Gaurav Vaidya

February 29, 2012

Here's the strange thing about being born on the leap day. Most years (exactly three out of four) are just the same as anybody else's: you hit your birthday, think about the year behind you and the months ago, and take the day as a chance to be slightly weird for a bit. Apart from a bit of fiddling about when exactly to celebrate it (Feb 28? Mar 1? Whenever my friends are free, duh), it's just the same.

Not in the years of the Olympics, though. February 29th reminds me of February 29ths which have been -- 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008, 1992 -- and those yet to come -- 2064, 2016, 2032. So much has changed -- ``some are dead and some are living'' and all that -- but so much stays the same. It's strange to divvy up your life into sets of four years -- into Olympiads, if you will -- but every four years, that's what my life feels like.

I had a touch of the depressions earlier in the evening (after yet another amazing D&D game), which is slightly odd, since this is definitely one of my best February 29ths in a while. And yet, and yet. To quote White Teeth, there is a sense of having picked up the wrong jacket from the cloakroom of life. Which is strangely self-contradictory: on almost every measure, my life today is many times better than it has been in years, even in Olympiads. Perhaps that has something to do with it? The feeling that life is almost, but not quite, perfect? The frustration of being at the right place at the right time with the right people but with just slightly the wrong clothes?

Anyway. I'm lucky enough to have been born an optimist (28 years ago today, as it happens), which means that I live in the belief that tomorrow -- tomorrow! -- it's all going to be a little bit better than today. So. So.

Ricardo Reis and me

People who know me know that, even as I acknowledge Lolita as the finest novel I've ever read, my heart belongs to my favouritest novel in all the world, the little known The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, a novel published in 1984 by genius Portuguese novelist José Saramago, who died last June at the age of 87. Saramago wrote Year of the Death when he was 62, and death is very much at the heart of the novel. But that's not why I like it.

On the surface, Year is an almost unbelievably dull book. Spoilers begin: Reis, a nobody Doctor who has lived in Brazil for years, has migrated back to Lisbon after learning of the death of his friend Fernando Pessoa. He spends a listless year falling in love with the young, unobtainable Marcenda, who in her shy way responds to his affection; while sleeping with Lydia, the chambermaid at his hotel, an affair he hides from the world. The ghost of Fernando Pessoa meets him occasionally, bringing wisdom, humor and friendship from a afterlife shrouded in darkness. Twisty plotlines following the state's suspicion of his sudden return to Portugal, the power dynamics at the hotel at which he stays, and his delicate balancing of his two, different loves. And then, on the second last page of the novel, as its title promises, Pessoa's ghost arrives to usher Reis into the afterlife.

So, why the love? I always knew that it was because I felt a link with Reis, buffeted by the forces of love, desire, boredom, fear and society, and unable to do more than to batten down his hatches, to take joy in a cold, friendless life when and where he could. Reis is a man who slips so quietly and unceremoniously out of his own life that nobody except the grieving Lydia and her unborn child -- Reis' only legacy -- notice his passing.

Tonight, I compare my behavior in areas like science and Wikipedia -- where I believe I would push to have my way, in some shape and form, if I was convinced that truth was on my side -- with how I act and react to human relationships. The twisty thing about simultaneously feeling worthless and unique is that you never, ever want to stand up for yourself. It's the path in the middle: the worthless part of my psyche insists that imposing myself on another human being is a crime, right up there with talking loudly on a phone on a bus, while the egotist in me insists that, welp, hey, if they don't want to interact with me, it's their own loss.

No, it isn't. And this is important.

Another teeny, tiny little point: there is one, single bit in the entire book where Reis goes out and does something. Knowing that Marcenda is heading to Lourdes in a final attempt to heal her paralyzed arm, Reis heads there himself to plead his case, to risk all in the name of love blah blah and so on and so forth. But, this final foray into standing up for his own affection, to condemn with his actions the line fate has drawn for him, is an utter failure. The lesson learned is not to fight.

Post scriptum (Dec 19, 2011): Bob Corbett reminds me of these glorious lines from the novel:

... human unrest is futile, the gods are wise and indifferent, and above them is fate, the supreme order to which even gods are subject. And what of men, what is their function. To challenge order, to change fate. For the better. For better or for worse, it makes no difference, the point is to keep fate from being fate.

So.

'ere I am (JH)

Man, I am so pleased with my new blog, I'm going to fill it up right now with a rubbish post on what I'm up to right now. Bear with me, people. This is going to be exciting.

Today is July 22, 2010. If all goes according to plan, by this time next year I will be enrolled in a graduate school programme, ideally a PhD programme, starting on a course of research which will stretch into 2015 and beyond. That's my next decade settled, more or less, if I can just get this started.

Why a PhD? To start off with, there's the job: long hours, yes; hard work, definitely. But also continually interesting stuff, with a lot of self-direction, and - a big win for me - the ability to create things to give away, be it software, data or content. Besides, the fields I'm interested in are really popping. The book of life is being compiled, on Wikipedia, on the Encyclopedia of Life, and in a dozen other places. A humongous amount of biodiversity data is being collected and stored and used. I'd hate to miss getting in on the ground floor of this - in a decade or two, the formats are going to solidify, the databases to be established, the toolset to be decided. Now is the time to really make something special here.

So that's my PhD dreams. With any luck, I'll have this website set up soon, and then it'll be time to e-mail people and see if they can come true. Until then, I reside in a lovely part of Paya Lebar, Singapore; I've got a great job at PaperTerminal, where I work on OCR Terminal and a handful of other projects across three programming languages, two operating systems, and a completely crazy number of ancillary tools.

So: life is good. Well, okay, maybe not that positive: life is satisfactory. Life is alright. And, with any luck, getting better all the time.