The evolution of exercise

There are moments when I wonder if we would have been better off as hunter-gatherers.  How was life back then?

Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors.

They didn't "work" much.  They woke up.  Yawned. Scratched themselves.  Took a nap. Got up. Ate stuff.  Sat around. Napped. Ate. Slept. Had sex. Slept. Woke up. ...  Not a bad life it was.

For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"

They were, by and large, physically fit.  (Well, if they didn't die young, that is!)  They walked. Ran. Did not overeat.

Life now is such a contrast that we might as well be inhabitants of a different planet in a different universe than the one in which humans lived 20,000 years ago.

We now worship work. We work hard and long.  We do not have time to nap. Sleep is a problem. We eat the wrong things at the wrong time. We gain weight.  We worry that we are fat and unhealthy. We take pills. Sex is not easy.  We take pills.  If there is time in between, we head to the gym.  

But, of course, there is no resetting the clock by 20,000 years.  We are stuck where we are. 

I try my best to be healthy because I do not want to become a burden to others and not because I drool for longevity.  I would argue that a healthy existence requires a life that is like a modern version of the hunter-gatherer life.  Especially when it comes to physical activity.

Now, do not jump to a conclusion that you need to be hyperactive and strong like the hunter-gatherers were.  Because, they were not.  Which is why I am not super-active either; I can barely run or lift a few pounds! 

It is a darn myth that our ancestors were physically active all the time; "we can do better by looking beyond the weird world in which we live to consider how our ancestors as well as people in other cultures manage to be physically active." 

The hunting/gathering ancestors spent roughly 2 hours a day working to obtain food.  And then they kicked back.  "Because natural selection ultimately cares only about how many offspring we have, our hunter-gatherer ancestors evolved to avoid needless exertion – exercise – unless it was rewarding."  I suspect that they spent more time thinking about sex and working it than in working and exercising.

We "modern" humans strap on devices that tell us how many steps we have taken during a day.  We wear gadgets that tell us when to stand, move, walk, and run.  A few years ago, David Sedaris wrote an awesomely hilarious essay--perhaps the best of his that I have read, other than this one about his partner--about how the Fitbit started ruling his life.

I wonder what kind of exercises humans will do on Mars after it is colonized!

How to become famous?

One of the many benefits of blogging is simply this: I can track down what I thought about a topic and whether my views have changed.  I always hope that my record shows that my opinions change when the facts change; else, I will be a stupid ideologue, which I don't want to be.

Consider Facebook about which I have blogged a lot.  After the first couple of years of an unbiased use of Facebook, I started worrying about the platform.  In July 2011, I wrote about my love-hate relationship with Facebook.  I temporarily froze my account and activities because "There is a kind of creepy feeling and shallow interactions that bothered me."

Shallow interactions to the point where I felt like I was merely an entertainment channel for "friends" who wanted to kill some time.  "There are moments when I worry about all this social media network and the internet ..." I wrote back then.

After a few temporary freezes and reactivation, I finally quit Facebook for good more than three years ago.

Even though I don't use Facebook, nor its other popular services--Instagram and WhatsApp--I read and think a lot about how damaging they are to individuals and to society. 

When a cousin "jokingly" asked me in a group email conversation "have you decided to join the civilised world of WhatsApp and Insta?" I wrote back bluntly that I am on an anti-Facebook crusade: "FB is a doomsday machine and one of the greatest threats to humanity.  FB owns WhatsApp and Insta also."

There's more to read every single day, like this Ross Douthat column in the NY Times.

I agree with Chris Hayes about how social media have warped our minds to think about, and crave, fame.

The internet and social media seem to promise fame for anybody and everybody, and one feels like a loser for not taking up the chance.  You too can become famous.  For what?  Maybe your cat video will go viral and gain 2 million views. Your meme will get retweeted by a celebrity.  If you have not become famous it is because you are not putting any effort into it!

You don't care that your momentary fame does not get you a single cent nor a can of beans because, well, you have had your nanosecond of fame.  Meanwhile, you have made a couple of tech billionaires gain a few more dollars!

As I wrote in one of my posts, We are fucked, folks.

Leisure is for performance?

