Only one life to live

On a gorgeous summer night in southern California, an old college acquaintance ended his life by committing suicide.

Our lives diverged after we completed the undergrad program 35 years ago.  Our paths didn't cross again, except for brief email exchanges about four years ago.

This suicide is the closest by degrees of separation in thirty years.  When I was in graduate school, my roommate took a leave of absence for a semester, and later returned to India.  A few months after that, a mutual contact informed me that he had committed suicide.

I cannot begin to imagine the intense pain and suffering that they had felt within for them to decide that ending their lives was the only option that remained.

My analytical mind tells me that there are ways out.  Losing one's job, or failed love or marriage, or any unpleasant turn in one's life can be intensely traumatic.  There's no question about that.  My analytical mind would, therefore, would tell people with suicidal thoughts that there is plenty to live for--family, friends, the places one can visit, ... 

Yet, every single day there are people who choose to end their lives.

Philip Brickman was one such person.

At a young age, Brickman had established himself as an expert in the psychology of happiness; yet, he was 39 when he jumped to death in 1982, from the building on the campus of the University of Michigan where he worked.

The essay about Brickman's life and death is lengthy and covers a lot of ground.  Including this:

So what do you do, as a clinician or loved one, when faced with such suffering? How do you see them through?

You help them generate thoughts about the future in concrete, specific detail.

You point out, using specific numbers, how many years they lived without thoughts of suicide, versus the number of years they have had such thoughts.

You help them find therapy, ideally cognitive behavioral therapy, and drag them to sessions if you have to.

You take away their ability to kill themselves.

You try to keep them safe.

These efforts may not work. Suicidal people can be determined, and they know how to dissemble, how to feign stability. But you try. Most are relieved when they fail. And approximately half of them, according to the most up-to-date research, will not be feeling suicidal at the same time the following year — or ever again.

I can only hope and wish that many will fail in their attempts to end their lives.

In case there is a reader of this post who has considered such thoughts:

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK). You can find a list of additional resources at SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources.

Is the Pope Catholic ... or one of the Vaishnavas?

In his NYT oped, which I referred to in this post yesterday, the Pope writes:

If we are to come out of this crisis less selfish than when we went in, we have to let ourselves be touched by others’ pain. ...

The pandemic has exposed the paradox that while we are more connected, we are also more divided. Feverish consumerism breaks the bonds of belonging. It causes us to focus on our self-preservation and makes us anxious. Our fears are exacerbated and exploited by a certain kind of populist politics that seeks power over society. It is hard to build a culture of encounter, in which we meet as people with a shared dignity, within a throwaway culture that regards the well-being of the elderly, the unemployed, the disabled and the unborn as peripheral to our own well-being.

To come out of this crisis better, we have to recover the knowledge that as a people we have a shared destination. The pandemic has reminded us that no one is saved alone. What ties us to one another is what we commonly call solidarity. Solidarity is more than acts of generosity, important as they are; it is the call to embrace the reality that we are bound by bonds of reciprocity. On this solid foundation we can build a better, different, human future. 

"we have to let ourselves be touched by others’ pain."

Yes.

Empathy, as I have often written about here and even in my newspaper columns, is fundamental to understanding what it means to be human. I wrote in this oped in October 2016 that one of Gandhi’s favorite prayers says it all about being human: It is to “feel the pain of others, help those who are in misery.”

The Pope writing that we have to let ourselves be touched by others' pain echoes the message that I received through the faith in which I was raised.  The fact that I do not practice religion, and challenge the very notion of a supreme being, does not mean that I do not value empathy that non-politicized religious leaders talk about with the faithful.  Why the faithful choose not to let themselves be touched by others' pain is beyond me.  The utter selfishness and disregard for human suffering that the faithful display and practice is one of the most hypocritical behaviors of the religious folk.

Empathy is framed in non-secular philosophy too.  Adam Smith, often hailed as the brains behind capitalism, was a philosopher who wrote in A Theory of Moral Sentiments " ... by changing places in fancy with the sufferer, that we come either to conceive or to be affected by what he feels."

Many among the faithful and the irreligious alike seem to conveniently shut themselves off from the sufferer.  As the Pope writes, "some of us that we can act as if they don’t exist."

Think, for example, of the wars scattered across different parts of the world; of the production and trade in weapons; of the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing poverty, hunger and lack of opportunity; of climate change. These tragedies may seem distant from us, as part of the daily news that, sadly, fails to move us to change our agendas and priorities. But like the Covid-19 crisis, they affect the whole of humanity.

Shutting ourselves off from the sufferer is nothing but a statement of our priorities.  We would rather spend money to buy the latest gadget than donate that money to help alleviate human suffering.

I am glad that the Pope continues to hammer the message that the church needs to go to the margins to see life as it really is. 

“I’ve always thought that the world looks clearer from the periphery,” he said in the book. “When God wanted to regenerate creation, He chose to go to the margins — to places of sin and misery, of exclusion and suffering, of illness and solitude.”

If only the faithful would think about that!

The Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. The Pope

In a 5-4 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court has temporarily barred New York from enforcing strict attendance limits on places of worship in areas designated coronavirus hot spots.  The case on which it ruled is this: Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, New York v. Andrew M. Cuomo, Governor of New York.

