Spill the beans

I am getting used to a new grocery store in town, which is way bigger than the one that I used to frequent.  No more interactions with the former body-builder and others.  The small talk that happened a lot at the old grocery store is, well, history.

The last time that this happened was when my parents moved to a new home from one part of Chennai to another.  The grocery store people was one of the many to whom my parents bid goodbye after 25 years of interactions that were more than mere small talk--the store owner even attended my sister's wedding!

Life happens and we literally move on to new places.

A couple of weeks ago, I was at the coffee bins, mixing the roasts to bring about my own preferred taste.  I don't like the charcoal like dark roasts.  Nor the pale light roast.  But, the dark and the light bring their own chemistry to the brew.  Which is why I typically mix a heavy proportion of the espresso roast with a little bit of light and dark.

I emptied the bag's content into the grinder.  I was about to hit the power button when I felt a guy rushing towards me.  He was one of the employees.

"Do you know how to use this machine?"

Was this guy serious?  Doesn't he know that coffee is practically a religion to me?  In all my decades of grinding coffee at the grocery stores, not once has anybody interfered with my purchase.

"Yes, thank you" I replied.

My immediate thought was, of course, related to my skin color and my appearance.  Did that white guy think that I was fresh off the boat from a shithole and that I wouldn't know how to use a coffee grinder?

I finished grinding and moved on.

Today, he took his attitude to a whole new level.

He was filling the coffee bins.  I approached the machine that was near him in order to grind today's mix.

"The next time, use one of the machines away from me when you see me working," he said.

WTF!

The guy is plainly rude, or a racist, or both.

Assholes are everywhere.  Life will be a lot more enjoyable without them.

The tricks and treats of life

It seems like there was a "fancy dress" competition in school.  Or was it at Park Club? 

Oh well, it doesn't matter either way because it is not like I ever participated in those.  I suppose I have always been General Malaise!

From the colonizers, the elites picked up the idea of high tea and fancy dress (costume party.)  The wannabe elites in the township too had to have these, of course.

The fancy dress events were the closest to Halloween.  But then, until I came to the US, I had no idea that there is something called Halloween when kids go trick or treating and load up on candies.

When students have asked me about my Halloween costume, I have offered them my typical response: "every day is Halloween for me.  People take one look at me and run away scared." 

The day after Halloween is when male students begin to view me with respect and jealousy!

On the other hand, the Hindu life in which I was born and raised offered plenty of "fancy dress" and ghosts throughout the year.  No special day was ever needed. 

As a kid, I was terrified of the image of Bhadrakali.  I had yet to learn that those were not photos but were artistic renderings of vivid imaginations.  I am glad that we didn't have television back then.  Chances are that I would have been terrified of all the violence in Tom and Jerry!  Yes, I have always been a wuss; thanks for asking.

Ghosts were everywhere, especially in tamarind trees.  For whatever reasons, some believed--yes, believed--that tamarind trees were the favorite "haunts" for ghosts. 

At our home in the township, in addition to one big tamarind tree at the gate, there were five or six others in our compound.  Add to this minimal lighting all around and dull streetlights, hey, even adults can easily become terrified.  Every single night was Halloween spooky!

And then there were those times when ghosts presented themselves through people.  Like how my grandmother "appeared" through my cousin, who thus had his fifteen minutes of fame.

The older I get, there are times when I wonder if what I recall as memory are of events that happened or whether they are merely figments of my wild imagination.  Aging is one hell of a strange experience and is the ultimate trick-or-treat event in life!

What am I doing here?

As Ross Perot's running mate, retired Vice Admiral Jim Stockdale uttered the memorable "Who am I? Why am I here?" lines in the vice presidential debate in 1992.  

Stockdale had an unintended effect of laughter as a response, when he had planned that as a serious opener to critiquing politics.  While that laughter didn't really tip the elections one way or another, he didn't get the job that he was auditioning for either.

Millions of Americans apparently have been asking questions in recent months about themselves and their employment in a Jim Stockdale-like manner.  In response, they too are out of jobs--people have been voluntarily quitting.  The Great Resignation, as it is being referred to.

Why are millions quitting, and why are millions of job openings unfilled?

There's something existential behind the #GreatResignation: "The pandemic and the rise of remote work have changed the way we view our lives and the world."https://t.co/1flESYGNFz#Covid #WorkLifeBalance

— Sriram K (@congoboy) October 27, 2021

Our view of life, work, and our fleeting presence in this world has changed dramatically as a result of the epidemic.

In the old country, people refer to Smashana Vairagya (स्मशान वैराग्य).  At the cremation grounds (smashanam) as we look at the burning body of the person that we loved so dearly, we are hit with the realization that we too will be dead one day.  That momentary understanding leads to a determination (vairagya) to examine one's priorities in life.

