What, me worry?

I worry.
A lot.
All the time.

When discussing issues like resource management, population "explosion," etc., I often tell students that we humans worry a great deal about a number of collective problems, in addition to our personal worries.

I also tell them that it is such worrying that has also helped us live long and prosper.  Worrying helps us avert disasters, or at least manage our lives through them.

Sometimes, I have also told them variations of this: "But, if the worry paralyses you into inaction, then that is destructive."

At least thus far into my life, my worry-wart personality has not ruined me.  I just need to ride out another two decades ;)

Worrying is less about the today, and a lot about tomorrow.  We have no certainty about the future--all we can imagine are probabilities.  The uncertainty about tomorrow is what leads people like me to worry.  For instance, the job that I have might not be there next year. If so, then what?  Have I saved enough to live through a period of extended unemployment?  What if there are unfortunate events in the old country that require me to to fly there?  What if ...

The worrying leads us to plan.  I suspect that the happy-go-lucky are rarely the planners that we worry-warts are.  The more the worrying type, the more we plan things in advance.

Even when we plan in advance, we worry that shit will happen and render waste all those plans.

We worry.

The constructive worrying is useful, especially in three ways, research says:

First, by worrying about something, we are more likely to think of reasons to take action and be motivated to do something. Second, worry acts as a reminder to do things – in effect the unresolved uncertainty or concern keeps coming to mind as a mental process to make sure we try and tackle it… Third, worry can involve effective preparation, planning and problem-solving.

Seriously, they need research to arrive at these conclusions? ;)

Worry has an important function:

It’s a signal. It’s essentially pointing us towards something that might be coming and it’s drawing our attention there. It’s motivating us to ideally prevent the bad thing from happening or at least prepare for it.

Yep.  Like how I worry about my wussy personality not being the ideal one for aging, which is why I want to healthily age for which I practice healthy eating and walking and ...

So, here is my one-word advice for you.

Worry!

Should progress have to occur funeral by funeral?

In 1955:

On this day in 1955, two white men abducted and murdered a 14-year-old Black boy named Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi. To overcome racial inequality, we must confront our history. Share this #racialinjustice https://t.co/i42tiT2xbm

— Equal Justice Initiative (@eji_org) August 28, 2020

In 1963:

Today is the 57th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s historic I Have A Dream speech at the 1963 March on Washington.

Half a century later, against the backdrop of nationwide uprisings demanding racial justice, much of his words still ring true.

Let's revisit them.

— ACLU (@ACLU) August 28, 2020

At that march in 1963, MLK said:

There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, ‘When will you be satisfied?’
We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.

Police brutality.

Here we are in 2020.  It has been 65 years since Emmett Till's brutal murder.  57 years since MLK's soaring rhetoric.  A couple of days ago, the police shot a black man 7 times in the back. As his kids were watching.

Turns out that this group was always right, though I didn't initially see it that way.

Fuck the police comin' straight from the underground
A young nigga got it bad 'cause I'm brown
And not the other color so police think
They have the authority to kill a minority
Fuck that shit, 'cause I ain't the one
For a punk motherfucker with a badge and a gun

It is beyond my wildest imagination how Blacks continue on with their lives without breaking into riots all over the country.  I have the utmost respect and admiration for how they have controlled their anger.

But, one thing is clear: This white supremacist shit cannot and will not continue for much longer.

Black Lives Matter!



PS: The title of this post is derived from Max Planck's observation that science progresses one funeral at a time.

A virus loses the battle in Africa

Throughout my childhood years, a sudden onset of high-temperature fever was a constant in my life.  One moment I would be playing like any other kid, and the next I would be down with a scalding temperature.

One story that I have heard my mother narrate often was about how I was delirious and calling out the gods Krishna and Rama during one of those fevers when I was a kid.  She panicked that I was well on my way out of earth.

The one that I always remember is when I worried that I wouldn't be able to sit for the Class X exams, because I came down with one such sudden fever.  In the old country's system, missing the all-important end of year exams at the 10th or 12th grade would mess up one's life.  The doctor had a simple treatment protocol: Rest, and do not do any exam preparation.  As one who never cared to spend time prepping for exams, I found the doctor's recommendation to be useless ;)

The fever weakened me a great deal though.  So, for one exam, my father escorted me to the hall and sat outside ready--in case he had to rush me to the hospital.

All through those years of sudden fevers, one of the questions I was always asked was whether I experienced any pain in my legs.  If ever I said yes to that, the expression on my parents' faces conveyed well their worries. It was all because of a fear of polio.

I was fortunate that none of those episodes had anything to do with the poliovirus.

Two years ago, I blogged that most of the world is polio-free, except three countries: Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nigeria.

Now we are down to one.

The remaining two are in South Asia, which means that the entire continent of Africa is now free of polio.

