The Nose Knows

"sinuous smells"


Evolution has given us five senses to perceive an internally consistent 'reality' of the world around us. Yet we somehow neglect the sense of smell and give it little importance. I agree it's a base sense, perhaps not half as sophisticated as vision, for the processing of which we devote a lot more brain space. We give so much importance (and rightly so) to seeing, that experiencing the world around us is mostly visual. And since language mirrors ours experiences, we have invented several dramatic verbs for the act of seeing. We can look, behold, observe, witness, perceive, spot or simply eye. Yet to experience a fragrance, we can only smell it, or perhaps at most sniff it (and even that makes us look like a dog).

In spite of how much we take our sense of smell for granted, or not give it the respect that's due to it, the truth remains that our most basic behaviours are driven by it. Sexual arousal is governed directly by the sense of smell, whether one is consciously aware of it or not. Doesn't taking a deep breath near your lover's hair give you a rush through your carotid arteries, and you feel the blood gushing through your neck? And although there's a lot of debate about it, I'm almost certain that humans do detect sex-pheromones and use it to judge sexual attractiveness. You can google the sweaty t-shirt experiment for more on this. Not just sex, also to enjoy a meal, and to fully appreciate it, tastebuds must be aided by the aroma of the food to let us experience the full flavour of the cinnamon or the garlic in it. You know how drab foods taste when you have a cold and your sense of smell is down. Aversive responses are also strongly determined by smell. If a place has dangerous fumes, or if food-stuff has gone bad (and you should avoid eating it) the nose is what you should trust first.

In our evolutionary past, we must have used the nose a lot more than today. Every breath would tell us about our surroundings, whether a predator is approaching, whether the air is polluted or whether food is around. Smell filled in for what was not visible. Today, if we could (and I'm sure we still can), we should be consciously receptive to our sense of smell. As soon as one gets out of home, one should take a deep breath and experience the multitude of smells around. You would be surprised at the insight about your surroundings that it would give you. Try consciously taking a deep long breath to smell the air around and you would immediately know what's cooking. The nose knows way more than you give it credit for. Let's try not losing it in evolution.

Loquacity, in poster colour

Why must we speak

to tell of thought?
The silliest joke,
our mind hath wrought?

Highly pretentious thoughts on knowledge, science and religion

Science may set limits to knowledge,
but should not set limits to imagination.

- Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970)

Whenever one observes anything happening around us and asks how, one is essentially prodding a question in science. Perhaps that is how religion came into being (particularly religions that were not created by one man, but evolved over time, like Hinduism). Man observed the stars and planets and their movement in the sky, and first tried to understand their trajectory. On having discovered a regularity in their appearance and disappearance, he would have asked more fundamental questions like how they are traversing the heavens, and what their trajectories mean. On a more fundamental note, he might have wondered how it all began, how the universe came into being. Obviously answers to these were not trivial (and still are not), and there was no way hard knowledge (or even derivative logic) could resolve these questions. Science did set a limit to knowledge there, but did not set a limit to imagination. Without violating hard knowledge (i.e. what they knew were evidently true), they added layers of what they thought could be, to make sense of what is. The Vedas were born, which were perhaps not religious, but were aimed at understanding the universe and existence better.

With time, this imagination evolved and became religion that people started doggedly believing in. It became blasphemous to doubt the sacred texts. Knowledge (from experimental sciences) has also evolved along with this imagination, and instead of redefining this imagination (now religion) so as to fit it into the framework of hard knowledge, somewhere in history, they got divorced. Doubt and skepticism that were an integral part of our philosophical thought process, gave way to blind faith in a fantastic version of knowledge-derived imagination. People started taking religion too literally.

But if one goes back to the roots of Hinduism, the Rig Veda, we see insightful examples of the skepticism and rational thought that went into understanding the world around us. Let us take the Nasadiya Sukta (The Hymn of Creation) as an example. Every supposition that the poet makes here is doubted by the poet himself (perhaps he was a scientist of that era). Even the all-powerful being is hinted to have not been conscious of himself (or herself or itself) until the moment of creation and might even have been ignorant of the process of Creation. The last two stanzas as translated by Griffith, are as follows:

Who verily knows and who can here declare it, whence it was born and whence comes this creation? The Gods are later than this world's production. Who knows then whence it first came into being?

