Regret Minimization & Envy Freedom

(This post is meant to clarify a statement in my previous one.)

Envy Freedom obtains if no agent prefers another's outcome over his own. If that outcome has been arrived at only by fair means, we can call it 'Super-fair'.
Clearly, envy freedom will obtain only if
1) outcomes are identical
2) heterogenous outcomes reflect preference diversity- if I get half a cake and you get a whole one and I don't envy you it is because I am on a diet.
3) information asymmetry arises- I am so ignorant I don't get that a whole cake means more yummy goodness than half a cake.
4) preferences don't change such that Utility actually derives from a portfolio arising from 'multiplicative weight  update algorithm' rather than the individual's own outcome- i.e. agents have a psychic hedge of a Saintly type.

A moment's thought will show (2) is transitory if preferences serve a Darwinian function- i.e. enable an organism to survive and propagate. If people who eat a full cake and have man-boobs get hot chicks and have more babies (this is my own reproductive strategy) then sooner or later no allocation such that some people get less cake will be envy-free.
Similarly (3) is transitory. Once someone explains to me that half a cake means less less yummy goodness, I start to cry my eyes out consumed by bitter envy. If that doesn't help, I get political- i.e. vote for a Varoufakis and help fuck things up for everybody.

Is there some way to prevent (2) and (3) from being transitory? That way, if an allocation is envy-free at time t, then 'fair' exchange based on it yields a 'super-fair', i.e. envy free, allocation at time t+1 and so on ad kalendas Graecas 

Subjectively, envy at what other people ended up getting compared to what we had to settle for could be linked to regret about our decisions.
Halpern & Pass write-
'Roughly speaking, the idea of regret in decision theory is that an agent chooses an action x that minimizes regret across states, where the regret of action x in a state S is the difference between the agent’s utility when he performs x in a state S and when he performs the act that gives the highest utility in state S.'
They introduce a concept of 'iterated regret minimization' in strategic games and show it is a better predictor of empirical results in games like Basu's Traveller's dilemma, the Centipede game, Nash bargaining and Bertrand Competition.
'To apply regret in a strategic-form game, we take the states to be the other players’ strategy choices. Iterated regret minimization takes this idea one step further: we see what inferences we can draw starting with minimal beliefs about the other players’ strategies, using only the fact that the other players are regret minimizer.'

Interestingly, there is a link between 'regret minimization' and Evolutionarily Stable States.
As a recent paper points out-
'Even the most seasoned students of evolution, starting with Darwin himself, have occasionally expressed amazement that the mechanism of natural selection has produced the whole of Life as we see it around us. There is a computational way to articulate the same amazement: “What algorithm could possibly achieve all this in a mere three and a half billion years?” In this paper we propose an answer: We demonstrate that in the regime of weak selection, the standard equations of population genetics describing natural selection in the presence of sex become identical to those of a repeated game between genes played according to multiplicative weight updates (MWUA), an algorithm known in computer science to be surprisingly powerful and versatile. MWUA maximizes a tradeoff between cumulative performance and entropy, which suggests a new view on the maintenance of diversity in evolution'

Hannan, of whose relationship with the Bengali, or speaking more broadly, Indian Statistical Tradition, I have written elsewhere, originated the MWUA approach. Perhaps, readers of the Mahabharata- in particular the Nalopakhyanam- will not be surprised that 'Multiplicative weight updates in a coordination game are equivalent to evolution under sex and weak selection.'

Since words like 'fairness' and 'envy' gain purchase as apparent solutions for a Social co-ordination game; perhaps we can say that Muth Rational agents can indeed agree that heterogenous outcomes are 'envy free' provided they are also 'regret minimizers'. There is a bit of Hegelian sleight of hand going on here but since it connects with genuine ongoing Scientific Research Programs involving open questions for Maths, maybe that's okay.

Interestingly, a meta-ethics founded on Dawkin's 'extended phenotype' is identical to one based on the Yoga Vasishta- essentially agents have a stake in each others Utilities.

The result, in the Mahabharata, is that the Ruling Class doesn't have to extirpate itself utterly in a war occasioned by envy, because the Just King has learnt statistical Game Theory- including, presumably, the MWUA- and understands that all Evolutionarily Stable Strategies are equal in Eusebia.

Deconstructing Doniger on the Gita

'How did Indian tradition transform the Bhagavad Gita (the “Song of God”) into a bible for pacifism, when it began life, sometime between the third century BC and the third century CE, as an epic argument persuading a warrior to engage in a battle, indeed, a particularly brutal, lawless, internecine war?'

Doniger says Indian Tradition transformed something. What was that something? Was it already a part of Indian tradition or did it come from somewhere else? If it was part of Indian tradition then why speak of Indian tradition transforming it? If it wasn't part of Indian tradition, where did it come from?

Doinger is saying something was turned into 'a Bible for pacifism'. But the Bible for pacifism- as in 'Resist not Evil' & 'turn the other cheek'- is the Christian Bible, at least for people whose first language is English. Doniger is saying that 'Indian Tradition took 'an argument persuading a warrior to engage in battle' and turned it into a homologue of the Christian Bible. 

As a matter of fact, that is certainly one way to interpret the Gita- indeed, it is my interpretation. Krishna's visvarupa is a sort of condign self-praise which, as he later tells Arjuna, is equivalent to self-slaying so the Gita depicts Krishna suffering himself to be slain, like the scapegoat or pharmakos, so as to take on the sins of his devotees and deliver them to salvation. However, this interpretation of mine is not found in the Indian tradition precisely because animal sacrifice had already lost salience and the concept of the pharmakos was, in any case, either absent or minimal in Vedic, as opposed to Greek or Semitic thought. Thus, whereas the sacrifice of a heifer is necessary to purge a community of blood guilt in the Hebrew and Quranic tradition,  Smarta Hinduism holds the killing of a cow to be the moral equivalent of killing a Brahmin.

Wendy, however, is not concerned with Soteriology which, if its subject matter is not empty, is more likely than not to display cohomology. Instead, she is interested in...wait for it... magic!

It has taken a true gift for magic—or, if you prefer, religion, particularly the sort of religion in the thrall of politics that has inspired Hindu nationalism from the time of the British Raj to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi today.

So Magic can also be termed 'Religion in the thrall of politics' and it has the power of transforming 'an argument persuading a warrior to engage in battle' into 'a Pacifist Bible.' The  good news is that Narendra Modi possesses this Magic. Is Wendy saying Modi will use this Magic power to turn other Scriptures 'persuading warriors to engage in battle' - including the good folk at ISIL- into Pacifist Bibles?

