The privilege of cultural capital

The world has gotten even more competitive and maniacal about "credentials" since my high school years.  In India and here in the US, and in the rest of the world too, students are finding it more and more difficult to understand who they are and what they might want to do with their lives, even as they rush towards the prestigious colleges.  The competition has become so intense that the elite of the elite colleges in the US have eye-popping rejection ratios.

The intense competition is why the admission process at Harvard has come under scrutiny.  Qualified students not getting admitted there complain against the affirmative action practices there. 

Of course, any systematic discrimination is a bad practice; but, it does not seem like Harvard discriminated in that sense.  I can understand a 17- or an 18-year old thinking that "Harvard or bust" is the bottom-line.  But, seriously?

The Supreme Court has taken up affirmative action cases relating to admissions/rejections at Harvard and the University of North Carolina.  Odds are that the evidence-based arguments and questions from the minority liberal female justices will not make a dent against the ideologically driven men and the lone right-wing female justice.

India has had affirmative action programs for decades in order to address the different and unequal starting points that kids from different castes face.  The godawful college where I earned my undergraduate degree was fantastic for one reason: It provided me with a real education about why affirmative action programs are important. 

Until college, I hadn't seriously considered the practical and daily experiences of the "backward" caste people and Dalits in the villages.  One simple, but profound, comment that a fellow student made in the first semester echoed haunts me even now.  He said that he didn't want to go home for the holidays because he would not be able to be passive when upper-caste kids bossed over his parents and addressed them by their first names, and while his parents behaved submissively towards those tiny tots. 

I was shocked. 

I had not heard anything like that from somebody my age.  After all, in school in the industrial town we grew up not worrying about caste.  Of course, I knew that some of my classmates were brahmins and many were not.  The "modern" township had created for us an environment in which we could talk the highfalutin talk about social problems and progress but without any idea of the nitty-gritty details of the real lives of really oppressed people. 

The commie-sympathizer in me was fully awakened.  Or, to use a modern expression, I became woke.

In the NY Times, an Indian-American has authored a commentary in which she opposes affirmative action programs in higher education.  Renu Mukherjee presents her family story of her grandfather coming to attend graduate school in the 1960s with less than $100 in his pocket.  She writes:

[Because] Asian American enrollment at their schools exceeds the Asian American share of the population, stories like mine don’t count as “diverse.” Instead, the stories of “underrepresented” racial minorities tend to count more as the diversity in which universities have a compelling interest, the rationale for racial preferences today.

Search if you want in her commentary and you will not find any acknowledgement of the privileged position that her grandfather came from.  There is no mention of "brahmin" or "dalit."  

Vice President Kamala Harris' mother was able to come to America for graduate schooling because she, like many of us who came here decades ago, was from the privileged caste and class.  She was from a brahmin family as I am.  And that, I am sure, is the story of the grandfather who made it possible for his granddaughter to write that NY Times commentary.

The NY Times commentary author's last name is Mukherjee.  Wikipedia is all one needs to understand the last name of Mukjerjee: 

All Mukherjees belong to the Bharadwaj Gotra or the clan of Rishi Bharadwaj. The Mukherjees belong to the Kulin Brahmin class and are also classified as Rarhi Brahmins. The origins of most of the Brahmins in Southern Bengal can be traced back to the Gangetic plains of Northern India

Imagine if the author had briefly mentioned the privilege that her people have had over the centuries!

Ahem, I too came to the US with just about a $100 with me.  Unlike that author, I talk and write about the privileged life--as a brahmin and as a male--that made my success possible.  Merit did not mysteriously pop into my brain, but was the result of generations of literacy, learning, and exposure to the world, which is what Sharmila Sen referred to in her memoir as "cultural capital." Almost always, brahmins gained this capital at the expense of an overwhelming majority who were discriminated against.

Grandpa Mukherjee and the rest of us could come to this country in such huge numbers because of the changes in the immigration laws that allowed brown people to immigrate.  This change followed the historic Civil Rights Act.

Inspired by the Civil Rights revolution in American society, the 1965 Immigration Act explicitly abolished the discriminatory national origins quotas that had regulated entrance into the country since the 1920s. It explicitly prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, sex, nationality, place of birth, or place of residence in the U.S. government’s decisions to issue immigrant visas. Instead, the law established a new system preference system based on professional status and family reunification.

Had African-Americans not fought for their civil rights, the immigration act would not have been revised either.  What a tragic farce it is that a privileged beneficiary of the civil rights legislation now questions the relevance of affirmative action!

Source

The sound of silence over peace

I hate wars. 

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

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

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

Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi's pacifism appealed a lot more to me.  By the time of the Iraq War during the first Bush presidency, I was a committed anti-war nutcase.  And have been since. 

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

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

Even President Obama, who was the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, loved droning the lives out of brown people all around the world.  I wrote in 2016 that "the killing of people in other countries--sometimes even US citizens--without the politically hot "putting boots on the ground" is one awful, awful direction in which Obama has led as the commander-in-chief."  When it comes to waging wars, Obama's legacy is that he is "the Nobel Peace Prize winner who pioneered a dramatically dangerous and ethically dubious form of warfare."  Obama became a better warring President than his predecessor was, and laid out the MO that I am sure will be followed for a long, long time!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Russia the aggressor is a permanent member of the Security Council and, of course, vetoed resolutions against its behavior and actions.

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

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

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

Michele Norris writes that "the ways and means — and words — of war are all around us" but there is nothing about peace.

But what about the language of peace? What about the concept of building bridges instead of walls, or bringing opposing forces to a shared understanding? Quick, name the catchphrase that’s in frequent use that speaks directly to peacemaking? (Example: Some used to say, “Make love, not war.”) I tested myself and eventually came up with “passing the olive branch.” Not exactly impressive.

In our everyday conversations we do use a lot of war metaphors.  Norris has a solid argument that the words we use begin to shape the world in which we live.

Peace requires a focus on peacemaking. That is an active, constant process that takes effort and will and frequent articulation.

We again need to give peace a chance. And not be afraid to say so out loud. As that adage goes, the words you speak become the house you live in.

I, for one, am not holding my breath for peace on earth, even as I try in my own way to give peace a chance!

Cool kids. Uncool life.

It will not surprise anybody, even a stranger who meets me for the first time, that I was never a cool kid.  Neither in school nor in college.  Not in graduate school.  Not after.  I just went about my life.  I continue to go about my life.

For a while, I was friends with a couple of cool kids in school.  Not because they were cool.  We were friends, that's it.  But then, as it almost always happens in life, we grow up and our interests diverge, and, well, those friends who were cool didn't really stay as friends with me.

Sitting on the deck with a cup of coffee, while listening to the sounds of rain falling on the roof above, I became a tad nostalgic thinking about my younger years, and about the cool and regular classmates and college-mates. 

