Yom Kippur is round the corner

Israel's Netanyahu is trying to manipulate politics yet again in order to stay in office and preclude indictment. If he succeeds, then he will try his best to intervene in our politics too because of his conviction that Democrats are not as pro-Israel and anti-Iran as he would like.

Meanwhile, tRump, who is a frenemy of his, has a yuge challenge ahead of him to avoid impeachment and prison time.

Even though I operate under a don't_forget/don't_forgive approach to life, if only these horrible human beings and their sycophants would take at least a few minutes next weekend in order to think about Leonard Bernstein's profound remarks that he gave at Harvard decades ago (emphasis mine):

I have come here tonight to share with you something I learned on this fantastic three-week journey abroad: first, that I have never loved my country so profoundly and caringly as I do now; second, that because of that love I feel more than ever the compulsion and responsibility to re-examine our automatic enemy-concept; and last, that this is a great time to do it, during these 10 days of prayer and reflection.

There is a charming legend about this penitential period: It is said that on Rosh Hashanah, New Year’s Day, the golden Book of Life up there in the sky is inscribed with the name of every single human being, along with his or her destiny for the year: who will live and who will die, who by fire and who by water, who will prosper and who will not. But there are 10 days within which one can change that inscription for the better—by prayer and the practice of good deeds. Charity and faith can avert the evil decree (you see, it’s all just another version of Corinthians, chapter 13). In other words, it’s now or never, because on the 10th day, Yom Kippur, the big book is closed and sealed for the year. Sorry folks, that’s it.So here we are on the eighth night, and I want to make my own public confession of faith, hope, and charity. You see, a couple of years ago I had a bit of a falling-out with my esteemed and well-loved friend Derek Bok. I won’t bore you with the story, but the rumpus was basically about a book written and published at Harvard and blessed with a sizable preface by President Bok. I read and hated this book and became quite exercised about the preface, which didn’t exactly endorse the book, but the presence of which, up front and center, by so distinguished a thinker, gave the book a certain cachet I didn’t think it deserved. Dare I mention its name? Living with Nuclear Weapons—the title alone was discouraging enough. Well, I got real mad and, in a self-righteous huff, stopped further contributions to the Harvard scholarship fund I had established years before. I was wrong to do so; and even though Derek and I have never debated the matter publicly or privately—never even had that lunch we promised each other—nevertheless I have sinned, I re-examine, I re-evaluate, and I hereby return the withheld funds.

There is no enemy; there is the American principle of free debate; fighting against an invented enemy is wasteful; fighting for ourselves and one another is constructive, is sharing—otherwise known as love.Let me leave you with the thought that we all have until Monday night to meditate, rectify, re-assess, and get that celestial inscription changed. Try it, it’s worth it. And, as we say, shana tovah, a good year, and hatimah tovah, a good inscription. Bless you.

So, yes, "shana tovah,"

Barre it all

On our way to the creative engagement of the evening that was the ending of this post, we passed a Barre3 studio.  We wondered, yet again, what that is all about.

And then, there I was reading a review of Jia Tolentino's book, (which M is currently reading) and the cosmos--well, the reviewer--answers that question by channeling Tolentino:

Barre dance studios, she writes, are a “nationwide fixture” that offer a cross between ballet and gymnastics, a series of positions that resemble “what a ballerina might do if you concussed her and then made her snort caffeine pills.” Barre was conceived and developed in the 1960s by Lotte Berk, a Jewish dancer who fled Germany for England before World War II and then passed the business on to her daughter, Esther. Today the largest barre franchise has more than five hundred outlets across the United States. Esther describes her mother as abusive. She dismissed the sexual proposition Esther’s father made to their daughter and said she’d pay Esther to give a blow job to one of her colleagues. Nonetheless, Esther chose to run a studio in Berkshire, England, and continues her mother’s tradition to this day.

That is perhaps far more than I would ever need to know about Barre3!

But, there is more in the review, about Tolentino as a writer, critic, and a voice coming from a younger generation:

Tolentino always has her eye out for the ugly history, the stain on the carpet that so many refuse to see. In this case, it is hard not to believe that the double trauma of the war and sexual abuse is lurking beneath this dazzling, cruel success story, the hidden spur for the “arbitrary prolonged agony” that barre inflicts systematically on its devotees (who over the years have included Ivana Trump, Edna O’Brien, and Mary Tyler Moore). Owners of barre studios have made a fortune in exploiting human masochism at a very high cost. Tolentino admits to finding it uplifting. Spandex, the luxury textile of choice for the new athletic class, was created by the military, also during World War II, to be “uniquely flexible, resilient, and strong.” Tolentino imagines herself wrapped in the material, chanting its mantra of potency on behalf of women, as blood streams from her eyes.

If you are like me, by now you are convinced that a Barre3 experience means getting on the road towards enhanced interrogation at Gitmo!

Like many, my first introduction to Jia Tolentino was through her fantastic memoir essay in The New Yorker.  As awesome as her writing was, the content was troubling and nihilistic. I, too, rejected the religion that I was born into, and do not subscribe to any faith, but I am not nihilistic about the life that I live.  Instead, I try to create meaning out of this otherwise mysterious and meaningless existence.  But, Tolentino did provide me a window into how others like her, irrespective of how many that might be, make of their lives.

The reviewer notes about this aspect too:

It is easy to be lured by the exhilaration—the fun, even—of these essays, and to miss the depression, not to say nihilism—a word Tolentino uses—that runs beneath the stream. Nihilism has almost become the common philosophical currency of the age, a way of describing the bleakness of a political system that seems always ahead, or on top, of the resistance that its glaring injustices provoke. “The half-ironic millennial death wish,” she wrote in a New Yorker essay in June, “has become an underground river rushing swiftly under the surface of the age.”

I wonder how many of the students that I interact with feel scammed the same way--if not fully--by the socioeconomic/political/religious framework that Tolentino writes about.  It would be a shame if the "half-ironic millennial death wish" is indeed pervasive.  I am confident, though, that the answer to that will not be found at a local Barre3 studio!

Drawing a few lessons about life and education

Way back in school in the old country, my friends Vijay and Srikumar were very good with pencil drawing.  Animals, nature, and even people, you name it and they easily could.  I, on the other hand, couldn't even draw a line!

How on earth do some people--even without any formal training--draw and sing and dance and write poems and more?

I have forever wondered about this, and have even blogged in plenty about creativity.  I get pissed off when education systematically marginalizes all these, and then write something like this, which I did a year ago:

Creativity is something that has always intrigued me; I have always felt that formal education the way we offer it simply kills any creativity. Only the fortunate ones survive with their creative skills in tact.
All these add to my frustration with the mantras of STEM and coding. If I could, I would tell educators to "fuck off."  But, alas, in the academic and professional worlds, we cannot ;)

Which is why when I read about one of the MacArthur "genius" Award winners, I was easily bowled over.

