Sometimes, it is just Dumb Luck!

As much as we might believe that it is up to ourselves to figure out what we want to do in life, and how we would like to be remembered, we can't forget that one piece in this: dumb luck.

Take, for instance, my return to academia.  There I was an unhappy transportation planner, when all I wanted to do was to be engaged in a world of ideas. Academia.  Years went on. One became two and quickly it became my fifth year there and I got one of those dull and boring form-letter style certificate of appreciation.  I worried that I would die young from not enjoying what I did.

One day, an intern, Robert, who was working on his undergraduate degree at the local university after a stint as an army officer, asked me whether I would be interested to guest-lecture at one of the classes he was in.  Based on our conversations, he apparently decided to suggest that to his professor, but wanted to check with me first.

As a colleague used to say, I simply wait for opportunities to exercise my lower jaw and I bet I said "yes of course, yes!!!"

A week later I guest-lectured.

A month later, I was an adjunct professor teaching a course in the evening.

Two terms of adjunct teaching later, I had a tempting offer to work there as a non-tenure-track full-time lecturer and direct an interdisciplinary major.

Two years after that, I had the job offer from Oregon.  It has been eleven years at Oregon now!

Dumb luck, don't you agree?

Dumb Luck
Corey Marks

 
The horse—its number smudged
by sweat and thumbs nuzzling
 
predictable exactas
stamped in black—stumbles
 
at the last, run too hard, run
beyond what her ankles could bear,
 
and the jockey, who’d driven
her ahead of the other horses
 
now churning past and flinging
back rings of dust, rides
 
her down, out of the grace
and rush of the race and into the hoof-
 
torn dirt, the shit and grit
and the shudder he’s lost control of...
 
Then another rush: people
flurry to the fallen animal, the jockey
 
is raised, stunned and still
he feels he’s moving—something roils
 
in him, around him, under him.
Words are inconsequential
 
as flies. Dumb luck.
The animal won’t rise.
 
Nearby, the winner paces,
cooling, saddled now with the reason
 
for the day, heavy chest
widening against his rider’s approval,
 
each breath ragged and expendable
and replaceable as the printed bets
 
that drift the grounds, skittering
between knuckles of grass
 
beneath the stands where people
stare, the ones who got it wrong,
 
used to seeing what doesn’t come,
to wagering chances bound to be
 
nothing, nothing, nothing
but lost. Though someone got it right
 
and smacks his ticket
against his palm, exactly sure
 
of what it bears. He looks away
as the crowd around him cranes
 
and gawks into the afterlife
of chance—a white truck,
 
a man with an open-mouthed kit.
A needle. A hurtling world
 
closes like a gate.


The Threepenny Review
Fall 2010
Source(ht)

Winning, losing, and plain dumb luck!

Nothing like reading a poem after all the drama of a close election or a championship game, where there can be only one winner at the end of it all. 
I wish I could listen to James Earl Jones or Harry Belafonte reading aloud the following poem...

Dumb Luck
Corey Marks

 
The horse—its number smudged
by sweat and thumbs nuzzling
 
predictable exactas
stamped in black—stumbles
 
at the last, run too hard, run
beyond what her ankles could bear,
 
and the jockey, who’d driven
her ahead of the other horses
 
now churning past and flinging
back rings of dust, rides
 
her down, out of the grace
and rush of the race and into the hoof-
 
torn dirt, the shit and grit
and the shudder he’s lost control of...
 
Then another rush: people
flurry to the fallen animal, the jockey
 
is raised, stunned and still
he feels he’s moving—something roils
 
in him, around him, under him.
Words are inconsequential
 
as flies. Dumb luck.
The animal won’t rise.
 
Nearby, the winner paces,
cooling, saddled now with the reason
 
for the day, heavy chest
widening against his rider’s approval,
 
each breath ragged and expendable
and replaceable as the printed bets
 
that drift the grounds, skittering
between knuckles of grass
 
beneath the stands where people
stare, the ones who got it wrong,
 
used to seeing what doesn’t come,
to wagering chances bound to be
 
nothing, nothing, nothing
but lost. Though someone got it right
 
and smacks his ticket
against his palm, exactly sure
 
of what it bears. He looks away
as the crowd around him cranes
 
and gawks into the afterlife
of chance—a white truck,
 
a man with an open-mouthed kit.
A needle. A hurtling world
 
closes like a gate.