Has Wendy succumbed to NaMo mania? Is she going to start poring over his speeches seeking for sexual innuendo? Is she going to explain to us that the slogan 'Make in India' means 'Make transgressive gender bending Love in India?' No. At least not immediately. First, seeing as she is a Professor, she has to tell us some stupid lies about Indian history.

The Gita’s philosophy is basically a compendium of the prevalent philosophical theories of the time, a kind of Cliff’s Notes for Indian Philosophy 101.

Wendy says the Gita dates between the 3rd Century BC and the 3rd Century AD. Buddhist, Jain and Ajivika philosophy flourished at that time. Yet the Gita makes no mention of any of them. So it is false to say that it is a compendium or a 'Cliff Notes Indian Philosophy 101'. Lord Krishna only mentions those Philosophical Schools which don't a priori exclude his thesis. As a matter of fact, his way of reconciling Samkhya and Chandogya type uttara mimamsa is pretty darn brilliant. 

Wendy, on the other hand, thinks there are 2 Gitas- one which tells warriors they need to go to war, d'uh, and another, which is philosophical, and which says killing everybody is like so not cool.  

Drawing upon the Upanishads, mystical Sanskrit texts from as early as the fifth century BC, the Gita tells of the immortal, transmigrating soul, and the brahman, or godhead, that pervades the universe and is identical with the individual soul. But the Gita also introduces two strikingly original new ideas that were to have a deep impact on the subsequent history of Hinduism. First, it offers a corrective to the older belief that the transmigrating soul is stained by a force called karma, consisting of the residues of actions committed within the past life and influencing the subsequent life. The Gita qualifies this belief by asserting that action without desire for the fruits of action (nishkama karma) leaves the soul unstained by such karmic residues.

The idea that sin or karmic bondage can be burnt up by a transfer of merit or gift of Grace is present in the most ancient texts. To argue otherwise is foolish.

 Wendy thinks that if I butcher your babies in a dispassionate or absent minded manner then you are obliged to believe that, according to the Gita, I escape any evil consequence. This is not true. Only if I have joined with other genuine Yogis and performed an action required by a divine duty of care, that too in a dispassionate manner, is the 'soul unstained by karmic residue'. Don't forget, Arjuna is just fulfilling God's plan at Kurukshetra. Thus contra Doniger, there is no 'warrior Gita'- what Krishna says to Arjuna can't be said to any warrior facing any war. Krishna himself is known as Ranchod- the one who flees the battlefield. Only that battle must not be fled which it is part of the Divine Plan for you to fight- for weal or woe. This is pure Occassionalism, that too expressed as cogently and comprehensively as by Ghazzali or Liebniz. Since the Gita is authored and intended by an Agent for an Agent, not a Principal for a Principal- unlike the Vyadha Gita- its hermeneutics is empty save for the bhakta, i.e. dependent shown here the path to becoming an Agent.

Wendy goes on to talk shite about how cowherds were low caste- which wasn't and isn't true . Yadavs are 'Educationally Backward' in some parts of India, but they are also ruling dynasts in others. There isn't a low caste Krishna who has sex and a high caste Krishna who talks Philosophy but, even if that were true, the theologians were also poets who celebrated the cowherd in order to make philosophical breakthroughs.

Wendy believes North Indian theologians turned the Gita into the Hindu Bible- with help from the British. As an Iyer, I point the finger at Sankara's Bhaja Govindam but obviously this is a discussion only very very stupid shitheads would want to have. 

Since people like Vivekananda, Gandhi, Tilak, Bhave, Amartya Sen etc thought they were smarter than the average India they quite naturally said and wrote very stupid and worthless things about the Gita because the average Indian, till recently, has been held in contempt by those who wish to lead the country. This is why it is now urgent that Doniger's book on Hinduism be made a compulsory subject of study in Indian Schools and Colleges and places of work. Until Hindus see Hinduism through Doniger's eyes they won't be worthy of contempt and thus the hoary old tradition of gobshites talking down to us will cease to be maintained from the ramparts of Red Fort.

Duryodhan Arjun ka land gand shyari

Some years ago I uploaded some of my books to the Academic.edu website. Ever since, they have faithfully informed me any time 'people searched for' me 'on Google.' and what's more highlighted the keywords with which these earnest seekers of knowledge stumbled upon my great Philosophical works.
Mainly the keywords indicated a Provincial, barely pubescent, desire for Spiritually improving Porn- '"master gita facking images" is a typical example'- but not always-  "which incidece made gandhiji to widrow his 'kiser e hindh power'" was clearly the work of Ananya Vajpeyi or Mithi Mukherjee or some other such blushful maiden of umpteen summers researching her next book for the OUP or Harvard's equivalent of the same.
Which brings me to today's keyword search- viz. ""duryodhan arjun ka lund gand shyari"- i.e Duryodhana's and Arjuna's (that is the two great antagonists in the Gita who respectively represent Thymotic and Theistic Religion) their penis, asshole poetry. 
Given that it was Bhima (who, from the metaphysical point of view, represents Magian 'artha' as Vedic 'Rta' i.e. vengeful Varuna which incarnates as the punitive servitude of Dualistic Theism- i.e.  Madhva, Vallabha & c)  who in a swimming pool wrestling match, broke Duryodhana's thighs, clearly the searcher-after-truth of whose existence Academia.edu so kindly informed me, wasn't your ordinary pubescent boy at some provincial Kendriya Vidhyalay BUT NONE OTHER THAN PURUSHOTTAMA BILIMORIA! Or if not him then Arindram Chakrabarti or some similar Hawaiian or Australian 'fusionist' of the sort that has my sphincter tighten by reflex- as should yours anytime Credentialized Brahmins are prowling around- coz otherwise we all end up getting buggered by the vast and coprolite turd Western psilosophy still extrudes.
To see why, we need to firstly take a refresher course in Luce Irigaray- the French Feminist Psilosopher Arindram has, inexcusably, read- and understand that like money is a dick which is why only men can pass money to each other- coz obviously men only fuck each other right?- even if they are actually thrusting into cunts coz cunts don't count coz they belong to women and women are totally shite. (Vide- 'this Sex which is not One') 
Look, I don't know if in a perfect world, Kurukshetra could have been prevented by like Arjuna and Duryodhana just consensually having a whole lotta butt sex.
My point is that in this case, Yoga is subordinated to Sankhya- i.e state of the Art Mathematics- for which Aumann Agreement is too an Open Question.

Aumann agreement and Arjuna's Vishada

The Bhagvad Gita tackles Arjuna's Vishada (Depression) which arises when he realizes that by doing his duty as a warrior in the Kurukshetra War he will have ended up bringing about the worst possible outcome for all sides- including his own.
Previously, a Gandharva (demi-god) had granted Arjuna the gift of' 'chaksushi vidya' such that Arjuna could always visualize whatever he wanted to know, that too in the manner he wished to visualize it.

