Friday, July 31, 2020

The joy of life includes tears too

I, like most boys, was raised with phrases like "don't cry like a girl."  If I had any smarts, I would have asked them right then, "how do you cry like a boy?"

Anger I could display. Fight I could--because boys will be boys.  But, crying was unmanly. I see that attitude even now, even in the adopted country.

Crying is an expression of feelings.  Women cultivate their sisterhood through talking about their feelings, whether it is about their husbands or mothers or colleagues or kids or ... it is a long list of events and people about which we have feelings and women seem to unreservedly talk about them.

We men, on the other hand, talk about sports and politics and the weather and everything else that is not about one's own feelings.

All these despite plenty of men singing about feelings.  Is it any wonder then that men who sing about feelings were, and are, immensely popular with women, from Frank Sinatra to Marvin Gaye to ... recall Rebecca's weak spot in Cheers?

Yet, "vulnerable emotions are coded as not masculine."  It is a world of emotions, but men aren't supposed to feel their vulnerability and cry?  The inability to share emotions means men have difficulty with friendships too, unlike women and their sisterhood.
Normalize it. Normalize the desire. Normalize the fact that all humans need these relationships to thrive. Charles Darwin said that our social abilities and skills is the reason why we've thrived as a species. I mean, we've known this for over a century - that these relationships are critical to our mental health - and we need to stop having a culture that says, somehow, you know, a certain gender doesn't need them and only another gender and sexuality needs them.
It's human to want friends - close, deep ocean friends, friends you love with an exclamation point, friends who know your deepest weirdness and your favorite emoji.
I am not at all surprised that of the students who come to my office, only female students ever are honest with their emotions and seek my assistance.  With quite a few male students, I have thought that they could straighten out their lives if only they reached into their true emotions ... but, hey, boys will be boys, right?

Even as we try to get past these false gender norms and become healthy, Covid-19 has upended our lives.  Death and illness.  Jobless.  Houseless.  Lining up at food banks.  As we try our best to help them, one of the PSAs that we could run is this: It is ok for adults--yes, including men, to cry.


Thursday, July 30, 2020

From this turn, walk by some lazy paths and a few fast paced ones

When we were kids, my sister listened to Hindi film songs.  Ameen Sayani's "Binaca Geetmala" was a favorite of hers.  She faithfully tuned in and counted down to the number one song.

That is how I got hooked on to the old Hindi songs.  

I then kept going further back in time, and ancient enough to talk about Shamshad Begum's songs with my father!

With barely a couple of Hindi words in my vocabulary, I love those songs for the melodies, and for whatever meaning they give me.  If only I could understand the poetry in some of those lyrics, like how the Tamil ones appealed to me!

Back to my sister.

Once, during her high school years, my sister and her friend, "M," decided to practice singing together a Hindi movie song.  Just for the fun of it.  

She first recorded the song from the radio broadcast in the Telefunken (I think that was the brand name) cassette tape recorder that we had.  The two friends then practiced singing that song, with my brother's help.  

What was his contribution?  My brother had his fingers on the tape recorder--to stop, or rewind, or fast forward the tape on command, so that the two girls could practice.

A few years ago, I asked my brother about the song.  He immediately hummed a tune, which, according to him, was the one that we were all tortured with.  Old as I am, I have promptly forgotten which song it was.

So, why the title of this post?

I borrowed that from an old Hindi song.  It is a statement on life--it is full of twists and turns, with slow walks and desperate runs.  

It turns out that having been a middle child was not a bad deal after all.  I wouldn't have these stories without a sibling ahead of me and another always in a rush to catch up with me.  I owe them thanks for having enriched my life.

Here's one of my favorites from those Binaca Geetmala years.


Wednesday, July 29, 2020

Can't work with them. Can't work without them.

Writing is a solitary activity, even for wannabe writers like me, and more often than not it is done when working from home.  Well, yes, there are stories of how writers would check into hotels and furiously pound on the typewriter keys.  Right, Jack?

Working from home has never been the norm for most, but WFH has become the default for most white-collar occupations.  With a coronavirus vaccine months away, companies like Google are making it clear to their employees that it might be summer 2021 before they can regroup in office buildings, and play ping pong like in the good old days.

Does WFH help with productivity?

Measuring productivity in the service sector has always been problematic.  What exactly are the outputs that we can measure and compare when the output is not always tangible, unlike in manufacturing or agriculture?

Yet, "they" said that WFH since the Covid-19 lockdown had increased productivity.  But then the reality is slowly sinking in that WFH is creating more problems for productivity.  The US, which unlike the European countries, is strangled by its irresponsible leader in the White House and several gubernatorial offices, is doomed to experience a productivity drop with continued WFH.

And then there is the employee morale itself.  For people whose living spaces are not really work environments, work-life divide has become hopelessly blurred.
“I used to think of a desk as like a kind of prison cell, where I was chained for eight hours a day,” she tells me over the phone. “It was always like serving time. But, at this point, my desk would be my saviour.”
As long as there was a work to go to, people complained about it while counting down the days towards their next vacation.  It was also a place to go to in order to get away for a few hours from the nagging spouse and whiny children.

Now, there is nowhere to go even if one takes off from work--you are stuck at home, which is where you also work.  Meanwhile, the nagging spouse and the demanding kids are always around all the time.

Those without spouses and children are trapped in loneliness.
More than half a million people have tuned into The Sound of Colleagues, a web page and Spotify playlist of workplace sounds, including keyboards, printers, chatter and coffee machines. Red Pipe, a Swedish music and sound studio, created it in April as a joke, but its data suggests that people keep it on in the background.
The whole thing is becoming a Kafkaesque nightmare for many!

Here's to hoping that the nightmare will end soon.  Make that nightmares--after all, they are linked!

Tuesday, July 28, 2020

The Way We Were

Back when I was a regular columnist for the local newspaper, I systematically made my decisions on what to write about--above and beyond the journalistic question of will it play in Peoria.  One of the factors was the timeliness.

That's how I ended up writing this column in July 2012, in which I appreciated the Americans with Disabilities Act.  The anniversary of that legislation was coming up and I timed my column for that.  It was published on July 20, 2012, in time for the anniversary date of July 26th when the law became effective.

I wrote in that piece:
The ADA is also a wonderful example of why we need government, and how political parties can work constructively toward the betterment of the people — a concept that has become old-fashioned and is drowned out increasingly by the loud and harsh yelling that accompanies the trivial pursuits played by politicians and commentators.
I had no idea that tRump would get elected to the Oval Office four years later, and that the dysfunctional politics of 2012 that I was complaining about would come across in 2020 as noble and saintly discussions!

I hope that the elections in November will get us back to doing the greatest work for the greater good of the country and the world.

