Don't go chasing waterfalls

When the context comes up--and it always comes up in any class that I teach--I remind students that they can go to a Walmart and buy whatever they can afford to, or shop online for whatever that they can afford to ... but, no retailer sells at any price something that we often talk about--happiness.

I know that my point won't register on 99.9999 percent of young people.  I am pretty darn confident that a 20-year old me would have internally chuckled at such a comment from an old, bald, and bearded man.  But, every once in a while I make such comments in class because, well, it is my responsibility.

Ok, ok, the 20-year old me was really concerned about such issues.

By then, I had read a few works of literature in order to understand life and happiness.  I was blown away with the simple and powerful opener that Leo Tolstoy had in Anna Karenina: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."  Charles Dickens and Somerset Maugham provided me with plenty to think about.  And so did Alexander Solzhenitsyn.  When helping my parents clean out their old place, I came across my old friend:

All those, in addition to the Tamil literature, and the little bit of Hindu philosophy that I had picked up, gave me insights into life.  And I now distill all those when I make those remarks to students.  Too bad if they don't want to pay attention to this bald old man!

These are also why I have always been puzzled by the American idea of the pursuit of happiness.  How can one pursue happiness?  "To constantly pursue something you can never catch is a form of madness."  I know for certain that I don't pursue it.

In practice, our strategies for finding happiness are usually self-defeating. There’s plenty of empirical evidence to suggest that much of what we do to gain happiness doesn’t pay off. It seems that aiming at happiness is always a misconceived project; happiness comes, as John Stuart Mill insisted, as the unintended outcome of aiming at something else. “The right to the pursuit of happiness,” wrote Aldous Huxley, “is nothing else than the right to disillusionment phrased in another way.”

Yet, we fool ourselves into the pursuit of happiness, and "the pursuit of happiness gave birth to the consumer society."

Thomas Jefferson lived in a world of slavery and pervasive inequality; he knew perfectly well that the world was not as it ought to be. But he believed, rightly, that a world in which people were free to pursue happiness would be one in which liberty would slowly spread, until all could benefit from it. ... But there is an important difference between us and the founding fathers. They saw life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as the alternative to despotism and intolerance. We now can see that a society devoted to self-gratification may, in the end, destroy the conditions of its own existence.

It has been a short descent from the idea of "the pursuit of happiness" to Instagram.

One day in the life of .... an Iraqi refugee

We use euphemisms to hide away the real trauma and tragedies in lives all around.  "Displaced persons" is one such sterile euphemism.  The Iraq situation has triggered the displacement of quite few, many of whom have ended up as refugees in Jordan.

How is the daily life of such a refugee in Jordan?  What were some of these refugees doing back in Iraq?  Here is one example--a photo narrative.

Yes, the title of this post is a play on Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

The atrocious Communist past

It bothers me a lot when people at Faux News simply toss around the word Communist when they disagree with Obama's policies.  Criticize for all you want, but do not casually use that Commie word because it then absolutely minimizes the extreme atrocities that occurred in the Soviet, Chinese, Albanian, and other flavors.
As a high schooler I read Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipalego and for a while I had a tough time even believing there could be horrible labor camps out there somewhere in Siberia for people who merely thought differently from what the official party line was.  It was way too outlandish for me to imagine them being real.  But they were.  As much as the Nazi concentration camps were real.
In an op-ed,  Professor Paul Hollander--who managed to flee Hungary--writes:

There is little public awareness of the large-scale atrocities, killings and human rights violations that occurred in communist states, especially compared with awareness of the Holocaust and Nazism (which led to to far fewer deaths). The number of documentaries, feature films or television programs about communist societies is minuscule compared with those on Nazi Germany and/or the Holocaust, and few universities offer courses on the remaining or former communist states. For most Americans, communism and its various incarnations remained an abstraction. ...
...  Political violence under communism had an idealistic origin and a cleansing, purifying objective. Those persecuted and killed were defined as politically and morally corrupt and a danger to a superior social system. The Marxist doctrine of class struggle provided ideological support for mass murder. People were persecuted not for what they did but for belonging to social categories that made them suspect.

Here is to hoping that Communism would never, ever, again be back in vogue. 

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died

A Socialist "third way" was Jawaharlal Nehru's plan for India, which remained in place pretty much until 1991, when liberal economic policies were introduced. With Indira Gandhi as the prime minister during most of my years in India, and with my father deeply committed to Nehru and I. Gandhi, and with political leaders and intellectuals--pseudo and real--constantly praising the USSR, for the longest time I was an avid proponent of Socialism, including the Soviet and Chinese flavors.

And then somewhere in my mid-to late teens I read three books, which I am not sure if I really understood them at that time. George Orwell's 1984, Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, and Solzhenitsyn 's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. A few years after that, I got to watch the movie version of 1984 at the British Consulate in Madras. The pot had been stirred enough. The old facades were rapidly collapsing within me, and the world started becoming clearer and clearer. To this day my parents wonder how I changed my mind and took off to America--after all, I was not a big fan of the US when I was young. I don't think they know how much Solzhenitsyn, among others, played a role.

It is not that I am a rah rah fan of America. Of all the imperfect societies that exist, I am convinced that I will gladly take the US over others. Unlike Solzhenitsyn, I do not ever consider myself to be in exile in America from any country. I suppose he was too much in poetic love with Russia for him that any soil other than Russian was only a temporary lodging. His jingoistic feelings for Russia rubbed many, including me, the wrong way, more so when he casually put down the feelings of non-Russians. And, the philosopher he was, Solzhenitsyn ought to have known that poetic love is idealized way too much that real life then is a failure. Well, he returned to Russia, only to be shocked at how impoverished the country was.

But, thanks to Solzhenitsyn, even if now I don't recall any of the specifics from The Gulag Archipelago. So, hey, thanks.