On Lords and Ladies

In the NY Times, I read this:

The Baylor University Lady Bears, who took home their third national title with an 82-81 victory over Notre Dame in this year’s N.C.A.A. final, were welcomed to the Oval Office by Mr. Trump.

Once again, I am pissed off.  No, not about #tRump, but about the usage "Lady."

Why?

Think about why there is a reference to "Lady Bears."  Are there Lord Bears?  Nope.  There are Bears, and then there are Lady Bears.

What's happening?  The nickname for the Baylor University is Bears.  By default, that nickname refers only to the men's teams.  Women's teams are therefore referenced with respect to the male Bears; hence, Lady Bears!

In my early op-ed writing years, I wrote about this too.  I thought--and I continue to think--that it was bizarre that a common nickname does not refer to males and females.  In that essay, I wrote about how the reports were then equating the name only to men, and therefore specially calling women out.  Of course, that essay was not published.

Imagine if "Americans" referred only to men, and we then said "female-Americans."

Well, we kind of sort of do that.

During my early years in the US, I was always surprised that only the non-white groups were referred to by their prefixes, as if the word "American" meant only white.  In my commentary-writing days in California, I once submitted an essay in which I argued that white criminals should be referred to as being white, just as reports call out the racial ID when the perps are "others."  Of course, the commentary was not published.

Maybe those essays were not published because they were crappy writing.  Or, maybe because I was calling out the obvious, and people are usually uncomfortable with dealing with such truths.

The "other" is based on such definitions of default conditions.  Whether it is about gender or race, or even food habits.

Recall my observations on the Indian usage "non-vegetarian" that is often referred to as "non-veg"?  What?  No?  How could you forget?

Ok, lemme quickly recap for you.

Meat eating is the default food habit in England.  The ones who do not eat meat, have to identify themselves as vegetarians or vegans or whatever else.  When the Subcontinent absorbed the English language, a new usage was created for the food habits there: non-veg.  As in not-vegetarian.

Such a special coinage to refer to the meat-eaters makes the rest of the world also think that Indians are vegetarians.  The reality is far from that.  It is a minority of Indians who are vegetarians.

Estimates of vegetarians in India are as low as 20 percent of the population to about 30 percent of the Indians.  Even if one takes the average, only about a quarter of India's population restricts itself to vegetarian food.  An overwhelming three-quarters of the population is non-veg.  This is not new.  It has always been that way. Consumers of animal protein have always exceeded the population of vegetarians.

Then, one would think that in India, too, there will not be any need for the "non-veg" usage, right?

I suspect that, as in many instances, this is a result of identifications being shaped by the rich and the powerful.  I think that given the high profile role of brahmins in the British Raj, well, both the British and the Brahmins made vegetarian as the default word to describe Indians in the new language.  And, therefore, a new word for the others.

Language is about power.  The dominance of "vegetarian" is a reflection of the power that a minority had over an overwhelming majority of "others."  The phrase "non-veg" is not any accidental creation.

"Lady Bears" says a lot about the power, privilege, and primacy of the "Lord" Bears.  It is not a phrase that was accidentally created.

Impermanence and Suffering

First there was Dr. Abraham Verghese. More than two decades ago, when I read his memoir that intertwined his personal life and his professional life treating HIV and AIDS patients in the boondocks of rural Tennessee, I was blown away that a physician with origins in India could engage in such awesome writing.

Then came Atul Gawande.

"And the muttering grew to a grumbling; And the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling." Now, it seems like there are Indian-American physician-authors everywhere I turn. Fantastic!

One of the latest additions to this long list is Sunita Puri, who is "a palliative care doctor at the University of Southern California."

Palliative care. It takes a brave soul to get into that field of medicine.

She wrote about that aspect too: "I hadn’t expected that the type of medicine I’d chosen to practice would require a strength and perspective that medical training hadn’t offered."  She writes there:

One of my attending physicians noticed that I’d become more withdrawn, less punctual and occasionally distracted. “This is difficult work,” she told me gently, reminding me that I’d need to care for myself in order to care for my patients. I tried massages, therapy, hiking and meditating under the shade of Marin County redwoods. But when my sadness grew stronger, I longed for a place where I might find community among others searching for support.

In that awesome piece of writing, Puri describes a group of Buddhist monks creating the mandala and then methodically sweeping away their creation.

[The] sweeping away of a sand painting that helped me truly understand that change and impermanence are not just spiritual tenets but laws of nature — ones that I’d struggled against and had been taught to ignore throughout much of my medical training.

In an interview with NPR, timed with the release of her book, Puri emphasizes that doctors, heroes they are, "are not good at knowing what to do when we can't fix a problem."  Puri says:

In my medical training, there were so much focus on the technical and scientific aspects. But as I was learning those things, I was not also learning how to talk with someone who has a serious diagnosis. How do you explain to them how their life might change? How do you ask, if this is not something that we can cure, "What would be really important to you in the time that you have?" And this language was not given to me in medical training.

I am so thankful that people like Sunita Puri are out there working on this important aspect of life, in which death is certain.  As she says, dying a good death is a part of living a good life.

Female empowerment and social progress

In the immediate outskirts of Kanchipuram, we saw three girls in school uniforms pedaling away on their brand new bicycles.  How did we know they were new?  The frames had the thin, filmy, plastic wraps.

My immediate thought was that it was perhaps a government project to give free bicycles in order to make sure that the kids don't drop out of school.  The success has been well documented.

We went to the temple.  As we were ready to leave, the same girls appeared.

I asked them about the bicycles.  Yes, they were new. And provided by the government. The leader of the pack was excited, animated, and eager to share with us how liberating it was for them to now freely go around.  Like this detour that they had taken on the way back home from school--she said that the distance between home and school was about ten kilometers (six miles.)

Girls on bicycles. Girls and women on scooters (Vespas.)  Young women in groups at beaches.  The part of India--way down south in the Subcontinent--has progressed a lot since my childhood days in the old country.

India's south is also where the dynamism is.  People live longer. They have fewer children, so much so that total fertility rates are lower than replacement levels.  Tamil Nadu's rates are on par with many European countries!  As a result, there is a lot of migration from the poorer and populous northern and northeastern parts of the country.

All these further convinced me that the Tamils would have been much better off had the state seceded from the union!

This Brookings Institution briefing notes that India's "economic geography is changing in favor of the southern states."  No surprise there, really, for any India watcher.  "The south has done better in providing basic services, building infrastructure, rejuvenating industry, empowering women, and educating girls."  Female empowerment is the key element here.

