were beautiful from inside the car, but outside, it looked unforgiving. It was cold, and the desert around us was different enough. Even so, the same landscapes at night take on a different feel and dimension altogether. The shelves of stone around us in the early morning light of dawn was breathtaking. As if a different hue was revealed with every tilt in angle of the sun’s rays. 

How drawn to light we are as a species? Somewhere, the sharp smells of pine wafted through, and I wondered briefly whether we stopped to let our other senses weigh in as much when we have sight and light. 

I suppose we do let sounds and smells in, and do allow our sense of touch  to help us along. But do we really develop our other senses? A preliminary search says we gather about 80% of our sensory perceptions using sight. 

Dogs, on the other hand, seem to distribute their perceptions between sight, smell and sound. 

The early morning calm of the sun-rise and my meandering thoughts were interrupted by the loud calls of a mother looking for her children. I turned around irritated, and was somewhat surprised that I was surrounded by this many people on a cold Christmas Day morning, standing on a cliff overlooking the Grand Canyon and waiting for the sun to rise. 

But I suppose, it was my fault for not expecting this. It promised to be a beautiful day, after all, and like me, many had decided to brave the cold, and take in the marvelous sunrise over the horizon at a point helpfully named Sunrise Point. 

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I let out an amused grin, and exchanged a look with the children – they seem to have caught on to my look of surprise at finding other people there. It was a beautiful moment: the mother pulled her child towards her, and the sun burst forth in glory over the horizon. 

All was well with the world at this moment. 

Let’s go for some breakfast and then take a long, quiet walk along time, I said shuffling away from Sunrise Point, and the children chuckled at the thought. We are not an early rising family, and we scurried inside towards warmth, food and coffee before attempting to take on people and canyons. 

2023 – I am stuck in a book, be back soon!

One of the favorite parts of the year are here. The Christmas lights are twinkling. There is magic in the air. I get to go back and revel in the books that have made it so. Some books evoke a feeling, and trying to capture that is a joy in itself.

Hindsight is our finest instrument for discerning the patterns of our lives. To look back on a year of reading, a year of writing, is to discover a secret map of the mind, revealing the landscape of living — after all, how we spend our thoughts is how we spend our lives.

– Maria Popova – TheMarginalian

This year, I get the strange sense of being in a floating Universe. I seem to have whizzed past centuries reading things in the past, zoomed and ducked out of alternate worlds with all the science fiction and fantasy adventures, while being thoroughly grounded in making sense of today’s world with its AI, and its technological advances.

I get the familiar sense of time slipping through the sieve with extra large holes once again, but then, will it always be like this? I hope so, for in its speed lies its charm.

Here are some of the notable ones – I find the neat classifications all being thrown out – every year, I seem to have a different classification system and therein lies the charm. Nothing is immutable and all that.

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I also see that I have dozens of unfinished posts for some of these books that have never made it to the blog. Oh well! I need to take inspiration from Robert Louis Stevenson I suppose.

“I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.” ― Robert Louis Stevenson

Peek back into time:

The World Around Us:

“The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest (people) of the past centuries.” ― René Descartes

    Non-Fiction:

    Beautiful & Informative:

    • Nanoscale – visualising an invisible world – Kenneth  S Deffeyes, Stephen E Deffeyes
    • Atlas of the Invisible – James Cheshire & Oliver Uberti
    • A celebration of Beatrix Potter : art and letters by more than 30 of today’s favorite children’s book illustrators
    • In the woods / David Elliott ; illustrated by Rob Dunlavey

    Alternate Worlds/ Science Fiction/Magic:

    Tech Tech:

    Inspirations:

    Books that ought to be classified as warm cups of tea 🙂

    • News from Thrush Green – Miss Read
    • The White Lady – by Jacqueline Winspear
    • Much Obliged Jeeves – P G Wodehouse
    • A Song of Comfortable Chairs – Alexander McCall Smith
    • What would Maisie Do? – Jacqueline Winspear

    “Some books are so familiar that reading them is like being home again.” ― Louisa May Alcott

      Children’s Books – my favorite category (just mentioning a few since I don’t keep note of all the titles)

      I hope 2024 continues to be as varied and inspirational in its moments of magic and learning for all of us! I shall put in a comment the complete list of books. I only put in a few in the post here.