"The Gandharva said 'O Arjuna, I would like to impart to thee the power of (producing) illusions which Gandharvas alone have... This science is called Chakshushi. It was communicated by Manu unto Soma and by Soma unto Viswavasu, and lastly by Viswavasu unto me. Communicated by my preceptor, that science, having come unto me who am without energy, is gradually becoming fruitless. I have spoken to thee about its origin and transmission. Listen now to its power!rly One may see (by its aid) whatever one wisheth to see, and in whatever way he liketh (generally or particularly). One can acquire this science only after standing on one leg for six months. I shall however, communicate to thee this science without thyself being obliged to observe any rigid vow. O king, it is for this knowledge that we are superior to men. And as we are capable of seeing everything by spiritual sight, we are equal to the gods.'

Unlike Yuddhishtra, whose Vishada was only dispelled by having to learn Statistics and mathematical Game theory, Arjuna just gets, by 'moral luck', the equivalent of a perfect information, Bayesian predictor for everything. What's more, it has a neat little g.u.i such that it can show its results as a perfect simulation of a real world video, or even a Supernatural video, where Gods or Abstractions or  'Emergents' do the Narration, which is super-cool.

What has this to do with Aumann's agreement theorem? (which states that two people acting rationally (in a certain precise sense) and with common knowledge of each other's beliefs cannot agree to disagree. More specifically, if two people are genuine Bayesian rationalists with common priors, and if they each have common knowledge of their individual posteriors, then their posteriors must be equal.<sup>[1] Ziv Hellman has recently extended this result.)

Well, the Gita looks forward to a piquant situation where Arjuna fights his eldest brother, Karna, and slays him under the influence of 'Manyu' (dark anger).  Karna knows that if he reveals his birth, then Arjuna won't fight him and there will be no War. But Karna wants the War to go ahead- the condition for it is that 'common knowledge' is blocked by Karna's desire that his paternity remain unknown. It may be that Arjuna, who wants to obey his eldest brother, is constrained in some magical way by this wish of Karna. However, Arjuna- as is quite natural- does want to know the outcome of the War and immediately gets a vision of the horror and destruction and futility of it all. He still doesn't see the worst aspect of it for him personally- which is that he kills Karna in a mood of dark fury, exulting in revenge, and thus violates his own Dharma by committing the moral equivalent of parricide- but, perhaps, he doesn't want to see this because what he wants is already determined by Karna's desire that his paternity remain a secret and the War proceed as a great sacrifice by which warriors gain Heaven.

Interestingly, the Gita would still have the outcome if Arjuna had no special feeling of filial piety.Suppose Arjuna and Karna were not younger and older brother but two independent scholars of equal stature. Suppose both want 'common knowledge' except if at some later point they might regret it. Suppose, further that they each receive Arjuna's chaksushi vidya so they have zero computational or informational constraints. In that case, 'regret minimization' or 'Hannan consistency' militates for not Aumann agreement but disagreement iff the multiplicative weights index algorithm is efficient. Another way of saying the same thing is- Life is what makes the price of anarchy negative- or, as Heraclitus put it, Gods and Men die each others lives, live each others deaths.</sup>

Reading this interview with Hannan, what astonished me was how far ahead the Indians (mainly Bengalis and Maharashtrians) were in Statistics some seventy years ago. But, truth be told, there was nothing surprising at all about this.
The Indian clerisy- Revenue officials in the main- were doing boring Statistical Decision theory most of the time though, no doubt, with a bit of ars dictaminis Sycophancy as the cherry on top.

Thus, the traditional Indian reading of the Gita was always, au fond, Decision Theory based. It's basic finding- viz. Prescriptivity is vector not scalar- agree to disagree and then try to kill each other but stop short of complete genocide so some diversity at the margin is retained- is pretty much what Nature- the chrematistic aspect of Life- keeps telling us.

Since Hannan's result was known to the Indian Math/Stats community some sixty or seventy years ago and since, furthermore, Game theory was going from strength to strength over the same period, how come Maharashtrian Statisticians, like Kosambi, and Bengali Academics, like Amartya Sen, write utter shite about the Gita?

Well, clearly, it's because they are smarter than you and me- 'drunkards, fools and fishermen' that we are- because, though the Mahabharata was written for us, only the savants are blinded by it and proceed to enact their genocidal illusory wars coz Aumann agreement actually means not that you can't agree to disagree but that everybody has to just go on shitting all over everybody else lest, by some mischance, whatever strain of bacteria it is that makes our own farts pleasant to only our own nostrils go entirely extinct and it is to that great end that Poetry as Socioproctology too is a true emanation of the Blessed Gita.

Wendy's theodicy

Theodicy means- 'how come bad things happen to good people?' Wendy Doniger wrote a book on Hindu theodicy way back in the mid Seventies. It was remarkable in that it didn't once mention the correct solution which no one doesn't know- viz. life is a stochastic process, D'uh. Indeed, everything is.  This is why Yuddhishtra, the Just King, has to learn Statistical game theory so as to overcome his 'Vishada' (Depression) and keep his place as the Head of the Pandavas.
Now, it's true that people whose shtick is being extra devout or to having an extra sensitive poetic disposition, try to grab attention by pretending that there's some great mystery involving God or their own putrid sexual dysphoria which lies at the heart of Theodicy. Furthermore, Statistics is a deeply boring subject. Yet, Theodicy is only important- at least this is the message of the Mahabharata- in so far as it motivates Mechanism Design- better mixed strategies so fewer good people have bad things happen to them. No genuine Theist, or genuine Poet, has any problem with this. But God botherers and Neurotic nutjobs we will always have with us which is why Literature is, by and large, shite.
For Wendy- a bright kid who got stuck in the Sanskrit ghetto without access to Statistics 101- Hindu theodicy had to be about the admittedly yucky fact that women bleed which is like toootally unfair and Evil coz one isn't allowed to slap Prof Zaehner with one's sanitary napkin though you gotta admit that sure would raise a laugh.
The other thing was Wendy came of age during the Sixties when Club of Rome silliness (endorsed by windbags like Raghavan Iyer) was sodomizing Marcusian silliness and getting it pregnant with a Harvard School of Divinity type phantom child.
This is not to say that Wendy's books are evil. They are menstrual, and menstruation is a good thing- provided you slap Rajiv Malhotra around the chops with your used tampon coz that's always funny. Not that I'm against Malhotra. It's just there's a certain protocol to be observed in dealing with Stephanians.

I too felled the Ashwattha tree.

