This little light of mine | I'm gonna let it shine

What a lovely and powerful illustration of the deep, deep, depths under the seas, about which we know very little!

That image accompanied this essay by Elizabeth Kolbert, who writes: "We’ve barely explored the darkest realm of the ocean. With rare-metal mining on the rise, we’re already destroying it."

One of those awesome mysteries lies way down where the sun don't shine, as they say:

Only the top layers of the oceans are illuminated. The “sunlight zone” extends down about seven hundred feet, the “twilight zone” down another twenty-six hundred feet. Below that—in the “midnight zone,” the “abyssal zone,” and the “hadal zone”—there’s only blackness, and the light created by life itself.

Hadal zone.  I had never heard about this, until I read the essay.

In this zone, the only light is the light created by life.  Yes, created by life.

Bioluminescent creatures produce light via chemical reaction. They synthesize luciferins, compounds that, in the presence of certain enzymes, known as luciferases, oxidize and give off photons. ... In the case of bioluminescence, different groups of organisms produce very different luciferins, meaning that each has invented its own way to shine.

We have barely understood anything that deep down, but we know enough that there are precious and rare metals.  So, who cares for life in its variety and complexity, eh!  “Even if we found unicorns living on the seafloor, I don’t think that would necessarily stop mining.”

Such is our human behavior!

A later issue of The New Yorker includes a poem titled Bioluminescence.  Why the editors failed to pair it in the same issue that had Kolbert's essay is beyond me.  At least in my post, I can present them together.

Here is the poem Bioluminescence, by Paul Tran:

There’s a dark so deep beneath the sea the creatures beget their own
light. This feat, this fact of adaptation, I could say, is beautiful

though the creatures are hideous. Lanternfish. Hatchetfish. Viperfish.
I, not unlike them, forfeited beauty to glimpse the world hidden

by eternal darkness. I subsisted on falling matter, unaware
from where or why matter fell, and on weaker creatures beguiled

by my luminosity. My hideous face opening, suddenly, to take them
into a darkness darker and more eternal than this underworld

underwater. I swam and swam toward nowhere and nothing.
I, after so much isolation, so much indifference, kept going

even if going meant only waiting, hovering in place. So far below, so far
away from the rest of life, the terrestrial made possible by and thereby

dependent upon light, I did what I had to do. I stalked. I killed.
I wanted to feel in my body my body at work, working to stay

alive. I swam. I kept going. I waited. I found myself without meaning
to, without contriving meaning at the time, in time, in the company

of creatures who, hideous like me, had to be their own illumination.
Their own god. Their own genesis. Often we feuded. Often we fused

like anglerfish. Blood to blood. Desire to desire. We were wild. Bewildered.
Beautiful in our wilderness and wildness. In the most extreme conditions

we proved that life can exist. I exist. I am my life, I thought, approaching
at last the bottom of the sea. It wasn’t the bottom. It wasn’t the sea.

The ticking time bomb

My father has often narrated an incident that happened years ago when he was visiting with his niece.  It was approaching dinner time and his niece suggested that he eat.  Especially because of the old tradition, my father wanted to dine with the niece's husband.

The in-law asked my father to go ahead.  My father was barely done with dinner when the in-law sat down to eat.

This would come across as strange to anybody.  So, of course, my father remarked about it and wondered why the in-law didn't join him at the table.

I will give you the time to read this for you to come up with your explanation.

It turned out that the in-law would eat only at the designated time.  He wouldn't advance it by even a couple of minutes.

While that person's behavior might be extreme, the reality is that we are all conditioned by the clock.  A strange Pavlovian behavior modification that compels us to get up by a certain time, eat at a certain hour, work at designated times, ... instead of eating when hungry, going to bed when we are tired, ...

What if we had no structure that coordinated all our clocks?  Of course humans have marked the passing of time.  But, the clock that we look at is a modern construct.  Clocks across the world being coordinated is even more recent.  Like with everything else that we humans have created for ourselves, we don't pause to consider our relationship with the clock that we invented:

[Kevin] Birth is one of a growing chorus of philosophers, social scientists, authors and artists who, for various reasons, are arguing that we need to urgently reassess our relationship with the clock. The clock, they say, does not measure time; it produces it. “Coordinated time is a mathematical construct, not the measure of a specific phenomenon,” Birth wrote in his book “Objects of Time.” That mathematical construct has been shaped over centuries by science, yes, but also power, religion, capitalism and colonialism. The clock is extremely useful as a social tool that helps us coordinate ourselves around the things we care about, but it is also deeply politically charged. And like anything political, it benefits some, marginalizes others and blinds us from a true understanding of what is really going on. 

So, what is really going on?

The more we synchronize ourselves with the time in clocks, the more we fall out of sync with our own bodies and the world around us. Borrowing a term from the environmentalist Bill McKibben, Michelle Bastian, a senior lecturer at Edinburgh University and editor of the academic journal Time & Society, has argued that clocks have made us “fatally confused” about the nature of time.