However, that is a fleeting sense of detachment because after a few minutes, or a few hours, or a couple of days, we return to the material world and get back to chasing after the irrelevant aspects of life.  After all, we are humans.

Covid, on the other hand, was not merely one death.  It has been days and days, months and months, of death and suffering of people we know and hundreds of thousands that we don't know.  But, the photos and videos of humans suddenly perishing, or of their families and friends struggling to find a bed in hospitals that were crammed full of covid patients, drove home the message that a single death alone cannot do.  Smashana vairagya became more than a fleeting emotion, and became deep set in many minds.

Work became the least important thing in many people's lives.  Living gained priority.  Their kids became important.  They quit.  And many of them do not plan to return to employment, at least not right away.

While there is plenty that Hindu philosophy has to offer on this topic, even a secular framework can help us think through whether we should be worried about this Great Resignation.

This author is one--and not an exception--who argues that this is a good thing:

A lot of us fundamentally said to ourselves, “I’m not going to take this or continue this job because I don’t have enough flexibility, or because I want to take care of the people I love, whether that’s kids or families or aging parents. It’s balancing things out in a way so it’s not just C-suite level leaders or boardrooms dictating what needs to happen in someone’s life or for the economy. 

I see it as actually balancing the scales to be more equal where people are standing up for themselves and saying, “This is what’s most important to me, and therefore, I will say no to what’s not.” That’s amazing.

Especially when they figure out how to get by, many of them will not return to the work force.

Count me in that statistic, even if for different reasons.  My priorities are very different now.  And this is no स्मशान वैराग्य.

Within me ... without I

It was a chance encounter. 

We were looking for a table, and the empty spaces were deep into the room.  We chatted with the two who were seated at the table as we proceeded to have a tasty South Indian lunch, which included aviyal--a favorite of mine.

During the small talk with strangers that turned out to be quite informative, he described one of his projects that incorporated Rabindra Sangeet, the compositions by Rabindranath Tagore. 

The last time anybody even mentioned Rabindra Sangeet was during my graduate school years.  Whether they loved it or not, the Bengali graduate school friends were all too familiar with it.  And now, a complete stranger talks about it?  And about how he brings it into a play?  Life is simply fascinating.

I wanted to listen what he had to say, and stayed away from boring everybody about the couple of months that I lived in Calcutta.  Rabindra Sangeet was around me every morning, from the radios of the homes and the tea shops.  Rasgullas seemed to taste even better with Rabindra Sangeet in the background.  

Tagore was a man of literature. And the arts. And science too.  A Renaissance man.  And a mystic.

I came across a poem by Kabir that Tagore translated into the English language.  One mystic relaying the work of another mystic that Kabir was.  One of the many poems by Kabir that Tagore translated.

I wonder if Tagore set this poem to music too!

There's A Moon Inside My Body

THE moon shines in my body, but my blind eyes cannot see it:

The moon is within me, and so is the sun.
The unstruck drum of Eternity is sounded within me; but my deaf ears cannot hear it.

So long as man clamours for the I and the Mine, his works are as naught:
When all love of the I and the Mine is dead, then the work of the Lord is done.
For work has no other aim than the getting of knowledge:
When that comes, then work is put away.

The flower blooms for the fruit: when the fruit comes, the flower withers.
The musk is in the deer, but it seeks it not within itself: it wanders in quest of grass.

Labor and Antiwork

Unless you have systematically shut yourself off all kinds of news reports and social media, you know well that there is a serious labor shortage here in the US. There are about 10 million jobs that aren't staffed.  There are no takers!

Take a look at the following examples:

• "Where are the workers?," asks the New York Times.
• The worst crisis at the state level is in Nebraska with "three job openings for every unemployed Nebraskan — signifying the largest labor shortage among all states."
• The US labor market could face structural problems, says the CEO of Whirlpool.

What's going on?

Lots of things are going on.  And that is the problem!

Farhad Manjoo writes that "there might also be something deeper afoot."

In its sudden rearrangement of daily life, the pandemic might have prompted many people to entertain a wonderfully un-American new possibility — that our society is entirely too obsessed with work, that employment is not the only avenue through which to derive meaning in life and that sometimes no job is better than a bad job.

I am not surprised one bit.

I have been writing for a while that there is something wrong with the obsession with work.  And about bullshit jobs.  The following is one of those that I am re-posting here; it is from October 12, 2019:

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

If you are like me, you, too, until today, have never ever come across the word nepreryvka.  What does that mean?

Glad you asked.  Because I want us all to pause a little and think about it.

In 1929, Stalin--yes, that Joseph Stalin and not this guy--introduced a staggered schedule that was known as nepreryvka, "or the “continuous workweek,” since production never stopped."