I could not recall the name of one guy who was a star cricket player in college.  I mean, he was good.  Beyond comparison.  I had not seen anyone play that well only a few feet away from me.  It seemed like he was bound for glory.  He was a good looking guy too.  Despite his star-status, he didn't seem to want attention 24x7.  A perfect cool guy!

As with cool guys and the rest of us, while I knew who he was, neither he nor did the overwhelming members of my cohort know me.  But, I was cool with that, living in my own world.  Even my high school teachers did not remember me; Mrs. Manson told me, yes in a phone conversation with me, that she did not remember me.  She went on to list quite a few of my classmates though!  Cool guys not acknowledging my presence is completely understandable.  

What was that cool guy's name?

The older we get, it is not always easy to recall facts.  Despite having a reputation for a steel-trap memory, I am increasingly reminded that it is a leaky vault up there, and this cool guy's name had slipped out.

Thankfully, unlike the primitive days that defined humanity until Google came along, now, all I had to do was enter a few keywords and that's what I did.

I was shocked with the result.

Former India and Tamil Nadu opener V.B. Chandrasekhar passed away here on Thursday. He was 57. Police said the body of the former cricketer was recovered from his residence. They suspect it to be a case of suicide.

That was from a news report in 2019.

I left India not long after the undergraduate studies ended.  My fading interest in cricket was completely extinguished after I came to America.  And keeping in touch with former classmates was extremely challenging in those days before email and cellphone.  No wonder then that until this Google search that I had no idea about VB, as he was known, having played for the Indian team.

Caption at the source:
Tamil Nadu batsman V.B. Chandrasekhar (right) celebrates with his skipper K. Srikkanth after scoring a century in 56 balls in the Irani Trophy cricket match against Rest of India at the M.A. Chidambaram Stadium (Chepauk), Madras, on October 05, 1988.

He died more than three years ago.  A suicide.  I would never, ever, have even remotely imagined such a tragic ending for that cool guy. 

Every single day is a revelation that life is unpredictable.  What will the trajectory of one's life be?  How high might one fly, how far will the reach be, and how long will the person be on this planet ?  It is all a mystery that is solved only as life unfolds.

It will be appropriate to end this post with a poem by one of the coolest kids there ever was in our school:

Smell of Things to Come

By Vijay Nambisan

A nose is a nose is a nose. Who knows
Those fibres of smell better than I? The scent
Of a book that grows on me, of a rose
Withered by fondling, of newsprint, of drink
Untasted but soon to be consumed, of course
I know them all and know too the gross
Odours of unwashed flesh, of dirt
Shed or retained by skin, and I know almost
The scent of love, because sometimes it flows
Between breast and breast, and my nose
Has nestled there.
     When blows the wind above
My senses, I have smelled the clouds grow
Against the sky. One scent remains to know,
The last breath I shall ever take as I.

Here comes the sun

 A good day was had.

Ah, the sun is shining
An LP on the turntable
Freshly brewed coffee
And a #QueenBee I am!
Life is good 😇#NYTSpellingBee #SpellingBee pic.twitter.com/6P87YsgiPa

— Sriram K (@congoboy) October 27, 2022

An upside to the premature retirement is that I can make the metaphorical hay when the sun shines!

(No, listening to LPs is not a retirement hobby.  Here is a post, for instance, from 2011.)

Only after moving to this part of the world do I truly experience the "make hay while the sun shines."  Back in the old country, with the abundant sunlight and heat for most of the year, it was not the sunny day that was rare. 

Halfway between the old home and the north pole, here in the valley where misty rain and cool temperature will be the norm through the end of May, I have become a sun worshiper. It is up here in these latitudes that people really need to do the surya-namaskaram.  Too bad that the yoga students in their Lululemons stay inside the studios while they chant om and do the surya-namaskar.

There is more than a fascination for the old that tempts me to play the LP.  I imagine that every song in every LP at home is available for streaming through any number of services.  I can only imagine that because I do not subscribe to Spotify and the like.  It is creepy to think that "they" know what I am listening to.  But, more than that, why should I listen to what somebody else tells me to listen to?

When I was young, we had no choice but to listen to curated collections of movie songs that were broadcast on the radio.  Often we would also wonder why they played more crappy ones and less of the good songs.  We had no option because of the dark times when there was neither a turntable nor a tape-player at home.

Conditions began to change when we acquired a Telefunken tape-player.  We could now begin to own our own collection of songs.  We could create our own mixed-tapes. 

Later, with the digital revolution came CDs.  Depending on my mood, I could listen to Hank Williams or Blondie or Pavarotti or Ali Akbar Khan.  The music world was my oyster.

Why stream music!

Streaming music in the age of abundance appears to give us more choice than ever before, but what does that choice make us do?

In theory, these developments have been boons to consumer choice. But they’ve also aggravated what [Simon] Reynolds calls “the porno-logic of franticity” that keeps us compulsively clicking (or swiping) to “the next, the next, the next,” increasingly isolated in our own algorithmically defined cultural spheres.

The more feedback a user gives to these algorithms, the more the user gets trapped in cultural spheres, without the user ever wondering about the choice paradox.

My father and his friends grew up in a time when live music was practically the only available music.  Attending a live concert meant that sometimes they walked quite a few miles from Pattamadai to the neighboring village or town, and then walked back home in the dead of the night.  Early in his engineering career, it was not unusual for him to travel to the big city in order to listen to live music.

I suspect that he, and people like him, found incalculable value in that kind of an experience with music and interactions with musicians, musicologists, and fans.  Unlike now.

Technology has reduced the formerly expensive and inconvenient task of listening through the discographies of such artists, however prolific they may be, to a matter of will and commitment—qualities now in short supply, though perhaps only somewhat less abundant than they were before the onrush of the sixties. “In societies with fewer opportunities for amusement,” W. H. Auden wrote in an essay more than half a century ago, one could more easily distinguish “a mere wish from a real desire. If, in order to hear some music, a man has to wait for six months and then walk twenty miles, it is easy to tell whether the words, ‘I should like to hear some music,’ mean what they appear to mean, or merely, ‘At this moment I should like to forget myself.’ ” Now that the distinction between the two has all but vanished, listeners hoping to remember themselves—as well as their time, place, and context in cultural history—have to stick to a strategy.

While writing this post, I had to walk over to the turntable and flip the LP to the other side, and play a second LP too.  Mindful listening is my strategy.  What's yours?

25 Years of Dignity

I suppose I inherited from my father the gene that makes me a compulsive planner.  Of course, the "gene" that makes me a compulsive planner doesn't exist.  It is a behavior, which means that it can be easily changed as well.  Planners can become impulsive, and non-planners can learn to plan ahead.

It is a fine line that separates planning for one's life from the person becoming a worrywart.  While worries about the future are incentives to plan ahead, those worries can also preclude constructive action.  I like to think that I am a planner who thinks ahead as much as possible, fully aware that shit happens.  Like an unplanned career-ending layoff.  Planning ahead prepares us for the shit that can happen anytime, anywhere.  One of life's greatest lessons is that rarely does anything go according to plans. We can at least mitigate the effects that can otherwise be disastrous.

