LIFE WITH MOM #3 [LAST DAY(S) - 3]

My sister and I reached home by 2200hrs on the 7th of May 2011. All along we were silent because we were being dropped by my colleague; we did not want to discuss the god man in their presence. Nor did I want to broach the subject of what transpired between them and the god man. First, neither I nor my sis was nosy. Secondly, we were too weighed down by the atmosphere at home. We just politely enquired if the visit was worth all the effort, to which they informed in the affirmative. By the time we spoke a few words, we were near home.
We entered home and moved into our rooms. I met mom talked to her for a few minutes and went off to bed, upstairs. I did so because Gita was there of take care of mom. My wife was all along cursing my having chosen to meet the god man, more so when I shared with her, some of this god man’s observations and comments. I pacified her not to bother and tried to steal some sleep.
I heard a knock on our room door urgently and my niece calling out desperately, around 0315hrs. I ran downstairs. My niece Shalini told me that my mom had asked for me to be called to her bed. I found my mother sitting wide eyed. My sis told me quickly that my mom hadn’t slept after 0000hrs. But she was speaking and requesting for her leg to be massaged.
My mom told me to call the doctor as she was feeling very uneasy. As she insisted on calling the doctor, though I wasn’t sure if the doctor would make it to our house in the dead of night, I did call him. There was an urgency to and importunate sense to her demand. I found that her breath was labored, so I felt may be she is low on glucose; she had not eaten anything that night; I quickly mixed some glucose in water and was trying to feed her a spoon or two, when I found that the water trickled down from her mouth, her gaze became fixed, and light had gone out of her eyes!
I exclaimed,[B] “Gita Amma is no more!”[/B]. My mother was leaning on my sis and facing me when all this happened. My sis immediately tried cardiac resuscitation by mouth-to-mouth, then pounding the chest etc., but to no avail. My mom had left her mortal coil. I checked the pulse. It had flattened. Mind blanked out, my sis Gita held mom cradled in her hands and was desperately calling her out. She felt mom responded. All of us were struck dumb. I looked at my watch it was 0345 hrs. The date was 8th May 2011!
By the time we picked up our senses, we heard the doctor’s knock on our front gate. I opened the gate. Dr.Chandrasekhar Adiga walked into the room where my mom was laid, and declared my mother dead for about 10 minutes, after he had finished applying medically certified checks. He said we had done what would have been done, by a trained medic - he was referring to the resuscitation efforts that we had done. The silent stalker had come in stealthily with hardly an indication – my mom was a diabetic, for whom the coming of a myocardial infarction would be undetectable. Her nervous system played truant. Well, that was the medical cause of death.
My mother had passed away in wee hours of the 8th of May 2011. It was, as per International convention, the Mother’s Day! So, memorably we had lost our mother on the Mother’s day. It was Mesha-Shukla-Panchami, the day Shankara Jayanti is celebrated in Shankar Mutts all over India.
Now is the time for me to once again indulge my passion – to delve into the manner of passing over to the other side of an individual evaluated against the Bhagavad- Gita Vakya. The time of My mother’s passing away was Uttarayana-Shukla Paksha-Panchami- brAhma-muhurta all pointing to an upward movement for the Atman_karmasharIra combine.
I checked up with my sis if my mom was remembering God’s name during the lucid interval. My sis said the previous few hours she was repeating the Lord’s name all through her laboring through the heart attack and the uneasy period before the coming of the actual attack. It gave me some satisfaction. But the last words on her lips were my name – the nickname [Raja] which could be considered- going by Vedic standards- very remotely as connected to Chandra. But then what was the image in her mind? That is a mystery. The day of passing was auspicious by all means. But was my Mother a mokshagAmI Atman? That is a mystery again. What were the last thoughts on her mind? Was she fixated on me or The Lord?
Taking into account the circumstances of her passing away -the timing- the day, the time of day, and the time of the year are all very excellent, and my mom’s moving into a higher yoni [B]is certain.[/B] But The Gita says, to be part of The Lord the exit must be as follows:
ओमित्येकाक्षरं ब्रह्म व्याहरन्मामनुस्मरन् ।
यःप्रयाति त्यजन्देहं स याति परमां गतिम् ॥8|13॥
This couplet gives what a person must do to make his exit from the mortal coil to result in a flight to the feet of the Lord. Lord Krishna says, “He who shall depart from this world repeating the single syllabic OM which is synonymous with God [Brahman], and remembering Me-Lord Krishna- the manifest Godhood, shall reach the Final Abode-that of Liberation and freedom from the shackles of births and deaths. This is the idea fundamental to Sanatana Dharma. This couplet makes it look very simple.
However for this to happen, the person must be conscious till the moment of the Grand Exit. If one is blessed to be so, then that is the first best thing. My mother was conscious till the last moment.
अग्निर्ज्योतिरहः शुक्लः षण्मासा उत्तरायणम् ।
तत्र प्रयाता गच्छन्ति ब्रह्म ब्रह्मविदो जना: ॥ 8|24॥
The couplet above details the time of passing. The first four wordsand the fifth a phrase: <1> agniH (fire), <2> jyotiH (Light),<3> ahaH (day time) <4> shuklaH(White-Fortnight), and <5>ShaNmAsA-uttarAyaNam (the six months of the Northward movement of the Sun (beginning Jan 15th to July 16th approximately of every year) indicate the brighter side of the time of departure.
The death must occur in the presence of the Sacred Fire <1>—in here, is the reference to the [I]tretagni[/I] – the three-fold fires of the householder; at a place that is well lit<2> in the daytime<3>; in fortnight of the waxing Moon<4> and in that part of the year when the Sun is on his Northward transit<5>. Those who leave their bodies [this is the standard idiom of Sanatana Dharma] they reach Brahman—provided, they have “known” Brahman, before the exit time.

Now, in this 24th couplet The Lord qualifies- the possible “entrants” to the State of Liberation! After stating the time of the day, period of the year, and the part of the month, the qualifying line calls for[B] knowledge of Brahman[/B] to be a pre-requisite. There are three preceding couplets to the 8-13. These describe the preparatory “work” needed to make the exit final. They are as follows:
प्रयाणकाले मनसाचलेन भक्त्या युक्तो योगबलेन चैव ।
भ्रुवोर्मध्ये प्राणमावेश्य सम्यक् स तं परं पुरुषमुपैति दिव्यम् ॥8|10॥
At the time departing from the body he who holds his pranic energy between his brows (concentrated at the Aj~nA chakra) with an unwavering mind, and connects to God either in devotion or with the power of yoga, and holds well, he attains the Great Lord!
सर्वद्वाराणि संयम्य मनो हृदि निरुध्य च ।
मूर्ध्न्याधायात्मनः प्राणमास्थितो योगधारणाम् ॥ 8|11॥
Holding all his exit points-these are supposed to be nine in the human body- called metaphorically the City of Nine Gates-in attention, holding his mind in the heart directing his life force towards the crown of the head if stays focussed at the contemplative stage of the eightfold yoga:Such a yogi who attains Liberation. It looks like a householder could qualify to be such a person.
These then, are the preconditions for a liberation-oriented “exit”. Taken together these steps i.e. 10, 11, and 13 are a tall order. It almost looks like it is all designed for a sanyasi – a renunciate. What would be the fate of the householders then?
This shall be delved into in detail in the subsequent blogs.

LIFE WITH MOM #3 [LAST DAYS -2]

Beginning May 1st (2011) mom’s conditions were deteriorating. She came back home on the 28th of April after being discharged from BGS Hospital. When she was discharged she looked hale and hearty. She was so happy, that on some of those days I had applied leave, to be with her. Sharada Periamma gave a lot of service to mom in those days. The service she rendered need be described in detail. There was a feeling of uneasiness but I kept pushing it away. The food they gave at the hospital, mom felt, was very bland and inedible. Well, it was nutritionist recommended food! They took into account the fact that she was a diabetic. We carried food for Periamma or sometimes we had breakfast/lunch in the hotel opposite. Periamma always requested for coffee and flask-fulls of it, just to keep her going. Periamma survived on over-sugared coffee.
Two days after mom reached home may be on the April 30th or so Periamma left for Hyd. Mom was disturbed that there would no one with her in daytime. Periamma reassured mom that she would be back in a week after attending to the receipt of her pension and settling some commitments at Hyd. Each day I tried to put her back on her heart management medication. The day she took those she lost appetite and sleep. She complained of pain in her legs and asked me, or Li or Ananya to keep pressing her feet, massaging her feet, in downward stroke, knee down. With the doctor’s permission I stopped the heart-related medicine regimen, and to let her sleep gave her mild sedative tablets-sleeping pills. The first two days i.e 1st and 2nd May she sort of responded. She had a reasonably good sleep. May 3rd and 4th I gingerly doubled the dose as it was warranted- the one nightly dose hardly worked; she had a disturbed sleep. She pleaded with me not to resume the cardiac medication. They did more damage to her peace than good she had said. I stopped them all. I used to sit with her in the nights to see her sleep for a few hours. She would just manage a light sleep for, say 2 hours and then she would be wide awake. On 5th May I felt an eerie feeling: may be mom’s not going to survive this! I called my sis Gita and told her she should try to reach Bangalore as early as possible. She talked to her boss and confirmed she would be there on the 7th Morning. Mom was happy and eagerly awaited Gita’s arrival on the 7th morning. I went to receive Gita and Shalini. Mom was so happy to see them come. I had gotten late for office, so I applied leave on the 7th May even though it was a Saturday. The three of us kept mom busy, talking to her about many things. Gita took care of her feeding by making soft rice and rasam mix. Li had, on Friday, fed her successfully this concoction.
On 7th night I had a special request from a colleague of mine. He was to meet a god man who was a Malayalee. Their family was to meet the god man to ask his advice on some family problem. Though I was a little embarrassed, having been asked to be an interpreter when they were discussing something private, I accepted since they didn’t mind. This meeting was fixed in some house which the god man frequented. We were supposed to meet him at 1900 hrs that evening. My sister also accompanied me so that we thought we would ask the god man about the prognosis about our mom’s health.
That evening we reached the place and waited in queue, after an initial puja wherein we –my sis and I recited LS along with the god man, who, I noticed was looking at me very frequently. My colleague’s family entered into private audience and had their ‘consultation’. They came out after 30 minutes. My sister and I entered and started talking to the “swamiji” – I spoke Malayalam while my sis asked him her questions in Tamil.
The swami went tangentially off into saying that I had the blessings of Saraswati, that I knew everything about Mantra Shastra but “cleanliness” [what is called ‘madi’ in most South Indian Languages] was missing; He said shuddham porA. I asked, “In which sense?” I said, “I don’t go to puja unless I take bath- and that too Keralite style a full bath!” He said, “I do not observe the separation needed for menstruating women- i.e. my wife doesn’t observe these!” Now this is a very controversial topic. It would be very difficult to get modern day women to accept such things. “In that case” he said, “Just give up your spiritual practices. Satisfy yourself with just the remembrance of the Lord/Dev!i”, was his caveat. Because of this one thing, he had said, even though Parashakti is pleased with the correctness on the application part of the Mantra Shastra alongside is the kShudra devI who buts in uninvited and was playing tricks with the results.” I asked him about the place of Cleanliness of the Mind and Heart. Wasn’t that important? He declined to answer. He kept insisting that bodily cleanliness was more important in Devi worship. I wanted to put a stop to this conversation as I found that we wouldn’t be able to find common ground.