The Threepenny Review
Fall 2010
Source(ht)

The ramps to life and death

I slowly eased on to the exit ramp and was nearing the traffic light when it happened.  All of a sudden the parents with the children in tow decided to cross the road.  They rushed to the road from my left side.

"Shiiiiit." I exclaimed as I slammed the brakes.

Meanwhile, there was an SUV that was close behind me.  I worried that the driver could be distracted and will drive straight into me, and then I would be pushed forward into the jaywalking family.  I braced myself for the collision and turned the hazard lights on.

The SUV continued to come towards my vehicle and then stopped just short. Perhaps only a few inches away from the rear fender.  Phew!

I looked in front.  The family darted across.

After the last of them moved all the way to the right, I was able to finally smile at the parent geese and the goslings.

I looked at the rear-view mirror and noticed that driver's head also turned towards the geese.

This time of the year, the geese and their kids put on quite a show.  Once, I saw a big fat goose (which was my sister's favorite curse word, by the way) look both sides before crossing the road.  How do the damn birds learn these things?  Pretty soon a few of them might even begin to have meals with knives and forks with wine on the side.  I tell ya, some of these birds are way brainier than most of the politicians in this country!

But then sometimes the geese miscalculate.  They mistime their road crossings.  It is so heart-wrenching to see their remains on the road, or by the side. Which is what happened the other day as I entered the ramp to the freeway.  Two birds on the roadside, and one was practically in an upended position and stiff.  Dead for a while, I am sure.  No wonder the clean up crew was circling above.  

Life, to some extent, is simply dumb luck.

Dumb Luck
Corey Marks

 
The horse—its number smudged
by sweat and thumbs nuzzling
 
predictable exactas
stamped in black—stumbles
 
at the last, run too hard, run
beyond what her ankles could bear,
 
and the jockey, who’d driven
her ahead of the other horses
 
now churning past and flinging
back rings of dust, rides
 
her down, out of the grace
and rush of the race and into the hoof-
 
torn dirt, the shit and grit
and the shudder he’s lost control of...
 
Then another rush: people
flurry to the fallen animal, the jockey
 
is raised, stunned and still
he feels he’s moving—something roils
 
in him, around him, under him.
Words are inconsequential
 
as flies. Dumb luck.
The animal won’t rise.
 
Nearby, the winner paces,
cooling, saddled now with the reason
 
for the day, heavy chest
widening against his rider’s approval,
 
each breath ragged and expendable
and replaceable as the printed bets
 
that drift the grounds, skittering
between knuckles of grass
 
beneath the stands where people
stare, the ones who got it wrong,
 
used to seeing what doesn’t come,
to wagering chances bound to be
 
nothing, nothing, nothing
but lost. Though someone got it right
 
and smacks his ticket
against his palm, exactly sure
 
of what it bears. He looks away
as the crowd around him cranes
 
and gawks into the afterlife
of chance—a white truck,
 
a man with an open-mouthed kit.
A needle. A hurtling world
 
closes like a gate.


The Threepenny Review
Fall 2010
Source(ht)

Geography at birth

For a while now, I have been blogging about the (mis)fortunes that come our way just because of our parents.  Who we are born to makes a huge difference in life.  Every time I blog along those lines, the frequent (and now the only) commenter, and others have disagreed with me.  (Check this out, or this, for instance.)

I have also blogged in plenty about luck. Dumb luck.

Thus, I have never really cared much for people bragging about how they made it all by themselves.  Not that he brags, but consider Bill Gates.  It is not as if he created his fortunes after growing up in the projects.  I was not born a Dalit and my father was not a manual scavenger.  The truly rags to riches, rising from the utterly disadvantaged, is a rare exception.  Most of us have only built upon the accident of birth.

