When ideas--especially from women--frighten men

The words and sentences in Tomb of Sand flow so easily.  It feels as if someone is sitting close by and narrating the story in the voices of the different characters.  I am intentionally not rushing through the novel because I want the wonderful taste of what I have read to last a lot longer before Geetanjali Shree serves me the next course.

It was during such an intentional pause that I decided to google for the author in order to find out about her background.

Google showed me a result that was a shocker, which I read and tweeted:

An event to honor International #BookerPrize winner #GeetanjaliShree in #Agra was canceled after a police complaint was lodged alleging that her work contained objectionable comments against #Hindu deities.https://t.co/I7ufJTwqY6
People have gone nuts!@shikhadalmia pic.twitter.com/FvCuti2XNI

— Sriram K (@congoboy) July 31, 2022

Allow me to repeat this much: A literary event to honor Geetanjali Shree for winning the International Booker Prize was canceled because a nutcase filed a complaint with the police that her book contains “objectionable comments” about Hindu deities Shiva and Parvati.

The crazy man--it is always a man in such instances, just like mass shootings in the US are always carried out by men--tweeted out urging the Chief Minister of the state where Agra is located and the state's police chief to look into the matter.

What was the response from the police, you ask?  The police said that they have to first read the book before deciding how to proceed with the complaint.  Of course, if somebody complaints about a murder, then the cops first need to establish whether there is a body or, at least, find out if that person is missing.  In this case, they have to read the book first.  Chances are good that the madman who complained hasn't read the book either.  For all I know, a friend might have forwarded him a WhatsApp message that said that Tomb of Sand defiles the good lord Shiva and his consort, the goddess Parvati, and the idiot filed a complaint because, well, he is god's soldier, like the vast multitude in the Hindu nationalistic party that is in power. 

India has gone crazy with its Hindu nationalism.  So crazy that an international literary award is met with a complaint. 

Now, of course, very few people read books.  And, therefore, very few care about awards for books and authors.  In a country that is maniacally obsessed with the great tamasha of cricket and masala movies, an author and her international recognition will not blip in political and cultural radar unless a celebrity--politician, movie star, cricket player--talk about it. 

Perhaps you are thinking, hey, aren't the Prime Minister and his party excited with this award for an Indian author?  An author who was born in India and lives in India?  An author who does not write in English, even though she is fluent in it, but writes in Hindi?  As the Booker Prize notes, "it is the first book originally written in any Indian language to win the prize, and the first novel translated from Hindi to be recognised by the award”.  Don't these nationalists love such things?

Hindu nationalism is an ideology.  In that ideology, Hindi is the language of the land, and words and sentences should champion Hindu Nationalism.  My guess is that Geetanjali Shree couldn't care less for Hindu nationalism.  So, neither the Prime Minister nor his party have publicly applauded Shree's Booker Prize, nor have they called for their toadies to stop complaining about Tomb of Sand.

Cultural organisations Rangleela and Agra Theatre Club had planned the felicitation event.

Rambharat Upadhyay, a spokesperson of Rangleela, told Scroll.in that ideally Adityanath should have honoured Shree. 

“Uttar Pradesh is her birthplace,” Upadhyay said. “The government...the chief minister should have felicitated her. Instead we are having to cancel this event. It’s a matter of shame.”

 Shree's response?

“My novel is forcefully being dragged into a political controversy,” the author told the organisers. “The references made in the novel are integral part of Indian mythology. Those who have objections to these descriptions, should challenge the Hindu mythological texts in the court.”

This is not the first time that Hindu Nationalists have attacked authors and their ideas.  The beatings will continue until the morale improves!

PS: As for my original quest to find out more about the author?  Wikipedia says that for generations her people have lived in Uttar Pradesh, and:

After beginning her PhD work at Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda on the Hindi writer Munshi Premchand, Shree became more interested in Hindi literature.  She wrote her first short story during her PhD, and turned to writing after graduation

Yet another PhD or almost PhD.  This list is getting longer!

Women are stories in themselves

In an alternate life, I would have been a book reviewer.  In addition to the pleasure that I get from reading a book, I damn well enjoy writing about it too, in the absence of a real-world setting in which I can talk about them with a few people.

Most book reviews are boring in the academic world, which I inhabited before my former employer decided that I wasn't worth the money.  My review essays were never boring, if I may say so myself.  In fact, even before I became a university professor, I authored a book review essay in which I brought together three (or was it four?) books.  A few years ago, I applied to become the editor of a book review journal.  But, nope, I didn't make it; I suspect it was because I wasn't a real academic who can only speak academese ;)

I am pretty confident that I won't make the cut for publications like the New York Review of Books.  So, I ramble on here about books that I want to talk about.  You have a choice: You can continue reading, or quit while you are ahead in the game ;)

Perhaps you have a question: "Sriram, why don't you join a book club?" 

For one, I don't drink wine, which is what most book clubs are about ;) 

A hilarious piece in The New Yorker a few months ago was on collective nouns in which the book club was explained as:

A group of ants is called a colony. A group of aunts is called a book club. https://t.co/9Yq7IOfojm

— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) October 13, 2021

Ah yes, what will we men be without our sense of humor!

I finally bought myself a copy of the Booker Prize-winning Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree.  Recall the preview blog-post about this book?

This book, authored by a woman who wrote in Hindi and translated into English by a woman, follows Segu, which was written in French by a woman and translated into English by a woman.  This female literary world is simply awesome!

If you thought I am hyping the female angle, well, let me tell you how Geetanjali Shree begins her book:

"Women are stories in themselves ..."

In most of the books authored by men, the stories revolve around male characters.  Females--girls and women--are supporting characters, at best, and they are also often portrayed through a male gaze.  Not often is a man able to tell a woman's story as a woman's story.  (Pedro Almodóvar comes to mind in the world of cinema. Have you seen his Parallel Mothers, for instance?)  In that preview post, I had quoted the translator, who said this in an inteview:

I felt fed up with the male gaze. It’s a bit of a Twitter truism to say this, but there are many interesting stories being told by women, and I was tired of translating detailed descriptions of male desire and women’s breasts. All of my most recent translations, therefore, are of works by women, and the stories really are much more diverse.

Well into middle age, I am enjoying books by female authors, whose tales are engaging.  Compelling stories on the human condition.  And when "women are stories in themselves ...," I can easily imagine that wonderful stories will be told by women.

It will be interesting to do some kind of a blind test in which we are asked to read a book that has been stripped of all the information about the author.  After reading through the book, we ought to comment whether it was written by a man or a woman or a transgender person, and defend our claim.  Perhaps this is the old academic in me talking, eh!

Experiencing life

I will spare you the details of how I got to reading Olga Tokarczuk's Nobel lecture.  I want to share with you the following sentences from her lecture:

Life is created by events, but it is only when we are able to interpret them, try to understand them and lend them meaning that they are transformed into experience. Events are facts, but experience is something inexpressibly different. It is experience, and not any event, that makes up the material of our lives. Experience is a fact that has been interpreted and situated in memory. It also refers to a certain foundation we have in our minds, to a deep structure of significations upon which we can unfurl our own lives and examine them fully and carefully.

