Come September. Bye September.

During my undergraduate days, I often broke my trip home with a stop at my aunt's home in Ranipet.  The industrial township was similar to, but a lot smaller than, the township where I grew up.  It was a stop that I much looked forward to.  Especially when I was fighting the angst within, unhappy with engineering, disgusted with the college and the town, and increasingly feeling out of place in the country and culture in which I was born and raised, it was soothing and therapeutic to be welcomed like I was by my aunt, uncle, and the cousins.

Years have gone by.  Decades, actually.  During the recent, but longer-than-normal, stay in India, the eldest cousin recalled those old days, which now come across as one of the best times of our younger years. She and her sisters, who are a lot younger than I am, would apparently wake up on Saturday mornings hoping that I had arrived Friday night after they had gone to sleep.

Back then, before cellphones and the internet, rarely did we get any prior notice about people visiting.  Instead, almost always it was a surprise visit.  A pleasant surprise.  Visits that generated a kind of happiness that was unadulterated.  A happiness that lingered in the air for a long while after the visitors returned to their own homes.  A happiness that does not seem within my grasp anymore.  A happiness that I think is beyond the imaginations of today's ten-year olds.

As we grow older, the childhood years seem more and more magical, angst and all.  It is almost as if they never happened and they are all in my/our imaginations.  They seem fantabulous and an impossible contrast to contemporary life and the childhood of now.  Recently, after recalling an event from his younger years, my father echoed the same sentiment: "Sometimes I wonder if they really happened."

My uncle had a turntable.  A record player, as we called them.  And a few vinyls--records.  After blowing the dust off, I would play a few. 

"What's the Hindi film song that I played a lot?" I asked the cousin.

She didn't even have to think about it.  "तेरी आँखों के सिवा दुनिया में रक्खा क्या है"

There was another song that I played a lot.  It was not Hindi film music.  Nor was it Tamil.  It was the theme song from Come September.  I have always wondered how my uncle had that in his possession.  It will remain a mystery forever.  (I am assuming that it was my uncle who bought it, and not my aunt.)

Perhaps his familiarity with that tune was no different from why I was at home with it, even though I had no idea then about Rock Hudson or Bobby Darrin.  No, it is not any ancient Indian swami trick to know something within.  It is just that the Come September theme had been imported to Tamil through a movie song!  But, there was no comparison.  The original is, as we say here, the real McCoy.  I don't suppose Bobby Darin earned even one paisa for the Tamil movie song though ;)

Good times were had.  They were real and spectacular.

Which is more damaging: Hurricane, or typhoon, or cyclone?

It is not the meteorology in which I am interested. All these are natural events.  A natural event by itself is merely a natural event.  

In such a framework, which is the more damaging event?  Cyclones, typhoons, or hurricanes?

First, a clarification.  Hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons are all storm systems with wind speeds that we normally do not experience--about 75 mph or more. The name for the storm systems depends on where they happen. 

In the old country, I grew up with news about cyclones.  Japan or the Philippines is battered by typhoons.  In Puerto Rico, "Always the hurricanes blowing, Always the population growing . ..."

Consider one of those tropical storms making landfall where no humans live.  It will, of course, uproot trees and flood the rivers.  Is there any damage?

This is the equivalent of the old philosophical question on whether a tree falling in a forest makes a sound if there is nobody to hear it.  These natural events become "disasters" and "catastrophes" only because they affect us humans.

Now, consider a typhoon blowing through the populated islands in the Philippines.  And then imagine a cyclone battering the Bangladeshi coast.  Now consider a hurricane hitting the southeastern coast of the US.

So, which one is more damaging an event?  A hurricane, or a cyclone, or a typhoon?

Does it matter that the average Pakistani is poorer than the typical Filipino?   Does the "disaster" become costlier because the typical American and the property are way more "expensive"? 

One doesn't even need to look beyond Wikipedia for this: 

The costs of disasters vary considerably depending on a range of factors, such as the geographical location where they occur. When a large disaster occurs in a wealthy country, the financial damage may be large, but when a comparable disaster occurs in a poorer country, the actual financial damage may appear to be relatively small.

So, we know the answer to the question.  Hurricanes cause way more damage than typhoons do, and cyclones are pretty darn cheap!

The relatively low cost of life and property in poorer countries, and the high price for every life in rich countries, is one of the many issues that I have struggling with ever since my graduate school days.  It is bizarre, godawful, that the "cost" of life varies.  Rich people's lives and property are valued more than poor people's lives are.  As long as this framework does not change, the "costliest" natural disasters will happen only in rich countries.  It boggles my mind.  I am always shocked that it does not boggle a lot of minds.

Consider the following image of a community that is under water:

What will be the cost of damage if this community were in Pakistan, versus in Fort Myers in Florida?

And, oh, a quick follow up: How many Americans would care if communities were flooded in Pakistan because of monsoon rains that have been massively above average because of climate change?

"The lack of attention on #Pakistan is heartbreaking: Too few major international cultural figures are speaking up for us in this moment of crisis."https://t.co/kMcb2gwnRM #ClimateReparationsForPakistan #SuperFlood #ClimateEmergency

— Sriram K (@congoboy) September 4, 2022

Most of us Americans will feel terrible about the damage to life and property that Hurricane Ian has caused, and will continue to cause as it makes another landfall in South Carolina.  And we should feel terrible.  The federal taxes that we pay even here in Oregon will help Floridians via FEMA and more.  Many of us will also personally contribute to the cause, and we should.

What is strange is that apparently our sense of humanity ends with political borders.

Guess how much of our federal dollars went to Pakistan to help with them recover from the Biblical flooding?

The United States has boosted assistance to Pakistan’s flood relief efforts, announcing $10 million in aid, in addition to Washington's already announced financial assistance of $56.1 million

About $66 million.  That amount is only slightly more than the $50 million that Aaron Rodgers will earn this year as the quarterback for the Packers!

Surely Uncle Sam can help out with more, yes?

Angelina Jolie has flown in and said that she’s never seen such devastation. President Biden casually mentioned at the U.N. General Assembly that Pakistan “needs help,” without any specifics. This all sounds like a lot until you remember that Pakistan’s losses are estimated to be around thirty billion dollars.

So, what can you do?

The first step is rather simple.  Elect public officials who have empathy.  For starters, do not elect people who toss paper towels to those rendered homeless after a hurricane wipes out communities.  Do not elect people who call Pakistan and other countries as shit holes.

The second step requires some effort.  Donate to help people around the world too.  Our cushy lives while condemning the rest of the world to eat cakes is not only immoral but also not sustainable in the long run.

I donated to Aghosh Alkhidmat USA in order to help the #flood relief efforts in #Pakistan https://t.co/Ny21NchaEG @alkhidmatorg #ClimateReparations

— Sriram K (@congoboy) September 6, 2022

Consumers don't know the Texas Two-Step

We use "Band-Aid" even in contexts that are not about a cut and bleeding.  Like, when we criticize public policies as nothing but a Band-Aid on the problem.  It is so much a part of our social vocabulary that we forget that Band-Aid is like Xerox--a very specific product that is trademarked.

