10/21/2005

juste comme ça - part six

“Wisdom cries out in the streets, and no man regards it”.
Shakespeare, in Henry IV
“A vulture flies high in the skies, but its eyes are perched on the piece of garbage littered on the ground”.
Ramakrishna Paramahamsa

10/18/2005

Products of a panopticon

Here is an excellent article that reflects on our (Indian) education system, which mirrors the TRIPOS system in Britain. We all groomed in our schools to be a foucaultian panopticon. But the truth is that we lose the perspective to be single minded in the pursuit of our interests. While it should be valid that we know something about everything, in that process we end up knowing only something about a particular thing.


The Hindu : Opinion / Leader Page Articles : School reform: learning from Iqbal

10/14/2005

juste comme ça - part cinq

“You believe in the light because of the darkness, You believe in the joy because of the sorrows, You believe in the God because of the Devil…” ENIGMA (From http://wearmyhat.blogspot.com)

I believe that the above statement captures the essence of existentialism. The belief in self is dictated by the existence of the other. One can avoid any debates by saying that "ah everything in this world is relative". That does not end the matter. Saying that you believe in "other" is because of the "self" (Gramsci) . There is one lacuna in this statement. It assumes the implicit existence of the other. Had the other not existed then your cause of belief is lost. It is like a dangling pointer.

The two sides of the coin are connected by the relationship of Oppression.The oppression of the self, creates the need for the other. Simplifying this, it means that due to the oppression of light, the space of darkness is created. This reminds me of a good line from the film BLACK.

"What is the use of eyes if there is no light" ......
In the absence of light, both the blind and the non-blinds are equal. This is what I mean by oppression. If I may say, if there is no light, then all blinds,non blinds are equivalent to darkness.

-----------The violence of self creates the other-------------

If we see at the flip-side of the same argument. Had there been no light, there is no need of darkness. Is darkness the absence of light ? I do not know. If I say that if there is no light, then there is no need of darkness. Is saying that "there is no light" equivalent to saying "there is darkness".

"I DO NOT KNOW". When I write this write this I get this clarion call from the great philosopher of the yesteryears without whom Sartre, Foucault would be like darkness... Nietzche.

HOW DO I KNOW THAT I DO NOT KNOW ..........

Add to this the Neumann principle......

"I KNOW THAT I DO NOT KNOW THAT I KNOW THAT I DO NOT KNOW....."

10/11/2005

Going down or turning Page

Reading over the ages has changed a lot. From the days when there was no papyrus to the days when there will be no papyrus. Reading as a concept was popularised with the coming of the printing press. It was the printing press that could make the reading a ubiquitous activity. With the transformation of the papyrus to the stream flow of electrons carrying our fonts and the texts, the way we read has undergone a fundamental change.

The pre-requisite for reading is pleasure. And that pleasure can only be derived from the turning of pages. However in the dog-eat-dog world of today, pleasure has become inversely proportional to the time you have. Therefore we all have to supplement our thirst and quest to read by resorting to the electronic forms. The essential anatomy of reading is co-ordinated from the left to the right. That is why we often feel uneasy to go to captions or footnotes as it breaks this natural movement of eyes from the left to that of the right (Just a note that this does not apply to urdu). Even when we turn the pages of the books it is from the right to
left. Imagine for each page if we had to turn from left to right, we would not be reading anything for the pleasure of it.

However with transport of reading from the left to right to the top to bottom something very fundamental changes. First of all the natural rhythm of reading patterns is broken. That is why we often find it difficult to read in this top-down manner. Moreover books do not have any problems related to that of eye stress originating due to colour or structure of the book. In the electronic forms our eyes are already loaded and irritated due to the intrusion of the top-down mannerism plus one has to adjust the layout of the screen to suit the intensity that can be bared easily.

What used to be referred to as "I have to read 3 pages from Chapter 1" shall now be termed as "I have to read three scrolls from top to bottom". Never were mice so important to reading. Structurally one could the reading is like flow of water. In a book water flows in a continuous manner from the left to right. However in a screen it is like water reaches at the end, then it is re-routed to the next level and so on to the end. Papyrus made using memory as a media of information transfer obsolete. It made information laying and transfer easier.

With the coming of the electronic media the papyrus has/will become obsolete. We all will end up making different meaning by seeing the same set of electrons in our CRT. It is just that these electrons desctruct some natural rhythms and create rhythms of their own. What the electronic media achieves is to break the structure of the book. Rather than make the book look fatter in breadth dimension, it obliterates the entire dimension itself. In these electronic books there is no breadth, there is only length. This is an example of going back. Remember the days when we used to have those lengthy scrolls. It is the same. The e-book is a long book that goes into pages just that organised in a linear fashion.

Suffice to say that - reading earlier used to belong to the three dimensions, now it is just a linear exercise. The tangible feeling that we all experience while reading is now lost. We all are left asking for more, but something at the end we could say yes I read through the entire of this. In other words reading is now de-objectified.

Go down
Down
Down
and down

and if you want
come up

There is no turning back or seeing left or right.