New Year 2023

The year 2022 will always be the year I lost my father. What gives me peace is that I was there for 12 of the last 15 months of his life, even though I had no idea he wouldn't be with us to celebrate 2023. Losing him brought every other worry of my life into perspective.

In 2021, I lost my grandmother, a favourite aunt, a favourite uncle, other dear ones -- all to covid. All living in different cities in India.

But losing my father finally broke me. I find it a miracle I am back to my PhD and I am about to close this chapter. For that I am grateful.

Paper

I could be worried about the job market. I would've been anxious about job outcomes if it weren't for perspective-altering events in my life this year.

All I really care about now is to make every paper I write as good as I can possibly make it. I am behind and I wish I had had time to polish my work before the semester began but, hey, you play the hand you're dealt and I am not complaining.

Every line that improves a paper represents a triumph. Ultimately, I came here to do a PhD. I want every one of my ten chapters to be really good by the time I graduate.

First Presentation Back

So I have a presentation today. In a parallel universe, with life being normal, I would have been anxious beyond reason. The big job market practice talk. Everything depends on it! As it stands now, I am just glad I can sit in my cube and read a book and write some slides. Funny how reference points change meaning. 

I am back

I am back in New York. It's been ten months and I feel as if I've landed here for the first time. There's barely enough time to do things and almost certainly no time to do things right. I just hope to finish the PhD and get this degree. Everything else can be figured out in due course of time.

Don't get me wrong. I want to do REALLY well. But this is a throwback to the old Haaris style of working. There's no point thinking about anything. I hope I can enjoy my time here and I am quite certain I'll work hard. Circumstances are way too volatile to plan things out. 

Quote of the Week - XVI

Blest, who can unconcernedly find 

   Hours, days, and years slide soft away, 

In health of body, peace of mind, 

                            Quiet by day, 

Sound sleep by night; study and ease, 

   Together mixed; sweet recreation; 

And innocence, which most does please, 

                            With meditation. 

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown; 

   Thus unlamented let me die; 

Steal from the world, and not a stone 

                            Tell where I lie.

~ Alexander Pope

One Step

Here I am. Fifty days after my father's passing. Still dazed. Still out of sorts. Afraid to step back in.

Till my father was unwell, there was but one aim: to do what I could to help him. Nothing else really mattered. Now that he's gone, I have to look around. I have to get back to normal life.

I don't feel up to it. 

I just sent my first email announcing I am back.

What else could I do?

Quote of the Week - XV

Titan! to whose immortal eyes

The sufferings of mortality,

Seen in their sad reality,

Were not as things that gods despise;

What was thy pity's recompense?

A silent suffering, and intense;

The rock, the vulture, and the chain;

All that the proud can feel of pain;

The agony they do not show;

The suffocating sense of woe.

~ Byron 

The Gene

The Gene in one diagram, from the book

Somewhere in the midst of late 2019, in the foggy chill of a typical Delhi winter, in the last glorious months of the BC (Before COVID) era, I picked up The Gene, eager to continue my Siddhartha Mukherjee reading spree, a list that included his [spellbinding] debut book and a host of articles, mostly in The New Yorker. The winter break quickly drew to a close and, 300 pages in, I packed my bags for the journey back to New York with no inkling of the depressing time to come. I forgot to pack the book – my travel read. Months later, COVID struck, and we were all stranded.

The book was placed on a shelf, soon buried under a frenzy of new book purchases bought by a family in urgent need of entertainment during successive lockdowns. A book on genes, on heredity, variation and mutation, environment and chance, and on the future of a species, incited queasiness when the species in question was under siege. It was lost.

2022 brought me back to Delhi. We are still besieged by the pandemic – its contours have changed as have our defenses. We’ve barely learnt to live with it, carrying scars from the trauma unwillingly collected through 2 back-breaking years.

