The Beautiful and the Damned (15 page)

Like Chak, S.S. was a Tamil Brahmin who had grown up in Madras. His had been a similar middle-class upbringing, and his journey towards becoming an engineer seemed to partly have been a matter of eliminating things he cared about, from cricket and television shows to Carnatic classical music. He had moved to Bangalore a few years earlier, and he was quite settled, married, with an apartment and a car. The same habit of thrift that made him avoid expensive cafés also determined that he used his car very sparingly, so that even though he had to come a long way to meet me, he had taken a bus.

S.S. had got married two years earlier. His bride had been selected for him by his parents, who had looked among relatives for a suitable match, comparing horoscopes. S.S. didn’t think this was unusual in any way. ‘The temple has always been in my ambience,’ he explained, and an arranged marriage was part of that ambience. It was part of his Hindu cultural inheritance, as were the sacred texts of the Vedas, in which he found both scientific rationality and an advanced aesthetic sensibility.

S.S. had attempted a similar synthesis in his own writing, although when he started writing poetry, he was mostly just trying to capture his ambience, including that of the temple. He had chosen to write in English, for which he’d trained himself by methodically reading
other Indian poets also writing in English. He had attended a poetry workshop, and his poems had begun to appear in small Indian literary journals. S.S. later emailed me some of these poems, and when I read them, I liked them for the snapshots they provided of his world, with some sharply observed details.

Yet these poems of S.S.’s, important though they were for him, took second place to the form of poetry he claimed to have invented. These consisted of ‘nanopoems’ that brought together the realms of engineering and poetry. S.S. wrote the nanopoems in a binary language of zeros and ones, and what made them special was that he inscribed them into the computer chips he designed at work. The chip design was part of his job, the nanopoems were not, but his employers were aware of what he did and were quite encouraging about it.

‘There’s a lot of space left on a chip after you put in the circuitry,’ S.S. said. ‘I fill in some of that emptiness with a nanopoem.’

In writing poems in the binary language of mathematics, S.S. was echoing – unconsciously or consciously? I never had a chance to ask him – the efforts of an Indian writer from 200
BC
called Pingala, who had created the first known description of a binary numeral system in an attempt to describe prosody. The nanopoems S.S. wrote were, however, singular in that they were invisible to the naked eye. When I asked S.S. who he imagined his reader to be, he replied, ‘An engineer at the other end.’ Somewhere in the United States, an unknown engineer would be checking the chip design when one of S.S.’s poems would appear suddenly under the microscope, a part of the chip that had nothing to do with the efficient, functional circuitry that made the chip work. The testing engineer could decide whether to let the poem remain, and if he did, the design would be sent back to Asia, to a manufacturing facility in Taiwan. It would then get replicated in every single chip with that particular design, a poem with a print run of millions that would be read by no one other than the solitary, anonymous engineer.

S.S. and I met up again a few days later to talk about the nanopoems. Although I had suggested we go to one of the cheaper coffee houses he frequented, S.S. insisted on the Barista outlet. He preferred
to interact with me on neutral ground, where he would perhaps not have to reveal too much of himself. We sat on a small outdoor deck and looked out at the shoppers parading down Church Street, an occasional working-class man stopping at the liquor store across from us to have a quick shot of Old Monk rum from its pavement counter.

S.S. had brought me a book, a slim yellow volume with the magnified image of a computer chip on the cover. It was self-published and had the modest title
100 Poems
. All the poems included in it were nanopoems, which suggested that at some level S.S. did want readers other than just one engineer at the midpoint of the production cycle. The nanopoems consisted largely of sequences of ones and zeros, although S.S. occasionally used other mathematical signs or letters from the alphabet. They had conventional titles (‘Sunflowers’, ‘In the School Auditorium’, ‘Shooting’ and ‘Binary Porn’) and from the photograph in the book of a nanopoem on a microchip (‘Game’), it seemed that S.S. used similar short titles in his chips.

Once the novelty of the approach wore off, there was a certain monotony to the binary sequences. Sometimes, they went on and on, as in ‘Fireflies’, which spread across two pages like a virus, and sometimes they were quite short, like ‘Common Centroid Sheep’, which read:

S.S. said that the numbers in his poems carried a special significance, as did the title
100 Poems
. When I said I didn’t understand, he scribbled down the following sequence in my notebook.

It made no sense to me, but the pattern had some kind of numerological significance for S.S. He began to talk about how proud he was of inventing the nanopoem, and that a short piece on this had appeared in
The American Scholar
. He had been inspired, he said, by a Chilean poet called Raúl Zurita who had written poems in the sky with the help of an aeroplane. S.S. had gone in the other direction from Zurita, choosing to focus on the minute, on what could be read only by an engineer’s cyborgian eye, part human orb and part microscope. The near invisibility of the poems did not mean that S.S. was deliberately seeking anonymity.

‘You know how they find pottery shards in archaeological digs?’ he said. ‘The inscription on such a shard might be all we know about an ancient civilization. I sometimes think that the same could happen with one of my chips. Chips get thrown away after they are used. Millions of them. They don’t disintegrate. It is possible that a chip might be all that is left of us, to be discovered by some other civilization that would then find one of my nanopoems on the chip.’

S.S. had struck me as remarkably polished when I first met him. As he spoke of civilizations and immortality, I felt the same about his world view, running smoothly from ancient Hindu texts through the present to a future where all that was left of human civilization was a chip containing one of his nanopoems. I wondered if there were any edges at all in the plane of his existence, if there was something that would shake up his unsmiling, intelligent and always composed face.

I asked him if he talked about poetry with his colleagues, or of the world that he tried to capture in his poetry.

‘We don’t talk about other things at work,’ he said. ‘We work.’

