by M. N. KRISH
But he was in for a pleasant surprise this time. The disciples at the monastery – snooty brahmins he’d heard so much about – turned out to be a lot more hospitable and friendly than he had expected. Most of them were householders, not monks, and many of them even boasted immediate relatives in the US. They welcomed Joshua so warmly that it put all his apprehensions to rest. When he explained his intentions and sought their assistance, he was granted free access to the monastery’s library. Mahalingam, an administrative officer who also doubled up as the caretaker of the library, was assigned to help him in whatever way necessary.
With his foot in the door, Joshua pitched his tent in Kanchipuram. Being a pilgrimage centre it had a few decent hotels for him to stay in though they were no match for the Oceanic. He checked into one and decided not to leave until he turned the library inside out.
He first spent some time superficially reviewing the stale smelling collection in the racks and getting the hang of things: printed books in modern binding, books made of coarse homemade paper, books written by hand, records inscribed on copper plates, bundles of palm-leaf manuscripts treated with peacock oil or other herbal extracts like turmeric paste . . . The library surely did not follow a Dewey decimal system or any other modern calling or tracking system. Even the labels were in Sanskritized Tamil. But Mahalingam – Mali – knew off the top of his head what was stacked where – stashed being the more appropriate description. He helped Joshua size up the collections with ease. Once Joshua got the general view of things, he began to plough through them in detail, rack by rack, section by section, with the guidance of Ramanathan, a pandit at the mutt. While Mali had given Joshua a helicopter tour of the place, Ramanathan took him through the streets and by-lanes, helping him with the nitty-gritty, providing patient, elaborate answers to the questions he kept asking: What is this? What does it mean? Where is this from? When was it written? Which language is it in? What is it about?
The texts in the collection were mostly devoted to religion, rituals and philosophy. Though the borders separating them were blurry, it looked as if it was philosophy that got the short shrift of the three. But it made sense. Religion and rituals had a more immediate role to play in modern life. Common people could always be drawn to take interest in them with the lure of material wellbeing, whereas philosophy did not have any such appeal; one did not turn to philosophy unless driven by a deeper urge or intellectual curiosity. Joshua resisted that urge and curiosity with an iron will and turned his focus on rituals. The pandit Ramanathan’s stock-in-trade was philosophy and he had been dispatched to Joshua’s side mainly for that reason, but Joshua ended up picking his brain for smaller stuff like rites and ceremonies.
When the ancients mentioned ‘rituals’ they meant it in every possible sense of the term. It was as if an individual’s life was nothing but a long chain of rites that began before they were conceived in the womb and did not end even after they died and turned to dust in fire. A clinical precision was demanded of every single aspect of daily life: how to rise from the bed, how to urinate, how to defecate, how to wash up, when and how to take a shave, how to take bath, what clothes to wear at what stage in life, how to worship the morning sun, how to sit for study, what rhyme, rhythm and intonation to use for chanting mantras, how to synchronize one’s respiratory cycle with mantra chanting, how to beg, how to donate, how to worship the afternoon sun, how to cook, what kind of lunch menu and taboos to follow on what day of the calendar, how to serve the dishes, how to pray before food, how to eat, how to drink, how to wash after food, how to introduce oneself to strangers, how to wash up after returning home, how to worship the evening sun, when and how to eat dinner, what dinner dos and don’ts to follow on what day, how to go to bed, how should that bed be made at each stage in life, how and when to make love . . . There were ISO-like specifications, sutras, governing every mundane domestic activity one could think of. They turned from strict to stringent when it came to higher things like ceremonies and sacrifices. There was an entire body of Kalpa Sutras which laid down all the rites and rules in black and white.
These Kalpa Sutra rules were not written down on any medium initially but passed on from one generation to the next by verbal propagation through the gurukul tradition. It frowned upon writing as an inferior mode of disseminating scriptural information as it did not capture the exact sound and intonation of words; it preferred incantation and recitation over reading and writing as the primary mode of teaching. All information was poetically encapsulated into a mantra and chanted by the guru at a specific rhyme and rhythm and students sat at his feet and recited them until they committed everything to memory. Some of the brighter students graduated to the position of a guru and the system carried on, without any need for written records, a practice that was responsible in part for the virtual monopoly of brahmins over scriptures and rituals.
