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The Theseus Paradox

Caveat: This is going to be a real long post

"Ship of Theseus” is one of the finest movies I have seen in recent times. An intense and thought-provoking narration of three different stories that beautifully converge towards the end to represent the Theseus' paradox.

For the ignorant: "The ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus' paradox, is a paradox that raises the question of whether an object which has had all its components replaced remains fundamentally the same object. The paradox is most notably recorded by Plutarch in Life of Theseus from the late 1st century. Plutarch asked whether a ship which was restored by replacing all and every of its wooden parts remained the same ship." (Source: Wikipedia)

Now the paradox could raise several questions. First of all is it the same ship? If not, then at what point would you call it a different ship? When 50% of its components are replaced? Or 100%? Or 10%? To arrive at any such number we would need to understand-What in fact constitutes a ship?
 

Let us take the analogy to a human being. Say a person gets a kidney/heart/cornea transplant. Will that change the person in any way at all? Will the person behave differently in the same external environment that she deals with? How about when more than one body parts are transplanted? At what point will the person change completely, cease to be the person she was to begin with. Or will the person remains the same irrespective of the changes? What defines being "same"?

As I was discussing this with a friend, I made the following argument:
When it comes to humans, the 'brain' is the key, without which everything else is pretty much useless. As long as the brain remains intact, any number of body part replacements will not change the person in any way. But if the brain is replaced (hypothetically), then the person becomes someone else. So I set "brain" as a limit beyond which the person no longer remains the same. I mean, have you ever seen a person change after a kidney transplant?
But then what about those instances where the human body rejects an external organ when tried to be transplanted? It does happen often. Is it because the external organ will make the person – someone else?

In response, my friend brought up a very interesting point of view:
“Brain in a jar” or “Brain in a vat” as it is commonly known. Essentially, every action, reaction and emotion of a human is store in the brain. Experiments have shown that when the brain is given tiny electric shocks, memories stored in those specific areas are triggered and the person experiences the memory as if it were really happening at that very instant. What if we were all just experiencing such a phenomenon where our brains are in reality store in a jar and someone is controlling them with electric shocks? This means that the life that we are leading is nothing but past events that have already happened in our lives and are re-surfacing now.
Difficult to conceptualize? Try this – when you are in a dream, doesn’t it feel like it is completely real? Till the time you wake up, you think that you are actually living the dream. So a brain in a jar is like a never ending dream. Only difference - in an actual dream, the events are fictional whereas over hear, the events are past recollections.

I do have an alternate theory to this:
The world we live in is itself virtual. A mere simulation, by superior beings who are playing some sort of a video game in which we are characters. Just like how one would control characters in a game of World of Warcraft or Halo. We humans are the characters of a very large video game controlled by superior species. Moreover, what we think is our ‘free will’ is in fact the free will of the being who is our controller.
 

Let me take a break here and come back to the movie.
Story 1:
A young girl loses her vision to an infection. Despite the blindness, she becomes an ace photographer. Later on, she gets a cornea replacement and gains her sight back. However, her photography skills are now no longer the same as it used to be earlier.
So what actually happened here? Having someone else’s cornea changes her skill-set. She is no longer the same person she used to be. Remember the ship?
However, one thing was not very clear in the movie. Whether the girl already a good photographer before she turned blind or was it a skill set she developed only after she turned blind? In the first case, the ship theory is applicable. However, in the second case her talent in photography is directly correlated to her blindness and the cornea replacement simply reiterated the fact. The movie did not answer this issue clearly.
Story 2:
A monk is fighting a PIL against pharmaceutical companies on the issue of cruelty to animals. The monk believes in Karma and Destiny and in the equality of living beings. This is in contrast to his ardent disciple who belongs to the Charvak school of thought which essentially rejects the concept of an afterlife and advocates hedonism. Throughout this story, we are exposed to a lot of heavy philosophy on the purpose of existence, identity, and death in the form of healthy debating between the monk and his disciple. In a twist of fate, the monk contracts cirrhosis, the treatment for which will entail a liver transplant and medicines from the very same companies he is fighting against. Caught between ethics and survival, what does the monk finally do?
This story shows how a simple event such as ‘death’ makes a person go through a whole lot of identity crisis. Death – is an equalizer in many ways. When faced by it, nearly every person would possibly react in the same manner. Overwhelmed by fear, unpreparedness and a desperate desire to get out of it. Because this is a phenomenon one gets to experience only once in a lifetime and hence no prior experience in handling it. In the end, the monk decides to give up every single thing he stood for his entire life and embrace the very medicines he was fighting against, simply because he could not face death.
Story 3:
A workaholic stock broker is constantly nagged by his grandmother to go out, enjoy life, and try to contribute something meaningful to society.
Their conversations go thus:
“What is the use of earning all the money when you are not contributing anything back to the society?” “If I am a hardworking, sincere guy who does have enough compassion in him to help a fellow human when in need, but otherwise is focused only on earning money, why is it wrong?”
Hard to dismiss such an argument. The guy is certainly shown to have concern and empathy when his grandmother was sick and bed ridden. What is then wrong to focus one’s life on material pursuits otherwise? What more is required? Does one necessarily have to take extra initiatives on ‘contributing’ to society?
The story continues:
The stockbroker gets a kidney transplant and later comes to know that the hospital is involved in a kidney stealing racket. Suspecting that his kidney may be a stolen one, he investigates. He finds out that the kidney of a certain labourer was stolen and donated to a rich Swedish chap. He makes it a personal agenda to get justice done to the victim and goes to Stockholm to confront the guy. What finally happens is that the Swedish guy buys out the labourer with so much money that the man is no longer interested in fighting back for his kidney and the stockbroker remains helpless
The question now arises – is money the only thing that drives the world? The stock broker could have afforded to go legal, but can the poor man do the same? What made the broker go out of his way to help a poor man? A new kidney? Given that his mission was ultimately unsuccessful, should he have even attempted it? To this, the grandmother says “Bas itna hi hota hai”.
Don’t expect anything more, but you do what you have to do. Just like what the Bhagwad gita says – “Karm karo, phal ki chinta mat karo” or “Perform your duty, don’t worry about its results”.
The story ends when it is revealed that all of the three transplants – cornea, liver, and kidney had come from the same person, an unfortunate accident victim.
All the characters in each of the stories transformed in various ways as certain events changed the way they looked at life. The environment changed, they were out of their comfort zones. At what point does this change exactly happen?

