"This Friday is the one year anniversary according to the Tamil calendar," appa said during a call nearly two weeks ago.
He paused.
Appa never paused between sentences until recently. Through all these years, it has been with great difficulty that the rest of us managed to get a few words in when he talked. He loved being in total control of the conversation. But, he pauses now. He has an excuse; he is 91 years old.
When my father spoke through the phone into the ear of my aunt who was unresponsive, he told her to report to grandmother that we are all doing well. He told the aunt not to worry about the people that she is leaving behind.
Where did the aunt go? Did she reunite with her favorite sister?
My intellectual and atheistic brain has a simple and definitive answer to those questions. But, the mind can't help wonder if the sisters are together again somewhere.
"Incredible that it has been a year already," I wrote to the aunt's son.
The pandemic has distorted my feel for time. On one hand, everything seems to be in slow motion and life seems to be a dull and boring drag. On the other hand, it feels like the year has flown by at a dizzying speed that it is difficult to recall the events over the months. However contradictory as they sound, the reports from both the hands are true.
"We think of her every day," he wrote in the reply.
It is the anniversary of the assassination of Mohandas Gandhi. He was shot dead on January 30th in 1948.
I am re-posting here a modified version of one my op-ed columns
****************************************
Gandhi, who was born in 1869, led the
independence movement that, in 1947, resulted in the creation of two new
countries of India and Pakistan and, with that, the end of the British
Raj. The struggle for freedom, in which Gandhi passionately urged his
followers to observe non-violence even against the colonizer’s brutal
force, inspired many others, including Martin Luther King Jr.
Life is full of tragic ironies — Gandhi and
King, the champions of peace and nonviolence, fell to bullets aimed at
them. Unlike Gandhi, who was assassinated in 1948, King had not lived
long enough to live in the promised land of freedom.
Albert Einstein summed it up best for all
of us when he wrote about Gandhi that “generations to come, it may well
be, will scarce believe that such a man as this one ever in flesh and
blood walked upon this Earth.”
In the contemporary United States, any talk
in the public space about peace and nonviolence is rare. Politicians of
all stripes want to prove how much tougher they are than the other, out
of a fear of being labeled a wimp. The worst ones are those who successfully dodged the Vietnam War draft but now want to establish their manliness! This has been especially the case
since the fateful events on Sept. 11, 2001. At the national level, the
“tough” ones smell blood when an opponent does not talk of war. At this
rate, even those running for the office of dogcatcher will have to prove
their toughness.
Of course, violence is more than merely
engaging in war. The political rhetoric over the past four years was anything but peaceful and nonviolent. A new day began with
attacks on yet another person or group of people, based on whatever
cultural trait is deemed to be the “wrong” one for the moment. Even I,
as insignificant as one can be in the political landscape, have been a
target for those who are seemingly at ease with offensive words and
rhetoric. The four years ended with a violent insurrection!
While words, unlike sticks and stones, do
not break bones, the violence conveyed through words causes plenty of
harm. In the noise and confusion of the violent rhetoric that surrounds
us in the real and cyber worlds, we seem to have lost a fundamental
understanding of what it means to be human.
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.” Unfortunately, the rhetoric and practice--even among those who claim to be followers of Vishnu--is
far from that interpretation of humanity.
When it comes to terrible humanitarian
crises, it is depressing and
shocking to see how quickly we closed ourselves off from the “pain of
others” and how easily we refuse to “help those who are in misery.” We
have refused to budge even when the screens all around us flashed the
images of dead toddlers. Or, the images of mothers and children running after being tear-gassed at the border for seeking asylum.
The former president's adviser on immigration, whose life was possible only because the US offered asylum to Jews fleeing pogroms in Europe, boasted, “I would be happy if not a single refugee foot ever again touched America’s soil.”
The moral arc of the universe might bend towards justice, but the radius of the arc seems to be getting longer. Let's do whatever we can in order to shorten the arc.
"All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
Well, maybe "all" is an exaggeration. But, most people do seem to be unable to sit quietly in a room with other people or by themselves.
Covid is testing our abilities to sit quietly in a room alone. Like the recent case of a woman who was placed in a 14-day mandatory hotel
quarantine upon returning from abroad. The woman couldn't stand her loneliness, I suppose; the hotel security caught her and a man working in the hotel in an inappropriate
encounter. He was fired.
That quote about man's inability to sit quietly is from 1654. All I am saying is that this is not a new problem.
There is a difference between loneliness and solitude. A huge difference.
One can be in the middle of the noisiest and tightest crowds like in the congested Ranganathan Street and yet feel lonely. Loneliness is a state of mind where the person is craving for company because the person does not like being alone. Perhaps even hates being alone.
Solitude is different.
Solitude is not boredom either. Boredom begins when people do not know what to with their "free" time.
Solitude is intentional. It is activity even when being inactive, or inactive even when being active. It is that wonderful combination of actively doing nothing while being all by oneself.
We do not often seek loneliness, but there are times that we seek solitude.
You end up isolated if you don't cultivate the capacity for solitude, the ability to be separate, to gather yourself. Solitude is where you find yourself so that you can reach out to other people and form real attachments. When we don't have the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people in order to feel less anxious or in order to feel alive. When this happens, we're not able to appreciate who they are. It's as though we're using them as spare parts to support our fragile sense of self. We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us feel less alone. But we're at risk, because actually it's the opposite that's true. If we're not able to be alone, we're going to be more lonely.
