Want to buy a shiny new thing?

I have heard my mother and grandmothers comment that if you leave the house it is for nothing but expense.  My mother has lived long enough to experience for herself how one doesn't even have to leave home anymore to spend money in this click-and-spend culture.

We consume a lot.  We buy things we need, we want, we don't need, and we don't want.  We have grown addicted to stuff, and getting rid of this addiction is impossible it seems.  

Consumption is practically what the modern economy is all about, once we got beyond basic survival.  Such a worry about consumption and economic growth is not new.  In graduate school, I learnt about the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth.  This report came out when I had barely started elementary school!  Decades later, we continue to worry about the consequences of growth and consumption.

Whether we live in apartments or mansions, we Americans collect a whole lot of worthless crap.  A few years ago, I wrote in Planetizen: 

Of course, as many of us have observed, but for which data don't exist, most homeowners seem to fill their garages with refrigerators, freezers, bicycles, treadmills, etc., and then park their cars on the driveways or by the curb. When things have to be put away, households find that they have more stuff for which they need additional space, which is where the self-storage business comes in.

How did we humans become such voracious consumers?  Kerryn Higgs has written a book on this.  In a shorter version, she writes:

People, of course, have always “consumed” the necessities of life — food, shelter, clothing — and have always had to work to get them or have others work for them, but there was little economic motive for increased consumption among the mass of people before the 20th century.

Through most of their lives, my grandmothers were not consumers.  Sure, they had more than what was needed to survive.  But, it is not as if they bought stuff and stored them at home.  What they left behind was truly worthwhile--like the wall clock that I have inherited.

Higgs writes:

Although the period after World War II is often identified as the beginning of the immense eruption of consumption across the industrialized world, the historian William Leach locates its roots in the United States around the turn of the century. 

In the United States, existing shops were rapidly extended through the 1890s, mail-order shopping surged, and the new century saw massive multistory department stores covering millions of acres of selling space. Retailing was already passing decisively from small shopkeepers to corporate giants who had access to investment bankers and drew on assembly-line production of commodities, powered by fossil fuels; the traditional objective of making products for their self-evident usefulness was displaced by the goal of profit and the need for a machinery of enticement.

Think about "making products for their self-evident usefulness" and compare it to now.  We didn't know we needed carbonated drinks, for instance.  The profit-motive means that businesses create new products for which they then have to create a marketing campaign in order to convince us that we need them.

New needs would be created, with advertising brought into play to “augment and accelerate” the process. People would be encouraged to give up thrift and husbandry, to value goods over free time.

My grandmothers had lots of free time.  They spent that time talking with their neighbor women while playing kattam.  Or, they read.  Or, they slept.  They knew how to handle free time, which is why when we kids--who were growing up in a "modern" society--complained about being bored, my grandmothers had a tough time understanding what boredom was all about!

This modern economic system would collapse overnight "if people were content because they felt they had enough."  But, of course, we have been brainwashed enough that we have no understanding of what it means to be content.

If we are working long hours primarily because it is not about mere survival but to consume more, then "today’s discussions need to move beyond the old point about the marvels of technology, and truly ask: what is it all for?"

Thus begins the retirement

Retirement became real today.

On this final working day of the month, my bank account shows a direct deposit of my pension.  I am now officially a pensioner!

Pension and retirement are relatively new concepts in human history.  In the old country, for instance, the multi-generational living arrangement allowed for the elderly--if they managed to live long--to be supported by their children and grandchildren.

I grew up in such a system. 

My paternal grandmother had two sons--my father and his elder brother. As was the custom, she--a widow--went to live with her first son.  And that is how it would have been until she died, but for the domestic drama with that daughter-in-law.  She then lived her final seven years with us before her congenitally enlarged heart just stopped working.

My maternal grandmother had no sons.  In the old tradition, parents worried a lot if they did not have sons.  Only sons could support them in this earthly life and in the beyond.  She lucked out with welcoming and warm sons-in-law and daughters who never fought a day in their lives.

At some point in my high school life, I began to wonder if people had children only because they wanted somebody to take care of them in their old age.  As we get older, our bodies begin to ache and squeak and break, for which medical and financial assistance is needed.  Sons and daughters and grandchildren automatically become the insurance policy.

With a few cousins and friends I talked about this old age insurance scheme.  Looking back, I am not surprised that one cousin started referring to me as the Buddha because I had lots of thoughts and questions on various aspects of life.

Much later, in graduate school, I found it hilarious that researchers had given such a behavior a name, and were publishing papers on it!  According to the old-age-security hypothesis, the benefits that people expect from children as their insurance decreases with economic development.  Further, if there are government-offered old-age security programs, then fertility rates plunge with economic development.  Of course, there are a few other factors too--like increase in the rights for women.  My gut-level and observation-led argument on children as old-age insurance was now intellectually validated.

Sure, people have children for other reasons too. But, none of those reasons ever appealed to me.  Even as a teenager, I knew for certain that I did not want to have children, and why people have kids continues to be beyond my imagination.  But, here too, life does not unfold as we script it.

At my first real job, in California, a colleague, Peter, told me that he was going to offer me a piece of advice whether or not I needed it.  He talked about the importance of saving for retirement. He suggested that I channel the pay-raises into savings.  His mantra was simple: You never miss the money you never saw in the first place.  

I became a saver, and am thankful I did.  After all, the odds are that the years in retirement could even exceed the years that I lived working.

Float like a butterfly

Vladimir Nabokov ran from the communist revolution in Russia, then from Hitler, and finally came here to America.  If not for the revolution in 1917, Nabokov's parents might not have left Russia in 1919, when the author was a young man of twenty.  

An undergraduate program--with honors, of course--at Trinity College came next.  Then back to Berlin and then on to Paris.  And then to the US as a forty-year old man where Nabokov lived as a writer and as a faculty at the best institutions: Stanford, Harvard, Wellesley,and Cornell.  Finally, back to Europe--to Switzerland--in 1961 where he lived until his death in 1977. 

I wonder if he would have ever imagined that the Soviet Union would disintegrate a mere decade later.

Nabokov was a refugee and an immigrant more than once in his life.  And, yet, he prospered, leaving his mark on humanity in ways most of us are incapable of.

Nabokov was also an expert on butterflies.

In an interview in 1967, Nabokov said:

The pleasures and rewards of literary inspiration are nothing beside the rapture of discovering a new organ under the microscope or an undescribed species on a mountainside in Iran or Peru. It is not improbable that had there been no revolution in Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology and never written any novels at all.

The longer I live, the more I understand that life is less defined by the paths that we chart for ourselves and created more by external forces that are beyond our control and imagination.  When I was getting into my teens, I would not have ever imagined that I would live my adult life in America.  Into my early fifties, I was on a path to retire as I neared 70, and yet here I am in retirement a decade earlier than planned.  We think we are in control of our lives, and rarely do we acknowledge that such a thought is nothing but an illusion.  A grand delusion, actually.

When we studied in high school biology about the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly, I had a tough time believing and imagining a wriggly worm becoming a colorful butterfly.  How magical, I thought.

These days, kids and adults rarely ever see butterflies in our urban lives.  We call this progress!

The Indian poet-mystic Rabindranath Tagore had a simple and yet profound poem in which he referred to the butterfly, in his Poems on Time.  Well, it is not really about the butterfly itself, as you can see:

The butterfly counts not months but moments,
and has time enough.

Time is a wealth of change,
but the clock in its parody makes it mere change and no wealth.

Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time
like dew on the tip of a leaf.

May you, too, have wealthy moments in your life!

A Brown Revolution For A Green Revolution?