...

Literature is built on tenderness toward any being other than ourselves. It is the basic psychological mechanism of the novel. Thanks to this miraculous tool, the most sophisticated means of human communication, our experience can travel through time, reaching those who have not yet been born, but who will one day turn to what we have written, the stories we told about ourselves and our world.

Happy reading, whatever you read that builds on "tenderness toward any being other than ourselves."

A story of triple heritage

Hopefully, this post won't be pedantic; after all, old habits die hard. ;)

In graduate school, I quickly realized that a lot had already been said/written on the very issues in which I was interested.  I felt like a latecomer to a party who was trying to fit into the conversations in groups and the jokes that they were enjoying.  In one such intellectual immersion, I heard my professor referring to Ali Mazrui.

Hang on, this is not an academic discussion.

Mazrui wrote a book that accompanied a multi-part documentary on how Islam and the West (colonialism and Christianity) interacted with traditional Africa.  A Triple Heritage, Mazrui named this.  It was in those ancient times before YouTube, when the logistics of watching a video were far more complicated than reading a book.  I don't recall watching the entire series.  

It is not difficult to understand both Christianity and Islam diffusing deep into Africa.  One needs to only look at a map and note how short the distance is between the continent and the Arabian peninsula or the Levant.

Now, if only there was an epic-level novel  that wove together traditional Africa, Islam, Christianity, and the West and its slave trade.  Right?

That's exactly what a reader like me finds in Maryse Condé's Segu. 

The tale that involves multiple leading characters with names that are unfamiliar to most of us, across multiple locations and continents, might seem like a lot of work.  However, that is not the case.  Condé draws the reader in and her richly descriptive sentences make it easy to imagine the landscapes, and the people and their emotions.

Source

It is a shame that only recently did I come to know about Condé and her works.  Segu was originally written in French because she was born and raised in the French Caribbean--in Guadeloupe.  And, yes, a descendant of enslaved people she is.  And her people came from the geographic areas in which she has set Segu--visualize West Africa all the way to northeastern Mali.

Who is Maryse Condé?

Maryse Condé was born in Guadeloupe in 1937, earned her MA and PhD in comparative literature at Paris-Sorbonne University and went on to have a distinguished academic career, becoming professor emerita of French at Columbia University in New York. She has also lived in Guinea, Ghana and Mali, where she gained inspiration for her worldwide bestseller Segu. Condé was awarded the 2018 New Academy prize (the “alternative Nobel”)

In an essay based on her remarks on receiving the "alternative Nobel," Condé writes:

During the eighteenth century, missionaries and travelers named Guadeloupe an island paradise. Closing their eyes to the conditions of the slaves who were working in the hell of the sugar cane plantations, the colonists preferred to boast of the climate and the majestic landscapes. Even the indigenous population ended up being convinced by this counter-truth.

I cannot ever understand what drove the melanin-deprived men from northern latitudes to colonize lands that were far from their homes, and mess up humans forever!

As a final note, this ex-professor who was laid off by my former employer wonders if papers have been published analyzing Maryse Condé's Segu in the triple heritage framework that Ali Mazrui offered.  And, oh, what did Mazrui think of Segu?

Just cool it!

Life, as I recall my younger days, was rarely not hot in the industrial town of Neyveli.  For about ten weeks towards the end of the calendar year, we experienced pleasant temperatures.  Those weeks, it would sometimes cool in the night enough for coconut oil to solidify at room temperature.  Otherwise, it was hot, hotter, and hottest!

Relatives coming from other places, even Madras (as Chennai was known then,) would comment on the blistering heat in Neyveli.  But, as kids, who grew up with it, we didn't know any better.  I don't ever recall knowing the temperature outside because it really didn't matter.  I biked and played under the hot sun.  Sometimes, I sat under the trees to read or do nothing during those hot, hot days.

Most summers were at grandmothers' places--Sengottai and Pattamadai.  The hills and greenery made Sengottai a tad less hot than Pattamadai, but not by much.  Every time we returned to Neyveli, dad's first few comments were about how much darker we had become.

With every passing year, my grandmothers and aunts kept commenting that I was getting darker and darker.   And leaner.  I suppose I was most lovable only as the chubby kid that I once was ;)  Of course, I was getting more and more tanned--who wouldn't when out in the sun!

Those were the days when there was no air conditioning.  Having a ceiling fan in every room, as we did, was a luxury for most.  To most of us, going to an air conditioned movie hall was a thrill.  But, even this enjoyment was only during any visit to Madras--the only movie hall in Neyveli was not air conditioned.  Madras even had air conditioned restaurants!

Air conditioning has dramatically changed our relationship with heat.  With global warming, even in the mild and temperate Pacific Northwest, we need air conditioning.  The American South, with its heat and humidity that made living there quite a hassle, might not have experienced the rapid growth in the post-WWII decades if it were not for air conditioning.  As the Economist pointed out a few years ago, "the South became suddenly more comfortable to live and work in."  Who would otherwise live and work in places like Houston and Phoenix and Tampa! 

When I lived in the hot and dusty southern San Joaquin Valley, I would get discouraged with the blasting summer heat.  My consolation was to look up the temperature in Phoenix and tell myself, "at least I don't live in Phoenix."  I simply cannot imagine living in a place where some nights the temperature could hover above 100 degrees even close to midnight.

The friends and relatives who live in the Persian Gulf countries know the heat all too well.  It is always interesting to hear them complain about the heat in Chennai though.  But, they do have a point: while working and living as professionals in the Middle East, they rarely step outside the climate-controlled environments.  "We go from air-conditioned homes, by air-conditioned cars, to air-conditioned offices or malls" is their typical explanation.  As a result of our privileged past, my people are not the worker bees out in the desert sun, for whom life is harsh as laborers at construction sites.  The cheap and exploited labor makes possible those air conditioned homes and offices and malls.

And now we experience extreme heat everywhere on the planet, for which the old ceiling fans will not suffice.  Access to air conditioning is rapidly becoming a critical public health issue.  The world already uses plenty of air conditioning:

There are now roughly 2 billion air conditioners in use around the world today, with half of those units in the US and China alone. Cooling systems like ACs, fans, and ventilation account for about 20 percent of energy use in buildings globally, according to the International Energy Agency. That adds up to two-and-a-half times as much electricity consumed globally for cooling as the entire continent of Africa uses.

It doesn't take a climate scientist to compute that this energy consumption will add to the climate crisis story.  A crisis in a world that is far from equal, as this comparison reminds us: "The U.S. uses almost as much energy for cooling as the 1.2 billion people of Africa use for everything all year."

The acceleration in warming along with increases in per capita incomes around the world mean that there will be a mega demand for air conditioning in the years ahead.  But we can't air condition our way through the climate crisis, right?

Don't you think we need better political leaders than the ones we have now, so that we can collectively commit our resources to address the climate emergency?

