Trapped in Algorithm

I have the habit of scrolling through comments on youtube videos while listening to videos - this is especially the case for songs, since it's the audio rather than the video that is of interest. Most of the comments are cliched and inane, some deeply personal and poignant and there is always a sprinkling of genuinely unhinged comments where you hope the commenter is seeing a therapist or has friends in the real world. 

On the video to a rather popular, mainstream song (it has over 900 million views), I read a comment that said "I really miss this song". I paused for a moment to understand the comment - how can you miss a song that you can choose to listen to anytime you want? Pretty much every song ever made is a few clicks of a button away for most people.

I pondered a bit and understood what the commenter meant - it wasn't that he/she missed the song, but rather the time period in which the song came out. I'm sure we all have this - you listen to a song and this takes you back to a very very particular time when the song was popular or when you first came across the song and heard it several times within a short period. 

The songs of the movie gaaLipatta take me back to the summer holidays of 2008, when I would spend the entire holidays either with my cousin visiting my home or vice versa, and most of the days were spent playing cricket on the street. The songs of Yeh Jawaani hai deewani remind me of the monsoon in Pune, since the movie was released in the rainy season of 2013, around the time I shifted from Bengaluru to Pune for college. That year saw a particularly rainy August in Pune and I enjoyed my initial days on campus, away from the city and traffic, surrounded by hills and greenery. (A funny aside - in that period I had just switched from a rudimentary Nokia phone-brick to my first smartphone. The Nokia phone could store at most 2-3 song files before running out of memory, one of them being the song Kabira from this movie. I somehow transferred this song file to my shiny new smart-phone and so it was the one song that I could listen to in the days of 100 MB/month of 2G internet. My flatmate said that whenever he wanted to find me, he would just wait for 5 minutes and move in the direction from which he could hear Kabira playing. :D )

Somehow these songs get interspersed with your life and memories. And nostalgia is always sweet - hindsight makes everything feel sweeter. You might have been miserable in the winter of 2015, but listening to a song associated with this period will make you feel like you are being reminded of some "good old days". I guess the point isn't that the days were good - more that the company of the song was good, even if the times were generally miserable. 

I have a set of songs which take me back to a very particular time in my school  days - those were the days when the bus driver would switch on the radio on the school bus. And the radio would also keep me company while I studied late in the night. When the wind was blowing in the right direction and it was late enough that the general noise of traffic in the city had died down, it was possible to hear the sound of a train horn from the window in my room. Whenever I visit home, even the distant sound of the train horn late at night is enough to bring back a flood of memories, a feeling of being transported back in time.

Recently I was doing some routine chores on my own with some music playing on youtube and something about the list of songs chosen by the youtube algorithm annoyed me - it was repetitive. I had heard the same songs in almost the same order a few days prior. I scrolled through the list of songs in the automatically curated playlists and saw the same theme - they were all songs I had relentlessly listened to in the previous few months. They weren't recently released songs - some were old songs. But they were all songs I had recently searched for. 

Maybe this is particular to the Youtube algorithm rather than algorithms in general, but the repetitiveness of the songs youtube suggests has started to get on my nerves. Songs that made me feel pleasant a few weeks ago now feel jarring. 

It's at times like these that I miss the days of the radio - it may seem quaint and naive, but I liked it when someone else made the choice of what I will listen to. What we have today is an excess of having exactly what we want all the time. We want the music that falls on our ears to exactly match our mood and mindset at that instant. And a small deviation can get us annoyed. And sometimes you want to listen to something, but you are not sure exactly what you want to listen to - all you know is that it's not any of the songs Youtube is recommending. 

In the days of the radio, or music channels on TV, you just made it through all those advertisements and annoying promotions by the host and listened to whatever was on. When it was exactly what matched your mood or it was the song that happened to be stuck in your head, you were overjoyed. If it wasn't, well, hey at least something was on. 

But for me this is beyond nostalgia - with radio, you got these songs that were insanely popular for a few weeks - they would play it literally every hour. And then they would fade away. You would forget them after a couple of months. But maybe 3 months later, you would hear it again. Then maybe 5 months later. It very naturally fades away and you move on slowly to the next nice thing. 