Let's take a religion roll call first:

Roman Catholic Diocese v. Cuomo, who is Catholic

The five justices who ruled in favor of the Diocese:

• Amy Coney Barrett--Catholic
• Brett Kavanaugh--Catholic
• Neil Gorsuch--Episcopelian (raised Catholic)
• Justices Samuel Alito--Catholic
• Clarence Thomas--Catholic

The four justices in the minority:

• John Roberts--Catholic
• Stephen Breyer--Jewish
• Elena Kagan--Jewish
• Sonia Sotomayor--Catholic

How did Cuomo react?

Cuomo described Wednesday's decision as a political statement. In his daily coronavirus briefing Thursday, he said, "Look, I'm a former altar boy, Catholic, Catholic grammar school, Catholic high school, Jesuits at college. So I fully respect religion and if there's a time in life when we need it, the time is now. But we want to make sure we keep people safe at the same time, and that's the balance we're trying to hit, especially in this holiday season."

So, which Catholic would you believe?

Why not check with the infallible Catholic, the Pope himself?

With some exceptions, governments have made great efforts to put the well-being of their people first, acting decisively to protect health and to save lives. The exceptions have been some governments that shrugged off the painful evidence of mounting deaths, with inevitable, grievous consequences. But most governments acted responsibly, imposing strict measures to contain the outbreak.

Yet some groups protested, refusing to keep their distance, marching against travel restrictions — as if measures that governments must impose for the good of their people constitute some kind of political assault on autonomy or personal freedom! Looking to the common good is much more than the sum of what is good for individuals. It means having a regard for all citizens and seeking to respond effectively to the needs of the least fortunate.

Hmmm ... let's remind ourselves what the Supreme Court's majority opinion noted:

The restrictions at issue here, by effectively barring many from attending religious services, strike at the very heart of the First Amendment's guarantee of religious liberty

The Pope, on the other hand, writes:

It is all too easy for some to take an idea — in this case, for example, personal freedom — and turn it into an ideology, creating a prism through which they judge everything.

I understand that a lawmaker who is Catholic doesn't take orders from the Pope on political issues. That was the very issue that JFK faced as the first serious Catholic candidate, and he made the separation of church and state very clear. 

For contrary to common newspaper usage, I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party's candidate for president, who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me.

Whatever issue may come before me as president — on birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling or any other subject — I will make my decision in accordance with these views, in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressures or dictates.

I am glad that judges who happen to be Catholic don't take marching orders from the Pope.  But, what about the science of public health that guides the political decisions on restrictions on churches during Covid?  Why is Chief Justice Roberts' view not the majority opinion when he writes: "Only that our Constitution principally entrusts the safety and health of the people to the politically accountable officials of the states to guard and protect."

I suppose the Pope is not infallible even to justices who happen to be Catholic.

Where are you really from? Even He does not know

A while ago, I read an essay in which the author imagined our ancestors living in caves.  One night, the woman tries to wake up her man who is beside her, and he doesn't respond.  She touches him again and realizes that he is colder than normal.  She falls asleep.

She wakes up later as the sun comes up, and her man is in the same position.

Our ancestors understood that something had happened.  The guy is no more.  What happened to him?

Ever since we became conscious of the fact that we die, we have wondered what really happens when our body is here but we are no longer here.  We are not what we see as bodies?  Then, who are we?  Where did we come from, and what happens when we die?

I grew up in a traditional, orthodox, Brahmin setting, and that context provided a narrative that explained this existential question.

As a kid, I was convinced about that narrative.

But then came the science classes.  Atoms. Carbon. Sex and reproduction. Galaxies and the universe.  The big bang.

The Brahminical explanation seemed like nothing but a tall tale.

We read about Stanley Miller's experiment.  The idea that a primordial soup provided the building blocks of life seemed a better and more convincing narrative than anything else.

But, where did that primordial soup come from?

On this question, I like the answer that goes way back in my Brahminical roots--to the Rig Veda.  

Who really knows?
Who will here proclaim it?
Whence was it produced?
Whence is this creation?
The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe.
Who then knows whence it has arisen?

Whence this creation has arisen
- perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not -
the One who looks down on it,
in the highest heaven, only He knows
or perhaps even He does not know.

When poems carry our burdens

I went looking for interesting reads at The American Scholar.  A long time ago, I got attached to reading it even though it was not the normal channel that made me aware of that publication.  The "normal" is if one gets elected to the Phi Beta Kappa society.  But, as a junkie for all things higher ed, I quickly came to know about PBK and the publication.

The magazine often has absolutely riveting essays.  My all time favorite there is one by a black professor writing about discussing the n-word with a class of white students.  There was another time when I read an essay by a professor recalling the experiences when he and Scooter Libby were school mates--this was when Libby, who was Darth Vader's dick Cheney's aide, was convicted on multiple counts for leaking the identity of a female CIA officer.  I wrote to the author, who replied!

These days, I hit the paywall and end up reading only whatever freebies they offer.  One of the freebies is their poetry section.  

As they note there, poems are to read aloud.  And, they do it wonderfully.  Many poems I have blogged about after listening to the reading there.

This time, the magazine featured a poem by Gulzar.  And there was a photo of Gulzar.  It was nothing like the only Gulzar that I know about.  This was Anand Mohan Zutshi Gulzar Dehlavi.  