It is celebration time.

It took quite an effort in Nigeria where public health workers literally lost their lives in their efforts to vaccinate their kids.  The virus did not kill them; they were murdered by assassins who had been brainwashed into thinking that the polio drops were contaminated medicine!

Now, Africa has gotten rid of the damn virus.

Delivering polio vaccines to every child in the African region and wiping out the wild virus is no small feat, and the human resources, skills and experience gained in the process leave behind a legacy in how to tackle diseases and reach the poorest and most marginalised communities with lifesaving services. Leadership from all levels of government across party lines, a historic public-private partnership which raised billions, millions of health workers reaching children across the region - from conflict zones to remote areas only accessible by motorbike or helicopter - and a culture of continual improvement were all critical to overcoming challenges and bottlenecks. 

If the world is committed to doing the right thing, then we can move the proverbial mountains!

Polio and COVID-19 both demonstrate that the best ways to break the chains of disease transmission are working together in solidarity, accelerating the science and continually cooperating to solve problems on the ground and improve service delivery.

It is such an effort that will be needed to fight the coronavirus.  Unfortunately, tRump and his fellow sociopaths are running ruining the government.

For now, we will forget the sociopaths and just celebrate the victory in Africa.

Mind your Ps and Qs ... because ...

During discussions in the classroom, which now seems like something that happened in my previous life and to which we might not return for a few more months, I would often follow up with a student's point with "because ..."

I want students to explain why X leads to Y, and not just assume that X is there or that Y will happen.  After all, the courses that I teach are not faith-based.  Sometimes, I would even tell them that very point--we do not simply believe but provide logical explanations.

If the context is climate change, then I even quote Katherine Hayhoe, who said it well that she does not believe in climate change, because climate change is not about belief, not about faith, but is about cause-effect.

Even though I walk around with a Rodney Dangerfield-like punchline, I know well that there are students who listen to me and think about what we discussed.   Like how a student wrote to me well after a term ended:

Hello Dr. K,
When we were in class last term talking about Climate Change you had mentioned Dr. Hayhoe and the quote she had about belief ...
I was wondering if you could please either send a link to her quote or just the quote itself.

If only a significant number of Americans behaved like that student!

Instead, there is a widespread denial of science that runs deep.  "[So many] of the same people who reject the scientific evidence of anthropogenic climate change also question the evidence related to COVID-19."

Given how common it is, it is remarkable that philosophers have failed to give it a formal name. But I think we can view it as a variety of what sociologists call implicatory denial. I interpret implicatory denial as taking this form: If P, then Q. But I don't like Q! Therefore, P must be wrong. This is the logic (or illogic) that underlies most science rejection.

It is not that this crowd is completely against science.  They cheer, for instance, when the American military pinpoints a location and bombs the shit out of an area full of brown people.  They know well that it was science that helped create the bombs and the precision technology to target an area.  So, to call them science-deniers is perhaps incorrect.  They are against science only when they run into "If P, then Q. But I don't like Q! Therefore, P must be wrong."

I like this framework to understand those who oppose climate change, evolution, ...

But, to reject Q just because it is not what we prefer as an interpretation means that it is only a matter of time before we run into reality.  "When we reject evidence because we do not like what it implies, we put ourselves at risk."

The U.S. could have acted more quickly to contain COVID-19. If we had, we would have saved both lives and jobs. But facts have an inconvenient habit of getting in the way of our desires. Sooner or later, denial crashes on the rocks of reality. The only question is whether it crashes before or after we get out of the way.

We are paying for the inaction due to denial all through February.  I cannot wait for President Joe Biden to throw out the regime of "alternative facts" and get us on to a path of ""If P, then Q" and take care of the Ps and Qs.

Stranded in the Falklands

I was a globally-curious political junkie of a college student when Margaret Thatcher went to war against Argentina.

As a colonizer-hating pinkie, I was against Thatcher and the UK, even if I had no idea about the issues.  Much later in my life, when I watched Groucho Marx, I wished I had known about "I'm against it!" as my guiding principle ;)

When I did find out from the atlas where the Falklands are, it shocked me that the UK would go to war so far away from home over some small islands.

The Falklands are practically a launching pad to the Antarctic and with barely any population, yet Thatcher was keen on fighting for it!

A year later, Reagan sent the US forces to invade Grenada.  Some simpaticos they were!

A few weeks ago, Larissa MacFarquhar wrote about how much the Falklands have transformed over the past couple of decades and are now at global crossroads.  A recent development there was about oil:

Since the nineteen-nineties, oil companies had been exploring the waters around the islands, and by the early twenty-tens it had become clear that substantial oil deposits existed in the basins offshore.

Money started coming in.

Well, all that was in an era before COVID-19.  Once the coronavirus took charge of the world, everything changed.

