Fine Wining

When it comes to mathematics, the world is divided into those who love it and those who would rather beat their heads against a brick wall repeatedly than have anything to do with the subject. To the first lot, there is an analytical beauty to maths – a logical simplicity, a neat sequencing of numbers and patterns that’s rhythmic and unambiguous – a refreshing clarity not always associated with other subjects. To others, it’s a complicated mess, a jumble of arcane symbols and formulae with no grey areas or ‘it depends on the way you look at it’ to fall back upon, the sort of subject created solely to trip you up and make life difficult until you have the freedom to choose your subjects. While I’ve come to the conclusion that I belong to the latter category, it wasn’t always that way. In the beginning, when it was just arithmetic, I actually quite enjoyed the subject and was pretty good at it. While algebra threw me off a little bit, especially when matters turned quadratic and whatnot, I hung in there in a very respectable manner. Even when trigonometry, coordinate geometry and all that got thrown in the mix, things turned grim but I wasn’t completely stumped. Until…

Along came Calculus.

Calculus was a different beast altogether – a dizzying array of symbols, alphabets and equations that would stretch for pages on end for no discernible purpose. Things got raised to infinity, dragged back to zero, limits were imposed and all manner of strange characters started popping up everywhere. If the true character of a man is tested when he’s brought face to face with calculus, I was spineless, gutless and heartless. Apparently Isaac Newton had devised Calculus as a way of simplifying complex equations – if Calculus is the simplified version, I shudder to think what the complicated version may have been.

Of course, Newton was already a legend thanks to gravity. Calculus probably made him the greatest of all time, at least until Einstein came along I suppose. It was hailed as a branch of mathematics that had opened up a whole new world of possibilities. While I wholeheartedly agreed with that sentiment, I didn’t see it as being a good thing. Calculus had made it possible for me to wake up in the dead of night in a state of cold terror. Calculus had made it possible for my worst nightmares to look as cheerful as a Kate Hudson chick flick. Calculus had made it possible for me to think that even dancing may be more my thing, even though I have all the grace of a refrigerator tumbling down a staircase. So you can understand why this was a world of possibilities that did not exactly leave me tingling with anticipation. At the end of the day, though I was still willing to accept that maybe Calculus did make solving mathematical equations easier. Perhaps these were equations that otherwise took a painstaking 2 days to solve and could now be solved in a frighteningly rapid 2 hours.

After my first brush with Calculus, though, I was wise enough to ensure that my life steered as far from Calculus as possible. While I did leave Calculus behind, complexity continued to follow me. No, it wasn’t in the form of higher studies or workplace challenges. Instead it was in the form of wine. The first time I encountered wine, my head was spinning. Sadly, it was due to the tasting notes on the wine bottle, instead of the alcohol itself. How on earth could an alcoholic beverage be so complicated? To me, the drink tasted a little sour and grape-y, but according to the tasting notes I should’ve gotten hints of blueberries, apple, cinnamon, cherry oak, cigar, avocadoes, muskmelon, ripe plums, dried ginger and dark chocolate. How could one drink taste of an entire tropical forest and more? What was I missing? Sure, I wasn’t much of a wine person, but did it have to be that complex?

It’s something we all try to do at a professional level, make things sound far more complicated than it actually is. But most people don’t generally fall for that. So when a designer unveils a new logo that looks exactly like the old logo but says that it is now more contemporary, optimistic and forward-looking because they’ve given an upward tilt to the angle of the stem in the F of the logo, you really know that all they’ve done is find a very expensive way to play spot the difference. Of course, bankers have been a lot more successful on this front. They’ve made their whole profession sound so complicated that they’ve been handed over large amounts of money by governments even after precipitating a terrible financial crisis, just because no one else could possibly understand what they did. But at least the socialists hate them.

On the other hand, people don't just accept the complexity of wine but even embrace it with the sophisticated, la-di-da air of detached eagerness. I thought it would be interesting to try a stunt like that with normal, everyday cooking. So the other day when the wife asked me what I thought of this rather delicious fish that she’d cooked, I seized the opportunity. Clearing my throat, I loftily announced that “The first bite had the truculent air of a student protest thanks to the mustard assaulting one’s senses, and then it mellowed down into a citrusy flourish drizzled with hints of pine nut, pink guava and mustachioed pistachio. The body of the fish had notes of gooseberry, cherry oak and walnuts that have seen better days. It ended with the aroma of drizzled honey and grizzled lemons and the aftertaste of a thousand splendid suns.”

