All things Quixotic

Cervantes' "Don Quixote" has been very popular since centuries, despite its gargantuan proportions. It deals with the eponymous idealistic knight, his brains addled with reading the chivalrous literature popular in his time, setting out to replicate the adventures in them. His illiterate squire, Sancho Panza, provides an apt foil with his homegrown wisdom.

It is not widely known that Orson Welles set out to film a contemporary version of the novel, the film sadly remaining unfinished.

The son of the legendary director Bunuel, worked as assistant director in this film. The musical starring Peter O'Toole, Sophia Loren & James Coco, though taking enormous liberties with the text, remained faithful to the spirit of the novel.

The Spanish philosopher Unamuno, claiming to be more Quixotist than Cervantist, wrote "My Lord Don Quixote" a metaphysical analysis of the character.

Graham Greene turned the title character into a Catholic priest in his "Monsignor Quixote." He, like his mythical ancestor, remained an idealist in a cynical, materialist world. His Sancho was the communist ex-mayor of their hometown El Toboso, the native place of the "peerless" Dulcinea, the idol of the fictional Don. This was also made into a film starring Alec Guiness as the Monsignor.

Rushdie's metafiction "Quichotte" rounds up this "Quixotic" essay.

Boolean Algebra & Spirituality

Boolean algebra deals with only two states, true or false or expressed in numerical digits 1 or 0. This was applied by Claude Shannon, the father of information technology in his landmark paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication." It can also be represented by an electrical circuit which can only be "on" or "off". By means of splitting any logical process into a number of options which require only "yes" or "no" answers, complex problems can be solved. This also may be considered as the nucleus of computer programming.

Now it can be examined how this idea can be applied to spirituality. The human aspirations can be categorised into worldly or spiritual ambitions. The wordly life is in accordance with nature, I e., devoted to the pursuit of sensual pleasures & the acquisition of wealth. The spiritual life, in direct opposition to the above, consists in renouncing sensual pleasures & embracing voluntary poverty. The two can never be reconciled (except in the sermons in churches, discourses in mosques or "pravachanas" in temples, which are at best only palliatives to go through the travails of life & at worst "politically correct" statements.

True spirituality presupposes "Chittavritti Virodhaha" as stated in Patanjali Yoga Sutras or "A life against nature" as stated in Kathryn Hulme's classic novel. The Qur'an says "Requite evil with what is better & your enemy will become your friend. But none will attain this attribute save those who patiently endure." (Surah 41, Verse 35). This is in accordance with the earlier Biblical injunction of "turning the other cheek" & the idea of the meek inheriting the earth. This also illustrates that the wordly impulse to take revenge on our enemies is opposed by the spiritual way. 

It is pertinent to note that in the "Dhammapada", the canonical text of Buddhism, out of the ten perfections aimed at by the aspirants, four are "renunciation", "patience", "loving kindness"& "equanimity."

To take Boolean Algebra to extreme spiritual limits, 1 or "on" can denote the Godhead & 0 or "off" can denote the physical world. Sankara's Advaita Aphorism "Brahma Satyam, Jagat Mithya" can also be another facet of this.

Composers's single Violin Concertos

It is a strange phenomenon that most famous composers wrote only one violin concerto. The list starts from Beethoven (though he wrote a triple concerto featuring the violin also), Brahms (though he wrote a double concerto featuring the cello also), Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, Mendelssohn, Elgar & most famously Bruch, whose only remembered piece is the violin concerto, albeit a magnificent one. But it is to be remembered that all these single violin concertos are the staples of the concert stage, & the showpieces of the virtuosos.

But the glorious exception is the most supremely gifted Mozart, who though a virtuoso Pianist, was also a violinist & composed no less than five violin concertos, the last being the famous "Turkish" so called because of the unison chromatic crescendos among other things.

