All my adult life – which admittedly has not been very long if maturity is the defining characteristic of adulthood – I have been told that in order to be successful, I need to manage time effectively. At face value, this advice seems sagacious since there is only finite time on this planet. But when I’ve thought about it more, I’ve found that those who offer advice on managing time are not interested in whether I pursue activities that might possibly stretch my lifespan by a few years or make it more meaningful or enjoyable: they are talking about multitasking, an unfortunate catchphrase describing the act of performing as many routine chores as possible in the least amount of time. In short, they want me to do more work in the same amount of time.

Is this always good advice? I’m not sure. Here an analogy might be useful to visualize time management. Say, for example, that the total amount of time in which you want to complete an activity is an empty glass. Of course the glass has a defined volume; if you pour more water in the glass than it will take, the residual water will spill over. Say also, for the sake of the analogy, that the least amount of time it takes to do an activity properly is the volume of water that fills the glass to the rim and then some. Time management teaches you different ways to pour the water into the glass with the promise that none of it will spill over.

Obviously, the analogy applies only if you’ve reached the point of maximum efficiency. In this case, you are at the stage where you can not appreciably decrease the time it takes to complete a certain activity unless the situation changes. Those who multitask will say that successful people juggle multiple activities at once, so they have a longer timeframe to complete the task. The implicit argument in this case is less reassuring: why do one activity well, when you can do a number of activities at the same time adequately or poorly?

A motivational speaker might say that human potential is infinite and everything is in the realm of the possible. In a sense, people do get better at what they do with dedication and experience. Here another analogy is useful. In a fixed amount of time, I might be able to juggle one or two balls while a professional juggler might be able to handle four or more. Given the time, inclination, and training, I should be able to learn how to juggle more than the number I currently can. But there are physical and mental limits to what I and other humans can comfortably achieve. For short spurts of time, I might be able juggle multiple balls, but this unnatural activity is clearly unsustainable. Increase the number of tasks anyone needs to concentrate on at the same time or the duration of time needed to maintain this strained state and you have a recipe for failure.

A side effect of the constant urge to do as many things at once is that we’ve created an attention-deficit-prone society in which the ability to concentrate is an endangered skill. Left to our devices, we all seem to fall back on our devices. No one can stand in a train or in a line or on an elevator without looking at smartphones anymore. Everyone is reading and listening to music and sharing their life-story in 140 characters and walking and working at the same time. How many times a day when we should be focusing on the task at hand, do we get distracted by email? If I’m not interested in the minutiae that my friends share on social media, why do I bombard them with the mundane details from my life as well? If I take a photograph every waking minute of my life, don’t I need another life to view them once myself? What were tools which were supposed to help us stay connected and save us time, are taking up more of our time than we’d like to admit.

Of course everyone wants to do more in life. But we need to step back and understand that time deals us two blows simultaneously. The first blow is that with every passing moment there is less of it left in life. Regardless of whether we know how long we are going to live or not, our lives have an expiry date. Death is a real deadline. The second blow is that with every passing moment what is done can’t be changed. The time I spend checking whether I have any new email in my inbox while participating in a conference call is time I have lost forever. I cannot compensate for it by trying to cram a ton of activities into a shortening life and euphemistically calling it quality time.

My one-month-old son whose brain is developing at a faster rate than his father’s is now, knows a thing or two I understood myself before I got infected with multitasking. He is not trying to watch a movie and read a newspaper and have a conversation with the rest of his family at the same time, though the day he will simultaneously process a deluge of information will come soon. Today, as he was on my lap and staring at my face I reached for my smartphone to check my email. Sensing that his father was not giving him his undivided attention made him furious. I got the message and I put the phone down. Somethings are more important. This moment will be gone before I know it. Email can wait.

“কানা ছেলের নাম পদ্মলোচন” —- “A blind boy is named the Lotus-eyed One” – Bengali proverb

Having gone through the arduous process of naming my newborn son – and yes, there is definitely a rigorous vetting process – I now feel competent enough to give unsolicited advice on how to name a Bengali baby boy. The rather involved process of finding a name for a Bengali newborn is a life-or-death situation; for most of us, an easy one, such as a Puja or Raj simply will not do.

I will briefly touch upon a couple of key considerations that apply to providing names for all Bengali children, but the focus here is primarily on Sanskrit and Bangla derived secular (and “Hindu-sounding,” for lack of a better phrase) names for boys born in the modern era in West Bengal. A wider discussion of Muslim and Christian Bengali names won’t be covered here, though some of the principles apply to nicknames, which almost all Bengali boys and girls are given. In addition, the discussion is restricted primarily to boys, and yes, of course to baby boys (for how many of you will ever need to name “adult boys” even if there was such a thing? So yes, Dear Reader, the title is somewhat misleading; it is an offering at the altar of search engines.)

A hundred years ago, Bengali names were drastically different. A Saratchandra, or a Bankimchandra born today would sound so provincial. Definitely studied at a mofussil school in the backwaters of Paschim Medinipur. Or maybe not even there. I’m from Paschim Medinipur and I’ve never met either in my entire life. In my own family, the Ayodhyanaths and Janakinaths passed on eons before my birth too. You will find few Rukminikumars, Rakhoharis, and Botokeshtos filling up the ledgers of birth certificates these days. They will not be missed. Do not try to resuscitate them, although we will applaud a Subhas Chandra (Jai Hind!) and a Rabindranath (Kabiguru ke pronam!) from time to time.

