Light sleep

Today is a milestone in my personal history: I got paid for doing nothing!

Before my work-life came to a sudden end, I had a schedule, which, according to a few, was regimented.  "Live a little," people told me. 

In that schedule, I typically woke up at about 5:30, which prompted a former neighbor with whom I ceased interactions more than four years ago to ask me why I woke up that early as if I had cows to milk.

Now that I get paid for doing nothing, 5:30 is no longer a target.

It does not mean that I sleep for many more hours than I did in the past.  No siestas either.

I wish I slept like a baby.  Well into middle-age means that I no longer sleep for seven or eight continuous hours, unlike when I was younger when no amount of caffeine nor noise could keep me awake.

Decades ago, during the wedding of a cousin (who tragically died young,) a much younger cousin, who was perhaps five or six years old then, fell asleep while seated right next to the thundering thavil.  An older uncle commented jealously about the kid sleeping in that noisy setting. Only now do I truly understand his feelings!

But did adults always have uninterrupted sleep?  As I noted in this post more than six years ago, there is plenty of evidence that people had segmented sleep.

The forgotten practice of ‘segmented sleep’, memorably described by the historian A. Roger Ekirch in At Day’s Close: A History of Night-time (2005), meant that people generally slept at night in two equal intervals, spending up to two hours awake between their first and second slumber. In the long, dark winter months, when the labouring classes may have spent as many as 14 hours in bed, broken sleep was regarded as routine and natural and only disappeared in Europe with the advent of artificial lighting.

We humans were regulated by the availability of natural light.  Artificial light, which we now take for granted and even assume is some kind of a fundamental right, was expensive for the most part of human history. 

Back in the prehistoric era a person would have to gather, chop and burn wood for roughly 10 hours a day for six days straight in order to produce the equivalent light of a modern lightbulb shining for about an hour. Today, the same amount of labor could light a room for over 50 years.

In relatively modern times, artificial lighting continued to be expensive:

Around the year 1800, you could get about 10 hours of modern-equivalent lighting from animal fat candles for 60 hours of labor. Not too shabby, if you didn't mind the smell of burning animal byproducts. 

Around this time, none other than George Washington estimated that the cost of burning a single candle for five hours each night worked out to about 8 British pounds a year, or well over $1,000 in current dollars.

When we were kids, grandmas' villages suffered from power-cuts (load shedding) and even when the electrons flowed, lights were barely brighter than candles.  Weddings, therefore, always had Petromax lights.  A wedding procession in the night included workers carrying those Petromax lights on their heads.

Now, the abundant electricity has made artificial light remarkably inexpensive, which has also altered our daily schedules.  So different is contemporary life from how humans lived until very recently that students (and even middle-aged adults) boast that they are night workers who produce their best when most of the rest are asleep.  

I have no idea what the long-term impacts of our altered night lives will be.  My suspicion is that this cannot be good for our personal well-being.

On my part, I will continue to think about such issues, and collect my monthly reward for not working!

Shah Shanked

We skipped past quite a few English and French movie titles.  We were about to give up when we spotted an Indian movie in the suggestions.

I have no patience for three-hour song-and-dance melodrama of movies from India, whatever the language might be.  I am yet to recover from the painful experience from a few years ago when I watched one because of a friend's suggestion.  She now owes me big time for having made me suffer!

But then I spotted Naseeruddin Shah's face.  

I still remember him as Albert Pinto, from back when I was a proud commie sympathizer.  A few years ago, we watched him as a magical chef in Aasif Manndvi's Today's Special. So, yes, Shah's face is all I needed to be convinced to watch Ramprasad Ki Tehrvi.

A few minutes into the movie, it was clear that Shah was not the main character but was making a guest appearance.  I was trapped by false advertising! 

The movie seemed like it was more suited for live theatre than as a cinematic experience.  While I lack any expertise, as a fan of live theatre and movies, I know the difference when I watch them.  The rather simple plot of family dynamics after the death of the patriarch lacked the layers that I expect from a movie that features Naseeruddin Shah.

I was reminded of the couple of Anton Chekov's plays that I have watched.  They are about people, families, and the humans that we all are, which then means that the play is like life itself--a mix of good times and bad, and good hearts and evil.  Chekov doesn't point fingers at a bad person; instead, the bad apple is very much a part of the orchard as the good ones are.  (Did I play enough on Chekov's The Cherry Orchard?)

I loved Chekov's Uncle Vanya so much that I quoted from it in my first ever commentary on higher education that was not in a newspaper.  The quote won me favors with a colleague who was an English professor, but nobody else seemed to care.