“Even the environment signals its presence through the genome,” writes Mukherjee in a chapter on epigenetics. Epigenetics studies cellular memory. Every individual’s genome collects memories over time triggered by experience, environment, and chance. These memories occur not as mutations, that is, as alterations in the sequence of DNA nucleotides, but in the chemical structure of the DNA, through markers and tags.

This is a provocative thought. I wonder if COVID has made its presence felt in the genome. The world has endured years of recurring stress and existential anxiety, not to mention actual infections. The developing world has had it worse (as usual) – 2020 was the year of shock and lockdowns in India. Carnage was unleashed in 2021.

Have we been tossed into a massive experiment with no control group?

That the environment may influence gene expression is disquieting. Can nurture influence nature? Can cellular memories be modified? Can they be erased? Mukherjee is quick to caution the reader. Epigenetic memories do not conveniently lace the genome with markers for every important cellular event. Nor do these markers act in a way that can be conveniently interpreted. “Most epigenetic memories are the consequence of ancient evolutionary pathways…” In other words, you cannot cut the tails of mice over successive generations hoping a tail-less mouse will emerge. Really – scientists have tried.

The tension between scientists’ attempts to learn and control the discrete determinants of human information and the danger of tampering horribly, possibly irreversibly, with the human organism runs through The Gene. Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier’s recent Nobel is a terrific example of the speed at which we’re moving. Doudna-Charpentier found ways to control bacterial switchblades that can precisely target genes. This technology is only a decade old, and it has already promised the ability to modify our own genome. Are we capable of treating this awesome power with respect?

What makes Siddhartha Mukherjee’s book different from many other excellent books on genetic research is his openness to discuss these societal implications of research – its past, present, and future. Consider the past, a time littered with the evil of eugenics, of deadly research designs, of treating homosexuality as a Freudian neurosis. But also, a time when we learnt the genetic determinants of heritable diseases and developed new techniques of providing insulin and other proteins to people suffering from chronic problems. Mukherjee’s book is as much about the former missteps as about the science.

Now, consider the future – a world where we could screen embryos for their propensities beyond disease/disorder and about their personalities. Or even more – a world where people could choose the attributes they wanted in their babies. Mukherjee does not relegate scientific facts on these sensitive topics to the margin; quite the contrary. But he also gives adequate space to the larger public debate around what counts as “normal” and whether extreme individual choice to pre-select/design embryos is acceptable. (It must be admitted though that his enthusiasm often misses the gravity of these ethical concerns.)

The Gene is a remarkable book dripping with facts and a narrative that refuses to let go of your attention. We witness legendary characters – Mendel, Darwin, Franklin, Sanger – who changed our understanding of humans as a species. We see the debates that animated scientific circles, and we learn that abstruse discussions can have terrible consequences. Regulation enters the pure scientific enterprise and the reader roots for it!

I write this review in Delhi. When I returned earlier this year, during a rather cold and dismal winter, I brought back 25 kg of books with me – those that were read in New York and deserved to join the ranks of my home books.

As I was desperately squeezing them into our overflowing shelves, I found The Gene, deeply ensconced, hidden away, calmly holding a wealth of knowledge, not caring if a prying eye would discover it.

There is no better metaphor for the actual gene, I think, except this natural book is infinitely deeper. And dangerous.

Gufa

Cold winter morning. 

The bustle -- 

Milk vans, sweepers, 

Dawn commuters, early risers. 

I, jet-lagged,

Awake since three, 

Bundled up in my quilt and typing this;

Almost discharged.

I am in Delhi. 

I am back.

Question

(Written on March 16, 2020)

I think it should be clear that the biggest crises are novel -- it's hard to predict their impact especially as the world keeps changing. It is also the case that prevention is not possible always -- by definition they cannot be foreseen (state or costs). When we see them, we see them with limited time to impact. Then what's the solution?

