May 28, 1830

The Equal Justice Initiative informs me about an important event that happened on this very date in 1830:

On this day in 1830, President Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, forcing Indigenous people who had lived in the region for centuries to migrate west in brutal and dangerous conditions. To overcome racial inequality, we must confront our history. https://t.co/jmxsbO2zup

— Equal Justice Initiative (@eji_org) May 28, 2021

We must confront our history.

That's exactly what the GOP's "leaders" do not want us to do.  At the federal and state levels, they are on a mission to stop teaching and discussing our history that involves atrocious treatment of non-whites.  Their catchphrase is about "critical race theory," even if the GOP base has no idea what that really means.

The following is an unedited re-post from January 2019:

*************************************************

Remember this factoid?

Between 1500 and 1800 roughly two and a half million Europeans moved to the Americas; they carried twelve million Africans by force; and as many as fifty million Native Americans died, chiefly of disease.

The genocide and then the ethnic cleansing did not end just because it was now the 19th century!

Enter trump in his previous incarnation: andrew jackson, who "extended the powers of the presidency," writes Jill Lepore.

"The man we have made our President has made himself our despot, and the Constitution now lies in a heap of ruins at his feet," declared a senator from Rhode Island.  "When the way to his object lies through the Constitution, the Constitution has not the strength of a cobweb to restrain him from breaking through it."

Jackson set his sights on Indian removal.  He wanted to forcibly move Native Americans from east of the Mississippi to the West.

The Cherokees had forever been fighting to remain on their lands.

We beg leave to observe, and to remind you, that the Cherokees are not foreigners, but original inhabitants of America; and that they now inhabit and stand on the soil of their own territory.

And then a most unfortunate thing happened: "Gold was discovered on Cherokee land."

The US Supreme Court and its Chief Justice, John Marshall, ruled in favor of the Cherokees.  andrew jackson "decided to ignore the Supreme Court."  The Trail of Tears was the result.

We often refer to slavery as America's original sin.  As sinful as that was, the destruction of the lives and histories of the original inhabitants of this land is an even older story.  As much as the aftereffects of slavery and white supremacy have never gone away, the shameful and atrocious treatment of Native Americans continues.  Especially now with version 2.0 of andrew jackson: trump.

President Donald Trump started off the week by mocking one of the worst Native American massacres in US history in order to score some political points. By Friday, a group of young white teenagers were following his footsteps by taunting Native American elders at the Indigenous Peoples March in Washington, DC — on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, no less.
In videos shared widely on YouTube and Twitter, a young man wearing a self-assured smirk and a red “Make America Great Again” stands inches away from a native elder who is beating a drum. Different angles of the incident show a group of a few dozen young people, mostly boys, in the background, jumping up and down and jeering in unison at the group of elders present for the day’s march. In some shots, the teens appear to be shouting “build that wall, build that wall.”

The native elder, Nathan Phillips, is also a Vietnam vet--the war that President Bone Spurs dodged well.

“I heard them saying ‘build that wall, build that wall,’ ” Phillips said while wiping away tears. “This is indigenous land. You’re not supposed to have walls here. We never did for a millennia. We never had a prison. We always took care of our elders, took care of our children, always provided for them, taught them right from wrong. I wish I could see that energy … put that energy to making this country really, really great.”

Yet another Indian elder shedding tears is not going to influence the thinking of 63 million racists!

The American bubble

The world makes no sense to me.  At some point, I should just give up trying to understand the world.  But, I persist like a mad man!

Here in the US, people are dilly-dallying getting vaccinated.  Some are even refusing the shots.  There is no out-of-pocket cost to get vaccinated, and yet there is a high level of hesitancy!

So much so that state governments are offering lotteries as incentives to get vaccinated.  California has the largest pool of lottery money at $116.5 million.

Meanwhile, there is the rest of the world where there is severe vaccine shortage.  Let them eat cakes!

On my part, I have been regularly tweeting about the urgency for vaccine equity.  It doesn't matter to me if my tweets, like my blog, will not have any effect on the world.  After all, I am a mad man!

If only even the terribly selfish America First person understood that "we risk a forever pandemic with long-term cycles of lockdowns, economic damage and constant fear. We cannot just vaccinate rich countries and hope that we will be safe."

Even if we do not care a damn about the rest of the world, "the longer it takes for the United States to lead a global response, the more the risks compound."

