Ever since I was a kid I have wondered what living beings are. What exactly is the difference between a dog and a rock? Are they made out of different stuff? How did they come to be? For the longest time (till the age of 12) I believed that dogs and rocks are simply made of different stuff. Nobody taught me that. It just made kind of sense. Rocks are hard and stationary, whereas dogs are furry, they have muscles, and are full of energy. They are just different. When we learned things like "human body is 65% water" the confusion started creeping in.
When I got older, I started to understand that our bodies are made of the same stuff as all other inert material - carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen etc. I heard statements like "scientists simulated early earth conditions, and amino acids (basic building blocks of life forms) were generated." I could not bridge the gap between molecules and life forms. How can presence of bricks mean buildings can be formed?
The more I knew, the more questions were formed. If plants are living, being then that means movement is not necessary for something to be alive. But how did living things come to be? When? Why?
All my questions were answered when I read the "The selfish gene" by Richard Dawkins. If you have not read it, please do. It paints a picture, a possible pathway of how molecules evolve into complex living organisms. (description of replicator to living beings journey).
Once you understand this the whole living versus non-living question is seen in completely different light. If you imagine your lineage far enough back, your ancestors will slowly start looking different and different. And at one point you will come across the original replicator molecule. You are certainly alive. And your hundred-million odd generation ago ancestor is a molecule. "He" is not alive. The question is, where do you draw the line? At what point in this lineage do you say this is where "alive" begins and "non-living" ends?
This problem is not trivial. It arises in the first place because like any other gray matter, this is a continuum. We discovered some obviously living beings, and some obviously non-living beings. We created the classes, the words, first and then started to populate those classes. Anything that we come across, now necessarily needs to go in either one of them.
Even the qualities that we associate with the living are not polarized quantities. Let me list some of the obvious ones.
Ability to move, to reproduce, to consume energy. But even these three are not without problems. Fire consumes energy. Fire certainly moves. And yes, it does reproduce itself. You can construct the same argument for water. I am not trying show that fire and water are living entities. What I am saying is that we do not have any specific objective test that tells us that something is alive.
Beyond these three the others start becoming little questionable. For example some definitions of life include
(Invitation to Life,: H. Curtis and N. Barnes, Worth Publishers, 1994)
1. They have the capacity to replicate themselves.
2. They have enzymes, and complex proteins essential for the chemical reactions needed for life.
3. Have a memebrane that separates the cell from the environment and gives it a distinct chemical identity.
The number 2 and 3 in this list smack of attempting to cleanly break the long chain of ancestors down into two classes. However the words "enzymes, proteins" imply a specific type of life. The need for a membrane and mention of cell is simply an attempt to draw a line in the sand. You and I don't have a "cell membrane", our cells do. We have skins. So according to this definition, you and I are alive, at the same time the billions of cells inside our bodies are life forms on their own. They do divide and replicate, you know.
The truth of the matter is that no matter how finely or broadly you try to draw lines, it is not possible. It may be useful to draw the lines somewhere. But we have to keep in mind that instead of making two buckets like living and non-living, we must accept that we what call "aliveness" is a continous variable. It is not a 1 - 0 property. Each entity has some properties of being alive. So you can probably assign a score that goes continuously from 0 to 1 and say that there is some degree of aliveness.
This sounds strange, but the strangeness is due to our predetermined conception of having two buckets - dead and alive. Yes or no. We don't entertain the huge range of phenomena that are "partly alive". And then wonder how come we have the gap. The belief in God or the supernatural comes entirely from this perceived gap. Only God (means no one except by miracle) can bridge this gap.
Friday, May 23, 2008
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
There is no such thing as Indian food
I am an Indian, living in the US. So I get asked a lot of questions about Indian Food. "Do you always cook Indian food at home?" "How did your mom cook naan, did you have tandoor at home?" And countless others.
I try to answer as politely as possible. No, we don't cook Indian food at home all the time, in fact my wife loves to cook different cuisines every day. No, we did not have tandoor, and my mom did not make naan even once. Rarely do I tell the real truth about Indian food. There is no such thing as Indian food.
This sounds a little crazy, after all when you go to a typical Indian restaurant in the US, there are those staples of tandoorie chicken, butter chicken, chicken masala and naan. Those certainly are Indian food, aren't they?
Yes they are.
So am I talking about the fact that they originated around Persia and were brought to India by Muslim rulers?
No I am not. If a food item is consumed in a sizable part of India, for last few hundred years, I don't give a damn about where it originated, and who brought it. It is Indian food.
Now I just gave definition of what Indian food is. How can I then say there is no such thing as Indian food?
Well, let me clarify. What I mean is that a typical foreigner has a specific idea of what Indian food is - mostly based on their experience from rastaurants. That includes some specific dishes, made with a set of ingredients and spices. The problem is that a huge majority of the Indians hardly ever eat that food. This is because of plethora of reasons - the typical North Indian dishes mentioned earlier are not part of the traditional diet of Southerners, and the Westerns and the Easterns. The other reasons are that many of them contain meat, which a lot of people don't eat because they are vegitarians or because they can't afford it. I for one, came from a family that had a traditional food from my state, and it did not include almost any dish from those available in a typical "Indian" restaurant.