I shall end this post with a quote from the movie that aptly describes this conundrum.
 

“Where does the individual end and his environment begin?”

September rain - Revisited

Two years earlier I wrote about September rains. That was in Bangalore. And now I am writing about yet another rainy day experience in the same month. This time in Mumbai. But no, this was not 'yet another' experience. This was the experience of a lifetime and it can happen only in Mumbai.

September 03, 2012

It started raining in the morning at around 10.30-11.00am. Started off as light showers, followed by intermittent heavy showers that at some point just became incessant. I was quite happy for we badly needed to bring down the more than 40% deficit in monsoons this year in Mumbai. Little did I anticipate what was about to follow.

6.50 pm:

I get a call from my roommate.

Did you hear? The traffic towards Kurla has come to a standstill. There is heavy water logging and vehicles are just stuck. How do you plan to go home?

Really? Oh no. Let me think over it.

I instantly recalled the day a couple of months ago when the monsoon season had just set in. Overnight, it had rained in quite heavily and I was in for a rude shock when I took out my car in the morning to go to office. I had to drive through one-two feet deep water for almost 2 kilometers and it took me one full hour to reach office, while it normally takes me just 20 minutes. I was really lucky that my car could put up with such a traumatic experience. Especially when all along my way I saw so many other broken down vehicles stranded on the road. (Honda Brio is awesome!)

The rain today was worse than that day and I really did not want to take a chance with the car this time. So I decided instead to wade through the water logged roads for the entire stretch of 5km in the worst case scenario.

7.05 pm: I get out of office to the parking lot. To my horror, the path to the parking was already a foot deep in water. It was worse inside. Floating cars all around, submerged till the headlights. I certainly didn't want to leave my car back in that condition, but neither was I keen on driving through the waters. Before I could take stock of what was happening, the parking lot attendant asked for my keys and offered to park it safely at a higher elevation to which I thankfully obliged. Apparently an hour after I left that place, these parking attendants were charging 200 bucks per head from everyone to bring their cars out of the water and the hapless people had no choice but to give in! (There is more to this part of the story, but that is for a different blogpost).

By now I was already soaked till the knees in water. My main priority at this time was to reach home as quickly as possible and avoid walking in the water as much as possible. Luckily for me, I managed to get a bus for the first 2km of the journey that took me to the end of Bandra-Kurla Complex. This is the place where the water-free and traffic-free road ends.

Another 3km to go. From hereon, the road was full of vehicles with barely any space in-between for pedestrians to walk through. The traffic had come to a stand-still.

Slowly and steadily, I walked to LBS Marg - the biggest curse of Mumbai monsoons. Thereon started a crazy journey walking through water that started off one foot deep to begin with and at its deepest point touched the knees. The road was completely congested with vehicles, some of them broken down completely (especially two wheelers and autos).
 

Most of the vehicles had their engines shut off and the drivers were out having chai coffee and waiting for the rains to stop and the traffic to clear! They knew that there was no point waiting inside the vehicles as there was absolutely no way the traffic was to move until the rain stops and the BMC pumps out all the water from the road.

The traffic was only on one side of the road cos the water-logging on the other side was so bad that it was impossible for vehicles, even trucks and SUVs to ply through that.
 

The entire 3km stretch till my house was flooded, with just the depth of water varying between 1 and 3 feet.

 
As I walked along, I decided to make the best of the situation and started clicking photographs of whatever I saw, so that I could post them up on a blog post that I would write later :) 

Here you can see people wading through the water:

Unfortunately the quality of pictures is quite bad as it was taken with the camera on a really ancient Blackberry. I had left my Nokia Lumia 800 smartphone at home, which as it turns out was a bad decision on a day like this.