In late March, as the plague drew closer, and the planes stopped coming, the islanders, like people everywhere, sat at home and went online, trying to figure out what was going to happen. Oil prices had plunged since the pandemic began, and covid had been spreading among workers living in close quarters on rigs, so it seemed unlikely that drilling would start anytime soon. With restaurants closing in Europe, demand for fish was a fraction of what it had been, and that was in addition to the possibility that Brexit would result in European tariffs approaching twenty per cent. It was not yet clear what all this meant for the fisheries, but their revenues made up nearly two-thirds of the islands’ income, so any reduction would have an enormous impact. Tourism was the second-largest business, and that consisted almost entirely of cruise-ship passengers. Who was going to sign up for a cruise now? And if the tourists stopped coming restaurants and hotels would close. You weren’t allowed to stay in the Falklands without a job, so the people who worked there and didn’t yet have permanent residency might have to go home.
What would happen if planes stopped bringing in regular supplies? Would the islands become remote once more, hoping the deliveries came in, relying on homegrown food if they didn’t? In the old days, fruit was shipped in once a month—it was hard to grow anything on the islands other than berries—and people called mutton “365” because they ate it every day, sometimes for all three meals. Could that happen again? Would younger people who’d grown up in Stanley learn to slaughter sheep?

And what happens to the offshore oil exploration?  A gambler's loss:; "tapping some fields no longer makes economic sense"

[A] decade after the discovery of as much as 1.7 billion barrels of crude in surrounding waters, the British overseas territory known for sheep rearing and tension with Argentina looks as remote as ever. Rather than the next frontier, the project to extract energy risks being added to a list of what companies call “stranded assets” that could cost them huge sums to mothball.

The coronavirus has, in some ways, accelerated the shift away from fossil fuels, even as the sociopath in the White House continues to operate in his own world of alternative facts.  A tRumpian world in which coal is king, and oil is black gold.

I wonder if the stable genius knows where the Falklands are!

This post ain't worth a hill of beans

Years ago--well, two decades ago--I was preparing for an European vacation that included a few days in Italy.

The web was in its infancy; there was nothing much in the web for Alta Vista, the search engine of those days, to tell me anything meaningful.  So, I read and re-read the Fodor's travel guidebook for Italy.

I was fascinated with the travel-book talking up Pasta e fagioli.  Pasta and beans?

Beans in Italy?

I checked with an office colleague, Joe, whose mother was from Italy.  From his stories about his mother, I knew that Joe would have the answer.

Joe confirmed the idea of pasta and beans, and said there are many variations according to one's tastes.  And he pointed out to me that it is a part of Dean Martin's song too!

Every single day is a learning experience!

So, of course, when in Italy, I had pasta e fagioli, in a town near Florence.

Up until then, I hadn't associated Europe with beans.  I had always been under the impression that beans were, well, warm country foods.  All kinds of beans in India.  The beans that my Nigerian friend made.  Beans that I had in Venezuela.  And now beans in Italy, too.  Who woulda thunk that!

A few years ago, here in Oregon, for a potluck gathering I made my version of வேர்க்கடலை சுண்டல் (verkadalai chundal) from the old country life.

I was away from the table when I heard a couple of people asking each other whether they tasted the bean dish.  Their comments conveyed that they were confused about the dish that looked like beans but tasted like peanuts.

Finally, one asked aloud who made the bean dish.

I explained.  They were peanuts, I told them.

"Peanuts"?

I explained to the gathering that peanuts are nothing but legumes, and that you can boil them just like you boil any beans.

"Boil them?"

Like I said, every single day is a learning experience!

Income inequality and the artist

The old belief was that college was the ticket to the fabled middle class American Dream. In this belief system, a four-year college diploma was worth more than a diploma from a two-year college.

The belief did deliver for a while. A great number attended state schools in their regions, graduated, and went on to own homes in the suburbs.

Over the recent years, however, this belief system has stopped delivering.

Students are now graduating with debts that are beyond most of our imaginations, and graduates often end up in jobs for which it seems like college degrees are not required and the pay isn't great either. The dream of owning a home and having kids gets postponed. Sometimes the dreams are simply that.

It is not that the "value" of college education itself has changed. The political economy in the world outside the college campus has changed--radically. Average wages have not kept up with the times. There is plenty of money being made by a few, while the vast middle struggles. Increasingly, the money is made by a very few in the rapidly shape-shifting technology world, while the rest are left behind in the silicon dust.

In this structure, it has become a nightmare for those who majored in order to become writers, musicians, dancers, painters, playwrights, and anything else in such a grouping. In The Death of the Artist, William Deresiewicz writes in detail about how conditions have changed in this group that interprets the human condition through their creative talents. And it is one hell of a depressing portrayal of how much things have changed for the worse.