The government divided workers into five groups, and assigned each to a different day off. On any given day, four-fifths of the proletariat would show up to their factories and work while the other fifth rested. Each laborer received a colored slip of paper—yellow, orange, red, purple, or green—that signified his or her group.

Oh, why five when there are seven days in a week?  Because his governemnt "downsized the week from seven to five days. Saturday and Sunday were abolished."

Anything introduced by Stalin ought to be the worst for humanity, right?  What was awful about this continuous workweek?

People had no time to see friends; instead they associated by color: purple people with purple people, orange with orange, and so on. Managers were supposed to assign husbands and wives to the same color but rarely did.

You are perhaps thinking, "hey, that was back in the godawful USSR."  Think again.

How many people do you know in the working age who truly do not work on Saturdays and Sundays?  Do they leave at a reasonable hour in the morning and return home about the same decent hour in the evening?  Are they checking their work emails during their "off" time?  Do you hear people complaining that it is increasingly difficult even to plan dinners with family and friends because of conflicting work schedules?

Remember that we are talking about people in the working age.  Think about 25 to 55.  Those of us over 55 are lucky that we are mostly done, as long as we are able to hang on to whatever we are now doing.

We seem to have created for ourselves a nepreryvka in a market economy, without a Stalin dictating it,?

Whereas we once shared the same temporal rhythms—five days on, two days off, federal holidays, thank-God-it’s-Fridays—our weeks are now shaped by the unpredictable dictates of our employers. Nearly a fifth of Americans hold jobs with nonstandard or variable hours. They may work seasonally, on rotating shifts, or in the gig economy driving for Uber or delivering for Postmates. Meanwhile, more people on the upper end of the pay scale are working long hours. Combine the people who have unpredictable workweeks with those who have prolonged ones, and you get a good third of the American labor force.

Why does this matter?  "A calendar is more than the organization of days and months. It’s the blueprint for a shared life."

Without a shared life, there are no shared memories either.  Shared memories are what we are left with, yes?

It’s a cliché among political philosophers that if you want to create the conditions for tyranny, you sever the bonds of intimate relationships and local community. “Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals,” Hannah Arendt famously wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism. She focused on the role of terror in breaking down social and family ties in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin. But we don’t need a secret police to turn us into atomized, isolated souls. All it takes is for us to stand by while unbridled capitalism rips apart the temporal preserves that used to let us cultivate the seeds of civil society and nurture the sadly fragile shoots of affection, affinity, and solidarity.

What good is a smartphone and "progress" if we can't get together consistently and create memories?

Horse, carriage, and ... taxation?

Back in the old country, I knew Frank Sinatra only as an actor!  In Von Ryan's Express that I recall watching in the cinema in Madras that screened English films.  How could a teenage boy not like World War II action movies!

It was only after coming to America that I knew how huge a star Sinatra was, and how the crooner made women swoon.  After all, there was nobody around me in the old country who listened to music from the US or Europe or anywhere else.

From the day I arrived here in my adopted land, I have been immersed in all things Americana.  And, thus, as I have often mentioned in this blog, one of my all time favorite songs is his signature song.  

The first time I heard another song of Sinatra's, Love and marriage, which I like but is not in any of my top listings, was in a sitcom that even back then was far from politically correct.  Sinatra sings:

Love and marriage, love and marriage, 

Go together like a horse and carriage. 

This I tell ya, brother,

you can't have one without the other.  

Love and marriage, love and marriage, 

It's an institute you can't disparage. 

Ask the local gentry and they will say it's elementary. 

 Try, try, try to separate them, it's an illusion.

Horse-and-carriage is practically history.  When was the last time that you rode one?  While marriage has not become extinct, yet, it certainly is not the institution that it once was.

Yet, we have government policies in place that favor marriage.  Married people have rights and privileges that the unmarried do not have.   I have argued many times that a government has no place in "marriage."  Until recently, governments didn't have any role in this. Marriages were the domain of families, villages, and religious authorities.

The government's interest was all because of taxation.  But, I don't want to rant about that in this post.

Instead, I want to highlight that it is time that we examined the role of government in marriage when adults are increasingly choosing to be unmarried.  As Charles Blow asks, is it "fair and right to continue to reward and encourage marriage through taxation and policy when fewer people — disproportionately Black ones — are choosing marriage or finding acceptable partnerships"?

Social structures and norms are changing, and changing rapidly.  Marriage is one of those:

Census data that shows low marriage rates among millennials and Gen Z-ers — only 29 percent of 18-to-34-year-olds were married in 2018, compared to 59 percent in 1978 — begets headlines bemoaning a “marriage crisis” or predicting “the end of marriage in America.”