In a politically polarized country in which millions believe that masks are useless, I am not sure how much the President can provide the beacon for the world.  The world "needs a Marshall Plan to invest billions in global health infrastructure, technology transfers, and exports of raw materials, ... and not just a patchwork of disjointed solutions."

The Marshall Plan happened under different circumstances.  But then the plan was also to primarily assist white people in European countries.  Now, the need is to help out a whole lot of brown people all over the world.  The America First voters have made it clear that they do not care about brown people.

Many Americans already struggle to sympathize with their neighbors—convincing them to care about poorer countries, particularly while recovering from what has been a tragic and difficult year, will surely be a tougher pitch.

A very tough pitch! It doesn't have to be that way :(

They are here!

A few days after I blogged about UFOs and the much anticipated government report on it, the New Yorker had a lengthy essay on how the Pentagon started taking UFOs seriously.  Unlike most people like me who rarely ever get away from terra firma, the military's pilots fly high above in the atmosphere.  The reports from its pilots became too many to ignore. 

The government may or may not care about the resolution of the U.F.O. enigma. But, in throwing up its hands and granting that there are things it simply cannot figure out, it has relaxed its grip on the taboo. For many, this has been a comfort. In March, I spoke with a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force who said that about a decade ago, during combat, he had an extended encounter with a U.F.O., one that registered on two of his plane’s sensors. For all the usual reasons, he had never officially reported the sighting, but every once in a while he’d bring a close friend into his confidence over a beer. He did not want to be named. “Why am I telling you this story?” he asked. “I guess I just want this data out there—hopefully this helps somebody else somehow.” 

The object he’d encountered was about forty feet long, disobeyed the principles of aerodynamics as he understood them, and looked exactly like a giant Tic Tac. 

The military has a security interest in this, of course. What do scientists think?

Not much.

And therein lies a serious problem, writes Avi Loeb.

Loeb is the Harvard astrophysicist who argued that the interstellar object Oumuamua might have been the remnant from another civilization somewhere else in the universe.  Scientists promptly ridiculed him.  Even America's friendliest and well known astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, mocked the argument.

It seems as if scientists do not want to consider the possibility.  Loeb writes that scientists and the scientific establishment are not doing us any favors by preemptively shutting down investigations.

Finding extraordinary evidence requires a commitment of extraordinary funds. This was true in the successful searches for the Higgs boson or gravitational waves, and it is definitely true in the so-far unsuccessful search for the nature of dark matter. Lack of evidence can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, the result of not investing enough in the search. All four proposals for explaining the anomalies of ‘Oumuamua in the context of a natural origin contemplated objects that we had never seen before in the solar system, including a hydrogen iceberg, a nitrogen iceberg, a tidal disruption fragment or a dust bunny. Therefore, by taking a close-up photograph of an ‘Oumuamua-like object in the future, we will learn something new about the nurseries that give birth to objects that we never imagined before ‘Oumuamua’s discovery. Our scientific knowledge will benefit irrespective of whether these objects are natural or artificial in origin. Only one scenario will maintain our ignorance—that of “business as usual” and lack of interest in ‘Oumuamua’s anomalies.

The chance that Earth is the only place in the universe with intelligent life, as we understand it, is way lower than the probability that we are not alone in the universe whose vastness we are yet to comprehend.  Not too long ago, most of humanity believed that we were at the center of it all.  Galileo muttered under his breath "And yet it moves," after surrendering to the Catholic Church and recanting his claim that Earth moves around the Sun.  Wouldn't we want to allocate funds for scientists understand these unexplainable aerial phenomena, instead of muttering under our breaths, "and yet they move"?

A shot in the arm

Conversations with my parents these days are only about Covid.  "There is a constant feeling of fear," my father remarked.  So did my mother.

I told them that vaccines are the key, and that there is no way out otherwise.  I drew a parallel with polio.  "They are doing research to develop tablet version of the vaccines," I told them.  Tablet is the Indian usage for a pill; to communicate, one needs to use the relevant usage.  I recall the confusion on a male student's face when as a fresh-off-the-boat student I asked him where the lift.  How would he know that I was referring to the elevator!

The tablet will be easy to administer, without the logistical hassles of the below-freezing temperatures needed for most of the Covid vaccines.  Imagine the Pfizer vaccine as a pill.  That will be a game-changer!

Pfizer’s experimental oral drug to treat Covid-19 at the first sign of illness could be available by the end of the year, CEO Albert Bourla told CNBC on Tuesday.

