A year into the pandemic :(

On February 28th,  year ago, we had the first confirmed case of Covid-19 here in Oregon. 

We must continue to keep each other safe by wearing masks, avoiding gatherings, and maintaining distance.

But, while we must continue to keep our physical distance from one another, we will get through the rest of this pandemic the same way we have come this far: together.

— Governor Kate Brown (@OregonGovBrown) February 28, 2021

The following is an unedited post from a year ago--from March 1, 2020.

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During the H1N1 scare, when I was visiting India, one of the relatives simply pooh-poohed the global worries by declaring that the virus is not new and that it has always been there.  Having learnt my lessons well, I decided that I would not argue with fools like him.  I smiled.  He then launched into a rant about how the controversy was manufactured by the pharmaceuticals industry.

More than a decade later, as I recall those interactions, I am now amazed at how much conspiracy theories have always been there even in medical contexts.  With every real threat, there are always nutcases that spout crazy theories.  Now it is COVID19.  The most recent Presidential Medal of Freedom honoree said this: “The coronavirus is the common cold, folks”.  He continued on: “It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump”.

As public health experts warn that the spread of the coronavirus is inevitable and urge Americans to take precautions, the pro-Trump media world has presented the subject as more fodder for partisan debate.

And then there are the rest of us who don't care about crazy conspiracies, but instead focus on the science and the evidence.  We understand the importance of this: "Getting ready for the possibility of major disruptions is not only smart; it’s also our civic duty."

It is a civic duty.  Indeed.

We should prepare, not because we may feel personally at risk, but so that we can help lessen the risk for everyone. We should prepare not because we are facing a doomsday scenario out of our control, but because we can alter every aspect of this risk we face as a society.
That’s right, you should prepare because your neighbors need you to prepare—especially your elderly neighbors, your neighbors who work at hospitals, your neighbors with chronic illnesses, and your neighbors who may not have the means or the time to prepare because of lack of resources or time.

I might be healthy enough that the virus might just about make me sneeze a few times.  But, I could also be spreading the virus through the sneeze. Or by carrying it in my fingers.  We need to play our part to flatten the curve of how it spreads:

Epidemiologists often talk about two important numbers: R0 or how infectious a disease might be, expressed as the number of people that are infected by each person who’s been infected; and the case fatality ratio (CFR): the number of people who die as a result of being infected. For example, an R0 of two means each infected person infects two people on average, while a number less than one means the disease is likely dying out in the population.

The CFR is out of my individual control--that is the task of the government machinery and hospitals and various organizations.  But, I can personally address the R0.

The infectiousness of a virus, for example, depends on how much we encounter one another; how well we quarantine individuals who are ill; how often we wash our hands; whether those treating the ill have proper protective equipment; how healthy we are to begin with—and such factors are all under our control. After active measures were implemented, the R0 for the 2003 SARS epidemic, for example, went from around three, meaning each person infected three others, to 0.04. It was our response to SARS in 2003 that made sure the disease died out from earth, with less than a thousand victims globally.

So, what are the estimates of R0 in the case of COVID19?  It is a wide range at this point, as epidemiologists try to make sense of the data.

Meanwhile, an epidemiologist cautions: “things are going to get shut down. And this virus is probably going to be with us for some time to come. It might become endemic, like measles.”

Who you gonna believe?  This President and the likes of his Presidential Medal of Freedom honoree on Faux News, or public health experts?  Oh, of course, if you are reading this, it means you are not one of the 63 million here in the US.  Good for you for being a responsible citizen!

When developed countries are worse

When Covid went global, we worried in our own ways about nightmarish scenarios in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, and other countries.  These are countries with huge populations, and with very little medical infrastructure.

I was practically getting panic attacks from thinking about the old country.  My sleep was getting disturbed, and no amount of playing bridge was of help.

A year into the pandemic, conditions in India and elsewhere have become a medical mystery, which Siddhartha Mukherjee writes about in The New Yorker: "While the virus has ravaged rich nations, reported death rates in poorer ones remain relatively low." 