Basaveshwara, Calvin & Weber

Max Weber's influential book "The Protestant Ethic & the spirit of Capitalism" (which inspired Sri Narayana Murthy also) postulates how protestantism (especially Calvinism) was instrumental in the rise of Capitalism, by emphasising the importance of productive work.

The importance of productive work as opposed to un-productive work was also dealt with in the Scottish economist Adam Smith's seminal work "The Wealth of Nations."

The American savant & polymath Benjamin Franklin also propagated the same idea in his influential "Poor Richard's Almanack" & by living a productive life himself.

Predating all these western ideas, the twelfth century Indian reformer Basaveshwara mooted the idea of "Work is Worship". The playwright Girish Karnad opines that this gave rise to an increase in material prosperity also.

Franz Fanon & V. S. Naipaul - Colonialism & Culture of Conversion

Fanon's seminal book "Black skin, White masks" had a profound influence on N.R.Narayana Murthy, when he was wondering why after Independence, India's progress was tardy. In his book "A better India, a better world", Murthy writes that he realised that the colonial mindset of 'the dark elite in white masks' in a postcolonial society, the mindset that the ruled & the rulers have different sets of rights & responsibilities with a huge asymmetry in favour of the rulers, struck him as the reason for the skewed state.

Similarly, Naipaul in his two books, "Among the Believers" & "Beyond Belief" (a sequel written 17 years later), examines the mindset of the converted in Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan & Malaysia. He wonders how can one convert a personal faith into the apparatus of a state without settling for a personal tyranny. He feels that the people of these countries are mentally, physically & geographically torn between two worlds, similar to the ruled & the rulers in Fanon's "Black skin, white masks'." If colonialism has created the dichotomy in Fanon's work, conversion (white mask) has done the same in these four countries, with the same result.

To end on a lighter note, the saying "More loyal than the King" can be applied here in two contexts. One is that English Literature is studied more in India than in England in a post-colonial scenario & secondly, while Arabia itself is liberalising it's stringent laws, the converted countries are becoming more fundamentalist!

Virtuoso use of the English Language

The supreme example of the virtuoso use of the English language is, of course, in James Joyce's "Ulysses." Here are some other examples.

One of the most intriguing detective novels is Josephine Tey's "The Daughter of Time", where the author piles up historical evidence to debunk Shakespeare's portrayal of Richard the Third as a "dyed in the wool" villain. However in the opening pages of the novel, she describes devastatingly the standard plot structure of a popular novelist thus:

"Mother lying-in with her eleventh upstairs, father laid-out after his ninth downstairs, eldest son lying to the government in the cow-shed, eldest daughter lying with her lover in the hay-loft, everyone lying low in the barn."

Every shade of meaning of lying, lying-in, laid-out are explored in this lurid passage.

The crucial importance of the correct prepositions is emphasised in "Yes, Minister." When the Minister is concerned about the possible abolishing of his own ministry, he visits the PM's private secretary & asks him whether the PM is smiling "on" the proposal & adding a threatening counter-move of his, if so. The private secretary, alarmed at this, suavely denies it saying the PM smiled "at" the proposal & not smiled "on" it, thereby completely reversing the meaning!

Later, when Hacker became the PM himself, he tames Humphrey, with the help of his lady political adviser & Bernard, his private secretary. Afterward burying the hatchet, he tells Humphrey that he will call him "if" he needs him. Humphrey panics again, surmising that "if" may include "if not" also. At this Hacker taking pity, puts him out of his misery, saying "when" he is needs him, thus implying that he will be consulted & it is only a question of time!

Sri Ramakrishna, Satyajit Ray & Ravi Shankar: The links between the three famous Bengalis

One of the most ardent non-monastic devotees of Sri Ramakrishna was the celebrated Bengali playwright & producer Girish Chandra Ghosh. It is not well known that Chunibala Devi, who played the old woman in Satyajit Ray's "Pather Panchali" was also a member of Girish's troupe in her younger days.