The curmudgeon that I am, I complain about people a lot.  One of my complaints is rather pedestrian compared to many others.  I don't understand why people have to get all hung up on everything that they do.

Let me explain.

Back when we were kids, most people I know did the bare minimum in life.  They went to school or work. They came home.  Relaxed. Ate. Went to sleep.

Some may have did a little bit of gardening. Or whatever. But, essentially leisure was leisure. Nobody I knew was even remotely maniacal about how they spent their downtime.

I don't know how much life has changed in India.  But, here in the US, leisure is no longer leisure. There is intense commitment, a maniacal intensity, to whatever people decide that they want to pursue.

My early exposure to this was back in California.  Brewing beer at home was becoming a craze.  I practically had to run away from a couple of acquaintances if I ever ran into them at any get together, because they could go on and on about the latest in their brewing.  Then there were the bake-bread-at-home people, especially after that machine appeared in the market in the early 1990s.  Remember that?  Quilters, oh, don't get me started on them!

The age of Facebook and Instagram has made this worse.  People bike 20 miles and can't wait to post it.  Leisure activities are meticulously documented and broadcast to the world.  I won't be surprised if soon people start boasting about the awesomest sex they have, and think that they are porn stars in their bedrooms. Oh, wait, they already do!

Why do people get so maniacal, and competitive, about their hobbies and interests?  When did this "play hard" concept take over lives?  And then the condescending attitude towards those of us who don't play hard!  Why not just chill, and enjoy whatever it is that they like to do?

Why don't people stop doing stuff and simply relax?  As this writer notes, it has "morphed and migrated into pithy catchphrases like YOLO — “you only live once” — and “rise and grind.” I saw it in the way people bragged about how busy they were, as if it were a badge of honor."

That writer and I are not the only ones; there are more who think so.

If you’re a jogger, it is no longer enough to cruise around the block; you’re training for the next marathon. If you’re a painter, you are no longer passing a pleasant afternoon, just you, your watercolors and your water lilies; you are trying to land a gallery show or at least garner a respectable social media following. When your identity is linked to your hobby — you’re a yogi, a surfer, a rock climber — you’d better be good at it, or else who are you?

Insanity!  It is almost like these people go to work only to relax after their hectic pursuit of their hobbies!

The promise of our civilization, the point of all our labor and technological progress, is to free us from the struggle for survival and to make room for higher pursuits. But demanding excellence in all that we do can undermine that; it can threaten and even destroy freedom. It steals from us one of life’s greatest rewards — the simple pleasure of doing something you merely, but truly, enjoy.

YES to the simple pleasures of leisure activities. 

Robots at play

As a kid, I was in love with the game of cricket like how most boys were.  (I had no idea what girls thought about cricket--we didn't talk!)  I particularly liked players who seemed to play for the love of the game and not with the competitive venom that has now become the de facto approach.  Vince Lombardi's "winning is the only thing" has diffused all over the world and into cricket too.

In one of those old-style games, in an important moment in a cricket match between India and the visiting England team, when the visitors were struggling and one of their players had been given out by the umpire, the captain of the Indian team--G.R. Vishwanath--withdrew the appeal, which brought the English player, Ian Botham, back to the game.  He went on to win the match for his team.

The human error in the form of the umpire's decision, the human Vishwanath displaying a view of humanity, and the results on the match made for highly interesting events for the teenager that I was then.

Soon after that, Vishwanath was forced out of the game into retirement.  And when billions of dollars are involved--in contrast to the old days--it is now all about winning, which is the only thing. 

A couple of years ago, when visiting India, I watched on television a few minutes of a match with my father.  I thought a batsmen was out when my father said that they were waiting for the decision by an umpire whose job was to review the play from different camera angles.  A minute or two later came the decision.

It was far from the game that I followed and the game that Vishwanath played.

Baseball, which for a few years appealed to me in this adopted country, has gone a step further with robot umpires! 

The robots are significantly better than humans in umpiring calls.  But, is that what we humans want?

Meanwhile, robots--artificial intelligence--have completed the tenth symphony that Beethoven started working on but died before he could put that together.  "All he left behind were some musical sketches."