A burning issue

Even as I started reading this essay on how and why most Americans are now choosing cremation over burials, I was struck by this: "Parting.com, which compares the pricing of funerals and cremations, points out."

Is there anything that cannot be found on the internet?  Seriously.

So, of course, I had to suspend reading the essay and open a new tab to look at parting.com, while making sure that I didn't type "f" in place of "p".  I was not in any mood for farting.com, which, if exists, will not surprise me one bit.

The blog at parting.com--yes, there is a blog there!--notes that "once all funeral-related costs are factored in, the typical traditional funeral service will cost the average family closer to $8,000 - $10,000."

A typical funeral service will cost about $10,000?  I am a cheapo guy.  I don't ever want to spend that much on my funeral.  I can't recall the last time I even bought a nice shirt.  I wear out my pants and tshirts until there are holes all over, and they want me to spend 10,000 after my death?

Further, it is not like there will be a huge crowd weeping at my funeral.  I am with my great-uncle; he joked about himself that after he died, most people when informed would reply with, "oh, was there a guy with that name?"  Most of the rest would be mighty glad that he was dead, he said.  Maybe ten people would feel sad about his death, my great-uncle joked.  I hope that he knew that I am one of the ten; I still talk about him, and blog about him.

10,000 dollars to celebrate my death? Over my dead body!  Oh wait, I will be a dead body by then ;)

So, of course, I wanted to find out an inexpensive option, and this is where parting.com is helpful.  I made my preferences clear: No viewing, no service, and a direct cremation.  Anybody who wanted to view me would have visited with me before my expiration, and I would have thanked them for stopping by.  True to the hospitality of the old country traditions, I would have offered them something to eat and drink.

I don't see any reason for people to come by and say hello to me after I am dead.  No service either.  Anything nice that people wanted to tell me, they would have told me to my face or emailed me.  And, there is a chance that a few will come by only to make sure that I am truly gone; seeing is believing to them.  Why should I pay for a venue and food after I am dead?

The dead me has to be dealt with before my body becomes a public health nuisance, to say the least.  So, all I wanted from parting.com was an estimate for direct cremation.  And it delivers:

$2,000 is a much better deal than $10,000.

Cremation works well for me.  (By the way, notice that when you remove the "m" from the word, it makes a new word "creation" that is the opposite of cremation?  I should perhaps tip Will Shortz about this for his Sunday Puzzle program on NPR.)  I was raised in a culture that disposed of the dead by cremating.  In the old tradition, the dead had to be cremated before the day ended.  in addition to a lack of refrigeration back in the old days, one of the reasons for a quick disposal of the body was to also make sure that neighbors would not be put to great inconvenience.

When my paternal grandmother died, it was early evening.  She was put away in the hospital's morgue. I freaked myself out by imagining grandma becoming conscious in the morgue and feeling cold and abandoned.  I was a teenager then and imaginations on any topic ran wild. 

In the morning, grandma--the body--came home.  After the ritual washing and chanting, she was taken away to the cremation grounds.  That was my first experience with death and cremation.

In my case, there will be no services.  No chanting.  Off I will go to be turned into ashes.  Maybe I should request that the Ella Fitzgerald/Louis Armstrong take on Summertime be played on a loop for anybody at the cremation site.  Now, that's lovely, soothing, music for any occasion, be it melancholic or celebratory.

In a completely different culture, here in the US, where burial was the preferred and religious way of dealing with the dead, cremation has become popular, if that is an appropriate way of describing it.

Most Americans are now comfortable with cremation as a practice. They like the power that it gives them to inter the remains in the cemetery, keep them at home, or scatter them in forests, parks, oceans and streams.

Keep the ashes at home?  That's where I draw the line.  Too bad that I won't be around to draw that line! ;)

Porcine Pearls

There were a number of things big and small in America that impressed me a great deal.  One of them, perhaps you might think it is trivial, was, get ready for it, comic strips in the newspaper.

You didn't see that coming, eh ;)

I was blown away by an entire page of the newspaper with nothing but comic strips.  And then on Sundays, a special supplement in which the cartoons were in color.  Boy was in heaven!

In India, Tamil magazines had cartoons.  And I loved them, especially the ones by Madan.  And there were comic books.  But, comic strips in newspapers with the same characters wisecracking day after day?  America was truly the land of plenty!

After barely looking at the top headline on the front page, I started turning to the funny pages to begin my newspaper reading in the morning.  Among all the cartoons, my favorite was Calvin and Hobbes.  The humor, the social commentary, the sarcasm about adulthood, they appealed to me a great deal.  (Some day, I will blog about The Far Side)

Then one day, Bill Watterson signed off, and Calvin and Hobbes became history.  What a disappointment it was!

Over the recent years, I have started enjoying Pearls Before Swine, though it is quite a few rungs below Calvin and Hobbes.  No fancy drawings, simple names of the characters, and often self deprecating humor.  Like this recent one.

Until yesterday, I hadn't thought much about the title of the comic strip--Pearls Before Swine.  I assumed that the cartoonist had to title it, and because of the pig character, well, he threw those words together.

But then I learnt something new.  There is always something new every day.  It is amazing.  How do people ever go around like they know it all?  Confident idiots they are.

I returned to reading Segu after taking a break to do what I know not.  (It is a coincidence that in my post on Segu a month ago, I had embedded a Pearls Before Swine strip.  Check it out.)  One of the many subplots in Segu is about the diffusion of Islam and Christianity.  Two French missionaries feature in the pages that I was reading when I came across a "pearls before swine" reference.

I wondered if it was a real Christian thing.  I turned to the oracle that knows it all--Google.

Sure enough, it is a biblical reference:

Do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not throw your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces. (Matthew 7:6)

It is from Jesus' Sermon on the Mount.

There's an equivalent moral instruction in Tamil: பாத்திரம் அறிந்து பிச்சை போடு  It advises us to be fully aware of who the person is who is asking for money before we decide to help out.  Because, not all are worthy, and even worse they might not understand the value of our contribution and might abuse it.

You didn't expect a post on comic strips to end on this philosophical note either, right?

 

Could I care any less?

Source

English is one hell of a strange language.  So strange that, as far as I know, it is the only one that has a spelling competition because words are not always pronounced the way they are written.  This is not the case in Tamil, for instance.  When you know a language like Tamil or German, as soon as you hear it, you pretty much know how to spell it.  No mystery there.

English is godawful.  When we were young, I read a satirical take on this with the word "ghoti."  Ghoti, a fictional word, is pronounced as "fish" because:

Gh takes the sound "f" as in the word tough

O becomes "i" like in "women"

"Ti" takes on the sound of "sh" like in "station"

Ghoti is, therefore, pronounced as fish!

This godawful language has become the global language!  Whether it is India or Costa Rica, people bash their heads against the hardest surfaces that they can find because there is no logic behind most aspects of this language.

At the Orosi Lodge in Costa Rica, as I was collecting my key from the front desk one afternoon, Connie--one half of the couple who owned the place--said "I have a question for you. About English grammar." I noticed that she was working with a Tica. 