Ray himself, though an agnostic, designed the book cover for Achintya Kumar Sengupta's 4 volume Bengali work "Parampurush Ramakrishna." Obviously he was aware of his teachings, as evinced by his dialogue in his "Abhijan", where, of all people, an unscrupulous shady character quotes the Sage's words as "all the attractions in the world being due to 'woman & gold'".

Habu Dutt, a cousin of Swami Vivekananda, (who took Sri Ramakrishna's teachings all over the world), was one of the gurus of Ustad Allauddin Khan, the teacher of Pandit Ravi Shankar. Both Habu Dutt & Allauddin Khan were also involved in the orchestra of Girish Chandra Ghosh's troupe.

Optimum Use of Leisure

There is a book called "I would rather be reading" by Anne Bogel, in which the author prioritises reading as the preferred leisure time activity. Similarly, there may be a few whose preferred leisure time activity is listening to classical music. But sadly, especially in our country, these are a miniscule minority.

Most people, when they find "disposable time" (or even when they don't!) rush off to the nearest theatre to watch the latest block-buster film. Once there, they only absorb the stars acting & the story paying scant or no attention to how the director has developed the film, where the camera is placed & why, what colours are used in the clothes & sets, how the background music comes in before the scene & the innumerable other things that go to make a film.

It is really sad to see this frittering away of irrevocable time in our finite lives ignoring the best that culture has in offer & running after tawdry things. And now about the common use of the ubiquitous smartphones, the less said the better. Even the busiest person will have some "disposable time". It is up to them to realise the invaluable & irrevocable nature of it & invest it in the best way humanly possible & make their lives really worthwhile.

Bach's famous "48"

These are called fully as "The Well tempered (tuned) Klavier (keyboard)". They consist of preludes & fugues in all 24 keys (12 notes in an Octave, both major & minor keys). There are two sets, thus making a total of 48. (BWV 846-893.) They are meant for aspiring students as well as practising musicians. They are considered as the foundation of Western Classical Music, & the "Bible" of piano players. Beethoven could play these when he was 11!

Prior to these, because of "Just" intonation based on mathematical ratios of the frequencies of the notes, keyboard players had some difficulty in playing in remote keys. Bach used the "equal temperament" of multiplying the frequency of each note by the twelfth root of two to get the next note, thus enabling the keyboard players to play in all keys with ease. By the time all semitones are covered by this, it can be noticed that the tonic frequency has  doubled. (Because the equal tempered notes are fractionally different in frequencies than the "Just" intoned notes based on mathematical notes, some wags called them "notes which are always out of tune!")

Though from the title, it may appear that this work may be an academic, pedantic exercise, Bach's genius transforms the work into a work of infinite mood, emotions & variety.

To end on a humorous note, Hans Von Bulow, no lover of encores, on facing a thunderously applauding audience, said "Ladies & Gentlemen, if you do not stop applauding, I will play Bach's 48 from beginning to end!" It takes 4-5 hours to play these, so the audience laughed but stopped applauding, being fully aware that Von Bulow was capable of playing these entirely from memory!

Paeans to the middle class from Defoe & Lamb

Advice from his father to Daniel Defoe, author of "Robinson Crusoe".

"The calamities of life are shared between the rich & poor, but the middle class has the fewest disasters. The middle class has fewer illnesses of the body & mind, than the rich, who because of indulgence & wantonness are prone to it as are the poor from want & hard labour. The middle class is calculated to promote a life of virtue & temperate enjoyment. In this station, people go through their life smoothly & comfortably out of it."

From Charles Lamb's essay "Old China".

My cousin Bridget (probably his older sister Mary) said "I wish the good old times would come again, when we were not quite so rich. Not poor, but there was a middle state in which I am sure we were a great deal  happier. A purchase is but a purchase now that you have money to spare. Formerly it used to be a triumph. When we coveted a cheap luxury, we were used to have a debate two or three days before & to weigh the for & against, & think what we might spare it out of & what saving we could hit upon, that should be an equivalent. A thing was worth buying then, when we felt the money that we paid for it."