My doctor has been bugging me to get a colonoscopy done.  From what I know about the procedure, there is nothing that is attractive.  To first drink a horribly tasting liquid which then forcefully evacuates the insides, after which a doctor sends a tube with a camera up from the rear end while I am sedated comes across more as how the likes of Dick Cheney love to torture whoever they label as terrorists.  I should note for the record that I am not a terrorist!

After having failed to convince me over the years, the good doctor recommended another procedure.  In this option, I have to collect the excrement and send the parcel to a lab.  In a moment of weakness, when my defenses were down, I agreed with him. 

Then the collection kit arrived.  After I watched the video on how to use it, I knew that I couldn't go through it.

I am, of course, not the only one who gets so grossed out by something that comes out of our own bodies.  To think that the stuff was inside all the time!

There is a good biological reason for us to be turned off by turd.  It is for our own well being.  Across the cultures, right from when we are toddlers, we learn to stay away from poop.

Faeces are dangerous shit. When left to nature’s own devices, a pile of poo begins to endanger humans almost immediately. Attracted to the nutrients inside that pile – nitrogen, phosphorous and undigested proteins – pathogens swarm in. Some feed on it, others lay eggs. When faecal matter leeches into drinking water, it spreads cholera, dysentery and intestinal worms causing deadly disease outbreaks. So it’s hardly surprising that humans have a very complicated relationship with their own waste.

A complicated relationship, indeed.

In India, the complication even seeped into the rigid caste system, in which some people born as Dalits were condemned to live as manual scavengers.

In the modern world, we wipe or wash and flush the toilet after we are done, and we don't think twice about what happens.  But, Lena Zeldovich writes that we should.  In fact, she wants us to learn about how we traditionally dealt with feces in order to recover the nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium that are fertilizers that are being flushed away. 

Fertilizer "from people’s bottoms was an easy and naturally occurring resource that never ran out, as long as there were people."  Zeldovich writes about how old Japan created a "market" for the night soil:

The Japanese name for night soil was pithy and right to the point: named shimogoe, it literally meant fertiliser from the bottom of a person, according to Kayo Tajima, now professor at Rikkyo University in Tokyo. In the rapidly developing cities of Osaka and Edo (today’s Tokyo), this ‘person’s bottom fertiliser’ was in such high demand that governing bodies had to outline a strict system of its rights and regulations. For example, if a family rented a house, who had the rights to the excrement – the tenants or the landlord? It may seem logical that the tenants, who produced it, should’ve been the proud owners of their poo, but the preindustrial Japanese lawmakers thought quite the opposite. They bestowed the valuable shimogoe rights onto the landlords who sold it to the collectors, who in turn sold it to farmers. In some cases, farmers established tsuke-tsubo – direct contracts with the urban poo producers. The residents would promise the farmer all the poo they generated for a year in exchange for a certain amount of rice as a down payment. Grateful farmers sometimes thanked their contributors with gifts, like special rice treats, sometimes dubbed ‘dung cakes’.

Why was Japan so innovative in creating such contractual arrangements for shit?

Unlike European countries, rich with lush forests or green meadows, Japan was not blessed by wide stretches of fertile land. The country’s poor sandy soils didn’t naturally produce abundant crops. Before a newly created patch could yield some food, farmers had to work hard to nourish it, with every scrap of biomass they could find. ‘A new field gives but a small crop,’ states the old Japanese saying. Fertiliser from people’s bottoms was an easy and naturally occurring resource that never ran out, as long as there were people. Thanks to the fertiliser from their own bottoms, the Japanese converted their unfriendly rocky lands into flourishing fields. Similarly, the Chinese farmers managed to keep their soils fertile for generations, which to the farmers of European descent was nothing short of a miracle. European and American farm fields would start turning to dust sooner or later.

Perhaps you are already racing ahead and thinking, "why don't our sewage systems recover NPK from our crap, and sell that fertilizer?"  

Turns out that engineers and planners are already testing these out.  Zeldovich writes that "there is no one single solution that would fit every geographical locale" and describes a few attempts in developing and developed countries.  My favorite example in her essay is from Washington, DC:

DC Water, a cutting-edge treatment plant in the US capital, takes poo repurposing to new heights. As the metabolic output of the 2.2 million people who live Washington, DC and the surrounding areas arrives, it is loaded up into massive pressure cookers where it simmers at 300°F (149°C) and six times the atmospheric pressure, which kills everything alive. The resulting stew is fed to the hungry microbes in huge concrete biodigester tanks with similar end products – the methane used to generate electricity and a black, liquidly goo. In an uncanny similarity to the fenfu men’s night soil processing, the goo is dried and packaged into bags, which are sold in local stores.

Curious that I always am, I looked up Bloom, about which DC Water has plenty to say:

Applying biosolids to the land helps capture carbon and prevents it from being released to the atmosphere. Biosolids application also helps to recycle important nutrients like phosphorous and nitrogen back into the soil instead of releasing them into our waterways.  The use of biosolids also reduces our carbon footprint and saves energy when compared to conventional petroleum based fertilizers.

Sounds like a win-win to me.  May more shit bloom!

Now, if only scientists can come up with a better approach to check my GI system!

Only one way out

I didn't find anything good in the Washington Post report on the heat wave in India that I later tweeted:

Between Friday and Sunday, temperatures could climb as high as 120 degrees (49 Celsius) if the most extreme forecast models are correct.#india #heatwave #climatecrisis https://t.co/USDvo8qxMS

— Sriram K (@congoboy) April 26, 2022

Heat comes on earlier, in spring, with record high temperatures, and summer extends into a forever.  Add humidity to the mix, and that is the devastating and dystopian climate-fiction that Kim Stanley Robinson presented in The Ministry for the Future.

For people like me who worry about climate change and its effects, we often worry that our personal choices are affecting the environment and that maybe we should do something about it.  We sincerely practice the three "R"s--Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.  We say no to drinking straws.  And more. 

But, we also know well that our individual actions won't even blip in the larger scheme of things.  

In fact, by treating climate change at such individual levels we are falling into the wonderful trap that fossil fuel companies laid out for us:

In the early 2000s, the major oil company BP weaponized the scientific concept of the carbon footprint, placing it at the center of a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign that made resolving the climate crisis a matter of individuals reducing their consumption. The effect of their strategy was and is to make people feel personally responsible not only for causing the climate crisis by simply living their lives, but also for solving it by no longer driving or flying or eating beef or using plastic straws or whatever the case may be.

Addressing climate change is way beyond what the readers of this blog or I can do as individuals.  It is the equivalent of asking individual Ukrainians to fight the Russian military.  It doesn't take even a five-year old to understand that no single Ukrainian can battle the Russian forces, and yet we think individual actions can do something against the massive global climate change?

Only governments can do anything at all meaningful.

Only governmental institutions have the capacity to meet the systemic challenges of decarbonization. Even if every individual person on the planet reduced their discretionary carbon footprint to zero, the electrical, industrial and agricultural systems of our economies would continue to emit greenhouse gases and make global heating worse.

In thinking about climate change and what we can do about it, we "have to recognize the realities of the world, and the realities of the world tend to be unpleasant, discouraging and depressing," says Vaclac Smil, who is not new to this blog.  I wonder if I have quoted Smil before because he is a lot more realistic to the point of being cynical like I am.  

Smil makes an important point that requiring people to make sacrifices so that their grandchildren will be better off is asking for a lot because thinking about such voluntary sacrifices is not how we animals are wired. "You have to redo the basic human wiring in the brain to change this risk analysis and say, I value 2055 or 2060 as much as I value tomorrow. None of us is wired to think that way."  

Most people can't even save for their children's college fund or their own retirement by giving up on their lattes and streaming services today, and we expect the same people to make sacrifices to fight climate change?

But, our governments have always required us to give up something today in order to enjoy greater returns in the future.  We pay taxes, which means less money for our discretionary spending.  Those who have more to give pay more in taxes.  Note that these are not individual-level decisions that we make.  Very few of us would voluntarily part with our money for the sake of the greater good.  Instead, it is the government making the decisions for us.  