Quote of the Week - XIV

rahnumāoñ kī adāoñ pe fidā hai duniyā

is bahaktī huī duniyā ko sambhālo yaaro

~ Dushyant Kumar

Pensieve

(Written on July 1, 2018)

I realized a few minutes ago that my blog is everything but a blog and there's quite a lot that's taking place in my life (or at least isn't that boring) that's worth recording and sharing. I was looking at past posts of this sort and I realized also (which is fairly obvious) that the blog used be a nifty Pensieve.

So here we go.

The biggest target that's in front of me these days is to complete my second year paper. Some words of description. The second year is that wonderful thing of no consequence in your immediate PhD life but everyone initially hopes it would be the genesis of a precocious prodigious paper of such force that you'd get a top 5 publication by the end of your fourth year by which time of course you'd be the toast of the town, ready to lap up the praises and choosing your ultimate job destination.

As you'd imagine it, by the time there's a month left most students end up just wanting to end the damn thing. It turns out to be winding maze filled with dead ends, with the sneaking suspicion that there is no true way after all. People do learn I suppose and they often learn what they dislike. The latter is the true charm of this challenge.

So where am I?

I think I am not exactly at the stage where I want to leave it all and vacation in Europe. I do have something and it's not clear if it's publishable. What this means is that I just have to spend the next month working my heart and soul out.

What is it about? Top secret. For a month.

(Before getting down and dirty for the paper I was back in India.)

Best Books of 2021

2022 is here. And it's time for what everyone has been waiting for: my best books list.

Sit down. Stop getting excited. Let us begin.

1. India in the Persianate Age: 1000 -1765 by Richard Eaton

The best book I read in 2021 was a history book covering the rich and vibrant interaction between the Sanskrit and Persianate worlds between 1000-1765. New identities arose -- the Rajputs, for instance -- and a palimpsest of regional kingdoms grew prosperous and carved out their own cultures, in Bengal, the Deccan, Kashmir, and so on. Richard Eaton's informative and unputdownable book elegantly demonstrates the rich intermingling of these cultures connected by a common style, amply justifying the "Persianate Age" in the title.

There are many delightful facts generously sprinkled throughout the book. There are anecdotes worth repeating to friends and family. The book, naturally, covers the Sultanate and the Mughals but there is so much more besides that was, for me, novel and exciting. As I mentioned in my Goodreads review,

My favorite part was his discussion of 15th century India, what has often been described, rather dismally, as the 'long fifteenth century.' Eaton describes a wonderfully vibrant time of regional dynasties and cultural movements, in Bengal, Gujarat, Malwa, and Kashmir in the north, and the Vijayanagara empire and the Bahmani sultanate in the south. Through this time, new identities developed in each of these regions, and local courts patronized artists to create architecture and written works that synthesized traditional styles with the Persian influence.

Eaton persuasively argues that colonial constructs of imagining this period in India are hopelessly narrow. Chapter by chapter he provides insightful examples and evidence for an India in constant churn, not split on modern notions of identity; rather constantly synthesizing new and old influences, led both by grassroots movements and by rulers of all shades.

I think this book is a must-read. Other notable history books include The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India by Manan Ahmed Asif for an academic dissection of the condescending colonial episteme of writing history (India as a mix of despots and savages essentially) and how histories written by people in India before the British were distinctly different and displayed significant evolution in focus over time; and India's Founding Moment: The Constitution of a Most Surprising Democracy by Madhav Khosla which is a thought-provoking legal history of the basis for India's constitution and how it must be read in the context of the challenges facing India's founding fathers faced with the onerous task of creating a democracy from scratch.

2. The Decameron by Boccaccio

The Decameron is a daunting book. The setting is apt for our times: a group of women and men decide to escape Florence during the plague and move to the countryside. In this beautiful, tranquil and Eden-esque landscape, they resolve to pass their days by narrating stories based on a theme. They do this for ten days, each individual providing their tale each day, for a total of 100 stories. 

