I hope that a very long 2020 will end soon!
Looking forward to normal life resuming in a few months.
But these risks feel like fairly low probability events. As dire as things look now, I think the likeliest outcome is a pretty good situation in February which – if we’re lucky (and there hasn’t been much luck in 2020-21) – will be our durable state by 2nd quarter, 2022.(23/24)
— Bob Wachter (@Bob_Wachter) December 29, 2021
Back when I was an undergraduate student, a few of us went to Ooty and Coonoor for a couple of days. We were young men; naturally, we were idiots. Naive adventurers. It was either at Lamb's Rock or at Dolhin's Nose that we were sitting at the very edge of the rock formation, without considering the risks that we were taking.
It was during this trip that I tried smoking different types of cigarettes, in order to see if anything might interest me. A puff from each, and it was successively worse. The worst of them all was the menthol cigarette. To this day, I cannot imagine why people smoke cigarettes!
As the names Lamb's Rock and Dolphin's Nose suggest, these are colonial legacies. The melanin-deprived colonizers set up "hill stations" in higher altitudes in order to cool themselves during the peak weeks of summer. Many of these also became places where they established boarding schools and military academies--for the colonizers and for the natives who wanted to be like their masters.
A couple of miles away from Coonoor is Wellington--another settler name, of course--which is home to India's defense training college. Recently, India's highest military officer was on his way to the college when the helicopter in which he was traveling crashed, killing him, his wife, and others who were on board.
A wisecracking YouTuber in Tamil Nadu ranted something critical of this crash, for which he was immediately charged. The high court dismissed the charges against him and, in doing so, quoted Orhan Pamuk:
The judge also referred to how Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk differentiates between a naive and sentimental novelist. He said, "The naive write spontaneously almost without thinking, not bothering to consider the intellectual and ethical consequences of their words and paying any attention to what others might say," adding that Maridhas’s post could be categorised as naive writing.
It shouldn't surprise any of us that Pamuk was quoted in a judicial ruling. Great writers offer plenty of thoughtful observations about humanity.
Pamuk himself ran into trouble with his government, which accused him of insulting Turkishness. This too shouldn't surprise any of us; authoritarian governments of strongman leaders do what authoritarian governments of strongman leaders do!
As even my blog shows, I have often found Pamuk's thoughts to be wise and informative. I liked how he phrased the ascendance of writers from outside Europe and North America:
When I began writing, no one cared about Turkey, no one knew about Turkey. In 1985 I went to America for two years and began to write The Black Book around then. Finding that my voice was getting stronger, I really remember thinking, ‘my God these Latin American writers are so lucky, who cares about Turkish writers or Middle Eastern writers or Muslim or Indian or Pakistani writers?’ That’s what I thought then. But the situation has changed in 25 years and during that change my books boomed, I am happy to say that. There are political reasons, cultural reasons, history, all of which changed the world. And now I would say that a big writer from Turkey or the Middle East or India is more visible. Salman Rushdie, for example, was visible in 1981. It all began after that. ...
I'm sure we will be reading more Indian literature, because Indian literature in English is slightly more visible, than say, Chinese or Latin American. But I would say, the private lives of non-western nations will be more visible in future. That I can only say. Non-western writers will be more visible and domination of the European-American small world – they were dominating the whole world – that domination will be less. But it's not an animosity, it's not a clash, it's a friendship. We have learned the art of the novel from them – Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Proust, Mann. These are my brothers; I am not fighting with them.
Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Dickens, and more were the authors I read when I was an undergraduate. I learnt a lot from them. And now, for the first time, I am all set to read one of Orhan Pamuk's novels.
The first book of Naipaul's that read was about the old country. His old country too, in a way. India: A Wounded Civilization.
I was blown away by that book. It was the first one that I read that was merciless in its criticism of India. It was brutal. And, as I recall, Naipaul claimed that the country of India as we know it will forever behave wounded because of one reason: Hinduism and all the related hierarchical relationships and structures.
It was also clear that he had a special place for India, the land from which his people had moved to the Caribbean. But, that special place did not mean that he overlooked anything, nor did he sugarcoat the millions of things that he critiqued.
Later, when my brother was working in Mauritius, I read The Overcrowded Barracoon. I wrote to my brother that perhaps he, too, would be interested to read it. I never heard from him about the book, and I assumed he either did not or he didn't care to.
Now, 35 years after first leaving the old country, I am only slightly older than the age Naipaul was when The Enigma of Arrival was published. There are so many ways I am able to relate to his experiences, and I am glad that he has the facility with words to express them in ways that I would never be able to.
Naipaul writes about visiting Trinidad after being away for a few years in the UK. True to his style, Naipaul does not shy away from frank and harsh observations about the island and its people, even as he romanticizes about the island and its people.
I read the following paragraph. And then I re-read it to make sure that I understood him:
"India" in place of the "island" sums up my feelings about the old country. It does not take long before I feel the restlessness and the anxiety to move on. To move back home.
The book, which is an autobiography, fiction, and poetry all combined together seamlessly, is bleak. Very bleak. There is plenty of grief. Very little kindness. And no love. I suppose that's what Naipaul wanted to convey in his contemplation on how we view ourselves, perhaps even fool ourselves, in order to fit into a world that almost always is not to our exact preference.
Our arrival on this planet, the lands we move to and the lives that we lead, are all enigmas worth understanding.
Professor E.O. Wilson died. He was 92 years old.
As the obituary notes, his scientific arguments have generated a lot of praise and criticism too. I lack the ability to make sense of them all.