The following is the column from 2012:
*************************************


The United States’ current dysfunctional politics reminds me of the contrast with a serious piece of history-making legislation: the Americans with Disabilities Act, which was signed into law in July 1990.

I was in graduate school in Los Angeles and in the early phase of getting to know the new country when the ADA was introduced in Congress. The idea of the act appealed to me as noble: that people with disabilities ought to be accommodated so that they, too, can rise to their potential and freely engage in the pursuit of happiness.

Having grown up in India, I had witnessed at close quarters many different ways in which friends and relatives were restricted, sometimes literally to within their homes, because of disabilities. A distant uncle, for instance, who lost his eyesight as a young adult became practically unwanted in his own family because he had become a “burden.” India’s public spaces are daily reminders of the extreme challenges in everyday life for those who lack full physical abilities.

If a great society is identifiable by how it takes care of those with limitations of any kind, then the unfolding of the ADA — from the introduction of the bill to its implementation, which continues — has been a story about which we truly can be proud.

The ADA was not without its opponents. While it was an academic exercise for me to learn in coursework about how cost-benefit analysis is employed in public policymaking, it sounded quite awful when critics argued that the ADA would increase costs. Claims that the law would become a mandate conveniently overlooked the reality that those with disabilities were being treated as less than equals. When religious institutions were concerned that they would be forced to accommodate disabled people by spending money on structural changes to their buildings, I was struck by how much they seemed to be going against their own fundamental teachings on how human beings should be treated.

The bill eventually passed and became the law of the land, despite a divided government then — the U.S. Senate and the House were in the control of the Democratic Party, and a Republican president, George H.W. Bush, was in the White House. The final passage of the bill was, for all purposes, completely and totally bipartisan — a world away from the contemporary bickering over all things trivial!

The implementation phase of the ADA coincided with my first few years of gainful employment. In the small public agency that I worked for, we now had an additional responsibility of conforming to the ADA.

It became even more fascinating as the Internet gave us all an entirely new way to deal with information, which required us to think about accommodating those who were challenged visually. Later, when I returned to the academic world, I was impressed with how the ADA translated to accommodating students constrained by their hearing disabilities.

The ADA-led accommodations have become so much a part of my existence here in the United States that I forget how different conditions are elsewhere — until I cross our borders, that is. My recent experiences in different parts of the world were reminders of the phenomenal advances in the United States on this front.

Accommodating the disabled has required us to spend on everything from sidewalk improvements to sign language interpreters. These are additional expenses, yes, when compared to how we conducted our affairs before 1990. But I bet there are very few people in this country anymore who would ever question these kinds of “expenses,” because we fully understand the value these deliver — a value that cannot be captured through any bean counting or cost-­benefit analysis.

The ADA is also a wonderful example of why we need government, and how political parties can work constructively toward the betterment of the people — a concept that has become old-fashioned and is drowned out increasingly by the loud and harsh yelling that accompanies the trivial pursuits played by politicians and commentators.

Monday, July 27, 2020

Do corporations give birth and breastfeed?

Six years ago, in this post, I wrote about the number of women scientists who were involved in India's success with the Mars orbiter, and included the following image too:


Women rocket scientists.  How awesome, right?

I don't know their back stories.  But, chances are good that if those scientists are also mothers, then child care was never a big worry for them--because, grandparents, almost always grandmothers, took care of the young ones while the parents were off at work.  Nuclear families in which the parents, especially mothers, exclusively take care of their kids is more the exception than the rule in the old country.

Of course, that is not the case here in the United States.

And now the coronavirus has completely upended every aspect of our lives, including schooling and day care centers, which then requires parents to take care of their children 24x7.  In most cases, this huge task falls on mothers, which is a huge challenge when they are also working from home.  It is even more of a challenge if they suddenly became unemployed.
According to research from Syracuse University released last month, more than 80% of adults in the country not working in order to care for children who would be in school or daycare if not for COVID-19 are women. A recent paper published in the academic journal Gender, Work & Organization found that mothers of young children reduced their working hours four to five times more than fathers.
It.Is.A.Nightmare.

Though the following metaphor that Betsey Stevenson uses is not the best one for the context, it conveys the point:
Although young men today are much more likely to profess their belief in gender equality than those of previous generations, they are not significantly more likely to divide most household tasks equitably, from child care to grocery shopping. And COVID-19 does not seem to be changing this dynamic, Stevenson says.
“If the guy is driving toward the cliff of not feeding the children, and the woman is driving toward the cliff of not feeding the children, she pulls off first and she feeds the children,” Stevenson said. “And the problem is that if he knows that she’s going to pull off first, then he wins the game of chicken.”
If that is the situation now, what might be the long-term effects?
Child care is one of those issues where we still really think it’s a personal problem: ‘You made the choice to have those little rugrats. You deal with them.’ Compare that with elder care. We recognized it was a social issue. We built a series of nursing homes and institutional care, and we have societal grants to cover some of that through Medicaid. But with child care, we’ve said this isn’t a social issue. And I think the pandemic has revealed that it is a social issue.
Child care is not a personal issue, it’s not a women’s issue; it’s actually an economic issue. It’s an economic issue because we need to invest in children.
Again, compare with India, where not only child care is a part of an extended family issue, elder care too is part of an extended family issue.

Meanwhile, here in the US, we are leaving parents and their children behind even as we spend gazillions on supporting persons corporations like the airlines.
Come September, I don’t think that the pandemic is enough behind us that every job would be back anyhow. Can we get every job back without child care? Absolutely not. The question is, how much is a lack of child care holding us back, versus how much are people still staying at home because they don’t want to get Covid?
Even if child care is not holding us back in September or October, we are letting the whole child care system erode in such a way that it’s not going to be there for us when we are fully ready to go back.
How so?
Where I really see the child care crisis holding us back is once we are ready to have all the jobs come back and we’re really ready to recover, even though we’ll have opened the schools, opened the child care centers, the workers aren’t going to be there, the slots aren’t going to be there. At the state level, we saw this in the 2008 recession
Very depressing!

Does Professor Betsey Stevenson have a solution?
 The solution has got to be government spending on child care. It’s going to have to be government encouraging and rewarding businesses that provide employees with the flexibility they need in order to balance work and child care. The policymakers debating legislation right now need to realize that caregiving is an essential part of our economy. And it’s an investment that when they make that, they are going to see benefits in terms of economic growth.
The same folks who are happy to cut corporate taxes because they think that’s going to unleash a wave of growth, I want them to realize that if they want to unleash a wave of growth, they need to invest in the next generation so that the current generation can do their work and the next generation is prepared to do it even better.
I am on board with this.

I was/am never a fan of government-subsidies for adults to have children.  But, I have also always believed that subsidies for human issues are far more important than subsidies for corporations to screw our lives.  However, as long as we have a party that is committed to protecting the life of abstract "persons" that corporations are, and with their party faithful committed to defending the "life" of a fetus in a petri dish while not caring about investing in life that is already here alive and suffering, we are doomed.