As an aside, gone too are many of the misogynistic names given to Bengali women; an Annakali, which roughly translates as an entreaty to the goddess, Kali for no more female children, is less likely to be spotted than an Anarkali. Interestingly, all married women carry the honorific “Debi” these days, and in many cases this is also used in a marital-status-neutral manner. Quite unlike what was the norm one hundred years ago, when a woman was generally referred to as Annapurna Debi if she belonged to a Brahmin family and as Annapurna Dasi if she was from a family of any other caste.  A good thing if you ask me. But I digress. Back to naming boys.

When my father was born, long names synonymous with the stalwarts of the Hindu pantheon – Rama, Shiva, and Krishna had just started to fall out of favor among the genteel. The bourgeoisie had also just started to separate Kumar, Ranjan,  Kanti, and Chandra from their given names to create middle names, even though in Bangla there are few true middle-names. As an aside, we can thank cricket-despotic Maharashtrians for forcing a Sourav Chandidas Ganguly on us.

But that was then. This is now. Middle names have again fallen out of favor.

Back in my father’s time, secular names derived from Bangla and Sanskrit words had just started to become popular. This has continued. Today it is often difficult to ascertain religion from a name: an Imon or a Shagor Chowdhury are somewhat ambigious. To confuse things, there are a few Buddhadebs and Jishus walking around too! Not bad if you ask me. (Where I finally draw the line is at the current trend of nonsensical onomatopoeic monosyllabic names.)

In these dark loadshedding-filled politically uncertain times, names synonymous, for example, with the sun and light are quite the rage. After all, my own name, Anirban, roughly translates to “inextinguishable”. Power-names are much in demand.

Another trend in vogue is to go back to the old books. Literally. Parents and well-wishers are scouring the Vedas and Vedantas for references to gods and sages. This process has become so commonplace that even the most obscure ones have been taken up. Go ahead and name a sage mentioned in passing in one of the Upanishads, and I’ll point out a bespectacled top-ranker on the West Bengal Joint Entrance Examination with that name, who graduated with an engineering degree and is comfortably settled in the United States. Sounik? Sounak? Yes, I know them both. I’m even convinced that if Arsenik had been the name of a rishi in the Vedas, well-meaning Bengali mothers and fathers would have given that name to their sons by now!

Another major trend is the creation of names from a combination of prefixes and suffixes.  Parents add “A-“ to describe what something is not, therefore Anirban is not Nirban, Anindya is not Nindya and Amal is not…  (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) On the other hand, “Su-” is added to accentuate a positive trait in names like Subinoy and Sunirmal… (What? Binoy and Nirmal aren’t good enough for your son?)

These are just two examples and there are quite a few suffixes as well.  You can add nearly an inexhaustible number of words such as Deb to “-deep”, “-jit”, “-esh”, “-ashis”and “jyoti” to make names like Debdeep, Debjit, Debesh, Debashis, and Debjyoti. It is the great Bengali-Name-Lego set that parents love to play with.

Unless you are absolutely convinced that your son will never come in contact with a non-Bengali in his entire life, keep his name, or at least the preferred spelling of his name, simple. I know this is challenging: on the one hand, you want your son’s name spelled Surya: on the other, you know that the accurate pronunciation in Bangla is Shurjo. Weigh the options. An uncle of mine related the story of a sadhu who took on the name Nandanananda. I am told that an American tried to pronounce it and went into an infinite loop of “nanda…nanda…nanda.” The story is probably not true, but the way my uncle said it, I bought into it at the time.

Consider the variations in spelling and ask non-Bengalis to test-drive them on their tongue. Do not pick an androgynous name like Suman. Yes, he is a male singer in Bengal, but there are way too many women with that name in North India who were conceived in 1989 after their parents saw Maine Pyar Kiya. Sudipta might be logically correct from a Sanskrit-centered phonetic point-of-view, but no one will ever pronounce it like your child is male. A better option is to spell it in the Bangla-centered phonetic, Sudipto.

Don’t make it easy for your son’s friends to ridicule him because of his name. You will never prevent his classmates creating nicknames, just don’t make it any easier than it has to be. For example, Aripro conjures up a nice limerick line ending in Wipro. Delicious! Animik is perpetually anemic. If you love your child, please don’t name him Achyut. Too easy. Which brings me to a related point…

Don’t get too swept up in your Bangaliana. Unless you are convinced that your son will be the heir to the famous Bangla poet Shakti, stick to Chatterjee instead of Chattopadhyaya. Save your Bangaliana for superior cuisine, football, literature, art, activism, and bus-burning among other things, and spare your child’s given name and surname from it.  

If on the other hand, your surname is Bose, change it to the synonymous Basu if you’re hell-bent on naming your son after your favorite actor, Dilip Kumar. Or if you were born after 1977, maybe the Left Front government forced the change on your Madhyamik certificate anyway.

Don’t get swept on the other end of the spectrum either. I knew a Benjamin Franklin Bhattacharya. He was permanently wincing. It was not a pretty sight.