We selfish humans make sacrifices for the sake of a better future--but only collectively and not individually.

So, yes, continue to reduce, reuse, and recycle.  Say no to the drinking straws.  Eat grains and vegetables, and not animal proteins.  Those are good behaviors.  But, there is one thing that we need to do over and over and over: Compel our governments to address climate change.

The other guy

Jerry Seinfeld had a bit about the "Three Tenors" in his hit show, playing on the notion that people could name Pavarotti and Domingo, but couldn't name the third of the trio, who then became "the other guy."  It is perhaps the story of people who don't get no respect!

Growing up, we knew the names of India's Nobel laureates.  Three at that time: Rabindranath Tagore, C.V. Raman, and the other guy.

That other guy was Har Gobind Khorana. 

It is not that we didn't know his name.  We did.  It is just that while Tagore and Raman lived and died in India, Khorana lived abroad.  Further, he was technically born in Pakistan.  Even worse, Khorana gave up his Indian citizenship in favor of living in America, which did not appeal to some of us kids who were quite jingoistic after the Indo-Pak war of 1971.

My father's friend, RV, visiting from America a few years after the war challenged my ideas of what it meant to be Indian.  I remember asking him if he knew the American national anthem.  After all, those were the days before the internet and we relied on books or people for information.  A good sport that RV was, he sang the first couple of lines.

Here I am now blogging this as an American, which has been my nationality for more than two decades.  It is now a different world in which people from India are spread far and wide across the world.  The Indian diaspora is the largest in the world.  There are no crocodile tears over the alleged brain drain.  As I like to joke, my exit was no brain drain.  With my move from India to the US, I simultaneously increased the IQ levels in both countries ;)

So much have the conditions changed over the decades that an American with an Indian parent is now the Vice President of the US is celebrated in India as one of theirs--a contrast to how Khorana was treated decades ago.

This year marks the centenary of Khorana's birth.  But then we aren't sure of that: "The exact date of his birth is not known, because Khorana was born in poverty in a British Indian class that rarely recorded such dates."

What a tragedy that they did not teach us kids Khorana's life story as a shining example of one who was born dirt poor and yet became a Nobel laureate!  How awful that a bizarre and twisted notion of nationalism prevented us from understanding his accomplishment.  As an older man, I have grown to become highly suspicious, to put it mildly, of people and politicians being very nationalistic.  Need I remind you about trump and modi in my adopted and birth lands?

In 1949, Khorana returned to India after earning a PhD in chemistry, "but his promised government job never materialized because the newly independent country was bankrupt."  India's loss was perhaps for the betterment of humanity; Khorana would not have been able to conduct the research that he was able to do in the better funded and equipped labs in Canada and the US.

"In spite of his acknowledged success and prominence, racism marred Khorana’s life through much of his career."  Seriously, why did they not teach us about Khorana's life in order to inspire us kids?

Though the rate of change has been slower than what I prefer, I am nonetheless glad that conditions have changed for the better.  There have been two other India-born Nobel science prize recipients since Khorana--Chandrasekhar and  Ramakrishnan.  (No, economics, for which Sen received a Nobel, is not a science!)  They were not given the silent treatment that was directed at Khorana, but were warmly and enthusiastically celebrated.

Some time soon, I hope, that a person whose work and life was only in India wins a Nobel Prize in the sciences.  If and when that happens, I won't be surprised if that person is a woman.

Spinning Yarn

A friend of my father's was a polymer chemist in America.  But, I first knew him only as the man who gifted my brother and me with subscriptions to the National Geographic for two years.  He became even more of a favorite gift-giver when we each received a set of pencils with our names engraved on them.  (Those pencils did not write well on the paper that we used; we soon put those pencils away in favor of locally-made Nataraj pencils!)

When he ("RV" as he was called) visited with us for a day in Neyveli, he brought with him in a Ziplock bag (the first time I saw one) a sample of fiber that he had extruded from basalt rock.  Fiber from a rock!  I was blown away.  He said that it could have wide-ranging applications from fiberglass to fire protection.

His visit happened about the time when polyester shirts were all the rage in India.  Oh boy, did we boys love to wear polyester shirts with bell bottom pants!  Later in the chemistry class when we learnt about polymers, and how polyester is a classic example polymer, RV's research became a tad more understandable.

It has been decades since I have worn a polyester shirt.  But, as one who has helped students think about the role of plastics in our lives, I know well that we use polyester in our clothing, though not as polyester shirts.  "Performance-driven innovations made polyester better for everyday wear: softer, more comfortable, more durable, less likely to hold odor, and less obviously synthetic."

Progress is certainly a double-edged sword.  Descriptions of how the Kalapuya kept themselves warm and dry on this land do not appeal to me.  I shudder to think of dealing with the wet and cold conditions here in Eugene without the warm comfort that the synthetic materials with cotton provide me, whether it is the thermal underwear, or the fleece sweater, or the cold weather jacket. 

Polyester makes it possible to clothe a world population of nearly 8 billion people at a much lower toll on land and water than cotton or wool would exact. And it’s practically free – an important factor in places like India, where the per capita income is less than $2,000 a year. ‘We have also to remember’, says Pingani, ‘that sustainability means that we should allow the poor people to get to buy a shirt without spending a fortune’. 

We aren’t going back to a world without polyester. The challenge is to find the best ways to go forward.

If we do not want to live like how our great-grandparents lived, leave alone how the Kalahari bushmen live even now, then we will have to incorporate various kinds of synthetics. 

My father, like many in his time, went to school barefoot through the first few grades of elementary school.  Now, even in Sengottai and Pattamadai, it is practically impossible to see a child attend school without the appropriate clothes and footwear.  The backpacks that the kids carry seem to cover their entire bodies, and heavier than the kids themselves.  Plastics like polyester and nylon make possible the clothes, shoes, backpacks, pens, raincoats, umbrellas, and more.  We do not ever want to return to "the good old days" when children went to school with bare feet, and we certainly do not want people to be unclothed or suffering in the cold and wet weather. 

Squaring such a circle will require us to think beyond sound bites and bumper stickers.  Are we ready for this task?

About the photograph: I wish the photographer had included all the way down to our shoes too.  We would then have seen the bell bottoms in all their glory!  The shirt that I am wearing in the photo is all synthetic.  As Mark Twain phrased it, none of us smile because "A photograph is a most important document, and there is nothing more damning to go down to posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught and fixed forever." ;)

Don't take the village out of the man

The visit to Sengottai a few years ago was the last time I visited the old village.  It was not a village anymore, with most modern urban services that we take for granted.  There were refrigerators at homes!  Some homes had cable TV connections, and a few had dish antennas on the roofs.  People walked around with cell phones.  Scooters (Vespas) buzzed next to me almost knocking me off the road.  Some homes had also been updated and upgraded to include parking spaces for their cars.

Any lingering doubt on its status as a village was removed when all of a sudden I saw people rush out of their homes with plastic bags full of stuff.  And then I saw a small trash collection truck enter the street.  Grandmother's village had a trash collection service?

I do not recall trash being generated at home when paatti (grandmother) was alive.  There was plenty of dirt and dust that the maid swept away twice a day and mopped every morning.  But, there was no trash.

Such a trash-less life was possible because there was very little material consumption back when Sengottai was a village.  There were no packaging materials to get rid of, and no plastic bags and spoons to throw away.

Whenever I visited, I ran errands for patti, which is why I remember well how things were.  Even the grocery shopping.  I would hand the list to the grocer.  I would also hand over the stainless steel containers for the oils that were on the list.  Dal and spices were packed in old newspaper sheets when he delivered the grocery items.  There was no plastic to be thrown away.