Band-Aid was invented and made popular by a huge multinational company, Johnson & Johnson.  It is one of the few companies that constitute the Dow Jones Industrial Average, aka the Dow.  Its product range is vast.  How vast?

There's a lot more to what J&J produces--those are merely familiar examples.

Notice the "But" at the end of that excerpt?  There's always a "but" that tells us, as Paul Harvey used to say, the rest of the story.  In the case of Johnson and Johnson, the "but" that is the crux of this New Yorker essay is this: "But what few of those consumers grasped until a series of baby-powder cases began to go to trial was that, for decades, the company had known that its powders could contain asbestos, among the world’s deadliest carcinogens."

One cannot put a Band-Aid over such a problem in which a product has a known carcinogen.  A problem that J&J has known for years.

The company has known all along, but consumers have been aware of it only for a few years.  This is "information asymmetry," which is one of the concepts that I understood in graduate school.  In market economics, we refer to the warning caveat emptor--buyer beware.  But, what if the buyer simply has no clue about carcinogens that a powerful multinational company has known all along?

We consumers are screwed.  That's the simple bottom-line.

Think about the fact that J&J has known for years about the carcinogen in the baby-powder it manufactured and marketed.  It couldn't care about the health effects on consumers.  And when consumers finally linked their ovarian cancers and other health issues to the product, of course J&J did not accept responsibility and discontinue the manufacture and sales of the deadly product.  Instead, the company employed an army of lawyers to fight back.

Here's the most godawful way in which J&J fought back "legally": Johnson & Johnson filed for bankruptcy.

Actually, J&J did not go bankrupt.  After all, it won't be part of the Dow then, right?  This is where the Texas Two-Step comes in.  I had no idea (meta information-asymmetry!) about this “the greatest innovation in the history of bankruptcy” until I read the essay:

The company that did so was called LTL Management L.L.C. LTL, which stands for Legacy Talc Litigation, was created in Texas on October 11, 2021, and merged on the following day with—let’s call it Old J. & J. That same day, LTL Management was converted to a limited-liability company based in North Carolina, and two days after that, on October 14th, it filed for Chapter 11 protection in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Charlotte.

The L.L.C. that Johnson & Johnson created never had an office or any employees of its own in Texas or North Carolina. It never manufactured or sold talcum powder; for that matter, it never really conducted any business at all before going belly up. Still, in between its formation in one business-friendly jurisdiction and its bankruptcy in another, the new company took on all of Old J. & J.’s talc liabilities. It was suddenly responsible for some forty thousand talc cases, while a new company, also called Johnson & Johnson Consumer Inc., emerged with all of Old J. & J.’s assets—those tens of billions of dollars—and none of its talc liabilities, leaving it free to carry on with its operations.

The bankruptcy route taken by Johnson & Johnson, formally called a divisional merger, is better known as the Texas two-step.

This bankruptcy shell-game is being challenged in higher courts.  But,

[Many] companies are exploring strategic bankruptcy as a cheaper, faster way out of mass torts. 3M recently tried to move tens of thousands of lawsuits filed by veterans over its allegedly defective Combat Arms Earplugs into bankruptcy after three years of litigating the cases in an M.D.L. Bayer could decide that bankruptcy court is a better way out of the long-tail liability it faces from its product Roundup, which contains glyphosate, a chemical that plaintiffs claim has been linked to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

I do not understand how the executives in-charge of such decisions go to sleep at night fully knowing that they sell products that kill.  And there are lawyers in plenty who not only defend these bastards but also come up with more novel legal schemes.  May all of them be tortured to the maximum when they go to hell that their religions warn them about.

Johnson & Johnson’s most recent quarterly report shows twenty-four billion dollars in sales, and, in the eleven months since it filed for bankruptcy, an average of one woman a day has died waiting to find out if her case against the company would ever be heard.

As an individual consumer, what can I possibly do?  Here's a listing of some of the J&J products that I use: Tylenol, Imodium, Neosporin, Motrin, Zyrtec, Listerine.  I suppose I could buy the generic versions of these, or buy competitors' products. But, I am aware that there are no saints among the multinational corporations that sell us everything from paper towels to automobiles.

I have only one option: Elect people who will go after these bastards.

Here we go again. Another giant corporation is abusing our bankruptcy system to shield its assets and evade liability for the harm it has caused people across the country. We can’t keep letting this happen and I have a bill to stop it. https://t.co/OTKdBmomSZ

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) October 15, 2021

Your vote, too, has consequences.

(Readers in India need to note that J&J continues to sell talc-based baby powder in India, despite discontinuing in the US and Canada.)

Openness and Kindness

Was it in the 6th grade, or was it the 8th, when I shifted to learning Sanskrit instead of Tamil as per my father's orders, er, instruction?  In any case, I was way too young then to have had any independently formulated thoughts on what language one ought to learn.

Now, looking back, all I can see is the one big reason that pops up for the shift to Sanskrit: The brahminical context.  A traditional and conservative Brahmin, my father wanted his sons to learn the language of the Vedas.  (Two years after I did, my brother too took the same fork in the road.)  My sister, on the other hand, studied Tamil all the way through high school.  In the old tradition, it was only the Brahmin males who studied the Vedas, and it was not necessary for a girl to know Sanskrit!

I enjoyed learning Sanskrit, and have fond memories of Narayana Sastrigal and Pattabhiraman sir.  The little bit that I learnt has found its way to many blog posts too.  Heck, it even helped me eavesdrop on a conversation in a park in Chennai.

But, I missed out on learning about some of the greatest Tamil works, which is what my classmates did in the years that I was learning Sanskrit.  Like the Tirukkural.

Tirukkural and its author, Tiruvalluvar, might be unfamiliar to those who are not from Tamil Nadu.  But, to the Tamils from Tamil Nadu, I bet that we won't be able to recall the first time we came across anything from Tirukkural.  It is almost as if we have always been immersed in it--even if all we know is a couplet or two.  

It is because the Tirukkural couplets are all around in Tamil Nadu.  If memory serves me well, a Tamil newspaper, Dina Malar (தின மலர்) used to publish a different couplet every day along with short commentaries too.  Kural was everywhere!  

In his review of the latest English translation of the Tirukkural, which dates back to the fifth century, David Shulman begins with a scene that anybody in Tamil Nadu will recognize:

Suppose you are traveling on a municipal bus in the sunbaked South Indian city of Chennai, and you know Tamil. At some point, overwhelmed by the sheer density of color and form that you can see through the window, you raise your eyes to the board just above the driver’s seat, where a couplet is inscribed ...

Public transport buses invariably have a couplet or two from the 1,330 in the Tirukkural.  Whether or not we truly understood the couplet itself was immaterial; we were immersed in them and that's all that mattered.

Shulman writes: "To translate even a single kural couplet, bewitching in its rhythm and packed with meaning, is a formidable task. But we now have Thomas Hitoshi Pruiksma’s translation, without doubt the best ever into English."