Planning is different from overthinking, especially because "excessive planning can have other negative effects including exacerbating worries."

For instance, when planning carefully, it’s tempting to try to predict all the things that could possibly interfere with a plan and how to potentially handle such events should they occur, thereby initiating a process of worry. Others plan meticulously because they believe that they won’t be able to cope otherwise, which can lead to excessive worries when planning isn’t possible or unexpected events arise.

Unexpected events always arise.  Life is a series of events over which we rarely have any control, though we like to claim agency when the outcomes are good.

While a career-ender is one thing, end of life is completely another.  There is no escaping death that awaits us all.  How does one plan for death?  Should one plan for that final event?  We plan for retirement.  We develop plans to travel, even if all it means is developing a bucket list.  Shouldn't one plan for kicking the bucket too?

Like many, I hope that I will quickly and painlessly go at a sweet spot in life.  As one who compulsively plans, I have been an ardent supporter of dying with dignity.  Should my physical and/or health conditions fail, I want to be able to exit this world with dignity. 

It is not a coincidence that my first newspaper commentary after moving to Oregon was in support of the state's Death with Dignity Act, which the "pro-life" Republicans were all too keen on dismantling.

If you think that only recently have Republicans gone off the deep end, I need to remind you about the Terry Schiavo tragedy in the public sphere.  It was godawful. 

Schiavo was a young woman whose medical conditions resulted in an irreversible vegetative state.  Her husband was ready to release her from this suspended state, but her parents opposed and sued.  When the courts agreed that Terry Schiavo would have wanted the doctors to unplug her from the machines, Republicans took it up as cause célèbre. 

From DC--yes, the same Republicans who yell and scream that Washington should not dictate--Republican senators adamantly stood against pulling her plug, in order to defend the sanctity of human life.  Their leader in the Senate at that time, Bill Frist, who is a Harvard medical school product, even made his own diagnosis--without having ever met the patient!  Not to be left out, President W. tried to influence the case through his executive authority.

I tell ya, the GOP has been home to nothing but nutcases and maniacs.  That is how we ended up with tRump and trumpism!

Finally, after almost two decades in a vegetative state, Schiavo died in 2005 when the court-ordered removal of feeding tubes was carried out. 

By then I was already an Oregonian.  And had already authored an op-ed on the state's Death With Dignity Act.  I wrote that in late 2002, soon after I moved to Oregon in response to the Bush administration's effort to overturn the Oregon law.  That effort was led by a religious fanatic John Ashcroft, who was the then Attorney General.

How many terminally ill patients in Oregon chose to exit this planet on their own terms?

It is easy to answer that question: "The Act requires the Oregon Health Authority (OHA) to collect information about the patients and physicians who participate in the Act and to publish an annual statistical report."  Last year:

As of January 21, 2022, 238 people had died in 2021 from ingesting the prescribed medications, including 20 who had received prescriptions in previous years. Demographic characteristics of DWDA patients were similar to those of previous years: most patients were aged 65 years or older (81%) and white (95%). The most common diagnosis was cancer (61%), followed by neurological disease (15%) and heart disease (12%)

And over the years?

In the "local" newspaper (not really local for a couple of years now) a local politician writes: "This month marks the 25th anniversary of Oregon's Death With Dignity Act; in approving the law, Oregon was the first state to authorize medical aid in dying."

The commentary is in line with my preference--it makes it personal.

My mother was a member of the Hemlock Society and taught me from an early age how critical it is for all of us to have agency over our bodies, our lives and our deaths. ...

Inspired by my mother’s example, I have begun end-of-life conversations with my children and family in the hopes that I can provide them with the gift of peace that my mother gave me. In honor of this important anniversary, I encourage my fellow Oregonians to do the same.

Not only Oregonians; I hope people think about these issues wherever they live.  After all, death does not care for geography.

At the very least, we could all benefit from having the most difficult conversations and making clear one's end of life choices, of which Death with Dignity or going to Zurich are at the far end of the continuum.  After all, we talk shit all the time.  We have time for sports. We talk endlessly about the only President who was impeached twice.  We talk forever about the weather, for heaven's sake.  We definitely have time for this important conversation.

If you want some ideas on how to go about having such a talk with your people, check out the resources here. 

In the meanwhile, enjoy the precious gift of life!

Pride and Patriotism

In this post a couple of days ago, on identity politics, I wrote that in order to constructively go forward:

First, vote out the wannabe fascists wherever you have the right to vote!

And then, compel the political leaders to articulate an inclusive vision that allows for distinct identities within national identities even as we work together as a global humanity. 

What does that mean?  As always, I will end up being autoethnographic in exploring that.

One of my early memories of Hindi, from my early years deep in peninsular India, was from when mother asked the gurkha why he was coming by way early in the night to check on the property, instead of coming much later.  She spoke to him in Hindi.

I was shocked.  Mother knew Hindi?  And, like most kids, I was impressed.  Mothers do know everything!

I never bothered to learn the language, other than during the mandatory couple of years of Hindi language in school.  The older I grew, the more I hated the very thought of learning Hindi, because, by then I had learnt a little bit about the long and rich history of Tamil, and about the politics of imposing Hindi upon us non-Hindi people.

Decades have gone by since those years in Neyveli.  And I have become more fanatical about this issue.  So much was the anti-Hindi sentiment inside me that even in graduate school in Los Angeles, if a couple of Indian students spoke in Hindi when I was also with them, I would let them know that I didn't know Hindi.  The assumption that anybody from India knows Hindi--and should know the language--has always pissed me off to no end.

Understanding the world a lot more has also made me realize that forcing a new language upon people is one of the oldest successful strategies that bastards have always employed.  The stories echo all over the world: From the native peoples in the Americas who were systematically forced to learn alien European languages and, in the process, render dead their own languages, to the Russification in the old Soviet bloc, to the Chinese treatment of Uighurs, to ...

Nine years ago, I quoted this:

A single generation of English education suffices to break the threads of tradition and to create a nondescript and superficial being deprived of all roots

Forcing a language upon people is one of the easiest ways to erase history and tradition.

I have ranted about this issue for a long time.  Perhaps all the easier for me, not because I have been an American for a long time, but because I have always believed that "Indian" is an artificial construct.  Being an American feels more real than the "Indian" that I was.  The political unit of India was where my discomfort was.  

I came to believe that it was a terrible idea to have created an artificial “India” and an artificial “Indian.” Until the British Raj, there was no single political unit that encompassed the geography that we refer to as India. Until the colonization by Europeans, the Subcontinent was like any other place on the planet, with kingdoms large and small. Kingdoms and cultures with long and rich histories. All that history was rudely interrupted by colonization. Centuries of cultural identities were thrown out under a new term called “Indian” in a country called "India."

I had nothing in common with the people from, say, Nagaland or Kashmir.  I could not understand why such an artificial union was created.

