Micro-meanderings — 1

A drunkard’s walk through Bengaluru and the philosophy of micro-improvements

At the outset, there are three concepts.

A drunkard’s walk is a stochastic process that idealises a protagonist in infinite space: all directions open to him, the verisimilar fluctuations of chance toppling him toward life or death. When I learnt this in 2014 atop barricaded apartments of the Indian Institute of Science, the metaphor stirred me more deeply than the math. Its physicality was not approximated by mere equations.

Bengaluru is a city at first glance. On closer inspection, it may be a rumour or a doughnut, or battered pages of a book accidentally dropped — a cliff-edge? — a place that exists in different spaces, different topologies, different worlds. Its nature: a something-scape with a wobbly prefix, points toward its conceptual status. Bengaluru needs unpacking.

Micro-improvement is an approach toward school improvement that helps break down big objectives into small, measurable steps. Since last year, it has driven school action across India. Like all ‘approaches’, it casts a long philosophical shadow. Like all philosophy, this shadow creates fiction: it pronounces into existence what did not exist (a metaphysics), a way of knowing it (epistemology), a way of being comfortable about it (ethics) and a way of experiencing it (aesthetics).

For a year, I have been approximating these concepts in various capacities: the revisioned drunkard’s walk, the envisioned micro-improvement and the visional Bengaluru. For a year, I have been reflecting these visions. This follows.

Subdivision

A while ago, in a short story, I discussed subdivision as a civilisation-building strategy, emphasising its techno-managerial aspects. Primarily an alien love story, the piece was my attempt at describing a Post-Fordist world where ‘break it down’ held constructive connotations. About how analysis: the task of shearing away, simplifying, cleaving, dropping a grenade and shattering into a thousand similar pieces is routinely attached to synthesis: the task of joining, creating and the act of parturition. Imagine a world where this routine attachment is disrupted, I thought, and churned out a 6000-word diatribe against nothing in particular.

Concepts aside, I had mischaracterized subdivision as a descendant of vision, which becomes division by orthographically accumulating and semantically separating, which becomes subdivision by further orthographically accumulating and further semantically separating. Mischaracterisation, because the words subdivision and vision are distant cousins, not grandparent and grandchild — their lineage is complicated by an overlap between close Latin roots, at least to the extent that I researched this issue. In the story, Gri’al and his mirror believe that ‘Seeing is Being’ while the humans argue that ‘You cannot See where you cannot Be’. The horror! An entire narrative laid loose by a linguistic error, an entire fiction collapsing under the weight of its buckled columns.

The logic of subdivision, hitherto untouched by my antagonistic pen, parades around with its aide: isomorphism, in an early reading of the micro-improvement concept. Micro-improvement appears first in its analytic avatar, a breaking down of something complex, many-faceted, into something simple, uni-faceted. It then flips to reveal its synthetic end, as a brick and mortar element, a building block, of the same complex process that we broke down. In a process of layering, sequencing, integrating different but identical micro-improvements together, a big objective is realised. The logic of subdivision, thus, must be carefully considered.

Displacement

In Aspinwall House in the Kochi Biennale, the art is arranged in rooms, antechambers, galleries, corridors, gardens, beachfronts and streets. The bends of a residential bungalow create a narrative out of a photo-story, where on turning a corner I discover with incredulity family photos that abound. Darkened corridors depicting gender and claustrophobia open up into dingy washrooms and roving projectors and static screens take on the physicality of surveillance cameras in a panoramic vision of Mumbai. In between the conflation of spatial form and artistic content, a few signs depict a gallery map, mark an arrow and say, ‘You Are Here’.

‘You are Here’ is an arrival myth, as if a long-lost lover suddenly rose up mid-work, remarking at my presence. Not quite believing that I would come, they falter a bit and say, ‘You, Here’, the ‘Are’ in a perpetual statement-question interposition. ‘You are Here’ is also an authoritative shackle, as if the sign did not want gallery viewers to be too transported into the world of art. ‘You, Here’ is an assurance, with the ‘Are’ as a guarantee of Being. What of the arrow? The arrow is a translatory signifier: the ‘here’ within the ‘here’, the mover of ‘here’ to not really here but ‘there’. ‘You Are Here’ is a lie in its very constitution, since the arrow, arbitrarily long, takes away the gaze and makes it rest in a different place, before epiphany. Ah, I say, and understand at once the lover, the authority and one’s geographical location — statements, questions, diagrams all resolving into a unity of understanding and doubt. I feel ‘placed’ even as I am ‘displaced’, from my body onto a map, from the map back into the physicality of the room and its three-dimensional arrangement. I realign my bearings, retrace and trace a few steps and head in a direction.

I have lived in Bengaluru for four years now and changed as many residences during my stay. I have always opted to shift with a coterie of select furniture — a table here, a cot there, and a roster of utensils that get shunted into progressively smaller spaces. There is a point in the journey between home to home, where the pickup truck opens up into a cavernous void: into a space wide open yet locked in, hollow but dark, where objects that enter on one end emerge as something else on the other. The furniture arrives, pre-made into each new house or is discarded into disuse. The furniture, like in another untold story I wrote a long time ago, accords meaning in ways that I least expect it to. To understand Bengaluru, thus, I have to understand the logic of this displacement.

Substitution

A more recent piece, more salacious than the last, began as an experiment in substitution. A nose, I thought, was a phallic protuberance — may not a man legitimately touch his nose erotically? The nose has a strong tradition of such symbolism in literary history; I was not breaking new ground. But for my protagonist, floating in a swell of speculative fiction that had washed over me, the nose in flesh was the site for further substitution: with the nose of another, for instance, in part-homosexual, part-transsexual fantasy, and eventually with a nose cast in metal. While writing the story, however, I found myself at the off end of a strange feeling — one that concerned my own nose.

At the end, the man, anonymously named, walks into a parlour to get his nose drilled away. The effect was difficult for me to reproduce since I shied away from the notebook, edging away from the imagined effects of imagined words that were never penned. Typing, considered a more distant enterprise, did not help either. There was a fundamental distaste about the entire affair that I could not get past: the last part of the story thus arrives after an astounding three-month delay.

The man was not immune from this delay either. The metal nose comes across as cold and unfeeling. Its descriptions are neither as colourful nor as evocative as ones for the nose-in-flesh, the organicism of the latter replaced by the mechanism of the former. Of course, the man is a ghost, the substitution of an author for another (for ghostwriting) and a man for a shell. Substitutions are not precise but approximations of near-precise events, stacked one on top of another. A ghost becomes the most layered of all transparent entities.

A drunkard’s walk describes the long-term behaviour of a series of probabilistic events. Semi-precise in the sense of being probabilistic, the walk resolves itself by mathematical self-substitution. The trick is to play within the infinite, to translate space this way and that and argue that one is always beset within the same rules. In fact, for a drunk man who remembers no history, who wakes each time a new step is taken and who has no landmarks to hold on to, each moment is a substitution for the previous one, remarkable in its homogeneity.

To understand a drunkard’s walk, therefore, it is important to understand substitution.

Layout

This series offers several juxtaposed parts.