Boccaccio wrote The Decameron, it is believed, as a literary response to Dante's Divine Comedy. This book is not a lament about losing one's way in the eyes of God. Instead, the focus is on human beings and their frailties, their deviousness and misdemeanors, and their occasional nobility of character. In other words, The Decameron is about the world we inhabit rather than the Divine. 

Boccaccio writes with unsparing wit. Much before the likes of Voltaire, Boccaccio demolishes any aura of honor among authority figures such as members of the clergy and aristocracy. Resourcefulness is a recurrent theme. So is bawdiness.

The Decameron also possesses deep wisdom. Some stories are parables worth repeating and narrating to friends and family. And Boccaccio leaves no misgivings to the reader about his writing skill. In his introduction and the first chapter, he exquisitely presents the meta-narrator of the story (Boccaccio), a person who is only trying to express his gratitude to those who have helped him in dire circumstances, by offering in turn this collection of humanly stories. He hopes these stories will educate and entertain. Moving then to to the first chapter, he sets the scene in Florence during the plague. One could pluck quotes and passages at random and easily use them to describe the past 2+ years we've all faced.

I must add that reading the book is no straightforward task. It's a gigantic book and hops between themes and characters with tremendous ferocity. But I think anyone who manages to read through it will be delighted and rewarded for a lifetime.

Other notable fiction reads include The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen, the much awaited sequel to The Sympathizer, where our protagonist lands up in France, to the land of his former colonial masters, to the land of the father who abandoned him. I also read two cli-fi (ugh, hate the term) novels in Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler and The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. The former is considered a classic while the second is jarring in its vision for the future, if a tad optimistic. Finally, a special mention to a re-read of American Gods by Neil Gaiman. This was before I began the Amazon Prime series (which lost a lot of steam after the first season).

3. Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem by Michael Schmidt

The best critical work I read last year was Michael Schmidt's Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem. Schmidt compares many different translations and interpretations of this ancient poem and does so with delightful zeal. I wrote a long long review of the book on Goodreads, and let me be lazy and let it take over,

What is Gilgamesh? Michael Schmidt's beautiful book excavates the origins and meaning of an ancient chronicle, or a collection of genres or, quite simply, a poem, that resists interpretation through classical and modern structures and conventions.

The poem dates back to before 2000 B.C. In it, you find the story of a great Deluge, where a man, Uta-napishti builds a boat that saves humans and animals alike. A familiar story? In fact, the fervor first associated with Gilgamesh was spurred by comparisons with and echoes of Biblical themes found in its story.

Unlike the Homeric epics, scholarship on Gilgamesh is recent: cuneiform had to be translated; tablets had to be discovered and brought together; the Sumerian [Old Babylonian] and Akkadian [Standard Babylonian] accounts had to be compared.

And so Gilgamesh is a poem that continues to change as our understanding of that ancient period changes, and as further discoveries are made: perhaps, of missing sections of extant tablets, or fresh discoveries of older, but different, versions of the same chronicle.

The story of Gilgamesh is fascinating. Here is a mighty man who starts off as an impetuous and tyrannical ruler. He meets his match in Enkidu, a wild man who is tamed, and who in turn tames Gilgamesh...

You can read the full review here. The other interesting book in this category was a collection of essays by recent Nobel laureate Louise Glück, Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry, giving an insightful glimpse into the mind of a poet critiquing other prominent poets, both recent and old.

4. Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson

We've covered non-fiction, fiction, and critical analysis. Quite a sweep. It is fitting that the best biography/memoir I read was about the greatest polymath to have ever lived. Indeed, Leonardo would have covered ten times more ground in half the time, and he would've described it all in a few corners of his mysterious notebooks.