The last time I read Shulman writing about the Tirukkural, his recommendation was different.  I blogged in January 2019: 

After quoting and discussing a few of the couplets from Tirukkural, Shulman writes that "the reader is warmly advised to find his own favorites in translations such as P.S. Sundaram's or the beautiful French one by Francois Gros."

Pause for a little to think about this: Shulman, who was born in Waterloo, Iowa, and later immigrated to Israel, is a polyglot/polymath who knows more about Tamil than anybody in my circle of friends and relations does, and is applauding a translation by a guy whose middle and last names are not Tamil either.  These two non-Tamils are helping me appreciate one of the greatest works of Tamil, which I did not study during my formative years!

The nerd that I am, I watched the book-launch/discussion video, in which the discussant is Archana Venkatesan--yes, that same person! 

I loved the couplet that Pruiksma recited about openness and kindness.  Think about the cruelty that has come to define trumpism, as exemplifed by the recent political stunt by the Florida governor when he criminally trafficked refugees from Venezuela to Martha's Vineyard.  Tiruvalluvar has a message for these cruel Torquemadas, which Pruiksma delivers well:

From openness to all people the practice

Of kindness comes easily.

எண்பதத்தால் எய்தல் எளிதென்ப யார்மாட்டும்

பண்புடைமை என்னும் வழக்கு

Gas price and college debt

Today, September 26th, is the first day of class across at the university where I used to teach.  This is the first September that I am not reporting for work.

What was my teaching about?  What is the purpose of higher education?

In the Washington Post, Christine Emba writes in the context of college loans and debts:

When higher education becomes a financial albatross rather than a launchpad to success, of course its value might seem dubious. But this raises at least two types of questions. The practical: How do we solve for the high cost of college? And the philosophical: When it comes to education, how do we define “success” and “usefulness” in the first place? What is an education really for, and how do we decide which fields of study are “valuable”?

I authored a few commentaries on these very issues in the three big newspapers that Oregon had until a few years ago: The Register Guard, Statesman Journal, and The Oregonian.  I tried my best to engage with many former colleagues to discuss those important issues.  I even organized a campus-wide discussion series in my capacity as a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Teaching and Learning.

Most of them come back to a fundamental issue of mission drift.  The mission drift that places athletics above academics, for instance.  The mission drift that promotes building fancy dorms and recreation facilities.  The mission drift that has led to a cancerous growth of student life bureaucracy.  It is an endless list of malpractice that results from mission drift.  The mission drift then reflects in a terribly expensive higher education.

In this post in 2011, I wrote:

Such a higher educational system cannot go on forever.  As Herbert Stein famously remarked, "if something cannot go on forever, it will stop."  I suspect that it will come to a crashing halt when students, and their families, and taxpayers begin to see the numbers flashing by really fast on their meters.

That post became a commentary in The Oregonian a few days after that.

Of course, it could not go on forever.  It came to a stop, with layoffs.  Including mine.

Meanwhile, not even half the enrolled students complete their degrees even after six years!

Don't blame me; I tried!

The following was my commentary that was published on May 14, 2011.

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

If only we were all aware of the cost of higher education and engaged in those discussions as much as we are painfully in sync with gas prices.

Every once in a while I point out to students that in the academic quarter system, it costs about $110 every week, per term, for each of the four-credit classes that I teach. A majority of that $110 is paid for by students through tuition and fees. Taxpayers chip in a significant amount as well.

Such an expensive investment is guided by a belief that college education is about future employment and economic productivity, but that's not entirely true. In fact, this linkage of higher education to economic performance is relatively new in human history.

Education, for the longest time, was not about credentialing for the trades. As one looks back to the days of gurukula in India or Plato's academy, it becomes clear that education was simply about knowing. Preparations for the trades and professions happened elsewhere.

Thus, higher education wasn't an industry, either. Galileo pursued research on the cosmos because of his undying, and heretical, curiosity, not because he thought of it as a convenient opportunity to charge students fees that they could not afford.

But especially since the post-World War II years, there has been a transformation that's resulted in a twisted understanding that higher education is some sort of a credentialing service for young adults interested in joining the 21st-century equivalents of trade guilds.

The irony is that it doesn't require an undergraduate degree to complete the tasks in service-sector jobs. Yet we've managed to convince ourselves that a college diploma is a must-have for mere survival, let alone prosperity. Most students I talk to feel that they have no choice but to get a college diploma if they want to get any sort of job anymore. And that presents a horrible choice.

After spending $110 week after week for classes like mine, students graduate, typically, with about $20,000 in debt, only to realize the realities of employment. Despite all my full disclosures in the classroom, they are shocked to find that there really isn't a job waiting for them and that their diploma isn't necessarily the guaranteed route across the (un)employment gates. In fact, trade guilds often add and require their own training and certification.

At the end of the day, the only beneficiaries are colleges and universities that are, naturally, recording enrollment increases -- even in my classes in the summer. This enrollment growth then triggers the need for additional facilities, which necessitates a demand for more money from students and taxpayers.

Such a higher educational system cannot go on forever. As economist Herbert Stein famously remarked, "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." I suspect that it will come to a crashing halt when students, and their families and taxpayers, begin to see the numbers flashing by really fast on their meters.

Maybe students and taxpayers will then demand a refund of the money they spent on my classes, eh?

Ten holy days

I have a hard time defining myself as an atheist.  Because that requires a definitive and conclusive bottom-line that there is no god.  As one who follows the scientific method, I know I do not have the evidence to definitively state that there is no god.  But, whatever I can understand as evidence leads to me conclude that there is a very high probability that there is no god.

I suppose that is an academic point.  For all practical purposes, yes, I am an atheist.

Yet, that does not mean I don't value and cherish many of the lessons that religions offer. 

There is plenty to be understood about the human condition, and a religious lens certainly provides valuable insights into some of them.  

The high holy days in every religion are, to me, reminders to pause our lives in which we pursue material comforts and reflect on the fact that we are mortals with finite time on this planet.  These are all timely, regular, reminders that no one makes it out alive.  The holy days prompt us to think about what really matters in life, and how we ought to go about our priorities.

This atheist doesn't observe the high holy days; every day that I am alive and well is a holy day.  But, the calendar of major events rarely escapes my attention.  Especially when two seemingly different religions observe ten holy days at about the same time.

In the Hindu calendar that tightly circumscribed my formative years, Navaratri begins after the new moon on the 25th.  Navaratri, which literally means nine nights, is from the first day after the new moon day. 

The tenth day is observed as Vijaya Dasami: Dasami referring to the tenth day (after the new moon) and vijaya meaning victory.  What's special about Navaratri is that it is about the female gods Durga, Lakshmi and Saraswati.  (They are the spouses of the Hindu trinity of Shiva, Vishnu, and Brahma respectively.)

One major reason I fondly recall the nine days?  Because of the wonderful "sundal," with a different one every day.  As a kid, my favorite of them all was a sweet sundal made with jaggery, which my mother says is very easy to make but am yet to try in my kitchen.