Yet, as much as cooking shows are popular despite the fact that most kitchens are rarely used, reality shows about finding Mr. Right and Ms. Right are popular as ever:

In reality TV land, singlehood isn’t a newly desirable state, but rather a purgatory that people will exit as soon as their finances allow, or they meet the right partner, or an army of TV producers steps in to intervene. And these shows aren’t an anachronism as much as a cry for a roadmap — a shortcut to getting married once and for all.

There is a huge disconnect between reality TV and the real world, and the viewers seem to want to escape into the fantasy, similar to how Indian masala movies are all about falling in love when "love marriage" is rarely welcomed by many.

I suppose this kind of cognitive dissonance is also what makes us human.  Else, we will be automatons ;)

I am not a crook

A wedding is coming up in the extended family, and I will be there representing the extended family's eldest--my father.  I wondered whether two cousins, who are a few years younger than me, will be in attendance. 

In the old days, as in before the coronavirus, the question would not have popped up in my head.  Of course they will be at the wedding.  Duh!  But these are weird Covid times.

In the email, she answered the question: "you'll have an awesome reunion with them!"

I have not seen them for decades.  More than forty years have gone by?  I have pleasant memories of them all, and their late father.

During one of the usual summer stays with grandmas, we kids went to Trivandrum.  In the extended family scene, it made no difference whether it was the grandma or the great-aunt.  We were happy to spend time with them, and they were delighted that we visited.

The "lost" cousins also lived in the same city--their father was a professor.  One day, he came to the great-aunt's home, picked us up in his Standard Herald (Fiat?) and off we went to their home.

I am sure that my brother and I ingloriously feasted on whatever they gave us, and my sister would have behaved properly.  

He said he would show us a few photographs from their years in America.

But, he didn't bring out any photo album.

Instead, out came a gadget, on which he mounted a circular tray.

That was the first time I had ever seen a photo slide projector.  In fact, until then--and I was perhaps about 11 years old--I didn't even know that there was such a gadget.

I don't think there was a screen--the photos were projected on a wall.  There is only one photo that I remember after all these decades.  It was a photo of President Nixon.

I was doubly blown away now.  He had taken a photo of the American President?

A few years later, the family returned to America, as I recall.  I am sure I will get the timeline straightened out at the "reunion."

Life is about memories.  Every day, we create more memories. Some are pleasant. Some are profound.  A few are traumatic.  

In my life, the charming and pleasant memories far outweigh the traumatic and sad ones.  The cosmos has treated me well.

To have or not to have. Is that even a question?

My grandmothers did not work outside the home; they worked like hell inside.  At home, among other work, they took care of the children they gave birth to.  But, they didn't do it all by themselves.

Consider my Sengottai grandmother. Her life was in a joint family-- a multi-generational household in which the matriarch lived with her daughter and son-in-law, and their sons and daughters-in-law.  My grandmother was one of the daughters-in-law.

When my grandmother had kids--four of them, and all daughters--she was not the only one taking care of the girls.  Depending on the time of the day, there were other family members who attended to the infant or the toddler.

After getting married, my mother was practically in a nuclear family setting--with the occasional long stays by her mother-in-law (my paternal grandmother) or her mother (my maternal grandmother.)  During their visits, grandmas helped out in the kitchen and with the kids.  And, yes, my mother too did not work outside the home.

When we were three or four years old, we started "lower kindergarten."  LKG, as it was referred to.  And then a year of UKG, before first grade began. (Yes, it means that we were all potty-trained well before LKG.)

Neither my mother nor my grandmother worried about child care for their kids.

But then those were the old days when a woman's role was highly circumscribed. 

At first gradually, and then suddenly, conditions for women changed in India too.  My father's younger female cousins went to college.  A couple of them started working as professionals--one was a teacher, and two are physicians.  My sister earned a graduate degree in chemistry.  Now, there is no young woman in the extended family who does not have a college degree.

Such changes in the old country made possible the wonderful image of women rocket scientists celebrating their achievement in India's space program.

Did those women scientists have to worry about child care for their kids?  My speculation is that they did not.

I don't know their back stories.  But, chances are good that if those scientists are also mothers, then child care was never a big worry for them--grandparents, almost always grandmothers, took care of the young ones while the parents were off at work.  Nuclear families in which the parents, especially mothers, exclusively take care of their kids is more the exception than the rule in the old country.

Of course, that is not the case here in the United States.

So, if people willingly live as nuclear families, many in a single-parent situation, and far away from grandparents, then is child care a personal responsibility or a social issue that has to be collectively addressed?

When there is no going back to living as joint families, and when there is no going back to restricting what women can do, it does not take a female rocket scientist in India to figure out that we have a huge problem in this country.

The two main political parties here are divided on this, as one can easily imagine. 

