Cousin Brothers ... and the sisterhood of authors

First, it was in Blue-Skinned Gods.

And then it was in The City of Good Death.

And now in The Death of Vivek Oji.

In all those three works of fiction, the stories revolve around two cousins who grow up more as brothers.  The authors are all women, about the same age too, and writing about the (inner) lives of young men.

The first, S J Sindu, is a Srilankan-Canadian with Tamil roots.  The second, Priyanka A. Champaneri, is an Indian-American whose parents migrated from Gujarat.  Unlike these two authors, Akwaeke Emezi immigrated to the US from Nigeria, where she was born and raised. 

Emezi, unlike the other two authors, was born to parents of two different ethnicities: Her father is Nigerian (Igbo) and her mother is Tamil.

A Tamil married to a Nigerian?  This real life story appeals to me far more than the fiction that Emezi weaves.

The authors represent how much humans have moved around, unlike all the previous centuries when humans lived and died pretty much near where they were born.

Champaneri's parents migrated halfway around the world seeking better opportunities in the US.  A story that is familiar to me and millions of others.

On the other hand, if there hadn't been a raging civil war in Sri Lanka, Sindu's parents might not have emigrated.

Emezi's mother is a Tamil from Malaysia. "My dad went to medical school in Russia and met my mom in London while she was at nursing school."

What a fascinating world in which we live!

Three non-white women telling stories that are set in non-white land reminds me of Orhan Pamuk's comment about non-white authors in the English language:

When I began writing, no one cared about Turkey, no one knew about Turkey. In 1985 I went to America for two years and began to write The Black Book around then. Finding that my voice was getting stronger, I really remember thinking, ‘my God these Latin American writers are so lucky, who cares about Turkish writers or Middle Eastern writers or Muslim or Indian or Pakistani writers?’ That’s what I thought then. But the situation has changed in 25 years and during that change my books boomed, I am happy to say that. There are political reasons, cultural reasons, history, all of which changed the world. And now I would say that a big writer from Turkey or the Middle East or India is more visible. Salman Rushdie, for example, was visible in 1981. It all began after that. ...

I'm sure we will be reading more Indian literature, because Indian literature in English is slightly more visible, than say, Chinese or Latin American. But I would say, the private lives of non-western nations will be more visible in future. That I can only say. Non-western writers will be more visible and domination of the European-American small world – they were dominating the whole world – that domination will be less. But it's not an animosity, it's not a clash, it's a friendship. We have learned the art of the novel from them – Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Proust, Mann. These are my brothers; I am not fighting with them.

To treat my midlife crisis: A shiny red ... pot?

The old rice cooker that I have used for a few years is showing its age.  The nonstick surface has quite a few scratches; the muscle memory worries about potential carcinogenic effects of the chemical that makes the nonstick surface.

As a kid, when we went to spend summers with the grandmothers, their kitchens had wood-fired stoves, and rice was cooked the traditional way.  A huge pot of rice over flames that were fueled by firewood or coal.  When the starchy water started bubbling over, they knew how to lower the heat by adjusting the wood or coal.  The kitchen was not a fun place to hang out, with all the smoke and heat and sweat.

Then came the pressure cooker for rice and daal and vegetables.  Even my grandmother started using a pressure cooker!

When my mother and grandmothers and aunts cooked rice, boy did the starch stick everywhere.  The empty dishes were then left to soak in water for a while in order to make cleaning easy.

The real advantage of the nonstick surface was not in cooking rice but in preparing all those tasty dishes.  Not having to worry whether stuff was getting caught and burnt in the bottom was a great relief.

But, that advantage meant that we dealt a chemical that was unnatural.  Synthetic.  The tradeoffs that we engage with!

It simply amazes me how technologists and entrepreneurs come up with better and easier and inexpensive gadgets like the electronic rice cooker, which, in addition to making everyday living a lot less complicated, make life that much more exciting. 

Without a rice cooker and nonstick cookware, I doubt I would  have ever experimented in the kitchen.  Tasty experiments like how I once added dried cranberries to the my version of a rice pilaf, much to the displeasure of a visiting cousin :)

To continue experimenting, it was time to replace the old rice cooker.  

A click on the website is all it took for the new stainless steel--no Teflon coating--rice cooker to arrive on the front porch.

In such a short time frame that my life has been thus far, I have gone from witnessing wood-fired stoves and traditional cooking, to using cranberries, which I had not seen nor tasted in the old country, while cooking with a digital rice cooker.

putin Attacks Ukraine

#StandWithUkraine 💛💙

🎥: @dorosh_raw pic.twitter.com/5Cq7qbPCue

— Ukraine / Україна (@Ukraine) February 22, 2022

Click here to read my past posts, critical of war and wondering why we don't work towards peace.

My own personal book club

When I was young, we never seemed to have enough money for me to buy books.  Other than books for school, that is. 

Throughout my life in the old country, money was tight.  My parents did the household budget and accounting in the presence of us kids, and we were all well aware that there was no free money lying around.

Often, the parents borrowed from the rainy-day-fund.  We became intensely aware that the rainy-day-fund was being depleted.

I knew it was a luxury for me to buy books.  

So, I relied on the local library.

That small library had more what I needed those days.  Heck, that library even had Fahrenheit 451, and The Prophet, which are evidence enough that it was not a bad library by any means.  I didn't fully understand what I was reading, but that did not matter one bit.

When we moved to the big city of Madras, I made wonderful use of the libraries at the American and British consulates to read newspapers and magazines.  I don't recall borrowing books from either one.

Attending graduate school at a university with more libraries than I could have imagined, with more books than I could have ever dreamt of, meant that I now had even less of an incentive to purchase books.

But, every once in a while, I do buy books.  And am always ready to loan them to anybody who is interested.  Why would I not want others to read the books that I read?

Over the four decades since the end of high school, I read more non-fiction books than full-length works of fiction.  I read plenty of short stories in The New Yorker and The Atlantic, but rarely ever did I pick up a novel to read.  Years went by without buying a novel because I found contemporary full-length fiction to be unappealing.  Were I in the mood for one, I preferred to go back to the classics. 

In recent years, I have gotten back to reading novels.  What started as carefully curated summer reads have now become a part of regular life, especially during this unplanned and forced retirement.