"If we're not able to be alone, we're going to be more lonely."
The health implications of loneliness have become clearer over time.
According to the research of Julianne Holt-Lunstad, professor of
psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University, and colleagues,
the heightened risk of mortality from loneliness equals that of smoking
15 cigarettes a day or being an alcoholic, and exceeds the health risks
associated with obesity. Researchers are now actively studying the
mechanisms by which loneliness affects health, including its
relationship with inflammation and harmful changes in DNA expression.
Now, add the effect of COVID-19--the social distancing and shelter-in-place and more.
“A major adverse consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to be
increased social isolation and loneliness,” argued several professors in
The Lancet Psychiatry in April. “Tracking loneliness and intervening early are important priorities.”
We have to wait for the world to be vaccinated for us to end this new wave of loneliness. It will be quite a wait though :(
On January 21, 2020, there was confirmation of Patient One. Six weeks after that, schools and offices closed, and working from home became the norm.
We knew that eventually vaccines will be needed to deliver us from the pandemic. We knew that right when schools and offices closed. Many of us assumed that the machinery of the government would create various task-forces in order to deal with the multiple aspects of vaccine delivery.
While that assumption is logical, it did not work out that way. It has been a colossal failure.
They didn't even bother to layout a clear plan for priority among the population. Who gets the vaccine first? Who are the people who can be sent to the back of the line for vaccination? Even worse has been the messaging about it.
The World Health Organization (WHO) developed a blueprint, which notes: "Setting priorities and rationing resources in this context means making tragic choices, but these tragic choices can be ethically justified. This is why we have ethics."
That is why we have ethics. What a concept!
A commentary, in The American Journal of Medicine, on the ethical dimension of allocating vaccines during a pandemic, reminds us that "the benefits of vaccines are communal in the sense that vaccinating 1 individual confers benefits on other members of the community as well. What is to be fairly allocated, then,is not the vaccines per se but, rather, the benefits thereof."
If it is about the benefits of vaccination, then who gets priority? What are the ethics in this?
Allocating vaccines to those most responsible for the trans-mission of COVID-19 may confer more benefit to the population at large. Allocation guidelines must balance the obligation to assist individuals most likely to benefit against the obligation to secure the greatest aggregate benefit across the population.
The greatest benefit across the population. So, who gets priority?
Think about a person like my 91-year old father, who hasn't stepped out over the year, versus a 31-year old high school teacher. Vaccinating which of these two will "secure the greatest aggregate benefit across the population"? The elderly, in this logic, will have to step away from the line for now, right?
WHO notes in that blueprint that the population "falling into each category may change over time." This is also something that leaders should have communicated to people, right? They did not.
Maybe it's a time to think about character and personal values and
emphasize the importance now more than ever of the virtues of patience,
of empathy, of recognizing that not everybody can protect themselves the
way perhaps I might be positioned or you might be positioned to protect
themselves from infection and disease, and of solidarity. It maybe is a
little bit too trite to say that we're all in this together. Some of us
are suffering far more than others of us, but we are all really
suffering. And so if we can remember - right? - to be patient, to be
empathetic and to be committed to making this world better than it was
before, I think we can get through this.
One day, in my life in California, when I was working as a transportation planner, the secretary buzzed and said that I had a call.
In an unmistakable Indian accent, he introduced himself as Kris, and that he was a professor at the local university. He called to appreciate my commentary in the newspaper.
In that short phone call, he invited us over for dinner.
It turned out that Kris was an an Americanized name. He was Venkatakrishna. He and his wife, Kirsten, were much older than me, almost as old as my parents.
Kris was delighted that a younger Indian immigrant was writing commentaries in the paper. He wanted me to join him at the university as a colleague, and even introduced me to a couple of people to explore if I could at least teach as an adjunct. Nothing worked out. He was more disappointed than I was. If memory serves me well, Kris unexpectedly died before my return to academe.
Kris was a strict vegetarian, but not a cook. Kirsten was a good cook. She made idlis for him and froze them in packets. All Kris had to do whenever he wanted to eat idlis was take a packet from the freezer and microwave the idlis.
Kirsten made plenty of other Indian dishes too. Including sambhar for the idlis! And chicken tikka masala for her sons. And a whole bunch of Danish delicacies.
Yes, Danish.
The two of them met in Denmark where he had been as a graduate student, and the couple made America their home.
I was reminded of Kris and Kirsten when I read this memoir essay about an Indian father and a Puerto Rican/Italian-American mother.
In 1979, when Loretta and Roop were dating, he’d take her to restaurants in Jackson Heights, in Queens, where many working-class immigrants lived upon arriving in the US. The aromas, colors, tastes and textures that flowed out of storefronts from merchants selling Indian goods intoxicated my mother, and piqued her interest in Indian culture.
Imagine that! Forty years ago, a young man from India going out with a young Puerto Rican woman. Perhaps a rare thing even now?
The author continues with anecdotes. I love this one after the young bride "failed" in her attempt to make a chicken curry with coconut milk:
It was an embarrassing moment for my insecure mother, as the unforgiving wives and girlfriends she had cooked for reveled in her failure. “So, how does it feel to be marrying a foreigner?” one of them said to Roop. “No, we are the foreigners,” he said, referring to himself and the entire dinner party of Indian immigrants, and defending my mother.
That is something!