[Progressives] are seeking a paradigm shift. They see child care much like public education: a service on which society depends and therefore should ensure. 

“It’s a public good and should be treated that way” said Julie Kashen, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation. “The shared stake in seeing children thrive doesn’t suddenly begin when they turn five.” 

But conservatives fear government intrusion into the family realm. Rachel Greszler, an analyst with the Heritage Foundation, recently warned Congress that the measure would increase costs and drive small centers out of business, especially those based in homes and churches. She also said the policy would penalize parents who stay at home, taxing them to expand center-based care and ignoring the “tremendous personal and societal value” of full-time child-rearing.

I was/am never a fan of government-subsidies for adults to have children.  As an atheist, I don't have any sympathy for an argument that god wants us to have children.  In the secular framework, having a child is a conscious (or, sometimes, an accidental) choice.  Decisions on what we choose to do have consequences.

But, I have also always believed that subsidies for human issues are far more important than subsidies for corporations.

However, as long as we have a party that is committed to protecting the life of abstract "persons" that corporations are, and with their party faithful committed to defending the "life" of a fetus in a petri dish while not caring about investing in life that is already here alive and suffering, we are doomed.

So, what can you do?  The answer is simple.

Do the right thing

In the city where my parents live, there is litter everywhere. 

Plastic bags are one of the many eyesores.  More than an eyesore, for instance, when they clog the storm water intakes and add to urban flooding during the monsoons. 

A few years ago, my father, who likes cleanliness and order, thought that perhaps he would do something at least right outside his own yard.  He talked with the "watchmen" at the neighboring buildings and told them that they could at least keep their own respective street-fronts clear of waste. The logic is that people do not generally litter a clean place, but are always quick to add crap if there is a pile of waste. 

It worked for a week or so.  And that was it. 

That experience is a reminder that individual actions rarely ever make a real difference, when it is the massive system that needs to be changed.  Yet, in our own ways, many of us try to do what we believe are the right things in the tiny bit of the world over which we might have some say.  Such feel-good acts do not really seem to matter in the grand scheme of things.  Does it mean that we should stop doing them?

The author of this essay argues that "individual action is part of the collective. So, while you won’t save the world on your own, you might be part of the solution."

I agree with that logic.  I do what I have to do fully knowing that I won't save the world on my own.  But, at least, I am not adding to the world's problems, and I am trying to be part of the solution.

Further, through our actions, "we can encourage others to make these changes too, triggering a ripple effect. ... It is difficult to try to convince people that they should change their habits without following such advice yourself; if you want people to take you seriously, practice what you preach."

Of course, one can easily imagine a game-theory situation in which me doing the right thing could lead to another person transgressing even more than before, creating what would seem like a "winner" out of that person while I become a "loser."

The old Hindu belief says that should not matter.  Not even a little bit.  I need to keep doing what is right, irrespective of what others do. 

One doesn't even need any Hindu background.  After all, mothers have been saying those very things to children all over the world with guidance such as "I don't care if others jump off the bridge."

Bug off!

A few years ago, one day I saw a couple of ants in the kitchen.  I went on a red alert after killing them--I was sure that the two meant that more were on their way.

Sure enough, they came. In increasing numbers.  After a few more days of spot and kill, when I saw a long line of them marching, I called up a pest control guy. 

"I keep my home, especially the kitchen, really clean.  Yet there are ants," I told him.

He behaved like he had heard them all.  He nodded.  "Even hospitals have ants inside."

And then he continued with this: "You live on an ant hill."

That's the problem.  We make homes in territories where there is plenty of life, big and small.  And in our arrogance we want to clear away those other life forms.  Ants, which were the original inhabitants, are being wiped out by settlers like me.

A few years ago, when I returned home after being gone for a week or so, I found that wasps had made themselves a home right outside my front door.  Wasp spray and then hosing it down.  Wasps gone.

I kill spiders all the time. 

The occasional fly either has to find a way back out, or die. 

When I kill these bugs, I apologize to them. A sorry, within my mind.  I feel bad I have to kill them. 

A few years ago, when scientists speculated that sometime in the near future women might be able to reproduce without a need for sperm and, therefore, a male in their lives, a news report included reactions from women.  One woman said that she knows that women like her will need men because it is men's job to kill spiders that she hated.

What's with humans and spiders?  Why do we commit arachnicide?  Perhaps because of our pathological fear of things with eight legs?  Our parents scared the shit out of us about spiders when we were toddlers?  We certainly don't enjoy walking into one of their webs that we don't even see.  A complex set of reasons. 

