Women write. I read.

I didn't expect the list to get longer.  After all, it is such an exclusive list of fiction authors who have earned their doctorates. Today I add one more to the list.

Well, technically not an addition to the list because the author, Malinda Lo, did not complete the PhD program.  Wikipedia is where I found out that:

Lo was born in China and moved to the United States at the age of three. She graduated from Wellesley College and earned a master's degree in Regional Studies from Harvard. She enrolled at Stanford with the intention of obtaining a PhD in Cultural and Social Anthropology, but left with a second master's degree.

I am blown away by these accomplished writers, many of whom are women. 

Through my early years of reading fiction, the authors were overwhelmingly male.  From RK Narayan to Fyodor Dostoevsky to John Steinbeck, it was mostly male authors.  Even the potboilers were from men like Frederick Forsyth.  Among Tamil authors, it was not unusual back then for men to write under female pseudonyms.  Like with Indira Parthasarathy, whose name suggests that it is a woman but it is a man writing under his wife's name.

So much was the male dominance in my literary world that six years ago, I intentionally curated for my summer reading books that were authored by women.  It was a summer of no male authors!  As I noted then, it has always bothered me that while I have not read a great many books, most of what I read was authored by men.  I was badly in need of diversity in the form of female authors.  It is not that I have shied away from them; from Jane Austen to Jhumpa Lahiri, I have read my share of works by female writers.  But, the scale was clearly tilted.

The current reading series is different in many ways.  Unlike in the past when most of my serious fiction reading happened only in the summer, the forced retirement has made every day a summer day, even when there is no sun and warmth outside.  And, it is not that I have been particular about reading books mostly by women; it just so happens that the works that I selected to read had female authors.

A byproduct to this diversity in authors brings in other kinds of diversity too.  For one, many authors are non-white, confirming again and again Orhan Pamuk's prediction that the future in English fiction belongs to storytellers from the brown world, and with stories about brown people's lives.  On top of this, some of the stories, and the authors too, do not conform to the heterosexual normative through which most of us look at the world.  Of course, there is the classic example of Somerset Maugham from the past, many of whose stories I have read and enjoyed.  But his sexuality was not openly talked about, nor did the stories that I read have characters who were not straight.

Now, it is diversity galore.  What a great time to have been laid off; I should thank my former employer for giving me this unpaid sabbatical for life so that I can understand the world better through diverse stories.

I didn't know anything about Malinda Lo whose book, Last Night at the Telegraph Club, I am reading until I read the acknowledgements.  I have had this nasty habit for a long time, perhaps all the time.  I read the pages other than the main story and only after that do I start reading the story.  I don't ever recall reading any magazine from the first page to the last either.  This has worked well for me, though it might drive others crazy!

In the acknowledgement, Lo thanked her wife. Even though there are plenty of pages left in the book, I thank Lo for the book.

A bonus if you read until here ;)  The winner of the International Booker Prize is, yep, a woman.  A woman from India.  It is for a work of fiction in Hindi that has been translated into English.

Memorial Day and the Dalai Lama

A few years ago, after weeks of increasing levels of pain and discomfort, I went to the doctor.  Like most people, or perhaps it is a male thing, I try my best to put off talking with the doctor about my problems.  I take my car on schedule for maintenance work.  I panic if something goes wrong at home.  But, when it comes to my body, well, the problems can wait!

It became difficult to get in and out of my shirts without me carefully and consciously lifting my arm.  A simple everyday act that we take for granted now became an arduous task.  I had no choice but to check in with the MD.

After reviewing the x-ray image, he said it was nothing but Calcific tendinitis.  Pain killers if needed, but physical therapy was the solution.  His nurse recommended a therapist.  She warned me that he talked a lot but that he was very good at his work.

I had never been to a physical therapist.  Middle age was leading me to people that I was not looking forward to meeting.  The cosmos was dragging me out of my comfort zone into terribly uncomfortable settings.

The nurse was not exaggerating even a bit.  All through the hour that I met with the therapist, he talked nonstop educating me about the problem, the anatomy, his assessment, his plan for the treatment, and whatever else.  At the end of it all, he led me to a younger woman who, he said, would work with me in future visits.

More discomfort.  A woman right next to me.  She would from time to time place her hands on my shoulder and arms.  Though I grew up in India where I had to deal with physical and mental proximity of other people all the time, as an introvert I always preferred a little distance from others.  Over the years, my need for space around me has increased.  And now a stranger, a woman, was right in my face!

The only way I could get over the uncomfortable closeness of a stranger was by chatting with her--the silence at that proximity was terrifyingly unsettling ;)  I recall asking her if she had any plans for the Memorial Day cookout.

She was shocked that I said cookout.  And I couldn't understand her reaction.

She explained that out in the west people used the words "grill" and "barbecue" more than "cookout," which is the word that she was used to in the Midwest where she was born and raised.

It didn't surprise me at all that people find my vocabulary and accent rather strange and offbeat.  More than a couple of people have found that I pronounce "about" as if I had spent some time in the Canadian frontiers.  One couple asked me years ago whether my English teachers were from Scotland, or if they had been trained in Scotland, because of what they considered to be traces of Scottish accent.  I was asked about my Scottish accent at a conference here in the US..  A student asked me about my Irish-sounding accent.  Back in graduate school, a fellow Indian student thought I spoke with a Bengali accent.  Bengali?

I have no idea where I picked up the accent that I have and the words that I use.  I have no idea why I asked the therapist about a "cookout" as opposed to a "barbecue."

It is Memorial Day, and many of my fellow Americans will be grilling hot dogs and more at cookouts and barbecues.  I am always reminded of my favorite hot dog joke that I picked up from a philosophy radio program a few years ago. Yes, a joke that involves hot dogs, philosophy, and the Dalai Lama.

The Dalai Lama visits Times Square at New York and is excited being a tourist.  He decides to get himself a New York hotdog, and walks up to a vendor and says "make me one with everything."

(I will pause for your laughter.  What?  You didn't get the joke? tsk, tsk!)

Anyway, after getting the hotdog, the monk asks how much he has to pay.  The vendor says "eight bucks."  The Dalai Lama gives him a twenty and waits for the twelve back.
The vendor does not give him anything.
The Dalai Lama then asks the vendor, "hey, what about the change?"
The hotdog vendor replies, "change comes from within."

(You got this joke at least?)

A PhD from the Johnny Carson university

All through my childhood, and well into the undergraduate years, I did not entertain thoughts of going to America.  The angry radical mind in me put America in the same basket as the old colonizing Europeans who came from Britain, France, and Portugal.  Spain had already suffered enough under Franco and I thought that was well deserved for its colonial adventures.

As I began to understand the world a tad more, it occurred to me that there is no saintly country.  The rich and powerful countries talked the big talk like liberté, égalité, fraternité, but we essentially lived in an Animal Farm where all of us were equals but some are more equal than others.  I began to reformulate my view of the US.

My parents, who were fully aware of my political leanings were surprised to know that I quit my job in order to go to America for higher studies, after which I was not planning to return.

Back then, I had no idea about everyday America.  Sure, I knew enough about the political process, about racism, and the big picture.  But, I was uninformed about American music, television, and even movies.    There's only so much one can understand about American life from potboiler fiction, which too I consumed in good proportion!

Outside the university environment, Americans of all shades had difficulty understanding my accent, I realized. Some made it clear that they couldn't be bothered.  I was both surprised and offended.  A French accented person who barely knew a few English words could be found to be charming, but an Indian-accented me with a good command of the language was not worth their time.

