What You See Is What You Get

She catches glimpses of an oval moon that's only partially uncovered by silvery clouds. Her face reflects a bluish tinge. The apparent serenity is misleading. At the surface, the roles have been reversed. She ponders long and hard at possible consequences. This time I’m sure, she tells herself. She audits the situation with much prudence and concludes assured security. She's traded fear for desire. She’s scared and therefore in control. ‘Have you imagined us together?’ – his words reverberate in her mind. If she is to assume a certain amount of sincerity on the part of her ally, it follows logically that he is in love with her and is willing to project this onto an eternity. To love is not a primary requirement, to be loved is, not to be hurt is - she tells herself. She’s especially careful after a poignant heartbreak.

The riffs fill his emptiness. A wicked soul wonders about ways and means of riddance. He lays supine with the half-open door ushering in gushes of cold air that leave him shivering. He doesn’t bother protecting himself. The carapace is doing its job. There is attachment, he concludes without quandary, but to play it safe, he’s exaggerated and on occasion, over-said. How much longer? His eyes fixate on the couch by the wall. He remembers those passionate kisses. An inexplicable uneasiness shudders up his entire being as he realizes that he may be losing interest. Does she not turn me on anymore? Is it reducible to sex? – the questions haunt him. His self-esteem is long over and done with. He thinks of the prerogatives.

Turtles with sweaters...

This, in part, is due to mystery.

Let's start with a flickering lamp. But a flickering lamp is no good unless we're in the very late hours of the day. Preferably a couple of hours after midnight. Since a certain stillness is essential for this portrait, we will avoid the weekends. Monday, the first day of the week, works well. What we're seeing here is a quiet suburban tree lined street, spacious houses with lavish lawns arrayed with impeccable uniformity. Let's make these houses somewhat opulent with fancy facades; makes for greater visual appeal. In fact the house that we're looking at even has a tiny swimming pool in the back. To give our shot here some more verity, let's add some crickets chirping in the background. As we focus in on our lavish two-storey house with a derelict lagoon, we catch a glimpse of a cat whisking across the front lawn. Let's avoid being excessive and not throw in any thundering clouds or lightning. That'd be an overkill. Let's make this cat black and give her red glowing eyes. We move towards the large bedroom on the first floor with a quiet nervousness that this moment evokes, almost scared to wake anyone up by merely reading this prose. On the couch in the living room downstairs, we observe a half empty bottle of beer; Stella Artois. There might be an empty pizza delivery box with some crumbs littered around the black leather couch, but I'm not really sure. Have it in the picture if you like. There is white noise on the TV that has inadvertently been left switched on.

She appears to be sleeping unfettered, but on closer inspection we observe a tiny wrinkle on her forehead. Is something amiss? The lamp by her bed is flickering. Turtles put on their sweaters to save themselves from alien transmissions via the circumspect bulb. Her alarm clock starts to beep. She yawns, scratches her head and rubs her eyes open in stupor. Her arms reach out to snooze the alarm as she squints and eventually registers that it is 05:05AM. Time to shirk off dreams, wake up and get out of bed, she thinks.

Sitting on the fence...

There's something to be said about being able to sit quietly by the window, a window that is hopefully looking out to a tranquil yet potent ocean. If you're a poet, or an artist, you might consider throwing in the sun around the horizon. Maybe the sunset. Sunsets always get a lot more poetic attention that do sunrises. Why is that? Are artists not morning people? Probably not. There's something about licentious behavior that fosters creativity. Or maybe the sunsets are more poetic in the first place, darker. Something negative about them, unlike sunrises, which happen to bring forth hope and joy and all those good things. Why do we associate light with brightness of spirit and optimism. It's fairly natural I guess. We correlate visual discernability with self-awareness. Light facilitates physical sight and hence the metaphor. So much for sitting quietly by the window.

I have an idea. So often with art, what we see is a finished piece. A completed painting, a finished book, a film, shot, edited and refined until it is released. But we're not privy to what is going on inside the artist's head, as his ideas evolve from inchoateness to coherence. Well, there maybe exceptions, but in my experience, in general this is true. And I admit that this may not be feasible or and even desirable in many cases, but it is still an interesting idea. After all, isn't there life in evolution? A kind of recursive book (much harder to define/understand this concept for a painting). A book that starts out only with a sketch, a very rough structure. Like this post. I started it with the image of a lass (now don't you get any nasty ideas!) looking out the window. Then I threw in the ocean and the sunset. Maybe I would have propped some solitude, some unexpressed sorrow in her yearning eyes next. I think it would be cool to have the reader be a part of this creative process! What do you think?