Even the local library is a part of my life now--for the first time after the Neyveli years.

Ironically, I am picking up the old habit of borrowing books from the local public library when one half the country is hell bent on banning books. 

The dystopian future that Ray Bradbury described in Fahrenheit 451, in which books were burnt because they triggered discomfort in people, has arrived.  Like the premise in Fahrenheit 451, Republicans understand that preventing people--especially kids--from reading books that are critical will make it easier for them to govern over unthinking and brainwashed masses.

Republicans are out to prove that Bradbury was correct in saying: “You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them”.  Stop young people from reading altogether, or at least from reading the "wrong" books, and, as one of their leaders famously said in a different context, Mission Accomplished!

I will head to the local public library and pick up two books that are on hold for me to borrow: The Death of Vivek Oji, and Burnt Sugar.

Source

Bearing witness to an unfolding unjust war

From my small little corner of the world, I have always been worried about what Putin would do--and this was even before his evil schemes that helped TFG win the election in 2016.

In her Secondhand Time, Svetlana Alexievich wrote about how the collapse of the Soviet system not only shattered the structure of the everyday life that people lived, but it also eviscerated the ideas about Russia and its place in the world and, along with that, their own place in this world. 

The Russians who talked with her were pissed off at how their lives had been ruined.  They loved Putin, who, as an effective demagogue, know well how to tap into this anger and frustration.

Svetlana Alexievich's comment about Putin made a deep impression on me.  She said:

“In the West, people demonize Putin,” Ms. Alexievich, who turns 68 later this month, said in a recent interview here, speaking Russian through a translator after a conference on her work at the University of Gothenburg. “They do not understand that there is a collective Putin, consisting of some millions of people who do not want to be humiliated by the West, ” she added. “There is a little piece of Putin in everyone.”

How unfortunate that there is a little piece of Putin in everyone, instead of a little piece of Mikhail Gorbachev in everyone!

(Alexievich had to flee to Germany, after the rigged Belarusian election of 2020 handed the Putin-loyalist a "mandate" for another term in office.)

But then even Gorbachev was unhappy with the condescension towards Russia.  In the context of the Russia-Georgia war, he wrote in 2008:

Russia has long been told to simply accept the facts. Here’s the independence of Kosovo for you. Here’s the abrogation of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, and the American decision to place missile defenses in neighboring countries. Here’s the unending expansion of NATO. All of these moves have been set against the backdrop of sweet talk about partnership. Why would anyone put up with such a charade?

There is much talk now in the United States about rethinking relations with Russia. One thing that should definitely be rethought: the habit of talking to Russia in a condescending way, without regard for its positions and interests.

For once, Thomas Friedmann was on the mark when he also wrote in the same context in 2008:

Russia would be wise to reconsider Putin’s Georgia gambit. If it does, we would be wise to reconsider where our NATO/Russia policy is taking us — and whether we really want to spend the 21st century containing Russia the same way we spent much of the 20th containing the Soviet Union.

I worry about Putin's aggression, which reflects the godawful desire of millions of Russians to Make Russia Great Again.

I worry about Ukrainians and their children, like the few who have been here and whom I have shared dinners and laughs.  Is there anything else that I can do from my little corner of the world?

Ukraine wants peace but won't give up its land to Russia, president says https://t.co/9FeTJkCAaD pic.twitter.com/njT0C1wYi2

— Reuters (@Reuters) February 22, 2022

The cycle of life

I think I was about nine years old when I learnt how to ride a bicycle.  I don't think it could have been earlier than that.

As was typical of any growing up experience, my parents were not involved in my learning to bike. 

Here in the US, kids begin to learn on small cycles that have training wheels, while the parents walk or jog along.  Soon, the training wheel is off and the kid is off and pedaling. 

A few weeks ago, we saw a kid who could not have been even four years old and he was having a great time on his small little bicycle, with the father behind on his bike.  And, the family dog--of course--was keeping pace with them.

I wish I could recall when exactly I learnt how to balance on a moving bicycle.  The first time that I pedalled away without falling.  The first time that I pedaled hands free, without holding on to the handlebars.  Not even the foggiest of memory!

I do recall well the race that I had with Shyam, when I went down hard on the rough road.  The skin on my knee looked as if it had been put through a mandoline slicer.  Fortunately, home was not far away.  It was back to the Burnol and veshti treatment!

In my teenage years, my friends--especially Srikumar--and I biked all over the town.  A couple of times, we went outside the town too, though that is not something my parents knew about.

Moving to Madras practically put an end to biking.  I did not want to deal with the traffic and vehicle exhaust.  Once, I yielded to the temptation and rode to Connemara Library, which was one big mistake.  I was sweating like a pig by the time I reached the library, and the return home was worse.

After almost a five-year break from biking, one of the first things that I did as a grad student was to buy myself a bicycle.  Siddiqui bought a multi-speed bike and I bought a used single-speed bicycle, with a basket in front.

The bike got me everywhere--to campus, grocery store, and to friend's apartments.  I loved my bike, which is why I was devastated when somebody stole it.  I could not believe that somebody would steal that very old, used bike!

All the youthful excitement of biking is long gone.  When we are young, there are so many new adventures every single day, many of which would not have been possible without bicycles.  As we age, we start working and have family commitments, and the bicycle rarely plays any role in our daily lives. 

Every once in a while, we dust up the bikes and ride.  But then I realize, all over again, that B.B. King is right: The thrill is gone!

A sea is not always blue

In the social studies class (was Shyamala Miss the teacher?) in one of those pre-teen years, I was amused that there were seas around the world that had names of colors.  Red Sea. White Sea. Black Sea. (I now wonder if the Black Sea is referred to in Tamil as கருப்பு கடல், which sounds ominous!)

I was positive that the teacher was playing a prank when she added Yellow Sea to the list, because the primitive atlas of the world that we had at home did not list a Yellow Sea!

Years later, my friend Kumar went to study in the Soviet Union.  Letters were how we kept in touch.  After all, the internet hadn't been invented yet and phones were rare at most homes. 

Kumar always wrote lengthy letters, none of which I ever retained.  In contrast to many people who fill their homes with boxes of old letters and cards from friends and family, I have always tossed out letters after reading and replying.