[If] you look at the pattern of covid-19 deaths reported per capita—deaths, not infections—Belgium, Italy, Spain, the United States, and the United Kingdom are among the worst off. The reported death rate in India, which has 1.3 billion people and a rickety, ad-hoc public-health infrastructure, is roughly a tenth of what it is in the United States. In Nigeria, with a population of some two hundred million, the reported death rate is less than a hundredth of the U.S. rate. Rich countries, with sophisticated health-care systems, seem to have suffered the worst ravages of the infection. Death rates in poorer countries—particularly in South Asia and large swaths of sub-Saharan Africa—appear curiously low.

How do we explain this?

Mukherjee goes through the typical hypothesis you and I might propose--from younger population to prevalence of infectious diseases leading to immunity, to undercounting , to ... you name the possibility and Mukherjee addresses them all. It is a wonderful read, and an awesomely informative one.

Towards the end, Mukherjee writes:

The covid-19 pandemic will teach us many lessons—about virological surveillance, immunology, vaccine development, and social policy, among other topics. One of the lessons concerns not just epidemiology but also epistemology: the theory of how we know what we know. Epidemiology isn’t physics. Human bodies are not Newtonian bodies. When it comes to a crisis that combines social and biological forces, we’ll do well to acknowledge the causal patchwork.

Meanwhile, another Indian-American medical writer, Atul Gawande reports on the worst-hit county in the worst-hit state in the worst-hit country.  The county is the US.  North Dakota is the state.

Gawande writes:

When an entire community must decide how to tackle a serious problem—must choose what it is and is not willing to sacrifice—matters get more complicated. In business, the decision-maker is generally clear, and, if you don’t like the decision, too bad. The boss can insist on obedience. But that’s not how democracy works. We designate decision-makers, but the community has to live with dissent. This is why businesspeople so often make terrible government leaders. They’ve never had to manage civic conflict and endure unending battles over priorities and limits.

Keep in mind who presided over the federal government when the pandemic broke.

As of writing this post, 510,458 have died because of Covid here in the US.

I hope we will learn the lessons from this pandemic and be absolutely ready for the next one.

Immigrant stories

Consider this:

As a student in America, where I was considering a Ph.D. in mathematics and a job in finance, I would read 200-word stories buried in the back pages of newspapers. With so few words, speaking of events so large, there was a powerful sense of dissonance. I traveled to Congo, at age 22, on a one-way ticket, without a job or any promise of publication, with only a little money in my pocket and a conviction that what I would witness should be news.

Impressive, right?

The person who bought himself a one-way ticket to Congo, at age 22, was Anjan Sundaram.  That excerpt is from this blog-post in 2014.

For those who are from my part of the old country, the name Sundaram immediately suggests that his people hail from the same part of the country.  My excitement is always multiplied a gazillion times over when my people take the roads less traveled and accomplish a lot.  Sundaram wrote in 2014:

News organizations tell us that immersive reporting is prohibitively expensive. But the money is there; it’s just often misallocated on expensive trips for correspondents. Even as I was struggling to justify costs for a new round of reporting in Congo, I watched teams of correspondents stay in $300-per-night hotels, spending in one night what I would in two months. And they missed the story.

Parachuting in with little context, and with a dozen other countries to cover, they stayed for the vote but left before the results were announced. A battle broke out in Kinshasa after they left, and I found myself hiding in an old margarine factory, relaying news to the world, including reports to this newspaper.

Sundaram has accomplished a lot over the seven years.  He has authored a poignant and honest memoir essay in The New York Review of Books.  It is a wonderful essay about immigration, and his relationship with his father.  Read it in full; will be worth your time.

One piece of information in his essay grabbed my attention, even though it is mentioned only in passing:

Two winters ago, I paid a visit back to my ancestral village, at the southern tip of India. My great-grandfather’s home there was left to me, on a small plot of land.

An ancestral village at the southern tip of India.  I wonder how far away that is from Pattamadai or Sengottai.

Rare is an immigrant who completely forgets the old country and the old ancestral village.  Most of us remember.  It almost haunts us.  It is also a constant reminder of how far we have traveled, and what we have given up in order to live elsewhere.  Choices we make in plenty to be where we are, but there is always that umbilical cord that ties us to the village far, far, far away.

Sundaram writes:

“Who am I becoming?”

