Now you see me ... now you don't

The above screenshot is from two days ago.  I saved that screenshot because I knew that I would be erased from the university directory after the month ended.

Turns out that they didn't wait for the month to end.  True to the letter that the layoff will take effect on the 31st, well, you won't find me anymore at Western Oregon University:

It is no April Fool joke!  The layoff process has been completed. 

A process that began with a meeting with three managers at 2:00 pm on March 30, 2021.  A meeting that lasted less than five minutes, when I was given a year notice.

The layoff meeting was a remarkable sign of the progress that society has made: All three managers were female, and they were in the meeting to layoff a man.  If that isn't progress, I don't know what is ;)

The fact that I got a one-year notice, in contrast to the two-week notice that we imagine, or the horrible immediate layoff, was only because I was a tenured professor.  Such a courteous notice is never afforded to, say, an administrative assistant or an adjunct faculty.  The one-year notice is evidence of the elite status that tenured faculty have in higher education in the US.

It was dumb luck that I got into that elite and enjoyable profession.  But, that luck ran out.  

I am now a retired professor.

याद आ रही है

There are plenty of events that I clearly remember.  

There are a few others that people say happened, but of which I have no memory.  

Like when a cousin told me about visiting with them in 1989--my first trip to India after coming to the US for graduate school.  She said that a big group of us went to a movie, which I don't remember. 

What fascinated her was my behavior at the cinema in Ranipet, which is where they lived then.  Apparently a big bag of roasted peanuts--not shelled--was bought for this outing.  While the rest were tossing away the shells as they were eating, which was (is?) the standard practice, I was carefully pocketing the shells that I later tossed into a trash can.

She says that was proof that I had changed.  I had become an American in a mere two years!

I don't remember anything that she describes.

And then there are events that I know happened, of which my memory is hazy.  Very hazy.

Like how for a long time I have been trying to figure out where and when I watched a Hindi movie Love Story.  I was an angst-ridden teenager when I watched it.  Was it in Bangalore when a bunch of us from school went to that city?  Why did we go to Bangalore from Neyveli?  Was it some kind of a school leaving hurrah?  Where did we stay in that city?  What did we do?

My cousin or siblings who can fill in the blanks for me on the family side of my life will not be of help with a whole part of my life that did not include them.

Of course, the friends that I went with can certainly help me.  But, there's only one who I clearly remember as being in the group.  Manibaba was a happy-go-lucky guy, full of energy.  He was not academically inclined nor talented, but he knew how to get around in the world--a skill that I lack even today.  Once his father asked me to coach him for an exam, and I did.  Boy was Manibaba thankful!

But, Manibaba died years ago, after a sudden and serious cardiac event.  A shock when I came to know about it.

In the memory fog, I am see that Srikumar was in the group that went to Bangalore.  But, over the years, we have gradually lost contact for me to find out more about the Bangalore trip and Love Story.  

Srikumar's global wandering and his life in the Czech Republic brings another set of vague memories, including the trip to Pondicherry.

I recall going with him and Kannan.  I can picture us having a soup at Auroville; Srikumar talking in Russian with some whitey; Kannan having an upset stomach that compelled us to return to Neyveli earlier than scheduled. 

At Srikumar's home, at lunch time, his mother suggested that I eat there.  She added that her cooking would taste different from my mother's.  It did.  Of course I could tell the difference, particularly after having been a taste-tester for my mother from since I can remember.  The rasam was different with the garlic and without the paruppu.   Even the plain rice tasted different. The thuvaran was the only one that was almost like my mother's preparation.

Where did I stay in Neyveli?  By then we had all moved to Chennai and there was no place of my own in Neyveli.  Those were the days before email and cellphones, with very few homes equipped even with landlines as we now refer to them.  How did Srikumar, Kannan, and I coordinate our plans?  Too bad that Kannan too is incommunicado.

I suppose that this is typical of what happens in life.  We are left with stories.  Some with rich details.  And with a few stories, we could use a little help from our friends.  But, often those friends are no longer friends, or not around anymore.

But, memories we will always have.

The Consumption Problem in Ukraine

Into his adulthood, grandfather had three siblings--two sisters and a brother. 

One sister got married to a local attorney in Sengottai.  Not too long after that, she was diagnosed with one of the most dreaded diseases of those days: tuberculosis. This was way back early in the 1940s and true to its other name of "consumption" the disease killed her. 

The brother, who was in his early twenties, also fell ill.  Yes, the same dreaded tuberculosis.  Soon, he was also gone. 

Grandfather was now left with only one sister.

A few years later, my grandparents celebrated the wedding of their first daughter--my mother.  A couple of months after the joyful day, my mother was diagnosed with tuberculosis.  Fortunately for her (otherwise, I would not have been born either!) science and medicine came to the rescue.

India has not eliminated tuberculosis.  But, what I did not know until I heard on NPR is this:

TB — a serious bacterial infection of the lungs — is a big problem in Ukraine. According to the World Health Organization, the country has the fourth highest incidence of the disease in Europe. And it has one of the highest rates of multidrug resistant TB anywhere in the world.

Anywhere in the world.  Even worse than India is Ukraine's rate of multidrug resistance TB!

Once we know this, it does not take a brainiac then to worry about the war's impact on the refugees and the internally displaced, and the countries that take in the refugees.

This briefing in Nature notes that "an estimated 32,000 people there develop active TB each year, and about one-third of all new TB cases are drug resistant."  In such a context:

Drug-resistant TB arises when people don’t adhere to their arduous regimen of daily drugs. “If you have TB or HIV, no one has time to get their treatment and run with it, they barely have time to get their kids and run,” says Papowitz. “Any interruption of treatment will lead to drug-resistant TB, including MDR TB,” Ditiu says. “After 5 years without treatment, 50% of people with pulmonary TB can die. Meanwhile, you infect many others around you.”

The supply chain crisis affecting new home construction in this country pales against such problems!

European public health experts are well aware of this:

Meanwhile, with more than 3 million people having fled the country since the start of the invasion, the risk of TB among refugees has also come into focus. In a report released earlier this month, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) urged Ukraine's neighbouring states to ensure refugees had access to health-care services to help in the early detection of infectious diseases. 

Teymur Noori, ECDC expert in migrant health, said the organisation was “worried about TB, especially MDR-TB” among refugees but stressed the institution's recommendations were made with refugees, not local populations, in mind.

How did Ukraine become a country with so many TB cases?

It dates back to the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Across the entire region, most former republics of USSR faced a collapsing economy and society, from which they had to rebuild.

Unemployment soared. Crime escalated, which sent a lot of people to prison. And that created a kind of "epidemiological pump," says Dr. Salmaan Keshavjee, director of the Center for Global Health Delivery at Harvard Medical School. 

"Some people had TB," he explains. "It spread in the jails and in the prisons. And then they went back to their community, of course, when they were released. So the TB also went back to the communities."

I, for one, had no idea that TB continues to worry even a country like Ukraine.

We are all Ukrainians now

In March 2010--it feels like eons ago--I wrote a commentary in what was once a lively local newspaper about Syeda Rizwana Hasan, who was visiting from Bangladesh.

During the few minutes I chatted with Hasan, I asked her not about the ship-breaking industry and its environmental impacts that she challenged in the courts, but about the father of that nation, Mujibur Rahman.

In 1971 Bangladesh came into existence, after having been East Pakistan since 1947 when the British Raj ended.  I told Hasan about the comic books I had read as a kid that told the story of Mujib—as he is popularly referred to—and his fight for Bangladesh’s freedom.

The 1971 war was my political coming of age, if I exclude my grandmothers recalling and retelling stories of me as a four-year old walking away from home to see MGR who was scheduled to address a rally in Sengottai; how an older boy saw me dazed and confused in an alley; how he brought me home in the light rain that had started falling; and how I had a raging fever the next couple of days that they referred to as "MGR fever."  I have no personal memories of that episode from 1968.  But, I remember well the 1971 war.

I could not understand how there could be war in which people were killed.  I was only seven years old and was anti-war.

