Life?

This is one of those things that every living entity on this planet has in common. Yet we seem to be at a loss when confronted with the question, “What is life?”. I mean, it is not like a non-living entity would walk up to one of us ask with a tap on the shoulder, “Er... excuse me, but I couldn't help but notice that you have life, and I was wondering if you could enlighten me as to what life is”.

Though that situation may never arise, it would do us well to attempt an answer. It would do us well as it would enable us to see life from a new perspective. Maybe we could notice something that had remained unnoticed before. Then there would be many fundamentally different explanations and theories, we could debate them, these theories could grow in magnitude and become religions and we could go to war over the matter of “Which one of us is right?”.

On a more serious note, the answer to “What is life?” or the method of arriving at a suitable answer to it would enable us to analyze life in detail and answer many personal questions. For example, I have always asked myself why it is that we consider our kind of life the only kind of life there is (you know, carbon based, oxygen breathing organisms). Apparently the oxygen breathing part is not a sufficient condition for life as is evident thanks to the many anaerobic bacteria that have been found. So is reproduction.

No one would consider a eunuch to be a non living entity. It is no secret that eunuchs are incapable of reproduction; yet we count them under the living. Ergo reproduction too seems to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for life. So what are the sufficient conditions for life? What condition or group of conditions, which when present guarantee the presence of life?

From my currently limited perspective, I can see one thing. Living things are born, they lead a “life” and then they die; they have a life cycle. They are self sustaining; either they consume certain resources from their surroundings to ensure their own existence or they have all the resources they need for existence within themselves and they die when the resources within themselves are depleted. A partial example for the latter would be insects in the pupa state, hibernating animals, etc.

Life cycles have been ascribed for seemingly inanimate objects too. Stars seem to have a life cycle. They are said to be “born” in a nebula. They live out their lives by running nuclear fusion reactors, first by fusing hydrogen into helium, helium into carbon, carbon into neon, neon into silicon, and finally silicon into Iron. Finally they reach the stage where their core is made up of Iron or some other heavy metal, which they cannot fuse into something heavier profitably, they collapse on themselves and their “life”ends. Their “death” results in either a white dwarf or a neutron star or a black hole (depending on the size of the original star subject to the Chandrasekhar Limit).

If we think of birth as simply a kind of creation and death as simply a kind of destruction, everything around us seems to have its own cycle of creation and destruction. Therefore it does not seem too big a stretch to try and ascribe life to everything. Even man-made objects; tables for example. Tables are created (birth), they serve their purpose which is to say that they support many things on their surfaces, they get damaged and we repair them(life), they eventually fall into disrepair and we discard them, then they are taken apart. Their useful parts are recycled, their combustible parts are incinerated and the rest are discarded as waste (death). This does not seem too big a stretch.

Many living things appear inanimate when observed for just an instant. Sure when observed for prolonged periods of time we can see evidence that suggests growth, self repair and so on. My point being this: what gives us the right to classify anything other than ourselves as living or non living? There are so many things we do not know. The extent of our knowledge of the universe is grossly limited. We do not even know everything about ourselves. We still do not completely understand the workings of our own brain. We still do not know why each and every single strand of DNA on earth is a left handed helix. Well as far as we know there is no physical, structural, functional or chemical explanation for why there do not exist any right handed DNA helices. The only conclusion I can draw from that is that there seems to be some way in which right handed helices are deficient, but we do not know enough to ascertain for ourselves what that is.

When there are such serious lacunae in our knowledge; why do we consider our definition of “life” so true? It is but an assumption. An assumption that we have made based on our limited knowledge which is based on our limited view of the universe. For all you know, some time in the future, what we consider to be nonliving may very well turn out to be a living entity.

IIIT

I am living on the IIIT campus in Hyderabad. This campus is situated near a part of Hyderabad known as the “HITEC City”; where all the offices and office campuses of major software MNCs are situated. The IIIT campus is not large, spanning just about 62 acres. These 62 acres are the closest I have come to finding a haven for researchers and aspiring researchers (like myself) in the chaotic city of Hyderabad.

Do not misunderstand me, I love Hyderabad; its the city I was born and brought up in. I love the culture of the place. But lately it has become extremely chaotic. Those who are on the road have no respect for the rule of the road (if indeed they know what the rule of the road is). Other than that there is the usual chaos that is associated with life in any city, town, village or settlement ie national politics, local politics, the politics of sharing basic amenities (water, electricity), th chaos associated with someone getting married/ deceased/ engaged in your locality, etc. Hyderabad is full of it, more so for Hyderabad has the distinction of being the capital of Andhra Pradesh. But the IIIT, offers a campus where you are sequestered from this chaos.