Back in India, most of us always got excited if a foreigner spoke even a couple of words of Tamil.  It told us that they spent the time and effort to learn those words, and that meant a lot.  I am willing to bet it is still the same way.  Heck, it was the case even with Indians who were from other parts of India.  I recall once two families came over for coffee--this was back in Neyveli.  These were wives and children of two contract folks who were colleagues of dad's and they were from West Bengal.  Because my father had worked in that region early in his life, he wanted to help them on his home turf.  It was an interesting evening, as I recall--the men folk conversing in English, the women struggling with a scattering of English and Hindi words.  

After such experiences in the old country, it was off-putting when listeners couldn't care for what I said.  The introvert that I am, my world did shrink a tad more.  But, I figured that improving my pronunciation would help me in the long run.  However, I was firm that I would not try to roll my tongue in new ways and consciously work towards sounding like California's white Americans, as a few others did.

It is one thing to speak and be understood.  It is another to be fluent with the content that others could relate to.  Conversation is about all aspects of life, and I genuinely wanted to know more about American life.  Television--especially late night television--helped a lot.  Johnny Carson, David Letterman, and reruns of sitcoms were interesting and funny, and also highly educational.   As a fresh off the boat (metaphorically!) graduate student, I was an equally enthusiastic student of all things Americana.

Over the decades, life has changed.  Immigration now is of a completely different flavor.  On the one hand, incoming students from India are way more familiar with the US than I was at any comparable age.  America is no stranger to the newbies, thanks to the phenomenal level of global inter-connectedness, and with India having opened up its economy and culture to the external world.

At the same time, it seems to be increasingly possible for newbies to be comfortable within their own preferences and not explore and understand the American quirks.  Immigrants can now easily stay with their compatriots, shop for Indian groceries, watch Indian movies and shows, socialize with Indians from work or otherwise, ...

I prefer the experience I had.  The unfamiliarity made me a sharp observer of life around me, instead of settling into a comfort zone.  Though, as I get older, the idea of moving to a new place seems terribly scary.  If only we had throughout our lives the courage that seems exclusive to the youth!

Life in the slow lane

A two-day weekend was not the norm when I was a kid.  At least, that's how I remember my childhood.  Sunday was a day off from school.  And only the second Saturday of every month was a holiday.

What did we do those Sundays and that lucky Saturday every month?

We helped my father dust and clean our home.  In my tweens, that dusting operation is how I found out that I have intense allergies to cobweb dust.  The reaction was so intense once that I had to be taken to the hospital for an intravenous shot.  My father and sister sneezed and carried on!

Some Sundays we had luxurious oil treatment.  We rubbed the warmed up oil all over and let the skin soak it all up for maybe a half an hour, some of which was spent under the sun sitting on the washing stone in the backyard.  We read a magazine or a book while letting the oil do its job.  And after washing up, we sat down for amma's special Sunday meal.

I am sure that my sister listened to the radio in the afternoon, as she did in the evening and night too.  Amma read her magazines.  Appa wrote letters to the extended family.  My brother and I would start playing chess and end up fighting, or we would play badminton and end up fighting, or fight just because.  It was not unusual for friends to drop in for a visit in the evening.

That was the weekend.

It is a contrast to the life that most of us lead now.  We think that puttering at home is not enough of an activity for the weekend.  "What are your plans for the weekend" is a typical question at the grocery talk small talk and among colleagues and friends.

Why are we uninterested in a slow-paced life and economy? 

Simply because we want more.  We want to consume more.  We want to shop for things, even if we don't need them.  We want to eat out even when we know it will be unhealthy for our health and the pocketbook.  We need to keep up with the Joneses.  We know “we must stop shopping, and yet we can’t stop shopping.”

Aswath Damodaran, a professor of finance at the Stern School of Business at New York University, grew up in Chennai, India, in the 1960s and predicts that in the wake of a drastic contraction in consumption, cities would most likely resemble the Chennai of his childhood: “There were no toy stores. Three restaurants for a city of millions. One bookstore, because who needs books?”

Damodaran, from my old country, is being true to his business school thinking and warns that without all of us spending our money, we won't have restaurants round the corner and kids won't have toys.  And that is a problem because ...?  Incidentally, we had all the toys that we needed.  And most of them were made of wood and not plastic, which threatens our lives.

We have granted money and economics way too much importance in life and in our collective decision making.  Even this atheist worries that we worship the market.  I will be happier if the faithful were sincere in their faith; after all, every old religion advises people not to be obsessed with money.  The world has enough and more to help out those who don't.  But, of course, there are lots of privileged people who oppose helping out fellow humans.

I don't imagine that we will change our ways of thinking.  I am sure that even now kids have a hard time imagining the kind of childhood that I had.  In a few years, there won't even be people with firsthand experiences of such lives.  

So ... what are your plans for the weekend? ;)

Health at a low, low price

In what seems now as my previous life as a university professor, I have often remarked in classes, when appropriate contexts arose, that students will gain a lot for the rest of their lives if they learnt a couple of things that are not necessarily explicitly stated in undergraduate education: money management, and health and wellness management.

Think about this: Some of our greatest stresses, worries, come from those two aspects of life.  A personal budget crisis, a family not having enough, is a nightmare.  Problems with physical and mental health are not only big challenges by themselves but put pressure on one's cash flow, which can drive one into helplessness if they do not have the money.

I particularly warned them about the combination of cheap calories.  In my early days, I used to have a presentation slide on this issue.  We humans are wired for sweet taste, and will easily be tempted by the inexpensive sugary foods and drinks, I reminded them.  When working with a limited budget, those cheap foods would appeal a lot, but we have to deal with it like how Ulysses dealt with the Sirens. 

But, most students, perhaps all of them, did not care about such remarks from me.  An old man ranting in a strange accent.  What does a geography professor know about these things, when biology and business professors assured them that they were set for the rest of their lives if they focused on biology and business.  And, of course, when liberal education had been gutted so that students couldn't care about Ulysses and the Sirens, I was nothing but a Cassandra whose prophecies were never to be believed!

A documentary that we watched a couple of nights ago noted that a 12-oz can of Coca Cola has 39 grams of added sugar in it.  Here in the US, it is a rare few who are familiar with grams of the metric system.  It was helpful when viewers were provided with an image of 39 grams of sugar in a cup.  It takes about 13 teaspoons to add up to 39 grams.  Imagine consuming 13 teaspoons of sugar in 5 minutes!  And then we wonder why there's an obesity crisis here in the US and throughout the world!

But, the sugary calories of Coca Cola are cheaper than the wholesome calories in an apple.  There is no work of slicing or biting into the apple either.  Sugar is a devil in disguise.

Dinner last night was rice and daal with a side of raita.  A glass of tap water to drink.  Eating such simple but nutritious foods is perhaps why we do not feel the inflation that is reported all the time in the news.

The following two parts of this chart here tell the story about inflation and foods all by themselves:

A burger with Coca Cola is a lose-lose choice: Waste of money and bad for one's health.  Being money smart by eating home-cooked beans is healthy for the body too!

Of course, such a healthy approach has its downsides; but that's my problem! ;)

I read. I write. Now you read!

I recently read a book that might perhaps appeal to a narrow subset of the reading population.  (BTW, have you ever wondered what percentage of the population reads books?)  Authored by an American who immigrated from India when she was 12 years old, the book could become work for those not familiar with India and the US.  You can see why I think it has a limited audience.

