(An earlier essay that I wrote on the horrific frequency of rapes in India.)
A series of observations:
India disillusions its citizens with a theoretical promise of democracy and freedom (we do celebrate an "Independence Day") and a reality of utterly shameless corruption, disempowerment and humiliation in daily life.
There is a drive to power, fulfillment and autonomy in any normal human male.
This drive is thereby strangled and trampled upon in daily life in India, leading to immense neurosis, feelings of helplessness and despair.
Men and women therefore become despotic, exercising their power in vile and criminal ways.
Indian women routinely exercise their despotism in internal family dynamics, while Indian men, being by nature more brutish, want a more tangible exercise of that un-channeled energy.
They either exercise their drive to power by being arrogant and domineering to the men weaker than them, or to harass, humiliate and assault any un-defended woman that they can. They will rape a little girl or an elderly woman if they get a chance. A rape is of course about sexual gratification, but it is as well an act of wiping away the experience of being an impotent incel that one lives through every day.
The society can keep prosecuting the rapists, but it is the society itself that is producing them. What factors in Indian society are leading to an ever-present population of rapists? An important factor is the vicious cycle of being humiliated and dominated by ones stronger than oneself, and then indulging in the humiliation and domination of ones weaker than oneself.
The default condition of a man and a woman in India is that of having been socially and systemically raped. In many (too frequent) cases, this rape is the actual act of physical assault and physical rape.
To solve this problem in the long term, we have to look at slowly reducing the almost universal occurence of the dehumanizing exercise of domination in India. That phenomenon starts at the very top of political and state machinery, and continues in families, schools and marriages. We are a country of bullies and the bullied.
Without checks and balances, despotism is inevitable. And in a despotic region, those who the despots treat with disdain will occasionally and brutally erupt in ways that will seem exceptional but should be expected.
It is a common but a "loserthink" habit to blame one's childhood or one's past for one's bad behavior in the present.
I know three people: a man, his wife and his brother, all of who had less than ideal childhoods. The man spent his childhood in relative deprivation, doing odd and sometimes menial jobs. The woman spent her childhood away from her home, with a horrible aunt who was mean and vile. The man's brother, like the man himself, had a similarly deprived childhood and perhaps took on even more responsibilities than the man himself during their mutual childhood.
The man grew up to be a bitter, insecure, selfish (almost narcissistic) individual. The wife turend out to be a gentle, meek and un-assertive woman in her adulthood. And the man's brother became a happy-go-lucky, jovial and living-in-the-present kind of man.
All of them spoke of their childhood with hurt and pain. But they all became different kinds of people.
You will find it everywhere. People go through the same circumstances and turn out to be very different in character and personality.
Our childhoods are mostly spent in relative unconsciousness and un-self-awareness. As adults, we have a responsibility to be self-aware, to strive to be better, and to try and transcend our past.
Carrying the wounds of the past is perhaps inevitable, but I believe many of us can choose to live a better life despite those wounds. We need not consider the implications of those wounds as inevitable and inviolate.
We can learn from those wounds, and choose not to inflict similar wounds on others. We can be better than many others who may not have had those opportunities of learning.
Some experiences are too traumatic, but most experiences, if one is willing and reflective, are springboards to a higher level of consciousness and sensitivity.
It goes without saying, for anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of freedom of speech, that censorship or banning of a docudrama film is authoritarian, cowardly and a symptom of a regime that is drunk with its own power.
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I have long remained an admirer of the late Mr Jaswant Singh Khalra, the human rights activist from Punjab. During the process of his investigation and judicial activism about the state-sponsored killings and cremations of thousands of people in Punjab, he himself was kidnapped, tortured and killed by Punjab Police.
He was a family man, and he was very brave to have taken on against a brutal state machinery. He and his family paid the price for his bravery, and the least we can do is to respect his memory, and to honor his legacy, and to be inspired by his courage and his conscience.
I have also long regarded the Punjab DGP from that era, K P S Gill, as a butcher, a cruel, sadistic and degenerate man, who was given free rein by his political masters to unleash his own brand of terrorism and violence, frequently on the innocent, while his stated mission was to control and eliminate the violence by the radical Sikh separatists, no less criminal, in Punjab. The violence by the state is far more condemn-able than the violence by misguided separatists because the former is to be held to a far higher standard of morality and due process.
It is fitting that Mr Gill was awarded with Padam Shri, and Mr Khalra was never, either during his activism or after his death, honored by the Indian state. Such are the ways of how power is wielded, and one must be thoroughly naive to expect otherwise.
Mr Khalra was born in a family of activists, and that showed itself in how he was roused to action when he saw what was going on. His wife is equally brave, and my salute to her, as well.
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When one evaluates the thuggery, violence and amorality in Punjab or in many parts of India, it is my conclusion that the region and the people are feudal in their world-view, medieval in their mindset, and brutal in their acts.
Parents routinely murder their unborn daughters or their disobedient children who dare to marry of their own choice. Property feuds often escalate into violence and murder. People are petty, and though the Sikh religion is considered liberal, Sikhs are vehemently caste-conscious, superstitious, believers in blasphemy and brutality in response to it, and generally immoral (consider for example their tactics to immigrate to the West). Sikh industrialists are well-known to be thoroughly corrupt, and not a single Sikh politician is known to have some measure of integrity.
People looted and killed and raped each other with impunity during the partition of 1947, and many of the legends of Sikh history, Banda Singh Bahadur or Ranjit Singh, falter miserably when subjected to a scrutiny of their acts and motives.
I consider this to be a lawless, despotic region. If anything, I find that the brutality of the state has become more pervasive at present. At that time (of Mr Khalra's death), the CBI was somewhat effective in prosecuting some police officers for Mr Khalra's murder, but since then, hundreds and thousands of people have been killed by Punjab Police without any real repercussions. Now even human rights activists have given up. Police "encounters" are reported every other day, gangsters in the pay of the state are busy in extortion and kidnappings, and any individual who even hints at becoming a political force to be reckoned with, is killed or imprisoned under draconian laws.
Mr Khalra was valiant, and he tried to turn the tide, but he was too hopeful about this region. Like many previous "revolutionaries", he died an untimely death, a few of his killers were jailed, but nothing really changed in Punjab. Punjab was a region of brutality, and it remains that way. Perhaps more hopeless than at his time. Most sensible people have left this region, and those who are left are busy making money while they can while the future looks bleak and black.
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The film (Punjab 95, Satluj) itself needed to be made, but I feel it is, as produced, a mediocre film. It would have been much better to make an actual documentary on Mr Khalra's life and work. The film repeats some musical tones, the acting except for a couple of actors is atrocious, the scenes of torture and killings are shoddily done, and the screenwriting and the dialog delivery is amateurish.
The people involved in producing this film, however mediocre they may be in terms of execution, deserve accolades for their courage in going for it.
The Indian state has not cleared it for screening, and that's a shame (but to expected from a regime that keeps a tight grip on the media, and supports the release of far more gruesome and politically charged propaganda movies but ones that fit its chosen narratives).
The film is brave in pointing clearly at KPS Gill and the then Chief Minister Beant Singh for the violence indulged in by the police. The film does not go into Mr Khalra's background, his wife's courage, the reactions of his relatives or children, his association with left-leaning people (his wife is shown in a library where a portrait of Pash the Punjabi poet is behind her desk), and the general context of the violence and extortion.
The film also doesn't consider the general disenfranchisement of a population which has to beg and plead for a modicum of justice. Even the judges shown in the film are unremarkable, and it is only due to a single witness' testimony which almost wasn't there, that there were some convictions. The judicial system has, by any account, has become far worse and a crony of the state at this time (but it was never a true pillar of democracy to begin with in independent India).
The film should not have ended in a catharsis, but in rage. The architects of the thousands of those killings that Mr Khalra was investigating remain unpunished. Mr K P S Gill is dead and he was provided with state honors. The riots of 1984 remain unpunished. And the Indian state continues to plot and carry out assassinations of Sikhs in India and abroad.
This film needed to be made, and it is perhaps unrealistic to expect a great film given the restrictions on its message and that it was never going to make any money. But a good director can work with a limited budget and instead of filming shoddy scenes of fake torture, can show things in a hidden manner rather than overtly. But again, that is my quibble as a cinematic critic, and as a social wake-up call, this film deserves to be applauded.
I have very little hope that any lasting change will be triggered by this film. I pray that I am wrong.
Instrumentalism in Quantum Mechanics is a perspective where we consider the various equations and mathematical formulations strictly as a means to predicting physical outcomes. If the formulae work well, great! We don't really care about the philosophical meaning of the equations, or the ontological implications (uncertainty, duality, the observer effect, etc.). We have a series of physical measurements, we apply certain equations, we get predicted measurements in the future, and we are happy.
In a similar manner, debates about consciousness, self-awareness, emergent properties, Chinese room, etc. in computational intelligence are fine as conversational pieces. But that does not diminish one bit the extraordinary capabilities shown by LLMs in responding to complex inputs. Those capabilities in LLMs are usable whether or not we endow them with "real" intelligence or "understanding".
For example, see this sample problem from Humanity's Last Exam (a benchmark for LLMs):
Hummingbirds within Apodiformes uniquely have a bilaterally paired oval bone, a sesamoid embedded in the caudolateral portion of the expanded, cruciate aponeurosis of insertion of m. depressor caudae. How many paired tendons are supported by this sesamoid bone? Answer with a number.
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We will see a rapid evolution in AI capabilities. We are still in the very early stages of this new technology and for many years and decades, the capabilities will increase non-linearly. Capabilities will evolve in various dimensions:
Computational advances: It is very likely that the current foundations of AI in terms of context and token-input-output neural networks will morph into something very different that requires a very different quality or quantity of computational horsepower.
Multi-modal expansion: For computation to excel in the real world, input processing from high-fidelity environments (such as visual or tactile or auditory) will become more tractable. Multi-modal output will also become increasingly realistic. Augmented reality will become as good as lucid dreaming.
Agency: After a few initial hiccups, AI agents will be increasingly left alone, with very little oversight except from AI supervisors, to inspect, decide and take action.
Price and Availability: AI will become cheaper and cheaper, eventually uncensored: almost omnipotent AND almost free. What that will mean for human consumption patterns is scary.
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AI will lead to economic devastation for those who offer repetition and basic pattern-matching as their value-add to human society. Many regions of the world will become empty of humans and will be managed by AI. Flourishing as a human being, having power, commanding AI, and reproducing will be a luxury that only a few will experience. Vastly fewer in percentage terms.
While studying in 12th standard, I applied to appear in IIT Joint Entrance. The application form came to me in a brown envelope, with the acronym IITD/JEE/xyz written in one corner. I remember the fondness with which I noticed the seven characters: IITD/JEE. It seemed like a distant, cherished, perhaps unattainable dream.
I did not know about IITs when I graduated from class 10. One day I noticed an advert in the paper for a correspondence course to help students prepare for IIT joint entrance. The company advertising was called Brilliant Tutorials based in Madras.
I, and my family, thought it was well worth it to prepare for and to take the entrance exam. I studied mostly at leisure. I never woke up at an unearthly hour, or stayed awake beyond bedtime. My normal 11th and 12th standard college regimen was a breeze. I never took any in-person coaching.
Once a distant relative visited us, and he sternly chided me on my leisurely studying, and told me that unless I woke up at 4 every morning, or unless I studied till midnight or beyond, I had no hope in hell of succeeding.
My hometown was not known to produce IIT graduates, and when the fact of my preparing for JEE became known in my locality, I was the laughing stock of many youngsters, one of whom said that he would change his name if I didn't crash and burn at the entrance exam. The teachers at my 11th and 12th standard college were dismissive and insulting of their students, and took pride in their haughty condescension.
Our home was near a university, and both my parents were teachers in that university. I therefore had ready access to the university library, and read many a text meant for undergraduate and postgraduate science degrees. Sometimes I could only understand one or two chapters, and at other times it was instructive to read books designed and written with far greater care and quality than the Indian textbooks I normally had for my college syllabus.
Due to those university books, my interest was not just in solving problems but in educating myself. Those days of being a self-paced learner, an autodidact, someone who studied for pleasure, was one of the happiest periods of my life.
In the end, I got the JEE All India Rank 19, and was ranked third in the North zone, with two students from Delhi ahead of me.
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I loved computers, but had no access to computer at school, at my college, or at home. I chose to study Computer Science at IIT Delhi, and from the very early days, it was a nightmare and a debacle. Ugly hostels, bad food, a terrible discouragement to do anything but study the prescribed syllabus, a woeful library that had nothing but textbooks, a crammed curriculum, subjects which were taught without passion, some sadistic teachers, attendance requirements, and hardly any time to think and reflect. This was in stark contrast to a life of leisurely intellection and study in my hometown.
The one positive was ready access to computing machinery, and instead of spending my time trying to get good grades, I spent almost all my free time tinkering with personal computers, mainframes, and multi-user Unix systems.
Except for courses in Logic and Philosophy and the Humanities, which I genuinely enjoyed, I did not have good grades. I trudged through the four years at IIT Delhi, and got thoroughly disenchanted with studying for grades. I copied assignments, cheated in some quizzes, and became generally alienated from the official curriculum, while gaining tremendous felicity with systems administration. A few courses did hold my interest, but those were very unpleasant four years. I wished to be rid of being in that cage, and not being able to physically leave IIT, I instead became interested in transcendental philosophy, social activism and alternative ways of living.
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I had become almost the best in a country by having space and freedom for two years. But I became a recluse and a shell of a person by going through four years of IIT. Many of my IIT friends lost their balance from that trauma, and have still not regained it, and struggle with feelings of inadequacy and maladjustment.
For me, preparing to get into IIT was a great joy. But the actual reward, the actual being at IIT, was a disaster. The acronym that had enchanted me, IITD/JEE, proved to be a conjunction of hell and heaven.
During my fourth year at IIT Delhi, I appeared for the GATE exam for entrance to post-graduate courses at IISc or at the IITs, and I think I got a rank that was in the top 40. But I chose not to study further, and decided pretty much to drop out of society.
Many of my fellow classmates went to do their Masters in Computer Science, but I know they had no passion for the subject, and even less the courage to live an authentic life. Even today, I find them disinterested in a new advance in computing or science or philosophy, with their energies focused on their careers and the careers of their children.
I imagine that these days even that heaven of preparing for JEE has become hellish for many, with students choosing rather to die than go through the endless coaching. And I have no reason to think that the actual experience at the IITs has gotten any better.
My moderate professional success has no doubt been partly due to my IIT pedigree, but that is no commendation of its killing the soul of so many students. IITs get the very best of brains in India, and then choose to trample over them. Many of its students eventually do great things after they leave, but that is more a tribute to the innate intellectual ability of the students than to any nourishing of that ability by the IITs.