Thus, I am not surprised at the intense opposition that continues to grow in Tamil Nadu against the current Hindu Raj's Home Minister and his push for Hindi.    If only the Hindu nationalists who want to force Hindi in every corner of India even half-understood that "to know Tamil" can also mean "to be a civilized human being."

To celebrate my Tamil identity is not the same as demeaning other identities.  To champion Tamil does not mean that I am jingoistic to the extent that I want to force others to be like me.  I have always been suspicious about cries of nationalism.  How could an accidental birth determine everything political?

Nationalism is a danger, especially when such rhetoric spews from the mouths of demagogues.  Over the years, the flag-waving nationalism has gotten me quite worried.  The backdrop of the Soviet Union and Hitler's Germany always remind me that flag-waving mobs don't work out well for humanity.  Yet, here we are in the age of tRump and his base, who cannot see the difference between pride and patriotism versus nationalism.

To wrap this up, I will quote, again, Mario Vargas Llosa:

I believe that the great danger in our age is nationalism, it’s no longer fascism, nor communism. These ideologies have become completely outdated. But in contrast, nationalism is a defect that is always there under the surface and above all, at moments of crisis, can be very easily exploited by demagogues and power-hungry leaders. Nationalism is the great tradition of humankind; unfortunately it’s always present in history.
And so, I believe that it’s the great enemy of democracy. It’s the great enemy of freedom and a terrible source of racism. If one believes that being born into or forming part of a particular community is a privilege, then that is racism. I believe that one must fight nationalism energetically if one believes in democracy, in freedom, especially in this age of mixing and the building of great blocks.

Click here for the backstory about this

A blessing in disguise?

The unplanned exit from the teaching job has had plenty of repercussions.  From where I live to what I do every single day to even when I travel to India.  There is no paid job to attend to, which means I begin every day with a blank slate.  My visits to India are no longer restricted to the winter and summer breaks between academic terms. 

Upsides are in plenty, but it does not mean that I am going to send a thank-you card to my former employer.  After all, a layoff is a layoff.

The exit from teaching has also politically liberated me. 

When I was employed, I did not want students to think about my political leanings when we explored and discussed various issues in economic geography.  Whether we like it or not, and whether it is true or not when it comes to individuals, we associate political parties with cut-and-dried positions on issues, and I could be guilty by association with any particular party.  (Many faculty colleagues found me guilty because I did not associate with their party.)

But, my job--and my personality too--was all about the nuances that I wanted students to think about.  Politics almost always precludes nuances.  So much so that a former President, a Republican he was, famously said that he doesn't do nuance.  What a shame!

Let me give you an example.  Consider offshoring of jobs.  It is considered a bad, bad thing here in the US that multinational  corporations outsource some of their operations to countries like India or Vietnam.  The stereotype is that the Democratic Party is the one that cares about labor and working conditions, and that it caters to labor unions that are opposed to such outsourcing.  On the other side, the GOP is viewed as being pro-business and, therefore, it does not care about people who lose jobs as a result of offshoring.

Not that there is no truth in these representations.  Offshoring often leads to people losing their jobs.  Corporations benefit when operations are shifted to low-cost countries.  But, there is a lot more to the offshoring issue. 

For instance, I wanted students to consider the economic status of India or Vietnam, where people are desperate for jobs.  Is there any secular or religious law that grants Americans the rights to those jobs, and that Indians and Vietnamese should not pursue those?  Wouldn't Americans benefit from the lower costs of doing business in India and Vietnam?  Should we not care about the much poorer India and Vietnam?

In the newspaper commentaries that I authored, including about offshoring, I often explored the grey areas in our collective issues.  If everything were black and white, then it is remarkably easy to formulate public policies.  But, our collective issues are complex, and developing public policies is not easy.  Just as in the classroom, here too I was more interested in making people consider the nuances and not fall into the trap of the stereotypical political party talking points.

After the layoff, I no longer have a responsibility to educate anybody.  Local newspapers are dead, and it has been a long time I wrote any commentary in that media.  I write here, and I assume that regular readers and any accidental reader are like me who want to think about things. 

I have been freed, which is why earlier this year I changed my affiliation in my voter registration.  I came out of the political closet and I don't care anymore 😉

Ireland. US. UK.

It began in Ireland.  In 2017.

In 2021, it (almost) happened in the US.

And it is the UK's turn now in 2022.

What is the "it?"  An offspring of an Indian immigrant being elected to the highest office.

In June 2017, in this blog-post: I commented on Leo Varadkar becoming the Prime Minister of  Ireland.  What made that so special for me to blog about it?  

Mr. Varadkar was born in Dublin in 1979, the son of an Irish Catholic nurse from County Waterford and a Hindu doctor from Mumbai, India. His parents met in England in the 1960s and lived in India for a time before moving to Ireland.

A son of an Indian immigrant in Ireland goes on to become the country's leader, at a young 38 years of age.

In fall 2020, a daughter of an Indian immigrant to the US, Kamala Harris, became the Democratic Party's nominee for the vice presidency, and in January 2021 she was sworn into that office.  A heartbeat away from the presidency.  (This would not have been possible without Barack Obama as the president for two full terms.)

And now, in the UK, a son of Indian immigrants is on the verge of becoming the country's Prime Minister.  Rishi Sunak was the last candidate standing in the chaotic and confusing political race to become the country's third prime minister this year.

Plenty will be written by pundits and historians on Sunak as the Prime Minister noting the many firsts.  As much as I am thrilled that people of Indian descent have been elected to such high offices, I want to remind myself and anybody reading this post about how wrong Republicans in this country are, as much as Conservatives were in the UK.  The reactionaries falsely believe that immigration is bad, especially when they are brown-skinned.

In the UK, when browns like Sunak's parents started arriving in large numbers starting in the 1960s, a leading Conservative Party leader, Enoch Powell, made a loud and racist speech on April 20,1968, that is referred to as the "Rivers of Blood" speech.

Powell said that if immigration to Britain from the country’s former colonies continued, a violent clash between white and black communities was inevitable. “As I look ahead,” Powell said, “I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood,’” an allusion to a line in Virgil’s Aeneid. He maintained that it would not be enough to close Britain’s borders—some of the immigrants already settled in the country would need to be sent “home.” If not, he declared, attributing a quote to one of his constituents, “in this country, in 15 or 20 years’ time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.”

Note his worry that "the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.”  Given the minority status of the browns, why would Powell worry that browns would gain that much power?  Isn't it easy for an overwhelming majority to easily keep the browns under control in a country where Winston Churchill famously declared his intention to “Keep England White”?  What were Powell and his sympathizers worried about?

Powell, and his fellow passengers on the political Titanic, knew something that is not explicitly stated in their anti-brown rhetoric: "the fear was not that immigrants wouldn’t integrate: the fear was that they would."

Immigrants, especially the children of immigrants, integrate into society, so much so that in a liberal democracy they too stand an equal chance of getting elected into offices, including the highest office in the land.  Fifty-four years after Powell's speech, a son of immigrants of Indian origin is making history after getting elected as the leader of the Conservative Party, and will soon be sworn in as the Prime Minister.