I hope that President Biden will make more such immigrant stories possible. After all, these stories are possible only in America.
A rocket powered by kerosene and liquid oxygen and carrying a scientific observatory blasted off into space at 10:49 p.m., March 6, 2009 (by local calendars and clocks). The launch came from the third planet out from a G-type star, 25,000 light-years from the center of a galaxy called the Milky Way, itself located on the outskirts of the Virgo Cluster of galaxies. On the night of the launch, the sky was clear, with no precipitation or wind, and the temperature was 292 degrees by the absolute temperature scale. Local intelligent life forms cheered the launch. Shortly before the blastoff, the government agency responsible for spacecraft, named the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, wrote in the global network of computers: “We are looking at a gorgeous night to launch the Kepler observatory on the first-ever mission dedicated to finding planets like ours outside the solar system.”
Usually, a scientist doesn't write like that. But, Alan Lightman is no ordinary scientist. He is one of the few alive who is a master in science and literature. An established physicist, he has also authored six novels among other writings. Like in the essay that I refer to in this blog post from more than 5 years ago, Lightman weaves science and the humanities so well that even those of us who barely know any science or literature can easily follow along.
When people glibly tell kids that they can be whatever they want to be, I can't but help wonder if any kid can become an expert in both science and literature. Can any kid be whatever they want to be? Seriously?
But, I digress.
In that paragraph, which is how this essay begins, Lightman imagines that the "account might have been written by an intelligent life form located on exactly the kind of distant planet that Kepler would soon begin to search for."
Is there life outside our own planet? We do not have proof. But, the probability is high that we are not the only life forms, and not the only intelligent ones either. "With 100 billion stars just in our galaxy alone, and so many other galaxies out there, it is highly probable that there are many, many other solar systems with life" if something like 10% of stars have a habitable planet in orbit."
So, on one hand, it might seem like life in the universe is not rare. But, Lightman makes us think in another manner, which I find fascinating:
I have estimated that the fraction of all matter in the universe in living form is roughly one-billionth of one-billionth. Here’s a way to visualize such a tiny fraction. If the Gobi Desert represents all of the matter flung across the cosmos, living matter is a single grain of sand on that desert. How should we think about this extreme rarity of life?
How should we think about this extreme rarity?
[If] we can manage to get outside of our usual thinking, if we can rise to a truly mind-bending view of the cosmos, there’s another way to think of existence. In our extraordinarily entitled position of being not only living matter but conscious matter, we are the cosmic “observers.” We are uniquely aware of ourselves and the cosmos around us. We can watch and record. We are the only mechanism by which the universe can comment on itself. All the rest, all those other grains of sand on the desert, are dumb, lifeless matter.
I wish I could require students to read this essay and comment on it as a requirement for successfully completing liberal education. I wish!
In a couple of days I will most likely get the layoff letter.
At least I got paid well enough and I got to work in academe as I had wanted to ever since I decided on graduate school in the US. But, seriously, who would have imagined even a few years ago that tenured professorships can also suddenly crash and burn!
As much as I loved my job, how I earned my paycheck was not anywhere near the top of the list for what gives meaning to me. Neither do gods and religions provide me with any meaning. The people who matter to me, the places, the mountains and rivers, the dogs that were wonderful companions, and more in such a list come before my job as meaning to my life.
Of course, I wanted to make sure that my paycheck would come from an honorable occupation, and I am glad that worked out. But it was not an answer to my existence.
Perhaps it is uniquely American, but is increasingly catching on around the world: "we’re told to love work, and to find meaning in it, as if work were a family, or a religion, or a body of knowledge." But, why?
“Meaningful work” is an expression that had barely appeared in the
English language before the early nineteen-seventies, as McCallum
observes. “Once upon a time, it was assumed, to put it bluntly, that
work sucked,” Sarah Jaffe writes in “Work Won’t Love You Back: How
Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone” (Bold
Type). That started to change in the nineteen-seventies, both McCallum
and Jaffe argue, when, in their telling, managers began informing
workers that they should expect to discover life’s purpose in work.
"Meaningful work" barely appeared in the language before the early 1970s. What might have happened since then compared to the work conditions prior to the 1970s?
A major economic restructuring was unfolding. This was the time that the "steel belt" of the US was changing into a rust belt. The American big cars that couldn't deal with the hike in oil prices were facing stiff competition from the small fuel-efficient Japanese cars. And ...
The labor-of-love ethos grew in tandem with the
feminization of work. That is, from the middle of the twentieth century,
not only did women enter the paid workforce en masse, but the kind of
work Americans do more closely resembled traditional “women’s work” of
caring for and responding to the emotions of others. Manufacturing and
mining were down, customer service was up. In addition, the low wages
and minimal security of the (mostly white and female) temp labor force of the 1960s spread throughout the economy in subsequent decades. In the words of Bryce Covert, “We’re all women workers now, and we’re all suffering for it.”
Women entered the workforce in larger and larger numbers. Employers didn't want to pay them well. So, guess what? The spin machinery took over and convinced them that they do what they do despite the low wages because the labor-of-love is simply priceless. Imagine telling a bunch of men who are coal miners that they will get paid next to nothing because of the priceless labor-of-love!
In academe too this attitude is showing up big time. Well-paying professorships are increasingly rare in higher education. Part-time professors outnumber the permanent ones. We give them fancier titles than calling them part-timers; one of the worst euphemisms is "visiting assistant professor." Words are, after all, cheap. The take-home money is little.