"You know how we say big, bigger, biggest?" Connie asked.  I nodded my head. 

"But, it is beautiful and more beautiful.  It is not beautifuller.  I just know that is the case.  But how do I teach her that it is different for different words?" 

Ah, yes, the pain of learning English as a second language. 

And then there are idioms that people incorrectly use.  Sometimes, like how some of the students did, back when I used to be a professor before my former employer laid me off, people make atrocious mistakes.  One of my favorites was in a student's appreciation for what I did.  In that note, the student had written how much they take people like me "for granite."

Get it?  "For granite" when the student meant "for granted."

The comic strip at the top of this post captures some of those that we encounter in our daily life.  When President W said "nucular"--even I who learnt English as a foreign language know that it is nuclear--it seemed like all of a sudden a good chunk of the country started saying "nucular" as if the emperor cannot be wrong.

If only I couldn't care less!

In life though, I tend to care not about a whole lot.  I wish I could care even less.  Often I ask myself, "what is the outcome that I am aiming for?"  If I don't have a clear answer to that, well, it is off my list. It is no different from the suggestion in this essay to ask oneself "why do I care?"

Caring less doesn’t mean negligence. To care less about inconsequential matters, you need to zero in on what is worth caring for. Consider taking stock of to-do list items and obligations and asking if these responsibilities make your day feel more spacious or more confined, Cohan suggests. Does it nourish your sense of creativity? Is it the best use of your time and talent? Does it make you feel exhausted? Do you want to spend your time and energy on this?

If one doesn't go through such an exercise, then they can easily find themselves in the busy trap.  I bet you know plenty of people who behave that way, and sometimes they try to drag you into that same trap.

Now, if you couldn't care less, you would not have read this post, right?

The teetering American democracy

The Congressional committee that was created to inquire into the events of January 6, 2020 (as if an inquiry was needed when the world watched it all happen in real time) has wrapped up its hearings, with a note that they will reconvene in September because they continue to get new information from new people who knew what happened.

As much as I applaud the witnesses for coming forward, sometimes only because they had to respond to a subpoena or face jail for contempt, I cannot help but think that we might never have heard from these people had the former guy won.  They would have happily continued working for him despite the despot that he so achingly wants to be.

Here’s what so damning: If Trump had won in 2020, virtually all of these people who’ve testified in these hearings would still be working for him.

— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) July 22, 2022

The day after January 6th, I blogged, of course.

January 6th also became a huge and undeniable piece of evidence that there is no such thing as a good tRump voter.

It is now up to voters to restore American democracy by abandoning candidates who support tRump and trumpism.  Do I have the confidence that Republican voters will put country way, way, way before politics?  Nope.  But, human history has been driven by hope even in situations that were far worse than the state of contemporary American democracy.  Hopeful I will try to be.

The following is the unedited post from January 7, 2020.

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

I have no words to describe the events of January 6, 2021.

As shocked and upset I am, I am not surprised even one bit.

Back on March 9, 2016--yes, almost five years ago--when tRump was a candidate in the Republican primaries, I was worried sick that nobody was stopping him.  

I wrote then:

The emergence of Trump as a candidate--and, gasp, as President of the proverbial free world--will only further reinforce the idea that liberal democracies are for pussies!

Oh well, we get the leaders we deserve!

One after another, Republican "leaders" embraced the demagogue.  A friendly couple who were dead set against him decided that they would after all vote for him holding their noses.  Across the street, neighbors became jubilant tRump red-hatters.

It was easy to see what kind of a president he would be because he was always transparent about his motives and actions.  That is why even one of the commenters--who herself later voted for him!--wrote in her comment:

In a recent conversation with my dad, I speculated how much Trump would use executive orders to get his way. I can't imagine Congress giving him everything, or even half of what, he wants, and it seems his personality to respond with an executive order. (In ways he reminds me of a toddler in a sandbox, preferring to go home rather than share his toys.) Can't you hear it now? "Congress didn't pass my ban on Muslim immigrants so I will use executive order." He'll say that he is following the will of the people since the people elected him. I wonder how long it takes to initiate impeachment proceedings?

Even that tRump voter--with whom I ended my association because there is no such thing as a good tRump voter--could see eight months before the election, and ten months before the inauguration, that he would be impeached.  

And he was.

However, his enablers in the Senate acquitted him, thereby giving him a free pass to do even more damage.  He gladly took up the second lease on his presidency, and continued with his assault on democracy all the way through January 6, 2021.

Maybe I live in Mr. Robinson's Neighborhood?

I was a teenager when I went along with my family to visit with my father's cousin and her husband.  A relatively newly wed couple they were at that time. Their home was in a part of Madras, as Chennai was known then, that seemed like a mosquito factory from where the terrible creatures were unleashed on to the world. 

 Anyway, as one who has always had a nearly obsessive compulsive disorder to check out the title of any book that I come across--and to quickly scan through if possible and even pretend to know about the book--my eyes stopped roving when I came across two books there. 

The first was Dale Carnegie's How to win friends and influence people. The other book was the one that made my heart skip a beat or two. The title blew the mind of the teenager: The joy of sex.

I did not talk about either book with my aunt nor her husband.  I pretended that I never saw their bookshelf.  Life is sometimes easier when we don't recognize reality ;) 

This post it is about my greatest failure in life. No, it is not about sex. But, please, read on ;) 

The post is about my inability to make friends.  I suppose I should have read Carnegie, instead of ... 

The introverted me had a tough time making friends right from a young age.

Of course, as it happens with anyone, the older I got the more difficult it became to make new friends. Meanwhile, plenty of old friendships withered away.  Whoever said no man is an island never knew me!

And then there is Facebook, which has completely distorted the meaning of "friend."

I used to be on Facebook.  Throughout the years that I used Facebook, I had a difficult love-hate relationship with that medium.  Not only because I was worried about the technology snooping into our lives and making money out of it, but also because 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."  Barely an acquaintance, if that!

Studies suggest that most people have about five intimate friends.  In addition, we might have about 15 close friends, 50 general friends. and 150 acquaintances. 

Of course, I don't care for formal academic research when common sense would suffice.  I have often commented, as a joke but always meant the joke, that intimate friends are easy to identify.  They are the ones that we might be completely at ease with to ask for money, should we need, and they too would lend it without hesitation.  Money is not something easy to part with, but commenting on Facebook status is a piece of cake ;) 

Oh well, such are the ramblings of a middle-aged-bald-man who doesn't have many friends.   Maybe I should tell you about the Joy of Sex book then ;)  Wait, I already blogged about it a while ago!

People who need people

In 2023, unless the former guy and his party members do something even more treasonous to dominate the news cycle, chances are good that you will hear and read a lot about India's population having overtaken China's.  This post will put you ahead of that news curve.  Every once in a while, this blog addresses tomorrow's, even next year's, news ;)

One part of the story is the dynamic in China:  "[After] four extraordinary decades in which China’s population has swelled from 660 million to 1.4 billion, its population is on track to turn down this year, for the first time since the great famine of 1959-1961."  Imagine that; China's mighty population will decrease!