Based on an intuitive understanding derived from reading about the changing trends, I have cautioned many students, like "R" who was passionate about a career in dancing, about the kinds of red flags that Deresiewicz writes about. I have always warned them about the myth of the "starving artist" who does "not sell out." Of course, money is not everything, but the lack of money is one awful existence. Should more students like "R" approach me, I now have a better approach: I will tell them to first read The Death of the Artist.

As Deresiewicz writes, it is not that there is no money in the arts "industry." Consider, for instance, that "Salvator Mundi," a 600-year-old painting by Leonardo da Vinci, sold for almost half-a-billion dollars. There are people who are THAT wealthy in order to afford to buy paintings valued at multiple millions. The fact that there are such ultra-wealthy is the real problem. Deresiewicz writes:

The devastation of the arts economy, like the degradation of the college experience, is rooted in the great besetting sin of contemporary American society: extreme and growing inequality.

Why does this matter?

The growing inequality leaves very little in the bank accounts of the middle class. This then means that the middle class is less able to spend on non-essentials. They then do not spend money on the local community theatre; the local indie band; the local writers' books; etc. Meanwhile, the tech world continues its brainwashing that you, too, can become a music millionaire right from your basement. You fall for it, and the tech giants add a few more billion dollars in market capitalization.

So, what can be done?

You as a consumer have a choice. For example, you could stop patronizing the algorithm-driven services like Pandora and Spotify. Instead, spend that money on art and the artists in your own community.

You as a citizen have a choice. You could vote for candidates and parties that promise to address the growing income and wealth inequality, and who truly want to make the American Dream possible for many more.

You don't have to take my word for it--read William Deresiewicz's The Death of the Artist.

Absurdities and atrocities

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

Voltaire wrote that.

Absurdities come in all types.

Claims like how the Hindu god Ganesha is evidence of cosmetic surgery in ancient India. Or that Karna in Mahabharata was a result of advanced genetic science and technology. Or, absurdities like how the noise from wind turbines causes cancer, or about building a wall at the Mexico border as a solar wall so it creates energy and pays for itself.

In the theatre of the absurd that politics is, it turns out that if you can make enough people believe in absurdities, well, you can make them commit atrocities too.

Atrocities like lynching non-Hindus for eating beef, or even for expressing love across religions.  Atrocities like caging mothers and separating their children from them.

Of course, Voltaire did not make that observation in the context of "democratic" politics.  It was about faith. About organized religion.  In contemporary India, there is an unholy mix of religion and politics, which then leads to "politicization of health care."

In the political theatre where logic and evidence have lost to populism, the leaders have spun many absurd stories that have been well received.  Think about how an entertainer kept repeating the absurd claim that former President Obama was born in Kenya, and that perhaps he is even a Muslim. It worked, and we now have people dying even as the sociopath refuses to take any responsibility and while manically dissing health care experts.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

This is all the more the reason why we should teach Voltaire and Socrates and more in higher education.

The first step is to remove from office the absurd who are in office and committing atrocities!

The campaign is heating up

In school, back in the old country, when learning about deserts around the world, we came across a name that summed up what awaited one on a miserably hot day in the desert: Death Valley.

There is simply no way that I would have imagined then that I would live in the United States, and for a few years not far from Death Valley itself.

However, visiting Death Valley never happened.  It turned out that visiting Death Valley and staying at the historic inn during the couple of pleasant months required long-term planning and committing to the dates month in advance.

Death Valley is in the news today: It "hit a scorching 130 degrees on Sunday, marking what could be the hottest temperature on Earth since at least 1913."

130!

The World Meteorological Organization tweeted that this "would be the hottest global temperature officially recorded since 1931."

We can't merely shrug this off though, in a world in which we have been experiencing a warming trend.  A year ago, on July 2nd, Shahdad, Iran, registered 127.6 degrees on the thermometer.  Every year, we are told that it was hotter than the previous year.

Bill McKibben writes that we might be looking at a century of crises:

Because humans have fundamentally altered the physical workings of planet Earth, this is going to be a century of crises, many of them more dangerous than what we’re living through now. The main question is whether we’ll be able to hold the rise in temperature to a point where we can, at great expense and suffering, deal with those crises coherently, or whether they will overwhelm the coping abilities of our civilization.

We can't even console ourselves with the Casablanca line, "We'll Always Have Paris."  tRump withdrew from the Paris Agreement, remember?

So, what are we looking at?

McKibben quotes from the book by Matthew Lynas that he reviews in the essay:

If we stay on the current business-as-usual trajectory, we could see two degrees as soon as the early 2030s, three degrees around mid-century, and four degrees by 2075 or so. If we’re unlucky with positive feedbacks…from thawing permafrost in the Arctic or collapsing tropical rainforests, then we could be in for five or even six degrees by century’s end.