A full recording of Beethoven’s 10th Symphony is set to be released on Oct. 9, 2021, the same day as the world premiere performance scheduled to take place in Bonn, Germany – the culmination of a two-year-plus effort.

In two weeks!

We anticipate some pushback to this work – those who will say that the arts should be off-limits from AI, and that AI has no business trying to replicate the human creative process. Yet when it comes to the arts, I see AI not as a replacement, but as a tool – one that opens doors for artists to express themselves in new ways.

A robot umpire. A robot composer. We already have robot bank tellers.  Robot house cleaners. Robot ... 

Not my idea of humanity. 

Those among us who prefer the old ways will be forced out, I suppose, as Vishwanath was!

It is simple. Just simplify!

Do you like to keep your options open?  Do you believe that it is a good approach to living one's life? After all, every single day the opportunities seem to increase, right?  And, therefore, not keeping options open might lead to premature decision-making that precludes better options?

Well, chances are that keeping options open tends to make people more unhappy, stressed out, and tired from having to choose between too many things.  Further, decision-fatigue kicks in!  As Wikipedia explains:

 It is now understood as one of the causes of irrational trade-offs in decision making.^[2] Decision fatigue may also lead to consumers making poor choices with their purchases.

There is a paradox in that "people who lack choices seem to want them and often will fight for them", yet at the same time, "people find that making many choices can be [psychologically] aversive."

The moral of the story is not difficult to figure out: Reduce the unnecessary decisions you have to make in a day, and without being hasty, try to get going with the choices that you have.

Let me, as I always do, make it autoethnographic.  My life is simple.  And I am never ever tempted by any of these other options that I know exist; I simply don't care.  Nor do I every worry about missing out.

For instance, coffee.  I rarely ever go to a coffee shop.  Why should I when the coffee that I brew at home is awesomely tasty and refreshing!

Occasionally, if I do ever stop at a coffee place, my order is always either a regular coffee or a cappuccino.  Nothing else.  Despite the gazillion options that even the drive-through places have these days.  And, oh, for the record, I have never bought myself any damn thing at any of these drive-through coffee places.

It is not any blissful state of ignorance that I am referring to.  Nope.  In fact, I try my best to be in the know about the fads.  Ignorance just does not appeal to me anyway, in a life that I love examining.  In fact, my concern for a while has been that college has failed in this fundamental aspect of helping students examine and understand life.

Coffee is merely one of the mundane examples from my life that I can cite in this context.  Recall this post about my lunch, for instance?  I suppose my life is relatively easy and stress-free for at least one reason: In many aspects of life, mundane and profound, I have eliminated the need to sort through the endless choices.  As simple as that.

Research continues to confirm that "we’re increasingly bombarded with choices – and it’s stressing us out."  So, what can one do?

It might help to remember that many of the day-to-day choices you make – what to have for lunch, what flavor best complements that caramel macchiato – aren’t going to matter in the grand scheme of things. Even seemingly more consequential choices, like accepting a new job, can ultimately be changed.

Nothing really matters!

When thinking this way, the consequences associated with making the “wrong” choice become less scary.
It could also help to enter these situations with just a few clear guidelines and ideas of what you want – and absolutely don’t want – from the range of options. This can winnow the possible choices, and also make you more confident about your decision-making abilities.

Perhaps this is also why I often come across as a person who knows what he wants, and is quite decisive.  You don't have a choice but to agree with me on this ;)

When autumn came

It is a brand new season.

It is autumn.

No, it is fall.

Fall or Autumn?

Why two completely different sounding words in the English language that describe the same thing?

The older of the two words is autumn, which first came into English in the 1300s from the Latin word autumnus. (Etymologists aren't sure where the Latin word came from.) It had extensive use right from its first appearance in English writing, and with good reason: the common name for this intermediary season prior to the arrival of autumn was harvest, which was potentially confusing, since harvest can refer to both the time when harvesting crops usually happens (autumn) as well as the actual harvesting of crops (harvest). The word autumn was, then, a big hit.

Names for the season didn't just end with autumn, however. Poets continued to be wowed by the changes autumn brought, and in time, the phrase "the fall of the leaves" came to be associated with the season. This was shortened in the 1600s to fall. 

