Life and Beyond

 Call it a calculated conspiracy of algorithms but over the last week I watched two 'recommended' TED videos, each dealing with with dimensions of life and death.

The first one was by Isabel Stenzel Byrnes titled the "The Art of Saying Goodbye", and the second one by Nancy Trivellato on Out-of-Body Experiences (OBE).

Isabel describes her own harrowing experiences with Cystic Fibrosis, numerous encounters with the death, end-of-life issues, and organ donation. She also talks about her realisation that there is no right or wrong way to say goodbye to a loved one, and that grief is an art, a deeply intellectual and spiritual process of making sense of loss.

I was particularly touched by this description of grief by Isabel's friend, Christine:

"If you were to ask me what stage of grief I'm in, I would say denial, anger, fear, profound sadness...sequentially, and then all at once, and sometimes not at all."

The second TED video by Nancy Trivellato, a researcher from Brazil, begins with a question that has long been familiar to ancient Indian philosophers - "Is the reality we live in the actual reality?". The point being made here was that the 'reality' being presented to us by our sense organs give us, at best, only a small fraction of the many realities that exist in parallel. Nancy makes this point by presenting a set of photographs of the cosmos, each showing how instruments that detect different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum see the same slice of the night sky so differently.

However Nancy's talk is not about the EM spectrum or the cosmos but something more subtle. She describes how as a child she had an out-of-body experience of 'seeing' a beloved uncle on a hospital bed in Sao Paolo. He and his wife had gone there for a gall bladder operation without informing anybody and were quite astounded to hear the little girl describe his hospital room.

The common thread that runs through both these videos is that there is more to life and death, and dimensions of consciousness that needs our attention with tools that are beyond the reach of existing scientific instruments and conceptual frameworks. 

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* TED Video - "The Art of Saying Goodbye" (Isabel Byrnes) - https://youtu.be/Dkffpibi-Dc

* TED - Nancy Trivellato on OBE - https://youtu.be/NMBNZspmn7I

* The Power of Two - A Twin Triumph Over Cystic Fibrosis - https://www.amazon.com/Power-Two-Triumph-Cystic-Fibrosis/dp/0826217540 

The Gentle Way to Self-Defence

 

Today's Doodle honours Kano Jigoro, the 'Father of Modern Judo' on his 161st birth anniversary.

A series of neat panels illustrate the life of this remarkable man who developed the institutions that globalised Judo (柔道 lit. "gentle way"), to take it beyond the Samurai class, to make it an international olympic sport.

This also brought back memories of the University of Tsukuba where I had my first brush (and bruises, sprains and near dislocations!) with this remarkable art of self-defence. Memories of stepping into the airy, well-lit Budokan for the first time; the tatami-matted practice halls; the feel of coarse, stiff judo-gi outfit that would break your fingernails, and that peculiar smell of deodorants mixed with sweat, blood and dried. 

I had been amazed to see how men and women trained together, and how once a month,  the elite Tsukuba Blue Team held an open house with other enthusiasts. Olympic medallists sparred with schoolchildren on one side, and grandfathers teaching pigtailed grand-daughters on the other.

A portrait of Kano Sensei  and his many quotations lined a wall in the Budokan,  looking down on us with with his bemused, slightly bored expression, watching over various groups going through their paces - sparring, fighting, and learning how an opponents physical strength could be used against them.

Tsukuba University apparently grew from the educational institutions Kano set up a century earlier. Sometime during 2010 the university suddenly decided to replace the statue of a Greek hero with that of this venerable teacher. So imagine our surprise when during a visit to the post office, we looked up to find that in place of a naked, muscular European, stood a fully clothed statue of the man who repackaged Jujitsu into Judo for the world!

Perhaps it would have been more appropriate - and less expensive -  to have a sporty statue of his in front of the university Budokan or Sports Department, but then, when it comes to sentimental matters, the Japanese do not seem to believe in Kano Jigoro's dictum -  "Maximum efficiency with minimum effort" (精力善用 seiryoku zen'yō)!

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REFERENCES & LINKS

* The pioneer of Judo  - https://www.tsukuba.ac.jp/en/about/history/kano/index.html

* The Olympic Movement and J Kano - https://www.joc.or.jp/english/historyjapan/kano_jigoro.html

Orion and Friends

It's 5:30AM and there is a nip in the air. You look out from the balcony and your gaze moves up from the empty roads, the streetlights, over the tree-tops, to one single bright star in the sky.

Which one is it? you wonder..

As your eyes get accustomed to the darkness, other less bright stars peek out through the haze, and a familiar pattern emerges - the three stars that make the belt, two for the dagger, another two pairs each for the shoulders and limbs... and Orion the Hunter emerges in all its glory. Then again on either side of the hunter two more bright stars - Aldebaran and Sirius marking the positions staked by the constellations Taurus and Canis Major.

We are now the Navaratri festival season, a period of nine nights when the moon transforms from a thin sliver barely visible in evening sky, to a bright autumn full-moon marking, not only two of the most important festivals in India, Dussehra and Diwali, but also the onset of winter.

I often wonder - why are our night skies filled with stellar patterns that carry mostly Latin names, with a few Arabic ones thrown in for variety? What did the ancients in India, South America or Australia make of these patterns in the night sky?