What I know for certain is that one of Wilson's sentences is a wonderful distillation of many problems that we face as humans. Wilson wrote:
All of man's troubles have arisen from the fact that we do not know what we are and do not agree on what we want to be.
What an awesome sentence that is! We do not know what we are and we do not agree on what we want to be.
Wilson extended his deep dive into how ants behave in order to understand how humans behave. He wrote:
Civilization appears to be the ultimate redeeming product of competition between groups. Because of it, we struggle on behalf of good and against evil, and reward generosity, compassion, and altruism while punishing or downplaying selfishness. But if group conflict created the best in us, it also created the deadliest. As humans, this is our greatest, and worst, genetic inheritance.
Group conflict. We immediately sense the importance of that phrase, especially after our experiences over the past six years.
He summed up the result of our greatest, and worst, genetic inheritance:
We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. We thrash about. We are terribly confused by the mere fact of our existence, and a danger to ourselves and to the rest of life.
People like E.O. Wilson wrote on scientific insights in a language that was simple enough for many of us like me to understand. In the contemporary world in which rational and logical thinkers are drowned out by flame-throwing ratings-grabbers, I worry that we will miss out on the younger and newer versions of the likes of Wilson. And that certainly is "a danger to ourselves and to the rest of life."
In the old tradition, it is the son who lights the cremation pyre after the death of a parent. The son could be the youngest and only male child among a bunch of children, it does not matter. Only the son has the right to engage in the final act.
Actually, it is not the final act, but the beginning of a series of acts to make sure that the departed reaches heaven. Not only the departed but also the two generations who preceded. While the souls are in a waiting room, they need to be fed, which is why the son then performs rituals every month on a new moon day and then a grander set of rituals to mark the anniversary.
What if one has only daughters and no son?
I told the aunt that it is not the old shastras that I care about. Instead, we need to remember those who went before us and made our lives possible, I added. I reminded her that we always recall the grandparents and the uncles and the aunts and share stories even if they are ones that we have heard a million times. To remember them is what all the rituals are about, I argued. It is not really about the ritual itself.
But, I know that such talk will not move the faithful from their firmly rooted beliefs. Yet, I am at an age that to not speak the truth as I understand it is simply not an option.
Traditions are powerful. They give meaning to many. Even when they are a world away from the old country.
Naipaul writes movingly and yet matter-of-factly about the ritualistic traditions after the death of his sister in Trinidad. The sister's son, who was born in a land far, far away from India, and a descendant of people who were brought over to the Caribbean islands by the British who wanted cheap labor after slavery was abolished, was the one with the rights and responsibility for the rituals after his mother's death.
Whether or not they understood the words and the actions that the pundit was choreographing, the son said swa-ha and fed the fire. He and the assembled knew that the tradition would help them make meaning of death and, therefore, life, and to deal with the grief of having lost a loved one.
Sons like me who have shed the old traditions have to find a place for ourselves; we can learn from the daughters who have figured out how to be a part of the tradition even when the tradition keeps them out.
2021 is coming to an end.
We do not even think twice when we refer to the year as 2021. It has become the standard across the world, even though cultures had their own ways of measuring years.
In my old tradition, people used the Kollam Panchangam, according to which this year 1197. In a different computation, it is 5,122 years into the Kali Yuga.
Yet, even in the old country, it is 2021. December 2021.
As a Jewish comedian joked, this standardization of the calendar is the ultimate victory for Christians. Even though most of the world is not Christian, we are marking time with reference to the birth of baby Jesus.
Until a few years ago, we even noted the years as BC and AD. AD being short for anno domini, or in the year of the lord. Hindus used AD as did Jews and Muslims and Buddhists and atheists and everybody! We have since moved on to a neutral language of "common era"--CE--though the reality is that the common era years neatly correspond to everything after the birth of Jesus.
Does it really matter?
It does not. After all, what we are measuring is the number of times earth goes around the sun. It has been far too many years of our home planet doing this iteration. Our minds cannot keep adding to the billions of years that have gone by. In order to keep track of a system that we can mentally understand and use, we need to arbitrarily create a starting point for the calendar. It does not matter if it is 2021 or 5,122.
What really matters to me is what we do with the time that we have.
Jesus' message on how to behave as humans matters.
As I understand religions, there is very little difference on their directives for goodness.
The Pope reminds the Roman Catholic organization about the fundamentals and zooms into humility. "It is not easy to understand what humility is," he says.
Deep down, most of us have an idea of what humility is. It is just that we do not want to practice it. To his flock, the Pope says:
Humility is the ability to know how to “inhabit” our humanity, this humanity beloved and blessed by the Lord, and to do so without despair but with realism, joy and hope. Humility means recognizing that we should not be ashamed of our frailty. Jesus teaches us to look upon our poverty with the same love and tenderness with which we look upon a little child, vulnerable and in need of everything. Lacking humility, we will look for things that can reassure us, and perhaps find them, but we will surely not find what saves us, what can heal us. Seeking those kinds of reassurance is the most perverse fruit of spiritual worldliness, for it reveals a lack of faith, hope and love; it leads to an inability to discern the truth of things.
That paragraph works well even if one removes any reference to Jesus or Lord.
Later he says:
For this reason, if the word of God reminds the whole world of the value of poverty, we, the members of the Curia, must be the first to commit ourselves to being converted to a style of sobriety. If the Gospel proclaims justice, we must be the first to try to live transparently, without favouritism or cliques. If the Church follows the path of synodality, we must be the first to be converted to a different style of work, of cooperation and communion. All this is possible only by following the path of humility. Without humility, we cannot do this.