Here in the US too, racist conservatives know well that a fully-functioning liberal democracy provides equal opportunity to non-whites too.  Like Powell, they too worry that "the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.” 

Unlike Powell, these American racists have, therefore, launched a full-fledged assault on liberal democracy itself.  Refusing to accept election results, carrying out a coup attempt on January 6th, gerrymandering districts in order to retain power, rigging local election laws, and more are their ways to kill liberal democracy that could make possible for browns and supporters of browns to gain political power.

They might succeed.  But their success will be short-lived.  Progress is unstoppable.  Sunak is the latest piece of evidence along what MLK referred to as the moral arc of the universe.  We should do our part by voting for progress.  The future is ours!

A festival of lights

It is Deepavali time in India, and anywhere in the world that the Hindu, Jain, and Sikh diaspora celebrates it.

I can't even recall the last time I celebrated this Hindu festival, or any festival for that matter.  The high holy days in every religion are to this atheist reminders to pause our lives in which we pursue material comforts and to spend a few minutes to 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, similar to how I keep track of football and baseball scores even though I don't really follow any team or sport.  (I suppose it is blasphemous to put sports and religion on the same plane.)

I am intentionally using the word Deepavali because that is what we said during my years back in the old country.  But, perhaps the more common usage is "Diwali."

"Diwali" annoys my sensibilities for one highly frustrating reason--there is no "w" sound in the Indian languages. 

Sanskrit and its offsprings, and the Dravidian languages too, do not have a "w" sound that we run into in English, which is why many of us from that part of the world end up pronouncing, for instance, wax as vax or van as wan.   It took me a while to get over the v/w pronunciation hassle, and even now sometimes it trips me up. 

When Diwali is written in Hindi (दिवाली) it is a "v." "தீபாவளி" in Tamil has the letter for "v"--there is no "w" in Tamil!   Hence, Diwali should be spelled with a "v" and pronounced with that "v" sound as Divali.  I wonder why the old country's grammarians were so lax with introducing "w" where it does not belong.  When in doubt, blame the British I say!  

Why overthink the "w" in Diwali, you might ask.  Why not simply shrug my shoulders and move on, right?  Especially when I don't even observe Deepavali like we used to when I was a kid.  But, hey, thinking and overthinking is all that I can do.  You, more than me, should be worried if I stop thinking!

Anyway, back to Deepavali.

I suppose it doesn't matter if it is Deepavali or Diwali.  Nor does it matter if you are a Hindu, or a Scientologist or even an atheist.  It is merely yet another reason to enjoy eating sweets.  Like this one:

Source

Americans might think these are "doughnut holes" .... nope.  These are "vella cheedai"

Meanwhile, Indians reading this are wondering how one can make and sell "holes." Only in America! 😁

Mother made phenomenal sweets for Deepavali.  My favorites were the cashew sweet and the gulab-jamuns that she made.  In the days leading up to Deepavali, my brother and I often swung by the kitchen and the pantry areas whenever mother was not around and gobbled up sweets that were off-limits to us until the big day arrived. 

That past is a contrast to the contemporary life in which sweets are rarely made at home.  Stores sell them every single day, and there is nothing special about any sweet anymore.  Abundance has killed the precious value of everything including sweets.  In my adopted land, which is the global poster-child for abundance and consumption, the diaspora can even buy sweets that no grandmother ever made in India, like this one, which is "sandwich gulab jamun filled with sweetened milk solids."

Source

The increasing number of Hindu, Jain, and Sikh immigrants has resulted in New York declaring that "the festival represents the victory of light over dark, good over evil and knowledge over ignorance" will be an official holiday in New York schools.  And, yes, the Indian-American Vice-President held a Diwali weekend.

Have an awesomely sweet day, and may light drive out the literal and metaphorical darkness.

Identity Politics

The UK will soon get its third Prime Minister in a matter of three months.  Fifth one in six years.

After the Brexit vote, when Leave beat Remain by 52 to 48, I commented:

A referendum that was heard around the world. This will certainly have enormous repercussions throughout the world, for years to come. An event perhaps as important as the Berlin Wall coming down ... Real life is always infinitely more unpredictable than we can ever imagine.

I was cheering for Brexit, but for a reason that I have been warning about for years.  A reason that is common to both Brexit and tRump and trumpism here in the US: The loss of the importance of geographic and national identities in a rapidly globalizing economy.

Back in 2014, which now feels like eons ago, I was cheering for Scotland to quit the "united" kingdom.  Yes, of course, I want even the remnants of the old empire to crumble to dust.  That will be poetic justice. And I will continue to laugh at jokes like this one: A demon took a monkey to wife – the result by the Grace of God was the English.

But that was not why I cheered Scotland on.  I wrote then:

I am all in support of an independent Scotland for a very simple reason.  We are so much wrapped up with the idea of globalization that we forget we are humans and we like, we love, identities.  Identities especially when there is a long and rich history of the peoples.  Economics--being materially well off--does matter to us, yes.  But, we seem to overlook that we do not live on bread alone.  There is a lot more than mere material satisfaction that makes us human.  Identity--religious, ethnic, linguistic, ... and often these are also intertwined.

That was in 2014.

The post did not go well with one commenter, and I piled on:

My point was that economics aside, people have plenty of other values that cannot (and should not) be monetized. If they value that, and if they want to express that by wanting to go "Scot free" then more power to them. I assume they know what they want and what they are getting into. 

I would point to my old country as an example of a very high price being paid in order to maintain an artificial entity called India. There was no "India" in history and is a creation of the British. Up until the British Raj, those lands had different cultures, traditions, languages, religions, ... One of the worst decisions that the strong man Patel did was to force those who did not want to join the union by even employing the military.

I built on this as the Brexit vote neared in 2016:

The challenge, as I see it, is to figure out how to understand each other and engage in constructive cross-cultural relationships even while holding on to the identities and without making those identities as a metric for hierarchical comparisons.  The solution is not to erase the identities but to understand that we can create a much better future even as we tightly embrace whatever identity that we want to hold on to.

But, this was a challenge that the left-of-center did not take up.  The right-of-center wholeheartedly embraced it because they found a divisive issue on which they could stir up the emotions.

Going further back, to 2011, I quoted one of my favorite political economic thinkers, Joseph Stiglitz, who wrote:

Of all the costs imposed on our society by the top 1 percent, perhaps the greatest is this: the erosion of our sense of identity, in which fair play, equality of opportunity, and a sense of community are so important.

Way back, in 2006, I authored a newspaper commentary, in which I wrote:

We have been so wrapped up with our fascination with globalization that maybe we assumed that ours is a homogenous world. On the contrary, we have different languages, religions, beliefs, histories. And sometimes, people want explicit recognition of those differences.

So, yes, I have been talking and writing about this forever.