As I started understanding the world through formal schooling and from whatever I read, I was struck by how much people were fanatical about their national identities.  For a while, I too suffered from an "India fever" that my Indian pride caused.  During those few years, I suppose it would not have taken me much to sign up for a war and go kill people with other identities.  Thankfully, the fever broke in my late teens.

I came to believe that it was a terrible idea to have created an artificial “India” and an artificial “Indian.” Until the British Raj, there was no single political unit that encompassed the geography that we refer to as India. Until the colonization by Europeans, the Subcontinent was like any other place on the planet, with kingdoms large and small. Kingdoms and cultures with long and rich histories.

All that history was rudely interrupted by colonization. Centuries of cultural identities were thrown out under a new term called “Indian” in a country called "India."

I am still shocked that it took graduate school for me to understand that even the name “Pakistan” was something that was cooked up to create an identity out of Punjab, Indus, Afghan, Sindh, Balochistan, and … yes, Kashmir. I was never taught in school, nor did I pick up from any of the readings, that "Pakistan" was a synthesized word!  

In this artificially created national identities of "India" and "Pakistan" Kashmir became a battleground to both identities.  If not for the creation of these identities that drive people to a mad passion, there wouldn't be a fixation that Kashmir. 

During my early teens, when there was unrest in Nagaland and Mizoram, I could not understand why so much money and manpower was being invested to forcibly assimilate people with immense differences. A cousin's husband served as an army physician in Mizoram.  I couldn't understand his "service" nor the military's presence there.

The political unit of India was where my discomfort was.  I had nothing in common with the people from, say, Nagaland or Kashmir.  I could not understand why such a political union was created. On the other hand, I was at ease in my Tamil identity.  Because, I was born into it, raised in a Tamil environment, read Tamil fiction, listened to Tamil politicians, ... even as I read English fiction, watched English movies, and loved Hindi film songs.

But, I also understood that being a Tamil was a mere accident of birth.  How could an accidental birth determine everything political?  Once, I remarked about the accidental birth making me a Tamil Brahmin; the remark did not go well at home.  When people are wrapped up with such accidental identities, well, of course people do not welcome such remarks either.

For a long time now, I have been suspicious about cries of nationalism.  I, therefore, have no patience for any state forcing people, especially in such a highly militarized manner, to be in a political unit.

The orange monster stirring up nationalism here in the US worried me a lot.  Not only because he stirred it up, but also because I believed that it would take a long time for the flag-waving nationalism to die down.   The backdrop of the Soviet Union and Hitler's Germany always remind me that flag-waving mobs and armies don't work out well for humanity.  Yet, here we are in an unfortunate age of militant nationalism.

Mario Vargas Llosa said it eloquently four years ago:

I believe that the great danger in our age is nationalism, it’s no longer fascism, nor communism. These ideologies have become completely outdated. But in contrast, nationalism is a defect that is always there under the surface and above all, at moments of crisis, can be very easily exploited by demagogues and power-hungry leaders. Nationalism is the great tradition of humankind; unfortunately it’s always present in history. 

And so, I believe that it’s the great enemy of democracy. It’s the great enemy of freedom and a terrible source of racism. If one believes that being born into or forming part of a particular community is a privilege, then that is racism. I believe that one must fight nationalism energetically if one believes in democracy, in freedom, especially in this age of mixing and the building of great blocks.

I agree with Llosa (how could I ever disagree with him!): "I think I have achieved something that I aimed for at a young age, which was to be a citizen of the world. The truth is I feel at home in France, in England and in Spain."

Why don't people want to chase after the lofty ideal of being a citizen of the world? 

My place in this world

It will not be an exaggeration when I assert that I am emotionally invested in, tied to, very, very specific places. 

My grandmas' villages, Sengottai and Pattamadai, are very special to me. 

Neyveli, the town where I grew up, has its own place in my heart. 

The city where I landed in America and where I earned my doctorate, Los Angeles, I cherish.

Bakersfield, though a brief interlude, matters to me a great deal.

And, for twenty years now, this wonderful place by the Willamette in a gloriously green state. 

These personal places have defined my life.  They have also given me a clear sense of rootedness and an assurance of belonging. 

Growing up in Neyveli, there was a distinct sense of home being there, while grandmas' villages were the "native places"--the places from where our people were from. 

In contrast, the city where I went to for my undergraduate degree was not "home."  I always knew it was only a transit stop. Even if the college had been a fantastic one of my dreams, I would have known within that the place itself did not matter to me.  Calcutta, on the other hand, where I lived for three months, means more to me than does Coimbatore where I earned my undergraduate degree.

I write and talk with fondness for very few places in the old country and those places were home to me.  It is good to have such a geographic rootedness, I would argue.  A belonging to a place.  A place that is home.  Barry Lopez wrote that "the effort to know a place deeply is, ultimately, an expression of the human desire to belong, to fit somewhere."  True as that is, I would take it a step further and would like people to relate to a quote that I once came across: “Philosophy is really nostalgia, the desire to be at home.”  If we thought about our place, our home, our relationship to the place, we are philosophers.

Whether it is Pattamadai and Sengottai, or Neyveli, or Calcutta, or ... the deep desire to know about them and understand them has been a wonderful blessing in terms of how much they have helped me know about myself.   I even routinely tell students that, without going into autoethnographic details--understanding the world, understanding the peoples, is a wonderful way to understand our own country and our own place in the grand scheme of things.

I love staying put, knowing that I belong to a place.

Staying put—fully inhabiting, loving, and stewarding the place in which you live—is a conservative idea in many respects. It’s interwoven with the idea of civic care and involvement, the importance of commitment to the political, economic, and cultural wellbeing of a community. 

A conservative idea that is also radical in how contrarian it comes across in the contemporary world where it has become increasingly common for people to live in a place but to be emotionally or professionally in a completely different place several time zones away.  Such a disconnect is progress, they say.  But, I disagree.

It is such a "conservative" commitment to the community that even spurred me to write op-eds.  Not op-eds for newspapers in the Timbuktus of the world, but for the newspapers in the community where I lived.  My father asked me more than once why I don't write for the publications in India.  I offered explanations that camouflaged the core reason--I do not feel a connect, a commitment, to India.  I couldn't bear the thought of offending him by making clear my separation from the old country.

Early in my years in Oregon, the editor of one of the newspapers to which I had contributed op-eds, asked me to write about why I authored newspaper commentaries.  It was clear to me why I did and that is what I wrote about too: Writing on issues that matter to the public is my civic responsibility.  Such a civic sense would not be there if I didn't have any geographic rootedness and commitment to a place.

Rootlessness merely adds to the existential angst.  To quote Barry Lopez again: "Existential loneliness and a sense that one’s life is inconsequential, both of which are hallmarks of modern civilizations, seem to me to derive in part from our abandoning a belief in the therapeutic dimensions of a relationship with place."

The R-word

I don't have to wonder much why even Republicans who knew right from wrong, moral from immoral, voted for the orange psychopath who was later impeached not once but twice.

The following is a lengthy comment that a Republican posted in December 2015 in response to my post on income inequality. 

What is wrong with income inequality? Throughout history people of different skills have earned different amounts. I perform a job that requires significant skill and education and am appropriately compensated. Why is it wrong that I earn more than someone who picks blueberries or digs ditches (cue Caddyshack music). 

Now I will be provocative because I really hate the idea of redistribution. I am addressing only attempts at redistribution through governmental or legal means. Moral and ethical issues are separate. Why must my income be taken by the government through taxes and redistributed to those who earn less? What gives government the right to determine how much I or anyone else needs to live? What gives government the right to take my earnings just because I earn above some arbitrary line? It is my money. I earned it. I pay ridiculous amounts in taxes, donate significant amounts to charity, have a family to care for and a retirement (God willing) for which to save. Taking my money and giving it to someone who did not earn it and may or may not "deserve" it is a gross overreach of governmental banditry. If a hunter is more skilled and meets the limit, why shouldn't he eat well all winter? Why should he be forced to share with a lousy hunter who had no success?

