k^infinity to http://kpowerinfinity.spaces.live.com/ & http://kpowerinfinity.wordpress.com

Pushing the limits ... to infinity! This blog has now been split into two. My personal blog is now located at Live Spaces and my more technical blog is located at Wordpress

Wednesday, August 31, 2005

and suddenly ...


and suddenly the mountains seem heavier
and suddenly the air is thick
and suddenly i am no longer the cavalier
and suddenly i feel like a prick

Monday, August 29, 2005

Romancing in Mathland

So, you thought the only things mathematicians and computer scientists romanced was complicated graphs and even more complicated algorithms.

Now well, even though I may not doubt the verity of the above statement, there are perhaps more facets to a mathematicians life and to his imagination. And I would like a describe one, which will perhaps convince you that romance has not left the mathematicians.

So, one day long long ago there lived a mathematician. Surely, like all of his ilk, he was immersed in creating Game Trees, but he never found a "game" for himself. All his artificial and real intelligence combined could not get him an acquaintance with the Eighth Queen, despite an exhaustive search through and through the chessboard. His Rubik cube didn't seem to have any solution, all the generations of mathematicians before him Newton et al, seemed to have deserted him in this crucial juncture of life. Even though he sometimes dreamt of conjugal bliss, the problem of finding a stable member of the opposite sex seemed to be not just NP-complete, but he could not find any solutions in P-space.

Undaunted, he set about to find an algorithm by which he could find a "stable" match with the woman who would complete his graph. It was a difficult task to do it alone, so took resort to distributed search. Given n men and n women he tried to find the most "stable" match for them. Mathematicians usually try to disambiguate everything before they start looking for answers, and he decided to do the same:
  • If a man x and a woman y like each other more than their existing partners, they might switch in favour of each other, and leave their current partners.
  • In that case, we say that the pair (x,y) is an unstable pair.
  • A perfect matching is a stable matching if it yields no unstable pair.
Try as he might, he could not understand how to find the most stable girl for himself, who would not leave him despite his wierd mathematical ideas and wierder computer scientific actions.

At that time, there lived two great mathematical saints Gale and Shapley, whose fame spread far and wide, and mathematics students from the seven continents came to seek their blessings and their algorithms. Our dearest mathematician decided that matters were now out of his hands, and it required "divine" algorithms. St. Gale and St. Shapley heard his problem and they had just the right decision procedure to suit his needs. They proposed the "Gale-Shapley Proposal Algorithm":

Input: Preference rankings by each of n men and n women.
Iteration:
  1. Each man proposes to the woman highest on his preference list, who has not previously not rejected him
  2. If each woman receives exactly one proposal, say "yes", go straight to the two great Saints and request them to sanctify their love.
  3. Otherwise, every woman receiving more than one proposal rejects all of them except the one highest on her preference list.
  4. Every woman receiving a proposal says "maybe" to the most attractive proposal received.
The iteration is repeated and the Saints were able to use all the formal logic at their disposal to prove that their scheme of mass marriage would be able to produce a lasting marriages with cute kids.

And they differentiated and integrated happily ever after ... would be a nice ending to the mathematicians story, but alas! it wasn't to be! A lady mathematicians soon discovered that the schema was biased towards the men, because if all of them had distinct crushes, every woman would get just one proposal which she would be bound to accept. She decided to revolt against the "Man's World", gather all her allies, statistically find out the probability of winning, optimise her troops to achieve the lowest cost function and the largest victory (it was a multi-objective optimisation). She built an inverted index to ensure that the troops were posted in the correct location always, she created genetic algorithms to design the best weapons ever, she took the help of artificial neural networks to make sure the enemy's location always was known to the tenth of a millimeter in her specially designed infrared hypercube radar (outsourced for design to India), she arranged her soldiers in Ant colonies and left them to create the best of the breed attack strategies ... (okay okay I know its getting just a little too ludicrous with every clause!)

Anyway, the men were also obviously preparing hard for it. With St. Gale and St. Shapley in charge, and our very own beloved mathematician at the helm of the attacking troops, they worked out the best strategies to build a huuuuuge fortress, with a fuzzy moat all around it, and an even fuzzier mist surrounding it.

And ever since, the students of IIT Kharagpur have been sitting in this castle of theirs, with all the girls all around the world, and none in Kharagpur [the few that are are quick to ensnare a few chaps into getting out of their halls in the nights]. And ever since, your beloved little mathematician has been blogging so that one day, just one day, the seige will get over, and some girl would be kind enough to overlook the war of the worlds and say "yes".