An immigrant inevitably asks this question.

It is one of the toughest questions ever.

Clothes don't make the man

Our neighbor was a widower, whose adult children lived far away.  A traditional and orthodox Brahmin, he had a young family live with him to do things around the house--including cooking his meals.

The young couple soon had a child.  A beautiful boy. 

The beaming young mother often came over with her son, and we loved playing with him.

In the hot and humid conditions of the place, the kid was the lucky one who was unclothed.  While the rest of us were complaining about the heat, fanning ourselves, and wiping off the sweat, there he was in his naked self enjoying exploring the world.

But, no clothes on him meant that his pees became puddles on the floor.  And worse was the steaming pile of shit ;)

Even then, cleaning those awful things was beyond me.  Stomach-churning.

In response, all I did was walk up to my mother, or the kid's mother, to inform them that they had a job to do.  "Clean up on aisle 3!"

Going to grandma's villages exposed us to a lot more nudity.  It was not only infants and toddlers, but even 7- and 8-year olds were casually out and about bare naked.  At the river or the canal, the kids frolicked in the nude.

After the mad rush to cover ourselves up, now even a little bit of baring of the skin makes heads turn.  Wardrobe malfunctions become headline news.  People of all ages, even the young ones, send selfie nudies to others.

Maybe our lives would have been less complicated if we had not worried too much about nudity.

Do you read me, HAL?

When we scroll through the movies and shows that Netflix lists on our home page, we rarely see anything that interests us.  It is awful.

But, we do watch quite a few movies in Netflix.

It is just that we don't care for what Netflix's AI offers.  We do our own homework, like reading Anthony Lane's reviews, and decide on what we want to watch.  More importantly, we never rate any of the movies that we watch.

Netflix's AI can't figure our our tastes, and I am happy about it ;)

I suppose we employ a version of lateral reading.  We gather information about movies from different sources, evaluate the ratings, and then search for those movies in Netflix.  Of course, not always do we find them in Netflix, but there are plenty of good ones that we have been able to watch.

No, this is is not merely about Netflix.  It is about something much bigger.  It is about my worry that artificial intelligence (AI) is beginning to run/ruin our lives by telling us what to watch, what to cook, where to go, how to go, ...  It is almost as if AI is beginning to kill whatever free will I have.

We are merely at the beginning stages of AI, and it is getting smarter by the second.  Two researchers from the U. of Mass. (Boston) write:

Algorithms could soon – if they don’t already – have a better idea about which show you’d like to watch next and which job candidate you should hire than you do. One day, humans may even find a way machines can make these decisions without some of the biases that humans typically display.

But to the extent that unpredictability is part of how people understand themselves and part of what people like about themselves, humanity is in the process of losing something significant. As they become more and more predictable, the creatures inhabiting the increasingly AI-mediated world will become less and less like us.

Think about what AI is doing, and will do, to distort what it means to be human.  Don't just take my word though--do some lateral reading and conclude for yourself.

BTW, have you watched Burning or Tune in for love? ;)

I have no words to describe ...

"Do you know what an antimetabole is?"

That was the question he posed in the email.

He was a sharp guy with a curious mind that was especially fond of linguistics.

He continued that antimetabole is a noun meaning "the repetition, in a transposed order, of words or phrases in successive clauses."

And provided a couple of examples that made it all clear:

"Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country" - JFK 

"We do not stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing -Ben Franklin

A few months after that, he continued with his fascination for words, when he wrote in an email:

xenodochy: hospitality 

xenodochial: hospitable or kind to strangers 

xenodochium: a hostel or guesthouse, or room set aside for receiving visitors

All those exchanges happened when he was undergoing painful treatment.

He passed away earlier this morning.  He was only 37!

An indescribable tragedy!!!

In memory!

 A year ago, on February 21, 2020, NBC reported:

How countries are able to contain the virus and prevent it from sustained person-to-person transmission will be important in determining the "ultimate end game" of the virus, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told NBC News.

"If infection control gets out of control in many of these countries throughout the world, then it's going to be very difficult to prevent cases from then going, by travel, to all parts of the world," Fauci said. "That's how a pandemic starts."

A year later, the US reports that more than 500,000 Americans have died from Covid-19.