He, the first origin of this creation, whether he formed it all or did not form it,Whose eye controls this world in highest heaven, he verily knows it, or perhaps he knows not.

(the entire poem and the translation can be found here. )

Imagination, the consequence of hard knowledge had not become religion then. If only we could go back to the era where "the clear stream of reason had not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit" , our lives would possibly be much richer and more meaningful.

An Apology For A Chain Reaction

A pause in our conversation,

You look into my eyes
You don't see much,
You look for traces of concern,
You don't really find much,
My eyes, do they look blank?

The supposed windows to my heart,
are open, yet inadvertently shut.

For my eyes have drawn a screen so sheer,
impenetrable by your piercing gaze;
My thoughts, they zoom past the moment,
they go into recursive loops in a maze,
fall back upon themselves,
tie knots and tangles,
and then open up again...

You're still looking,
I can see you are...
Yet I endlessly spin a warped web of thoughts...
Not of introspection or self assessment,
Only an absurd chain reaction that starts so easily,
Perhaps it was the last word you said,
Or the pattern of the froth in my coffee,
They fill my mind with associations
which often even I dont understand.
Just random inconsequential images,
but colourful and abstract.

The eyes can't help but doodle thoughts in the head
Tedious, annoying, often incomprehensible scribbles.

And finally you give up and sip your coffee...

And so do I...

And resume conversation.

Seek Not

A translation of a song by Tagore

When you don't seek Him, shall He emerge;
When you let go of Him, He walks up to you;
His light I thought I'd lost in day,
In the dark of night its presence I knew.

You won't see Him, you can't touch Him;
Yet, liberate your spirit towards Him and Awake!
In the patterns of the stars shall He voice Himself,
With the flower bud shall He blossom at daybreak!

When you don't seek Him, shall He emerge;

All the tears that once I had shed for Him in pain,
on white lotuses as dewdrops now they shimmer, wax and wane;

To my song, the dewdrops flash and shine,
and dance in concerted consonance,
And to my tranquil eyelashes, they,
return as tears of exuberance.




"Na Chahile Jaare Paawa Jaae"


One of Tagore's numerous profoundly abstruse compositions came to my mind a few days back, and I've been trying to understand the intended meaning in it. The song seems to imply that fervently pursuing a goal (be it God, love or anything else) often makes the goal elude us. Whereas dispassionately letting it go can unite us with the very thing that we now no longer doggedly seek. The song is wonderful and I attempted to translate it without colouring it with my interpretation, and I must flash a disclaimer that (like any other translation) I have not been able to retain all the subtle nuances of the song, especially the alliterative wordplay.

Since genders need not be explicitly stated in Bengali grammar, we do not know whether the 3rd person reference in this song is towards a man, woman, God, or a personified object. Hence 'He' is not necessarily God.

To Kalboishakhi*

(as experienced on May 3rd in Kolkata)





Impulsive summer rain
ushered in by gypsy winds!
You are by no means modest;
You enjoyed a theatrical entry that day:

When first with curtains of grey you hid the sky,
Then with a clangor of thunder you walked in.
A cool zephyr whispered your name
in all our ears.

You demanded an audience that day;
Little boys abandoned their summer games and watched!
Lovers let go of clasped hands and watched!
Crowds rushed out of shopping-malls and watched!

all eyes fixated towards your North Western drama;

The zephyr soon grew into a gale
and you impaled the grey curtains
with your brilliant thunderbolt
and ripped them open;

a zillion silver arrows rained towards us.

And we rejoiced intoxicated,
Indulging every sense organ.

But you left without a spectacle;
Or did we miss it in our rapture?