The briefing adds:

For a long time, political power, population, poverty, and production were concentrated in the north. As production moves southward, political power will inevitably follow. And as the economic center of gravity moves away from traditional centers of power, it could exacerbate regional tensions. India will have to figure out ways to manage them.

Like I said, Tamil Nadu ought to have been a country of its own, instead of being a part of "India."

Broken history. Broken hearts.

“No man ever went to the East Indies with good intentions.”

Wrote Horace Walpole.  The same Walpole who also gave the English language the word Serendipity.

To think that I had to come to the US as a graduate student and then learn about the horrors that these bastards unleashed upon the browns!  How twisted that the history that we studied in a "free" India was merely the European version :(

In contemporary India, the fair-skinned rulers have been replaced by uber-nationalistic Hindu leaders.  The curse of the East India Company haunts the old country.  Heck, it haunts the entire Subcontinent and the world!

So, yes, there is immense schadenfreude--I won't deny that--when the old colonizer is all twisted about itself thanks to Brexit.

What an ironical twist of fate that the melanin-deficient Brits who roamed the far corners of the earth, imposed their customs, religion, language, and themselves too, on the browns everywhere, are now upset that other melanin-deficient ones from the continent across the channel are pouring into their precious island!

If only we humans learnt the lesson not to mess up other people's lives!  But we don't.

And, so, here i am thinking and writing in English as a result, instead of carrying on with one of the oldest languages ever.  I am often reminded of this:

‘It is hard to realize,’ Coomaraswamy writes in The Dance of Shiva, ‘how completely the continuity of Indian life has been severed. A single generation of English education suffices to break the threads of tradition and to create a nondescript and superficial being deprived of all roots—a sort of intellectual pariah who does not belong to the East or the West.’

The word "pariah" of course coming from the Subcontinent.  A word that in its usage in the old country that is as awful as the "n"-word in this culture.

Why this unleashing of anti-colonial emotions?

I am reading a book about people from India who were brought to the West Indies.  I have been commissioned to review that book.  In the formal review, I cannot bring such emotions.  So, I will vent here, and then take the sober academic writing there ;)

Learning empathy takes effort

I have blogged in plenty about the need for empathy and, in a number of posts, have also written about a horrible human being seemingly with no sense of empathy being elected by 63 million as the President of the US.

To me, empathy has always been about the others. "Empathy is other-focused, not self-focused."  This is important to understand.  Because, sociopaths like tRump seem to easily zoom into what makes the "others" hurt:

Someone with sociopathic tendencies can ‘read’ other people well and understand their emotions. But a sociopathic person reads others in order to manipulate or take advantage of that person.

Empathy is not about merely understanding the emotions of others.  Empathy "is a tool or skill that provides people with information from which we are then free to take actions, or not. Empathy itself is neutral. What we choose to do with it is up to us."

It is up to us.  And up to us to invest the time and energy to understand the others.

The challenge with empathy is to be open to gaining knowledge about others. We tend to be biased when it comes to empathy. We are better at reading those who are like us than at reading people who are different.

tRump openly expresses his hate for, oh, Muslims and Haitians. But, his heart bleeds if a white person somewhere is attacked by a brown person.  It is not that he is empathetic to the white person in distress--the guy is simply biased. He is bigoted.

The "us-versus-them perception diminishes the ability to empathise. So, what can be done?"  The author distills the full array of empathy into seven behaviors; read them.

I will end this post with the final paragraph from that essay:

If we see ourselves in others, if we walk in their shoes, we have little to fear and can allow empathy to help us decide how to react and behave. It is a challenge to engage in empathy, it is not easy. Some days in some situations, empathy might come easily, other times it won’t. When people are scared, stressed or anxious, it can be difficult for them to step away from their own feelings and tune into those of another person. However, because of mirroring, empathy begets empathy. The more we use it, the more others around us will use it. Everyone wants to be heard and understood. Every group wants to be recognised. It can’t happen without empathy.

Source

Controlling pollution is ... a game of whack-a-mole?

Remember Larry Summers, back when he was the World Bank's chief economist, writing in 1991 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.

Remember that?

The reality is that it was no joke.  Polluting industries found China and India and others to be "better" locations compared to the US and the UK and others that were tightening up the environmental regulations and targeting polluters.

Now, people in the advanced countries, who claim that they have done a lot to clean up their air and water and soil, conveniently forget that they have in reality outsourced pollution.

Many wealthy countries have effectively “outsourced” a big chunk of their carbon pollution overseas, by importing more steel, cement and other goods from factories in China and other places, rather than producing it domestically.

Like I said, the Summers memo from almost 30 years ago was no joke.

From 1990, about the time that Summers authored that memo, to 2015:

If you included all the global emissions produced in the course of making things like the imported steel used in London’s skyscrapers and cars, then Britain’s total carbon footprint has actually increased slightly over that time.

A cleaner Britain, indeed! “If a country is meeting its climate goals by outsourcing emissions elsewhere, then we’re not making as much progress as we thought.”

Because the problem is global, and not localized, the solution is simple, right? "One possible solution to all this emissions shifting would be for all countries to work together to enact a global carbon tax that applied equally everywhere."

tRump can't even sign on to a global climate agreement.  A global carbon tax will never happen.  So ... then what?

Environmentalists and state governments can target the supply chains for their environmental impacts through "buy clean" laws.  This will put pressure on suppliers "to lower their emissions. “Even for companies who don’t want to admit it,” Mr. Erickson said, “they know a change is coming.”

Yes, it is coming.  Despite the people that 63 million voted to power.

“School teaches you only to be better at school"

It was an email from a student who graduated three years ago.

"But, I wasn't even her favorite instructor.  I thought she did not like me and the classes that she took with me."

Yep, those were my immediate thoughts.  I am by now used to not being anybody's favorite.  Popularity is simply not my thing.

And, yet, there it was. An email from her.

I wrote "I will gladly assist you" in my reply to her request that I participate as a guide in her professional pursuit.

And I added more.

After all, if a student has taken two classes with me, then for certain I remember them well--sometimes way too well for their liking!

I wrote in that email, "BTW, perhaps you have forgotten that I used your remark in class in one of my op-eds." And expanded on it.

A couple of days later, she replied. "I actually forgot about the op-ed (and my cheeky comments in class). Hopefully, I can teach my students more than just to be good at school!"

She will be a fantastic teacher.

Here is that op-ed, from May 2016.
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“School teaches you only to be better at school,” said a student who is graduating in June, in response to my question to the class on whether they thought they were ready for the world of employment.