Keep in mind that the "degrees" are in Celsius.  One degree in Celsius is about 1.8 degrees difference in the Fahrenheit scale.

tRump does not want to "stay on the current business-as-usual trajectory"--he is bent on accelerating the process with his populist talk about coal (and oil and natural gas too.)   The Arctic is for drilling! So, we don't even need to wait for 2030!

The record-setting heatwaves of 2019 “will be considered an unusually cool summer in the three-degree world”; over a billion people would live in zones of the planet “where it becomes impossible to safely work outside artificially cooled environments, even in the shade.” The Amazon dies back, permafrost collapses. Change feeds on itself: at three degrees the albedo, or reflectivity, of the planet is grossly altered, with white ice that bounces sunshine back out to space replaced by blue ocean or brown land that absorbs those rays, amplifying the process.
And then comes four degrees

You don't want to know what happens!

While there is no vaccine to protect us from the warming and the effects, there are other things that are happening.  Like:

The price per kilowatt hour of solar power has fallen 82 percent since 2010—this spring in the sunny deserts of Dubai the winning bid for what will be the world’s largest solar array came in at not much more than a penny. The price of wind power has fallen nearly as dramatically. Now batteries are whooshing down the same curve.

There is hope.  Possibilities.  "The climate plan announced by the Biden campaign last month is a credible start toward the necessary effort."

Vote tRump out of office.  And unseat all the Republicans who continue to deny the science and reality of global warming and climate change.

You were born when? You, too, are responsible for this!

In retrospect, the comments to this post from four years ago come across as being consistent with how supremacists view the world.

In my post, I wrote, "The older I get, the more I am appalled that people lived and behaved so awfully.  Especially my people who belonged to the privileged upper caste."  I followed it up with, "Deep down within me, I want the leaders of the Brahmin community to issue a formal and heartfelt apology."

That was about the caste system in which I was born into the upper caste of Brahmin.

I reflected on the atrocities here in my adopted land, and I wrote, "we have a long way to go to correcting the grievous errors of the past."

The commenters, on the other hand, did not see any reason for any kind of a "I am sorry."

Referring to their horrible (ill)logic, I responded that according to them, "I, as a naturalized citizen, am in the clear and do not have to worry a bit about the American past, right?"  How twisted is that logic!  It has always been clear to me that "It is not about "victimhood" but about honest engagement with the past. It is our collective responsibility even though I--as an individual--had no part in this."

For a long time, I have been feeling the weight of caste issues from the old country, and anti-Blackness in the adopted country.  Two unbearable burdens, as I have referred to them.

Isabel Wilkerson brings them together in her latest book, Caste.  The book arrived a couple of days ago.  It lives up to the expectations.

Kwame Anthony Appiah articulates my feelings for me, as great writers do:

In chapter after chapter, Wilkerson brings out suggestive similarities in the treatment of Dalits in India, African-Americans in the United States and Jews in Nazi Germany. Lower-caste members are dehumanized and stigmatized, kept in their place through cruelty and terror, and forbidden to intermarry with members of the higher castes. Privileges are arrogated to the high caste. Pollution comes from contact with the low caste. When, in the 1960s, a Black civil rights activist sought to “integrate” a pool by swimming a lap, Wilkerson tells us, it was subsequently drained and entirely refilled to appease its white users.
What distinguishes Wilkerson is her grasp of the power of individual narratives to illustrate such general ideas, allowing her to tell us what these abstract notions have meant in the lived experience of ordinary people both of the higher castes (white Americans, Brahmins and “Aryan” Germans) and of the lowest (African-Americans, Dalits and Jews).

I am approaching the halfway mark of the book, and that is exactly how I feel about Wilkerson's writing.  The connections that she makes across the different strings of history when helping us understand the dark chapters of history!

While Wilkerson including the Nazi framework is understandable for how those monsters drew ideas from the American treatment of Blacks and Native Americans, the manner in which the Nazis treated their "others," especially the Jewish population, is starkly different from how the enslaved were treated and how the Dalits fared in India.  This is a point that this review in The New Yorker brings up:

In the book’s comparison of the Third Reich to India and America, for example, a rather jarring distinction is set aside: the final objective of Nazi ideology was to eliminate Jewish people, not just to subordinate them. While American whites and Indian upper castes exploited Blacks and Dalits to do their menial labor, the Nazis came to see no functional role for Jews. In Nazi propaganda, Jews weren’t backward, bestial, natural-born toilers; they were cunning arch-manipulators of historical events. (When Goebbels and other Nazis reviled “extreme Jewish intellectualism” and claimed that Jews had helped orchestrate Germany’s defeat in the Great War, they were insisting on Jewish iniquity, not occupational incapacity.) The violence exercised against Dalits in India and Black people in America provides an ill-fitting template for eliminationist anti-Semitism.