And then there is Judaism with ten high holy days beginning with Rosh Hashanah--on the 25th--and ending with Yom Kippur, which is the tenth day. 

There's one message in Yom Kippur that is perhaps not one that my old Hindu tradition taught me.  Yom Kippur is about atonement.  I don't recall observing a day of atonement back when I was a sacred-thread-wearing god-fearing kid.

Even though I am far, far, far from religions, I sincerely appreciate the "atonement" that Yom Kippur reminds.  After all, both the religious and the irreligious err.  We humans make plenty of mistakes, big and small, which add up to a lot over the years that we live.

Isn't it wonderful that the high holy days offer us valuable reminders like this?  It is not about any god, really.  It is about us, about how we engage with fellow humans, about how we interact with all forms of life and non-living things that surround us.  Most of all, it is about focusing on making the best use of the time that remains on our respective clocks.

So long, summer!

Summer is behind us, and it is a brand new season.  I know that because fashionistas have stopped wearing white!

I was only a few weeks old in the US, when school closed for the Labor Day holiday.  Even the usage "school" was new to me.  Back in the old country, "school" referred only to K-12 and not to college.  I was learning a lot about America.

So, school resumed after Labor Day. 

A few of us students were chatting.  Most of us were international students.  Matthew was the big native in that group. 

A Taiwanese student, I think her name was Yu-Chun, whose clothes and mannerisms suggested an affluent background, said that she had been to San Francisco for the weekend.  Matt jumped in with a comment about her dress.  Unlike me, he knew how to talk to people.  He had the confidence that generational wealth bestows on the young.  At least, that's what I thought about him.  And, oh, he had also served a couple of years in the Peace Corps in the Philippines.

Where was I?  Yes, Matt's comment.  He noted that Yu-Chun was wearing white.  She looked confused.  I had no clue what he was talking about; of course she was wearing white.

Matt then explained himself.  In the world of fashion, there is no wearing of white after Labor Day.

(A postscript about Matt: I find that he has now become a gin distiller! In the Philippines! In graduate school, he made a documentary project on Manila's slums--a documentary that was funded by Oliver Stone, among others.  Talk about a career change!)

And that's how I now know when summer has ended!

Anyway, it is now autumn.

No, it is fall.

Fall or Autumn?

Why two completely different sounding words in the English language that describe the same thing?

The older of the two words is autumn, which first came into English in the 1300s from the Latin word autumnus. (Etymologists aren't sure where the Latin word came from.) It had extensive use right from its first appearance in English writing, and with good reason: the common name for this intermediary season prior to the arrival of autumn was harvest, which was potentially confusing, since harvest can refer to both the time when harvesting crops usually happens (autumn) as well as the actual harvesting of crops (harvest). The word autumn was, then, a big hit.

Names for the season didn't just end with autumn, however. Poets continued to be wowed by the changes autumn brought, and in time, the phrase "the fall of the leaves" came to be associated with the season. This was shortened in the 1600s to fall. 

Back in the old country, when we learnt in school about autumn and winter seasons, those were merely textbook concepts for me.  There was no relevance to the real world in which the four seasons were hot, hotter, hottest, and rainy.  Leaves turning yellow and the trees going bare?  Not where I lived. The mango and the tamarind and everything else looked green all the time.

When visiting the old home in Neyveli, in 2002,
the gardener working for the German consultant who was living there was happy to pose for me under the tamarind tree in the backyard

Years ago, when living in Southern California, where it is spring and summer most of the year, an acquaintance decided to quit her job and head back to Chicago--the place where she grew up. Her explanation that she missed the four seasons was incomprehensible to me.  I now know what she meant.  There is something magical, profound, about the seasons changing.

A summer evening by the Willamette

Decades later, for one whose formative years were in the hot and nearly-equatorial southern part of India, I cannot imagine living without winter, spring, summer, and fall. The temperature will continue to drop, the misty rains will settle in for the long haul, and the sun will become an occasional visitor.  I will yet again wonder where the hummingbirds and crows and turkey vultures and other birds went.  It will be a long while before I will see them darting about and making noises.  I will miss them.

But then I don't really care about wearing white anyway!

Food and history

"Before the English came to India, say 400 years ago, how would our people have made aviyal?" I asked at lunch as we started serving ourselves the delicious food of the day.

When parents are way old, there are not a lot of topics on which I can engage with them.  The most common topics relate to old stories--of places and people--and food.  And boy there is plenty to talk about just on these!  We love food, but our love is not of the Instagram variety nor about overeating, which are the two ways in which modern "love" for food seems to manifest in people.

Further, while I am well into my premature retirement, the inner academic in me is alive and well to constantly ask questions and think about everything that interests me.  So, I lead group discussions at the dining table too!

Aviyal is one of the many favorites of mine in the old country cuisine.  It is a mixed-vegetable dish.  The question that I posed was about vegetables that are native to the peninsular region of the Subcontinent versus the veggies that have been adapted into the cuisine.

Consider the aviyal recipe at this site, for instance, and the photo that accompanies it:

Source

The bright colored vegetable is, of course, the carrot.  In addition to the carrot, the recipe also includes potato, chayote squash, and more.

Four hundred years ago, aviyal would not have included potatoes, carrots, and chayote squash.  These are, to borrow my late grandmother's phrasing, "English vegetables."  She and elders like her used that phrase for a good reason: they were not native to the geography and culture, and they were foreign.  "English" meant European, not merely the people from England.

A family lore is that when this grandmother's brother went to Bombay (Mumbai) many, many decades ago, he stayed with one of the extended family members.  A special, very special, vegetable was served at lunch for him--green (bush) beans.  Yes, one of those "English vegetables" that was extremely rare back in the village.

The list of "English vegetables" is long, with most on the list not from Europe but from the Americas.  The Columbian exchange found its way to India.  So much have the foreign veggies become a part of the food landscape that it would shock a great many in the Subcontinent to know that these are not native to the land.

So, what would have gone into making aviyal 400 years ago?

• Eggplant aka brinjal
• Snake gourd
• Elephant yam
• Jackfruit seeds (at home we love this)
• Moringa fruit aka drumstick
• Green plantain
• Ash pumpkin/ash gourd
• Taro 
• Chinese potatoes (we love this too at home)
• Coconut--of course!

At the discussion, we decided that bitter gourd and cluster beans would have been prepared as separate dishes and would not have been included in the aviyal.

The aviyal that we ate had carrots and beans, but there was no taro nor jack seeds and, sadly, no Chinese potatoes either.  But, that did not stop us from making sure that there would be no leftovers! 

PS: If this food discussion interests you, then you might want to read this brief evolution of the Indian cuisine.  Maybe take a look at the photos there to make you drool over your smartphone!  However, influenced by that essay, do not try to make and sell bhaang 😇

When women rise in anger ...