But, memory retains and immediately recalls what boxes of letters cannot.  In one of his letters, Kumar described visiting the Black Sea one summer and noting that the Ukrainian girls were pretty and friendly. (No, he is not married to an Ukrainian; his wife is Czech!) 

I was meanwhile trapped in an awful college studying something that I did not care for, and wondering what I could possibly do in my life.  Those were some dark years.  If mental health professionals had assessed me then, it is possible that I would have come across as borderline depressed.

Towards the end of the torturous undergraduate years, Kumar came to my college during his visit home.  I wasn't there when he arrived because I had no prior intimation from him about his plans.  As I reached the campus gate, a friend who was leaving yelled out to me that I had a visitor.

I don't quite recall where he stayed that night.  There is a grainy image in my mind of the two of us going across town to say hello to another classmate who was a student at a college that was far better than where I was.

About two years later, I left for America, and with a clear understanding within that I was not going to live in India for the rest of my life.

The USSR collapsed.  Teachers like Shyamala Miss now had more countries to keep track of and teach their students.  

I completed the graduate program and started working.

One of the fellow-graduate students, Shahab, who was also a colleague for a brief time, had an easy going manner that attracted women but never seemed to in a relationship with any.  

He surprised me one day with an announcement that he was going to marry an Ukrainian. Shahab and Olga came by one day.  She was from the Black Sea region of Ukraine.

A few years ago, a visiting Ukrainian came home to to have dinner.  I showed her the gift that Kumar gave me when he visited with me at the godawful college.  

She confirmed that it was, indeed, Ukrainian.  Perhaps from the Black Sea region.

Who is the audience?

"I have a question," he said.

Back in the day, in the work environment, I would have immediately responded with something like "I have five answers of which eight are incorrect."  All that is rapidly receding in the rear view mirror of life.

"Are you going to start working on your memoirs?  That's what most retired people seem to do."

So, that was the question!

Chances are that he is not aware of my autoethnographic thinking and writing, which makes most of what I write about practically qualify as memoirs.  

Rare is a week when I don't bring into the writing observations on my own life--present and past--and the lives of my parents and grandparents.  This introspective autoethnography helps me make sense of my life, my existence.  An existence in which there is a clear beginning and an undefined ending.  To make meaning of the muddled and noisy part between the beginning and the end is a joyful activity.

I didn't want to get into a discussion of autoethnography either.  I certainly did not want to lecture about all these.

Instead, I pointed the index finger at him, suggesting that I was in on the joke.  A hearty laugh was my response.

He too smiled.

When regular people like me write their memoirs, the most common reason is that future generations might want to know about generations past.  Perhaps so.  But, one doesn't need written memoirs for that purpose. 

The rich understanding that I have about my past, through generations of my people in Sengottai, was not from anything written.  In fact, there is no documentation.

My people, retired or not, did not write memoirs. The elders were all too happy to talk about the old stories.  From their lives.  From the lives of people in the extended family.  Happy stories.  Sad stories.  Uplifting ones.  Depressing ones. 

Oral memoirs they were, but only if others were eager to listen.

I have listened to plenty of family stories.  I have always been a sucker for those.  At this point, there is very little that my parents or aunts can tell me something new.

I suppose the question remains: Would it not be useful if I wrote down in my memoirs the experiences from my life and from the lives of the elders?

To which I have a counter-question: Why would anybody be interested in my memoirs anyway?  Other than my parents, that is.

Over the years, I have compiled my thoughts and mailed them to my parents, who do not read my blog.  My father has meticulously numbered the collections.  The last of those was six years ago.  "This is the ninth volume" my father said after he received it.  

What he said after that was valuable to me: "This is the one that made me think the most because it was philosophical and it involved plenty of old family stories. In fact, it even upset me." 

Understandable.  After all, my memoirs are his as well.  And my mother's.  And my grandparents'.

Progress report

I ran around and played games like any young boy did, in contrast to my sedentary and lethargic life as a middle-aged man.  All that activity as a kid meant that I had my fair share of injuries that, thankfully, were all minor.  

My mother patiently and carefully took care of the problems that I brought to her.   But, sometimes--not often, phew!--she, being the at-home parent, had to take me to the doctor.  The clinic near home, which was referred to as the dispensary, was where the nurses bandaged me up, or yanked out thorns that had embedded way deep in my heel.

But, most injuries called only for home remedies.  Amma usually cleaned up the scraped skin, applied Burnol, which was used for practically everything.  She then tore a piece of an old, discarded veshti and tied that around as bandage.

Why veshti and not a sari?  Because the white veshti, which would have dulled by the time it was tossed away, served better as bandage than a piece of colorful sari would!

Once when visiting grandma's village in order to celebrate her sixtieth birthday, I fell while racing another kid.  The terrible bleeding from the bottom of the chin wouldn't stop and appa took me to the local doctor, who cleaned up the wound and sutured it.  For a few days after, I walked around with a tape--plaster--under my chin.  I felt like I had accomplished something in life.  The injury, the suture, and the plaster were my trophies!

Later when I had other minor injuries at home, I couldn't understand why we were back to the Burnol and veshti routine.  I didn't want to go to school with a piece of tattered white cloth serving as a bandage that now had a big spot of the Burnol yellow.  I wanted to look modern--with a regular bandage gauze and plaster over it.

My parents could not understand why they had to waste money buying gauze, or why I should be bothered by the Burnol yellow on a piece of an old veshti.

Looking back, I now see that the reusing of an old veshti was merely one of the many things that my parents and others in the old country did in ways that we now would refer to as living sustainably.  The contemporary mantra of "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" was how people lived.  

Very little of what we purchased was not a need.  We kids wanted many, of course, whether it was medical gauze and plaster or Fanta, but rarely did the parents cater to the want.  Not only because of the tight budget but--and even more importantly--because they couldn't imagine wasting money when there were options at no cost. 

Bottles were reused as storage containers.  We tore unused sheets from school notebooks and bound them together to create notebooks that came in handy at home.  Even the envelopes received in the mail were reused in order to write grocery lists.  No wonder we did not have a trash can at home--there was no trash to throw away!

Grandmas' homes and villages were even better models of sustainability.  In the kitchens, grandmas even set aside the water that they used to rinse rice and lentils, after which it was not fit for drinking or cooking, and the domestic help  carried away that water to her cows and water buffaloes.  Water was reused; imagine that!

