Sex sells?

We live in strange times.  People have plenty of "friends" but perhaps feel way more alone than ever.  It is, but one measure, of how rapidly our lives are being transformed.  In the process--and more importantly--we are completely redefining what it means to be human, with human emotions.

Sex is one of those human emotions, which is also being rapidly redefined.  "Making sense of modern pornography" is what this New Yorker essay is about.  The following sentence there makes me think about how much even our "regular" vocabulary and approach to life has changed:

It has permeated everyday life, to the point where we talk easily of food porn, disaster porn, war porn, real-estate porn—not because culture has been sexualized, or sex pornified, but because porn’s patterns of excess, fantasy, desire, and shame are so familiar.

I know what the author is referring to; even in this blog, I have used phrases like 'poverty porn' when, for instance, critiquing Slumdog Millionaire.  The word "porn" has pretty much become a part of our daily vocabulary.

Porn is everywhere.  And at zero cost.  One small typo when entering a URL can easily send one to a porn site.

Years ago, back when the web was young, I wrote an op-ed about this, during my California years, in which I noted that life as a teenager has become immensely more complicated and how amazed I was that the kids were managing this quite successfully.  In the years since, the life of a young person has become even more challenging with porn so easy to access right from the smartphone, and with sexting becoming a part of the daily vocabulary.  I am so glad that I am not a stressed out teenager with hormones rushing through every possible vein.  Phew!

With the growth in technology, we knew it was only a matter of time before we reached that strange twilight zone issue--robot sex.  And, therefore, robot porn. And, heck, robot brothels.

Apparently it already arrived and I never knew about it!

A Canadian company wants to open a so-called “robot brothel” in Houston, but is getting pushback from officials and community groups, with the mayor saying the city is reviewing its ordinances to determine if they address public safety and health concerns potentially associated with the business.
...
Kinky S Dolls says it’s opening a “love dolls brothel” in Houston. It opened a similar venue in Toronto in 2017.

What is the business about?

KinkySDolls is one of many manufacturers of sex dolls that range in price from $4,000 to $20,000 depending on the features. The company operates a try-before-you-buy store in Toronto, where time alone in a private room with one of the products ranges from $80 to $120.
Or put another way, the company offers a hotel room with a sex doll in it on an hourly basis.

Why Houston?  I am sure the company did the background market research.  While people who don't care for profits make location decisions for crazy reasons, businesses guided by the profit motive don't casually choose locations.  I wonder what it is about Houston!

The profit-loving people will perhaps love this, despite their rhetoric!

As one who cares about humans and empathy and emotions, I am not thrilled with this.  But, I am not surprised that it has come to this :(

The background drone of the tambura connects the dots

In an email to a few colleagues, I quoted the following:

Since the early 1970s, higher education has suffered from increasing specialization and, correspondingly, excessive professionalization. That has created a culture of expertise in which scholars, who know more and more about less and less, spend their professional lives talking to other scholars with similar interests who have little interest in the world around them. This development has led to the increasing fragmentation of disciplines, departments, and curricula. The problem is not only that far too many teachers and students don’t connect the dots, they don’t even know what dots need to be connected.

Of course, I have used that in my blog. Years ago.  How do you think I easily tracked down the quote?  What I write here is no different from what I write to my colleagues, which is no different from what I tell my students.  The only difference is that in the blog, I allow myself to freely express my emotions, dammit ;)

In my intellectual approach, I am always drawn to connecting the dots.  To me, there is simply no other way.  How else can we understand this world?

Which is why I end up reading essays that sometimes are difficult reads for me.  But then I freely admit to my ignorance and try my best to learn the lessons for me there.

Today's complicated essay is this, authored by a president of a prestigious liberal arts college--Middlebury.  She is also an accomplished poet.  The essay involves a lot of poetry.  I am ignorant there.  But, I kept reading.  Because, I know well enough that if I struggle through, there will be gems that will help me connect the dot.

And the gems started appearing; she invokes "the Tanpura Principle."

I practice what I tell students all the time--be an engaged reader.  So, of course, red flag alert right away.  Tanpura, as in the tambura that we refer to in Carnatic music?  Have I been incorrect all my life in referring to the tanpura as the tambura?  So, where did the tambura come from?  And, yes, what the hell is " the Tanpura Principle"?

Connecting the dots.  To help me understand the world.

I paused reading the essay, in order to find out about this tambura/tanpura.  Wiki says that the origin of this instrument is Persian!

The name of the instrument derives from Persian تنبور (pr. tanbūr) where it designates a group of long necked lutes (see tanbur). Hindustani musicians favour the term 'tanpura' whereas Carnatic musicians say 'tambura'; 'tanpuri' is a smaller variant sometimes used for accompanying instrumental soloists.

WTF!  How come I didn't know this Persian connection all these years!  Do the Hindu fundamentalists know that they are using an, ahem, Islamic musical instrument for their bhakti?  I am sure they know that the violin is not Indian, but the tambura?

So, what is the tanpura principle?

The tanpura is a long-necked, lute-like instrument in Indian music that sustains the other instruments by providing a drone. Tanpura players do not provide their own melody, but pluck the instrument’s four strings in a continuous loop of rich tones, to provide a base from which the soloist can draw in singing or playing the raga melody.
The Tanpura Principle in writing is the idea that much of writing occurs while doing something else, because the base of poetic inspiration, the supporting drone, is always there.

Aha; go on:

There are times when we don’t hear the drone, because we are too tired or too overwhelmed with other emotional, spiritual or even logistical challenges to know it. But the point is not then to “cultivate inspiration,” rather, it is to remember that the drone is always there, perhaps even especially there, in the fatigue and frustration of our “other” work.

Think about the dots that this blog has connected.  By themselves, the dots seem unrelated.  But, when connected this way, the world makes sense.  We try our best to make sense of the world which is really incomprehensible.

Not only Jewish kids; even this Indian blames his mother

It is my mother's fault. I blame her.

No, it is not about this.  Let me explain.

When we were kids, my father would direct us to go help mother in the kitchen.

The obedient kids that we were, we would go to the kitchen.  And ask amma if she needed any help.

Even as she was cleaning the kitchen and putting things away, her typical response was that there was nothing that we could do.  Sometimes her reply was along the lines of "look around, and do what needs to be done."

Do what needs to be done.  As simple as that.

Guess what we then did?

We looked around. Decided that there was nothing to be done. And we left.

As I got a tad older--still a kid--I remember staying back and helping her with grinding the coffee beans (a manual grinder those days); getting the butter out of the butter milk (yes, manual labor); or wiping the wet dishes and putting them away.

Much later in life, I have told amma more than once that it is how I even teach, and how I even deal with my colleagues.  I tell students and colleagues once or twice what they could/should do, and then it is up to them to do what needs to be done.

I am not like my father who can and will, ahem, nag or order people around if he needed somebody to do whatever that somebody needed to do.  As a cousin remarked back when appa was not the old man that he now is, my father could take command like an army general on a battlefield and boss around very quickly ;)

It is my mother's fault that I am not an alpha male in telling others what they should do. I am an omega male! ;)

It also means that I am all the time thinking to myself, "I told you so!"  Sometimes I even say that aloud to people. Especially to colleagues.