Lynda Barry, whose class at Wisconsin helps college students tap innate creativity, is one of the honorees.    Barry was tapped for the award for "Inspiring creative engagement through original graphic works and a teaching practice centered on the role of image making in communication."

I followed the link and listened to a 30-minute interview with her from six years ago.  Yep, there is no doubt about her genius.

Barry says there:

I find so interesting is there's that longing to make things stays with us our whole lives, and there is a lot of sadness about it, and a lot of, a lot of terror about drawing. I mean, that's the - that's the part, when I'm working with the people at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, I'm around geneticists and mathematicians and physicists, all these people who are also - and they do their big formulas on the board, you know, delta epsilon minus two and whatever they're doing. But if they have to draw like even a stick figure, they freak out. So that's interesting to me.

Count me as one those sad people!

Maybe some day we will think beyond how to prepare young children as coders and programmers and worker bees, and encourage them to explore their inner creativity.  Further, it is not as if creativity and imagination are "wastes" in the scientific and analytical thinking; remember this quote from a week ago?

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

On my part, later this evening I will go watch and support some creative people.  That's something "creative" that I could do.

The meaning of life

As even a casual visitor to this blog soon finds out, I have blogged in plenty about death. And regular readers know this all too well, though it is not this particular topic that drove away many of the old regulars (instead, it was this topic!)

I came across an essay on death and how we humans have changed the ways in which we relate to "the body."  It is by Thomas Lynch--a name I chanced upon years (decades?) ago when listening to NPR.  Lynch is truly one of a kind.  He is a poet and essayist, yes, but he is also an undertaker.  Yep, an undertaker, who took over his father's business after his father died.  How many such people have you ever heard about?  Ok, this woman comes close to that kind of a uniqueness.

Lynch's essay is a must-read for anybody at any age.  After all, we know well that we, too, will die, sooner or later.  And our loved ones too will die.  Lynch's essay is a narrative that will make people think about death.  He writes there, imagining life when humans were cave-dwellers, say, about 70,000 years ago, and the suddenly still and cold body then framed "what are the signature questions of our species":

Is that all there is? Why is he cold? Can this happen to me? What comes next? Of course, there are other questions, but all of them are uniquely human, because surely no other species ponders such things. This is when the first glimpse of a life before or beyond this one begins to flicker into our species’ consciousness, and questions about where we come from and where we go take up more and more of the moments not spent on rudimentary survival.

These are the kinds of questions that compel me to think a lot about death.  As I wrote--coincidentally, this post was just about a year ago on the 26th of September:

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.

Lynch's essay is about something more immediate.  How do we relate to the body?  Lynch writes that we have increasingly become disconnected from the body itself.

The bodiless obsequy, which has become a staple of available options for bereaved families in the past half century, has created an estrangement between the living and the dead that is unique in human history. Furthermore, this estrangement, this disconnect, this refusal to deal with our dead (their corpses), could be reasonably expected to handicap our ability to deal with death (the concept, the idea of it). And a failure to deal authentically with death might have something to do with an inability to deal authentically with life.

And that is the critical point that I have forever presented even here in this blog: Not sincerely dealing with death and the dead body, makes us less capable of sincerely dealing with life itself.

From breakfast to dinner ...

You have heard a gazillion times that breakfast is the most important meal of the day.  Yes?

That is bullshit.

I would argue, based on what I practice, that every meal that we eat is absolutely important.  What we eat, when we eat, and even with whom we eat, together makes sanitas per escam.

First, let's handle the breakfast aspect. You have seen all those images of kids emptying cereals from cartons into bowls, and add milk, right?  Have you ever wondered about the sugar content in those cereals?  Or, people having doughnuts, with all that sugar?  Starting the day with sugar is a very, very, very recent thing in human history:

“The idea that children should have bland, sweet food is a very industrial presumption,” says Krishnendu Ray, a professor of food studies at New York University who grew up in India. “In many parts of the world, breakfast is tepid, sour, fermented and savory.”

Tepid, sour, fermented, and savory.  I think that is how I was described in my last evaluation at work ;)

Back to sugary breakfasts:

Getting children to eat sugar is easy. Teaching them to eat slimy fermented soybeans, by contrast, requires a more robust and conservative culinary culture, one that resists the candy-coated breakfast buffet.

Dinners around the world are varied too.  Even the time that people have dinners.  I am always shocked at how late in the evening that most people in India eat--in this collection, note that the family in India sits down at nine in the night.  Nine, on a weeknight!  And it is not any light meal either:

The family eats around 9 p.m., and on this night, the meal consisted of palak paneer (spinach with cheese), raita, kadai aloo (potatoes with onions and spices), cucumber salad and roasted chapatis.

A carb-heavy dinner that close to bedtime, which is a contrast to my sanitas per escam schedule in which I want to make sure that my stomach is light after all the digestion by the time I head to bed.

After reading what the Nigerian family in that collection had for dinner, I am ready to fly to Nigeria:

Wednesday nights are for wraps at the Sokoh home in Lagos. Ozoz Sokoh, right, a food writer, with her daughter Riobo, flipped freshly made plantain flatbreads, which were served with chicken suya, lime-pickled onions and a tomato and eggplant salsa thawed from the freezer. Dinner included condiments galore, including peanut butter sauce, papaya chutney, hibiscus green chile sauce, mint and spring onion oil, tamarind ginger sauce, and beet and carrot sauerkraut.

The plantain flatbreads are done in the old country too, especially in the cultures along the Malabar Coast.

I loved the Turkish dinner too:

homemade kofte (meatballs), lentil soup and bulgur pilaf with grated tomatoes and bell peppers, along with dolmas (stuffed grape leaves) and red beans in olive oil. They ended the meal with a rice pudding called sutlac and pumpkin with tahini and walnuts.

Sutlac?

Google answers with this image that makes me drool all over:

Source

What do you have cooking for dinner?

Roaches, monkeys, and man

The undergraduate years gave me the time and space for me to figure out how I viewed many aspects of life, including religion.  Like a pendulum that violently swings, suggesting instability and the entire structure falling apart, the violence within was also reflected in my words and action.  In retrospect, it is so clear that I could have either had a complete and total mental breakdown or I could have achieved clarity on how to move forward.  I am immensely glad, and relieved, that I did not suffer a breakdown.

All that was from thinking about what I had known from the years of brainwashing.  I had yet to start any serious reading and thinking about how screwed up other religions might be.  Graduate school provided me that opportunity too.

While I did not take courses on religions, many of the books and articles that I read, and the lectures that I listened to, gave me insights.  One of those was about the relationship between god, nature, and man.