Who?

I suppose most of the world is no different from me.  I live my life as is there is nothing more to know.  I then get smacked everyday about how I don't know a damn thing.  No wonder the university president wants to give me the pink-slip!

This Gulzar was a big time poet.  And more.  

I now know.

Gulzar's poem, Messiah, in translation from the Urdu, is short and conveys a lot.  Listen:

Age like fine wine

I read The Godfather when I was a teenager.  I had to, because everybody around me seemed to be reading it.

I am yet to watch the movie version. 

Sure, I am familiar with the pop culture references to it. But, I always feel exactly like how the Meg Ryan character, Kathleen, in  You've Got Mail put it: "What's it with men and The Godfather?"

I was even more shocked when Dr. Fauci referred to The Godfather.  

What Fauci said was reported in my favorite magazine, The New Yorker:

“I go to my favorite book of philosophy, ‘The Godfather,’ and say, ‘It’s nothing personal, it’s strictly business.’ ”

Et tu, Fauci?

As Kathleen explained it to Joe, the character played by Tom Hanks, "it was not personal to you, but it was personal to me."

My problem is the same as Kathleen's--every damn thing is always personal to me.

Never before has the "it's strictly business" become as personal as it has now become.  As I wrote in this commentary, I could be out of a job soon.

A budget manager who speaks of compassion channeled the "it's strictly business" through "I have never felt like my argument was with you, Sriram."

That was the mildest cut of them all.

In recent emails, the following was conveyed by three colleagues:

We need to capitalize on new opportunities to keep WOU more than just afloat....and if we fail to act immediately by making both thoughtful and painful decisions, we won't float for long. 

At the forefront of my worries is the survival of this institution. 

I suppose this is the higher education's version of Mitt Romney's "corporations are people, my friend."  The university needs to survive; it's strictly business.

More than a decade ago, I watched Up in the air.  It is a movie about a guy who is hired to deliver the employment termination news to people because the management take is that a hired guy can be an impersonal messenger between them and the employees whose lives will be screwed.  It's strictly business only for one side, and it is all personal on the other side of the table.

As I was contemplating about all these, I got an email.  From a former student.  She had heard the news about my university.  She writes:

 I know my words won't replace the career you have spent years curating. I just wanted to reach out and let you know that of all the academics I have been taught by you are by far the best. The honesty you provide young adults is refreshing at an age when many still continue to shelter us. Though times are hard with covid I feel like it has allowed many of your advice to age like fine wine in my mind. There are many conversations I remember from your courses that still ring true and with ample effect now. I hope you are doing well and finding some peace in unpredictability of life.

She knows that it is personal.

Burn After Reading!

My favorite contemporary public intellectual has an essay in the recent issue of The New Yorker.  The title of the piece will draw one in: Will tRump burn the evidence?

I will read it after I get the physical copy in the mail.

Corrupt regimes trying to burn the evidence is not anything new.  As always, the bastard raj perfected that too.  I remembered blogging about it, and pulled it up.  The post is from October 6, 2016.

October 6, 2016.  The election was barely a month away. 

It is shocking to now read the comments that two commenters had left.

One commenter wrote there:

Sure, the British did a lot of horrible things during the Raj. They did a little good too. ...

Forget your election. Its not as relevant as you lot think it is. You are just going to have more years of gridlock whoever "wins".

Another commenter wrote:

You seem to discount everything the British did as horrible, discriminatory, racist and evil. There has to be something positive from that time, and the positives should not be ignored completely, no matter how awful the negatives. The positives don't compensate for the negatives necessarily, but they deserve recognition as well.

Shocking!

I stand by my response there:

"Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln ..." applies to the White Supremacist Raj too ;) 

I don't refer to all the British then as white supremacists. But, the Raj was very much built on that notion. One of the "positives" that even people in India refer to as an example is the railway network. But that was not built out of any goodness of the heart--it was merely to make the extraction/plunder easier.

Do not put the history away so fast, my friend. Pause enough to acknowledge it. Denounce clearly the colonization. Shine the light enough on the white supremacy that messed up the lives of millions forever ... 

"Forget your election" is not something that we--you included--can afford to. The xenophobic, misogynistic, maniacal Trump's odds of winning are not good. Yes. But:

1. One can't be lax until it is all really over.

2. The nasty underbelly that Trump has exposed will not go away after his defeat. I am convinced that the nasty white supremacy will be more openly vitriolic.

Oh, yes, the bastard raj destroyed as much evidence as they could.  Read that post.  And read Jill Lepore's essay.

No two patients are ever the same

Last evening, we watched Oliver Sacks: His Own Life.  

What a life story, with tremendous personal troubles that were mirrored by remarkable accomplishments!

The following is from my post on August 31, 2015, after Sacks died.

Like many, I too read more than one obituary piece on Sacks.  In this one, at the New Yorker, I found something especially insightful:

 He resisted the powerful current of modern practice that seeks the generic. He rejected a monolithic mindset, and retrieved the individual from the obscuring blanket of statistics. This put him outside of the academy, exiled to chronic-care institutions. Through his writing, Sacks ultimately received recognition for advancing a unique form of clinical scholarship that was largely abandoned: the study of the single person within the context of his own life. Ever the acute observer, his case histories confirmed that under a single diagnostic term was a spectrum of human biology. No two patients are ever the same, he emphasized. ...
Every dimension of the patient was meaningful in his thinking.