In the US and in India, the system made sure that everyone knew their respective stations and stayed there.  Any attempt to rise above one's station meant extreme violence for the "untouchable."

From 1619 to 1865 was a long 250 years of enslaving human beings.  And then another 100 years of separate-and-unequal.  How can we move forward?

I took a peek at the epilogue.  Isabel Wilkerson refers to the same framework that we always end up with--create a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

For that, and more, we first need to vote away from power all the white supremacists--starting with the one in the White House.

A missing person

The small-talk chit-chat began seven years ago.  A few months in, we were on first name basis.  That was a huge deal given that all our interactions were for a couple of minutes as she scanned my purchases and rang up the total at the grocery store.

She has been gone for a month or so.

Absence of a person during these Covid times makes one worry a lot.  At least, I do.  I did.

Covid has taken the fun out of life.  Over the past months, we stopped trading horrible jokes and puns.  Like, "What is the one food that has caused the greatest grief and misery to humans?"  We barely had the time and the energy to inquire about each other's physical and mental health.  The coronavirus has the last laugh, it seems like.

So, when she has been gone for a month, I worried that it was because of Covid.  I decided to ask about her.

The checkout clerk was familiar with me after these years.  But, we are not on first name basis though.

As she scanned, I asked her, "hey, whatever happened to W? I haven't seen her like for more than a month"

I hesitated to ask even that much.  I didn't want a bureaucratic response like, "you have to ask the manager."  Or worse, for my intentions to be misunderstood.  But, with this clerk, I knew I would not be misunderstood, and that I would get a straight response.

"She had a fracture at home for which she needed to have a surgery.  It might take her another 2 weeks or so. I haven't texted her recently."

I told her to convey my regards.

She will tell me all about it when she returns.

Dosais for breakfast in the People's House in 2021

I am absolutely delighted that Kamala Harris is Joe Biden's running mate.

A year ago, as the Democratic wannabes were positioning themselves, and when it seemed like Haris was a formidable front runner, The New Yorker profiled this daughter of immigrants--Jamaican father and Indian (Tamil) mother.

Harris' mother was from Chennai.

Harris’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan, the Brahman daughter of a diplomat from Chennai, graduated from the University of Delhi at nineteen, and, avoiding an arranged marriage, went to Berkeley to study nutrition and endocrinology. There, she met another graduate student, Donald Harris, from Jamaica, who was pursuing a Ph.D. in economics. The student civil-rights movement, centered on the Berkeley campus, gave the two young immigrants a shared context. “They both identified as people of color and people who were oppressed by a white-male-dominated world,” Meena Harris, Kamala’s niece, told me. “Their fields were science and economics—there were not many Indian women or black men.” They were married while still in graduate school, and Kamala was born in 1964; another daughter, Maya, came two years after that.

A wonderful immigrant story.  Only in America can a brown-skinned woman come to study advanced science, marry another brown-skinned immigrant doing advanced studies in economics, and have a daughter who grows up to be the attorney general of the biggest state, and then its senator, and now a VP candidate.  This itself gives me so much hope for the country that I adopted as mine.

It is awesome that she embraced the Black identity of hers right from when she was young, which is why she chose to study at Howard.

In her late teens, Harris fell in with a group of friends who were bound for historically black colleges. “We all went to private school, we all were educated, we all were very much parented, but we knew kids that weren’t,” Derreck Johnson, a restaurateur in Oakland, told me. He attended the same Catholic school as Maya, before going to Fisk University, and remains close to the family. “The idea of the struggle was embedded in us from our mothers, who told their stories,” he said. Kamala went to Howard and returned to San Francisco for law school. By then, Maya, who had given birth to Meena at seventeen, was in college, so Kamala and her mother often took Meena for overnights and weekends. The matriarchy was intact.

Kamala is not a Tamil word though.  As is the case with most Brahmin names, it is from the Sanskrit, and it means lotus.

This lively, warm, and absolutely human video of Kamala Harris and Mindy Kaling (also with Tamil roots) will remind you of the kind of empathetic and joyful leadership that we used to take for granted.  It is time to make America great again ... and this time with dosai ;)

“It’s like being slapped in the dark”

Yesterday, during a physically-distanced chat with friends, one of them used an idiom.  "Who creates all these?" I said.  Like "pushing the envelope."

Of course, there are experts in the field who know the answers to such questions.

When we were kids, we had a rudimentary English-Tamil dictionary--the same dictionary that gave me the correct spelling for bougainvillea.  It also included equivalents of  few English and Tamil idioms.  I was glad that we had such a dictionary because the meaning of the words that are strung together in an idiom do not by any means add up to what the idiom means.  "Pushing the envelope" does not mean pushing the envelope, right?  Or, even better is this one where the words have nothing to do with that the phrase means: "It rained cats and dogs."