So ...

Vote accordingly.

Saturday, July 25, 2020

Book those meetings!

Working from home for many means plenty of video meetings.  "Zoom" has taken on a new meaning in our vocabulary.

Not everybody is comfortable with this new way of interacting.  Some are relaxed and easy, while many others are seemingly not.  A few make sure that the background is professional and presentable, and then there are others.

So, of course, there are ratings for that too.


For now, these are in a lighter vein, but I won't be surprised if the rating system becomes a part of everything else in life that we seem to be rating all the time.

A shelf with books is one of the favorite backgrounds--it tells the viewer that the person is a reader and is informed and, therefore, knows what they are talking about.  Is it any surprise that book publishers provide background images of their books?  Like this one from Random House:


Have that in your background and impress the heck out of the viewer!  Who cares if you have not read the books as long as you know how to talk about them ;)

Couldn't books be a part of the home decor as much as paintings and tchotchkes are?

Yes, they can, say the Japanese, who even have a word for it: Tsundoku.

And you thought only Germans have a word for everything!

Tsundoku means buying books that you do not read but pile up at home.
"The phrase 'tsundoku sensei' appears in text from 1879 according to the writer Mori Senzo," Prof Gerstle explained. "Which is likely to be satirical, about a teacher who has lots of books but doesn't read them."
While this might sound like tsundoku is being used as an insult, Prof Gerstle said the word does not carry any stigma in Japan.
You just happen to have a lot of unread literature.  That's all.  There are far worse things that one can do about which we need to worry a lot ;)

But what if some of the unread books have $20 bills tucked away in between the pages?  You will never know unless you read the books, right?

Friday, July 24, 2020

He sets forth toward class. NOT?

Even though I have taught online classes for two decades, from back when DSL was a huge deal as many others were struggling with dial-up modems, there is one aspect of the real world classes that my ego enjoys: For a few minutes every class meeting, I am in the front and center of students.

A diva with the spotlight on me.

A sage on a stage.

Of course it is the ego talking.  Especially when I go about my Rodney Dangerfield life!

But, that ego thing was only a small aspect of what I enjoyed about the real world classroom.  A small one, but an awesome added benefit.

The big and real reason is that it was only through the real world classrooms that I made meaningful connect with students.  In the online world, it is mostly transactional.  Sure, even in the real world plenty of students might have merely clocked in and out; but then there are those who make all the difference in the life of a teacher.

Thus, as it got to the final phase of the term, every term, the inner feeling got larger and larger that I might never see most of the students again in any of my classes.  And rarely ever even on campus.  Maybe forever in life.

As the author of this essay noted:
For a few months, we are front and center in our students’ lives—or so we hope. They are the focus of our courses, our assignments, our examinations, our office hours, our meditations in the car ride home. We encourage them. We try to fill the gaps in their education. In some cases, we try to resolve the unique challenges that they pose to us (as well as to themselves), psychologically as well as academically. We modify our lesson plans and rework our syllabi. ...
And then it all comes to an end. Students leave, move on, transfer, graduate, and, quite often, we never see or hear from them again. And we are OK with that.
For us, the process starts over, and we soon find ourselves caught up in new stories, while the previous ones remain largely unresolved. ... We fill in the blanks about them based upon what we know (or think we know), and tell ourselves that their stories ended the way that we hoped.
That level of an emotional investment and return does not happen in the online environment.

But then when I view teaching and learning that way, it becomes evident that I am thinking it is all about me.  Even though I know well that my profession is not one bit about me, but is about students.  It is darn difficult to let go of the ego!

The novel coronavirus has pushed us into a virtual world.  It is not clear when exactly we will return to how things were.  The "old prof" in the poem by Oregon's own William Stafford seems completely out of step with the reality:
Old Prof
By William Stafford
He wants to go north. His life has become
observations about what others
 have said, and he wants to go north. Up there
far enough you might hear the world, not
what people say. Maybe a road will discover
those reasons that the real travelers had.
Sometimes he looks at the map above
Moose Jaw and thinks about silence up there.
Late at night he opens an atlas
and follows the last road, then hovers
at a ghost town, letting the snow have whatever
it wants. Silence extends farther
and farther, till dawn finds the same page
and nothing has moved all night, except
that his head has bowed and rested on his arms.
Rousing to get started, he has his coffee.
He sets forth toward class. Instead of the north,
he lets an aspirin whisper through his veins.
There is no "sets forth toward class."  Not for a while, at least.  Maybe never after one more year?

Thursday, July 23, 2020

Black Lives Matter!

The following poem by Gwendolyn Brooks is from The Poetry Foundation's collections.
Riot

A riot is the language of the unheard.
—martin luther king

John Cabot, out of Wilma, once a Wycliffe,
all whitebluerose below his golden hair,
wrapped richly in right linen and right wool,
almost forgot his Jaguar and Lake Bluff;
almost forgot Grandtully (which is The
Best Thing That Ever Happened To Scotch); almost
forgot the sculpture at the Richard Gray
and Distelheim; the kidney pie at Maxim’s,
the Grenadine de Boeuf at Maison Henri.

Because the Negroes were coming down the street.

Because the Poor were sweaty and unpretty
(not like Two Dainty Negroes in Winnetka)
and they were coming toward him in rough ranks.
In seas. In windsweep. They were black and loud.
And not detainable. And not discreet.

Gross. Gross. “Que tu es grossier!” John Cabot
itched instantly beneath the nourished white
that told his story of glory to the World.
“Don’t let It touch me! the blackness! Lord!” he whispered
to any handy angel in the sky.
But, in a thrilling announcement, on It drove
and breathed on him: and touched him. In that breath
the fume of pig foot, chitterling and cheap chili,
malign, mocked John. And, in terrific touch, old
averted doubt jerked forward decently,
cried, “Cabot! John! You are a desperate man,
and the desperate die expensively today.”

John Cabot went down in the smoke and fire
and broken glass and blood, and he cried “Lord!
Forgive these nigguhs that know not what they do.”
A powerful poem.

It is a tragedy that the poem which was published in 1969 is relevant even in 2020!

Here's to hoping that anti-Blackness will be permanently voted out of power in November, and that the institutional structures that enable racism will be rapidly dismantled.

ps: I remain convinced that poems are to be heard. Listened.  So, here's another poem by Gwendolyn Brooks.

Wednesday, July 22, 2020

Will procreation be the COVID-19 recreation?

After the virus crossed over from China, in countries around the world, people have been sheltering in place since March.  People have also been unemployed in huge numbers.  Adding to all these, the lock down has sharply decreased entertainment options.