Way, way back in January 2008--yes, that long ago--in my Register Guard column, I wrote about the global importance of the year 1979:

If ever there was a competition for which year since World War II will qualify for the title of Annus Horribilis, 1979 could be a leading candidate. First, a list of some of the events from that year: 

• Jan. 16: The shah of Iran flees the country, and goes into exile. 
• Feb. 1: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returns to Iran, and is warmly welcomed by millions of Iranians. 
• April 4: Former Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto is hanged in Pakistan. 
• July 3: President Jimmy Carter signs a directive to support the opponents of the pro-Soviet government of Afghanistan. 
• July 16: Saddam Hussein becomes the president of Iraq. 
• Nov. 4: Americans in the U.S. embassy in Tehran are taken hostage. 
• Nov. 20: Armed dissidents stunned the ruling Saudi family by seizing the Grand Mosque in Mecca
• Dec. 25: The Soviet Union begins to deploy troops in Afghanistan.

Look at that list again.  Think about the global ramifications of those events.

Iran is in the news again because the women are out on the streets protesting against the regime.  

The demonstrations, led mostly by women, broke out in more than a dozen cities and on university campuses in Tehran. They were prompted by the death on Friday of Mahsa Amini, 22, who had been arrested three days earlier in Tehran for allegedly violating Iran’s hijab law, which requires women to cover their hair and wear loosefitting robes.

Women protesting on Monday took their head scarves off and waved them in defiance.

The theocratic regime has been utterly misogynistic ever since it gained power in 1979. 

The essence of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 15 seconds. “Although the 1979 revolution in Iran is often called an Islamic revolution, it can actually be said to be a revolution of men against women." -Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi pic.twitter.com/gVN1QsO4cv

— Karim Sadjadpour (@ksadjadpour) September 20, 2022

It is godawful how women are held under force by bearded mullahs!

The mullahs have already started clamping down on the internet in Iran:

⚠️ Confirmed: Real-time network data show a nation-scale loss of connectivity on MCI (First Mobile), #Iran's leading mobile operator, and Rightel; the incidents come amid widespread protests over the death of #MahsaAmini 📵

📰 Background: https://t.co/8cCHIJA2Oi pic.twitter.com/8FY4TIOJdI

— NetBlocks (@netblocks) September 21, 2022

This is not the first time that women and young men of Iran have taken to the streets.  All the previous protests were violently and forcefully crushed.  It is not easy to predict what these protests will lead to:

The widespread protests in #Iran are significant in of themselves but also come at a particularly tricky time for IR. With SL's health in question and nuclear deal in play it is not clear how far protests will go and the outcome #MahsaAmini #مهسا_امینی

— Vali Nasr (@vali_nasr) September 21, 2022

One thing is for certain: Women in Iran are "mad as hell and not going to take it anymore."  I, for one, hope  that they will successfully topple the mullah regime!

The world according to 23-year olds

If one reads the autoethnographic posts here from the time I began blogging, which was back in 2001 ... ok, you can't--I deleted them all in one stroke in 2007.  I then took a break, and restarted the blog in 2008. 

If one reads my autoethnographic posts since 2008, there is a good chance that a thoughtful reader can put together a composite picture of who I am and what I value most and what I couldn't care for. 

Ever since my young adult years, I have been consciously making decisions in order to lead a life that makes meaning to me.  Meaning that cannot be measured in material terms. A different perspective might lead one to conclude that I had no drive and that I failed to live up to my potential.  But, this blog itself is more than evidence that I am trying as much as I can to follow that old sage's advice to lead a life that is examined, even if it meant a life in exile.

The sun finally set and ended my mediocre career.  Mediocre by conventional measures, that is.  I have been largely at peace with that because I have never intentionally and mindfully worked on "advancing" in a career anyway.  A career does not make a person.  It is irrelevant to who the human is.  Irrelevant to who I am.

Sooner or later, most--if not all--of us realize that a successful career is not by itself the source of happiness.  Happiness is one of those strange things that comes from within.  A blue sky with puffy white clouds makes us happy.  A good time with friends makes us happy.  What the hell has a career got to do with all these, and how do you put a price tag on these, right?

So, how might one figure out what they want out of life in ways that will make them happy?

Simple enough at face value, “What do I enjoy about life?” is a deceptively difficult question. Since no one enters this world as a fully realized human, this takes some trial and error. Coffman says to consider what naturally excites you and to feed those desires. “If you lived on an island and there was nobody around to people-please or to impress, what is it that you would want in your life?” she says. “What is it that you would be doing? What are your natural passions and skills? What excites you naturally?”

Because I had internalized this, thankfully, right from when I was young, I have a tough time imagining why others do not constantly engage in such thinking.

This work is difficult and, frankly, terrifying. Few people would willingly embark on a thought exercise that puts their entire life into question. However, consider the alternative: coasting along in a career or relationship you don’t quite feel passionate about because you never considered other possibilities. At any age, setting aside time and intentionality to decipher what motivates you and whether you’ve been living authentically can be enlightening. This isn’t to say a life full of “traditional” markers of success and happiness isn’t worthwhile, but some contemplation can determine if these milestones are desirable for you.

What we do for a living seems to serve as an identity mark, as much as the moles on my lower forearms are.  (Oddly, I have nearly identical placements of a mole each in my right and left arms!)  To most people, the work that they do is both a critically important part of their identity and also one of the most unpleasant parts of their lives.  To shove that job aside is, I suppose, nothing especially American but a universal story.

I lived that unpleasant life, more than once.

Even before getting into the engineering program, I knew that I wouldn't enjoy it.  Four years in the program certainly confirmed that. Working in India upon graduation erased even the tiniest doubts I might have had.  I hated waking up in the morning and heading to work.  I barely survived ten weeks in my first job, and then it was quite a few months before I took up my second one, in which I didn't last even a month. 

For a few months in mid-1986, I might have come across to people as one of those young men who was nothing but a loser who was wasting his time and his parents' money. I did not care about what others thought. Those were the precious months when I was rapidly zooming into what I wanted to study in graduate school, and the universities that might offer such programs.

At my uncle's insistence, I took up another job in which I served the longest--six months!  Finally, as a 23-year old, I was off to the US for graduate schooling.

But, it was not a case of happily ever after.  Not yet.

The "work" after graduate school was not one that I had planned on, and I certainly felt ill at ease there, while it certainly paid immensely more than what I eventually earned as a university professor.  It took another six years to gain a foothold in academia.

But, how would I get all these across to 23-year olds trying to figure out what they want out of life?

Will 23-year olds understand what Bill Watterson said in a much simpler language?

[Having] an enviable career is one thing, and being a happy person is another. 

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

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

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

The best time to travel

Pattamadai was one grandmother's village, and Sengottai was the other's.  They were not even forty miles apart, but boy was it a pain to travel from one place to another!

It took almost five hours from the time we left one doorstep and walked into the other grandma's home.  Five tiring hours for forty miles of travel via public transport buses!

The main road in Sengottai

The bus stop at Sengottai was practically in my grandmother's backyard.  We would be at the stop by the post office a few minutes before the time that the bus was scheduled to arrive there.  And then the long bus ride, with stops that seemed to occur every two minutes.