The internet is your friend. Use it with caution. Don’t trust the online dictionaries to give you an accurate spelling in your native language or the modern meaning of your son’s name, because they won’t. Check if there are a million other people with the same name on LinkedIn. Google if the name you’ve chosen was chosen a few decades ago by the parents of a notorious killer with 10,000 of the top hits. These are not hypothetical situations, and they sure as hell aren’t palatable.

Take your time and put in the effort. You can’t go wrong. Unless you name your son Anal Kanti Shit.

My son has been alive all of two weeks now. Alive. It is the wrong word. Let me try again.

My son was born two weeks ago. In a sense he has been alive much longer, and I, as his father, have also been thinking about his existence for many months now. How long has he existed?

On the one hand, there are those who say that a child becomes a person at the moment of conception. On the other end of the spectrum are those who say that a person comes into existence at birth, or even some point weeks or months after birth, when the child is capable of autonomous survival. I’ve discovered that most of these arguments are positioned in order to demarcate when developing offspring have moral and legal rights: arguments put forth are predominantly post hoc edifices constructed by those who have entrenched viewpoints on the morality of abortion.

I will not get drawn into the quicksand of motives. As a father, what interests me most right now, is in knowing just how my little baby boy is developing into an individual.

In my son, the chain of life is still unbroken. In that sense, even the first cellular divisions of his embryonic form were not entirely new: however, by this rigid assertion, there has been no new life after the first forms were developed and we are stuck back in the speculative days of the primordial soup when life might have originated. Hardly helpful if you’re curious how your own baby developed.

Life is a game of probabilities. There will always be a relatively high chance than an embryo will never make it past the first few days: usually even mothers are unaware that these early embryos spontaneously cease to develop further. Even later, throughout the rest of the first trimester of pregnancy, as cells are dividing and the body systems are starting to develop, there is a possibility that the embryo will cease to develop naturally. Every day that the embryo grows, the chance of its survival increases. Still, there is a one in five chance of spontaneous termination of a pregnancy during those early months, and this is often thought to be a natural way to ensure that genetic defects are not passed on to living offspring. A fertilized egg or a developing embryo obviously possesses the possibility of developing into a person, but is it truly a person? If we consider it a person, then we must also come to terms with the fact that it has a 20% of not even passing to the next phase of its development and that this holocaust is predominantly natural and likely unpreventable. If it is incapable of survival on its own, does not have developed systems, and is considered predominantly parasitic on its mother, then it is formally possible to say that it is not a person. But we have to examine these criteria individually.

Just when did my son become a person? His mother felt his movements when his gestational age was approximately sixteen weeks. At the twenty-week ultrasonogram, the technician clearly pointed out attributes which remarkably turned out to be visible when he was born nearly twenty-weeks later. At twenty-weeks we were able to visualize his organs, see the blood pump through his heart, see his face, and notice him move his arms and legs. He responded to stimuli. By twenty-weeks many of his other organs were gearing up for primetime too. Was he a person then?

So much is made of time of birth and independent existence. When my son was born, a whole industrious coterie of hospital staff meticulously entered his vital statistics into the wired machines of society. Biologically, though, time of birth in humans is an evolutionary compromise to allow the large brainbox of the infant to pass through the narrow birth-canal of the mother. A newborn is not capable of taking care of itself. Does that make it not a person?

Only five percent of babies are born on their due dates. If a baby becomes a person when it emerges from the womb, shouldn’t we be better at predicting this event? On a tangential note, I’m curious how the pseudoscience, astrology, deals with “celestial” time-of-birth when it is predetermined by humans via elective or emergency Caesarian section.

Modern medicine has advanced to such a stage that premature babies born even twelve weeks before their due date can survive with a little help from neonatal specialists. In other words, a fetus is often viable at 28 weeks, something which was unheard of one-hundred years ago. With further advances, this early arrival stamp is likely to be pushed back even earlier. Do they become persons when they are delivered surgically by physicians, or when they are hooked up to artificial respirators, or, if and when they survive when they are taken off? Are lungs the organs that define life? And if they are, then are grownups who are temporarily put on respirators dead?

For adults either cessation of function of the heart or the brain is clinically considered death. Conversely, are fetuses whose hearts and brains functioning non-living? My son had not used his lungs yet, but his brain and nervous system were functioning exactly the same way ten minutes before he was born as they were at the time of birth; he was capable of dreaming, and his heart was pumping in the same manner that it will be for the rest of his life.

Even after two weeks of being an independent entity my son’s sense of coordination is very poor; it will take months for his hearing and eyesight to develop. His brain will continue to develop for decades to come.

The various vital organs of a human start to “boot up” many months before birth. Essential development continues unabated on a very long timeframe. Birth is the most important time-point during this process, but I am peeved: why do we take it for granted that existence and non-existence are binary and occur at the time someone looks up at a clock hanging on a wall in a delivery room?

Welcome!

I have been waiting for an eternity to meet you, son! I see you wiggle in front of me. I gaze into your eyes and I want to know you. I hope you will learn something about me too. I have to remind myself not to think ahead, though it is very hard to control my excitement. I have so many stories to tell you. One day when you are older, you will know exactly what I mean.