Somewhat disconnectedly, I'll close this post with a quote (actually one of the first few opening lines) from Woody Allen's '79 film, "Manhattan" (recommended!)

Chapter One. He adored New York City. To him, it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture. The same lack of individual integrity that caused so many people to take the easy way out was rapidly turning the town of his dreams in ... - no, that's a little bit too preachy. I mean, you know, let's face it, I want to sell some books here. -

Chapter One. He adored New York City, although to him it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture. How hard it was to exist in a society desensitized by drugs, loud music, television, crime, garbage ...

the ice cream will melt

So let's see. Is there really such a thing as uninhibited, unfettered writing. Just an honest and transparent transcription of my mind. Untainted and unblemished by the lens of perspective, or the suffocating self-consciousness that comes with the urge to impress. The urge to come across as intellectually stimulating. A cross section of my mental landscape without annotations. If not impossible, it's certainly hard.

The ironic thing is, if it stops raining then the ice cream will melt.

Stella Artois

Imagine the following (no words, only pictures, so for increased efficacy, please don't imagine any conversation): a hot grueling day in a tiny village in Belgium. A poor peasant and his sweating mother are floundering back home after what has presumably been a very exhausting day. The mother, once a rather dignified woman in all likelihood, now mired to a life of less than modest means has to endure blisters on her feet due to her dilapidated and worn out shoes. As they happen to walk by the only shoe store in the village, this caring and deeply disappointed son notices his mother salivating over the sparkling new pair of pink sandals with quiet temptation. Deeply moved by this poignant moment, he resolves to put his heart and soul into labour over the next couple of weeks and put together the twenty francs he needs to buy his mother those shoes. In the next shot, we see our poor little peasant ploughing the fields in the scorching summer heat, with a river of sweat dripping from his brow. We see him gathering the corn into barns and carrying it through mountainous terrain. We see him cutting and and collecting wood. But at the end of what seems like an eternity of hard work, we see him getting the twenty francs that he needs to make his mother happy. We then see the sweating peasant rushing back to the shoe store. His dedicated labour bears fruit and he buys the new sandals that his mother so desperately needs. Thoroughly tired, we see the poor peasant sitting at a cafe nearby just to catch his breath. At this point, a waitress walks over to the gentleman sitting on the table next to his and serves him a mug full of Stella Artois. In the next shot, we see the peasant gulping down an entire mug of Stella Artois himself and the waitress walking away in a lovely new pair of pink sandals. Later, we see the peasant tearing apart the Stella Artois beer mat in two and placing each part in each one of his mother's shoes to cover the holes. The commercial ends here and we read 'Stella Artois: Perfection has it's price.' If you haven't seen this Stella commercial, you should try and get hold of it. I couldn't find it on the Internet, but here are a couple of others:

• The last wishes of a dying man.
• Stella Artois on the web.

The Stable Marriage Problem

Computer scientists and economists will perhaps disregard this post as pretentious. But I think that the Stable Matching problem is really cool and easily formulated, so I am going to go ahead with it anyway.

Assume, for whatever reason, that you are holding a grand ball-dancing event in which you invite 'n' men and 'n' women. Each man has a strict preference ordering over the women and analogously, every woman has a strict preference ordering over the men. Your objective is to match men with women such that the pairing has a certain 'stability' quality. For the sake of this problem, assume that you have been sent back about twenty years in time and the main pairing mechanism is still heterosexual). A given pairing is said to be unstable if there exist two pairs (Amit, Puja) and (John, Alice) say, such that Amit prefers Alice to Puja and Alice prefers Amit to John (so that both Amit and Alice have incentive to cheat on their partners). Given the fickle and uncompromising nature of men, clearly instability is an undesirable property and you would like to avoid the anguish it ensues at all cost. So your task as a match maker is to pair up men and women, one on one such that the resulting pairing is stable in the sense that there are no unstable pairs. It is interesting to note that it is not sufficient for Amit to prefer Alice to Puja to make the pairing unstable. In other words, Alice must reciprocate this bias for instability.

The first question that you might be interested in is, do stable matchings always exist?
Answer: Yes (was shown by Gale and Shapley in 1962).
Caveat: The proof breaks down for mixed (homosexual + heterosexual) preferences.

The next question that you would like to resolve, given that you are organizing this ball is whether there is some easy (efficient) way in which you can determine this matching. In other words, you are interested in an efficient algorithm that computes a stable matching. The solution (also given by Gale and Shapley in 1962) is a simple and elegant one.

