Light sleep

Today is a milestone in my personal history: I got paid for doing nothing!

Before my work-life came to a sudden end, I had a schedule, which, according to a few, was regimented.  "Live a little," people told me. 

In that schedule, I typically woke up at about 5:30, which prompted a former neighbor with whom I ceased interactions more than four years ago to ask me why I woke up that early as if I had cows to milk.

Now that I get paid for doing nothing, 5:30 is no longer a target.

It does not mean that I sleep for many more hours than I did in the past.  No siestas either.

I wish I slept like a baby.  Well into middle-age means that I no longer sleep for seven or eight continuous hours, unlike when I was younger when no amount of caffeine nor noise could keep me awake.

Decades ago, during the wedding of a cousin (who tragically died young,) a much younger cousin, who was perhaps five or six years old then, fell asleep while seated right next to the thundering thavil.  An older uncle commented jealously about the kid sleeping in that noisy setting. Only now do I truly understand his feelings!

But did adults always have uninterrupted sleep?  As I noted in this post more than six years ago, there is plenty of evidence that people had segmented sleep.

The forgotten practice of ‘segmented sleep’, memorably described by the historian A. Roger Ekirch in At Day’s Close: A History of Night-time (2005), meant that people generally slept at night in two equal intervals, spending up to two hours awake between their first and second slumber. In the long, dark winter months, when the labouring classes may have spent as many as 14 hours in bed, broken sleep was regarded as routine and natural and only disappeared in Europe with the advent of artificial lighting.

We humans were regulated by the availability of natural light.  Artificial light, which we now take for granted and even assume is some kind of a fundamental right, was expensive for the most part of human history. 

Back in the prehistoric era a person would have to gather, chop and burn wood for roughly 10 hours a day for six days straight in order to produce the equivalent light of a modern lightbulb shining for about an hour. Today, the same amount of labor could light a room for over 50 years.

In relatively modern times, artificial lighting continued to be expensive:

Around the year 1800, you could get about 10 hours of modern-equivalent lighting from animal fat candles for 60 hours of labor. Not too shabby, if you didn't mind the smell of burning animal byproducts. 

Around this time, none other than George Washington estimated that the cost of burning a single candle for five hours each night worked out to about 8 British pounds a year, or well over $1,000 in current dollars.

When we were kids, grandmas' villages suffered from power-cuts (load shedding) and even when the electrons flowed, lights were barely brighter than candles.  Weddings, therefore, always had Petromax lights.  A wedding procession in the night included workers carrying those Petromax lights on their heads.

Now, the abundant electricity has made artificial light remarkably inexpensive, which has also altered our daily schedules.  So different is contemporary life from how humans lived until very recently that students (and even middle-aged adults) boast that they are night workers who produce their best when most of the rest are asleep.  

I have no idea what the long-term impacts of our altered night lives will be.  My suspicion is that this cannot be good for our personal well-being.

On my part, I will continue to think about such issues, and collect my monthly reward for not working!

Shah Shanked

We skipped past quite a few English and French movie titles.  We were about to give up when we spotted an Indian movie in the suggestions.

I have no patience for three-hour song-and-dance melodrama of movies from India, whatever the language might be.  I am yet to recover from the painful experience from a few years ago when I watched one because of a friend's suggestion.  She now owes me big time for having made me suffer!

But then I spotted Naseeruddin Shah's face.  

I still remember him as Albert Pinto, from back when I was a proud commie sympathizer.  A few years ago, we watched him as a magical chef in Aasif Manndvi's Today's Special. So, yes, Shah's face is all I needed to be convinced to watch Ramprasad Ki Tehrvi.

A few minutes into the movie, it was clear that Shah was not the main character but was making a guest appearance.  I was trapped by false advertising! 

The movie seemed like it was more suited for live theatre than as a cinematic experience.  While I lack any expertise, as a fan of live theatre and movies, I know the difference when I watch them.  The rather simple plot of family dynamics after the death of the patriarch lacked the layers that I expect from a movie that features Naseeruddin Shah.

I was reminded of the couple of Anton Chekov's plays that I have watched.  They are about people, families, and the humans that we all are, which then means that the play is like life itself--a mix of good times and bad, and good hearts and evil.  Chekov doesn't point fingers at a bad person; instead, the bad apple is very much a part of the orchard as the good ones are.  (Did I play enough on Chekov's The Cherry Orchard?)

I loved Chekov's Uncle Vanya so much that I quoted from it in my first ever commentary on higher education that was not in a newspaper.  The quote won me favors with a colleague who was an English professor, but nobody else seemed to care.

This Hindi movie, too, did not present anybody as the wicked and evil person, but portrayed them as humans with flaws.  However, a Chekov play it was not!

After the movie ended, it was time to find out more about the movie.  Wikipedia informed me that the movies was indeed based on a play.

Turns out that the actor who played the role of the youngest daughter-in-law is the daughter of Aparna Sen. 

I was reminded of Sen's wonderful movie, 36 Chowringhee Lane, which I watched as a teenager.  I was impressed with every aspect of the movie.  About how the story was told. About the story itself.  And about the director being a woman!

Has India forgotten how to make quality movies?

Neural atrophy

There are heart and brain surgeries that take hours from the beginning to the end.  It takes a lot of focused work to get those done.  The surgeons and nurses working in operating rooms get there after years of intense and focused training over years.  Often, these are the same people who also spent hours as students focused on the learning materials in school.

One can easily think of many other professions that require undivided attention from its practitioners and wannabes. Will the "digital culture" affect the abilities of kids and adults to engage in deep and sustained practices?  Without the deep and sustained learning approach, are we looking at a rapid dumbing down?

I have been worried about this for a long time.  In my classes, for instance, I could easily see that reading and thinking about the ideas and information in the class materials was not something most students did; they were far more interested in endless swiping and texting on their smartphones. 

Of course, one could argue that most students even in the pre-digital era didn't engage in deep reading and thinking.  But, my suspicion that the percentages have worsened over time.

Reading V.S. Naipaul's The Engima of Arrival or Orhan Pamuk's Silent House is nowhere the digital skimming that is increasingly the norm.  I need to track the names of people and places, which were all "alien" especially in the Turkish novel.  Reading a lengthy novel over a few sittings over days meant that I had to remember everything that happened cumulatively.  A deep reading that is needed, unlike when I flick through my Twitter feed, for instance.

The implications of the loss of deep reading go far beyond literature.  One doesn't need a better example than the immediate former President of the US, who famously boasted that he didn't need to read books because he was already the smartest one around, and whose thinking and writing were expressed in tweets.

But, of course, we need to base our arguments on more than mere examples.  Maryanne Wolf writes:

Within this context, the “strong hypothesis” here is that if we are not vigilant, cognition will alter with little realization by most; the quality of our attention will change along with different forms of memory; and comprehension for complexity will change. Over time, there will be downstream effects on the quality of our background knowledge and of our understanding of others, which is the basis for seeking the “good” and discerning the “truth” of whatever we read or do next. The ultimate effects of such threats to how we process information and knowledge would weaken the basis of a thoughtful, empathic citizenry — the foundation of our democracy. Figuratively and physiologically, we will not be the wiser.

Don't you already see around you the loss of a thoughtful citizenry, who also seem to be incapable of discerning truth from misinformation and good from bad?

I agree with Wolf: "Deep reading, like the reading brain circuit itself, is not a given; it is built by use, or it atrophies from disuse."

It is unfortunate that there is seemingly nothing that we can do to prevent this atrophy.