Golden Age for Bibliophiles

Older readers may recall when imported paperbacks were priced quite high given the purchasing power of the rupee. This writer has with him an imported paperback copy of "Pinocchio" bought in 1947 for the then princely sum of one & a half rupee. Probably a gold sovereign was Rs.20 then. Now with the sovereign at about Rs.35,000, the book would have cost about Rs.2625. Now even though many paperbacks cost as much or even more, there are many classics available for one tenth that price. For example a new copy of the nearly 1000 page classic "Don Quixote" is sold for less than Rs.200!

In the Cold War period in the middle of the twentieth century, as part of their cultural outreach, USA & USSR marketed their literature at subsided prices. Whereas a new paperback copy of Mark Twain's "Life on the Mississippi" was sold for half a rupee, Dostoevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov" in a two volume hardcover set was sold for just Rs.100.

If that is the story of paperbacks, the price of finely printed hardbound illustrated books went on sky-rocketing until USA & UK began to outsource their fine printing work to first Europe & then Far East (mainly China) where labour was relatively cheap. Though the publishers did this to keep their costs down, the ultimate beneficiaries were the Bibliophiles, who could get the books of their choice for a lesser price than if they were printed in USA or UK.

Add to this the eye-popping improvement in printing technology & the fortuitous use of  E-commerce platforms by players like Amazon, who brought the world's bookstores to the doorsteps of the readers, the Utopian Paradise of book-lovers has finally arrived!

Aesthetics or Appreciation of Beauty

This is a fascinating branch of philosophy. A set of 11 essays on "The Pleasures of the Imagination" was contributed to the journal "The Spectator" in June-July 1712 by Joseph Addison. He divides these into primary pleasures (those that can be perceived by the senses, like architecture) & secondary pleasures, which require imagination like painting, literature, sculpture & music. He analyses the effects of poetic imagery in Homer, Virgil, Ovid & Milton on the imagination.

Nearer home we had Kuvempu writing a slim volume "Raso Vy Saha" in Kannada on literary appreciation & analysis of poetics.

Not to be forgotten is the three part exhaustive (& exhausting!) analysis of Kannada poets "Shaili" (Style) & their works with copious extracts from their works, by Prof. S. V. Ranganna.

The latest scholarly Kannada work on the subject is S. L. Bhyrappa's doctoral thesis on "Truth & Beauty" in Kannada, truly an epochal landmark work. It is a really wide ranging work ranging from the beauty of little children to the beauty in Beethoven's string quartet op.135, where he quotes Morris Weitz as saying this music proves that even non-verbal music can be meaningful.

Fallacy of equating Modernity with Westernisation

Just because the western world had a head start in science & technology is no reason to believe that their's is the only way to be modern. One can be true to one's national roots, but strive to be modern in that framework, abandoning only the outdated beliefs.

For example, an Indian woman can be modern, while wearing a sari. In fact many sari wearing women have achieved more in many fields in their lifetimes than their jeans & T shirt clad grand-daughters can achieve in many of their lifetimes. Modernity is a state of mind of being receptive to new ideas & being constantly creative. It is most unfortunate that jeans & T shirt or salwar & kameez have become the normal female attire, the sari being relegated to ethnic status.

The fact is one has adapted to a superficially western way of life, while holding onto the really anachronistic ancient beliefs. It was strange to see a film star, who had dated many men, like her western counterparts, suddenly turn a pious hindu wife, praying for her husband's longevity (itself a patriarchal idea) by peering at the moon through a sieve during Karva Chauth!

It was commendable to see Girish Karnad, the quintessential modern man, always donning Kurta Pyjama. Even at Oxford, he wore a close collar coat & never a jacket with tie.