I was so taken by the book that even when I was a third into it, I wrote to the author, Sharmila Sen.  The facility that we now have in the contemporary world to send an email to a writer who is a stranger!

Of course, this is not the first time I have written to authors.  I am always impressed when they reply.  After all, nobody needs to engage with a total stranger.  But, authors big and small are no different from this small town blogger: Most of us are social animals.  We like to engage with fellow humans, and we want to engage with them.

Some do not reply.  Authors like Jill Lepore set the bar high; despite her responsibilities as a mother, a husband, a Harvard professor, and a prolific writer, she replied to my email.  The reply was near instantaneous.

Back in the days when I authored newspaper commentaries, I received emails in response to almost every op-ed.  A few were hateful, yes.  But, for the most part, people were decent even when disagreeing with me.  I always replied to them, except to the haters.  To me, there was no second thought about replying; the whole point in writing op-eds was to engage with the public on important issues, and I loved that engagement.

So, I wrote to this author appreciating her book even as I was working my way through it.  The lively correspondence revealed that an architect who helped them settle down after immigrating was a friend of a graduate school professor of mine.  A small world this is with far fewer degrees of separation than we imagine. 

Carrying the ball forward, I wrote to my professor.  His reply was lengthy with rich details about his friend, and he attached photographs too!  In the email, he wrote: "I miss him a lot even though our contacts via email and phone were limited and actual physical get together even less so."

Old friendships from middle and high school years, from college, are so deep and meaningful that years of drifting apart does not mean that we do not miss them.  Such friendships take on a lot more value when compared against the "friends" in Facebook and elsewhere.  I used to be on Facebook.  I was worried about the technology snooping into our lives and making money out of it.  Further, I couldn't relate to the artificial "friendship" there with "friends" commenting about every damn thing, even though I knew very little about them in the real world.  Almost all of them were not really anywhere close to being my "friend."  Studies confirm that most people have about five intimate friends.  In addition, we might have about 15 close friends, 50 general friends. and 150 acquaintances.

In an alternate universe, authors like Sharmila Sen and Jill Lepore would be my friends.  Sympaticos.  After I finished reading the book, I sent a long feedback email, which I concluded with: "Thanks again for your book that helped me relish the old days, relive the immigrant experiences, especially the unpleasant ones, all over, be angry again, and to enjoy the world in which we live."

So, hey, read good books.  You never know what you might get out of them! ;)

On the death of 22 fellow humans

Back in 1987, it was my first flight out of the country.  It seemed never-ending.  I was one of the many passengers who couldn't sleep--I was way too excited about the travel and the life ahead.  Nor did I find the movie to be interesting.

I wandered over to the magazine/newspaper rack.  I don't remember now whether it was Time or Newsweek that I picked up.  I started leafing through that issue.

I was shocked when I read one report.  It was about freeway shootings in Los Angeles.  I was headed to Los Angeles for graduate school.  Shooting on a freeway?

That, too, was my "welcome to America."  

The land of guns and violence.  The wild, wild, west of the movies was also a real thing and not a part of history.

My friend picked me up from the airport.  It was a long drive to his home, mostly on freeways.  I asked him about the shootings.  He laughed it away.

I was excitedly looking all around.  I was impressed with everything.  I had never seen such an uninterrupted flow of traffic. In India, cows and goats and humans all claimed the road at the same time.  But, not here.  And, all the vehicles were speeding in one direction within well defined lanes, and across the barrier on the other side there were vehicles speeding in the other direction.  What surprised me the most was that everybody stayed within their lanes!

And then the big trucks.  I had never seen such humongous trucks on the road, except the couple of monstrous heavy-engineering trucks used in the mines in Neyveli.  Whenever those trucks appeared on our street, my brother and I rushed to look at them.  And we always counted the number of tires that rolled past us.

But, here were trucks speeding at sixty miles an hour, and there were plenty of trucks.  Every truck that we passed, I kept staring at it and I always tried to get a view of the driver.  How could just one tiny human drive such a giant with ease and at such speeds!

At one point, my friend mildly suggested that I stop doing that.  He advised me to not make eye contact with the truck drivers.  Ah, yes, the shootings on the freeways of Los Angeles!

A few weeks after my arrival, there was buzz among the Indian students about a group called the dotbusters that had killed an Indian on the east coast.  They shot an Indian?  Was it a continuation of the wild, wild, west, in which they found a new kind of an Indian to kill?

In those first few weeks, I came to understand the American obsession with guns. 

Years have gone by.  Decades have gone by.  Through the years, I have read way too many news reports of mass shootings.

I did the only thing that I know how to do--I wrote a newspaper commentary.  Seven years ago, after the senseless killings at Umpqua Community College, which is not far from here, I wrote in the commentary: It is beyond surreal that a powerful lobbying group that shall not be named has effectively preempted any political discussion related to guns and violence.

Not only have we not had sincere political discussions on guns and access to them, the American fascination for guns has ramped up, and with far more deadly weapons.  Guns have been made accessible to practically any adult who wants one.  In some states, they can walk around openly displaying their firearms.

A few days ago, an 18-year old shot and killed 10 shoppers at a grocery store.  Yesterday, another 18-year old shot dead his grandmother, and 19 children and 2 teachers at an elementary school.  Just like that 22 lives were extinguished.  Just.Like.That.  Two more days and the kids and teachers would have joyfully taken off on a well-deserved summer break.

This, too, is America.  It didn't have to be so!

Grandpa did not play cricket with me

"I wish I knew what my dad was like. All the mundane things.  Did he like music?  Did he dance?  What did I inherit from him?" she said wistfully.

She was in utero when her father died.  He remains a mystery to her as she nears the end of the fourth decade of her life.

I was reminded of one of my aunts, who was a barely fertilized ovum past the first trimester when her father died. 

Growing up in the extended/joint family of the old days, my aunt did not lack for parental affection.  Her father's older brother treated her on par with his own daughters.  Odds are that in the cultural norms, she did not ask questions about her father.  I assume that the elders did not talk about the tragic death nor the person.

My father's experience is not that different.  He was a 40-day old infant when his father suddenly died. 

The death did not even happen in the village.  Grandfather had gone to Madras (Chennai now) all the way from Pattamadai, a travel that back in 1930 would have taken two full days.  Grandfather was about 22 and my grandmother was almost 18, and my father was their second child at that young age!  Grandfather was a healthy, normal, young man when he left the village.  Not even a week after his departure, a telegram arrived informing my grandmother and others that grandfather was dead.  A shave at the barbershop led to a nasty nick of a skin tag that rapidly got infected in those bad old days before antibiotics.

The older my father got, the more he talked about how maybe he should have found out more about his father from grandfather's relatives and peers.  But, in the old culture, they preferred not to talk about tragedies like my grandfather's death.  Even if father had attempted to engage in such conversations, I am sure he would have been quickly rebuffed.

A couple of years ago, father commented that perhaps his long life, and the long life that his brother had, was the cosmos compensating them for grandfather's brief existence on this planet. Who knows; our comings and goings continue to be a mystery.

My mother's father also died young, when he was only 51.  I was barely three years old when he died.  I grew up without a grandfather.  Whenever other kids talked about their grandfathers, it pained me even more that I didn't know what it meant to have a grandfather. 

In my mind, I knew that I was always looking for elders who could be grandfatherly.  My father's uncle filled that void really well even though he probably was not aware of my emotions, which is why I overlooked all his flaws, and which he had in plenty.  Well, who isn't flawed really!