Meanwhile, India's will continue to grow.  But the growth will be at a far lower pace compared to decades past. 

In fact, it is incorrect to think of India's population growth because it hides the tremendous regional variations.  Given that there is no massive immigration into India, population growth is from natural conditions, with births exceeding deaths.  The average number of children (the fertility rate) that women in different states in India significantly differ, which then causes huge differences in population growth. 

Source

This is not anything new.  It has been happening for a while.  Ahem, I wrote about this in a commentary back in 2009!  "In Tamil Nadu, which is where my parents live, the fertility rate is about 1.8. The other southern states of Kerala and Andhra Pradesh also have similar low fertility rates." 

As I always do in such commentaries, I personalized that data: "So much so that well into the extended family only one cousin has more than two children—he has three. Most of the rest have only one child, and a few are yet to have any, even after a few years of being married. In some cases, even the only child is an adopted one."

That was in 2009.  What about the fertility rate now?  The national average itself has dipped below the magical number that is needed for maintaining a stable population.

Some of the readers are old enough to remember the 1970s and 1980s when the US was worried about Japan beating America.  About how the dollar would lose to the Yen.  Those were the years that Japan's population peaked and since then the story has been of Japan's population decrease.  Do we worry about Japan kicking America's butt?

We seem to worry about China kicking our butt, right?  Ahem, China's population has peaked and ... you can fill in the blanks.

So, will India be next in line to compete against the US?

Hah, never! Instead of giving you a detailed argument, I will remind you about this post from a couple of days ago.

You are now ready for the breaking news in 2023!

Heat Apocalypse

I have been worried about climate change for a long time, and  merely concerned about it for even longer.  I did what I could do--tried to get students to think about it, and engaged with the public through newspaper commentaries and blog-posts.

In an op-ed that was published in the summer of 2016, I wrote:

When records are being shattered in places across the world, across different parameters of heat, rain, drought, and cold, then surely these are not isolated events but a part of a larger story.

When it comes to that larger story of global climate change, it is not a case of what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Instead, the cumulative effects of Vegas and everywhere else means that all of us anywhere on the planet are feeling the effects. The more extreme the resulting weather events, the more will be the destruction of life and property as well.

In another commentary in 2018, when the former guy was in the Oval Office, I wrote:

The rest of the world has seemingly given up on the US when it comes to addressing global climate change. Meanwhile, in pursuing an “America First” approach, we are oblivious to the reality that there is no wall that we can build in the atmosphere in order to create our own climate. 

If only we understood how much our lives are intricately connected to the life of an auto-rickshaw driver on the other side of the planet!

Here we are in the summer of 2022, and the world seems to be on fire.  London registers 104 degrees!  It was hotter than Miami or Houston.  The Iberian peninsula is battling fires.  Two months ago, the news was all about the heatwave in the Subcontinent; remember?

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

Yet, we don't seem to want to address climate change.  How is such apathy possible?

Here in the US, many would like to conveniently point their accusatory fingers at Senator Manchin.  Sure, he is to be blamed.  But, he is not the only one.

Manchin isn't the only one who killed climate action. Heck, he isn't even the only Democrat responsible.
The answer to this whodunit is a Murder-on-the-Orient-Express-type solution: we all did it. Together.https://t.co/W21BM7T4OS?

— Catherine Rampell (@crampell) July 19, 2022

I agree with Rampell:

There is an entire political party — the GOP — that has shown roughly zero interest in addressing climate change, assuming its leaders even recognize that the planet is warming. Manchin’s vote wouldn’t be so crucial if just one Republican senator were willing to break ranks and work with Democrats on a compromise.

But for some reason Republican politicians have mostly received a pass as the media by and large framed legislative sclerosis as a Manchin-centric phenomenon.

I suppose the Bible-thumping Republicans want to speed up the date of the final hours on this planet after which they will be up there with their savior while we climate worriers will be left behind!

A reminder that you and I can do whatever we can.  Starting with voting wisely and throwing out the deniers.  Do you really want to be left behind or saved?

You know what the scariest part about this #HeatWave is?
As hot as it’s already been, this is still likely to be one of the coolest summers we’re going to experience for the rest of our lives.https://t.co/cH5K4seGpk via @voxdotcom #Europe #ClimateEmergency

— Sriram K (@congoboy) July 20, 2022

The merit of life

My cousin's son is joining a doctoral program.  In five years, he will become the latest PhD in the family.

My mother's generation was the last one that didn't go to college.  We used to joke about their high school diploma, which was called SSLC.  While it officially expanded to Secondary School Leaving Certificate, for most girls the reality was the joke that we made: Stop Studying, Learn Cooking!  My mother was 18 years old when she married my father.

Since then, undergraduate degrees have become the norm, with professional qualifications and advanced degrees becoming more common than not for girls and boys alike.

The last illiterate person in the family was a few generations ago.  While I am familiar with most of the important family stories, I had to resort to guessing who might have been the last of the illiterates going back in the family tree.

I was surprised to learn that my mother's great-grandmother, Meenakshi, was illiterate.  I was confident that she was literate and that her mother would have been the last who didn't know how to read and write.  My mother, who has clear memories of her great-grandmother Meenakshi,  said that she couldn't read or write.  Perhaps Meenakshi had somehow learnt to sign her name in legal documents, but that was the extent of what she could do with pen and paper.

It is all the more impressive that Meenakshi--an illiterate woman, who was widowed when quite young, in a very conservative household in a small town (er, village)--knew how to deal with farmlands, buy and sell property.  She, ultimately, made bright futures possible for the rest of us!

Meenakshi's grandson--my grandfather--was the first in the family to earn a college degree in the educational system that we now understand as the norm.  He was a metallurgical engineer, which also made him the first engineer in the family.

It wasn't until I became a university professor that I truly started understanding the stories behind the vast numbers of people without college degrees.  And, therefore, what a phenomenally privileged life that I was born into. 

The cultural capital that was accumulated over the generations is more valuable than any physical capital like land or gold.  All it took back then was for a big time burglar for one to lose one's wealth, most of which was in the form of gold jewelry at home.  A couple of years of bad harvests could set back even a wealthy landowner.  But, the cultural capital via education, music, an awareness of the world, cannot be robbed and can also be successfully passed along to the next generations.  And that's what I benefitted from.

Me getting a PhD decades ago is not that much an individual accomplishment as much as it was the product of this vast cultural capital.  Meenakshi and others made my PhD possible.  Writing these, I was reminded of an old New Yorker cartoon, which I tracked down:

Source

When I started teaching, which was at a regional public university, a significant percentage of the students were the first from their families to go to college.  In terms of collegiate education, I had almost a 100-year head start on them, if I looked back in the family tree.

As a society, should we be concerned about the favorable starting positions that some kids have, and the unfavorable points from where other kids start?  If so, what should we do collectively?  Do you think about these when you vote for your candidate/party?