LBS Marg was like Venice now. We badly needed Gondolas to travel around, not fossil fuel powered automobiles.
 

Here is a pic of a partly submerged broken-down bike:

This side of the street was now entirely being used by people to walk, despite deeper waters. The rains showed no signs of slowing down and the water level only kept increasing with each step.

I did have an umbrella with me but it was pretty useless. I was anyway half drenched from the dirty muddy ground water. Besides in a situation where one has to squeeze through vehicles in the jam packed road, it was not even possible to keep the umbrella open. I really didn't mind getting drenched though. The more important issue here was to ensure I don't fall into a pit or a pothole.

At crucial points there were several BMC workers who were guiding the pedestrians along the way, ensuring they don't walk into a pit. Commendable efforts.

I almost did fall off at one point though. Not into a pit, but I was walking on the footpath. Of course, I didn't initially know that I was walking on the footpath because it was atleast 1-2 feet below water level. I almost slipped and fell off when I put one foot forward onto the road instead, minor misstep anyway.

The worst part of the journey was my footwear. Bad day to be wearing the most uncomfortable hard-sole medium-heeled shoes.

It took me 1.5 hrs in all to reach home, half an hour of bus journey and one hour of walk in the water. Had I taken the car, I would easily taken 4-5 hours.

One important lesson I learnt from the whole episode.
Always carry your smartphone with a camera that has flash during monsoons in Mumbai. An umbrella may not always be required, but a good cameraphone is a must.

Postscript:
#mumbairains was the top trending keyword on twitter for that evening. Continuous updates on traffic situation across the city and emergency helpline contact numbers were tweeted.

There was even a google spreadsheet floating around with contact details of people offering carpooling to various destinations! I was absolutely amazed by the spirit of Mumbai in a situation like this. 

Windsurfing

Bow, Stern, Port and Starboard! Mast, Rig, Sail and Boom! Today morning reminded me of my first semester of engineering, way back in 1998 :) Gosh! That was like a zillion years ago, but it was a pleasant feeling to get back to those concepts once again. It was purely on a whim that I decided to opt for "Naval Architecture" as my engineering subject back then, but now I know why my intuition worked the way it did. Simply because I love the waters. I take to water like a fish, that is the kind of natural affinity I have towards this element of nature. And I feel absolutely ecstatic, on top of the world when I am in/near the waters. Like a true Cancerian.

So today out of yet another whim, I decided to get up early in the morning and learn windsurfing.

The first step in windsurfing (after the brief theory session) is to learn how to balance yourself on the surfboard, initially without the sail attached. I was a pretty quick learner. I did not have even a wee bit of trouble balancing on the board. It took less than five minutes of observing my balancing act on the board for the instructor to realize that I can skip lessons 1 and 2 and go a few steps ahead. Not that I want to brag about myself, but then they were quite impressed by my sailing skills for a first timer :) Apparently most people take 1-2 hours of practice to just get the balance right, something I did in 1-2 minutes.

It was such a beautiful experience. I took out the board with the sail into the water and within seconds, without even realizing I had drifted far away into the sea, all on my own. Standing on the surfboard, holding the boom and letting the wind and the waves take me wherever they wanted to. Absolute bliss. Words are insufficient to express how exhilarated I felt in the middle of the sea, surfing away into the deep blue waters, all by myself. All I could see around me was the endless mighty ocean, and a couple of fellow surfers. All I could hear was the whooshing wind and the rippling waves. I could just sail on like this forever.

Two hours. Time just flew by without even realizing. Two hours of my life spent in heaven. 

The ocean along the Girgaon-Chowpatty shore was quite calm actually, I would really love to learn surfing in rough seas. Of course this was just the beginning, there is so much more to do. Mastering windsurfing is just a mini-step, water skiing, paragliding are in line for the future. Miles to go before I sleep, seriously. 

DRS in Cricket...

Most of us would have had a good time with the Umpire Decision Review System (UDRS) that was in place during World Cup cricket. Technology gave a way for any one of us spectators to accurately determine whether or not the decision was right. As Tata Sky even put it in their ads "Babloo ne kaha out to out"!

However, the BCCI was against this system and therefore the DRS was not made mandatory across all forms of International cricket tournaments, given the clout BCCI holds in the cricket arena. Notwithstanding the fact that DRS was more beneficial than not to cricket (opinions here may differ vastly though), BCCI still is not in favor of DRS in its entirety, especially given that the opposition was from key players like Sachin Tendulkar and MS Dhoni. Ironically, Dhoni was the one who even recently in the WI tour lambasted the 'poor' decisions of Australian umpire Daryl Harper. Oh come on Dhoni, give it a break; you can't have it both ways! Either you accept DRS or you stop criticizing umpires.

Coming back to the present scenario - today's news is that the ICC and BCCI have reached an agreement to have a 'modified' version of DRS mandatory in all International series.