I try my best to give bugs their space not only because they deserve to live as much as I deserve to live, but also because way back in middle or high school we learnt about food chains and ecosystems and that message stuck with me.  We are all dependent on each other.  Unfortunately, we humans have gained enough power over other life forms that we casually and easily decimate this complex relationship.  With one spray, I can kill a hundred ants all at once!  As we humans dramatically alter the natural environment, quite a few bugs are being wiped out of existence altogether.

I understand all these, but only intellectually.  Even if I didn't love bugs ...  Emotionally, I don't ever want to see big fat spiders hanging from the ceiling!

On the meanness and miserliness of prosperous countries

I don't know anything about the scientists who were awarded the Nobel in medicine, nor in chemistry, nor in physics.  On occasions, I can at least pretend to have heard about them well before the Nobel, like in the case of CRISPR.  But, otherwise, almost always the laureates names are new to me.

What's good for the sciences is good for literature too.  I had never ever before heard of Abdulrazak Gurnah, who is the most recent honoree.

Who is Gurnah?  He was born in Zanzibar, and in 1964," a violent uprising forced Gurnah, when he was 18, to flee to England."

Hmmm ... Zanzibar to England.  Remind you of another brown-skinned person?

Gurnah, 72, is the first Black writer to receive the prize since Toni Morrison in 1993, and some observers saw his selection as a long overdue corrective after years of European and American Nobel laureates.

European and American writers dominate the higher education curriculum too.  A few years ago, I was a member of the campus curriculum committee when we reviewed a proposal from the English Department.  I asked them what "world literature" in the proposal meant.  I was shocked that there was but only one course that addressed ALL the literature from the vast part of the world that was outside Europe and North America.  It is understandable that we are restricted by language, and we can only read those that have been translated into English.  But, still ...

Amid the heated speculation in the run-up to this year’s award, the literature prize was called out for lacking diversity among its winners. The journalist Greta Thurfjell, writing in Dagens Nyheter, a Swedish newspaper, noted that 95 of the 117 past Nobel laureates were from Europe or North America, and that only 16 winners had been women. “Can it really continue like that?” she asked.

An alien might conclude from the data that it is overwhelmingly only males from Europe and North America who author outstanding works in literature!

Consider, for instance, the Sahitya Akademi Awards in India, which are conferred on "writers of the most outstanding books of literary merit published in any of the 24 major Indian languages."  Any of the 24 major languages!  Now, from that list, take a look at the honorees whose works were in the English language.

So, yes, Abdulrazak Gurnah's selection is a much needed corrective.

Gurnah’s first language is Swahili, but he adopted English as his literary language, with his prose often inflected with traces of Swahili, Arabic and German. He drew on the imagery and stories from the Quran, as well as from Arabic and Persian poetry, particularly “The Arabian Nights.” Occasionally, he had to push back against publishers who wanted to italicize or Anglicize Swahili and Arabic references and phrases in his books, he said.

“There’s a way in which British publishing, and perhaps American publishing as well, always wants to make the alien seem alien,” he said. “They want you to italicize it or even put a glossary. And I think no, no, no, no.”

Gurnah is the third Muslim to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.  An immigrant in the post-Brexit UK; I bet he has plenty of opinions on this matter.

In both his scholarly work and his fiction, Gurnah has tried to uncover “the way in which colonialism transformed everything in the world, and people who are living through it are still processing that experience and some of its wounds,” he said.

The same themes that occupied him early in his career, when he was processing the effects of his own displacement, feel equally urgent today, he said, as both Europe and America have been gripped with a backlash against immigrants and refugees, and political instability and war have driven more people from their home countries. “It’s a kind of meanness and miserliness on the part of these prosperous countries that say, we don’t want these people,” he said. “They’re getting these literally handfuls of people compared to European migrations.

An unfashionable post

A few years ago, during lunch time, a colleague chatted with me and then said he was on his way to the local chicken teriyaki joint.

There are many occasions when I forget to keep my mouth shut.  That was one of those times.  I replied that there is something wrong when a bowl of rice with teriyaki chicken is that dirt cheap.

He paused. He said he decided against getting that for lunch and returned to his office.

Feeling bad that he was sitting hungry in his office, I took to him a chocolate bar.

Even faculty who intellectually engage with various aspects of the environment and the economy apparently do not think much about the inexpensive chicken lunch at the local diner.

They should.

And about other aspects of life too.

Like the clothes we wear. 

One needs to wonder how it can be possible for a brand-name t-shirt to be manufactured on the other side of the planet, transported all the way here, and retailed for just a few dollars a piece.  It can mean only one thing: The workers who grow the cotton, and the workers in the garment industry are being screwed.

I think of my own life, and can easily see how rapidly my consumption has increased.  Take, for instance, clothes. Back in the old country, all my clothes could have been packed into a small carry-on.  Come to think of it, way back, many kids did not even wear underwear.  I say this with confidence because one of the punishments at school was to stand up on the bench. One of the old jokes related to this punishment is this:
The teacher asks, "where is Kenya?"