In a recent email, I wrote to one of the people in the university: "My personality is not one to aggressively sell my suggestions, how much ever I believe in them and with all the evidence to back me."  And I forwarded an email from more than three years ago, in which I had provided details on how a certain idea could/should be pursued.  And idea that now they think they want to look at.

In another context, I commented in an email a couple of days ago, "I don't understand why there was so much of resistance to the idea"--an idea that I had suggested two years ago, which they didn't agree with.  And the wrong decision that they made has come back to bite us big time!

Had I taken after my father, I would have commanded a few tanks and charged through with my ideas.  Instead, here I am blogging like this ... because of my mother.

It is all her fault! ;)

Consolation Prize

I have blogged in plenty--more than any reader ever wanted to read!--about death, religion, and god.  In blogging about these, I rarely ever make fun of religions, their gods, their narratives, and their followers.  Yes, the atheist that I am, sometimes I do joke about them.  But, for the most part, I don't.  For one simple and fundamental reason: Religions, gods, and the narratives help most people deal with the inevitable: Death.

If there were no death, then we humans would not have invented religions, gods, and the stories of how everything comes about.  We won't find any need to invent new religions/cults either.

But, there is death, and we humans know we are all going to die some time.  What happens to us after we die?  Where did grandma end up?  What about childhood friends? Heck, where did our favorite pet go upon death?

These are troubling questions.  And emotionally taxing questions.

Religions offer ways to deal with the ultimate existential angst:

Mainstream religion reduces anxiety, stress and depression. It provides existential meaning and hope. It focuses aggression and fear against enemies. It domesticates lust, and it strengthens filial connections. Through story, it trains feelings of empathy and compassion for others. And it provides consolation for suffering.
Emotional therapy is the animating heart of religion.

Of course, we are only talking about the sincere people, not like the fake ones who use religion and the fake religious for power.

When we are grieving, when we feel incapable of dealing with terrible developments, religions help:

Emotional management is important because life is hard. The Buddha said: ‘All life is suffering’ and most of us past a certain age can only agree. Religion evolved to handle what I call the ‘vulnerability problem’. When we’re sick, we go to the doctor, not the priest. But when our child dies, or we lose our home in a fire, or we’re diagnosed with Stage-4 cancer, then religion is helpful because it provides some relief and some strength. It also gives us something to do, when there’s nothing we can do.

Indeed.

The brown-skin exclusion act of November 2016

The current administration in DC has come up with yet another scheme to restrict immigration by providing yet another phony story:

The Department of Homeland Security announced a proposed rule on Friday that would penalize immigrants seeking permanent status who use public benefit programs such as food assistance and housing vouchers. Under the new policy, those who seek financial help could risk losing their chance at a green card.

It is not about any evidence to back this up, obviously.  It is to merely feed into the false narrative that brown-skinned immigrants are lazy bums who are collecting welfare money paid for by hardworking (white) taxpayers.

Just for the heck of it, what are the facts on the ground?

[Research] shows that immigrants are far less likely to burden the federal government than native-born Americans; if anything, they bolster it.

Yep.  There is evidence that we normal people use, and then there are alternative facts that the current administration uses!

Keep in mind that this is the same administration that said it wanted to encourage immigration from Norway and not from shithole countries.  One doesn't need to be a rocket scientist to figure out that it is all about restricting the browns from coming to America.

White nationalists and supremacists are having a glorious time thanks to this administration mainstreaming their views that have been unwelcome in the public space for a couple of decades.  Here's what the son of a big time white nationalist has to say about it:

unfortunately, I think we don't have to look very hard for examples of this kind of rhetoric now in our politics. You know, when you have someone in a primary position of power saying that we should be prioritizing European immigration, saying we need to build the wall - which is an idea that David Duke and the Klan spent a lot of time investing energy in in the late 1970s. When we have somebody in a huge position of power who's saying we don't want people from [expletive] countries - when you have somebody in a huge position of power who is constantly referring to his own genetics, which is a huge white nationalist talking point. They love to talk about eugenics and the false science of race. And so when you have somebody who's saying, I'm a credit to my great, tremendous, really wonderful genes - which, it turns out, some people might think maybe weren't so tremendous - that's furthering white nationalist talking points.

Source

Listen to that entire interview with Derek Black, the son of a grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.  The son has renounced the white nationalism that he was raised on, and is now an activist on the good side.  While the President might find it impossible, there is only one good side in this.  There are no good people on the other side.

The tightening of the immigration screws on non-Christian browns has had terrible effects already.  I suppose this is what 63 million "real" Americans voted for!

The charms to soothe a savage breast

Something happened a couple of nights ago, and I ended up watching almost two hours of opera arias and classical music, thanks to YouTube.  As I was wrapping up the show that I curated for myself, I remembered a piece that I came to know when my daughter was taking voice lessons two decades ago.

I searched for it.  We live in a miraculous world.  A few keystrokes and, bingo!  How did we ever live before Google and YouTube?

I watched Luciano Pavarotti sing it.  A relatively young Pavarotti.



But, the lyrics (in translation) and recalling my daughter practicing it, I wanted to listen to a female voice.  YouTube delivered.



I texted that to my daughter. Yes, in the night!

The following evening, I decided to get back to the old country's classical music.  I went after one of my favorites--L Subramaniam.  Not only because I have memories of listening to his performances, but also because his improvisations were always magical even to the half-baked that I am.  That magical experience is the bhkathi for me--not the other one that the rasikas blabber about.

I started with this.  It was even sweeter than I had remembered.

YouTube suggested this performance at Georgetown University.  I fast-forwarded through the talks and watched/listened only to the music.



Against such plenitude of music and the arts, the current White House has become a cultural wasteland!  Unlike the Obama years, there is no music from this White House.  It is a dead zone:

Since his inauguration in January 2017, there have been no official concerts at the White House (the Reagans had one every few weeks). No poetry readings (the Obamas regularly celebrated young poets). The Carters began a televised series, “In Performance at the White House,” which last aired in 2016, where artists as varied as Mikhail Baryshnikov and Patricia McBride performed in the East Room. The Clintons continued the series with Aretha Franklin and B. B. King, Alison Krauss and Linda Ronstadt.

Of course, the ultimate show business President was unmatched in this:

But perhaps no Republican could match the presidency of Ronald Reagan, whose guest list was a relentless celebration of the diversity of American culture. He and Nancy Reagan hosted Lionel Hampton. Then the Statler Brothers. Then Ella Fitzgerald. Then Benny Goodman. Then a night with Beverly Sills, Rudolf Serkin and Ida Levin. That was all in the fall of 1981. The Reagans did much to highlight uniquely American forms, especially jazz. One night in 1982, the White House hosted Dizzy Gillespie, Chick Corea and Stan Getz. When Reagan visited Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow in 1988, he brought along the Dave Brubeck Quartet.

And we now have this White House, where the arts have been murdered.  What a shame!

When we are without art, we are a diminished people — myopic, unlearned and cruel.

Awful!

Grannies help forget the mushroom toad

If you don't know what the mushroom and toad are that I am trying my best to forget, well, you are one lucky person on this planet!

Until two years ago, many of us had rich lives with plenty to read and watch, and talk about.  And then he happened.  And has sucked the oxygen out of everything else.

And then every single day is something or the other, either directly from him, or from others about him.