This Hindi movie, too, did not present anybody as the wicked and evil person, but portrayed them as humans with flaws.  However, a Chekov play it was not!

After the movie ended, it was time to find out more about the movie.  Wikipedia informed me that the movies was indeed based on a play.

Turns out that the actor who played the role of the youngest daughter-in-law is the daughter of Aparna Sen. 

I was reminded of Sen's wonderful movie, 36 Chowringhee Lane, which I watched as a teenager.  I was impressed with every aspect of the movie.  About how the story was told. About the story itself.  And about the director being a woman!

Has India forgotten how to make quality movies?

Neural atrophy

There are heart and brain surgeries that take hours from the beginning to the end.  It takes a lot of focused work to get those done.  The surgeons and nurses working in operating rooms get there after years of intense and focused training over years.  Often, these are the same people who also spent hours as students focused on the learning materials in school.

One can easily think of many other professions that require undivided attention from its practitioners and wannabes. Will the "digital culture" affect the abilities of kids and adults to engage in deep and sustained practices?  Without the deep and sustained learning approach, are we looking at a rapid dumbing down?

I have been worried about this for a long time.  In my classes, for instance, I could easily see that reading and thinking about the ideas and information in the class materials was not something most students did; they were far more interested in endless swiping and texting on their smartphones. 

Of course, one could argue that most students even in the pre-digital era didn't engage in deep reading and thinking.  But, my suspicion that the percentages have worsened over time.

Reading V.S. Naipaul's The Engima of Arrival or Orhan Pamuk's Silent House is nowhere the digital skimming that is increasingly the norm.  I need to track the names of people and places, which were all "alien" especially in the Turkish novel.  Reading a lengthy novel over a few sittings over days meant that I had to remember everything that happened cumulatively.  A deep reading that is needed, unlike when I flick through my Twitter feed, for instance.

The implications of the loss of deep reading go far beyond literature.  One doesn't need a better example than the immediate former President of the US, who famously boasted that he didn't need to read books because he was already the smartest one around, and whose thinking and writing were expressed in tweets.

But, of course, we need to base our arguments on more than mere examples.  Maryanne Wolf writes:

Within this context, the “strong hypothesis” here is that if we are not vigilant, cognition will alter with little realization by most; the quality of our attention will change along with different forms of memory; and comprehension for complexity will change. Over time, there will be downstream effects on the quality of our background knowledge and of our understanding of others, which is the basis for seeking the “good” and discerning the “truth” of whatever we read or do next. The ultimate effects of such threats to how we process information and knowledge would weaken the basis of a thoughtful, empathic citizenry — the foundation of our democracy. Figuratively and physiologically, we will not be the wiser.

Don't you already see around you the loss of a thoughtful citizenry, who also seem to be incapable of discerning truth from misinformation and good from bad?

I agree with Wolf: "Deep reading, like the reading brain circuit itself, is not a given; it is built by use, or it atrophies from disuse."

It is unfortunate that there is seemingly nothing that we can do to prevent this atrophy.

Making moral choices

The third paragraph of this commentary on artificial intelligence (AI) making moral choices included a link to Delphi, which uses machine learning to tell us right from wrong. 

I paused reading the essay and jumped over to Delphi in order to test-drive the AI. 

I asked three questions that are contemporary.  First:

Then:

Finally:

I am in agreement with the AI's thinking, of course.  But, I believe it is not correct to leave it to AI to provide me with input leave alone decide for me. 

I asked Delphi that question too:

Of course the damn machine thinks it is ok!

How does Delphi work?

Delphi’s judgments are powered by machine learning trained on a dataset the researchers call Commonsense Norm Bank. Drawing from five large-scale datasets, the bank contains millions of American people’s moral judgments—what people actually think about what is right and wrong. Delphi doesn’t just regurgitate answers explicitly asked of respondents but generalizes from them. (With each answer, it offers this disclaimer: “Delphi’s responses are automatically extrapolated from a survey of US crowd workers and may contain inappropriate or offensive results.”)

In case you think that AI making decisions belongs to the future, here's an example of how they are used even now:

When your credit card gets blocked for suspicious activity, for instance, it’s not a person making that call. It’s an AI that determines whether a transaction is so unusual, given your purchasing history and the purchasing patterns of people like you, that the transaction shouldn’t go through. When AI is right, it stops a thief from using your credit card. And when it’s wrong, it can leave you in a lurch. As software gets smarter, it will be deployed more often to make fast decisions that affect people’s lives in more significant ways.