The confusion shows up in daily and long-term behaviors.  Ordering young ones to bed, for instance, when it is still light outside during these long summer days is as odd as waking up teenagers at six on cold and dark winter mornings so that they can get to school at eight!  We fall out of sync with our own bodies and the world around us.  Our construct of time through the clock also warps our understanding of long-term issues like the build up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and climate change.

"For thousands of years, most human societies have accepted and moved in harmony with the irregular rhythms of nature, using the sun, moon and stars to understand the passage of time."  Nature has rhythms, yes, but is not bound by the seconds of the clocks that we use.  While we debate about the "daylight time" versus "standard time" of the clock, it has no effect on the flora and the fauna around us, which is why farmers operate on a different schedule from us urban dwellers.  Cows have to be milked not when the daylight savings clock-time says they have to be milked!

We live in a strange world in which we even have meetings in which people across the world participate, which means that some of the participants are interrupting their sleep and dinner and sex and whatever in order to be at the meetings.  And then we wonder why we have physical and health problems!

There's no going back to a way of life without clocks that are coordinated.  There's no possibility of operating with a local measure of the passing of time that depends on the movement of the sun and the moon, and our minds and bodies responding to the local stimuli.  But, we should certainly assess our own relationship with the clock that controls us.

The white man's burden

As an adult, I was always at a loss understanding how people born in India could not be angry.  Did they not care that the Bastard Empire ruined everything?  Even the loss of a historical continuity, and the very fact that here I am thinking and blogging in English?  Why such a worship of the barbarians who decimated life all around the world?  (Not that the rest of the world, including the old country, was a paradise otherwise.)

Over the years, I have blogged in plenty ranting about the Bastard Empire, and even celebrating the mess when the Conservatives tumble.  I am mighty glad that it has once again become a small island that is irrelevant to the rest of the world, as it was for most of human history.

One bastard, however, successfully managed to paint himself as the savior of western democracies.  Yep, this post is about the cigar chomping racist bastard.  It is beyond time to rewrite his history, like how Priya Satia writes in this essay.

(You may also want to read this book-review essay in the NYRB on the imperial delusions of the bastards; one of the books reviewed there is Priya Satia's Time's Monster.)

Satia, who is an endowed chair professor at Stanford, writes that Churchill had a godawful "sense of historical birthright, of masculine, upper-class entitlement to make history without accountability for human costs."

In every time, including ours, multiple value systems are in contest. Churchill’s decisions were guided less by intellectual consistency than an unapologetic sense of entitlement to make decisions (often opportunistically) based on his romantic intuitions.

I thought I had by now known enough about the bastard; yet, this was a shocker to me:

He praised Mussolini through the 1930s and continued to flatter him during the war itself. He sided with the fascists in the Spanish Civil War and admired Hitler, who also garnered a chapter in “Great Contemporaries.” He didn’t object to fascism but to the threatening continental expansionism that it inspired in Germany. 

I am reminded of George Carlin's punchline that the Allies were upset with Hitler because he cut in on their action.  It was not Hitler's Aryan supremacy and hitlerism that bothered the likes of Churchill, but that the fact that he went on an expansionist rampage into their own territories!

As we move forward in time, even those like Churchill who tried to engineer their stories will be defeated by the unfolding of history.  That is the fate that also awaits the contemporary GOP and the Republican "leaders" who, too, view "dominance as a birthright."

As a historian I assure you that what the @GOP and @LeaderMcConnell did today is completely in keeping with disenfranchisement after Reconstruction and the Jim Crow South. And history will judge them accordingly. They belong in the dustbin of history and will live in infamy.

— Manisha Sinha (@ProfMSinha) June 22, 2021

Our Poet

"I just read in the NYRB a review of your book, Endless Song: Tiruvāymoli.  And, of course, I had to write to you immediately ;)  After sending this message, I will order a copy of the book."

Tiruvāymoli is a poetic and religious work in Tamil, and dates back about 1,200 years.  Especially because I was raised in a religious orthodox environment, I am familiar with the name of the work and its author--Nammālvār.  The ālvārs were poet-saints devoted to Vishnu.  Though we were raised as followers of Shiva, the family worshiped Vishnu and his avatars also.

My parents were also serious fans of carnatic music, and we--yes, we kids too--sang a few Thiruppavai that were authored by the only female ālvār, Andal.  As an elementary school kid, I sang one of the Thiruppavais at the music competition in school and won a prize, I think.

However, what I knew about ālvārs and Nammālvār was absolutely superficial.

There was also another reason why Nammālvār was special.  His life was in the geography that is all too familiar to me.  The town Alwarthirunagiri, where he lived, is along the banks of the river Thamirabarani--the same river near Pattamadai and Srivaikuntam.   Nammālvār, meaning our ālvār, was literally ours.