Amen!
That papal message is no different from the kinds of religious ideas that I grew up with. Adi Shankara, who lived about 1,400 years ago and established maths in four corners of the Subcontinent interpreted the upanishads and authored numerous works, all of which are beyond the understanding of most of us mere mortals. He made things simple in a Q/A--Prasnottara Ratnamalika. It is not difficult to understand the direct messages like:
In Oregon, in the expansive valley under a big sky and with fields seemingly edged by mountains, we often see in late summer and early fall bales of hay. As if aliens plopped them overnight in neat little bundles that are either rectangular or round.
It was not difficult to understand why hay would be compressed into rectangular bundles. It would be easy to stack them up in a barn. On the other hand, round bales use up space inefficiently with space between.
The fact that there were farmers preferring round bales by itself means that there is an advantage that they were tapping into. What is it?
We have often pondered over this. We don't know if others care about it. The couple of people we asked, because we thought they knew something more about farming than we do--and I know nothing--shrugged it off as farmers' preferences.
But that answer never satisfied us.
If we observe and not merely look, we are flooded with questions like this. Observations lead to understanding the world.
I am glad that there are people who not only observe but also spend their lifetimes answering the questions that arise. Had astronomers not observed the sky, we would not have understood how much we are made of cosmic dust. Had natural scientists not observed life all around, we would have continued to assert that a divine being made us humans in his image, and that our existence is unrelated to monkeys and crocodiles.
Though it has become second nature to search the web for answers to questions, profound or trivial they may be, we did not engage in any Google-based research into rectangular versus round bales of hay. Perhaps because we love thinking about it while being fascinated with the sight of bales and bales of hay.
Naipaul's Enigma of Arrival is a rather unconventional novel in that it is more meditations on what he observes and less about the plot and characters. Observations that often compare the physical geography and people in the countryside outside of Salisbury and a few miles from the Stonehenge, with Trinidad where Naipaul was born.
And he observes a lot.
He observes rectangular and round bales of hay!
In a poetic manner that is also a beautiful description, Naipaul refers to the round ones as "the Swiss rolls" and he asks:
What was the point of the Swiss rolls? Was there an advantage over the traditional bales?
I did not expect this in the novel!
I never knew until years later, when this section of my life was closed. The bales, tightly banded by the baling machines, had to be broken into by hand and then spread out for the cattle. The big rolls had simply to be unrolled; a machine did the job in minutes.
There was a time in my life when I read for the sake of entertainment. To pass time that otherwise stood still. Those were the days before television and the internet when I read "popular" fiction that was almost always at least a decade old because in the small town where I lived it took a while for the outside world to reach.
I certainly was entertained. Whether they were about spies working on behalf of Her Majesty, or criminals of various types, or simply concocted outlandish tales, I was amused and entertained.
But, none of those books left me any wiser. They even contributed to the rot within.
It was towards the end of my teenage years that I turned to a different kind of fiction. Books that helped me understand the human condition. And me. And how I fit into the larger story of humanity. These books were not entertainment. Often they required me to pay attention and think. To think about what I read, to think about the world, and to think about myself.
In those early years of reading to understand, the authors were mostly Europeans and Americans. The world described by the Russians and the British and the Americans was one that I had to visualize in my mind. They were unlike anything that I was familiar with. In those tales, the air was not hot and humid, the soil was not dusty, monsoons did not dictate lives, the clothes were different and so were everything else.
But, what united me the reader, the characters, and the writer, was simply that we were all humans. Humans who eventually died. And before death happens, we laugh, we cry, we fight, we eat, we dream, we fail, we succeed, we love, we marry, we travel, we worry, we are human.
Yet, there was always an urge to find and read stories that were more relatable. Stories about brown people. By brown people. Brown people in their original lands. Brown people in alien lands. Brown people writing about brown people like me who left their original lands and are now somewhere else. A somewhere else that once upon a time existed only in our imaginations that were created by authors who were Europeans and Americans.
I recently picked up a work by a brown man. A brown whose people left their old homes. To a new place far away. And then he moved again. To a place of whites. To a place that was familiar because of the whites who came to the land of brown peoples.
It has been only a few pages. But, I can see, again, why I was drawn to his work. He helps me understand myself, with lines like this:
That idea of ruin and dereliction, of out-of-placeness, was something I felt about myself: a man from another hemisphere, another background, coming to rest in middle life in the cottage of a half-neglected estate […] with few connections to the present […] I felt that my presence in that old valley was part of something like an upheaval, a change in the course of the history of the country.
None of the white authors that I read spoke so personally to me.
The citation for the Nobel Prize for Literature to him included this:
Prize motivation: "for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories."
I am confident that I will understand more about myself and the human condition through V.S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival.
In the township where I grew up, a fertilizer factory was a part of the project in which mining lignite and generating electricity from it was the star. This fertilizer factory was the first in the southern part of India to manufacture urea.
Despite the fact that urea was in great demand, the plant managed to run into losses, the economics of it was perhaps beyond the imaginations of paper-pushing bureaucrats!
A reminder that urea is a concentrated nitrogen fertilizer. For a rapidly growing population, there is only so much nitrogen that soil can naturally offer, which is why we have relied a great deal on urea.
How important is this synthetic fertilizer?
As I blogged here a few years ago, "Half of us wouldn’t be alive today if not for synthetic nitrogen. ... Another mind-blowing way to think about it: On average, half of the nitrogen in your body was synthetically fixed."