You want to know how peaceful life was when Obama was the President?  One of the biggest complaints about Obama from the GOP was about the tan-colored suit that he wore.  Yes, the Republicans griped about his tan suit.  Because, well, they did not have anything to attack Obama.  (And the one guy who invented the problem about Obama has now become our collective problem!)

So, yes, tan suit.  One guy even makes a not-funny comment about that being an impeachable offense.  Yes, those were the days my friend!

That was in 2014.  Even The Onion could not have written up a headline that Faux News was upset over the the color of the President's suit!

Four years after the tan suit incident that threatened our national security, we are assaulted with mushroom and toad!

Which is where two grannies come in.

One is from California:

Betty Goedhart of Escondido will appear in the 2019 Guinness World Records as the oldest performing female trapeze artist. She set the record when she was 84 but her eye was on the sport much earlier.

You should listen to her in that report.  Awesome!


The other granny is from Japan. She is an 83-year-old woman in Japan who was recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s oldest club DJ.

As Seth Meyers says, these are the kind of stories that we need right now!

Stormy Climate

The bottom-line first: "the central question about storms in the Asia-Pacific is who pays for the damage."

 Although China is now the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, America and Europe are estimated to have emitted 37% of the global total between 1850 and 2012. The Philippines, by comparison, emitted 0.5%. That has triggered repeated calls for wealthy countries to help poorer ones pay for the cost of the effects of climate change, not least from tropical storms. Those calls are unlikely to grow softer. But, with the Carolinas still reeling from Florence, and Mr Trump in the White House, America, at least, is unlikely to offer an encouraging answer.

Sometimes, I suspect that Republicans do not want to acknowledge climate change, or the human causation of climate change, because they worry that America will be asked to pay for it.  Because, the moment one acknowledges the human causation behind global climate change, then the immediate follow-up question will be about who caused it.  And if the question of who caused it comes up, ahem, America is on the hook for massive payments.  Climate reparations!  Republicans smell money--in this case, a potential loss of money.

Here in the US, we talk about the increasingly powerful storms.  But,

If storms can wreak such havoc in the world’s richest country, their impact in poor Asia-Pacific countries is even more far-reaching. Every year, the Asia-Pacific region is battered by more and bigger storms than reach America.

Meanwhile, people in Chennai are already worried about the coming monsoon season.  After the disastrous rains and flood of 2015, and then the cyclone that tore through the city in 2016, it has been "normal" for two years.  When the people of Chennai watched in real time the devastating floods in Kerala this past summer, it was deja vu for them.

Here in the US, the GOP couldn't care about the rest of the world.  Heck, the party and its dear leader do not care even about Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands!

Therefore, news was made when 17 Republican members of the House signed a symbolic resolution to "promising to take “meaningful and responsible action” to address human-caused climate change."  Seventeen.  Yep, 17.

It is the largest number of Republicans ever to join an action-oriented climate initiative in “maybe ever,” said Jay Butera, a congressional liaison for Citizens’ Climate Lobby, which helped put together the resolution. “I’ve been working on this issue for 10 years,” he told me. “This is a high water mark.” Of course, these 17 Republicans represent just 7 percent of the House GOP.

Seven percent!

It should surprise nobody that the Democratic Party is the only hope for those worried about climate change.

More and more, voters seem to agree with California’s Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who recently said, “If you want to go green, you better go blue.” Becerra was speaking from the stage at the Climate Summit, comfortable as part of an overwhelmingly blue majority.

An inconvenient truth!

Stand and ... stare

It was a tad cold on campus because I was in my short-sleeves.  I cursed myself for my sartorial decision.  But then it is not easy to get over the habits of the glorious summer.  Hey, at least I was not in my sandals.

 I stepped outside to admire the cosmic blue sky with white clouds, against the terrestrial green trees and shrubs.  It was magical.  A miracle.

I stood like that for a few minutes.  The clouds were quite some shape-shifters.

I recognized the junior colleague who was walking towards the building.  "How was your summer?" she asked.

Summer?  I am enjoying the sun, the sky, the clouds, the trees.

"What a gorgeous day!"

She nodded.

"What an awesome blue sky with puffy white clouds.  Well, not as puffy as they can be."

Only then it struck her that I was for real.

"Have you tried laying on your back in a lake and looking at the clouds?  You will love it."

I didn't want to tell her that I can't take such risks in lakes when I swim like a rock.

"I remember the taxi driver in Munich telling me to look up before I stepped into the cab.  I did.  He then said in his broken English, "that is our beautiful Bavarian sky."  It was.  But, that is nothing compared to the blue sky with puffy clouds that I have seen in Oregon."

I have shared that Munich story with plenty of people. Even with strangers in strange lands.

Maybe this fascination with blue sky with clouds sounded a tad too odd for her.  "Why, did you not have such skies in the part of India where you are from?"

If only!

Bare traces of clouds.  It always seemed like the sun was beating down on us unfiltered by any damn thing.  If the clouds came, they were not beautifully puffy like here.  And then the dark clouds of the thunderstorms.  But, those dark clouds did not have the blue sky background.  They always looked ominous.  And during the monsoons, well, all one sees is rain.

As one got closer to the hills--the ghats--there was a possibility of blue sky with white clouds.  But then, the sun is only a tad less unbearable, like how it was when I visited Mysore a few summers ago.

I didn't tell her all these.  Nobody has time for my long and winding tales.  I wish more people knew about pole-pole.

"No. Usually it was clear skies.  And hot."

At least we had clear skies when growing up.  Now, kids in big cities in India rarely ever see the clear blue sky; they probably think that the sky is always a dirty white color.

I didn't tell her that either.  Like I said, nobody has time for my stories.  And that too in my strange accent!

"I thought you were waiting for somebody. I had no idea you were here to simply look at the clouds."

Waiting for somebody?  Does she not know that there is nobody who waits for me on campus, and nor do I wait for anyone?  Stand and stare, I do a lot.

Nope, I didn't tell her that either.

"Yep, to look at the clouds, before I go into a meeting."

We both entered the building, and went our separate ways.

Who will live and who will die?

“How many will pass away and how many will be born? Who will live and who will die?”

I had no idea of that couplet until I read this opinion piece in the NY Times.  It is a part of Yom Kippur prayers.  A day in which we remind ourselves that "No one makes it out alive."

There’s the obvious — the plastic surgery and the digital surgery and the obsession with achieving perfect quantities of tautness and plumpness and dewiness. But look through the death lens, and you’ll see our fixation on wellness and workouts in a new way. Look through the death lens, and Silicon Valley’s project to extend life indefinitely looks as foolish as Gilgamesh’s efforts to do the same. Look through the death lens, and Instagram and Twitter look like nothing more than numbing agents.

I am not Jewish. I am not religious either. Yet, my suspicion is that I think a lot more about my mortality and, therefore, what I want to do with my limited time, more than most religious do.  Such an atheist life should really not surprise anybody; as the Huguenot philosopher and historian, Pierre Bayle wrote, way back in 1682:

It is no stranger for an atheist to live virtuously than it is strange for a Christian to live criminally. We see the latter sort of monster all the time, so why should we think the former is impossible? 

Whether it is Ramadan, or Vaikunta Ekadasi; or any religious high holy day--and I don't really observe any of those days--those are all timely, regular, reminders that no one makes it out alive and, therefore, we better figure out our priorities before it is way late.