To quite some extent, the cosmic dice rolled in our favor, which is why you and I are interacting here.

I started thinking as a social scientist on the role of circumstance and luck in how lives turn out. It's a sobering experience to realize just how many variables are out of our control

Yep.  That's what I have been saying for a long, long time.

What about intelligence and hard work? Surely they matter as much as luck. Yes, but decades of data from behavior genetics tell us that at least half of intelligence is heritable, as is having a personality high in openness to experience, conscientiousness and the need for achievement—all factors that help to shape success. The nongenetic components of aptitude, scrupulousness and ambition matter, too, of course, but most of those environmental and cultural variables were provided by others or circumstances not of your making.

Choosing your parents well has given you one hell of an advantage, dear reader!

Michael Shermer wraps up his column--his 200th for the Scientific American--with this:

There should be consolation in the fact that studies show that what is important in the long run is not success so much as living a meaningful life. And that is the result of having family and friends, setting long-range goals, meeting challenges with courage and conviction, and being true to yourself.

Ahem, I have been saying this, too, for the longest time.  Damn, I am good!

Now you see me ... now you don't

The above screenshot is from two days ago.  I saved that screenshot because I knew that I would be erased from the university directory after the month ended.

Turns out that they didn't wait for the month to end.  True to the letter that the layoff will take effect on the 31st, well, you won't find me anymore at Western Oregon University:

It is no April Fool joke!  The layoff process has been completed. 

A process that began with a meeting with three managers at 2:00 pm on March 30, 2021.  A meeting that lasted less than five minutes, when I was given a year notice.

The layoff meeting was a remarkable sign of the progress that society has made: All three managers were female, and they were in the meeting to layoff a man.  If that isn't progress, I don't know what is ;)

The fact that I got a one-year notice, in contrast to the two-week notice that we imagine, or the horrible immediate layoff, was only because I was a tenured professor.  Such a courteous notice is never afforded to, say, an administrative assistant or an adjunct faculty.  The one-year notice is evidence of the elite status that tenured faculty have in higher education in the US.

It was dumb luck that I got into that elite and enjoyable profession.  But, that luck ran out.  

I am now a retired professor.

An adequate life

More than ten years years ago, I blogged about being in the twilight of a mediocre career.  No, that's not the reason that I am likely to be fired from my job; that's an entirely different matter.

Of course, I know that my life has not been mediocre.  I have had an awesome life, and an awesome career, mostly thanks to dumb luck and the fact that I chose my parents well.

Life is not about excellence.  I always tell students that it is alright if they don't earn the highest grades--in my classes or anywhere.  There are no "A"s in real life, I often tell them.  And even if we are excellent at some small aspect, we are incompetent with the infinity that is the rest is. 

I tell them that life is about giving the fullest to anything that we do. Whether it is chores at home, or the classes that we take, or whatever.  And even embrace our failures because, well, we cannot be good in everything.

I am sure that most students do not care for such a message. For one, all the other "elders" tell them a completely different thing, and I come across as a raving lunatic with a strange accent.  For another, if somebody had told me such stuff when I was twenty years old, I would have immediately dismissed that.  It is with age and experience that we gain such insights.  Wisdom arrives way too late in life!

A history professor at Cornell writes in praise of mediocrity.  "We should learn to give mediocrity the love it deserves. The first step is to rebrand it. I prefer to call it "adequacy."

I agree.

For me as a teacher, to honor adequacy is not to discount the individual excellence of particular students, but to appreciate the collective excellence that can occur even when some students are merely adequate. When I started teaching, I judged the success of a course by how many students wrote brilliant papers — which meant I was always disappointed.
Now I judge it by the quality of the conversation in the room: Did students listen and respond? Did the conversation build on itself? Was there enough disagreement to keep the discussion interesting yet enough common understanding of the subject and questions at hand to keep it focused? In short, did we make interesting intellectual music together?

And,

Let’s drop the exhortations to fail or suck at something and instead cultivate the adequacy mind-set — the feeling of being proud and grateful to be good enough to continue doing something from which we get pleasure and knowledge.

Yes!