It was sometime in the second or first millennium BC when the first written records of the sutras and other Vedic literature began to emerge. Given that the sutras were compiled by different gurus separated by time and distance, they did not always tally with one another. This gave rise to different ritual systems over time. Families affiliated themselves with a particular guru or system and followed their prescriptions. While there were a dozen or so such gurus whose ritual systems gained a wide following over time, there was one whose system was particularly demanding of the lot: Baudhayana. While all sutras insisted that a cook making food for brahmins had to take bath and wear freshly washed clothes, Baudhayana went a step further, insisting that the clothes should be soaked in water and worn dripping wet, without even being wrung by hand first, a custom followed by brahmins to this day.
In addition to tackling such nuts and bolts of quotidian life and establishing moral and legal codes of conduct, Kalpa Sutras also nailed down the rules for conducting ceremonies and sacrifices to propitiate Gods and ancestors: what ceremony to conduct when, what postures to adopt in front of the sacrificial fire, what offerings to make to the fire, how to drop sacrificial objects into the fire, how to actually start that fire, what kind of fuel to use, how to prepare the venue of sacrifice, how to lay out the ground, what shape and form of fire-altar to use for what purpose, how to go about constructing that altar . . .
With the word sutra conjuring up Panini’s rules on grammar and syntax, the pandit Ramanathan already had Joshua’s interest. When he dropped terms like shapes, forms and construction, Joshua’s ears pricked up like a prairie dog’s. He knew this was where he had to dig deeper, and dig he did.
If one part of Kalpa Sutras dealt with the actual conduct of ceremonies and sacrifice, there was another part named Sulba Sutras that was devoted exclusively to the layout of the venue and construction of altars. As with other sutras, Sulba Sutras too had branched and evolved into different schools over time. Several systems of Sulba Sutras and their variants had come down through the ages, each formulated or compiled by a different guru with six of them acquiring major following: Kathyayana, Apasthamba, Manava, Baudhayana, Ranayani and Trahyayani. The Baudhayana school, which insisted that people cooking a meal for brahmins ought to be dripping wet in the kitchen, stole a march over the other schools even in the specifications on sacrificial grounds and fire-altars.
Dated to around 9th century BC, Baudhayana Sulba Sutras described techniques for building fire-altars based on painstakingly precise mathematical formulas, including what became famously known as the Pythagoras Theorem. The altars had to be flawless in shape, size, proportion and construction to please the Gods and ancestors and bring forth heavenly bounties upon earth. The slightest deviation was believed to nullify the effects of the oblations made to the fire. The sutras adopted a well-defined system of scales and measures to check and ensure such degree of accuracy. The dimensions of the altar and bricks were measured in units like purusha, pradesa and angula and tolerance levels were sized up as a fraction of the thickness of a sesame seed or tila. The sutras described step-by-
step construction procedures for all types of altars so that the desired geometric perfection – error tolerance trimmed down to a thousandth of the thickness of a sesame seed – could be achieved as efficiently as possible, in the smallest number of steps.
Joshua left Kanchipuram after three days, with a thorough grasp of the Sulba Sutras. The realization that their construction techniques were rooted in geometry and essentially mimicking the steps of an algorithm sent his brain cells on overdrive. He began to develop his own corollaries and arrive at new generalizations even before he left for Madras. By the time he boarded his flight back to Boston, he had mentally mapped out a spanking new method for carrying out a host of power series computations in an efficient manner, achieving the desired level of accuracy in fewer steps or iterations than other methods already in use.