In one of our chats about grandfather, mother's regret was that she did not get to interact with him as a full-fledged adult.  She felt worse for her youngest sister, who was only 15 when their father died.  But, my mother had known her father well enough for her to comment that grandfather would have been delighted that I was a university professor.

We miss the parents and grandparents that we know and love.  We miss the ones that we did not get to know.  Some choose not to know the parents and grandparents even when everybody is alive and well.  Such is life.

Mostly ... not Only

I blog mostly for myself, so that I can develop consistent approaches to life, whether it is about plastics or dying or whatever.  Heck, even happiness.  How often do people sit and think about what truly makes them happy and then do something about it?

Most of us rarely have the time nor the inclination to keep thinking about issues big and small. Instead, we simply react.  We react to whatever might be the issues of the day.  We react when the death of someone we know makes us think about our own mortality.  And then we forget that we are mortals and live as if we do not have any expiration dates printed on us.  We react when a draft of a Supreme Court opinion is leaked, or when Republicans vote for tax cuts, without articulating for ourselves what the public policy priorities ought to be and how we would defend those priorities.

Blogging, writing, allows me to go above and beyond reflexive opinions.  It gives me the space to think through.  It grants me the ability to go back to old posts and check for myself whether I am consistent, or if my views have changed.  I am not opposed to changing my views either.   I agree with John Maynard Keynes in an approach where we change our opinions if the facts change.  I do not want to live in a world of alternative facts.

At the same time, I recognize that I am not maintaining a personal journal.  I am not writing my thoughts down in notebooks that nobody else reads. Notebooks that somebody will have to toss away after I am gone.  Here I am expressing my thoughts in the open for anybody to read.  Why?

Elizabeth Corey writes that "writing is profoundly and unavoidably social."  Henry Walden Thoreau, for instance, lived for a while a simple life away from cities and in the natural settings in Massachusetts.  It was all about self-reliance and simplicity and self-realization.  Yet, he wrote a book about it, which is why we know what he did and thought!  Why did he write a book if he lived that way for himself?  It is all because Thoreau, like the rest of us, is a social animal.  We like to engage with fellow humans, we want to engage with them, even if we dream of going off-grid and living by ourselves.  We want to suggest to others that there is a different way to look at the world and to live in it.

Corey writes:

Writing is at once a process of clarifying our own thoughts and communicating with others. "Am I correct in my arguments and assertions," a writer may ask, "or will people disagree and criticize? Will I be helpful in showing readers something they have not seen before, or are my thoughts stale and overly rehearsed? Can I offer the reader a certain kind of empathy, a sort of friendship once removed? Or perhaps charity, or recognition of shared sorrow, or even re-assurance during a time of trial?"

At the same time, a writer also wants the attention of readers. Publishing anything at all is a request for others to pay attention, and publication entails the hope that what one has written will receive due consideration. "I have something I want to say, and I want you to hear it," writers implicitly tell the world. The worst outcome is for a piece to go unnoticed, as if it had never been written — dropped stillborn into an indifferent world.

That is not different from what Joan Didion wrote in "Why I Write":

In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.

After I blog, this secret bully also is forever curious if readers that I know and random visitors to my blog have comments--even though I blog mostly for myself.  Note the usage mostly and not only. ;) 

What scares you: “Nylon flocking” or “microplastics"?

Way, way back, when even this balding, graybeard was a child, women were warned to be careful in the kitchen if they were wearing the "fashionable" nylon sari.  The traditional sari was a cotton sari, and silk saris were worn by those with money during special occasions and celebrations.  Nylon was modern, and who didn't want to be modern!  And it was such an easy wash-and-wear fabric.  On top of everything, unlike a silk sari, a nylon sari was inexpensive, which put it well within reach of the lower middle class too.

In those years, open fires were the norm in India's kitchens.  Firewood, charcoal, or kerosene-fueled cooking near which women sat or stood meant that a tiny spark could easily make the nylon sari a death trap.  Should a sari catch fire, unwrapping oneself--especially in a culture that emphasized modesty--was not an easily accomplished task.

Such a combination also made possible for husbands and mothers-in-law to claim that they had no role in the deaths of young brides, even when they were suspects in "dowry deaths."  Even now, among many, the bride's family is expected to give hard cash or expensive gifts as dowry, and the failure to deliver then causes conflicts between the husband and mother-in-law who gang up against the new bride.  Bride burning, in which nylon saris played a big role, was often in the news.

That was the only downside to nylon that I knew about when I was young.  Otherwise, nylon, polyester, polycot--a mix of cotton and polyester--and more were all the rage.  They were visible, external, markers of modernity.  Would my behavior and our collective behavior have been different if we had known about the huge downsides of those polymers, which are more commonly known as plastics?

Until today, I did not know that one of the earliest documented effects of microplastics--less than five millimeters long--on humans was a link to cancer.

One of the earliest bodies of research on the impact of plastic particles on humans examined the so-called “flock worker’s lung,” a condition developed by employees of a Rhode Island plant that processed nylon flock, short fibers cut from cables of synthetic monofilaments to produce velvet-like materials used in upholstery, blankets, and clothing. The factory had almost no ventilation, and epidemiologists found that workers there had levels of lung cancer that were three times higher than among the people in the area who didn’t work in the factory. At first, they suspected the workers were inhaling chemicals, but when they studied the lungs of some of the workers who had died, they found nylon fibers lodged in the lung tissue.

The "flock worker's lung" was documented in the late 1990s.  But, the word "microplastics" had not been invented yet.  It was only in 2004 that the world had this new word.  It was only recently that microplastics has become a part of everyday vocabulary.  But, now, we know better:

In March, 2022, a lab in the Netherlands published research that examined lung tissue from eight volunteers and found plastic fibers in 80 percent of them. Jeanette Rotchell, an aquatic toxicologist at the University of Hull who was an author of the study, says she was less surprised than her land-oriented colleagues to find plastic in those hard-to-reach places. That’s because, with a background in marine ecology, she had seen the inflammation in fish gills and guts from microplastics. The biggest particles were about the length of a sesame seed, but long and thin, and they were wedged deep in the deepest part of the lungs. Still, Rotchell cautions about making a leap from animal to human studies. “You can see inflammation effects in mussels and fish,” she says. “But I think for humans, we don’t have enough data yet with environmentally relevant levels and types of plastics.”

The more we understand microplastics, the more we will want to find ways to regulate the problem, similar to policies that deal with emissions from factories and cars or the permissible levels of chemicals in drinking water.  However, by the time we act, the microplastics problem will become even worse than it already is: "367 million metric tons of plastics were manufactured in 2020. That amount is predicted to triple by 2050."

It is easy to be outraged by bride burning, and we should be outraged.  It is a visible horror that no human should be subject to, and the perpetrators deserve the maximum punishment under the law.  But, microplastics are practically invisible, and anything that is out of sight is out of mind, which is why I don't imagine large-scale and worldwide regulations against microplastics coming into effect anytime soon.

As I noted a month ago, plastics like polyester and nylon make possible clothes, shoes, backpacks, pens, raincoats, umbrellas, and more, especially for those in the lower economic strata.  These "modern" problems require us to think beyond sound bites and bumper stickers.  Are we ready for this task?

And life flows on within you and without you

I have blogged too many times about happiness, as clicking here will reveal.  I am practically obsessed with happiness--despite the General Malaise that I am! 

As I wrote here, I suppose I often return to this theme only because I think people do not think through this as they go through the process of college degrees and careers and incomes and travel and everything else.