The bus stop at Pattamadai was a long, long walk from home.  It always which seemed infinitely longer on those sunny and hot summer days.

The road home from the Pattamadai bus stand

Walk we did if we didn't have anything heavy to carry.  If not, via letters--the ancient days before even landlines became common--we would have pre-arranged for a bullock-cart.  Yep, bullock-cart.  We kids then competed for the car equivalent of "riding shotgun."  To sit up front was very exciting, even with the oxen farting and shitting as they walked.

We couldn't complain much about such travel conditions because the elders had even worse stories from their childhood days.  The complicated logistics and travel that took up an entire day were big reasons why they rarely traveled at all.  If it was out of the range of a bullock-cart ride, well, forget about it then.

A few of the extended family getting set for a short trip, about 60 years ago
(From parents' collections)

Travel was so arduous that elders always consulted the almanac to chalk out auspicious days, which seemed to assure them that they would safely return after completing a productive trip.  

It was just us three siblings traveling one summer.  We got bored at Pattamadai and got tired of the heat and the mosquitoes.  We preferred to return to Sengottai, which was always a tad cooler thanks to its location by the hills.  But, we weren't allowed to leave for two days because they were considered inauspicious.  செவ்வாய் புதன் வடக்க சூலம்  Yes, inauspicious for travel over those forty miles.

During another summer holidays, we weren't allowed to leave Pattamadai for a couple of days because there was a death in a house up the street.  The person who died was not related to us, but that didn't matter to the elders who were guided by the tradition that a death in the street meant that we couldn't leave!

Life was not easy, in the old days, and a belief in such auspicious days for travel was one way they thought they could deal with the probabilities of things going wrong.  After all, that we are mortals is not any new wisdom, and those astrological superstitions helped them deal with the uncertainties of life.

Franz Kafka writes about the uncertain life in the story, The Next Village:

My grandfather used to say: "Life is astoundingly short. To me, looking back over it, life seems so foreshortened that I scarcely understand, for instance, how a young man can decide to ride over to the next village without being afraid that -- not to mention accidents -- even the span of a normal happy life may fall far short of the time needed for such a journey."

Yet, we take those chances.  We humans have been taking those chances ever since walked upright and wandered out of Africa.

In mid-July, I left for a two month stay in Chennai.  I did not consult any almanac.  I bought the ticket based on my preferences and the availability of seats on the flight segments.  A distance from one side of the planet to another that is obviously way more than the forty miles that separated Pattamadai and Sengottai, and travel that involved flying for hours over oceans, the crossing of which was forbidden in the old traditions. 

In my almanac, every day that I am alive and well and able to do things is always an auspicious day!

A new academic year begins

I am pleasantly surprised, and relieved, at how much I have embraced by prematurely retired status, instead of constantly thinking about how things were and how life could  have been. 

"I am very disappointed that you are not working as a professor anymore," my father recently said.  "Because you don't have retirement age in American universities, I thought you would be a professor for a long time like GG" he added.  GG is his cousin, who has been a university professor for decades in Texas.

"If you are disappointed, then think about the magnitude of my disappointment," I told my father.  "Retiring this early was never in any of my plans."

But, life is what it is.  The Buddha advised us more than 2,000 years ago that our desire for something other than how things are is the root cause of suffering.  Thankfully, I do not ponder about work and life other than what they currently are, though there was the initial shock of it all that upset my mental equilibrium for a short time.

I was given my layoff notice in a Zoom call on March 30, 2021. 

Well before this layoff, almost six months prior, in manner that is typical of how I engage with the world, I authored a commentary in The Oregonian, which was published on November 4, 2020. In that commentary, I wrote:

Like many regional public universities in the United States, my university too is dealing with financial crisis that had been slowly developing and which the coronavirus accelerated.  “Our goal is to retain as many employees as possible,” noted the president in a three-page, single-spaced memo to the campus about the process of rightsizing the university.

In a couple of weeks, we will find out about the president’s plan to “align faculty resources with enrollment trends to reduce faculty expenses in academic programs.”

The regional public universities have been the ones that mostly served, and continue to serve, the vast numbers of under-privileged students.  You can easily recognize them.  Many of them have geographic identifiers like "western."  One of my first applications for a teaching job was to Southeast Missouri State University,  In California, the "CalState" campuses were designed as regional universities.

As one who has thought a lot about higher education, and has authored quite a few commentaries on it, I clearly understood that there was nothing unique about my layoff and how my former employer was going about the business of it all.  The large universities and private liberal arts colleges with money are in a league of their own.  But, not the regionals.

Today I read in the news of another regional going the same route: Declaring a financial emergency that then allows for tenured faculty to be laid off, so that the university can align its resources with what will sell in these contemporary times.  It is deja vu all over again, this time at Emporia State University in Kansas:

Ken Hush, the university’s president, told the board that for years, the university had enacted traditional budget-cutting measures like hiring freezes, spending restrictions, and voluntary retirements. It’s been “death by a thousand cuts,” Hush said. But “that doesn’t work for us anymore, either programmatically or financially.”

The university has terminated 33 positions, "the bulk coming out of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences."  Sounds familiar to me.

Even in the years before the financial problems worsened, I repeatedly suggested to the president and anybody who raised the issue that there was a simple solution to untie the Gordian Knot: Cut the spending on athletics.  The millions spent on athletic entertainment can easily be downsized and academic programs can be sustained with that money.  But, of course, American higher education is cursed with spending gazillions on athletics.

In no other country’s university system, after all, does sports play anything like the central role it does in American academic life. Men do not go to Oxford to play cricket; the Sorbonne does not field a nationally celebrated soccer team. Even in the most sports-mad countries, sports is sports and education is education. That’s a better system.

American universities are big time landlords, who earn a lot of income from their developed real estate. Country clubs Dorms, conference rooms, auditoriums, climbing walls, etc.  Some also own huge basketball and football venues for educational purposes entertainment.

These public policy decisions I don't care about anymore.  The people have spoken, and very clearly at that.  Philosophy or Geography or History are not what universities are about.  Universities exist to offer football and basketball and more, and whatever money is left will be used for the liberal arts and sciences.

Stop Adani

A post that is about the coming together of capitalism, religion, and divisive nationalistic politics, might suggest to an American that this post is about tRump, whose political power is driven by "faithful" Christians and rabid capitalists alike, who are all united in their "bah, humbug!" attitude towards the natural environment.  But, America is not truly exceptional when it comes to such a formula of religious political economy.

This post is about the old country, where its current Prime Minister has long been a tRump well before tRump even surfaced as a candidate who slithered down the golden escalators.

Observing India from the other side of the planet, which is what I have been doing for 35 years, I wrote in this blog-post in March 2009: "I won't be surprised at all if Modi, or somebody like him, becomes the prime minister really soon."