Source

I, me, and myself

When I started blogging way back in 2001, I had ideas. Grand ideas.

My grand idea was to make this blog a space where others would also contribute.  I imagined an intellectual cyber-cafe where people dropped in and chatted with me or others.  

It never came to pass.

As with most grand ideas, this one too died, when I deleted all the posts sometime in 2007.

A year later, I simply had to start blogging again.

I had to because, well, I realized that blogging, writing, is an integral part of my identity.  I didn't care anymore about any grand idea.  I didn't care if anybody read the posts.  I didn't care if anybody engaged with me.  I would blog for an audience of one--me.  Everything else was pure gravy.

I keep to my own schedule of blogging every single day.  With exceptions, of course.

Blogging, expressing ideas, commenting, or creating something new, is not easy.  For most of us, it is hard work to create something on a blank screen, and for that creation to be engaging to a passerby.  

Yet, I feel compelled to do this.  Because?  There is no reason, really.  It is just me writing, mostly for myself.

The hard work seems to also reinvigorate the brain.  While I have no research to back me up, I am confident that this creates new synapses.  Memory cells are re-charged.

Like with everything else in life, it is up to me to create the time that is needed for this activity.  A truly busy man has time for everything, they say.  I am not that man.  So, every once in a while, I take off, like what I did this past few days.

Of course, there is a catch if I am going to set aside time for blogging: There are only 24 hours in a day.  Setting time aside to blog means that I give up the time to do something else.  Or to even do nothing. 

It is all worth it.  Especially when writing is so immensely cathartic. Therapeutic.

In 2021, unlike when I began blogging in 2001, blogging here is no longer about any grand ideas of conversations in a virtual cafe.  To some extent, writing here has become an exercise in mindfulness.  A focused activity, in which I create something out of nothing.  

And then I look up, look out, to check on the world around me.  

A wonderful world it is.

A mid-winter break

Will resume blogging after a few days.

Coding to the end of the world!

Oldsmar, Florida.

I had never heard about this town.  The name itself is new to me.  Oldsmar?

It is a small town northwest of Tampa.

What was my interest in this town?  Because it was in the news.

Hackers remotely accessed the water treatment plant of a small Florida city last week and briefly changed the levels of lye in the drinking water, in the kind of critical infrastructure intrusion that cybersecurity experts have long warned about.

The attack in Oldsmar, a city of 15,000 people in the Tampa Bay area, was caught before it could inflict harm

This is the world in which we live, unfortunately!

As the report makes it clear, this is merely the latest--and small potatoes at that--in attempts by terrorists and nation-states alike to hack into various utilities of their target countries.

It began "when the plant operator noticed his mouse moving out of his control":

The cursor began clicking through the water treatment plant's controls. Within seconds, the intruder was attempting to change the water supply's levels of sodium hydroxide, also known as lye or caustic soda, moving the setting from 100 parts per million to 11,100 parts per million.

Creepy.

Coincidentally, Jill Lepore writes in a book-review essay in The New Yorker that "the infrastructure of our daily lives has never been more vulnerable."

In writing about Nicole Perlroth’s “This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race,” Lepore discusses "zero-days":

[Nicole] Perlroth is interested in one particular plague—governments using hacking as a weapon of war—but her book raises the question of whether that’s the root of a lot of other evils. For seven years, Perlroth investigated the market in “zero-days” (pronounced “oh-days”); her book is the story of that chase, and telling that story, which gets pretty technical, requires a good bit of decoding. “A zero-day is a software or hardware flaw for which there is no existing patch,” she explains. Zero-days “got their name because, as with Patient Zero in an epidemic, when a zero-day flaw is discovered, software and hardware companies have had zero days to come up with a defense.” A flaw can be harmless, but zero-days represent vulnerabilities that can be turned into weapons. And, as Perlroth demonstrates, governments have been buying them and storing them in vaults, like so many vials of the bubonic plague.

After the state-sponsored hackers and free-wheeling lone-wolves are all done, the indigenous folk like those in Namibia or the Amazon might be the only ones who will survive thanks to their of-grid lives!

The dreams of young men

I am continuing with opening a random page in the book, and reading a poem on that page or on a page near that.

