My little flask

Ye Jamsheds who hold the Earth in fee

Your cups belie ecstasy.

Tho' Khayyam's songs the Heavens scry

That Galaxy is wrong in which we die.

My little flask

You only ask

That her to view

I empty you.

Thirsty is the lip o' the tilth

Sehra's tongue for Khizr's filth

Did the Saqi depart to seal its doom?

Or are my eyes now their own simoom?

Little flask, why

Do you empty lie?

She isn't here
Nor was ever near.

In the Stars' Wine Cup, the Sun casts its stone

Shadows forsake us, themselves forlorn

The world is the prayer mat on which Muezza sat

Couldn't the Prophet shoo a sleepy cat?

Why in these wastes did you let go my hand?

My little flask filling up with sand

Will you with the desert's advancing dunes

Hunt the gazelle with goliard tunes?

Or, like the Sphinx enclosed at Sehra's heart

Practice yet the Saqi's art?

Self mutilation is the only Sin

Yet how else heed the Muezzin?

Envoi- 

Prince! Tho' savants thrill thy Cup to task

Happier yet my little flask.

The truth about the Brahmo Samaj

A bunch of gangsters move into your neighborhood and start beating up everybody and stealing anything they can get their hands on. Some locals cut a deal with the gangsters. These greedy little shysters work for the alien Crime Lords and get rich. Naturally, such scum are shunned by the better class of their own people. But they don't like being shunned- more especially because knowledge of their degraded status reduces the commission they are able to charge the Mleccha Mafia.
So they claim to be far Holier and more Spiritual and more Moral than even the elite of their own Society. How do they get away with this imposture? Well, one way is by claiming to know the true interpretation of Holy Scripture- indeed, they go further and claim they know the true interpretation of any and every Holy Scripture that ever was or might come to be.  Another way is to claim to be great patriots who only collaborated with the foreign gangsters so as to raise up the Nation till it once again occupy a wholly imaginary pinnacle of Purity and Enlightenment and true Humanitarianism.
Such was the origin of the Brahmo Samaj. Its founder thought worshiping idols was very very bad even though guys who weren't worshipping idols were self evidently no angels themselves.
Another thing which was very very bad was polytheism- like that of the Trinitarian Christians. Since conversion to Islam was no longer profitable this was an excellent argument to make. After all, Hindus who converted to Christianity were expected to lead a more, not less, moral life by their new Masters. That, by itself, disqualified converts from being the gangsters' compradors of choice. Hypocritical Hindu 'Brahmos' on the other hand were just what the Doctor ordered.
Unfortunately, though Brahmoism started off as anti-Hindu, its swift degeneration into an endogamous caste meant that Hindu values spontaneously regenerated within it and so, as time went on, even Brahmo's became patriots. Tagore himself stopped inveighing against the Freedom Fighters.
Why? He needed Marwari money.
Brahmoism had all but disappeared by the time I was born. Hegelian Marxism had been found to be a more potent source of mischief to the commonweal than even Benthamite Unitarianism. However, one wan hope remained- viz. the elderly expat Bengali Econ Professor. Don't write off Brahmoism till the very last of them bites the dirt pillow.

Why we must immediately ban D.H. Lawrence

I recall, as a boy of 14, thrilling to the sight of huge muscular coal miners suddenly appearing on the leafy lanes of Cricklewood in support of frail little sari clad Gujerati women who had gone on strike protesting the lack of air conditioning (London is very hot) at the Grunwick photo lab which happened to be owned by an Anglo-Indian with Right Wing views.
Imagine my dismay when the Indians, truly a beastly people as Churchill pointed out, repaid this generous gesture of solidarity on the part of the Miners by proceeding to make a hobby out of sodomizing them and hanging them from trees in various backward parts of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. When will this epidemic of sexual violence against Miners cease?
The answer, I'm afraid, is not till we ban D.H. Lawrence whose books sexualise and objectify Miners in a totally unacceptable way. His infamous 'Lady Chatterjee's lover' which propagandized for the pleasures of 'a bit of brown' has been turned, by brown people, into an instrument for the oppression of Miners who have already suffered enough at the hands of Mrs. Thatcher.
For which I personally blame David Cameron.
That boy aint right.

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. Arjuna did not accept it but the Gandharva didn't take it back either. This meant that it could vest in Arjuna the moment he ceased to be master of himself (which is what happens when you suffer 'Vishada'). The dramatic element in the Gita has to do with whether Lord Krishna will be able to prevent Arjuna from finding out, using the Gandharva's boon, that Karna is his true eldest brother because then the war can't go ahead as Karna wants. 

"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.

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.

The British Struggle for Independence needs Gandhian leadership

The recent electoral success of UKIP has suddenly made the British Struggle for Independence newsworthy. For too long, the British people have been ground down by the jackboot of Europe.  Yet, what is the alternative? Without Brussels to tell the British what to put in their Pork Pies and Cornish pasties, the British will inevitably revert to cannibalism.
Prof. Majumdar, of Bhagalpur University, disagrees. Deciphering ancient Bengali manuscripts, he has found references to the existence of a flourishing manufacturing industry in Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century Britain. This, of course, does not prove that the British are capable of ruling themselves. Proponents of the Aryan Invasion theory suggest that German industrialists, like Friedrich Engels, had established small centers of Civilization  in places like Monchister and Burningham where people could talk boring bureaucratic shite to each other and fill out forms and hold endless meetings. Interestingly, the British people retain no such memory themselves. What, then, motivates their Struggle for Independence? The answer, I'm afraid, is that they're trying to mimic the Scots without realizing that Scots, too, are Brits, which is why they are fighting so desperately to go their own way.
Mahatma Gandhi, you will remember, got involved with the Indian Freedom for Struggle because Muhammad Ali Jinnah had removed the biggest obstacle towards its achievement by getting the Hindus and Muslims to form a common front and that was just Wrong coz Jinnah wore trousers instead of striding around in a diaper and True Independence can only be achieved if you wear a diaper.
The Gandhian contribution to the British Struggle for Independence, similarly, must concentrate not on establishing a common front with the Scots but insisting that politicians wear only diapers and babble incoherent nonsense. The alternative is that Brussels will just simply cut the apron strings and do a bunk.

Ghalib's ghazal 59

 Upon the latch of your gate, since I erect, with no word spoken,
Natch, my Estate,  you'll only detect by heard token

She says- now my Logos fails and her Laughter too is weak-

'What hearts say, I can't know, no wights speak!'

She who fixed upon my neck Love's collar of iron
This World surnames the tyranny of Zion.

By the time ghazal 59 was written, Ghalib had already composed several odes (qasida) to Ind's true 'sitamgars'- i.e ruinous tyrants- the British Imperialists and their ever Victorious Queen. Some of these qasidas were returned as improperly addressed- a familiar plaint in succeeding decades; Champaran's indigo farmers went en masse to petition the King Emperor, who was in their vicinity, for a spot of Tiger shooting ( this was a few years before Gandhi appeared on the scene) but their petition was rejected because it had not gone through the proper channels.

Conventionally, the qasida opens (nasib) with an account of the poet's sense of ruination on arriving at the encampment of the beloved only to see that it has already moved on.

First couplet

ghar jab banaa liyaa tire dar par kahe ba;Gair
jaanegaa ab bhii tuu nah miraa ghar kahe ba;Gair

1) when I built a house at your door, without [your/my] saying [anything]

2a) will you not know my house, even/also now, without [your/my] saying [anything]?
2b) you will not know my house, even/also now, without [your/my] saying [anything]!

Nowadays, of course, the beloved aint a bedouin- tho' perhaps little better than a 'street Arab' subsisting upon 'the produce of her vagrant amours'- yet her house is the centre of a now universal depredation which mirrors the activities of the 'Stationary Bandit' that is Company Raj- and though the foundation of my house is now but the eddying of dust at her too frequented door, yet she refuses to know my location save by way of my own nasib which is to but describe my desolation at her having already moved on though still at the same place.

It seems Ghalib has predicted the trajectory of the 'Post Colonial Subject' in this pithy verse.  The fatalism of the 'Musselman' in Primo Levis Auschwitz now has a triple valency as 

1) the beginning of Philosophy, which is the beginning of Love, which is the rekindling of anamnesis (the qasidah's nostalgic nasib) and proper induction into the Socratic practise of Death (T.S. Eliot knew that the Sanskrit 'Smara'- Love but also Memory- is but a sibilant prefixed to that distinguished...nothing which destroys both) i.e. the ecstatic, in articulo mortis, practice of relinquishing Maieutics for Mousike (the Urdu word derives from the Greek) but all to no avail for, Post or Pre Colonial subject- i.e. qua subject- all that is recited is some muthoi of Aesop such that the Lion in its net is rescued by mice who nibble away not the rope that binds the noble beast, but its very marrow and sinews.

2) The transformation of the notion of Sacred allotment or apportionment (nasib) into negative Entitlement- a tax owed to a Secular Aeon (ad-dhar) which we can't vilify because it robs us so thoroughly no tongue is left to us nor candle, book or bell.

3) Nasib not as the tempering of Thymos by terminable Fate but an un-annealing amor fati and Eternal, worse un-Ergodic, and therefore unmeaning, Recurrence and Seriality.

Second couplet 

kahte haiñ jab rahī nah mujhe t̤āqat-e suḳhan
jānūñ kisī ke dil kī maiñ kyūñkar kahe baġhair

1) [she] says, when the strength for speech did not remain to me,
2) 'how would I know [the speech] of anyone's heart, without [his] saying [it]?'

Sukhan, as used by Sheikh Galip, means 'Logos'- more particularly 'Logos' as self-evidently Logos, not vainglorious doxa, by reason of the special facility- or Lewis 'elite eligibility'-  which 'Poetry'- at least that of Galip or  Ghalib's-  shows in carving it up along its joints; or rather the reverse, restoring the Lion Aslan whose sinews our mind mice had previously been snacking on.

Third couplet
kām us se ā paṛā hai kih jis kā jahān meñ
leve nah koʾī nām sitamgar kahe baġhair
work/desire} with/through that one has befallen [me]-- [that one] of whom, in the world,
 no one would mention/invoke the name without saying 'tyrant'

Kaam, in the Hindvi tradition has a double valency- both 'work' and 'Eros'- and both are sublated by 'Naam'- the name- Eros perpetuates either an honourable family name or the stain of infamy just as Work (karm) perpetuates bondage to karma- the cycle of re-birth and nescience. Chanting the name of God- for example that of Shiva, one of whose epithets is 'Smarahara'- destroyer of 'Eros', destroyer of 'Memory'- including the memory of work done and debts owed- on the other hand releases from the delusion of ontology- the Name is higher than the Reality it signifies, indeed the Names of God- independent of attributes- are both cause and cure of worldly dysphoria.
From the time of Amir Khusrau, if not earlier, this theme had been very thoroughly integrated into Islamic mysticism- indeed, there is no difficulty in warranting it a wholly Arab intellectual provenance.
The equation of the beloved with the tyrant has, however, a specifically Indian meaning- given the use of the Hindvi words 'kaam' and 'naam'- best explicated by the story of, the Turkish, Sultan Mahmud and his beloved slave, the native, Ayaz who, proverbially, knew his place.
Ahmed Ghazzali analysed their relationship in terms reminiscent of Hegel's 'Master-Slave dialectic' such that, the 'Young' Marx's 'Alienation' applies equally, or- indeed- more particularly- to 'Love' rather than 'Labour' such that, in the same way that the Thymotic Roman Master becomes the helpless slave of the Wealth created by the self-objectifying Arts of his Stoic bondsman, so too does the  capricious Turkish Sultan come under the tutelage of his all tolerating Punjabi peon.
From the ecumenical Spiritual point of view, this raises a question regarding the archetypal figure of the 'beloved disciple'- be it Christ & St. John the Evangelist, or Lord Buddha and Ananda, or some rather more antinomian syzygies in the Malamati Sufi tradition which however should not be taken at face value so as to give scandal to the Faithful.
Goethe, I think, said that of the animals we know are assured of heaven, sans doubt, Prophet Muhammad's beloved cat Muezza, is up there along with the dog of Ephesus' Seven Sleepers.  Was that cat a Pharaonic 'tyrant' or 'Abu Houl' type 'father of terrors'- i.e. a Sphinx? It caused the Prophet to mutilate his robe.
Yet, surely, for all hearts, be we Muslim or Kaffir, that cat which sat on the mantle of Prophethood, is verily the name of all that empowers, honours and strengthens our own self-sought bondage to Love be that parole howsoever delayed.