Isaacson's biography is very enjoyable. Leonardo was a man of destiny. Born a najaayas aulad (bastard), he knew he couldn't inherit his affluent father's business and estate. He was free to explore. Ultimately, he joined Verocchio's studio as an apprentice. This was no ordinary time. This was Florence at its glorious peak hosting every kind of artist, engineer and men of war. Leonardo took it all in. As the years went by and his fame grew, he remained nimble on his feet, politically speaking. Inevitably selected into the close ranks of changing rulers, he had the license to explore throughout his life.

But Leonardo wouldn't have been what he is today if he was merely in the right place at the right time. It was his ethereal genius and incessant curiosity that made him an icon then, as he is now. Isaacson shows Leonardo spending every day of his life trying to understand, to their very dark depths, a gamut of phenomena.

Isaacson expertly builds on Leonardo's interests in optics, anatomy, engineering, architecture, geology -- the list goes on -- suggesting that his most famous works, such as The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa, are the natural culmination of an incessantly curious and incredibly talented mind.

Of course, Leonardo's life is so much more than these justly celebrated paintings. Leonardo wanted to learn as much as he could about the world and his explorations were unhindered by a desire to publish his findings or to demonstrate his erudition. At the very least, these more mundane considerations always took a back-seat to the more pressing matters of understanding the world. Here is a person who truly wanted to know. The paintings may even be said to be incidental to the larger task of gathering a complete understanding of everything.

It's a very well-written biography. Other mentions: if you are, like me, an Amartya Sen fan, then you should read his memoir Home in the World. I didn't completely enjoy it but there's enough to keep the Sen enthusiast happy.

And there you have it. A special mention to V.S. Ramachandran's Phantoms in the Brain. In a year dominated by heavy tomes in fiction and history I was lucky to read a very thought-provoking science book. Also, they weren't the best books I read last year but I wish I could have talked about graphic novels. Then again, novels like Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi and Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh have been read by many before me.

Weekly Update I

(Written on May 18, 2018)

I am sitting in Columbia's Lehman library preparing a presentation.

Really.

When I left my consulting life, I told myself that one of the things that'll transpire would be the prospect of eschewing the making of presentations. After all, while it's perfectly understandable why the consultant needs her slides it was, at least to my naive past self, somewhat obvious that an academic need only worry about getting her work convincing, novel and useful.

Well, I am sitting here making my fourth presentation in a month, well past 25 slides, and not finding an end point any time soon. 

I can bore you with the nuanced differences between presentations made in this life and my last one but I know you'd care about it as much as Spurs' chances of winning Silverware next season so let me not torture you.

I can talk about tennis. I guess I can only talk about tennis these days. In my free time and when I am tired but need to continue working I switch on my TennisTV and have a match playing in the background. This isn't very different from the last two years of my schooling though I suspect I was not too sincere about the balance between work and sport back in my teen years.

******

I am reading The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan these days. Sagan represents the ideal skeptic for me - he carries a certain maturity about the limitations of human sentiments; that we cannot all go about expressing profound doubts on all that we come to believe in our daily lives. At the same time, he unleashes a spirited attack on the proliferation of what he calls pseudo-science and how it causes people to be led to "easy" beliefs about the way the world works. He's worried - this is in the 90s - by the growing market of peddlers of pseudo-science and his exasperation is endearing.

******

Among the macro-literature that I am exploring these days is about "bunching" and its use in finding deep structural (that means used in economic theories) parameters such the elasticity of intertemporal substitution. This is part-attempt to learn something fascinating and part-desperation in trying to finish a course safely but it's not time wasted. And that, at least, is a relief.

This will be the last class of my life in a must-pass setting. And I never thought I'd say it but here it goes.

I am relieved.

Getting Fresh – III

(Written on June 8, 2019)

It’s been a while. Honestly though, it too me a while to fill up the pot again. I want to be vain at this point and tell you it’s because I upgraded to a much much bigger pot and I’ve been on a quest to make sure I add content over bluster and also that I have tried to rise above the melee again except that this time it’s more difficult because 30 is a little more than a year away and as anyone who is close to the cliff (or who has fallen off) can tell you it’s that much harder switching gears to a brand new field, especially if one refuses to eschew old habits – classical literature, classical music, physics, math, and deep suspicion of the social sciences.

