Sulba Sutras And Discounted Cash Flows

The Steradian Trail: Book #0 of the Infinity Cycle, is an exciting cocktail of science and mythology, religion and technology. An extract.

The Steradian Trail: Book #0 of the Infinity Circle, M.N. Krish, Westland, 2013

0 (PLEASE NOTE, THIS 0 IS NOT A TYPO. IT’S THE CHAPTER HEADING!)

The second bullet keeled Jeffrey over and he dropped the duffel bag and car key and tumbled down the flight of steps like a sack of coals.

There was a rustle among the leafless shrubs lining the walkway to the parking lot, soon followed by the squelching of shoes in slush. His breath fogging in quick spurts in a fit of panic, he gripped the wrought-iron banister and tried to rise to his feet, but his shoes kept slipping in the snow. He continued to try nevertheless, like a hamster on a wheel, but stopped when he found himself face-to-face with a hulk in a hoodie.

The hulk ran his eyes over Jeffrey for a moment, then turned away and went nosing about the gym’s entrance. He picked up the car key lying on the steps and flung it up and away into the darkness with all his might. That done, he sprang down the steps in two hops, grabbed Jeffrey by his lapels, and pulled him up a little. Then thrust his pockmarked face menacingly close to Jeffrey and shook him.

‘Gimme your cell phone,’ he barked, spittle and snow spraying on Jeffrey’s face, ‘and your wallet.’

Jeffrey made no reply. He went limp in the thug’s hands and then started twitching a little.

The thug patted down Jeffrey’s pockets and fished out his wallet and cell phone. Shoving him away and letting him slump to the ground, he tucked the loot into his pocket and tore away towards a grey Corolla that lay in wait across the street, rumbling, ready to go.

By the time a helpless Jeffrey heard the car zipping away, he was bleeding profusely from the two puncture wounds. His head throbbed feverishly and his body winced with unbearable pain. Moments back, he was standing in front of the gym door after an invigorating workout, feeling the chill air whistling into his windpipe and diffusing in his lungs, gazing at the silent snowfall with an equally quiet admiration, marvelling at the fractal patterns that ruled all the way from the tiny snowflakes dancing in front of him to the humongous old temples he’d seen in India. And now, he was gasping for breath, a fire raging in his gut, sweat beading his brow.

It didn’t take Jeffrey long to come to the realization that he only had minutes to live. He had heard that gastric acids were safe only as long as they were confined to their sacs where they could be continuously neutralized; once they oozed out, they’d burn away the tissues to death in a matter of minutes. Whatever he had to do, he had to do within that window, with whatever strength was still left in him.

He could think of only one thing . . . pass on information to nail his killer, the real killer. At least that way, he would have his revenge, even if posthumously.

But how?

Now he could see why his cell phone had been taken along with the wallet. There was a phone inside the gym, but with his wallet gone and his ID along with it, there was no way he could open the door and get in. But he quickly remembered that there was an emergency callbox in the gym’s parking lot. It was perhaps forty yards away and there was no guarantee that he would even make it that far, let alone speak articulately. But with a definite death staring down in his face and the slush making it impossible to leave a message in blood, that seemed like the only course left to pursue.

Jeffrey was no mere fitness freak but a muscle maniac who tended to every fibre in his body with the utmost precision and care – nothing else would explain his lonely visit to the gym so early on a winter’s day. All that effort came to the fore now in his final minutes. Mustering every ounce of energy left in his fast withering body, he dragged himself towards the parking lot, tumbling and scrambling every inch of the way, the dripping blood blending with snow and congealing in crimson patches in his wake.

He collapsed at the foot of the phone post, after barely managing to slur a few incoherent words into the callbox. A strange peace swept over him as he passed out: even if the name didn’t get through properly the magic number he’d uttered would definitely drive home the message.

1

Though Joshua Ezekiel held that the real logical starting point for anything went back to Big Bang one way or another, when he ran a rewind-search of his memory to trace the origin of Jeffrey’s murder, it came to a stop much too soon: at a conference he’d attended in San Jose several years ago where Fasal Godot Dushert, a freshly minted PhD from Stanford, had presented a paper on Panini’s grammar and Natural Language Processing in one of the breakout sessions.

Sparked off by Panini, Joshua developed what gradually evolved into an abiding interest in the mathematical advances of ancient societies: Egyptian, Mayan, Aztec, Ionian, Greek, Chinese and Indian. As he learnt more about them, he began to feel that it wasn’t necessary that every invention and discovery of the ancient world should have come down to the modern world; some of them could still be lurking somewhere, waiting to be found. He took up a new hobby of researching the intellectual advances of ancient civilizations and accumulated a wealth of knowledge about them in a few years. Though he did not really stumble upon any eye-popping finds, he was able to glean one curious fact during the course of his research: scientific innovations and discoveries in the ancient world were not always rooted in intellectual curiosity; they often stemmed from compulsions of religion, ritual or superstition.