So, like Khushwant Singh famously joked decades ago about India, will acts of procreation be major recreation in the age of the coronavirus?  Are we looking at a big baby boom towards the end of 2020 and in early 2021?

Nope.

Even back in April, experts said that a baby boom won't happen.
In the short term, as the pandemic wrecks swaths of the economy, the coronavirus will probably give couples even more cause not to have children, experts said.
“I really don’t think they’re saying, ‘Oh, let’s have a baby in the midst of the greatest epidemic that the country has faced in 100 years,’” said Kenneth Johnson, a demographer at the University of New Hampshire.
There may be recreation in the bedroom, but no procreation.

The anxiety over one's economic future in this context itself is a mood dampener, to say the least.  Further, responsible adults might also have intense worries about the future of babies brought into existence when things are chaotic all over.
In contrast, the original baby boom, between 1946 and 1964, took place in an era of postwar euphoria and financial stability for many Americans. Couples married young, could afford homes and had children quickly. And it was not until 1960 that the federal government approved the first birth control pill.
That was in April.  Did the experts change their opinion over time?

Nope.  They doubled down.

Three months into the lock down, experts said that "the COVID-19 episode will likely lead to a large, lasting baby bust."  As a result of the pandemic and the economic recession, "we could see a drop of perhaps 300,000 to 500,000 births in the U.S."

The baby bust will further complicate the demographic crisis that has been slowly unfolding.  Even prior to the corona-recession, the fertility rate - the average number of children a woman gives birth to - had been falling.  As a result, it is only a matter of time before population in many countries started shrinking instead of growing:


Is there a solution?

Yes. But that won't appeal to the uber-nationalistic blood-and-soil tRumpians.  Migration is the answer.  And that too from "shitholes."
Prof Ibrahim Abubakar, University College London (UCL), said: "If these predictions are even half accurate, migration will become a necessity for all nations and not an option. "
To be successful we need a fundamental rethink of global politics.
"The distribution of working-age populations will be crucial to whether humanity prospers or withers."
Of course, the tRumpians can dismiss all these and work with alternative facts that will show that young white women will have lots of babies.

Tuesday, July 21, 2020

What if we don't reconstruct an "efficient" economy?

I have ranted, sometimes nearly hysterically, against the primacy of efficiency.  As I wrote in this post a while ago, even as an undergrad, and definitely in graduate school, I had an intuitive understanding that there was something wrong with the pursuit of efficiency.  After all, if I had worshiped efficiency, I would have then stayed in engineering, which is about making "things" less inefficient.

Years have gone by.  Heck, it has been decades.  I have only become even more of a efficiency-hater.  Especially in the world of higher education, for which I often quote Leon Botstein:
No matter the outcome of such a conversation, a very important point is that we must make clear that the university will never be an efficient institution. A university is, by definition, inefficient. If one wants a great university, one has to put up with “wasted” time, unproductivity, seeming leisure.
However, whether it is in higher education, or by individuals who want to manically multitask, there is a huge worship at the feet of efficiency.  If only people would understand that efficiency is more satan than god!

The COVID-19 life is a context in which we could engage in discussions on efficiency.  Right?
Efficiency means getting the most “bang for your buck”, the most benefit for every pound spent. Any other course of action is wasteful, surely? But eliminating waste implies eliminating excess capacity, and we now see the consequences of that in health systems worldwide. Our obsession with efficiency, if it means failing to plan for a pandemic or a climate emergency, will cost lives.
Our priority should be resilience, not efficiency. We need to build resilient systems and economies that are explicitly designed to withstand worst-case scenarios – and have a fighting chance of coping with unforeseen disasters too.
Am reminded of an old joke about an auditor who viewed fire engines that the company had as wasted investment because they were rarely used!

If only we would use the coronavirus conditions to rethink efficiency!

Should we focus our energy on rebuilding an economy that was governed by the rules before COVID-19 brought activities to a halt?
What if, instead of going back to work full-time, we decided to work less, buy less, make less, and not fight to raise GDP at any cost?
What if?

Seriously, what if?  Why not think about prosperity without growth?
“Reversing consumerism’s financial and cultural dominance in public and private life is set to be one of the twenty-first century’s most gripping psychological dramas.”
What good is all the wealth when, for instance, four months into a lock down of sorts, and six months since the virus went, ahem, viral, we in the US are yet to develop enough testing capacity and PPE?  Does it not mean that all that wealth is inefficient, when we should have instead invested in "wasteful" resilience?

I suppose I will have lots more time to "waste" on such matters after I am laid off!

Monday, July 20, 2020

It is never just about the food

Ever since I came to America, I have fighting against the usage "Indian food" and "Indian restaurant."

Because, there is no "Indian" food.

In order to paint a picture of the tremendous diversity in the Subcontinent, I have often countered people who ask me about Indian food by asking them whether they have ever had "European food."  That often does the trick.

We not only do not make such a reference to the white people's food, we even show off our culinary knowledge by talking about food from northern Italy versus the delicacies from southern Italy.

Yet, we talk about Indian food!

Recently a friend invited us over for a socially-distanced dinner.  She would cook her favorite Mexican dinner (her mother was from Mexico,) she said.

I asked her if she does mole.

The first time that I had a mole, which had a little bit of cocoa also in the sauce, I was blown away.  That was at a friend's home back in California.

However, rarely does a "Mexican" restaurant include a mole in the menu, and the few times that I have ordered them, well, they have been disasters!  It has been years since I have a had a mole, leave alone a good mole.  Which is why I asked the friend if she cooks mole.

"No, they didn't make mole in the part of Mexico where my mother was from and, so, we didn't grow up with it," she said.

The stereotypical and cliched idea of Mexican food does not allow for the incredible diversity in the traditional foods even in the country south of the border; how are we then going to imagine that there is nothing called "Indian food" in a land that is on the other side of the planet!

Even as confused as we are about all these, in multi-ethnic societies like the US, we tend to view that some "ethnics" cook and eat only their "ethnic food" and, we thereby render people one-dimensional.  A food-blogger/author/chef in Canada but with Indian heritage writes about this:
It is an unavoidable truth, but the color of my skin is sometimes confused with the scope of my talent. The more I write on the foods of India, the greater the risk I will be limited to that focus in the jobs I am offered, even though Indian food is not my chosen specialty. And even if it were, getting pigeonholed would still be a liability.
We have a long way to go in order to get away from the old ways of thinking.

The author, Tara O'Brady, writes about why it "wasn’t a simple yes" to write about a "food I’ve loved for longer than I can remember to those who don’t know it, to explain the process, and the science of it all."
Writers of color are expected to make a living off of their skin, off our families’ private rituals.
That's a powerful line.
There is less interest for us to exist outside broad stereotypes. Our food is sold on conjured emotion rather than granting these dishes the same deferential study we allow “classical” cuisines of Europe, no matter if our traditions stretch back further.
The food that Tara O'Brady was assigned to write about?