An unhappy and stressful time--thankfully, it was brief--during the pandemic when the layoff loomed large convinced me forever that life without happiness can be unbearable.  I want to lead a happy life however short or long that might be.  

I have been in pursuit of happiness my whole life, it seems to me.  Ditching a career in engineering was the beginning step in getting away from a life of unhappiness that I was headed towards.  A career that would have delivered plenty of money but with a whole lot of unhappiness.  I intuitively understood that no amount of money would buy me happiness.

More of power, prestige, and whatever else that we work for is no path towards happiness either.  Happiness is internal that is not based on something externally observable.  In this happy life, I am less concerned about stuff and more interested in making memories.  I remain convinced that memories is all that we take with us during that final journey.  Stuff doesn't make one happy.

Alas, we live in a world in which happiness is all about the external.  People buy stuff, go places, and document all these in order to demonstrate that they are happy.  Gazillions are made by those promising such fake happiness!

Nothing that I have written thus far will be new to any thinking person.  After all, cultures across the world have clearly conveyed over the centuries everything that one would need to know about happiness.  Yet, we all need reminders as we lead our daily lives that often bring about discomfort and depression.

A few days ago, my sister had plenty of updates about the extended family but not one was cheerful.  She was about to hand over the phone to my father when I told her that she can't end the chat with nothing but bad news.  "Surely there is at least one good news," I said.

"You tell me."  She laughed.

"Ok, here is one.  We are all alive and well and talking like this."

"Yes, that is good news."

The older I get, the more I am convinced that one cannot pursue happiness even if I commented earlier that I have been in pursuit of happiness my entire life.  Happiness, I have concluded, comes from within.  The pursuit is within by trying to understand what makes us truly happy and content.

How is your internal pursuit of happiness going?

Source

Terra incognita

Right from an early age, I read fiction.  A lot of fiction.  I loved the Tamil stories, to which I could easily relate.  The ones set in America or England, and the Russian works in translation, required me to imagine lands and peoples and cultures that were completely alien to me.  I read them all, sometimes even if they were beyond my fullest abilities, as was the case with Anna Karenina, which I read when I had yet to gain even a little bit of an understanding of the world.

Fiction that is set in cultures different from one's own requires the reader to learn new names of people and places, the foods and drinks that they consume, the music that the stories refer to, and the history and politics too.  While all these might seem like a lot of work, I have found it to be otherwise.  It was enriching.  It made me want to travel the world and enjoy the remarkably different lives that people lead.

Over the past few years, it has been a world of riches when it comes to reading fiction in the English language.  Even Tamil novels have been wonderfully translated into English; Tamarind History and Perumal Murugan's works offered plenty for me to think about. And, of course, authors from the brown world writing in English about brown people's lives.  The latest is Tahmima Anam's The Good Muslim.

Anam's work here is like the few other books that I recently read (and blogged) that is set in the non-Western world, with characters who are non-white, which is what Orhan Pamuk said would happen:

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

Unlike with books by Dostoyevsky and the rest, The Good Muslim covers a relatively familiar terrain--Bangladesh.  When the author drops the name Bangabandhu, I know right away that she refers to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who is considered as the father of that country.  Even though I have not visited the country, Dhaka and Chittagong are names of places that have been familiar to me forever.  When the story is set against the backdrop of the 1971 war that birthed Bangladesh by severing it from Pakistan, I do not need to brush up on history in order to understand what happened.

The familiarity with the context makes the fiction more real.  But, the unfamiliarity of, say, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk was also equally enjoyable and thought-provoking.  Ultimately, it is all about viewing the world through somebody else's eyes and values, which we all need to do in plenty if we want to work towards peace.  As I noted in this post five years ago, empathy does not come easily to us.  We need to learn about it, and experience it over and over.  We learn and experience empathy through the profound works of literature.  The quote in that post, which I had excerpted from an essay, is worth repeating:

What could be more important, for ethical and social understanding, than the ability to grasp what it is like to be someone from a different culture, period, social class, gender, religion or personality type? And one learns why even those broad categories won’t do, because one senses what it is like to be a particular other person. And that, too, is an important lesson: no one experiences the world in quite the same way as anyone else. 

If we could more easily put ourselves in the position of others and put on a set of glasses to see the world in their way, we might very well, when those glasses are off, still not share their beliefs. But we will at least understand people better, negotiate with them more effectively, or guess what measures are likely to work. Just as important, we will have enlarged our sense of what it is to be human. No longer imprisoned in our own culture and moment, or mistaking our local and current values for only possible ones, we will recognize our beliefs as one of many possibilities -- not as something inevitable, but as a choice. 

Your personal opinion is the Constitution?

Towards the end of last year, we watched The Daily Show's Trevor Noah interviewing Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.  It was a delight to watch her and listen to her.  

Among many things, Sotomayor talked about the Court and the landmark Roe V. Wade decision, which made abortion legal in the US.

When Sotomayor said that the court's decision was not a narrow majority but a 7-2 split, I was shocked.  I had no idea; I had always assumed it was a close 5-4 or a 6-3 decision.  But, 7-2?

Sotomayor then said something else that made a deep impact.  She said that while we might get all charged and upset about a decision that doesn't go our way, or celebrate when it is a win for us, it would do us all good if we read the opinions.

Now, of course, Sotomayor is a unique justice in that we the public are her audience when she writes her opinions.  She writes in a way that anybody with average intelligence can understand her opinion and the logic behind it.  I have been a huge fan of hers, and she would become the Chief Justice in my alternate universe:

#SCOTUS no longer a #Roberts court.
It is a #Thomas court.
If Roberts really cares about the legitimacy of the institution and how history will record him, he would resign in 2021#Biden then elevates #Sotomayor and adds a replacement.https://t.co/UPFL5GiWiQ #Barrett

— Sriram K (@congoboy) October 27, 2020

The recent leak of the draft opinion of the majority of the Supreme Court, which is on the verge of tossing out the Roe V. Wade decision, confirms my suspicion that the Court is now firmly in the hands of Thomas, his allies, and his wife.

I decided to take up Sotomayor's directive to read the Court's decision in 1973 that made Roe V. Wade a phrase with which we have become familiar.

Right in the beginning, the 1973 decision notes:

We forthwith acknowledge our awareness of the sensitive and emotional nature of the abortion controversy, of the vigorous opposing views, even among physicians, and of the deep and seemingly absolute convictions that the subject inspires. One's philosophy, one's experiences, one's exposure to the raw edges of human existence, one's religious training, one's attitudes toward life and family and their values, and the moral standards one establishes and seeks to observe, are all likely to influence and to color one's thinking and conclusions about abortion.

In addition, population growth, pollution, poverty, and racial overtones tend to complicate and not to simplify the problem.

Those sentences are true today too.  It is foolish to pretend otherwise, which is why I, like many, practically laughed when Justice Roberts said at his nomination hearings that his job was merely to call balls and strikes like a baseball umpire would:

Judges are like umpires. Umpires don’t make the rules, they apply them. The role of an umpire and a judge is critical.  They make sure everybody plays by the rules, but it is a limited role.  Nobody ever went to a ball game to see the umpire.

On matters that reach the Court, "One's philosophy, one's experiences, one's exposure to the raw edges of human existence, one's religious training, one's attitudes toward life and family and their values, and the moral standards one establishes and seeks to observe, are all likely to influence and to color one's thinking and conclusions" to quote from the Roe V. Wade decision.

Much later in the opinion, the Court notes:

Texas urges that, apart from the Fourteenth Amendment, life begins at conception and is present throughout pregnancy, and that, therefore, the State has a compelling interest in protecting that life from and after conception. We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer. 