For months now, your presence has been indelibly imprinted on my psyche. When I first heard your heartbeat when you were still inside your mother, my own heart raced uncontrollably. I have spoken to you in many words that I imagined made you move, suspending in my consciousness the logic that you did not understand. We kissed the picture of your perfect tiny left foot the doctors gave us after the ultrasonogram. As you grew, your mother winced every time you jabbed her in the ribs. On the night of February 29, the rarest of days, your mother and I rushed the hospital. She grimaced as the contractions progressively got stronger. In the middle of the night, I briefly dozed off to the rhythmic sound of your heart on the monitor. But we would have to wait another day to see you. You stubbornly resisted for 24 hours. Those were the most intense 24 hours of your mother’s life. It was by far the most emotionally draining of mine.

You announced your arrival in this world by screaming and furiously moving your arms and legs. I understand, son. Each life is bookended by two traumatic events – and even though the central character involved in these events never retains memories of them– they define us all. You experienced one such defining moment: the curtains were just raised in an act in which the rest of us only play supporting roles.

I know everything around you is confusing now. If I could speak clearly to you, I’d tell you that this is natural. Like a little bird trapped in a cage, you were flitting inside your mother all these months. Now you are free from one cage but inside another larger, more chaotic one, which we inhabit for all of our days. I do not profess to understand this larger cage. It bewilders me too. As your parents, we promise to provide a security blanket, so that you have some semblance of regularity in your life until you are prepared to collide with this immensity of the world. And when that moment comes, son, spread your arms to embrace this chaos!

Soak in the oxygen with your brand-new, expanding lungs. Move around and claim ownership of your immediate space. This is the world that we inherited, which is now rightfully yours too. Much of which you have in your possession, you received from us. I cannot fully catalog what I have given you, but perhaps as you grow older and you notice prematurely graying hair or a natural propensity for high-blood pressure, you will smile knowingly. The world calls certain traits, imperfections, but there are no perfections, son. We are all dealt a certain hand. Our characteristics define who we are.

Though I speak in incomprehensible words today, you need not worry about such trifles for a very long time. You were born with a multitude of neurons, but your brain is still plastic. Absorb all the information you can. Let the neurons fight it out to form connections, to develop skills, strengthen senses, and form memories. Your mother and I will watch you as you learn to smile and to clap. We will hold you as you crawl and as you take your first steps. As you learn to articulate both nonverbally and verbally. As you learn to express yourself through letters, numbers, lines, motions, and sounds. And all the while, we will learn how to be parents from you.

You know, I just have to tell you this story. The other day, we were visiting a specialty store for babies, which in itself was like entering a new country for the first time – complete with its own language, customs, and totems. We picked out some clothes for you and smiled at the cute taglines, “Mommy’s Little Helper,” “Daddy’s Rockstar,” but paused when we saw a shirt with “My Grandpa Loves Me” emblazoned across the front. Yes, he would have loved you, my dear.

You will get acquainted with our oral histories because we will feel the urge to tell you about those who we were honored to have known. I wish you could have known my grandparents. They were exemplary individuals, as were the uncles and aunts who can no longer personally welcome you into the extended family. But most of all, your mother and I are immensely saddened that you will never meet her father, your dadu: that void can never be filled with words and recollections.

Stories of other ancestors have passed from generation to generation, often so much that the distinction between history and legend has blurred. We will recount these stories to you. But I must warn you, son: there were some who treated men who were not like them and even their own women on unequal terms. In our own lives, we can renounce their despicable acts, but we must not forget that we are their descendants: lest we ever be proud of our distant past, we should remember that we cannot wish away the stigma associated with caste prejudice and religious persecution that hang like a proverbial albatross around our necks. We can never deny that we are inheritors of the asymmetry which they created, and the blessings and curse which come with it.

Of course you did not ask for this life. None of us came into existence of our own volition. As you came to this world through us, we were brought here by those who preceded us. Sometimes, when I see how we have treated this planet, words fail and tears escape. If I could believe, I would pray. If wishes came true, I would wish to make this a better place before your arrival. But that is a father who wants the perfect home and world for his son speaking.

When the burdens of the world bear down on you, as they surely will many times, please forgive us for our selfishness; you brought new joy and fulfillment to our lives in a way we had not known was ever possible. But son, that is not even a brushstroke on a painting. We did not rush in this direction. We made the decision at a relatively ripe age, not for ourselves or from any pressure from anyone else; we made it for you. It is true that you had no say in this life, and neither did any of us in ours. But son, what is volition without existence? What is reality, perception, joy, or even suffering without life? The clarity that even pain brings is a burden indeed, but how should it ever compare to not existing at all? My darling, know that we brought you here because we sincerely believe that despite all the suffering in this imperfect world, it is truly worthwhile to live.

To be able to experience the world is a gift beyond all others. To know that you are connected to all life is the ultimate thrill. For your true lineage extends billions of years into the past to form an unbroken bond with all life that has ever existed, from the first organisms which arose on our planet to every astounding form you see, and billions of others which you cannot perceive. And while it is true that you are I are infinitesimally small compared to the vastness of time and space, we are part of this spectacular chain. Our planet developed through a specific series of events; bubbling, expanding, seething, and cooling. The atoms in our body are cosmic; our energy, solar; the oxygen we breathe, excreted by ancient microorganisms, and our water, possibly from comets. If life had not formed on this pale blue planet, if through changes in the environment certain species had not existed and others become extinct, if our ancestors had not persisted through an evolutionary bottleneck that threatened to decimate them, modern humans would never evolved. We are the true extremophiles comfortable in our tiny refuge when compared to the inhospitable vastness of the known universe.