 Against the generic.  No two patients are ever the same.

Powerful ideas.  Ideas that are relevant not only to the medical practice alone and, instead, they are applicable to every walk of life.  We often forget that no two people are the same.

In any professional practice, there is a reason, I suppose, that we go with the generic--it is "cost efficient."  But then, I have problems getting even the best fitting shoe because my feet are not the generic 7.5 size!  If that is the problem with the feet, then think about the brain, the biochemistry, the ...

Even though Sacks kept the individual patient in the front and center,

This did not mean Sacks was a Luddite. He was an avid reader of scientific journals, fascinated by scientific advancements in imaging the nervous system at work. He engaged in dialogue with Nobel laureates and lab scientists about the nature of consciousness, providing what they lacked—the insights of a naturalist, a field worker.

Sacks showed us that being an "artisan" didn't therefore automatically mean being opposed to scientific and technological advancements.  He made it seem easy how to use those advancements in order to make his individual-centered approach that much more rewarding to his patients.

I saw Sacks in person, and heard him, when he was in Portland on a book tour, which was soon after the publication of Uncle Tungsten.  Even from the back rows of the auditorium, it was clear that he was full of energy.  I had no idea at that time about the complicated and miserable life that he had lived in his younger years; reading about those made me appreciate his energy and commitment all the more.

His own words, from a couple of weeks ago, seem to be the best way to end this post, especially because of the references to the meaning of life and inner peace and happiness, about which I often blog:

And now, weak, short of breath, my once-firm muscles melted away by cancer, I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual, but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life — achieving a sense of peace within oneself. I find my thoughts drifting to the Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week, and perhaps the seventh day of one’s life as well, when one can feel that one’s work is done, and one may, in good conscience, rest.

The tears of mothers, wives, and daughters

I was really, really young when I heard the word "posthumous."  My father used that word when referring to my aunt, who was a few-months old fetus when her father died.  In utero, a phrase that I learned much later.

I have never talked with this aunt about growing up fatherless.  Yes, there were father-figures in her life.  But, nobody that she called appa.  

I never talked to her mother either about losing her husband when she was a few months into her first and only pregnancy. 

In the old country, we never talked about such important things in life. 

But, we religious Hindus channeled them all into the grand epics.  Through those mythological characters--some of whom were/are divine to many--we shared the angst, pain, aches, sorrows, and everything unpleasant that life deals us.

In the Mahabharata, Parikshit is a posthumous child.  His father, Abhimanyu, was one of the many killed in the war at Kurukshetra. 

Kathika Nair gives voice to Abhimanyu's wife, Uttara, who was pregnant with Parikshit.

A young mother ready to give birth and her husband is killed.

There is plenty to be understood, and written, about the tears that mothers and daughters shed, and don't shed.  Yiyun Li writes about that in a moving personal essay.

"I have so little to keep, to hold, of you."  In the mythology and in real life.  Even today. 

What do people vote for?

Back when I was an electrical engineering undergraduate student and thoroughly unhappy in that collegiate setting, I am not sure if I would have immediately jumped on "economic geography," even if somebody had expressed that to me like in the "plastics" scene in The Graduate.

The reality is that I had always been thinking about economic geography without ever knowing that there was a field of study called economic geography.  I couldn't care about how electrons traveled and about silicon chips.  I was sincerely worried about the poverty and illiteracy and open defecation and more that was all around.  A silicon chip was not going to do a damn thing about those human problems.

Graduate school took me to an intellectual world that was unknown to me all through my formal years of education in the old country.  Books and journals and talks and ... 

Decades later, as I noted here, when people ask me what economic geography is about, one of the examples I give them is what I refer to as a big-picture question.  "Why are some countries rich and some poor?"  It is, after all, one of the pressing questions to which, as a teenager, I was struggling to find an answer. 

People always get excited about this example.  Their response is typically along the lines of "wow, I had no idea that geography includes such topics.  I would love to take your classes."

In a huge country like the United States, that question can also be scaled down to "why are some regions rich and some poor?"

That economic geography question easily translates into the political world.  Hillary Clinton spoke the truth to struggling workers in the coal belt, when she told them coal wasn't coming back, and that her government would invest in job-training programs to help them find alternative jobs.  tRump, on the other hand, blatantly lied to them that if elected he will bring even more high paying coal jobs to the region.

The liar won.

But, the liar cannot remake economic geography.  The poorer regions are getting relatively poorer, but they continue to vote for liars!

2000: Gore won 659 counties accounting for 54% of the US economy.

2016: Clinton won 472 counties accounting for 64% of the US economy.

2020: Biden won 477 counties accounting for 70% of the US economy.

Notice both the trends: A decreasing number of counties won by Democrats but representing increasing percentages of the national economic output.

Source

Though I detest tRump, and have no patience for those who voted for him, I worry about this trend.  It does not bode well for the country, for democracy, and--more importantly--for the people who voted for tRump in the lagging regions.

