Sunday 22 June 2014

Kalidas, thy Martingale


Love, Ghalib, is a losing bet
Memory maximises but regret
Anarchy's price let Ind entail
Kalidas, thy Martingale

The Qasidah's Naseeb & Nehru's tryst
Sophie's Choice from Schindler's list
& the Mahatma's  too secular ordination
 Schelling's Shoah of Co-ordination

O'er Shakuntala, yet, a vulture hovers
So only a Gossen ken 'ye heavenly powers'
I too would slaughter Helios' kine
Could Bharat drown in Balram's wine

Notes-
1) Ghalib- 'the winning throw in a game of dice'- more generally the power of God as the 'king of strategists'.  Also the nom de plume of two great Turkish origin poets of the Nineteenth Century.
2) Vide- 'regret minimization and the price of total anarchy'. The chrematistic diversity of Life arises from an algorithm (mechanical decision process) associated with 'Hannan consistency' which, obviously, is like totally Indian dude cause Hannan, during the Second World War, was in India getting dysentery and malaria and shit and actually passed the site of the future Mahanalobis campus- this at a time when he'd never heard from Stats, later he found the 'Indians' to be way ahead in that Dept.- so like Q.E.D dude; Hannan is too totally Indian especially coz S.N. Roy taught him for a bit and from that sort of Bengal famine no one who recovers ever afterwards discovers Ramprasad Sen's intuition that Life is the Mother Theresa of Life- i.e lets it die so Not Life can burgeon.
Of course, Sen- good Bong that he was- derives entirely from Navadwipa's detournement on the Shakuntala's author's philosophically necessary Kumarasambhava.  Love is Memory and both are loser take all till the Lord burn up Eros and Ergodicity resumes with the birth of the War God.
3) Qaisdah- Arabic ode which begins with a nostalgic evocation of the Beloved's abandoned bedouin encampment- this erotic prelude is called 'naseeb'. This word has come to mean 'Fate's apportionment'- i.e Destiny.
4) Jawaharlal Nehru spoke of India keeping 'a tryst with Destiny' in his speech on the occasion of Indian Independence from Britain.  Conventionally, for Hindu poetry, such trysts are secret, transgressive and ontologically dysphoric.
5) Thomas Schelling's book on the Co-ordination problem decisively influenced David Lewis and thus shines a satirical light on much modern American psilosophy. If Professors- including Putnam and Dennet or even Dawkins and so on really believed Life evolved- if they believe it aint ontologically dysphoric, if not incompossible- then Abrahamic 'prophets' or Delphic 'oracles' or even fucking Gandhian/Rawlsian minimax gobshites gain a salience they themselves, by Putnam/Quine indispensability, are denied save as Lovecraftian revenants consecrated to the priestly service of not just Elder, but utterly Senile, Gods.
6) Shakuntala- play by Kalidasa. As a babe, she was sheltered from the Sun by the outspread wings of 'shakun' birds. Not doves, vultures.
7) Bharat was the son of Shakuntala. It is independent India's self-chosen name- 'Bharat, that is India'.
Balram was the elder brother of Lord Krishna who, during the Mahabharata war, chose to remain wholly drunk rather than participate in the slaughter.


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