What prevents me from going sequentially from page 1 on is a question for which I have no answer.  If a text does not require me to read pages in sequence, then almost always I jump around.  When this approach has worked well for me all these years, why would I want to change things now, eh!

When reading the poems by African-Americans, I feel an emotional difference--these issues do not hit me as hard as they used to over the past four years.  "I can't breathe" seemed to be the motif during the dark era between November 8, 2016 and January 6, 2021, even though that phrase itself became a rallying cry only in spring and summer of 2021.

I hope that the urgency of the horror of anti-blackness will not ease up just because we are no longer governed by a sociopath and his toadies.  After all, as Charles Blow notes: "Racism is everywhere — it's just about what kind of racism you can live with."

Blow pays special attention to the role of elders in the community as he discusses how the original Great Migration caused a "loss of generational connectedness as an entire young generation left and the South became more of aged society," adversely affecting both young people and the elders. Here, Blow crafts an homage to the of elders in the Black community — from the great-uncle who babysat him to the importance of the example of elders like the 100 year-old Tim Black of Chicago who mentored a young Barack Obama newly arrived to Chicago.

We need to make big gains and fast before yet another generation grows old and see their bubbles burst in air.

Old Black Men
By Georgia Douglas Johnson

They have dreamed as young men dream
Of glory, love and power;
They have hoped as youth will hope
Of life’s sun-minted hour.

They have seen as other saw
Their bubbles burst in air,
And they have learned to live it down
As though they did not care.

Will the real Joe Biden please stand up!

I usually stay away from commenting about the goings on in the old country.  Because, more often than not, it is simply heartbreaking even to read about the news about India!

This morning, I woke up to the news about a dam break in the northern part of India, after "part of a Himalayan glacier broke off, triggering an avalanche of rock, mud, water and debris that swept away a hydroelectric dam."

It was a disaster that was bound to happen: "Environmentalists have long cautioned against building dams and power plants there, because it's so prone to landslides and flooding."

A terrible tragedy.

I hope that people will India will think more about how much we – and our economies – are ‘embedded’ within Nature, not external to it.  If only the religious in India too can be motivated to do something about the natural environment.

But, I want to first catch up on an older issue.  It is about how the authoritarian government is tightening its chokehold on the country.

In response to the growing farmers protests, the artist Rihanna tweeted:

why aren’t we talking about this?! #FarmersProtest https://t.co/obmIlXhK9S

— Rihanna (@rihanna) February 2, 2021

Rihanna has a following.  Nearly 102 million!

So, of course, the fanatics in India burned her effigy.

The teen activist icon Greta Thunberg tweeted about the protest. So, of course, the fanatics in India burned her effigy.

Meena Harris tweeted:

Weird to see a photo of yourself burned by an extremist mob but imagine what they would do if we lived in India. I'll tell you—23 yo labor rights activist Nodeep Kaur was arrested, tortured & sexually assaulted in police custody. She's been detained without bail for over 20 days. pic.twitter.com/Ypt2h1hWJz

— Meena Harris (@meenaharris) February 5, 2021

In case any academic decided to write or talk about these issues, the Indian government was ready for them:

In a new restriction on academic freedom at the country’s publicly-funded universities, professors and administrators will now have to get prior approval from the ministry of external affairs (MEA) if they want to hold online international conferences or seminars that are centred around issues relating to the security of the Indian state or which are “clearly related to India’s internal matters”.

The latter phrase is so broad as to include virtually every topic of interest to academics. The farmers’ protest relates to ‘India’s internal matters” as does the government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, or caste issues or even the pros and cons of demonetisation.

In addition, the names of all participants in such seminars will have to be approved in advance by the government.

Am I shocked?  Not one bit.  

This is what anti-democratic forces do. This is why I have been blogging against the current prime minister and his toadies forever.  

I am not at all shocked.  I am terribly sad though that my old country has been reduced to such a pathetic state of affairs.

What can one do besides issuing statements that won't have any influence on "the strong man"?

Why aren't we talking about all these?