It should be sufficient to note briefly the wide divergence of thinking on this most sensitive and difficult question.

Almost 50 years later, we are back to arguing the same set of issues!

Don't you agree with the 1973 opinion that "One's philosophy, one's experiences, one's exposure to the raw edges of human existence, one's religious training, one's attitudes toward life and family and their values, and the moral standards one establishes and seeks to observe, are all likely to influence and to color one's thinking and conclusions"?

Unearthing the future

The evidence of lignite mining in Neyveli was visible to us if we stepped outside our compound.  From the gate, towards the far end of the road, we could see a small brown sandy hill, which was the overburden from the mines. Years later, the mining area expanded.

What if the lignite hadn't been mined?

The answer to that question is pretty simply that without the mines, there wouldn't have been a thermal power station.  The electricity generated at Neyveli was (and is the case today too?) critical for the state's economic activities.

Mining permanently transforms the terrain and the entire ecosystem.  But, without the essential mining like at Neyveli, there is no economic progress either.

Such a tension between nature and economics is played out all over the world.  As students learn in ECON 101, there's no free lunch.  Something gotta give.

We face those tradeoffs when it comes to "green" energy options too.  In the race to power the world without fossil fuels, we have come to realize the importance of a lightweight: Lithium.

The International Energy Agency named lithium as the mineral for which there was the fastest growing demand as the world transitions from oil and gas to a green energy grid. If the world is to meet the global climate targets set as part of the Paris Agreement, at least 40 times as much lithium will be needed by 2040 compared with today.

We need lithium.  We need lots of it.  We need it now.

Lithium has to be mined.  And, mining has problems.  The problem has reached my neighborhood, to so speak.  There is plenty of lithium in a vast area near the Oregon-Nevada border, in the McDermitt Caldera.

Source

In addition to the impacts on the environment, the mining activity will happen on ancestral lands of Native American tribes.  It will be a vast open-pit mining operation, similar to lignite mining in Neyveli.

The 18,000-acre Thacker Pass mine would reach into ancestral lands of the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribes, the Burns Paiute Tribe, Reno Sparks Indian Colony and the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes of Duck Valley Indian Reservation.

Several of the tribes, along with environmental groups and others, say the mine would wreck their land, resources and culture, depleting or poisoning water supplies, destroying sacred sites, degrading wildlife habitat and leaving behind hazardous waste.

“They will never ever be able to repair this area. It will never look the same. It will never be reclaimed. It has irreparable harm,” [Daranda] Hinkey said. “What we see here is destruction of the lands, contamination of the water and complete cultural genocide to the Indigenous people here.”

To recap, on the one hand, we have a rapidly growing demand for lithium, which is needed for the transition away from fossil fuels that is screwing up the global climate.  On the other hand, ... Estimates are that about 79% of lithium that can be mined in the US are within 35 miles of Native American reservations. 

So, how would you resolve this tension?

Meanwhile, lithium is not the only metal that we will need in plenty in order to go forward into a renewable energy future.  Recall this issue about cobalt, which is one hell of an expensive item in the lithium-ion battery?

The root problem will be obvious to anybody who thinks through all these.  The root problem is our consumption.  We want nice homes, climate controlled indoors, good food, great entertainment, fabulous clothes, travel to see the world, and more.  Of course, I am no exception; I want them all!  But, this collective consumption, for which there is no seeming end, means that we cannot ever get away from the difficult tradeoffs that we need to make.  Remember, there's no free lunch!

How would you unearth the future?

The Theocratic States of America

In Afghanistan, the Taliban are back to their old ways of treating women:

The Taliban government decreed Saturday that Afghan women must cover themselves from head to toe, expanding a series of onerous restrictions on women that dictate nearly every aspect of public life. 

The decree, by the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice,  drew condemnation from women’s rights advocates and the United Nations, which described it as another bald betrayal of Taliban pledges to respect gender equality. The ministry suggested the burqa as the preferred garment for covering a woman’s face, hair and body. But it did not mandate wearing the garment as long as women otherwise cover themselves with a hijab.

The government provided helpful clarification about what could happen if a woman did not follow those rules.  Her male guardian will be warned.  But, if the violation is repeated:

The second time, the guardian will be summoned [by Taliban officials], and after repeated summons, her guardian will be imprisoned for three days ... And male guardians found guilty of repeated offences “will be sent to the court for further punishment”

Yes, men ruling over the lives of women.  That surely cannot happen here in the United States of America.

Of course, I want to point out that the burqa rule in Afghanistan is not that far removed from our lives here.  That is merely one end of a continuum along which we are slightly better off.  While we don't tell women what to wear when they are out and about, and though we don't require them to have male guardians, the Supreme Court is on the verge of telling women that their bodies will be regulated by lawmakers in the states where they live.

We make fun of the Taliban when they regulate women's lives based on their religious beliefs.  After all, those are some barbaric Islamic beliefs, unlike life that is governed by highly civilized Christian beliefs, in which the fertilized ova are vessels for the souls that god has already created.  We then regulate women's lives in order to carry out god's direction, and will make it the law of the land in a liberal democracy.  The Supreme Court is not at all like the Taliban; come on, unlike the Taliban, there is a woman in the majority of judges who want to tightly circumscribe women's lives!

The Scientific American has plenty of issues with the regulation of women's lives in the US.

Regardless of how they legally justify their ruling, the justices of the Supreme Court who choose to strike down abortion rights are telling the American public that science doesn’t matter, that evidence can be ignored. High courts have similarly said as much in striking down mask and vaccine mandates during the COVID pandemic. The logic of Alito’s draft—the right to an abortion is not in the Constitution—could apply to all reproductive health, including the Griswold v. Connecticut Supreme Court decision that overturned a law banning birth control.

If only the editors of SciAm paused to ask ourselves why the religious fanatics in the Supreme Court or the Taliban would worry about science when it is god that they answer to! 

The pro-life crowd ought to simply recognize the Taliban as comrade-in-arms engaged in a crusade (or jihad) to cleanse the world of infidels like me.

The uprooted life

As I have gotten older, I have understood a thing or two about the world and the human condition.  It could very well be that I am utterly wrong, but that's how I try to make sense of it all.

One of those results from the tension within me: A global migrant who greatly values the continuity of lives in old cultures.  I cherish the old stories from the old country, whether the stories are personal from Pattamadai and Sengottai, or from history that goes back five thousand years and more.  The migration and travels are about places and peoples that are new, while I have been shedding away from my personal life the traditions of the old.

I feel rooted here in Oregon, but I am not really from here.  This land is not naturally in my blood, but, to continue along with the metaphor, it is like I have had a blood transfusion.  It is not as if I could have stayed back in the old lands with my original blood either.

Of course, such a story is not unique to me.  Most of us have wandered away from the places where we were born and raised.  We may have moved to Oregon from New York or Hawaii, or moved from one corner of the state to another.  In the old country, my classmates in Neyveli have resettled in places far, far away from that industrial town and from their "native" villages.

We are all settlers, not unlike Europeans who moved to the Americas and Australia and New Zealand and southern Africa.  Thankfully, we did not colonize the lands but we came in peace.  But, the settlers that we are, we lack the fierce spirit of the place that a rare few have because they and their peoples have lived on that same land for generations.

The massive mining project and power generation projects in Neyveli required displacing people who had lived there for a long time.  In the name of development and progress, the lands were acquired and people were compensated.  Settlers from different parts of India came to work in the town.  I grew up there, without knowing anything about the people who once lived on those lands.