      “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”

      Dr. Seuss 

      Happy Reading!

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      The Tides of the Year

      It is already that time of the year when people are making lists, and reminiscing the past year. I don’t feel like it has been 12 months since we last did this exercise, if we are being honest. I just wrote out all the books I read in 2022, is it already time for me to do the 2023 list? I feel strangely like a student in the headlights before the final examinations. Wait a minute – I was supposed to have read this and that. My bedside table is sagging, with half-read books, to-be-read books.

       I planned to write about this topic and that book, and well, that possibility too, if it comes to that. My document with burgeoning ideas and drafts looks worse than ever with half completed phrases and paragraphs. In short, it feels like a construction site : a promise of feverish hectic activity, but a dull ache between the eyes while thinking of shaping it all up. 

      Looking back over the past few years, it seems to be the same song sung : pace of life, the months whizzing by, and all that. 

      However, this year seems to be tinged with the dawning realization of the opposite and inevitable too. Maybe it is our phase in life. What I mean by that is, in increased conversations with elderly people, it is obvious that the elderly amidst us face the opposite problem : one of filling their time while holding onto their anxieties of their health, and the inevitable frailty it involves. Acceptance of our mortality has always been one philosophers have addressed. But will we remember all these concepts when it is our time? I wonder. 

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      In the exuberance of youth, and the arrogance of our health, we often parry the times when we do have to set ourselves down to a slower pace, and imagine a life when we are not in control of our circumstances. The pace of technology, while helpful in general, seems to be a source of anxiety for many, and I don’t blame them. I feel the same way – on my recent visit to India, I was confronted with both sides of the coin. On the one hand it was fun to watch everyone from the roadside vendor selling chaats to the large department store going with options such as PayTM and Google Pay. But on the other hand, it was unnerving for older people or NRIs like us who needed to have all that set up within the country in order for smooth functioning. 

      I remember reading somewhere that it is not just us and our bodies that are changing, but the situations and the world around us changing too. At times, it feels like the combination can feel like we are being pushed and pulled by the tides back and forth relentlessly. We need to weather the tides, ride through the storms, and look out for the light on gloomy days. 

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      2023 had its share of hikes, bikes, runs, and walks. It had a fair share of travel managing multiple responsibilities across work and our personal lives. Not to mention the frenzied feel of to-do lists and the sinking feeling that nothing was never quite enough. But in spite of all this, it felt rewarding: it gave us the feeling of spotting the rainbow in the storm. 

      I liked this quote and wanted to share this here:

      “Half of me is filled with bursting words and half of me is painfully shy. I crave solitude yet also crave people. I want to pour life and love into everything yet also nurture my self-care and go gently. I want to live within the rush of primal, intuitive decision, yet also wish to sit and contemplate. This is the messiness of life – that we all carry multitudes, so must sit with the shifts. We are complicated creatures, and ultimately, the balance comes from this understanding. Be water. Flowing, flexible and soft. Subtly powerful and open. Wild and serene. Able to accept all changes, yet still led by the pull of steady tides. It is enough.”

      ― Victoria Erickson

      A Sleepy Jolly Christmas

      I lounged in bed – it was a Sunday morning, and the approaching holidays made the whole world seem more warm even though the world outside was foggy, rainy, and cold. It was the perfect weather to be doing nothing. It was also the perfect day – no one should be expected to bustle about on Sundays, I said severely to no one. The whole house seemed to have been knackered – there was some movement elsewhere but we were all happy to be left alone.

      I read a series of books one after the other, still lounging in bed, completely aware of what a luxury that was. Indian women of our generation are used to this voice: it chastises you every time you don’t get yourself up to toil for the rest of the people around you. I ignored this voice resolutely, and plodded on. Indians pride themselves so unnecessarily on rising early and all that lark, it makes me mad. I liked sleeping in on cold wintry week-ends. Always have, even when the neighboring temple started blaring its margazhi music at an ungodly hour, or the maids swooped in to sweep at times when one cannot expect to be fully conscious.

