I wrote last post in a groggy state of mind at four o'clock in the morning, after having five cans of beer in empty stomach. What was the occasion? Our school, LSU, won its first football match of the season against ASU in their home ground. And it was not just the win, rather the way we won, that was curious. Nothing short of miraculous. Anyone interested in football would be surprised to know that there were six touchdowns in the last-quarters only, and four out of six were for LSU, and that was the reason we won.
So much for football. It is already a week old story now.
Actually, there doesn't seem to be anything to write now. I think I am succumbing back to my old habit of dissembling my own thoughts, trying to hide from myself, what I am thinking. Over that writing those thought and posting them on the internet for the whole world to see, is little too scary right now. I hope I will be able to crack open that shell of secrecy pretty soon. Till then, good bye.
I had a small discussion with a friend. It doesn't matter whether you are a genius academically, but if you are in the wrong side of the history, then it matters nothing. You will just be a tiny speck in the history. This started when he said that he thought Ramesh Nath Pandey, Nepal's current foreign minister, was one of the brilliant person king had. In reply I said that it didnot matter whether you were brilliant academically, but when it comes to the reality, your stand on current issues show who you are. That shows what your true beliefs are.
It is weird how everything seems normal now, after a week's break and all those evacuees moving around down in stadium, on ground, and almost everywhere. Five days after the college reopened, it is weekend now. Tomorrow, LSU is playing its first season opener football game (American football, not the soccer) with Arizon State University-Sun Devils, after its first game with University of North Texas got cancelled last week due to hurricane. Finally, everything is going as it is supposed to go, according to plan. But...
I think there is some amount of chance in play all the time. For example, I was planning to go to be early tonight and to wake up fresh early in the morning. It is past 2:30 in the morning and I am still up and writing. Why? Actually I wasn't planning for this. As I said there is always some element of chance involved. I was doing some homeworks and at the end I felt like checking news and email. I went through the news. Saw one statement from our foreign minister, Ramesh Nath Pandey, and updated my other blog. Then I checked my email. There was an email from Sital reminding me to update my blog. This past week had been so hectic and somewhat frustrating, that I had almost gotten lazy to write anything. Also, during the weekdays I have all the excuses, but how can I get excuse for weekends. Oh! what the hell, it is not even three now, I thought, and started writing. Actually I am at the end of this post now. See ya.
I now think I was too starry-eyed when I wrote that the issue of class and race was going to a topic for open discussion. As long as MSM - Monstrously Self-righteous Media - remains the major outlet for discussion, nothing like it is going to happen. Mark my word for it because such discussions openly questions their own existence.
Small but multiple venues of discussions with channels connecting those venues so that information can pass back and forth between them provide a neutral platform for discussion. Detached from any mercantile aims of big corporations such venues then can act for the benefit of the people in the true spirit of democracy. It is like object oriented software development in computer industry. Instead of a big monolithic software that has so many bugs and is very difficult to manage, small autonomous objects connected together through the methods and interfaces they provide, result a cleaner and more manageable software.
Such thesis then questions the very viability of capitalism and free market. I think they are like utopia, when actually realized, result a very equitable and just society. I am not against them. In reality though, just like utopia, can never exist. And the distorted capitalism and free market result hugely disproportionate distribution of resources, inequity, and unjustness. I don't know what is the right way to distribute the resources so that the hard-working people are not punished and they get fruit of their hard-work, and also the society doesn't veer out of control because there was disproportionate distribution of the resources. There are now a clear sign that free market and capitalism in US is getting slightly out of control. It is becoming a large behemoth that is having problem adjusting to the societal change.
Today, I was reading a five-year old column by Keith Devlin, a Stanford mathematician, on MAA (Mathematical Association of America) online, about Edward Witten, I came across a paragraph that puzzled me.
...But mathematical invention is not like invention in music or literature. If Beethoven had not lived, we would never have heard the piece we call his Ninth Symphony. If Shakespeare had not lived, we'd never have seen Hamlet. But if, say, Newton had not lived, the world would have gotten calculus sooner or later, and it would have been exactly the same! Likewise, if Witten had not lived we'd have obtained his results eventually. (Although the wait would almost certainly have been much longer for Witten's work than it was for calculus.) devlinIs it necessarily true that if Newton hadn't invented the calculus or if Einstein hadn't come up with all those groundbreaking ideas, other scientists from afteryears would have invented exactly the same mathematical formalisms or theories? Does that mean there are only one way of working all these physical and mathematical theories out? I doubt that.
Katrina came and went. On the wake, leaving Mobile, AL, Biloxi, MS, and New Orleans, LA, devastated. While state government and local personnel were trying to take grasp of the situation, federal government stayed watching (assuming they were awake) for two days. Mr. President was busy talking about Iraq war. Only when he cut short his month long summer vacation by two days and headed back to DC and on the way, when the Air Force One was lowered little bit to have a look at situation in New Orleans, he realized that Katrina had hit the city. It must have looked like a small Atlantis. When he reached DC, he proclaimed that federal emergency management agencies were already depolyed and actively involved in rescue operations. And I think sank back to his old habit of indifference. It took another day of horrifying reporting on MSM (Mainstream Media) to wake him up from the reverie and remind him that without doing anything nothing is going to be alright. He went to ground and saw the ground reality on Friday, and realized why everybody is chastising him and his government's handling of the situation.
All these was bad. But one good thing that might come out of all this is an open discussion about class and race in America. Some people have already started talking about these issues. These issues were sort of taboo and whoever talks about these here in America was sure to be branded as a liberal. Talking about them is sure to raise questions about socialism and capitalism, American way of capitalism, etc. And these debates are harmful to maintain the American status quo and people in power donot want that to happen.
I myself have started thinking about this situation. I used to have a feeling that something is not right in America as a society and distribution of resources. A very small minority of people control vast majority of resources here, and size of the middle class is ever shrinking. When size of the high-class society increases, only middle class experiences the pressure. People is the lowest rung are already there and have almost nothing to lose by this increase. Many people I get in touch on day to day basis seem to be well off when compared with thirld-world yardstick. That is the only yardstick I have as I don't know how people judge economic well-offness in America, excepting the economic jargon of 'consumer price index', of 'gross domestic product', and what not. Because those indices shows an aggregate behavior and life is not aggregate, and society has so many ugly details that make it so complex and unpredictable, and interesting also. Smoothing those details may be good for policy making and for sloganeering, is not helpful for the life. Sadly, those people have no say over policy, distribution of resources, among other things. Middle-class here in America, victim of the society, just live their life. If something happens, this class has enough resource to take care of themselves, but not the others. When high-class also turns its head to look in some other direction, it is the people on the lowest rung that get trapped. And that is what happened here in Louisiana this past last week. Now, after MSM's massive reporting, they realized that the control over policy and resources comes with small responsibility.