The student has no clue.
The teacher tells the student to stand on the bench.
The smartass student then asks, "if I stand up on the bench, will I be able to see Kenya?" 

It was a public shaming--the one standing up on the bench did something wrong according to the teacher and now the entire class and anybody who passed by is made aware as well.  Such a "stand up on the bench" would sometimes result in the nearby kids being able to see the bat and balls, if you know what I mean.  Kids went commando by default and not by choice.

We now own clothes in quantities that perhaps even royalty a thousand years ago could not have had.  And they are inexpensive too.  There's something wrong with this picture.  What's wrong?  "People with money need to realize that there is no way workers are being paid fair wages for a $10 dress."

Should be obvious, no?

It is not sustainable any which way you look at such consumption.

The Western notion of “sustainability” has always looked very white, yet the process of garment-making largely relies on nonwhite people. It is nonwhite people working in those sweatshops and having resources taken from their land. Our fashion system hurts the countries we’ve outsourced labor to, and they are tasked with having the world’s clothing “donations” dumped into their backyard.

You read that correctly--our out-of-fashion clothes are donated to, and dumped in, the countries of the non-white people, and almost always somewhere in Africa.  Like in Ghana.  Accra has “become the dumping ground for textile waste,”  Of course, not all the donations are usable, which means that now they have a waste management problem also to deal with.

I shudder to think about how this is all going to end!

Oh my!!!
👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽 https://t.co/aaiEQsWT2W

— Sriram K (@congoboy) October 6, 2021

Can't see 'em. But they kill!

When we kids came down with chickenpox, I came to understand all the more the wonderful life that we had compared to decades past when the first sign of a bubble on the skin panicked people about the dreaded smallpox. Thus, it was no surprise when the family thanked the "amman" goddess after the recovery.  The fact that we lived in an industrial township amidst all the science and technology didn't matter.  Science and religion coexisted without any hassles in the family and in the community too.

When I returned to school after the few days off, my class teacher exempted me from attending the school assembly under the hot morning sun, which was quite a reward! ;) 

There were worries about mumps and measles too, when we were kids.  After hearing about a kid in school who died from diphtheria, I had one more addition to my vocabulary of dreaded diseases even though I had no clue what any of those ailments were. 

Life, even a few decades ago, was an obstacle race.  Viruses and bacteria were always waiting to trip people of all ages down, and any one obstacle could end it all.  We have quickly forgotten how difficult existence was a mere generation or two ago, in any part of the world. A virus or a bacteria, on the other hand, doesn't forget, and tries its best live and propagate.  If those suckers live, we die.

So, whatever happened to diphtheria that killed a young school-mate of mine?  How widespread was this "throat distemper"?

Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, diphtheria challenged doctors with the terrible specter of children choked, smothered, snuffed out. It brought terror to the richest and the poorest, blighting famous families and anonymous ones.

No royal power could match this deadly disease.

And then something happened:

Then, toward the end of the 19th century, scientists started identifying the bacteria that caused this human misery—giving the pathogen a name and delineating its poisonous weapon. It was diphtheria that led researchers around the world to unite in an unprecedented effort, using laboratory investigations to come up with new treatments for struggling, suffocating victims. And it was diphtheria that prompted doctors and public health officials to coordinate their efforts in cities worldwide, taking much of the terror out of a deadly disease.

A pathogen. It chokes people to death.  Public health.  Global coordination.

Seems familiar, doesn't it!

Scientists developed a vaccine against the bacteria, and now we pretty much never ever hear about diphtheria.  A few years ago, when I went to the doctor after a nasty reaction to an insect bite, they gave me a Tdap vaccine that protects adults from tetanus, diphtheria, and whooping cough.  A booster shot of sorts.  Sounds familiar?

If only the story ended there.

And yet, the diphtheria story isn’t over. A recent analysis led by a researcher at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention noted some 8,800 cases reported overseas in 2017. In places where people aren’t getting vaccinated, or are slacking off on booster shots, diphtheria is finding its way back. And the standard treatment, little changed in more than a century, is in short supply.

"Remembering these success stories can help us maintain a feeling of awe, gratitude and willingness to do our part."

People have forgotten the nasty, brutish, and short lives of a few generations ago.  Those who forget history are bound to relive it; unfortunately, they make the rest of us also relive it sometimes to the point of dying from it :(

Care for கீரை?

கீரை (Keerai) is one of my favorites--among many--in the foods in the old country.  The dry curry; the variation with tamarind; and, of course, the one with coconut.  I could eat them all day long.