Hypocrisy seems rampant in the debates over income inequality. How can anyone take Hillary Clinton seriously when she pretends to care about the plight of the common man and his income struggles? She earns more in a year than many of her supporters will earn in a lifetime. No one asks her to redistribute, and I certainly don't hear her volunteering to do so. Even Bernie Sanders, champion of the low-wage earner, earns 10 times more than those he says he wants to help. Why isn't he asked to redistribute his income? Everyone is shocked when an athlete signs a multi-gazillion dollar contract, but no one mentions income inequality in those conversations. Same with actors and singers. The target is almost always businessmen. Always evil corporations. When is the last time someone did the math? If a president of a multinational company that employs 100,000 who earns $10M per year decided to forgo $9M of his income in an effort to reduce income inequality with his employees, it would mean each employee would get all of $90 that year, or $0.043/hour if the employee works 2080 hours per year. For many people, that doesn't even pay one month's phone bill. What have we accomplished? Nothing. A whole lot of token salary cuts that are good for PR and nothing else.

Perhaps the conversation is really about those earning much more than I earn. Perhaps the conversation is really about those earning over $1M annually. If so, why is it such a hot-button campaign issue? There aren't enough people earning that much to make it an issue. It is an issue because people are uninformed enough to believe that if Sanders says he'll do it, it will happen when he becomes president. They seem to forget that Congress has to pass such a law, and there are a lot of rich people in Congress who will not want to pass such a law. I don't think even Obama and his overzealous use of executive order could force income redistribution. It's all a pipe dream that makes for good campaign sound bites but will never happen.

If people want to help those earning minimal amounts, cut government intervention, mandates and taxes. If businesses didn't have to pay such exorbitant amounts and meet such ridiculous demands, there'd be money enough to give everyone a raise. Until a $15 minimum wage passes, that is. Then businesses will either close shop or will automate as much as possible to reduce labor costs below such a crushing level. 

I removed ethical and moral components of the income redistribution conversation at the beginning because it is not the government's job. Period, end of sentence. Every human has an obligation to help those less fortunate, and it is up to every human to determine to what extent he can help. It is not the government's job to TELL me how much to help or even to force me to help. It is up to each person's conscience, nothing else. 

We are a capitalist country. Laissez faire.

My position has not changed from what I wrote in response: "We differ on what we mean as "moral" in this context."  Overlay the theme from yesterday's post, and the Republican political platform is practically all written up for the next version on which the orange psychopath can campaign!

SehYuhSorry

In the post-WWII Anglo-American world, two events happened in 1952.  On the eastern side of the Atlantic, Princess Elizabeth ascended to the throne after the death of her father.  Later in the year, General Eisenhower won the presidency in a landslide victory over his Democratic opponent, Adlai Stevenson.

The former had a "divine right" to the throne.  In what was once a colony of the British monarch, Eisenhower campaigned and convinced the electorate that he was the best man for the job.

After serving the maximum eight years, Eisenhower returned to life as a regular citizen of the United States.  Elizabeth has been holding on to the throne at a ripe old age of 95.

The Queen continues to be the titular head of many of her former colonies.  So, she sent her grandson and his wife on a goodwill tour to a couple of them in the Caribbean.

The royal grandson made some waves even before reaching the blue Caribbean waters.  When commenting on the situation in Ukraine, he forgot that we do not live in a world in which the king is always correct.  We are only too happy to remind the royalty if they are walking around in the nude.

He said that it was “alien” to see war in Europe.

Those of us who did not sleep through the history classes in high school know well that if anything Europe has been a battlefield for ever.  And the bloodletting was so massive across Europe that even though there are conflicts in Africa that involve a few countries, the phrase "World War" refers only to the horrible wars in Europe.

Alien to see war in Europe?

This gifted royal grandson and his wife headed to the warm Caribbean, where the reception was not always pleasantly warm.

In Belize, for example, the royal couple had to cancel their first engagement after Indigenous Q’eqchi Maya villagers protested plans for the royal helicopter to land on a local football field. ...

Protesters in Kingston carried or wore signs telling the British to SehYuhSorry, and, in honor of 60 years of Jamaican independence, groups posted 60 reasons the British should formally apologize for slavery and more than 400 years of exploitation.

The Queen's representative 'expressed “profound sorrow" and said that “slavery was abhorrent, and it should never have happened.”

You see how he distanced himself from all that?  Like a Nixonian "mistakes were made."  It is not without reason that English teachers stress using the active voice.  Tell us who did it!

Of course, the royal grandson did not personally enslave humans.  He did not colonize alien lands.  But, his royal status is intimately tied to all that and more.

So,what should be done to move forward?

What we now need is for the west, especially the United Kingdom, to seriously engage with us on this matter. And, it’s not just lip service that we require. Flowery words and artful symbols not only do not placate us, but words without action will also offend us. We need leaders in civil society, in politics and in the monarchy to not only acknowledge historic exploitation and the consequences thereof but to begin to make concrete steps to rectify it. 

Work has already been done. The Caricom Reparations Commission has outlined a clear 10-point action plan with a tangible plan forward for creating justice.

Here in America, to seriously engage on such matter is what the inheritors of Eisenhower's political party do not want to do.  In fact, Republicans have actively passed laws, in the states where they are in power, that ban any sincere discussion of the past and how that past has brought about the present.  Further, they believe that this ban on history will be a critical part of their campaign to win back the Congress and the White House!

These two countries on either side of the Atlantic are supposedly the beacons of democracy!

No wonder I am now bald(ing)!

One of the many things that I discovered after becoming an adult is simply that I had way too many things to attend to.  As a kid and later as a teen, as with most kids and teens, I was not really responsible for anything.  But, now, all of a sudden, responsibilities add up one after another during adulthood.

There were one too many things to take care of, and the list seemed to grow with the passing of every year.  Perhaps even with the passing of every month.  Once, as a graduate student, I somehow forgot to pay the electricity bill to the LA DWP.  It was easy for such things to happen.  After all, in what now seems like a prehistoric era, bills came by mail, and we typically sat down over weekends to write the checks, stuck them in the envelopes, fixed postage on them, and then dropped them off at a mailbox. 

Finally, we made sure that there was enough money in the bank to cover all those checks.  Oh, every month we had to also make sure that the bank's statement of how much we had in the account matched our own records; if not, it meant hours of head-splitting paperwork trying to figure out where we messed up.

Remember those days?  You see the number of steps involved?  One miss, and the result is a warning from the utility company that the power will be shut off within a set number of days.

Turned out that the graduate school days were simple and easy compared with life that followed.  The number of businesses that billed me every month seemed to have quadrupled.  As a former colleague joked, everybody wants to grab our wallets! 

Meanwhile, there was a full time job with hours to maintain, unlike graduate school days when I could work according to my pace and schedule.  Then having to track the daughter's schedule and her payments for piano classes, voice lessons, and whatever else.  Scheduling dinners with friends.  Chalking out vacation plans, which meant calling up hotels, airlines, rental car agencies, or going to a travel agent's office.

And then the surprises.  Like when a Swedish teenager came to stay with us for three weeks during the hottest stretch of the San Joaquin Valley summer, and the air conditioning unit conked out.  Or the time when the hot water heater failed.  Or the time that the spring in the garage door broke with a loud noise.

When a couple of plumbers came to fix the broken hot water heater, one of them suggested that I should put some effort into cleaning up the garage.  A random guy walking into my home and adding to the list of chores?

What happens to a person who might not be capable of handling all these things?  Should we be sympathetic towards those who seem to lack the skills to juggle the work that comes with adulthood?  Should we shrug our shoulders and move on when they fail?

When going about our walks or driving around, we see homes overflowing with stuff.  Or, their yards are a sorry mess.  Could it just be that they do not know how to manage their lives?