Of course, practically everything that we do is a Faustian Bargain. We pay a big price for our reliance on urea.
What would happen if we suddenly stopped relying on this synthesized nitrogen?
We are experiencing it now, not because the world decided to get away from urea but because prices have rocketed up thanks to a "a freakish confluence" of factors. The high prices and shortages have choked quite a few economic activities, including farming.
But, isn't avoiding fertilizers and going organic a positive development?
Conceptually, yes. But in a world of 8 billion people, it is doubtful that we can feed everybody without synthesized nitrogen in particular. And this is what Sri Lanka is finding out the hard way after the government's campaign toward organic farming:
[Farmers] and agriculture experts blame the policy for a sharp drop in crop yields and spiraling prices that are worsening the country’s growing economic woes and leading to fears of food shortages.
Prices for some foodstuffs, like rice, have risen by nearly one-third compared with a year ago, according to Sri Lanka’s central bank. The prices of vegetables like tomatoes and carrots have risen to five times their year-ago levels.
Why did prices rise so much?
[Three-quarters] of Sri Lanka’s farmers relied heavily on chemical fertilizers, while just about 10 percent cultivated without them. Almost all major crops grown in the country depend on the chemicals. For crops crucial to the economy like rice, rubber and tea, the dependence reaches 90 percent or more.
One does not need to be an agronomist to understand why a sudden withdrawal from synthetic fertilizers would result in such shortages and price hikes.
Now Sri Lanka’s government, run by members of the Rajapaksa family, is rushing to avert a crisis. Late last month, Sri Lanka’s plantation minister, Ramesh Pathirana, confirmed a partial reversal of the policy, telling the country’s Parliament that the government would be importing fertilizer necessary for tea, rubber and coconut, which make up the nation’s major agricultural exports.
And in the old country that has been hit by shortages and inflation? I assume that there are many more tragic stories like this one:
Danpal Yadav, 44, a rice grower in the central state of Madhya Pradesh, was already reeling under debt because of low crop yields last season. After coming home empty-handed from visits to government fertilizer distribution centers, he grew anguished and talked about suicide, his family said.
Time was running out for Mr. Yadav to nourish his fields. On Oct. 28, after sleeping outside a fertilizer center for three days and getting nothing, he returned home and bolted the door.
His brother Vivek later found him unconscious. He had consumed poison. Doctors declared him dead at a hospital.
“He was desperately trying to find fertilizer,” Vivek Yadav said. “This is the story of every farmer during this season.”
The winter weather cometh.
Cold.
Dark.
Damp.
Makes for a miserable combination.
One can escape to warmer and sunnier places. But, there's one catch: Covid hasn't gone away. You can run but cannot hide is more apt here than in many other contexts.
There is only one way out--through!
So, what can one do?
Psychologist Dacher Keltner, the founding director of the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California at Berkeley, has spent years studying the beneficial effects of awe on our physical, mental and emotional well-being. “It makes us curious rather than judgmental. It makes us collaborative. It makes us humble, sharing and altruistic. It quiets the ego so that you’re not thinking about yourself as much.” It also calms the brain’s default mode network and has been shown to reduce inflammation. In other words, he says, don’t underestimate the power of goose bumps.
You see something that you perhaps haven't noticed before, and you realize there's a lot more to it than you previously had thought. It's almost like you're peering into a world that you hadn't seen before. Something is opening up to you. ...You can be looking at something grand, like the view at the top of a hill, or something tiny, like a pink stripe on a flower. And you may think, wow, how on earth did that stripe get there?
In turn, several studies found that experiencing awe can make us kinder, more generous people. For example, participants who briefly stared at tall, beautiful trees — as opposed to staring at a building — were more likely to help a stranger who dropped their belongings. As Anderson says: “My hope is that awe can be an emotion that we leverage for the greater good of our communities, of our country and of people around the world.”
During the years that I lived in the armpit of California (ahem!) if I didn't have to worry about the bad air quality, there was another invisible danger that we had all been alerted about: Valley fever.
As the CDC notes:
People can get Valley fever by breathing in the microscopic fungal spores from the air, although most people who breathe in the spores don’t get sick. Usually, people who get sick with Valley fever will get better on their own within weeks to months, but some people will need antifungal medication. Certain groups of people are at higher risk for becoming severely ill. It’s difficult to prevent exposure to Coccidioides in areas where it’s common in the environment, but people who are at higher risk for severe Valley fever should try to avoid breathing in large amounts of dust if they’re in these areas.
Farming activity in the valley kicks up dusts, and so does construction activity. Of course, the probability was low, but it is not as if the probability of getting valley fever was zero either.
The world generally thinks of fungi as something good, especially after the release of the Netflix documentary on this topic. People are mostly not aware of the bad fungi.
My first (and the only one, I hope) experience with a fungus was back when I was just about getting into teenage. Discoloration on my skin in a couple of spots. The ones on the neck were visible too, adding to the self-consciousness of a terribly self-conscious introvert. Life was stressful. After a couple of months of home remedies, finally father took me to the doctor, who scraped a tiny bit of the skin for culture analysis even after telling me that it was a fungal infection.
Thankfully, modern medicine helped, and I had one less horror to be self-conscious about!
About a decade ago, when I returned to Oregon after a summer in the old country, I saw those creepy spots again on my skin. The doctor, also an immigrant from a hot and humid country, assured me it was nothing but the same fungus infection. The damn things lay in wait for suckers like me.