Of course, back in the old country, when we learnt in school about autumn and winter seasons, well, it was one of those textbook concepts for me that had no relevance to the real world in which I lived where the four seasons were hot, hotter, hottest, and rainy.  Leaves turning yellow and the trees going bare were, well, book knowledge.  At school, we studied about deciduous trees that shed their leaves, while the mango and the tamarind and everything else looked green all the time.

When visiting the old home in Neyveli, in 2002,
the gardener working for the foreigner living there was happy to pose for me under the tamarind tree in the backyard

Decades later, for one whose formative years were in the hot and nearly-equatorial southern part of India, I now find living without the four seasons almost unimaginable. 

Years ago, when living in Southern California, where it is spring and summer most of the year, an acquaintance decided to quit her job and head back to Chicago--the place where she grew up. "I miss the four seasons" she said.  I couldn't understand it then. I now know what she meant.  I look forward to the seasons changing. There is something magical, profound, about it.

A summer evening by the Willamette

The temperature will continue to drop, the misty rains will settle in for the long haul, and the sun will become an occasional visitor.  I will yet again wonder where the hummingbirds and crows and turkey vultures and other birds go.  It will be a long while before I will see them darting about and making noises.  I will miss them. Until next spring!

When Autumn Came
By Faiz Ahmed Faiz

This is the way that autumn came to the trees:
it stripped them down to the skin,
left their ebony bodies naked.
It shook out their hearts, the yellow leaves,
scattered them over the ground.
Anyone could trample them out of shape
undisturbed by a single moan of protest.

The birds that herald dreams
were exiled from their song,
each voice torn out of its throat.
They dropped into the dust
even before the hunter strung his bow.

Oh, God of May have mercy.
Bless these withered bodies
with the passion of your resurrection;
make their dead veins flow with blood again.

Give some tree the gift of green again.
Let one bird sing.

Let them eat cakes!

It has been a year and a half since the WHO declared the novel coronavirus is a global pandemic.  With the exception of a few experts, the rest of us had to hurriedly educate ourselves on what it meant.  Life as we knew it came to a standstill with lockdowns and closures. 

Vaccines will be the only way out, we were told.

"#Trump can stamp his foot all he likes, but Americans are unlikely to risk their lives absent a high degree of certainty they are not going to contract the disease before there is a #vaccine."https://t.co/JB6Q9BUq9a#Covid19 #Recession #unemployment

— Sriram K (@congoboy) April 7, 2020

I was not the only one who celebrated how vaccines were developed way quicker than was considered likely.  When I got the second shot of the vaccine, I felt like hugging the nurse and everybody at the vaccination site.

#Freedom!!!https://t.co/slBW4X8nka
Thank you, scientists, for the #vaccine.
Now, if only the US will work with the #WHO on #VaccineEquity and help lead the world out of this #pandemic

— Sriram K (@congoboy) June 1, 2021

Through those celebrations of the arrival of the vaccine, one fact worried me--vaccine inequity.

Without #VaccineEquity, "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."https://t.co/szNzd72h0b#India #Covid19 #Vaccines

— Sriram K (@congoboy) April 30, 2021

Now, the US is considering booster shots for its people, even as a huge number of people in poorer countries have yet to receive even one dose!

This opinion essay argues that we need to vaccinate the world before starting COVID booster shots.

Of the more than 5.8 billion doses of COVID vaccines that have been administered across the world by mid-September, the vast majority (about 80 percent) have gone to people living in high- and upper-middle-income countries. Fewer than 0.5 percent of doses have gone to people in low-income countries.

How awful!

The richest countries in the world—those belonging to the G20—have failed to commit to equitable distribution of this global public health good, instead choosing to prioritize booster doses for those in their countries who are already fully vaccinated.

The authors conclude: "Countries that are rich in resources can swiftly bring an end to this deadly inequity—if only they have the moral backbone to do so."

Moral backbone we rarely have.  It is not news that we lack them.  I have always advocated for a broad and inclusive understanding of the world and caring for others.  I find it strange when people casually ignore anything that is not within their neighborhood.  In my professional and personal lives, I have tried my best to advocate for vastly enlarging the radius of our mental neighborhoods. 

