Author: Pradeep

  • Atrangi Re (2021)

    We watched this movie in the morning of the first day of the new year. We were looking for something light-hearted. I had not read any of the reviews and things got pretty serious very fast.

  • From a Radically Networked Society to an Evo-Devo Universe

    During the time I spent in Takshashila, I heard a lot about Radically Networked Societies. It is a framework to think about societies structured in the Information Age. In a paper/book by Nitin Pai and Sneha Shankar, they define it thus:

    A networked society is flat, its demands are diverse and often inchoate, decision-making processes are amorphous, and leadership diffuse.

    – Nitin Pai and Sneha Shankar, Networked Societies and Hierarchical States: The Emerging Challenge to Political Order

    Nitin had a TEDx Bangalore talk on similarly organizing government at the level of cities (to begin with) to better respond to citizen’s demands in the information age.

    Yesterday, I read a blog post titled, The Goodness of the Universe on the excellent, Centauri Dreams blog. The paragraph that caught my eye in the blog post was this:

    At its core, life has never been about either individual or group success. Instead, life’s processes have self-organized, under selection, to advance network success. Well-built networks, not individuals or even groups, always progress. As a network, life is immortal, increasingly diverse and complex, and always improving its stability, resiliency, and intelligence.

    John Smart, The Goodness of the Universe

    There it was again. The mention of networks. This is networks at the level of the planetary scale. He believes that both evolutionary and developmental processes are work in the Universe. He calls this the Evo-Devo Universe. In this paradigm, he believes that we are more likely to head to a non-dystopian, post-biological future.

    I am also convinced we are rapidly and mostly unconsciously creating a civilization that will be ever more organized around our increasingly life-like machines. We can already see that these machines will be far smarter, faster, more capable, more miniaturized, more resource-independent, and more sustainable than our biology.

    John Smart, The Goodness of the Universe

    The author goes on to say that at this level, the ethics and empathy in the network grows. The longer we live in this post-biological future, the more good we get. His conclusion also was interesting to me, when he says:

    Also, far too many of us still believe we are headed for the stars, when our history to date shows that the most complex networks are always headed inward, into zones of ever-greater locality, miniaturization, complexity, consciousness, ethics, empathy, and adaptiveness. As I say in my books, it seems that our destiny is density, and dematerialization.

    John Smart, The Goodness of the Universe

    We see this in part in the growth of our cities, to some extent. I think the Evo-Devo Universe is the end point for which a Radically Networked Society is the starting point. As always, it is the middle that is interesting.

  • Bheemante Vazhi (2021)

    We watched Bheemante Vazhi on New Year’s eve on December 31, 2021. The film portrays the efforts of a people in a poor neighborhood on the side of the railway tracks trying to get an accessible road to their houses.

    Theatrical Release Poster of Bheemante Vazhi

    The movie highlights the plight of any person who undertakes public tasks in a community in Kerala. The film highlights these in a light hearted way.

    Kunchako Boban’s character Sanju aka Bheeman’s love stories in the movie seem interesting choices. Be it the one-way or the love-to-get-your-work-done with the Railway Engineer or the girl who seemed to be waiting for him to make a proposal. Does the presence of martial arts in this movie and in Minnal Murali point to something?

    I enjoyed the climax fight scene involving not your usual suspects. I did not understand the animation for the intro scene of the movie. I guess like other Malayalam movies of the day, I would need to read reviews to understand these nuances.

  • 2022 – Write and Read

    I had a lot of plans for 2022. Like everyone else. One thing that 2021 illustrated was not to say yes to too many things. You end up disappointing others and yourself.

    Photo by Suzy Hazelwood on Pexels.com

    This informed me when I was filling up the YearCompass and I chose to select two things to focus on for 2022. Writing and reading.

    I write for a living. I write field documentation and manuals for a living. I want to practice writing more type of documents to expand my horizons. I also want to write fiction. I want to contribute by writing documentation for open source software.

    But, as I shared above, I want to focus on two things at a time. I want to first improve my skills in writing field documentation and fiction.

    The other thing I want to focus on, is reading. Through 2021, I had stopped reading. I could not read anything long. I wanted to get back to reading. I started by listening to the audiobook version of Dune. I followed that up by listening to the audiobook version of the Neuromancer.

    Towards the end of 2021, I started reading Indian Philosophy, inspired in part by the work that Ryan Holiday does with Stoicism. So, one branch of my reading will be spent reading/listening to fiction and another reading Indian Philosophy.

  • Heading back to Indian Philosophy

    I had subscribed to Brain Pickings a long time ago. I used to have the time to read this newsletter before the time there were so many newsletters. I was thinking of names when I learnt that Maria Popova changed the name of her newsletter from Brain Pickings to The Marginalian. Somehow, it pushed me to take the time to read her newsletter every Sunday, her weekly digest.

    In a post written on December 7 (coincidence?), she had an article on Carl Jung. The post was on Jung’s advice on how to live and do the next right thing. This post seems to have triggered some avalanche inside me.

    Popova writes:

    We long to be given the next step and the route to the horizon, allaying our anxiety with the illusion of a destination somewhere beyond the vista of our present life.

    Maria Popova, The Marginalian
    Photo by Sindre Stru00f8m on Pexels.com

    I think when I read non-fiction, this is what I sought. An answer that will help me take the next step and provide me with a destination. But, as I read, an author would convince me to change my next step and even the destination.