So, if the labor-of-love workers from part-time professors to nursing assistants are not getting paid well at the same time as an explosive growth in the economy, well, who is getting the money?
You don't have to track all the way from the 1970s to answer that question. All you need to think about is what happened over the past year. Remember how much the essential workers were lauded? Even assisted-care facilities that hire nursing assistants at barely above minimum wages put up signs that "heroes work here." Yes? So, you think all those essential workers get paid a lot? Teachers struggling to do their work over video got huge salary raises? Nope. It is, after all, labor-of-love that needs no compensation.
Between roughly mid-March and Dec. 22, the United States gained 56 new
billionaires, according to the Institute for Policy Studies, bringing
the total to 659. The wealth held by that small cadre of Americans has
jumped by more than $1 trillion in the months since the pandemic began.
According to news reports, he is getting the hell out of town in the early hours of Wednesday morning, lacking the balls to face up to the reality that he lost and was impeached twice.
To think that tens of millions, including former commenters here, voted for this sociopath!!!
From tomorrow, this blog too will return to old times when the politics of the presidency was only of minor concern. Competent people will take over, and I can focus on my own problems.
For one final time, here's a re-post of what I wrote when the madman was inaugurated to the highest elected office in the country four centuries years ago.
I have set up this post to be published in advance of the noon hour in DC, when the horrible human being will be sworn in as the president of these United States.
I don't care about whatever the demagogue said or did prior to the launch of his campaign for the presidency. For one, that is a long and dirty record, and for another what matters to me more is the fact that he openly said a bunch of horrible things during the campaign stretch and yet the Republican voters gladly cast their ballots for him even while tightly holding on to their Bibles!
I don't forget nor forgive. Which is why I want to remind you about the following select hits from this hit man.
As he was getting ready to launch his campaign, he tweeted this in April 2015:
When Mexico (meaning the Mexican Government) sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you (pointing to the audience). They’re not sending you (pointing again). They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems to us. They’re bringing drugs.They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people!
Instead of an outright rejection of this horrible human being, Republicans elected him to the Oval Office!
He disparaged John McCain and his war service because McCain was captured by the North Vietnamese and was tortured. The horrible human being said he prefers war heroes who are not captured by the enemy.
Instead of an outright rejection of this horrible human being, Republicans, who love to talk up the military, elected him to the Oval Office!
Instead of an outright rejection of this horrible human being, Republicans elected him to the Oval Office!
He openly bragged about his disdain for the law and how loyal his minions are: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose voters.”
Instead of an outright rejection of this horrible human being, Republicans elected him to the Oval Office!
Many people are asking themselves and others how an insurrection could have happened. To which I feel like reminding them what Voltaire said quite a while ago: Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
If you can make them believe that the President is actually a Muslim who was born in Kenya and that he forged his birth certificate, well, you can certainly make them commit atrocities.
Of course, such a situation does not arise every day. Thankfully!
But, the absurdities come in all types.
Claims like how the Hindu god Ganesha is evidence of cosmetic surgery in ancient India. Or that Karna in Mahabharata was a result of advanced genetic science and technology. Or, absurdities like how wind turbines cause cancer, or about building a wall at the Mexico border as a solar wall so it creates energy and pays for itself. Or drinking bleach to cure Covid-19!
Those were absurdities, yes. But, the believers were ready to commit atrocities like lynching non-Hindus for eating beef, or even for expressing love across religions. Atrocities like caging mothers and separating their children from them; refugees turned away; pregnant mothers facing the possibility of prosecuted as criminal killers if they aborted their fetuses; white supremacists marching with flaming torches; ...
How did Voltaire know as truth that if you can make enough people believe in absurdities, you can make them commit atrocities too?
Of course, Voltaire did not make that observation in the context of "democratic" politics. It was against blind faith. He ranted about organized religion. Voltaire argued in favor of logic and reason.
One would argue that this is all the more the reason that we should teach logic and reason, and bring in Voltaire and Socrates and more in higher education.
As the doomsday clock ticks down to the appointed hour, as one can imagine, I have been thinking a lot more about education and the miserable state of affairs that contemporary higher education has become. One thing is for certain, however: I am certainly not thinking if only ...!
In my case, misery does not mean drowning in alcohol, though I wonder if that might help! Instead all I know is to drink coffee and then read essays that really smart people have authored.
As comforting as this exercise is, well, it is equally depressing that the issues that I worry about now were the same set of issues that were talked and written about even a few years ago, and the situation has only worsened.
For instance, in this essay from 20 years ago (!) Jackson Lears writes:
The contemporary academic crisis is not about job security any more than it is about how many classes are online or which departments get the most resources. It is about the attitudes we take to our most important audience, a non-academic audience. Professors are constantly berating themselves and being berated for withdrawing into the insular world of scholarship, for not connecting with the real world. The real world is right in front of us, in the classroom; it is composed of students, 99 percent of whom have no intention of entering the academy themselves. They are a non-academic audience; they require us, however implicitly and imperfectly, to become public intellectuals.
The attitude towards students and their learning is appalling, to put it mildly. Increasingly, colleges see students as nothing more than warm bodies who bring in monies, which they can use to build Taj Mahals and create more "student-services" administrative positions. Faculty, too, are only happy to be active participants in fashioning revenue-maximizing strategies. Thus, the higher education industry keeps charging ahead at full speed, consuming the monies students, taxpayers, and philanthropists keep throwing its way. Are we surprised then at all with the following sentences from Jackson Lears?