Because I too felled the Ashwattha tree, not its fountain of sap

Krishna plays, everywhere I see, in but Yashoda's lap

Ashwatthaama, thy jewel, Ahasuerus thy pomp

I'd barter to be a puppy & join in their romp

Note- Aswattha means 'under which horses stand' and hence is a name for the sacred banyan fig tree. In the Gita, Lord Krishna tells Arjun to cut down, with the axe of non-attachment, the 'hymn leaved banyan whose roots are in Heaven and branches down below'.
Ashwatthaama means 'endowed with the strength of a horse'.
In the Mahabharata, Ashwatthaama forfeits his crest-jewel because he chopped down the family tree of the Pandavas, However, Lord Krishna revived the son of his nephew, who was also Arjuna's grandson, and thus the Pandavas were able to continue their royal lineage after all.

Barbarik & Backward Induction

Barbarik, son of Ghatotkacha, has 3 arrows which return to his quiver after completing their task. The first picks out and marks all the things he wants to destroy. The second picks out and marks all the things he wants to save and the third destroys everything marked by the first while sparing those picked out by the second.
Barbarik travels to Kurukshetra with the determination to join the weaker side. However, Krishna stops him and persuades him to offer his own head as a sacrifice to sanctify the battle ground.
Why does Barbarik agree to part with his own head? In ancient times it was the practice to offer 'dakshina' as a fee to the Guru who reveals a great truth.
What was this truth?
The argument Krishna uses with Barbarik is similar to what Mathematicians call 'backward induction'. This means first considering the last time a decision might be made and choosing what to do at that time. Using this information, one can then determine what to do at the second-to-last time of decision. This process continues backwards until one has determined the best action for every possible situation (i.e. for every possible information set) at every point in time.
Suppose Barbarik is the only combatant alive on the battlefield. If he does not kill himself he isn't on the weaker side because the weaker side must also be the losing side. So he should kill himself. However, suppose there is one other combatant left on the battlefield. If he is on the same side as Barbarik, then together they constitute the stronger side. If Barbarik kills the other, then Barbarik is still on the stronger side. However, if Barbarik kills himself, the other combatant is victorious and thus proven to be on the stronger side. Thus Barbarik should kill himself to ensure that he has fought on the weaker side. Suppose there are two other combatants other than Barbarik left on the battlefield. If Barbarik kills himself one or other is victorious or both are victorious (if allied)- in either case Barbarik is on the weaker, because losing, side. Suppose there are n combatants, Barbarik should kill himself because otherwise he ends up on the winning side. This is because his arrow kills all enemy combatants present at the time. So Backward induction says Barbarik should kill himself no matter what the number of combatants or relative strength of their respective sides.
However there is another way to look at this.Suppose Barbarik says to the first arrow- I want you mark for death everybody on the stronger side- and to the second arrow- I want you to mark 'safe' everybody on the weaker side- before unleashing the third arrow. What would happen?
Well, anyone marked for death by the first arrow can't be on the stronger side because they are bound to lose and thus will be marked 'safe' by the second arrow. So nobody dies when the third arrow is unleashed.
I'm assuming that only an infinitesimal span of time separates the flight of each arrow and that nothing else changes over the period.
What happens if all combatants are given the choice of switching sides after the flight of the first arrow? Then the third arrow can only have casualties from the weaker side. But if combatants are rational and given the chance to also switch sides before the first arrow then once again no casualties arise.
More generally, if all feasible adversarial coalitions.of combatants can be ranked and this information is publicly available then every combatant who wants to be on the winning side should have a 'nearest possible world' feasible coalition which is stronger than what obtains such that a strategic action on his own part, or that of his sub-coalition, can call it into being. This is a dynamic notion of allegiance which sounds quite realistic for medieval Indian wars where commanders frequently switched sides on the battlefield. 
Consider the set of combatants who want to be on the winning side and aren't particularly bothered whether this is the Pandavas or the Kauravas. Call those who want to be on the stronger side the Hard-heads. Those who want to be on the weaker side are Soft-hearts, .
Suppose the world is divided into Hard-heads and Soft-Hearts.
Can a given number of Hard-heads ever by themselves decide to have a war?
Yes, so long as there are two equally strong feasible adversarial coalitions assuming zero risk aversion. 
Indeed, if coalitions are unstable then there can still be wars between unequal coalitions because there is some chance that sufficient last minute desertions will pull off a big upset with a consequent big pay out for those who bet on the right side.
Similarly a population of Soft-hearts could go to war as could a mixed population of Soft-hearts and Hard-heads.
Call a warrior Hegemonic if he changes any coalition into a strong one by adhering to it.
We have seen that a Hegemonic Soft-heart like Barbarik either kills himself and lets the War proceed or kills all combatants and then himself. But this means only Soft hearts will be killed. Rational Hard-heads will abstain from Combat till Barbarik chops off his own head after which they can fight over the spoils of war.
A Hegemonic Hard-head also only kills Soft hearts but he does not kill himself and thus retains a countervailing power over other hard-heads.

In the Mahabhrarata, Barbarik's decapitated head witnessed the events of the War thanks to a boon from Lord Krishna. 
But this means Barbarik realizes that he could have prevented the great slaughter of the Kurukshetra war- including the killing of his father and uncles- by choosing
1) to mark for destruction, with his first arrow, all those implacably resolved on a war to the death
2) saving all those who would abide by a compromise settlement with his second arrow
3) unleashing his third arrow.

Was Krishna perhaps a tad thoughtless in the boon he granted Barbarik?
Perhaps. But Sacrifice, truly so called, should be a path to truth.
In this sense, Barbarik is a true Martyr, a true Shaheed- both of which words mean Witness. Yet, as the story of Barbarik shows, it is only by hanging around for a while after your death that you get to see the true stupidity of the fucked up principles for which you sacrificed your life and screwed the pooch of eusocial Consilience.

Umaswati & Entropy

Jainism was late in coming to the attention of Western savants. Interestingly, Jacobi, the pioneer in this regard, started off as a Mathematician and Umaswati too was a mathematician of repute. His doctrine of the perfectibility of all beings has an interesting consequence viz. the heat death of the karmic world such that all beings attain a univocal kevalya and thus Time with its infinite cycles is but the vanishingly small denumerable component of the nondenumerably dense eternity of universal bliss.
This result arises because, though all beings have free will, nevertheless
1) acts which generate karma have to involve some other jiva and acts which prevent the ingress of karma determining particles can't arise by Grace because substance can't act directly on substance. For Narratology, such a doctrine gives rise to something like a stable marriage problem such that out of the tangled events of the jiva's innumerable past lives there emerged stable antagonists or reciprocal obstructors. Umaswati treats of this in his consideration of the concept of VIGHNAKARANAMANTARAAYASYA |6-27|- 'Creating obstacles  constitutes  the  cause of  the influx of obstructing karma. Obstructing karma prevents a worldly soul from achieving its potential.'
2) Since an askesis exists such that some jivas can migrate out of the world of karma to kevalya it follows that the amount of Gibbs free energy in the system degrades.  Indeed, karma is 'exergy' because it alone can produce work, kevalya can't do so, thus- considered as a closed system, which it must be if jivas are eternal, the Jain Universe is subject to entropy and suffers a heat death when all Suffering ends and Time itself becomes but an evanescent, far-from-equilibrium aberration governed by a sort of Fluctuation Theorem such that though Jainism's ontological distinctiveness is preserved,  it becomes indistinguishable, from the point of view of eschatology, from other optimistic soteriologies, including Theistic ones.