The company, which developed the first authorized Covid-19 vaccine in the U.S. with German drugmaker BioNTech, began in March an early stage clinical trial testing a new antiviral therapy for the disease.

Of course, there are also others in the race to develop an oral Covid vaccine.  But, until then, it will be shots.  Injections, which is the usage in India.

But, why the shots in the arm?

For one, easy access.  Imagine if every one of us has to get the injections in the buttocks.  It can't be done in the open.  I certainly do not want to reveal my bony butt to the world!

But, the buttocks too are sometimes the locations for injections.  Why the buttocks or the arm?  "Muscles make an excellent vaccine administration site because muscle tissue contains important immune cells."

Aha!

These immune cells recognize the antigen, a tiny piece of a virus or bacteria introduced by the vaccine that stimulates an immune response. In the case of the COVID-19 vaccine, it is not introducing an antigen but rather administering the blueprint for producing antigens. The immune cells in the muscle tissue pick up these antigens and present them to the lymph nodes. Injecting the vaccine into muscle tissue keeps the vaccine localized, allowing immune cells to sound the alarm to other immune cells and get to work.

Hence, the shot in the arm.

And, yes, injections in the arm are recent.  They are one of the many ways in which modern medicine has transformed our lives.  The literal "shot in the arm" that dates back to early 20th century is now also used as an idiom, as a metaphor, in discussions like a Keynesian economic stimulus program.  I suppose taking a pill will not be a powerful metaphor in the stimulus talks!

And on schedule, I had my second #PfizerVaccine shot earlier this morning.
🤞🏽on side effects #freedom starts on #MemorialDay

— K Sriram (@congoboy) May 18, 2021

A Bengal Tiger

 First, read the following lines from a New Yorker essay:

When, starting in 1919, Vladimir Lenin convened the first congresses of the Communist International, some Bolsheviks were disappointed by the characters who turned up—old-fashioned socialists, trade unionists, and anarchists, coming with false papers, in disguise, under aliases, and all apparently expecting hotel rooms. The Russian revolutionary Victor Serge observed, “It was obvious at first glance that here were no insurgent souls.” Lenin kept a blinking electric light on his desk to cut meetings short. But one of the arrivals made an impression. “Very tall, very handsome, very dark, with very wavy hair,” Serge recalled. It was Manabendra Nath Roy, an Indian who was a founder of the Mexican Communist Party.

Did you catch that?

One of the arrivals who impressed Lenin was an Indian.  And, this Indian was a founder of the Mexican Communist Party!

As one with leftist leanings in my younger phase, I had heard of a name M.N. Roy.  But, I had no idea how big he was in the history of Communism.

Who was this M.N. Roy?  "Born into a Brahmin family in West Bengal in 1887, he left India in his twenties on a series of missions to secure funds and weapons for an uprising against the British Raj."  

Roy was one of the many thinkers from there, which prompted Gopal Krishna Gokhale to put it succinctly more than a century ago: “What Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow.” 

Such rich stories were why I was fascinated with Bengal and Calcutta, and when the opportunity presented itself, I left for Calcutta.  I am surprised that I didn't fall in love with a Bengali girl! 

But, to think is one thing.  For a thinker to end up in Mexico and Russia in the early years of the 20th century is completely another.  How did M.N. Roy manage to do that?

Roy’s parleys with contacts in Java, China, and Japan yielded almost nothing. In Tokyo, he resolved to press onward to the United States: “I decided to take the bull by the horn, pinned a golden cross to the lapel of my coat, put on a very sombre face, and called at the American consulate.” Disguised as “Father Martin” and having, he said, “reinforced my armour with a morocco-bound copy of the Holy Bible beautifully printed on rice-paper,” Roy arrived in San Francisco in 1916.

Damn, they should make a movie out of this guy's life!

Roy promptly fell in love, got married, and the couple's political activities invited trouble.  That is when he changed his name from Narendranath Bhattacharya and became Manabendra Nath Roy.

A name change doesn't fool anybody.  The couple fled to to Mexico.

There Roy witnessed a revolution, learned Spanish, and co-founded the Communist Party of Mexico—one of the first national Communist Parties outside Russia. One day, a Russian man from Chicago asked to meet Roy at a hotel: Mikhail Borodin, one of Lenin’s top lieutenants. Before long, he invited him to the Kremlin. It was the start of a journey that led not only to Moscow and Berlin but also to China, where Roy became a leading Soviet envoy during the Chinese Civil War.

Head-spinning!