So, naturally, I immediately emailed the author, Archana Venkatesan, with whom I had had prior correspondence because of the Pattamadai connection.

The book arrived a couple of days ago.  In the email to Professor Venkatesan, I wrote:

Lacking an intellectual grounding in these topics means that most of your book will be way, way, way over my head.  I am so delighted and thankful that you are doing such fantastic work.  Thankful that you are unearthing the poetry and history of a place that is so dear to me, and helping me and the world appreciate the richness through the English language that is now practically the lingua franca.

Venkatesan's translations of Nammālvār's verses are poetic.  Here's a sampler that will appeal to readers anywhere:

As I wrote in the email to Venkatesan, I am in for a treat.

I wish I could engage my father about all these.  But, a serious conversation over the phone with a 91-year old man is not easy.  I will do that in person, in December, when I will also play Ali Akbar Khan's treatment of the raag Sindhu Bhairavi.

Will Americans adopt namaste?

As the meeting ended, I asked the doctor what the health protocols are now about handshakes.  "No more handshakes, and only elbow bumps?"

He didn't even pause to consider the question.  "I don't think I will ever shake hands again.  For 15 months, I haven't even had a cold.  It is because I am not in contact with people."

People have their own preferences.  While I honor his, I am not in agreement.

Social distancing in order to avoid a deathly virus is not the same as social distancing in order to avoid a common cold.  If we take this approach to its logical conclusion, then we can continue with social distancing, work from home, and tele-medicine forever, and such a bubble existence will help us avoid any contagious disease however minor or deadly it is, right?

As much a gregarious hermit I am, the bubble doesn't appeal to me.  It completely redefines what it means to be human.

I hope that in this case, too, public memory will be short.  After a few months, or a couple of years, we will return to handshakes and hugs like we used to before the pandemic upended our ways of life.

Now, it is not that I am a huge fan of hugs.  I have learnt to accept them as a part of life, as much as my balding head is something I need to live with ;)

I grew up in a culture in which there seemed to be lots of emphasis on not touching the other person.  A culture in which there were no handshakes or hugs, particularly across the genders. In the culture in which I grew up, relationships were non-contact sports.  As kids, we might have clung on to grandmothers or uncles, but as grown ups we maintained our distances.  A handshake between men was the most we ever got to in terms of bodily contact to express anything.

I often joked, after a few years of living in the US, that it was because we lived in hot and humid conditions and that the last thing we wanted was the other person's stinky sweat!  Even as a kid, I always sweated more than the rest.  My grandmother often commented that I was like a உப்பு சட்டி (salt container) that was always a tad moist.  (The finely powdered "table salt" was not around during my formative years.  Chunks of sea salt were stored in ceramic containers on which condensation was not unusual.) 

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.

Sex talk

My grandmothers were married in their early teens.  My grandfathers were also only teenagers--only a couple of years older.  It was basically child-marriage, which was the norm back then.  My paternal grandmother delivered her first child when she was only 15!

Now, child marriages are illegal, thankfully.  Girls aren't condemned to be barefoot and pregnant, and they can grow up to become rocket scientists too.

But, the new social and legal structure for marriage does not mean that the reproductive biology has changed.  The hormones begin to kick in, and boys and girls are fully ready to have sex in their teens.  In fact, puberty appears to have been fast-forwarded:

Puberty generally begins between eight and 13 years in girls and nine and 14 years for boys. However, a number of global studies suggest the average age of puberty is falling.

The hormones are kicking and screaming, and porn is all around.  In traditional and conservative societies like India's, this can be a recipe for challenging times for boys and girls alike.

Living with parents tightly circumscribes the sexual lives of teenagers in most countries, including the US.  I have always jokingly hypothesized that this sexual urge is the biggest reason that American teenagers seek their independence after they turn 18 years old.  However, COVID-19 forced many of them to return to their parents' homes.  Even if they were out of the nests, quarantine and social distancing made sexual relations rather challenging, if not impossible.

Now, we have the vaccines, and young people here in America are eager to have sex.  However, more sex will not mean more kids; the fertility rate has been falling.  Within a decade or two, we will find out if this is good or bad news.

The contemporary world is a different planet compared to my grandmothers' teenage years. 

Sweating through summers

Unlike my life in the old country where I experienced only two seasons--hot, and rainy--my life here in the Pacific Northwest is defined by four seasons.  The changes are gradual at first, and then dramatic enough for us to wonder when the season changed.

Summer begins on the longest day of the year--June 20th--and the weather is forecast to reach a high of 97 degrees on the 21st.

97?

It is only a matter of time before we begin to complain about the bright sun and the heat.  And, of course, I will lead that chant!

I have acclimated to the temperate conditions in this part of the world. Every year, as the temperature rises, I wonder how it can be possible for a boy who played outside under hot and humid conditions to become a wuss who cannot bear even the much lower temperatures.