It is interesting that the various Sociological Theories of History that Thermodynamic notions of equilibrium- predating even Carnot's Theorem, for example, the sorts of Utilitarian Utopianism inspired by 'the baronised Yankee, Benjamin Thompson (alias Count Rumford)'- similarly postulate the heat death of Profit, Speculation, which, of course, was the original meaning of karma. Only when it allowed itself to be degraded to work, that too of a ritualistic or rule governed sort,  did it become the victim of Soteriology.
The irony here is that, to whatever degree of atheism we might aspire, we remain caught in the reciprocal process of Vighnakaranam- maliciously obstructing each other but doing so in the name of Philosophy and the Greater Good- both now regarded as work, not profit, a joyless audit, not a giddy speculation, and subsumed under a wider Socio/Ecological askesis which repudiating poetry- or repudiated by it, for Suka flies by the nets of his father, Ved Vyasa- drags down the kavi, the maker, the shaper, the widsith, to the fallen world of karma.

The Gita as Dutch book

We've all heard of Pascal's wager- one should bet that God exists, even if that seems very improbable because there's an infinite pay-out and anyway what have you got to lose?
The problem is that in life we are making not just one bet but a series of connected or coherent bets- like an accumulator- such that Pascal's wager involves one in smaller lower fungibility or uncertain arbitrage bets with different time horizons. The intuitive idea I'm trying to get at here is that betting on God might mean your daughter, the dentist in Ireland, dies because the doctors aren't allowed to conduct a procedure that aborts her unviable foetus.

But, even in the simplistic sorts of models Economists use, two related problems inevitably arise. One is that when you offer a fair bet you are assigning a probability to an outcome. If the  price of the bet is 'to believe x' then that price does not stay constant as new information becomes available. Bayes' Law shows how that price changes over time. I'm assuming that it is more costly to believe a more improbable thing but even if we drop this assumption there's another reason why this will be the case. That has to do with your ability to 'lay-off' risk or increase the reward for risk without increasing your 'downside' exposure by running a book.
I'm not up on the literature but it seems a reasonable guess that philosophically inclined gamblers in the ancient world- like Yudhishtra, in the Mahabharata, or Ghalib, our Ghazal King- spent a lot of time considering under what circumstances it would be profitable to run a book, that is offer a bunch of bets, consistent with Pascal's wager.
The Italian Probability theorist, de Finetti formalized this notion as follows-  A person who has set prices on an array of wagers in such a way that he or she will make a net gain regardless of the outcome, is said to have made a Dutch book
Fudging things a bit, the Dutch book theorem conveys the notion that coherent betting creates Dutch books whose 'fair odds' are probabilities as estimated by the agent.
This raises the question, what is the Dutch Book such that Pascal's wager, by itself, shows us a path to find the 'best' Scripture? This notion is interesting once we admit errancy in Scripture reception as itself a determinant of its content- i.e. the signal is designed to be rationally repairable. Now, Pascal was certainly smart enough to work out whether his Jansenist reading of the Bible was indeed a Dutch Book- let alone the best possible Dutch Book. The fact that he did not make that claim- nobody is taught Probability theory in the Bible- itself tells a stupid bloke like me that it's not a profitable avenue of inquiry.. 
But what about the Gita? I read it as the 'dual' of the Just King's education in Probability theory. So am I committed to the notion that the Gita is a Dutch book ? One reason why I might indeed be maintaining this position is my belief that the Mahabharata is a series of balanced games with homothetic preferences- i.e. everybody pretty much wants the same sorts of things, has the same information or ability to get that information if they want to, and the guy offering the wager has to give the other fellow first pick.  So if I say 5 to 1 we have a White Christmas, you and I have access to the same Weather forecasts and it's your choice as to which state of the world is going to pay-out for you.

Now, assuming that new information about the world- which changes 'the price' of the Pascalian wager- arrives from totally independent sources, let's say all the causal chains involved are totally separate and identically randomly distributed- then it appears common sense to say there is no profitable Dutch book, or such a book is empty. How can you offer a bunch of people as smart as yourself a series of bets and come out ahead regardless of the outcome? Bookmakers and Casinos and Stock brokers and so on make their money on 'the spread'- the margin between the price at which they buy and sell- or else they have 'insider information' or are better at complex maths or something of that sort.
However, this might not be the case because of something inherent in the subjective way we adjust our expectations and calculate probabilities. Of course, if we had some assurance that everything that is knowable is stuff we can know, this does not pose a problem. But what if there are latent variables outside our ken? Well, in practice we know that there are lots of things we can't directly observe or measure but perhaps there's always a good enough workaround so long as things aren't hopelessly entangled.
De Fenetti introduced a distinction between 'independent sequences' which are 'exchangeable' in the sense of being just as random as each other, and exchangeable sequences arising out of dependent sequences. In other words, subjectively there is wiggle room between things being random because all causal sequences are independent and their appearing interchangable though they are in fact not independent at all. It is the 'latent' variable which introduces this wiggle-room and makes me wonder whether I haven't been confusing independence for exchangeability in broader ways.

In other words, just when I was about to say with great confidence that the Gita aint a Dutch book- sure it's  great poetry, & good for instilling shradda piety, but no way, no how does it constrain me to embrace Occultation and Occassionalism for purely Rational reasons- I come a cropper because I can't deny latent variables exist nor that Evolution is Probabilistic nor that I'm a dumb fuck knows shit from poetry or piety- i.e. maybe my response to the Gita is Rational and it's only coz I got such low bandwith Rationality that I didn't realize that was the only signal I was getting.
What makes things worse is that 'Evidential decision theory' allows for the possibility of backward causation. In other words, the claim made by Ved Vyasa or Valmiki or Tulsi or whoever, that who ever listens to their work gains salvation without any further mental effort or even volition on their part, turns out to be apodictically true- at least for genuinely stupid people like me. Why? 
Well, to quote Prof. Huw Price, the possibility now exists that 'without inconsistency, we might claim to be able to bring about past events. Dummett shows that we can accommodate a belief in backward influence, so long as we are prepared to give up the assumption that before we decide how to act, it is possible for us to find out whether the past event in question has already occurred.'