He was elected Prime Minister in 2014, and was successfully re-elected in 2019.  Prior to his election in 2014, I authored a commentary in The Register Guard, in which I wrote:

Odds are looking highly favorable for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its leader, Narendra Modi. Both the BJP and Modi have cultivated a nationalistic spirit, bordering on jingoism.  The party and Modi also have strong associations with Hindu nationalist groups.  Modi is alleged to have had a hand in the anti-Muslim riots in 2002, though subsequent government inquiries have cleared him of those charges. It is for these reasons that the US State Department has also denied Modi a visa to visit this country.  If Modi gets elected Prime Minister, I suppose we here would have an interesting and controversial political question to resolve.

mOdi's pro-business policies that couldn't care about the natural environment was lauded by corporate India, despite his divisive politics of Hindus vs others--especially Muslims.  Through all these years one person in particular has become so prosperous that he is now wealthier than Jeff Bezos, and that man is Gautam Adani.

Gautam #Adani’s wealth has risen from an estimated $8bn at the time of #Modi’s election in 2014 to $137bn today, a rise of more than 1,600%.
Ah, yes, a mere coincidence!https://t.co/0XyGHDQ00o #Gujarat #FossilFuels

— Sriram K (@congoboy) August 31, 2022

How did he create those billions? "Many of his businesses are involved in natural gas, coal mining and electricity generation, and are likely to have benefited from the global energy price increase."

From the descriptions thus far, you are perhaps hypothesizing that there is a huge movement in India against this mega-mega-rich Indian and, hence, the "Stop Adani" slogan.

Nope.

It is from way down under.

Source

The "Stop Adani" protests are truly Australian.

What has Adani done to piss off the usually laid back and sun-loving Australians?  "Adani is digging the biggest coal mine in Australian history"

Adani still plans to dig the biggest coal mine in Australia, extracting up to 60 million tonnes of coal a year for 90 years, and creating 4.6 billion tonnes of carbon pollution. Adani’s coal will be shipped through the Great Barrier Reef via Adani’s Abbot Point coal port and burned in Adani’s Indian coal plants. 

Adani’s mine will open the way for at least 8 other mega coal mines in Queensland’s Galilee Basin - one of the largest unexploited coal reserves in the world.

Stopping the world's third wealthiest guy from pursuing his grand ideas will not be easy, as one can imagine.

Adani continues to flex his muscles in order to pay back to the political movement and its leaders who made possible his unimaginable wealth.  A couple of weeks ago, Adani "a 29 percent stake in New Delhi Television (NDTV) and a proposal to buy an additional 26 percent from public shareholders."

Gautam Adani, the richest man in Asia and a close ally of prime minister Narendra Modi, owns some of India’s busiest airports and seaports, coal mines and power plants. This week, Adani made a foray into a new field — television — in a move that could reshape India’s media landscape.

...

It is not clear when Adani, who overtook Warren Buffett this year to become the world’s fourth-richest man, would amass a majority stake in NDTV and take control. But the move by a business mogul who famously lent his private jet to the prime minister-elect after Modi’s 2014 election triumph stunned India’s liberal elite, threw the broadcaster’s staff into upheaval and surprised even NDTV’s founders.

Because, you know, India too needs its own Fox News!

I doubt if either Adani or mOdi can be stopped.  What a tragedy!

Coal billionaire Gautum Adani is now the world's 2nd richest person. His company has extracted more coal almost every year since the Paris agreement. A big jump forecast next year as extraction from the new Carmichael mine in Australia ramps up. Yes, a new coal mine. In Australia pic.twitter.com/pHrIR7NIQJ

— XR Cambridge (@xr_cambridge) September 17, 2022

Counters

I finally moved up to the front of the line at the passport check at the airport.

I could feel the pressure within now that I was the next person to be called.  It was not a pressure about the documentation.  But, a kind of pressure that I feel only in India.

It is a kind of feeling one gets when playing whack-a-mole, in which you need to be on high alert with your eyes constantly roving from the left to the right in order to watch out for a mole popping up.  Here, at the front of the long serpentine line behind me, I had to keep an eye out for the counter that would open up and to then rush to that officer.  A momentary delay would invite quite a few behind me to vocalize their feelings that I was holding them back. There's also a worry that if I did not watch out, then somebody from somewhere might beat me to that open counter.  The damn colonizers could have at least done one good thing by forcing a culture of queuing!

I whacked the mole.

I handed my passport.  I looked at the camera as instructed.

The officer flipped through the pages.  Without looking up, he asked, "what improvements have you noticed?"

That was a leading question.  He wants me to talk only about the improvements.  Yes, there have been wonderful improvements in India since I left the old country in 1987.  For one, at least in the part of India that I go to, there are no beggars, which is simply incredible to people of my age or older.  Women young and old are rushing around in two-wheelers, which is an improvement whose value can be appreciated only by those whose growing up experiences were practically in a male-only public space and women were rarely seen out and about by themselves, unless they were poor workers or beggars.  The list of improvements is long.

But then there are also losses in plenty.  Like the loss of appreciation of history and historical leaders who delivered us from the colonizers and made possible the measurable and intangible improvements that we now see in India.  Like the loss of religious tolerance in daily life and politics.  Like the deepening social caste divisions. 

The passport control counter at the airport was not where I was going to be a prematurely retired academic.  Even when I was teaching, I knew the limits to which anybody paid any attention to what I had to say.  Here at the airport, I was merely yet another traveler.

"Yes, plenty of changes" is all I said. 

Without looking up, the officer laughed when he heard my reply.  "I asked about improvements and you merely say there are changes."

He handed back my passport and I was off to the security check.

It occurred to me when I was waiting for the boarding to begin that I could have said something to make the officer happy and moved on.  I could have said, for instance, that the airport itself was a huge improvement from the old one.  But, I am what I am, and this is how I have often ended up in trouble, and burnt bridges with people and ended friendships.

Hours and hours later, I was walking towards the passport check in America.  I heard somebody call out, "sir, ..."  I looked at where the sound came from, which I now can do now ever since my ear was fixed and I don't have problems triangulating the location of the source of the noise.

"This way" the security officer guided me.  He wanted me to cut across because there was no crowd.  In no time it was my turn at an officer's window.

I handed the passport.

He placed it on a scanner.  "Where are you coming from?"

"India."

"Any money or food?"

"No."

"Welcome back." 

"Thanks"

I was home.

Lessons from a family feud

For Tamil Hindus of my age, I would think that it is not uncommon for Rajaji to have been our interlocutor for the Mahabharata.  His retelling/summarizing of the epic into a manageable tome in the local vernacular, Tamil, was a fascinating read.  A gripping story involving a gazillion characters and complex inter-relationships between the characters.

Of course, it is not a mere story for the believers, of whom I was one.  I was a true believer when I read Rajaji's Mahabharata but even then it came across more as an awesome story than as a religious text.

As the polymath-polyglot-scholar-intellectual David Shulman noted in his review of a wonderful book: 

[This] two-thousand-year-old book is, in a way, a template for Indian civilization; it remains as vital and relevant today as it ever was, and not only for South Asia. The apocalypse it describes is something all too human, driven by greed, egotism, spite, and the usual phoney fixation on the glories of dying in war.