Blue and red America reflect two very different economies: one oriented to diverse, often college-educated workers in professional and digital services occupations, and the other whiter, less-educated, and more dependent on “traditional” industries.

There are reasons why immigrants are going only to some places.  The reasons have a lot to do with economic geography.

Therefore,

If this pattern continues—with one party aiming to confront the challenges at top of mind for a majority of Americans, and the other continuing to stoke the hostility and indignation held by a significant minority—it will be a recipe not only for more gridlock and ineffective governance, but also for economic harm to nearly all people and places.

The challenges are in plenty.  Starting with how to make people understand the basics of economic geography in their own lives.  How do we convince people about the importance of truth?

I hope that Joe Biden and his team will be able to do these.  If they fail, we all will fail.

Immigrants and Project Lightspeed

The tRump regime--"administration" doesn't really describe it--loudly and openly beat up on immigrants and Muslims.  Remember how one of the first things he tried to do was a blatant Muslim ban?  He then had to scale it down and pretend it was not really a Muslim ban when it was.

During those dark days, social media--from the anti-tRump side--pointed out how Apple might not have happened if a certain Syrian immigrant had not come to the US.  Steve Jobs' biological father, Abdulfattah Jandali, was an Arab Muslim from Syria, who came to the US to pursue a PhD.

Now, it is another Muslim immigrant to the rescue.  Make that two immigrants.  Not here in the US, but in Germany.  But, it is also an American story.

Scientists have greeted with cautious optimism a press release declaring positive interim results from a coronavirus vaccine phase III trial — the first to report on the final round of human testing.

New York City-based drug company Pfizer made the announcement on 9 November. It offers the first compelling evidence that a vaccine can prevent COVID-19 — and bodes well for other COVID-19 vaccines in development.

Pfizer being a US-based company.  But, the immigrants who provided the scientific breakthrough are not here.  They are in Germany, born to Turkish immigrants.

Dr. [Ugur] Sahin, 55, was born in Iskenderun, Turkey. When he was 4, his family moved to Cologne, Germany, where his parents worked at a Ford factory. He grew up wanting to be a doctor, and became a physician at the University of Cologne. In 1993, he earned a doctorate from the university for his work on immunotherapy in tumor cells.

Early in his career, he met Dr. [Özlem] Türeci. She had early hopes to become a nun and ultimately wound up studying medicine. Dr. Türeci, now 53 and the chief medical officer of BioNTech, was born in Germany, the daughter of a Turkish physician who immigrated from Istanbul.

BioNTech is the firm that the couple founded.

BioNTech began work on the vaccine in January, after Dr. Sahin read an article in the medical journal The Lancet that left him convinced that the coronavirus, at the time spreading quickly in parts of China, would explode into a full-blown pandemic. Scientists at the company, based in Mainz, Germany, canceled vacations and set to work on what they called Project Lightspeed.

They partnered with Pfizer, whose CEO is Greek!

Albert Bourla was born and raised in Thessaloniki, Greece.^[2] Born into a Jewish family, he earned his doctorate in the biotechnology of reproduction at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki's Veterinary School.^[3] He left Greece with his wife when he was 34 and since then he has lived in seven different cities, in four different countries.

The tRump regime eagerly broadcast the Pfizer success as one that was made possible through its Operation Warp Speed.  Controversies are in plenty on how much Warp Speed really made it possible.  Whatever that might be, did the regime say anything about how it was immigrants who created this success?  Did the regime say anything about the Turkish Muslim backgrounds of the two scientists in Germany?

I am glad that the fucking tRump regime is on its way out, though they will torch everything they possibly can during the exit.  I can only hope that we Americans have inoculated ourselves against that kind of a political virus.

Meanwhile, I hope that the Pfizer vaccine and the others under development will deliver us from the global pandemic in a matter of mere months from now.

Ill-behaved men and the abused women

Audrey Truschke, whose lecture on Aurangzeb I attended in Chennai in January 2019 during my sabbatical and was condemned by the Hindutva and its sympathizers as whitesplaining, writes this about the Mahabharata:

The epic itself foretells:

आचख्युः कवयः केचित्संप्रत्याचक्षते परे

आख्यास्यन्ति तथैवान्ये इतिहासमिमं भुवि

Some poets told this epic before.

Others are telling it now.

Different narrators will tell it in the future.

One of the latest narrators is Karthika Nair, whose interpretation of the Mahabharata is absolutely innovative.  It compels the reader to rethink the old epic, however familiar one might be with the tales and the characters.

Nair gives voice to the Queen of Panchala--Draupadi's mother--who is a "woman without a name" in the epic.  Through this queen, Nair condemns how men--kings in particular--defined life that was hell for mothers because of wars and bloodshed:

As Truschke also reminds us, the Mahabharata "condemns many of the appalling things it depicts, but one area where its response is more tepid concerns the treatment meted out to women."

The world of the Mahabharata is stacked against women. Our world today looks distinct in its details, but some basic principles are not much different. For example, more than one person has compared Draupadi’s plight with that of ‘Nirbhaya’, the name given to the young woman mortally gang-raped in Delhi in 2012. Nirbhaya (meaning ‘fearless’) resisted her attackers, and one of the rapists later said that this resistance prompted him and his fellow assaulters to be more brutal than they would have been otherwise. Two millennia later, the corrupt ‘moral’ remains: she should not have objected to unjust treatment.