Until two years ago, before embarking on international travel, I would register myself with the US State Department and also inform my credit card companies.  I didn't want my credit card to be denied because the charges were happening far from my home.  I no longer have to inform the credit card companies about my travel plans. Their algorithm knows from my spending patterns (and the actual items too) whether it is me in Delhi or if somebody in Delhi has illegally accessed my credit card.  The machines are already at work!

As programmers and big-data researchers develop algorithms that will increasingly affect our everyday lives, I wonder how many of them would have been through rigorous training in ethics. 

In the old country, which turns out computer scientists and coders by the minute, 18-year old high school graduates go on to engineering schools where courses in the humanities and ethics might be an afterthought at best.  

Here in the US, the broad general education is considered a mere hurdle to get over, and most students will be happy if they never had to take such courses.  A few years ago, I served as an advisor to an undergraduate student on her computer science thesis in which she looked at ethical considerations because, well, the curriculum did not offer anything in ethics in computer science!

If ethics were a concern, don't you think Facebook's business model would be very different from what it is now?

I asked Delphi about Facebook.  In not condemning Facebook, the AI merely adds a warning:

Like father, like sons

In 1950, on the 26th of January, India kicked out the colonizers for ever and became a republic.

The new constitution was adopted and went into effect, the Bastard Raj ended, and the old colonizer was set to become an island increasingly irrelevant in the world as it had always been for the most part of human existence!

Even as an Indian, I never cared for the Republic Day celebrations, however.  Because, it was less about the spirit of independence and more about jingoism and the military spectacle.  Further, with age, I have also become a wussy peacenik, with no stomach for military marches.

My brother has another reason to mark the 26th of January.  It is the official national day of his adopted country, which continues to have the crown as its figurehead for reasons beyond my understanding.  Maybe it is a white thing!

All those are political.

On a strictly personal level, January 26th is a day to celebrate.  I owe my existence, my male chromosome, to an event that happened on the 26th.

It is the day that my father was born in 1930.

Paal paayasam for the 92-year old and for everybody! ;)

About a decade ago

Shanti!

I think it was in 1972--I was eight years old then--when we went with a bus load of Iyer families to visit a couple of temples, including Srisailam.  Well, the main purpose of this trip was to pay tribute to the head of the Kanchi Kamakoti Peetam, who was away from Kanchipuram and had "camped" near Srisailam.

We walked into the camp chanting "Hara hara, Sankara; Jaya jaya, Sankara." We submitted the offerings at the feet of the Mahaperiyava, and stayed for the puja.  I was convinced that I was participating in something extraordinary.

A few years after that, the junior head, Periayava, came to Neyveli for a few days and we were at this local "camp" quite a few times to pray and listen to his lectures.  I liked his lectures because he sprinkled jokes, and I have always loved humor of any kind in any setting.  Here was a sanyasi with whom I could relate!

I was still in my teens when a successor was anointed.  A 14-year was chosen as the successor to Periyava.  14!  It blew my mind that a young teenager could be launched on a path to becoming an acharya, a spiritual leader, for tens of thousands of people.

Of course, by this time I was in my own orbit, rushing farther and farther away from the traditional practices and the religion in which I was raised. 

I was a student in an engineering college when the three acharyas came to the town where my aunt's family lived.  My grandmothers were also visiting, and we all went to pay respects to the three.

Blue-Skinned Gods reminded me of all those--especially the selection of a young boy as a spiritual leader.  The author creatively uses Hindu mythology in weaving a story in which a ten-year old boy with blue-skin is hailed and revered as a god who heals.  His father establishes an ashram to which the locals bring their sick ones.  The father has great plans to go international, which leads to the novel's climactic ending.

Perhaps the faithful will consider the novel to be blasphemous.  But then the real world ashrams and their spiritual leaders offer plenty of drama that are often beyond the wildest imaginations of screenplay writers.  For instance, the murder mystery that ensnared the Kanchi Acharyas continues to baffle me!

Ultimately, the "need" for gods among us mortals is all because of the existential angst, which results in sufferings of many kinds that science and technology can only mitigate at best, but never solve.  Spiritual leaders, like the acharyas, are the ones to whom we often turn to for advice about the angst and peace of mind.  These leaders, whatever the religion might be, are, after all, humans like us, which then makes possible fictional works like Blue-Skinned Gods.

Birthrights, Jews ... and Brahmins?