How this is relevant, is because the random question 'is the Gita a Dutch Book?' has just revealed that  I don't know what I believed about the Gita- there's a backward influence of the Dummett kind because it is impossible for me to know whether some element of what made up my 'belief'- or De Finetti 'coherent' speculation- had or indeed has already come to pass. 

As I go on to say in this previous blog post- The fact is, it is never possible, on a sufficiently fine-grained phenomenology or theory of the world, to determine that any occurrence is truly 'Past'- which also means Gibbardian 'hyperstates' and judgments made by 'hyperagents' have no road to supervenience with respect to 'prosaic factual properties'; everything is always in a sort of 'mixed inference' or else a Frege-Geachian flux till Beenakker's boundary resolves Hempel's dilemma as the Cosmic cows come home. Thus any Agency and Intentionality-based 'inwardness' we can have knowledge off must be reverse mereological and Time arrow reversed as indeed is what we would expect if our minds evolved on a stochastic fitness landscape.

So, thank You Great Hindu God, yeah, thanks ever so much- why didn't you make me something sensible, like a Mormon or a Scientologist? What? You thought I was Gay? Look I've explained all that. Yes, as a horny 16 year old,  I did put an ad in Time Out- 'gay South Indian boy wants to meet gay non-Manglik  for gay times'- but I never thought P.Chidambaram would respond. Okay, it was with a cease and desist order, coz I used his wet veshti picture, still, you can't say he doesn't look a bit like Pippa Middleton from behind.

Lloyd Shapley and the Bhagvad Gita

Shapley's well deserved Nobel win has been a long time coming. I know geniuses like him don't need Nobels but it is worth pausing a moment on an occasion like this to think about how India might have been different if people of my generation- or that of Gurcharan Das, for that matter- had not gone Gadarening after Amartya Sen and John Rawls and now Martha Nussbaum and Hilary Putnam and so forth, rather than Coase and Tiebout and Shapley and Buchanan who, I think, are right about Wicksteed & Choice and thus immune to pointless palaver over what the word 'Cost' means- i.e. dining philosophers starving to death for caught in a concurrency deadlock.
Still maybe these hunger artists on Ivy League catwalks were doing Gandhian dharna so my Hindu instinct was to worship them.
My own antipathy to Shapley is summarized by this extract from my novel Samlee's daughter-

In other words, since Shapley's work is very useful and highly relevant to India, it must be 'Right Wing' and thus it is to be feared and denounced or, at any rate, studied in the abstract but never applied to Policy making. At the same time, I guess people like me were uneasily aware that every semi-literate dehati politician was a master of calculating the Shapley index of power for various interest groups, not to mention  the most computationally efficient collocation method for solving for correlated equilibria (we call it corruption)- indeed that sort of thing is virtually hard-wired in their brains- and that even if us City boys mastered the maths or wrote a Computer program to do the same thing, we'd simply be outclassed by them.

It was only later on, thinking about Game theory in the Gita, that I realized that the paleo-discrete maths tradition in ancient Tribal Republics would have been strongly focused on the sorts of things Shapley taught us guys to at least be aware of, if not actually do. Since the Mahabharata's own compositional heuristic- at least in my belief- is part and parcel of that wider paleo-mathematical politics Welt Bild- it follows that the Bhagvad Gita, as its Pyrrhonist epoche- tells us that it is our 'svadharma' (i.e. there is a 'public signal' telling us our strategy so that, in a manner more general than Nash, we come to Aumann correlated equilibrium) to do Shapley not for the sake of the fruits of Shapley (good stuff, like getting democracy to work properly) but in an Amartya Sen-tentious spirit of utterly abnegating constructive Politics in favor of cunt-queefing pi-jaw so Man remain a futile passion and God again slay himself in vain.
Shapley & Roth's approach to matching problems is, of course, something the Mahabharata does very well so as to show that all 'svadharmas' have a stable way of meshing within just a few iterations. But the central epochee of the Gita shows that one such match- that of Nar & Narayan- is thereby rendered both a Philosophical Situation Comedy as well as Occasionalism's Nightmare on Om Street.
So I'm sticking with slagging off Sen- virodha bhakti donchaknow- but, sure, you guys just go ahead and read the Gita with Shapley as its Smriti. Not everybody can be a pointless fuckwit you know. Me, I'm just lucky that way.

Ithamar Theodore's Gita

Dr. Ithamar Theodore is an ISKCON devotee and a Professor of something or other. In other words, he is bound to misunderstand the Gita. Yet, his book 'Exploring the Gita' isn't particularly egregious but conventional merely.
In his case, I imagine it must be the ultra conservative aspect of Sw. Prabhupada's ideology- itself a recent development in the movement inspired by Chaitanya- which renders the divine Comedy of the Gita obscure and mystagogic to him.
Simply put, Dr. Theodore thinks Arjuna says he won't fight because of of some sort of utilitarian or 'dharmic' calculus he has performed. Krishna then says something which expands Arjuna's information set with the result that he decides to fight. Theodore thinks what Krishna says has to do with ontology- a hierarchy of values and modes of being such that what appears at ground level to be cousins killing cousins over who gets a piece of ground, is actually something very nice and good and necessary for the comfort of higher types of beings or higher types of conceptions of the Good, located at the penthouse level.
The truth is there are a lot of crap stories where something like this does happen. The hero, who is a bit stupid, says he is sick of killing people. The wise Guide then says 'Killing them you are not young grasshopper. Tickling their tummies you are merely. Subtle Truth is. Grasped it is easily not . Princess Leia your sister, yea, verily is. Could you kindly throw away that crusty sports sock of yours now? Beating your meat over her, ashamed of, are you not you big perv?'
Fortunately, Vyasa made sure that the Gita- though appearing to be an episode of this type in a grand sword & sorcery Epic- does not suffer from this defect. How so? Well he made sure Arjuna got the equivocal faery gift of chakshushi vidya- which enables him to visualize anything in the form he wishes- long before the Kurukshetra battle.  Thus, Krishna- serving here as Arjuna's charioteer- is off the hook for the crap social philosophy in the Gita. Arjuna gets to see things the way it suits him to see things. Krishna pays the price. His theophany- being a sort of condign self-praise- is equivalent to suicide as he himself later reveals.
Prabhupada- a former Gandhian as we could easily guess- and his Socially complacent holier than thou organisation, don't have chakshushi vidya but they too have no difficulty seeing the world in the manner most flattering to themselves. Shame they have to drag the Gita into it. But, if they didn't, Krishna's self-sacrifice would be meaningless. It isn't the case that Christ must be re-crucified in every age so that more shite can be talked. But it is the case that that shitheads we will always have with us. Those shitheads will always endorse certain supererogatory crimes on the ground for the sake of the Rulers of the State on the First floor and the Rulers of Religion on the Second even though those supererogatory crimes are internecine only amongst those denizens of supposed upper storeys and generally arise from epistemological differences of the order of  'who smelt it, dealt it' vs. 'who denied it, supplied it' .