I asked him how he felt as an Indian and as a Hindu about the inequalities evident in the country, especially about the hierarchies of caste.

‘I don’t disturb the environment,’ he said calmly, ‘and I don’t want it to disturb me.’

Our session was nearly over and S.S. was getting ready to leave. I lingered on the word ‘environment’, and somehow the image that
came to my mind was of millions of chips sitting in the earth somewhere. I didn’t know if chips ever disintegrated, but according to S.S., they didn’t, and so I asked him, ‘What do you think about global warming? Climate change?’

S.S.’s face finally began to exhibit something like tension and unhappiness. ‘I don’t know what global warming is,’ he said tersely. He listened carefully to my rambling explanation. Then he replied, ‘I haven’t heard of global warming until now and so I do not have an opinion on it.’

Later that evening, I got a phone call from S.S. He said he would prefer it if I didn’t write about him. I asked him why, feeling certain that he was upset about the questions I had asked him about inequality and global warming. He was indeed perturbed by this. But what worried him even more was the possibility that I wouldn’t give him credit for inventing the nanopoem.

‘I don’t want you to write that some person has invented the nanopoem,’ he said, sounding increasingly anguished. ‘I want it to be made clear that I invented the nanopoem. Otherwise, I would prefer it if you didn’t write about me.’

A few days later, S.S. sent me a long email. It was polite and thoughtful, grappling quite sincerely with the question of the relationship between his poetry and the larger world. He spoke admiringly of Raúl Zurita, the sky-writing poet who had a background in engineering and mathematics and who had identified with the Chilean people oppressed by the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. But he also referred to Indian women poets who had written about widowhood and about not wanting to have children, and maintained that these were ‘purely personal choices of individual selves and if it has to be applied to a larger mass of people, it needs to be time tested’. I got the sense, from the email and from our phone conversations, that S.S. was saying his ‘immediate surroundings’ were more peaceful than Zurita’s Chile and that he didn’t have to take an immediate position on social questions. In some ways, he was right. He lived in a democracy, in the relatively peaceful surroundings of Bangalore. If there was turbulence here, it wouldn’t be easily visible to someone like him.

Yet there was turbulence even in S.S.’s placid life, and that was clear from the rest of the email.

I had asked S.S. why he thought personal credit was so important, given his admiration for the Vedas, whose authors were, after all, anonymous. He had been rather annoyed by this sophistry on my part. He didn’t think the anonymous authorship of the Vedas was relevant to his concerns. Perhaps it wasn’t, but the stridency of his tone in talking about inventing the nanopoem offered a sharp contrast to how measured he was in all other ways. I had struck a nerve somewhere, and if at the beginning of our interaction S.S. had hoped for some publicity, he ended it with the fear that I would indulge in intellectual property theft.

S.S.’s interests had led him to the chip even when he was being a poet. His was the song of the engineer, communicating not with just any human listener, but with another engineer. His poems appeared in a realm beyond the human eye, hidden, for the most part, inside a computer, and visible, briefly, under a microscope. They were written to function in a dimension beyond human time, speaking to future civilizations.

I wondered if there were engineers who went in the other direction, towards the human sphere, into the world rather than away
from it. There has long been a rhetoric of social change around the IT industry in Bangalore, promoted heavily in the media and in countless best-selling books that assure the reader that a new technological approach is putting an end to old social inequities. One day, I met up with Sugata Srinivasaraju, the
Outlook
journalist who covered the IT industry quite extensively, and often in relation to the larger society in which the industry functioned. Srinivasaraju’s take on the issue was far more critical. He spoke of the engineer’s perspective on Bangalore as a combination of the traditional and the modern, as ‘technofeudal’, viewing the city and its environments as a neutral and apolitical space. He said that the IT industry in Bangalore and in India had never acknowledged that its success was built on the infrastructure created by the old Nehruvian state – the engineering colleges with their subsidized fees, the state industries like HAL that created a manufacturing and technical base – and instead indulged in anti-government rhetoric while continuing to depend heavily on the government.

Srinivasaraju also spoke about how engineering had become a Brahmin occupation. The liberalization of the Indian economy in the early nineties had come directly after affirmative-action policies promised quotas in state jobs for traditionally oppressed castes and tribes. When the upper castes began to fear that they would be shut out of their traditional dominance in the civil services, they began to move en masse to jobs in the private sector, especially in technology. Srinivasaraju’s perception of the upper-caste dominance in the IT industry is supported in studies made by social scientists like Carol Upadhya. She has written, for instance, that the perception of IT jobs as being dependent solely on ‘merit’ is not borne out in empirical surveys. She discovered instead that engineers were ‘largely urban, middle class, and high or middle caste’. As Arvind of A Fuller Life had put it, they possessed a tighter distribution in terms of homogeneity.

There is also something Brahminical in the very way engineers perceive their work around computers, if by Brahminical one means the idea of exclusive access to knowledge that cannot be shared with commoners. There is no glamour in India, for instance, associated
with being a civil engineer, and in this it differs remarkably from countries in the West, where, through the nineteenth and a great part of the twentieth century, the civil engineer has been celebrated for his rugged masculinity, especially in the way he dominates nature by building dams and bridges.

Today’s Indian middle class, in contrast, celebrates the engineer-entrepreneur who makes money or the engineer-functionary who sits at a workstation. The cubicle is clean, air-conditioned and unpolluted, while the factory is dirty and physical. The cubicle is Brahminical, the factory is Sudra, the realm of the low-caste crafts-person. Seen from this perspective, S.S.’s nanopoems could easily come across as Brahminical, part of a techno-millennial Hinduism where a secret, and sacred, text is passed on from computer engineer to computer engineer.