To cut a long one short..

    I like long sentences.

    To be more precise, I like sentences which, unlike those that you find yourself uttering all your life in most acoustic forms of communication, are generously worded, as lavishly punctuated as can be, precariously worked upon (can be compromised with skill) and polished to verbal perfection, posed to leave the casual reader lost for an interpretation, offering to him their true arguments and implications only upon atleast a second reading, holding him back and drawing his attention as less complicated wayward statements of thought seldom can, stimulating those mental faculties that, in a sizable portion of the populace, lay dormant until presented with a stimulus that to them seems vivid enough to be worthy of their consideration, the parsing of which calls for marked patience and a realisation of the oft ignored importance of every single comma and colon, and which, while not all the time resorting to pentasyllabic words or far-fetched metaphors, manage to leave the casual reader stumped for a few seconds by the sheer complexity in their structure and formulation, and at the same time are not vague rantings of an incongruous mind, but at the end of all the effort, convey to the patient (or skilled, perhaps) interpreter the precise ideas and bits of information that the writer meant them to.

    So yes, I like long sentences.

    From what I've heard, the supposedly phenomenal Ulysses, by James Joyce, has, in its last chapter, a sentence consisting of over 12,000 words. (I've heard lots about that book. Should read someday.) In contrast, my personal best happens to be a page long on a scribbling pad on the futilities of the Indian educational system (an all-time favourite topic; definitely a post on that soon).

Now, I have two theories as to why I like using long sentences:

1)  I try to cover up my inadequacies in writing in terms of lack of involving content and inability to present in a humourous or forceful manner my thoughts.

2)  The "intellectual stimulation" they provide appeals to my rarely exercised . 

   It is not for me to comment on the first point, but as for the second, I always preferred House M.D. to sitcoms, and Memento or The Usual Suspects to American Pie. Humour, of course, is a different aspect and commands importance on its own merits.

    The brain, I have often heard, is much like any other muscle in the body- it can be exercised to further its potential greatly, but the exercise is not to cease if one wishes to keep one's bean toned and up for action. Disuse begets slackening. In accord, it is essential to occasionally engage in activities that strain one's mental capabilities, reasoning, lingual or otherwise, and which are at the same time fun. Framing or even parsing "long sentences" (see definition above), for example, is one such activity. (Avoidance of anything related to the study of Chemistry is a significant other)

     These and a couple of other as wondrous and perhaps as individualistic activities such as my harmonica and some sociology fill up whatever free time I get. Trust me, its fun to be busy. :)

The science of consideration

The bible of online information, the mecca of the seeker of knowledge, the knight in shining armour of the helpless student with an assignment due tomorrow and with no idea what its topic is about, the encyclopedia built on wikis , holds the following opinion:

Science (from the Latin scientia, meaning "knowledge") is, in its broadest sense, any systematic knowledge-base or prescriptive practice that is capable of resulting in a prediction or predictable type of outcome.

As the article goes on to mention, science, under a stricter definition, is any systematic study carried out by "the scientific method". The scientific method, as I remember reading a long time ago, refers to the process of observation and  acquisition of data, formulation of a hypothesis to explain the observations, and subsequent testing of the hypothesis by further experimentation. In simpler terms, you look at stuff and try to explain it off.


So, what "stuff" do you look at as subjects of study in the course of your mundane existence on this forlorn planet? In school, its balls and slinky toys. In college, perhaps diffraction gratings, colorimeters, or the rare specimen of the fairer gender (though with considerably less success as compared to the other topics). But what about the much more common elements, like say, the fullstop and the comma, or the throes of passion and the pleasure in humour? These are generally topics left for linguists, cognitive psychologists and other such specialists.


So, I figured, why not, with the playful curiosity of a young adolescent kid uncorrupted by 'education', explore these less frequented domains of study? Of course, these searches for the truth in each case can only be shallow, for I am neither a specialist in any of these fields, nor am I in possession of an intellect broad and magnificent enough to have an insight of any significance in anything whatsoever. Such an exercise, I believe, shall not only help understand a whole load of stuff better, but shall also serve to develop skills of reasoning and deduction, which can only be honed by constant practice


Hence, in that spirit, I propose to "publish" over here the results of a few of my exploits. (well, I need to maintain a record somewhere, right?).


As with all sciences, we start with an axiom- something that cannot be proved or derived from anything more fundamental. Following my fancy of fancy names, I call it "The Axiom of Consideration" :

Anything can be considered scientifically.

 What that implies is that one can take the scientific method, and apply it to any subject of one's choice, be it grammar, baldness or wheat fields, and actually hope to obtain some sort of an insight into either how the subject works, or how it behaves to a particular set of stimuli, or something similar to what physicists look for in particles and chemists in test tubes.


Now, it is not without some reflection that I decided to take this up as an axiom. For a lot of us would prefer that certain emotionally significant topics like friendship or love would rather be left as they are, unfathomable and mystical. I felt this myself, and I would like to mention here that rationality is quite different from insensitivity. Knowing how something works doesn't take the fun out of it, just as the knowledge that all emotions are nothing more than a few thousand electrical signals in the brain doesn't stop you from being happy or sad. (unless you happen to be a stage magician, where you're broke if you broadcast how your tricks work). So, I figured, the axiom is actually a swell idea to begin with.


I'm working on questions right now, and though not much progress has been made, I can now decorate my language with a brand new set of vivid constructs. Like, for example:

Random bloke: May I ask, when will your blog next be updated?

 Me: (with straight face) I do not know, but the answerablitily of that particular question happens to possess a non-trivial degree of temporal dependance.

Random bloke: Vada pochae...

So long then, either until I'm done on questions or until I find something interesting to write about.