I was a bit annoyed for my sis and I were there only to know about my Mom’s health and prognosis and not to be lectured on the proper way of dealing with mantra shastra. He then returned back to the subject and gave us what we needed to set some things right. He talked of getting some pujas performed to “cleanse” my mom’s family of accumulated karma born of insufficient caring to the manes. There were some correct statements he made about events in my mom’s life and family background, so I resolved to do the needful should my mom be out of this spell of ill health. The man was so vociferous in his warning that unless I mended my ways about bodily shuddhi in rituals, I mustn’t be seeing him. Fine! I resolved not to see him ever again. I wasn’t in the least bit convinced about his reading of my spiritual engagements. I had better confirmation than that. All said and done I did want to take some of his points and apply though I had zero belief in his way of looking at things from a typical Keralite outlook. Does that mean Keralites are the only ones who had powers of mantra shastra based Divine Intercession? I did not want to buy this. God is for all. Devi included. If Keralites are obsessed with bodily neatness to the point of being fastidiousness, yea it has a weather- basis for that and nothing more. What would someone from say Bengal or Assam or any other cold clime do?
That night we returned home by 2200 hrs. All along my wife was very unhappy about my consulting this god man. Since she refused I had taken my sis along. Even on our return, my wife, after being narrated the whole conversation was very indignant. She was cross with me for having thought about this “consultation”. I just kept quiet. I resolved to do the needful corrective pujas soon after my mother’s recovery from the ill-health.

FUZZY THINKING - BART KOSKO

(THE NEW SCIENCE OF FUZZY LOGIC)
This book was first published in 1993. It must have been reviewed then and may be several times. I would like to write here a review of the book recording my own impressions about this book
I remember reading about Fuzzy Sets as an article by Lofti A. Zadeh in the Information and Control magazine. It was during a Final Year seminar during our Engineering Course that we had presented a glimpse of this concept. After that I must admit we all but forgot about Fuzzy Logic. We had, as one of the papers in Bachelor of Engineering (Electronics and Communications Engg) course, a lesson on Threshold Logic as part of our Paper on Logic Design. Neural Networks was a nascent field then, perhaps.
After I joined a manufacturing company as an engineering professional, I nurtured an interest in Artificial Intelligence, as a personal passion as all my efforts to make it a part of my professional practice came to a naught. In the field of AI I was fascinated by Automated Theorem Proving based on Aristotelian Logic, studied by Logicians as Formal Logic – the so called Statement Calculus and First Order Predicate Calculus. This I think was a carryover of my interest from my college days in Pure Math and Logic. Even though I was a student of Engineering, and if at all natural, an interest in Applied Math would have been most appropriate, I had this interest in Logic and Pure Math.
Even as I studied Logic way beyond the requirements of my scholastic curriculum, there was always one gnawing doubt that was never answered sufficiently by any book on Logic. Books on Logic separated meaning from structure and the Calculus was all about tautological structures and formal constituents of Valid Inferential schema. Central to Classical Logics as they are now called was their binary or bivalent nature. As I progressed through the study, I was even thrilled about successful implementations of Theorem Proving programs based on the Null Horn Clause idea. Though the program itself was ‘creative’ enough to offer, for instance, in respect of one theorem, a proof different from the ones in Euclid’s Elements for a theorem of Elementary High School Geometry, there were reasons that turned me off Formal Logic, as time passed. Godel’s Theorem of Undecidability about the completeness of an Axiomatic System created in my mind a dichotomy about the utility of Logic as a means for implementing Intelligence in Machines. The next to captivate my attention was the concept of Expert Systems and by that time AI as a field, even if considered Inter-disciplinary was losing its sheen. Many thought it was just a sophisticated way of Programming. It was about 1989, I shifted from Logic to Intuition as a means to discovery. Thus, to me Intuition was the source of creative thinking. I was now looking for working on Machine Intelligence by mimicking the workings of the human brain. This is when I came across, a news paper article on what was then called as neo-connectionism or what is presently known by the name Neural Networks. Thus over a decade I had started with memberships to the Journal of Symbolic Logic and shifted to the AI Magazine and last to the Journal of the International Society of Neural Networks. After a time the subscriptions became unaffordable and I had to discontinue.