The dosai.  Or "dosa" as it is often referred to outside the Tamil world.

The dosai and its sibling dish--idli--are perfect foods for a simple reason: They include carbs and protein to get one going for the day.  O'Brady highlights this:
Most dosas are naturally gluten-free (excluding the wheat varieties, of course), vegetarian, and vegan-friendly if cooked with oil instead of ghee. As a grain is paired with a legume in the batter, a dosa includes a complete form of protein. In short, they’re a practically perfect food.
Even with dosais, the restaurant versions are often different from the home-made ones.
At restaurants this type of dosa can reach impressive physical proportions, the batter spread thin, then coaxed into rolls that span the width of a table. Those shattering paper-thin dosas are ethereal and almost cracker-like, a vehicle for the main component of the meal—aloo masala (dry-fried potatoes with mustard seeds, turmeric, urad dal and asafoetida) being the most traditional.
Homemade dosas tend to be more diminutive and also sturdier, with distinct circles where the batter is left comparatively thick. The bands go lacy and translucent like restaurant dosas, while the mounded ribs fluff, all spongy and bouncy.
Yep, which is why when I visit India, I never ever order dosais at restaurants; my favorite breakfast at any restaurant when in Tamil Nadu--poori with potatoes, with a side of vadai and sambar ;)

I wonder if dosais will go well with a mole sauce!

Dosais waiting to be eaten
Source

Friday, July 17, 2020

Brown skinned, brown eyed, with long and curly dark hair

Take a look at the art below:

Source
A mother who has the Hindu "dot" on her forehead, with wavy hair and holding a child.

But then there is something that is off, right?  She is not dressed in the traditional sari.  Hindu women in history were not portrayed with pearl necklaces, but with gold and silver and precious stones.

So, you want to guess again on what that image is about?

If I had been asked to guess, which I was not because I read about it instead, I would never have imagined that it is a representation of Mary holding baby Jesus!

Here's the image in full:


The Holy Family, is how it is titled.

The note there is even more head-spinning: "c.1620s Northern India, Mughal court, early 17th century"

An artist in the Mughal court created this "Indian"-looking image of Mary holding Jesus, and making sure that the baby--whose hands are around a beautiful vase--does not knock the vase over.

Is this watercolor art work in India then?

Nope.

It is in Cleveland.

Yes, the Cleveland that every comedian jokes about.

At the Cleveland Museum of Art.

How did it get there?
Gift in honor of Madeline Neves Clapp; Gift of Mrs. Henry White Cannon by exchange; Bequest of Louise T. Cooper; Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund; From the Catherine and Ralph Benkaim Collection
How did these people get their hands on a Mughal court art from 400 years ago?  Stolen merchandise that has passed through many hands, and now in a museum half way around the world from where it was created!

As Ricky Ricardo often told Lucy, "you have some 'splaining to do!"

How did I get to viewing that piece of art?

I jumped off a hyperlink in this piece on how in art depictions Jesus started resembling white Europeans, even though Jesus was born in the Middle East.
The historical Jesus likely had the brown eyes and skin of other first-century Jews from Galilee, a region in biblical Israel. But no one knows exactly what Jesus looked like. There are no known images of Jesus from his lifetime
Academics have talked about Jesus' "whiteness" a lot, and how it is highly likely that he was nothing like the northern European depictions.  Will the Black Lives Matter movement of today, and the challenge to the white narratives, dethrone the image of the white savior with blue eyes and blond hair?

I like this description:
Jesus was a man of color who was murdered by law enforcement and state-sanctioned violence for insurrection against the Roman Empire.
That is one powerful image!

So, ... brown skinned, brown eyed, with long and curly dark hair.  Jesus probably looked like me when I had lots of hair on my head!

Me at 27

Jesus looked like this? Source

Thursday, July 16, 2020

How many Morks and where?

Of course the title of the essay was the draw: How Many Aliens Are in the Milky Way? Astronomers Turn to Statistics for Answers.

Wouldn't you also be interested?

An even bigger draw was the author's name: Anil Ananthaswamy.

I knew I have blogged his essay and referred to the shared heritage behind that name; it was 3 years ago, in June 2017, where I noted this:
First, the author of the essay, from where I excerpted those two sentences, has a name that is easily recognizable as a distinctly Tamil name--for those of us from that part of the old country.  Anil Ananthaswamy.  So, of course, I had to check that first:
He studied electronics and electrical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India, and the University of Washington, Seattle, and trained as a journalist at the University of California, Santa Cruz 
He is now a journalist/science writer, operating from Bangalore and Berkeley!  I suppose there are quite a few of us who mistakenly wandered into engineering programs!
Ananthaswamy covers interesting territory through science and, as I wrote then, "way beyond my technical abilities."  This essay on aliens in the Milky Way is also filled with scientific information that was sometimes difficult to handle.  But, hey, if I want my students to work through difficult topics, well, I ought to practice what I preach.  Practice I did.

Sure, there are billions and billions of stars out there.  If luck has it, I might even view with my own eyes a comet that will not come around for another 6,800 years.  But, "the probability that life would ever get started—that you would make that leap from chemistry to life, even given suitable conditions," is a difficult one to estimate.

So, how many aliens are out there in the Milky Way?  There is no bottom-line answer to that question.  Ananthaswamy tricked me into reading the essay, which turned out to be a discussion of how Bayesian statistics is applied to this challenging question!

Whether it is scientists or the religious, and even the non-scientist seculars like me, we are all fascinated with questions on where life came from, and whether life-especially intelligent life--exists elsewhere in the universe.

I wonder if humans--or some future form of homo sapiens--will have cracked the mystery by the time Comet Neowise returns.


Wednesday, July 15, 2020

The thread of life

Unlike in most other countries, American universities are big time landlords, who earn a lot of income from their developed real estate.

Country clubs Dorms, conference rooms, auditoriums, climbing walls, etc.  Some also own huge basketball and football venues for educational purposes entertainment.

All those expensive real estate developments have been idle since last March.  And there is very little chance that significant usage of those facilities will begin even in early 2021.

The landlords universities are in distress, and the Republican Uncle Sam couldn't care less.

My own university also has to reckon with the tightening dollars and cents.  As a result, some of us faculty, too, are bound to lose our jobs before the next academic year ends.

Should that day arrive way earlier than I had planned, I will be thankful that I was/am one of the lucky few on this planet who was able to pursue for quite a length of time what truly interested me.  Thanks to some dumb luck!

In my agitated and angst-filled younger years, I was convinced that somewhere out there were the answers to the big questions.  Somewhere.

Even in the first couple of years of graduate school, I was confident that I was on the way to the answers.