In my classes, I have often remarked--in appropriate contexts--that students will benefit a lot in their lives if they learnt to manage three things in life.  Yep, only three things: Their health, money, and time.  Unfortunately, we don't really teach students about these, and we leave it to them to figure things out.  Evidence leads me, a guy who couldn't hold on to his job, to conclude that not many have mastered these three.

Ready or not, the buck stops with us adults--students and masters alike.

The Departure

I checked my work email.  There was only one email of importance.  It was from the university's payroll department.

The email began thus:

In order to prepare for your departure from WOU, I am reaching out to see how you would like to receive your final check: via direct deposit on 03/31/2022 or via a paper check on your final day.

It is now a one week countdown to when I apparently will depart from WOU.  A nice euphemism that makes it seem like I am off to a pleasant journey.  I suppose a truthful statement "As a result of your layoff ..." is not acceptable in the contemporary organizational behavior handbooks.

(March 31st is my mother's birthday!)

I am reminded of the one-paragraph Franz Kafka story that I have often shared with students for them to think about their own lives. Here it is for your reading:

The Departure

by Franz Kafka

I ordered my horse to be brought from the stables. The servant did not understand my orders. So I went to the stables myself, saddled my horse, and mounted. In the distance I heard the sound of a trumpet, and I asked the servant what it meant. He knew nothing and had heard nothing. At the gate he stopped me and asked: "Where is the master going?" "I don't know," I said, "just out of here, just out of here. Out of here, nothing else, it's the only way I can reach my goal." "So you know your goal?" he asked. "Yes," I replied, "I've just told you. Out of here--that's my goal."

I feel pain, therefore I exist?

Years ago, one video that I used in my classes was about the economic geography of Gloucester, Massachusetts.  The city, the entire cape, has a long and rich fishing heritage.  But, it is also a textbook example of overfishing, which then leads to an economic decline in an area that hadn't diversified from what was once a booming industry.

In one scene in the video, a fisher stamps his foot over a iced container of fish.  Even the students who love to fish almost involuntarily reacted in horror, which always interested me.  

I don't eat fish--both because of the alien smell and taste, and because I have seen one too many movies and television shows in which the baited fish struggles to survive out of water.  But, to the students, the smell and taste of fish is a part of their life about which they don't think, and most of them have their own personal fishing stories too, which often involves their grandfathers.  Yet, they recoiled more than I did when the fisher in the video stomps in the vat of ice and fish.

During one of those class discussions, it was clear that students did not want to talk about their feelings about fish being harvested and iced and cooked.  It was almost a "can we not talk about that, please!" situation.  My class was not about feelings, and I didn't see any reason to pursue that issue.

To an orthodox Jain, this issue doesn't arise.  They even refuse to eat vegetables that grow under the soil out of a concern that harvesting them could also kill the tiny life forms around them.  Further, something like a potato is "alive"--it can sprout and propagate.

Most of us aren't that strict.  What we instead do, explicitly or implicitly, is to draw a line that clarifies when it is acceptable to kill an animal.  Whether it is for consumption, like in the case of lobsters, or at our homes when we slam the life out of spiders, we make our own rules.  Beef-eaters think that people who eat dog meat or beetles are crazies, while people who worship cows think that the beef eaters are crazies.  And, some of us apologize to the critter for killing them!  

In a secular context, we even offer arguments that a spider or a lobster doesn't really feel pain.  Those are not highly developed animals capable of such feelings, we claim.

But, what if even worms feel pain?

The documentary My Octopus Teacher gave us watchers plenty of video footage to think about the octopus.  When an octopus shows that much intelligence and emotion, we can certainly imagine that they feel pain, right?  Should we recognize these animals as sentient?

Is it ok to kill the fly that has been bugging me? 

Dalit, Deity, and Deliverance

Like everybody else I knew, I grew up watching melodramatic movies in which actors sang, danced, cried, and fought.  The movies were in Tamil because of the accident of my birth in Tamil Nadu; I imagine that kids my age in Andhra Pradesh watched similar movies but in Telugu, or those in Karnataka watched Kannada movies.

At some point, thanks to my sister, I started watching melodramatic movies in which actors sang, danced, cried, and fought, while talking in Hindi, which I did not understand.  The beautiful female actors made it all worthwhile for the tween whose body was beginning to feel the testosterone within.

The Hindu and a few Tamil and English magazines often featured movies and actors and directors that were all different from the movies and actors and directors of those melodramatic Tamil and Hindi movies.  From what I read, those unseen art movies appealed to me.

The one-channel (state-owned) television that was introduced regularly telecast some of those art movies.  I  could finally watch movies that I had only read about in newspapers and magazines.  The movies that rarely ever played in cinema houses but won awards both at home and abroad were now available for my viewing right from home.

I finally was able to watch movies by the likes of Adoor Goplakrishnan, Mrinal Sen, Satyajit Ray, and more. Even Tamil movies like Yarukkaaga Azhudhaan (For whom did he cry?) that weren't screened in the cinemas.  Unlike the typical movies, these had no song-dance sequences.  No songs, period.  I loved them all.  I found them engaging.  They made me think about the human condition.  There was so much to learn about the world, and the art movies were wonderful teachers.

I wondered if some of them might be available in YouTube.  After all, technology has made it possible for us to watch movies from all corners of the world.

I remembered an old Satyajit Ray movie about Dalits and Brahmins in a village.  But, what was the title?

In the old days, we struggled to recall details of events and places and peoples when our memories failed.  Like a cumin seed in a camel's mouth.  We might go on for days trying to solve the puzzle.  We asked friends if they remembered.  And then, suddenly, the details would arise from deep within the mind.  We would then feel an enormous sense of relief, as if an irritating peppercorn bit had been dislodged by the tongue after hours of struggle.  

Now, Google solves those problems within seconds.  The struggles are gone.  The Satyajit Ray movie was Sadgati. 

Google also informed me that it starred Om Puri and Smita Patil.  Now they were actors, unlike most of them in those song-and-dance melodramas!

Watching Sadgati was an intense and moving experience as it was decades ago.  I will refrain from discussing the movie, which is not even an hour-long, if an occasional reader is tempted enough to watch the movie on YouTube.  (It is subtitled in English.)

Glory to Ukraine!

"I been to Delhi," he said slowly gathering the words.  English is not his first language.  Nor his second.  Perhaps not even his third.

"It was in 1978.  I spent only one day.  A driver drove me around."

I told him that I would help him remember the different touristy spots.  I showed him a few photos from my couple of days there in 2012.

With every photo, his eyes lit up more and more.  It was clear that he was reliving that day in his mind.

I wondered whether he made it to Agra.  I pulled up the photo of the Taj Mahal.

He blew a kiss, and his smile was wider than the country itself.

She, on the other hand, had a different kind of a favorite memory of India.  "We loved watching Indian movies," she said, clearly demonstrating familiarity and confidence with the alien language.

"My favorite was about two girls who were twins."

I asked her when it was that she watched the movie.  She said it was perhaps forty years ago.

I knew right away the movie that she was referring to.  Seeta Aur Geeta.  And its glorious songs, like this one.

"Was it Seeta and Geeta?" I asked her.

"Yes, that's the movie."

That was five months ago, when we had the pleasure of hosting them for dinner on a cold fall evening.  We talked about their lives, our lives, their country, and about India.

"It is cold," I remarked.

"You call this cold? Hah!  You should come to our country.  You will see what cold means!"  She laughed.

Now, it is almost a month since Putin launched an unprovoked and unjustifiable war on their country.  The country that they love.  The country to which they have dedicated all their waking hours ever since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Five months ago, I did not think then that there would be a war, even though he was sure that it was coming.  To him, it was not "if" but "when" Russia would launch a full-fledged war.

Until a month ago, I never considered the possibility that we might not meet again.  There are dark moments when I worry that we might never hear from them again.  Every morning, I fear that a WhatsApp message would deliver the tragic news.  We worry about them every day.  We hope that they will be safe.  

War is hell.

This land is my land ...

When we were kids, towards the end of one school year, a puppy wandered into our compound and made himself at home. 