Prussian productivism melded with American vocationalism and anti-intellectualism–the love of the practical, the demand for cash value now. The result was the accentuation of a fundamental conflict in the university’s mission, between furthering the pursuit of truth and serving the needs of established power.
In that same issue of the Hedgehog Review, Russell Jacoby writes:
Driven by academic discontent and boredom, professors might want to reinvent themselves as public writers. ...
But, simultaneously recognizes the challenge when we have:
institutional imperatives that reward technical rather than public contributions. Will they be successful? It is not clear.
It is a lot clearer now; only technical contributions matter, even if they are less than third-rate. Public contributions, well, who cares!
Jacoby worried then about specialization, well before the introduction of gerontology as a major in a small time public university where I teach! Jacoby wrote:
it should be possible to raise the issue of insular specialization without pledging fealty to progress and industrial society. The incarceration of specialists and a return to bloodletting or phrenology is hardly the goal; nor is the point to foster anti-intellectual populism or half-educated generalists. Specialization inheres in industrial society. We need specialists. No one wants to hear a cheery announcement that today your airline pilot will be a family therapist. Nevertheless this truth does not justify every micro-field or subdiscipline or new jargon. Specialization can also be obscurantism, turf building, careerism, and regression, as well as a simple waste of talent and resources.
All that was from 20 years ago.
At the rate at which universities were changing for the worse, I figured that the worst might happen only after my retirement. Covid-19 and the resulting economic crisis have accelerated the decline by more than a decade. I suppose I will soon have to literally utter that cliched line about what students supposedly say after studying the liberal arts: Would you like fries with that?
More than ten years years ago, I blogged about being in the twilight of a mediocre career. No, that's not the reason that I am likely to be fired from my job; that's an entirely different matter.
Of course, I know that my life has not been mediocre. I have had an awesome life, and an awesome career, mostly thanks to dumb luck and the fact that I chose my parents well.
Life is not about excellence. I always tell students that it is alright if they don't earn the highest grades--in my classes or anywhere. There are no "A"s in real life, I often tell them. And even if we are excellent at some small aspect, we are incompetent with the infinity that is the rest is.
I tell them that life is about giving the fullest to anything that we do. Whether it is chores at home, or the classes that we take, or whatever. And even embrace our failures because, well, we cannot be good in everything.
I am sure that most students do not care for such a message. For one, all the other "elders" tell them a completely different thing, and I come across as a raving lunatic with a strange accent. For another, if somebody had told me such stuff when I was twenty years old, I would have immediately dismissed that. It is with age and experience that we gain such insights. Wisdom arrives way too late in life!
A history professor at Cornell writes in praise of mediocrity. "We should learn to give mediocrity the love it deserves. The first step is to rebrand it. I prefer to call it "adequacy."
I agree.
For me as a teacher, to honor adequacy is not to discount the
individual excellence of particular students, but to appreciate the
collective excellence that can occur even when some students are merely
adequate. When I started teaching, I judged the success of a course by
how many students wrote brilliant papers — which meant I was always
disappointed.
Now I judge it by the quality of the conversation
in the room: Did students listen and respond? Did the conversation build
on itself? Was there enough disagreement to keep the discussion
interesting yet enough common understanding of the subject and questions
at hand to keep it focused? In short, did we make interesting
intellectual music together?
And,
Let’s drop the exhortations to fail or suck at something and instead
cultivate the adequacy mind-set — the feeling of being proud and
grateful to be good enough to continue doing something from which we get
pleasure and knowledge.
Yes!
It does not mean that we should not strive for excellence. Life will be a lot more enjoyable if we celebrate our adequacy at most of what we do.
As you read this post, chances are good that you will think this: No wonder this guy is about to be fired from his job!
If you don't think that, well, then you are as much as "loser" as I am, and you need to be worried about your job too ;)
My first day at the university where I have been teaching for 19 years, I met others who were also joining that same year. One of them, about my age, was a physicist, with what seemed like an intense New York way of speaking. When talking with him, I found out that he was the physics department--there was no other physics faculty at the university. I was shocked, of course, especially when that was my first ever intellectual love.
At small universities like ours, physics is not one that we care to educate students about. For that matter, even at big time universities, physics does not attract students. As with many aspects of higher education, this too is something that disappoints and depresses me. Whatever happened to the old-fashioned notion of exploration of ideas in a liberal education setting?
We have moved far, far away from exploration. The excitement that we could be exploring the universe forever apparently is not easy to monetize within a few years; ergo, those are not worth studying! Despite the number of studies about the benefits and tangible returns over the long-term, people are obsessed with short-term ROI.
Should we wonder then that right from when they are kids, there is a push to teach them how to code! Yes, kids are being pushed to code!
WhiteHat Jr., which operates in India and
the United States, mounted an advertising blitzkrieg in India telling
parents that our children need to learn coding from the age of 4, 5 or 6
— or they will fall behind in life. Indian celebrities promoted the
brand and spread the fear of losing out among families.
How terrible!
Hrithik Roshan,
one of the most prominent Bollywood actors and the father of two boys,
endorsed the brand in a television campaign, where he was anxious about
the utility of the skills Indian children are learning today and saw hope and promise for their future in learning coding on WhiteHat Jr.