During my visits to India, it is always a struggle within when it comes to having coffee in the afternoon.  Should I have a hot drink when it is warm all around, or have something cooler?

Of course, such a question never came up when I was young.  Hot coffee or masala tea on a hot afternoon was what we had.  Was it because we didn't have a fridge for the longest time?  Or, is it because it really helps drinking something hot on a hot day?

While having hot coffee on summer afternoons might sound strange, it is not stranger than people licking ice cream on cones while walking on cold winter evenings here in my adopted home.  So, if having ice cold stuff in winter is ok, is there any benefit in drinking hot coffee in the summer?

This has been a matter of scientific inquiry, too.

There are all sorts of receptors in all sorts of nerves, but the nerves in the tongue have a lot of one particular receptor that responds to heat. It's called the TRPV1 receptor, if anyone wants to know.

So when you eat or drink something hot, these receptors get that heat signal, and that tells the nerve to let the brain know what's going on.

When the brain gets the message "It's hot in here," it turns on the mechanism we have to cool ourselves off: sweating.

Yes, the hot drink makes you hotter ... but it does something else, too.

"The hot drink somehow has an effect on your systemic cooling mechanisms, which exceeds its actual effect in terms of heating your body."

Aha!

But, what if the conditions are also so humid that the sweat doesn't vaporize and cool the body but instead sticks around?

This is the nightmarish scenario that Kim Stanley Robinson describes in the opening chapters of Ministry for the Future.   Robinson emphasizes the wet-bulb temperature, which translates the effect of the thermometer reading after accounting for evaporative cooling.  This cooling does not happen at 100% relative humidity. 

So, if the temperatures are rising in the old country, with humidity levels the same as they were when I was a kid, then sweat as a cooling mechanism doesn't really work as it once did.  Instead, sweating adds to the misery.  As Wikipedia puts it, "Even heat-adapted people cannot carry out normal outdoor activities past a wet-bulb temperature of 32 °C (90 °F), equivalent to a heat index of 55 °C (130 °F)."

Here in the Pacific Northwest, the summer months are practically drought times, and the humidity levels drop.  While we never experience terrible wet-bulb temperatures, we begin sweating at the first report of forest fires, which are becoming more and more frequent.

The end is nigh

In the 2018-2019 annual report, when reflecting on my career, I noted that I had professionally achieved a lot more than what I thought was possible. I wondered about the years ahead.

I wrote in that report: “I suppose the decade ahead will simply unfold.”

The events since then have served as a wonderful reminder, yet again, that life is what happens when we are busily planning for it.

I never imagined that 2020 would be dominated by COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter. Everything else, positive and negative experiences alike, fade into the distance in the rear-view mirror.

And I definitely did not imagine back in June 2019 that I will be served with a layoff notice in March 2021.

But, hey, life is what happens when we are busily planning for it.

The end of yet another academic year leaves me wondering, "what next?"

The last time that I felt clueless about the future was when I joined the engineering program, back in 1981.  All I knew was that I didn't want my professional life to be in engineering.  But I had no idea what exactly it was that I wanted to do either.

However, in that phase of life, I still had things to do until I figured out what came after.  I had classes to go to, exams to clear, and be a dickhead teenager.  And I did all that over four years.

Now, the unstructured 24 hours a day, seven days a week, on the other hand, looms large.  There are only so many hours that a man can walk, or play bridge.

"I am sure others have told you this," the daughter prefaced before telling me what she wanted to tell me.  "You have another chapter in you.  I don't know what it is, but I am sure you will find out."

I will have to wait for that chapter to write itself.  After all, life is what happens when we are busily planning for it!

The future has arrived. But, which future?

In this blog, and with my students (I have only one more term to engage with them!) I have often discussed my concerns about the China model for development and its superficial attractiveness not only to developing countries but even to "thinkers" right here in the US.  In 2013, for instance, I wrote in this post against the backdrop of a federal government shutdown:

It is tempting, in such situations, to look across at Russia and China and note that their governments are more “efficient.”  A few months ago, well before this partial shut down, even the New York Times columnists, Thomas Friedman and Nicholas Kristof, had written about how the Chinese get things done while we squabble here.  When Valdimir Putin effortlessly pushes ahead with his agenda, there are appreciative comments as well.

The Chinese model looks "efficient."  The American model of democracy, on the other hand, has always seemed messy, and the past five years of tRumpian politics has only worsened the standing of American politics and governance.

No wonder then that I was attracted to this essay in The Atlantic, in which the author argues that when Joe Biden worries about China it is not merely about the economic competition.  Nope.  His worry is something much bigger.  "In Biden’s view, the United States and other democracies are in a competition with China and other autocracies."

The old rules-based international order has come apart, and two broad constellations of countries are emerging in its place—one consisting of democracies, the other autocracies. Each side is motivated more by insecurity than by an ambition to transform the world in its image. Xi and his fellow autocrats worry that the free flow of information, the attractiveness of democracy, and economic interdependence would destabilize their regimes. Biden and America’s allies are concerned that Xi’s attempt to make the world safe for the Chinese Communist Party will undermine freedom and democracy, pushing international rules in an illiberal direction and empowering autocrats worldwide.