Now this is 'modified' version:
1: Only infra-red cameras and audio-tracking devices are allowed
2: Ball-tracking technology or Hawk-Eye will NOT be used

In case 1: A caught behind or LBW decision can be reviewed by determining whether or not the ball hit the bat - primarily using the help of microphone on the stumps.
In case 2: Technology will NOT be used to extrapolate the trajectory of the ball to determine whether or not it would have hit the stumps in case of a LBW decision. However, the decision can still be appealed and the third umpire will give his view but the final call will be taken by the on-field umpire himself. This effectively means that appealing in this kind of situation is practically useless as the chances of on-field umpire altering his original decision will be minimal, with the lack of technology for everyone to see.

Added to this, there is a talk that only one review will be allowed per innings instead of the current two.

All this sounds totally ridiculous to me. Either you use technology or you don’t. What’s the point of having technology assistance when all these restrictions come into place? I would rather prefer UDRS, in its complete form. In fact, UDRS should not be restricted to one or two reviews; it should be allowed for all decisions that seem vague. Further, the third umpire’s decision/technology’s decision should be final and binding and the ball should not be thrown back to the on-field umpire’s court; after all there will be a conflict of interest (read ego) when this happens.

A matter of life and death

Supreme Court allows Passive Euthanasia – Screamed the headlines in Times of India…

First thing in the morning, I wake up to read this!

           Well, this is not the kind of topic I would normally write about, but seeing all the hoopla around the topic in the last few days, I thought I might as well.

           For a traditionally conservative society, the Indian Judicial system has surely come a long way. Decriminalizing Section 377, allowing live-in relationships, and now this.

To make it clear – the SC has only permitted passive Euthanasia and not active; which means a terminally ill patient can be allowed to die by cutting off the life support system, but not by giving a fatal injection which is in the case of active. This is the precise reason why Aruna Shanbaug is not allowed to die, as she isn’t under a life support system!

In a way legalizing Euthanasia is a good thing – I fully support it, in fact I would support both the passive and active forms. After all isn’t the right to live life one’s own? Then why is the right NOT to live life someone else’s? The decision should solely be that of the person concerned and nobody else. If they think that there is no point living a life of burden for both themselves and others, then that should be it. No questions asked.

But then of course the issue in case of passive euthanasia surfaces when the patient is unable to make the decision for themself, which is when family, doctors ‘next friend’ and all others come into the picture. In this case, who ultimately is the final deciding authority? What if the patient’s family have ulterior motives and decide to let go of them? How do you ensure that the case is a genuine one? Even though the issue has just been officially acknowledged by the SC, passive euthanasia is already actively (pun intended) being practiced in the country. For e.g. when the family could no longer afford further treatment given the high costs of private healthcare, they might want to pull the plug.

           

            Several European countries including the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemborg and Switzerland have legalized Euthanasia. While most nations across the world permit the passive form, few of these European nations allow the active form as well. In fact, “Suicide Tourism” is quite a popular movement in Europe, so much so that there is an active market for it with firms such as “Dignitas” having made a thriving business out of it. Interestingly, it says “21% of people receiving assisted dying in Dignitas do not have a terminal or progressive illness, but rather "weariness of life".

           

            Now Euthanasia is defined as “the practice of ending a life in a manner which relieves pain and suffering”, according to Wikipedia (thanks to my friend the author of ‘soul’s euthanasia’ for pointing out the subtle difference between Suicide and Euthansia. Ha!). In such a case, how is the above practice of Dignitas justified even legally speaking? Beats me!

           There is this very interesting concept called “Santhara” in Jainism, which is a “religious ritual of voluntary death by fasting”. Some may call it suicide, while some may call it karma. I on the other hand find it strangely similar to the Euthanasia practiced by Dignitas.

           But then sometimes commercialization of such a sensitive issue may be totally inappropriate. For e.g. I had heard of this story about Dignitas (not sure how true though) – “A very old lady aged 80+ goes to Dignitas, accompanied by her son to commit Euthanasia as she does not want to be a burden on the son anymore. She just expresses her concerns to the officials there that her son may find it difficult to sustain without her. And the response of the officials was like – Alright! He could also go through Euthanasia at a 50% discount offer”. Simply appalling, to say the least!

           Coming back to India, what’s with the authorities and Aruna Shanbaug? This lady has been in a vegetative state for the last 37 years. Thirty Seven Years!!! Is this some kind of a joke? Of what use has her life been to anyone, including herself? And the worst part is, Aruna not under a life support system, she is perfectly sane and well able to communicate her feelings and her will to go through Euthanasia. What right do third parties like the hospital or the Supreme Court have to deny her wishes? It is indeed such a pity!

Anyway, I can keep going on with this and writing a lot more boring stuff on related topics as well, but let me stop here.

But to conclude, I think the best thing of all would be to be like Bheeshma of Mahabharata. To be able to die at will!

Hogenakkal...

The planning:

It had been a while since I and my roommate went on a weekend trip together. The last one was Masinagudi, which was in October 2010. So we decided to go to Hogenakkal on the 29^th of January – a one day trip. This time I wanted to have a reserved return ticket in advance, as I didn’t want to end up in a messy situation like the previous trip when we had gone without tickets and ended up taking a cab at the last minute, getting stuck in terrible traffic and finally reaching home only around midnight.