Although
numerous experts advise against teaching children to code, a skill that
will soon become redundant, the WhiteHat Jr. campaign taps into a
parent’s deepest fear: Will my child be left behind?
Fire me already for I am simply unfit for this new world :(
Such a contemporary approach to education and knowing, and the push for specialization in order to "grow the economy," cannot possibly help us in the long-run. Buckminster Fuller said it best:
Specialization has bred feelings of isolation, futility, and confusion
in individuals. It has also resulted in the individual’s leaving
responsibility for thinking and social action to others. Specialization
breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological
discord, which in turn leads to war.
Right from when we are kids, we need to understand how we relate to other humans, to other life forms, to rocks and rivers, and to outer space. But, we cannot expect all these to miraculously happen if we take away exploration from education. With a singular focus on various aspects of computing, we are only educating to create a society of automatons!
"But, it doesn't usually rain as we get close to Pongal, right?" I asked him.
"You are correct. But this is not the big time rain."
"So, when is Pongal?"
"On the 14th."
As a kid growing up in an industrial town, I had no idea what the Pongal celebrations were really about. But, I didn't care because I loved to eat sakkarapongal. Served warm, and with mother adding more ghee to my portion.
Father handed the phone to mother. I shared with her an incident from our childhood.
My brother and I got tired of chewing on the sugarcane, which is also integral to the Pongal celebration. So, we decided that we would make juice out of it.
The idiots that we were, we thought we could cut up the cane into pieces and throw them into the blender--the "mixie." Which is what we did.
Mother stood there watching us, smiling all the way. It wasn't after the event that we understood why she was smiling.
We threw the chopped up cane pieces into the blender. With great excitement we turned the machine on.
Not the kind of juice that we thought it would yield.
That's when we understood why she had been smiling throughout--she preferred to teach us a lesson by not teaching us the lesson. We learnt the difference between a mixie and the juicer that the roadside sugarcane juice guy used.
Mother laughed after she listened to me recall the old days.
Meanwhile, her nurse had arrived. It was time for her bath. We said bye.
I continued to think about the Pongal of my childhood days.
Like every kid, I too looked forward to the cricket test match in Madras during Pongal time. It was Ananda Vikatan, or maybe Kalki, that had an extensive feature on the visiting England team. I remember finding it hysterically funny that a player's name was "Old." "How could somebody have a name "old"" was all I could think of then.
Thanks to the web, I could immediately verify the year of that test match: Pongal of 1973!
India and England fielded names that I would remember forever.
If I am fired from my job--"layoff" if you prefer the less harsh euphemism--there will be drastic changes in my lifestyle.
I think a lot about about the effects on the body and mind because of massive changes to one's life. Ah well, do not worry. I am not going to jump off a cliff. After all, I am a calm wreck of a man!
This post is about a mundane change that results from abrupt changes of huge magnitude.
I write about shitting.
You read that right. Shitting.
We take shitting for granted. It deserves a lot more respect.
A little deviation can mean trouble. Like, if you are traveling. As if the body knows that you are not home! "as many as 40 percent of people experience constipation while they’re away from home."
Traveling throws off one’s routine -- and constipation may be one
result, said Dr. Brooke Gurland, a colorectal surgeon at the Cleveland
Clinic. “We’re creatures of habit,” including when it comes to bowel
movements, she said. “People have a time when they do that, and once we
throw the schedule off, we can become completely disrupted.”
Off the regular schedule means no "regular" ;)
Perhaps "home, sweet home" was first expressed when the person was ecstatic while shitting in one's own bathroom, after getting back to the "regular" schedule?
“Any time you leave your general habitat, it’s throwing your gut
microflora off balance,” says Brooke Alpert, a New York-based registered
dietician.
The experience of a holiday trip—remembering to pack everything,
navigating a crowded airport, staying with family for an extended period
of time—may be enough to stop the bowels from functioning the way they
usually do.
If travelling causes so much havoc, then imagine how much a layoff could mean. A whole new shitting regimen, and possibly in a new place altogether!
It is not that I am the only one who appreciates the importance of shitting--daily and regularly. Heck,even poets and writers tried to tell us that, perhaps tongue-in-cheek; like the following poem by John Updike that I came to know about from this essay.
"The Beautiful Bowel Movement"
by John Updike
Though most of them aren’t much to write about—
mere squibs and nubs, like half-smoked pale cigars,
the tint and stink recalling Tuesday’s meal,
the texture loose and soon dissolved—this one,
struck off in solitude one afternoon
(that prairie stretch before the late light fails)
with no distinct sensation, sweet or pained,
of special inspiration or release,
was yet a masterpiece: a flawless coil,
unbroken, in the bowl, as if a potter
who worked in this most frail, least grateful clay
had set himself to shape a topaz vase.
O spiral perfection, not seashell nor
stardust, how can I keep you? With this poem.
I have no words to describe the events of January 6, 2021.
As shocked and upset I am, I am not surprised even one bit.
Back on March 9, 2016--yes, almost five years ago--when tRump was a candidate in the Republican primaries, I was worried sick that nobody was stopping him.
I wrote then:
The emergence of Trump as a candidate--and, gasp, as President of the proverbial free world--will only further reinforce the idea that liberal democracies are for pussies!
Oh well, we get the leaders we deserve!
One after another, Republican "leaders" embraced the demagogue. A friendly couple who were dead set against him decided that they would after all vote for him holding their noses. Across the street, neighbors became jubilant tRump red-hatters.