I did find the answer.  It was a non-answer of sorts.  Life is full of wonderful ambiguity.  That's it.  We have to live through it all.

Every once in a while I succumb to the temptation of the answer, but almost always I just want to breathe and drink and eat this ambiguity.  I love those damn wicked problems!

No wonder then that even with the courses I teach, I seem to always force students to think about the possible multiple interpretations. I even tell them sometimes not to expect a definitive answer from me.  I suppose my pedagogical goal, if I were to think about it that way, is that if I can help students understand that life itself is all about dealing with ambiguity, then they will know how to deal with specific instances whatever they might be.

A concern and worry that I have is that despite the high levels of literacy that humanity has achieved, there appears to be a decreasing interest in exploring and understanding and discussing the ambiguity that life is.  Perhaps that is also a reason why 63 million responded with a favorable vote when a demagogue yelled and screamed that he alone had all the answers,

The following poem by Oregon's own William Stafford is how I want to end this note on the delightful pursuit of ambiguity:
The Way It Is
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

Tuesday, July 14, 2020

Lynching's stepchild

The President and his attorney general, who couldn't care less about the rule of law, beat their chests and proclaim themselves to be defenders of the constitution only when it pleases them.  The death penalty is one of those instances.

After nearly two decades, the federal government resumed capital punishment.  Yes, resumed, and in the middle of a pandemic that is also killing people aided by the federal government's willful inaction.  The Supreme Court refused to stop it:
Hours after the Supreme Court rejected a last-minute legal-challenge on a 5-4 vote, the Justice Department put a 47-year-old man to death for his role in the 1996 murder of a family of three, the first federal execution in more than 17 years.
A left-of-center person throughout my life, I have always opposed capital punishment.  But, as a secular liberal, what do I know compared to those god-loving Republicans who favor the death penalty!  I am sure that Jesus said torture and kill those who harmed you, right?

My earliest post on the awful Republican pursuit of the death penalty was in 2011, well before tRump became a darling candidate for the hate-filled Republicans.  I quoted Christopher Hitchens there when linking the religiosity of the country (especially Republicans) and the support for capital punishment:
The reason why the United States is alone among comparable countries in its commitment to doing this is that it is the most religious of those countries. (Take away only China, which is run by a very nervous oligarchy, and the remaining death-penalty states in the world will generally be noticeable as theocratic ones.)
The Jesus-loving, Bible-thumping, pro-life party wants the government to kill.  Whether it is the support for war or the death penalty, these ardent supporters are pro-death.  These proud pro-life people are maniacally pro-killing!

Dahlia Lithwick noted the unfortunate irony that most of the ardent supporters of the death sentence are simultaneously the same ones denouncing the role of government, and their primary reason is that the government can't get any damn thing right:
when you hear Republicans moan about the bureaucratic burdens and failures of government-run education, health care, and disaster-relief systems, doesn't any part of you wonder why they have such boundless confidence in the capital justice system?
They have such remarkable confidence that the government is awesome when it comes to killing people!

There is one more dimension that is exceptional to the US among the advanced liberal democracies that have otherwise done away with capital punishment--the continuing effects in a society that once enslaved human beings.  Capital punishment in the United States is linked with "its history of racially motivated lynchings in the South."
Southern legislatures shifted to capital punishment so that legal and ostensibly unbiased court proceedings could serve the same purpose as vigilante violence: satisfying the lust for revenge.
The Equal Justice Initiative reported on this:
The death penalty in America is a “direct descendant of lynching.” Racial terror lynchings gave way to executions in response to criticism that torturing and killing Black people for cheering audiences was undermining America’s image and moral authority on the world stage.
The reality is that we the people are not in favor of the death penalty; "a majority of Americans say that life imprisonment with no possibility of parole is a better punishment for murder than the death penalty is."

As with the results of the 2016 election, the majority opinion does not count here too :(
Republicans are one of the rare groups in society to indicate a preference for the death penalty over life imprisonment. Political conservatives (51%) are another.
Democrats and political liberals (77%) are two of the subgroups most likely to believe life imprisonment is a better punishment for murder than the death penalty.
There is only one way to get rid of capital punishment--vote against the pro-death Republican candidates in November 2020, and throw tRump and his toadies out of power.


Monday, July 13, 2020

A wall has been built

He promised the adoring crowds, which apparently included former readers of this blog and quite a few of my neighbors too, that Mexico will pay for a beautiful wall at the border.

We needed the wall, he said, because rapists, serial killers, and drugs and diseases were otherwise pouring into the country.



His base applauded.

A huge wall now surrounds the US.  We are all trapped within.


Yes, Cambodia!

Ishaan Tharoor (yes, a son of that Tharoor) recently tweeted:
The US passport is worthless, for the time being:
While coronavirus travel restrictions may vary from country to country, much of the world is united in one aspect of their current response: Travelers from the United States are not welcome.
A U.S. passport, long seen as a golden ticket to visa-free travel in much of the world, has long provided its holders with the ability to trot around the globe with ease. Now, that sense of passport privilege Americans are used to is fading.
The wall has been built by the rest of the world to keep Americans and our diseases out of their countries!

All thanks to 63 million voters!


Sunday, July 12, 2020

காலை எழுந்தவுடன் நாளைய கேள்வி

During these Covid times, practically every morning I face the same question over and over again as if I am playing a role in Groundhog Day.  It is the question that Kannadasan poetically phrased it in this phenomenal song in Apoorva Ragangalகாலை எழுந்தவுடன் நாளைய கேள்வி, which roughly translates to "After waking up, one ponders about the day."



A couple of mornings ago, I didn't have to think about that question only because I woke up with this Kannadasan song from an old movie playing in my mind.

After breakfast, I emailed a few in the extended family about it.  "YouTube helped me pull it up in no time, and I have already played it three times ;)" I wrote to them.



When it comes to Kannadasan's songs, I pay attention to the lyrics, which otherwise I rarely ever do.  The man always spoke to me, though I couldn't figure out why.  It was well into my life in the US, decades ago, a chance conversation with a colleague who taught English helped me understand the connect.

Poetry is about emotions, she said.

Aha!

Poetry does what prose often does not, and it does that in a mere few verses, sometimes even in a few lines. A poem conveys the emotions that we feel, or want to feel.

Kannadasan did that well for me and millions of other Tamils.