So, with all these accomplishments, whatever became of Roy?  Why did we never read about him in our history textbook?

Roy got disillusioned with the international communist movement. 

Shortly after Roy returned to India, in 1930, in a deluded attempt to influence the independence movement, he was arrested and imprisoned by the British. Few people had any reason to remember him once he quit the Communists and became a radical humanist, living out his final years in a cottage in the foothills of the Himalayas.

Aha!

His radical humanism lost against the Gandhian humanism and Nehru's socialism.  Like most of us, M.N. Roy too was soon forgotten even when he was alive.

In 1946, Roy established the Indian Renaissance Institute at Dehradun in order to develop the Indian Renaissance Movement. 

Roy died of a heart attack on 25 January 1954.

What a life!

Source
Notice the “Very tall, very handsome, very dark, with very wavy hair”? And, oh, Lenin too ;)

The good son

The moment the WHO declared the novel coronavirus a pandemic, I started worrying about India.  About my people in India.  About my parents.

What if something happened and I cannot go for months?

A year has passed.  The question remains.

As I noted in this post a few days ago, I am not the only one in the diaspora who is worried about these issues.  It is a surreal situation.

One person writes about this moral dilemma in her (his?) question to to the the NY Times ethics columnist, Kwame Appiah.  She writes about her husband who "is adamant that if his parents or sister become ill (with Covid or anything else), he will return to India to be with them."

She is, naturally, worried about her husband's stance.

In addition, if my husband got sick in India, I doubt he would be able to count on any medical care, and may be unable to return to the United States for many weeks, or even months, if the travel ban goes through and continues. I feel this risk is real, even though my husband is a U.S. citizen. The only things we have going for us are that we are both vaccinated and that we have a place in our home where he would be able to quarantine once he returns.

I have told him that if he goes, I will ready myself for the very real possibility that he may never return. Sadly, I do not think I am being irrational in thinking this.

She requests Appiah to "suggest a few things that both of us should consider so that we can make this decision together, carefully weighing and preparing for all the risks in the calmest state possible."

Before reading Appiah's response, or my excerpts below, think about what you would advise that woman.  Exercise your brain and mind on this ethical issue, which is real and not a hypothetical scenario.

Appiah being Appiah (there are other posts like this one in which I quote his wise words) he carefully weighs the issues and provides a reassuring response.  I am not going to excerpt anything from there; I encourage you to read it in full.

Appiah concludes with this:

[Relationships] have an ethics of their own, which isn’t reducible to a set of rational assessments. Love must be responsive to unreason. Your husband should take account of your own fears and needs, then, just as you should take account of his. In the end, however, the wisdom of preparing for the worst has its limits when — all things considered — it keeps us from doing what’s best.

Maya Angelou and ... me?

I practice a no-forget-no-forgive approach to life.  Like in many other posts, I explained here, about my take on those who create the grudge in the first place:

There is a huge difference, however, between wallowing and viewing the world as a worthless place, versus wallowing while enjoying the world and the vastness of this universe. 

I enjoy the world.  The river. The goslings. The green. The warmth.  The ocean.  The mountains.  And, yes, a few people ;)

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that a car well ahead of me in my lane of traffic had stopped with the brake lights a bright red on a cloudy mid-afternoon.  This being spring time, I knew what to expect and pressed the hazard lights on as I came to a stop.

Just as a I expected, it was a parade of geese. 

Four adult geese were chaperoning about a dozen goslings from one side of the street to another.  Three or four cars in each direction, and no honking or pressuring the birds.  They took their sweet little time to cross the road, after which we were off.

The one enjoyment that I have missed out on over the pandemic year?  Terrible puns!  It has been a while since I had real-time classes for students to share their favorite puns with me.  At the grocery store, small talk had vanished, and my regular source there and I have been barely able to say hello to each other.

The sillier the puns, the better.  Like, have you heard this one before?

Q: What do you call a cow that is lying on the grass?
A: Ground beef!

Or, how about this:

Why do you have to "put your two cents in"... but it’s only a "penny for your thoughts"? Where's that extra penny going?

The key here is to enjoy life.  I created a meme for the occasion ;)

A terrible curse on humanity

A second Covid-related death in the family.  He was my cousin's husband.

Covid is a curse on humanity, I often tell people.  Not only do loved ones die, but friends and family cannot gather to grieve either.  To die alone, and for the bereaved to grieve alone, is a terrible curse that none of us ever imagined.  But, that is the reality that my cousin and millions of others have to deal with in India, which is reeling from a Covid surge that does not seem like it will abate soon.