The pot is full again. And with that milestone I must confess I have missed blabbering into the open on this blog. I am free to talk with myself once more!

What must be said first up is the reality of the gauntlet thrown at me by…me. Last semester meant 5 more subjects (for credit) and work for 4 professors in different capacities. Plus the onerous requirement to produce original research. Plus my own quest to go for research that was more than incremental. Some teaching work which everyone else does. And lastly, making sure I realize that research is a game – play it but don’t depend on it.

Yup, I could be vain like that. Except I will be throughout this post.

Research is very strange. Social science research is even stranger. The utility function is the ultimate non-falsifiable hypothesis. Theory is progressively becoming how you can use fancy math to produce counter-intuitive results that, these days, are as likely to be testable as building a particle collider that can detect strings. Empirical research is interesting but worryingly liable to fraud and more worryingly a case of looking for your keys under the street lamp while you house languishes in darkness. There are very few rules that apply in every context. And no good textbooks.

It’s not all bad. Then again most of it is so I’m not going to be overly-optimistic.

Let’s get on with this collection of moments from my pensieve.

*****************

I am in Banaras (Varanasi). It’s where my paternal grandmother lives and from where effectively my father’s side of the family hails. Benaras is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. Standing at Dashashwamedh Ghat, one of the most frequented riverside banks in this city, one can only lapse into deep philosophical ruminations while looking at the holy Ganges. Dashashmedh Ghat is so heavily frequented because it is in some ways in the most religiously and spiritually significant part of this already very holy city, a stone’s throw away from the Kashi Vishwanath temple. It also happens to be a stone’s throw away from where we live.

Varanasi is well known these days for being India’s Prime Minister’s constituency. People ask me if I see progress there. My first response is that this is not an easy task. Benaras is by its very nature a city of narrow lanes and winding alleys. And the people living in the corners and choked streets have been there for a hundred years or more. So you can’t just throw them out. As far as all these aspects are concerned there has been little or no change. The streets are still very dirty and the roads are still crumbling. People are no better off.

It’s where tourists visit that there has been change. This is somewhat related to the previous point – there’s a lot more scope to do stuff in these places. And by stuff I mainly mean roads. Indian leaders are poor at changing administrative systems and in completing soft targets – mortality indicators, employment, or even sanitation. They are much better at building one time infrastructure. And for our PM, roads have always been a way to show he’s doing work. In that vein, the road to the airport is fantastic. The posh locale of Ravindrapuri is posher. Assi Ghat, which was mostly jungle earlier, has been cleared and converted to a hip place where people can sit and relax. Old timers have a hard time seeing this metamorphosis of Assi Ghat. It’s really a great place to visit.

More than that, this PM has managed to grant people the most rare of feelings – he has instilled in the people of Benaras (and I imagine in many other places) a sense of hope. People believe more substantive changes will be made.

For what it’s worth one can only hope they are right. Progress will be progress. And much respected and loved.

*****************

Change

(Written on March 14, 2021)

Where to begin? This is the penultimate March of PhD life but it may well be the last one of note. I've been juggling multiple possible job market papers and it seems nothing is truly clicking. I do have more ten papers in some stage of being written and I think at least half of them will be top quality so it's not all bad. Whatever else that may happen, I'll get out with some genuine research in my name.

This is easily the longest I've spent away from home. Sure, COVID is a good reason to stay put. But the mental health costs of staying essentially in the same room for 14 months and counting are huge. Work has progressed but the mind has suffered. The quest has been undertaken but it has been more lonely than first imagined or bargained for.

In the next six months, I will try to produce a paper of some note. If I make it, then phew. If I don't my degree will be complete and I will see what pastures await a person who can think through anything under seconds but is not research material. What am I meant to do?

(Last post in this series)