      The past few days had been a lot of doing after all. 

      The Christmas tree and the decorations were finally up, and the husband and children had gone overboard with all the twinkling lights and the music during the decorating itself. The son and I sat by the twinkling lights of the christmas tree, and the little lights from the street outside well past midnight the previous night reading. It was a beautiful, silent night. 

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      I remember sitting and reading well after the children went to bed. It felt nice – like I was sitting inside a christmas card. The only thing missing was a robin chirping. I smiled to myself thinking of this, and started up a silly song in my head. 

      November’s gone nilly nilly, December’s here.

      December’s here dilly, dilly, the year will be gone.

      Where shall we start willy willy, what shall we do?

      The next morning was a school day, and as such, did not afford the luxuries of the previous day. I stepped out for a short stroll before the day started, and the cloudy rainy day meant that the air was fresh, if nippy, the ground moist with the rains, and the whole Earth smelling fragrant and beautiful. 

      As I was driving a few minutes later, the sun burst out from behind the clouds, and I scanned the skies feverishly for a rainbow. It must be somewhere – the conditions were just right after all. After a while of looking, when I’d almost given up, the little rainbow showed itself – not one of those fully formed ones, just a small-ish patch of it nestled amidst the clouds. But I had the luxury of seeing it from the bridge, and the bay below seemed to become prettier just by virtue of that. The birds flew past, and the clouds skittered, the world beautiful, and fresh once again.

      The sun seemed to send the message that it was a day meant to be bustling about, and I didn’t mind that so much. It isn’t often that things turn out this way, and when it did, I was grateful to take advantage of them.

      🕊️🍁 🦅 Hawkish Power? 🐦‍⬛🍁 🦅

      As soon as I came home, the words rattled in me 

      To capture the moments when joyous and noisy, turned to eerie and silent.

      The terrifying sound of all the birds leaving at the same time

      The fluttering of a thousand wings – away, away to safety.

      The ecstatic beauty of standing under a tree 

      With thousands of leaves fluttering gently down.

      The ears pricking up with the joy of 

      Listening to hundreds of little birds chittering above.

      All gone with the arrival of one regal hawk

      The birds all flew, while the hawk gawked.

      Without the rustling of the birds

      Even the leaves stopped falling.

      Of what use was this power?

      When there was no one to exert it on?

      It was a show of power so instant, so terrifying and so alien to the beautiful wintry surroundings, that I shuddered in spite of myself.

      My thoughts swirled with dictators and their absolute clawing for this kind of power. Do people in power not want a happy, joyous populace? I thought of the happy chittering and camaraderie of the birds from moments ago and stood under the tree not making any noise,  content to enjoy the sounds of life overhead. 

      As I walked back home from this eerie setting, my mind wandered to all the fittings of power and its lure over mankind. It doesn’t look like it will abate. Countries continue to go to war, and though countries may win or lose, the people involved always only seem to lose – their trust, their security, their loved ones, their hopes, their peace.

       

       

      On Writing

      It is always fascinating to understand the process behind the craft. To everyone, the process is different, the resulting work is different, and maybe that is why everyone’s voice and stories are different. Though some things seem to be common enough: curiosity and observing people.

      Haruki Murakami in his musings, Novelist as a Vocation, writes about his mental chest of drawers – a place in which he places relevant and irrelevant information to be extracted when he is writing a novel. Some of the remaining ideas are used in his essays he says but the rest are there for the taking.

      The truth is that none of us can imagine the beautiful fierce power of our own imagination. Where will it take us, or what it can do for us if we wrestle with it long enough? Few of us get to find out and fewer get it out into the world. How are some authors able to create the Harry Potter universe, others write books that evoke such deep rooted emotions such as The Crane Husband? 

      I was fascinated to read that  the idea struck the author of Crane Husband, Kelly Barnhill, when she saw a crane land on a rooftop while she was driving through the countryside from somewhere to somewhere. What an evocative inspiration? 

      I remember thinking of the book, every time I spotted a crane by the riverbank. The raw sadness of the tale stayed with me for days afterward.

