identity through art

haha! this was in 2005, 11 years ago. thx APAA (Asian/Pacific Islander/American Association of Greater Rochester) for producing the documentary “identity through art,” which included this interview. it was a prelude to much film and art making for me and a definitive divergence from finance and economics.

Clips from my interview for the doc “Identity Through Art” directed by Rehema Trimiew and produced by APA-Hip, 2005.

weekend in canada

what an amazing weekend in canada! i got to spend time with a dear friend from college and was blown away by her entire family’s warmth and hospitality. my mom and dad accompanied us, which made everything more special. i got to visit two of my cousins and their families, and my daughter got along beautifully with all her new found brothers and sisters. we attended the wedding of a wonderful young man whose parents are close rochester friends. throughout this trip, we enjoyed hakka chinese, chicken biryani, some serious barbecued meat, delicious homemade koftas and karhi, and pakistani mangoes that transported us back to lahore. my daughter got some gorgeous mehndi and bangles in order to celebrate the first weekend after eid and we got to try doubles (a sandwich made with flat fried bread filled with curried chick peas – popular street food in trinidad and tobago) as well as bolani (fried or baked afghan naan with a vegetable or ground beef filling). thank u to all the lovely family and friends we met on this super busy trip, especially our generous hosts. my only regret is that i didn’t take more pictures.

mehndi

wedding

family and friends

my uncle atique ahmed passes away

yesterday i found out that my uncle (my mom’s brother) passed away on june 6, 2016. atique mamoon lived in london most of his life. he was an outstanding student and athlete at government college, lahore, where he excelled at soccer, field hockey and squash. he joined the pakistan air force and later emigrated to the UK. he was a dashing, debonair man, an intellectual who read voluminously and appreciated art and beauty. the love of his life was a german woman, gaby wolff, whom he met in london in the 70s and who shared his passion for travel and scholarship. they decided not to have kids and lived a cosmopolitan, unorthodox, and fully-realized life together.

but my eternal gratitude for atique mamoon’s independence of mind stems from something personal. my grandfather died when my mom was a mere child, soon after the 1947 partition. when it came time for her to go to college, the family had to consider all the expenses involved in sending her off to lahore. but atique mamoon, who was still a young man getting started with his own career, committed to supporting her education at his alma mater, the prestigious government college. that’s how my mom ended up graduating from GC, and meeting my dad, who was her classmate there. my siblings and i wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t been for atique mamoon’s belief in education and his unwavering love for his little sister. may he rest in peace. surely we belong to god, and to god we return.

atique ahmed
atique ahmed

Alain Badiou: “Happiness is a risk that we must be ready to take”

Alain Badiou: At root the common consciousness also shares this conception of the rarity of happiness, even if it masks or hides it. Hence, I think, the extreme (I wouldn’t hesitate in calling it lyrical) importance of love in this matter. Love, passion, meeting someone, are thought of as exceptional moments of existence, and everyone is well aware that these moments signpost what we can truly call happiness. Clearly it’s entirely desirable not to be unhappy. But real happiness takes a lot more than just not being unhappy. Happiness can’t just be a simple negation of unhappiness: it is a present, a gift from life that goes beyond the order of satisfaction. A gift from life that we must be ready to accept, a risk that we must be ready to take. It is a major existential choice: either a life that’s only open to satisfaction, or a life that takes on the risk of happiness, including as an exception.

[…] Benjamin proposed a fibrous conception of time, according to which there are many times: there is no single, common time, but a multiplicity of tangled and sometimes contradictory temporalities. And it is clear that the time of happiness – including in a political sense – is a time that goes beyond and in a sense destroys ordinary temporality. In philosophy, the twentieth century (with the theory of relativity and Bergson) was a moment when the multiplicity of temporalities was explored. The question of happiness takes its place within this framework. The time proper to truths, be they mathematical, artistic, political or the truths of love – the time of happy subjectivation – is the time of the consequences of the event, which can’t be situated in the course of ordinary time. It is necessarily the time of a split, a rupture, an exceptional time. Accepting the consequences of this temporal exception means forging a different time. That’s what common sense ultimately means when it says that lovers are alone in the world. Alone in the world – that is, alone in the time that constitutes this couple, which does not share, or no longer shares, ordinary time. That is a general characteristic of real happiness: the same is also true of a mathematician who resolves a problem, working alone. How, then, can a collective happiness be built, in these conditions? If enthusiasm is the affect that corresponds to political happiness, it is because it marks out a new time in common. Enthusiasm denotes the moment when individuals become subjectively conscious that they can make history, and not just undergo it. So enthusiasm is the shared conviction that we can make history, that history belongs to us and, as Françoise Proust declared, that history is not over yet. It is the sharing of an intensity, of a demonstration, as we saw in the public squares of the Arab Spring. But it is also the maintenance of a state of exception, through the laborious work of what we call political activism properly speaking (interminable meetings, leaflets written at dawn); and I can tell you, political happiness is also exhausting. That has to be said. More here.

a small, intimate iftar

my daughter and i had a lovely iftar at a friend’s house tonight. we broke our long fast with dates, crispy samosas and cool water. my friend made thai chicken curry with potatoes, white rice, and mashed sweet potatoes for dinner. we had baklava for dessert. her roommates joined us and we all partook of this wonderful food together. it’s the simplicity of ramadan that makes it so beautiful. thank u dear isabelle!

Your brain does not process information and it is not a computer

Robert Epstein: A few cognitive scientists – notably Anthony Chemero of the University of Cincinnati, the author of Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (2009) – now completely reject the view that the human brain works like a computer. The mainstream view is that we, like computers, make sense of the world by performing computations on mental representations of it, but Chemero and others describe another way of understanding intelligent behaviour – as a direct interaction between organisms and their world.

My favourite example of the dramatic difference between the IP perspective and what some now call the ‘anti-representational’ view of human functioning involves two different ways of explaining how a baseball player manages to catch a fly ball – beautifully explicated by Michael McBeath, now at Arizona State University, and his colleagues in a 1995 paper in Science. The IP perspective requires the player to formulate an estimate of various initial conditions of the ball’s flight – the force of the impact, the angle of the trajectory, that kind of thing – then to create and analyse an internal model of the path along which the ball will likely move, then to use that model to guide and adjust motor movements continuously in time in order to intercept the ball.

That is all well and good if we functioned as computers do, but McBeath and his colleagues gave a simpler account: to catch the ball, the player simply needs to keep moving in a way that keeps the ball in a constant visual relationship with respect to home plate and the surrounding scenery (technically, in a ‘linear optical trajectory’). This might sound complicated, but it is actually incredibly simple, and completely free of computations, representations and algorithms. More here.