India is a place where diversity rules. We have hundreds of languages, with thousands of different dialects. If you asked, what is the Indian language, there is no single answer. The same goes with the food. There are different flavors, spices, ingredients used in different regions. The quisines change by the region, by the religion, by the cast and the subcast. In that sense all those foods are Indian foods, yet there is no single set of dishes that we can call Indian food! True, we can accumulate all the dishes that are consumed in India in a sizable quantity for large enough number of years and call them Indian Food. And that will be different from a similarly gathered Italian food. But the two populations will be enoromously complex compared to the simple foreign-restaurant-Indian/Italian-Food. The restaurant food is just one edge of a tip of an iceberg. It is just one facet of the whole jewel that is Indian food, not unrelated to the rest of the structure, but simply does not do justice to the entire picture.
To explain this phenomenon in mathematical terms, imagine a space of recipes. Some of the axes will be ingredients, cooking times etc. This is very hard to do, but nevertheless, it can be done. In this space a particular dish can be represented by a point. The same dish with everything exactly the same, but extra salt will be another point right next to it, shifted by the amount of salt on the salt axis. So if you make the same dish multiple times, it will look like a tight bunch in the space, no two dishes are exactly same even though made by the same person. If you look at the same dish prepared by thousands of different people, it will appear as a much loser bunch in this space. Now, if you look at all the dishes that have been made in India for the past 500 years, say, you will a complex structure. Closest anology I can give is that of a tree. The branches of this tree may correspond to different regional cuisines. The leaves represent individual recipes. The real picture will be complicated based on which angle you look at it. For example bread and naan will have similar location along the ingredient axis. However, if you look at the cooking method axis they will be farther away. Kind of like looking at our tree from top down or from sideways. Two particular leaves will appear at the same location if you look from above. However, if they are at different height, you will see the difference when you look at it from the side.
Indian food is just an example of other larger more potent simplification problems. Grouping some things into one group is certainly not wrong. But forgetting that there are other things out there that belong in the group is definitely a problem. We use the words like jews, muslims, blacks in a single breath and make statements about them. (need some examples). What we know of that category, comes from a collective experience. This experience may not necessarily represent the whole population. But we nevertheless make those statements about the tip, about that one facet. It is like looking at one bunch of leaves and talking about the shape, size and expanse of the tree.
I try to answer as politely as possible. No, we don't cook Indian food at home all the time, in fact my wife loves to cook different cuisines every day. No, we did not have tandoor, and my mom did not make naan even once. Rarely do I tell the real truth about Indian food. There is no such thing as Indian food.
This sounds a little crazy, after all when you go to a typical Indian restaurant in the US, there are those staples of tandoorie chicken, butter chicken, chicken masala and naan. Those certainly are Indian food, aren't they?
Yes they are.
So am I talking about the fact that they originated around Persia and were brought to India by Muslim rulers?
No I am not. If a food item is consumed in a sizable part of India, for last few hundred years, I don't give a damn about where it originated, and who brought it. It is Indian food.
Now I just gave definition of what Indian food is. How can I then say there is no such thing as Indian food?
Well, let me clarify. What I mean is that a typical foreigner has a specific idea of what Indian food is - mostly based on their experience from rastaurants. That includes some specific dishes, made with a set of ingredients and spices. The problem is that a huge majority of the Indians hardly ever eat that food. This is because of plethora of reasons - the typical North Indian dishes mentioned earlier are not part of the traditional diet of Southerners, and the Westerns and the Easterns. The other reasons are that many of them contain meat, which a lot of people don't eat because they are vegitarians or because they can't afford it. I for one, came from a family that had a traditional food from my state, and it did not include almost any dish from those available in a typical "Indian" restaurant.
India is a place where diversity rules. We have hundreds of languages, with thousands of different dialects. If you asked, what is the Indian language, there is no single answer. The same goes with the food. There are different flavors, spices, ingredients used in different regions. The quisines change by the region, by the religion, by the cast and the subcast. In that sense all those foods are Indian foods, yet there is no single set of dishes that we can call Indian food! True, we can accumulate all the dishes that are consumed in India in a sizable quantity for large enough number of years and call them Indian Food. And that will be different from a similarly gathered Italian food. But the two populations will be enoromously complex compared to the simple foreign-restaurant-Indian/Italian-Food. The restaurant food is just one edge of a tip of an iceberg. It is just one facet of the whole jewel that is Indian food, not unrelated to the rest of the structure, but simply does not do justice to the entire picture.
To explain this phenomenon in mathematical terms, imagine a space of recipes. Some of the axes will be ingredients, cooking times etc. This is very hard to do, but nevertheless, it can be done. In this space a particular dish can be represented by a point. The same dish with everything exactly the same, but extra salt will be another point right next to it, shifted by the amount of salt on the salt axis. So if you make the same dish multiple times, it will look like a tight bunch in the space, no two dishes are exactly same even though made by the same person. If you look at the same dish prepared by thousands of different people, it will appear as a much loser bunch in this space. Now, if you look at all the dishes that have been made in India for the past 500 years, say, you will a complex structure. Closest anology I can give is that of a tree. The branches of this tree may correspond to different regional cuisines. The leaves represent individual recipes. The real picture will be complicated based on which angle you look at it. For example bread and naan will have similar location along the ingredient axis. However, if you look at the cooking method axis they will be farther away. Kind of like looking at our tree from top down or from sideways. Two particular leaves will appear at the same location if you look from above. However, if they are at different height, you will see the difference when you look at it from the side.
Indian food is just an example of other larger more potent simplification problems. Grouping some things into one group is certainly not wrong. But forgetting that there are other things out there that belong in the group is definitely a problem. We use the words like jews, muslims, blacks in a single breath and make statements about them. (need some examples). What we know of that category, comes from a collective experience. This experience may not necessarily represent the whole population. But we nevertheless make those statements about the tip, about that one facet. It is like looking at one bunch of leaves and talking about the shape, size and expanse of the tree.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)