Right from the first paragraph, this essay resonated with me in so many different ways.  A couple of hours later, I wrote to the author, William Deresiewicz, whom I have met in the real world and with whom I have corresponded.  In this blog, I have made plenty of references to his writings, like this one, and even reviewed one of his later books.

A few years ago, I invited him to talk with students and faculty.  He was ready and eager to do it for practically no fee at all.  I was excited, until the managers nixed the idea.  I suppose it was yet another piece of evidence that I was a misfit at my old university.

So, yes, I wrote to Deresiewicz.  He replied right away that he loved my feedback.

The following is mostly what I wrote to him in an email with the subject line that is the title of this post:

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

We have met and corresponded during my efforts to bring you to Western Oregon University.  The managers nixed that idea, much to my disappointment.  Unrelated to all that, and because of the ongoing financial crisis, I was recently laid off--one of the many tenured professors whose careers abruptly ended.

But then I never did fit into the university's faculty culture for various reasons.  One of them is related to what you write in Birthrights: "the group demands unswerving adherence to norms. Deviate, and you’re no longer part of the us."

It is not about higher education that I write to you about, though there is plenty to share.  Your essay made me think, yet again, of the parallels between the Jewish traditions and the Brahminical culture in which I was born and raised.

In the Jewish environment of your childhood, you write: "There were things you couldn’t say and things you had to say, things you couldn’t do and things you had to do. ... To violate one of these precepts, which carried the force of taboo, was to commit an unthinkable act, an offense against the group as well as God. It was to mark yourself as other, beyond the pale, a kind of pollution. And in our tightknit world, with scores of families living in close proximity, you felt the eyes of the community eternally upon you." 

That can easily describe my formative years too--in a totally different culture and halfway around the world.

Like it was for you, it was in my early teens that I realized that there was something fundamentally wrong about the faith (Hinduism) itself, the faith that also created castes and all the rules that governed everyday life.  Slowly and steadily, Dickens and Dostoevsky and Maugham and Gorky and more helped me understand the world in ways that I had otherwise not imagined. 

Before I knew it, I had also outed myself as an atheist! 

While you spent some time in Israel trying to figure out whether that would be a better home than America was to you, I was fleeing the old country that was choking my thoughts.  Even now, it is only the elderly parents and a few others who draw me to India. The old country has become far more intolerable than it was a few decades ago because Hindu religious nationalism has infected what was the country's secular space too! 

So, though the old country is beautiful and charismatic, with a long and rich history with which I can easily and effortlessly relate, your bottom-line is no different from mine: "My home, with whatever ambivalence, was America. My home was with other Americans."

There's a lot more that I could write--in agreement--with your wonderful essay, particularly on topics like Latinx and punctuality and the long list of uber-left talking points that are just bizarre.  But, I shall stop here.

Fool's gold

Oscar Wilde wrote that a cynic was "a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."  Along those lines, we are a world full of greedy cynics now.

It is not merely the sweets that have lost the value.  New clothes have lost their value.  Movies have lost their value.  In every one of those situations, and in more, the rarity provided the excitement and value.  Sweets were not in abundance at home.  New clothes were bought just a couple of times a year.  To go to a movie required lots of planning and it was excitement in plenty.

In the contemporary era of abundance, we do not even have to leave our homes in order to have sweets, wear new clothes, watch movies, do whatever.  They are delivered to us.  Movies have become examples of instant gratification, which we could not have imagined even a few years ago.

We are awash with so much abundance that there is no special value for anything.  We know the price of everything--and prices are at rock bottom--but, all those that used to add charm to our lives have lost their value.

Most of us live in a Midas world. 

Thankfully, the food that we touch doesn't turn into gold.  But, our lives are also increasingly resembling the problem that Midas had: We can't seem to find real happiness in a world of abundance.

Meanwhile, our appetite for gold continues to grow.  How much more material well being do we want, if we are not content and happy with what we currently have?  Or, as Thoreau asked, how many copper pumps do we need?  Is there a ceiling at all, or is our material want sky high with no limits?

Or, is there a limit when, like Midas, we too will regret the golden touch?  Will we wash the gold off our hands in order to truly understand the value of everything around us?

Here comes the sun

"Do your people in India also mark the solstice?"

An interesting question for this retired professor.

I chose to stay away from beginning with an explanation of uttarayanam and dhakshinayanam.  They respectively refer to the (apparent) northward and southward movement of the sun.  After the winter solstice, the sun begins to move northward bringing more light and heat to the northern hemisphere, which includes the Subcontinent.