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      Such inspirations are not unheard of. A few days ago I read a folk tale about the Crane Wife, in the book,

      Beneath the Moon, Tales, Myths, and Divine Stories From Around the World by Yoshitani, Yoshi

      All of us have  a mental chest of drawers and some of us rely on it more than others, but those memories shape and define us in ways we do not realize. 

      Murakami writes about his journey and how he stumbled upon the conviction that he wanted more than anything else to be a novelist at the age of 29. His journey was not one of writing obsessively throughout his childhood, but of simply deciding one day to become a writer.

      He writes about how his formative years were fairly trauma free apart from a stint in college where there seems to have been unrest among the student community. He writes:

      “I have never been comfortable in groups or in any kind of collective action with others, so I didn’t become a member of any student groups, but I did support the movement in a general sort of way.”

      But as time went on, he realized that:

      “Something criminally wrong had wormed its way into the movement. The positive power of imagination had been lost. I felt this strongly. As a result when the storm passed, we were left with the bitter taste of disappointment. Uplifting slogans and beautiful messages might stir the soul, but if they weren’t accompanied by moral power they amounted to no more than a litany of empty words,

      Words have power.

      Yet that power must be rooted in truth and justice. Words must never stand apart from these principles.”

      It was perhaps this realization that led him to lose faith in the movement and turn towards writing as a career when the epiphany hit him one day while watching a baseball game that he might be a novelist yet. 

      I am sure a conviction as deep as that would find its way into his writing and if there are specific examples or suggestions of books regarding these, please let me know.

      I remember a discussion in which it was mentioned that ‘You need war or love if you need a complete series.’

      While that is true, the pursuit of truth, peace, justice, the power of words all seem to be good enough inspirations too.

      Books:

      • Novelist as a Vocation – By Haruki Murakami
      • The Crane Husband – By Kelly Barnhill
      • Beneath the Moon – Fairy Tales, Myths and Divine Stories from Around the World – By Yoshi Yoshitani

      🐙The 🐙🐙Kraken 🐙🐙Sleepeth🐙

      I don’t know how many of you have heard of the Carta Marina: I hadn’t and was agog after reading about it. It is a fascinating geological map showing the mythical monsters in the oceans and where they are to be found. 

      Completed by Olaus Magnus in Italy in the mid sixteenth century, it attempts to outline all the monsters known at the time in the Nordic regions from various accounts. 

      In the book, The Underworld – Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean – By Susan Casey, she writes about the Carta Marina:

      “On land the action is orderly: tiny figures are farming, hunting, skiing, playing the violin, By contrast, the ocean is in chaos, awash in dangers and tragedies, livid with waves and currents flowing, swirling, pooling, seething. Aid the tumult, twenty-five monsters make their appearance.”

      • Susan Casey – The Underworld – Journeys to the Depths f the Ocean

      I may have mentioned several times in these archives that the daughter is a mermaid born to human parents. Which is to say the endless fascination with the oceans, and natant joys of reveling in the waters are things we all enjoy. 

      After reading about the Carta Marina, I went looking for the Kraken picture. When you browse through the daughter’s artwork, there are quite a few aquatic themed paintings. This one – it is Kraken – the mythical creature that is spoken of with awe among the nautical elite. I must admit I am endlessly fascinated with octopii, squid and I suppose the kraken  as well.

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      Dictionary.com summarizes this perfectly: https://www.dictionary.com/e/squid-vs-octopus/

      In summary, if you see a sea creature with eight sucker-covered arms and a round shape, that’s an octopus. But if it’s got a long, thin, triangular shape and 10 limbs—eight arms and two tentacles—it’s a squid. If you see it swallowing a ship, it’s a kraken.

      Sea-faring must have been a difficult vocation as most vocations in humankinds’ past seems to have been, but it also provided the richest tales of adventure and mystique to those whose fortunes or destinies never allowed them to leave the small square footage they’d been born and raised in. 