Don't cry for me, India ... er, Argentina

I am not an economist (thankfully!)  I am no banker either (praise the lord!)  But, I have opinions in these areas too.  And in this blog, I express them.

We might not bother to think much about money matters and exchange rates, but that is a topic that economists and bankers talk about a lot and engage in actions that affect all of us.  Add politicians and their hare-brained ideas, well, one's life can be upended easily when we realize one fine day that the money we earn or have might not be of much value.

While neither an economist nor a banker, and one without any political aspirations whatsoever, I have been convinced about one thing forever: Never bet against the US and the US dollar. 

The other side of this conclusion, a corollary of sorts, is that as long as people want to immigrate to the US, and as long as the US dollar appeals to the rest of the world, then most of the rest of the world will be terribly messed up if the dollar gains strength and gains it rapidly.

With that lengthy preface, let me spin for you my version of the story about the old country.

The USSR came and went. The Sun briefly rose in Japan, and then sank really fast.  China is only a powder-keg away from the Communist party exploding and, in any case, the country is far from ready to deal with the demographic implosion.

The US wins one of two ways: either it genuinely gets creative and forges ahead, or it simply waits for others to fall and then be the last one standing.

The old country? 

In this post a decade ago, I noted the Indian rupee's slide against the dollar--it had slipped to a psychologically upsetting 55 rupees to the dollar.  I wrote then: Indians better start getting used to the fifties.  In fact, buying a dollar for 55 rupees might even sound like a good deal because chances are high that it could get worse.

My conviction was not based on sophisticated econometric modeling or whatever mumbo jumbo that bankers use.  Instead, it was from an understanding of how India's government, like Argentina's, never wasted an opportunity to do the worst thing at the wrong time.  The US is a contrast--it does the right thing but only after exhausting all the other options!

I was, therefore, confident that 55 rupees to a dollar was merely a milestone along the highway to further depreciation.

A mere year after that, 55 sounded like a great deal when the exchange rate plunged--it took more than 65 rupees to buy a dollar!  In my rejoinder to comments at that blog-post, I added: I don't know how any thinking person is able to continue on with daily life fully aware of the missed opportunities and the sorry depths of irresponsibility against so much potential ...

To people thinking that a change in government might do the trick, I warned that throwing the bums out will mean new bums will get in!

A year after the 65 rupees to a dollar exchange rate, Indians voted in a new government, and reelected that party after five years.  The new government has been far more interested in creating exciting visuals and persecuting the religious minorities than strengthening the economic fundamentals.  Making a spectacle of meditating in a cave is just that--a spectacle that is well-suited for this age of social media, but one that does nothing for the man and woman on the streets of India.

It does not surprise me one bit that the rupee has been tending towards newer and newer lows.  Now, an Indian will need 80 rupees to buy a dollar.

May I remind you that a decade ago I said that 55 would be a good deal if Indians can find it!

Now, I do not follow the exchange rate stories because I have gazillions to invest.  Far from that.  If only I had been interested in making money!  I follow these news reports because ultimately it will be the poor and the lower-middle class that will suffer as a result of the government's misplaced priorities.  A weaker rupee drives up the cost of imports, which will eventually make everything costlier.  The rich and the upper middle class might have to make a few adjustments, sure, but otherwise their lives will be unchanged.

it is always one heck of a horse race between India and Argentina doing the worst possible things at the worst possible moments.  Let us see if Argentina can match India's moves, or raise the stakes!

About a robbery

The thief, left it behind:
The moon
at the window.

Every single day is a humbling experience that I don't even know what I don't know.  It is not just me though.  How could one possibly know it all anyway.  The very fact that we couldn't possibly know it all should automatically make every one of us humble to the core.  Yet, humble we are not!

Consider the verse at the beginning of this post.

The thief, left it behind:
The moon
at the window.

Even by itself, the verse is lovely.  It lets us imagine a scenario in which a person has been robbed of everything owned.  But, the moon viewed through the window is so priceless that it makes up for everything that the thief robbed.

The backstory, and the verse itself, I read in this essay:

According to traditional lore, the Japanese Zen master and poet Ryokan Taigu, who lived from 1758 to 1831, was a happy hermit. He trained in a monastery for 10 years, then rejected conventional religion. He went on to live a simple life, meditating, writing poetry, occasionally drinking sake with rural farmers, and sharing his modest meals with the birds and beasts.
He didn’t have much to steal. But one night, a thief came to Ryokan’s spare mountain hut looking for treasure. The criminal found nothing of value and was disappointed, which saddened the Zen master. It’s said that the poet pressed his clothes—or his blanket, depending on which account you read—upon the thief, saying, “You’ve come such a long way to see me, please accept this gift.”
The stunned thief took the poet’s clothing. But he didn’t take anything that mattered to the Zen master, who reportedly spent the rest of the evening naked, gazing at the moon in the sky—a jewel that no one could steal, yet everyone can enjoy. Ryokan was still a bit sad, as he hadn’t been able to give the thief this most valuable of treasures. In his diary, the Zen master penned a now-famous poem

Picture in your mind a naked Zen monk writing that verse, and the verse and the story becoming a masterclass moment in the pursuit of happiness!

The story is told by Zen teachers to remind students that most people are attached to things that don’t really matter, while missing the marvels that abound in the natural world.

Indeed!

The thief left it behind!

When out walking by the river, or at the coast, or even in our backyard, I feel sometimes overwhelmed by the wonders all around me.  The other day, two white butterflies flitted around in the garden.  One moment by a flower and the next somewhere in the bushes and then reappearing from nowhere.  I now realize that the thief left them behind!

There are great riches everywhere.  I often blog about some of them that I see.  And often complain that people are missing out on the riches when they are yakking on the phone as they walk by the river and oblivious to the osprey suddenly diving towards the river, the mama duck and the ducklings floating by, the heron flying, and the geese obnoxiously honking.  Whatever could be more valuable to talk about than these riches that the thief left behind?

The other day, as we started walking back--after all, it is miles to go before we sleep--I passed a young woman who was clearly out there with her guy.  He was a few feet away holding their puppy by the water.  I told her, "you should check out the moon."  Where she was seated, the moon was completely blocked out by the trees.  I smiled and kept walking.

I had walked a mere couple of steps when I heard a bunch of Spanish words from her in which all I recognized was one word: luna.  My guess is that she wanted her guy to confirm that there was something special about the luna.

I hope her guy asked her to go where he was standing with the puppy in order to look at the moon.  And, I hope that she too enjoyed what the thief left behind.  

What a treasure this Zen verse and story that the thief made possible!

Small is beautiful

I went to pick up the car part at the auto dealership.  It was simple enough an installation that I decided to do it myself.  One of those rare moments when I feel able and competent to work with my hands.

"You are not a real man unless you work with your hands" joked a friend recently. 

"Hold it ... how many real men cook and clean as I do with my own hands?"

We laughed.

The man behind the counter was wrapping up a phone call with another customer. He was perhaps in his late forties.  I looked at his name tag.  "Hans."