Monday, August 15, 2005

Independance Day, not just 15h August

A lot of things cross my mind this independance day. And I feel inexplicably relaxed today. Perhaps, its all the reading over the past couple of weeks. I read:
  1. The Lexus and The Olive Tree by Thomas Friedman
  2. 4.50 from Paddington by Agatha Christie
  3. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
  4. Alexander: Child of a Dream by Valerio Massimo Manfredi (Book 1 of a trilogy)
Somehow, reading a book really makes me think. And numbers 1 and 4 are closely related to the world, politics, economics and independance.

First of all, what model of independance are we looking at? As we step into a global village, we are more and more interdependant rather than independant. A fisherman in India may be affected if the Nikkei nosedives, or the Hang Seng shoots up. We are no longer masters of our destinies, we are the collective masters of the destinies of billions of people. Each of our actions could potentially affect the whole world!

The most potent of course are the business satraps, whom Friedman calls the Electronic Herd. They have the power to move capital around the world in a matter of seconds. But are they free and independant? I am not sure. They are slaves of their own greed, of money, of fame, of power. They are like King Philip, the father of Alexander, slaves of their own success. They are like the geishas - bought as slaves to live a life of drudgery, of exploitation, but once they grow up, they can no longer forego the same life.

Nevertheless, it is money which is the world's most potent weapon today. Trade and industry have lifted millions of people above the poverty line in China and India. It is business interests which made the US suddenly change its stance towards India. It has prevented many a wars in the last few decades. The Lexus, a symbol of this economic power [as symbolized by Friedman], is now driving around the world, picking up passengers it deems best, in whichever country in the world. And this multicultural, multiracial environment is not limited to a single city or country. From New York to London to Frankfurt to Dubai to Bangalore to Shanghai, people of all kinds live together and aggrandize wealth together. Because that is the only way to succeed in today's world.

Getting back to the issue of independance, I would believe that true independance today lies not just in determining your government, but also your destiny. True independance is when you have a kid in a village of Bihar growing up to be an engineer and bringing light to his village. True independance is when a peasant's daughter in India can become a teacher in the US. Independance would be when opportunities are equally available and anybody can come grab them. Independance would be when we can provide education to all the millions of children being born everyday, empower them to choose their own destiny. Independance would be to provide retirement benefits to all the millions retiring every year [We promised them retirement benefits in their heydeys, we cant leave them in the lurch now that hey are old and decrepit].

Independance would be when we could unshackle all the millions born to "small" ancestry, enable them to live a life of dignity. Independance would be achieved when we could begin to respect every job whether it is a truck driver or a furniture mover or a cleaner. It is not all that difficult considering such egalitarianism already exists in many of the western countries.

At the same time, however, we must reaffirm our faith in the Indian way of living - our family values, our sense of belonging, our languages, olive trees which keep us firmly grounded in our civilization. The lexus, however, modern needs a garage to park in, to refuel, to be reforged into the modern beauty it is. Leaving our parents in old-age homes to leave a life of debauchery and hedonism is no form of independance.

We have a long way to go before we can realize the dreams of all those who laid our lives to ensure a honorable life for us, but it is a tight rope we walk, we have to make sure that we balance ourselves well, we make sure that in our hurry to cross the chasm, we don't forget all those who brought us till the bridge, because one thing is for sure - India is going to cross the chasm in this generation.

Tuesday, August 09, 2005

A Geisha's Memoirs


There are very few books which I have enjoyed so much as Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden, and I must add that it is not right there, near the top of my list.

The book, written in an autobiographical note, tells the story of Sayuri, a fisherman's daughter who grows up to be one of the formost geishas in the District of Gion in Japan and subsequently in New York. The novel is acclaimed to be "one of those novel-lovers yearn for", and it is indeed the case. It is one of those novels which can captivate you and keep you turning the pages even though there is hardly a murder, and no suspense. The language is most unpretentious - there were no "big" words, and I rather felt the lucidity the language and the simplicity of expression only strengthens the author's delivery.