Sure, there are other interpretations of China in the global stage.  Biden gets my vote on this with his concern that the China model is a serious threat to liberal democracy.

And, yet again consistent with my world view, another essay argues that the fate of democracy in the world depends on the fate of democracy in one country--India, where liberal democracy has been rapidly losing ground to authoritarianism that is favored by mOdi and his toadies.

And the rest of the world doesn't even need a microscope to examine what the tRumpian Republicans have been doing in the states that are governed by them: Democracy is already dying in those states!

As Biden says, we are at an inflection point.  What we do and say have immense implications for the global future of liberal democracy.

Names and indentities

"Like in our traditional practice, he is named after his grandfather," my father commented.

The first born is named after the paternal grandparent.  How about the second child?  It depends.  If the second child is the same sex, then the name is the maternal grandparent's name.  A different sex means that the first two kids have the names of the paternal grandparents.  The mother's lineage is for leftovers!

In that tradition, I would have usually been given the name Ramaswamy--my paternal grandfather's name.  But, I wasn't.  The social norms were rapidly changing in the urban and industrial parts of India, and Ramaswamy was old fashioned a name.  Capturing the "Ram" in Ramaswamy, my father came up with Sriram.

I was also given an alias that was used in the formal, Hindu religious and ritualistic contexts: Venkataramasubramanian.  Boy am I glad that this multi-syllable name is not in the official records!

Traditional names are part of the cultural landscapes. Every cultural landscape has its own tradition.  The Icelandic last names are different from the Slavic ones, which are different from Nigerian.  You get the point.  Even within the cultures, traditions are being challenged. Like the Czechs questioning the gendering of last names.

But, even more challenging is when people with names from one culture move to lands with completely different cultures.  

I first got a taste of this as a graduate student when I was surrounded by students from China and South Korea.  "Strange" names with unusual spellings.  But, it was not a huge problem to overcome.  Mungjin and Rongsheng became familiar sounds. 

What I could not understand was a few students taking on Western, Christian names in order to make it easy for the natives.  Why they preferred to lose their identities was simply beyond my imagination and understanding, despite engaging with them about this issue.

I couldn't imagine walking around as "Sam" just because a few natives couldn't pronounce my name.  Sam I am not.  Nor am I a Sri.  I am Sriram, as I have always been.

A cardiologist, who is about my age, writes about her name--Xiaoyan Huang--in the Washington Post:

When I first came to the United States in the late 1980s, for college, I immediately realized that Americans had a hard time pronouncing my name. (Roughly, it’s see-ow yen.) Some people mocked the name; for others, mastering it was a genuine struggle. Meanwhile, among Asian students, I soon learned, my name put me on the lowest rung of the social ladder on campus. The kids who were born in America, or who immigrated with their parents at a young age, often had American names.

Of course, "Xiaoyan" stumps me when I read that string of letters.  It is new.  Just like Quixote was new to me.  Just like I had to learn to pronounce Foucault too!

How did she get that name?

Because Chinese civilization is built upon our profoundly metaphorical language, the words chosen for a baby’s given name are perceived as being critically important in the identity of that person. When I was born in Beijing, my parents carefully selected my given name using the traditional methods. But on his way to the district office to file my birth certificate — or so my parents told me — my father, in his usual romantic and impulsive way, decided unilaterally to change the name. He settled on “Xiao Yan.” “Yan” is a key component of my mother’s name, referencing Yan’an, her birth place — also a center of the Chinese Communist revolution — while “Xiao” means “small.” The name expresses his love for both of us.

I am glad that her professor in Oregon advised her to ditch adopting a Christian name: “Your name is your identity — stick with it”.

Yes!

Before the Valley

In a talk a few years ago, Alan Lightman underscored an important commonality between science and literature: Both the scientist and the artist are seeking truth.

The tests of the scientist's invention are more definitive; no matter how beautiful a scientific theory is, it has a terrible vulnerability - it can be proven false. A writer's characters or story cannot be proven definitively wrong, but they can ring false and thus lose their power with the reader, and in this way, the novelist is constantly testing his fiction against the accumulated life experiences of his readers.

Today's exhibit that relates to Lightman's point? Alzheimer's.  Well, kind of about Lightman's point, as in the scientific and literary approaches to the disease that I have dreaded about ever since my thirties when I read Sherwin Nuland's How We Die.

Big news from the world of medicine regarding Alzheimer's:

The Food and Drug Administration on Monday approved the first new medication for Alzheimer’s disease in nearly two decades, a contentious decision, made despite opposition from the agency’s independent advisory committee and some Alzheimer’s experts who said there was not enough evidence that the drug can help patients.