On an even more mind-boggling level, a precise chain of events had to occur for your birth to occur. One seemingly minor temporal change in billions of years of stochastic noise would have resulted in none of us being here. You are the result of a fantastic equation which even our most complicated mathematics cannot derive; your existence alone holds the key to more wondrous insight than any banal text can offer on the meaning of life. And not only do you exist, but you bear the gift of consciousness.

I speak, of course, of years to come. Your existential concerns now are quite different from what they will be two, ten, or twenty years from now. As you grow, you will build a mental library which you will be able to tap to develop definitive skills – hindsight and premonition. But there is a tradeoff. Today, you start with countless possibilities. Mine are more limited. As the years progress, we all walk along a path strewn with memories, regrets, and missed opportunities, a path on which we cannot return. I have my own share of accumulated baggage, son. Yet, I consider myself exceptionally fortunate for all I have received in this life, and most of all, for the love of your mother, who with her kindness, hospitality, and grace is quite certainly a better person than I have the capacity to ever become.

I am also fortunate because I have you.

You know, the other day, when I was up in the air, I looked out of the window and saw the setting sun light up billowing clouds: one day I will show you what it felt like to see those clouds. I want to read books to you that have made me smile and cry. I want to point out flickering stars in the wondrous night sky and tell you tales of galaxies beyond our farthest grasp. I want to show you microscopic life teeming in a drop of water and tell you that we know next to nothing about them. These are unexplored worlds, which maybe one day you will journey into on behalf of all of humanity.

You will see through your own eyes, but I will offer you my perception. Sometimes, you will want to walk fast; and I ask you to be slow. You will speak directly from the heart; I will insist that you also learn to think critically. I want to teach you how to play cricket, but maybe one day you will teach me how to play baseball too. (Either way, your mother will insist that you wear a helmet. Listen to her. Try not to hurt her sentiments, even when they are at odds with mine).

Through pure chance, you and I we were born men. We will never face many of the hardships women suffer in this inequitable world. Remember that a woman left everything she knew to start a family and bring you into this world: she carried your burden, nourished you, and bore the pain of your birth with strength. Honor her sacrifice and those of your female ancestors by treating women as your equals– with dignity, love, and respect.

Your mother and I were not born in this country. We made the long voyage leaving everyone and everything we knew behind. This country gave us a new life. We sought refuge here: we also found exile. This country accepts you as one of its own, but one day you too may heed an urge to leave it behind.

In life, you will find many who include you in artificial groups. There will be others who exclude you based on what you look like, what you think, or what you do. Do not despise them. We must all stumble through life and make our own way without a roadmap. And as we harness technology to tear down the physical barriers that separate us, we create other barriers based on criteria such as nationality, ethnicity, and wealth.

The day is not far off when you will learn to speak. Even though groping for words can be frustrating at times, I will say that language is a beautiful invention. Languages are inclusive and inviting, even when their speakers are not. Becoming fluent in a multitude of languages will give you wondrous vistas into the mind. We will teach you our words. In return, I hope you will teach us many new words in new languages you learn. And although today I write to you in English, a language you will learn, treat Bangla with respect. It is the quiet peaceful home where you will always find your name properly pronounced in your own voice, and your baba and ma talking to you.

Your mother and I connect you to incipient experiences rooted in an unknowable time and space. You will never fully understand our compulsions, but that should not drive a wedge between us. We will try to protect you, sometimes failing to realize that you will make mistakes like we did. In turn, you will be puzzled by our cluelessness. We will be wary of change and risk-averse. We will speak with a strange accent. When you interact with your peers, we will unwittingly embarrass you. We cannot help it. Such is the whimsy of the world.

We, in turn, will never fully understand you either. Your clothes will never be fashionable enough. Your allowance will never be adequate. The food on your plate will not always be what you want to eat. You will be angry with us. In many ways, this is deserved: we need to come full-circle too.

But as I look at you today, I promise you this much: even if we don’t always see eye to eye, you will get the affection, respect, and support you deserve as you seek to be true to your calling. When the time comes for you to move on– distant though it might seem now– I can hope that we will have provided an environment in which you will have learned well. For in the end, as much as I want to see the world through your eyes, I know that is not possible. There will always be a new country to discover, an unfathomable ocean to cross, another dimension to unravel. And even though, one day we will set sail for different shores, your mother and I will always be a compass on your voyage of self-discovery.

In 1921, Raymond Pearl, Professor of Biometry and Vital Statistics at Johns Hopkins made a starting prediction that the upper-limit of population which could be sustained by the United States would be reached in 2060 and that it would be around 200 million souls. Dr. Pearl employed logically-sound analyses extrapolating from the Malthusian doctrine prevalent at the time, as well as state-of-the-art calculations of growth-curves for other nations and other animal populations such as fruit flies. Of course, his calculations were wildly off: in 2011, the United States reached a population of over 310 million.

In October of the same year, according to some analysts, the world’s human population surpassed a statistical 7 billion. Of course, no one really knows when that demographic milestone was reached and the selection of the 7 billionth infant in 2011 was largely a symbolic act. Regardless, the world’s population is in the midst of an explosion with no immediate signs of stabilizing.

