I am fascinated by the beauty of our lei, the salusalu.
I am reminded of its artistic value whenever I see chief guests being garlanded. Your paper recently had several pictures of the lei being worn by prominent people of Fiji.
The Fijian floral lei is indeed a work of art with an exquisite design spotting an intricate elliptical arrangement of scented flowers and leaves finely woven into the majestic masi with its exotic dark brown base and curly fringes.
I fondly recall my granny bubu from Natewa merrily and magically weaving leis into existence, a suki dangling precariously off one corner of her toothless mouth, and smoke escaping from the other corner — a remarkable feat that I will never ever be able to emulate.
The end product of her efforts left a mark on my impressionable youthful mind, then.
Unfortunately, the mark is indelible, and my mind had just simply decided for me that I could only be happy in life if I could instantly create the Fijian lei whenever I wanted to.
As my smart teenage son often reminded me, this Houdini act was practically impossible to execute because it could take days of hard work to collect and weave the flowers, leaves and masi together.
Not deterred, I finally decided to become Houdini by spending the next few years worshipping the omnipresent god of technology — the computer — with a single question in mind. Can the computer simulate and recreate for me the Fijian lei and allow me to admire its beauty whenever I want to?
Of course, the computer is as stupid as a donkey and will not magically yield to your command. You have to work hard at begging the donkey.
So, unlike my granny, I cursed and struggled in trying to rein in the unwieldy donkey to obey my commands.
At the end of most of my efforts, I would be staring at a crippled pointer on a frozen screen. In such dark hours, my mouse would mysteriously squeak. To this day, I am not sure why. Perhaps I was joyously squeezing it to death.
Then one beautiful Sunday morning, while taking a walk, listening to Sunday Morning.mp3, and admiring the beauty of nature, I was stung by a bee on the ear. It ruined my appreciation of nature. I saw that the bee was a member of a swarm.
Cheekily, it separated from the swarm, said good morning to my now rabbit ear, and flew back to rejoin the crowd — I am sure, gleefully — after a successful stinging mission. I cursed and wished it a kamikaze mission.
Despite my pain, I saw an intriguing spectacle before me.
As the dark swarm swerved around obstacles, its movement was fluid and its form malleable, like river flowing over rocks effortlessly.
Without an apparent leader, the swarm would majestically hover above the flowers and leaves. In the wind, they dipped and rose as they followed the motion of the swarm as if worshipping an alien deity. And often the swarm would rotate into circular patterns about a branch.
Circular patterns by a swarm? My mind wondered on a fanciful scenario.
If I could simulate the movements of these bees on my donkey computer, would the artificial swarm also form circular patterns?
That perhaps could be a starting point in creating the lei. Hooray! My light tube was now ablaze, no longer a dimmed kerosene lantern flickering in my bubu’s bure. My heart was racing. With great excitement, enthusiasm and jubilation, I proudly declared my intention to my son and asked what he thought about it. He said that I better talk to mum to check if things were all right. I was puzzled. I wondered how mum and the swarm were related. Anyway, half the time I could not understand my son.
Back on the donkey, the light tube was now firing. Google threw up insanely cool terms like swarm intelligence, emergent behavior, particle swarm optimisation, genetic algorithm. Wow! My mind rose to dizzying heights.
This was much better than gulping down Fiji Bitter with Jimmy, my good high-school buddy at O’Reilly’s. And good too for our beer bellies which at one stage were growing to dizzying heights themselves.
With new Google-derived knowledge at hand, I set the donkey loose to chase after an artificial swarm in the virtual world. And ran it did — finally.
Then the unbelievable occurred.
A new universe began to unveil itself on the screen and a flower came to life and bloomed as the artificial swarm floated majestically past.
Like some Greek god of pollination, wherever the swarm went, a flower blossomed. Flower after flower after flower.
I thought I was watching the famous 1976 British movie The Swarm Has Landed, wherein Winston Churchill was stung by a swarm of bees while being hotly pursued by a gang of tongue-wagging lusty Nazis through a field of beautiful flowers in France. Churchill was counting his lucky flowers he was not caught.
I have shown here one of the very first beautiful simulated flowers that emerged from artificial swarming.
The flower seems to show a cross in a lotus. I am more inclined to believe it is the iron cross that belonged to the Nazis who gave Churchill such a hard time in the flower patch. But don’t take my words for it. See the cross for yourself and decide.
Some flowers gave me the chill, like the deadly crown-of-thorns that a drunkard Roman soldier, two thousand years ago, thought looked cool as a cap.
Others were cute little dahlias. If only I could hold these cuties in my palms, I’d be in heaven.
Finally, after hours of seeing flowers from alien lands, my first beloved Fijian lei revealed itself in all its splendor and glory. You should see it in color. It is heart-stopping.
Here at last was the object of my search that had taken many donkey years before manifesting itself like some bright star appearing over Natewa Bay, signifying that a great event had occurred. I could almost hear Tears in Heaven playing in the background.
Indeed, I almost choked to death with tears of jubilation, if not for the constant supply of toilet tissue paper by my son, who was now awestruck at the spectacle being played out on the screen. A job as a toilet paper supplier suited him well for being a doubting Thomas.
My donkey has captured all the parameters. Now I have the power to recreate my leis in an instant. And there are literally hundreds of them, and I can choose from hundreds of different styles and shapes.
Wherever the swarm went, they bloomed as if praising Ra, the mighty sun god of the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt.
Krishna, another good drinking buddy of mine, solemnly informed me, after a few cartons of Fiji Gold and plates of Labasa goat curry, that the sun god was from Ra, Viti Levu. I corrected him. “No, not Ra but Rakiraki”.
Anyway, my childhood dream has come true. And I thank my bubu for that. She was Adi Ateca Vanualailai o Natewa.
What a fitting name for a big-hearted woman from the big place Natewa. She passed away in 1974 when she was 95, despite all the suki and minus the NCDs that the modern generation suffer from.
In August 2014, I will dedicate my first saluslau to her when I will proudly present the Fijian leis to the world at a well-known international conference, called Bridges Seoul 2014, which accepted my paper, titled Emergent Spirograph-like Patterns from Artificial Swarming, and tell the story of this unbelievable journey in Wonderland.
* Dr Jito Vanualailai is the Associate
Professor of Mathematics,
Director Research, Research Office at the University of the South
Pacific.