But, life had changed in the village.  Dal and spices and oils came in prepackaged quantities.  Sachets, as they called them in the old country.   Every grocery purchase generated plastic bags, big and small.  Coffee and tea at the roadside stalls were sold in plastic cups.  People bought carbonated drinks that were in plastic bottles.  Plantain and jack chips came in plastic packets.  And more.  Trash was being generated every single day and, of course, there was then a need for trash collection services.

There was also very little organic waste back in the old days when I used to spend time with patti.  Without a refrigerator at home in near-equatorial conditions meant buying vegetables and fruits practically every other day.  Because potatoes are more tolerant than most other vegetables, they were stored in a dark corner and were often the option if a guest showed up un-announced--after all, those were also the days before emails and telephones, and relatives did knock on the door without a heads-up.  Almost always, nothing was ever wasted or thrown away.

A while ago I came across a report that included a few practical tips on ways in which we could shop and eat with our health in mind. Like: 

• When we shop less often, we may be less likely to buy fresh food because it spoils quicker. 
• We tend to buy more in bulk, bringing home more food than we need. 
• Our cupboards and pantries become full of food, encouraging us to eat when we are not hungry. 
• We’re overwhelmed by choice in large stores, potentially making us more susceptible to marketing tactics and displays that encourage impulse purchasing decisions. 

If you re-read those bullet-points, you will agree with me that it is all common sense.  People buy a dozen apples because it is cheaper by the dozen, but then end up dumping three or four apples into the trash because, hey, there are only so many apples a man can eat.  Having all kinds of sweets and savories at our disposal is nothing but a way for the devil to tempt us into eating the wrong things at the wrong time.  My patti could have easily provided all that advice for free!

We might live in cities.  But, if we want to live healthy lives, maybe we could, should, think about how to live the old Sengottai life.

Click here for more tips on how to go zero-waste at the grocery store.

About the photograph: I clicked this during a morning walk more than 15 years ago.  It is the road to Puliyarai, which is an even smaller village by the foothills of the Western Ghats.

Looking for men who like arepas?

One semester into graduate school in a field of study that was far, far away from my electrical engineering undergraduate program, I decided to join a group of students who were going to Venezuela for a summer project.  I had no idea what it meant to do a research project for four weeks in a different country where English was not the official language.  But, I signed up anyway.

I suppose we do things when we are younger that we never even imagine doing when we are older.

Coming to America was my first international trip and within a year I was heading abroad again.  I could not have dreamt up such a scenario when I was an angst-filled undergraduate student wondering and worrying about my place in this world.

As an introvert who does not like to venture out of his comfort zone, I would have preferred to stay put in my apartment and not gone with a group to Venezuela. I have always been uncomfortably out of place.   But, the inner drive that got me out of the old country now propelled me to South America.

While wisdom that travel supposedly provides is an overreach for most of us, to be exposed to a world that is all alien and to learn from it is one of the best ways that I think I have made whatever little progress that I have made to understand the human condition.

Over the years, I have come to know well a trait of mine: when I travel to a country, then those, too, are places that I want to read about and understand, even though the chances are slim that I will ever visit those places again.  Those countries, their peoples, become my friends, and I want to stay connected with them.  As with "real" friends, I get excited if what I read about is positive and exciting, and feel awful if otherwise.

The graduate student group, of which I was one, spent only a couple of days in Caracas before we shifted to the project site--Maracaibo. The airline that we flew, PanAm, has long since disappeared from the world of business.  I was thrilled to fly PanAm; for the longest time, I thought that PanAm was the only American airline thanks to its outsized influence in movies and fiction.

I had no idea in that summer of 1988 that PanAm, the mighty airline, was close to bankruptcy.  It has now been more than three decades since PanAm disappeared from the industry that it once dominated.

Being together with the same group of people, who were all different from me in many ways, was--as I now look in the rear view mirror--when I started realizing that making friends with men was going to be difficult for me.

As we settled down into a work schedule after the first couple of days, evenings were about hanging out, sometimes at the rented house where we all stayed.  A couple of evenings, we went to the local bars.  At home and at the bars, I always had nothing but a soda.  I was the only one who didn't drink.  It is not easy to socialize, I came to understand, if I was the only one who stayed away from alcohol.  Nor did I become a social drinker, as some people choose to describe themselves.

If not drinking was a hassle by itself, the conversation topics didn't interest me either.  The group was pretty excited about the NBA championship games, about which I couldn't care.  The fact that the Lakers were a local team was nothing for me to get excited about.  So, when they talked about Kareem and Magic, I became a silent observer.  It has been the same story ever since; no alcohol and no ball-games makes one a boring social companion!

A few months ago, we spotted in the local paper that a food-truck vendor was selling arepas.  I ate arepas with cheese every single day in the streets of Maracaibo.  Travel exposes us to new foods and music.  As a kid, I hadn't known anything but the foods that we ate in my part of India, with the occasional North Indian dish.  Almost 35 years since the Venezuela trip, my mouth started watering for arepas the same way it gets ready for pooris.  But, we couldn't make it to the truck because they served only lunches.  For all I know, the memory of the Venezuelan arepa will any day be tastier than even the best one that I can get now.

Dinner today will be dolmas and pita with hummus, I announced.  A long way from dosai and chutney!

About the photograph: Before we left for Venezuela, with my highly limited student budget, I bought a point-and-shoot camera along with a few rolls.  During a morning walk, I clicked this in Caracas.  

Don't save the planet

There are a few bumper sticker slogans that I enjoy reading.  Like the one that said "Visualize Whirled Peas."  Even funnier was "I Hate Bumper Stickers."

There are bumper sticker slogans that I used as examples of incorrect grammar.  "Eat Local" is my favorite.  I have always felt the urge to take a sharpie and add "ly" to make it a grammatically correct "Eat Locally."

One of the most incorrect and arrogant messages in bumper stickers is "Save The Planet."  Are these people so vain that they think they can save the planet?  A planet that has been around for 4.5 billion years, on which we homo sapiens have existed for a mere 200,000 years.  

Let's do that math here: 200,000 out of 4.5 billion is 0.00004.  We haven't been here for a measurable fraction of time and we think we can save the planet?

COVID-19 has adequately demonstrated that we humans cannot even save ourselves from an invisible virus, which has set us back in so many ways.  If anything, such a humbling experience should lead us to yelling out mayday! "Save Our Souls" should be the bumper sticker.  But then that would draw unnecessary attention from the religious fundamentalists.  Perhaps the bumper sticker ought to be a simple "SOS"--if only people can understand what that message means!

Instead, it is the every day life (and death) issues, starting from how we treat the lakes and the mountains, the ants and the elephants, and fellow humans, ... that Earth Day should be about, which means that we need to think of every single day as Earth Day.

I care for, and worry about, the natural environment--the living and inanimate--because of a deep conviction that the cosmos is not merely about us humans and our own comfortable material existence.  My atheism and a sincere belief that there is nothing for me after this life ends does not mean that I am going to trash this place while I am here either.

The undergraduate years gave me the time and space for me to figure out how I viewed many aspects of life, including religion.  The internal tensions related to religion and the various daily practicalities of life resulted from the years of brainwashing.  I had yet to start any serious reading and thinking about how screwed up other religions might be. 

Graduate school provided me that opportunity too. While I did not take courses on religions, many of the books and articles that I read, and the lectures that I listened to, gave me insights.  One of those was about the relationship between god, nature, and humans.

In the traditional approaches in the various strands of Hindu faith, there is plenty of nature worship.  Mountains are sacred as are rivers and trees.  And, of course, even killing the damn roaches troubled the really faithful ones.  But, apparently not so in the Abrahamic framework in which god rules over man, who rules over nature.  A relationship that is very different from what the faith in the old country told me.  But even the devout Hindus seem to care less about pollution in the holy Ganga.  