One of the biggest advantages with facing up to the reality of my coming expiration is that I am less and less interested in people whose words and actions seem to miss that perspective.  I have encountered one too many "god-fearing" people who refuse to feel the pain of others, and who refuse to help those in misery.   Of course, their behaviors bother me, but once they reveal who they are, I keep away from them.  They are not worth my limited time!

The author of that opinion piece quotes a Manhattan rabbi, Angela Buchdahl:

thinking about your death can bring you much closer to experiencing true joy. It “compels us to squeeze out every bit of life out of every day that we have”

That has been my experience too.  As I have blogged in plenty here, thinking about my mortality makes me appreciate the good people around me; the blue sky with puffy white clouds; the sparkling waters in the river and the ocean; the giggles of a child; ... it is an endless list of miracles.

Finally, even though I am far from religions, I sincerely appreciate the "atonement" that Yom Kippur reminds.  After all, both the religious and the irreligious err.  We humans make plenty of mistakes, big and small, which add up to a lot over the years that we live.

I apologize for all my misdeeds and to all those I have wronged.

Carnatic music is not a Hindu fundamentalist art

Listening to the South Indian classical music--carnatic music--was a serious passion among most elders in the extended family.  Appreciation of the music came quite naturally to me and I was beginning to get really good in recognizing the ragas even from the first couple of notes.  It was wonderful until ... I started questioning religion.

Rare is a composition that is not about any one of the Hindu gods.  For all purposes then this classical music is also devotional music. To borrow a word from Christianity, it was ecclesiastical. 

Into my teenage years, as I started questioning religion, the agnosticism spilled over into the appreciation of this music as well.  I suppose I was consistent in my approach in questioning whether one could be into the music without being in the religion.

I was provided with a wonderful real example of this puzzle--following some of controversies related to the musician KJ Yesudas.  Born into a Catholic family, Yesudas took up carnatic music and was a student of one of the most accomplished musicians.

Yesudas' involvement with this Hindu music drew ire from the Catholic religious leaders, who even threatened him with excommunication.  The Catholic logic was that by singing bhajans and carnatic music compositions in temples, Yesudas was straying far away from the monotheism of Christianity.  The excommunication never happened, but all those developments made me think that much more about religion and carnatic music even as I was questioning the concept of "god" itself.

In fact, one of the compositions by Thyagaraja clearly lays out the relationship between carnatic music and devotion:

Sangeetha gnanamu Bhakthi vinaa,  San margamu  kaladhe , Oh Manasa
(The knowledge of music, without devotion (bhakthi) is not the right path, oh mind)

The lyrics further note that this music is a mode of worship. 

The more I moved away from religion--not merely Hinduism, but any religion and god--the more I was naturally disconnecting from this classical music as well. 

Over the decades, I have pretty much lost any interest in carnatic music, and it is only the intellectual curiosities about the music that remain within me.

Every time I visit India, which is almost always in December, I am often presented with opportunities to think about this question of bhakthi in carnatic music--it is also in December that Chennai hosts the huge music festival, and there are programs on television as well.  One of the TV programs features Q/A sessions with musicians.  Without fail, there is always a question about the role of bhakthi in the music, and every musician who has taken that question emphasizes that without bhakthi there cannot be any music.  It is like listening to baseball players responding to questions when you know exactly what their response is going to be. 

Maybe someday there will be a body of secular carnatic music that was borne out of the rebellion against Hinduism?  You think? Nah!

All the above is a part of my post here from seven years ago.

After reading that post, an old high school friend wrote to me about TM Krishna. I then emailed him.  In his lengthy reply (July 17, 2011) Krishna wrote about his experiences when questioning the bhakthi: "reactions have varied agreements to very upset emails etc."

All that was before modi and the BJP came to power in Delhi and in a number of states.  Since then, the emboldened hindutva has gone after anybody who they deem to be a threat to Hindu traditions.  Singers like Krishna and O.S. Arun who have broadened the scope of carnatic music are now under fire; such a huge controversy that even NPR reports.

What's worse is this: Indians living outside the US are some of the big money drivers for such Hindu fundamentalism in carnatic music:

[The musicians] been called "disgusting cretins." Arun has received threatening phone calls.
Much of the vitriol has come from Indians abroad, who've emigrated to the United States or Australia.

It is not a surprise by any means, especially when there is a lack of domestic financial support for carnatic music.

modi and the BJP recognized early on that many of the Hindus living outside India and earning a lot of money are a lot more fanatical than their peers back in India.  The Hindu diaspora is heavily influencing India's politics thanks to its money power, as The Economist noted:

For years Indian politicians paid little heed to the diaspora. But in the 2014 general election the diaspora, some 30m people strong, proved to be influential. Mr Modi made best use of them, realising the diaspora, especially in America, is wealthy and increasingly interested in politics generally

The Hindu diaspora forced the cancellations of concerts that Krishna and Arun were scheduled to perform!

One by one, Hindu temples in the U.S. that had been scheduled to host concerts this fall by Arun and another Carnatic star, T.M. Krishna, have said the singers are no longer welcome. Concerts have also been canceled in India.

I love Krishna's response to all these maniacs: "Krishna vowed to release a new song each month about Jesus or Allah."

Macho, macho man!

One of the long-running topics in this blog is about how girls, who have been discriminated against historically all through the world, are now rapidly redefining what it means to be woman, and about boys whose worlds appear to be shrinking.

Now, don't jump up and aim for my jugular immediately as a reflex.  Do it after you have had to think about it for a while.

I will start with a simple example first.  In the old country, in the old days, girls and women had to wear only the traditional female dresses.  Four decades ago, when my sister was a teenager, she was not allowed to wear jeans--because it was not an approved female attire. Now, wait a second, do not jump to any conclusion that India was all backward then.  Do you recall the fight that women had to fight in this country so that they could wear pants to work?  Do you recall the nasty jokes on Hillary Clinton because she wore pantsuits?  They made fun of that even when she was a presidential candidate!

In urban India, it is no longer news when a girl wears jeans, and when a woman wears trousers.  They wear tshirts and shirts, just like we men do.  Some even wear shorts in the old country.

So, to recap: Girls and women can wear whatever they want, even the outfits that used to exclusively men's.  Right?

So, if your five year old boy prefers to wear those colorful skirts that he finds some girls wearing, will you let him wear those skirts?  What if your nine-year old boy wants to wear skirts?

I use the example of outfits only because all of us can easily relate to them.  It is not an alien topic.

Girls and women are increasingly finding that they can do what ever they want to, and be whatever they want to, and wear whatever they want to.  I say, good for them.  And good for societies that actively encourage that.  We should pat ourselves on our backs for this.  They can be astronauts, neurosurgeons, programmers, CEOs, and more, even as they can also go after jobs that were once reserved for women--teachers, nurses, etc.  Their world has expanded.  Right?

How about for boys?

Aha, you are not so ready to aim for my jugular now, are you?

At this point, I want to provide you the link to a thoughtful NY Times story: Many Ways to Be a Girl, but One Way to Be a Boy.  That title seems to be all about what I have been ranting about, right?