    Jung says that death is the only destination or horizon that is real. There are many ways to get there. We have to take the next step intuitively. There is uncertainty in this. But, uncertainty is the price we pay for beauty. Integrity is the only compass we have to point to the right direction on this uncertain landscape. Popova summarizes Jung more poetically in her post above.

    This reminded me of my interest in Samkhya that I had shared here earlier. But, I felt that I wanted to place my study in the context of the wider Indian philosophy.

    I have started reading the Sarva Darsana Samagraha. This is an English translation from 1882 but is a surprisingly easy read. While looking for other similar books, I found a suggestion among Nitin Pai’s notes for Chatterjee and Dutta’s Introduction to Indian Philosophy. I am listening to that book on Audible so that I can get through the content once.

  • 2021 Status Update

    My friend Saurabh introduced me to the wonders of a year-planning tool called YearCompass. I spent today filling it out with the new Kanwrite fountain pen that I got from Amazon today.

    It has helped me clear many things that I want from me in the new year ahead.

    I know I have not been hanging around here a lot but thanks for sticking around. I hope to see more of myself here in 2022. Wishing you all a Happy New Year.

    Photo by Damir Mijailovic on Pexels.com

  • Dune (1965)

    I listened to the audiobook version of Dune, the 1965 sci-fi book written by Frank Herbert.

    I had started my Audible subscription to listen to non-fiction books that I could just not get through reading. I expanded it for reading science fiction and fantasy books which also tend to be really long. I thought that the audiobook format would be the perfect way to consume this content. Especially the older ones.

    The story is a political thriller set in a science fictional future. If you removed the frame of a futuristic planet and interplanetary rivalries, it is just political intrigue.

    I would probably watch the movie and not read the rest of the series.

  • Balcony Scenes

    Pune skyline is red and purple. The city roads in the foreground. Image Credit: Pradeep Mohandas

    For the past few days we have been taking pics of the horizon at sunset. We have been sharing these on my Instagram account. This one had me thinking.

    The horizon is beautiful in a palette of red, blue and purple. There are several mixtures of these colours in striated layers at the horizon. There are stray clouds throughout the sky. Some are black and menacing but most are white and look almost lazy. The winds carry them.

    At the level of the road, I am not sure how many notice the colours mixing on the celestial canvas. I am sure a few boys and girls look up. I am also sure a few men and women also look up. Some prodded by the aforementioned boys and girls and some of their own curiosity. Some may have looked by mistake looking for metaphors to compare their loved ones.

    But the streets are busy mostly. It is full of people rushing here and there. Some scooters and bikes shuttling between traffic. A few car drivers also forget they are driving four-wheelers and not two-wheelers.

    But amongst this mass of people who move like an organism, you can spot a figure or two stop. This irritates the aforementioned organism. But those that stop, look up. Some of them are looking at awe at the cosmic canvas, not able to do anything but stare. Some point their smartphones and try to capture the infinite scenes in the rectangular boundary.

    Not all are satisfied. No camera seems to capture the beauty quite like their eyes.

  • Writing a Novel

    November is celebrated as National Novel Writing Month in America. It’s called NaNoWriMo for short. Although it began as a US phenomenon, it has turned into a global movement. There is growing global participation each year of authors writing every day in the month of November. They hope to write about 50,000 words in the month of November. Consistent daily writing with global accountability.

    My tryst with NaNoWriMo began in 2012. I do not have any public record of this. I had emailed a bunch of people in 2012 asking if they would be my beta readers. There is no record of this novel on my private storage or on Google Drive. I seem to also not have informed these people about the status of this novel.

    In 2018, I started writing chapters of a science fiction novel. I had called it One in Malayalam – Onu. I had published the chapters on Medium. Although I call them Chapters, the number of words in each was very low. I don’t think the whole thing together would qualify as a short story. I was also not sure where the story was going after Chapter 8. Hence, I abandoned that effort.

    In 2019, I took to a physical notebook and started writing a nation-state fiction. The first book in the series was called William Horsborg – Life and Times. I wrote about 1200 words before I gave up on that. I will take this up again. It is a story I used to tell myself as I drew maps in a notebook as a 11 year old child. I have the stories in my head and they will not leave me in peace until I have told them.

    I gave 2020 a hard pass and did not attempt NaNoWriMo.

    In 2021, I had mixed feelings about writing a novel. I see-sawed between wanting to write and not wanting to write. An opportunity to write for about an hour a day opened up for me yesterday. I took the time to read the story I had written in 2018.

    Although, I started writing it in the month of November, I am not counting it as an entry for NaNoWriMo 2021. But, I would like to acknowledge the part that NaNoWriMo played in remembering about writing the novel.

    I am calling the novel, Return to Earth, tentatively. It is not a final title and it may change. Once each chapter is over, I will share it here and on my About page. I finished writing about 1000 words of the first chapter today morning.

  • Bookend November 2021

    This is a post after a long time of no writing and no reading. This post is just to bookend things.

    We drove back from Kerala in the first week of October. We moved rental houses within Pune in the last week of October. The strain of moving houses has been more mental than physical. For quite some time, I have not been able to read or write anything much. I have been much more active posting on Instagram.

    I had intended to use the blog and write more seriously after putting out Pradeep’s Space Newsletter #28 on October 7. VM at The Wire Science re-published it on their website.