*Kalboishakhi - Nor'westers; local winds that bring relief in summer in East India

Comatose

Love is not dead;
It only hangs directionless
in the night's thick air;
It hangs low with the mist
lazily touching sidewalks,
looking for company in the empty streets
in diffident cats.

Love is not dead;
It only looks around for answers
in the haze of the cold misty air,
where clarity has been deliberately blurred.
It questioningly gazes at the lonely moon,
who herself knows not for whom she shines,
while dogs howl in protest.

Love is still alive
As a lump in the throat,
As a sudden gush in the neck
And in the emptiness of the heart;
It blocks conduits in the body,
which beg for catharsis.
I plead with Cupid to remove the dart.

Painting Life with Water

I took a paintbrush
And dabbed it in water,
With mild brushstrokes
I trailed it on paper;
And I drew a story
with Lines of water,
For more than colour
ethereal water feels safer;


Trails fade quickly
as water dries:
The patterns vanished
before my helpless eyes.
I stared at the paper;
it looked white for sure,
I searched for traces of lines
which could time endure;
A few wet trails
glistened in view,
Seen only from
skewed angles few.

If I let these lines fade in vain
An untold story would die in pain.

So I dashed in bold strokes of Red
And Through the water veins it spread...

A story with water cautiously made,
Red filled with life before it could fade
From a metaphor subtle and unsaid
It robustly radiated in red.

Hallowed Hyderabad

Hyderabad as seen from Golconda


The Buddha Statue at Husainsagar Lake


It was at least 4 feet long


Sridhar, proud of the age of the lake

My trip to Hyderabad made me miss two much awaited things in TIFR* – The terrace party and Republic Day. Yet I have no regrets that I chose a Biophysics symposium over a week that I would never get back.

My train arrived exactly on time at Hyderabad Station. A very jovial driver stood outside the station with a placard proudly proclaiming CCMB (Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biophysics). He said that we were waiting for more delegates arriving by the same train, and after some time I was quite happy to see a known face walking towards the car. Another student from TIFR, and I didn’t even know that he was coming as well! The Bong connection immediately worked with Shashwat and we yapped away to glory the entire week, at least for the time I spent at the accommodation CCMB provided.

I spent quite a bit of time away from the symposium, and Sridhar made my visit absolutely worth it. Sridhar is a friend from Stephen’s, who after returning from Oxford, is now waiting to choose between the top schools in the world for a PhD. But people who know him know that that’s not what makes him special. His spontaneity (which some mistake for rudeness), his characteristic demeanor (which some call clumsiness) and his hair (which he thinks is a fashion statement) are some of the things that make him Sridhar. He must drop the samosa once before eating it, drop the cigarette on the road twice before smoking it, and must spill tea on his pants in the middle of a seminar and then elegantly sit with one leg neatly covering the stain, as if nothing at all has happened. I met him almost everyday I was in Hyderabad, and along with extensive touristy sightseeing, Go-Karting and snow-ball fighting (yes one can do that in Hyderabad), we relived those wonderful days of the not so distant past in Delhi.

There was a lot to learn in Hyderabad. I learnt that one plate is NEVER for one person. A plate of biriyani would serve at least five and one paper masala dosa is not less than four feet long. I also have been able to conclude why so many people make it to the U.S. from Andhra Pradesh: It’s the magic of The Visa Temple (less popularly known as the Chilukur Balaji Temple). One must make 8 rounds of the temple before and 108 rounds after one receives the transcendental permission to leave. Sridhar also learnt a few things: his life is no longer restricted to the area of influence of the 113M Bus Route (he would even follow the bus in his car lest he would get lost); he realized that the laser show at Lumbini Gardens is not really a must watch; and he now knows that he could “lose” the clutch if he laughed too much while driving and the car would violently shake in protest.

And yes, the symposium was rewarding as well (in parts at least). I presented my work to a large audience from different fields in science, I interacted with a lot of people from all over the country and I learnt how to switch off in a talk while staring blankly at the screen. It’s more practical and less shameless than closing your eyes and switching off.

*TIFR - Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai