Chompsky. =)

Hey, it's HARD to blog everyday! Especially for someone who's been at it for just as long as I have (four days). Withhold your censure if ye can, ye kind souls.

Well, you guys know what this post is going to be about. The title is quite revealing. So, instead of subtly leading to the point of this post, I'm going to jump right into it.

Chomsky. He started my day today. Without even bothering to brush, I acted on the sudden, inexplicable impulse to watch Chomsky interviews on YouTube. He is a terribly interesting personality. A Colossus in the field of Linguistics, and a vehement and outspoken critic of US foreign policy in particular and democracy and other political structures in general, he is the 8th most cited author in today's world. Almost insanely prolific, he, on the citation rankings, trails people who have single-handedly altered the course of history, like Marx, Lenin, Shakespeare, Aristotle and Freud, and even surpasses Hegel and Cicero; also, he is the only one out of the top ten on that list who is still alive. Go Chomsky!

I am as interested in what he's like as a person as I am in awe of his achievements. Sources who have been in direct contact with him say that he is a small man in a sweater (and no doubt adorable), and speaks in soft, hardly audible tones that do not in the least befit his image as some kind of a giant in all other respects. However, the ideas that he expresses in his speech are clear and clinically penetrating, while being expressed with a driving passion for fact. Liesbeth Koenen said something about him that really struck me as apt and beautifully put:

"...As soon as he opens his mouth you start to realize why he is so famous and notorious. Chomsky sounds rational, cerebral and detached, but at the same time probing and deeply committed to whatever his topic happens to be. He is utterly serious, but will break into a smile at the most unexpected moments."

Most pictures of him on Google Images show him surrounded by columns of books. He is a classic nerd. =) His own wife admitted to thinking of him as "nerdy", and said that he wasn't the type she would have dated (until she became a similar kind of nerd herself =). When he was younger, he apparently "[couldn't] tell a radio from a toaster" in his own words. He is so deeply involved in his chosen fields, linguistics and political activism, that he blissfully sees nothing else, and can tell even the most informed people a thing or two about their own areas of expertise. His "arrogance" is fascinating and entertaining to watch, purely because it is so well-handled - it doesn't get out of hand, he NEVER engages in people-bashing - and so justified. One (in other words, I) can easily derive pleasure from letting their imaginations take flight and imagine him as a grandparent, playing with his grandkids, or as a boyfriend, buying a bunch of flowers for his future wife to send to her room at UPenn, undergraduates both.

What is most interesting about him is his simplicity in the expression of certain ideas and his exhaustingly complicated and convoluted way of expressing others. I have had the frustrating and exciting experience of reading one of his papers - NOT any kind of cakewalk at ALL. At times I found myself thinking - Who is this guy? Is he so great that it's such a big problem for him to make his papers understandable to at least a small part of the general public? Now, my future self would like to give my past self a withering look and say, "He is, actually." My future self has also discovered that he is a very humane person. He is into political activism for a reason, and that reason is that he loves people and wants the best for them. He respects every man a great deal, enough to believe that they have the capacity to think for themselves and make a decision about something. He says this, too. His message to everyone is to: See, think, judge and decide for yourself. And his message to his fellow activists and human beings is: Keep at it. It will work out. It will come through in the end. This is really the centre of what he is.

I would like to end this post with a quote from my Linguistics professor, Mike Flynn. He had written up a document to serve as a set of general guidelines for all students writing a paper in Linguistics. In the "Things to Remember" section, the last but not the least important point was:

"There is no "p" in Chomsky."

=)

Quoting Arundhati Roy: "Chomsky zindabad!"