Although there is no way for knowing for sure, it is estimated that the population of the world surpassed one billion in the early 1800s. To double to two billion it took over 100 years, but reached three billion in only thirty or forty more years. By most official estimates, the global population exceeded four billion the year I was born, five billion when I was in the sixth grade, and six billion by the time I got my master’s degree. Given these trends, I do not think I will need to live very long to see it double in my own lifetime.

Since the mid-Seventies, Carl Laub of the Population Reference Bureau has attempted an audacious exercise. Laub has been trying to reach an estimate of the number of humans that have ever lived, starting from a statistical first couple at 50,000 B.C. In mid-2011, he arrived at approximately 108 billion humans (give or take a few billion). His analysis presumably does not take into account an evolutionary bottleneck caused by a supervolcano which erupted around 70,000 B.C. causing only a few thousand of our ancestors to survive, but otherwise seems plausible. It is in the ballpark.

If that is indeed the case, 108 billion is the total sum of every man, woman, and child that has ever lived. This number included every Buddha, Aristotle, Alexander, Genghis, Shakespeare, Kalidas, Hitler, Da Vinci, Stalin, Lincoln and Newton. It also includes the vast multitudes of humanity who, for better or worse, never reached their true potential in life and thus, disappeared into the quicksand of obscurity.

But even the people we have memories of lived very recently. As Carl Sagan astutely noted, if you put the cosmic scale on the Gregorian calendar, all of human existence would pass by on the last ten seconds of December 31. Even if we stretch this timeframe to include only the time humans have been on the planet, there is no existing narrative for most of our existence. The oral, mythical traditions of our preliterate ancestors –and the written word is a very recent construct even for those fortunate to have access to it in modern times – have mostly vanished. For 99.9% of human existence, our ancestors were hunter-gatherers. How long did they live? What did they die from? We will never really know. Our ancestors are alien to us.

No wonder the challenge in explaining the remaining recent 0.01% puts the social sciences on unenviable ground. At best, history and sociology can provide fragmentary papyruses on the few individuals, customs, and events which have influenced us the most. At worst, as conflicting accounts of the tragedies at Nanking and Dhaka in recent times show, oppressor and “oppressee” will obfuscate any approach towards an absolute truth, so that it is unknowable even for the most detached of observers.

The physical and life sciences cannot bring an absolute framework of knowledge to pass either. For example, biologists cannot study (or possibly even identify every living organism) that was or is alive on this planet. A few model organisms, such as E. coli, yeast, worms, and fruit flies are studied in extensive details to make associative inferences, and we will continue to know more, but scientific knowledge will always be fragmentary too.

If scratching beyond the surface of the duration of human existence is impossible, if absolute knowledge is a mirage, it does not diminish the value of knowing what is knowable. As Thomas Kuhn hypothesized, it is the relatively short spurts in which revolutions and paradigm shifts occurred that human history was likely shaped.

I am inclined to take the democratic view that human culture is the sum of what is important to all humans. If that is so, then our modern times, hold special significance. Over 6% of every human who ever breathed on this earth is alive now. (On a sobering note, this also means that over 6% will die in a lifetime: an unprecedented scale of deaths the likes of which have never been seen).

In absolute terms, this puts immense pressure on society. Languages, for example, are under extreme duress to conform to the needs of an unprecedented number of users in extraordinary situations.

For the most of human existence, apart from just after wars, pandemics, and famines, the present has been the most important time in history. And if today is the most important day ever for humanity, then it behooves us to ensure we do whatever is possible to improve the collective human condition.

I have a problem that needs fixing. I am a bibliophile with limited space on my shelves.

I have put off this problem for a long time wishing that it would go away by itself, but now I urgently need to make space for new pages which will inevitably encroach upon my small apartment.

One way to fix the situation would be to get new bookshelves with more space. Another way would be to pile the books I have amassed in some sort of crystalline close-packing form in storage ottomans. To a certain extent, I have employed both tactics, but short of moving into a larger home –and I dread the thought of lugging around the books I’ve already amassed – the fact remains that the dimensions of my physical space will not change.

I do read words in digital format on the multiplicity of devices I have accrued, and this certainly has made carrying around hundreds and even thousands of books convenient. However, many of the real books I own have a history of their own, have been out of print, or were bought second-hand for a pittance. In addition, none of the books I own in Bangla are available in digital format. Others, like my marked-up copy of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, have sentimental value.

For the longest time, I thought of shipping some of the books I’d already read back to the home I grew up in. I’d love to revisit some of those books, but am also quite certain that I won’t be able to do so anytime soon. For as Richard Ford astutely noted, “rereading’s actually an expensive and baulky luxury, since our roads are already lined with all those books we haven’t even read the first time and that have a first claim on us if we could ever get to them.”

I was never overly concerned that it would cost me more to ship the books than it cost me to purchase them in the first place. The worth of a book has no direct relation to the price that was paid for it. However, in the end, I decided against having my bulky books shipped across the oceans to a house, which I will visit, perhaps, for a couple of days every few years, a house which is no longer my home.

So, the problem remained and I decided that the only way to tackle it was to discipline myself and to clean up my shelves sorting out what I would give away to others. Well, that was much easier said than done. Giving up old magazines took little time, because I could convince myself that with the steady flow of information in more current issues, I would never have the time to revisit the old ones. Books presented a more difficult predicament.