In the traditional approaches in the various strands of Hindu faith, there is plenty of nature worship.  Mountains are sacred as are rivers and trees.  And, of course, even killing the damn roaches troubled the really faithful ones.  But, apparently not so in the Judaeo-Christian framework.  Why?  The Bible said so:

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

God rules over man, who rules over nature.  A relationship that is very different from what the faith in the old country told me.

Of course, just because people say they are religious does not mean they truly mean it. Many devout brahmins, for instance, devour meat.  And there are nature-worshiping hippies among Christians.  But, the broad framework suggests that the faithful might look at nature differently because their views stem from what their religions instructed them.

Do evangelical Christians in the US then put into practice a view that man rules over nature?  And, therefore, do they think differently from many of us who are worried about environmental crises and climate change in particular?

The following excerpt should settle that, it seems:

Here, for example, is what a church youth minister had to say about environmental care: “If we have the opportunity we should help take care of this planet that we’ve been given. Having said that, I also believe that the value of human life is higher than the value of a whale, or a species of monkey.”
It’s not that evangelicals don’t care about the environment. It’s that they care about people more.

Of course, the people that evangelicals care about don't live in shitholes--but, that is a post for another day!

Meera Subramanian worked on a series to find the middle ground in these environment discussions.  In one, she talked to a bunch of students at the Harvard of the evangelicals--Wheaton College.

While many evangelicals are preoccupied with the long-term state of human souls and the protection of the unborn, Diego and the other students I met at Wheaton are also considering other eternal implications and a broader definition of pro-life. They are concerned about the lifespan of climate pollutants that will last in the atmosphere for thousands of years, and about the lives of the poor and weak who are being disproportionately harmed by the effects of those greenhouse gases. 

But, as much as I found the world a challenging place back when I was a teenager, these students also are in a tough spot:

It can be tough to be an evangelical who cares about climate change, Chelsey said, "because the environmental activists don't trust you and the evangelicals hate you." Or they could hate you

If only we could engage in serious and sincere discussions all over the world on the relationship between humans and the natural world that envelops us.  If only!

And thus ends summer

We woke up to the sound of light rain.

It has been a rather strange summer, with bucket-loads of rain falling from the sky.  Tomatoes are cracking and bursting even when green because of all the water that the plants are being force-fed by nature.  At this rate, the green might never turn to red, and it will be weeks of fried-green-tomatoes but without that special "barbecue" ;)

It has been fall-like for almost two weeks now, even though the official season begins only on Monday.

What can we expect this season?

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is forecasting a warmer-than-normal fall across the entire United States.

It certainly was a cooler than normal summer here in Oregon.

Soon, the leaves will become yellow and red and brown, and they will fall.  Stormy winds will chase the leaves. The rain will wash them all away.

Fashionistas will proclaim that fall is their favorite season.  Students will begin to feel the hard work that goes into learning.  Politicians will step up the pace of campaigning.

And we will wonder what ever happened to the long, warm, sunny, summer days, and why the livin' is not easy anymore.

Imagine!

Read the following:

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

Who do you think said that?

Even if you can't name the person, any guesses on what that person--a famous one--was known for?

The keyword there is "imagination," right?  And this imagination is linked to knowledge. And the quote begins with "artist."

We might be tempted to think that it was a famous person in the arts.  That's what I would have thought.

Think again.

It was Einstein!

Aha, you say, because we are immediately reminded of Einstein's famous thought-experiment approach to big questions.

It is not only Einstein.  Science itself requires imagination.

[It] doesn’t take an Albert Einstein to observe that, without the essential first step, without a creative reimagining of nature, a conceiving of hypotheses for what might be going on behind the perceived surface of phenomena, there can be no science at all.

Now think about your own science classes.  Did you ever get a feel that science called for imagination?  To the contrary, chances are great that the classes came across as one boring thing to memorize after another boring thing, right?  I tell ya, every day I am amazed that we humans have progressed this much despite our best attempts to kill curiosity, learning, and imagination.  As Picasso--another imaginative mind, though a thoroughly flawed human--said, through schooling we make sure that students do not become artists!

Science education favours the presentation of results, and a focus on knowledge, rather than the human stories of wonder, imagination, failed ideas and those glorious and uninvited moments of illumination that thread through the lives of all who actually do science.

The older I get, the more I am frustrated by our screwed up approach to education.

I have blogged before on the role of imagination in science.  Like here, in which I quote Freeman Dyson:

Science is a creative interaction of observation with imagination. ... Imagination by itself can still enlarge our vision when observation fails. 

Of course, the imagination is cross-checked by experiments and evidence, which is why string theory, for example, hasn't broken through--great imagination, but no proof. At least, not yet.

I have always known that I lack that kind of imagination.  But, as I noted here:

Education and learning are perhaps also about stretching one's imaginations.  It is easy to walk around with a limited view of the world, but is a challenge to expand that view.

I try my best to get that view across to students and colleagues alike, even though I know fully well that I am not winning.

Politics makes strange bedfellows

Bill and Melinda Gates are set to honor mOdi, "who is being cited for building toilets for millions of rural Indians as part of his Swachh Bharat Mission (Clean India Mission)."

To the Gateses, it apparently does not matter that mOdi looms behind the killings in Gujarat; is mute about lynchings; has systematically stripped millions of Muslims of their citizenship; and most recently has transformed Kashmir into a highly militarized prison.

Ten years ago--yep, in 2009--I wrote that "I won't be surprised at all if Modi, or somebody like him, becomes the prime minister really soon."  It was not all that difficult to predict the turn that India was going to make. Except, I was overly optimistic--I thought his authoritarianism would be benign!

Since then, he and his party have been doing exactly what they said they would do in the socio-political arena.  The Indian electorate, as are voters anywhere, did not understand that no autocrat can dictate how the global economy should work, and slowly they are beginning to realize that their favored fascist has failed to deliver the economic goods.  And, basic political science says that when a power-hungry thug knows that the economy is failing or under-delivering, well, he will resort to political violence of various sorts, exactly along the lines of what has been happening.

Authoritarians also love showing their cojones to their loyal supporters. In the global lives that we lead, with a large Indian diaspora, it means that mOdi struts on stages outside India too.  Recall this from five years ago, when he was on Times Square?  It was all about self-aggrandizement.

Now, he is ready for another tour.  This time in Houston.  And he will be joined by our own symbol of self-aggrandizement--tRump!  I suppose mOdi doesn't care that care that tRump thinks mOdi is from a shithole, and tRump doesn't care that mOdi is from a country that he considers a shithole.  All the two of them care for is a eVa Peron-like "You must love me, you must love me | You must love me"

It is one hell of a combination, and full of contradictions.