Now, I don't want to be naive--biology plays a huge role.  When those hormones kick in, we begin to act in a certain way.  Especially boys, who are driven crazy by the testosterone that rushes through their system.  But, it is up us to teach boys and girls, and to guide young men and women, on why biology does not determine our fate.

As a middle-aged man, I am all the more convinced that we are messing up people's lives by not allowing boys to be children first.  Their male chromosome should not matter.  If, for instance, a boy wants to cry, let him; don't tell him that he cries like a girl.  If a boy wants to be nurse, encourage him.  Real men do all that, and more.

As a middle-aged man, I am also convinced that we are messing up people's lives by not allowing girls to be children first.  There should not be any discussion on how they look 24x7.  Girls should not be getting the message that they are getting that what they look like matters.

So, you still want to aim for my jugular?

Which is more damaging: Hurricane, or typhoon, or cyclone?

It is not the meteorology in which I am interested.

All these are natural events.  And, yes, human activities warming up the world have added power to them.

But, a natural event by itself is merely a natural event.  It is the equivalent of the old philosophical question on whether a tree falling in a forest makes a sound if there is nobody to hear it.  These natural events become "disasters" and "catastrophes" only because they affect us humans.

So, in such a framework, which is the more damaging event?

Consider one of those tropical storms making landfall where no humans live.  It will, of course, uproot trees and flood the rivers.  Is there any damage?

Now, consider one of those tropical storms making landfall in one of the sparsely populated islands in the Philippines.  And then imagine if a storm goes through the Bangladeshi coast.  The number of humans who will be affected will be vastly different, right?

Does it matter that the average Bangladeshi is poorer than the typical Filipino?

Now consider a hurricane hitting the southeastern coast of the US.  Does the "disaster" become costlier because the typical American and the property are way more "expensive"?

One doesn't even need to look beyond Wikipedia for this:

The costs of disasters vary considerably depending on a range of factors, such as the geographical location where they occur. When a disaster occurs in a densely populated area in a wealthy country, the financial damage might be huge, but when a comparable disaster occurs in a densely populated area in a poorer country, the actual financial damage might be relatively small, in part due to a lack of insurance. For example, the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, with a death toll of over 230,000 people, cost a 'mere' $15 billion,^[1] whereas in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, in which 11 people died, the damages were six-fold.

This is an issue that I have struggling with ever since my graduate school days: The "cost" of life varies.  It boggles my mind.  In that Wiki example, a quarter million people perished, but the "cost" of the disaster was low because it all happened in the emerging economies.

It is such economic logic that led Larry Summers, back when he was the World Bank's chief economist, to write that controversial memo, from which he later back-pedaled saying it was a thought experiment and was sarcastic.  That memo joked about the low earnings in emerging economies leading to the "cost" of pollution being lower there and, therefore, polluting industries should migrate to those poorer countries.  In reality, isn't that how the world has operated over the past three decades?

Rich people's lives and property are valued more than poor people's lives are.  As long as this framework does not change, the "costliest" natural disasters will happen only in rich countries.

Therefore, cyclones are the "cheapest" of those storms!

Such is life.

Fifty years a widow!

An edited re-post, remembering my grandmother on the anniversary of her death.
************************************************************

She died 38 years ago.  She was 67 years old.

The cosmos handed her an extremely raw deal.  Misfortunes upon misfortunes.  

The eldest child in the typically large family of those days, she was the beloved sister to her siblings and practically the mother for the two youngest sisters.  A beautiful girl she was, her contemporaries often recalled, when she was married.  A girl--not a young woman--as was the custom for centuries until recently.

She was only fifteen when she had her first child, and barely seventeen when the second--my father--was born.

So, there she was all of seventeen, a mother of two boys of whom one was only forty days old, when her husband died.

He died far away from her village, in the big city of Madras where he had gone to participate in political meetings and make his contribution to India's independence movement that was gaining strength.  She never even got to see her husband's dead body.

She was now a seventeen-year old widow, with a two-year old son and a forty-day old infant.

The unexpected death of the son was traumatic to the husband's parents.  Within a year, the mother died.  And then the father also died.  

She was now about twenty, with two young boys, without the father-in-law and the mother-in-law.  A couple of years later, her mother also died and her father became senile.

Meanwhile, society compelled her to shave her hair, and wear the plain beige saris that marked women as widows.  That is the how even my father remembers her.  Father has no idea how his mother looked as a woman with hair and wearing regular saris and clad in jewels as young women would typically look.

And there were more mishaps, big and small.

As I recall grandmother and her life, I am all the more impressed that she was, by and large, an optimistic and fun-loving woman--despite all these setbacks.

It turned out that she literally had an enlarged heart, in addition to the metaphorical one.  Yes, a heart that was enlarged.  It started slowing down.  Back then, India didn't have any treatment for her enlarged heart.

One day, she seemed to be more than a tad short of breath and the oxygen at home was not helping her.  Mother and I rushed her to the hospital.

I was in the front with the driver and mother was in the back with grandmother.  We were not even halfway to the hospital when my mother said that grandmother had died.

That was in 1980.

The street in Pattamadai
where grandmother lived

When hell freezes over!

English as the second language gave us plenty to laugh about.  Especially in school, where some teachers were more at ease in the local vernacular.

Our physical training (PT) master was one of those.  As school kids, most of us did not know any better than to make fun of him. In my middle-age, as I look back at those times, this too is one of the many that makes me realize that we all screw up when we are young.  Our words and behavior later as adults, by when we ought to know right from wrong are what matter.  Of course, some are assholes, unlike most of us who become better people with age.

That PT master was not at ease with the language that the colonizers left behind.  One day, when PT was rained out and we had to stay in the classroom, he told a student who was sitting by the window to open it.  I suppose it was closed to keep the rain spray away.  "Open the window, and let the climate come in," he ordered.

We barely concealed our smiles, and we laughed loudly later.  For days.  Like I said, we didn't know any better.

It is one thing for a person who is not a native language speaker to confuse the climate and weather.  It is another when native speakers intentionally treat them as synonyms only because they are anti-science and deny that we are going through human-caused climate change that is affecting the weather patterns.

[A]  changing climate can “load the dice” on weather, making certain kinds of extreme event more likely. For example: the amount of water vapor that the atmosphere can hold increases with temperature. Heat it up by 1° F, and the moisture content increases by about 3 percent. The result? More intense rainstorms. Similarly, heat waves happen more often when the planet as a whole gets warmer. Does one torrential storm or one bad heat wave prove climate change is happening? Of course not. Multiple long-term lines of evidence do that. But climate change will make heavy rainfall even heavier, and heatwaves hotter and more frequent. It’s reasonable to suspect that climate change plays a role in recent events.

Remember that infamous incident at the US Senate when a moronic senator tossed a snowball as evidence that there is no global warming?  More morons in North Carolina even banned the discussion of science-based policies.

As Hurricane Florence slowly makes it way to the land--it looks like it will be one hell of a slow crawl, which means dangerous levels of rains and floods--I wish reporters will ask those moronic politicians to explain the difference between weather and climate, and how climate change affects weather.  But, of course, those morons will dodge it, like how they always respond that it is inappropriate to talk about about gun-control policies right after yet another mass shooting.

As a middle-aged man, when I know better than what I knew as a high school kid, I know it is most fitting to make fun of these deniers who do not want to acknowledge the difference between weather and climate, and how the changing climate affects the weather.