My luxurious existence now and the material progress worldwide have come at the cost of the natural environment.  Could I have arrived where I am in a sustainable manner, but without modernity trashing the natural environment?

India unveiled

We wore uniforms to school.  Grey shorts (or pants) and white shirts for boys.  Black shoes with white socks.  Girls wore white tops with skirts that were grey.

For a couple of years, we had a principal who was a retired military officer.   Yes, a retired military man!

I have no idea whether Lt. Col. Thamburaj had any classroom teaching experience with elementary or high school kids.  He came to us from a Sainik School.  Sainik schools were established by the federal government's defense department in order to provide a pathway for young minds to think about eventually serving in the Indian military.  Our school was no Sainik School.

The only significant change that Thamburaj introduced was inspecting students up and down at the school assembly under a blazing morning sun. 

As if we were military cadets and he were the ranking officer, Thamburaj walked past us standing in attention while he made sure that there was no shirt untucked, no shoe unpolished, and whatever else he thought was required to be the mark of a good student at our school. 

Much later in life, when reading in Catch-22 the insanity of marching parades, I had a good laugh thinking about the absurdity of Thamburaj inspecting our uniforms.

Through all those years as a lifer in the school, I never came across any girl student in school wearing a head-cover.  If at all, I am now shocked that traditional and conservative parents allowed their daughters to go to school wearing pinafore skirts that revealed their legs from the knees down!

What would have happened if a girl's parents wanted her to attend our school, but didn't want her to wear a calf-revealing skirt?  Would Thamburaj have allowed a girl to wear hijab--in grey, in order to conform to the school uniform colors?  How would I have reacted to a classmate wearing a hijab?

Counter-factual thinking about the past is a challenge.  Yet, I suspect that Thamburaj would not have allowed hijabs.  The principal who succeeded him would not have either.  Not because I think they were Islamophobic, but because they were disciplinarians who did not encourage diversity.  A deviation from the school uniform would have driven them crazy.

Chances are that most of us students would have thought that wearing a hijab is a Muslim act, like how we Hindus had vibhuthi and kungumam on our foreheads.  And we would have carried on with our lives.

But then those were the years when Hindu fundamentalists were marginal players in India's politics, and were held in suspect as troublemakers.  India is different now with Hindu nationalists governing from Delhi and in power in many states in the union. 

Display of Muslim beliefs, even in schools, bothers these nationalists.  The judiciary increasingly agrees with the Hindu majoritarians: "An Indian court has said that students in the southern state of Karnataka should stop wearing religious garments in class until it makes a final ruling on whether a school there can ban Muslim head scarves".

“We think it’s really unfair to ask Muslim women to suspend their faith for a few days while the court completes its hearing,” Fawaz Shaheen, national secretary of the Students Islamic Organization of India, a Delhi-based group with over 9,000 members, said of the court’s Thursday statement.

If vibhuthi and kungumam wearing students could pursue science without suspending their faith, why the hijab or niqab should not be allowed is simply beyond my imagination.

Leefa Mahek, an 11th-grade student who said her head scarf had not been mentioned as a problem by administrators when she was admitted to the school a year ago. With only two months left in the school term, she said she was worried that the ban was jeopardizing her future. 

“Last minute they are trying to pour water over our hard work,” she said. “They can’t do this.” 

Arsheen, a final-year commerce student who uses only one name, said that she had worn the hijab in colors matching the school uniform — baggy brown pants and a long pink and white blouse — each of the three years she had attended the school. 

“Hijab is our right, and nobody can make us give it up,” she said.

Like in the US where the bigots have now been given permission to display in public their hate for non-whites and those who are not Christians, India's politics has completely unveiled the anti-Muslim emotions that only lurked in the shadows for the longest time.  These Islamophobic forces are willing to deny girls the right to school, eerily mirroring the Taliban that tried to assassinate Malala for merely wanting to go to school!

Now that these forces have been unleashed, it will take a long, long time before humanity comes to its senses.

The rage of the impotent caveman!

In one of the sitcoms that I watched in the past, something that I don't want to admit but then telling the truth is way easier, two teenagers who are neighbors are also in love and, as is not uncommon here in the US, have sexual relations.

As the relationship progresses, the teenage couple begin to bicker, and it soon blows up into a huge fight.  They both decide to punish the other by holding off on sex.

The teenage couple punishing the other was funny, no doubt.  But, as I understand it, the biology works in ways that doesn't make it easy for males to forget about sex.  Recall the reports from a few years ago that a man on an average thinks about sex about 20 times a day?  This is why the 2,500-year old Greek play Lysistrata worked with women denying men sex unless and until they ended fighting wars.  

In the old country, two teenage kids who are neighbors might fall in love but the odds of them having sex are practically nil.  Premarital sex is extremely rare.  Sexual relations for the overwhelming majority is within marriage.

What if after getting married the husband wants to have sex but his wife doesn't?  What if he compels her to have sex with him?  What if it is a terrorizing rape by the husband?

India is now forced to think about these issues:

Marital rape is a crime in many Western countries, including the United States, Britain and Canada. But India is among nearly three dozen countries in the world where spouses cannot file a criminal complaint against their partners for nonconsensual sex. 

A high court in Delhi will decide whether to eliminate the marital rape exemption from the country’s rape laws

How violent are marital relations?

Marital rape is a sensitive topic, difficult to measure anywhere, but even more so in India – where most sexual violence is believed to occur within families and goes unreported. According to the Indian government's latest National Family Health Survey, about 30% Indian women aged 18-49 reported having experienced spousal violence. In terms of sexual violence, the average Indian woman is 17 times more likely to face sexual violence from her husband than from anyone else, according to the survey of 724,115 women.

Not that spousal violence doesn't exist in sexually liberated societies.  But, when one overlays the stigma of divorce in India, it is easy to understand why wives would continue to live with their violent husbands until death does them apart.    

Predictably, there is opposition from men, and a few women too, to laws that will criminalize marital rape.  Like this one from Anil Murty, co-founder of the Save Indian Family Foundation:

Murty, the men’s rights activist, said the domestic violence law had turned men into “second-class citizens” in India as they had no recourse if they were abused at home. “This will lead to a gender-war situation,” he said.