It was easy to see what kind of a president he would be because he was always transparent about his motives and actions. That is why even one of the commenters--who herself later voted for him!--wrote in her comment:
In a recent conversation with my dad, I speculated how much Trump would use executive orders to get his way. I can't imagine Congress giving him everything, or even half of what, he wants, and it seems his personality to respond with an executive order. (In ways he reminds me of a toddler in a sandbox, preferring to go home rather than share his toys.) Can't you hear it now? "Congress didn't pass my ban on Muslim immigrants so I will use executive order." He'll say that he is following the will of the people since the people elected him. I wonder how long it takes to initiate impeachment proceedings?
Even that tRump voter--with whom I ended my association because there is no such thing as a good tRump voter--could see eight months before the election, and ten months before the inauguration, that he would be impeached.
And he was.
However, his enablers in the Senate acquitted him, thereby giving him a free pass to do even more damage. He gladly took up the second lease on his presidency, and continued with his assault on democracy all the way through January 6, 2021.
In his memory, the following is a re-post from January 2016. ***************************************************
A few years ago, the Association of American Geographers recognized Barry Lopez as an "honorary geographer." It is to recognize "excellence in research, teaching, or writing on geographic topics by non-geographers." I understand that sentiment--after all, I do not have any formal education, from the undergraduate through the doctorate level, in geography and, yet, have been gainfully employed as a geography instructor for nearly a decade-and-a-half.
Lopez lives in Oregon, not far from my home. He, too, is a transplant, from across the continent. A writer of the highest caliber, reflecting on life by observing places, especially the natural environment. In this recent essay, Lopez writes:
Existential loneliness and a sense that one’s life is inconsequential,
both of which are hallmarks of modern civilizations, seem to me to
derive in part from our abandoning a belief in the therapeutic
dimensions of a relationship with place. A continually refreshed sense
of the unplumbable complexity of patterns in the natural world, patterns
that are ever present and discernible, and which incorporate the
observer, undermine the feeling that one is alone in the world, or
meaningless in it. The effort to know a place deeply is, ultimately, an
expression of the human desire to belong, to fit somewhere.
The themes of existence, the inconsequential lives that we lead, and attempting to create a meaning through experiencing a place, are all regular features of this blog. Existential loneliness was also very much a part of Anomalisathat I watched last night with the friend. Which is perhaps why that paragraph appealed to me.
I am convinced that if we paused to think about our existence we would then realize the crisis within. I suppose we do our best to avoid thinking about it. Or, we try to lighten that crisis by making meaning via our affiliations with everything from family and friends to football teams and faiths. When we strip all those affiliations away, the existential loneliness is all that remains. Of course, to some extent, these are all age-old questions that humans have been grappling with.
Lopez writes:
The determination to know a
particular place, in my experience, is consistently rewarded. And every
natural place, to my mind, is open to being known. And somewhere in this
process a person begins to sense that they themselves
are becoming known, so that when they are absent from that place they
know that place misses them. And this reciprocity, to know and be known,
reinforces a sense that one is necessary in the world.
Indeed. Whether it is Pattamadai and Sengottai, or Neyveli, or Calcutta, or ... the deep desire to know about them and understand them has been a wonderful blessing in terms of how much they have helped me know about myself. I even routinely tell students that, without going into autoethnographic details--understanding the world, understanding the peoples, is a wonderful way to understand our own country and our own place in the grand scheme of things.
Back to Lopez:
Perhaps the first rule of everything we endeavor to do is to pay
attention. Perhaps the second is to be patient. And perhaps a third is
to be attentive to what the body knows.
Yes. To pay attention. To observe the place. To be patient. To be in the here and the now. I suppose it is not easy to translate those ideas to everyday life!
This past summer, as the pandemic encouraged binge-watching, even quite a few non-Indians were feasting on a show that was all about arranged marriages in India. The eight episodes of Indian Matchmaking provided entertainment for many who otherwise couldn't be bothered to learn anything about India. That's entertainment!
I didn't watch even one episode, but I read plenty of commentaries about the show. And, yes, I blogged about it! In that post, I noted:
The average non-Indian viewer might not imagine an India beyond the Hindu upper-caste that the show is about:
Though the show is called Indian Matchmaking, it portrays no couples who identify as Muslim, Christian, or Dalit—communities that represent close to 40 percent of India’s 1 billion–plus population.
I ended that post with this:
Netflix has the last laugh in this, similar to how the current President owes it all to the entertainment of the lowest kind.
What a depressing and sad state of the world!
We did recently watch a six-episode show that was also about matchmaking and weddings in India. It was not merely entertainment, however. A viewer who knew nothing about the Subcontinent but delightfully watched Indian Matchmaking would not have watched this show because it requires paying attention to the characters, their names, their religions, the words they use, the differences among them, the political backdrop, ... It would have been too much of a learning experience.
As an educator who has tried his best to get a few people interested in the Subcontinent--and failed miserably at that--I don't expect a lot of crossover audience from Indian Matchmaking to ... A Suitable Boy.
The title for this post comes from a New Yorkerinterview with the director of A Suitable Boy--Mira Nair:
I’ve talked to a bunch of friends who’ve read “A Suitable
Boy,” and some of them have said a version of “When I read that book
when I was eighteen or twenty or twenty-three, I was so angry about who
Lata ended up with. And now I’ve read it as someone who’s thirty-five or
forty or fifty, and I understand the decision she made.” You don’t have
to tell us how your series ends, but did you have a similar feeling
with the book, and do you understand that emotion?