Joshua could see that the new technique had the potential to speed up common financial computations, particularly those involving Discounted Cash Flow, Net Present Value, Internal Rate of Return and various types of interest calculations. All the same, he also came to recognize the barriers that stood in the way of putting them to common use. While the workings of the method were easy to visualize as they were based on geometric principles, they were difficult to implement algebraically in a computer. The geometric method had to be first converted into a numerical algorithm before it could be used. Even so it would require extensive programming and development efforts to be of value to smaller firms. However, large financial institutions where such calculations were made millions of times every day stood to gain significant savings in computer processing costs by using the new approach – provided they were willing to take the risk and make an investment upfront. The constraints on practical utility notwithstanding, the new method was of definite academic value and Joshua decided to write it out as a research paper and get the idea out in the world.
~
Joshua paused, took a sip of his beer, sank a fork into a pakoda and gazed at Lakshman.
Lakshman remained quiet for a moment, almost mesmerized. Having never heard of Kalpa Sutras or Sulba Sutras, he had more than a few arcane details to grapple with. He was on top of the technical stuff without any difficulty, but the minutiae of rituals and sacrifices had his head spinning. But that did not prevent him from spotting a missing link in the story. ‘What you say sounds great, Josh,’ he said. ‘I mean, I wouldn’t even have imagined such a thing was possible, coming up with something new based on formulas from 800 BC. But what does all this have to do with Jeffrey Williams?’
‘Everything,’ Joshua said. ‘When I decided to go to Kanchipuram, I figured I should take someone along to help me with things there. You were not going to be around so I had to look for someone else. There was this brilliant guy in my group who was almost done with his post-doc and I decided to rope him in. . . .’
‘Jeffrey Williams?’ Lakshman asked.
‘In flesh and blood,’ Joshua nodded. ‘Or, flesh, bone and marrow, as Zen people say – we’re talking Kanchipuram after all,’ he added, and bit into the pakoda.
19
Jeffrey had landed in Madras – recently rechristened to Chennai – a day before Joshua was to arrive after wrapping up his consulting engagements in Bangalore. He picked Joshua up at the airport and they had driven straight to Kanchipuram from there.
Jeffrey assisted Joshua in many ways, at Kanchipuram and later, scribbling down notes, recording Joshua’s random thoughts, taking down Ramanathan’s explanations of the sutras and analyzing them from different angles – geometric, algebraic and algorithmic – and working on the new approaches and extensions proposed by Joshua. They had a day to kill in Madras before boarding the flight back to Boston and Joshua made sure it was well spent. They stayed within the cosy confines of the Oceanic – dividing the time between his enviable suite, the multi-cuisine restaurant, the opulent lobby and the colourful bar – and thrashed out all the possibilities that popped up in his head. Joshua let go of Jeffrey only when compelled to do so by the boarding call at the airport. He was travelling first class and Jeffrey was in coach and went conveniently missing during the stopover at Heathrow where they had to switch flights for Boston.
Joshua summoned Jeffrey to his office the day after they landed in Boston for another debriefing session. Halfway over the Atlantic, he’d had some flashes on speeding up financial calculations with the new method and wanted to explore them further. It was during this brainstorming that he managed to understand the difficulties in putting the method to practical use, making the quantum leap from geometry to algebra and turning it into useful computer code that could be embedded into a commercial system with all the bells and whistles. He figured the best thing to do was to publish the findings and get the idea into the world with his name attached and asked Jeffrey to come up with the first draft of the paper as a co-author. Jeffrey’s post-doctoral stint was drawing to a close in a few weeks and he was all set to join Tennessee Dennis University as a tenure-track assistant professor starting in fall. Writing the first draft of the paper would be his last assignment for Joshua. Joshua asked him to turn it in before he left so he could take it from there.
A week went by and then Jeffrey came to see Joshua on his own. Joshua was on a tight schedule, but Jeffrey had somehow wangled an appointment through Nancy. Joshua did not even know that he had a meeting with Jeffrey until an alert popped up on the computer screen a few minutes before.
Joshua froze in shock when he saw him come in through the door.