At least this fungal infection does not kill or maim, unlike the spores that cause valley fever.
But, there are others that can cause a lot of harm. Like Candida Auris.
Again, from the CDC:
Candida auris is an emerging fungus that presents a serious global health threat. CDC is concerned about C. auris for three main reasons:
Resistant to antifungal treatments!
Why is this fungal infection worrisome?
It causes serious infections. C. auris can cause bloodstream infections and even death, particularly in hospital and nursing home patients with serious medical problems. More than 1 in 3 patients with invasive C. auris infection (for example, an infection that affects the blood, heart, or brain) die.
And now add climate change to this. Why?
Scientists wonder if C. auris is an example of fungi adapting to the warming world and, thereby, gaining abilities to make themselves at home inside our bodies. Throughout history, "we’ve been protected from fungi because they haven’t adapted to live at the temperatures inside our bodies."
For a fungus to live or die, even a few degrees can make all the difference. As the world continues to warm, a growing number of places will approach internal human body temperature more of the time. Sooner or later, the fungi will learn to adapt. And if they do, they might find a whole new set of hosts in us. ...
Already, over 300 million people globally contract serious fungal infection each year and over 1.5 million of them die. People with certain kinds of infections can develop “fungal balls” inside their lungs.
It is all about survival. Fungi will do anything to survive, just like viruses and bacteria do. I hope that we, too, will do everything possible to fight all those tiny bastards that try to kill us!
If we wanted to produce as much as Keynes’s countrymen did in the 1930s, we wouldn’t need everyone to work even 15 hours per week. If you adjust for increases in labour productivity, it could be done in seven or eight hours, 10 in Japan (see graph below). These increases in productivity come from a century of automation and technological advances: allowing us to produce more stuff with less labour. In this sense, modern developed countries have way overshot Keynes prediction – we need to work only half the hours he predicted to match his lifestyle.
Globally, people enjoy a standard of living much higher than in 1930 (and nowhere is this more true than in the Western countries that Keynes wrote about). We would not be content with a good life by our grandparents’ standards.We humans are a strange species!
[We] should look at that very seriously, and think about the fact that if the only things that we say are valuable in our lives, through our actions, through the time allocated, are our jobs and our immediate families, we are not investing in our communities. We don’t value the people around us.
So at least for the time being, until labor legislation catches up to the current reality of work — which I think is a major and an important goal moving forward — companies, if they do say that they want to value work-life balance, or say that they want their workers to not burn out, to be sustainable, they have to maintain standards of what good work looks like; these guardrails.And so that looks like, “In our company, we do not correspond after 8 pm.” If you are a person who really does good work at night and that’s how you have arranged your flexible work schedule, great. But you do not send that email. You delay send, which is not a hard thing. You delay send that message, that email, whatever it is, until the morning, until standard working hours. And most importantly, if you violate that standard, that guardrail, it becomes something that is actually a problem, not a low-key way to garner praise.
Think along with me here.
Picture in your minds the lives that your grandparents lived, however short or long it was. Think about their material comforts. How much did they travel? How far and how often? How much of a rich variety of foods did they eat on a daily basis?
If you are like me, even without additional prompts, you will be ready to conclude that your life is immensely more comfortable and rich compared to how the grandparents lived.
Globally, people enjoy a standard of living that is far greater than a mere two generations ago.
How much more material well being do we want, if we are not content and happy with what we currently have? Is there a ceiling at all, or is our material want sky high with no limits?
More than 60 years ago, in 1958, the economist-thinker John Kenneth Galbraith raised the question that I have borrowed as the title for this post. Galbraith warned and worried that this appetite "is the ultimate source of the problem. If it continues its geometric course, will it not one day have to be restrained? Yet in the literature of the resource problem this is the forbidden question."
Galbraith was not arguing against consumption. But, he was farsighted to argue that we needed a change in our consumption patterns, "from those which have a high material requirement to those which have a much lower requirement. Education, health services, sanitary services, good parks and playgrounds, orchestras, effective local government, a clean countryside, all have rather small materials requirements."
What is common to education, heath services, sanitary services, parks, orchestras?
Labor. Humans doing the work.
Now, think about the contemporary world. Orchestras are endangered species because people do not want to pay for labor, and would rather stream music that can be reproduced at next-to-nothing costs. Teachers and healthcare workers and being paid far less than those who want us to consume materials in various forms. Societies seem to operate as if parks and clean air and water do not matter at all.
Instead of measuring what we truly value, we have settled on valuing something that can be relatively easily measured--the Gross Domestic Product (GDP.) Nearly 70% of the GDP comes from consumption. In such a context, "what's good for the environment can be not so good for the economy and vice versa. How do you struggle to reconcile that? What is the answer?"
What can we do about the appetite when we are awash with so much abundance that it is like most of us live in a Midas world.
It is true that the planet needs us to stop shopping. The economy needs us to keep shopping. But ultimately, it's the planet that has the priority here. We cannot continue to expand the amount of consumption that each individual person on the planet does in perpetuity. So the answers have to be found, I think, in what kind of changes can we make to the economic system?
We will not be able to answer that question as long as one major political party denies that this is even a problem. But, giving up is not an option either. We have no choice but to keep thinking about the changes that we--individually and collectively--can make to the economic system.
The morning began with the public radio streaming live the arguments at the Supreme Court. This was the day that anti-abortion forces have been waiting for a long time, to make abortion illegal across the country. Or as close as possible to that stage.