Meanwhile, the US CDC declared that those who are fully vaccinated can resume normal activities, for all practical purposes. 

This sets up a huge moral dilemma for people like me who live in the bubble that vaccinations have made possible, but watch in horror the conditions in India worrying all the time about the health and welfare of family and friends.

It is an unbearable pandemic guilt.  I am not the only one, of course, to feel that way.

“I have extreme feelings of guilt as someone who has most of my extended family in India,” said Neha Shastry, 30, who lives in Brooklyn. She has been shaken by the deepening Covid crisis there, as infections and deaths rapidly advance from big cities into rural areas. “It’s surreal to wake up a year later in New York City and see the streets full and businesses flourishing again, while my family is fearing for their lives.”

It is surreal.

My logical mind tells me that there is no reason to feel guilty.  And that's what psychologists remind us: "If you’re feeling guilty about things over which you have no control, the guilt you’re feeling is not warranted, the experts said."

In the old faith in which I grew up, we were advised to accept with detachment both the good and bad things that happen in our lives.  Humans that we are, detachment is not easy to practice.

I suppose modern life has conditioned us into thinking that we are in control of events that happen in our lives.  We forget that as much as life itself is an accident, whatever happens in life is also nothing but a series of fortunate and unfortunate accidents.  When that unfortunate event is a death that does not allow us to come together, it is a challenge to remain detached and philosophical.  But, such is life!

Slow down

Whatever Malcolm Gladwell might have intended, his book has been reduced to a simplistic notion that any bloke can become an expert by practicing, practicing, and practicing for 10,000 hours.  The character Sharad in the movie The Disciple appears to have arrived at that Gladwellian framework on his own and devotes his time, energy, and money to practicing classical music with the hopes and dreams of becoming a maestro.

It does not take long for a viewer to figure out that Sharad will not succeed.  The movie then is about when and how he would realize this on his own, and what he would do as a result.

What a pleasure it was to watch the movie!

In a cinematic world of fast action, cuts and edits, loud noise, and closeups, this movie stands out in contrast.  Long and wide takes in which the camera slowly movies in allow us to absorb the moment and feel the events and the emotions that the director presents to us.  

They rarely make movies like this anymore.  Not that they made such movies in plenty in the past, and definitely not in India.  I wonder if even among the audience, there are fewer numbers now eager to watch storytelling that is at a slow pace.  The shorter and shorter attention spans that people of all ages seem to have means that movies like The Disciple will appeal only to a few of us who long for the longform in text, music, and movies.

As a kid, I gravitated towards classical musicians who rendered music at a slow and deliberate pace that presented a raaga in all its richness.  One of my favorites was M.D. Ramanathan.  He performed at the auditorium in Neyveli, and I was immediately drawn to his style.  I was so much a fan of his that I could not understand why a music critic like Subbudu was merciless in his comments about Ramanathan to the extreme of outright insults like calling Ramanathan a water buffalo!

One of my greatest disappointments with Carnatic musicians was their abandonment of the longform presentation of a raaga.  Instead, they chose what appealed to the audience and which, thereby, brought them money and fame.  The Disciple presents the tension between purity of music and the market dynamics, and does it well without taking sides. Sharad is committed to the purity of classical music and, towards the end of the movie, watches with a mix of horror and awe a female musician gaining money and fame in popular music.

A couple of months ago, after listening to a NPR segment, I immediately placed an order for a twin-CD set of recordings of a live performance in 1970 by Ali Akbar Khan, accompanied by Zakir Hussain.  In one of the CDs, Khan Sahib performs Sindhu Bhairavi for 75 minutes.  One raaga in all its glories for more than an hour.  Do musicians even attempt something like this in contemporary India, I wonder.

Bageshri is one raaga that features prominently in The Disciple.  I will end this long post with a favorite of mine--but from the world of movies.

Why even bother blogging about Israel and Palestine?

As Ramadan comes to an end, the Middle East is in the beginnings of yet another round of Israeli-Palestinian exchange of rocket-fire.  This time, too, the fight is unequal.  Not that I would want a fight between near-equals either.  But, the asymmetry between the Israeli firepower and what the Palestinians in Gaza have is easy to see and understand in a world in which everything is broadcast live with video and audio.

Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who is the daughter of Palestinian immigrants, tweets about the tragedy that coincides with Eid.