Of course, I did no such thing because I did not want steaming hot gravy to be poured down my lap. Now, if only someone did that to the first wine snob, wine wouldn’t have turned into an alcohol you needed an advanced degree to appreciate. It’s alcohol – where’s the fun if you have to study it?

No Country for Junk Mail

Yesterday, I came across one of those propaganda booklets by the Jehovah’s Witnesses. It’s the sort of booklet that most people would classify in the same category as junk mail, and not deem worthy of a second glance. Not me, though – it rather piqued my curiosity, that booklet. To me, all I’d known about the Jehovah’s Witnesses is that they were the ones that knocked. Not in the cool, badass manner of Walter White in Breaking Bad, but in the sad, pleading, “May I have a moment of your time?” sort of desperate sales pitch manner. So naturally, I was curious to read more and wanted to add to, what was at that point, a single sentence worth of knowledge about an obscure religious denomination. When I thought about it, my knowledge of a lot of other strange American religious denominations was also limited to a single sentence.

The Amish: The religion where everyone grows beards, shuns modern technology and dresses like it’s 19^th century England.

Mormons: The religion where everyone has many wives and lives in Utah.

Scientology: The religion that turned Tom Cruise into a nut job.

The Quakers: Kind of like the Amish, but they make Oats.

Thankfully, the decision to go ahead and read the booklet turned out to be a richly rewarding one. Seldom have I passed a more diverting half hour, and only the fact that multiple crises were piling up on the work front finally pulled me away from the booklet. As far as I could tell, the whole Jehovian religion revolved around a very patient strategy of wait and watch. At some point, the Kingdom of God would be upon us and everything would be sorted out – until then you just hung around and waited. It’s the sort of religion that would make you very nervous if you were an old man, because you’d really want the whole Kingdom of God stuff to happen in your lifetime, otherwise what was the point? The booklet delved in great detail on how corrupt every single government had become, and how it was only the Kingdom of God that could save us from all the corruption, insisting that there was no place for bribes in the Kingdom of God.

Not content with higher order philosophizing, the booklet then delved into the rather more domestic matter of the husband and wife equation, although on this front it lacked the sort of clarity displayed on the Kingdom of God matter. It started on a promising note, stating confidently that a man and a woman were equal partners in a marriage. It promptly contradicted itself by then saying that God had appointed man as the head of the household and he could do as he jolly well pleased because the woman came under the “law of her husband”. Finally, perhaps anticipating a feminist backlash, it ended with admitting that the man could perhaps do a bit more for the woman by being a little more supportive and appreciative.

While I had to get back to work, the booklet made me realize how much I actually missed junk mail in my life. About a decade ago, the junk mail phenomenon was at its peak. From the more prosaic ones about winning the Coca Cola lottery to the more colourful ones involving exotic royalty, a whole lot of people from distant lands were displaying unusually high levels of dogged determination to hoodwink you into giving away your money. Clearly, the junk mail guys had realized that emails had opened up a whole new avenue that could be far more lucrative as the probability of stumbling upon a gullible idiot had gone up a thousand fold, compared to the snail mail days.

Sadly, advanced spam filters mean that I now rarely come across any of them. Sure, while I’m perfectly happy not receiving mails insisting that I enlarge my penis, I was one of the few that actually did end up reading through a lot of my junk mail. For sheer entertainment value, it was well worth the trouble. On the odd occasion, I’d even engage in a spot of correspondence, to see where the whole thing actually went. I’d usually receive warm, highly enthusiastic responses to my mails, with the enthusiasm waning progressively as they realized I was no closer to sharing my account details than I’d been in my first reply.

Without ever falling for it, I always appreciated a long-winded, elaborate story that was concocted to swindle me of my money. At least it felt like someone was going to great lengths and giving it a good old-fashioned go. A representative of a deposed Nigerian prince who would rather share his ill-gotten but tremendous gains with you than give it up to the Nigerian rebels who had overthrown his father’s kingdom. A woman from Scotland who was the accountant to a rich Indian businessman whose entire family tree was killed in a car crash, and hence she was now looking for an Indian man who could claim to be next of kin and share the dead man’s estate with her. A Russian doctor who was looking for a business partner who could get him a rare medicinal product only grown in India that the Russians would pay a killing for. It was all so exotic and outlandish that it made for some great guilty pleasure, like the occasional bad Bollywood movie or clichéd Hollywood romcom. It was a rich tapestry of convoluted chicanery, ingenious skullduggery and foolish optimism that added a touch of colour to a slow workday.

