After the exhaustive Mumbai thriller, Sacred Games, which was published in 2006, Vikram Chandra can perhaps afford to indulge himself. And that is what he has done with his first work of non-fiction, Mirrored Mind: My Life in Letters and Code. Self-admittedly, it was conceived when he hit a roadblock while writing a new work of fiction. Chandra thought he would write some pages on his other obsession (writing being one)?coding?and the exercise on computer programming expanded to become Mirrored Mind, where he explores the connections between the seemingly dissimilar worlds of art and technology. The journey, as it were, takes him back to the writings of Abhinavagupta, a 10th- and 11th-century Kashmiri thinker, Panini and Sanskrit grammar, tantriks and so forth.
As he tries to connect the worlds of art, history and technology, he also gives us a glimpse of his early days as a writer when he doubled up as a computer programmer. ?I came to computers while trying to run away from literature,? he writes. ?Writing sentences felt like construction, and, also simultaneously, a steady, slow excavation. You put each word in place, brick by brick, with a shimmery sense of what the whole edifice would look like, the shape of the final thing.? So in 1986, Chandra found himself at film school trying to write his first novel and picking up computer programming, which he soon became passionate about. His acclaimed first novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, was published in 1995 and he still remembers vividly that computers were ?the machines I spent endless hours with, through which my characters came alive?.
And then, even when he was writing fiction steadily, he found that the ?stark determinisms of code were a welcome relief from the ambiguities of literary narrative. By the end of a morning of writing, I was eager for the pleasures of programming?.
Computing, points out Chandra, has transformed all our lives and yet the processes and cultures that produce software remain largely opaque, alien, unknown. While most artists regard programming as ?an esoteric scientific discipline?, most programmers regard themselves as artists. Since programmers create complex objects and care not just about function, but also about beauty, they are just like painters or sculptors, argues Chandra, a notion that was put forth eloquently by programmer and venture capitalist Paul Graham in his essay, Hackers and Painters.
Chandra joins the dots between programming and ancient texts of Sanskrit through algorithms. If programming is all about thinking of the world as an algorithm, Panini?s grammar, too, is an algorithm. ?Programmers also use formal languages, but programs are not just algorithms as concepts or applied ideas; they are algorithms in motion. Code is uniquely kinetic? Code moves. It changes the world?.
In the end, Chandra says his writing life and his life with computers ?in spite of their differences, seem mirrored, twinned. Both are explorations of process, of the unfolding of connections. Both reward curiosity, dogged patience?.
And yet, if some of the links seem tenuous, some of the programming language a bit stretched for this premise, some explanations defying logic, Chandra has an answer: ??when I write?, I want a certain density that encourages savouring. I want to slide warp over woof, I want to make knots. I want entanglement, unexpected connections, reverberations, the weight of pouring rain on red earth. Mud is where life begins?.
The knots are welcome, but in the case of Chandra, fiction is definitely a richer medium. His ?memoir? is unusual and a tad too self-indulgent.
Sudipta Datta is a freelancer