I
understand Lata, and I never wanted to feel in the film that Lata
settles. She sees people for who they are, to some extent, in her
youthful way, but the question, which I love, that Vikram asks in the
book is “Is it possible to be happy without making others unhappy?”
That’s Lata’s question, really, all the time, and I think she makes a
decision that she knows will work to make herself grow. So that’s the
way I saw it.
“Is it possible to be happy without making others unhappy?”
That's not an Indian question. It is universal.
The characters, their language and religions, the locale, and plenty more could be different across the world, but the universality of “Is it possible to be happy without making others unhappy?” is beyond doubt. (If only people would read fiction set in other parts of the world, and watch foreign movies. Here again, I am trying my best as an educator, like a freshman seminar in which students can learn about the world by reading and discussing a short story every week.)
Maniktala teared
up over the phone as she reflected on her own grandfather’s trauma as a
Hindu refugee forced by the 1947 partition to flee to India from what is
today Pakistan. “I realize how important pain is, and the lessons” to
be found in that, she said.
“The kind
of empathy people had — I feel the humanity aspect has been on the
decline,” she continued. “We have to remember where we came from. We can
never forget.”
The trauma of the 1947 partition continues to haunt India and Pakistan.
SIMON: Miss Nair, I have to ask you - back to the first film of yours
I saw, "Mississippi Masala." Your films have been a wonderful
celebration of the masala, if you please, of multiculturalism, of people
from all various parts of the world spontaneously being thrown together
and making a society out of themselves and each other's lives and
joining together to create something distinctive and unique and amazing.
Are you worried about the prospects for multiculturalism in today's
India and, for that matter, today's America?
NAIR: In America, I feel that we are waking up to
multiculturalism. We are waking up to the power of culture, of color,
you know? I mean, with the whole movements, finally, of Black Lives
Matter and even the #MeToo movement, there's been an enormous sort of
galvanizing. So I feel actually here, energized. Part of what inspired
us, Sooni Taraporevala, the writer and myself, to make "Mississippi
Masala" was first the racism within us in our own Indian community. And
that led into this interracial love story, really, with the African
American community in Mississippi.
I sort of see it as an anthem to Kamala Harris. Like, Kamala
Harris is, in a way, the child of Mina and Demetrius in "Mississippi
Masala." And finally, 30 years later, today's young can see that she
didn't come out of nowhere, that this is a culture that is there and not
seen. So I must say, there is a feeling of being heartened here.
In India, I refuse to despair, but I am deeply disturbed about
the systematic obliteration, really, of precisely that that makes us
powerful and strong, which is, I think, our plurality and our layered -
our interconnectedness, not just really from - you know, from the entire
silk route, from Iran, from, you know, all through Pakistan,
Balochistan to India. This is a region that has influenced so many
aspects of who we are as Indians, you know, today in religion and music
and poetry. This is so much what also is in "Suitable Boy." So I feel
that that is our power. And it would be very reductive to make it a one
religion, one nation. That is not the absolute extraordinary glory of
where we come from.
If only more people watched such shows and reflected on the human condition!
If a corporate executive gets a $100,000 bonus for steering a company through a difficult year, while four $25,000-per-year restaurant workers lose their jobs entirely, the net effect on total compensation is zero — even though in human terms a great deal of pain has been incurred.
This is a perfect illustration of why quantitative literacy is important in this modern world. I wonder what percentage of a literate population, heck even college graduates, will be able to make sense of that simple arithmetic. I have done my part to educate a few and will perhaps have one final opportunity in the fall term that could even be in the real world, after all the virtual interactions.
It is also a perfect illustration of why we need an economic restructuring, and create a new political economy that will address the human suffering when four workers lose their jobs.
So ... "Even as millions of individuals faced great financial hardship this year, Americans in the aggregate were building savings at a startling rate."
One of the most counter-intuitive outcomes ever, right, when we might have expected differently in what has been awful loss of jobs?
The trend became clear six months into the pandemic. Professionals and high-income earners didn't seem to lose jobs. Low-wage workers bore the brunt of the recession.
Back in September, as the university's president and his aides were developing the plans for firing quite a few tenured and adjunct faculty and staff because of the Covid-induced budgetary crisis, I wrote to the president: "It certainly is surprising that Oregon’s current budget won't be significantly affected by COVID-19, and that projections into the future might not be that dark after all." Always evidence-based in my arguments, I attached the report from the Oregon Office of Economic Analysis.
It has been more than three months since I sent that email; I am yet to hear from the president or his aides. I suppose I will soon hear from them!
Will there be protection for low-wage workers not only through this pandemic but--and more importantly--even after conditions return to "normal"?
I worry it won't.
Why this pessimism?
For the same reason that I have offered many times. Like here:
I will once again say the same thing: We work out the solutions politically. Unlike a challenge of how to get humans to the moon and back, or how to vaccinate people, these are not technical issues. In a democracy, we are, therefore, at the mercy of voters and politicians.
At the mercy of politicians. Picture in your mind the likes of mItch mcConnell, tEd cRuz, mArco rUbio, kEvin mcCarthy, ... who will do everything that they can to stop doing anything good for the less-privileged, even as they kiss rich white asses!
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