The other students immediately and unhesitatingly agreed with her.

Without even knowing it, the student was channeling Ken Robinson. In a highly entertaining TED talk back in 2006 (way before “TED talk” became a part of our everyday vocabulary), Robinson noted that “you’d have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors.” Psychology professors are keen on creating more psychology professors and biology professors want to make biologists, so to speak.

I will be at least a tad happy if that student’s statement were true. I am not convinced that school is teaching students to be better at school. An increasing body of research questions the value added over the four-plus years of undergraduate schooling.

But, even more do I worry that higher education has become a diluted and credential-chasing process that is falling way short when it comes to preparing students for employment.

It begins when graduating high school seniors and college freshmen are bombarded about their academic majors. This is where the machinery of school teaching students to be better at school does a tremendous disservice because college is really not about the major.

The composition of the academic credits toward a college degree itself easily gives this away — a majority of those credits will not be in the major. Or, to rephrase it, if college education is only about a major, then an undergraduate experience can be wrapped up within a year and a half after high school.

Even the preparation for productive employment is rarely about the major itself. The skills that employers repeatedly cite as important — skills like writing, thinking, communicating, researching and more — are gained through a broad array of topics outside one’s major, and that is what most of the undergraduate education is all about.

Yet the myth persists and, despite all the research, there are some academic majors that are more geared for employment than others. Of course, that is the case if students are in professional undergraduate programs like elementary school teaching, for instance. But, otherwise, the link between a college major and productive employment is nebulous at best — unless one wants to be a college professor.

If we are truly interested in how higher education is serving the young and, hence, the country’s future, then the debate we ought to be engaged in is not about whether majoring in science, technology, engineering and math (often grouped as STEM) is better than art history, or whether we need philosophers or plumbers.

Instead, society needs to pay attention to whether students are mastering the skills that are needed to be gainfully employed, along with a broad understanding in order to be caring citizens. Else it will continue to be the case that the only thing that school teaches the young is to be better at school.

Blogging, public intellectuals, and faculty

Of course I am talking about myself; this is my blog!

A few years ago a student exclaimed in class that he was reading my blog and realized that he need not ever come to my classes; instead he could get everything that I might have to say in the class right from the blog itself.

Whenever students discover this, I tell them that my blog serves multiple purposes for me, of which one is that this blog serves as my own notes that I can refer to if/when needed.  And, of course, it also serves the curiosities of anybody who is interested in the content here.

Over the years, I have wondered why faculty do not operate in such modes, within and outside the classroom.  And why faculty do not go to classes and treat students as members of the public with whom they have to intellectually interact. 

Tyler Cowen, who is one heck of a prolific, accomplished, polymath of a professor across the continent, and whom I have cited many times here, says:

What’s a university and what is not? Those distinctions are crumbling. If we’re not a university, maybe no one else will be either. There’s a lot of content on the web. A lot of it’s free. That will be increasingly important. I think it’s already the case on a given day. More people read economics blogs than are taking "Principles of Economics" classes in the United States, so why aren’t the blogs already a kind of university? They’ve sort of won that competitive battle in some way.
The people who read the blogs want to read them. A lot of people in "Principles" class, they’re not paying attention, they don’t want to learn, they feel they have to, so blogs are in some ways doing a better job of educating.

While Cowen uses the example of economics, the same can be said about any subject.  People want to know about any number of topics but somehow we have convinced ourselves that the old buildings with ivies crawling on them is the only way to meet that desire to know.  In fact, it increasingly works the other way around--those who come to the universities are some of those who are least interested in learning and are in college only to pick up a diploma.

Cowen has moved beyond blogging itself--to a "university" that offers a whole bunch of videos.  The interviewer signs off with this:

Maybe the biggest impact of upstarts like Marginal Revolution University will be that traditional colleges will feel more like, well, like blogging. Maybe the line between the formality of college education and the informal materials found online throughout one’s life will blur, and maybe those distinctions will just matter less and less. Authority may sound less like a lecture from a podium and more like a Facebook post.

But, are the faculty, who are busily writing books that nobody ever reads, thinking about such important questions as "What’s a university and what is not?"

Source

You read until here?  Check this out.

Om Shanti Shanti Shantihi

We need a new way entirely to think about what it means to be a human being and what the purpose of our lives is.

Yep.

That excerpt is from this Kristof column, in which he continues the series on conversations with the religious.

To me--born into a traditional Hindu Brahmin family, and an atheist by choice--the question "what it means to be a human being" has nothing to do with any religion.  It is an existential one that all of us have to think about, given the certainty of death.  I sometimes think that I spend time thinking about all these more than most religious do!

I have blogged in plenty about this topic.  A few years ago, a neighbor, who had known me well over the years, commented that I was more of a Christian than many of the people who went to their church.  Coming from born-again Christians, it was high praise.

I am far from confident that religions--old and new--have succeeded in making people think about what it means to be a human being.  It is clear that millions of born-again Christians here in the US have a strange interpretation of what it means to be human.  Elsewhere, there are even Buddhist monks who systematically advocate for violence against others.  Hindus seem to be increasingly jingoistic about their faith in ways that lead to oppressing others.

Kristof's interviewee notes:

The structures of religion as we know it have come up bankrupt and are collapsing. What will emerge? That is for our children and our children’s children to envision and build.

It is irresponsible of us to collectively place such a burden on future generations.  Hopefully, they will do better than us.

A new social contract for progressive capitalism

I searched my blog for the earliest post that included the label "Stiglitz."  I am not at all surprised that it was way back in 2008, not long after I re-started the blog.

In that post, I wrote, "It will be neat if neoclassical economics alters its course thanks to Amartya Sen, Joseph Stiglitz, and Paul Krugman. but, maybe that is asking for too much, eh!"

In my understanding, mainstream academic economics--and its political variation--did not significantly change in the more than ten years since then.  Even the nasty Great Recession did not force a sharp re-thinking in economics and politics!

There is a reason that I have keenly followed these three: They are not merely economists of repute, but also phenomenal thinkers.  And, they also write in a manner that makes even blokes like me understand the weight of their arguments.

Stiglitz has, forever it seems, yelling about the need to redo the social contract, so that it would reflect the conditions in which we live now.  There are a number of posts where I have quoted him, among many others, on the need for a new social contract.  Like in this post from three years ago.

