The Subjective Stance

I realized that my blog was getting too serious for my own comfort, so here is a completely frivolous post. I was thinking about Superman and Clark Kent (CK) and how each time Clark Kent has to become Superman, he has to go into a telephone booth and change. With the advent of cellphones there are no telephone booths anymore, so what is CK gonna do? I think that Superman has to change with the times. In other words, he has to become Quantum Supeman, who is in a superposition state, being both Superman and not Superman simultaneously. Just think about how terrific a slogan quantum Superman has waiting for him: "He is a Bird AND he is a Plane AND he is Superman!" But Houston, there is a problem. If Superman is quantum while Lois Lane (LL) is still classical, then with whom does she fall in love? Is it with Clark Kent or is it with Superman? A good classical girl (as all DC comics heroines are, none of this postmodern hedonism for them) wouldnt be caught dead performing quantu...

I think one of Gandhi's greatest ideological innovations (and certainly the symbol most associated with him) was the Charkha , the spinning wheel. It was a great example of a mechanical device that was easy to make, easy to use by an individual working by himself, and it made a product that was clearly useful to the spinner as well as society as a whole. In one stroke, Gandhi seized upon an invention that subverted the idea of industrialization being necessary for production in a modern economy and furthered his goal of highlighting the material and spiritual benefits of manual labour as opposed to the mental gymnastics normally associated with Brahminical Hinduism. However, times have changed. When we think of technology we dont think anymore of massive steel mills and big dams. Our imagination has been captured by intelligent computers and virtual worlds. Some might say that the microcomputer has combined high technology and decentralization to give rise to the ideal Gandhian art...

In case you havent heard, these are exciting times in the otherwise media unfriendly domain of mathematical research. A month ago, Grigory Perelman refused to attend the International Congress of Mathematicians (held in Madrid this time) in order to collect his Fields medal, the mathematical equivalent of the Nobel Prize. While Perelman was holed up in his mothers apartment in St.Petersburg, the worlds of gossip and geometry were intersecting at faster than light speeds. One of the pioneers in the field of geometric analysis, S.T.Yau , sued the New Yorker as well as Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber for writing this article about Perelman's proof of the Poincare Conjecture. I am not going to dwell any longer on the controversies surrounding Perelman and his proof, since the webuniverse has plenty of material to whet your appetites (including the New Yorker article cited above), but here is a juicy titbit of my own: while I was a graduate student at MIT in the late 90's and early ...

In 1992, Francis Fukuyama published an (in)famous book called " The End of History and the Last Man "in which he famously pronounced that the end of the cold war marked the end of history and that we would all ride into the liberal democratic sunset unto the end of all days. Recent events, from 9/11 to the rise of China have put paid to Fukuyama's predictions, but I think that after making a minor adjustment, he might still be right. My point being: what if the cold war marked the End of European History ? That is to say, was the cold war the last global dialogue/debate/battle of ideas all whom had their origins in Europe? The west is clearly in a furor over the relationship between global Islam and "western values". I think that the presence of Islam in the global arena is only one sign of the changing times. I wouldnt be surprised, for example, if China and India make increasingly larger contributions to the debate about the future of humanity. About a year a...

I am going to be at home all day today since everything is closed and rumors are that anybody or any vehicle on the street is liable to be stoned or beaten up. Why? Because some shadowy group of "Kannada Organizations" is organizing a Statewide bandh, i.e., all shutters are closed for the day. I am amazed by the level of Kannada nationalism in Karnataka. The ostensible reason is the border dispute between Maharashtra and Karnataka over some villages in northern Karnataka. I am not aware of the underlying political dynamic. Being Tamilian, though not having grown up in Tamil Nadu, I am quite aware of Tamil Nationalism and the anti-Hindi stance of Tamilians. I can understand that to some extent since having grown up in the north, I am quite aware of the routine dismissal of non-Hindi speakers by northerners. But Tamil nationalism has other, less attractive aspects as well, such as the complete domination of Tamil politics by the two Dravidian parties with their hagiographic re...

One can distinguish between two different epistemological stances: (a) The theoretical attitude: this is the standard claim about the nature of western thinking, where one stands in a propositional attitude towards the world, either as a belief or as a claim or whatever. It is this attitude that western thinkers have one the one hand tried to universalize in order to explain all phenomena, from quarks to quasars, and on the other hand claimed as being uniquely true of western thought, its inheritance from the ancient Greeks. For example, here's what the well known German philosopher and ur-phenomenologist, Edmund Husserl has to say about this topic: "'The spiritual image of Europe' - what is it? It is exhibiting the philosophical idea immanent in the history of Europe (of spiritual Europe). To put it another way, it is its immanent teleology, which, if we consider mankind in general, manifests itself as a new human epoch emerging and beginning to grow, the epoch of a ...