Divergence and convergence

Back in the old country, in those old days before television and the internet, it was in rather strange ways that I learnt about the African continent.  Father's interest to get to Sierra Leone on a work assignment (which did not happen), the travel writing by Manian, and my classmate having spent two years in Kenya, all gave me an idea of Africa that made me all the more curious about the people from there.

In graduate school, one of the fellow students I really liked interacting with was a wonderfully sharp guy from Nigeria.  Kayode, whose intellectual pursuits were in science and engineering, and I shared many common interests, from movies to politics to sports too.  We were the only people who liked Jacob's Ladder, or at least it seemed that way ;)

The first time I invited Kayode to taste my home cooking, I thought I had to warn him that the food might be spicy for his taste.  After taking a bite, Kayode laughed his characteristic hearty laugh and said something like "if you think this is spicy, you have to taste my aunt's cooking back in Nigeria. I bet you won't be able to handle it." 

A few days after that, we were talking about this with his friend Seth (?), who was from Ghana.  He then challenged Kayode that his family cooked even spicier meals.  

I had no idea until then that in Africa, too, spicy food was not unusual at all.

Years have gone by.  Our lives take us to different places and peoples.  Work and family.  But, the memories remain.

I decided that it was time to contact my old friend.

"Hey Kayode: This is Sriram, from the old USC days."

Within hours a lengthy reply arrived.

He commented about his gray hair.  I am jealous that he has hair!

Old friendships.  A little bit of watering and they come back to life.

Subdue the earth? No!

In graduate school, a classmate remarked that his Jewish family would watch out for Jewish names in the news, whether it was good or bad.  I told him that I found doing something similar--watching out for Indian names.  And, if it was a Tamil name, then it was even more exciting.

Of course, sometimes the names pop up in unfortunate circumstances (like here or here.)  But, and thankfully, those are rare.

The cherry on top of awesome news was undoubtedly getting a dosai connoisseur as the Vice President ;)

It is human, after all, to applaud "our people."  An applause that does not have any baggage of superiority of inferiority.

It was that same graduate school excitement that I felt when I read the name of the lead author of a UK government report on the economics of biodiversity: Sir Partha Dasgupta.

My man!

All I read was the Headline Messages.  I love it.

The report notes this: "The Review develops the economics of biodiversity on the understanding that we – and our economies – are ‘embedded’ within Nature, not external to it."

We are embedded within Nature, not external to it.

The fact that we even need to be reminded about this fundamental aspect of life!

Back in graduate school, one of the discussions was the framework that the Judeo-Christian religions offered in contrast to many others around the world.  In the Judeo-Christian approach, god made man in his image and likeness. Then:

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

In the Judeo-Christian framework, god rules over man, who rules over nature.

That relationship is very different from what the faith in the old country told me.  Whether it was Native Americans or people in India or elsewhere, nature was worshiped.  There wasn't a sense of everything on earth as humans to take any which way it pleased them.

Sir Partha Dasgupta reminds us that we are embedded in Nature.  We don't rule over it.  We are so much intertwined with nature that "Dasgupta said assigning absolute monetary values to nature would be meaningless because life would simply cease to exist if it was destroyed."

Dasgupta's report notes:

[Relying] on institutions alone to curb our excesses will not be enough. The discipline to draw on Nature sustainably must, ultimately, be provided by us as individuals. But societal change – particularly growing urbanisation – has meant that many people have grown distant from Nature. Interventions to enable people to understand and connect with Nature would not only improve our health and well-being, but also help empower citizens to make informed choices and demand the change that is needed

Read the 10-pager.  Spread the word.  Be good to Nature.

What is so civil in a civil war?

In the second version of this blog that began in June 2008 after I deleted all the previous entries, I worried about a few global hotspots as I observed them from my corner of the world.  I listed in that August 2008 post the following countries/regions in addition to Iraq and Iran:

• Pakistan
• Afghanistan
• Georgia
• Zimbabwe
• Sudan/Darfur
• Israel/Palestine
• Lebanon
• Sri Lanka
• Burma
• Tibet

Only Georgia has really gotten off that list, right?

About Sri Lanka, this is what I wrote in that post in 2008:

This AFP report says it all: Strife-torn Sri Lanka is bracing for intense and bloody battles as security forces close in on the political capital of the Tamil Tiger rebels, according to military analysts.