The Mahabharata is not as straightforward a story about good and bad as one might expect from an epic that features practically all the Vedic gods.  

The Mahabharata claims to show dharma or righteous conduct – a guiding ideal of human life in Hindu thought – within the morass of the characters’ immoral behaviours. But the line between virtue and vice, dharma and adharma, is often muddled. The bad guys sometimes act more ethically than the good guys, who are themselves deeply flawed. In the epic’s polychromatic morality, the constraints of society and politics shackle all.

This is also why Nair prefers this epic over the Ramayana.  She writes that in the Mahabharata, "right and wrong and not so easy to spot anymore."  Tragic!

Make vegetables great again!

Sure, there are 70 million fellow citizens who are in mourning.  I don't care.  

We have taken our country back from the sociopath and his followers.  I am ready to move on to pontificating about stuff like I usually do, even when I have no idea what I am talking about.

When I was a kid, cauliflower was rare.  I hadn't even heard of something called broccoli.  Chances are that if I had been asked what broccoli is, even into my teens I would have said it was perhaps a type of bacterium--like E. Coli.

After coming to America, it has been an introduction to a world of vegetables and fruits that I didn't know even existed.  Patty pan squash?  Come on!

Or strawberries and raspberries.  I had read about them, but didn't taste one until I came to California.  The first blackberries that I had were after I moved to Oregon.

Years ago, a neighbor gave me a small packet of quinoa and said that I might like to cook and eat it.  I had never heard of quinoa until then, and I certainly didn't know how to pronounce it either.

My point here is this: In five decades, the varieties of fruits and vegetables that I consume has increased phenomenally.  There is more that I don't know about. 

Extrapolate from all these, and I could hypothesize that there are way more known-unknowns that we need to make a lot more people aware of.  Especially because of climate change:

The old strategies of improving size and yield are no longer enough. A couple centuries of human greenhouse emissions have caught up with us. With the world likely to get at least 2 degrees Celsius warmer, on average, by the middle of the century, and with extreme storms, rains, and drought already happening more frequently, growing conditions are changing faster than farmers and their crops can adapt.

Diversity is the key to our healthy future:

Solving the food-and-climate crisis will require going back to basics, finding ways to make our mix of crops broader rather than even narrower. ... We can do that again, adding overlooked crops to the mainstream food supply and working to broaden the agricultural gene pool after centuries of going the other way. That adjustment will help ensure that farmers will have crops suitable for the extreme growing conditions they are likely to encounter in the coming decades.

“We haven’t done a very good job of maximizing diversity,” Lippman says. “And diversity is what you need to win the battle of climate change.”

Like with orphan crops:

ones that are cultivated on a small scale in some parts of the world, but that have not benefited from breeding and research to the same extent that major crops have. Some of them are already suited to relatively hot or dry conditions. Because they have not gone through the same extensive breeding as corn, soy, and wheat, the orphans have more untapped potential.

Quinoa is an example of an orphan crop.  Though it was consumed for centuries in the Andes, the rest of us had no idea about it.  I knew about it barely a decade ago.  Once when visiting with a way-out-there in the extended family cousin, I was pleasantly surprised that the cousin's mother was making a quinoa uppuma.  Adapting a new grain or vegetable is not a big deal--coming to know about is the hurdle. 

Lippman’s research group at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory has been investigating orphans in the Solanaceae family, a diverse group that includes tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants, and peppers. At least 25 orphan crops exist in this family, and there are many other uncultivated wild relatives that have crop potential. Lippman is particularly interested in the domesticated African eggplant, grown for its fruit, and a wild relative, Solanum anguivi, whose leaves are eaten. Only local communities eat these species, because there hasn’t been much interest in developing them into mainstream food crops. “There are dozens of Solanaceae plants that have more widespread agricultural potential than we currently realize,” Lippman says.

The next time somebody tells you that we cannot feed more humans, ask them to explain their logic.  And then talk to them about the orphan plants.  Help them understand that not everybody on this planet eats the same stuff, and that all of us could benefit from a lot more diversified portfolio.  "We missed the chance to stop climate change, but Lippman believes we can still win the race to remake agriculture and safeguard the food supply for humankind."

This land is my land!

Thank you, Americahttps://t.co/7vukXDUUTq#PresidentBidenVPHarris #JillBiden

— Am Dr Khe (@congoboy) November 7, 2020

J'accuse! J'accuse! J'accuse!

The sociopath is on his way out.  We are only hours away from it becoming official.

Looking forward to #Biden and #Harris to make America truly great again.https://t.co/Pa9bYrkIrM#Election2020 #tRump #VoteGOPoutIn2022

— Am Dr Khe (@congoboy) November 6, 2020

But, the fact that he is defeated does not mean the country becomes a land of angels.  Nope.  Despite everything that he did, despite his impeachment, despite his awful handling of the pandemic, despite ... it is an endless list. Yet, even more people voted for him this time than in 2016!

Think about that.

Think about the fact that 70 million people voted for the sociopath! 

There are at least 70 million in this country who are ok with corruption, misuse of government machinery, separating mothers from children, ban on Muslims, tolerance of armed gangs of white supremacists, ... 