The drug, aducanumab, which will go by the brand name Aduhelm, is a monthly intravenous infusion intended to slow cognitive decline in people with mild memory and thinking problems. It is the first approved treatment to attack the disease process of Alzheimer’s instead of just addressing dementia symptoms.

But, there is a reason why this is considered a contentious decision: "the amyloid hypothesis, which pinpoints clumps of the toxic protein as the root cause of cognitive impairment, has yet to be proven."  It reinforces Lightman's point that "no matter how beautiful a scientific theory is, it has a terrible vulnerability - it can be proven false."  

Meanwhile, last night I read this fantastic short story that is set in an old age home.  It is a social commentary on aging and dementia that is presented as fiction.  The truth in the novel is consistent with how I understand life.  It is true.  As Lightman said, we believe in the ending in good fiction:

[We] know that it's true even in fiction because it accords with our life experiences, with our understanding of human nature, and it causes us anguish. ... A writer's characters or story cannot be proven definitively wrong, but they can ring false and thus lose their power with the reader, and in this way, the novelist is constantly testing his fiction against the accumulated life experiences of his readers.

We will find out, sooner or later, whether the amyloid hypothesis and the treatment are proven false.  But, the fact remains that if we are lucky enough, we will become old, and some of us will slip into the netherworld of dementia. Novelist force us to think about that, even as scientists work hard to develop drugs to treat the problem.

We need the novelist and the scientist to help us out.

How do you say freedom in China?

The New York Times reported this:

Microsoft’s Bing search engine briefly blocked images and videos of the famous “tank man” of Tiananmen Square on Friday, the anniversary of China’s massacre of pro-democracy protesters in 1989, in what the company said was an error.

Users outside China reported that the search engine had returned text results for “tank man” — as the unknown person, carrying shopping bags, who blocked a line of tanks in central Beijing after the killings has become known. But Bing’s video and image tabs displayed no references to the event.

I am shocked, shocked that big tech would engage in such practices in order to pursue their business interests in China!

The following is my post from 2014.

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

There was one brief period in my life, in my early life, when I understood what it means not to have the freedom of expression.  I was barely into my teenage and I knew I hated the very idea of government clamping down on that glorious freedom.

It was when federal rule was imposed as a result of a declaration of national emergency.  The prime minister, Indira Gandhi, and her minions--especially her second son, Sanjay Gandhi--turned India into a police state.  One of my favorite magazines, Thuglak, carried blank spaces in its pages--the blank resulting from the government censors axing out paragraphs that, one would assume, were critical of the government.

A fearful life was not worth it even though trains ran on time and workers actually worked.  It became the beginnings of the doubts about the communist ideas that so much fascinated me, though it took me a few more years to completely rid myself of the red within.

A little more than a decade later, I, like hundreds of millions of others on this planet, watched transfixed the protests at Beijing's Tiananmen Square.  Pro-democracy protests by students who were in my age cohort.  The rawness of the emotions!

Recalling the protests, Nicholas Kristof writes:

A quarter-century has passed. The bullet holes in the buildings along the Avenue of Eternal Peace have been patched, and history similarly sanitized....
The great Chinese writer Lu Xun once wrote, about an earlier massacre: “Lies written in ink cannot disguise facts written in blood.”

I have to remind myself that it has been 25 years since those protests.  Twenty-five years!

Individual freedom is way too valuable for me to give up.  I empathize with those who yearn for it.  When the Arab Spring spread, I hoped that the protests in Tunisia and others in the Arab world would reach China and trigger a Jasmine Revolution.  It never happened, of course.

If you can read this blog post, tweet, update your status on Facebook, or even yell out loud that your government is fucked up, those are all evidence that you--and I--have freedoms that did not come easily.  A great many made this possible for us, and often they paid for it by suffering torturous deaths.  For now, it might seem as if the deaths of the Tiananmen protesters was all in vain.  Not by any means.  For one, it reminded millions like me that freedom is precious.  Further, as Kristof writes:

As China prospers and builds an educated middle class, demands for participation will grow. I’ve covered democracy movements around the world, from Poland to South Korea, and I’m confident that someday, at Tiananmen Square, I’ll be able to pay my respects at a memorial to those men and women killed that night.

I can only hope that we are not far from that day in the future.

Here is the late poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz:

Speak, by Faiz Ahmed Faiz

Speak, your lips are free.
Speak, it is your own tongue.
Speak, it is your own body.
Speak, your life is still yours.

See how in the blacksmith's shop
The flame burns wild, the iron glows red;
The locks open their jaws,
And every chain begins to break.

Speak, this brief hour is long enough
Before the death of body and tongue:
Speak, 'cause the truth is not dead yet,
Speak, speak, whatever you must speak.

Nammālvār, Kampaṉ, ... and Pattamadai?

There is something about poetry that appeals to me, even though I have a tough time understanding poems because they are never straightforward.  There is plenty of subtext that interpreters have to explain to me.  Even worse the situation is when the poems are from the old days.  Centuries old.  In those cases, I need translators before I can seek the help of interpreters.