Every language/culture has its own sets of idioms.  In the culture we grow up with, we don't think twice about the usage until it comes to explaining it to a non-native.  Like how difficult it is to explain what "it warmed the cockles of my heart" means!

Today I came across an idiom.  In Italian.  È come essere schiaffeggiato nel buio.

It means “It’s like being slapped in the dark.”

But, it is not about the slap or darkness.  There is a deeper meaning behind those words: "You don’t know where it’s coming from, and you don’t know why it’s happening to you."  When you are slapped in the dark, you have no idea where it came from.  And if it is in a quiet room where you thought you were alone, you have no idea why you were slapped either.

I suppose if there were an Italian-American dictionary, comparable to the English-Tamil dictionary, then the equivalent of È come essere schiaffeggiato nel buio might be "it came out of left field."

Even more fascinating that the person who used that Italian expression was no Italian.  It was an Indian-American!  Padma Lakshmi, the model-turned-chef-turned-celebrity uses that Italian expression in an interview.  She is able to toss an Italian idiom into the conversation because, according to Wikipedia, "Lakshmi speaks English, Italian, Spanish, Tamil and Hindi."

We live in such a fascinating world.  Instead of appreciating the beauty in all these, we have a demented demagogue who can barely speak in sentences that are at a second-grader's level, and who probably thinks that somebody like a Padma Lakshmi is from a shithole!

The election of tRump is certainly one of those that is best described as È come essere schiaffeggiato nel buio.

Our polarized and fragmented political worlds

Over the decades, I have gotten used to editors rejecting my commentaries.  The latest is merely that--the latest.  Disappointing, yes.  But, to use the words of the current President, it is what it is!

One of the rejections was about the polarized political environment and television "news" channels catering to their audience.  A first version of this was rejected back during my California years.  A decade into my Oregon years, I wrote again about it in 2012, and yet again it was rejected.

Re-reading the piece, well, I stand by it ;)

I concluded there,"We have no choice but to get used to the reality that most Americans—and the rest of the world, too—will increasingly live in polarized and fragmented political worlds."

That was in 2012.  Well before tRump!  Over the past four years, the fragmentation has become severe.

I have always hated living and thinking in a bubble.  This is why I used to read the WSJ, even if I cursed it most of the time.  I engaged with Republicans and have even shared many meals with them.  But, that was all prior to the summer of 2016.

I terribly miss that pre-2016 world, and I know that it will never come back.  After all, the tRump voters have made it clear, to borrow from Taylor Swift, that they are "gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate."

Here it is for you to read my rejected 2012 commentary:
************************

When I was new to this country, C-Span fascinated me for its uniqueness—it provided politics in the raw without filters of any kind, and offered me multiple perspectives that I could not have ever otherwise followed.  It even seemed rather quaint that the channel would list separate phone numbers for Republican and Democratic viewers to call in with their comments and questions.

At C-Span and in the real world, the old days at least held out a possibility of conversations across political or religious lines and about the issues of the day, both profound and trivial. 

Now, as much as the common water cooler has been replaced by individualized water bottles, news sources and discussion forums have also become customized.  Thus, it is now easy to remain within our own narrowly defined identities, whatever they might be and, thereby, shut ourselves from anything that does not correspond to our views of the world.

Professor Cass Sunstein wrote about this rapidly emerging trend back in 2001—eons ago in the modern digital timelines!  Sunstein wrote then that one of the vices of the exponentially expanding modern communications involved “the risk of fragmentation, as the increased power of individual choice allows people to sort themselves into innumerable homogeneous groups, which often results in amplifying their preexisting views.”

Empirical evidence confirms this.  In a research paper, Shanto Iyengar of Stanford and Kyu Hahn of UCLA note that “although an infinite variety of information is available, individuals may well limit their exposure to news or sources that they expect to find agreeable. Over time, this behavior is likely to become habituated so that users turn to their preferred sources automatically no matter what the subject matter.”

Fragmentation in the news media will then be a logical outcome in such an information world.

As a matter of fact, this is already the case in India.  .

In the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, the two main political parties are represented through their leaders Jayalalitha and Karunanidhi.  Interestingly enough, they both also own stakes in two television cable channels.  The channel “JayaTV” is aligned with Jayalalitha, while “SunTV” is pro-Karunanidhi.   

These channels offer the usual entertainment staples of dramas and movies.   The political slant of the two channels becomes obvious during the regional news programs.  When Jayalalitha is in power, SunTV is forever critical of the government, and the roles reverse when the political fortunes shift! 

It is equally fascinating that the audience is also fully aware that the news from these two television channels is not unbiased.  Thus, news items that are highly critical or laudatory are then appropriately scaled by the viewers!