During her questioning, the junior-most justice made an irresponsible, cavalier, comparison of pregnancy and vaccines when it comes to bodily autonomy:
When Roe was decided, viability was around 28 weeks. These days, depending on the hospital, fetuses can survive outside the womb after around 23 weeks.
“Viability has come in for criticism from some bioethicists, both pro-choice and pro-life, essentially on the theory that it doesn’t track our moral intuitions of when life takes on value to focus exclusively on dependency, especially if dependency tracks technological development or even technological availability,”
This decision, like all decisions, will be political. Some seem less political than others. But this case will be truly and completely political. It has been beginning with how Republicans blocked President Obama's nominee from getting a hearing, to Republicans rushing to swear in a vehemently anti-abortion justice only days before the 2020 election.
It is no wonder that Justice Sotomayor said this during her questioning time:
I just can’t move off of Justice Sotomayor’s question: “how will this Court survive the stench?…” It was a shocking moment. An unadorned recognition of the legitimacy issues that are clearly preoccupying a number of the justices.
— Sherrilyn Ifill (@Sifill_LDF) December 1, 2021
Tracing the roots of one's family interests many here in my adopted land. The technology of the day provides valuable support in this effort--from software that helps organize and visualize family trees, to DNA databases, which makes connections that otherwise might not have been possible.
I do not have any questions about my family roots; we tell each other enough and more stories that easily go back three or four generations. Perhaps the interest to go back only three generations comes from an internalized Vedic idea of three generations past being up somewhere in a waiting area before the oldest generation is promoted to heaven after the death.
I was, and am, far more interested in the grand narrative of how we ended up where were are from the origins in Africa. And that is why a decade ago, I submitted my DNA to the National Geographic's Genographic Project.
This was a project with grand ambitions. It was "a multiyear, global initiative by National Geographic that used genetics as a tool to address anthropological questions on a global scale." The data volunteered by people like me "helped to map world migratory patterns dating back some 150,000 years and to fill in the gaps in our knowledge of humankind’s migratory history."
I was curious how my male chromosome ended up in Pattamadai.
The report said that my ancestors "arrived in India around 30,000 years ago and represent the earliest significant settlement of India. For this reason, haplogroup L (M61) is known as the Indian Clan."
Despite going back 30,000 years, this DNA was only a part of the second wave that reached the Subcontinent.
Although more than 50 percent of southern Indians carry marker M20 and are members of haplogroup L (M61), your ancestors were not the first people to reach India; descendants of an early wave of migration out of Africa that took place some 50,000 to 60,000 years ago had already settled in small groups along the southern coastline of the sub-continent.
Of course, there are plenty of other questions that haunt my imaginations. Did my ancestral male chromosome stay in the Indus Valley area for centuries? When exactly did this chromosome begin to migrate towards the peninsular south? How did my people interact with the descendants of the original settlers?
One researcher threads a needle in this piece of multi-generational cloth by focusing on the Dravidian word for tooth--like the word pallu (பல்) in Tamil--and argues that "a significant population of Indus valley civilization must have used that Proto-Dravidian tooth-word in their daily communication."
How do the Indus Civilization and the Tamil language that I grew up with fit within the 30,000 year story of my male chromosome?
There is no family tree database that can help me in this! At least, not yet.
The average life expectancy at birth in India was about 25 years around the time my paternal grandfather was born. By my calculations, he was born around the year 1905.
He just about lived up to that average when he suddenly died in 1930. A shave at the barbershop led to a nasty nick of a skin tag that soon got infected in those bad old days before antibiotics.
Slowly and steadily, the average has increased in the old country, to nearly 70 years.
Here in my adopted country, a child born today has a significant chance of living to become a centenarian.
Back when people worried about death being round the corner, it made logical sense to marry young, and have children soon after. By the time my grandfather died, he had two sons. Longevity has given humanity a lot more time, thankfully, before they decide whether they want to have children.
Having kids is one of the many experiences in life that humans go through. So, how should the various experiences be staged in a life that is no longer rushed by the grim reaper?
I have often remarked in classes and in advising sessions that students need to plan for a long game. A very long game. "You will be working for at least 45 years after you graduate" is something that I have told students for a long time.
I am not sure if any student gives a damn about it. I suppose at 18, I would not have imagined 45 long years, when the prospect of 4 years of undergrad itself was huge. Think about the proportions: 4 out of 18, and then 45 compared to 18.
As difficult as it might be to imagine these time horizons, we will be better off if we tried to. If we did think about 45 years of working, and living into the 8th and 9th decade of one's life, then we might begin to appreciate the complex aspects of life.
We are already living nearly immortal lives compared to the average human a mere 200 years ago, when globally the life expectancy at birth was a mere 35 years. When conditions have changed this rapidly, it also means that the magnitude of change has yet to sink into our collective consciousness.
But, we need to spend time and energy trying to figure out how to correspondingly restructure life for a potential centenarian. When should formal schooling end? At what age we should expect them to start working? How long should they work? How should we rethink the social programs for the elderly?
Aren't you shocked that these are not the kinds of questions that politicians talk about?
It is one thing when a 19-year old in my class does not care about what I say. It is another when political leaders who make collective decisions for all of us do not seem to engage on such issues.
We need a "new map of life."
[Professor Laura] Carstensen and her colleagues at the Center on Longevity are proposing a potential route out of this mess. This month, the center published a report titled “The New Map of Life” — a blueprint for what education, careers, cities and life transitions could look like if they were designed for lives that span a century (or more).