"Of course" I told him.  "In fact, the big celebration of the northward movement of the sun happens in mid-January in my old part of India.  It is a three-day festival."

"Is it a particularly Hindu thing?"

"Traditionally, a long time ago, there were no Muslims and Christians, and it was a bunch of beliefs that we refer to as Hindu.  It is a celebration of life itself" I replied.

I didn't want to bug him about the long and rich Tamil history according to which Pongal seems to have been celebrated as long as 2,000 years ago.

Pongal as a marker of time and as a symbol of the cosmic mystery itself is what Carl Sagan talks about in this segment on Hinduism in his phenomenally influential television series, Cosmos.  The video footage includes everything that happens over the three-day celebration: The cleaning up of homes and the whitewashing of the exteriors; the newly harvested rice being boiled--the boiling overflow itself giving the name Pongal; the cows and bulls treated specially on the third day; sugarcane and turmeric being part of the celebrations; ...

Thankfully, he didn't ask me why the festival is being celebrated three weeks after the solstice.  Because, that is a question that requires a technical understanding of earth's rotation and gravity that is simply beyond my capabilities, and I would have certainly bullshitted a response.  All I know is that about 2,000 years ago, Pongal did coincide with the solstice and since then the date has drifted away in the Tamil calendar.

As a child, I feasted on sakkarapongal with extra helpings of ghee.  Mid-afternoon, my brother and I would sit in the backyard and chew on the sugarcane, and once we were also stupid enough to try juicing it.  

Life is all about creating memories and re-living them in our minds.  My pongal memories overflow the mind.

As we say in the old country, pongalo pongal!

There but for the grace of God go I

A few years ago, in a commentary on homelessness in America, the author wrote that one of the biggest problems in this country is the lack of empathy from the housed, who seem to believe that they could never become homeless. 

While the sheltered--poor and rich alike--might worry about, for instance, health issues like cancer and, therefore, participate in efforts to advance treatments and cures, their apathy towards the homeless arises from a confidence that that such a condition will never fall upon them.

I operate at the other end of the spectrum, where I believe that misfortunes that people suffer could have easily happened to me too. 

It is sheer luck that I am not homeless, nor a drug addict, nor one who has already died from an incurable disease.  While not a religious person, I pretty much think along the lines of there but for the grace of god go I!

I was lucky that I was born into an educated upper-class/caste privileged family in India, whose economic security was beyond the imaginations of an overwhelming majority.  It will be a lie if I were to claim even the few accomplishments as testament to my personal efforts because that will completely overlook the familial and societal contexts that made everything in my life possible.

Had I been born into a different family and in a different part of India, and a family that did not have money nor education, life would have turned out differently.  I could have become the custodial worker at the Delhi airport whom I encountered, who smiled and acknowledged us entering and exiting the restrooms, the cleanliness of which was his responsibility.

Of course there is pride in any work that we do.  His work is considered an essential service too, unlike most of what the rest of us do while we hurry through the airport.  But, the material comforts and the prestige that we non-essential workers enjoy are not his.  He sees planes big and small every single day, but chances are close to nil that he has ever flown even for only a few minutes. 

After spending thousands of dollars that he dreams that his children might earn some day, I complain about jet lag and the pain of traveling for 36 hours.  There but for the grace of god go I!

Sam I am not

I grew up with stories of people in the extended family having worked in Rangoon, Singapore, and Ceylon.  Those were during the days of the British Raj.  They were forced to rush to India when Japan started attacking Burma and Singapore. 

Most of them managed to get away well ahead of time, but a few had no choice but to trek through jungle trails before they could get transportation to peninsular India.  One of them later recalled those stories during a conversation in which I systematically guided her with questions about those days that interested me. 

One of the most fascinating aspects of her childhood in Rangoon was her school, which was run by Christian missionaries.  "We were all given Christian names," she said.  Kalyani was Bernadette at school.

While the name Bernadette was thrust on Kalyani as a price to pay to study at a missionary-run school, it was not unusual for many students I knew in graduate school in the US to voluntarily assume a Christian name.  Such practice was more frequent among students from China and South Korea, and rarely from students who were from Islamic countries like Syria and Saudi Arabia. 

Even a few Indian students walked around with Christian names that they used with their non-Indian friends.  A classmate from my engineering college, who did his MS in Texas, became Andy; after all these years, I have even forgotten the part of his name that has now morphed into Andy!