If you truly liked a particular song or a set of songs, you made the effort to go somewhere, actually pay money to buy a CD (or a casette if you're older than me), maybe painstakingly make your own compilation by burning some CDs. 

Today, we theoretically have all the options, but we are simply redirected constantly to the same stuff. When we had just one newspaper delivered home, we just read what was on it. Today we have information about almost any topic right at our fingertips and yet we easily get stuck in little echo-chambers of people who all think, speak and act in exactly the same way as us. There's no slow, constant change. 

You jump rapidly from one thing to the other, and somehow stay on the same things all the time.

Balance

"The basis of morality is the application to human life of the principles governing the universe, and the great principle of the universe is beauty."

Shri Aurobindo

My blog generally avoid topics related to my (modest) practice of and thoughts on religion. This is probably because I come from a family where my elders, particularly my (late) grandfather, are extremely well-versed in many aspects of religion and are far more disciplined and faithful practitioners than me, so I feel rather unqualified to hold forth on it.

In June 2022, I had been to Kedarnath and Badrinath in Uttarakhand for a darshan of Lord Shiva at Kedarnath and Shri Narayana at Badrinath. This wasn't my first time visiting this part of the Himalayas. I had visited Badrinath in 2007 with my family and there was a part of me deep inside that always wanted to return - something about the air and the majestic natural beauty there. At Dev Prayag, the rivers Bhagirathi and Alakananda flow into each other to be known as river Ganga. It is believed that the lands and mountains further upstream from Dev Prayag are no longer part of the earthly domain. Instead, they are inhabited by the Devas themselves.

I remember travelling along the winding mountain roads, the river Alakananda flowing far-away in the valley with an other-worldly blue hue. I remember marvelling at the mountains all around, their peaks seeming to penetrate the blue sky. There is something magnetic about these mountains that makes you want to keep returning there, to breathe the same air once again.

Before departing from Bengaluru to Badrinath back then, we had read about the boulders which frequently get dislodged from the mountain-side on to the road, often triggering landslides that sometimes hit vehicles. One report said that an entire bus was knocked off the road into the river below, claiming tens of lives. This was just a few days before we made our journey. 

Perhaps it was this memory that was fresh in my mind at that time, but at some point a thought entered my head - if I die here, it's alright. What a beautiful place to die. I still wonder from where this thought came to me. I was only 12 years old. I was not a fatalistic person as a child, nor am I one now. I had never grappled with such ideas. I had not yet really seen seen the death of anyone close or well-known to me.

My experience was not the same during last year's visit. There was construction debris and dust everywhere along the road from the plains to the Dhams. Relentless construction work and massive crowds made it look like the land of the BBMP rather than the Devas. It must be said that once you actually reach your destination, you leave behind what you felt during the journey and only feel happy that you have reached. 

A while after returning home, I quickly penned down some of my thoughts and feelings regarding what I saw. I had forgotten about this write-up in my mobile notes. The recent news on the danger of the town of Joshimath sinking entirely reminded me about the note and I felt it's worth reproducing.

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Dharma is an ultimate order of the universe - the laws that have to be followed and maintained, not because some person prefers them that way or deemed it to be the best way, but because the universe is that way. Any questions on why it is so can be taken up with the creator of the universe.

Every object, animate or inanimate, has a Dharma, a certain nature and a certain way that it has to be. Again, the reason is that it was so ordained. Not to minimise evil or "for the good", but because the creator manifests in the universe in this form. He is in every pebble and grain of sand, in His entirety.

When we interact with nature, we are interacting with the divine. When we interact with other people and animals, we are still interacting with the divine. And deep inside us, lives the divine, hoping to be realised. And when you realise It, you will become It, unshackled from this petty world of attachments and desires, anger and jealousy, hubris and illusions.

The order of the universe is balance. The order of nature is balance. We may take away from Her and plunder today, but we will fail in our Dharma.

