The constant gardener

Once, way back when I was young, I suggested to my mother that we have white pillowcases instead of the colored and printed ones.

"But the white ones quickly become dirty," she said.

"Exactly.  That way we will always know that it is time to launder them."

If only I had known even at that age that nobody ever listens to what I have to say!  Not even my mother! ;)

My mother had a point.  In the heat and dust of the old world, white pillowcases become ecru and dark brown in no time at all.  Though, it is not any comfort to think that we used pillowcases that were dirty as hell, but we did not know they were that dirty only because they were dark colored to begin with!

It is the law of the universe.  Entropy makes sure that even the white snow gets dirty fast.  Even the white supremacists can try all they want, but sooner or later the world will become beige ;)

In an awesome essay, Siddhartha Mukherjee quotes G.K. Chesterton:

"If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.  If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. . . . An almost unnatural vigilance is really required of the citizen because of the horrible rapidity with which human institutions grow old.”

It requires constant work. Unnatural vigilance, indeed.

Everything in life requires constant work and attention.  Life itself mandates constant work.  Sitting around and doing nothing is unhealthy, the medical folks tell us over and over again.  Like hamsters, we therefore keep running and running.  Mukherjee brings in Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen: "The world is spinning so fast under her feet, she tells Alice, that “it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place.”

This against the cosmic backdrop of every action of ours ultimately amounting to nothing.  The cosmic joke that we have to constantly keep doing things only to make sure we will end up as stardust, again!

A Very Stable Genius

I almost fell off the chair when  the computer mouse hovered over the Google doodle:

Har Gobind Khorana.

My generation of people from the old country know that name well.  He was a Nobel Prize recipient.  We boasted about Tagore, and Raman, and criticized the exclusion of Gandhi from the Nobel.  And were always unsure if Khorana was our man because he had become a foreigner--an American citizen.  We counted him anyway.  We consoled ourselves that one of our people doing awesome things elsewhere is, well, awesome.

Google honors him today, on what would have been his 96th birthday.

Khorana was the fifth child born to a Hindu family in 1922 in Raipur, a 100-person village in the Punjab region of what is now Pakistan.
He started his education at a village school that met under a tree and quickly demonstrated an aptitude for science, tempered with humility. He received a scholarship to study chemistry at Punjab University in Lahore, but he was too shy to attend the mandatory admissions interview and considered majoring in English instead.
The admissions committee was still impressed enough with Khorana’s application that they enrolled him anyway.

Throughout his life, Khorana was apparently a humble man.  "Despite his accomplishments, Khorana’s friends described him as a modest man who avoided publicity."

The doodle on Khorana reminded me about an op-ed that I read in the paper in the old country, which asked:

what is still holding our nation back from achieving large-scale global academic excellence which is commensurate with our intellectual heritage and calibre?

A fair question to ask, right?

What I liked about that argument was how the author drew a straight line between that question on the scientific enterprise with excellence as an ethical issue that affects pretty much every aspect of life in India.

Why do we in India accept extraneous considerations that militate against excellence? Of course our political culture is deeply implicated, which makes it ironic when our politicians ask why Indian scientists do not win Nobel prizes. But a part of the responsibility and the power to change lies within the academic community itself. The problem is our collective failure to articulate the goal of excellence and to exert firm pressure on anyone, however important, who blocks the path.

We in the US, on the other hand, have clearly demonstrated  our commitment to excellence as an ethical issue by electing to the highest political office a very stable genius, whose humility and genius far exceeds Khorana's!

Race in the new year!

"Where did you travel to?"

"India."

"For how long?"

"Three weeks."

"To spend time with family?"

"Yes"

"All good with everybody there?"

I was stunned by that question from the immigration officer.

In all my years of returning to America after a trip to the old country, I had never ever been asked anything even remotely close to that question.  Not even once.

"Yes, thank you."

"Welcome home."

"Thank you."

As I picked up my passport and walked towards baggage claim, there was one aspect that interested me.  Was that immigration officer so awesome towards me because he was not white?

Perhaps the Chinese-American officer understands immigrants going back and forth between the new and old countries? A simpatico?

I re-checked my bag and then joined the serpentine queue for security check before the final flight segment.  The agent looked at my boarding pass. Then my ID.  She looked up.

I wondered what the problem might be.

She handed back the pass and the ID, and with a smile said, "early birthday greetings!"

I laughed and thanked.

Did she say what she said because she was not white, but was Hispanic (or maybe mixed)?

Have trump and his 63 million voters messed me up so much that I now see whiteness, and acutely feel my otherness, wherever I go and wherever I am?  Is it because of the trump effect that the non-white officers were also extra attentive to non-whites like me?  Have we all gotten messed up by hair fuhrer?

Thus began my new year in America!