Meanwhile, a few men--of all ages--have taken the fight to a whole new level: Marriage strike. These men refuse to get married.  Get the logic?  No marriage means no sex for the women too. 

Do these men really believe that their version of Lysistrata will be a success?  Do these men on marriage strike live by themselves?  Or, do they live with their mothers who cook and clean for their adult sons who are busy tweeting about their protest?

I suspect that the underlying issue is one that I have been talking and blogging about for years: Men, especially young men, have a tough time understanding that the world is rapidly changing and that it no longer treats men as the privileged gender.  They are then shocked that girls are smart in school; women enroll in huge numbers in colleges and outperform them; women are now CEOs and rocket-scientists and not merely stay-at-home moms; ... 

Meanwhile, testosterone continues to pump through their bodies even as women become unattainable.  Here in this country, these are the incels who are in rage, and looking for male supremacy.

What these morons fail to understand is that if they change their ways, they too will have lots of sex just like the teenagers in the sitcom that I don't want to admit to watching!

A Sindhi in Liberia?

Decades ago, one of the first Indian-Americans I met in the San Joaquin Valley city where I lived for a while was a man who was way older than me.  He was a couple of years older than my father. 

Back in the old country, a younger person like me would have addressed him as "uncle."  Any older man is an uncle, and any older woman becomes an auntie.  But, we met here in the US.  So, "uncle" was not in the vocabulary of social interactions.

We called him Mr. G.

A fun-loving man, but Mr. G. closely guarded his personal life.  I did come to learn a few things about Mr. G.  He was working somewhere in Iraq in the early 1940s by when it was becoming clear that it was only a matter of time before the British abandoned the Subcontinent that they had colonized.

In 1947, the British drew in haste political borders that created India and Pakistan.  Sindh, where Mr. G. was born and raised, now became a part of Pakistan.

Source

Fortunately, Mr. G. was far away from the Subcontinent, and was not trapped in the violence of partition. 

But, as a Hindu, Mr. G. faced a tough question: Because his home was now in Pakistan, which was explicitly carved out as a country for Muslims, did he want to claim Pakistan for his citizenship?  Or, should he apply to become an Indian citizen?

He eventually got an Indian passport, though he continued to live outside India, in various countries throughout the Middle East.  

From his stories, I understood that some of his favorites were Lebanon and Cypress--where he even owned a vacation home.  I do not recall him ever talking about a home-base in India. 

Much later in his life, Mr.G. immigrated to the US from Bahrain.

I was reminded of Mr. G. when I read that Dr. Raj Panjabi will be the next Senior Director for Global Health Security and Biodefense at the National Security Council.  

This is the office that President tRump dissolved a year into his term because he was so convinced that there was nothing to worry about global biosecurity and pandemics, thereby leaving the country less prepared for Covid-19!

As always, I became curious with yet another Indian-American at such an important position.  Could the last name mean that he or his people are from Punjab?

It turns out that Dr. Panjabi's coming-to-America story is not straightforward as one might imagine:

My family and I arrived in America 30 years ago after fleeing civil war in Liberia. A community of Americans rallied around my family to help us rebuild.

— Dr. Raj Panjabi (@rajpanjabi) February 9, 2022

From Liberia?

Fortunately, there is Wikipedia:

Panjabi's grandparents were refugees from Sindh Province following the British Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, resettling in Mumbai and Indore in India. A generation later, Panjabi's parents migrated to West Africa, where Panjabi was born and raised in Monrovia, Liberia. After civil war broke out in Liberia in 1989, Panjabi, at age nine, and his family fled on a rescue cargo plane to Sierra Leone and eventually sought asylum in the United States, resettling initially with a host family in High Point, North Carolina.

What a story!

I am sure Mr. G. would have been elated with this news.

Brand (New) Name

Curiosity is limitless.  I live that every single day.  I wonder about the trivial and the profound. To further my curiosity, the web offers plenty to think about. 

I only wish I were smart enough to explain them all. 

Traditional names are part of the cultural landscapes.  But, within cultures, traditions are being challenged.

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

But then the parents did not call their kids by those names.  In the joint-family environment, it was disrespectful for a son or a daughter-in-law to call out a name that could also be misunderstood as addressing the elder.  The kids, therefore, had an alias at home and among the extended family.

Urbanization changed the naming styles.  Shorter names were preferred in the urban(e) settings over the long, and old-styled, traditional names.

Going by the tradition, I would have been given the name Ramaswamy--my paternal grandfather's name.  But, I wasn't.  Capturing the "Ram" in Ramaswamy, I was named Sriram. 

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

In the old country, the names of the kids of my younger cousins are nothing like the names around me when I was a kid.  I suppose by now even a name like mine has become old-fashioned.

The trend in my adopted country is no different.

Here in the US, too, it was not uncommon for kids to be named after grandparents and other close relations.

For much of American history, many people just named their kids after someone on the family tree, which helped keep names in circulation for a long time. This was especially true for baby boys, who have historically had less varied names than baby girls in part because they were more likely to inherit a family name.

Not anymore.

As family sizes shrunk and kids stopped doing labor, Americans “started to fixate on the uniqueness of each child,” as the sociologist Philip Cohen has written, and “individuality emerged as a project—starting with naming—of creating an identity.” Meanwhile, society was becoming more casual, and people were less likely to address each other by their surname. As Evans pointed out, this made differentiating your first name from others’ more important.

Uniqueness is what matters now.  Your name is a brand, or could potentially be one.

American naming is now in a phase where distinctiveness is a virtue, which is a departure from the mid-century model of success: Today, you excel not by fitting in, but by standing out. “Parents are thinking about naming kids more like how companies think about naming products, which is a kind of competitive marketplace where you need to be able to get attention to succeed”.

The names of African-Americans. who are descendants of people enslaved by whites, have been unique for quite some time now, way before whites and others started searching for unique names for their kids.  During this Black History Month, this explainer on "Black" sounding names is an appropriate way to end this curiosity-driven post on names.

The answer, my friend, is not blowing in the wind

In the Hindi film music that I grew up listening to, thanks to my sister and father, two singers dominated.  The male voice was a Muslim's and the female singer was a Hindu.  Much later in life, the iconic singer who was a Hindu endorsed the candidacy of the leader of the Hindu nationalist party, the BJP.