No new prime minister will be able to immediately provide a sense of identity and a sense of community.  Inflation and the cost of heating as winter descends will further agitate Britons of every political stripe.  Should Vlad the Aggressor decide to go nuclear in his failing war against Ukraine, the UK will be torn apart by domestic and foreign agendas.

Meanwhile, here in the US, the far right wants to clearly establish an American identity as nothing but white, Christian, and heterosexual, exactly as Jesus and the Constitution intended!  The old country is bulldozing its way to defining India as Hindu.  In China, you can be whatever you want to be as long as you do not talk about being a Muslim or a Uighur or protest for freedom.

Where do we go from here?

Moral clarity makes it simple: First, vote out the wannabe fascists wherever you have the right to vote! 

And then, compel the political leaders to articulate an inclusive vision that allows for distinct identities within national identities even as we work together as a global humanity.  In the old country, we were fed a line in the civics curriculum: Unity in diversity.  Here in the US, some of us cherish e pluribus unum as the real and only motto.

Otherwise, I need to remind you of this: "We have met the enemy and he is us."

Just do it

A good chunk of the city is excited about tomorrow (Saturday.)  A crowd is coming and all the hotels are sold out. 

No, it is not that Oregonians have decided that Deepavali (Diwali) should be celebrated like how we do Thanksgiving, when families drive and fly from all around and gather for a few hours before they start fighting about the issues that keeps them apart for a good part of the year.

The reason is a lot bigger than religion.  The excitement can be seen among many of the faithful and among many irreligious, atheist, people too.

It is a big day in college football!

The local team is ranked in the top ten, and so is the visiting team, which is why even the sports broadcaster is all pumped up.

I,  for one, couldn't give a fuck!  Well, ok, I have plenty to give, which is why I am blogging about it.

In a number of posts in this blog, for more than a decade, I have quoted Katha Pollitt over and over again:

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.

College football is yet another American exceptionalism at play (yes, pun intended.)

Football maniacs do not seem to understand that the economic future of the state and its peoples depend not on whatever happens with the football team, but on the employment conditions in economic activities from machine shops to semiconductor factories.  Academic quality and reputation of our universities—public and private—is an important ingredient to this effort.  Relegating academics--the very reason for the existence of universities--to the dark background will certainly not be a winning formula for the future of Oregonians.

But, neither the rabidly MAGA Republican in an economically depressed area like Coos Bay nor a rabidly Berniac in Eugene could be bothered with that logic.  Polarized they are on political issues, but they come together for communion before the football gods.

I have been complaining about these issues for a long, long time.  After I restarted this blog in 2008, one of the earliest posts was about college football.  An anonymous person left a comment that says it all about how much this religion shall not be insulted.  The comment also reflects the average intelligence of these maniacs.  Anonymous wrote: "You are a dumb dyke"

For a couple of years I had fun comparing the ranking of the football powerhouses with their academic ranking, like in this post from 2008.   I could use the same method even now.

The local and visiting football teams are ranked 9 and 10 (or 10 and 9) in the polls.  Let's compare their academic ranks, shall we?

The local team is ranked 105 by US News.  The visiting university is the 20th best in the country.  Not even a close contest, right?

(The university where I earned my PhD, which has a long history as a football team, is ranked as the 25th best university in the country.)

The local team is bankrolled by the founder of Nike.  Yes, just do it!  The founder, pHil kNight, is also opposed to progressive policies. 

Foaming-in-the-mouth, so to speak, kNight funds candidates on the right in order to defeat Democratic candidates.  This November, he will celebrate success if the Democratic Party's candidate loses in the gubernatorial race.

#pHilKnight, #Oregon’s richest man, bought himself a university #football team. He is now buying a #governor. https://t.co/Fvrs2nDWzc

— Sriram K (@congoboy) October 15, 2022

The Republican candidate for governor is thrilled to be such a close contender in a blue state.  She has promised to use her veto powers in order to stop progressive policies.  I expect the MAGA football fan to be ecstatic at this divine intersection of football and politics.  How about the football nutcases who call themselves progressives?

The reality is that football-crazy progressives couldn't care a shit.  As long as they are entertained by football, and as long as "their" team keeps winning, progressive politics be damned!

Will all those #liberals who are passionate about @oregonfootball and cheer #GoDucks even pause to consider the damage that #pHilKnight has done to #Oregon, and boycott the team?
I think not. After all, football is bigger than religion!

— Sriram K (@congoboy) October 15, 2022

To quote from Gladiator, "Are you not entertained?"

The luck of the draw

They wheeled me into the Procedure Room.  I think that is what I read as the nurse made a tight, right turn through the doorway.

I suppose that's what a colonoscopy is.  A procedure.  Before that process began, the doctor introduced himself.  He would have known about my India roots from my name and looks.  His name, too, was distinctly Indian, and most likely Tamil.  But, this was not the place to talk about our Indian connections.  It was the Procedure Room.

Is there any colorectal cancer history in my family, he asked.

Thankfully, there is none.

The blood-related extended family has a pretty solid health record, which is why there are many who have outlived the average life expectancy for their cohorts.  Even during my recent extended visit to India, I talked about this with my parents.  When chatting about these health issues, my parents are always thankful--and so am I--that there is no history of dementia through the generations that they can recall.

Whether or not there is a genetic component in dementia is immaterial to me.  It immensely comforts me that for quite a few generations men and women have lived long enough without losing their sense of self.  We have lucked out. 

But I don't want to be the first either.

I have always been terrified of Alzheimer's.  One does not have to look beyond this blog for posts on this issue. 

Way back, when I was barely thirty years old, which was the first time that I worked out a legal document on end-of-life preferences, I told the attorney friend that my greatest worry was that I would end up with dementia. With Alzheimer's. Dennis laughed.  "Alzheimer's won't be your problem at all, but somebody else's."

Of course I do not want to end up being a burden to somebody. That is secondary, however.  I worry about the scenario where I am no longer aware of who I am.  The body being here without the mind not knowing the self is a nightmare that I would rather not have.  To be unable to recognize friends and family, or being unable to recall whether I had breakfast leave alone what I had for breakfast ... it is not a simple Halloween scare.

I got a sample of that disease after I was wheeled out of the Procedure Room: I have no memory of wearing my clothes, putting my shoes on, walking out, being driven home, having lunch, and talking throughout to the point of repeating things.  Not even one of those activities I remember having done, yet I apparently did.  To live like that day after day, for years, is a scare that I hope I will successfully dodge like how my bloodline has done in the past.

As one who loves living the life of the mind, and with thinking as my profession and hobby, I shudder to think that I could lose it and then be around without actually being around.  I have been waiting for some kind of a development that would nuke Alzheimer's before it actually begins.

When I moved to Oregon, my first commentary in a newspaper was about the state's Death with Dignity law.  That wonderful legal structure does not apply to Alzheimer's because of the requirement of a diagnosis of a terminal disease with a statistical probability of death within six months.  While Alzheimer's is terminal in many ways, there's no definitive six-month time frame.  Oregon's Death with Dignity does not offer anything for a person like me who doesn't want to exist with the dreaded disease.

