10LADs and women

It was about a year ago.  The hot summer days.  The Republican nominee for the presidency said that the news anchor at Faux News "had blood coming out of her wherever."

That was merely an addition to lots of other words and phrases he had used to describe women: Fat. Pig. Dog. Slob. Disgusting animal ...

Ah yes, the good times they were.  And they kept on coming.  And it keeps on coming, well past his advice on pussy-grabbing, thanks to 63 million Americans.

With him as the president, I have no right to comment on the state of affairs anywhere else in the world.  Those who live in glass houses ... and I am stark naked in my glass house :(

At least in the years past we pretended to worry about morals.  We Americans could claim the moral high ground as an aspiration.  But, the day to day reality now makes utter hypocrisy out of any moral finger-pointing.

The fact that we now occupy a stinking swamp having come down from the high ground does not mean, however, the world's problems have gone away though.

Consider, for instance, the death of an 18-year old girl in Nepal.  Even by itself, that death is a tragedy.  And then to think about other young women like here, only because they menstruate--you know, the "blood coming out of her wherever"--makes it terribly, terribly tragic.  All because of "a tradition known as chhaupadi that sequesters menstruating women from their families.":

The Supreme Court of Nepal ordered an end to chhaupadi, which is linked to Hinduism, in 2005. But it is still practiced in many of Nepal’s isolated villages, particularly in the west. A bill is pending in Parliament to formally criminalize the practice. Many people in rural villages believe that menstruating women are impure and can bring bad luck on a household. Under the chhaupadi tradition, the women are kept from taking part in normal family activities and social gatherings or from entering houses, kitchens and temples....
The practice has its dangers: Women must often brave winter cold or summer heat in rude huts where they are vulnerable to human and animal intruders.

Vulnerable to animals like snakes that bit that 18-year old woman who died a day after that unfortunate event.

All because of "blood coming out of her wherever."

Visualize this.  A kid might write to the President complaining about anything--from homework to stress to world peace to whatever.  From anywhere on the planet, for that matter.  (An uncle of mine wanted to name his home "White House."  So, he wrote a letter to President Eisenhower requesting his ok  And he received a formal reply stating that the President had no problems with that.)

Now, think about a Nepali girl who wants to tell the American President about this chhaupadi issue. ... you can fill in the rest!

Don't ever think that I am exaggerating such an aspect of the Presidency.  That's what the 10LADs in the subject refers to:

At the beginning of his first term, President Obama said he wanted to read his mail. He said he would like to see 10 letters a day. After that, the 10LADs, as they came to be called, were put in a purple folder and added to the back of the briefing book he took with him to the residence on the second floor of the White House each night.

Caption at the source:
In the Obama White House’s hard-mail room, each intern and staff member read and categorized 300 letters a day.

The reporter asked Obama "how he might advise Donald Trump on what to do with the mail if he were to become president."  Obama's response:

He laughed. “You know what, this is a great habit. But um, it, uh,” he said about the idea of a President Trump reading constituent mail. “I think it worked for me because it wasn’t something I did for anyone else — I did it because it ... sustained me. So maybe it will sustain others in the future.
“O.K.?”

No letter from a Nepali girl about "blood coming out of her wherever," will ever be read by this president.

Maybe those girls will write to the real leader of the free world, who personally knows well about "blood coming out of her wherever."

How do you say "dam(n) it" in Chinese ... and in Nepali too?

In case you forgot this post from just about a month ago, I quoted at length from an op-ed in which the author expressed serious concerns over China's dam building frenzy.  The author's solution was an easy and simple one:

The solution to these complex problems is simple: Since these enormous projects are state-run and state-financed, China’s leaders can cancel them at will.

That was a month back.

And then something big happened a week ago. So big it measured a 7.9 on the Richter Scale. Yes, the earthquake in Nepal.

In addition to the thousands dead, thousands missing, and the destruction to property, the quake rocked the dam world too.

Two workers at the Rasuwagadhi Hydropower station were killed and several injured in the quake, according to a statement released by the plant’s operator China Three Gorges Co.

And:

Rasuwagadhi, about 67.5 km from the quake epicentre, is one of three dams in Nepal under construction by Three Gorges Corp, according to the company’s website.

The New Yorker has a lot more analysis to offer.

Other deadly earthquakes will almost certainly strike the region, and the damage at Rasuwagadhi raises the question of whether a future quake in the Himalayas might precipitate a dam collapse that could send thousands of tons of water and rubble crashing downstream, piling horror upon catastrophe. The likelihood of such an event is growing because, simply put, more and more dams are being built in one of the world’s most active earthquake zones. More than four hundred dams are planned or are under construction in steep Himalayan valleys in China, India, Pakistan, and Bhutan, in one of the biggest waves of dam construction the world has ever seen.