Tamil literature has poems in plenty from the Sangam era.  But, that classical Tamil is not the Tamil that we speak now and, therefore, is well beyond my intellectual abilities.  It is a tragedy that decades under European colonial powers interrupted the transmission of knowledge down the generations through a simple act of imposing a new language as the official language.  That interruption meant that Shakespeare became well known to many young students for whom the local masters of the past were practically non-existent.

Reading David Shulman's biography of Tamil a couple of years ago was, thus, a pleasure because, for one, he presented in English the history of the language along with samples of great works of literature.  It was a feast unlike any.  

Many of the classical works are religious as well, which is how I am at least familiar with the names of a few poets and their works.  Nammālvār's Tiruvāymoli is one of those.  Who hasn't heard of the name Nammālvār.  But, how many of us have read more than a couple of lines of his Tiruvāymoli?

Archana Venkatesan has done us a huge favor by translating into English Nammālvār's Tiruvāymoli.  The 528-page book includes a foreword by, yes, David Shulman.  A review essay in The New York Review of Books was how I came to know about this translation. 

Venkatesan has a Pattamadai connection too!  A couple of months ago, in the depths of the pandemic that precluded my annual travel to the old country, one night I googled for "Pattamadai."  One of the links led me to this blog post, which was about the blogger--Archana Venkatesan--visiting her ancestral village--Pattamadai--for the first time.  She writes there:

This is the village, deep in beautiful ten-Pandya Nadu, where my maternal grandfather was born and raised. This was where he studied, gaining life-skills that pulled him and his family out of difficult circumstances to forge a better life for all of them. This is where my paternal grandmother studied, where my paternal great-great-grandfather helped run a school. Where my uncles and aunts studied.

I emailed her that night.  I wrote:

I understand from your post that your grandparents and elders lived in "mela theru."  My grandmother's home was in "keezha theru"--almost at the very end and near the Shivan Koil.  I have spent many summers in Pattamadai during my childhood years; the last time I was there was 10 to 15 years ago.  I have been to mela theru only once: When I was a kid, my father took me there to visit with his friend, Sankaran, who was also visiting from Bombay.

In her reply, Venkatesan noted that until the pandemic hit she had been going to Tirunelveli every year for 15 years for her professional work.  An academic, a Tamil scholar, based in the US, who unearths for us the lost works and also translates for our understanding the old classical literature.  How fantastic!

After reading the NYRB essay, I immediately wrote to her.  In her reply, Venkatesan included a link to her latest project, which is "to produce a complete, scholarly, fully annotated literary English translation of the Tamil Rāmāyaṇa of Kampaṉ."

The ever curious me wanted to know more about her collaborators in this multi-year project.  In addition to Shulman, there was another name that I recognized: Aniruddhan Vasudevan.  Vasudevan translated into English Perumal Murugan's One Part Woman.

We owe a great deal to these scholars who are keeping the classics alive.  

Vaccine apartheid

A week ago, I blogged about the insanity of state governments here in the US falling over each other with incentives so that residents in their states will get themselves the Covid vaccine.  Incentives to get a free vaccine that could be the difference between life and death.  How insane is it to offer a million dollar raffle in order to lure the hesitant crowd to the needle!

Many people in many countries around the world would gladly pay to get the vaccine into their deltoids. (Why always into the arm muscle?  Click here to know why.)  Yet, here, we have to offer people pizza, beer, and even million dollar lotteries!

Poor people in poor countries are screwed because they might not get the vaccines until 2023.  Yes, you read that correctly.  2023.  Most covid vaccines going to high- and middle-income countries.

According to Nature, as of mid-March, those countries had secured more than six billion out of 8.6 billion doses. Less than a week later, the Times reported that “86 percent of shots” that went into arms across the globe were “administered in high- and upper-middle-income countries.”

Why should we care? "simple humanity and simple biology."

If left unchecked, the loss of human life for families and societies worldwide will be staggering. Viruses are international travellers, and over time they mutate. Wherever vaccine coverage is patchy, there is selective pressure for the virus to evolve resistance.

If "vaccine apartheid" makes you feel squishy because you are being compelled to think about the awful apartheid regime, then a more palatable phrase "a two track pandemic" might provide you the incentive to think about how "richer countries having access and poorer ones being left behind."

A recent proposal from IMF staff puts forward a plan with clear targets, pragmatic actions, and at a feasible cost. It builds on and supports the ongoing work of WHO, its partners in the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator initiative and its global vaccine access programme COVAX, as well as the work of the World Bank Group, the WTO and many others. 

At an estimated $50 billion, it will bring the pandemic to an end faster in the developing world, reduce infections and loss of lives, accelerate the economic recovery, and generate some $9 trillion in additional global output by 2025.  It is a win for all — while around 60 percent of the gains will go to emerging markets and developing economies, the remaining 40 percent will benefit the developed world. And this is without taking into account the inestimable benefits on people’s health and lives.