All I can hear is children screaming & crying. Their fear. If this isn't terror, I don't know what is.

It's Eid ul Fitr, the end of the holy month of Ramadan. Kids should be celebrating, wearing new clothes, and receiving candy & gifts, not hiding from bombs, homeless. pic.twitter.com/CXtAkS2t4t

— Rashida Tlaib (@RashidaTlaib) May 12, 2021

The asymmetry leads Trevor Noah to ask, “If you are in a fight where the other person cannot beat you, how hard should you retaliate when they try to hurt you? ... when you have this much power, what is your responsibility?"

Thomas Friedman, whose opinions I read only if they are about the Israel-Palestinian issue given his rich understanding of the region and its issues, has a question that should worry us all: "Is this the big one? Is this the start of the next Palestinian uprising?"

Friedman answers his own question with this:

This could all calm down in three or four days as Hamas, Israel, Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority all find it in their interests to impose their will on the street. Or not. And if it turns into another Intifada, with the street imposing its will on their leaderships, this earthquake will shake Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Egypt and the Abraham Accords.

In short, we don't know.  But we know well enough to hope that this will end soon.

Why even blog about this?  It is not as if my observations will solve the problem and bring about peace.

To put it simply, old habits die hard.  

In the old days before the university's president and provost decided to email me the layoff letter, reading about these matters and blogging about them was also a way in which I was engaging in continuing education.  Even if I never taught about many of the topics that I blogged about, the broad understanding that I have helped me in the interactions with students.  Now, all I have is one more term of teaching to wrap up the contractual obligations.  From 2022 onward, I won't have any students to talk with, and no courses to teach.

But then, I suppose I blog because this is all I know!

That's entertainment, folks

When everybody was binge-watching, I went against the trend and blogged that binge-watching or binge-reading might be entertaining for the moment but doesn't do a damn thing for memory recall.  Only one person actually listened to me.  Compared to the zero impacts that I usually have, one person is a huge success ;)

Now, the trend is all about listening to podcasts and audiobooks.  People listen to them when walking or driving, or even when gardening maybe.  Audio and video can feel more engaging than text, but doesn't measure up to the good ol' reading:

The collective research shows that digital media have common features and user practices that can constrain learning. These include diminished concentration, an entertainment mindset, a propensity to multitask, lack of a fixed physical reference point, reduced use of annotation and less frequent reviewing of what has been read, heard or viewed.

It is bloody entertainment, that's all it is!  Podcasts and audiobooks are ways to spend one's time.  A few days later, the brain remembers nothing, and meanwhile it is processing newer podcasts and audiobooks.

But then, perhaps you are thinking that not all people learn the old-fashioned way.  Some work only with visual or auditory materials.  Ahem, in that case, you may want to re-read this post from April 2018. (Of course, I am referring to individuals without visual or auditory disabilities.)

It is not the mere memory recall that worries me.  I don't care about memory recall, especially in the age of Google and Siri and more to come.  We can always pull up the information.  But, we won't be able to do that unless we have an idea of what we are looking for.  We won't be able to figure out what to look for unless we have built our capacity through continuous rigorous learning.

What concerns me more is when I project all these into the future.  If the trends continue and there is less rigorous interaction with information of many kinds, will we end up with an overwhelming majority of the population that might be functionally literate but nothing beyond that?  Engaging with information is hard work, and if people do not want to do that ...

A sweet Mother's Day

It is Mother's Day.

As the old Sanskrit couplet reminds me, there is the birth mother, and then all kinds of other mothers who played important roles in my life.  The following is a slightly edited version of an old post about the women who literally made my life sweet!

Mother made plenty of sweets for various special religious events and regular days.  My favorites were the cashew sweet and the gulab-jamuns that she made.  I often swung by the kitchen and the pantry areas whenever mother was not around and gobbled up sweets that were off-limits.

As a kid, I ate sweets all the time. From morning until night. Sweets any time.  It continued on even into my young adult phase. 

As an adult, it was always an additional pleasure to listen to my grandmothers recall stories about my fascination for sweets.  An incident that grandmother recalled often, which always made me feel special, related to a milk-sweet, which was her specialty.  To make this "thirattipal,", my grandmothers patiently stirred, and stirred, and stirred milk for hours until it boiled down to the sweetest delight ever.   Back then, there was no tins of condensed milk that could have made it easier.  