In my first full time employment in California, a colleague often joked that had I come to the country a hundred years prior, I would have been registered in the documents at Ellis Island at Sam Murphy.  That is impossible for one and only one reason: Back then people from India could not immigrate to the US.  Immigration laws clearly excluded us "Asiatic" people.

We browns started trickling into the country only after the atrocious Chinese Exclusion Act was thrown out and immigration laws were reformed.  It was a bold move to Make America Great Again!

The trickle slowly at first, and then rapidly, became a flood of non-whites immigrating to America.  Quite a few assumed Christian names in order to fit in, and gave their children names from their cultures that would not stand out too much in the adopted land. 

Now, some of them are beginning to take ownership of their "real" names and cultures.

Marian Chia-Ming Liu writes about her experiences in the Washington Post.  "Over the years, I’d essentially erased the middle two words of the name on my birth certificate: Marian Chia-Ming Liu." 

In reclaiming her name, she explains what it means:

The middle character is one I share with all my first cousins on my father’s side. It comes from a poem that dates back to the Qin dynasty, 221 B.C. Each generation takes the next word. Other cultures that use pictographs in their languages, like Japanese and Korean, says Maasbach, also use poems in their names. While it’s spelled out as “Chia” in English, it’s pronounced more like “Jiā” (家) and means “home” — which is particularly significant to me as a journalist who has moved across the country and world for work.

Lastly, my individual name — like a first name in English — is Ming (明). (The same character as former NBA player Yao Ming’s name.) Combined with the middle character, the name is rather masculine; my grandfather didn’t want me to be the kind of woman who needed a man to depend on. One side of the character is a sun and the other the moon. Together, the character means “bright,” and next to my grandfather’s name, Tsong (聪明), the resulting phrase means “smart.”

There is so much to her name that we outsiders wouldn't have known.  I am blown away with the explanation!

“What's in a name? That which we call a rose/ By any other name would smell as sweet," wrote Shakespeare.  If only we recognized and appreciated the sweetness in "strange" sounding names!

"We are never sure of anything, including ourselves."

Back when I was a professor (ha!) I often urged students to be direct in the essay.  I advised them to be clear right from the opening sentence and paragraph, and not bury the lede nor hide behind convoluted presentations.

Apparently, I rarely ever got that message through.

So, I no longer work as a professor (huh?!)

During those professorial years, I once tried to bring William Deresiewicz to campus.  I had hoped for two different sessions on the purpose of higher education: One in which he would engage with students, and in another the audience would be faculty and staff.

Deresiewicz was ready to do it for practically no fees.  But, I couldn't convince the powers-to-be.

Deresiewicz is direct right from the get go in this essay.  One can't get more direct than this:

... religion is a lie. [Ross] Douthat is “puzzled” that secular-minded people think the rationality of religion has been disproven. We are puzzled that anyone as intelligent as Douthat (my favorite of the Times opinion columnists, though I often disagree with him) can still believe, not just in a higher power or cosmic intelligence, but in the whole menagerie of dogma: miracles, messiahs, resurrections, angels and demons and heavens and hells, the literal truth of ancient myths.

But, the essay is not about religion or god.  Instead, it is about the purpose of higher education.

Before we get there, Deresiewicz notes:

But Douthat is right about one thing, and it is a very big thing. He is right (the point is only touched on in this particular piece, but he has pursued it elsewhere, and it is the very premise of the kind of argu-ment he’s making here) that secularism leaves us in a moral and spiritual and in some sense emotional vacuum. It doesn’t tell us what to do or how to live; it doesn’t connect us to anything larger than ourselves; it doesn’t bring us into relationship with other people. It leaves us alone with our terrors, our confusions, our despair.

For some of us, this is vaccum is also a freedom to conscientiously make our choices on how to live a good life.  We don't do certain things and pursue others not because we are afraid of hell and are attracted to the promise of heaven--because we don't believe in heaven and hell--but because what we do or don't do is important to us in this lifetime.  And through those carefully considered decisions we feel connected to people and to the cosmos.

In a secular framework, as Deresiewicz asks, we are faced with important questions: "What is college for? What should we teach our students?"

You can now see why I wanted Deresiewicz to come to campus and engage with students, faculty, and staff.

In my own ways, I tried to engage with students who came my way, and with a few faculty and staff.  Ironically, most students and faculty thought I was a conservative.  I was not being an activist to their liking.  Activism that is captured under an umbrella of "social justice."

Deresiewicz argues that in the non-religious secular context in which teaching and learning happen, social justice has become the new religion.  "With stunning speed and unanimity, colleges and universities have rebranded themselves en masse as seminaries of social action, places where you go to learn to “change the world.”