Moreover, this time it was relatively simple, I had most of the info required as I had researched it well enough. The route that we needed to follow was:

Bangalore (BLR) – Hosur (HSR) – Krishnagiri (KGR) – Dharmapuri (DPJ) – Hogenakkal (HKL)

The plan was to leave our house at 5.30 am, take a bus to Hosur and go to KGR from there, spend half an hour at KGR, leave for DPJ and then HKL. My estimate was to be at HKL by 11 am latest, so that we can spend 3-4 hours and leave the place by 4 pm to board the return train from DPJ at 4.45pm.

The onward journey:

BLR-KGR

We woke up only at 6 am, left the house at 6.45, and boarded a Salem bound Express bus to KGR at around 7 am. I don’t remember the last time I got on to a local government bus as  bad as that one. The seats were cushioned, but all worn and torn, quite congested and dirty, and the bus was playing really local Tamil songs (which was fun in a way actually). The minute we entered the bus, the seated passengers were all looking at us with astonishment as if we were alien creatures from outer space. We did look quite unfit in that ambience though. Two women, dressed in track pants and sport shoes, entering a bus with backpacks, a bus full of traditionally attired village folk of Tamil Nadu, well you get the picture.

Okay, so pretty soon we made ourselves comfortable, enjoying ourselves, chatting, joking, eating, studying the surroundings and listening to the really funny tam songs. We then decided to take a “Trip Oath” (learnt this term during this trip) that “we would eat lots of junk and get really tired so that we burn out all the excess calories consumed” and high-fived over it!

Krishnagiri

The bus reached Krishnagiri at 9.15 am. We took an auto to the dam, after negotiating for a return trip to the bus stop for 270 bucks.

The auto chap dropped us in front of the entrance to the Dam. There was a small bamboo shed over there where we saw food. We were famished and decided to have breakfast over there. The menu was simple – Parothas and Kuska (some kind of veg biryani). After ensuring that the food was Saivam (learnt a new word in Tamil that means Vegetarian), we sat down to eat food that was served on a plantain leaf, which is very typical of traditional Tamilnadu. There were all goats and chicken roaming around the place.

 

The place was quite rustic, but also very comforting. We were made to feel at home by our breakfast host. After breakfast, we went to check out the surroundings. As we had gone there quite early, there was no tourist crowd around and it was pretty calm and serene.

Here are a few pics.

 

 We left the Dam vicinity by around 10 am, on our way to DPJ.

KGR-HKL

We left KGR bus stop at around 10.30 am and reached DPJ at around 11.50 am and got onto a bus to HKL that was supposed to start at 12.00pm. By now I realized that I had grossly underestimated the distance and timings. A friend had told me earlier that it was just a 20 minute journey from DPJ to HKL and I took that for granted, without bothering to verify. At DPJ, I saw that HKL was a cool 46kms away and you could imagine how long it would take traveling in local government bus stopping every 5 kms. Needless to say, the bus reached HKL only at 1.45 pm. By now we realized that there was no way we would be able to take the return train (with reservation) back to Bangalore. The train was to start off from DPJ at 4.45, which would mean that we should leave HKL at 3 pm. So we decided to chuck the train, enjoy ourselves and think of our return only after we were done touring the place.

Hogenakkal

It was quite warm at 2.00pm in Hogenakkal, after all we were in Tamil Nadu. The first thing we did was buy a fancy hat to protect ourselves from the heat (and also to take some cool photographs). We directly went to the place where we had to board the Parisal (another new Tamil word I learnt, which meant coracle – a small circular boat made of bamboo)

Mr. Madhavan, the captain of our ship, was quite warm and friendly. We learnt from him that the coracle ride system is unionized. A coracle ride cost us 620 bucks for two persons whereas a family of 4-5 would end up paying around 700-800 for a single boat. All the payment is taken by the union leader, who monitors the entire workflow. Approximately 100 boat rides happen in a single day and each boatman gets to go out maximum twice a day. So, we can assume around 60-70 boatmen operating there. In some ways it’s a good thing that these guys have a union of sorts in operation, at-least ensures a regular stream of income and whittles the competition.

So coming back to our trip, right from the word “Go”, I started clicking away photographs of the waterfalls:

Hey, look at this dude here in a coracle, selling Frito Lays and Pepsis!

Amazing stuff! This is what is called commercialization of Cauvery waters!

The water here was apparently 100 feet deep! Wow, it certainly didn’t look so, with all the fish floating around right at the surface that one could just catch a few by grazing their palm on the water. And during monsoons it gets worse, at-least 10-15 ft deeper. Should go there sometime during the monsoons too, I guess.

As Mr. Madhavan took us closer to the waterfalls, the force was enough to get us all wet and fill the boat too with water even without getting off. Upon our insistence though, he allowed us to get off the boat and soak ourselves under one of the smaller falls. That was real fun. Our boatman was a bit of an entertainer too, he tried out stunts like rotating the Parisal really fast along the axis, while stationary. He was also kind enough to give us a chance to row the boat.