One of the report’s central theses is that modern life has a pacing problem. Middle age is uncomfortably crammed with career and caregiving responsibilities, while many older people find themselves with neither enough purpose, connection or income to live comfortably.
I agree. But, I am not the one who needs to be convinced.
The tricky part is convincing lawmakers, employers, educational institutions and the public to consider alternatives to some of our culture’s most deeply ingrained patterns.
To refer to the task as "the tricky part" is one hell of an understatement.
But, hey, I have done my part over the years. I will now watch the proceedings from the sidelines.
I hadn't yet completed my first year of living in the US as a poor graduate student when I watched West Side Story.
Nope, it was not on stage. Not live theatre.
I watched it on a small television set that my dental school roommate owned.
Yet, that miniscule screen size didn't take away the excitement of the musical in any way.
I am reminded of all that because of the news that one of the people involved in creating that phenomenal musical, Stephen Sondheim, died.
When I watched West Side Story, it is not as if I had been listening to Broadway musicals in India. Not at all. West Side Story was my first ever, and what a way to fall in love with Broadway!
I had no idea about Bernstein and Sondheim until that very day. I sat there completely transfixed by the visual and aural experience.
The more I think about it, I am not sure if I fell in love with Broadway musicals or with America itself. Or both perhaps.
Naturally, the piece that really, really, grabbed my attention was "America."
When I discussed migration and immigration in my classes, I often played "America" for my students too. I always hoped that they, too, fell in love with the musical and America--as if they had not been born here but were experiencing it all for the first time.
Thank you, Stephen Sondheim.
I wasn't surprised one bit with the news report about the continuing decline in the fertility rate here in the US.
I strongly disagree with the second part of the title of the opinion essay: "there are no easy solutions to fix it."
Yes, there are easy solutions.
The easiest of them all? Encourage immigration.
But, immigration is not mentioned in that essay, which is all focused on childcare expenses and Build Back Better.
Almost four years ago, on December 7, 2017, the newspaper where I was a regular columnist for years, published one of my last columns. In that essay, I wrote about the decreasing fertility rate and how immigration can quickly and easily address that issue.
Because there is no longer a hyperlink to that column, I have copied/pasted below the version that I emailed to the editor.
*********************
I have often remarked to people, and blogged here, that had I been a young man in the 1950s and 1960s here in America, chances are high that I would have signed up with Malcolm X and not with Martin Luther King, Jr.
MLK's movement would not have given the outlet for the anger within, but Malcolm X would have.
After all, even now, well into middle age, I am one angry man. It is a surprise that I am not dead already from such a pent-up anger.
On this Thanksgiving Day, should one celebrate or mourn the first Thanksgiving that happened 400 years ago?
For the Wampanoags and many other American Indians, the fourth Thursday in November is considered a day of mourning, not a day of celebration.
Because while the Wampanoags did help the Pilgrims survive, their support was followed by years of a slow, unfolding genocide of their people and the taking of their land.
In 1619, a ship called the White Lion brought the first enslaved people from the African continent. Two years later, in 1621, and about 700 miles away, another group of white settlers observed the first Thanksgiving.
The decades that followed were some of the darkest and cruelest in human history.
Malcolm X phrased it so well: “Our forefathers weren’t the Pilgrims. We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock. The rock was landed on us. We were brought here against our will. We were not brought here to be made citizens.”
How should we deal with the dark history of a country that is supposedly a beacon for freedom and democracy?
The eminent documentary filmmaker, Ken Burns, says: "The dark chapters of American history have just as much to teach us, if not more, than the glorious ones, and often the two are intertwined."
Today, too, is a good day to learn from those dark chapters.
Hari Kondabolu had a serious and comedic take on what Kamala Harris' elevation as the Vice Presidential candidate--back in August 2020--might mean for the Indian community. He raised a troubling issue:
I wonder if Kamala Harris as VP will have any impact on the “No Blacks” marriage rule Indian immigrants set for their children.
— Hari Kondabolu (@harikondabolu) August 11, 2020
He added a clarifying tweet, in case he was misunderstood:
To clarify this tweet: This is a cynical comment on the anti-Black racism in the Indian community. This is not supporting such actions, but condemning them. It is not the most pleasant thing to talk about, but it’s about time our community did.
— Hari Kondabolu (@harikondabolu) August 13, 2020
The problem of colorism in India is pretty much common knowledge at this point; after all, it is a land of "Fair & Lovely." Recall the vagina whiteners?
I grew up in that culture where the skin complexion was categorized in so many ways, like:
Coal black
Dark
Dark brown
Brown
Light brown
Wheatish
Fair
Very fair
And, yes, even white!
It is also a land in which we were all acutely aware of our castes and the castes of others.
When Indians immigrate to America, do they bring with them the baggage of colorism and caste?
Isabel Wilkerson made a compelling and insightful argument that immigrants often want to align themselves with the dominant caste here--Whites. Overlay colorism on the highly race-sensitive society and, well, that's why Kondabolu tweeted that maybe Kamala Harris might be the ticket to the diaspora ditching the "No Blacks" marriage rule for their children. Blindians don't have to be a rare species, right?
While Rusell Peters joked about the world becoming beige as a result of people mixing across the races, what if the non-white immigrants bring with them the anti-blackness baggage?
Charles Blow writes about this very issue that "when people migrate to this country from those societies, they can bring those biases with them, underscoring that you don’t have to be white to contribute to anti-blackness."
How depressing that the browning of America does not automatically mean an elimination of anti-blackness. As Blow concluded, "Colorism and racism are cousins, and both are a pestilence."