As Raj Vedam explains so well in his videos, ancient astronomers in India looked at the skies in a very different way, with oral traditions that record and mark the changing positions of the moon, planets and stars with almost obsessive detail. So much so that with modern software simulations it is possible to triangulate the time-period of certain historical events that could only have happened thousands of years ago. 

The Ecliptic, or the path taken by the sun to traverse the sky, is one of the key reference points. They observed that - "The moon appears on the eastern horizon at a different time every day, offset by about 48 minutes, agains a different backdrop of stars." Also, it was noticed that it takes 28 days for the moon to return to the same backdrop of stars. From this emerged a system based on Nakshatras and Raashis.

Nakshatra refers to the principal or brightest star in each segment of the night sky, formed by dividing the ecliptic into 27 segments of 13.33 degrees (13.3 * 27 = 360). As a mnemonic to remember the right sequence these stars were woven into mythology to represent 27 wives of the moon.

Similarly the 12 lunar months were made by dividing the sky into 12 segments of 30 degrees each (12 * 30 = 360), represented by the constellation in which the full moon made its appearance. These were called the Raashis.

So when the full moon appeared in Chittira Nakshatra (Spica in Virgo Constellation) it could immediately be understood that in that month, the sunrise took place 180 degrees opposite in Ashvini Nakshatra (Sheratan or Beta Arietis in the Aries constellation).

What about old familiar friend Orion and his companions? For some reason it seems ancient astronomers in India were not too keen on conjuring up figures from the stellar patterns. They highlighted only three stars in the Orion and Taurus constellations:

• Nakshatra no. 4 -   Rohini (Aldebaran in Taurus constellation)
• Nakshatra no. 5 - Makaram (Mintaka or Delta Orionis in Orion constellation)
• Nakshatra no. 6 - Thiruvathira (Betelgeuse in Orion constellation)

One big surprise is that in the subsequent 13.3 degree segment they completely ignored the brightest star in the sky, Sirius and instead selected Pollux (Gemini constellation) as Nakshatra no. 7. To put this in perspective, Pollux  or Beta Geminorium is an orange giant with a magnitude (brightness) of 1.1 while Sirius (Greek for 'scorching' and also called Alpha Canis Majoris) has a magnitude of - 1.5 which is about 2.5 times brighter!

Maybe there is something more to this that I am missing, but ignoring the brightest star in the sky! - you can't be Sirius! 

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REFERENCES & LINKS

* Orion Constellation - ultimate guide - https://www.planetguide.net/orion-constellation/

*  https://www.astrosoftware.com/SiriusNakshatra.htm

* Inca Astronomy - https://www.peruforless.com/blog/inca-astronomy/

The Sense of Smell

Remember this post about 'The Most Translated Books of the World'? 

Well, a few days ago, I decided to pick one of the few European books that I had not read in that collection - the most translated book from Germany -   Patrick Süskind's "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer', which apparently has been translated into no less than 49 languages.

It seemed to deal with an interesting topic - the sense of smell - which is perhaps the most evocative of our sense perceptions, and one that often triggers a flood of memories. There is a certain agarbatti fragrance that instantly takes me back to my wonder years in Hyderabad, a childhood filled with sunny days squinting at floating kites, of playing and wandering about without a care in the world; The smell of musty books takes me to my grandfather's library in Kerala, of hours spent flipping through books I had been explicitly banned from reading (was that a trick to get me interested in books?). A couple of years ago when I landed up for my first UN assignment in Afghanistan, I kept wondering why buildings at Green Village reminded me so much of Tsukuba University in Japan, until it struck me that they were using a floor cleaner with the exact same fragrance! 

This book tells us the story of an orphan named Grenouille who was born in the 1700s and promptly discarded  in an offal heap at a slaughterhouse in Paris. The child grows up to discover that he has an unusual talent, an obsession for smells and odours as well as the ability to recreate them.  He first starts earning his keep as an apprentice at a tannery, then wheedles into a becoming an assistant to a leading perfumer in Paris, before becoming a serial killer who ultimately never gets punished for his crimes.

As expected, the narrative serves dollops of gyan on the art of making perfumes, but then goes overboard over their power to influence human behaviour: 

"Odours have a power of persuasion stronger than that of words, appearances, emotions or will. The persuasive power of an odour cannot be fended off, it enters into us like breath into our lungs, it fill us up, imbues us totally. There is no remedy for it... for people could close their eyes to greatness, to horrors, to beauty, and their ears to melodies or deceiving sounds. But they cannot escape scent. For scent is the brother of breath...

"There are scents that linger for decades. A cupboard rubbed with musk, a piece of leather drenched with cinnamon oil, a glob of ambergris, a cedar chest - they all possess virtual eternal olfactory life. While other things like lime oil, bergamot, jonquil and tuberose extracts, and many floral scents -- evaporate within a few hours if they are exposed to the air in a pure, unbound form."

The book itself is fast-paced and describes Paris and France in a way that is not very different from Victor Hugo's "Les Misérables". In this storyline you travel from Paris southwards to the barren hills of Plomb du Cantal,  Montpellier, Grenoble and then to Grasse, north of Cannes.  

Yet, unlike Hugo's classic it descends into incredulous levels, like a pet peeve that has run amok, taking the story to a point where you just wonder - Why would anybody want to translate this book into so many languages? Is this really the most translatable book that German language has to offer? 

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REFERENCES

* Book - Süskind, Patrick (1985): "Perfume - The Story of a Murderer "

* The Smell of Evolution (NatGeo)