It wasn’t too bad; with some practice I would have surely aced it :)

The coracle ride was an hour and a half long, after which we decided to explore the area on our own. We got some tea and walked towards the hanging bridge.  To my horror, I found dozens of monkeys occupying the bridge. My friend here was the brave one, nudged me to ignore the monkeys and walk on. Of course, I was too scared; I have had some really bitter experiences with monkeys in the past. All of a sudden one of them started chasing me. My friend told me to put the cup of tea down, as that was what the monkey was actually looking for. But I was not willing to part with my cup of chai, I started running back with the monkey in hot pursuit. Luckily for me there were a few men around who saw my plight and chased the monkey away.

After some exploration, we reached closer to one of the water falls – “Cine Falls” it was called. 

We were really looking for a place exclusive to women, where we could enjoy standing under the falls. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find any such exclusive place.  Instead what we saw a bunch of huge pot-bellied men under the falls, bathing  "each other" with soap and water !! Ugh. What an ugly sight it was. 

Anyway, finally we found a small stream in the vicinity, where we decided to get completely wet in the water. 

This was a lot of fun and by the end of it we were famished, so we decided to have some food before we took leave of Hogenakkal. Food was yet again a traditional affair, like the one we had at Krishnagiri, parotas served on a plantain leaf.

Next thing we looked for was a rest room. The waiter directed us to the first floor of the restaurant (which by the way was adjacent to a bar). We went upstairs, to the end of the corridor and saw a room that was latched from the outside. Thinking it may be the restroom, we opened the door. We were absolutely startled to see what was inside. The entire room was filled with liquor bottles! We got really scared as to what kind of a shady place we had entered and instantly took to our heels and came out of the building as quickly as possible.

Time for our return journey.

The local experience

All through the trip we had travelled by local buses. It was really weird actually; both of us felt so out of place even though both of us are from Tamil Nadu. For one, we did not even remotely look like any of the locals in the bus, nor did we look like we knew Tamil and we were the only two women around in track pants/kurta/tee shirt. We felt like foreigners in our own land. Everyone we interacted with – the local women, the policemen, the boatman, the hotel waiters, the bus conductor etc seemed quite surprised that we both were travelling on our own. Stuff like “Only the two of you are travelling? How do you know Tamil? Veli ooru kara (outsiders)” were most common. I guess two women travelling on their own is not a common sight in the hinterland of Tamilnadu atleast. Even so, most of them were quite warm and friendly and expressed concerned about our safety. Then there were other funny things. It had been ages since I had travelled in such crowded buses with people standing. There was this bus at Dharmapuri, before it started off for Hogenakkal. All kinds of hawkers and beggars entered the bus and were annoying the passengers. There was this one weirdo, who came with a broomstick and brushed our heads with it, asking for money! Of course, everything was not as pleasant and fun during the trip; we did have our not so good moments too. For instance, there was this bunch of hooligans who entered the bus at Hosur, and were trying to create trouble for us.

Weirdos and hooligans apart, the bus journeys and the views surrounding us en-route was quite charming, especially the HSR-KGR route. There were vast fields on either side  of the road all through the way, felt somewhat like we were on agriculture tourism. Then the food, the traditional manner in which food was served and the local lingo. It was somewhat like village tourism too!

The return journey

After changing three buses and an auto, we finally manage to reach home by 10.30 pm.  It felt so much at home in the hustle bustle of the city….after being aliens in our own homeland Tamil Nadu for a whole day! It was a good experience. Alongside a tourist/adventure trip, we also got a taste of the ‘real’ Tamil nadu and the life in the hinterlands.

Of course, one of the decisions we made after the trip was to travel by a cab instead of local modes of transport.

Masinagudi in pictures

Saturday Oct 16th

2.30 pm

Here I was, lying on a hammock in the middle of the dense forest on a bright sunny day, enjoying the cool breeze, and fully soaking in the glory of nature as I pen down this post. Yes! ‘Pen down’ – The surroundings were so inspiring that I actually took out a pen and a paper and started to write this down. The calm serene atmosphere was only interrupted by the pleasant chirping of birds and the rustling of leaves in the wind. What a sea change from the daily noise of vehicular traffic in the city.

This was absolute bliss!!
I could just lie like this forever.

Thursday Oct 14th

10.30 pm

It all began when I casually told my friend “Babe, we should make a trip to Masinagudi sometime. I was recommended this place by many people”. And my friend instantly said “Let’s go this weekend”, not having any clue about what/where this place was. Filled with encouragement, I immediately googled for a few minutes and found out the contact number of the first resort name I came across – “Jungle Retreat”. My friend made a quick call and made a booking right away, before we could even finalize our weekend plans. Everything happened so quickly, and we were shortly on our way to Mudumalai on Saturday Morning at 6.30 am.

Saturday Oct 16th

1.30pm

Seven hours later we were at Jungle Hut, welcomed warmly by the cackle of geese and the bleating of sheep.