It does not mean that we should not strive for excellence.  Life will be a lot more enjoyable if we celebrate our adequacy at most of what we do.

The thread of life

Unlike in most other countries, American universities are big time landlords, who earn a lot of income from their developed real estate.

Country clubs Dorms, conference rooms, auditoriums, climbing walls, etc.  Some also own huge basketball and football venues for educational purposes entertainment.

All those expensive real estate developments have been idle since last March.  And there is very little chance that significant usage of those facilities will begin even in early 2021.

The landlords universities are in distress, and the Republican Uncle Sam couldn't care less.

My own university also has to reckon with the tightening dollars and cents.  As a result, some of us faculty, too, are bound to lose our jobs before the next academic year ends.

Should that day arrive way earlier than I had planned, I will be thankful that I was/am one of the lucky few on this planet who was able to pursue for quite a length of time what truly interested me.  Thanks to some dumb luck!

In my agitated and angst-filled younger years, I was convinced that somewhere out there were the answers to the big questions.  Somewhere.

Even in the first couple of years of graduate school, I was confident that I was on the way to the answers.

I did find the answer.  It was a non-answer of sorts.  Life is full of wonderful ambiguity.  That's it.  We have to live through it all.

Every once in a while I succumb to the temptation of the answer, but almost always I just want to breathe and drink and eat this ambiguity.  I love those damn wicked problems!

No wonder then that even with the courses I teach, I seem to always force students to think about the possible multiple interpretations. I even tell them sometimes not to expect a definitive answer from me.  I suppose my pedagogical goal, if I were to think about it that way, is that if I can help students understand that life itself is all about dealing with ambiguity, then they will know how to deal with specific instances whatever they might be.

A concern and worry that I have is that despite the high levels of literacy that humanity has achieved, there appears to be a decreasing interest in exploring and understanding and discussing the ambiguity that life is.  Perhaps that is also a reason why 63 million responded with a favorable vote when a demagogue yelled and screamed that he alone had all the answers,

The following poem by Oregon's own William Stafford is how I want to end this note on the delightful pursuit of ambiguity:

The Way It Is
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

Indians everywhere in the US! Loving it :)

Freida Pinto on the cover of the NY Times style/fashion issue.  BTW, let us see how well she does in the Woody Allen movie scheduled to be released later this month.

And I am reading the New Yorker, where there is a multi-page profile on "The Laughing Guru" from India--Madan Lal Kataria. However, the full-page portrait graphic makes him look like a strange creature from The Lord of the Rings :)

Then I came across in the Economist, yet again, the name Narayana Kocherlakota, who is now the  President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.  (editor: technically, Kocherlakota was born here in the US ...)

More evidence to reinforce my understanding that we folks with Indian origins blend well with mainstream America.

BTW, that was one piece of dumb-luck for Pinto, eh. To star in Slumdog Millionaire, which is loved in the West (but not in India) thanks to which she is now in a Woody Allen movie ...  not that her acting skills were any impressive in Slumdog either ... perhaps this is the "ten percent" that Woody Allen left out when he made that famous comment that ninety percent of success is simply showing up :)

Thoughts on a dog day afternoon

Walking by the river is always therapeutic.  I am so much used to it that I wonder how I lived without a gorgeous river to walk by during all those years before I moved to Oregon!

The mind wandered, even while I paid attention to people walking or biking.  I was struck, yet again, by the sight of a dog being walked--in a stroller, as if it was a human child that the person was caring for. 

I was reminded of my father for the millionth time for his comment after seeing how dogs are treated in this country; he joked that if people do good things in their lives, then they will be reborn as dogs in America, and will be taken care of better than how kings and queens lived!  Some of the dog beds are a lot more luxurious than what royalty slept on.  Queens from the old days would have enjoyed the kind of grooming services that dogs get.  The grocery store even has dog food that is not canned but specially made!

The wandering mind wondered what I had blogged about two years ago, when I was a gainfully employed full professor.  The post from July 15, 2020 impressed me quite a bit.  Not for the writing style, but one particular paragraph there:

My own university also has to reckon with the tightening dollars and cents.  As a result, some of us faculty, too, are bound to lose our jobs before the next academic year ends.