I suppose one thing that is common to most believers around the world. irrespective of their religions, is how much they are in favor of polluting the planet!

So, yes, tomorrow is Earth Day.  We will hear, and read, the same old bromides.  I am certain that I will hear somebody say on NPR how important it is to save the planet.  You will hear me laughing!

PS: Three things that we can all do rather painlessly in order to save our souls ourselves: 
1. Reduce consumption
2. Eliminate (or at least reduce) food waste
3. Vote

Value meals

In the early years of my teaching here in Oregon, I used to take, every once in a while, cookies, brownies, and cakes to work, and share with a few.  A faculty colleague remarked that sharing food--especially food made at home--rarely happens anymore in America.  This was unlike his own experiences when he was younger, he added.

When we got to talking more about this, he suggested that the reason was the price of food: It is now way less expensive than ever before and, therefore, we don't care about food itself that much anymore.

It is true that food is in plenty and accounts for a much smaller share of the household budget compared to even a generation ago.  But, the inexpensive aspect could also be the basis for arguing that one would then expect more people to share food with others.

Of course, even in the years past, it was never about the food itself.  It was a way to meaningfully connect with family, friends, and neighbors.  But, sharing food is rapidly becoming a dying tradition in a world that is, ironically, super-saturated with food shows.

My best memory of a neighbor sharing food left me with a deep appreciation of the neighbor and the idea of sharing.  I was in high school when my grandmother died.  In the traditional context in which I grew up, we couldn't have celebrations for a year, which meant that we kids wouldn't get to eat all those wonderful goodies that mother would have otherwise made. 

Fully aware of this, our neighbor sent home-made sweets for every major religious event that entire year.  Not just a couple of pieces, but a tray full of tasty eats every single time.  The neighbor's actions were immensely louder and more powerful than the most commonly expressed phrase of "I am sorry to hear about your loss." 

Of course, the situation doesn't have to be mournful in order to share food.  We can do it on good days too.

Why then don't people invite family and friends over to share meals?

This question has bugged me for years.  It was when I lived in California that I openly popped that question for the first time in a conversation.  A friend, who knew his way around the kitchen, was firm in his response.  He said that most people simply do not know how to cook decent enough food and, therefore, they do not invite others over.

That hypothesis is difficult for me to imagine, perhaps because of my formative years when I was always surrounded by people who cooked remarkably tasty foods every single day and without the fancy gadgets that we now take for granted.

Maybe the reason is as simple as there is less interest than ever before for humans to get together with fellow humans and share meals.

I cherish the idea of sharing food with friends.  Sitting around the dining table and talking while having a home-cooked meal is not the same as texting or emailing people or liking their Facebook posts.  A couple of weeks ago, during one such dinner table chat with friends, we laughed so hard that our eyes were tearing up.  

"You will never be able to laugh like this on Facebook.  It can happen only in the real world when sitting around like this" I told them after we had all recovered from the bout of laughing.

Inventing traditions

The old tradition of grand weddings being celebrated over four days was long gone even before I was born.  The sons and daughters of the affluent villagers had moved on to cities that were sometimes on the other side of the country.  From way down in peninsular India, many of my people sought educational qualifications that took them away from their villages, and then their professions took them even farther, which is how they ended up in Bombay and Delhi and Calcutta.  Back then, it took more than four days of travel from Pattamadai and Sengottai to these cities; where was the time then to attend a four-day wedding celebration when eight days were spent on travel alone?

When I was a kid, weddings had been reduced to only two-days of feasts, fun, and fights.  Yes, fights were in plenty.  There was never a wedding, it seemed like, that did not involve verbal altercations.  A wedding well before my birth took altercations to a new level when the brother of the bride was murdered!

The event on the evening prior to the wedding day was about publicly announcing the engagement and introducing the groom to the village where the bride's family lived.  "Maappillai azahippu" (மாப்பிள்ளை அழைப்பு) which translates to inviting the groom/son-in-law.  A "pleasure car," as my grandmothers used to say, was rented for the occasion.

It is interesting how the usage diffused all the way down to a distant Pattamadai from America, where "pleasure car" meant a vehicle that was not for commercial or agricultural activities.  Of course, soon that usage lost its meaning even in America, where the car became a regular commuter vehicle.

The pleasure car was nothing but a convertible.  More often that not, it was an old Plymouth, like the ones that we see even now in the photographs of Cuban life.  The groom sat in the back seat wearing a full suit.  Yes, a full suit in the village.  In most cases, the suit was never worn again; after all, very few jobs in India--then and now--require a man to wear a suit to work. 

(Towards the end of his working life, my father took up a job with a Delhi-based firm and he reported to work wearing a full suit.  The firm's managing director chided him for not wearing a vest too--a three-piece suit was the standard there!)

Wearing a suit and being driven through the couple of streets in the village was, of course, not always the tradition in a culture that had not known a suit until the white man appeared in one, and with the pleasure car a new addition to life anywhere on the planet.  Traditions are not all traditions as we think they are.  We shed a few along the way, and invent new ones that later become the tradition.

The tradition of மாப்பிள்ளை அழைப்பு was discarded even when I was barely getting into my teens, when weddings ceased to be celebrated in the "native" villages where people hailed from.  It did not matter to city dwellers that they were raised in Pattamadai or Sengottai; they preferred to celebrate weddings in the cities where they lived.  The groom no longer sat in the back seat of a pleasure car to be driven around in the streets of Madras or Madurai.

People migrated not only to the big cities in India but to other countries too.  It is no surprise, therefore, that new traditions are being invented when weddings are celebrated here in the US.  Most of the children in the diaspora know nothing about Pattamadai or Sengottai.  Maybe they do not even know those names.  Those details do not matter anymore.  The one constant is the ritual of two adults making a commitment to each other in front of family and friends.

At the recent wedding in the extended family, we were seated outside at a table with a much older couple, who looked like they were in their 70s. Like most men, he too was bald on top.  Whatever hair that remained on the sides were grayish white.  She looked like the female equivalent of Ken Burns--a girlish face that perhaps has not changed much since when, you know, she was a girl.

I was taking digital and mental photographs of the proceedings for my reportage to my parents.  It was time for dinner.  Unlike the weddings in Pattamadai and Sengottai, where we sat on the floor and food was served on banana leaves that were in front of us, we stood in line in order to get whatever we wanted from the buffet.  

The husband came back with two plates of food--one was for his wife.  He placed them on the table.  "It is cold there" he told her and then went to get their drinks.

"That was so sweet" I told her.

As a man, I prefer not to use words like "sweet" and "cute" because they are so unmanly.  But, there was no other word that could describe an old man getting food and drinks for his wife.

"Yes, he is very sweet to me," she replied with a huge smile.

"How long have you been married?"

"54 years."

Fifty-four-years!

The gentleman returned with water for both of them.  "Your wife was singing your praises," I told him.

"She always does that only when I am away."

She smiled again.

Now that is a tradition that I hope will be carried on forever.

At least I tried!

One of the advantages of blogging, and having authored newspaper commentaries is this: I can review my records and feel confident that I tried.  I tried, in my own way within the abilities that I have, to make this world a better place for the future.

Often, in the formal writings, I tried to include constructive approaches when discussing challenging topics.  While I am personally cynical--a nattering nabob of negativity, to use the late William Safire's phrase--when engaging with the public, I want to be constructive.

Take, for instance, the newspaper commentary from December 2009, which is about climate change.  There, I suggested a few ways in which we can collectively think and act.  My favorite is the following that I thought would be a good public policy:

I can imagine easily the packing on the 56-inch high-definition TV or an iPhone having a "climate change" information chart similar to the nutritional labels - information on carbon dioxide emissions, for instance, comparable to the calorie data on a chocolate bar. We can then make decisions as informed consumers, just as some of us avoid junk food packed with fats.