A quick check-in and a sumptuous lunch later, we decided to relax the rest of the afternoon until 5 pm when we had a “nature trek” planned for us.

5.00pm

The nature trek was a short one, in the forest area. Still, it was such a pleasurable experience to walk amidst the enchanting beauty surrounding us. The lush green trees, the frothy white foam emerging from the fresh water streams that flowed over hard rocks, the diverse flora and fauna, the beauty of everything was truly captivating.

We also got to see a bear den, but didn’t quite manage a glimpse of the bear despite throwing stones/bottles at the den to attract the animal’s attention.

The rest of Saturday went in swimming, foosball, movies, books, campfire dinner, among other thing. We hit the bed early as we had to get going the next day morning for an early morning safari.

Sunday Oct 17th

5.30 am

We were all set for the Wildlife Safari at the Satyamangalam forest. Satyamangalam – This was the abode of the infamous Sandalwood king Veerappan. The area is supposed to be off limits for regular tourists, but our guide Siddhu had special permission to access the area. Incidentally, Siddhu was an official guide for the local police to walk through the forest territory during Veerappan’s regime; and he was so comfortable with the wildlife that he never carried any weapon while going inside. Incredible!

All excited, we took off hoping to see some genuine wildlife such as Leopards, Tigers, Panthers, Sambars, Chitals and of course Elephants, which is what Mudumalai is known for.

We came across lots and lots of Chitals (Spotted Deer) on the way and we started off our wildlife photography. Deer are such lovely creatures. When you look at them, they look back at you with such an innocent childlike curiosity, and an inquisitive sparkle in the eye that instantly turns into a deadly fear the minute they see the camera flash.

The Elephants:

We saw lots and lots of them all around the place. There was this one bunch where there were three adult elephants and one baby, which looked quite adorable. It was picture perfect. But the minute we started clicking photos, they got pretty anxious; as though we were going to harm the little kid. The adults really got enraged, and started charging towards us.

Luckily for us, within 2-3 minutes they realized that we were just a harmless bunch of humans out there to have fun, and they decided to leave us alone!

Alas, we didn't get to see any of the 'most sought after' creatures such as Leopards, or Panthers. But it was really beautiful to see wild animals – in the wild. Truly, there is no place like home; for man or for beast.

And that brought us to the end of our brief tryst with Mother Nature and 24 hours away from the maddening city life.

September Rain

I love rains. I’ve always loved the rainy season.

As a kid, I would eagerly wait for the first monsoon showers in the month of June. Floating paper boats around with friends, getting thoroughly drenched in the torrential downpour for hours together; ah, those good old innocent days!

I still love rains. There is absolutely nothing like sitting in the balcony with a hot cuppa tea, listening to the pitter patter raindrops, watching them lash against window panes, uprooting trees around, thundering with all their might and showing man what an infinitesimally small and helpless creature he is in front of nature’s fury. And of course, rains are supposed to be one of the most romantic things on earth!

But today was different. Completely different. No paper boats, no cuppa tea, no pitter patter, and surely nothing romantic; Instead, for the first time ever in my life I was wishing so badly for the rain to stop.

September 24^th 2010

At 6.40 pm, I decided to call it a day and bade goodbye to my colleagues in office. Just when I stepped out on my Honda Aviator (it’s an awesome bike by the way), it started drizzling lightly. I chose to ignore the drizzle, as the day had been pretty hot otherwise and I estimated I would reach home in 30 minutes, ample time before it starts heavily (if at all). Turned out I was wrong. Within 5 minutes, the rain turned bad. I have driven in rains before, so I thought I would get through this as well.

Again, turned out I was wrong. The rain only got bad to worse and I really wanted to get out of it quickly. But unfortunately, I had to stop to fill fuel on the way. At the petrol bunk, there were several motorists who had halted just waiting for the rains to stop. Instead of doing the same, I just filled in fuel and decided to brave through the downpour. A wrong decision.

I went on for a while, but after a point it got so bad that my vision was beginning to get compromised and I desperately was looking out for some shelter. As Murphy’s Law would necessitate, there was none around. No shops, no petrol bunks, no bus stops, just a long stretch of road lay ahead of me. I somehow managed another 10 minutes very slowly, trying hard to see what was in front of me and finally reached a place where I could see a lot of bikes parked. So I too stopped, parked my bike there and decided to wait for the rain to reduce. Another wrong decision. There was no real shelter there; all of us just had to stand under a tree!! All I had was my helmet for protection.

We were standing right outside the police academy on Hosur main road. The entrance to the police academy was sloping slightly upwards and as a result water was gradually getting accumulated where we were standing. All of a sudden the security guards over there opened the two front gates. Immediately, water started gushing out of the gates with so much force, that it was as though the floodgates of a dam were opened up. The force would have been enough to run a turbine and generate electricity, in fact! Within minutes, the water was almost knee deep at that place and a few of the bikes got half submerged. Luckily mine was parked at a higher elevation, so was better off.

