Some of newer winter colours...

The Tower Bridge

The Big Ben

Embankment Skyline

Transport exhibition

On being booked and winter reading....

This Gaurdian article with the subsequent blog and discussion flooded me with memories.
I must admit I have a huge thing for schools and classifications , more so when it comes to books. Though its kinda settled a bit now it still is an obsession at times. Sometimes I take a day off to collect all my scribbles inside various books in one place. If you thought that was weird , hang on, I used to read all the newspaper editorials of 6 months together on some holidays! Once my sister's friend happened to visit on one of them days and on learning about my special hobby, gaped and fainted! For full three minutes. That made me realise how healthy it was!
Guess, Im making up for it now by reading newspapers only when needed.

Since I have my collection scattered over many cities, Ive managed to keep the current classification quite simple,
1. Fiction
2. Non fiction
3. Favourites
4. Miscellaneous
The borrowed books are rafted in a separate shelf.
And since the favourite section occupies the front, people still get freaked out to see an entire collection of Joyce and Nietzsche! Yet all their commentaries lie beneath the bed.

And as the winter seeps, the streets are fogged and smudged dark so early and with the gales happily roaring one can only fancy to spend these evening sipping printed words with some fine scotch .
So the winter schedule is drawn-

Reading-
Baroque architecture
Life a user manual George Perec
Salman rushdie Essays and columns
Umberto Eco on Joyce and semiotics

Researching incl online
7th Panzer division and many other Nazi elite units
Lesbianism
Revolt of Boudica against romans
C Rajagopalachari (Tell me Everything and anything you know about him)
White as an art form , starting from Lowry here .
Diane Arbus (One article in the Independent made me yearn for her)

Interested
- Arguments for/against NGO and charity structurization in India.
- Childhood sexual abuse in India

Anyone interested in the same or related feel free to chip in.

Question: For the postmodern hamlet ...

                B  lu  e          P  i l l 

                               or  

                         R  e d     P i ll

??

Ode to breakfast....

No hope, regrets not many
you run down
and round
in circles that
become history
of your life.

A history so precious
that even you wouldn’t
remember
just like
a breakfast on a monday
morning that
you can’t recall on
a Thursday. Yes,
that invaluable
bread you toiled for

weekdays
after weekdays..
only to lose its
taste in the
circles
of life. And
then to blame it
on a
busy workschedule...Ah!

truly what a weak and
idle theme
this seemingly
shameless dream?

~Liverpool 15/11/2005



* of course the last stanza was appropriated from his highness -The Bard

Passages...

Busy preparing for yet another presentation and thought Ill share here few segments from the passages that I usually exploit as references to get across complex points on human consciousness.

The first is from Principles of New Evaluation- Fredrich Nietzsche, what my friend referred to as the incisive gem of human zenith.

[1]

''Knowledge is judgment!" But judgment is a belief that something is thus and thus! And not knowledge! "All knowledge consists of synthetic judgments" of universal validity (the case is thus and not otherwise in every case), of necessary validity (the opposite of the assertion can never occur).

The legitimacy of belief in knowledge is always presupposed: just as the legitimacy of the feelings of conscience judgments is presupposed. Here moral ontology is the dominant prejudice.

The conclusion is therefore:
1. There are assertions that we consider universally valid and necessary;
2. Necessity and universal validity cannot be derived from experience;
3. Consequently they must be founded, not upon experience, but upon something else, and derive from another source of knowledge!

(Kant infers (1) there are assertions which are valid only under a certain condition; (2) this condition is that they derive, not from experience, but from pure reason.)

Therefore: the question is, whence do we derive our reasons for believing in the truth of such assertions?
No, how our belief is caused!

But the origin of a belief, of a strong conviction, is a psychological problem: and a very narrow and limited experience often produces such a belief! It already presupposes that there is not "data a posteriori" but also data a priori, "preceding experience."
Necessity and universal validity could never be given to us by experience: why does that mean that they are present without any experience at all?

There are no isolated judgments!

An isolated judgment is never "true," never knowledge; only in the connection and relation of many judgments is there any surety.

What distinguishes the true from the false belief? What is knowledge? He "knows" it, that is heavenly!
Necessity and universality can never be given by experience! Thus they are independent of experience, prior to all experience! That insight that occurs a priori, therefore independently of all experience, out of sheer reason, is "a pure form of knowledge"!

"The basic laws of logic, the law of identity and the law of contradiction,are forms of pure knowledge because they precede all experience.''--But these are not forms of knowledge at all!they are regulative articles of belief.

To establish the a priori character (the pure rationality) of the judgments of mathematics, space must be conceived as a form of pure reason.

Hume had declared: "There are no synthetic a priori judgments." Kant says: But there are! Those of mathematics! And if there are such judgments, perhaps there is also metaphysics, a knowledge of things by pure reason!

Mathematics is possible under conditions under which metaphysics is never possible. All human knowlege is either experience or mathematics.

A judgment is synthetic; i.e., it connects different ideas.
It is a priori; i.e., every connection is a universally valid and necessary one, which can never be given by sense perception but only through pure reason.

If there are to be synthetic a priori judgments, then reason must be in a position to make connections: connection is a form. Reason must possess the capacity of giving form.


(Cant help but worship)

+++

The second is Calvino's lovely ride through prose poetry and metaphysics.

[2]

POLO:… Perhaps the terraces of this garden overlook only the lake of our mind. . .

KUBLAI: . . . and however far our troubled enterprises as warriors and merchants may take us, we both harbor within ourselves this silent shade, this conversation of pauses, this evening that is always the same.

POLO: Unless the opposite hypothesis is correct: that those who strive in camps and ports exist only because we two think of them, here, enclosed among these bamboo hedges, motionless since time began.

KUBLAI: Unless toil, shouts, sores, stink do not exist; and only this azalea bush.

POLO: Unless porters, stonecutters, rubbish collectors, cooks cleaning the lights of chicken, washerwoman bent over stones, mothers stirring rice as they nurse their infants, exist only because we think of them.

KUBLAI: To tell the truth, I never think them.

POLO: Then they do not exist.

KUBLAI: To me this conjecture does not seem to suit our purposes. Without them we could never remain here swaying, cocooned in our hammocks.

POLO: Then the hypothesis must be rejected. So the other hypothesis is true: they exist and we do not.

KUBLAI: We have proved that if we were here, we would not be.

POLO: And here, in fact, we are.

+++
And there are those genius of passages from the one and only Doestoevesky. Notes from the Underground especially.

As I typed out the second am just pondering how it reflects so much on the Internet. Blogging in particular.

City mapping...

It is said that for a person, a name of the city invokes one dominant image.

Be it a café, monument, railway platform, a conversation, or even the flashy smile of the girl at the take-away joint; but it is almost always moulded by the circumstances of the image.

A farewell, a smile, a special love, aroma of the certain variety of tea or splattering of the rain that drenched you in your favourite shirt, in all - there you are to stand, enshrined in the religious sanctity of your own memories.

Adding colours, smiles and meaning.

A few dozens of these images become planks to navigate through the innumerable other less easily remembered images and then soon you find you have navigated across a significant segment of certain river they call life.

Inevitably.

For now lets just be content with brick and mortar. Shall we?




Liverpool.

West London.

Bath.

Manchester.

London- her camera but I shot it. So Its mine. Technically!