I had given myself a layoff notice well before the university laid me off!  The layoff letter was delivered to me during a Zoom meeting on March 30, 2021--more than eight months after my blog-post.  The end was too damn easy to predict.

Now, as a pensioner, I have time to walk, to cook, to clean, to read, to blog ...  And, to play bridge.   I suppose I have a dog's life thanks to the good deeds in my previous birth!  Maybe I should send a thank-you note to the university on the anniversary of the layoff notice in 2023 ;)

The following is the (unedited) post from July 15, 2020.

********************

Unlike in most other countries, American universities are big time landlords, who earn a lot of income from their developed real estate.

Country clubs Dorms, conference rooms, auditoriums, climbing walls, etc.  Some also own huge basketball and football venues for educational purposes entertainment.

All those expensive real estate developments have been idle since last March.  And there is very little chance that significant usage of those facilities will begin even in early 2021.

The landlords universities are in distress, and the Republican Uncle Sam couldn't care less.

My own university also has to reckon with the tightening dollars and cents.  As a result, some of us faculty, too, are bound to lose our jobs before the next academic year ends.

Should that day arrive way earlier than I had planned, I will be thankful that I was/am one of the lucky few on this planet who was able to pursue for quite a length of time what truly interested me.  Thanks to some dumb luck!

In my agitated and angst-filled younger years, I was convinced that somewhere out there were the answers to the big questions.  Somewhere.

Even in the first couple of years of graduate school, I was confident that I was on the way to the answers.

I did find the answer.  It was a non-answer of sorts.  Life is full of wonderful ambiguity.  That's it.  We have to live through it all.

Every once in a while I succumb to the temptation of the answer, but almost always I just want to breathe and drink and eat this ambiguity.  I love those damn wicked problems!

No wonder then that even with the courses I teach, I seem to always force students to think about the possible multiple interpretations. I even tell them sometimes not to expect a definitive answer from me.  I suppose my pedagogical goal, if I were to think about it that way, is that if I can help students understand that life itself is all about dealing with ambiguity, then they will know how to deal with specific instances whatever they might be.

A concern and worry that I have is that despite the high levels of literacy that humanity has achieved, there appears to be a decreasing interest in exploring and understanding and discussing the ambiguity that life is.  Perhaps that is also a reason why 63 million responded with a favorable vote when a demagogue yelled and screamed that he alone had all the answers,

The following poem by Oregon's own William Stafford is how I want to end this note on the delightful pursuit of ambiguity:

The Way It Is
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

Gracias, Mexico. You made us possible!

If there is one word that characterizes well what ticks in America, it would be hustle.  Like the hustle at the pool table.  The hustling phone calls that I get about my car warranty or social security.  I mean, this is a country that has hustlers in plenty in its history, and one even got himself elected to the highest office in the land!

That American ethic of hustling also made possible a "Creation Museum" in Kentucky.  What an innovative hustle to make money!  Take, for instance, the way the museum deals with dinosaurs.  Their sales pitch is that dinosaurs and humans co-existed.  In this hustle, they ask, "were you there?"

Think about it: were you there when God created the earth? No, but we have a book inspired by the Creator that tells us how He did it. If we start with God’s Word, dinosaurs living with humans—at least early on—makes sense.

Tickets per person range from $24.95 to $39.95, and "parking not included."  If you want to see how humans lived with dinos, you need to fork over extra for parking your vehicle!

In understanding the universe in which we don't literally read "a book inspired by the Creator" we go about in search of evidence and rational explanations.  In other words, science.

Thanks to science, we understand that humans and dinosaurs didn't live together.  Had I known this in my childhood, I could have avoided a few nightmares!

But, until today, I hadn't considered the possibility that the dinos had to go extinct in order to make homo sapiens possible.

Our presence here on earth was a result of "the mother of all accidents" when a 6-mile wide asteroid crashed into earth.  The essay argues this crash made all the difference: "It stands to reason, then, that without the asteroid impact the dinosaurs that had reigned for more than 100 million years would likely still be here, and therefore the primates would not be, and so neither would we."