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| Grandfather during his undergraduate years at Varanasi (Benares) in the early-1930s. Notice his socks/stockings? ;) |
It was quite a transformation for me to come from a provincial life to be suddenly thrown into a global mix! Countries that I had only read about now came to life through those fellow students. In a matter of months after graduate school began, I had become what the Republicans now condescendingly, insultingly, and dangerously refer to as a "globalist." And there was no going back.
So much have I been bitten by this bug that I long for interactions with people from other parts of the world. And the list of countries that I want to travel to is long. I am proud to be a globalist.
Among the international students in graduate school across various disciplines, I had a whole bunch of classmates from South Korea. Some of the Korean classmates became good friends. Friendly enough to borrow and loan money, and share meals with. One of them took me to a Korean BBQ restaurant, which was quite an experience. Another guy took me to the Chart House in Malibu.
All of them are now doing really well as academics and policy wonks, and remain well networked. They are the Korean Mafia.
Only one among them had a Christian first name--Keith. I am not sure whether he was a Christian, as quite a few Koreans are, or if he assumed that to make his interactions easier in the US. I never did ask him that question.
After his PhD, Keith went on to work on a number of innovative urban planning solutions, including tearing down a multi-lane freeway in downtown Seoul in order to restore the river and create a green space.
Keith's wife was pursuing a graduate degree in music. Graduation recital was a part of the academic process, and Keith invited us to attend. I went there in my sloppy graduate student outfit and was shocked to see Keith in a full suit. His wife was in a flowing gown. And it was a piano recital!
Classical music appealing to people coming from different cultures has always fascinated me since growing up listening to, and reading about, Higgins Bhagavathar. Except for a tiny minority, an overwhelming majority of Carnatic music fans and musicians welcomed Jon Higgins as one of our own and even bestowed on him the honorific "Bhagavatar."
It was through Keith's wife's performance that I learnt about the spread of Western classical music in South Korea and China. Until then, I had never imagined tiny kids in Seoul or Shanghai learning to play the piano. Mao destroyed pianos, and what a cultural transformation it has been after Deng Xiaoping opened up China to the world!
Last night, Joyce Yang was the featured guest musician at the local symphony concert. Her finger movements over the keys, the way her entire body swayed to the music, and the magical sounds that she produced were a delight even to this uninformed listener.
I was not surprised by this part of her biography: "Born in 1986 in Seoul, South Korea, Yang received her first piano lesson from her aunt at the age of four." That was about the same time that Keith's wife was playing the piano as part of her graduation recital!
Two East Asian-looking women were seated a couple of rows in front of us. They did not return after the intermission--Yang was the featured artist only in the first half. I wonder if they went to talk with Yang about music and Korea and more.
I would not have had any of these experiences if I hadn't left the old country in 1987!
Many years ago, but what feels like centuries ago, the agency where I worked had two secretaries. Their job responsibilities differed with one taking on more substantive tasks than the other.
At some point, the professional world retitled them as "administrative assistants" and the old title was discarded. "Secretaries Day" now became even more a mouthful to say as "Administrative Professionals Day."
Once I got my footing in the workplace and town, which took me a couple of years, I figured that I would treat the secretaries, er, administrative assistants, to lunch sometime during that week. And that is what I did.
My only favorite restaurant in town was only a couple of blocks away, and we walked. I'm sure I would have ordered one of the only two dishes I always ate there: Penne puttanesca, or the chicken picatta.
Anyway, back to the secretaries. I walked by the side of the road, and the two secretaries--women--walked on the sidewalk. That's when the younger (relatively speaking) secretary commented that I was being a perfect gentleman by being in between them and the traffic.
These were women who were highly capable, but were working as secretaries as a result of the social mores in which they (we) were born and raised. So, it never surprised me when they made insightful comments like any thinking person would.
The one who complimented me on being a gentleman continued about the origins of such a practice. It was to shield the women from horse manure and farts from back in the day when horses were the mode of transportation in cities.
Whether or not that was entirely true I didn't care. But, I had never before thought about the possibility that the way we walk on the sidewalk could have been influenced by the city transport of the past.
Before cars and buses and trucks, cities depended on horses for transporting goods and people. Well, in the old country it was not horses but bullocks.
Big cities were, therefore, full of horseshit everywhere.
For a recent telling, you can turn to SuperFreakonomics, the best-selling 2009 book by economist Steven D. Levitt and journalist Stephen J. Dubner. The authors describe how, in the late 19th century, the streets of fast-industrializing cities were congested with horses, each pulling a cart or a coach, one after the other, in some places three abreast. There were something like 200,000 horses in New York City alone, depositing manure at a rate of roughly 35 pounds per day, per horse. It piled high in vacant lots and “lined city streets like banks of snow.” The elegant brownstone stoops so beloved of contemporary city-dwellers allowed homeowners to “rise above a sea of manure.” In Rochester, N. Y., health officials calculated that the city’s annual horse waste would, if collected on a single acre, make a 175-foot-tall tower.
Gradually, and then rapidly, horses gave way to streetcars and then to cars and trucks and buses. We don't care about the real horseshit anymore, but only about the metaphorical ones that come blowing out from the mouths of politicians, especially of the Republican variety.
Now, a significant percentage of administrative assistants have been replaced by the likes of Microsoft Word, Google calendar, and Siri. And Siri does not care about Administrative Professionals Day either, nor does Siri care about horseshit.
Heck, rarely do people go to the office and to restaurants in a world that has been upended by a damn epidemic!