At this point, I realized that it was absolutely futile to fight against Mother Nature and decided to wait right there under the tree till it stopped raining. I would have waited for almost an hour there, just getting drenched. It was freaking cold, especially as I did not even have a warm jacket. And this is the point when, for the first time in my life, I was wishing so badly for the rain to stop.

Finally, when the intensity of the downpour reduced a bit, I decide to leave. I had to wade through knee deep water with the bike, for about 20-30 metres to get onto the road itself. And when I did get onto the road, I was faced with yet another obstacle. Heavy Traffic Jam. Sigh, I resigned to my fate.

Somehow I got through the ordeal, fighting my way through the traffic, the water flooding, the potholes and the unruly motorists. By the time I reached home it took me 2 hours for a journey of 30 minutes, I was soaking wet, almost frozen, teeth shivering, hands so numb that I couldn’t even feel my fingers. But yeah, I was there. Safe and Sound.

So much for a rainy day in Bangalore. But yes, I still do love rains!

Here are some pics:

Superfreakonomics

I had been wanting to write about this book for quite sometime now, given that I had read it almost a year ago. I had read Freakonomics, the first book by the authors Dubner and Levitt and loved it so much that I blindly ordered a copy of the sequel without even bothering to read the reviews. Perhaps it wasn’t such a wise decision after all.

The basic premise that the authors worked on in the original Freakonomics is “People respond to incentives”; whether it is a suicide bomber, a real estate agent, a drug dealer, a sumo wrestler or a street prostitute. Superfreakonomics was intended as a sequel with the same premise, based on which, the authors have aggregated a number of unrelated topics which are in reality no more than anecdotes, short stories if you will. Somewhere along the entire book, I never got the impression that “People respond to incentives”. Either the authors have completely digressed from the basic premise that they claim to be a unifying theme between both the books, or I have somehow failed to read between the lines.

The very first chapter that gives a detailed ‘analysis’ of the economics of prostitution, is not only quite crude and obnoxious, in my view, but also really tells us nothing significant or interesting. It looks as though the authors have deliberately thrust the chapter right in the beginning of the book in order to engage the reader enough so that he/she will end up reading the rest of the book; this of course is the popular trend these days and it works!

Then there is this other chapter that talks about how the brouhaha over global warming is uncalled for, with only a 5% probability of an actual catastrophe happening, and this number itself is uncertain as well. The authors further say that the issue of global warming has become a ‘religion’ where the true believers are going all out to reduce carbon emissions while the agnostics claim that human activity contributes just 2% of global CO2 emissions, the rest coming from natural processes like plant decay. Obviously, this kind of an assertion had to incur the wrath of the scientist community. A few other smaller stories are thrown in such as about how ‘global cooling’ and not ‘global warming’ was the major issue in the 1970s, and the impact of Mount Pinatubo’s volcanic eruption on the world climate.

Okay, fine. Now while I am still trying to figure out what on earth any of the above stories have to do with economics or have any meaningful data backing them, the authors shift gears. Enter “Intellectual Ventures (IV)” and its founder Mr. Nathan Myhrvold. The rest of the chapter (which is around 60-70%) is all about glorifying the ingenuity of Mr. Myhrvold and how he has found the ‘magical’ solution to the global warming problem at a very low cost – Inject sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere using a really high hose. The Sulfur dioxide, combined with the water vapor in the atmosphere, has the property of reflecting sunlight back into space. Voila! An alternative solution suggested by IV is to form man-made clouds that would induce a cooling effect in the atmosphere. And how is this done? Use a fleet of boats with underwater turbines to kick up a steady stream of water spray into the air, several yards above the ocean’s surface. Sounds simple enough?

And not just global warming, IV seems to have a solution to every other global problem. For e.g, a simple solution to avert hurricanes in future is to continually keep flushing out the warm surface water of oceans to the bottom, so that the colder water comes to the surface; and this can be done by using huge floating cylinders in the ocean!

The whole chapter was nothing more than a long winding epic story, phew!

Now that was about global warming. There was this other chapter on why suicide bombers should buy life insurance. This topic particularly caught my attention, as the chapter summary hinted at something like “How to catch a terrorist?” which made me quite curious. And instead what do I get? I get to know about some guy called Ian Horsley (“name changed for security reasons”) who mined a lot of data on the terrorists, and created an algorithm that would identify a terrorist with 99% accuracy. And what more, the most potent metric that truly made the algorithm work was “Variable X”, that cannot be disclosed “in the interest of national security”. What a bummer this was!

I do not want to sound overtly critical; the book was definitely engaging to a good extent and does provide good entertainment value. There are also several interesting facts and theories that I learnt from the book. And yeah, the epilogue section on the experiments with monkeys was quite hilarious. But still, on the whole, the book turned out to be far below my expectations and was simply not up to the high standards set by Freakonomics. several claims were either not so believable or were incomplete, and not so much backed by data while some were plain irresponsible. One can read it purely for the entertainment it provides, and not look for applications of economic heories in day-to-day life, unlike Freakonomics which stuck to its theme pretty much.