Did they vote for him because of these or despite these, and does it matter which category the 70 million belong to?

For now, yes, I am delighted that he will be gone.  After four years of being trapped in his vortex, I look forward to my normal, dull and boring, life.  But, I will be on the alert that even my now-former-friends and neighbors who are Republicans are the proverbial wolves in sheep's clothing.

Most of what follows is adapted from my post on January 9, 2017.  As I noted in my response to a supporter of the fascist in the old country: Let me repeat (and I will do this for many more years, I am sure): There is no such thing as a good trump voter

In her speech, Meryl Streep reminded us about that noble human quality.  By pointing out how empathy-deficient the pussy-grabbing president-elect is:

It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter—someone he outranked in privilege, power, and the capacity to fight back. It kind of broke my heart when I saw it, and I still can’t get it out of my head because it wasn’t in a movie; it was real life. And this instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, filters down into everybody’s life, because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing.

I still cannot believe he won despite such talk and action.  A horrible human being as the President!

Source

It is even more depressing to think that he won because of such talk and action.

To quote the philosopher Adam Smith, "by changing places in fancy with the sufferer, that we come either to conceive or to be affected by what he feels."  We imagine how it would be to be disabled. Or to be terminally ill. Or to live in Aleppo.  Normal human beings, therefore, do not mock the disabled, or the dying, or those being bombed in Aleppo. 

Yet, if 63 million voted for that horrible human being to be the president, then I worry more about my fellow citizens than about the pussy-grabber himself!

Which is why right from election night I have been operating with a clear bottom-line: There is no such thing as a good trump voter:

Trump campaigned on state repression of disfavored minorities. He gives every sign that he plans to deliver that repression. This will mean disadvantage, immiseration, and violence for real people, people whose “inner pain and fear” were not reckoned worthy of many-thousand-word magazine feature stories. If you voted for Trump, you voted for this, regardless of what you believe about the groups in question. That you have black friends or Latino colleagues, that you think yourself to be tolerant and decent, doesn’t change the fact that you voted for racist policy that may affect, change, or harm their lives. And on that score, your frustration at being labeled a racist doesn’t justify or mitigate the moral weight of your political choice.

To empathize requires a fundamental starting point of recognizing and respecting the other--who does not look like me. Not with this demagogue and his voters!

Empathy is also what serious art conveys to us.  As Streep said, "An actor’s only job is to enter the lives of people who are different from us, and let you feel what that feels like."  Like even when a eleven-year old boy silently sheds tears because an animated character dies.

Unlike that eleven-year old boy, the demagogue has an utter lack of an ability to "fancy with the sufferer"--a complete and total lack of empathy.  There will be situations during his presidency when he will have to be the comforter-in-chief.  There will be situations when he will have to weigh whether or not to bomb a place or a country.  There will be situations when his policies might have drastic effects on people.  But, when he lacks empathy ... progress will stall.  We might even regress. 

The trump voters will stand accused!

To set forth toward class amid uncertainty

(My commentary was published on November 4th in The Oregonian)

Early last March was the last time I “set forth toward class,” to use the memorable phrase from the late William Stafford’s charming poem “Old Prof.” 

Since then, I have been waking up wondering whether I will ever set forth toward class, especially with my university’s president contemplating faculty layoffs and other cuts primarily in response to the pandemic.

During that final face-to-face meeting in March, students had questions in plenty, from arrangements for the final exams, to whether they will be able to come back to the dorms.  Their facial expressions and body language broke my heart.  “Keep calm and carry on” was one of the many clichés that I shared with them.

That was the last time I saw students in person. 

Work has been completely virtual since then.  Logging in from my “home office” is all I do anymore in order to set forth toward class. 

Every day, I end up asking myself the same question: Will I be able to once again have meaningful interactions with students? 

As if the pandemic weren’t enough to take away those interactions that I cherish, there is one other, and more important, reason for me to worry whether I will ever “set forth toward class.” 

Like many regional public universities in the United States, my university too is dealing with financial crisis that had been slowly developing and which the coronavirus accelerated.  “Our goal is to retain as many employees as possible,” noted the president in a three-page, single-spaced memo to the campus about the process of rightsizing the university.

In a couple of weeks, we will find out about the president’s plan to “align faculty resources with enrollment trends to reduce faculty expenses in academic programs.” 

Will I be informed that I will not be needed after June 2021?  How will I feel if I stayed on, but favorite colleagues are laid off? 

Of course, there are no clear answers in life. 

Even if I am laid off, as a citizen and a (former) educator, I will continue to worry about public regional universities like WOU. These are often the institutions that provide valuable learning opportunities for students who might be the first from their families to attend a four-year college. 

WOU and other similar colleges are increasingly the ones that serve the “non-traditional students”—adults returning to college after various life experiences. They welcome mothers and fathers, who decide that completing a college degree is way too precious. They open the doors to military veterans, who without fail are the only students who insist on addressing me as “sir.”

Among all the different types of students, I have especially been blown away by the dogged determination of students who are mothers, whose superhuman ability to juggle classwork and family life is simply beyond my wildest imagination. Their roads to degree completion are long and circuitous, but the value of their college degrees seems incomparably more than what a straightforward path from high school might deliver.