We kids loved the sight of a puppy, of course.  The traditional, and orthodox, household we were, the puppy had to remain outside though.  Mother gave him food and he was happy. Once, when she gave him something to eat, the fellow--as small as he was--scratched the dirt and tried to bury the food, which amused me to no extent. 

A few days later, it was time for us kids to head to grandma's village for the summer break.  We packed the bags into the car, which my parents sold soon after the oil shock of the early 1970s.  The car started rolling out of the compound on to the road.  The puppy darted after. The car picked up speed, and the puppy tried to keep up but could not.  We waved out to the puppy.

When we returned to get back to school, there was no puppy.  The emotion that I felt as a kid was so gut wrenching, which is why I remember that even after all these years.

Decades after that, when my parents visited with us here in America, we had two dogs at home--Speedy and Congo.  After observing how Speedy and Congo were treated, my father joked, tongue-in-cheek, that if one did good things in life, they will then be reborn in America as dogs.  He was convinced that a dog's life here was infinitely better than the human condition in almost every place on the planet, especially in India.

Speedy (left) and Congo (right)

If only he had known how much better it would get for Congo.  Speedy died, and it was all Congo's after that.  Congo had his own small little bed. Actually, three small little beds in different parts of the home.  Dog food. Vet bills. Riding shotgun. And, during walks, if he his small little legs got tired, well, I carried him!

We spend lots and lots of money on cats and dogs.  Amounts that most of the developing world will find incomprehensible, and perhaps even irresponsible when millions of humans struggle to meet even their basic needs.

One such pet owner was ahead of me in the line at the pharmacy window.  I know he was there to get medicines for his pet because he told the woman across the window: "There's no insurance.  It is for my dog."

I wondered if he knew that medical insurance is available for dogs too!

The woman at the pharmacy counter said something to which he responded in a loud voice: "Last time it was only thirty dollars.  How come it has gone up by three hundred and some percent?"

He was angry.  Maybe he is a loner.  His dog is his friend and family.  The dog is the only thing that keeps him going in life.

Yet, despite the anger, he was quick on his feet to calculate the percentage increase. Impressive in a country that is notorious for quantitative illiteracy!

The woman at the counter said something.

This time he exploded: "Fuck you all."  He hurried away without collecting the medicines.

Later in the evening, like Sylvester in Loony Tunes, I taut I taw a puddy tat; I deed, I deed!

A country in which dogs and cats live like they own the place can't be that bad, eh!

Feeling Hot Hot Hot

I felt the chills.  I started shivering.

Soon after, my body began tensing up as an involuntary response.  

The initial reading was 99.1, and two hours later the thermometer registered 101.1.

Yet again in my life, one minute I was a healthy guy going about my business, but with a fever the next minute.

My mother has often recounted an incident from when I was about four years old.  I had a raging fever and was delirious.  What worried her was not the fever itself, nor the delirium, but what I kept saying over and over in that delirious stage.  I didn't call out amma or appa.  I didn't blabber about the sweets that I liked.  Nope.  Not at all.  Instead, as my mother recalls, I called out the gods names over and over.

My mother was worried that I was on my way out.  She kept applying cold towels on my entire body, while she also called out to the same gods.

I survived to hear her tell this story many times over.

A sudden and raging fever has always been a part of my childhood.  Well, even into the middle-age!

Once, during one of those fevers, I complained about intense aches in my legs.  I could immediately see that my parents were, as we would say now, freaked out.  The memory was fresh.

I was about seven or eight years old when we went to grandma's village to attend my father's cousin's wedding.  The bride's youngest brother came down with a strange fever that quickly weakened his legs.  He couldn't walk.  For a couple of years after that, he wore braces on both legs and slowly dragged one foot after another.

So, when I complained about legs that ached while running a high fever, my parents had reasons to be freaked out.

Another fever out of nowhere that could have altered the trajectory of my life happened during the board exams.  In the education system in the old country, the school leaving exams determined one's academic fate, which then had the potential to mess up life altogether.

My father rushed me to the doctor, who recommended a simple treatment protocol: Rest, and do not do any exam preparation. 

As one who never cared to spend time prepping for exams, I found the doctor's recommendation to be utterly useless!

The fever weakened me a great deal though.  For one of the exams, my father escorted me to the hall and sat outside ready, in case he had to rush me to the hospital.

The latest fever episode is but one in a long running series.  I suppose I have always been hot! ;)

Thinking about the Ides of March

March 15th was a fateful date in my life.

Unlike Julius Caesar, I live to tell the tale of what happened.

Remember Shakespeare's setup?

Soothsayer 

Beware the ides of March.

CAESAR

What man is that?

BRUTUS

A soothsayer bids you beware the ides of March.

To which then Caesar says "He is a dreamer; let us leave him: pass."

The day did not turn out well for Caesar.  If only Julius Caesar had quarantined himself on that day, or at least socially distanced from Brutus! 

But, it is not as if we know about Caesar only because he was assassinated.  Instead, we discuss whether he was the greatest Roman emperor or whether he merely lucked out to have been the emperor when Rome was at its greatest.  The Ides of March certainly made Caesar's story and his death highly melodramatic.

In 2002, March 15th was when I interviewed for the job in Oregon. 

Of course, in my talk, I joked about the "Ides of March."

Was my Ides of March experience all for good?  For worse?

A year ago during the Ides of March some of us whose jobs were on the university president's chopping block were getting ready for the possible layoff notice, which did arrive two weeks after the fateful day.

Was it a bad news that I was laid off?  Or, was the layoff a blessing?

I will never, ever know.

We never know if our decisions, or the events of a day, are for the better or for worse. We are able to evaluate them only when we look back over the course of our lives.  All we have are events, which only after the passing of time become a story.  Or stories.

Given the uncertainties in life, it is all about life unfolding itself. Khe Sriram, Sriram Que sera sera!  The Ides of March is but one day, fateful or not, in a story that we tell ourselves about our lives.

I must quote you a Buddhist parable that I came across a few years ago, in a wonderful essay that was about a specific political development.

A poor farmer whose only worldly possession is a mare wakes up one morning to discover that the mare has gone. He runs to his parents’ house and breaks the terrible news. When he’s finished, they ask, “Are you sure it’s bad news?”
“Of course it’s bad news!” he replies, stomping angrily away.
Ten days later, his mare returns, bringing with her a magnificent stallion.
The farmer runs to his parents and tells them the wonderful news.
“Are you sure it’s good news?” they ask.
“Of course it’s good news,” he declares, leaving in a huff.
Days go by, and the farmer decides to try to break the stallion. He bridles the beast, climbs on its back, and is promptly thrown to the ground and trampled. The village doctor informs him that he will be a cripple for life. When he can do so, he makes his way to his parents and tells them the dreadful news.
“Are you sure it’s bad news?” they reply.
He doesn’t answer, but he mutters to himself all the way home. Two weeks later, a detachment of the Emperor’s army arrives to draft all the able-bodied men of the village. Of course, they pass over the crippled farmer. He hobbles to his parents’ house to share his joy.
“Are you sure it’s good news?” they ask.
The story has no end, of course

My story continues on after the layoff.  But, yes, life as it is now was certainly influenced by the fateful day twenty (!) years ago.

After I was all done at the old place in California, the department secretary wrote in her email to me:

I know that the people at WOU will be very thankful that you have accepted the position.  I will miss you very much.  You always had a smile on your face and willing to help in any way

The layoff has forced me into retirement--a stage in life that I for long thought would come much later.  But, life unfolds in strange ways.  After the initial frowns of worry, I hope to have a smile on my face, have my sense of humor--however warped it is--and willing to help in any way.   After all, life is not only about what happened, or did not happen, on the Ides of March.

Thoughts on a Pi Day

The grocery store that is close to my new home is bigger than the one where I used to get bananas, beans, butter, and everything else.  There are a number of checkout lanes, often with a couple of customers waiting in line for the clerks to tally up the purchase.  The shopping experience makes me feel like I have moved from a small town to a big city.