All it needed was a suitably quirky and demented villain, and you could even have yourself a James Bond movie somewhere in there!

Science Friction

One of the tricks to not being disappointed at the way your life has turned out is to not take romantic comedies too seriously. I’ve seen enough people who feel that their life is packed with bitter disappointment and humdrum banality simply because they haven’t had that wondrous love story, haven’t met ‘the one’ or do not have the sort of movie lifestyle where no one ever seems to be working but everyone is still rich enough to go on exciting and exotic trips where they follow their hearts to find themselves and have a perfect ending of life lessons learnt and redemption earned.

While the same could be said about other movie/book genres, I’ve never gotten terribly carried away by any of them, so life has been quite all right. However, if there is one genre that has left me disappointed, it is sci-fi. And it’s not because I was a sci-fi geek who’d read every book in the genre and watched all the Star Trek episodes and was therefore trapped in my own little world completely disconnected from what was going on around me. Nonetheless, there was a stage in life when I was reasonably into the genre – I’d read a few books of Isaac Asimov (how did that man write so many books?), Arthur C Clarke, Kurt Vonnegut and the like, as well as enjoyed many an episode of The Jetsons. Sure, calling yourself a fan of sci-fi because you watched the Jetsons is a bit like saying you’re interested in history because you watched the Flintstones, but still. All that space travel and time travel, new planets and strange new planes of existence, personal jet packs and robots that did everything for you – it was very exciting to my childlike imagination. Now, I wasn’t naive enough to expect all of that to have transpired by the time I was an adult, but am I the only one disappointed that it all seems as distant now as it did when I was 14? I mean, come on – I’m ok forgoing the robots and the new planets, but at least a personal jet pack that lets me fly around as I wish?

Not that I was alive then, but as early as the 1960s everyone thought that the space age was upon us. The Russians and the Americans were busy competing with each other by sending all sorts of animals to space, Neil Armstrong landed on the moon and David Bowie devoted half his discography to songs about space travel. Sci-fi movies and books did the rest, making it look like it was all a matter of time – that even if it wasn’t by the 1980s or 1990s, at least by the 21^st century a combination of advanced technology and terrible fashion sense would see us zipping around planets in our personal space crafts while wearing silver jumpsuits and sporting bad haircuts.

Yet, all we’ve got today is social networking and junk mail from African royalty of dubious antecedents. Now, a lot of you might think that this isn’t true – that artificial intelligence and virtual reality are the next big things that will alter the face of technology. All I can say is that for the last two decades, artificial intelligence and virtual reality have been the next big things, without ever really looking like becoming the current big thing. Again, a lot of you might say that companies like Google are at the cutting edge of innovation with drones that deliver pizzas and cars that drive themselves around – but these are the sort of things that kids today will be disappointed about 20 years from now when they see that they still haven’t transpired. Of course, if technology had actually done something truly remarkable like discover a cure to all of life’s diseases, I would have overlooked the lack of a personal jet pack – but the diseases have only gotten worse, haven’t they?

All this made me wonder – what has science been doing all these years? The answer suddenly dawned on me a few weeks back, when I was shopping for shoes. Shoes! That’s where all the scientific effort has been diverted to all these years. The best and brightest of scientific minds have been hired by the likes of Nike, Adidas and Puma, ferreted away into a remote and secret facility and been ordered to come up with the most advanced footwear that mankind has ever seen, never mind whether mankind really needed it. Shoes with technology so advanced, a gullible enough soul would be willing to part up to a month’s salary in exchange for a pair of them.

All I wanted was a pair of sneakers for the occasional bit of walking/exercising that, in all likelihood, I would not get around to doing, so I was hoping for a purchase that was quick and inexpensive.  Yet, I was interrogated thoroughly as to whether my intentions with the shoes were in any way honorable, what kind of activities would I subject them to, how long might I be using them everyday, and so on and so forth, before finally being handed a pair of shoes with a description on the tag seeking to justify the exorbitant price they commanded. It sounded something like this:

“Made using the same Dura-Edge flex-curve technology used by NASA in their space missions, our shoes rearrange themselves at a molecular level to fit the contours of your feet to ensure 360 degree dynamism and optimal comfort. Customized Hexa Polyhydrons, invented at our state of the art facility, allow you to jump from great heights and feel invincible.  Our micro fibrous, ambidextrous, jaw dropper, heart stopper, come a cropper material uses quantum aerodynamics to answer vital metaphysical questions that make them a perfect addition to your daily fitness routine.”

Looks like all that science fiction is reality after all, just not the way I expected it to be!