In the IIIT, you have the option of not being bothered by all these chaoses. Here they are not “in your face” therefore you can choose to ignore them and concentrate on your work, your calling, your passion- your research. Of course, if you choose to be bothered by these chaoses, there are television sets that are accessible and the whole campus is plugged in to the Internet. I choose not to be bothered by these chaoses. And whenever the climate permits, I like to take a walk through the campus on the wonderfully paved roads. There is a certain electricity you sense here. As I said in one of my pensive and poetic moments:

“on the lonely campus roads, if one is sensitive enough, one can just about sense the beginnings of something truly great.”

You get the sense that great minds are at work here. Busy solving various conundrums. Busy trying to make life a better place to be for their fellow human beings. Or just trying to understand the world around them and working to expand the boundaries of knowledge, and the universe.

The bottom line is, this place seriously is a strictly no-bullshit place. If you have the passion for research and the required skills, a place for you here will be created and those in charge will make sure to do everything in their power to see that you are able to reach your target.

This place is ideal for thinkers to dream up great things and endeavor to realize those dreams. One gets the sensation of swimming in the vast ocean of knowledge

We need more places like this in India where young innovators and aspiring researchers are encouraged and motivated to achieve their goals and help expand the boundaries of knowledge.

Brain Jacking

I read an interesting article today, in the “Scientific American” magazine (November 2008, Page. #34). It was about something called “Brain Jacking” or plugging into the brain. What this basically means is creating an interface between machines and the human brain such that we can control them by the means of thought alone. This concept is not entirely futuristic. There are bionic ears (cochlear implants) available which enable the completely deaf or those extremely hard of hearing hear normally. This is achieved by implanting a device into the cochlea that stimulates the auditory nerve.

The author (Gary Stix) explored this concept a little further. Researchers in the University of Pittsburgh have been doing many experiments with controlling machines with the power of thought alone. They (the researchers) trained a monkey to use its thought to manipulate a robotic arm to grab a morsel of food. Though this is far from the science fiction tales of storing many megabytes of data in one’s memory (a la Johnny Mnemonic), it is real enough to be experienced by anyone who wants to experience it.

The next level of this would be to reverse the flow of information, i.e. from machines into our minds. Much like our eyes, ears, tongue, and skin do. Such technology could help us develop things like night vision and help us enhance the power of our sensory perception. But this requires technology we do not have at our disposal today. This requires something that has yet to be invented or discovered. Now, let’s say that we did have all the requisite technology. We would still be unable to send information into our brains unless we figure out exactly how it is that the different neurons that make up our brains communicate with each other. In other words, we have to learn the language of the brain something known as “neural code”.

Unravelling the neural code is one of the most imposing challenges in neuroscience. There are many theories as to how neural codes work, one of them is that the code corresponds to the rate of firing of the voltage spikes generated by a neuron. More recent work has focused on the precise timing between each spike (temporal codes) and the constantly changing patterns of how neurons fire together (population codes).

A collaboration between the University of Southern California and the Wake Forest University has worked to fashion a replacement for a part of the brain known as the hippocampus which is responsible for forming new memories. The hippocampus is the part of the brain which sustains damage in stroke or Alzheimer’s. This project is funded by the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). 

They hope that this research work may pave the way to a stage where a person can be taught how to fly an F-15 fighter jet just by downloading the requisite literature into their brains.

They have successfully created an artificial hippocampus for consolidating a rat’s memory of pressing a lever to get a drop of water. Normally the hippocampus emits signals that are relayed to the cortical areas responsible for storing long term memories of an experience. For the experiment, a chemical temporarily incapacitated the rat’s hippocampus. When the rat pressed the bar, electrical inputs from the sensory and other areas of the cortex were channeled through a microchip, which, the scientists say dispatched the same signals the hippocampus would have sent. A demonstration that an artificial device mimicked the hippocampal (sic) output would mark a step towa4rd deducing the underlying code that could be used to create a memory in the motor cortex.

Though these are giant leaps in their own right, they are small steps towards our ultimate goal of understanding how the brain works. Would the neural code for the sentence “see spot run” mean the same to an English speaker as it would to a, say, native Tamil speaker?

“Complex information like the contents of a book weould requite the interaction os a veru large number of brain cells over a veru large area of the nervous system,” observes neuroscientist John Donoghue, of the Brown University. “Therefore you couldn’t address all of themgetting them to store in their connections the correct kind of information. So, I would say based on current knowledge, it’s not possible”

Therefore we can take it for granted we are light years behind what they showed in “The Matrix” when Trinity downloaded the manual for flying a helicopter into her mind through her cell phone. But what if that were possible? What if it were possible to download information directly into our brains? That would change everything from the way we learn to the way we look at the world.

The optimist in me imagines a world where less time is wasted in learning things and the time saved is utilized in gaining practical experience by applying what is learnt in the real world. People could just download the required information into their brains.  Scientist working together can collaborate even more by sharing their thoughts and intuitions with each other. This would also give rise to new forms of art.

The purpose of art is to convey one’s feelings, sensations and emotions through a medium. Now an artist would be able to do just that. A painter could encode in his painting certain devices that would convey to the observer exactly what he was feeling while painting that. An author or poet could encode his feelings and emotions into the words that (s)he writes to convey them to the reader. And then maybe an entirely new form of art could be born out of this. Eventually, instead of writing on a medium, an author or a poet could directly record his feelings and emotions as a package combined with his imagined imagery. Anyone who downloads that package could feel what the author or poet felt.

Cyber-sex would also become a wholly new and greatly enhanced experience. And telepathy would become the basis for a new form of global communications network.

On the darker side, hackers would now be able to induce a variety of disorders in people through downloads. A hacker could induce Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or any other disorder. One could induce dementia, depression, insanity or other psychological disorders in people by hacking into their brains.

Even without wrongdoers, the proliferation of telepathy could render physical contact obsolete. We would become a race of beings who seldom come into physical contact with each other.

But, all this is at best in the distant future, we have more important things to worry about. For example there is this quandary of whether or not to be able to jack into the human brain it is required to implant the device surgically into the human skull.

Once this is done, the next step I guess would be to modify the human genome such that we are born with these devices in us.

**All Scientific Data and direct quotes courtesy Scientific American Magazine**

The Greatest Duet Ever Sung

For the first time, I feel compelled to write about a single song. Not about an album or an artiste but a song. I consider this song the greatest duet ever sung. Its so great that I don't think that even the original artistes (if the guy was alive) could repeat the performance. And that is a huge thing to say considering that the original singers are the legendary Kishore Kumar and Asha Bhosle. These two have sung some of the best duets in Hindi cinema. But none of them comes close to their best: “Jaan'e Jaan Dhoondtaa Phir Raha”.

To begin with this song as multifaceted as a diamond. The way the two singers' voices dance with each other creates an ethereal feel. When one singer sings the song, the other singer provides a melody with his/her voice. And they cease being two separate voices. This is a love song. And I must say that this song successfully captures ever aspect, every nuance of every emotion and feeling between two people when they are in love, be it the intoxication that both feel when they are in each other's company, or the lust that they feel for each other.

This song effectively conveys the feeling of the togetherness people feel when they are in love. The feeling that the two lovers are no longer two separate entities but have coalesced into one single entity. The ecstasy that one feels when one is in the same general are as one's lover. The sudden feeling of helplessness and vulnerability one feels when one looses sight of one's lover even for a brief moment. This song even entails the orgasm from a sexual union that does not feel sinful because it is between two people who are deeply in love with each other.

Back in the days when this song was sung, the tune and the lyrics usually did match up with each other but in this case t he match is perfect. The words, everyone knows what the words mean. But the tune is yet another deal. The tune is pure ecstasy, it is bliss. It gives you the feeling of floating in mid-air and everything is right, you have not a single concern in the world for your beloved is by your side and you are basking in the warmth of your lover's affection.

Its a dream like state that is so real you have no clue whether it is real or a dream. It feels too good to be true but it cannot be anything but true.

It depicts the state where the satisfying of one's desires entail the satisfying of the other's desires and one derives pleasure from satisfying the other's desire.

This song successfully and superbly encapsulates the feeling of blissful intoxication and the absolute ecstasy that comes over a couple in love.

A book could be written to describe how superlative this song is, and even that would come nowhere near sufficing as a description of the excellence of this song.

Not Flogging India

They have made a new movie. Slumdog Millionaire. It has won a couple of Golden Globe awards and has been nominated for a cartload of Academy awards. It has been hailed as one of the very best Indian movies. I am not going to watch it. I will explain why, and no this post is not about me bashing this movie.

One of the people involved with the production of this movie said with quite a bit of pride, “there has been a general trend to glorify India or sanitize India, in Slumdog, we have done neither”. Whether showing India's stark and filthy reality is a matter of pride or not, I am not going to discuss. (And to the patriotic ones who are going to mail me about “India's stark and filthy reality”, the garbage strewn back alleys of Mumbai and the heaps of urban refuse can hardly be called anything other than filthy).

I wrote this post to focus on an aspect of India that has been pushed to the sidelines thanks to our infatuation with crime, grime, corruption, destitution, failure and everything else that is negative. Yes our politicians are corrupt slobs, yes almost all the governmental systems are saturated with corrupt cockroaches. And thanks to a certain Mr. Raju from Andhra Pradesh, we have come to “realize” that the corporate world isn't all that clean either.

But look around you, we are progressing; and not by a small margin but by leaps and bounds. This country of so many contradictions of so many different kinds of diversities is not only managing to stick together as a coherent entity, we are actually working together. To paraphrase a dialog from a movie called “Namastey London” or something to that effect “India is the only country in the world where a Catholic lady stepped aside to let a Sikh gentleman take the oath of office of Prime Minister from a Muslim President in a Hindu majority nation.” Come to think of it, which country can boast of such acceptance of diversity?

The USA immediately comes to mind, but the point to be noted here and the question to be asked is this, would Mr. Barack Hussain Obama have been elected to the office of the President of the USA if he had not converted to Christianity? Would the people of the USA have elected a Muslim president?

Yes we have had pogroms in our country, the most recent being the Gujarat carnage, orchestrated by Narendra Modi, in which a tragic number of Muslims were killed, some of them brutally, I will spare you the details which are a mere Google search away. The point to be noted here is that the carnage, though tragic, remained confined to the state of Gujarat (certain parts of Gujarat if memory serves me right). It was not like the whole nation of India got divided among communal lines and erupted into civil strife.

Wherever there are differences, there are bound to be conflicts, they may be communal in nature or ideological or something else. The point is, that so many years after independence, we are still together as one single nation, even though we have been through events that should have torn this country apart.

Lets change the subject. Communal togetherness is not the only feather in our cap. We have several others. The space program for one is a huge asset. Sure, we haven't sent anyone to the moon or anything to Mars (yet), but there is one thing we can boast of that no other country or conglomerate can boast of. Our maiden voyage to the moon, the first time we ever tried sending anything that far away from terra firma, succeeded.

No country other than India, no space agency other than ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization) can boast of succeeding at their first ever moon mission. How is that for a feather in our cap?

Let us talk about the military. It is no secret that we are not the most powerful nation on the planet. But ours is one of the largest armies. And if memory serves me right, ours is one of the most successful armies. The only time one army enforced a complete and unconditional surrender on another army was in the war of 1971 when the army of Pakistan (under Gen. Niazi) surrendered to the Indian National Army (under Gen. Sam Manekshaw) in Bangladesh (East Pakistan back then).

Anti terror and anti insurgent forces around the world are seeking the expertise of the corresponding commands of the Indian National Army in terms of training. Thanks to Pakistan our defense forces have become experts in matters of combating terrorism. Many would hold the 26-11 Mumbai attacks to mean the contrary, but on close examination reveal that the cause of the carnage was negligence on part of the civilian authorities as they disregarded the Intelligence reports provided by the RAW and IB (our intelligence agencies).

I am not denying the fact that its not all hunky dory in India, but there is an awful lot of good that is going on as well. Instead of concentrating on the bad news, working up a temper and coming down with blood pressure and other tension related disorders, we should concentrate on the good news. We should take pride in whatever successes our country can boast of, and use that pride to fuel our progress, while keeping the bad news in mind so that we do not repeat our own mistakes.

I take pride in being an Indian, and I know most (if not all) of you do, ergo its time to show it by working for the betterment of our country, after all, the government is not solely responsible for national development, we all are, whether we like it or not, so why not start liking it?

I am not going to watch Slumdog Millionaire because I do not want the image of gargantuan garbage dumps and back alley slums thrust in my face. Yes they are a reality and I will do my part in bettering that aspect of India. But I do not want to have the bleakness and precariousness of that society thrust into my face.