As with most big city experiences, the checkout experience is less personal than it was in the small town across the river.  Six months later, I am yet to build any familiarity with the checkout clerks.  I am yet to find a Wendy or Kathy or the rest here in the new store.  On this Pi Day, I am reminded of Wendy sharing a pun, as she often did: "Studies show that 3.14 percent of all sailors are PIrates."

As much as I have stories about places and people in the old country, I suppose I will also carry around stories of people from the other side of the river.

As a nerd, I loved solving all the π-problems in math.  I could not believe that π is a constant, whatever be the size of the circle.  It was one of the many mind-blowing concepts that I learnt, and which I truly enjoyed learning about.  Like how any which way we drew triangles, the angles always added up to 180 degrees.  What an exhilarating experience it was to learn such new stuff every day!

One year, the maths (which is how we referred to math in the old country) teacher was the daughter of my father's colleague.  Her younger brother was my age but in a different school.  I was a tad nervous in the classroom, worried that she might tell my parents what I was up to in school.  Not that I ever got into trouble, especially during those younger years, but the worry was always there.

During one of those quarterly or half-yearly exams, for which we took clipboards and the school supplied the paper on which we wrote down our responses, I completed the exam well ahead of time.  I loved racing to be the first to finish the tests.  Of course, there was a downside--"silly mistakes" as we called them.  Errors that might not have happened had I been slow and careful.  But, those mistakes did not matter to me because I didn't care about the grade--"marks." 

I suspect that my indifference to grades resulted from a supreme confidence that I had about my abilities, which is what another math teacher, in the high school level, referred to as "over-confidence."  She showed me an example of a mistake that I had made as a result of my careless race to the finish.  But, I never changed my approach.  I am glad that I never cared about marks and grades, even though they have effected me quite a bit, like this one.

True to myself, I finished the exam and turned the papers over to the teacher.  Very few teachers let us leave the exam hall early.  Almost always, I sat there scribbling something or thinking about whatever, until the teacher felt it was ok for students who turned in the papers to leave. 

This teacher, because she knew me and my family, inquired about us.  I recall telling her that I am the middle child.  I think that was the first time ever that I articulated my thoughts that I was a middle child.  What I didn't tell her was what I meant by that--a concern that my sister was loved more than me because she is the first, and my brother was loved more because he is the youngest. 

It is not without reason that much later in life, after moving to America and picking up all things Americana, I adopted Rodney Dangerfield's "I don't get no respect" as my shtick too.  After all, it is not that I was a favorite of any teacher at school either.  Leading up to the 30th-reunion after graduating from high school, I called up a classmate whose mother was our English teacher for a couple of years.  Mrs. M. had no idea who I was!  "I recall Ravikumar, Sridhar, Srikumar, ... but ..."  

Even though I didn't say anything about my insecurities, this math teacher perhaps picked up the vibe.  She told me that there was nothing wrong in being a middle child and that I should stop saying that.

When visiting India a few years ago, while sitting around and talking old stories, I asked my father if my sister is his favorite.  He acknowledged his special soft spot for her.  It was my mother's turn now.  I asked her if my brother was her favorite and, surprise, he was.

My sister jumped in: "You are Aunty R.'s favorite."

We are all somebody's favorites.

Persistent Majoritarianism

The Sri Lankan civil war haunts A Passage North.  This novel is an addition to the post-civil war movies that we have watched these past few years.  In Dheepan, three Tamils, including a former Tamil Tiger, flee Sri Lanka and seek refuge in France.  Funny Boy was a coming of age story in which the "Black July" of 1983 changes everything for all the characters.

Only the bizarre English language could use the word "civil" in a bloody war.

The violence of the war might have ended, but the wounds are deep and remain raw.

In 1972, slightly over two decades after gaining independence from European colonizers, in the renamed Sri Lanka, "the United Front government enshrined the unitary structure of the state, gave Buddhism a newly privileged position, did away with the provision in the 1948 constitution protecting minorities, and entrenched the Sinhala-only language policy constitutionally."

One can easily imagine that this would not solve problems but create a whole bunch in a country with a significant minority of the population that is not Buddhist nor Sinhala.  

The UN Human Rights Commission noted last month that the country has made progress but has a long way to go "particularly the continuing precarious situation of the families of the disappeared – the majority of whom are represented by women.”

Across the waters from Sri Lanka is the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, with a population that is three times that of the island country.  Tamil Nadu's population is barely 5 percent of India's population.

Sri Lanka is significantly smaller than India, but offers a worrying portrait of what could happen to civil society when democracy that protects the rights of minorities is replaced by majoritarianism.

With Hindus comprising nearly 80% of the population, the BJP, which is the political party governing the country, is on full throttle towards majoritarianism.  A tyranny of the majority that worried the framers of the American democratic system.  It is on a course towards making Hinduism the state religion, similar to Buddhism in Sri Lanka.

 

Writing about the mounting majoritarianism and political polarization in India, Niranjan Sahoo reminds us:

After the BJP’s historic victory in 2014, ethnonationalism gained greater traction as a core component of the party’s platform. Some BJP members even called for amending the constitution to redefine India as a Hindu nation.

Sahoo concludes:

The main hope for positive change comes from India’s resilient society, which has rejected threats to democracy in the past. In addition, the country’s diversity, multicultural roots, and strong culture of interfaith dialogue, as well as divisions within the Hindu religion, may act as checks against majoritarianism. Yet time may be running out for India and its democracy, and the BJP’s increasing majoritarianism since the 2019 elections offers a dire warning. With polarization now reaching alarming heights, Indian democracy may have entered uncharted territory.

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, we are warned.  If only the leaders from Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh turned their eyes towards the small little pearl drop in the blue waters, they too would worry about the dire implications of majoritarianism.  They need a passage south, comparable to A Passage North:

He couldn't help thinking, as the train hurtled closer toward his destination, that he'd traversed not any physical distance that day but rather some vast psychic distance inside him, that he'd been advancing not from the island's south to its north but from the south of his mind to its own distant northern reaches.

Are you a man or a mouse?

In my early years of atheism, I reveled in making fun of the "crazy" practices of the faithful.  I cheered on the militantly atheistic writers who made fun of the religious or debated them.  A news item like a Jehovah’s Witnesses parent refusing blood transfusion for their child were solid evidence for my view on religions.

And then I got older.

I began to appreciate how much religions offer meaning to lives.  People of faith or otherwise, all of us know we are going to die.  It is only a question of when. 

To live our lives fully aware that we could die at any minute is a sure trigger for existential angst.  Add to that the thoughts that make us wonder what would happen to us after we die.  When we have to bury or cremate the body of one who was dear to us, when that person has become the body that will soon disappear forever, we know well it could soon be our turn to become nothing but the body.

Religions ease the angst with happy thoughts.  Those who believe can take comfort that their father or daughter would be up there in heaven with god and the angels and all the other dead family members.  A wonderful family reunion that one can look forward to, which takes away the pain from the loss of a loved one.

That framework also orients the believer to work every day towards ensuring attendance at the glorious family reunion, instead of being condemned to hell.  (Whether or not the believers practice being good believers is not the point of this post.)

When a Jehovah’s Witnesses parent refuses blood transfusion, it is because both the Old and New Testaments clearly command them to abstain from blood.  They "avoid taking blood not only in obedience to God but also out of respect for him as the Giver of life."

The older, and a tad wiser, me stopped making fun of such faith-based decisions a while ago.  While I disagree with most faith-based practices, I acknowledge the important roles those frameworks play in the human condition.

The medical insight and technology that made blood transfusions possible continues to offer more advancements with which some people of faith might have problems.  Like xenotransplantation, which is transplantation from another species.  Like from pigs.  Recently, researchers successfully transplanted a genetically modified pig heart into a human, who lived two months before he died.

Why a pig heart?

Pigs are a preferred xenotransplantation animal for several reasons: their circulatory system is similar to the human one, their organs are about the right size, they grow up fast, they breed easily, and, well, although they’re as sweet and emotional as our pet dogs—and often smarter—they aren’t closely related to us.