As Karthika Nair observed in the introduction to her book:

Unlike in the Ramayana, where the enemy is far away and some Other, here "that mortal enemy is one's own kin; the blood the heroes spill is all their own."

In this great epic, the war is between cousins; the sons of two brothers.  And one set of brothers has the counsel of god--Krishna. During a critical part of the war, when Arjuna loses his composure at the thought of killing his uncles and cousins, Krishna advises him that it is his dharma to fight.  Wendy Doniger wrote about the transformation of a war cry into something else that it is not:

How did Indian tradition transform the Bhagavad Gita (the “Song of God”) into a bible for pacifism, when it began life, sometime between the third century BC and the third century CE, as an epic argument persuading a warrior to engage in a battle, indeed, a particularly brutal, lawless, internecine war? It has taken a true gift for magic—or, if you prefer, religion, particularly the sort of religion in the thrall of politics that has inspired Hindu nationalism from the time of the British Raj to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi today.

The Gita is a mere subplot in this massive epic.  The war does not end the epic though.  A confusing aspect of Rajaji's short versionof the epic were the pages well after the war, when the victorious brothers and their common wife are all dead.  This part of the Mahabharata is what Wendy Doniger is after this time in her latest work of translation, After the War: The Last Books of the Mahabharata.

In reviewing the book, Sunil Iyengar writes, "Why are the final books of the Mahabharata so unsettling, so gloomy about postwar prospects for what we now might call closure?"  Exactly.  That's how I have always felt about the post-war part of the story.  But, there was nobody that I could talk to about it, nor was I interested in religion and its stories for too long anyway.

Iyengar adds:

“The Mahabharata wants to have its karma and eat it too,” Doniger writes in her introduction. ... Doniger hails this ambiguity as an enduring charm of the text. It “is precisely the uncompromising and unresolved nature of their ethics,” she writes, “that makes these books particularly useful to us in this age of doubt and confusion.”

I was in my pre-teens when I read Rajaji's version for kids.  I can understand now why the final chapters of the Mahabharata were so confusing to me.  I was looking for a tidying up of the story, all wrapped up with a bow on top, but the end was not cut and dried.  (Too many metaphors in one sentence? To heck with that rule!) 

I have placed an order for the book.  Perhaps you too should?

Postscript: Vyasa is credited as the author of the Mahabharata.  To give you an idea of the complex inter-relationships between the characters, here is one: Vyasa is the father of the brothers Pandu and Dhritarashtra, whose sons battle it out on the killing fields of Kurukshetra.  Karthika Nair sarcastically described Vyasa like this:

The pink tongue

In the town where I grew up, and the school that I went to, we were all kids of people who had come to the town because of jobs at the mining-industrial complex.  The town did not exist prior to the mining and power generation enterprises.  There were a bunch of villages all around and, yes, many villagers were displaced--with compensation.  Whether that compensation was fair is a question to which I do not have an answer, nor is that the focus of this post.  

Many of the employees were from outside Tamil Nadu, which is why there were kids in my class whose "mother tongues" were not Tamil.  There were a number of Telugus. And then there were quite a few, like Vijay and Srikumar, spoke Malayalam at home.  Kannada. Bengali. Konkani. Gujarati. Marathi, Saurashtra!  I think there was one guy--Sanjay?--whose parents were from Bihar (?) and spoke Hindi at home; perhaps there were more.

This motley crew in a classroom setting once gave us a hilarious moment.  During the elementary years, I wonder if it was the 5th or 6th grade, our math teacher--PK Master--asked one girl what her mother tongue was.  He asked because we all knew that not every kid was a Tamil.

Madhulika's reply was hilarious.  "Pink," she said.

It is funny as hell now.  But, if you had been in PK Master's class, you too would have blurted out even worse things.  We were all stressed that PK Master would turn to us and ask us whatever.

(I think Madhulika's family spoke Kannada at home.  Or was it Konkani?)

We did not know any better or worse.  Such linguistic diversity was normal. The way things were.

Most Americans who grow up monolingual, and remain so throughout their lives, cannot possibly relate to all these.  Nor can they begin to begin to appreciate the deep emotions that are stirred when the first language looms in the background.

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

While they all spoke their respective languages, not all of them learnt to read and write in Telugu or Malayalam.  After all, the school did not offer those languages as options.  It was then up to their parents or classes at their cultural associations.  In order to satisfy the language requirements, my friends studied Hindi, with the exception of Manibaba who dabbled in Sanskrit. 

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

More than literacy in their native languages--the mother tongues--I would imagine that these raised questions about identity.   At least, they spoke their respective languages in their homes, unlike many children of immigrants who do not speak the languages spoken by their parents and grandparents.

After having moved far away from her native land, in this author's case, she realizes that "my native language has been sitting quietly in my soul’s vault all this time."  An accomplished linguist and writer, she writes in that wonderfully autoethnographic essay:

But embracing the dominant language comes at a price. Like a household that welcomes a new child, a single mind can’t admit a new language without some impact on other languages already residing there. Languages can co-exist, but they tussle, as do siblings, over mental resources and attention. When a bilingual person tries to articulate a thought in one language, words and grammatical structures from the other language often clamor in the background, jostling for attention. The subconscious effort of suppressing this competition can slow the retrieval of words—and if the background language elbows its way to the forefront, the speaker may resort to code-switching, plunking down a word from one language into the sentence frame of another.

The author then notes:

When a childhood language decays, so does the ability to reach far back into your own private history. Language is memory’s receptacle. It has Proustian powers. Just as smells are known to trigger vivid memories of past experiences, language is so entangled with our experiences that inhabiting a specific language helps surface submerged events or interactions that are associated with it.

Another child of immigrants has an entirely different story to tell about her mother tongue.  In this intense essay packed with emotions, "over time, Cantonese played a more minor role in my life," she writes.  What led to the memory erasure?

I became furious that my parents weren’t bilingual, too. If they valued English so much and knew how necessary it was in this country, why didn’t they do whatever it took to learn it? “Mommy and Baba had to start working. We had no money. We had no time. We needed to raise you and your brothers.” All I heard were excuses. I resented them for what I thought was laziness, an absence of sense and foresight that they should have had as my protectors. When I continued to be subjected to racial slurs even after my English had become pitch-perfect, I blamed my parents. Any progress I made towards acceptance in America was negated by their lack of assimilation. With nowhere to channel my fury, I spoke English to my parents, knowing that they couldn’t understand me. I was cruel; I called them hurtful names and belittled their intelligence. I used English, a language they admired, against them.

In immigrant families in which "successful" assimilation leads to children not learning the language of the old country, grandchildren often don't have the linguistic ability to converse with grandparents.  As Aziz Ansari joked in one of his bits, the chats with his grandmother were ultra-short because he didn't know Tamil that his grandmother spoke, and she did not speak English either.

These are modern problems because many of us simply do not stay put where we are born.  But then staying put is really not an exciting choice either.  Something has to give.  Sometimes it is the pink mother tongue that we sacrifice :(