The novel starts with Choyo, the swan-child of a fisherman and his ailing wife, growing up amongst the fish-laden beaches fo Yoriodo in Japan. Her stars predict behaviour akin to Water, and we see very much in the rest of the book how Choyo is able to adjust herself to her surroundings. The mother is dying and the father has no money; Choyo ultimately is sold to a Geisha okiya [geisha house], while her sister is sold to a brothel. The child's innocence, her gulliblity is very well represented when she actually thinks that the person who sold her off, had actually been thinking of adopting her. It really is very moving when Choyo is separated from her sister Satsu, and left in the patronage of the okiya.

After that the story meanders in a long and exciting tale of hard work, despondency, jealosy, villification, back-stabbing, treachery and finally jubilation describing Choyo's struggles to become a geisha, Sayuri. The story also describes her days as a geisha, the trials she has to face, the hardships during World War II, and finally ends with her coming to stay in New York. I would not like to give away the plot, but would definitely add in the same breath that I am sure no body could be disappointed with it.

The pace of the story is just ideal, it never seems to sag, and never seems to rush past. I believe the hallmark of good writing is that the words seem to flow into words, words into paragraphs, and paragraphs into chapters, and they form one solid plot, which never lets the reader put down the book. Somehow, in this book I enjoyed all of this and more.

The description of Gion and the geisha district is absolutely fascinating. You almost fell as if you are walking along the alleys, the tea-houses, the geisha school, the bridges, the okiyas. You feel geishas are walking around you, bowing to you, asking of your permission to entertain you. You imagine them with the atypical white make-up on their faces, dressed in multi-hued kimonos, apprentice geishas even more so. It really seems an idyllic surrounding.

However, the one reason I really liked the novel was because of the intricate examination of Sayuri's mind as a girl, an apprentice, a geisha, a woman and more importanly as a human being. Many people in western society mistake a geisha to be just another prostitute. This book however, explodes that myth. Geishas are artists - they dance, sing and entertain their guests. Even though they are also adept in the art of seducing people, there is definitely another side to their life. Sayuri has her own likes and dislikes. In many cases, they abhors the very people she has to entertain, even people living in her own okiya. And at the same time, she has her own fascinations, her own yearnings, her own idea of love.

Life as a geisha can be pretty tough. The elaborate hair-dos ensure that you have to learn to sleep in a very complicated bed called a futon, which has a kind of a stand for your head rather than a pillow. They are expected to look their elegant best, with an excess of make-up, and clumsy dresses. And with that they have to entertain all the guests, behave demurely, like the princess who finds a pea under the mattresses uncomfortable. However, the training they have to go through, prepares them for quite a rough life. As children, they not only go to the geisha school, but also have to work like a donkey in the okiya, because they are ultimately bought from the market, and become slaves if they don't turn out to be a swan they are expected to be. Sayuri got so calloused in their early lives, that there was a certain maturity in the way she looked at everything. She writes, "Adversity is like a strong wind. I don't mean just that it holds us back from places we might otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward we see outselves as we really are, and not merely as we might like to be."

The book shows how even in selling her body for the money, there is a certain acceptance of fate - which I really found intriguing. She longes for the Chairman, but still continues serving her danna, her patron, just as she would, just as she should, for it is her vocation. However, unlike the other geishas, she jeopardizes her future to reach to the Chairman, whose was the one thought which motivated her all through her formative years. And this further raises her in my eyes, since even though she is brought up to be a meek and docile, she still has the spark of rebellion alive in her, and she wants to carve her destiny, flow into another vessel whose shape is more in agreement with her.

At the same time, reading about Japan and its culture was interesting, for it is so much like our own Indian culture. There is a strong sense of hierarchy, and you rise only by giving due respect to your seniors, and the people who helped you reach thus far, and you continue to do that even though you might be more successful than them. Geishas are adopted by their okiya, and call their seniors as Mother, or Aunty, or Granny. There is a sense of belonging, even in case of Geishas and their patrons. Even though Geishas might be in the business of beauty, sex was mostly unspoken and only alluded to, very much the way it is in India. I accept, Japan must have changed a lot by now, just like India is beginning to change, but still reading about the past which may never exist ever again was an unparalleled experience.

In the book while talking about the World War II, the ensuing destruction, while she talks of laughter having drained from their lives, and their living "onion lives", it keeps peeling layer after layer and crying all the while, she talks of rebuilding. It is surprising how adversity can bring together the entire community, even somebody as cocooned as a geisha. The same happened in Germany. I just hope one day we might feel the same way towards our country and try to revive its former glory!