Pigs are not kosher, are haram, to Jews and Muslims, and to millions of Hindus, Jains, and Buddhists.  As the technology advances, and the yield of organs and body parts obtained from pigs that are specially grown for medical harvesting becomes better, will the faithful sign not up for the procedures?  Will their religious leaders be asked to clarify what god's intentions and directives are?  Like Jehovah’s Witnesses, will people of other faith say no to the porcine parts?

Science will increasingly challenge what it means to be human.  And, as our track record shows, we humans will continuously change our interpretations of what it means to be human.

I, for one, have no desire for life extension procedures. 

I have lived a good life that was purely an accident.  Every birth, in my atheistic view, is nothing but an accident, and not a physical body for a soul that god created.  The combination of a sperm and an egg on any other day would have resulted in a person other than me.  This product of a highly improbable union faces a certain end, postponing which has no appeal to me.

In my outlook, family reunions are in the here and in the now.  There is no reunion in the after.  Instead of spending money on porcine parts to extend my life, I would rather channel that into spending time with people who care about me before such reunions become physically impossible.

The elephant as a person

Right from when I was a kid, I loved elephants.  I am not the only kid in the old country who would have had such a strong feeling about elephants.

Every once in a rare while, we would spot a young elephant being walked down the street from or to a temple.  Here was a large, powerful animal, walking about slowly as if it owned the world.  The movement of people and bicycles and scooters and cars and lorries and buses seemed to come to a halt.  

I would stand and look at the animal until it completely disappeared from view. There was something calming, quite therapeutic.

At the temples with elephants, it was always a thrill to be blessed by the elephant.  We would give 50 paise or so to the mahout, who would prompt the elephant to lift up its trunk and gently place it over our heads.  It was as good as being blessed by Pillayar himself!

As I got a little older, I started getting uncomfortable looking at elephants being held in restricted temple corners and all by themselves.  To be all the time under a mahout's control, to be pricked by his stick, to be unfree, was certainly not natural.  Even the standard art work of elephants dragging huge logs reminded me of forced labor. 

I could not understand how they could ever be exhibits in zoos.  To be locked away in a tight space, far away from its natural habitat and other elephants came across as nothing but solitary confinement.  

Even when young, we read in stories that an elephant never forgets.  Their brains are highly developed.  "Their huge brains are capable of complex thinking—including imitation, memory, coöperative problem-solving—and such emotions as altruism, compassion, grief, and empathy."

Altruism, compassion, empathy, all emotions lacking in many human beings, and yet they are merely animals while we humans are some superior species!

If elephants can remember, imitate, work with groups, and show those emotions, don't they qualify to be recognized as persons?  If an abstract corporation can be legally recognized as a person, why not a real elephant?  Do corporations emote?  Do corporations die?  Do corporations give birth?  Elephants do them all, and more.

If fertilized human eggs are celebrated by half the country as having some kind of a personhood with rights,  don't elephants, and chimpanzees, and whales, and more deserve to be recognized as persons?  As non-human persons?  

"How are we to recalibrate our relationship with animals that live in complex societies and have a sense of themselves as individuals? ... If we can’t save elephants, what can we save?"

(The photo below is from my only trip to Tanzania in 2009.  I was excited to see the African elephant, which is a lot bigger than the Indian elephant, and with ears that are huge.  Even more exciting was to see so many calves at one place.)

What if I don't want to be entertained?

As the late Shashi Kapoor put it, Bollywood is "pure escapism."  The escapism often playing on the base emotions including, yes, sex.  But, Kapoor did not want to live on the margins and was a full-fledged participant in Bollywood.

Of course I have watched a few "Bollywood" movies in my life.  As one who grew up in India, how could I have not? 

But, anybody who is even remotely familiar with India knows that Bollywood is not India.  The songs, the melodies, were their real contribution.  (Like this one that Shashi Kapoor lip-syncs to.)

Anybody who is also vaguely familiar with movies in India knows about the parallel cinema scene.  The art movies that most ignore.

When I was young, I read about a group of youth who were convinced that the art movies would appeal to a lot more people if they actually watched it.  So, they drove around to a few villages, with a portable movie projector and screen and speakers.  This was back when movies were in reels and, therefore, one needed a projectionist who knew what to do.

The group was indeed correct in their assumption--a lot more people liked the art movies compared to what was thought as possible.  But then how would one go about convincing commercial distributors and cinema owners, who view the mainstream commercial movies as a sure bet?

The parallel cinema continued on but only with a select audience.

Thankfully, the state-owned television channel, which was the only one that we had, regularly telecast some of those art movies.  

I finally could watch movies that I had only read about in newspapers and magazines.  The movies that rarely ever played in cinema houses but which, according to newspapers and magazines, had won awards both at home and abroad.

As art, and as stories about the real world and its people, those art movies outnumber the commercial ones that I remember and cherish even after all these years.  Some stories were about the poor; a few were about the struggling middle-class; or were against a historical backdrop; one even made an Anglo-Indian woman the center of the story.  In other words, they were about life that interested me.

They did not cater to any set formula, and the endings often left the viewer exploring the story and the characters because, well, there was no formulaic ending.  No bow tie to wrap up the box.  If only they made more such movies in the old country instead of the messed up Bollywood ones!

The older I got, the more the Bollywood movies became unwatchable, like in the instances that I have blogged about.  (Here and here.)  Every visit to India has been even more disappointing than the previous ones on how far removed society seems to be from art and culture.

Technology has made possible for us to watch movies from all corners of the world.  Especially during the two pandemic years when the virus forced us to stay put, I often looked for art movies that told stories of life in India.  Two (this and this) came close enough, but not near what the old masters created, which people like me remember even after decades.  But, they give me hope that people in India have not given up on art.

If we change, who are we then? Oh, and if we don't change?

I grew up in a Tamil household in Tamil Nadu.  At the school that we siblings attended, English was the instructional language, and Tamil was one of the languages that we studied.  So, I grew up with an ability to read, write, and speak in English and Tamil, with a couple of years of exposure to Hindi and Sanskrit too.

Many friends from school were not Tamils.  When we spent time together, we joked and conversed in English.  Rangayya, Manibaba, and Srinivas were Telugu-speakers.  Srikumar and his family conversed in Malayalam.  When Vijay and I fought, we did that too in English, leaving aside our respective backgrounds of Malayalam and Tamil.  

While they all spoke their respective languages, they didn't learn to read and write in Telugu or Malayalam.  After all, the school did not offer those languages as options.  (I am not sure if their parents taught them how to read and write in those languages either.)  In order to satisfy the language requirements, my friends studied Hindi, with the exception of Manibaba who dabbled in Sanskrit.

All of them spoke Tamil, some more fluently than others.  If memory serves me well, none knew how to read and write in Tamil (unless they took Tamil for a couple of years in school.)  With stores and street names and bus routes and many more public services carrying signs in both English and Tamil,  they could easily navigate through the town and the state with the spoken language but were otherwise "illiterate" in Tamil.

More than literacy in their native languages--the mother tongues--I would imagine that these raised questions about identity.  Even though all their formative years were spent in the same industrial township in Tamil Nadu, which is no different from my experience, did they at any time wonder if they were Tamils?  Did they consider Tamil Nadu to be their home, or were Andhra Pradesh and Kerala their homelands?

Such questions did not bother us humans for the longest time because we rarely ever moved from the places where we were born and raised.  Our identities were clearly defined at birth, and continued to be no different all the way through the very end.  Spouses were found within that same group and the identity was reproduced over and over through the generations.

For me, my classmates, and billions of others in the brown world, European colonization changed everything before we were even born.  As Aatish Taseer wrote quoting the Sri Lankan art critic Anada Coomaraswamy:

‘It is hard to realize,’ Coomaraswamy writes in The Dance of Shiva, ‘how completely the continuity of Indian life has been severed. A single generation of English education suffices to break the threads of tradition and to create a nondescript and superficial being deprived of all roots—a sort of intellectual pariah who does not belong to the East or the West.’