Jeffrey was a regular at the gym and generally boasted the looks of a Greek sculpture of yore: a mesomorphic muscle mountain with vein twistings like wriggling serpents. That was how he was even after the return from India. But one week on, he’d withered into a pale distant shadow of his old sinewy self. Shedding several pounds, dark rings under his bleary eyes and spring missing in his stride, he walked in like a stiff-legged zombie.
‘Jeff, what happened to you? Are you all right? I thought you took all the shots before going to India?’ Joshua said. It wasn’t Jeffrey’s first trip to India but Joshua’s own experience told him one could catch the Delhi-belly bug anytime. ‘You could take some time off and see me later, you know.’
‘I’m fine, Josh,’ Jeffrey said. ‘Doing great, in fact. I have someone who wants to meet you. I set this meeting up for him.’
‘Who might that be?’
‘His name’s Edwin Miller. Why don’t I let him introduce himself? He’s waiting right outside. I’ll just bring him in if it’s all right with you.’
Joshua was somewhat puzzled. But he said: ‘By all means, go ahead.’
Jeffrey returned in a jiffy with Edwin Miller. Joshua stepped out from behind his desk to receive him in the sitting area at the far end of the room.
In his late thirties or perhaps early forties, decked in a three-piece suit, hair slick with mousse and parted at the side, Edwin had all the trappings of a corporate solider. Just like Jeffrey, he too seemed like a fitness freak. His breath smacked of a rotten mix of cigarette and cinnamon chewing gum, which was doing a poor job hiding his habit. With a vise-grip handshake which removed all doubts about his gym addiction, he introduced himself as a good friend of Jeffrey’s and handed Joshua his business card. His title: President and CEO, ChiP Tech Solutions.
Joshua shepherded both Edwin and Jeffrey to the couch but Jeffrey excused himself from further discussion. It was a one-to-one and he’d rather not interfere.
Joshua kicked it off as soon as they settled down on the couch. ‘So what brings you here?’ he asked without beating around the bush.
‘I’ll cut to the chase, Professor – I know you’re stretched for time. I understand from Jeff that you’ve been busy in India, cooking up a new algorithm. ChiP Tech would like to swoop in on it before anybody else does,’ Edwin said.
Edwin had Joshua reeling off the first ball. The most basic rule of research was that you keep your cards clos
e to the chest until your work is published. You don’t let details of your work slip out and make it easy for others to lift. It didn’t take an Einstein to know this. Even so, Joshua had taken no chances and made it clear to Jeffrey on the first day he showed up to work for him: Don’t submit anything anywhere, don’t share anything with anybody without consulting me first. He couldn’t believe that Jeffrey would let Edwin in without his consent. Not only had he told him about the method, he had even filled him in on their little expedition to India.
What else did Edwin know?
Joshua decided to find out.
‘Tell me this, Ed, how do you happen to know Jeff?’
‘Oh, he and I are old friends,’ Edwin said. ‘Same fraternity: Vega Vanna Vomma.’
‘What makes you interested in our work?’ asked Joshua.
‘The central idea,’ said Edwin. ‘Our forte is banking and financial services. Our client portfolio includes all the biggies: Citi, Chase, BofA, Fleet . . . you name it. Your algorithm could come in very handy in our client implementations. We see it enhancing our core competencies and boosting the value proposition of our services as we move up the chain and expand into mission-critical offerings; our solutions are going to have a lot more oomph with the algorithm added in. For a price, of course,’ Edwin said. ‘How does two hundred grand sound to you, Professor?’
Joshua maintained a studied silence and a poker face, unsure how to react.
‘That’s just the upfront advance, of course,’ Edwin continued. ‘Once the paperwork assigning the IP to us is done, another two hundred shouldn’t be a problem.’
Joshua nearly fell off the couch. There were algorithms that were worth millions of dollars and then there were those you could give away at every street corner and yet no one would touch them with a ten-foot-long pole. The one he had on hand belonged to the latter category. Or so he had thought till now. He was still grappling with this, when Edwin spoke again.