Hey, PT master, you are alright!  Thanks.

Because of our traditions, we've kept our balance for many, many years

Manahatta was one of the plays that we watched in Ashland this past June.  It was not in the top-tier of plays that I have enjoyed there over the years.  It certainly had an innovative storytelling by showing the past and the present in parallel.

One of the themes explored in that play was about language and traditions.  The smart daughter gets to a Wall Street firm while her family continues to struggle.  The struggle is not only financial, but also about the language and traditions and everything else that adds up to the identity of the Lenape people.

These struggles are not unique to the US, but are universal.  Canada's First Nations. The indigenous peoples in Australia and New Zealand. In South America. In... everywhere.

In many cases, the language and the traditions were even systematically wiped out by oppressors, who were almost always the invading whites.  Some, like Canadians, have sincerely apologized, and reconciled with the horrible past.

And then there is contemporary India.

Purnima, whose born name is Pukutti, comes from a hamlet deep in the forests of Niyamgiri, where her tribe has lived for centuries, rarely venturing beyond the market towns at the foot of the range. As a small child, she helped her mother sow the dongar, the shifting hillside plots from which the Dongria take their name. They grew millet, bananas, and beans, and at night the children watched for animals—wild dogs, bison, sloth bears, and sometimes tigers. For the Dongria people, “the mountain is God’s abode,” Purnima told me recently. “For many generations, we’ve worshipped these hills, streams, and trees.”

So far, all seems good, right?

There was no school near the family’s home, and Purnima, like many Dongria children, at first received no formal education. The year she turned seven, an official of the Dongria Kondh Development Agency arrived to enroll tribal children in an Ashram, a new government-run residential institution down in the plains. Purnima’s parents did not want her to leave, and they refused to let her go, until the official promised them rations of rice from the local council.

The parallels with Manahatta, and the Canadian First Nations immediately blips in the radar.  The sister, Kuni, who stayed in the forests, and who is illiterate, was one of the many tribal women who were in the forefront of the struggle against a a U.K.-based mining firm that wanted to mine bauxite from the hills and manufacture aluminum.

One night in early May last year, Kuni was asleep in the home of her new in-laws when members of India’s Central Reserve Police Force crept up to their village, Gorata, to arrest her. Kuni says she awoke to the sound of a girl crying, “The police are here!” Then armed men were in the house, hustling her family into the night. Kuni was seized by women constables, who forced her down the trail leading out of the village, to where a convoy of trucks and S.U.V.s were idling.

The authors reporting the tale of these two sisters write:

To close observers of the struggle, Kuni’s arrest is a signal that Vedanta, emboldened by the corporate-friendly national government of Narendra Modi, is setting up a new play for the bauxite in Niyamgiri. To Kuni herself, however, and to others in her tribe, the threat is not that they will be driven off their land but that they will be drawn off of it, like Purnima was, one child at a time.
“Our people are alert to the cause of our land. If the situation demands, we will rise up again,” Kuni told me, and later added, “Our fear is that so-called education will uproot our people. The companies know that ‘educated’ people want to leave. They want jobs elsewhere. That’s why they take our children so far away.”

And how is the residential school system that the other sister is in?

In September of last year, the anthropologist Felix Padel visited an Ashram school in Chatikona, south of Niyamgiri. What he found was, he said, “quite shocking: the girls aren’t allowed to wear their jewelry, and their hair is cut short on arrival, supposedly to get rid of lice.” Teachers seemed well-intentioned, he said, but spoke “in terms exactly reminiscent of colonial-era missionary schools, as if it’s a huge effort to pull these girls out of their traditional culture. Why should that be wished for?”

Is there a different approach that can be attempted?  Kuni suggests that there is:

“Dongria girls need an education, so they can fight for their rights and their land,” she said. “We do need schools, but over here, so they accommodate our knowledge system—what we learn from the Earth and from our community.” Absent that, the transplantation of children seems to her a harbinger of the eventual physical displacement of the Dongrias altogether. “When Vedanta leaves,” Kuni said, “then we will all go to school.”

It is a tragedy that the lands where indigenous people have lived for centuries are also the lands that are rich in resources that salivates the profit-seekers.  Another resource curse!

Caption at the Source:

A woman in traditional Dongria dress.

Of course, the title is from this wonderful song.

72 ... and going weak!

Six years ago, I blogged about the falling Indian rupee, which had reached "an all-time low of 55.03 against the dollar."

I am not an economist nor a finance person.  Common sense and critical thinking is all I have; I wrote then that "buying a dollar for 55 rupees might even sound like a good deal" because I expected it to keep falling.

Common sense and critical thinking did not prepare me for this, however:

On Monday (Sept. 10), the rupee nose-dived to a new historic low, ending at Rs72.45 to the dollar. In this calendar year alone, its value has eroded 12% against the greenback, making it one of Asia’s-worst performing currencies.

Yep, "one of Asia’s-worst performing currencies."

In that post, I compared India with one other country that has always been a grand failure--Argentina.  I wrote there, "India is not that far behind Argentina in that respect."  Here too, in the case of the slide against the dollar, Indians can comfort themselves that the rupee hasn't fallen like the Argentine peso, which has lost half its value!

In that post in 2012, I wrote:

Indians, similarly, ought to figure out how to get their monies back from the crazy politicians at every level whose personal riches have been at the expense of the regular folks who work hard. For starters, they can get vote all the bums out. The problem though is this: throwing the bums out will mean new bums will get in!

There was one comment to the post from a stranger, who ranted:

India would have been better off with ordinary people with common sense at the helm, rather than there cronies with brain-washed ideas from the west, tamely speaking in a "Phoreen" accent trying to sound more intelligent than rest.

The foreign accent was directed at the party that was in power then--Congress.  In the elections after, the "real Indians" voted for "ordinary people with common sense at the helm."  I don't know about that commenter, but to my common sense and critical thinking, 55 rupees to the dollar sounds like a much better deal for Indians than 72 rupees to a dollar ;)

As I wrote then, "throwing the bums out will mean new bums will get in!"  The new bums are well entrenched, and the modi-toadies are hard at work to re-elect them, and to also elect more such bums at the state offices. 

But then I am not a political scientist either; common sense and critical thinking is all I have.

I scream, you scream ... well, I don't

"Oh hello!!!" shrieked the woman on the bicycle as her companion bicyclist rode silently.

Why do girls and women shriek like that?  Do they go to some special classes, when they are three years old, where they are told: "You are women.  There'll be plenty of occasions when you have to shriek like mad.  Let's practice those screams."

Anyway, this woman didn't get excited because she saw me.  Nobody ever does!  I have no such illusions, dear reader.

I know this well enough, which is why if somebody even waves at me, I quickly look behind to see if there's someone tailing--and sure enough almost always there is.  Especially if a young woman appears to smile at me, I am supremely confident that there is a good looking man behind me.

Way back when I was a teenager, when like all teenagers I believed that the whole world was only about me, if a girl smiled even a tad, I was sure it was at me.  But then I quickly learnt my lesson.  Make that lessons--yes, in the plural.  The story of my life!

I even went to a psychiatrist once to talk about this issue.  I said, "well, the problem is this, doc: Nobody likes me."

He immediately said, "next!"