Hans?  A grown man named Hans?  When was the last time that I ever had a student named Hans or run into anybody named Hans in this country?  Never!

Hans is like many of the traditional names that are becoming rarer by the day.  It seems like fathers and mothers go overboard trying to come up with a new name for their kids.  In my extended family, everyone younger than thirty has names that practically none of us over thirty have.

Hans was done with the call.  "To pick up the car part" I told him.

When I ordered the part a couple of days prior, Burt, who was at the counter, told me that the small car that I bought a couple of years ago is no longer sold here in the US.

"It is such a wonderful vehicle.  Why is it not sold anymore?"

"Americans don't want small cars.  Correct that.  Most consumers do not want small cars.  They want big pickups and SUVs" he said.

"Even young people starting their lives?  Isn't a small car more affordable?"

Burt shrugged his shoulders.  "The cars are still sold in Europe and Asia.  Not here in the US though."

"I guess I have a knack for buying cars and models that are great, but people don't want them.  I drove a Saturn for years, which I traded in to buy this one."

He chuckled.

In my autoethnographic approach to understanding the world and commenting on issues, I authored a commentary in the local newspaper about this car purchase in the context of the former guy's illogical trade policies.   Well, when it was still the old family-owned respectable newspaper. 

I wrote in the commentary: "When it came time to retiring my rapidly aging Vue, I did not have the option of buying another Saturn — the company folded after the Great Recession of 2007-09."

Automakers have discontinued numerous small vehicles in recent years after consumers abandoned them:

Ford and General Motors axed virtually all of their small cars in recent years, except for a few performance models like the Ford Mustang and Chevrolet Corvette. Gone are small cars like the Chevrolet Cruze, Ford Focus, Toyota Yaris and Honda Fit.

That is how the market system works.  So, don't blame the manufacturers when American consumers are making it clear that they want bigger and even bigger!

Unlike Saturn, there is no danger of Honda folding.  But, small cars in America are doomed to fail given the consumer preferences and government subsidies for fossil fuels.  I suppose the real surprise is that Honda even sold the small little car for a few years!

We did good work until not too long ago

Within a few semesters in graduate school, and prior to formally becoming a PhD candidate, I reached a firm conclusion.  Two conclusions, actually. 

The first was simply that experts already knew plenty about many collective problems and the needed public policy responses to them.  Global warming, for instance, is, for all practical purposes, an old topic about which experts knew what to do even back in the 1980s.

The second conclusion was about democracy.  As warped and inefficient as democracy is, it is far better than other systems that we have tried.  However, the public, who are the ones that make democracy possible, was not aware of what experts knew, and experts weren't conversing with the public.  Politicians talked with the public and, unfortunately, said whatever they wanted to in order to win votes and be in power.

I decided that I would write for the public.  I felt the urgency to make the public aware of our common issues and how to think about them, and lost any interest in writing academic papers that even academics would not read.

Towards the end of graduate school, I started contributing commentaries to local newspapers.  I wished that one of the papers would just make me one of their columnists, even if they didn't pay me a penny.

In the commentaries that I wrote, I thought long and hard about connecting the big picture to the local dynamic.  "Will it play in Peoria?" as they say in journalism.  And, of course, the issues had to be timely.  The commentaries that were published were not out of the blue and on whatever topic that I liked.  The commentaries had real contexts in the real world.

An example is this column that was published in July 2012, in which I appreciated the Americans with Disabilities Act.  The anniversary of that legislation was coming up and I timed my column for that.  It was published on July 20, 2012, in time for the anniversary date of July 26th when the law became effective.

I wrote in that piece:

The ADA is also a wonderful example of why we need government, and how political parties can work constructively toward the betterment of the people — a concept that has become old-fashioned and is drowned out increasingly by the loud and harsh yelling that accompanies the trivial pursuits played by politicians and commentators.

In 2012, I, like the rest, had no idea that tRump would get elected to the Oval Office four years later, and that the dysfunctional politics of 2012 that I was complaining about would come across as noble and saintly discussions!

I hope against hope that the elections this upcoming November, which will be after the January 6 Committee publishes its report, will get us back to doing the best work for the greater good of the country and the world.

The following is the column from 2012:

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

The Register-Guard (July 20, 2012)

The United States’ current dysfunctional politics reminds me of the contrast with a serious piece of history-making legislation: the Americans with Disabilities Act, which was signed into law in July 1990.

I was in graduate school in Los Angeles and in the early phase of getting to know the new country when the ADA was introduced in Congress. The idea of the act appealed to me as noble: that people with disabilities ought to be accommodated so that they, too, can rise to their potential and freely engage in the pursuit of happiness.

Having grown up in India, I had witnessed at close quarters many different ways in which friends and relatives were restricted, sometimes literally to within their homes, because of disabilities. A distant uncle, for instance, who lost his eyesight as a young adult became practically unwanted in his own family because he had become a “burden.” India’s public spaces are daily reminders of the extreme challenges in everyday life for those who lack full physical abilities.

If a great society is identifiable by how it takes care of those with limitations of any kind, then the unfolding of the ADA — from the introduction of the bill to its implementation, which continues — has been a story about which we truly can be proud.

The ADA was not without its opponents. While it was an academic exercise for me to learn in coursework about how cost-benefit analysis is employed in public policymaking, it sounded quite awful when critics argued that the ADA would increase costs. Claims that the law would become a mandate conveniently overlooked the reality that those with disabilities were being treated as less than equals. When religious institutions were concerned that they would be forced to accommodate disabled people by spending money on structural changes to their buildings, I was struck by how much they seemed to be going against their own fundamental teachings on how human beings should be treated.

The bill eventually passed and became the law of the land, despite a divided government then — the U.S. Senate and the House were in the control of the Democratic Party, and a Republican president, George H.W. Bush, was in the White House. The final passage of the bill was, for all purposes, completely and totally bipartisan — a world away from the contemporary bickering over all things trivial!

The implementation phase of the ADA coincided with my first few years of gainful employment. In the small public agency that I worked for, we now had an additional responsibility of conforming to the ADA.

It became even more fascinating as the Internet gave us all an entirely new way to deal with information, which required us to think about accommodating those who were challenged visually. Later, when I returned to the academic world, I was impressed with how the ADA translated to accommodating students constrained by their hearing disabilities.

The ADA-led accommodations have become so much a part of my existence here in the United States that I forget how different conditions are elsewhere — until I cross our borders, that is. My recent experiences in different parts of the world were reminders of the phenomenal advances in the United States on this front.

Accommodating the disabled has required us to spend on everything from sidewalk improvements to sign language interpreters. These are additional expenses, yes, when compared to how we conducted our affairs before 1990. But I bet there are very few people in this country anymore who would ever question these kinds of “expenses,” because we fully understand the value these deliver — a value that cannot be captured through any bean counting or cost-­benefit analysis.