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      Even now, as we set out sights on interplanetary travels, I find the deep allure of the deeps as fascinating as ever.  Would we see into the eyes of a greenland shark that is rumoured to live on for 350 years or be pulled into the clutches of the mythical Kraken? Or be dumbfounded in the noises of the monster that rises out of the depths of the ocean in the FogHorn – By Ray BradBury (I believe the book is out of print – but I can never truly forget that feeling of deep awe and fear as the monster rears towards the lighthouse thinking it’s being called by a mate. I felt a strange sense of loneliness for the last monster standing the night I read it as a teenager)

      As Sylvia Earle says, “Looking into the eyes of a wild dolphin – who is looking into mine-inspires me to learn everything I can about them and do everything I can to take care of them…You can’t care if you don’t know.”

      I looked at the picture, and remembered the poem by Lord Tennyson

      Below the thunders of the upper deep

      Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,

      His ancient, dreamless, invaded sleep

      The Kraken sleepeth

      – Alfred, Lord Tennyson

      References:

      • Life in the Ocean – the Story of Oceanographer Sylvia Earle – by Claira A Nivola
      • The Underworld – Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean – By Susan Casey
      • The Carta Marina – The map of monsters 16th Century – By Magnus
      • The FogHorn – by Ray Bradbury

      The Past, Present and Future of Jobs

      “So, you work at a job that essentially takes away your own job?”, said the son.This is the kind of meta stuff that he finds exciting.

      The Thanksgiving week-end was rife with conversations about the corporate drama that in yester years could be equated to the coups of thrones. Would the CEO go? Would the Board of Governors go? Would they both go? Who would be their replacement?

      Last year the world popped their popcorns and watched the unfolding drama of an unraveling Twitter with Elon Musk and his hostile takeover of the company, now rechristened X, though the URL still points to twitter.com because the TFE team was probably let go.

      This year, it seems much of the dramatic action came from OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman. In modern day Wall Street wars, CEOs, (or C-Staff) and the Boards of companies provide for much of the action. Will the market hold? Will the Sensex drop?

      What happens to the interest rates?

      One of our friends was explaining to the children about their own roles – technical roles in which they enable AI to be utilized intelligently. One was working on images, another on code frameworks itself. A niece who was majoring in biology told me how they were already being encouraged to use ChatGPT to generate code for them. They only needed to see the results of the datasets fed into the model.

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      Fascinating as it all was, I was left musing on the future of work. It seems a rather recurring theme of late. There are image generators to replace artists, code generators for software engineers, of course plenty of writing that can be replaced with intelligent prompting. So, why not the design and maintenance of these systems too?

      I picked up the book from my recent library pile:

      The Worst Children’s Job in History – Sir Tony Robinson

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      The book was truly horrific and true. If anyone was wondering about the future of jobs and feeling glum, they could actually be grateful that the past nature of our jobs are well behind us.

      Every job not only held misery, but a generous helping of walloping, not enough food, abysmal conditions, no thought for safety etc. Compared to those jobs, the present day conditions of occupying ourselves and our children seems fantastic. I only hope this trend continues for, our current nature of jobs is about to upended again.

      It seems with the speed of technological challenges, the cycles with which our jobs are upended seems to be quicker and quicker.

      A couple of generations ago, seamstresses, tailors, knitters, bat makers, ball makers, farmers, equipment handlers all saw their jobs upended by mechanization.

      Then the next generation saw people’s fortunes needing more specialized skillsets such as coding, scientific knowledge etc.

      Recently, call center jobs, desk phones, phones that were in the family room all went away, to be replaced by cell phones. Those of us who remember having to take a friend’s call in the living room with three uncles, five aunts, three cousins of varying age and maturity levels, two grandparents and a maid, will forever envy the children of today who quietly buzz out of vicinity taking their phone calls mysteriously with them. 

      The next wave of AI seems to be disrupting industries that I’d hoped would not be. Creative industries that are already hard to make a living in: storytelling, image generation, writing, etc

      Will our grandchildren read books about us in this era and feel sorry for us that we had to slave in front of our computers all day long to accomplish certain things, spend days getting tests done in medical labs to determine what was the matter with us?

      What would the future of our jobs look like?

      More importantly, in this quest for bettering the use of our time, do we hope to become at peace with who we are without being defined by what occupies our time? If so, maybe we should start equipping ourselves towards that, shouldn’t we?

      Let me know your thoughts.