Here is the algorithm. Imagine that the men and women are standing at either end of the room. The algorithm is the Men Propose, Women Reject algorithm (much like the real world).
It proceeds in rounds. In the first round, every man proposes to his most desired woman. Among the proposals that a woman receives in this round (she might receive none), she (temporarily) accepts her most desired man, and rejects everyone else. In subsequent rounds, each unpaired man (and hence one who was rejected in the previous round) proposes to the most desired woman who has not yet rejected him. In case a woman, currently matched with John receives a proposal from a man she prefers to John, she rejects John (after having led him on initially by saying yes to him in an earlier round!) and accepts this other man. The algorithm terminates when all men are paired. And this works and produces a stable matching! How much it resembles real world dynamics in a modern day society - I leave to your imagination!

PS (thanks to Vivek for pointing this out): It turns out that the Men Propose, Women Reject algorithm is optimal for men in the following sense: the algorithm produces a matching in which every man lands up with the best possible woman he could have been with in any stable matching.

Moral of the story: Always hit onto the best girl even if you don't have the confidence, get ditched a few times, until you settle with the best possible woman you could possibly get.

Awakening from the hiatus....

Flipping through the pages of the book, I notice the following scribbles:

• A delightful dark off-Broadway show "Show People." Layered and not unnecessarily convoluted, Paul Weitz's (of About a Boy, In Good Company fame) 'Show People' is fundamentally about an artist's need to be creative. This self-referential intelligent play employs an unusual and extremely interesting form. In one line, the play is a show within a show which itself exists in another show. Read the New York Times raving review here.
• A serious off-Broadway play "Mercy on the Doorstep" that examines religion and blind faith and the connection therein, in the complex, disturbing and deeply strained relationship between a "saved" daughter (Rena) and her alcoholic step-mother (Corinne) and the Rena's devout preacher husband Mark. I wouldn't say that the play has many deep insights to offer (anyone who has been around the block for about twenty years or so realizes that religion is an extremely personal matter), but it does tie together a difficult set of issues with reasonable craft. The poignant moments are well-complemented by occasional wit and humor in this three character play. Here is a review.
• A quote that I ran into:

  I think that it is a relatively good approximation to truth - which is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations - that mathematical ideas originate in empirics, although the genealogy is sometime long and obscure. But, once they are so conceived, the subject begins to live a particular life of its own and it is better compared to a creative one, governed by almost entirely aesthetical motivations, than to anything else and, in particular, to an empirical science. – John von Neumann

• Movies:
  
• Kontroll - a Hungarian film shot over a period of three days entirely in the Budapest subway, this beautifully put together film borders on the edge of reality and fiction. Making the obvious, yet provocative connection between the relentless, unending (sometimes annoyingly so) nature of the underground subway and life itself, this movie shows us how the show, sometimes pointlessly so, must and by inertia continues to go on!
• Cache (Hidden) - It is bad enough when a movie is absurdist, but one can still scratch one's head and wonder long and hard about connections and clues to arrive at aworkingg understanding of what transpired through the two or so hours of the film, but when someone tells you that a movie is French absurdist, you know you are navigating a dangerously obscure territory. If French normal is absurdist, I leave it to your imagination to go figure what French absurdist might be like. Of course, I understood nothing. The movie goes on and on, with many long, completely unmoving shots where an innocuous looking house is in focus and nothing happens for one long minute. I certainly ran out of patience and was getting really edgy. Discussing the movie later with a friend, I came to understand that it was about guilt. But making a movie about universal emotions such as guilt, jealousy, hatred, greed without supporting it with a tangible plot is like making a movie about love only with red and white roses.
• Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room: This is a documentary about the rise and fall of Enron, the epitome of an evil union of brilliant minds and corporate avarice to pull the screws on corporate America and Wall St. The film tells us how Mr Lay and Mr Skilling were really running a 60 billion dollar gambling firm. The fact that they were able to orchestrate their operations with such seamless perfection to be declared Fortune magazine's most innovative company for six consecutive years is both remarkable and frightening. In reality, some of their ideas to continue churning astounding figures quarter after quarter, projecting sky-rocketing profits are absolutely ingenuous. From being worth around 60 billion at one point in time, Enron fell, within a couple of months, like a pack of cards to under a few million, and thousands of employees lost their jobs, retirements funds and medical care money. Courts are still trying to resolve the scandals and the loopholes that led to this catastrophe as Mr Lay and Mr Skilling go through their trial over the next couple of months.
• That's it for now. There is more to report but I'm kind of tired.