The commentary was published more than 12 years ago.  It is not news to you and me that conditions have worsened.  Republicans and Democrats falling over each other to try to reduce the price of gasoline at the pump in order to please voters who couldn't care about the impacts on the environment is a stark reminder that we will continue to burn carbon for a very long time.

The following is the commentary that was published in The Register Guard in December 2009.
************************************************

Chennai has been unseasonably warm during this visit, compared to my trips the last few Decembers. The overnight low, which is normally around 65 degrees, has been consistently and significantly above that - typically about 73 degrees. Is this a mere blip in the weather pattern, or a part of the overall climate change story? 

Thanks to the cooler early morning temperatures, stepping out for a walk at 5 a.m. is an activity that I always look forward to. For one, it will be months before Eugene warms up to that temperature, and therefore I feel an urgency to enjoy the warmth. 

Also, after having become accustomed to the milder Oregon climate, while I rush around the park in Chennai wearing shorts and a T-shirt, it is quite a sight to see the young and the old walk and jog wearing woolen beanies, scarves and sweaters. I suppose after getting used to temperatures in the high 90s and in the triple digits for most of the year, 65 can seem relatively cold to them. 

This time, though, my sister mentioned the other day that she has yet to take the woolen blankets and sweaters out of the boxes. It is no wonder, then, that I have spotted very few people wearing sweaters in the park. 

The much warmer overnight temperatures also have made the city a fertile breeding ground for mosquitoes. While not as huge as the mosquitoes that sucked the blood out of me in Alaska, the smaller ones here in Chennai are equally thirsty for nourishment and seem to enjoy my "American" blood, much to my discomfort! 

Yet there is very little talk about the weather and climate change. Those topics have been pushed way back by the worsening economic conditions and the possibility of a war with Pakistan. 

Furthermore, all it takes is one trip outside the comfortable enclaves in cities to the smaller towns and villages, where the majority of India lives, to understand why climate change fails to register as the biggest worry for the struggling millions. Thousands of villages and towns in India lack even the basic necessities of sanitation facilities and a protected and clean water supply. As one commentator put it recently in an Indian newspaper, "Out of the 1.2 billion people who defecate in the open worldwide because they have no access to toilets, more than half are Indian." Ouch! 

When daily life for millions is thus severely constrained by economic and public health limitations, it is not difficult to understand why these issues might take precedence over climate change. 

I am not dismissing the reality that as more and more Indians, Chinese and the rest of the world's population become affluent, the more they also are going to contribute to global climate change - particularly given the reliance on inefficient carbon--based energy sources. And, of course, we could make a convincing point that even the poor in villages and cities need to worry about climate change because we are all doomed to experience its effects, irrespective of how poor or affluent we are. But the importance of climate change pales in relation to the immediate struggles of daily life. 

Thus, with every trip, I am convinced even more that the burden is on us in the advanced countries, and the United States in particular, to take the lead on tackling this global environmental challenge. (It is ironic, indeed, that I should write about climate change after having traveled to the other side of the world in highly polluting jet planes!) 

The economic recession gives us an opportunity to consider our enormous consumption - which is, after all, a significant part of the climate change story. We need environmental equivalents of Slim Fast to get us on to a consumption regimen that can help slow down this urgent global problem. The highly influential Oprah Winfrey can launch a "climate change diet" program - perhaps even a separate television channel, "O!-lite," that will be exclusively devoted to this topic. 

Maybe we can employ one strategy that we have used to educate and alert consumers about dietary consumption - the nutritional labels on food packages. 

I can imagine easily the packing on the 56-inch high-definition TV or an iPhone having a "climate change" information chart similar to the nutritional labels - information on carbon dioxide emissions, for instance, comparable to the calorie data on a chocolate bar. We can then make decisions as informed consumers, just as some of us avoid junk food packed with fats. 

Otherwise, it is equally possible that the bloodthirsty mosquitoes of Chennai will enjoy the warmer world, and write the final chapters of the planet's story.

The end of a revolution

A couple of days ago, I asked my father when the new year falls this year.  It is always in mid-April, and I wanted to know if it was on the 13th or 14th, which is typically when it falls.

Of course, I am not referring to the new year in the western calendar, but in the Tamil calendar.

We mark the passing of time in many ways.  Birthdays are our personalized new years.  Muharram.  The academic new year.  The tax year.  Government fiscal budget year.  Alcoholic Anonymous members even make sure to tell us about the anniversary of their sobriety.  We have a gazillion "new years" in a year.  We note the completion of yet another revolution around the sun for the meanings that we seek.

During my younger years, I was interested in all things about the Soviets, and it puzzled me that the October Revolution was being celebrated in November. In the old days, there was no Google.  No internet.  And, of course, nobody to bug about this question either. As years passed, I forgot about that issue altogether.  Who cared anymore when the USSR itself became history, right? 

A few years ago, I was reading Svetlana Alexievich's Secondhand Time.  It is not any old  novel like Tolstoy's or Turgenev's.  Secondhand Time is about the last of the Soviets, in which people refer to all things Russian, which are self-evident to Russians but not to aliens like me.  (A wonderful book to read now if one wants to know about Russia and Putin.) 

One of the people that Alexievich talks to, Margarita Pogrebitskaya, says "my favorite holiday was always November 7 ..."  And there was a footnote along with that.  That footnote both reminded me of my old question about the October Revolution in November that I had forgotten about, and answered it. "The Bolshevik uprising, which turned into the October Revolution, took place the night of October 24-25, 1917."

The rest of the footnote gets to the exciting part--those dates were "according to the Julian calendar, which is November 6-7 according to the Gregorian calendar that was subsequently adopted in the USSR." 

I suppose it is the academic in me that I read the footnotes even in the summer readings!

Russia was the penultimate country to switch from the old Julian calendar to the Gregorian.  (Greece was the final holdout.)  It happened in 1918, when February 1st became February 14th.  Just like that!

In the old country, my grandmothers' generation kept time with "Kollavarsham" because of their roots in the old Travancore Kingdom.  The curious fellow that I have always been, I recall bugging my grandmother about when the home in Sengottai was built.  She replied that the original structure had the year noted on the external wall.  I went out, and was puzzled at the number that I saw. 

When I reported it, she laughed and said it was not in the "English" calendar but in Kollavarsham. Thankfully, the year the addition was completed is noted per the "English" calendar.

A view from the terrace on grandmother's home.  1956 was when the addition was completed.
The home is only a few feet away from the temple.
This was during my trip to Sengottai in December 2005.

So, yes, a few days ago when I asked my father about the new year, he laughingly said that he doesn't track the Tamil calendar dates like he used to in the past.  "I think it is the 14th or the 15th," he said.

I heard my sister yelling something in the background.  "She says it is on the 14th," he relayed her comment.

Have yourself a wonderful new year!

Thoughts on a divisive issue

I can confidently state that I never thought about abortion until I came to the US. 

For the political junkie that I have always been, abortion was not a red hot social issue for me to follow.  And, of course, there was no reason for me to spend time and energy on a topic that was not personal; a male privilege.  

Here in America, it was a completely different story.

Way back in graduate school, when I was an intern in a planning agency in downtown Los Angeles, I came across a pro-life (anti-abortion) rally.  And when walking about, I spotted in the window of a Christian bookstore--if my memory is correct--a couple of jars in which human fetuses had been preserved in order to convey the abortion issue in a graphic manner.

Abortion has become a lot more explosive political issue since those relatively mild times three decades ago.

Centuries before the biology of making babies was scientifically understood, it would have been clear, even to the caveman and cavewoman, that a couple of minutes of frolicking around could result in a baby ten moons later.  