Like in the following two lines in that Apoorva Ragangal song:
ஏன் என்ற கேள்வி ஒன்று என்றைக்கும் தங்கும்
மனிதன் இன்ப துன்பம் எதிலும் கேள்விதான் மிஞ்சும்

("Why?" will forever be a question in the mind
Through all sufferings and joys, questions will always remain!)
A few years ago, back in 2013, I blogged about Kannadasan, which, for whatever reason, continues to draw readers.  I quoted from Kannadasan's lyrics in this old song:
வாழ்க்கை என்றால் ஆயிரம் இருக்கும்
வாசல்தோறும் வேதனை இருக்கும்
வந்த துன்பம் எது என்றலும்
வாடி நின்றால் ஓய்வதில்லை
உனக்கும் கிழே உள்ளவர் கோடி
நினைத்து பார்த்து நிம்மதி தேடு
If only I had the abilities to translate that into English!

I suppose Kannadasan's poetry appealed to many of us because we didn't read them, but listened to the verses.  Poetry is to be heard.  If English is your language, then you might want to head here, which is my favorite site to listen to poetry in English, some of which are translations.   (This post from a couple of days ago was triggered by the poem that I listened to.)

To listen to Kannadasan's poems, well, there is Youtube.


Thursday, July 09, 2020

A possible lesson from Covid: Sports is sports, and education is education

Two months ago, in May 2020, which seems like two decades in the age of the coronavirus, I wrote in this post:
In response to COVID-19, if higher education is forced to stay focused on its mission and reduce its extravagant expenses on athletics, then it will be one of the few benefits to come out of this global catastrophe.
Ahem.  It could happen.

First was an announcement from the Ivy League, which became the first Division I conference to suspend football for the fall:
The presidents said in a statement that sports could not be played under campus-wide policies that include restrictions on student and staff travel, social distancing requirements and limits on group gatherings.
“With the information available to us today regarding the continued spread of the virus, we simply do not believe we can create and maintain an environment for intercollegiate athletic competition that meets our requirements for safety and acceptable levels of risk,” the statement read.
Of course, Harvard and Yale are not the champs who win the ultimate prize.

And then the Ivy on the west coast, Stanford, had more news:
Stanford will discontinue 11 of our varsity sports programs at the conclusion of the 2020-21 academic year: men’s and women’s fencing, field hockey, lightweight rowing, men’s rowing, co-ed and women’s sailing, squash, synchronized swimming, men’s volleyball and wrestling.
Yes, synchronized swimming.  You read that correctly.

And you know well where you have watched synchronized swimming.  In Hail, Caesar ;)



Ok, you perhaps have not watched that movie.  But, surely in the summer Olympics. Yes?

In the US, universities are the prep schools for wannabe Olympians!  And, Stanford is a leader in that:
USC topped the list at every Summer Games from 1928 through 1964 (tied with Cal in 1948). UCLA’s run went from 1968 through 2004. Stanford had the most in 2008, 2012 and 2016.
Now, it does not mean that Stanford coaches only US athletes for the Olympics.  Nope.   Athletes come from all over the world to "study" at American universities so that they can get access to all kinds of personnel and infrastructure support.  Remember the scene in Bend It Like Beckham where the young women celebrate getting the soccer scholarship to an American university?

This bizarre aspect of American higher education investing gazillions on athletics is truly an awful American Exceptionalism!  I will quote this again:
In no other country’s university system, after all, does sports play anything like the central role it does in American academic life. Men do not go to Oxford to play cricket; the Sorbonne does not field a nationally celebrated soccer team. Even in the most sports-mad countries, sports is sports and education is education. That’s a better system.
Will the novel coronavirus eventually lead American universities to a better system?  I am not holding my breath on that!


Wednesday, July 08, 2020

Howdy mOdi + नमस्ते tRump = Screw Indians!

During my trip to India a few weeks after the Houston rally where mOdi toadied up to tRump, people were still talking about it.  Knowing my political perspectives, the extended family did not engage me on those issues.  To  friends who asked me about it, I said India should not trust tRump.  He will screw India at the earliest chance, I warned.

Most of India didn't worry much about tRump because the people who voted for mOdi share something deep and fundamental with tRump and his minions--hatred for Muslims.  That shared Islamophobia made mOdi and his toadies warmly embrace tRump, even if he didn't care a bit about the "shithole" conditions in most of India.

I have been worried about the two politicians selling hatred of the other so openly.  In a post in March 2016--when tRump was doing his warming up act in the primaries--I blogged that the largest democracies have mainstreamed hatred.

mOdi and his adoring Indian-American toadies believed that they could thread the needle through tRump's racism and xenophobia:
“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.”
A few months ago--which in the age of the coronavirus seems like an eternity--tRump and his trophy wife went to India, and the mOdi gang put on quite a show.

They forgot the old story from Hindu mythology that a scorpion, however friendly it might seem to be, is a scorpion that will eventually sting you, even to death.

The scorpion did its thing.

The freeze on work visas (H-1) was the first sting.
Nearly half of a million H-1B visas issued between 2004 and 2012 went to Indians. Along with their dependants they accounted for more than a fourth of the Indian-American population, which is currently around 3 million.
And then came the regulations regarding international students.

This headline says it all about the Indian perspective in response:
Trump admn slams door on F-1 visa students whose institutes have moved to online-only mode
So, whatever happened to Howdy mOdi and नमस्ते tRump?

This news report refers to that special "friendship" between mOdi and tRump:
Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) state chief and Sangrur MP Bhagwant Mann on Wednesday appealed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to leverage his friendship with US President Donald Trump for the benefit of millions of Indian students studying in the US so that they are not made to leave the country.
Do these people know anything about tRump?  Have they not been following various reports on the narcissistic sociopath that he is?

Blinded by their Islamophobia, mOdi and his toadies failed to recognize that their brown skins are not welcomed by tRump.
He hates the brown-skinned.  His party hates the brown-skinned. And a good chunk of his party hates immigration, especially of the brown-skinned.
I.Told.You.So!!!

Tuesday, July 07, 2020

Postcard from Kashmir

"Can you explain to me what's going on in Kashmir between India and China?"

I told him what I know.

I could have told him more.

Like the stories from more than three decades ago, of a Kashmiri Muslim sister and brother who, by coming to graduate school, were fleeing their native land.

Compared to the present, those were Kashmir's good days!

I am confident that those siblings have read Agha Shahid Ali's "Postcard from Kashmir." I can easily imagine that they relate to every word in it.

Postcard from Kashmir
By Agha Shahid Ali

Kashmir shrinks into my mailbox,
my home a neat four by six inches.

I always loved neatness. Now I hold
the half-inch Himalayas in my hand.

This is home. And this the closest
I'll ever be to home. When I return,
the colors won't be so brilliant,
the Jhelum's waters so clean,
so ultramarine. My love
so overexposed.

And my memory will be a little
out of focus, it in
a giant negative, black
and white, still undeveloped.

Monday, July 06, 2020

Bridge of faith

I was almost done with walking the full clockwise loop by the river.

Starting on one side near my home, I walk for a while to a bridge that gets me to the other side.  And then towards the end of the loop, another bridge to re-cross the river.