A Diophantine Dionysios.

extracted from 'In search of Riemann zeroes'  here

The following is extracted from Steve Landsburg's lyrical appreciation of Weil's achievement-

'The essence of Weil's great vision was that Diophantine problems, although they appear to concern only the ancient subject of pure arithmetic, are inextricably linked to problems in geometry and topology, many of which can be stated only in the language of twentieth century mathematics. High school seniors know that the germ of this idea goes back to Fermat's contemporary Descartes, who discovered that by "graphing'', you can translate equations into geometry. But that translation is too crude to tell you very much about Diophantine questions. You can plot a curve that represents all the solutions to an equation like x⁵- y³=31, but no matter how long you stare, you'll never be able to discern which points on that curve represent whole number solutions. (One solution is x=2 and y=1. How can you tell whether this is the only whole number solution? Or one of many? Or one of an infinitude?)

So it's natural to guess that if you're interested in whole numbers, geometry won't be much help. But thanks largely to Weil (and others including L.J. Mordell and Carl Ludwig Siegel), we now know that guess to be the exact opposite of the truth. Weil was able to prove that the geometric structure of a curve conveys---in ways that are highly subtle and not at all obvious---information about the arithmetic of the associated equation. From there, he articulated a grand vision of how arithmetic and geometry should be linked in far more general circumstances. This grand vision---which became known as the "Weil conjectures''---was formulated in 1948 and soon became the Holy Grail of algebraic geometry. Throughout the 1960's, a team comprising several of the world's very best mathematicians, and led by the charismatic and indefatigable Alexandre Grothendieck, developed the machinery that made it possible, in 1973, for Pierre Deligne to prove the Weil conjectures and justify the audacious courage that had allowed Weil to suggest that such an extraordinary set of statements might actually be true.

Nowadays, it would be unthinkable to work on problems in arithmetic without exploiting the power of geometry. To a large extent, it was Weil's prescience that made this development inevitable.

But that gets slightly ahead of the story. Before you can apply geometry to arithmetic, you need proper foundations for geometry. When Weil was doing his most important work in the 1940's, those foundations did not exist. For several decades, algebraic geometry had been dominated by the traditions of the "Italian school''---traditions which included a somewhat breezy attitude toward the details of proofs. There was a vast literature full of beautiful results, but it had become essentially impossible to tell which had been proven true and which had only been proven plausible. 

The only remedy was to rebuild algebraic geometry from the ground up. Weil felt a particular urgency about this, because he needed a rigorous version of geometry to continue his work in arithmetic. This inspired him to write what he called "the indispensable key to my later work'', his book onFoundations of Algebraic Geometry. With the appearance of this book in 1946, the methods of the Italians were finally legitimized. In the process, Weil had to introduce new ideas and a new language, but characteristically he emphasized the continuity between his own work and the masters of the past. "Nor should one forget'', he wrote, "when discussing such subjects as algebraic geometry and in particular the work of the Italian school, that the so-called `intuition' of earlier mathematicians, reckless as their use of it may sometimes appear to us, often rested on a most painstaking study of numerous special examples, from which they gained an insight not always found among modern exponents of the axiomatic creed...Our wish and aim must be to return at the earliest possible moment to the palaces which are ours by birthright, to consolidate shaky foundations, to provide roofs where they are missing, to finish, in harmony with the portions already existing, what has been left undone.'' 

Within a few decades, Weil's rebuilt palaces were no longer the foundation of geometry, but the foundation of the foundation. In the 1960's, Grothendieck and his school used the palaces themselves as the groundwork for fantastic modern skyscrapers, reworking every assumption and expanding the realm of geometry to unimaginable heights. From these heights the Weil conjectures were eventually conquered. Grothendieck's project was one of the most remarkable episodes in the history of mathematics. Weil's conjectures made that project necessary, and Weil's foundations made it possible. If Weil had never lived, I cannot imagine what modern geometry would even be about.

The Bhagvad Gita, as I argue in my book Ghalib, Gandhi & the Gita, is the dual of the education in Game Theory of the Just King.
What happens is this. First the Just King experiences 'Vishada' (Depression) being perplexed by the question of what is the duty owed to dependants and Agents. This is answered by
1) the Vyadha Gita episode
2)  the story of Nala- who learns probability and Game theory so as to defeat Kala (Time in its degenerate aspect)
From the latter, it is clear that the Just King learns a sort of autistic discrete maths which, because it can solve any Diophantine question, is also an infinite axiom set theory.

But an infinite deontics is a bad or backward induction based decision tree. Cut it down, says Krishna, because this upside down tree, whose roots are in Heaven and hymn leaved branches down below, is nothing but- like the reflection of a tree in water- the dual of the tree of Manyu, dark anger, in whose shade nothing can grow.
Meanwhile, Krishna's own dual- Balram, Halayuddha (he whose weapon is the plough) has quit the killing field of Kurukshetra for a big pot of wine under the shade of a tree which is just a tree while his beloved Revaki's eyes- which are the colour of amethysts- amethysts being a sovereign defence against getting totally plastered- scintillate from the shadows.
Non-violence is all very good and well, so long as it leads to conquests like that of India by the Wine God of the Greeks who was armed only with lute, lyre and a retinue of loose women.
True, the deontics of our Diophantine Dionysios, too, is infinite but its about the arithmetic of quaffing cups and claiming kisses, so its capacity for public mischief is disabled in advance.

mimetic desire in the mahabharata?

    Both emulous Bilqis, in the Quran, and envious Duryodhana, in the Mahabharata, mistake a highly polished marble floor for a pool of water. The former lifts her skirts- giving rise to a  'free show' for King Solomon who,  thus impassioned, becomes instrumental in the breaking of her waters and thus, millennia later, for the providential provision, to the Muhajir Meccan Hanif, of secure refuge in Ethiopia- the Negus being a nested image of Solomon's mingling, in that mirror of stone, with the nethers' of the Gospel's'Queen of the South' who 'shall rise up in the judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it: for she came from the uttermost parts of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and, behold, a greater than Solomon is here.'