In this post in October 2016, I asked "where does the neighborhood end?"  Covid shows, yet again, that the neighborhood stops with the country's border, even when we fully understand that the virus recognizes no such borders!

Meaning Without Magic

Consider the following three questions:

• How did the universe come to exist?
• Why is there suffering in the world?
• What happens after we die?

Think about those questions.

What are your responses?  How did you arrive at those responses?

As I have often noted here, religions provide wonderfully comforting frameworks that address the existential questions. 

[Religious] practice could be seen as valuable and even cherishable, once it is understood to be a natural human quest for meaning. Everything flows from the double assumption that only finitude makes for ultimate meaning and that most religious values are unconsciously secular. We are meaning-haunted creatures.  

The faithful find soothing answers to those three troubling questions.  To the ultimate believer, perhaps the three questions do not even arise.

Those of us who live without god(s) and religions find value and meaning otherwise.  We try to, at least.  Is it comforting?

Could answers to these questions "offer existential comfort without appeal to God(s)"? To put it differently, "Is it really possible to have meaning without magic?"

Consider two paths to meaning without magic: "the humanists’ path, where meaning comes from belief in claims without supernatural commitments, and the theist’s path, where meaning comes from “belief” in the value of supernatural claims without “belief” in their truth."

The author, with whose essay I began this post, is a professor at Princeton; he concludes: "Humanist beliefs can offer a sense of existential meaning, but it can take a little work to get there."

It takes a LOT of work to get there.  And that work to get there itself is valuable and meaningful.

All these provide yet another reason for me to present the wonderful lines from the late Steven Weinberg:

Living without God isn’t easy. But its very difficulty offers one other consolation—that there is a certain honor, or perhaps just a grim satisfaction, in facing up to our condition without despair and without wishful thinking—with good humor, but without God.

A Day to Atone

A re-post from a year ago:

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I have a hard time defining myself as an atheist.  Because that requires a definitive and conclusive understanding that there is no god.  As one who follows the scientific method, I know I don't have the evidence to definitively state that there is no god.  But, whatever I can understand as evidence leads to me conclude that there is a very high probability that there is no god.

I suppose that is an academic point.  For all practical purposes, yes, I am an atheist.

Yet, that does not mean I don't value and cherish many of the lessons that religions offer.  There is plenty to be understood about the human condition, and a religious lens certainly provides valuable insights into some of them.  One of them is about the mistakes that we make.

We humans are prone to commit errors; hopefully, nothing really big.  But, we do make mistakes in plenty.  Every religion has its own way of easing believers.  Like Yom Kippur in Judaism.  

Yes, this post is because it is Yom Kippur.

The holiest of the high holy days, and is about repentance and atonement.  Even an atheist has plenty to think about in this context.

The following is a slightly edited version of the post from Yom Kippur 2018:
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“How many will pass away and how many will be born? Who will live and who will die?”

I had no idea of that couplet until I read this opinion piece in the NY Times.  It is a part of Yom Kippur prayers.  A day in which we remind ourselves that "No one makes it out alive."

There’s the obvious — the plastic surgery and the digital surgery and the obsession with achieving perfect quantities of tautness and plumpness and dewiness. But look through the death lens, and you’ll see our fixation on wellness and workouts in a new way. Look through the death lens, and Silicon Valley’s project to extend life indefinitely looks as foolish as Gilgamesh’s efforts to do the same. Look through the death lens, and Instagram and Twitter look like nothing more than numbing agents.

I am not Jewish. I am not religious either. Yet, my suspicion is that I think a lot more about my mortality and, therefore, what I want to do with my limited time, more than most religious do.  Such an atheist life should really not surprise anybody; as the Huguenot philosopher and historian, Pierre Bayle wrote, way back in 1682:

It is no stranger for an atheist to live virtuously than it is strange for a Christian to live criminally. We see the latter sort of monster all the time, so why should we think the former is impossible? 

Whether it is Ramadan, or Vaikunta Ekadasi; or any religious high holy day--and I don't really observe any of those days--those are all timely, regular, reminders that no one makes it out alive and, therefore, we better figure out our priorities before it is way late.