I was about five years old and was in Sengottai when she decided to make this milk sweet for me.  The process started late in the evening.  I was apparently sitting right by her side and started falling asleep, which is when I made my grandmother promise to wake me up after she was done making it.  I wanted to eat that sweet as fresh as I could get them.

The extra kick in the story was when she described how she woke me up and I ate it half-asleep. And then woke up in the morning and asked for the sweet before eating or drinking anything else.

It was well into a few years of life in the US when it dawned on me that I hadn't ever thanked them.  I had never thanked my mother, my grandmothers, my aunts, and my great-aunts, for making all those heavenly sweets. 

I owe a lot to all those mothers who literally sweetened up my life.  

Give Pfizer, et al, more money, dammit!

When we all started getting familiar with something called a "novel coronavirus," experts, who were way ahead of us and on top of a hill looking into the future, told us that eventually vaccines will be the only way out of the global pandemic.

A year ago, we knew that we will need vaccines to deliver us from the pandemic into some kind of normalcy.

Right?

Pharmaceutical companies also knew well about the money to be made from vaccines that could beat back COVID-19.  So, their scientists set out on the expedition, and amazed the world with the speed at which they developed, tested, and produced the vaccines.

What I don't understand is this: Why didn't governments, especially in affluent countries, offer all the needed dollars and euros in order to rush the production of billions of doses that can vaccinate the entire world?

Because big-pharma will make lots of money in the process?

Think about this: Isn't vaccinating the world worth the money?

Think about this also: The world's most profitable company is not a pharmaceutical giant.  Nor is it a fossil fuel company (if you set aside the strange monster that Saudi Aramco is.)  It is Apple.

Apple is one hell of a profit-generator:

Apple said on Wednesday that its profits more than doubled to $23.6 billion in the most recent quarter as people embraced its latest iPhones and bought more of its other products, striking results for what is already the world’s most valuable company.

Apple said its revenues soared by 54 percent to $89.6 billion, a record for the March quarter that meant Apple sold more than $1 billion on average each day.

Now, think about the massive profits earned by Apple versus the much lower profit rate that Pfizer earns from the Covid vaccine.  Which profit-maker is more important and valuable to humanity? (BTW, I have been complaining about Apple and its puke-inducing profits for a long time. Like this post from 2013)

We humans have a twisted relationship with vaccine development.  While we want to enjoy the benefits of vaccines, we don't want vaccine developers to profit from it.  Yet, we willingly fork over money to companies like Apple that don't deliver anything comparable to what vaccines do for our wellbeing.

On top of that, given the cost of vaccines, while we in the rich countries get the shots for free, without ever pausing to wonder who pays for the vaccine and its distribution, those in the poorer countries of the world are left to fend for themselves.

“It’s a moral issue,” said Boston Zimba, a doctor and vaccine expert in Malawi, which has vaccinated only 2 percent of its people. “This is something rich countries should be thinking about. It’s their conscience. It’s how they define themselves.”

To me, the solution is simple and is an expression of humanity: Pay the pharmaceutical companies that have already developed the COVID vaccines all the money they need in order to produce vaccines for humans everywhere.  And underwrite the expenses for the logistics of vaccine distribution.  Because, merely waiving patent protections doesn't do a damn thing to begin production at, say, Ghana!

Source

At the very least, do not complain about vaccine developers earning profits, even as big tech's profits dwarf other companies and even the economies of most countries!

Cooperation. Not competition.

After the catastrophic fires last summer, discussions quickly shifted to salvage logging--logging in order to recover whatever economic value that remains.

Why not leave those trees alone?

In fact, we should leave those trees alone and let them go through a natural process of death, says Suzanne Simard. 

Why?  

Because old dying trees have a lot to pass along to the young ones, Simard argues.  We need to remember "how old trees contribute to the next generations — that they have agency in the next generations."  Through salvage logging, "if we go in and cut them right away, we're actually short-circuiting that natural process."

A tree in a forest is not simply a tree.  It is a part of a system in which trees take care of each other. "Trees are "social creatures" that communicate with each other in cooperative ways that hold lessons for humans, too."

The communication and cooperation is not always visible to us:

Simard used radioactive isotopes of carbon to trace how trees share resources and information with one another through an intricately interconnected network of mycorrhizal fungi that colonize trees’ roots. In more recent work, she has found evidence that trees recognize their own kin and favor them with the lion’s share of their bounty, especially when the saplings are most vulnerable.

Among the religions, I suppose Jainism is the only one that would wholeheartedly endorse such a view, given that religion's acute attention to life and the natural environment.