It is also instructive to think about the comment there: "Stiglitz is in the same camp as Krugman and therefore I have to take many a gulp before I write this comment - lest Trumpesque unparliamentary language creeps in :)"  That comment is reflective of the intense political opposition that existed, and continues to exist.

In his latest opinion essay in The NY Times, Stiglitz writes:

We are now in a vicious cycle: Greater economic inequality is leading, in our money-driven political system, to more political inequality, with weaker rules and deregulation causing still more economic inequality.
If we don’t change course matters will likely grow worse, as machines (artificial intelligence and robots) replace an increasing fraction of routine labor, including many of the jobs of the several million Americans making their living by driving.

Even a casual reader of this blog knows well how much I have worried about these very issues, and which is why I have been yelling from my corner about the need for a new social contract.  A contract that would not dampen the innovative and creative forces in the marketplace, but would also provide a lot more support to the people and places that get left behind.

Stiglitz calls for a new social contract, through Progressive Capitalism.  A political economic structure that will be different from what we now have:

Most important, our exploitive capitalism has shaped who we are as individuals and as a society. The rampant dishonesty we’ve seen from Wells Fargo and Volkswagen or from members of the Sackler family as they promoted drugs they knew were addictive — this is what is to be expected in a society that lauds the pursuit of profits as leading, to quote Adam Smith, “as if by an invisible hand,” to the well-being of society, with no regard to whether those profits derive from exploitation or wealth creation.

This was the fork-in-the-road that we faced in the elections of 2016.  No thanks to two old white men, 63 million forced the country to take the wrong route despite all the flashing red lights warning us of danger ahead.  Let's see what we do in 2020.

Do not lean on me. Lean on the robot?

I try my best not to use the turn-by-turn navigation instructions from the smartphone.  In fact, preparations for a road trip include going to the local AAA office and picking up the relevant maps. Yes, the old-fashioned printed maps.

Will this practice of consulting with maps and figuring out directions go away as we humans begin to rely more and more on smartphones that direct us?

Technology is rapidly removing the "need" for many aspects of our lives.  Where will it all end?

There is something new in us not "needing" the old ways of knowing things.  Of course, even in the olden days, not all of us knew how to grow crops or fix the broken doors.  We got these done through cooperation:

We are constantly engaged in ‘memory transactions’ with a community of ‘memory partners’, through activities such as conversation, reading and writing. As members of these networks, most people no longer need to remember most things. This is not because that knowledge has been entirely forgotten or lost, but because someone or something else retains it. We just need to know whom to talk to, or where to go to look it up. The inherited talent for such cooperative behaviour is a gift from evolution, and it expands our effective memory capacity enormously.

We relied on fellow humans.

This time it is different.  We cooperate with "smart machines."

How then ought we to approach education?  Leave alone higher education for a second.  What should we teach kids in elementary schools?  How much should they be allowed to cooperate with smart machines? Without the smart machines helping them, will kids be way less smart than they seem?  Will that matter?

But in an educational setting, unlike collaborative chess or medical diagnostics, the student is not yet a content expert. The AI as know-it-all memory partner can easily become a crutch, while producing students who think they can walk on their own.

The changes are happening incredibly fast for us to collectively think through such issues.  Before we have thought about them and made a decision one way or another, a lot more changes happen.  We are forever behind when it comes to acting on these important issues that will profoundly affect the future.

My selfish answer is that it is not my problem anymore, given my age.  But, I worry. A lot.

I hate diets. I simply eat.

Every time I visit India, and when it is time for me to pack up to return home, I am asked the same questions by people around me, which are all variations of "are you taking with you sweets and savories?"

I tell them that I am not.  Well, sometimes I do sneak into the suitcase a packet of thattai.

The reason is simply this: I usually eat from whatever is available in the place where I am traveling.

In Costa Rica, I ate whatever tasty stuff that I got from the local diner and baker.  I ate what I was provided in Tanzania.  It is the same in Canada, France, wherever.   If I can't get nutritious vegetarian dishes, then I reluctantly reach for a cooked carcass! ;)

What we eat is cultural, not biological.  Which is why any fad for diets amuses me.  A few years ago, my grandmother claimed that the Idli/yogurt combination was the healthiest ever.  In response, I asked her to explain how the Japanese, who don't know idli, live long and healthy lives.  "They eat a lot of fish.  Will you also eat fish?" I asked her.  I tell ya, the eternal skeptic annoys everybody, including his grandmother!

These are the kinds of reasons why I agree with this author who writes that "the so-called Paleo diet is a myth."   Now, unlike me, the author is a real expert: "Peter S. Ungar is Distinguished Professor and director of the Environmental Dynamics Program at the University of Arkansas."  Ungar writes:

Many paleoanthropologists today believe that increasing climate fluctuation through the Pleistocene sculpted our ancestors—whether their bodies, or their wit, or both—for the dietary flexibility that’s become a hallmark of humanity. The basic idea is that our ever-changing world winnowed out the pickier eaters among us. Nature has made us a versatile species, which is why we can find something to satiate us on nearly all of its myriad biospheric buffet tables. It’s also why we have been able to change the game, transition from forager to farmer, and really begin to consume our planet.

We humans eat an enormous variety of foods.  The Finns eat differently from the Tamils whose foods are different from what Peruvians eat.  No other animal does like what we do.  Without understanding this, people--about three million Americans alone--are on a paleo diet.  But, did even the paleo people have any universal "paleo diet"?

From the standpoint of paleoecology, the Paleolithic diet is a myth. Food choice is as much about what’s available to be eaten as it is about what a species evolved to eat. And just as fruits ripen, leaves flush, and flowers bloom predictably at different times of the year, foods available to our ancestors varied over deep time as the world changed around them from warm and wet to cool and dry and back again. Those changes are what drove our evolution.

What our ancestors ate depended on where they lived.

Consider some of the recent hunter-gatherers who have inspired Paleolithic diet enthusiasts. The Tikiġaġmiut of the north Alaskan coast lived almost entirely on the protein and fat of marine mammals and fish, while the Gwi San in Botswana’s Central Kalahari took something like 70 percent of their calories from carbohydrate-rich, sugary melons and starchy roots. Traditional human foragers managed to earn a living from the larger community of life that surrounded them in a remarkable variety of habitats, from near-polar latitudes to the tropics.

So, when we refer to a paleo-style diet, which paleo are we referring to?  The Kalahari's carbohydrate rich food?  The Alaskan sea food diet?

It is one crazy world out there, and I have to struggle to maintain my sanity.

I have my own dietary protocols.  As I noted a month ago, even my lunch is pretty much predictable and same, day after day.