One more idea that troubled me all those years when I was consumed by a passion for Classical Logic was how it is possible that statements have only a binary truth value! Though I needed a discussion on this topic, I had no one to look up to as no one seemed to be interested in Logic in the first place. My professional company was still less interested as they were people from mainstream manufacturing of proven technological products. Thus there were hardly any who were even interested in these at an intellectual level too as there was no apparent use for these ideas in our day to day professional life. So sad, I did not chance to see the present book in our own library shelf. I vaguely remember a book on Neuro-fuzzy algorithms for Control Strategy implementation, but right now I am not able to locate it. But two years back I thought I must renew my interest in Neural Networks and bought two good graduate level texts on these.
In this book the author laments the lack-luster treatment that the subject of Fuzzy Logic/Fuzzy Systems received in the US. The field according to him has come up to where it is today mainly due to efforts in Japan. He attributes this Japanese preference for this field to their Zen Buddhist background and the comparative lack of interest in the Western countries, to the Aristotelian orientation of all Western Science and Technology.
The author begins with Set Theory where set membership is an all or none phenomenon and makes out the case for membership by “degrees”. Similarly, about statement Truth Values in Logic. The concept of Fuzzy sets and Fuzzy Logic is developed progressively, leading to some computationally important results like the FAT (Fuzzy Approximation Theorem): simply put the statement of the FAT is: A curve (even quite a kinky one at that) could be covered by finite number of fuzzy patches. FAT also says that one could approximate a continuous system (on a closed bounded set) as closely as possible. This leads to an idea of Math Model free estimation. The whole idea of Math Modeling of Real Time systems is to afford design of robust and finely tuned control systems. But then in all but the simplest of, partitioned parts of complex control systems only Math Modeling is possible, or has been useful.
The author laments ad nauseum the scant regard given to Fuzzy System Design. Mainstream S&T tend to pooh- pooh or belittle the development of the idea. This may not be so today as in Japan significant commercial results have been achieved esp. in the intelligent control of home appliances and some industrial processes and in aerospace. Thus if the scientific community refuses to admit the utility of Fuzzy System design on the plea that it lacks sufficient rigor, or the administrators refuse funding for Fuzzy systems research being influenced by the scientific community, then the best route is through the industrial applications generated and/or the commercially successful products released to the market. A part of the profits gained could be siphoned off for research into mainstream control and computational application of Fuzzy system concepts. The author again repeats too often the, funding availability for Neural Network systems as the concepts have been furthered by some rigorous Math! He recounts how he had even obtained funding for Neural Network research which he had combined with Fuzzy System research.
It is felt that if the repetitions were avoided the volume of the book could be brought to about 250 pages, without loss of clarity or intuitive appeal. I have procured a copy of the author’s standard text Neural Networks and Fuzzy Systems. It is hoped that this being a University curriculum text would not contain avoidable repetitions. The book also extends the idea to Adaptive Fuzzy systems where the set of Fuzzy rules developed evolve over a period of time to improve the closeness of the process image to reality.
The author gives an impression that Fuzzy Systems and Neural Networks play a complementary role and would be a power Decision Making and/or Control Strategy taken together. If rigorous Math Modeling could be successfully replaced leaving it as only an academic curiosity then one could say a revolution of sorts would have been achieved.
The influence of an Eastern Philosophical bent is clearly seen by the author, who elaborates on this by using Buddha and Aristotle references, for picking the concept of Fuzzy Systems, taken together with the Neural Network Research, in Japan. We know from recent history of the development of Science that Japan had picked up on the Logic Programming approach in the early seventies, only to abandon that in favor of Fuzzy Systems gives some hope for finding new applications to concepts from Classical Philosophical Systems of India like Nyaya and Navy-Nayaya etc. It is worthwhile to pursue these ideas in the light of the successes in Japan. Even otherwise a modern re-evaluation of the same to develop a holistic logic system would not be out of place. The author of this review subscribes to this opinion. It is time we(in India) take an independent approach if necessary different and divergent form western thinking using creation of working products and systems as a measure of the success of the approach.