Humanity and the sociopath

Life was different before tRump, and BC (Before Coronavirus.)  I wanted a feel for how different it was, and looked up my blog for a post on the first Saturday of April 2016, when the American President was an empathetic gentleman who spoke eloquently and loved the arts.  It was a time when the President was learned and confident about himself that he let himself be surrounded by highly qualified and talented people--including a science Nobel laureate!

The following was my post on the first Saturday of April 2016:
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In the big city, whenever I was out and about among the multitudes, I smiled a hi at the people walking past.  Not one smiled back.  Not even one.  It is not that they did not see me.  Even after the visual contact, they simply kept going.

After life in the small town that is precious home to me for fourteen years, well, I have been thoroughly spoiled by my fellow residents.  People are friendly.  Strangers smile. They even say hi.  We recognize the presence of a fellow human.

In the big city, the homeless were the only ones who seemed to recognize me.  One nodded his head in acknowledgement.

The older I get, and the more I think about what it means to be human, the more I am troubled by even such things as not even one person smiling back a hello.  It is not as if I went half way around the world and behaved in the Eugene manner.  Oh wait, I have done that too!

In the big city, there are a lot more people to observe, whether or not anybody cared about my existence there.  Humans are fascinating to watch.  I have no idea why people watch cat videos on Facebook; observing fellow humans is phenomenally more entertaining and educational at the same time.

I was waiting for the niece in the area that two decades ago a columnist referred to as "urine square."  That area has since gone through quite a revival.  Rarely did I smell urine there!

One elderly couple walked past me. Each had a cane to help them in their perambulation.  The woman walked with the cane on her left and the man--who was walking to her right--held his cane on his right hand.  "Don't talk to me" she said in her frail voice.  "You know it gives me ulcer."

I am not sure if even the funniest scriptwriters in Hollywood can come up with such scenarios and lines.  On the other hand, maybe all they do is hang out and places like these and merely record what they see and hear and then, presto, a movie scene.  But, surely Nora Ephron did not watch anything close to that scene in the real world and it was all her imagination.

Of course, most people seem to have a smartphone in their hands.  The young seem to look at the screen every other second.  One young man, perhaps in his late twenties, slowly walked past me and he was not looking at this smartphone.   It turns out that there was a reason--hey, even I could hear the phone giving him instructions.  "Now turn left."  Directions.  In the old days, you could always spot the tourists because they would be the ones holding maps in their hands and looking all confused.  With hesitation, they would ask a passerby for help.  Now, Siri takes care of all of us wanderers.

If only Siri can remind us to say hello to a fellow human!

We cannot go on thinking of ourselves, but only together can we do this

I was working in Calcutta when Pope John Paul II came to town, during his whirlwind tour of the Subcontinent in February 1986.

Of course, I too went to see him and his Popemobile.  He was an important figure for me in two ways: For one, I was coming out of my pinkie years, and I had tremendous respect for the work that he had done in ending communism in Poland and across Europe.  And, as one who was rapidly drifting away from faith, I wanted to understand the role of religion in life.

It is not merely COVID-19 that makes me think about faith and the existential crisis--these have been topics that I often blog about.  Especially during high holy days of (m)any religion.

As I noted in this post in March 2016, during the Holy Week, I use the religious calendar "to think about what it means to be human and what it means to lead a good life.  Atheist I am, but I feel constantly driven, sometimes a tad too intensely, to understand these."

We are now a week away from Good Friday.  A couple of days ago, Pope Francis gave "his extraordinary blessing "urbi et orbi" (to the city and the world) in an empty St. Peter's Square at the Vatican."

Source

In that address, Pope Francis said:

We have realized that we are on the same boat, all of us fragile and disoriented, but at the same time important and needed, all of us called to row together, each of us in need of comforting the other. On this boat… are all of us.

I was immediately reminded of MLK's "we may have come on different ships, but we're all in the same boat now."

The Pope reminds us that "we cannot go on thinking of ourselves, but only together can we do this.":

The storm exposes our vulnerability and uncovers those false and superfluous certainties around which we have constructed our daily schedules, our projects, our habits and priorities. It shows us how we have allowed to become dull and feeble the very things that nourish, sustain and strengthen our lives and our communities. The tempest lays bare all our prepackaged ideas and forgetfulness of what nourishes our people’s souls; all those attempts that anesthetize us with ways of thinking and acting that supposedly “save” us, but instead prove incapable of putting us in touch with our roots and keeping alive the memory of those who have gone before us. We deprive ourselves of the antibodies we need to confront adversity.
In this storm, the façade of those stereotypes with which we camouflaged our egos, always worrying about our image, has fallen away, uncovering once more that (blessed) common belonging, of which we cannot be deprived: our belonging as brothers and sisters.

We're all in the same boat that has sprung a leak.  I hope that COVID-19 will teach the 63 million Americans that we are all in this together, irrespective of our skin tones, our religions, and any other superficiality that demagogues love to use to divide people up.

Here's to a better tomorrow!

(Embedding this song here because of the news that Bill Withers has died.)

Smell the coronavirus

Reports indicate that the loss of smell and taste is an early indicator of an COVID-19 infection.  We take our nose and tongue and everything else for granted, until we find out that there is something wrong.  Such is life!

The poem "Smell of things to come" now comes across as an eerie omen about the novel coronavirus.  It is a poem by Vijay Nambisan, my old childhood friend and school-mate.

In his memory, and with April being poetry month, here is Vijay's poem:

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.

Vijay's photo in the 1971 annual school magazine.