Like any cult, this rebranded religion of activism will soon meet its end.  If only faculty and students had instead engaged in something that will stand the test of time:

I have also long recognized what art, what the humanities, cannot provide them, or me. It cannot provide us with the stability or certainty of creedal religion (including the certainty that it is, indeed, the right path). The only structure humanistic study offers is the classroom; the only guidance, a welter of ambiguous representations. You read a book—and then what? You graduate from college—and then what? Art enlarges our capacities, but it doesn’t tell us what to do with them. It develops our ability to figure things out for ourselves, but we still have to figure things out for ourselves. Our wisdom is always tenuous; our convictions are always tentative. We are never sure of anything, including ourselves.

Deresiewicz has long been an outsider after his voluntary exit from higher education.  I now join him in exile.

Truthful storytelling

After reading A Farewell to Arms, I blogged:

Hemingway simply sucked everything out of me with the anti-war story where the American protagonist signs up to serve in the medical corps of the Italian army in order to fight the good war, ends up deserting that only to have the military come after him because of his AWOL status as an officer, flees to neutral Switzerland with his British "wife" who is pregnant ... and then Hemingway lets the wife die after a difficult birth of a stillborn child. That is simply too cruel!

I could, therefore, totally relate to the Bradley Cooper character in Silver Linings Playbook, when he charges into the parents' bedroom at four in the morning to yell about the very ending that Hemingway wrote.

That ending, after all the experiences, was cruel.

But then it is such an ending that also makes the story real for us readers.  Any other ending would simply not have been truthful.

A good work in literature is as much a pursuit of truth as we expect in rigorous scientific work.  Alan Lightman, who is both an accomplished physicist and a novelist talked about the pursuit of truth in both.  The example that he chose was James Joyce's short story "The Dead," which is a one of the fifteen in The Dubliners.   Lightman said:

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.

Orhan Pamuk trusted his readers with his storytelling via plenty of interior monologues of his characters, and he knew well that for the story to ring true he had to write the ending that he did in Silent House.  As I reached the final pages of the novel, like the Bradley Cooper character, I was ready to fling the book while yelling "the fuck!"  But, I did not.

Who reads Ambai?

I read in the news that "Tamil feminist writer Ambai, whose writings challenge the stereotyping of women, has won this year’s Sahitya Akademi award."

Ambai?

I have been away from the old country for 35 years.  Did I miss reading her when I was in India and reading Tamil magazines?  Or, have I read her stories but forgotten them?  But then did she write in the mainstream magazines that almost always published traditional stories?  Or, was she an an exception like Jayakanthan whose stories were published in those conservative outfits too despite his work and politics being too radical?

It was time to dig deep.

Ambai is only her pen name, adopted at 16 when C.S. Lakshmi began writing Tamil fiction. "In those days it was fashionable to write under a pen name. Besides, I was not fond of my name because down south every child born on Friday is called Lakshmi."

I remember back then many writers used pseudonyms.  A male wrote under the female name of Sujatha.  For that matter, even in serious poetry, unlike Sujatha's potboiler prose, Kanagasabai Subburathnam wrote as Bharathidasan.  Pseudonyms were very popular in Tamil.  For the longest time, I thought that the writer Indira Parthasarathy was a woman!

But, the name Ambai?  A relatively important town near grandmother's village was Ambai, which is short for Ambasamudram.  Is she also from that part of the Tamil world?

Turned out that she is not from that part of my old country.  C.S. Lakshmi adopted as her pseudonym the name of a character in a short story that made a deep impression when she was a young girl.

Maybe Ambai is an author who is not unknown among people.  But, over the years I have observed only a dramatic diminishing of reading.  It seemed like Indians had become obsessed with material economic growth, cricket, and masala movies, and all the tamasha that never ends.  Book-reading has become an endangered human habit in the old country.  Even the news about the Sahitya Akademi Award would not have been read.

When I read that Ambai prefers writing short stories to novels, well, that sealed the deal for me who is a sucker for the short form of storytelling.  I decided to get two books: A collection in Tamil, and another collection of short stories that have been translated to English.

I am all set.

Source

Turkish Coffee

In the Russian novels that I read, samovar was a word that often popped up.  The primitive and rudimentary dictionary that we had at home helped me out with an understanding that it was an urn-like metal container to boil water for tea.

It was news to me that they drank tea in Russia.