    Duryodhana, on the other hand, visiting his nouveau riche cousins in Indraprastha, first won't step on stone, thinking it water, then falls into a pool thinking it stone. Because Draupati ridicules him for having inherited the blindness of his father- that final pool of water in which Duryodhana takes refuge sets also- like  Sagara addressing Ram in Tulsi's masterwork- a merely tribal and thymotic limit to the nature of the Ethical agon set in motion by that mirror of stone or gallehault of mimetic desire.

    A more obvious place to look for Girardian motifs, in the Mahabharata. is Chitrangada's battle with his namesake. Bhishma doesn't intervene. Why? The one thing he won't do battle to protect his family from is disease- where the body struggles with itself.  Is it the case that Adaa Vijaa, Adi Vigyan,- the casting off of one's ills onto one's image in the mirror- but, in Ind, the Gemini are healers by their mutual harmony not their homicidal rage to furnish a korban or Homo Sacer- is also at the root of Chitrangada, the Gandharva's, battle challenge to Chitrangada, the Mortal? The Human image must fight its Divine namesake- for only one can survive to attest the extensionless, therefore infinite, reverse mereology of  (Maryada Bhakti's) Pure Name.

    But, on Earth, at least in proper English, at marriage, two come together to boast the same name. The esteemed (hopefully, soon to be) wife of Mr. Vivek Iyer is not properly addressed as Mrs. Honeytits Iyer  but as Mrs. Vivek Iyer simply. If some allusion must be made to her nominal haecceity, as for example if I were polygynous, then the correct form, surely, would be 'Honeytits, Mrs. Vivek Iyer'. Otherwise, people might think the blameless damsel, and lapdancer, in question was actually descended from the impure wombs of, my second cousins, the arriviste, for ICS gotra, Honeytits Iyers of Hampstead Heath.

   Indeed, every sacral form of marriage involves a shared and shyly darted glance into 'Ayn ul Bibi Maryam'- Mary's mirror- where groom and bride see themselves as they will be seen in Heaven, the more securely univocal for freed of all earthly blemishes.

  Only thus should be read Tagore's Chitrangada or the Mahabharata's reversal of the Rustam /Sohrab, or Cuchulain/ Connia, outcome of Arjuna's unknowing duel with his son whereby-  husband resurrected by reflection in a water nymph's marble of co-motherhood- the miracle Krishna works for posthumous Parikshit, but firmly, is put in its place.

What has all this to do with the Gita?

Is the answer not obvious?
No?
Really, no?

    Well, in that case, I suppose I'd better add something to round this off  'fore chowing down on my tonight's meed of Microwaved Takeaway.

Too much information?

Meh!

  Drinking my iced Rum & Coke, in the glorious gloaming of the one Summery day afforded me by this unlucky year- so far has my way of life fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf- I suddenly think of what a son once said to his handsome father admiring himself in the mirror- 'You haven't seen Mum's true beauty' Hubby rushes off to wrathfully upbraid wifey for wrongfully withholding dowry. 

Wifey says 'who sees my true beauty will die in a fraticidal struggle.'

'But that is your own son!' Hubby is shocked.'You jus'  cursed your own son, Hon!' 

Heeding mother's cry of pain, God says, listen Luv, I can make an exception for your lad. 

Mum says- no, make an exception for every other mother's son- not mine.

Who was that mother who could recognize herself so in the Ayn-ul-Bibi-Maryam? 

Kunti? 

Sure.
Why not?
Actually yes- if you read Gita properly. 

I don't. 

 So, this is my source-
Matir Moyna (the clay bird)

Tareque Masud is dead. I'm alive. God fucking hates us.

The Butcher's Gita

In the Mahabharata, two Butchers teach Dharma and their teaching is called a Gita- a song.

   They’re not actual butchers- unlike Ding, who enlightened Confucius by showing that one never needs to sharpen one’s cleaver if one cuts along the grain, the marbling, the fatty Tao, of the flesh- instead, they’re vertically integrated Meat monopolists owning both the supply and retail side of the business. Consequently, they are wealthy and powerful beyond the common ken. Both are engaged in a disreputable trade- in the Mahabharata, the vyadha, the butcher, is a byword for fraud and sharp practice- but, by reason of their wealth, wisdom and winsome personality, neither are thus much reproached to their face. Indeed, we may say, the righteous Butcher of the Vyadha Gita redeems all of his profession who, we now see, are mere agents working his will.

     Lord Krishna redeems, not the profession of the professional butchers of men- variously called Kshatriyas, Robber-Barons or Kings- after all, at Kurukshetra, he appears as but Suta, charioteer or bard- but by affirming All his meat-puppets merely- in their own proper person they neither slay nor are slain- absolves of blood guilt even these, not Eagles amongst men but- it transpires- human, albeit by Huma's wings over-shadowed, but murder of crows or other collective noun for noisome birds fed on carrion.

    Ding, the butcher, acting without acting or not acting while acting- at peace with his own Nature and partaking of the always beneficent Tao- shows how svadharma is wu wei. This is because he actually cuts meat. Not coz of karma, nor coz he’s actually F.B.I undercover, but coz it’s what he does and does wu wei well. He cuts meat. End of. He’s not all like I’m only in the meat business coz like what actually went down, right? was I was like a shoo in for Juilliard, I mean I was definitely gonna apply but then, like, my Uncle was the Sausage King of South Bronx?- I mean he would have been if like Dad hadn’t gone and backed into the meat grinder- so everybody got a little behind with their orders as Confucius say!- and I mean there’s this buddy of mine from parochial who went to Wharton and he was like all in my face with 'get your frickin meat on, dude! What with Obamacare and everybody’s 401(k)’s in the toilet who fucking don’t wanna heart-attack? Gimme beef baby!'

Lord Krishna says amongst Vedas he’s the Sama.

Amongst Upanishads, the Chandogya.

   There’s only one non social fucking parasite in that last named- Raikva, the carter, the one who knows, or- by wu wei IS- the Way, that otherwise potholed road, the Tao.

    Scholiasts think Raikva calls the King, come humbly to learn from him, a ‘Shudra’ not because the King is actually working class- i.e. neither Priest, Peer, nor Plutocrat- but because the word is etymologically related to ‘Vishada’- sorrow, depression- and, interestingly, both the Vyadha and the Bhagvad Gita arise in the Mahabharata as cures for Vishada- that of King Yuddhistra in the former instance, that of Prince Arjuna in the latter.

But, fucking Aristos are all fucked in the head.
Priests, like those featured in the Chandogya, just hungry pan-handlers looking to score some vittels.

Why fucking bother with them?

Or- what?- you don’t like it here and wanna go back to World of Warcraft medieval times?

Fucking pay attention. I’m making an important point here.

You want to hear the Gita sing?

Learn first from slitty eyed Ding!