“Part of what makes it complicated for Indian-Americans is that they don’t like Trump for the most part and yet they like Modi,” Karthick Ramakrishnan, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Riverside and the director of AAPIData.com, a policy research and data firm that focused on Asians and Pacific Islanders, told Power Up. “They bristle against the kind of nationalism that Trump represents here in America, but then they still support Modi regardless of what he is doing in India. So, there is some ideological inconsistency there, but that is the kind of complicated world that we live in.” 

  Indian-Americans are not tRump voters:

It will be interesting to find out what percentage of the audience at this freak show also support tRump; my hypothesis is that it will be far greater than 28%, because of the anti-Muslim common denominator!

This is how the world's two largest democracies work now.  What shining examples!

Jesus said, "get the fuck out of here!"

President tRump, whose strongest supporters are white evangelical Christians, knows how Jesus would treat the homeless.  tRump expressed that very, very clearly:

He expressed sympathy for real estate investors here and other Californians whose property values or quality of life are threatened.
“In many cases, they came from other countries and they moved to Los Angeles or they moved to San Francisco because of the prestige of the city, and all of a sudden they have tents,” Trump said. “Hundreds and hundreds of tents and people living at the entrance to their office building. And they want to leave.”
In Los Angeles and San Francisco, Trump said, people are living on the “best highways, our best streets, our best entrances to buildings . . . where people in those buildings pay tremendous taxes, where they went to those locations because of the prestige.” ...
Trump has characterized the homeless problem in California and other places as a “disgrace,” saying this July: “We may do something to get that whole thing cleaned up. It’s inappropriate.” He more recently directed aides to figure out “how the hell we can get these people off the streets,” one senior administration official said.

As always, tRump offers a clear response to What Would Jesus Do?

Of course, I am not the only one who is angry at this President's inhumane approach to homelessness, and to the hypocrisy of his bible-thumping supporters.  This columnist, for instance, offers to rewrite a King tRump version of the bible, and suggests many sarcastic interpretations of Jesus' thoughts, like this one:

“A righteous man rounds up the poor and puts them someplace where people don’t have to see how gross they are; a wicked man allows people who pay tremendous taxes to be inconvenienced.”

This is how you make god great again!

Here is one exhibit that tRump and his supporters wouldn't even care about.  A local story of a homeless woman who was run over by a garbage truck.  She was once the kid on the right in this photo:

Much later, she was the mother in this photo:

She was 57 years old and homeless when she died.

Annette Lorraine Montero, unhoused and apparently suffering from mental illness, was run over and killed by a garbage truck as she slept in a parking lot near downtown Eugene.

Here's another exhibit, from Los Angeles.  The homeless man in the photo below was not born homeless. "He was a Yale graduate, Wall Street banker and entrepreneur."

Homelessness is a complex human problem.  This horrible human being in the Oval Office doesn't have an iota of empathy in him to begin to understand is not a surprise.  What excuse do the followers of Jesus have?

And if we cannot empathize with a fellow human right in front of our eyes, how are we going to even begin to understand the plight of humans far away, like the refugees fleeing wars?

And these are the same people who believe that I am going to hell because I am an atheist who does not believe in Jesus?  If only they understood that it is we humans who create hell right here on earth.  Why don't they want us to work together in order to create a heaven right here on earth!

I don't dream in Tamil though

While I hadn't planned on it, this post is in a way a continuation of the previous post.  It is also about the role that language plays in our life.  Especially the first language.  The mother tongue, as we referred to in the old country.

In the town where I grew up, and the school that I went to, we were all kids of people who had come to the town because of the jobs at the mining-industrial complex.  So, there were kids in my class whose "mother tongues" were not Tamil.  There were a number of Telugus. Quite a few, like Vijay and Srikumar, who spoke Malayalam at home.  Kannada. Bengali. Konkani. Gujarati. Marathi. Even Saurashtra, which was that girl's language!  I think there was one guy--Sanjay?--whose parents were from Bihar (?) and spoke Hindi at home.

Which is why in one class during the elementary years, our math teacher--PK Master--asked one girl what her mother tongue was.  Madhulika's reply was hilarious.  "Pink," she said. It is funny as hell now.  But, if you had been in PK Master's class, you too would have blurted out even worse things, I tell ya!  We were all stressed that PK Master would turn to us and ask us whatever.

Anyway, in an European context, such a school would be referred to as an international school.  For us, well, we did not know any better or worse.  It was normal, the way things were.

Most Americans who grow up monolingual, and remain so throughout their lives, cannot possibly relate to all these.  Nor can they begin to begin to appreciate the deep emotions that are stirred when the first language looms in the background.

After having moved far away from her native land, in this author's case, she realizes that "my native language has been sitting quietly in my soul’s vault all this time."  An accomplished linguist and writer, she writes:

But embracing the dominant language comes at a price. Like a household that welcomes a new child, a single mind can’t admit a new language without some impact on other languages already residing there. Languages can co-exist, but they tussle, as do siblings, over mental resources and attention. When a bilingual person tries to articulate a thought in one language, words and grammatical structures from the other language often clamor in the background, jostling for attention. The subconscious effort of suppressing this competition can slow the retrieval of words—and if the background language elbows its way to the forefront, the speaker may resort to code-switching, plunking down a word from one language into the sentence frame of another.

The author then notes:

When a childhood language decays, so does the ability to reach far back into your own private history. Language is memory’s receptacle. It has Proustian powers. Just as smells are known to trigger vivid memories of past experiences, language is so entangled with our experiences that inhabiting a specific language helps surface submerged events or interactions that are associated with it.

I urge you to read the entire essay, which is wonderfully autoethnographic, and which will particularly appeal to the reader who left this comment here.

The great danger in our age is nationalism

One of my early memories of Hindi, from my early years deep in peninsular India, was from when mother asked the gurkha why he was coming by way early in the night to check on the property, when he should be coming much later.

As a kid, I was shocked.  Mother knew Hindi?  And, like most kids, I was impressed.  Mothers do know everything!

I never bothered to learn the language, other than during the mandatory couple of years of Hindi language in school.  The older I grew, the more I hated the very thought of learning Hindi--because, by then I had learnt a little bit about the long and rich history of Tamil, and about the politics of imposing Hindi upon us non-Hindi people.

So much was the anti-Hindi sentiment inside me that even in graduate school, if a couple of Indian students spoke in Hindi when I was also with them, I would remind them that I didn't know Hindi.  The assumption that anybody from India knows Hindi--and should know the language--has always pissed me off to no end.

Decades have gone by since those years in Neyveli.  And I have become more fanatical about this issue.  Because, understanding the world a lot more has also made me realize that forcing a new language upon people is one of the oldest successful strategies that bastards have always employed.  The stories echo all over the world--from the native peoples in the Americas who were systematically forced to learn alien European languages and, in the process, render dead their own languages, to the Russification in the old Soviet bloc, to the Uighurs, to ...