One can, therefore, see why I would want to read Amy Bloom's memoir, In Love.  Bloom writes about "her husband's [Alzheimer's] diagnosis and her quest to help him end his life in the manner he chose."  Bloom's husband, Brian Ameche, chose to exit on his own terms by going to Zurich, Switzerland, where he could legally get medical assistance to end his life.

Ameche wanted Bloom to write about this, and she did.  It will be a tough read, I am sure.  I hope that I would never need a one-way ticket to Zurich.

As I was wrapping up this post came the news that a 10-month old baby of a friend died.  The baby was born with Down Syndrome.  Life is godawful sometimes!

The tragic death of that 10-month old is relevant also because of the connection between Down Syndrome and Alzheimer's, which I blogged about in 2014:

Down syndrome is a genetic disorder that's best known for causing intellectual disability. But it also causes Alzheimer's. "By the age of 40, 100 percent of all individuals with Down syndrome have the pathology of Alzheimer's in their brain," [Michael Rafii director of the Memory Disorders Clinic at UCSD] says.

I will end by re-posting the video of Seth Rogen canvassing the US Senate for funding for Alzheimer's research.  I wish that scientists will crack the case soon.

Fasting for a cause

I fast every day.  It is true. Ten, maybe even eleven, long hours every single day. Which is why I am always surprised when people make a big deal out of their fasting rituals.  Bah humbug!

My daily fasting is a part of my regimented life.  Dinner and dessert/snacking is usually done by eight in the night.  And the eating/drinking starts again the following morning at about six.  Ten long hours of fasting, you see? 

This is how our biology is supposed to work.  We animals lived in the tropics close to the equator, and our lives were determined by sunrise and sunset.  There was no concept of noshing on Cheetos while binge-watching yet another show on one of the many streaming channels. 

In the old country, there were a couple of holy days when some people, including in my immediate and extended family, fasted for 24-hours.  They did that for religious reasons.  Sacrificing one's food in order to remember and praise their favorite god, and to also be thankful for the foods that they were able to have.  I was always happy that we kids were exempted from this ritual, and I did not have to forego any meal ever.  Why can't the religious have sumptuous meals and thank their gods, and why do they fast instead?

Now, for the first time ever, I am fasting.

No, it is not any Damascene conversion.  No come-to-Jesus moment.

The fasting, with restricted intake of clear liquids, is mandatory prep for the colonoscopy that I have avoided all these years.

After I turned fifty, when I went to meet the physician for a health check up, he raised the issue of checking my prostate.

It was a butt-clenching moment.  "Do I really have to get that done?" I asked him.

I am sure he has heard that from many men.  We men are wimps.  Women routinely get their breasts pushed and stuffed into machines in order to get themselves checked for breast cancer.  They lie down on tables for pap-smear-tests.  But, once in a rare while when we men have to undergo an uncomfortable examination that is intended for our own good, we become wimps.  Big time wusses, we are.  At least, I am.

"If there is no family history of cancer at a young age, then it might be ok to skip it" the good doctor replied.  I could have hugged him for that, but then I am a man and we men stay away from expressing our true emotions.

It turned out that a hug would have been premature anyway. 

The doctor added: "when you go in for a colonoscopy, you can tell the doctor to check your prostate also.  Make it a two-in-one."

Like I really needed that twofer!

From what I knew about the procedure, there was nothing that is attractive.  To first drink a horribly tasting liquid which then forcefully evacuates the insides, after which a doctor sends a tube with a camera up from the rear end while I am sedated comes across more as how the likes of Dick Cheney love to torture whoever they label as terrorists. 

I should note for the record that despite my looks and accent, well, I am no terrorist!

After having failed to convince me over the years, a few months ago, the good doctor recommended another procedure.  In this option, I would have to collect my excrement and send the parcel to a lab. 

In a moment of weakness, when my defenses were down, I agreed with him.

A few days after that visit to the doctor's office, the collection kit arrived.  I watched the video on how to use it, and I immediately knew that I couldn't go through it.

But then, a man has gotta do what a man has gotta do.  I signed up for a colonoscopy.

The day prior I fasted.

In the middle of my fasting, I got a call from the colonoscopy office.  Among other things, they wanted to make sure that I had not eaten anything, and that I was following the instructions.

"I am hungry like crazy, and I am dreaming of foods that I want to eat.  But, nope, I haven't had anything," I told them.  I imagined in my mind the Charlie Chaplin character in Gold Rush.  And then the restaurant scene in City Lights.  I was ready for a food fight like in Great Dictator!  I suppose I have seen a few Charlie Chaplin movies in my life.

The wuss abides, as he always does.  "Will be there on time tomorrow," I said.  For the twofer!

Do not try to talk to me after I am dead

Many years ago, back when I was a professor before my former employer laid me off in a Zoom session, a student asked me a simple question.  Why are science fiction movies always dystopian, she asked.

I was not teaching any course that dealt with science fiction.  As it happens in any class discussion, we had taken a detour.  This time, it was about The Matrix.  She then came to my office to continue to talk about that movie and the larger issue of the dark futures in science fiction movies.

As I did when any student asked me a question, I led her to explore it on her own by posing additional questions.  She was one of the few students who liked reading and thinking, and she wrote well too, which was unusual.  (Later, a couple of terms into graduate school, in an email she appreciated how much another faculty and I had prepared her, and how many of her classmates found it difficult to write quality papers in the grad program.)

Perhaps I led her on a path that I preferred, and she concluded that science fiction is typically dystopian because that's what makes them interesting.  Happy forever does not ring true.

The dystopian science fiction suggests that a future with abundance, and free of diseases and other causes of displeasure, is not one that we might enjoy.  It is a strange notion that troubles, pain, suffering, help provide us with meaning to our lives and ease our existential angst.  And that is what we read and see in science fiction too.

It used to be that science fiction writers, movie-makers, were men.  Well, most of the storytelling, especially in movies, was by men.

(In the case of The Matrix, the two brothers who came up with the movie and directed it later went through gender transition: Andy Wachowski transitioned to Lilly Wachowski, Larry became Lana.  They now go as the Wachowski sisters.)

Vauhini Vara's The Immortal King Rao is dystopian.  A dystopian work of fiction that is authored by a woman.  But this is not really new, even in this blog.  A few months ago, I wrote about Tahmima Anam's The Startup Wife.  While not truly dystopian, this female-authored novel wants readers to think about the direction in which software is leading us. 

In the not too far future that Vara fictionalizes, technology seems to have developed enough to upload one's consciousness. In Anam's story, technology allows people to communicate with the dead.

Do we want such a future?

MIT Technology Review--clearly not from the world of fiction--asks: "Technology that lets us “speak” to our dead relatives has arrived. Are we ready? Digital clones of the people we love could forever change how we grieve."