That was in the summer of 2008.  The 25-year old civil war that began on "Black July" in 1983 was entering yet another bloody--yes, literally bloody--stretch. 

Here in the US, it was the summer of the presidential election season, with a young and untested but charismatic Barack Obama even going to Berlin and addressing the crowds that were all eager for a change from the Bush-Cheney era.  

The US couldn't care about the violence in Sri Lanka.

Later that December, I was in India, and observed people and the press expressing worries over the increased military assaults on Tamil areas in order to wipe out the Tamil Tigers.  So, I did what I could.  I wrote a newspaper commentary after returning home.

The Sri Lankan government didn't ease up.  It was a scorched earth approach to wiping out the Tamil terrorists, and civilian deaths and displacement didn't matter one bit to the government.  The leadership of the Tamil Tigers were killed.  An uneasy peace settled on the island.

All these in an island with which Arab merchants fell in love on first sight, which is why they called it serendip, which morphed into the English word "serendipity" to mean something absolutely awesome that just appeared or happened when least expected.

I was reminded of all that, of the roommates in my first year of graduate school, and more, when we watched Funny Boy.

The best #Tamil movie that I have watched in decades ... is a Canadian movie about #SriLanka ...#FunnyBoy involves two complex issues at once: #CivilWar and #Homosexuality https://t.co/Vfpi6unq65

— Am Dr Khe (@congoboy) February 2, 2021

If you read until here, well, you might be interested in a French/Sri Lankan movie we watched a couple of years ago.  Dheepan is a movie that is about three Sri Lankan Tamils who are in France after fleeing the civil war.

All I can do is read about peoples and countries, watch movies, and wish for peace.  That itself is a start, right?

Don't touch that tech

I grew up in a culture in which there was no hugging.  No touching.  As kids, we couldn't even brush against grandma until she was all done with lunch.

Many decades ago, when I was in middle or high school, a short story in the Tamil weekly, Ananda Vikatan, was about a father visiting with his son in the city and then the son accompanying the father to the railway station.  

The father boards the train that will take him back to his village and sits by the window while the son stands on the platform by that same window.  During the conversation, which itself was not a freely-flowing one and rather awkward, the son places his arm on the window and it accidentally grazes the father's hand. The son feels goosebumps all over and he realizes that it has been years since his childhood days when he even touched his father.

No hugs and touches, but people spent time with their relatives (mostly) and friends.  A lot of time.  The inability to be in the presence of their favorites during this pandemic has caused quite some stress in the old country.  After ten months, my aunt couldn't take it anymore and she visited with my parents.  As always, there was no hugging or touching and they sat at a distance from each other.

Video chats didn't do them any good.  I can relate to that.

But, I fear that those of us who place a premium on visiting with our friends and relatives are in the minority.  The world seems to have fully embraced (no pun intended) video chats of different kinds.

Those in the hugging culture--like here--miss hugging their siblings and parents and grandkids.  Will technology develop a hug app?  Would you like to have such an app?  Be careful what you wish for:

There are real consequences to letting technology intervene with social touch. Do you fear the day when you attempt to console your child only to have her turn to a device that can comfort her in a way you couldn’t even conceive of? Perhaps you should. With the rise of touch-replacement technology, socially distanced lives could become permanent, and we might end up with even greater levels of isolation than today.

The more we adopt such technologies, the more we risk getting isolated and feeling lonely.

In contexts like this, I am always reminded of the science fiction from a century ago, about which I have blogged before: E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops.

We live in a world that Forster wrote about back in 1909.  Imagine that--in 1909!  Screen time of all kinds just as Forster had feared.  We have replaced real human interactions with virtual ones.  So "satisfied" we are with the virtual interactions, and thinking that the virtual even eliminates the need for real interactions, we seem to believe that visiting with parents, children, friends, is not needed anymore.

Forster channels his warnings through the son telling his mother in that fictional work:

"You talk as if a god had made the Machine," cried the other.  "I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That is why I want you to come. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind."

After the pandemic ends, or at least eases, I will pay a visit to the old country, and meet face to face with my relatives and friends.  The older folk won't hug.  We will sit apart, and inquire about each others lives.  It will be a touching visit.