Six years ago, almost to the very date, I quoted this:

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

Forcing a language upon people is one of the easiest ways to erase history and tradition.

I have ranted about this issue for a long time.  Perhaps all the easier for me, not because I have been an American for a long time, but because I have always believed that "Indian" is an artificial construct.  I even go to other blogs and write about this!

Thus, I am not surprised at the intense opposition that continues to grow against the Hindu Raj's Home Minister and his push for Hindi.

Speaking at a public meeting organised by ally MDMK on the 111th birth anniversary of former Chief Minister C.N. Annadurai in Chennai, Mr Stalin said, “If we close our eyes for a second, they will impose Hindi and completely discard Tamil. We have been protesting against this since 1938. We protested in 1949, 1950, 1953, 1963 and 1965. We have once again arrived at a stage where we have to protest.”

Nationalism is a danger, especially when coming from the likes of politicians "ruling"* governing India now.  I will quote, again, Mario Vargas Llosa:

I believe that the great danger in our age is nationalism, it’s no longer fascism, nor communism. These ideologies have become completely outdated. But in contrast, nationalism is a defect that is always there under the surface and above all, at moments of crisis, can be very easily exploited by demagogues and power-hungry leaders. Nationalism is the great tradition of humankind; unfortunately it’s always present in history.
And so, I believe that it’s the great enemy of democracy. It’s the great enemy of freedom and a terrible source of racism. If one believes that being born into or forming part of a particular community is a privilege, then that is racism. I believe that one must fight nationalism energetically if one believes in democracy, in freedom, especially in this age of mixing and the building of great blocks.

If only the ill-informed and malicious Hindians will spend a few hours reading about Tamil, for instance.  If only they even half-understood that "to know Tamil" can also mean "to be a civilized human being."

* A few years ago, Vijay Nambisan wrote about how Indians continue to think of parties in power as "rulers" when they are merely elected to govern.  It is more than mere semantics.  I am not able to track down his commentary.

Click here for the backstory about this

The lifestyles of the rich and the famous

In my early days of writing newspaper commentaries, rejections were in plenty.  One of the pieces that never was published was about the Rhodes Scholarship.

Yep, about some obscure scholarship that perhaps even 99% of regular newspaper readers don't know about.  It certainly failed the "will it play in Peoria?" test that editors often employ.

But, to me this was, and continues to be, an important issue that we don't talk about much.  The commentary that I wrote was not merely about the scholarship.  But, the Rhodes Scholarship was the launching point for me to question the value of ill-gotten gains.

Cecil Rhodes did not make his fortunes in any laudable manner.  And, even more worryingly, the guy was a staunch imperialist and a racist, who believed that his people were the greatest race on earth.  His dream was to bring the entire world under British rule.  World domination by his people was his ultimate goal, for which he even devoted money that he had made from other people's misfortunes.

Yet, there is Rhodes Scholarship.  And we celebrate Rhodes Scholars?

I used that launching pad in order to question the value of philanthropy.  (Much later, and in a different context, I wrote this commentary about--pecunia non olet--the stink of money.)

Anand Giridharadas has written a bestseller on this topic, and the recent news reports add more evidence for him:

We have crossed the point beyond which anyone in philanthropy can wiggle out of this problem by talking about some good examples or invoking Bill Gates. Yes. Yes. Yes. There is much good being done. But your tool has become the implement of choice for scoundrels. Face it.

— Anand Giridharadas (@AnandWrites) September 10, 2019

I continue to worry about philanthropy.  Not only because of how the "philanthropists" made their fortunes but for a reason beyond that.  In a democracy, philanthropy tends to terribly undercut the ability of government to address the public interest.  As this review notes, Robert Reich--a Rhodes Scholar himself!--argues in his book that in a democracy, "philanthropy amplifies the power of the few at the expense of the many."

The rich avoid paying taxes, which makes it difficult for government to address real public policy issues like homelessness.  And meanwhile, the rich get tax deductions for their "philanthropy" that is used to pursue their favorite agendas.

The income tax deduction for charitable donations, Reich argues, is effectively a state subsidy for philanthropy. And since tax rates increase progressively on the basis of income, the rich are, in effect, being paid by the government to exert power by giving their money away.

To use Shakespeare's words, "So are they all, all honourable men."

Why all these questions?

The following are real titles for articles in the landing page of The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Is Meritocracy Hurting Higher Education?
Are Colleges Complicit if They Fail to Keep Students From Defaming Professors?
Why Elitism Makes Elite Schools ‘National Treasures’
Does Higher Education Perpetuate Inequality?
Can Starbucks Save the Middle Class?
What Critics of Student Writing Get Wrong
Want to Improve Your Teaching?

To which I have a question of my own: WTF?!

Whatever happened to professional publications presenting analysis and commentaries in a sober, measured, calm tone?  What is the deal with such cheap prostitution?

I suspect that we will soon see titles like in Cosmo:

Ten ways to please your dean
What color is your aura?
Seven teaching tips you definitely need
20 philosophers you forgot won the Genius Award
How YOU too can win a Genius Award
The nine best yoga poses when you are in the classroom

Btw, the aura thing is a real title--at Cosmo, not at the Chronicle, thankfully! ;)

It is awful that everything has to be catchy.  Sexy.  Else, apparently it won't "sell."  Even in academia!

As another academic year begins, I know I will be confronted by these kinds of issues.  Even more than in years past.  This dull and boring man will continue to be dull and boring, however, and continue to rant even when nobody is listening.

“There’s a level of bullshit that the culture is now embracing.”  You got that right!

The (f)art of science

As even the occasional reader of this blog finds out, there is no pretentious highfalutin crap here.  I am genuinely interested in many aspects of life and the human condition, and I try to understand it in the simplest possible ways.  I even suggest to students all the time that the key is on understanding and articulating that understanding.  The rest is fluff.

An interest in the human condition includes everything from life to death.  Emotions, of course.  Work, heck yes.  Sex and shit, too.  Even sweat; after all, it is human to sweat, right?

Yep, sweat.

I even quoted an uncle who had a quick retort, as he always did, when my brother complained about sweating and the stink. "Tell me when the sweat smells like a perfume and I will collect a bottle of it," he said.  We laughed.

Of course, we know that sweat itself does not have any smell.  The bacteria in places like our armpits are the ones that create that odor, which apparently is like pheromones to some.

An artist who focuses on science has taken this to a whole new level.  Get this: He "worked on an elaborate scent-based art installation called “Labor” to recreate the odor many people associate with sweat and give audiences a new way to “see” and understand smell."

We try to understand the human condition in many different ways.

So, how did he approach this project?