Too bad that thattai is not made freshly here though. ;)

A decade of Facebook. And a year without it.

Re-posting this, on the anniversary of permanently deleting my Facebook account ;)
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After years of a love-hate relationship, and asking myself whether I should stay or go, I did it.  It took some thinking. It was calculated. It was well-planned.

I quit Facebook ;)

It was a lengthy relationship, to which I dragged myself back in the summer of 2008.

But, two years is all it took for me to start worrying about Facebook.  I suspended my account.  As I noted in a post back in 2011, "There are moments when I worry about all this social media network and the internet ..."

That was the first of a few times when I suspended my account and then got back to Facebook after a while. It was a love-hate relationship.   I joked about that:

I feel like the heroine in the formulaic Bollywood movies who alternates between yelling "I hate you" to the hero and "I love you" a few minutes after that!

There are a gazillion posts with the label Facebook, which will demonstrate my worries not only about Facebook but about social media, technology, and artificial intelligence.

Technology, the internet, and social media all had good intentions in the beginning, of course.  But, it did not take long for them to become the evil forces of darkness.  As one of my go-to tech thinkers, Tristan Harris, puts it:

There was pressure from venture capital to grow really, really quickly. There’s a graph showing how many years it took different companies to get to 100 million users. It used to take ten years, but now you can do it in six months. So if you’re competing with other start-ups for funding, it depends on your ability to grow usage very quickly. Everyone in the tech industry is in denial. We think we’re making the world more open and connected, when in fact the game is just: How do I drive lots of engagement?

When it became all about the numbers, soon it was hell on earth:

Social media was supposed to be about, “Hey, Grandma. How are you?” Now it’s like, “Oh my God, did you see what she wore yesterday? What a fucking cow that bitch is.” Everything is toxic — and that has to do with the internet itself. It was founded to connect people all over the world. But now you can meet people all over the world and then murder them in virtual reality and rape their pets.

What drives this all?  The ability of the tech in social media to tap into our primal feelings of anger, rage, hate, and more.

They’re basically trying to trigger fear and anger to get the outrage cycle going, because outrage is what makes you be more deeply engaged. You spend more time on the site and you share more stuff. Therefore, you’re going to be exposed to more ads, and that makes you more valuable. In 2008, when they put their first app on the iPhone, the whole ballgame changed. Suddenly Bernays’s dream of the universal platform reaching everybody through every medium at the same time was achieved by a single device. You marry the social triggers to personalized content on a device that most people check on their way to pee in the morning and as the last thing they do before they turn the light out at night. You literally have a persuasion engine unlike any created in history.

As I wrote in one of my recent posts, We are fucked, folks. But, there is no going back either.  Well, I know that I am not going back to Facebook.

I will soon be teaching a math course. Kind of.

Looking back at events from nearly thirty years ago, I am pleasantly surprised at the decisions that I made.  One of those was to walk away from all things math, and I am all the happier.

Math came easily to me; not only did I not have anxieties, I enjoyed learning and doing math.  In school, I routinely did the classwork way ahead of the rest and then used up the remaining time to finish the assigned homework. (Which explains why my mother claims, and rightfully so, that she has never ever seen me do homework or study.)  I understood  the abstraction when in engineering too, though by then I knew for certain that my heart was not in math.

When I switched out of engineering to study the subjects that I wanted to know more about, it was clear that most faculty in the graduate program expected me to put my math and engineering background to use.  The social sciences were getting heavily into math and statistics and those who could play with numbers had an easier time publishing papers, which was all that mattered.

But, I couldn't care.  Because, I could not be convinced that mathematical and statistical modeling would explain the human and social dynamics that I was interested in and, I was even more confident that those models could never predict anything into the future.  Instead, I chose to transition into the methods that have been used for centuries--thinking and writing.  It was a difficult struggle because the years of schooling in India had screwed up my thinking abilities and had not given me any sense of how to write.

I even made fun of the articles in journals.  They were all gobbledygook.  Plenty of data but minutiae. Greek symbols expressing statistical modeling of social issues.  And sentences that rarely made sense.

As if a bunch of laws can explain quite a few things about the human condition.  The crazies who wanted to study the problems that humans and societies face decided to develop models to explain the problems.  And to develop laws and theories.  Madness, I say, madness!

The net result of all that?  I was a loser out of graduate school!  A loser I continue to be.  At least, I am a loser on my own terms, eh! ;)

Despite the losses, I am confident that all it will take is one look around the world in order to understand that developing mathematical and statistical models will do nothing to help us with the problems all around.  Oh well.  Losers don't get to write history! ;)

But, I will soon get to teach math to incoming college freshman students.  Details in another post; stay tuned!

Tourists

We were in Khajuraho.  A place that mesmerized me ever since I read about it during my high school years.

Khajuraho was infinitely more than what I had known.  It was as if I were in an entirely different planet.  A planet that was a peaceful and clean paradise, unlike the chaotic and polluted places we came from and through.

We were tourists.

Like all tourists, we happily walked around where once rich and powerful kingdoms existed.
Life was nasty, brutish, and short, to most, while it was a royal life to a few.
Where wars were fought. And people were killed.
Temples were built. And temples were demolished.
Art was created. And art was destroyed.

We tourists returned home.

This being poetry month, I wanted a poem that would speak to these emotions.  I was reminded of a poem that I had read a while ago.  It took me some time to track it down; time that was better spent than on Twitter.  Am delighted that the poem is by Amichai, whose another poem I read and blogged two years ago.

Here is Amichai on tourists.

Tourists
By Yehuda Amichai

Visits of condolence is all we get from them.
They squat at the Holocaust Memorial,
They put on grave faces at the Wailing Wall
And they laugh behind heavy curtains
In their hotels.
They have their pictures taken
Together with our famous dead
At Rachel's Tomb and Herzl's Tomb
And on Ammunition Hill.
They weep over our sweet boys
And lust after our tough girls
And hang up their underwear
To dry quickly
In cool, blue bathrooms.

sanitas per escam!

"About 11 million deaths a year are linked to poor diet around the globe," reports NPR.

Before you allow your bleeding liberal heart to command you to take your credit card and pay for some stereotypical poor people somewhere, read more.

What's driving this? As a planet we don't eat enough healthy foods including whole grains, nuts, seeds, fruits and vegetables. At the same time, we consume too many sugary drinks, too much salt and too much processed meat.

Have you put that credit card back in your wallet?