The odds of an asteroid hitting earth are very low.  The odds of that size of an asteroid hitting earth are very, very low.  And then the location where it crashed.

The rocks around the Yucatan target site are rich in hydrocarbons and sulfur, which resulted in the production of enormous quantities of soot and sunlight-deflecting aerosols. Geologists figure that as little as 1 to 13 percent of the Earth’s surface contains rocks that could have yielded a comparable stew of destructive materials.

This small target means that with the Earth rotating at about 1,000 miles per hour, had the asteroid arrived just 30 minutes sooner, it would have landed in the Atlantic Ocean; 30 minutes later, in the Pacific Ocean. Just 30 minutes either way and the dinosaurs would probably be here.

And I wouldn't be here blogging!  Dumb luck has been the story of our lives!

So, have a special dinosaur-themed celebration on Cinco de Mayo!

Only Modi can go to Pakistan. Will he?

At the carefully chosen auspicious midnight hour in 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru famously spoke on India's "Tryst with Destiny."  Sixty-seven years later, it does have the feel of yet another tryst with destiny, with the election of Narendra Modi to the office of the prime minister as a mere formal act that is pending, after the thumping victory in the recently concluded long-drawn election.  (Modi will become the first prime minister who was born in independent India.)  

Such is the margin of victory, and such is the magnitude of loss for the scions of the Nehru family, that the Congress Party might not rise again. Finito as they say in the Congress Party's president's old country. Coincidence it will be if Modi gets sworn into office on the anniversary of the death of the last of the Nehru-clan's prime minister--Rajiv Gandhi.

No doubt about the gravity of the political development. It is a marker in history.  What might be in store?  Que sera sera is not what we bloggers and commentators say. We attempt to read the tea leaves. We express our excitement and concerns. In this case, given my long track record, like here, of anything but a Modi sympathizer, concerns are in plenty.

A friend, in/from India, reminded me about Khalil Gibran's poem, Pity the Nation

Pity the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion.
Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave
and eats a bread it does not harvest.

Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero,
and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful.

Pity a nation that despises a passion in its dream,
yet submits in its awakening.

Pity the nation that raises not its voice
save when it walks in a funeral,
boasts not except among its ruins,
and will rebel not save when its neck is laid
between the sword and the block.

Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox,
whose philosopher is a juggler,
and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking

Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpeting,
and farewells him with hooting,
only to welcome another with trumpeting again.

Pity the nation whose sages are dumb with years
and whose strongmen are yet in the cradle.

Pity the nation divided into fragments,
each fragment deeming itself a nation.
Khalil Gibran (The Garden of the Prophet - 1934)

The concerns about Modi are about the very traits of the leader and the country that Gibran notes: " the bully as hero," whose statesman is a fox," the nation divided into fragments" ... And the poem itself, therefore, serving as a contrast to the wonderful dream that Rabindranath Tagore dreamt for an independent India, Where the mind is without fear:

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

Of course, Gibran's poem was the later one and could easily be his response to Tagore.  Both the mystical thinkers were expressing similar sentiments about countries and their leaders.  The biggest worry of mine is about the fragments and that Modi, even if not a uniter, might end up being even more divisive.  A future where the walls narrow, the minorities live in fear, and the neighbors get even more ready to push that red button.

Yet, I hope against hope. After all, human existence over the thousands of years has been propelled by hope, if nothing else.

The hope is this: Modi will become India's equivalent of Nixon going to China.  With his long documented association with the RSS, Modi bleeds more saffron than anybody else can. Thus, if he were to engage in opening up relations with Muslims--internally and with Pakistan--his supporters will not have the slightest doubts about the strongman, the Hindu, that Modi is.  Modi will not be accused of treason by his fanatical followers. The huge parliamentary majority that Modi has, which is such that there might not even be a formal Leader of the Opposition, means that Modi does not have to try to appease any coalition partner and can go about mending fences with Muslims within India and with the ummah.  

For now, good luck, Mr. Prime Minister!  And good luck to my old country!