No longer in the future.  It "has arrived."

The author of that essay is Charlotte Jee, and Charlotte is conventionally a female name.  Everywhere I turn, I see female authors!

Jee writes about testing out an app called HereAfterAI.  "The company’s goal is to let the living communicate with the dead."

For some, this tech may even be alarming, or downright creepy. I spoke to one man who’d created a virtual version of his mother, which he booted up and talked to at her own funeral. Some people argue that conversing with digital versions of lost loved ones could prolong your grief or loosen your grip on reality. And when I talked to friends about this article, some of them physically recoiled. There’s a common, deeply held belief that we mess with death at our peril. 

I understand these concerns. I found speaking to a virtual version of my parents uncomfortable, especially at first. Even now, it still feels slightly transgressive to speak to an artificial version of someone—especially when that someone is in your own family.

But I’m only human, and those worries end up being washed away by the even scarier prospect of losing the people I love—dead and gone without a trace. If technology might help me hang onto them, is it so wrong to try?

Yes.  It is wrong.

AI has progressed in its ability to mimic specific physical voices, a practice called voice cloning. It has also been getting better at injecting digital personas—whether cloned from a real person or completely artificial—with more of the qualities that make a voice sound “human.” In a poignant demonstration of how rapidly the field is progressing, Amazon shared a clip in June of a little boy listening to a passage from The Wizard of Oz read by his recently deceased grandmother. Her voice was artificially re-created using a clip of her speaking that lasted for less than a minute. 

As Rohit Prasad, Alexa’s senior vice president and head scientist, promised: “While AI can’t eliminate that pain of loss, it can definitely make the memories last.”

Don't these scientists have real and urgent problems to address?  Like fighting climate change?  Or finding a cure for cancer?

“The biggest issue with the [existing] technology is the idea you can generate a single universal person,” says Justin Harrison, founder of a soon-to-launch service called You, Only Virtual. “But the way we experience people is unique to us.” ...

The first incarnation of the service, which is set to launch in early 2023, will allow people to build a bot by uploading someone’s text messages, emails, and voice conversations.

Storytellers have always warned us about a dystopian scientific future.  I suppose the future always arrives faster than we expect.

Care for a crisis?

My grandmothers did not work outside the home; they worked like hell inside.  At home, among other work, they took care of the children they gave birth to.  But, they didn't do it all by themselves.

Consider my Sengottai grandmother. Her life was in a joint family--a multi-generational household in which the matriarch lived with her daughter and son-in-law, and their sons and daughters-in-law.  My grandmother was one of the two daughters-in-law.

When my grandmother had kids--four of them, and all daughters--she was not the only one taking care of the girls.  Depending on the time of the day, there were other family members who attended to the infant or the toddler.

After getting married, my mother was practically in a nuclear family setting.  (In their later and final years, both grandmothers lived with us.)  During their visits, grandmas helped out in the kitchen and with the kids.  And, yes, my mother too did not work outside the home.

All these mean that neither my mother nor my grandmother ever had any worry about child care for their kids.

But then those were the old days when a woman's role was tightly circumscribed. 

However, at first gradually, and then suddenly, conditions for women changed in India too. 

Most of my parents' younger female cousins went to college.  A couple of them started working as professionals, as teachers and physicians.  So, of course, there was no doubt that my sister would go to college, and that was the case with all my cousins too.

It is such changes throughout the old country that made possible the wonderful image of women rocket scientists celebrating their achievement in India's space program.

Did those women scientists have to worry about child care for their kids?  My hypothesis is that they did not.  I don't know their back stories.  But, chances are good that if those scientists are also mothers, then child care was never a big worry for them.  Grandparents, almost always grandmothers, took care of the young ones while the parents were off at work.

Of course, that is not the case here in the United States.

Living as nuclear families is the norm here in the US.  Sometimes the nucleus is a single-parent, surrounded by electron children.  (I know, I should stop here with this metaphor!)  It is also not unusual for the nuclear family to be far away from grandparents.  

There is no going back to living as joint families.  There is no going back to restricting what women can do either.  Well, in such a case, it does not take a female rocket scientist in India to figure out that we have a huge problem in this country with taking care of the young.

In such a context, is child care a personal responsibility or a social issue that has to be collectively addressed?

The two main political parties here are divided on this, as one can easily imagine. 

[Progressives] are seeking a paradigm shift. They see child care much like public education: a service on which society depends and therefore should ensure. 

“It’s a public good and should be treated that way” said Julie Kashen, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation. “The shared stake in seeing children thrive doesn’t suddenly begin when they turn five.” 

But conservatives fear government intrusion into the family realm. Rachel Greszler, an analyst with the Heritage Foundation, recently warned Congress that the measure would increase costs and drive small centers out of business, especially those based in homes and churches. She also said the policy would penalize parents who stay at home, taxing them to expand center-based care and ignoring the “tremendous personal and societal value” of full-time child-rearing.

I was/am never a fan of government-subsidies for adults to have children.  In my secular framework, having a child is a conscious (or, sometimes, an accidental) choice.  Decisions on what we choose to do have consequences.  I am not ready to agree that the consequences of personal decisions have to be shared societally.

But, I have also always believed that subsidies for human issues are far more important than subsidies for the artificially and legally constructed "persons" called corporations.

I don't suppose that the Republican Party that favors subsidizing artificial persons over real people could be bothered that Catherine Rampell says "care work is in crisis."

[Child]-care providers (whose ranks have begun shrinking again in recent months) as well as nursing and residential care facilities.
Both of these industries employ about 10 percent fewer workers today than was the case pre-pandemic. Collectively they’ve lost almost half a million jobs on net since February 2020.

It comes down to supply, demand, and price.

The need for care workers is vast. But few people are willing to take these positions, at least in exchange for the meager pay offered.

The key problem is the enormous gap between what it costs to pay a living wage, and what families can afford. Caregiving — whether for elderly patients, or young children — is extremely labor-intensive. The labor itself is emotionally and physically demanding. And care recipients often cannot absorb the full cost of these services on their own.

Corporations-loving Republicans ought to be concerned though:

Problems in the care economy cascade into every other industry. A lack of affordable care options pulls workers from other fields — especially women, who are more likely to be their families’ primary caregivers — out of the labor force.

If Republicans do not want to subsidize the child care and caring for the aged, then there is another option on which they could shift their position: Welcome immigrants!

.@margbrennan: "There are 100,000 fewer childcare workers now than...before the pandemic. Where did they go?"

"We are missing a lot of foreign-born women," says @BetseyStevenson. "Immigrant women provide a lot of childcare in this economy. And they left." https://t.co/nQnApL4MS3

— Will Saletan (@saletan) October 17, 2022

As long as we have a party that is committed to protecting the life of abstract "persons" that corporations are, and with their party faithful committed to defending the "life" of a fetus in a petri dish while not caring about investing in life that is already here alive and suffering, we are doomed.

So, what can you do?  The answer is simple: Vote like your life depends on it.