Btw, I am no grammar expert; but, leading a sentence with "as a planet we don't eat enough ..." sounds awful!  Sounds as bad as "buy local" or "save the earth." ;)

Mexico, in particular, is an interesting case:

The country ranked 57th on the list. On the one hand, people in Mexico consume a lot of whole grain corn tortillas, he says — and whole grains are beneficial. But on the other hand, "Mexico has one of the highest levels of consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages."

So, ok, more confirmation that sugar is bad for us, and it is awful how we are biologically programmed to enjoy it though.  And, yes, we need to eat healthily.

What if all of us, especially the soon-to-be 9 or 10 billion people, decide to eat healthily--you know, the wonderful mix of whole grains, nuts, fruits, and vegetables?

A recent study published in the journal PLOS One by researchers at the University of Guelph found that there would not be enough fruit and vegetables to go around.

Damned if you do, and damned if you don't! ;)

All the more why we need to seriously rethink agricultural production.  Check out this essay in The New Yorker. 

Source

New year greetings from "a civilized human being"

This is poetry month, and it is the Tamil New Year.

So, here is a classic from quite a few years ago.  The lyrics are by the poet Bharatidasan,



This poem is a sincere and touching homage to the language, Tamil.  And, of course, set to delightful music by the old masterful team of Viswanathan-Ramamurthy.

Tamil is one of the oldest living languages of the world--if not the oldest--with a vast body of literature.  The older I get, the more I appreciate the immense richness in which I grew up, but failed to systematically study.  I am all the happier that I came across the fantastic biography of Tamil that David Shulman authored.  As he so wonderfully put it, "to know Tamil" can also mean "to be a civilized human being."

But, of course, the old Tamil is even more difficult to understand than Shakespeare's English can be to a teenager of today.  We needed experts to interpret that old Tamil to us, but the teachers we had in school fell far short of conveying the beauty and lush gold in the historical past.  Come to think of it, those teachers murdered the language.

The song in the video below is a poem by Manonmaniam Sundaram Pillai.  It later became the official state song of Tamil Nadu.

Happy new year, dear reader!

"True joy is a serious thing"

I came across "true joy is a serious thing" in this wonderful essay on higher education.  On redeeming the liberal arts.

I became a huge fan of the author, Leon Botstein, after reading an essay in The New Yorker that was about him and Bard College that he presides over.  Quite a force he is!

In this recent essay, Botstein writes:

Students entering college ask basic questions about life. They are in search of ways to define their place in the world. They are concerned about their own lives and are curious about large problems in the world—matters of justice, the nature and possibilities of work and employment, the future of the planet, the construction of meaning, the nature of knowledge and belief, and the understanding of nature. These grand, wide-ranging concerns are not mirrored by the professional or disciplinary divisions of a university. The proper response is not old-fashioned survey courses; rather, courses on issues and problems that probe deeply and draw from more than one discipline are needed. So too are curricular structures that develop, from the first year, a common ground for all students that can enable serious conversation and debate among them. Finally, the sense of excitement and satisfaction derived from the active life of the mind must be nurtured. As Seneca put it, “True joy is a serious thing.” Cultivating that recognition ought to be a basic goal of the liberal arts.

And this exactly what we do not do.  In fact, we do everything possible to kill any innate student interest into inquiring about their place in this world and how to make meaning of their lives.

Higher education has been reduced to a glorified trade school. 

Now, there is nothing wrong with trade schools.  There is a place for trade schools that teach skills, and there is a place for universities that go beyond trade skills.  Trade schools, to their credit, do not suffer from any mission drift and stay focused on the trade.  Universities, on the other hand, have completely lost sight of their mission.  Increasingly, universities even go one step more and systematically transform themselves into becoming glorified trade schools.

Earlier this week, as we engaged in discussions in the classroom, I told students that I want them to  consider learning as personal.  It is not about something in the abstract; instead, it is about them, their lives, their communities, and their country.  I was telling them, without telling them, that education helps them with what Botstein refers to: Find their own answers to in their "search of ways to define their place in the world. They are concerned about their own lives and are curious about large problems in the world—matters of justice, the nature and possibilities of work and employment, the future of the planet, the construction of meaning, the nature of knowledge and belief, and the understanding of nature."

But then ... yes, you have heard me say this before, nobody listens to me!  When even Botstein has very little influence over all these issues, what chance do I have of being heard!

"The ultimate challenge"

I have been a fan of carbon tax.  I have blogged about it, talked about it, discussed it with students.  And I followed with interest the ballot initiative in the neighboring state.

It is, therefore, depressing to agree with David Leonhardt about the political reality of pricing carbon--won't happen.

What is the political reality?  As I quoted in that blog-post, "any Republican Presidential candidate who supported a carbon tax or regulations “would be at a severe disadvantage in the Republican nomination process.”  This Republican reality has become a nightmare in this hyper-partisan tRump time:

The G.O.P.’s radical turn means that climate activists can no longer search for a compromise between the two parties, in the hope that their leaders will try to sell it to skeptical voters. Republicans have made clear that they will instead stoke the skepticism for their own ends. Doing so pleases the oil and coal industries, which are generous campaign donors. It also helps win elections.

Win elections.  Win them at any cost.  Screw the damn liberals!

Why then don't initiatives succeed, even in blue states like Washington?

Carbon pricing puts attention on the mechanism, be it a dreaded tax or a byzantine cap-and-trade system. Mechanisms don’t inspire people. Mechanisms are easy to caricature as big-government bureaucracy. Think about the debate over Obamacare: When the focus was on mechanisms — insurance mandates, insurance exchanges and the like — the law was not popular. When the focus shifted to basic principles — Do sick people deserve health insurance? — the law became much more so.

Which is how tRump also won, right?  While Hillary Clinton talked like an expert on the mechanisms to make things better for Americans, tRump merely provided flashy simplistic slogans and rhetoric.  She, for instance, talked to coal miners, about how she will support programs to re-train them, while he even mimed a cartoonish version of coal-digging.  And he won!

This reality is also driving a new way of looking at the climate change issues--the Green New Deal:

Rhiana Gunn-Wright, a 29-year-old Rhodes scholar, works for the think tank New Consensus and helped design the Green New Deal. When I spoke with her, I was struck by her sense of political realism and how different it was from the old definition. For a long time, environmental activists have shown an almost compulsive — and in many ways admirable — honesty. They have chosen policies, like carbon taxes, that emphasize the downsides: Energy prices will rise. The Green New Deal and the recent clean-energy ballot initiatives do the reverse. They emphasize the benefits of clean energy and minimize the downsides. “There is a lot of anxiety and uncertainty in America today,” Gunn-Wright said. “Any solution that is tied to tangible economic benefits is going to have a better chance of passing.”