There were books I had bought but never read. There were books that I had read, which I promised myself I would read again. There were books I wanted to nibble on from time to time. There were ones I wanted on my shelf for no particular logical reason. And there was my bound dissertation which was a reminder of an era of my life more than any reference: it had a very short shelf-life in the world of scientific advances. I literally had to have a conversation with myself when deciding the fate of each one.

For even though I prided myself in being a swift reader, I knew it would be impossible to pay attention to every book on the shelf. Just as a starving man wants to keep a pantry full of various types of comestibles, ever since I’ve been employed, I’ve created a smorgasbord for my omnivorous reading habits. I always dreaded not having a choice and as a consequence I have hoarded.

The fear that I would have absolutely nothing interesting to read was not entirely unfounded. After school was out one summer, I had been so starved of reading material, that I spent weeks reading random entries in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, an act which in hindsight, is probably only a few notches above copying the text word for word (performed by the fictitious Jabez Wilson in the “The Red-Headed League”). At the time, I had clearly run out of books to read and the means to restock my shelves.

Thinking of Encyclopaedia Britannica does bring back memories! You of the Expedia, Wikipedia, and crowdsourcing generation have no idea the aura of prestige owning a set of Micropaedia, Macropaedia, and Propaedia conferred on the owner. Just as hosts show off their fine china or DVD collection these days, my father showed guests our bookshelves. It was not Collier’s, Funk and Wagnall’s, or the World Book encyclopedia that we owned: we owned a set of Britannica. It was The Encyclopaedia and it damn well took up an entire wall.

That is just how things were back then. We went to the Encylopaedia when faced with intractable geeky problems, and we left usually unsatisfied.

In a perverse way thinking of the Encylopaedia Britannica gathering dust on a bookshelf in the home I grew up in, its pages now yellow and the information obsolete, made the task of sorting the books I need to part with much easier.

A mountainous range stood before the sympathetic tedium
Revolver so sound of mind not free to remember
It operates with happy, dull abandon,
Figment of the imagination? Never… The hurting went on
A chain screams noisily, but no one ever listens…
A bread or a radiant dragon is the key
As Cleopatra’s heart melted at the sight of death.
Down by the babbling brook the cow dreams.
Whining out in frustration, the goose knifed violently.

____________________

A chain screams noisily, but no one ever listens…

What emotions ran through the writer who conjured these images? What pain took root in a sick, depressed mind?

Only, “emotions” is perhaps, not the right word. You see this poem was not written by any human hand; it was spit out by a computer algorithm according to very formal rules of grammar programmed into a system. I only hastened the process by feeding it a few words.

Read it again. Although one line can be loosely threaded to the next, there is really no continuity. Each line is a discrete string of words which the computer constructed independently of others.

However, despite the awkward syntax running through this nine-line poem written in free-verse and the incongruity of certain metaphors, it is contextually similar to other poems I have read. It could have been written by someone I know. I noticed the improbability of the emotional quotient only because I was privy to the secret of its creation.

How do you critically evaluate a work of art when you know it was not created by a human? Does it even qualify as art? Perhaps, other questions need to be asked as well. During the process of assessment, should the evaluator be blinded from the creator’s identity, so that the focus is solely on the intrinsic merit of the work? How much does algorithm, the syntax, and the context matter?

Who is to say that whatever is synthesized mechanically without emotional input is not art if it holds the power to elicit an emotional output?

In our minds, a machine is still only machine. It cannot breathe life into the lifeless. We pick up the phone and want to speak to another human: we want to connect with another sentient being capable of empathy. We want to know that there is an element of spontaneity, an aura of unpredictability, and that the rules can be bent. We want to have a conversation, not trigger voice activation.

If you could program spontaneity, would it still remain spontaneity? No, of course not. But perhaps, this is a moot point, for even in a randomly chosen human, there are only a finite number of possible responses to any situation. Perhaps, our machines only need more processing power.

A poem is not a voice-activated roboparrot. The written word is slightly different from a conversation in real-time. The writer has already spoken. The reader is in the process of digesting what has been said and simultaneously formulating a response.

Even so, our reaction is always calibrated to what we already know about the writer. We would not react the same way, if a computer could provide an element of expectation.

We feel cheated. In crowded surroundings devoid of interpersonal transactions, when we turned to look, the forbidden touch which elicited joy or disgust was not flesh pressing against flesh, it was plastic.

The brilliant mathematician, Alan Turing devised an ingenious test. A human interpreter tries to gauge from standard responses from a human and a machine which is which.

The philosophical implication intrigues me more than any practical consideration. Can machines be made intelligent? The machines which churn out digital poems will not create something with the finesse of a Shakespeare. But that misses the point. Only one human poet was Shakespeare. The range of human responsiveness indicates that the goal is highly subjective. A human could write like a computer. A human can easily flunk a reverse-Turing test, much in the same way that Charlie Chaplin once lost a Charlie Chaplin lookalike contest. The blurry combinations of letters we need to type to prove we are human are getting increasingly complicated. We need to get better to recognize them.

The race to create machines like humans rarely takes into consideration the fact that we are becoming increasingly machine-like. We are the ones being programmed psychologically in a corollary to the Turing test. Perhaps, one day a human will be indistinguishable from a machine at a flickering cursor on the long continuum.

In memory of Alan M. Turing (1912-1954).