The author of that opinion piece quotes a Manhattan rabbi, Angela Buchdahl:

thinking about your death can bring you much closer to experiencing true joy. It “compels us to squeeze out every bit of life out of every day that we have”

That has been my experience too.  As I have blogged in plenty here, thinking about my mortality makes me appreciate the good people around me; the blue sky with puffy white clouds; the sparkling waters in the river and the ocean; the giggles of a child; ... it is an endless list of miracles.

Finally, even though I am far from religions, I sincerely appreciate the "atonement" that Yom Kippur reminds.  After all, both the religious and the irreligious err.  We humans make plenty of mistakes, big and small, which add up to a lot over the years that we live.

I apologize for all my misdeeds and to all those I have wronged.

When was the last time that I dreamt in Tamil?

In the town where I grew up, and the school that I went to, we were all kids of people who had come to the town because of jobs at the mining-industrial complex.  So, there were kids in my class whose "mother tongues" were not Tamil even though the town was located in Tamil Nadu.  There were a number of Telugus. Quite a few, like Vijay and Srikumar, spoke Malayalam at home.  Kannada. Bengali. Konkani. Gujarati. Marathi. Even Saurashtra!  I think there was one guy--Sanjay?--whose parents were from Bihar (?) and spoke Hindi at home.

Which is why in one class during the elementary years, our math teacher--PK Master--asked one girl what her mother tongue was.  Not every kid was a Tamil.

Madhulika's reply was hilarious.  "Pink," she said.

It is funny as hell now.  But, if you had been in PK Master's class, you too would have blurted out even worse things.  We were all stressed that PK Master would turn to us and ask us whatever.

(I think Madhulika's family spoke Kannada at home.  Or was it Konkani?)

We did not know any better or worse.  Such linguistic diversity was normal. The way things were.

Most Americans who grow up monolingual, and remain so throughout their lives, cannot possibly relate to all these.  Nor can they begin to begin to appreciate the deep emotions that are stirred when the first language looms in the background.

After having moved far away from her native land, in this author's case, she realizes that "my native language has been sitting quietly in my soul’s vault all this time."  An accomplished linguist and writer, she writes in that wonderfully autoethnographic essay:

But embracing the dominant language comes at a price. Like a household that welcomes a new child, a single mind can’t admit a new language without some impact on other languages already residing there. Languages can co-exist, but they tussle, as do siblings, over mental resources and attention. When a bilingual person tries to articulate a thought in one language, words and grammatical structures from the other language often clamor in the background, jostling for attention. The subconscious effort of suppressing this competition can slow the retrieval of words—and if the background language elbows its way to the forefront, the speaker may resort to code-switching, plunking down a word from one language into the sentence frame of another.

The author then notes:

When a childhood language decays, so does the ability to reach far back into your own private history. Language is memory’s receptacle. It has Proustian powers. Just as smells are known to trigger vivid memories of past experiences, language is so entangled with our experiences that inhabiting a specific language helps surface submerged events or interactions that are associated with it.

Another child of immigrants has an entirely different story to tell about her mother tongue.  In this intense essay packed with emotions, "over time, Cantonese played a more minor role in my life," she writes.  What led to the memory erasure?

I became furious that my parents weren’t bilingual, too. If they valued English so much and knew how necessary it was in this country, why didn’t they do whatever it took to learn it? “Mommy and Baba had to start working. We had no money. We had no time. We needed to raise you and your brothers.” All I heard were excuses. I resented them for what I thought was laziness, an absence of sense and foresight that they should have had as my protectors. When I continued to be subjected to racial slurs even after my English had become pitch-perfect, I blamed my parents. Any progress I made towards acceptance in America was negated by their lack of assimilation. With nowhere to channel my fury, I spoke English to my parents, knowing that they couldn’t understand me. I was cruel; I called them hurtful names and belittled their intelligence. I used English, a language they admired, against them.

In immigrant families in which "successful" assimilation leads to children not learning the language of the old country, grandchildren often don't have the linguistic ability to converse with grandparents.  As Aziz Ansari joked in one of his bits, the chats with his grandmother were ultra-short because he didn't know Tamil that his grandmother spoke.  

Of course, such problems do not arise if people simply stayed put where they were born.  But, that is not an option either.  Something has to give.  Sometimes it is the pink mother tongue that we sacrifice :(