When I visited Badrinath in 2007, I was still a very young boy, but it left a fairly deep impression on me. It was a sleepy, inaccessible town, deep in the mountains, bitterly cold with very few people visiting there and even fewer living. It was nature unspoiled.

I wouldn't call it divinity unspoiled, because divinity is always pristine, and can never be spoiled or soiled. The rose and the thorn are still expressions of the divine. The difference is in our accessibility to the divine. 

 

Why do we worship a particular stone and not another one when both have within them the divine? - Because in one stone, the divine presents Himself more easily to us. The truly learned man, who has attained ultimate wisdom, cannot see this difference. Mere mortals still chained to the endless cycle of birth and death are forced to reckon with this difference. 

But why do I speak here about nature, Dharma, balance, divinity and Badrinath?

I visited Kedarnath and Badrinath earlier this year, in the height of summer. While the plains were still sweltering in the searing sun, Kedarnath was still cold and almost hostile. Thunder and freezing rain welcomed us as we were weary from walking for over 12 hrs, around 20 km and a vertical ascent of one mile. And let us say one thing for sure - when you catch a sight of the temple, when you are standing there while the aarti is played on the loudspeaker, while every breath fogs in the air and you can longer feel your naked feet in the puddles of freezing rainwater as you wait to enter the temple, you understand that you are in the vicinity of divinity, accessible to everyone. A force that drives the universe through cycles of creation, preservation and destruction. Srushti, sthithi, gathi.

But the climb was very different. We witnessed a path completely covered with the excrement of horses, extreme crowds. It felt more like a marketplace on the eve of Ganesh Chaturthi or Sankranti than a walk up to a small town deep in the mountains. And the horses, oh the horses. The poor animals could hardly carry themselves up and down the arduous path, let alone the human atop them. They were battered and beaten by their caretakers, a cruelly ironic way to describe those young men who brutalised and terrorised scores of animals to take them to Kedarnath.

A few incidents remain etched in my memory. A man taking charge of more than one horse had one horse that was "misbehaving" by refusing to walk uphill and constantly slipping and falling in the slurry of dung, mud and rainwater. He had to go back and get this horse to behave. He handed his stick to his client atop the horse and said "Beat the bastard if he won't move."

The client recoiled. How can I, he asked earnestly, beat an animal, that too at a sacred site? He was a decent man who probably had no prior idea about how the horses were treated. He had already paid for the transport up the hill. He was clearly filled with guilt, but he also wished to glimpse the Lord at the end of the climb. He didn't wish to turn back after coming so far and he was physically incapable of climbing.

The trouble is that Kedarnath is MEANT to be a sleepy little, inaccessible town deep in the mountains. A few sturdy, locally bred horses that are sure-footed in the mountains could perhaps take a few devotees up to Kedarnath. They would be fed well, not suffer in the cold, be well-treated and allowed plenty of rest.

But if Kedarnath becomes a cool place to click a selfie for Instagram, if shopkeepers are eager for people to throng the site for the good business and the authorities too have a vested interest in keeping this economy alive, if we want development and 4-Lane highways, we must understand that we are destroying a carefully crafted, harmonious balance of nature. And it is we who pay the price, we who carry the sin of beating and overworking innocent animals to death. We who will look down to enjoy the flow of the surging Mandakini deep in the gorge only to be met by the site of plastic bottles swirling in her waters. Yes, we may have acted responsibly and thrown our used bottles in the garbage bin, but little did we know that the shopkeepers might not share our divine concern for the Earth and will simply overturn the filled bin straight into the river.

Yet, she roars on. She will roar forever, plastic or no plastic. We are around for a few days, is this what we want to leave behind? When we take more than what is meant for us, we also leave behind more. Upsetting the balance leads to the performance of Adharma. Adharma takes us further from salvation, tying us closer to rebirth, again and again. The Adharma of beating horses, destroying forests and desecrating divine lands.

Plastic high in the mountains, dust from construction, dammed rivers in seismically active areas, mistreated animals, but we get our 4-lane highways.

Jai Badri Vishal