More than four hundred dams?  In an earthquake area?  Where access even during the good days is not easy?  

Nepal, which has an abundance of as-yet-undammed rivers, a chronic shortage of energy (nineteen-hour blackouts are routine across the country), no spare cash, and little engineering expertise, is an obvious target for these regional investors. But then, there are the earthquakes. The Himalayas are the world’s highest and youngest mountains, the product of a slow-motion collision, fifty million years ago, between India—then an island—and the Eurasian landmass that forced what became the spectacular mountains upwards. India still pushes several inches northward a year, and stresses on the mountain region’s multiple fault lines regularly result in severe earthquakes that send avalanches crashing into steep river valleys, carrying away precarious roads, bridges, and other infrastructure.

What could possibly go wrong, right?  Oh wait, in addition to all these natural hazards, we humans add more to the stress.  The geologic stress, that is:

Geologists argue that the risks of building dams in earthquake zones go well beyond an earthquake-induced collapse. Earthquakes trigger landslides that can block rivers or change their course, which would also impact the operation of a hydrodam. But the most fiercely debated risk, since the 7.9-magnitude Sichuan earthquake in 2008, which killed seventy thousand people and left nearly twenty thousand missing, is that of “reservoir-induced seismicity”—the theory that the weight of water behind a dam, coupled with the seeping of water into fissures in rocks below, can produce shearing stress strong enough to worsen, or trigger, an earthquake. The Zipingpu dam, a five-hundred-and-eleven-foot-high structure on the Min River and the largest dam in Sichuan Province, was implicated in the 2008 earthquake.

What's the bottom-line then?

Saturday’s quake demonstrated how vulnerable infrastructure projects remain in the unsettled Himalayas.

If only we thought about economic development that is not completely at the expense of nature, and if only invested in sustainable development.  But, there are bombs to build, missiles to launch, ...

As for Nepal and the rest of the world:

This earthquake will remain in the global conscience only until it disappears from the broader news agenda. Sooner rather than later, donor efforts will turn to the next disaster. Once interest fades, Nepal will return to the grim realities of everyday life, facing unsafe and underinvested infrastructure, political stalemate, inefficient and dysfunctional institutions, corruption, and ineffective policy. Ideally, this time would be different.

Nope, I am sure by now the world has turned to the latest news: another product of a royal fuck!

The Nepal earthquake brings out the Nero within us?

Of course, people die every day.  It will be the biggest news of all if nobody died anywhere on the planet even for one single day.  

But, when disaster strikes, I find that I  am almost always consumed by the news reports.  Fukushima, cyclone Nargis, the Indonesian earthquake ... and 9/11, Iraq War, ... and now the earthquake in Nepal.

It is strange that as individuals we continue on with our lives even when tragedies strike.  When something unfortunate happens to us, only then do we view it as an all-consuming and most-urgent issue.  As long as it--however small or huge--happens elsewhere, well, we might feel sorry for the people dead and alive in that somewhere else, but we go on with our own mundane lives.

I suppose such an approach is key to our own survival as individuals and as humankind on this planet; else, we could easily be numbed into inaction every single time something happens.  But, where does one draw the line between that selfish view of our individual existence versus a whole range of emotions for our fellow humans?

Of course, where to draw that line has been my obsession right from my teenage years.  Eleven years ago, I even wrote about it.  I concluded there that "perhaps academic life means a continuous attempt to redraw the line that separates what I teach from how I live."  I am all the more convinced about it.  And equally convinced am I that it is one frustrating attempt.  

We talk about the proverbial Nero fiddling while Rome burnt.  But, each and every one of us practices that all the time.  We know--really well, thanks to various information channels now available to us--that parts of the world are literally or metaphorically burning, but we fiddle away anyway. 

That fiddling while burning is another way of referring to the juxtapositions I referred to in the post yesterday.  

Today, from the same newspaper--the WSJ--are the following exhibits:

The WSJ has an excellent analysis of the financial impact of the quake on Nepal:

And in a different section is this opinion piece:

In the middle of the chaos in Nepal, you think the average person is wondering how awesome sex in the future will be?  

But, we continue on with our lives.  We might offer a small prayer for the suffering millions around the world and that is where we draw the line.  We humans are an interesting species, no doubt.

Why does god hate Nepal?

As I have often blogged here, living a Socratic examined life reveals a lot about our own priorities. A literal and metaphorical example came up in the context of the devastating earthquake in Nepal.  I captured this flow of tweets in my Twitter feed:

The juxtaposition of Pepsi and aspartame, and American kids and money, on either side of news about the tragedy in Nepal says a lot about the lives that we lead.  In all fairness to Vox, the Nepal news featured a lot in the tweets from that organization.  I value Vox as a news and analysis source; why else would I subscribe to that feed, right?  And, of course, WSJ tweets about all things trivial too.