Odds are overwhelming that the iconic Muslim singer would never have supported an anti-Muslim crusader, modi, to become the country's Prime Minister.  After all, modi's track record compelled even the US government to bar him from entering the country.  The BJP's vehement anti-Muslim politics included targeting the leading stars in Bollywood who are Muslims.  Yet, the revered Hindu singer apparently had no qualms supporting the Hindu nationalists.

The Hindu female singer, Lata Mangeshkar, was one of the earliest to publicly support the idea of modi as India's Prime Minister:

Speaking on November 1, 2013, at a Pune programme where Modi inaugurated the new Deenanath Mangeshkar super specialty hospital, the Mangeshkar formally endorsed him to head the country. 

In her speech, Lata Mangeshkar, said, “I pray to God for what everyone wants – that Narendrabhai should become the prime minister of the country.” 

Mangeshkar’s comments evoked huge applause from the audience to which she said, “Your response suggests you also want the same.”

Mangeshkar died of old age that Covid hastened.

In remembering her after her death, should one focus only on the musical artist that she was--and she was an excellent one--or do we also consider her support for the anti-democratic fundamentalists?  Do artists like her who have an extraordinary amount of influence have a responsibility for what they say and do in public?

In a world in which gun manufacturers are not held responsible for senseless violence, in a world in which Union Carbide has yet to pay for the enormous crime it committed in Bhopal, in a world in which there are millions of such examples, I suppose it is too much to ask an individual artist to behave responsibly and ethically.

On the other hand, we should expect political parties, which decide a government's policies and, therefore, direct the lives of the public, to be cautious and responsible.  As we have seen with the strongman favoring party here in the US, the BJP in India couldn't care about anything other than amassing political power.  No time was wasted in the context of Mangeshkar's death after a leading Bollywood actor--a Muslim--paid his respects to the dead artist:

Bharatiya Janata Party spokesperson Prashant Patel Umrao quote-tweeted another person who shared the viral video and wrote, “Shahrukh is Spitting!”.

The publication, India Today, has a "Anti-Fake News War room (AFWA)."  Such is the state of the world today that the American strongman has created where "fake news" spreads fast and it is enormous work to fact-check and clean up the records; by then, of course, a lot more fake news would have spread.

The AFWA reported that "Khan did not spit, rather he blew air after offering prayers."

Meanwhile, instead of heaping shame on the BJP spokesperson for spreading incendiary fake news, the discussion has morphed into whether Khan was correctly practicing Islam by blowing air after offering prayers in front of a dead body.

This is not what I imagined the world would be back when I was an idealistic teenager.

"Banaras is the chant on my lips"

The family stories are that my mother's father was one heck of a smart man.  He was a calm and studious type, and truly gentle, right from when he was a young boy.

In the school leaving exams, which determined the eligibility for college, he knew he had done really well.  But, to his shock, his results were held back.  He soon found out the reason: In one exam, his responses were identical to another student's, and the authorities needed additional time to establish who had copied from whom.

The principal and teachers at the high school submitted affidavits with evidence of grandfather's academic track record, and argued that it was the other student who had copied grandfather's responses.

Finally, the authorities cleared grandfather's results.

But, by then, it was too late for him to apply to the reputed colleges in Travancore and Madras.  He was stuck.

Dejected and frustrated, he applied for admission to Benares Hindu University.  The response was an offer of admission, but only to study metallurgy.

Wanting to get away the sour experiences, grandfather took up the admission offer to study metallurgy, which was never his primary interest.

Grandfather during his undergraduate years at Varanasi (Benares)
in the early-1930s

In his undergraduate years at Benares, grandfather got interested in North Indian classical music, especially the shehnai music.

The leading shehnai musicians playing Hindustani musicians have for the longest time been Muslims.  Varanasi, shehnai, and Muslims go together.  Ever since Islam and Muslim warriors found their passage to India, there has been a significant Muslim population in the holiest Hindu city.

Yet, almost halfway into The City of Good Death, there is no Muslim character.  Not even in passing.  Of course, the plot is built around the Hindu notion of the good death.  But, the canvas has enough and more space for non-Hindu elements that are a part of Varanasi.  (For instance, the local police inspector could have been a Muslim.)

To her credit, the author--an Indian-American brought up in a Hindu faith--notes in the book that Varanasi's population is not all Hindu.  Yet,  she decided not to include even a minor character who is Muslim.  But then she deserves a lot of leeway given that this is her debut novel.

Perhaps this aspect of her storytelling bothers me because of the contemporary political effort to saffronize Varanasi.  The current Prime Minister contested for India's Parliament not from his home state of Gujarat but from Varanasi (in Uttar Pradesh) in order to make clear the religious bottom-line.  He and his party have been very clear in their argument that anything Islamic is an overlay that covers the Hindu history and, therefore, are on a warpath to erase the Islamic aspects of the landscape--including in Varanasi.

This commentary in The Hindu expresses serious concerns about the saffronization of Varanasi:

Banaras, known to accept everyone with open arms, is being asked to exclude every person without a Hindu name. This overt saffronisation of Banaras might result in the erasure of its famous mixed culture, the mili juli tahzeeb

The author writes:

In the late Mughal period, with the arrival of Shahzada Mirza Jawan Bakht and Nawab Ali Ibrahim Khan in Banaras, the city emerged as a hub for literature and art. Mushaire (symposiums) on the lines of those held in Delhi’s Red Fort became common, especially at Nawab ki Deohdi, the residence of Ali Ibrahim Khan.

The commentary ends with this:

Mirza Hatim Ali Beig Mehr, a close friend of Ghalib who stayed in Banaras shortly, wrote: 

jab se mujhe qismat ne banaras se chhudaya,

rahta hai zabaan’ par meri bas haaye banaras! 

‘From the day fate compelled me to leave Banaras,

O Banaras is the chant on my lips’ 

kaabe mein’ dua mangunga main’ apne khuda se,

ya rab! but-e-kaafir mujhe bulwaaye banaras 

‘I will pray to my god in the kaaba;

O god, let me be recalled by the idols of Banaras’ 

These poets are long dead but the spirit of their poetry should not die with them. Let the narrow lanes of the old city not become a graveyard of all things good, of art and love, and a wealth of culture.