There is an unusual laboratory in Helsinki, Finland, founded to host creative interdisciplinary practices called “bio-art.” As part of an artist’s residency, I worked at Biofilia at Aalto University to recreate the scent people associate with sweat. For inspiration and perspiration, I used myself as a laboratory subject, spending plenty of time in the legendary Finnish saunas.

How fascinating!

My research began by defining human skin bacteria associated with odors and learning how to grow them. The scientific literature is sparse, as much of this research is carried out by deodorant and antiperspirant industries, which often don’t publish their results.

I tell ya, it is hard work trying to understand the human condition.  One can, of course, live a life without ever examining it.  But, that does not appeal to me.

Next, I isolated my sweat by capturing bacteria from my armpits in sterile gauze, filtering it and incubating it in dozens of heat and atmospheric conditions. Then I designed a bioreactor, similar to fermenters that brew beer, except they are built to enable more varied types of biochemical reactions with microbes. Finally, I experimented with liquid cultures that encouraged bacteria to thrive and produce fragrant waste products.
The concept of my artwork “Labor” is that microorganisms create the “vulgar odors” of sweat

So, at this point you begin to wonder where the "art" is because he is describing a scientific process, right?  Here it comes:

The exhibit contains several large glass bioreactors, each populated with one of three strains of bacteria. The soup in each container produced the smell of sweat, odors that collected in a central glass enclosure where a white T-shirt hung. From there, the smell drifted into the room.

What a piece of installation art!

He ends with this:

It has been said that deep human attraction is often premised on our scents. If bacteria are responsible for our scent, then are we attracted to a person or their bacteria? Perhaps bacteria help steer human sexual selection and evolution.

I wonder what bacteria are there in Love Potion Number 9 ;)

Solving the world's problems, one tomato at a time!

A few years ago, the university sent me and a couple of others to a conference in Kansas City.  The team leader suggested that we have dinner at a highly recommended restaurant that was a few blocks away.

When we reached the restaurant, I understood why it had those high ratings from a certain group of consumers.  It was one of those "farm to table" places.

"Farm to table" is one of those phrases that I have made fun of, like how I mock the slogan "eat local."  With the latter, I have some serious grammar problems too--they should at least phrase it as "eat locally."

With the "eat local" folks, who buy their meats and veggies and fruits from their locale, whatever the distance radius might be, how local is the eating when even the utensils that they use to cook are not made locally? The recipe is displayed on the iPad, which is not made locally.  You can see where I go with this ...

"Farm to table" is one of those.  Even the food I cook at home is "farm to table"--even though the farm might be far away in Mexico or New Zealand or in California.

A geographer at my old university writes about all these in an essay in which she brings her own life as an environmentalist.  She writes:

The late Anthony Bourdain made the point that “farm-to-table” is a cultural misnomer — all food comes from a farm, and most is served on a table.¹³ This trend has resulted in the tokenization of the local, environmentally friendly, sustainable meal and put many environmentally minded consumers in a place where their values make them vulnerable to manipulation by corporations that know how to capitalize on said values, but without accountability.
The concept of “local food” has been commodified to the point that it has become meaningless. Restaurants advertise themselves as “farm-to-table” and feature menus highlighting the names of the farms and places where headline ingredients are grown. But the Sysco truck still pulls up to the backdoor, unloading flours, oils, spices, and other ingredients sourced from across the globe.

I have found that if I point out such things that alert one to troubling contradictions, well, it is the quickest way to lose friends ;)

The author refers to a number of such "environmental micro-behaviors."

By fixating on micro-scale actions and lifestyle behaviors, environmentalists have made themselves vulnerable to attacks that characterize environmentalism as both out of touch with society and fixated on concerns that are dwarfed within the broader framework of environmental change.
What, then, should environmentalists do?

Keep in mind that the author is a self-described lifelong environmentalist and runs her daughter's school garden.

So, again, what should environmentalists do?

For many of us who think about the world and its problems, and who try to make meaning of it all in our pursuit of creating a better tomorrow, everything gets more complicated by the day.  And the moment we voice our thoughts on these, the naysayers--almost always from the Republican side of politics--immediately pounce on the contradictions we display in our lives.  Like with Al Gore and his jetting around.

I agree with her point that "micro-behaviors serve as anchors grounding us in a complicated world."

But we need to be careful about representing environmental micro-behaviors as larger and more impactful than they are, or attaching them to larger narratives that obscure the privilege of which they are a by-product. Are we capable of embracing this paradox? Can we contextualize our lifestyles within their broader environmental significance? Can we derive meaning and pleasure from activities that deepen our connectedness with the natural world while recognizing that we environmental moderns are among the most resource-intensive humans who have ever lived? Can we embrace hybridity and complexity without feeling compelled to quantify the carbon footprint of every micro-scale behavior?
In a world that is increasingly individualized, commercialized, and secular, environmentalism and the practices we enact in its name often serve as proxies for religious practices. Perhaps by allowing ourselves these pleasures without demanding that they solve the world’s ills, we can see them for what they are — opportunities for meaning and connection.

Indeed!

Marinara: From the backyard to the table!

Too full already is the grave

A tourist postcard I had picked up from the visit in the summer of 2000

Oh stay at home, my lad, and plough
By A.E. Housman

Oh stay at home, my lad, and plough  
     The land and not the sea,
And leave the soldiers at their drill,
And all about the idle hill  
     Shepherd your sheep with me.

Oh stay with company and mirth  
     And daylight and the air;
Too full already is the grave
Of fellows that were good and brave  
     And died because they were.

Driving Miss Crazy

Like anybody, I too am always delighted when my analysis is on the mark.

Let me explain.

A few days ago, in responding to a comment at this post, I wrote:

First, the equation of decreasing car sales with loss of employment. I would rather interpret this way: The hundreds of thousands (or lakhs) of rupees that would have been spent on cars will now be spent on other things, which will generate employment. The "loss" is primarily for those who invested in automobile manufacturing. I have no sympathies for those big investors, who know all too well about the market and profit and loss.
Second, some of us have been hypothesizing that in highly densely populated cities--which is all of India--the cost of car ownership is immense. Car sharing, which has been made possible by the likes of Uber and Ola and others, makes it possible for the upper-middle class to move around in cars without owning them.

As much as I don't care for the likes of Uber, those services are here to stay and will continue to grow.  Therefore, betting on the auto industry to sell more vehicles to a younger generation doesn't seem wise to me.  While I am no investment guru, I interact a lot with young people, and read commentaries, based on which even three years ago I wrote that teenagers perhaps don't dream of cars anymore.

Today, I read in the news that the finance minister of India is blaming millennials and services like Uber for the massive slump in the auto industry in my old country!