We have come a long way from a rudimentary understanding in those cave-dwelling days.  But, our inability to create life artificially and to prevent deaths mean that life itself remains a mystery.  When life is a mystery, it then provides enormous scope for interpretations, via religions and otherwise.

Science and technology have managed to remove most of the mystery out of life by continuously breaking down the mechanistic processes in baby-creation. 

The understanding of the mechanisms meant that we could also develop products that prevented pregnancy.  Humans were now increasingly looking at a real possibility of frolicking around without worrying about creating a life.  Thus, began our big political divide, which is a philosophical issue: Are contraceptives that prevent the creation of life acceptable?

The battle over contraception is far behind us.  Governments in developing countries spend money talking up contraception.  Family planning was a huge political issue in India when I was growing up, and the mother-son duo of Indira Gandhi and Sanjay Gandhi went overboard on this with forced sterilizations too.  As a tween who had yet to figure out human biology, I was quite confused about what the ads about Nirodh were all about.  We did not have then the kind of sex education classes that are offered in schools here in the US where they might even apply a condom over a banana.

The contraception battle is no longer fought.   The pill launched another political battle, but that too is largely over.

Science and technology also "created" life in test tubes, which further demonstrated the mechanics of life, which, in turn, made life that much less mysterious.  I am always surprised that the opposition to abortion far outnumbers any opposition to the "unnatural" ways in which medical technologists now routinely create babies without the natural frolicking.

If contraception failed in the natural way, or if the partners overlooked contraception in the heat of the moment, and if a life form results, then what?  The road forks: Carry or abort?

I have always had enormous sympathies for the anti-abortion sentiments, even though I am firmly settled on the side of the mother having the choice to abort the fetus.  I imagine--I have to only imagine, given that I am a male who has no idea otherwise about what it means to be a woman who discovers she is pregnant--an abortion to be a traumatic incident in a woman's life.  Yet, women choose to do it because they know that is the best possible outcome.  Who am I to say otherwise.

I understand how deep down that opposition is not merely to the horrors of abortion itself, but is about a philosophical understanding of what life is.  For all the non-believer that I am, I consciously think about my existence, and worry about what it means to be human.  I think a lot about what living a good life means, and that thinking extends to the abortion issue too.  

Whether it is weighty issues like abortion or life-extending medical procedures, or smaller ones like the role of technology, I am increasingly concerned that we do not spend enough time trying to understand what life is all about.  I do not mean a blind faith, dogmatic, thinking about life but a sincere, honest, and introspective approach to clarifying for oneself what makes life good, and how to deal with the twin mysteries of life and death. 

In a Socratic tradition, we ought to poke and prod and explore why beliefs and arguments are weak.  We ought not to be afraid to even throw out our own bottom-line when we find better explanations.

It is a tall order, no doubt, especially in a world of sound bites and systematic disinformation.  But, really, is there any other option?

What is war good for?

I hate wars. 

Of course, I too was once fascinated by wars and battles.  Like how back in grandma's village, I eagerly listened to what later turned out to be exaggerated accounts of an extended family elder's service in the military during the Indo-Pak war that birthed Bangladesh. 

Later, as a teenager, I read fictional works, like The Eagle Has Landed, that were set in the context of the second World War.   (Reading other writings about the war from the Soviet perspective turned out to be useful in the adopted land where tales of the victory over Hitler rarely include the importance of the Soviet front.) 

And then I grew up. Suddenly, wars began to make no sense.  

Mohandas Gandhi's pacifism appealed a lot more to me.  But, it was not any immediate Damascene Conversion to pacifism either.  I continued to oscillate back and forth between pro- and anti-war positions through my late teens and early twenties. By the time of the Iraq War during the first Bush presidency, I was a committed anti-war nutcase.  And have been since. 

Reading Ernest Hemingway and and others cemented my pacifism and with a clear understanding that war is hell.  So much so that even war movies that featured violence appealed less and less to me. 

But, there is no Department of Peace, there is no Secretary of Peace.  Wars continue. 

Even President Obama, who was the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, loved droning the lives out of brown people all around the world.  When it comes to waging wars, Obama's legacy is that he is "the Nobel Peace Prize winner who pioneered a dramatically dangerous and ethically dubious form of warfare."  Obama became a better warring President than his predecessor was!

The unfortunate reality is that wars are good for business and politics. 

In order to placate wusses like me, political leaders and military chiefs present us with "humane" wars!  In his review of Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, Jackson Lears writes that "the quest for humane war, whether by deploying smarter weaponry or making new rules, has obscured the more basic task of opposing war itself."

Lears quotes from the book, in which the author, Samuel Moyn, assays "the century and a half of US history" that preceded 9/11:

The notion of humane war would have been alien and baffling to most Americans for much of that period. “America’s default way of war—honed in the imperial encounter with native peoples and lasting into the twentieth century across the globe—recognized no limits,” Moyn writes. He records the consequences in sobering detail, ranging from the extermination of Native American tribes to the torching of Vietnamese villages. During the Pax Americana following World War II the whole world, in effect, became “Indian country” (as many GIs referred to Vietnam).

What about the United Nations?  Didn't we create it to further the cause of peace?

If you were a permanent member of the Security Council, as both the US and USSR were (and the US and Russia of course are), you you could veto any resolution that labeled you an aggressor. If you were a country that made the rules, then you could make a rules-based order work for you, as the US demonstrated by repeatedly violating the sovereignty of other nations—Iran, Guatemala, Congo, Chile…—throughout the cold war without ever being held to account.

Diplomacy to ease tensions and create peace became secondary.  Lears also comments about Obama:

At home, Obama succeeded in making war seem remote and detached from the messy business of body bags and bitterly contested occupation, largely by reasserting America’s singular virtue, underwritten by a renewed commitment to humane warmaking.

As long as the rules of engagement are followed, as long as the wars are humane, we apparently have no problems with warmaking.  We are particular that those who committed war crimes ought to be punished, and not pardoned.  We have become less interested in the active pursuit of peace itself!

After the end of the atrocious war that Putin has been waging against Ukraine, historians and international relations experts will dig into how much effort was put into preventing the war and to ending it soon after it began.  We already have plenty of evidence on how much effort is going into fighting the war; after all, even we regular people have now become familiar with "Javelins" and "Stingers."

I, for one, am not holding my breath for peace on earth!

Where in the world is ...

Take a look at the photograph of the mosque below:

Source

Also look at the photo below of the same mosque, from a different angle, with the overflow crowd of Muslims praying:

Source

It is a huge mosque that can accommodate about 10,000 people.

Now for the question: Where is this mosque located?

If you didn't know, chances are that you would use your critical thinking skills. 

You would immediately notice that the buildings around look modern and are well spaced.  Your mind thinks about the photos of mosques in countries with large Muslim populations, like Indonesia, Nigeria, India, or Pakistan.  In those countries, you would expect to see evidence of the dense and crowded human settlements all around such a mosque.  Here, there is no such evidence of a crowded settlement.

You are now left wondering where this mosque could be located.

You look again at the photo with worshipers all around the structure.  You look beyond them.  The buildings perhaps look like what you would expect in a country that is more affluent than Indonesia, Nigeria, India, or Pakistan.  Could it be Iran, you wonder.  But there is something about the red building in the first photo that makes you ditch Iran as the location.

Because the blogger lives in the US, you entertain the possibility that the huge mosque is somewhere in America.  Like in Detroit or Minneapolis or Houston which have large Muslim populations.  But then you notice that the mosque has no huge parking lots and parking structures nearby.  It then occurs to you that there is no way 10,000 people in America, whatever their religion, walk or take public transit to a place of worship.

You scratch your head.  All that does is remind you to shampoo your hair, and you have no idea where this magnificent mosque is located.

