LINES

"FIND x".
Something that I've realized only in the last few years is that there are absolutely no straight lines to be found, demarcating two things. Every concept, every hard science, every social discipline and national border, every person walks around with fuzzy borders. Gender is a clear / cut man / woman until it isn’t. As you travel to the peripheries of Kerala, or take a little ferry ride to Lakshadweep, the Malayalam they speak is no longer intelligible to me. How is it Malayalam at all, then? Come to that, I’m just a different periphery for someone else. Is Malayalam even real?
The hastily-drawn M.S. Paint doodle on my phone screen seems to be opening a lot of seemingly unrelated questions in my head. I have to write all of them down as they come, otherwise I’ll stare for three hours and turn in a blank sheet.
When I visited Spain in 2024, a Spanish woman hugged my mom on the street saying, “Thank you for giving us Flamenco”. The Romas of Europe, previously reffered to by the slur ‘gypsies’ (white ppl thought they were Egyptian), reached the continent centuries ago after a long migration from India. A lot of them went to Southern Spain, settling into the white walled ‘cuevas’ that they dug into the limestone caves around Granada. Flamenco was born in these cuevas.
We attended a show two days later, in one of these very cuevas. Third generation flamenco performers. As we listened to the old man sing, and watched the many colors of the dancer flutter across the cave, we were struck by an eerie familiarity: the colors, the cadence, the melody. “I swear I’ve been here before!” Fatehpur Sikri? Maybe Jaisalmer after the sun went down. The Roma were Indian. Are they still? Where’s the line?
The more I try to chase down lines, the less they seem to have ever been real. There’s nothing inherently fantastical about science fiction. If we lived in a SF novel, we’ll just call it science and move on with our lives. In a recent quest to understand linguistics better, I picked up a few entry-level neuroscience videos on youtube. The brain’s evolution seems to have happened in layers, like an archaeological site: newest evolutionary feature covering the entire brain like a sheet. Basically, we used to have just the Hippocampus figuring out “What?” and “Where?” coordinates, and using that to plot our way through this world. What the latest layer, the neo-cortex did, was take the functioning of the Hippocampus, miniaturize it into a tiny, self contained module known as the cortical column, and produce ~150,000 of them. These modules can plug into each other, turning those “What?”s and “Where?”s into further and further abstraction. Human brains are this elegant because it did what we did to the vacuum tube: turn them into transistors, miniaturize them over and over, squeeze trillions of them into every budget android device.
It feels wrong, somehow, to think of the brain doing this. It feels quasi-scientific, or pseudoscientific.
Fiction feels like it should be the easiest to demarcate amongst these three. It either happened or it didn’t right, what’s even the question here?
Slaughterhouse-five is a 1969 debut novel by Kurt Vonnegut. He never took himself way too seriously; it is an anti-war novel, and its science fiction. Listen. Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. He’ll be a soldier in the war one-minute, and as he enters the barracks he is in 1967, an optometrist in his NY office. You get it. Oh, he also gets kidnapped and put into a zoo by the higher-dimensional Tralfamadorians. Much to get into. I’m not doing that here.
There’s a certain moment in this book, almost a throwaway line, that has stayed with me ever since I read this book. After Billy Pilgrim and his compatriots are captured by the German troops, they are taken into these underground slaughterhouses below the city of Dresden, being used as a makeshift POW camp. It is while they’re down there that the historic bombing of Dresden takes place. While Billy Pilgrim is underground, the narrator refers to another imprisoned soldier doing something, or saying something. I don’t remember what.

“That was me. That was I. That was the author of this novel”
I believe everything now. Kurt Vonnegut was a soldier in WW2. He was taken prisoner by the Germans. He was imprisoned in Slaughterhouse-five when Dresden was bombed to bits, when 20,000 people were killed; a city of no strategic importance.
His sudden appearance as an unnamed, incidental soldier sets the whole novel under some kind of flickering, fluroscent tubelight of realness. Billy Pilgrim was there too. Listen. He did come unstuck in time. He did have sex with Montana Wildhack in a zoo enclosure in Tralfamadore.
What is real anymore. Everything is fuzzy; even atoms, the fundamental building blocks of matter, are fuzzy little clouds of probability. The hard lines in your little MS.PAINT doodle are a LIE; Every concept bleeds into one another.
Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that in the provided diagram, ‘x’ refers to the 2010 Indian Sci-fi / Comedy film Action Replayy, starring Akshay Kumar and Aditya Roy Kapur.