The ADA is also a wonderful example of why we need government, and how political parties can work constructively toward the betterment of the people — a concept that has become old-fashioned and is drowned out increasingly by the loud and harsh yelling that accompanies the trivial pursuits played by politicians and commentators.

Butt out ... or butt in?

The light turned red.  I came to a stop behind an Acura Integra.

We stop at red lights.  We stop at the "Stop" signs.  We stop to let pedestrians cross the road.  After such a life in this part of the world, I am always shocked at the traffic behavior in the old country.

It is almost trauma-inducing during the first exposure when driving out of the Chennai airport.  Lane markers on roads are treated as graffiti and nobody bothers with the idea of staying in one's lane.  Pedestrians dodge in between vehicles and through momentary pauses.  Red lights are left to the driver's discretion.

I press the imaginary brakes under my right foot.  Sometimes I just close my eyes; what I don't know won't hurt me!

I thought that being a passenger was enough tension.  Years ago, when driving with a friend, I heard her say "this is called high tension road."  It turned out that the name of the road came from the high voltage transmission lines.  Driving under high tension cables, or living right by a distribution transformer, is nothing out of the ordinary in India, unlike here in Oregon where some strongly believe that transmission lines mess up one's minds!

I could see the top of the Acura driver's head moving.  As if in response, the passenger's head moved.  Perhaps they were having a conversation.  I bet they were not talking about traffic conditions in India.

The driver's hand made an appearance outside the window.  The fingers dropped a cigarette butt.

Who litters like this in my town?  And who smokes cigarettes?

Could it be a person from the old country? But then the hand wasn't brown or dark.  

What if it was one of those lighter-skinned Indians?  Maybe you can take the cigarette smoker out of India, but you can't take India out of that smoker who litters like how it is done in the old country?

I wished that was not the case.

In one of my earliest newspaper commentaries after moving to Oregon, I wrote about how I was practically the representative of a billion people to Oregonians who might never have met an Indian until their paths crossed with mine.  I had to be on extra alert and not commit any faux pas, because they might conclude that all Indians are that way.  On the other hand, if my thoughts and actions impressed them enough to think highly of India and Indians in a positive light, well, mission accomplished!

After the light turned green, as the vehicles started moving, I caught a better view of the light-skinned driver.  It was a white woman.

Thankfully, not an Indian!

I drove on.

Life is never about me, me, me

On a wintry February day five years ago, I pulled up at a gas station.

The attendant, a young man, came running.  With a huge smile, he asked, "how you doin', sir?"

"Fine.  How are you?" 

"Living a life in gratitude" he replied as he took my credit card. After handing the card back to me, he proceeded to clean the windshield.

His facial expression, his body language, and the way he spoke, told me that he meant every word of "living a life in gratitude." I wondered how he gained that wisdom at such a young age.

We often go through life without being thankful for the people and materials in our lives. Gratitude calls for a meaningful and profound appreciation for what one has. 

Gratitude is not merely mouthing "thanks."  Not at all.  People often seem to mistake the "thanks" that is often the lubricant in social interactions with gratitude itself.  There is the etiquette of "thanks" and then there is gratitude.  In a post a couple of years ago, I included this quote from Arjun Appadurai, a fellow Tamil-American and an eminent social scientist:

[In] societies, like the Tamil one, that are based on reciprocity as a fundamental social principle, morality and etiquette are inextricably linked. In the modern West, by contrast, etiquette and morality are distinct domains, and although gratitude might be a moral question, thanking someone is frequently just a matter of good manners. Apparently similar kinds of awkwardness might therefore conceal dramatically different moral assumptions about the appropriate currency for the giving of thanks.

It is not any surprise that there is a Tamil expression that perhaps is not used that much anymore compared to years past: நன்றிகெட்ட நாயே (nanrikketta nāāye) means "a gratitude-lacking (or ungrateful) dog."  That wonderful phrase packs a ton of emotion in it, which I am incapable of accurately translating and explaining.

I would venture that all Tamil people are also familiar with one couplet by Tiruvalluvar, who had plenty to say about gratitude too, including this: நன்றி மறப்பது நன்றன்று நன்றல்லது அன்றே மறப்பது நன்று.  I would loosely translate to: It is not good to forget the good things; but, it is good to immediately forget the bad (thoughts and deeds.)  Of course, the second part of the couplet, which advises one to forget the bad, doesn't agree with my philosophy of life in which I neither forget nor forgive!

A few years ago, I read an essay in The Atlantic that was about "gratitude without god."  It raised a question that is important to people like me who are convinced that we can lead moral and fulfilling lives without religions and gods: "You can thank your grandma for making delicious pie, but who do you thank for the circumstances of your life?" 

The essay noted: 

We all begin life dependent on others, and most of us end life dependent on others. If we are lucky, in between we have roughly 60 years or so of unacknowledged dependency. The human condition is such that throughout life, not just at the beginning and end, we are profoundly dependent on other people. ... Gratitude is the truest approach to life. We did not create or fashion ourselves. We did not birth ourselves. Life is about giving, receiving, and repaying. We are receptive beings, dependent on the help of others, on their gifts and their kindness.

Appadurai underscored the morality that guides gratitude in the Tamil culture, and contrasted that with "thanks" that is said as a matter of etiquette in the West.  He noted the importance of gratitude in relationships between people:

What’s clear is that gratitude deeply intersects with a culture’s attitude about the self and its relation to others. Are we individuals forging our own paths, or members of a larger whole? ... 

Gratitude is, after all, ultimately a skill that strengthens our relationships—and it arises when we pay more attention to our relationships and all the gifts they bring us. “At a time when the society seems to be more about me me me, we really need to get people thinking about connections”

As always, or so it seems, research, on which tens of thousands of dollars were spent, merely confirms the old wisdom!

In positive psychology research, gratitude is strongly and consistently associated with greater happiness. Gratitude helps people feel more positive emotions, relish good experiences, improve their health, deal with adversity, and build strong relationships.

But, hey, if you would rather listen to researchers on these issues, note that they don't say anything different from what the Tamil culture practiced and advised for centuries:

People feel and express gratitude in multiple ways. They can apply it to the past (retrieving positive memories and being thankful for elements of childhood or past blessings), the present (not taking good fortune for granted as it comes), and the future (maintaining a hopeful and optimistic attitude). Regardless of the inherent or current level of someone's gratitude, it's a quality that individuals can successfully cultivate further.

In this blog, I often note that the cosmos has been kind to me.  While I know that the cosmos does not have any feelings--it just is--I imply that all things considered, there is not much for me to complain about. A sincere and truly religious person who believes in a Creator might have said in a similar situation that God has blessed them.

I think what a sincere believer and I refer to is the same thing: Gratitude.  It is a feeling from deep down within.

One does not need to go to a spiritual leader in order to understand how gratitude can guide one's life.  But, humans that we are, even the religious often forget this and instead fight to live a life of "me, me, me."  Tamils, too, seemed to have strayed away from a daily and genuine practice of gratitude.  We are humans and we err.  I want to make sure that I repay my debts, and pay forward as well in this only life that I have.