 

The wuss abides

The first important decision that I had to make, a decision with implications for the rest of my life, was about whether or not I wanted to study at the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT.) 

Within me, I knew that I did not want to study engineering.  But I worried that I would be considered a failure if I didn't aim for those high rungs of the ladder of success that the world lauded, especially when I was a natural in math and science.

I was a 16-year old wuss.

So, when a friend said that he and another classmate were going to work with a tutor in order to prepare for the IIT entrance exams and invited me to join them, I did.

After the first week of faithful attendance, I started to skip the tutorials.  After all, the heart knew what it wanted.

The month was over and it was time to pay the fees.

I walked up to the tutor with the rupees in my hand.

He commented that I had attended very few meetings.  And then said something that I hadn't expected.  He didn't want to accept the money unless I knew for certain that I wanted the coaching.

I was relieved of the pressure.  I never went there again.

(The other two carried on with the coaching, and eventually gained admission to the IIT campus in Madras.)

Later, another friend, Kiran, who was also a neighbor, asked me if I wanted to split the cost of the entrance exam tutorials, which was through the mail.  Agarwal Tutorials.  

Without any real enthusiasm, the 16-year old wuss agreed. 

Kiran was very keen on it.  I faked it as much as I could.  We split the cost of the test-prep tutorials that came in the mail. He became one of the very few who knew well that I didn't care for IIT and that I didn't care for engineering either. 

One day he expressed his concern that we were splitting the cost but that I was not making use of the tutorials.  He suggested that he pick up the entire cost of the remaining tutorials.  Kiran was such a nice guy, even at that young age.  Of course, I did not let him repay me. 

Decades later, an email or two after informing me about Kiran's tragic and fatal accident, his sister recalled, among other things, my anti-engineering sentiments that she had gathered from her brother and how I had stopped preparing altogether.  I can imagine that Kiran shared this with his family.

Cursing my undergraduate life in an engineering college of low caliber, I wondered and worried if I was a flake for not having been ambitious right from that early phase of life. 

I worried even more when I finally dumped engineering in order to learn more about what really interested me.  Math and science were ranked higher, way higher, in the social hierarchy than the social sciences were.  Was I flaking out?

In the graduate studies, I was not interested in the mathematical and statistical approaches to understanding the human condition, even though those were the favored approaches within academia and in the outside world.  I worried that I was flaking out yet again.

A few months ago, I was at a wedding at which every man in my age group with whom I chatted was an IIT alum.  In the small talk, every one of them wanted to know where I did my undergraduate studies.  Was it my imagination that their enthusiasm dropped a bit that I was not one of them?

Well into middle age, I know that none of those things matter.  Choosing one's own path in life, away from external expectations and incentives, is, in fact, far from being a wuss--it requires a great deal of inner strength.  It is far easier otherwise.

If only somebody had told the 16-year wuss that I was, something along the lines of what Bill Watterson told the graduating class of Kenyon College:

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it's to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.

You'll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you're doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you'll hear about them.

To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble.

Yes, all the trouble has been worth it.

Death at the confluence of the Varuna and the Asi

During the train ride from Florence to Rome, I chatted with the guy seated next to me.  He looked about five years older than me, and was dressed as I imagine a European executive would.  He asked about the travel plans.

"No Naples?" he asked after listening to my schedule.

He opened his briefcase and took out his business card.  On the other side he wrote something and handed it to me.

"It means that one should go to Naples before they die" he said as he passed me the card.  He had written Vedi Napoli e poi muori.  And, of course, his card noted his MBA credential.

Naples was that kind of a city in the history of Italy.  Such a fantastic city that there was nothing else to see after experiencing Naples.

Kashi is a total contrast to Naples.  Also known as Benares and Varanasi, Kashi was the city to which faithful Hindus liked to go and die. 

In the traditions, there is a saying about Kashi: Kashya maranam muktihih (काश्य मरणं मुक्ति:) which translates to Dying in Kashi leads to salvation.  A liberation from the cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth.  No reincarnations after the good death in Kashi.

My great-grandmother went to Kashi to die.  

She--Parvathy--had experienced one too many tragedies in her life.  Two of the six children that she gave birth to died before reaching five years of age. 

Of the four who remained, the eldest daughter died from tuberculosis within a couple of years of getting married and without having a child.  Her youngest son also died from the same dreaded disease when his wife was three months pregnant with their first child.

Great-grandmother was dejected with life.  She lost interest in living, and asked her husband to take her to Kashi while making it clear to the family that she was not coming back.  It was goodbye forever.

She died in Kashi as she wished.

Of course, not everyone can time their dying by traveling to the city of good death.  This is why many traditional families had in their homes small sealed containers of water from the holy Ganga River.  A few drops of this holy water in the dying person's mouth is considered the second-best alternative to the good death at Kashi.  If the Ganga water cannot be administered, then scattering the remains after cremation gets the person as close as possible to salvation.

Such a fascinating and profound view of life and death has also generated a backdrop for Priyanka Champaneri in her debut novel The City of Good Death. 

The citation for the 2018 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing notes:

A first-generation immigrant who was born and raised in the United States, Champaneri draws on her personal navigation of identity and culture, reconciling her Indian heritage and Hindu faith with her Western upbringing.  The City of Good Death confronts family, religion, and belonging in ways that reflect Champaneri's cultural dualities.

Most of us try in our own ways to reconcile our faiths and the social practices of wherever we live in a world of science and technology that are seemingly at odds with those faiths and practices.  We try to resolve them before we die, whether or not we have visited Napoli or Kashi.

The plague

It was harsh and unfortunate that I had to flee a quality engineering college, only to end up in an institution that lacked everything that I had imagined will be a part of my college life.  Yet, it was this godawful college  that provided me with a real education about the non-brahminical life.

Until then, for instance, I hadn't seriously considered many daily experiences of the "backward" caste people in the villages.  One simple, but profound, comment that a fellow student made in the first semester echoed within for days, and haunts me even now.  He said that he didn't want to go home for the holidays because he would not be able to be passive when upper-caste kids bossed over his parents and addressed them by their first names, while his parents had to behave submissively towards those tiny tots.

