Subdue the earth? No!

In graduate school, a classmate remarked that his Jewish family would watch out for Jewish names in the news, whether it was good or bad.  I told him that I found doing something similar--watching out for Indian names.  And, if it was a Tamil name, then it was even more exciting.

Of course, sometimes the names pop up in unfortunate circumstances (like here or here.)  But, and thankfully, those are rare.

The cherry on top of awesome news was undoubtedly getting a dosai connoisseur as the Vice President ;)

It is human, after all, to applaud "our people."  An applause that does not have any baggage of superiority of inferiority.

It was that same graduate school excitement that I felt when I read the name of the lead author of a UK government report on the economics of biodiversity: Sir Partha Dasgupta.

My man!

All I read was the Headline Messages.  I love it.

The report notes this: "The Review develops the economics of biodiversity on the understanding that we – and our economies – are ‘embedded’ within Nature, not external to it."

We are embedded within Nature, not external to it.

The fact that we even need to be reminded about this fundamental aspect of life!

Back in graduate school, one of the discussions was the framework that the Judeo-Christian religions offered in contrast to many others around the world.  In the Judeo-Christian approach, god made man in his image and likeness. Then:

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

In the Judeo-Christian framework, god rules over man, who rules over nature.

That relationship is very different from what the faith in the old country told me.  Whether it was Native Americans or people in India or elsewhere, nature was worshiped.  There wasn't a sense of everything on earth as humans to take any which way it pleased them.

Sir Partha Dasgupta reminds us that we are embedded in Nature.  We don't rule over it.  We are so much intertwined with nature that "Dasgupta said assigning absolute monetary values to nature would be meaningless because life would simply cease to exist if it was destroyed."

Dasgupta's report notes:

[Relying] on institutions alone to curb our excesses will not be enough. The discipline to draw on Nature sustainably must, ultimately, be provided by us as individuals. But societal change – particularly growing urbanisation – has meant that many people have grown distant from Nature. Interventions to enable people to understand and connect with Nature would not only improve our health and well-being, but also help empower citizens to make informed choices and demand the change that is needed

Read the 10-pager.  Spread the word.  Be good to Nature.

What is so civil in a civil war?

In the second version of this blog that began in June 2008 after I deleted all the previous entries, I worried about a few global hotspots as I observed them from my corner of the world.  I listed in that August 2008 post the following countries/regions in addition to Iraq and Iran:

• Pakistan
• Afghanistan
• Georgia
• Zimbabwe
• Sudan/Darfur
• Israel/Palestine
• Lebanon
• Sri Lanka
• Burma
• Tibet

Only Georgia has really gotten off that list, right?

About Sri Lanka, this is what I wrote in that post in 2008:

This AFP report says it all: Strife-torn Sri Lanka is bracing for intense and bloody battles as security forces close in on the political capital of the Tamil Tiger rebels, according to military analysts.

That was in the summer of 2008.  The 25-year old civil war that began on "Black July" in 1983 was entering yet another bloody--yes, literally bloody--stretch. 

Here in the US, it was the summer of the presidential election season, with a young and untested but charismatic Barack Obama even going to Berlin and addressing the crowds that were all eager for a change from the Bush-Cheney era.  

The US couldn't care about the violence in Sri Lanka.

Later that December, I was in India, and observed people and the press expressing worries over the increased military assaults on Tamil areas in order to wipe out the Tamil Tigers.  So, I did what I could.  I wrote a newspaper commentary after returning home.

The Sri Lankan government didn't ease up.  It was a scorched earth approach to wiping out the Tamil terrorists, and civilian deaths and displacement didn't matter one bit to the government.  The leadership of the Tamil Tigers were killed.  An uneasy peace settled on the island.

All these in an island with which Arab merchants fell in love on first sight, which is why they called it serendip, which morphed into the English word "serendipity" to mean something absolutely awesome that just appeared or happened when least expected.

I was reminded of all that, of the roommates in my first year of graduate school, and more, when we watched Funny Boy.

The best #Tamil movie that I have watched in decades ... is a Canadian movie about #SriLanka ...#FunnyBoy involves two complex issues at once: #CivilWar and #Homosexuality https://t.co/Vfpi6unq65

— Am Dr Khe (@congoboy) February 2, 2021

If you read until here, well, you might be interested in a French/Sri Lankan movie we watched a couple of years ago.  Dheepan is a movie that is about three Sri Lankan Tamils who are in France after fleeing the civil war.

All I can do is read about peoples and countries, watch movies, and wish for peace.  That itself is a start, right?

Don't touch that tech

I grew up in a culture in which there was no hugging.  No touching.  As kids, we couldn't even brush against grandma until she was all done with lunch.

Many decades ago, when I was in middle or high school, a short story in the Tamil weekly, Ananda Vikatan, was about a father visiting with his son in the city and then the son accompanying the father to the railway station.  

The father boards the train that will take him back to his village and sits by the window while the son stands on the platform by that same window.  During the conversation, which itself was not a freely-flowing one and rather awkward, the son places his arm on the window and it accidentally grazes the father's hand. The son feels goosebumps all over and he realizes that it has been years since his childhood days when he even touched his father.

No hugs and touches, but people spent time with their relatives (mostly) and friends.  A lot of time.  The inability to be in the presence of their favorites during this pandemic has caused quite some stress in the old country.  After ten months, my aunt couldn't take it anymore and she visited with my parents.  As always, there was no hugging or touching and they sat at a distance from each other.

Video chats didn't do them any good.  I can relate to that.

But, I fear that those of us who place a premium on visiting with our friends and relatives are in the minority.  The world seems to have fully embraced (no pun intended) video chats of different kinds.

Those in the hugging culture--like here--miss hugging their siblings and parents and grandkids.  Will technology develop a hug app?  Would you like to have such an app?  Be careful what you wish for:

There are real consequences to letting technology intervene with social touch. Do you fear the day when you attempt to console your child only to have her turn to a device that can comfort her in a way you couldn’t even conceive of? Perhaps you should. With the rise of touch-replacement technology, socially distanced lives could become permanent, and we might end up with even greater levels of isolation than today.

The more we adopt such technologies, the more we risk getting isolated and feeling lonely.

In contexts like this, I am always reminded of the science fiction from a century ago, about which I have blogged before: E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops.

We live in a world that Forster wrote about back in 1909.  Imagine that--in 1909!  Screen time of all kinds just as Forster had feared.  We have replaced real human interactions with virtual ones.  So "satisfied" we are with the virtual interactions, and thinking that the virtual even eliminates the need for real interactions, we seem to believe that visiting with parents, children, friends, is not needed anymore.

Forster channels his warnings through the son telling his mother in that fictional work:

"You talk as if a god had made the Machine," cried the other.  "I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That is why I want you to come. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind."

After the pandemic ends, or at least eases, I will pay a visit to the old country, and meet face to face with my relatives and friends.  The older folk won't hug.  We will sit apart, and inquire about each others lives.  It will be a touching visit.