Miles of sand melt into a featureless horizon. Is each grain of sand different? A vital piece of an architectural puzzle?

I am in a rush to go nowhere in particular.

We are a tiny fragment of an incomprehensibly large universe and a gigantic sum of imperceptibly small atoms. Both the massive and the minuscule are empty. From one star to the next is the vacuum; from the ground state to the excited is the void.

Life is short on a cosmic timescale and long compared to the half-lives of super-heavy atoms.

In a lifetime, a few flickering memories pierce the plasma of monotony, until they too collapse as dying stars into oblivion.

Yesterday, when I read the news, I thought of Raju.

Raju lived with him parents in the shanty just beyond the high walls surrounding the house where I grew up. His father leased a rickshaw; his mother was a maidservant.

Raju had five siblings, and I could have only told them apart by height when they were kids, over a decade ago. In fact, I only vaguely remember Raju’s brothers and sisters. They all came to play cricket in the galli with a ball made of plastic and rubber-band; and a bat made of a splintery wooden plank. Raju did not play cricket. He did not chase after kites like the other boys did, after they had been cut loose. He did not chase the barafgoli-wala in the torrid summer months. But he was always there. Of all the kids that played on the dusty streets, I still remember Raju the most.

It was not that Raju did not want to do all of these things. I imagine from Raju’s wistful expressions that he wanted to run in like Wasim Akram and bowl out all the other boys and that he wanted to show everyone how many kites he spotted and plucked from tree-branches.  It was that he was different. The other boys were always patient with him, never saying a mean word or growing impatient as Raju willed himself through dirt, mud, and dung on the streets on the strength of his arms – his legs too weak from childhood polio to support even the weight of his gaunt frame.

How ironic that the son of a rickshaw puller, who carried able-bodied children in bright colored uniforms and their corpulent parents, could only drag himself with his hands! How cruel that the son of a maidservant, who washed dishes and swept floors in houses of those who could physically do these chores themselves but had enough money not to – would need extra effort to fend for himself.

But this is not a patronizing story of how Raju defied the odds. It is not a tale of humiliations the Rajus of the world suffer in anger or resignation. I do not have the moral right to write that story. I live on the other side of a high-wall. The cards I was dealt were different- my parents were educated, well-off, and part of the Majority, and through an equation requiring a combination of these elements, well-respected in society. I prospered and when I have children they too will see the world with the asymmetry intact. What do I know about the struggles of the masses on the other side? What do I know about being crippled, poor, Muslim, and illiterate in the glorious Republic of India?

The last I heard of Raju was over a decade ago. I was about to leave for the United States to become a microbiologist. Raju’s father had somehow obtained a handcycle for him: using the monstrous contraption, Raju had carried himself with his hands over two miles to a Polio Prevention camp. He was not a doctor. He was not a philanthropist. He had no obligation to go. And yet he was there. He was there to tell parents, “Please make sure your child is vaccinated. You don’t want your son or daughter to turn out like me. This is important.”

It is not often that I think of him, but yesterday, as I read a report that India had gone one year without a single case of polio, all I could think of was Raju.

Some days I scan the dark figures flitting along the sidewalks for a face. I plant footsteps until my muscles ache, until I gasp for breath, until exhaustion and numbness force me to seek shelter indoors. I see many haggard faces during these jaunts, but never the one I want to see.

One day, on the Metro I saw a woman transform her own face. She was rather plain looking when she got on the train and sat down. But then, she opened her makeup kit and painted a new one with the brushstrokes of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. Everyone was busy reading the morning papers, playing with their phones, or listening to music; no one else noticed the metamorphosis. I had never seen her before: I never saw her again. Maybe it never really happened.

There was a homeless man who sat on a bench in the park I cut across to get in to work every day. I sprinted past him in spring as the first leaves sprouted, in summer when lovers sat in the shade of trees, and in autumn as the crimson and burnt-orange leaves fell. He always stared at the statue of the famous admiral in the center of the park. “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” I thought, as I rushed on every day. On the coldest day of winter, the bench was covered in rags– it looked like a termite mound. I wanted to go up to the homeless man to say, “everything is going to be all right!” but I did not have the courage to brush the thick blankets covering the bench, and lie to the face I had never really noticed before. Instead, I glared at the statue and walked on. I never saw the homeless man sitting on that bench again. Maybe he was never really there.

It frightens me when I walk out of the shower and the mirrors are so foggy that I can’t see anything clearly. I wait for the condensate to streak down like tears. For a moment, I am taken aback by the face I see.  I try to remember what it looked like to test my memory, but always fall short.

There are many faces I see every day. Some of them seem familiar… Is it true that none of them are exactly like they were when I last saw them? Maybe, as they change incrementally every moment, they reach a point after which I will no longer be able to recognize them. Or maybe, incremental is not the right word? As we sleep, what if black dotted lines are etched and a sharp scalpel is taken to our serene faces so we wake up different each morning?

Snapshots are not helpful either. I can recall the face in one photograph, but it doesn’t look like the face of the same person in another. Photographs only serve as crutches for failing memories to lean on. We build memories around deceptive hazy images, which crystallize shades and oblique angles.

I shut my eyes and try to remember what you looked like. All I can recall from all those years that I knew you are a few disjointed fragments. I am bitterly saddened: I am scared because I am forgetting your face.