This is also not a unique story.  It has happened all over the world, and continues on even today.

It is no wonder then that the resistance to modern projects mostly comes from people who have lived for generations in the places where those projects will be located.  Almost always, they are farmers and fishers and indigenous people, to whom their homes are more than mere homes.  An emotional attachment about which most of the rest of us know nothing.  How would we know what that means when we have been wandering, settling, and resettling?

In The Shepherd's Life that I am currently reading, the author, James Rebanks,  describes his people and the way of life that, according to his estimate, has been going on for five thousand years in the landscape in the north of England, in the Lake District.  He writes about the dignity of the people, and the indignities that they have had to face because they value their lands and sheep more than school and urban life.  “Some of the smartest people I’ve ever known are semi-illiterate,” Rebanks writes.

When I was a kid, I had no doubts that being the smartest one in the class was the best thing ever.  To see my name on the blackboard as one of the ranked students was validation beyond compare.  Studying engineering, coming to America, earning a doctorate, were all "progress" along the continuum.  But, like I said, I have understood a thing or two about the human condition.  One of those is simply that such smartness is not a big deal, and is nothing more special than any other skill that others have.

But then, do I want to live a deeply rooted life in the idyllic landscape in the north of England, or in the south of India, where people are skilled very differently from me?

How do you say Tharangambadi in Danish?

I read in the newspaper from India that I grew up with, The Hindu:

Ten early-Pandya period cave temples will be declared protected monuments this year, and the Danish Fort at Tharangambadi, which was damaged during a recent cyclone, will be repaired and restored, Thangam Thennarasu, Minister for Industries, Tamil Official Language and Tamil Culture and Archaeology, said on Thursday.

That news about the Danish Fort at Tharangambadi reminded me of Kris, Kirsten, and Danish-Americans in Bakersfield.

My first newspaper opinion piece--not any short letter to the editor--was when I was a few months away from wrapping up graduate schooling in Los Angeles, which was my port of entry to life in these United States.  The Hindu and The Los Angeles Times had published letters from me, but this was a full-fledged commentary.

One might expect me to cherish that commentary.  But, the op-ed was, in retrospect, a terrible piece.  If I am a work in progress, one can easily imagine that I and my writing sucked big time three decades ago. 

It was published in the Bakersfield Californian--by then I had transitioned to life in Bakersfield.  Soon, it was a second opinion piece in that same paper.  A day after that second opinion essay, when the phone rang at work, it turned out to be the beginning of a productive association and friendship.

The caller was a professor at the local university.  He was pleased that the opinion author was from India and wanted to contact me right away.  He was also from India, and chose to go with a short version of his multi-syllable Indian name.  At the end of the brief phone conversation, he invited me and my family over to his home for dinner with him and his wife.

I was impressed at two levels.  For one, he tracked down the phone number of the agency where I worked--newspapers always include a note about commentary writers--and called me right away.  More than that, without having ever met me in the real world, he invited us over for dinner.  He was carrying on with the tradition in the old country, where inviting people over for dinner was the way to build a relationship, and which is sorely lacking in this country where people casually say, "let's do coffee sometime."

We had plenty of dinners with Kris and Kirsten.  He was only a few years younger than my father.  Kirsten was from Denmark.  They met when he was a graduate student in Copenhagen.  From there, the couple came to the US, which is where Kris earned his doctorate.

Soon after, Kris invited us to join them at the local Danish association's potluck gathering.  In his uniquely funny manner, Kris added that he was the president of the Danish Association.  Only in America can an Indian be the president of a Danish association!

It was a small gathering.  Most of them were even older than Kris.  They were globally informed, and were familiar with India.  One of them, a very old woman, quizzed me about the Danish connection with India.  Yes, she quizzed me, as if I was a child who had just started going to school.  She asked me if I knew about the Danish colonies in India.  Of course, I knew about Tranquebar--it was the European name for Tharangambadi.  The town is not far from Neyveli, which is the industrial town of my childhood. 

As angry as I have always been about Europeans going to far, far away places to colonize lands and people, I don't hold that against individuals from those countries, unless they make condescending or racist remarks.  The old woman was genuinely interested in India, and I was delighted to engage her.  She was happy that I knew about Tranquebar.  She talked about how in their schooling they had learnt about the Danish East India Company, and the Nicobar Islands.  One of her biggest regrets was not having been to India. 

Had I not come to the US and had instead continued living in India, my life would have been like that of many of my classmates with their comfortably rich lives.  More than those comforts, I would have had pooris and vadais anytime I felt the urge, instead of drooling for them in a remote Oregon.  But, I would never have had interesting and serendipitous encounters with people from different corners of the world, including from a tiny country that is a long, long way from Tharangambadi.

Thoughts on a rainy day

"I stay away from anything about which I know nothing," I said.

"Good idea.  So, what's your thing?"

What's my thing?

Most people always have something as theirs.  When engaged in their careers, their response might be about what they do.  A doctor.  Landscaper.  Pilot.  Ditch digger.  Whatever it is that they do. 

Of course, increasingly what people, especially the younger ones, say as their thing comes across as mumbo jumbo.  "I help clients maximize their productivity in their customer-interface" is a kind of thing that we just nod along to and remind ourselves not to ask that person anything ever again!

On quite a number of occasions, my father has expressed his surprise at how people earn money these days, in contrast to the old days when he was an active participant in the labor economy.  He was a civil engineer who built things.  Farmers grew crops. Miners dug stuff. Workers made widgets. One didn't need much explanation.  If we talked about so-and-so who is a medical sales rep, everyone immediately knew what that meant.

Not anymore.

Now, it is a different world.  Nobody seems to offer a simple description of the thing that they do.

So, what's my thing?

In my first job, I was a computer engineer.  That, however, was not my thing.  It didn't last even three months.

In my second job, I was a hotel engineering manager.  The three weeks on the job was solid evidence that it was not my thing.

In my third job, I was a biomedical sales engineer.  Nope, that was not my thing either.

Day in and day out for the six years that I worked as a transportation planner after graduate school, I knew it was not my thing.

I taught for two decades.  So, is teaching my thing?

Now that I have prematurely retired, is being retired my thing?

So, when he asked me "what's your thing?" I had to quickly think about a response. 

Pointing my finger at him to suggest that he had a good point in the conversation, I chuckled.

He too laughed.

Laughing might be just about my thing!

The bike-path grammarian

"There's one more behind us."

It was a loud warning that came from behind.  By now, we are used to all kinds of alerts from bicyclists, old and young.  Some ring a warning bell.  Some just zoom on by catching us by surprise.  A few days ago, an old woman's voice yelled out something like, "please step off the path because there is another bike coming towards me and I have no space."

We literally stepped off the path onto the wet gravelly ground.

She then slowly went past us on a cruiser bike.  Maybe there was no stopping or slowing once she got herself going!

This time, the voice warned us about multiple bikes.  A masked woman passed us, followed by another woman.

I looked behind and there was nobody else.  Why did she yell out "there's one more behind us"?

She should have instead yelled out "one more behind me."  Maybe she also "buys local."  Whom cares, right! ;)

Source

In my early years as a pontificating professor (another alliteration that is also tautological!) in California, it did not take me much time to understand that students in my classes needed to learn how to write at the college level.

I, therefore, did the smartest thing ever: I sought help from the English Department.