If trees are cooperating so much, doesn't that contradict the popular understanding of Charles Darwin's argument that it is one hell of a competition out there and that only the fittest will survive? 

Darwin also understood the importance of cooperation. He knew that plants lived together in communities, and he wrote about it. It’s just that it never got the same traction as his natural-selection-based-on-competition theory.

Nowadays we look at things like the human genome and realize that a lot of our DNA is of viral or bacterial origin. We now know that we ourselves are consortiums of species that evolved together. It’s becoming more mainstream to think that way.

 If Darwin knew that, how come science ditched it?

We started very simply: we looked at single organisms, then we looked at single species, then we started to look at communities of species and then at ecosystems and then at even higher levels of organization. So Western science has gone from the simple to the complex. It’s changed naturally as we’ve become more sophisticated ourselves. It’s become more holistic.

Holistic, in an era of uber-specialization.

Suzanne Simard has a mother of a research effort--The Mother Tree Project:

Mother trees are the biggest, oldest trees in the forest. They are the glue that holds the forest together. They have the genes from previous climates; they are homes to so many creatures, so much biodiversity. Through their huge photosynthetic capacity, they provide food for the whole soil web of life. They keep carbon in the soil and aboveground, and they keep the water flowing. These ancient trees help forest recover from disturbances. We can’t afford to lose them.

The Mother Tree Project is trying to apply these concepts in real forests so that we can begin to manage forests for resilience, biodiversity and health, recognizing that we’ve actually pushed them to the brink of collapse with climate change and overharvesting.

We can't afford to lose them.

This too shall pass ... eventually

As we go about our daily lives, and as I witness India's descent into Covid hell that the government made possible, it is difficult to view the events over a longer time horizon.  Even though I teach students to understand the human condition by looking at trend lines, the Covid catastrophe, which Arundhati Roy correctly describes as the modi government's crime against humanity, preempts looking at tomorrow leave alone history.

But, history does offer a little bit of comfort if we look back at the world in 1918, when the Spanish flu killed many.

Imagine you were there at Camp Devens in late 1918, surveying the bodies stacked in a makeshift morgue. Or you were roaming the streets of Bombay, where more than 5 percent of the population died of influenza in a matter of months. Imagine touring the military hospitals of Europe, seeing the bodies of so many young men simultaneously mutilated by the new technologies of warfare — machine guns and tanks and aerial bombers — and the respiratory violence of H1N1. Imagine knowing the toll this carnage would take on global life expectancy, with the entire planet lurching backward to numbers more suited to the 17th century, not the 20th. What forecast would you have made for the next hundred years?

I would have forecast that it was the end times.  That we were all going to die.  And that it would be a miracle if humanity recovered from such a catastrophe. 

I would have been proven wrong! 

A hundred years ago, an impoverished resident of Bombay or Delhi would beat the odds simply by surviving into his or her late 20s. Today average life expectancy in India is roughly 70 years.

Sriram in 1918 would never have predicted such a positive transformation.

How did this happen?

Of course scientific breakthroughs helped.  But it was not science alone that did it.

Those breakthroughs might have been initiated by scientists, but it took the work of activists and public intellectuals and legal reformers to bring their benefits to everyday people. From this perspective, the doubling of human life span is an achievement that is closer to something like universal suffrage or the abolition of slavery: progress that required new social movements, new forms of persuasion and new kinds of public institutions to take root.

(I hope the ardent advocates for STEM will read the long read in the NY Times Magazine, which is what I am referring to here.)

Perhaps you don't have the time to read that long essay, and want an example of how science alone didn't deliver progress.  In that case, here is an example: Pasteurization.  The scientific method led Pasteur to understand the role that bacteria played in spoiling the milk, which then caused sickness in people who drank it.  He then figured out that heating milk and then quickly cooling it down did the trick. But, this didn't take effect right away.

In the United States, it would not become standard practice in the milk industry until a half century after Pasteur conceived it. That’s because progress is never a result of scientific discovery alone. It also requires other forces: crusading journalism, activism, politics.

My favorite examples, as I have blogged in plenty, will always be the elimination of small pox, and piped drinking water supply. In both, science alone wasn't enough; it required an army of non-scientists, and sometimes the literal army too.

So, yes, over the long run, the trend lines tell a story that is vastly different from what most would have predicted in 1918.

But, then there is the reality of daily life.

I cannot wait for this pandemic to end.