My concerns about the usage of the word pariah aside, I wonder now if my friends felt that they belonged neither to Tamil Nadu nor to Kerala or Andhra Pradesh, while fully aware that English was an alien language that had been thrust upon us.

Language and all the related customs and traditions faced yet another challenge as we graduated from high school and college, and moved to completely new surroundings.  Srikumar ended up in the Czech Republic.  Manibaba was working in the Middle East when he passed away.  Rangayya and Srinivas settled down in Maharashtra, where the primary languages are Marathi and Hindi.  I am here in the US.  What has migration done to our respective identities of who we are?

Here in the US, the offspring of Indian immigrants were (are?) referred to as ABCDs--American Born Confused Desis.  The confusion arising from a lack of a clear identity.  Are they Americans?  Indian-Americans?  Tamil-Americans?  Muslim-Americans?  But, isn't it a reality that even the desis in India are confused desis struggling with identity issues?

I have forever believed that it is up to individuals to figure out for themselves who they are--even if they have not migrated across international or domestic borders.  The family and, therefore, the cultural contexts that we are born into are beyond our control.  My Tamil identity is an accident of birth, as much Rangayya's identity as a Telugu was.  Do we want to claim those accidental identities forever?  Are changes to those identities transgressions in life?  Are there other identities that we could explore?

In A Passage North, Anuk Arudpragasam writes in the English language about characters who are are Tamils in Sri Lanka.  He was born into a Tamil family, but in Sri Lanka.  Like many of us from the Subcontinent, he too grew up with the English language, and speaking with an accent just as we did and do.  He earned his undergrad and doctorate degrees in the US.  How does he think about identity, and how does he square the circle?   In the video that I have embedded here, he talks about migration and identity.  (The talk is in Tamil.)

Ukraine and the squirrel

I am not one of those who is acutely aware of the types of trees or animals.  Especially in the adopted country where I have no childhood familiarity, unlike with tamarind or banyan trees or elephants.  So, years ago, when a friend asked me whether what I saw was a squirrel or a chipmunk, I thought to myself "does it really matter?"  I vocalized that internal voice as "is there a difference other than their size?"

As we got into talking about those rodents, I told them about the story of how the Indian squirrel earned its stripes.  Now, that was new to them.

I might not know a pine tree from a fir, but boy do I relish in connecting with the old Hindu mythologies.  I suppose the mythology to a non-believer is religion to others.  After all, it takes a giant leap of faith to believe that a dead man came back to life after three days, or that the religious leader took a night trip to the heavens on a winged horse, or that chanting to a granite idol will solve one's problems.

Of course, the Hindu mythologies were at one time integral to my faith.  There were times that I tried to convince myself that the gods weren't delivering the goods only because I was not believing enough.  I heard a religious pundit use an example to drive home the point about faith.  A Vedic scholar is pushed off a mountain by anti-social elements.  As he is falling down to his death, he remains calm and says "if the Vedas are true, then this fall will not kill me."  Splat he hits the ground and dies.  In heaven, he asks the gods why they didn't save him and let him live.  They tell him that he said "if the Vedas are true" and that there is no ifs and buts about the Vedas.

I have been a non-believer for decades.  But, I love the old mythologies because they offer wonderful insights into the human condition.  When I think about them as allegories, they are valuable moral guidelines on how to live a good life.

The story of the squirrel in the Ramayana, an epic that every Hindu is at least superficially familiar with, is one such allegory.

In the mythology, Rama is on his way to Lanka to rescue his wife, Sita, from Ravana.  One minor problem that Rama--a human incarnation of the god Vishnu--faces is that Lanka is an island off peninsular India.  Rama didn't have a flying machine that Ravana had--the bad guys always seem to be the ones with better gadgets!  So, a bridge had to be built for Rama and his soldiers, which included a monkey regiment, to cross the sea.

As humans and monkeys worked day and night to build that bridge from Rameshwaram, a squirrel too wanted to help out in this just war.  It rolled around in the sand and ran to the bridge under construction and shook the sand off its body.  Rama was so impressed and moved by the critter's dedication to the war effort that he gently caressed the squirrel.

According to the Ramayana, those gentle caresses are how the squirrel earned its white stripes.  Rama's imprints on the squirrel that wanted to help the good guy fight the bad guy.

Which brings us to Ukraine.

Of course there is very little that this blogger can do from a small town that is ten time zones away.  There is practically nothing that most of us individuals can do.  However, we can, should, be like the allegorical squirrel in the Ramayana and do whatever is possible within our capabilities so that a country and its people can be rescued from the evil actions of a madman.

Here are some ways that you too can be a squirrel in this modern day retelling of the Ramayana and help defeat the Russian Ravana.

"The present, we assume, is eternally before us"

There are a few opening lines in works of literature that I can immediately recognize.  Like:

"Call me Ishmael."

"Mother died today."

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

And then there is the lengthy paragraph that begins Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

To those memorable lines (and more) I will boldly add this one too: 

The present, we assume, is eternally before us, one of the few things in life from which we cannot be parted.

What a powerful and profound thought!

The paragraph-sentence that follows adds more:

It overwhelms us in the painful first moments of entry into the world, when it is still too new to be managed or negotiated, remains by our side during childhood and adolescence, in those years before the weight of memory and expectation, and so it is sad and a little unsettling to see that we become, as we grow older, much less capable of touching, grazing, or even glimpsing it, that the closest we seem to get to the present are those brief moments we stop to consider the spaces our bodies are occupying, the intimate warmth of the sheets in which we wake, the scratched surface of the window on a train taking us somewhere else, as if the only way we can hold time still is by trying physically to prevent the objects around us from moving.

The author gets the reader ready for an intensely retrospective, reflective narrative.  Anuk Arudpragasam has me wanting more right from those opening pages of his A Passage North.

Source

When I first came across that name a few weeks ago, when I added the book to my reading list, I felt that the author either was a Sri Lankan Tamil, or a descendant of a Tamil who had ventured, on their own or as indentured labor, into a land far away like South Africa or Trinidad.  In both, the Tamil Hindu names are spelled differently from how they are back in the old country.  Like how the name Nagamuthu of the old country gets spelled as Nagamootoo.

Arudpragasam is, similarly, a differently spelled Arulprakasam of the old country.  And, yes, he is from Sri Lanka.

Arudpragasam wrote the novel when he was wrapping up his PhD in philosophy at Columbia University!  Maybe that explains the weighty opening sentence?

How did the philosopher get interested in writing fiction?

I didn’t come from a book-reading household, so my entry into books was arbitrary. It happened to be through philosophy books that I found at a bookshop close to my house. The first book I read was Plato’s Republic. Then it was Descartes’s Meditations and a book of lecture notes of Wittgenstein’s called The Blue Book. I tried to read Aristotle’s Ethics, but I stopped that after a while. I read a lot of philosophy when I was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, before I went to university. That was my entry into literature—I only really started reading fiction when I was in college. There was one book in particular, The Man without Qualities, by Robert Musil—he actually had a Ph.D. in philosophy. He has these long, digressive, essayistic sections in his book, which I haven’t read since I was twenty, so I don’t know how I’d feel about it now. At the time I was very moved by the way he places philosophical questioning and response in a kind of living, bodily situation. Philosophical problems arise in lived context, in response to real situations, and in philosophy, academically, you don’t really ask or answer questions in that way. But I read that book, and it showed me that there was a place in fiction and novels for a lot of what interested me about philosophy. Actually placing these things in their lived context charges philosophy in a way that simply discussing them abstractly does not. So I read that book, and I decided that I would like to write fiction, that I wanted to be the kind of person who could write a book like that.

 

It is not that difficult, however, to imagine PhDs writing fiction.  There are at least four that I can name without checking with Google, and whose works I have blogged about: Jhumpa Lahiri, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Alan Lightman.   S.J. Sindu was a recent addition to that list.

I am, yet again, reminded of Orhan Pamuk's observation on the (coming) dominance of non-white writers.