Your jaw drops when you read that this mosque is in Moscow, Russia.

It is a new mosque that was built on the same site as an older mosque that was demolished.  In 2015, Moscow's Cathedral Mosque was opened by, hold your breath, Putin.

Flanked by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, President Vladimir V. Putin used his speech at the inauguration of the mosque, which he called the biggest mosque in Europe, to emphasize that Russia would develop its own system of religious education and training to counter extremism. ...

“Finally, Moscow, which lays claim to the title of the biggest Muslim city in Europe, has a big mosque,” said Aleksei Malashenko, an expert on Islam at the Carnegie Moscow Center. “It shows that the center of Islamic life in the Russian Federation is in Moscow.”

Yes, Putin was there at the inauguration.  And maybe you are shocked about Moscow with "the title of the biggest Muslim city in Europe."

I am with you; as I wrote in this post in 2009, I would never have correctly guessed Russia's Muslim population.

The number of Muslims in Russia is mostly an educated guess because the government's data on this is suspect.  A recent US State Department report suggests that "there were 25 million Muslims in 2018, approximately 18 percent of the population." 

In case you are now wondering whether there are Muslims in Ukraine, the answer is yes, of course.

When we think of the diffusion of Islam, we often forget that Mongols went west too and took Islam with them.  The Ottoman Empire was also an important player in the geopolitics of the region and in spreading Islam.  In fact, Crimea, which is where Putin's Ukrainian invasion began, has a long history with Muslims:

From the mid-1400s it existed as the Crimean Khanate, a protectorate of the Ottoman Empire, during which time it became the center of a roaring slave trade. 

The modern name "Crimea" seems to have come from the language of the Crimean Tatars, a Turkic ethnic group that emerged during the Crimean Khanate. The Tatars called the peninsula "Qırım." While Russia, which annexed the state in 1783, officially tried to change the name back to Taurica, Crimea was still used informally and eventually reappeared officially in 1917.

All I want to do here is remind ourselves that the world is one complicated place, and that it takes a lot of work to understand it.

(A simple question popped up inside me.  "It is Ramadan now.  I wonder how it is being observed in Russia."  That, in turn, led me to wonder about mosques in Moscow.  This post was the result!)

Ukrainian Honey Cake in Oregon

A month ago, I wrote about being a metaphorical squirrel in helping Ukraine defeat the Russian Ravana, like the squirrel that helped Rama vanquish Ravana in the Hindu mythological epic Ramayana.  While it is easy to imagine that we are insignificant in a geopolitical situation far away from where we live, we can and should find ways in this fight against evil.  If a squirrel could, what prevents us humans, right?

From here in Oregon, I contributed to Doctors Without Borders (MSF,) who have a dedicated unit for their Ukraine operations.  For years, I have been contributing to MSF to assist in the work that they do, and it was MSF that immediately came to mind when I thought about helping Ukraine.

In December 1999, after Doctors Without Borders was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, its then president, James Orbinski, started his Nobel lecture with a reference to Chechnya:

The people of Chechnya—and the people of Grozny—today, and for more than three months, are enduring indiscriminate bombing by the Russian army. For them, humanitarian assistance is virtually unknown. It is the sick, the old and the infirm who cannot escape Grozny. While the dignity of people in crisis is so central to the honor you give today, what you acknowledge in us is our particular response to it. I appeal here today to his excellency the Ambassador of Russia and through him, to President Yeltsin, to stop the bombing of defenseless civilians in Chechnya. If conflicts and wars are an affair of the state, violations of humanitarian law, war crimes and crimes against humanity apply to us all—as civil society, as citizens, and as human beings.

Note the reference to "indiscriminate bombing by the Russian army."  

Putin became Russia's Prime Minister on Aug. 9, 1999, "and by the end of that month, Russia was waging a renewed bombing campaign against Chechen rebels in an attempt to reverse the earlier humiliation." 

Now, in 2022, more than decades after orchestrating a human tragedy in Grozny, an unchecked Putin is indiscriminately bombing civilian areas in Ukraine.

Organizations like Doctors Without Borders help ease civilians' sufferings.  As noted in that 1999 Nobel lecture:

Bringing medical aid to people in distress is an attempt to defend them against what is aggressive to them as human beings. Humanitarian action is more than simple generosity, simple charity. It aims to build spaces of normalcy in the midst of what is abnormal. More than offering material assistance, we aim to enable individuals to regain their rights and dignity as human beings. As an independent volunteer association, we are committed to bringing direct medical aid to people in need. But we act not in a vacuum, and we speak not into the wind, but with a clear intent to assist, to provoke change, or to reveal injustice. Our action and our voice is an act of indignation, a refusal to accept an active or passive assault on the other.

It is not charity, but with an "aim to enable individuals to regain their rights and dignity as human beings."  Fiercely proud people like Ukrainians detest the very idea that they need charity.  But, the reality is that civilian lives are affected in many ways that are beyond the imaginations of those of us who live in peaceful areas, watching our favorite streaming programs, and eating our favorite foods and snacks.

Food itself becomes an issue for civilians trapped in war zones.  Recognizing the urgent need of food, an Oregon bakery has been selling "Ukrainian Honey Cake" with the proceeds going to World Central Kitchen.  Friends who came over to have meals with us brought us this cake that they picked up at the bakery in Waldport:

There are many ways to contribute to defeat Putin, and to help Ukraine.  Be a squirrel.

India is a fraternal society?

During the past few days, I have been reading up, watching videos, and thinking about caste and Dalit issues.  I have also been reading some of my own blog posts on this topic.

Click here if you want to tap into resources to further your understanding of caste issues during this Dalit History Month.

Source

The following is a verbatim re-post of my blog entry from December 24, 2017:

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In this post a couple of days ago, I wrote about the geographic separation of religions and castes and subcastes that has been the condition in India forever.  I added there:

Had the randomness in the cosmos made me a Dalit and not a brahmin by birth, I know for certain that I would have been an angry young man, an angry middle-aged man, and perhaps a bitter old man, unable to forget the atrocities that were committed against my people.

The coexistence in India is a false narrative.  An overwhelming part of India operates within its own.

India is a fraternal society. There is a Brahmin society, a Reddy society and a Dalit society. Within each society, there is a sense of fraternity, but they don’t want to come out of that circle.

This is what I too had noted in my post, when I wrote, that the paths don't seem to cross much.  Unlike me, the one who remarked about the warped sense of fraternity in India is the Magsaysay awardee, Bezwada Wilson.

Bezwada Wilson has been fighting for the eradication of manual scavenging for three decades now. Born in Kolar, Karnataka, to a family of manual scavengers, he founded the Safai Karmachari Andolan in 1994 with retired IAS officer S.R. Sankaran and Dalit activist Paul Diwakar.

What he has been doing is simply invaluable.  According to his group, about 160,000 people continue to work as manual scavenging.  In the 21st century, as 2017 comes to an end!

Bezwada Wilson says:

Sanitation is reserved for Dalits. So there is no development in that field. We have apps to deliver food home without involving human beings but they can’t discover a technology to clear human waste. Caste is the reason behind this discrimination.

Launching rockets is a priority. Serving as the back office for US and European firms is a priority.   But, developing an appropriate technology to remove human shit is not a priority because it is not a priority for the upper castes, whose priorities are elsewhere.

Every field has extensive research, but in sanitation, no research is ever done. We are over 130 crore people, we defecate every day. We have a caste to clean it up. We don’t even think about it.  

When I was young, and a wannabe commie, all I knew was that the societal priorities were messed up.  As I got older, I figured that I did not have the balls to be an activist.  The best I could then do was to at least intellectually begin to understand the issues and engage with a few people about it.

After all these years, I am all the more convinced that there's something seriously wrong with the world, and I can't do a damn thing about it!