To which I have only one response:
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Source

The minister made this comment in Chennai for a good reason--it is the Detroit of India, where the auto industry is huge.  But, it is remarkably stupid for a finance minister to blame young people for not buying automobiles.  Seriously?  Is the government now going to mandate that thirty-somethings buy cars, or else?  Next they will frame it as a patriotic duty to buy cars?  Like how my President here tweets and talks about "Patriot Farmers" who are being screwed by his trade wars?

A year ago, when I was in India, an old high school classmate suggested that I use Uber or Ola.  He, like me, is no millennial.  And is a highly affluent fellow.  Even he regularly uses Uber to get to work, he said--better than hiring a driver, and far better than "self-driving."  Another advantage?  He could talk without distractions while on the road--he was, in fact, in an Uber ride when he made that suggestion to me.

I tell ya, if only people listened to me and my analysis of how the world works! ;)

How to respond to mUgabe's death?

Way back--make that way, way back--in 2003, Samantha Power "profiled" rObert mUgabe in her essay with an arresting title: How to kill a country.

How could the breadbasket of Africa have deteriorated so quickly into the continent's basket case? The answer is Robert Mugabe

Marx--Karl, that is, not Groucho--said that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce, which is what we now see happening in Venezuela. But, that is a post for another day.

Today, it is all about the hero turned horror, mUgabe.

How awful was he?  There has been so much written, and a lot more will be written.  Consider this alone, for instance:

One statistic sums up what Robert Mugabe did for his people: At independence in 1980, the average life expectancy for a Zimbabwean was about 60 years old; by 2006, that had dropped to 37 for men and 34 for women, the shortest in the world.

I am not the only one who is trying to figure out how to respond to the death of this sociopath:

Some hailed Mugabe as a liberation hero. Others dismissed him as a “monster”. This suggests that Mugabe will be as divisive a figure in death as he was in life.

Many in Zimbabwe are left to live in the disaster that he made out of the breadbasket:

Nomarn Makoto, 33, a school teacher from the poor outlying neighbourhood of Epworth, said he felt little sympathy for Mugabe
“He has just died like everyone else. He left us in this mess and we are still suffering. The Bible says your deeds, good or bad, will follow you. His will surely haunt him on the other side,” Makoto said.

Makoto is like most people who do not seem to believe in my approach to life--there is no forget nor forgive!

Robin Wright, who lived in Africa and interviewed mUgabe the day after he was first elected in 1980, adds a comparison between him and tRump:

The two men were wildly different in many ways, yet I was struck by how much they were alike when I heard that Mugabe had died on Friday. Both came to power with a fiercely populist dogma defined by victimhood and the righteousness of their truths, the facts be damned and their critics publicly shamed. Both men relied on political bases that hero-worshipped, often to the disbelief of the outside world. Both men had economic theories that defied global trends. Both men displayed demagogic narcissism. And each reflected wider global political challenges—Trump among Western nations, Mugabe in Africa.

Here's to hoping that we, too, will not be turned into a disaster by tRump and his 63 million toadies!

Dying is not a bad thing

From what I am able to track down in my blog, it was six years ago--also on September 8th, and also a Sunday it was--that I first thought of most suitable age when I could die.

75.

That number sounded just right to me.  As I wrote then:

I have experienced a good life, have seen quite a bit of this world, and have met a mix of good and bad people.  ...  And when that end comes, I look forward to a good death, without machines and tubes and chemicals to keep me "alive."

Frankly, I am quite pleased with how I had phrased my thoughts in that context.  Good for me!

If you don't like how I phrased it, well, here is Joseph Epstein:

I have had a good and lucky run, having been born to honorable and intelligent parents in the most interesting country in the world during a period of unrivaled prosperity and vast technological advance. I prefer to think I’ve got the best out of my ability, and have been properly appreciated for what I’ve managed to accomplish. One may regard one’s death as a tragic event, or view it as the ineluctable conclusion to the great good fortune of having been born to begin with. I’m going with the latter.

Death is a certainty.  We might as well plan about how we want to live and die.

A year after that, five years ago almost to the date, I was delighted that a guy with a lot more credibility and influence had also declared that he didn't care to live past 75.   That guy?

Ezekiel Emanuel is director of the Clinical Bioethics Department at the U.S. National Institutes of Health and heads the Department of Medical Ethics & Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania.

Today, I read this follow-up interview with Emanuel.  In that interview, he reminds us about how much older people suck resources from society:

Lots of presidents and lots of politicians say, “Children are our most valuable resource.” But we as a country don’t behave like that. We don’t invest in children the way we invest in adults, especially older adults. One of the statistics I like to point out is if you look at the federal budget, $7 goes to people over 65 for every dollar for people under 18.

Back when average life expectancy was much lower, grandpa's fortunes became inheritance for grandchildren.  Now, there is nothing for the kids.  No college fund and no taxpayer money either.  So long, suckers!  

Again, a reminder to the two people who want me to live a long life ;)  It is not that I will willingly end my life at 75.  It is just that if the doctor says something like a surgery that will cost a bit will extend my life for another 15 years, I will smilingly say, "no, thanks." DNR!

What am I going to do after 75 anyway?

These people who live a vigorous life to 70, 80, 90 years of age—when I look at what those people “do,” almost all of it is what I classify as play. It’s not meaningful work. They’re riding motorcycles; they’re hiking. Which can all have value—don’t get me wrong. But if it’s the main thing in your life? Ummm, that’s not probably a meaningful life.

I am with Emanuel.  I don't care about life as playing.  Such a life does not appeal to me.  Again, a reminder--I am only talking about my own life.  Whatever works for you, well, go ahead.

In the end, nothing really matters.

The world will exist fine if you happen to die. Great people, maybe even people greater than you, like Newton and Shakespeare and Euler—they died. And guess what? The world’s still there.

Celebrate the fact that you are here and alive.  Do some good deeds, unlike the fascist loyalists in my old and adopted countries. 

“J.R., Wiley is dead.”

I didn't know Wiley nor J.R. until yesterday.

Now I know them.  And Wiley's mother too.

A news report referred to a post that went viral.  A post by a father on his 8-year old son's death.  A post in which he wondered whether all that time at work is worth it.

So, I read his post.  It is honest. It is moving. It is tragic.  I then read the mother's public grieving.

I cannot even begin to imagine what it feels like to suddenly lose a 8-year old child.

The father writes:

Around 5:40am, the next morning I woke up for a series of back to back meetings. I did a Peloton ride, took an analyst call from my home office, one with a colleague on the drive to work, then the rest at the office. None seem that important now. I left that morning without saying goodbye or checking on the boys. 