These are amaranth leaves.  Like mulakkeerai and arakkerai.  Have I ever been to the fields where these are cultivated?  Nope. Never. Not once!  I am not the only one to suffer such disconnect; an overwhelming majority of us have no relationship with the land and the workers who grow such awesomely tasty and healthy vegetables.  Bizarre it sounds as I express it in words!

In fact, the name amaranth was unknown to me through all my life until I came to the US.  Spinach here didn't feel and taste the same as the keerai in India, which then compelled me to learn what the difference was in the leafy vegetables that I relished so much all through my younger years.  At first, I read the word as amarnath and wondered why it had such an Indian name.

What I didn't know until just a few weeks ago was this: "Amaranth is an 8,000-year-old pseudocereal – not a grain, but a seed, like quinoa and buckwheat – indigenous to Mesoamerica, but also grown in China, India, south-east Asia, west Africa and the Caribbean."

One hell of a head-scratcher!

It has been a decade-plus since I knew there was something called quinoa, which I then made it a part of my kitchen pantry.  Now amaranth?  And it has been grown all over the world?  If so, how come I am learning about it only now?

Before the Spanish arrived in the Americas, the Aztecs and Maya cultivated amaranth as an excellent source of proteins, but also for ceremonial purposes. When Spanish conquistadors arrived on the continent in the 16th century, they threatened to cut off the hands of anyone who grew the crop, fearing that the Indigenous Americans’ spiritual connection to plants and the land might undermine Christianity.

As an old colonial-power hater, it never surprises me to read about the extent to which colonizers were fanatic in their mission.  There is no amount of reparation that can ever compensate for the atrocities that were committed in the name of the crown and Jesus.

While amaranth is no longer banned, Tsosie-Peña says “planting it today feels like an act of resistance”. Reestablishing relationships with other Indigenous communities across international borders is part of a “larger movement of self-determination of Indigenous peoples”, she says, to return to the “alternative economies that existed before capitalism, that existed before the United States”.

There were plenty of alternative economies and food habits in the past before colonization and "modernization."  We need to learn from them and popularize the good aspects, like amaranth and quinoa as sources of nutrition.  Not mere calories but micronutrients too.  "As a complete protein with all nine essential amino acids, amaranth is a highly nutritious source of manganese, magnesium, phosphorus, iron and antioxidants that may improve brain function and reduce inflammation."

My favorite example from the old country is finger millet.  It is a crop that is hardy and grows well even when there isn't a whole lot of water--unlike rice that requires a hell of a lot of water.  But, finger millet is now more a novelty item in the urban kitchen than a continuation of tradition, though it is a sustainable and enriching food.

There are a number of easy, effective, and healthy ways to feed the world of the 10 billion that we will be before this century ends.  We don't want to make amaranth and quinoa and millet orphan crops in the pursuit of pizzas and burgers and fries and Coca-Cola!

Milk it

As a kid, I knew that there were two kinds of milk that we used at home--cow's milk and buffalo milk.  Well, here in the US, where buffaloes once roamed in large numbers, I should qualify that as milk from water buffaloes.  To us, it was simply buffalo.

Pandurangan delivered cow's milk.  And Ramamani (?) had buffaloes.  Pandurangan seemed to be at ease with adding water to the milk, which often led to problems with our neighbor who checked for the specific gravity using a lactometer.

It was a simple life.

I came to the US, and the grocery stores were filled with different kinds of milk.
Homogenized.
Low fat.
Skim. 
Ultra pasteurized. ...

Almost every carton had an image of a happy cow.  No buffaloes.

And then there were other kinds of milk.  "Milk" I should say.  Soya milk? Almond milk?  I had never heard of these in the old country.  Of course, I was familiar with தேங்கா பால் (coconut milk); but, nobody--I mean, nobody--that I knew drank that as an alternative to milk.  Coffee and tea were not made with coconut milk.

Over the three-plus decades that I have lived here, the non-dairy milk options have vastly increased.  As a fan of cashew, I once tried out cashew milk.  And, a few months ago, I tried out oat milk.  They tasted like what you would think it would taste like--crap!

I don't drink milk, nor add it to coffee.  But, I eat a lot of yogurt.  Of course, there is non-dairy yogurt.  I am too much of a wuss to taste something that was made from cashew milk or soy milk.

The reality is that we humans have invented this milk fetish.  Other mammals couldn't care about milk.  Not even cats.  Like us, cats are lactose intolerant.  Well, most of us humans are lactose intolerant, which is why we convert it into yogurt first, and then make a religion out of தயிர் சாதம் (yogurt plus rice.)  Force feeding milk has been one hell of an advertising success for the milk industry.

BTW, did you know that the buffalo is the national mammal of the US?  To drink buffalo milk will then be highly patriotic, no? ;)