I went this route because as much as I emphasized the importance of writing, I was almost always at a loss when it came to explaining to students why something didn't quite feel correct.  There was one particular occasion when a student raised her hand in class and asked for the difference between "affect" and "effect" because I had crossed out her usage of "affect" and written there that she should have used "effect" instead.

I had no clue how to answer that question.  I was stumped.  I told the class that I merely had a feel for it after all the years of working with the language, and that they had to take it up with the writing folks.

From the English Department, Kim loaned me one of her teaching assistants for 30 minutes each week for about six weeks.  One of those was Rebecca.  Once, over lunch when planning for the week's discussion on writing, we talked about books.  To this day, I am pleasantly flummoxed by her response to my question on what book she was reading for fun.  I expected her to respond with an interesting work of fiction.  I certainly did not imagine that the book that she was reading for fun was all about grammar.  Yes, it was about grammar.

I suppose I can confidently state that the biker who yelled about "one more behind us" was not that Rebecca!

Of course, there is more to life than grammar, which is the point of departure for a sacred Hindu prayer.  The first verse is literally about life that is wasted on grammar:

Bhajagovindam bhajagovindam
Govindam bhaja muudhamate
Sampraapte sannihite kaale
Nahi nahi rakshati dukrijnkarane.          
Translation:
Worship Govinda, Worship Govinda,
Worship Govinda. Oh fool!
Rules of Grammar will not save you
At the time of your death.

Rules of grammar will not save me from death.  But, they provide order in the chaos that is called life.

Source

Pedantic is not a compliment

It is a list that gets longer.  A list that gets longer primarily because I am retired, which has released me from the otherwise stressful and time-consuming tasks of grading essays and attending committee meetings.

What is the list?

It is not a to-do list.  Those who have known me for a long time know all too well that I don't do anything.  I used to be a living example of GBS' "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach."  Now, I neither do nor teach!

The list is perhaps pedantic, reflecting my old profession.  A "pedantic professor" is an alluring alliteration.  It is also tautological; aren't professors pedantic?

The list of authors of fictional works that I have recently read:

Tahmima Anam's The Startup Wife;

S.J. Sindu's Blue-Skinned Gods and Marriage of a Thousand Lies; 

Anuk Arudpragasam's A Passage North;

Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future.

These authors get added to the list that includes Alan Lightman and Jhumpa Lahiri.

What is so special about these authors?

They earned their PhDs before they became fiction writers of note.  Not honorary doctorates, but earned!

Anam, with Bangladeshi roots, has a PhD in anthropology from Harvard.  Sindu's PhD in creative writing is from Florida State University, and is part of the vast Tamil diaspora.  Arudpragasam, a Sri Lankan Tamil, has a PhD in philosophy at Columbia University. 

Compared to these young authors, Jhumpa Lahiri is old, and Lightman, and Robinson are way old!  Oh, their credentials: Lahiri has a PhD in renaissance studies; Lightman is a big-time physicist as well with a PhD from Caltech; and Robinson's PhD is in English.

They have doctorates and are also wonderful storytellers.  Their stories are statements on the human condition, which will make us think about the path ahead that we humans need to carefully and consciously tread.

Whether they are anthropologists or physicists, the stories they tell easily and immediately convey the remarkable breadth and depth of their understanding.  When Anam writes about the startup culture, it is more than mere anthropology at work.  Robinson's science fiction is not perhaps what one would expect from an English major.

(I am confident that my old classmate and friend, Vijay, would have easily belonged to this group of PhD writers had he been born in the US, which allows the youth to take the time that they need to tap into their potential.  The India of old, on the other hand, compelled him to make a choice early in his life, which is what he did.)

But, I am not sure if reading fiction is something that people do anymore in huge numbers.  I couldn't get students to get excited even about the short stories that I curated for them in a course that was about understanding the world through short stories.

Quite a few years ago, I noticed on the first day of classes that a female student had the last name of Steinbeck.  As students introduced themselves one after another, when it came to her turn, I remember asking her if she was related to the Steinbeck.  When she excitedly said yes, I asked her if she was asked that question all the time.  Her response shocked me: In her couple of years in college, I was the first one to ever ask that question.  Naturally, I took a couple of minutes to engage the class about Steinbeck, and it was even more depressing that very few had ever read anything at all by Steinbeck.

Now, in retirement, I can read whatever I want like I did before I was laid off.  The only difference is that I now don't have to ever think about whether what I read would be of interest to students.

And I can develop my own lists that mean nothing to other people!

We have digits

A few years ago, Tunku Varadarajan, who used to write for the Wall Street Journal--when it was a respectable publication before it became a Faux-News-wannabe rag pretending to be a newspaper--wrote in a tongue-in-cheek commentary on why Indians love Facebook: "They take to it naturally and with great passion. It allows them to do two things they love: Tell everyone what they are doing; and stick their noses into other people's business."

As one can imagine, Varadarajan's commentary was not well received by Indians. 

But it is not only Indians who tell everyone what they are doing and stick their noses into other people's business.  On Facebook everyone is an Indian.  As a New Yorker cartoon memorably summed up a long time ago during the very early days of the dot.com era, on the internet, nobody knows you are a dog!

It has been years since I deleted my Facebook account after temporarily suspending it.  I don't imagine human behavior having changed for the better in Facebook and Instagram and whatever else that kids and adults alike seem to enjoy.

If anything, the recent years of Twitter have convinced me that human behavior has worsened with social media.  People like the former President knew how to tap into this base human instincts inside us and rose to power.  The rabid humanity is forcing one of my favorite columnists and Twitter pundits, Charles Blow, to withdraw from Twitter.  Blow writes:

Social media is full of hate speech, bots, vitriol, attack armies, screamers and people who live for the opportunity to be angry.

For people like me, that meant half my time on Twitter on any given day could be spent blocking and muting accounts. It’s not because I’m fragile or averse to opposing views, but rather that much of what I was seeing clearly crossed over into hostility and sometimes harassment. I can’t even count the number of racial slurs that have been directed at me, or attacks on my sexuality, or allusions to my family. And, of course, there is the occasional threat of violence.

It is not difficult to imagine what Blow is describing.  In this post in April 2018, I quoted Tristan Harris who said:

Social media was supposed to be about, “Hey, Grandma. How are you?” Now it’s like, “Oh my God, did you see what she wore yesterday? What a fucking cow that bitch is.” Everything is toxic — and that has to do with the internet itself. It was founded to connect people all over the world. But now you can meet people all over the world and then murder them in virtual reality and rape their pets.

Blow has received threats, even to his life.  He writes that by pulling back, he is "slowly returning to me, the person, and away from the persona."

Who are we, and what is social media doing to us humans?

Tish Harrison Warren joins a long list of people who worry about the increasing digitization of life, and wants us to reconnect with material things:

We are made to enjoy the physical presence of other human beings. We are made to enjoy rainstorms or sunshine or walks in the woods. We are made to enjoy touchable things. We cannot escape or overcome this need through technology. Our attempts to do so go against the grain of our deepest human needs and longings.

This gregarious hermit has been living such a life--out of choice, and without any remorse.

Warren adds:

Claims that we can fundamentally alter how human beings have learned, lived and interacted together in essential institutions and activities like education, worship, friendships, dating, communities, work and parenting without large unforeseen social consequences smacks of the hubris and reductionism.

So, what should one do?

We have to be cautious and wise about introducing devices into our lives that fundamentally change how humans have interacted since time immemorial. We have to plunge ourselves primarily into the natural world and embodied human relationships, with all the complexity, challenges, inconvenience and pain that entails.

I hope you will think about that.