The truth, but not the whole truth.  Which is any day infinitely better than tRump's and the GOP's bullshit.

Leonhardt sums it up well:

The sad truth is that climate politics are probably not going remain as they are today. The future will almost certainly bring increasing harm, through more extreme weather. Eventually, some Republican politicians, especially in coastal states, may be willing to break with party leaders on the issue. Eventually, Americans may decide to punish politicians who deny or play down climate change. By the time a price on carbon took effect, it might not be so unpopular anymore. But we can’t wait for the politics to change to begin taking action.

The pursuit of madness!

March Madness has ended!  More on the Madness here.

It is time then to re-post this from April 2017 ;)
*************************************************

Recall the sound bite "we need more welders and less philosophers" from back when it was the season of the Republican primaries? I wish we had engaged in a whole lot of discussion regarding that statement from Senator Marco Rubio. Instead, we collectively shrugged and moved on.

We could, and should, have used that opportunity to engage in discussions on what education ought to accomplish. If we had, then we would have agreed that we need both welders and philosophers, and that higher education is failing to deliver them.

Public higher educational institutions have suffered from extensive mission creep over the years. It is best (worst?) seen in how sports-oriented the taxpayer subsidized colleges and universities have become. Welders and philosophers are apparently way less important than athletics in the mission of higher education!

Countries where people are far more sports-crazy than we are do not waste their taxpayer monies like we do here in the US. Europeans, for instance, are maniacal about soccer, but they know well that sports is sports, and education is education. Or, consider my old country, India, where cricket is practically a religion. Colleges do not waste enormous resources on cricket and its gods.

If only we had continued to engage with the welders/philosophers soundbite, then we would have ended up talking about the wasteful practices in higher education, with athletics as perhaps the foremost waste of taxpayer money. But, of course, public institutions do not want us to talk about this, and the sports-addicted taxpayers are even less interested it seems.

A year ago, journalists in Michigan attempted to understand how much taxpayer money is spent on athletics by public institutions in their state. It was not an easy project. They “obtained through the Freedom of Information Act the financial disclosure statements provided to the NCAA from Michigan's 13 public universities that offer NCAA-level athletics.” Yes, through the Freedom of Information Act!

What they found did not surprise any of us who have been critical of this unholy mix of sports and academics in public higher education. Not only did the public institutions spend gazillions on athletics, “students are often "kept in the dark" when it comes to how universities fund college athletics and the degree to which colleges are subsidizing sports.”

Yet, whenever they cry funding shortage, universities are ready to cut philosophy before they even think of reducing the sports subsidies. I wish that legislatures, including here in Oregon with our huge budget deficit, would question the wisdom of public colleges as entertainment arenas.

The university where I have been teaching for fifteen years is no exception. A decade ago, a 25-million dollar facility was built primarily to meet the NCAA Division II requirements. Such an outrageous expense would not have been incurred if sports were played at the lower tier National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA,) in which the university participated until the year 2000.

America is exceptional indeed—when it comes to diverting taxpayer money on entertainment, when that could be spent instead on welders and philosophers. This taxpayer-supported entertainment is what the Declaration of Independence meant by "the pursuit of happiness.”

Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall

But too much is falling here in Oregon.

The key word there is "some."  Not a whole lot, dammit!

It has been pouring here in the Valley.  The atmospheric river, as the weather folks call it, has been dumping water into the rivers here on land, and everywhere else.

The ground is super-saturated.  True to my father's engineering claim that water is an enemy for the bitumen, roads are rapidly becoming pothole avenues.  A little bit more rain and I will have to trade in my car for a boat.

The river is running brown, full, fast, and furious.  But, comforting it is to get a visual confirmation that my home is well above on a high ground.

April showers these are not; these are April downpours!

April is also poetry month.  Enjoy the poetry that Ella Fitzgerald sings so easily, smoothly, and emotionally.

Into each life some rain must fall 
But too much is falling in mine 
Into each heart some tears must fall 
But some day the sun will shine 

Some folks can lose the blues in their hearts 
But when I think of you another shower starts 
Into each life some rain must fall 
But too much is falling in mine 

Into each life some rain must fall 
But too much, too much is fallin' in mine 
Into each heart some tears must fall 
But some day the sun will shine 

Some folks can lose the blues in their heart 
But when I think of you another shower starts 
Into each life some rain must fall 
But too much is fallin' in mine 

Into each and every life some rain has got to fall 
But too much of that stuff is fallin' into mine 
And into each heart some tears got to fall 
And I know that someday that sun is bound to shine 

Some folks can lose the blues in their heart
But when I think of you another shower starts
Into each life some rain must fall
But too much is fallin' in mine

I am handsome. Really?

During my teenage years, I was convinced that I was not one of those guys with charming looks who instantly won girls over.  Had I known then the word "nerd," I would have instantly connected with that emotion-laden word.  In addition, almost every other week, like clockwork, a big fat zit would appear on my nose.

We never talked about feelings those years.  I did not even know it was possible.  All I knew was that I felt sad sometimes.  And perhaps was even on the verge of tears--but, of course, boys don't cry!  Beauty is in the eye of the beholder is all baloney, I decided.

I was not exaggerating much when I blogged a few months ago on life if one is not the object of dreams.  As I wrote there, I bet there are many among us who worried, or worry even now: "What if I were nothing but an ugly pile who could not, and would not, attract anyone?"

Of course, the pressure to look good is immensely worse on girls and women.  Even on older women.  A few years ago, when I told my mother that she ought to walk more, and get some sun on her for the essential vitamin-D, my father immediately jumped in and said that she could easily go for short walks in the morning after having coffee.  Seems logical, right?

My mother had a response that I could not have imagined.  She said that she had to look presentable when stepping out, and that meant she could do only after showering (or, take a bath, as they say in the old country.)  To her, going for a walk was not all that simple a thing as stepping out of the house.

A young Irish woman writes about the "embarrassment I felt as a teenager about not fitting some ideal of beauty."

Yes, we have all been there in some manner.  She then makes an important point about the contemporary "inclusivity ": "somewhere along the way, the message of inclusivity went from “every kind of person can be beautiful” to “every person is beautiful," which she argues is "actively harmful."