Will I never set forth toward class again and work with students, like how I have been doing since joining WOU in 2002? Only time will tell.

zozobra?

Woke up, fell out of bed
Dragged a comb across my head
Found my way downstairs and drank a cup

That didn't happen to me, of course.  

I did almost fall out of bed.  I was way too distracted and preoccupied.  Add to that a nagging background anxiety.

It is comforting to know that there is a word that describes this package of emotions.  Zozobra.  Who knew!

Ever had the feeling that you can’t make sense of what’s happening? One moment everything seems normal, then suddenly the frame shifts to reveal a world on fire, struggling with pandemic, recession, climate change and political upheaval.

That’s “zozobra,” the peculiar form of anxiety that comes from being unable to settle into a single point of view.

It has been a long time since November 2016 to be in such a state of mind that has worsened over the four years.

The word “zozobra” is an ordinary Spanish term for “anxiety” but with connotations that call to mind the wobbling of a ship about to capsize. The term emerged as a key concept among Mexican intellectuals in the early 20th century to describe the sense of having no stable ground and feeling out of place in the world. 

Feeling out place in this world.  Phew!

Why only now?  How come I didn't feel this in, say, 2007?

[It] comes from cracks in the frameworks of meaning that we rely on to make sense of our world – the shared understanding of what is real and who is trustworthy, what risks we face and how to meet them, what basic decency requires of us and what ideals our nation aspires to.

In the past, many people in the U.S. took these frameworks for granted – but no longer.

The gnawing sense of distress and disorientation many Americans are feeling is a sign that at some level, they now recognize just how necessary and fragile these structures are.

So, ok, I have a name for this crisis.  But, ... what can I do about it?

Talking about zozobra provides something to commune over, something on which to base a love for one another, or at least sympathy.

I hope that we can collectively talk about love and sympathy from January 2021 onward.

Forget apples. A teaspoon of dirt everyday will keep the doctors away?

Like most kids, I played in the dirt a lot.  Sure, I am a neat-freak now, but that's not how I always was.

In the old country five and six decades ago, I cannot imagine any kid not having played a lot in the dirt.  Villages like grandmas' offered plenty of dirt all around.  Young ones crawled, on floors licking anything and everything that they came across.  Toddlers rushed outside and grabbed whatever they found and, as toddlers do, gave them a good licking too.  And more, as you can imagine.

Urban India was not that different.  

Perhaps I was a tad more in the dirt than the average kid.  I recall a phase when I had boils in my arms and legs--my unclean self had made them possible.

Oh, there was more "unclean" stuff. Like tiny worms in vegetables.  In the rice too. Bugs in the lentils.  Ants seemingly in everything.

There was no point complaining to the grandmothers.  "That's ok, if you swallowed ants, your eyesight will get better" was one of the responses.  And here I am wearing glasses.  Clearly the ants that I swallowed didn't help ;)

Could all these early experiences have also helped me become healthy?

That is the hygiene hypothesis in health.

The argument has been that our immune systems do not gear up to fight infections, or even go rogue sometimes, if they have not been trained early on in our lives when we were kids.  The more kids (and adults) live in sterile conditions most of the time, the less that their bodies know how to develop a fertile internal environment that can be the army to fight invaders when they come knocking.

I am not sure if we can establish this with certainty.  But, it has always appealed to me, and I am thankful that I grew up dirty, and am clean during my middle age as my body begins to weaken.

In the age of the coronavirus, the hygiene hypothesis has reared up in an interesting way.  Could tropical countries that are also poor, like India or Nigeria, be handling Covid-19 better because the people there got a lot of hygiene and immune building exposure during their childhood?

Now, new research by Indian scientists suggests that low hygiene, lack of clean drinking water, and unsanitary conditions may have actually saved many lives from severe Covid-19.

In other words, they propose that people living in low and low middle-income countries may have been able to stave off severe forms of the infection because of exposure to various pathogens from childhood, which give them sturdier immunity to Covid-19. Both papers, yet to be peer reviewed, looked at deaths per million of population to compare fatality rates.

Before you jump to conclusions, keep in mind that a lack of potable water and sanitation infrastructure literally kills people.  Bad air quality also is a killer.  By having clean water, sewage processing systems, and clean air, we save lives and extend longevity.  So, we don't want to cut back on these, right?

 Smita Iyer, an immunologist at the University of California, Davis, believes the "hygiene hypothesis" in Covid-19 "does fly in the face of our understanding of anti-viral immune responses".

An immunologist in the US, with a last name of Iyer.  Hmmm ... 

Low hygiene conditions correlated with low Covid fatality rate is merely a correlation at this time.  We have very little understanding of the virus almost a year into the pandemic.

Clearly, a range and variety of reasons could be possibly behind the low fatality rate. "We still have a lot more to learn about the virus as we are still only 10 months into the pandemic," says Prof Kuppalli. The fact is there is much we don't know.

There is much that we don't know.  But, I am always inclined to believe that all the dirt that didn't kill me in my childhood made me stronger.  As I wrote seven years ago, "I am willing to buy into the idea that all those tiny doses of dirt in the air and the food helped me develop my immune system, and I now worry that I will live way too long for my own good!  And that the absence of that from my regular life now is why I have to be ultra-careful when I visit India."

I wonder when I will be able to visit India again!