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Prologue - The Incidents:
Eighteen years ago, in 1996, I spent a month traveling around India with two friends, plus a driver who knew just a bit of English. One afternoon, as we were going through the plains of Rajasthan - relatively empty country, rolling fields, gold in the sun - we came upon a small village well off the road, and decided to go there to see if we could have a tire repaired. We were of course swarmed by bright-eyed children with huge smiles, noisily wanting pens and to have their pictures taken (as did some of the adults!). One ~ten-year-old boy in particular, justifiably proud of his rudimentary English, asked if he could have one of the single-use cameras I had with me. I cautioned him about the costs of developing and printing, but he was undeterred so I gave it to him.

As we did, the farmer ran back to his house and re-emerged leading a shy, comely, teen-age girl. Through the halting translation of our driver, the farmer explained that his daughter was blind, but that her sight could be restored if only he could take her to New Delhi for treatment. He did not, however, have the money for the trip. He asked: Could we help.

Then and there, I wanted to hand over to him my cash reserve, but, well.... one simply doesn't do that..... could be a con; or I might need it if there was an emergency; and there were those incessant admonitions we'd been given against being complicit in the evils of begging. So wishing them well, we drove on, though with troubled hearts. I'm still not sure what I should have done out there on that arid plain, but I've always regretted having turned my back on that father and his daughter. In conflicts between mind and heart, the heart is most often the winner, usually wrongfully. In this case however, it may well have been the other way around.

The Present -The Incidents Reëmerge:
At graduation time at MIT, there's a several-day celebration that includes every-five-year reunions for alumni. One of the features is "Technology Day", during which a number of leading-edge researchers present their new work to the community. Five years ago, at my 55th MIT class reunion in 2009, the theme of the presentations was the development of multidisciplinary study centers focused on tackling large problems - lots of excitement about the benefits of cross-fertilization. The particular subject this day was research aimed at understanding how the brain, and in conjunction with it, the mind, work.

I happened to be at the presentation of one of the researchers, a doctor whose specialty was the processes of vision. His project: How does the brain convert the photons entering the eye into usable images. The project required finding subjects blind since birth, whose blindness was curable, and who were old enough to be self-aware and articulate. They would be given sight through surgery, then, in a laboratory setting, report what they were experiencing during the first moments after the blindfold came off: How did they perceive light signals, never before seen, and process them into visual concepts of objects they'd previously only heard of or touched.

A severe constraint on this research was that there were very few subjects in North America with the necessary qualifications; curable children would have already been cured. But there were plenty of qualifying subjects in the rural parts of the doctor's native India. So the doctor moved his research center there. It was probably inevitable that the curing of the blind children rose to became a parallel focus of his work, alongside the initial focus of his research. Mobile clinics were established; treatment was free for all. Patients' agreement to participate in the research was sought but not required.

I was fascinated by the presentation, and not just by the science: I realized that an opportunity to atone for having abandoned that blind girl had presented itself. I asked the doctor what the process should be for me to contribute. He responded that an appropriate mechanism was not yet in place; he'd let me know. Several follow-ups during the subsequent months were fruitless, and finally the matter dropped.

Then, five years later, this June, I was back at MIT, now attending my 60th class reunion. While standing in line between events, I happened to overhear a conversation in which one of the participants was clearly an administrator. I asked him if he could help me make contact with the researcher (I'd forgotten details) who'd given that vision-interpretation presentation five years ago. Indeed he could.... and did. The researcher is Dr Pawan Sinha; his (inspiring) initiative in India is Project Prakash (the subject of a recent special report on National Public Radio). I was finally able to make the donation I'd intended: the amount of the "emergency cash" I'd been carrying during that sad encounter with the blind girl, plus interest. My cover letter to Dr Sinha related the story of that encounter. In his gracious acknowledgement, he observed that he'd grown up in an environment that recognized karmic circles.

Several days after returning home from this reunion - here's where the notion of karmic circling became compelling for me - I received a small packet of mail from India. It was from the boy ("Ram Laxman" if I have the name right and in the correct order) in Bhap, the village where we'd stopped to have our tire repaired a few hours before our encounter with the blind girl. The packet contained several photographs, the tattered letter I'd included when I'd sent the photos (he'd saved it all these years), and a warm if not totally comprehensible note.

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Epilogue - Whence Karma?:

PS: A bit of whimsy: Dr Sinha's mention of Karmic Circles made me think of Noam Chomsky's reply when asked* to respond to the assertion that "Everything Important in Science Has Now Been Discovered; there remain only details".

Chomsky's take, which appeals to me, was that our (human) view of the universe is as through a prism, which, though infinitely long, is bounded by its walls. While the extent of our vision and ability to examine is unconstrained within the confines of that prism, our minds lack the ability to perceive, or to formulate, that which lies outside it. (Wherein, perhaps, live "Karmic Circles".)

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* Here's what elicited this observation from Chomsky:

Some years ago, the assertion that "Science Is At An End!" was mischievously thrown out at a cocktail party in Cambridge, of course drawing the expected raucous chorus of responses. John Horgan, an editor of Scientific American, was present, and was inspired to develop the event into a book. His format was an aggregation of short chapters, each summarizing an interview he'd set up with a leading scientist in a wide array of fields, in which interviews he elicited their reactions to that provocative assertion. Among his interviewees was Epistemologist (NOT "Linguist"!) Chomsky.