Ok, that really didn't happen.

But, that is because I cannot even get an appointment with any therapist.

Ok, that is also not true! ;)

So, the shrieker and her male companion got off their bikes.  They both looked like my age.  With her arms wide open, ready for a hug, she walked towards the man that she shrieked at.

Her companion was simply standing around, as if he was used to her theatrics by now.  I couldn't see whether he was rolling his eyes.

She gave the man a hug.  And then turned to her male companion.

"You know who this is?  He is Brenda's third husband."

Was it necessary to add "third"?  Was Brenda's ninth husband sitting somewhere else by the bikepath?  Have these two been stopping every few minutes, with her shrieking at one of Brenda's husbands while her male companion stood by rolling his eyes?

I have no more details to offer, dear reader.  I kept on walking.

The rule of law, my ass!

I agree with the idea of rule of law.  But, I don't believe in the rule of law as it is.  What if, as Dickens described it, the law is an ass?

Think about this: Slavery was legal for a long time.  Yes, slavery was legal.  The Constitution as it was framed did not even consider blacks to be fully human!  Will we be happy with the rule of law as it was?

The rule of law also requires a constant critical examination of what is wrong with the law.  We humans are imperfect, and the laws we craft will be imperfect.  It is up to us to make laws less imperfect.

Last spring, we watched a documentary that taught us about yet another imperfection, which remained the law for a long time.  It was about the Chinese Exclusion Act.  The details in that completely floored me.  The law not only made it illegal for Chinese to come to America, it even denied the citizenship of those who were already in America.

The rule of law is not sacrosanct because the laws can be awful.

The challenge to the law went all the way to the US Supreme Court.  In 1889, the Court upheld this law.  And was the law for six decades.

Remind me again why the rule of law is sacrosanct!

In the recently concluded hearings at the Senate regarding the nomination of brett kavanugh to the Supreme Court, Kamala Harris asked the nominee about what he meant as settled law, which kavanaugh touted often.

In the 1889 Chinese Exclusion case, the Supreme Court permitted a ban on Chinese people entering the United States. The court said Chinese people are "impossible to assimilate with our people" and said they were immigrating in numbers "approaching an invasion." This case has never been explicitly overruled. Can you tell me was the United States Supreme Court correct in holding that Chinese people could be banned from entering our country,” Harris asked.

Even to a non-law person like me, it was obvious that the question was not really about the Chinese Exclusion Act per se. So what was the question really about?

It was about trump's Muslim Ban.

Go back to that Kamala Harris question, and make the following substitutions: Muslims in place of Chinese, and 2017 in place of 1889.  It becomes deja vu all over again, right?

Should such a case go up to the Supreme Court, what would kavanaugh do?

So, what was kavanaugh's response about the 1889 ruling?

It was pathetic. Awful. Disgusting.

Watch for yourself.

A killer app!

A couple of months ago, my father commented that I am the only one who is not on WhatsApp.  Which is true.  I have never had a WhatsApp account.  I have blogged a lot about it though ;)

A few years ago, Tunku Varadarajan, who used to write for the Wall Street Journal when it was a respectable publication before it became a Faux-News-wannabe trash wrote what I thought was a tongue-in-cheek commentary on why Indians love Facebook.

Social media was invented for Indians, says Sree Sreenivasan, a digital media professor at Columbia and co-founder of SAJA, the South Asian Journalists Association. "They take to it naturally and with great passion. It allows them to do two things they love: Tell everyone what they are doing; and stick their noses into other people's business."

As one can imagine, Varadarajan's commentary was not well received by Indians.

The spread of Facebook in India is nothing compared to how passionately people use WhatsApp there.  Messages bouncing off other's phones seemingly faster than the speed of light.  People don't even bother with regular cellphone or landline calling--they WhatsApp call each other.  "Social media was invented for Indians" indeed!

And sticking noses into other people's business has taken on dangerous--yes, literally dangerous--scales.  A couple of months ago, NPR even did a story on this!

In India, fake news can be deadly. About 20 people have been lynched by mobs, amid social media messages of kidnappers on the loose. Police are trying to teach first time smartphone users how to discern fact from fiction online.

This is a real hazard in India, where the beat-first-question-later approach is one that I have been scared about right from a young age.  As a kid, I had barely learnt to ride a bicycle, when I crashed into a kid on the street, a few hundred feet from home.  The kid's mother thrashed me--without asking even one question about what had happened!  A friend from Bombay used to joke (no haha for me though) about this beat-first-question-later MO--he said that in Hindi and then translated it for me!

With WhatsApp, made up news travels fast and wide.  It has gotten out of control.

As smartphone use spread in India, so did WhatsApp: It has over 200 million users in the country, according to a company spokesman. Soon, it became more than just a simple peer-to-peer communications tool. Indians now use it to disseminate political campaign platforms, distribute news and public announcements, and promote businesses, turning it into something resembling a broadcasting and publishing platform. According to WhatsApp, users in India forward more messages, photos, and videos than in any other country in the world—making it the perfect breeding ground for disinformation.

Last December, when my father showed me a video that somebody had sent him through WhatsApp, I told him it was fake, and warned him to be careful.  I am not sure if he understood how serious I was.

Life gets more and more challenging!

Of princes and paupers

A young woman we know graduated last June, and is excited about the job that she has been offered in San Francisco.  General Malaise that I am, I had to make sure I would not blurt anything bad.  For once, thankfully, I kept my mouth shut.

I did comment to M that this woman will be able to barely rent a closet in somebody's home with the income that she will get.  But then youthful mistakes are what most of our lives are about ;)  She will soon find out!

Housing is so expensive that more people are leaving than those are going there:

The cost of living is among the highest in the world. One founder reckons young startups pay at least four times more to operate in the Bay Area than in most other American cities. New technologies, from quantum computing to synthetic biology, offer lower margins than internet services, making it more important for startups in these emerging fields to husband their cash. All this is before taking into account the nastier features of Bay Area life: clogged traffic, discarded syringes and shocking inequality.

Housing being expensive there is not a new thing.  The growth curve has only become steeper. 

Two decades ago, I was considering a job opportunity at San Jose State University.  When talking with the department chairman, I asked him whether the university offered any subsidy scheme for faculty to own homes there.  After all, faculty don't get paid by the truckload.  He paused.  And responded that housing costs had become a major disincentive, and that attracting faculty was getting to be difficult.  The old timers lucked out, he said.

That was twenty years ago.

Now, think about students who want to go to any of the universities there.  Tough luck finding something affordable!  It has gotten so bad that ...

Amid a local housing crisis and facing a shortage of on-campus beds as the fall quarter looms, UC Santa Cruz sent an email this week to faculty and staff asking them to open their homes to students.
“The need is real and it is urgent, so I am reaching out to the faculty and staff community for help,” the executive director of housing services, Dave Keller, wrote. “Offering a room in your home to a student who has not been able to find housing for the school year would be a tremendous support to their success at UCSC.”

Re-read that excerpt in order to get a feel for how bad the situation is.

And, of course, these are also the no-growth or slow-growth communities where the old-timers who lucked out back in the day are making sure that no new high density residential areas will be built.

Yes, all in "liberal" California!

As George Carlin caustically remarked, these liberals don't really care about others as much as making sure that their awesome lifestyles will not be affected.  The rest can eat cakes!