Hmmm ... $50 billion.  A big number, right?  Let's compare that number against the US annual spending for its military.  President Biden has proposed spending $715 billion on national defense.  $50 billion is practically a rounding off error. 

It is not that we do not have the money.  We clearly lack the will to do the right thing--vaccinate the world. 

Planning v. overthinking

I suppose I inherited from my father the gene that makes me a compulsive planner.  It is a fine line that separates planning for one's life from the person becoming a worrywart.  While worries about the future are incentives to plan ahead, those worries can also preclude constructive action.

My hope is that I am a planner, who thinks ahead as much as possible, fully aware that shit happens.  Like an unplanned career-ending layoff.  Planning ahead prepares us for the shit that can happen anytime, anywhere.  We can at least mitigate the effects that can otherwise be disastrous.

While a career-ender is one thing, end of life is completely another.  There is no escaping death that awaits us all.  How does one plan for death?  Should one plan for that final event?

As one who compulsively plans, I have been an ardent supporter of dying with dignity.  Should my health conditions fail, I want to be able to exit this world with dignity.  It is not a coincidence that my first newspaper commentary after moving to Oregon was in support of the state's Death with Dignity Act, which the "pro-life" Republicans were all too keen on dismantling.

In an intensely personal essay, Lionel Shriver writes: "Above a certain subjective threshold of torment, life is not worth living. It fails a primitive cost-benefit analysis."  It is a personal calculation, of course that makes one question, "Should We Stay Or Should We Go"?

Like many, I hope that I will quickly and painlessly go at a sweet spot in life.  However, looking at this horizon is different from worrying about it.  Planning is different from overthinking, especially because "excessive planning can have other negative effects including exacerbating worries."

For instance, when planning carefully, it’s tempting to try to predict all the things that could possibly interfere with a plan and how to potentially handle such events should they occur, thereby initiating a process of worry. Others plan meticulously because they believe that they won’t be able to cope otherwise, which can lead to excessive worries when planning isn’t possible or unexpected events arise.

Unexpected events always arise.  Life is a series of events over which we rarely have any control, though we like to claim agency when the outcomes are good.

Of course, the "gene" that makes me a compulsive planner doesn't exist.  It is a behavior, which means that it can be easily changed as well.  Planners can become impulsive, and non-planners can learn to plan ahead.  Worrying is also a behavior that can be altered:

Many view overthinking as an innate personality trait; something we can’t change. However, overthinking, in terms of worry and rumination, is a learned strategy that we choose – consciously or unconsciously – in trying to deal with our thoughts and feelings. It’s basically a habit that we fall into, but we can learn to change it.

So, yes, plan ahead.  And worry less.  Be happy.

The rare success of a cult leader

In what feels like a million years ago, I blogged wondering whether we should think about the money that is donated as philanthropy.  Was the money earned through justifiable means?  Or, is it the case that most people simply do not care about the stink of the money.

In that post, I quoted the late Christopher Hitchens, who wrote about "Mother" Teresa, whom he referred to as MT:

MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan.

She was a friend of poverty.  I loved the way Hitchens phrased it.

Back then, there were two frequent commenters.  One was from the right side of the political spectrum here in the US, and another came from the right side of the political spectrum in the old country.  And, of course, true to their political ideology, they commented that money has no stink and that MT did nothing but good to the poor.

Ten days ago, Michelle Goldberg asked in her NY Times column if MT was "a cult leader."

I wonder if the right-wing commenters of the past read that column.  Perhaps not.

Goldberg writes about Mary Johnson, who spent 20 years in Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity:

“The Missionaries of Charity, very much, in so many ways, carried the characteristics of those groups that we easily recognize as cults,” Johnson told me. “But because it comes out of the Catholic Church and is so strongly identified with the Catholic Church, which on the whole is a religion and not a cult, people tend immediately to assume that ‘cult’ doesn’t apply here.”

Goldberg continues:

The former sisters describe an obsession with chastity so intense that any physical human contact or friendship was prohibited; according to Johnson, Mother Teresa even told them not to touch the babies they cared for more than necessary. They were expected to flog themselves regularly — a practice called “the discipline” — and were allowed to leave to visit their families only once every 10 years. 

A former Missionaries of Charity nun named Colette Livermore recalled being denied permission to visit her brother in the hospital, even though he was thought to be dying. “I wanted to go home, but you see, I had no money, and my hair was completely shaved — not that that would have stopped me. I didn’t have any regular clothes,” she said. “It’s just strange how completely cut off you are from your family.” Speaking of her experience, she used the term “brainwashing.”

Cult leaders maintain a tight grip over their flock.  It is difficult to flee from the leader.

Meanwhile, MT has been recognized by the Pope as as saint.

And you thought cult leaders always end up in trouble!