      Books:

      • The Worst Children’s Jobs in History – Sir Tony Robinson
      • The Age of AI – Henry Kissinger

      🍁I Found A 🍁🍁Million🍁🍁 Bucks 🍁

      “It rained last night, did you hear?” the son said the first thing in the morning as he crept groggily downstairs. 

      I confessed I hadn’t. It had been a late night – one fraught with beeping alarms, low-battery carbon monoxide filters, very cold temperatures, and a spate of international phone calls. I remember peeking out at the full-ish moon before finally collapsing into a warm bed, but not much else.  In fact when the alarm went off in the morning, I was in the midst of a strange and confusing dream in which somebody was giving me a recipe. I can’t remember the details, but I also remember my first thought being – what a strange recipe!

      Luckily I shook all memories of frog chutneys and slime pickles aside and made for the open air. The air was fresh – the Earth beautiful after the rains, and I was not going to miss it.

      I was rewarded with brilliant cloudy skies, rain-drop topped leaves, and quiet birds shaking their wings and beaks throughout. 

      I stopped to marvel at the casual beauty that lay there in front of me – the lake not realizing the perfect reflection it provided to the mountains in the distance, the fall trees closer by, and the still groggy white heron on the opposite shore. All just there for anyone wanting to see it. Sleepy, dewy, cloudy, misty. 

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      I stood there trying to remember the chemical names that were responsible for the brilliance of the colours reflected before me: carotenids, anthocyanins and tannins. I wondered at the wisdom of these trees: realizing that it was time to stop photosynthesis and let the tannins and cyanins or whatever take over without any fanfare, and producing the most breath-taking show for the world to revel in. 

      🍁Carotenids : the pigments for the orange and yellow colors

      🍁Anthocyanins: the pigments that are responsible for the purples and reds.

      🍁Tannins: responsible for the brown color.

      Almost instinctively, I looked around and found myself alone. Alone in a bustling suburban area – the only one who took a quick detour and stopped to admire the lake on my way from somewhere to somewhere. It felt nice. Special. Like I had won a million bucks.

      November is already on its way out – 2023 is already on its way out. The trees have put their show on, on time. I gave myself a little scolding: My Christmas tree was not up yet.  “But I did have some beautiful poinsetta plants beaming their reds at me in the morning, that was something! “ I said to myself heading to a small park bench, and there: I found a million bucks. 

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      I left it there for the next lucky person to find, and went on my way, a smile playing on my lips.

      Who said the universe did not have a sense of humor?

      The Light of Being

      The evenings have been drawing in earlier and earlier. As if the natural tilt of the axis weren’t enough, there was a time change thrown in. The result is that my evening walk is in the company of the glittering stars, and I am grateful for these little reminders of light – as far away as they may be. 

      One evening I found myself thinking of this and that on my evening walk. The stars twinkled above, the leaves crunched below. Though I could not make out the colors just then, I could imagine them well enough in my mind’s eyes – bright reds, yellows, deep maroons. 

      Californian Novembers are magical indeed. 

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      Where our northern or eastern counterparts would already be bracing for the winters, our autumn cloaks are just getting started. Our gingkos have only just donned their beautiful cloaks of buttery mellow yellow, the maples and oaks, their swirling cloaks of ruby reds, and thick velvety ones of deep maroon. I wondered when the cold would start and looked up at the stars instinctively. 

      Albus Dumbledore seemed to wink at me through the stars: 

      “Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.”

      – Dumbledore in the Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban 

      I swished on for a bit pondering.

      Deep in the epipelagic layers of the ocean, there are creatures who have taken this to heart. In the twilight zone, the only light they have is their own. How must that feel to them? The deepest darkest nooks and crannies of an unforgiving ocean made accessible only through their own bioluminescence. 

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      In one fell arc bypassing lands and atmospheres, the stars and the bioluminescent life in the oceans seem to share a Light of Being. 

      What are our sources for finding the light in ourselves – the means of switching on the inner lights? Good friends, warm meals, bracing walks in nature, the finest ideas in literature, art and music. Hygge. A halo that reflects the warmth and light within, in the harshest of winters, and the coolest of springs? If only we could all cast our own little patronus.

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      Books: