Where The Rivers Meet

Somewhere in the middle of last year, a couple of months into entering the pharmaceutical industry, I realized that I probably needed to understand basic chemistry, biology, physics and a little bit of mathematics. The stalwarts tell you to go way out of your comfort zone to do business and do things you are not prepared to. And, there I was – a fish out of water, dabbling in subjects I have dreaded (and barely managed to scrape through) all through high school.

The romanticism of bracing the unknown was one thing, and then reliving dreadful memories of science phobia was another. Mathematics was something I absolutely dreaded since school - so I had a very, very clear memory and opinion on the subject. I somehow managed to rot my way through biology, but chemistry and physics had totally whooshed past me like a rocket.

If you ask me now, what about chemistry did I even remember from those days, I probably couldn't tell you - may be a formula of water and carbon dioxide, or memories of a rather tall and unfashionable chemistry teacher queuing up all the girls to the chemistry laboratory, which was mainly for use for senior science students, as a "special treat with special permission" she got from the school principal, and then the nearly abominable smell of weird gases that always came out of the lab, right next to my classroom. That was all that chemistry was for me, which circa 2001, after my high school board exams, became absolutely irrelevant and redundant in my life. Of course, till circa 2015, as it turns out.

In India, probably like so many other places, STEM subjects are for the "smart ones", and a vast majority end up studying sciences, anyways. Everybody talked about sciences as the smarter subjects, that required “brain” unlike studying humanities (which required memory, as if memory wasn’t a brain function). I always wondered what could study of science give, other than the joys of discovering this and that. What is it like for a chemist to see the world through the lenses of chemistry or physicists through physics?

By high school, I had discovered my love for humanities. My first useful tutor of any merit whatsoever was an average level government clerk doubled up his income as a private tutor. Born to an intellectual elite family of a barrister, but torn into relative poverty by partition of India with his native Bangladesh, he wasn’t an achiever by any counts. His only claim was that he believed inherently that he was the bearer of the family pedigree - an intellectual, and hence, kept an absolutely meticulous but superficial knowledge of academia. For a ten year old, even such superficial knowledge was useful, given the sheer lack of imagination my school life had become to represent by them. It was this man who taught me basics of linguistics, historiography, and semantics, and got me introduced to myriad concepts like Emanual Kant and Amartya Sen. Deprived of cable television as part of my puritan upbringing, my only refugee became 2 hour programs on All India Radio’s own FM channel called Rainbow FM, which had a host of smart people from anthropologists, feminists, psychiatrists, poets, and all, that I listened more attentively for five years, than I did my school work. My life by then had split into lives – one where I went to school, dreaded sciences and mugged up humanities, and the other where I spent hours staying up wondering about the various tribes of India that an anthropologists just updated on, or constantly trying to understand the evolution of a language.

A year into this intellectual exercise, I watched the first influential person of my life person – danseuse Ranjabati Sircar and her mother Manjusri Chaki Sircar on television. I had learned Bharatnatyam for a few years and had a knack for understanding dance, and as much as I loved the technical prowess of the dance form, I felt stagnated with how constant, un-changing and rigid the traditional dance form was, both in its grammar and content. There was little scope to rewrite the rules, and even less to rewrite the existing social biases that the dance form represented. All the hereos were Brahmins and the women nearly always coy  and wanted to put garlands on their hairs in various renditions. The mother-daughter due of the Sircars changed my world, because now, I saw a new form of dance called Nava-Nritya, that not only created a language that was more egalitarian (with steps taking from tribal dances to classical brahmanical dance forms), as also the renditions which constantly questioned and challenged existing social norms.

By fifteen I had known for sure, that humanities was a wonderful discipline, that helps one understand one’s social conditioning to really choose consciously one’s identity. The self, as we knew it as repository of various given identities of sex, gender, caste, community, religion and nationalism, could not be re-created as a self-chosen identity. We could all choose to be the kind of Hindu we wanted (or any other religion), the kind of sexuality we wanted to practise, the kind of food we wanted to eat to represent our caste biases (and lack of it) and such.

I was sorted for life, and felt more at ease with myself, for my lack of skill at STEM subjects.

Yet, as time went by, I realized how humanities and fundamental sciences were intertwined as knowledge outflows, like all knowledge sources was, and just by understanding the world through humanities, was never going to enough, if I completely didn’t understand science.

Even though Physics and Chemistry evaporated from my life for years after high school, unlike mathematics which continued to haunt me with stamp duty calculations and I moved on with my dedicated humanities studies, I spent hours in an eerie uneasiness when I was still haunted by the same question as to why people study sciences.  The world isn't a laboratory after all, where one could go around concocting strange chemical combinations. And even if one one knew how to balance ions and neutrons and whatever it was, how does that help one unravel complex questions of human identity? 

So I asked many engineers (the most ubiquitous clan pursuing sciences in India) for years and what I got was that chemistry is everywhere - from the shampoo one uses to the drugs one takes : everything was a complex network of chemicals. Like they also said Physics is needed for everything – from switching on the fan to the light. Of course,  same logic applied for mathematics. Now, this wasn't the kind of answer I was seeking - the response was a lot like telling someone that law is a wonderful subject because it will teach you how to do your tax planning, or file for property documents. As we know, an understanding of law does more - from understanding the entire rights discourse to assessing one's life through an understanding of jurisprudence. What I wanted to know was basically if there was anything equivalent to philosophy or jurisprudence in chemistry or physics - sadly, no one I knew had answers.

A failed venture later, when I finally ended up running the small pharmacy my family was running for years, I knew that chemistry could no longer be ignored and entire journey of merely beginning to understand a rather unknown, and erstwhile dreadful subject, turned out to be tougher that I ever imagined. For a while, I spent long, long hours just contemplating on the modus operandi to tame the dragon called chemistry - should I by-heart all the names of all possible medicine brand names in the world (and then die of memory burst) or begin slowly and steadily with basic biochemistry and move upwards ? The problem (or blessing) with beginning to learn subjects from scratch at an advanced age (like thirty, for me) is that nobody wants to teach this group. Either one stumps upon material aimed at kids, or more advanced pop-fiction literature aimed at those with some basic idea. Clearly, thirty plus aged students is no one's favorites ! 

Left to myself to fend for my own inadequacies of high school science failures, I began searching for a book that was going to introduce me to biology and chemistry without intimidation. Nearly all of Isaac Asimov’s books turned out to be a great help as a substitute for text books, Asimov was nonetheless a great science teacher, and not the types I met at school that was intimidating and boring, and reading through his books like the “Human Brain” was a real treat for my scared, doubtful mind.  Just like that, in a page or two, he would explain what amino acid was and how chains of chemical bonds worked – and then go about cracking some joke on its roman origins. As if there was never a better way to explain Amino Acid to anyone who has hated chemistry any better, Asimov was a kind teacher, and a great first teacher as well.

Sadly, Asimov’s books were written long back and even the updated versions were out-dated, so I knew I had to look for more sources. Multiple google searches later, I picked up Primo Levi's ‘Periodic Table’, having read that it had won the award for the best book on science, beating Richard Dawkins to the second place. I had assumed that it was going to an introduction to periodic table and basic concepts of chemistry - a lot like ‘Codes’ by Charles Pretzold, which introduced Coding to me, or 'Naked Statistics' by Charles Wheelan, which introduced statistics to me.

So I began reading the Periodic Table, with great interest and enthusiasm, ready with note book and pen to jot down notes as I was to go ahead with chemicals in the periodic table. Like I usually did for more technical books, my reading position was upright on the chair in front of my study table, as opposed to the rest which I read lounging on my bed or a couch. And then, ten pages down, and I realized Primo Levi was never going to talk about chemicals in the periodic table !

The book, as it revealed to me, isn't on chemistry at all, it is about his life. And while I was fooled into believing that may be after a brief intro into his life, he was going to get to business and teach me periodic table, I ended up reading a few chapters at first rather resentfully, only to realize that I have now, officially, stumbled upon gold mine.

Never have I read a science book, as potent and as poignant as this one and as Tim Radford of The Guardian puts it much more succinctly than me, that "If you were looking for a good book, a really good book in every sense, this is it."

Radford goes on to write : 

 "And yet, on the fourth or fifth reading in the 24 years since UK publication, The Periodic Table still seems to me to be the nearest match to the ideal science book. At some point – for me it was page 33 of the original Michael Joseph edition – the reader begins to understand that chemistry is not a "subject", not an arcane and sometimes bewildering intellectual scaffolding laboriously erected to frame reality: it is reality. Chemistry is what happens when we breathe, when we touch, when we react, and even our behaviour with others is chemistry at some greater level."

What I also loved about the book is it states Levi's life, through his words, as non-judgementally as anyone writing about life should. This isn't one of those steroid high books on an entrepreneur making the largest company in the world, or a chemist making the most important discovery in the world. Levi was neither. In fact, he was a chemist, who gave up chemistry to become a salesman - and that hardly makes him the best poster boy for pop-business genre. But at heart, it was chemistry which taught him how to deal with life. He drew his life’s learning from the way various chemicals reacted with each other and from their nature. It was then possible to understand chemistry and life together, and that was greatest philosophical learning from the book for me.

That was a good beginning to understanding how science is fundamental to our lives, but it wasn’t enough. Primo Levi’s work was poetic, but not as strong on philosophy as I wanted him to be. It helped me understand how external conduct can be guided by how various chemicals reacted with each other in nature, but it didn’t still give me a full-blown answer to whether that understanding could help us re-create the self.

Quite accidentally, the rest of my quest ended in a Vipassana Camp teaching the old Buddhist technique of Vipassana. I hadn’t of course gone for a Vipassana meditation retreat to find answers to science and philosophy. I had been working long hours, but I wanted longer hours in a day to finish all the tasks I set out for myself every morning. The task of understanding pharmaceutical industry felt daunting every day, and I was tired at the end of day to get down to learning anything new. And barring the tiredness, there was constant fear – of how time was just flying by, and I was still running a small shop, ignorant of market trend and future action plans. I wanted an energy drink, and an anxiety pill, all in one, but naturally, and Vipassana seemed like my only option.

Forced to do 100 hours of vipassana over ten days in absolute silence and isolation without phone or any human contact, it was of course great in increasing one’s mental health quotient. My mental alertness increased, and my mind became less tense, less restless, less volatile.

As I was taught the art of intense alertness of one’s body through breathing, a very animated Guruji Late SatyaNarayan Goenka, through video lectures, poignantly asked – what have we known about ourselves all this while, except when physicists, chemists and biologists have cut through us, put us under the microscope, studied us diligently and come to a conclusion as to what we are made up of. What is the point of understanding one’s self (and its physical manifestation of the body) through external investigations by scientists, when one can look inside through Vipassana and come to the same conclusion?

Guruji’s discourses happen each day at night, after ten long hours of meditation, that begin at 4.30 am in the morning. On the first session, as I was busy nursing my back from the unbearable back pain I felt after sitting upright for ten hours, I was jerked out of my numbed body – Wait ! Did I just hear Guruji saying that scientists and scientific knowledge were now redundant to understand the science of one’s own body and self  - as in I didn’t really need to learn periodic table, structure of atoms and various positions of glands and ducts inside my body to know what’s really that I am made up of ? I had mostly made up my mind to sleep through discourses, the only time one sit in a relaxed position, but instead now Guruji was all but ready to become my science teacher. As I squinted my eyes and bent forward in attention towards the huge screen at the far end of the meditation hall, S N Goenka ji mentioned in no ambiguous terms to leave all the intellectual activities outside. Do not seek the truth through external knowledge and intellect, but through one’s true experience, he urged as it reassured that each day of Vipassana was going to take each of us meditators closer towards that truth.

Each day, through focusing on normal breathing, I felt an acute awareness of my self. I wasn’t all bones, muscles, fat (a lot of it) and water retention (since I suffered from Edema) or fungal infections and allergies, but a lot of tiny particles that tingled through my body as I felt the signal of one nerve signaling towards another, and electric waves getting transmitted. All the body part that I had allergies, heated up, like it was a biochemical rave party, and as I learned to accept the pain of the swelling heat and itchiness, it resided.

I had been a well-read person by my own account. I read, if not voraciously in numbers but certainly voraciously with passion. Pyschology was one of my favourite subjects, and Bhagwat Geeta was my favourite book. I wasn’t dumb, and I had believed I knew an awful lot of what was to be known of mindfulness meditation.

Yet, what I experienced at Dhamma Vipassana was a sub-body alien experience like nothing I had experienced before and nothing that I had read earlier, had prepared me to face these experiences. There were days when I felt I had a bad attack of Parkinson, or Dengue, and there wasn’t going to be any way I was going to stop the shivers coming from deep inside the body. And then on some days, so much heat just left my body, that I felt like a furnace. As days progressed, we were taught to feel our internal organs and I could feel my heart pumping and stomach crunching, but nearly nothing on the right side of my stomach – So I ran to the resident teacher and asked him if that meant bad news because I was meant to feel the intestine and I wasn’t. He asked me to keep my biology knowledge out of my head, and told me whatever is there, you will feel it yourself. He assured, as Guruji had, that over years and years of Vipassana practice, one can scan every minute centimeter of the one’s body and remain alert of the happenings.

In those flipping moments that stretched over ten days, I found the answer to the question, whose answer that I have been looking out for so long. All these years, and all those lessons I had learned and byhearted in Physics and Chemistry, that the world consists of matter and matter is made up of atoms and molecules, was now true and couldn’t have been true-er that experiencing it in real-time. I was a matter, and made up atoms as well, and various chemicals and energy flows worked all through my body.

But the moot question was still unanswered – how does an understanding of the fact that matter was made up of atoms and molecules do anything to deciding my conduct - what is the greater philosophical takeaway from it, if there is one any ways ?

It turns out there is. For one, everything as minute as atoms and molecules as its unit destroy the understanding of self as we know it through the lense of hubris. None of us are solid structures, but smaller units, that are impermanent, and hence, will last temporarily before going into another form.

If everything is impermanent, then, well, so are our joys and sorrows and our failures and success. The fleeting moments of the heart beat, the crunching of the stomach, the pain in the bones – as I realized through Vipassana – taught me how everything is fleeting and intransient, and that realization in itself was the greatest philosophical revelation.

Thus, in a nutshell, physics and chemistry do not teach us how electric bulbs work or how medicines work. They teach us how we don’t exist as a concrete self but rather as minute small units of atoms and molecules, and how there is no greater truth than acknowledging the intransience of nature. That, coincidentally, is what the Bhagwat Geeta, a seminal piece on Indian philosophy teaches, that atma is intransient and we must acknowledge the intransience with “stit-pragna” or disinterested alertness. It also what historiography teaches us that every narrative is transient, true-r to the moment it exists, and then un-true for next, as also our entire trajectory of scientific knowledge, which as Isaac Asimov explains magnificently, in “The relativity of Wrong” where he argues that physics theories are never really right or wrong; rather they are outside the binary distinction of right or wrong, and what happens is that theories gradually get improved in such a way that they are always a bit less wrong than the previous version, which means there is no ultimate theory that is going to be permanently absolutely right.

That’s how my world just shrunk into one cohesive truth - one size that fits all disciplines. And trust me, that feeling is wonderful.