Wouldn’t it be freeing to admit that most people are not beautiful? What if we stopped prioritizing pleasing aesthetics above so much else? I wonder what it would be like to grow up in a world where being beautiful is not seen as a necessity, but instead a nice thing some people are born with and some people aren’t, like a talent for swimming, or playing the piano.

Quite an interesting way to think about it.  We say some are good at swimming, while others---like me--swim like a rock.  We state it as a fact.  The truth.  Why can't we be the same way about appearances?  Hmmm ...

In another part of the world, in Bangladesh,  a 29-year-old photographer documents the pressures on women in Bangladesh to be attractive through a unique series of photographs like the one that I have included in this post.

The women in Habiba's photos look bright and colourful but their faces are entirely covered, representing a loss of the inner self even though outwardly the women have made great efforts to look beautiful.
Habiba wants to draw attention to how much of themselves Bangladeshi women have to compromise to make others happy.

Life is complicated in so many ways!

Source

The coming elections will be nasty ... and critical

It was from my life in California that I understood the place-based politics that I have been worried about forever since.  Life in the Central Valley was nothing like the California that people have in mind.  I used to tell people that the SoCal versus NorCal (Southern California versus Northern California) was an incorrect framework, and that the realistic one is coastal California versus inland California.

Coastal California is urban, cosmopolitan, and everything that we think of when we think about the state.  It is liberal in its politics and culture.  People have no hassles relating themselves to the world.

The inland communities and people gave me a very different taste of the Golden State.  When What's the matter with Kansas? came out, I could easily relate to the discussions there because the dynamics were similar to what I had experienced in the southern San Joaquin Valley. 

Moving to Oregon reinforced the place-based understanding.  It turned out that the state being described as liberal and full of hippies was one hell of a gross caricature.  There were--and are--some hard core conservatives, whose outlook was/is no different from the population in California's Central Valley.

All these are why I never dismissed the possibility of tRump winning not only his adopted party's nomination but also the general election.  And I was worried sick about tRump, even as the "progressive" Berniacs were enthusiastically beating up on Hillary Clinton.

I was thinking about all these as a result of reading this compelling essay about the gilets jaunes (the yellow vests).  When we think about France, we think in terms that are comparable to reducing California to its coasts, or Oregon to its liberals.  As much as there is a lot more in these two states, there is plenty more to France as well.  The neglected are pissed off, and for good reasons; the "populist anger as the inevitable response to the widening gulf between those “rooted” in a particular place and cosmopolitans at home anywhere"

To most of us--yes, including you, the reader--the world is our larger home within which we have a physical address as our "home."  We ask ourselves "in an age of massive displacement and global travel, does the concept of home even make sense anymore?"  But, this is not a question that tRump's base or the gilets jaunes or the Brexiters ask themselves.

This struggle is bound to worsen in the US if the economic benefits from all-things-global are not accompanied by constructive redistribution policies and programs.  Unfortunately, the party that fuels and funnels the rage of the "rooted" is also opposed to redistribution of any kind.  Let us see if any of the Democratic contenders are able to overcome this important challenge.  I hope they will.

Call out the bullshit. Tell the truth. Run!

Many, many moons ago, when I was a young graduate student, I went across town to listen to Pranab Bardhan, among others, at a symposium at UCLA.  A question Bardhan was asked was whether he would like to serve the Indian government in an official capacity.  This was back when India was beginning to think about liberalizing its economy.  Bardhan's reply resonated with me: he said that he could best contribute by being a constructive critic from the outside.

While life after graduation convinced me all the more that I am nowhere near Bardhan's smartness, I equally understood that constructive criticism is how I can best serve my fellow humans.

I was/am thankful get back to the academic world, which provides the best possible environment from which we can engage in constructive criticism.  After all, if we do not, and cannot, critique then what good are colleges for?

However, it seems like criticism is increasingly of the destructive and thoughtless kind.  On television, it is yelling matches devoid of reason and evidence.  Worse, it is all about bullshit now!  Of course, I am not the only one who has even created courses to address bullshit.

At the other end, it is nothing but standing ovations for any activity, all the way from kindergarten to graduate school.  Why this nauseating level of all enthusiasm and ovation all the time, and whatever happened to critics?  Not every work deserves that gold star, writes this professional critic:

The sad truth about the book world is that it doesn’t need more yes-saying novelists and certainly no more yes-saying critics. We are drowning in them. What we need more of, now that newspaper book sections are shrinking and vanishing like glaciers, are excellent and authoritative and punishing critics — perceptive enough to single out the voices that matter for legitimate praise, abusive enough to remind us that not everyone gets, or deserves, a gold star. 

What he writes about the book world is equally applicable to the world outside of publishing too.

[Criticism] doesn’t mean delivering petty, ill-tempered Simon Cowell-like put-downs. It doesn’t necessarily mean heaping scorn. It means making fine distinctions. It means talking about ideas, aesthetics and morality as if these things matter (and they do). It’s at base an act of love. Our critical faculties are what make us human.

He puts it really, really, well: criticism comes out of a love for ideas and their beauty, whether that idea is scientific, musical, literary, or whatever.  It is precisely to develop an appreciation and understanding of these that we (supposedly) engage in higher education where we (supposedly) emphasize "critical thinking."

Of course, engaging in criticism might not win friends:

Until you work up the nerve to say what you think and stand behind it, young critics and fellow amiable tweeters, there’s always the advice the critic George Seldes gave in the title of his 1953 memoir: “Tell the Truth and Run.”

I suppose my problem is that I don't run even when it is clear that is what I am told to do!

I am here; deal with it :)

Tasting the nectar of life

I read an opinion essay about the hardship that Vladimir Nabokov--and his wife, Vera Slonim--went through--from the communist revolution to Hitler, which finally brought them to America.  He was a refugee and an immigrant more than once in his life.  And, yet, he prospered, leaving his mark on humanity in ways most of us are incapable of.

Nabokov was also an expert on butterflies.  A lepidopterist.

In biology, when we studied about the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly, I had a tough time believing and imagining a wriggly worm becoming a colorful butterfly.  How magical, I thought.

These days, urban life means that kids and adults rarely ever encounter butterflies.  Such is life that we call progress!

The Indian poet-mystic Rabindranath Tagore had a simple and yet profound poem in which he referred to the butterfly, in his Poems on Time.  Well, it is not really about the butterfly itself, as you can tell:

The butterfly counts not months but moments,
and has time enough.

Time is a wealth of change,
but the clock in its parody makes it mere change and no wealth.

Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time
like dew on the tip of a leaf.

May you, too, have enough wealthy moments in your life!