It was on that second bridge that I spotted two older people and their bikes.  The man seemed to be getting ready to leave, and the woman appeared to have decided that the bench where she was sitting would be her spot for a while.

I neared them.  They both looked 70-plus.  She had an accordion resting across her chest and abdomen.

The woman waved her hand.

I looked at her and waved out as I continued walking.

"Jesus loves you," she said.

"Thanks."

To believers, Jesus rose from the dead.  Not right away, but more than two days after he died.

To have that kind of unshakable belief is something.  Of course, every religion has something comparable that is the foundation of the faith that their followers have.

The faithful's claims about Jesus are extraordinary claims.
The principle of proportionality demands extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims. Of the approximately 100 billion people who have lived before us, all have died and none have returned, so the claim that one (or more) of them rose from the dead is about as extraordinary as one will ever find. Is the evidence commensurate with the conviction? 
The extraordinary evidence is not there.  It is the same case with other religions too.

"In science, we need external validation." There is no other way.  One might choose to believe in whatever, but that belief by itself does not make it a truth.

Is science itself a "faith" as much as the resurrection of Jesus is a faith?

Nope.

The fact that you are reading this is evidence that science and the scientific method are no "beliefs" or "faiths."  Here is Richard Dawkins explaining that:



Friday, July 03, 2020

"To him, your celebration is a sham"

I blogged about Frederick Douglass' "What to the slave is the Fourth of July?" in 2017.

We continue to struggle with the issues that Douglass raised in that powerful and compelling oration.  The descendants of the enslaved people continue to be treated as less than equal, and all we can do is do our part to make sure that Black Lives Matter.

Meanwhile, the original people of this land, who were systematically wiped out by the settler whites, were put through another round of torture when tRump decided to hold a fireworks rally at Mt. Rushmore.  If you need a reminder on why that is painful site:
The insult of Rushmore to some Sioux is at least three-fold:
1. It was built on land the government took from them.
2. The Black Hills in particular are considered sacred ground.
3.The monument celebrates the European settlers who killed so many Native Americans and appropriated their land.
Sure, Washington and Jefferson owned human beings as property.  But, didn't Lincoln free the slaves?
Abraham Lincoln famously emancipated slaves, but he supported eradicating Indian tribes from western lands and approved America’s largest-ever mass execution, the hanging of 38 Dakota in Mankato for their alleged crimes in the 1862 war along the Minnesota River.
Teddy Roosevelt, in his “The Winning of the West,” wrote: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are … .”
All these bring me back to the Frederick Douglass speech.

Back in high school, my friend and classmate, Chandru, had a record player, in which he played for a couple of us who had gone over to his home an LP of a music group called ABBA.  And soon after that, I came to know the music of another group, Boney M, especially the one that began with "By the rivers of Babylon ..."  That opening line is from "a biblical Psalm – Psalm 137."

That tidbit is merely the starting point for my ignorance.  This essay begins with:
On the anniversary of America’s independence, the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass made a biblical Psalm – Psalm 137 – best known for its opening line, “By the Rivers of Babylon,” a centerpiece of his most famous speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”.
Douglass told the audience at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York, on July 5, 1852, that for a free black like himself, being expected to celebrate American independence was akin to the Judean captives being mockingly coerced to perform songs in praise of Jerusalem.
Not only did it inspire the famous abolitionist; this 2,500-year-old Hebrew psalm has long served as an uplifting historical analogy for a variety of oppressed and subjugated groups, including African Americans.
I read Douglass' speech. Or, at least most of it.

It is powerful. It is moving. It is a must-read.

It will be a gross injustice to excerpt even a single sentence from that speech.  With all the apologies, and my ignorance as an excuse, I will wrap up this post with the following lines from Frederick Douglass:
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour. 

Wednesday, July 01, 2020

Knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door

Two days ago, I wrote about the mad science that "pure research" can sometimes be.  That post itself was a follow-up to another post on the primacy of science, in which I yet again worried about science and technology that is disconnected from the humanities and the social sciences.

It is not that I am anti-science, unlike the nutcases who elected the anti-science-in-chief, whose scientific proclamations include: Windmills cause cancer; hurricanes can be nuked; ingesting bleach will prevent COVID-19; vaccination causes autism; and more.

Science, as I have often described even knowledge to students, is like the kitchen knife.  One can use a kitchen knife to create tasty and healthy dishes, or one can also go the OJ route.

Richard Feyman gives me yet another metaphor to think about the value of science.  He draws on a Buddhist thought: "To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell."  The same key that opens the gates of heaven also opens hell's gates. The question then is are we at the gates of hell or heaven, and how do we know we are on the way to heaven or hell?

Of the three values that Feynman lists, I find the following to be critical:
I would now like to turn to a third value that science has. It is a little less direct, but not much. The scientist has a lot of experience with ignorance and doubt and uncertainty, and this experience is of very great importance, I think. When a scientist doesn’t know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty darn sure of what the result is going to be, he is still in some doubt. We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty - some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain.
Now, we scientists are used to this, and we take it for granted that it is perfectly consistent to be unsure, that it is possible to live and not know. But I don’t know whether everyone realizes this is true.
On top of this varying degrees of certainty, the sciences, Feynman writes, "do not directly teach good and bad."  Consider an example that he gives:
Communications between nations must promote understanding - so went another dream. But the machines of communication can be manipulated. What is communicated can be truth or lie. Communication is a strong force, but also for either good or evil.
Reminds you of Facebook, and other communication channels in which manipulation is the game that is played for fortune and power?

Feynman wrote that in 1955.  Yes, in 1955!

He concludes with this:
It is our responsibility as scientists, knowing the great progress which comes from a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, the great progress which is the fruit of freedom of thought, to proclaim the value of this freedom; to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed; and to demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations.
This is how even this mediocre teacher engages with his students at a podunk university.  But, and as one whose initial training was in science and technology, I have also worried for long that the science that takes us to heaven is losing the on public relations front because science rarely ever offers the certainty that we humans crave for:
A refreshing feeling that we don't know and we are trying our best to find out.  What we know now is incredibly more than what people knew only a few generations ago.  And there is a good chance that quote a bit of what we now know will be overthrown in a couple of generations.  It is awesome.
But, we humans like a clear story, a story that does not keep changing.  We like narratives that provide us with a sense of certainty.
So, when a narcissistic sociopath proclaims with certainty that he alone can fix all our problems, it does not surprise me one bit that his certainty beat the crap out of the varying degrees of uncertainty that a scientific and rational mind offers.

What is the way forward then?

It is a struggle to fight for truth and to know.  Our fantastic lives today are possible thanks to the people who engaged in this struggle for hundreds of years.  As Feynman wrote:
It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.
We have the key; we just need to figure out the path towards the gates of heaven.