While at work, when he was in a meeting, the mother called and said “J.R., Wiley is dead.”  The father writes, "If there’s any lesson to take away from this, it’s to remind others (and myself) not to miss out on the things that matter. "

We fail to ask regularly ask ourselves what really matters to us and, therefore, whether we are living our lives consistent with that.  It is a tragic irony that at work we engage in discussions on what our mission is, and worry about mission creep.  In our personal lives, on the other hand, we don't seem to have a "mission statement" of any sort.

I have ranted and ranted on these topics.  Perhaps because I have never let go of an understanding that life is unpredictable.  Good days aren't forever, and tomorrow could be a bad day.  Death haunts our everyday lives.  Which is also why I critique the "bucket list" that people have, because the list is almost always about trivial pursuits instead of focusing on "the things that matter" that we need to address before we die.

More than anything else, why the monomaniacal devotion to work?  In the grand scheme of things, our existence will not even register in this cosmos.  More powerful and rich and famous people have lived and died, and most of us don't even know any damn thing about them.  If they don't matter, we do?

I will end this with how Wiley's mother ended hers:

If we’ve learned anything at all, it’s that life is fragile and time really can be so cruelly short. We wish a lot of things were different, but mostly we wish we’d had more time. If you are a parent and have any capacity to spend more time with your kids, do. When it ends, there’s just photos and left over things and time is no longer available to you. It is priceless and should not be squandered. Take your vacation days and sabbaticals and go be with them. You will not regret the emails you forgot to send. From now on, if you email or text me and my reply takes longer than expected, know that I am with the people I love sharing my time, creating my new identity and I encourage you to do the same. 

The devil wears Zara

As I was putting the clothes away, I noticed it.  I could see light through my trousers--the seat was frayed.

I rushed to the closet and checked the other two pairs that are for my daily wear.  One looked ok enough.  The other had the telltale signs of a frayed bottom.

Back in the old country, that is how we wore clothes--until they were frayed.  I remember my grandmother joking about one of those shorts that I had worn out: "துணிய கிழிக்க சந்துல ஆணி இருக்கா?" (Do you have nails in your butt to tear the cloth?)

If I am comfy in them, why toss them away, right?

But, unlike my childhood, I now have way more clothes than I could ever need. Work clothes. Casual clothes. Shirts. Tshirts. Sweaters. Fleece.

And I am not even trying to keep up with the fashion trends. Some of my clothes are more than a decade old!  One can easily imagine the nightmare if I even remotely kept pace with what is current!

The pace at which clothes go out of style should worry us.  Leave along the mental health of the fashion-conscious. (Did you look at any of the photos of iVanka when her ultra-stylish outfit malfunctioned?)  Fast fashion messes up the life of workers in the industry, and is also an environmental nightmare:

In “Fashionopolis,” Dana Thomas, a veteran style writer, convincingly connects our fast-fashion wardrobes to global economic and climate patterns and crises, rooting the current state of the fashion biosphere as a whole — production methods, labor practices and environmental impacts — in the history of the garment industry.

Instead of looking into such issues big and small, morons and their moronic leaders instead believe that population growth is the greatest threat to sustainability, and that abortion is therefore critical for controlling population growth in poorer countries!

The industry manipulates us, and we consumers eagerly and merrily respond:

Fashionopolis lays blame squarely at the industry's door. At no point does Thomas shame consumers. But she does ask us to change our ways. As a nation, she writes, Americans sent 14 million tons of clothing to landfills in 2018, while shopping at a feverish pace. This "fashion bulimia" is enabled by fast fashion companies. In turn, it encourages their social and environmental malpractice.

If this is what being "developed" means!

The problem looks to worsen than ever before. It is on an Amazon scale now.  I mean, literally.

Amazon introduced in June 2018 a gadget called Echo Look: a hands-free camera and artificial intelligence personal stylist, retailing for $199. It’s like having your own Mews sales assistant, but at home. Echo Look connects to Amazon’s virtual assistant, Alexa; takes full- length pictures or six-second videos of you in your clothes; and builds a library of looks, which you can sort by season, style, color, or dressiness. The Style Check feature compares images of you in different outfits— like those “Who Wore It Better” magazine features— and tells you, on the screen, with the side‑by‑side shots, what’s working, and what’s not, sans the snark. “Fit looks better.” “The shape of the outfit works better.” “Colors look better on you.”

With my height and build, and with a balding head and grey hair, and a face that can't ever smile, I know well that clothes don't make a man.  We are ugly, and we are proud!  Maybe I should consider moving to Germany

Did I ask to be born?

Prose I can easily understand, even if I don't always get all the subtexts.  But, poetry is different. Right from the old school days, I have been puzzled that the poem's words say one thing and then the interpretation is always something very different.  Which has then led to wonder why poets don't say what they mean in a straightforward way.  No wonder then that women, with their complicated conversations of hidden meanings, love poems and poets ;)

The poem here, from The New Yorker, seems straightforward enough.  I think I get it.  But, I bet that I don't have a clue what the poem is all about; thankfully, unlike the old days, there is no quarterly exam ;)

We don't ask to be born.  As a comedian (from Brazil was he?) put it, we were once nothing but a sperm, with a dick and an asshole as neighbors!

Our creators--father and mother--perhaps got together for her looks and his money, or for his looks and her money, or for whatever reason.  Maybe they wanted a boy and they kept trying.  An aunt of mine is supposed to have exclaimed "girl again?" after the third child also turning out to be a girl!  the cosmos being a comedian, well, that girl also ended up having a daughter ;)

We don't ask to be born a boy or a girl.  There are people struggling with their inner boy trapped in a girl's body, or vice versa.  They didn't ask that either.

Once we are born, we struggle to make sense of it all. We rush from pillar to post, move from place to place, read and listen to the great minds, in search of the meaning of life.

The poet says, "I want to say that love is the meaning, but I think that love may be the means, what we ask with."

All you need is love!

I Cannot Say I Did Not

By Sharon Olds

I cannot say I did not ask
to be born. I asked with my mother’s beauty,
and her money. I asked with my father’s desire
for his orgasms and for my mother’s money.
I asked with the cradle my sister had grown out of.
I asked with my mother’s longing for a son,
I asked with patriarchy. I asked
with the milk that would well in her breasts, needing to be
drained by a little, living pump.
I asked with my sister’s hand-me-downs, lying
folded. I asked with geometry, with
origami, with swimming, with sewing, with
what my mind would thirst to learn.
Before I existed, I asked, with the love of my
children, to exist, and with the love of their children.
Did I ask with my tiny flat lungs
for a long portion of breaths? Did I ask
with the space in the ground, like a portion of breath,
where my body will rest, when it is motionless,
when its elements move back into the earth?
I asked, with everything I did not
have, to be born. And nowhere in any
of it was there meaning, there was only the asking
for being, and then the being, the turn
taken. I want to say that love
is the meaning, but I think that love may be
the means, what we ask with.