Crazy rich failure

Fun fact first: Asia is home to about 60% of the world's population.  About 4.5 billion people.

Fun question: Can you generalize 4.5 billion with a word "Asian"?

Fun answer: Yes, but only here in the US!

Here in the US, one can easily shock most people by referring to, say, Iranians or Bangladeshis as Asians.  It will shock them because most Americans think only of Chinese and other Far East Asians as Asians.  The rest?  We are from shitholes, of course!

The box-office champ Crazy Rich Asians has done a lot to further reinforce this screwed up understanding.  (Nope, I haven't seen the movie, nor do I have any plans to watch it.)

The film has been "heralded as a milestone for Hollywood"

Not a single central or even auxiliary character is played by a white actor. On the few occasions when white people do feature, they flash across the screen as extras: as plane passengers or, on a giant container ship chartered for an over-the-top bachelor party, as bikini-clad beauty queens for hire.
Asian-Americans, including among the cast, hail this as a breakthrough moment in American cinema.

Well, ok.  But, that is the American perspective.  What is the reaction from Singapore, which is the locale for the movie? The film "ignores all Asians other than the Chinese kind."

One-quarter of Singapore’s population is not ethnic-Chinese, but of Malay or Indian descent. Yet when Malays feature, it is as valet-parking attendants. Indonesians are masseuses. As for the pair of Sikh guards at the Young family mansion, their buffoonish performance is as excruciating as Mickey Rooney’s as the Japanese photographer living above Audrey Hepburn in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”. Brown bodies, writes one anonymous film-goer, were disembodied “footnotes”: mere openers of doors or cleaners of homes. “Crazy Rich Asians” is not just “money porn”, she goes on, it is also, to many South-East Asians, “othering porn”. What passes as a victory in Hollywood can look like a glaring failure in Singapore.

And, how about in China?  You know, the "Asia" that most Americans think about?

Well, the movie "may not even be released there":

Under China’s strict quota system, a limited number of foreign films are approved for import every year and some experts are skeptical about the movie’s chances. The depictions of profligate spending and vast wealth inequality in “Crazy Rich Asians,” they say, might not sit well with Chinese officials amid the country’s growing push for positive “core socialist values.”

How about the content of the movie?

Dong Ming, a Shanghai film critic, said: “Maybe the content of the film wouldn’t get censored but it’s a question of whether the film would even be popular in China.”
“Chinese people really dislike this kind of westernized Chinese culture,” he added, comparing the movie to American Chinese food staples like General Tso’s chicken and fortune cookies. “The flavor is not authentic.”

We are a crazy rich people!

The Lady Emperor

Consider this:

a Shia Muslim, but “married a Sunni king who had a Hindu mother and both Hindu and Muslim wives and concubines.”

Who was this?

She was named Mihr un-Nisa at birth and was later named Nur Jahan (light of the world) by her husband, the Mughal emperor, Jahangir. She was born only a few decades after Queen Elizabeth I, yet she ruled a territory far more diverse than that of her British counterpart.

There is a new biography of Nur Jahan, which gives people like me who never really knew her a bunch of new information that impresses the hell out of me.  There is a lot more to her than the romance story with Salim (later the emperor Jahangir.)

She was a fascinating woman who came to rule an empire against extraordinary odds.
She was a poet, an expert hunter and an innovative architect. Her design for her parents' tomb in Agra later inspired the construction of the Taj Mahal.
A remarkable leader in a male-dominated world, Nur didn't come from royalty. Yet she ascended from the emperor's harem to great heights as an astute politician and the favourite wife of Jahangir, ruling the vast Mughal empire as a co-sovereign.

How awesome!

Soon after their marriage, she issued her first royal order to protect the land rights of an employee. Her signature in the order read, Nur Jahan Padshah Begum, which translates as Nur Jahan, the Lady Emperor.
It was a sign of sovereignty and an indication that her power was growing.

I had no idea!

Be it hunting, issuing imperial orders and coins, designing public buildings, taking measures to support poor women or champion the disadvantaged, Nur lived a life that was unusual among women at the time.
She also led an army to save the emperor when he was taken captive - a daring act which ensured that her name was etched indelibly in public imagination, and in history.

So, why did we never learn about Nur Jahan?  Of course, people and the education system in India don't care a shit about history--they were only too keen on shoving math and science down our throats!

In addition, ahem, she was a woman:

Nur Jahan’s accomplishments have been belittled for two reasons. One is that history is written by its victors, and she lost a power struggle on Jahangir’s death—to Shah Jahan. To erase her from history, he may even have tried to withdraw the coins that bore her name. Certainly, his official chronicles overlooked her achievements and blamed her for the turmoil that marked the last years of Jahangir’s reign.
The second reason is that she was a woman, and as such, according to a guide to conduct popular among the Mughal aristocracy, “it were best…not to come into existence, but, being born, she had better be married or be buried.”

BTW, the author of this biography is not based in India. "Historian Ruby Lal teaches at Emory University."
 
Oh well ... :(

(the clip embedded below is about the fictionalized love story between Salim and Anarkali)

My midlife crisis: I am shedding friends :(

I have always appreciated the two-word phrase that M used to describe me: Gregarious hermit.

From my school days, I have always been that way.  Very few friends, and not open to many.  The older I got, the more difficult it became--as it is for most people--to make new friends.  But, despite the odds, I made a few friends.

But, over the past two-plus years, I have been shedding friends.  All because they revealed their true colors as fascist sympathizers!

Political differences have never bothered me.  After all, we are different from one another, and our views of the world won't always converge.  In broad political discussions, we will, of course, have disagreements on the appropriate roles for the government and the market.  This gets reflected in our understanding of, and the favored solutions to, problems such as homelessness.  Our respective understandings of humanity might lead us to differ on how we ought to respond to humanitarian crises around the world.

All those differences are fine with me.  Those differences have always been fine with me.  Which is why I have never had problems interacting with people whose political preferences were not anywhere close to mine.

So, yes, we can certainly differ on whether or not one should hand out money to the person the street corner.  We can differ on whether churches or the government should take care of the homeless.  We can differ on whether high income earners ought to be taxed in order to provide for such services.  I will be less than pleased if others did not agree with me, but that never ruined friendships.

But, it is another thing if the friend turned out to be a Nazi sympathizer.  Or supports a Nazi sympathizer. If the friend votes for people who demonize Muslims.  If the friend consistently makes jokes with blacks and watermelons as the punchline. If the friend actively defends supremacist sentiments.

Source

Many friends of the old days revealed their dark sides.  And I have been shedding them.  Our lives are short, and I would prefer to die with as few regrets as possible.  I do not want a tortured mind struggling at the end over the mistakes that I have made.

This blog used to attract a few comments; the lack of comments over the past few months is a reflection of friendships that did not pass the devil test.

Two more friends are now practically off my metaphorical Christmas list.  I wrote in an email recently:

I would love to be there. However, it is highly likely that a significant number of attendees--perhaps even an overwhelming number--will be ardent trump supporters. As a brown-skinned non-Christian immigrant, looking like an Arab Muslim and with a funny accent, I will not be at ease among a trump crowd.

It is an event that is important to them. But, ...

I am now more of a hermit than ever before!  But, that is okay too.