Which is why I use that juxtaposition as a metaphor.  Think about some of the major events over the past few months that have terribly affected humanity.  The civil war in Syria.  Boko Haram in Nigeria. The convoluted Greek fiscal tragedy.  Ferguson and Baltimore.  The list is endless.

Caption at the source:
On Sunday, Nepalis in Bhaktapur, near the capital, Katmandu, cremate relatives killed in in the earthquake

Sure, we humans cannot be immersed in tragedies all the time and we might get tired of the bad news out there.  But, seriously, what percentage of our lives do we actually spend on the bad news?  Both in terms of time as well as money.  Or, let me put it this way: should we not at least match the time and money that we spend entertaining ourselves with time and money on the unfortunate situations that are all around us?  I don't mean our work time, how much ever that is entertaining to us.  I wish there were a meter of sorts--a meter that lets us watch sports for an hour, for instance, only after we spent at least half that time reading/watching in-depth news and reports about some of the issues that trouble fellow humans.

I suppose this rant is nothing but a secular version of the old religious ideas of caring for others, donating to help, not to be preoccupied with entertainment, and more.  But then most believers, of whatever gods they fancy, have long since walked away from those teachings, while this atheist continues to pound on those old-fashioned ideas!  Such is life :(

Just as I was writing that previous sentence, an emailed popped up--it was about Nepal:

If you feel like donating, then here is a list that the NY Times has put together.

PS: Why the title, you ask?  Click here for the answer.

India, not America, key to global democracy

Which comes first: economic development or liberal democracy?

In recent years, China has been a poster-child for liberal democracy taking a back seat to rapid economic growth and development. China, which is home to almost a fifth of the world’s population, significantly opened up its economy when Deng Xiaoping launched the country on a path that is, thankfully, remarkably different from the one envisioned by Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. But, Deng’s approach did not free up the country’s politics though.

South Korea and Singapore too, for instance, did not become affluent and democratic at the same time. These were countries where governments ruled with enormous control over their citizens, with a sharp focus on rapid economic development.

Unlike these examples, very few developing countries, like India, tried to advance economic growth and development within a liberal democratic context. The late Albert Hirschman, who was an eminent social scientist, commented that India’s economic transformation was slow because resources were being invested in building democratic institutions.

Offering a slightly different perspective, and projecting India as “the next Asian miracle”, Yasheng Huang writes in the latest issue of Foreign Policy that “the emerging Indian miracle should debunk—hopefully permanently—the entirely specious notion that democracy is bad for growth.” And, this Business Week essay contends that India will beat China.

Unless India can quickly debunk the “specious notion”, as Huang refers to it, there is a good chance that other developing countries will attempt to mimic what comes across as the only successful path towards rapid economic development—the East Asian, particularly Chinese, model. Of course, this would also then involve sacrificing liberal democracy.

In such a context, Nepal will be an interesting case study to track. The monarchy started unraveling in 2001 when the then king, queen, and many relatives were killed in a drunken shooting spree by none other than the crown prince, who later fatally shot himself. This made it even more possible for a radical leftist group, the Nepal Communist Party, to step up its activities, particularly through violence.

The radicals were modeled after the Shining Path, in Peru, and are referred to as Maoist rebels because of their advocacy of Mao’s communist ideas. In the years since 2001, Nepal’s Maoist rebels signed truce accords with the government only to abandon it later, and the government imposed curfews and suspended elections.

In 2007, the rebels made clear their demands for the abolition of the monarchy, which was approved later in December as a part of the peace agreement. In May 2008, Nepal shed its monarchic tradition and is now a republic. The former rebels now hold most seats in the parliament and if they lean heavily on Maoist teaching, there is a good possibility that the government will be tempted to sacrifice liberal democracy in its pursuit of economic and social development.

It is an irony, indeed, that the land of Mao Zedong—China—has long shed its Maoist ideals, and offers a fertile economic landscape for profiting through capitalist ideas. Yet, thirty years after Deng’s decision, we now have a democratically elected government in power in Nepal that sincerely believes in Maoist ideals.

Whether elected or otherwise, countries from Rwanda to Nepal will benefit from assistance from the West when it comes to creating and sustaining democratic institutions. I suspect that the growing uncertainty in global economic conditions—the recent increases in the price of food crops and petroleum, in particular—will further compel many African and Asian countries to do something, even if it means curtailing the freedom of individuals. India better do the right things, and fast.