I had not heard anything like that from somebody my age.  After all, in school in the industrial town we grew up not worrying about caste.  Of course, I knew that some of my classmates were brahmins and many were not.  But, that didn't stop our interactions as classmates and friends.  The "modern" township had created for us an environment in which we could talk the highfalutin talk about social problems and progress but without any idea of the nitty-gritty details of the real lives of really oppressed people.

The commie-sympathizer in me was fully awakened.  Or, to use a modern expression, I became woke.

It has been more than forty years of life after high school, during which I have traveled far away, literally and mentally, from the brahmin world.

The older I got, and especially after getting to America, the more I thought about all these.  In one of my early letters to my parents when I was in graduate school, I wrote about the luck of the draw.  I wrote to them that had I been born in a different house, I might have grown up a Muslim or an untouchable.  The randomness of these bothered me, and it pissed me off that the traditional Hindu explanations conveniently justified all these as divine! 

Back when I had a Facebook presence, when proudly posting my family's old photographs in Facebook, it occurred to me that only those of us who grew up in privileged backgrounds even had photos from the past.  The poorer people, and if they were also from the lower castes, had barely anything and, therefore, there was no question of photos of their grandparents and great-grandparents.  A privilege that I had taken for granted.

I noticed quite a few Facebook posts that celebrated "TamBrahm"--Tamil Brahmin--practices.  Of course, people ought to celebrate and cherish their unique community foods and music and the like.  But, when celebrating, they ought to also acknowledge the terrible impact that TamBrahm has had on lower-caste communities.  And that is what they did not do, and they didn't want to either. 

TamBrahm and other brahmins from all over India dominate in the tech world.  When even the much adored tech sector in India is plagued with caste issues, is there really any hope that conditions will improve soon? 

Most IT companies in India are privately owned and are not required to comply with the government’s affirmative action policies. This cemented the view that entry into the tech industry was purely based on individual capability and that factors such as religion, gender, and caste were irrelevant. Given its close links to U.S. companies, the IT sector came with the promise of creating a level playing field where people could succeed solely on merit.

But in reality, tech did not make the world flatter. Instead, caste hierarchies replicated themselves within the industry. One 2011 report on caste in the Indian IT sector concludes “that caste is not disappearing from Indian society; rather, it is dramatically adapting to modern circumstances.”

It has always been the case that caste adapts to the changing conditions, and even spreads to the US along with the people who come here.  The large diaspora creates communities of Indians based on the kinds of divisions that one might experience in the old country--language, religion, and caste.  And even if people do not openly talk about caste, that unsaid can be easily picked up if one paid attention.

In June 2020, the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing filed a lawsuit against American tech conglomerate Cisco alleging discrimination against an Indian Dalit engineer — listed as “John Doe” in the complaint — over his caste. The engineer, who had immigrated from India to the U.S., alleged that two of his dominant caste co-workers, also Indian immigrants, harassed him. In fall 2021, the case was voluntarily dismissed, and was later refiled at the state level, where it is still ongoing.

Casteism is not merely in the workplace.  As more and more students come from India to study here in the US, some of them also bring along the plague.  So much so that the California State University (CSU) system recently adopted a caste discrimination ban.  The CSU system "added caste to its non-discrimination policy, prohibiting caste-based discrimination or bias across its 23 campuses." How unfortunate that the plague has spread so far away from the old country!

It is terrible that the oppressed feel that they need to hide their caste details if they want to live and prosper in a world created by and for the upper-castes.  "I strongly feel that instead of putting the responsibility of speaking out about casteism on the Dalit people, the onus should fall on the oppressors to speak up. We did not cause this suffering or harm done to us. Why are we the ones who should be fixing this?"

I agree.  As I wrote in this post more than five years ago, deep down within me, I want the leaders of the Brahmin community to issue a formal and heartfelt apology.  In the lectures that the "learned" masters deliver, I want them to engage with their followers on the awful practices of the centuries, and lead an honest introspection.

I have practically given up on the old country when it comes to serious issues like caste and religion; unlike the racial tensions here in the US, in which we can see progress being made despite the best efforts of white supremacists. The least that Indians can do is not bring the plague here!

With some grace

On his way to a comfortable retirement, the university's president issued a few of us the layoff letters, which we knew was coming.  Soon after, a colleague wrote in his email to me: "I hope you are riding the wave with some grace."

I am not sure what he meant there.  Perhaps he was worried that I was not calmly handling the layoff?  Or that I would file a legal complaint like this one?  Or that as an op-ed writer, I would wash the dirty linen in public?

But then I have always described in my blog the university's dirty linen.  Most of what I have written here about my university and colleagues won't be new to the university personnel either because I have shared those with many people. 

It is just that I have not written commentaries about them in any of the newspapers where I typically submit my essays.  That approach has never appealed to me anyway.

Shit happens in life.  We have to deal with it.  Cleaning up the shit and moving it far away is the only way to live healthily.  And that is what I do.  It is not that I have forgotten all about the shit; after all, I never forget nor forgive.

As I started gearing up for the layoff, I was supremely confident about one thing: My identity as a professor would come to an end.  I would have to invent a new identity in the post-layoff life, even as I figure out what to do with the 24 hours every single day.

Such an approach has been easy for me only because of a lifelong conviction that I am not who I am based on what I do for a living.  After all, I am the same one who at one time was an electrical engineer, a transportation planner at a different time, and a professor for a very long time.  All those different identities are a part of me, but are merely a part of me.  I am far more interested to talk about, for instance, my love to travel, or the simple but tasty foods that we make at home, or the joyful experiences with the extended family in grandmas' villages.

This is also why as I have gotten older, I have stopped asking strangers at social gatherings about their work.  I am far more interested in other aspects of life, which is where we truly express who we are as humans.

This essay in Harvard Business Review confirms (as if I needed a confirmation) my views on how to deal with major changes that upend one's sense of self.  The authors write:

Mark a Distinct Break with the Past 

Craft a Story to Tie the Past and Present Together  

Acknowledge and Work Through Challenging Emotions 

Focus on Meaningful, Non-Work Identities

Check, check, check, and check!

They conclude with this:

[Left] unchecked, identity paralysis can threaten both your career prospects and your mental health. To avoid getting stuck and truly move forward in our lives, we must acknowledge and embrace our current identities, our past selves, and everything in between.

Indeed.

And I say that "with some grace" :)