The same goes for musical tastes. Nowadays, the young always wear earphones, listening to what? Probably western rock music, completely alien to Hindu culture with frequently abhorrent lyrics. A true modern young man, with refined tastes, can listen to western classical music, which is universal like all great art. Of course, it may be an acquired taste.

As George Eliot says in her "Daniel Deronda", "Popular music is a form of melody which expresses a puerile state of culture, the passion & thought of people without any breadth or horizon. There is a sort of self satisfied folly about every phrase of such melody, no cries of deep mysterious passion, no conflict, no sense of the universal. It makes men small as they listen to it."

Nirad Chaudhuri describes his first encounter with Western Music. He had gone to his favourite bookshop in Kolkata & accidentally heard Massenet's Gavotte, sung by Amelia Galli-Curci, played on a record player. He fell in love with Western classical music then & there. He adds acidly "If I had heard pop music then, my chance encounter with Western music would not have any sequel. A man moored to the highest in one's own culture does not go over to barbarism, nor is he beaten by it."

"Meends" of Hindustani Music & Calculus

A "meend" is a gradual sliding from one musical note to another. For example middle C (Stuttgart pitch) is 264 hertz & D is  264 X 9/8 = 297 hertz. (in "Just" intonation.) In equally tempered scale, it will be 264 X 1.06 X 1.06 = 296.6 hertz, 1.06 being the twelfth root of 2. In a keyboard instrument one has to jump from one to the other directly, whereas in a string instrument like the Sitar, one can glide from one to the other by laterally pulling the string downwards along the fret, taking in all the microtones in between, not to speak of the semitone of C#.

Now this has an equivalent in Information technology, where "bits" of information are digitally stored either as 0 or 1. (like two keys of a keyboard). In analogue processing of information, a continuously varying signal can be handled (like the "meend" in a Sitar).

In Calculus, which can also be called "slope finding", the slope can be easily found in a straight line graph by calculating the ratio of opposite side over the adjacent side (of the triangle of the graph), or the tangent of the angle. In the case of calculating the slope of a curve like a parabola (y=x squared), the slope is obviously different at different points of the curve, but can be found by dividing the curve into miniscule portions, finding its slope & proceeding to the next portion. So, the general slope of a curve like the above parabola is dy/dx = 2X. (Full details of the calculations can be found in "How to enjoy Calculus" by Eli S Pine.)

So to conclude, the "meend" is the processing of microtones between C & D, like processing the miniscule bits of the parabolic curve in Calculus or the continuous analogue processing of data, instead of digital bits as in information technology.

Anthropomorphic Animal Tales

Probably the earliest of these is Vishnu Sharma's "Panchatantra" narrated to bring the wayward princes of a king to heel.

It is interesting to note that both Aesop & Uncle Remus were slaves, so some amount of harshness of their lives influenced their tales. Whereas Aesop's tales had a moral attached to each tale, Uncle Remus's Brer Rabbit used his wiliness to escape the clutches of the predatory Brer Fox & Brer Wolf.

Beatrix Potter was reputedly not very fond of children for whom she wrote, but was certainly very fond of animals in their habitat, who appeared in her tales. She was a very skilled & observant painter of small animals.

A. A. Milne, creator of the two immortal "Winnie the Pooh" prose works, not only made his animals human, but invested them with human psychological traits as well, like the depressive Eeyore, the hyperactive Tigger, the dyslexic owl, the bossy Rabbit, the anxiety ridden Piglet & Winnie himself suffering from ADHD. (Attention deficit hyperactive disorder). His prose was admirably complemented by Shepard's marvellous colour renditions.

Kenneth Grahame's "Wind in the Willows", gave the animals all the mannerisms of Edwardian gentlemen. Toad, notably is a stinging caricature of the British Upper Class, with inherited wealth & a snooty attitude towards his social inferiors, spending his ample time & money on momentary enthusiasms. All noted illustrators have tried their hand at illustrating it, notably Shepard, Rackham, Ingpen & the "impressionist" Inga Moore.