A novel is not merely about a hero or a heroine and the villains.  To me, a novel also gave me a wonderful window into the lives of peoples somewhere far away from the southern tip of the Subcontinent that was home to me.

It fascinated me to no end that they drank tea in Russia.  We drank a lot of chai, and I knew that tea was a thing in China.  Of course, the British with their "high tea."  And the famous Boston Tea Party that we read about in the chapter on American Revolution in the history book.  But, tea in Russia?

When people talk about globalization as a new thing, I always point out that we have been global for a long time.  It is just that the pace of globalization picked up a lot in recent times so much so that there is now practically no inhabited place on the planet that is exclusively local.

Tea drinking in Russia fits into that narrative of globalization in history.

Orhan Pamuk describes in Silent House the changes that globalization brought to modern Turkey.  From Coca Cola to the culture of tanning at the beach like Europeans, the result of global interactions are in plenty in the fictional work.  A character dreaming of moving to America and making for himself a good life there is relatable to many of us.

None of the characters drank the Turkish coffee that I am familiar with because of my interest in coffee.  I assumed that there would be at least one scene that was set in a coffee shop where they drank (ate?) the brown sludge (ha!)  But, not even one.

There is also the food and drink that is truly local.  Like the drink raki.  Unlike the bad old days when I had to rely on a primitive and rudimentary dictionary, I now have the all-knowing Google at hand, which gives me detailed answers when I go looking for what raki means.  It even confirmed my suspicion that the word is related to arrack that I remember being a part of the dark and seedy looking liquor stores in India back when I was growing up.

With only a third of the novel remaining, the names of the characters are familiar.  Ceylan and Metin and Nilgun are now part of the world that I too inhabit.  

It is like how the name Nazife Emel was once alien to me.  A Turkish name that I knew only because a fellow Indian, Sukumar Ganapati--a Tamil--who was a couple of years junior to me in the doctoral program wrote to me once that he had married another doctoral student named Emel, whom I had not known. 

What we cannot learn from the real world with its physical limitations we can certainly learn from the fictional world that brings us all closer than we can imagine.

Imagination and Empathy

The power of imagination that fiction provides!  They help us understand the world, and somehow make order of the chaos that is outside.

With the Indian fiction, especially like in RK Narayan's Swami and Friends, there was no need to imagine much.  Because I ate the same kind of foods. Like Swami, I too hoped to have a good cricket game every single day.  Swami's grandmother reminded me a lot of my own grandmothers.  I could absolutely relate to this fictional kid in a fictional town.  His Malgudi was my Neyveli, plus Sengottai, plus Pattamadai.  The pains and pleasures of his were mine as well.
 
I had to imagine a lot, a considerable lot, when I read fictional works by British and American authors. And, of course, the Russian authors too.  The people and the settings in Somerset Maugham's were unlike Swami and Malgudi.  London was anything bigger and grander than I had ever seen.  Moscow and New York seemed like alien planets!  

It was never a one-to-one matching between me and the characters.  But, the human condition bore plenty of similarities.  Similarities to what I felt and experienced, or to what I observed around me.  I could imagine the situations in which the Artful Dodger was trapped in a world of child criminals in a Dickensian world.  I could empathize with him and Oliver Twist.  I could feel for Anna Karenina.

As one whose imaginations are highly circumscribed, and as one with no creativity, I have always turned to storytellers to help me understand the world in all its complexity.  In all my years of reading fiction, I haven't read works by writers who grew up in Muslim countries telling stories that were set in the Islamic world. 

Orhan Pamuk's Silent House fills that gaping hole. 

I suppose in a way it is only fitting for me to bridge the gap with story that is set in Turkey, which itself is the land bridge between Europe and Asia, between Christianity and Islam, between antiquity and modern.  A country that was "reformed" in a hurry by Kemal Ataturk.

The names of people and places were different from what I have been used to.  Unlike many of the Russian ones that I read in translation in which a page listed the characters' names and their relationships, there is no cheat sheet here that I can refer back to.  Heck, it took me a while to figure out that bey means gentleman!

Now that I am familiar with the characters and halfway into the novel, I cannot understand why I never read any of Pamuk's novels all these years!

A new groundhog day?

I woke up.  Had coffee and ate.
And then rested.

I read.
And then rested.

I walked.
And then rested.

I ate.
And then rested.

I read.
And then rested.

I played.
And then rested.

I ate.
And then rested.

I walked.
And then rested.

I read.
And then rested.

This is a new routine for me.  A routine in which there is no "work."

I suppose this is what it means to simply be.

I welcome 2022.