Joshua’s knowledge of Indian history and civilisation, enhanced by his repeated visits, made it amply clear that besides being the land of Panini, the country was home to the most ritualistic and superstitious peoples from time immemorial. While some prehistoric civilisations vanished into oblivion and some others broke with the past and embraced modernity, losing or wiping out much of their legacy in that process, India remained steeped in millennia-old tradition even in modern times. Some of the torchbearers of that tradition remained alive and active to this day, nestling among the milling crowds in cities and towns, like in Kanchipuram.

There was one particular institution in Kanchipuram that sent light bulbs flashing in Joshua’s head as soon as he found out about its existence: the Sankara mutt, the monastery propagating the doctrine of Non-dualism or Advaitha.

Though Dualism, Non-dualism and the nature of Ultimate Reality had long ceased to be burning issues in India and gurus were no longer bandying words with each other in public forums, the mutt continued to train priests and scholars and house a library containing stacks of ancient texts. The devotion to Non-dualism and the library were enough enticements for Joshua and he decided to pay a visit to the place during his very next trip to India.

2

Joshua approached the Kanchipuram mutt with more than a little apprehension. He wasn’t even sure if he would be welcome within its precincts to start with. But he was in for a pleasant surprise. The disciples at the monastery – snooty brahmins he’d heard so much about – turned out to be a lot more hospitable and friendly than he had expected. Most of them were householders, not monks, and many of them even boasted immediate relatives in the US. They welcomed Joshua so warmly that it put all his apprehensions to rest. When he explained his intentions and sought their assistance, he was granted free access to the monastery’s library. Mahalingam, an administrative officer who also doubled up as the caretaker of the library, was assigned to help him in whatever way necessary.

With his foot in the door, Joshua pitched his tent in Kanchipuram and decided not to leave until he turned the library inside out, rack by rack, section by section, with the guidance of Ramanathan, a pandit at the mutt. While Mahalingam had given Joshua a helicopter tour of the place, Ramanathan took him through the streets and by-lanes, helping him with the nitty-gritty, providing patient, elaborate answers to the questions he kept asking: What is this? What does it mean? Where is this from? When was it written? Which language is it in? What is it about?

The pandit Ramanathan’s stock-in-trade was philosophy and he had been dispatched to Joshua’s side mainly for that reason, but Joshua ended up picking his brain for smaller stuff like rites and ceremonies.

There was an entire body of Kalpa Sutras which laid down all the rites and rules in black and white: what ceremony to conduct when, what postures to adopt in front of the sacrificial fire, what offerings to make to the fire, how to drop sacrificial objects into the fire, how to actually start that fire, what kind of fuel to use, how to prepare the venue of sacrifice, how to lay out the ground, what shape and form of fire-altar to use for what purpose, how to go about constructing that altar . . .

With the word sutra conjuring up Panini’s rules on grammar and syntax, the pandit Ramanathan already had Joshua’s interest. When he dropped terms like shapes, forms and construction, Joshua’s ears pricked up like a prairie dog’s. He knew this was where he had to dig deeper, and dig he did.

If one part of Kalpa Sutras dealt with the actual conduct of ceremonies and sacrifice, there was another part named Sulba Sutras that was devoted exclusively to the layout of the venue and construction of altars. They described step-by-step construction procedures for all types of altars so that the desired geometric perfection – error tolerance trimmed down to a thousandth of the thickness of a sesame seed – could be achieved as efficiently as possible, in the smallest number of steps.

3

Joshua left Kanchipuram after three days, with a thorough grasp of the Sulba Sutras. The realization that their construction techniques were rooted in geometry and essentially mimicking the steps of an algorithm sent his brain cells on overdrive. He began to develop his own corollaries and arrive at new generalizations even before he left for Madras. By the time he boarded his flight back to Boston, he had mentally mapped out a spanking new method for carrying out a host of power series computations in an efficient manner, achieving the desired level of accuracy in fewer steps or iterations than other methods already in use. The new technique had the potential to speed up common financial computations, particularly those involving Discounted Cash Flow, Net Present Value, Internal Rate of Return and various types of interest calculations and Joshua decided to write it out as a research paper and get the idea out in the world.

But Jeffrey Williams had other plans of his own.

As Joshua’s research associate Jeffrey had accompanied him to India and assisted him in many ways, scribbling down notes, recording Joshua’s random thoughts, taking down Ramanathan’s explanations of the sutras and analyzing them from different angles – geometric, algebraic and algorithmic – and working on the new approaches and extensions proposed by Joshua. He was not content letting all that effort languish in an obscure research paper in some academic journal. He put his crooked genius to work and started making his own secret plans. Joshua, however, managed to sniff it out and thwart him before any real damage is done.

But all that was in the past.

Now Jeffrey has made another hush-hush hunting trip to India and this time, he succeeds in unleashing his monstrous scheme – a scheme so brilliant and so crooked that it not only kills him but also traps Joshua in the mess and mayhem that ensue.