It appears that this model is being rapidly adopted by other political leaders and parties across India.  In Gujarat, for instance:

Weeks before Gujarat gets into poll mode, the state BJP is set to launch its own TV channel called ‘Namo Gujarat’, eponymously named after CM Narendra Modi.

Perhaps then all we need is a similar sort of full-disclosure of political affiliations from “news” organizations in America. Those who are upset with Fox News and MSNBC will, I am confident, be ok with them if these and similar media outlets stopped pretending that they offer objective and balanced news and analysis and, instead, came out of the news closet and revealed their true political colors.

As Sunstein argued years ago, such fragmentation might not advance the cause of healthy democratic participation.  Instead of having constructive conversations where differences are articulated, we then end up with “shoutfests” where the objective is not to listen to differing views but to drown out the opposing voices. 

But then, as the old saying goes, the genie is, unfortunately, out of the bottle!  We have no choice but to get used to the reality that most Americans—and the rest of the world, too—will increasingly live in polarized and fragmented political worlds. 

Let me sail in the ocean of my dreams

Lebanon and Beirut have been in the news these past couple of days because of the terrible explosion and the awful loss of lives.  What a tragedy!

Some day, when peace returns, I hope I will be able to travel to Lebanon.

As a young teenager, I realized that I had a deep-seated yearning for understanding the world outside the small little part that I had been exposed to.   My window to the world was through the radio and the print media--after all, the internet had yet to be invented!

Thus, it was perhaps in my eleventh grade or so, I wrote two letters.

The first one was to the West German embassy in New Delhi.  In the letter, I requested information about possibilities for undergraduate studies in West Germany.  With the characteristic German efficiency, which I would personally experience two decades later, I got a thick envelope from the embassy with a whole lot of information.

Well, it didn't take me long to realize that fluency of the German language was required. And, that was it.

The second letter was to the American University in Beirut.  Yes, the Beirut of the horrendous civil war that was dominating the pages of The Hindu those days.  I couldn't care about the war, and I figured that there wouldn't be any language issue with the American University.

When a thickly padded envelope arrived, dad was flummoxed, and may have said something along the lines of "you want to go to a country that is in the middle of a war?"

I suppose I had a difficult time explaining my fascination for Lebanon--it was all because of Khalil Gibran.

I had borrowed The Prophet from the only library in town, and found Gibran's writings very intriguing.  It appealed a lot to the brooding teenager that I was, like most teens!  Even though, I wasn't able to quite fathom Gibran's philosophical and mystical words.

But, Gibran had me all worked up about Lebanon.  A few other essays I read talked up Lebanon as a Venice, as an exciting place where the West met the East.  Others described it as a Paris in the east.

I wanted to be there, civil war be damned!

I might have made it there, but for the truckloads of money that was needed.

So, no Beirut either.

Instead, I went to Coimbatore, via Nagpur.  Oh well, Beirut, Coimbatore, ... all the same, right? :)

A little over five years after the first time I ever went to Coimbatore, I reached America.  Lebanon and Beirut always managed to pop up in my life at regular intervals.

Towards the end of graduate school, a friend, Praveen, who returned to India after completing his doctoral work, presented me with Gibran's Tears and Laughter.  It kept the Lebanon flame alive.

One of the people in the life after graduate school, and who later became good friends, was a couple from Lebanon.  Samir, who suddenly died of a heart attack way too young, fondly talked about his growing up years in Lebanon, and about the cedars and the figs.  Sam, as he was known, did his part to stoke the fire inside for Gibran's land.

It is now almost forty years since I fell in love with a place and its peoples I had never met.  Maybe soon I will be in Lebanon.

Here's a stanza from Gibran's "Leave me, my blamer"

Let me sail in the ocean of
My dreams; Wait until Tomorrow
Comes, for tomorrow is free to
Do with me as he wishes. Your
Laying is naught but shadow
That walks with the spirit to
The tomb of abashment, and shows
Heard the cold, solid earth.

To set forth toward class

It does not look like the following essay will be published anywhere other than here in my blog :(
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With the novel coronavirus firmly establishing itself in the country, and with my university’s budget managers contemplating laying off a few faculty, I have been waking up these past summer mornings wondering if I will ever “set forth toward class,” to use the memorable phrase from William Stafford’s charming poem Old Prof.

Early last March was the last time I “set forth toward class.”  During that final face-to-face meeting in the winter quarter, students had questions in plenty, from arrangements for the final exams, to whether they will be able to come back to the dorms.  I suggested to them that they should take all their valuables when they go back to their homes and assume that they would not be back on campus for a very long time.

Their facial expressions and body language broke my heart.  “Keep calm and carry on” was one of the many clichéd words of wisdom that I shared with them.

The spring quarter that followed was completely virtual.  Logging into the learning management  system from my “home office” was all I had to do in order to set forth toward class.

Virtual classes are not new to me—I have been teaching courses online for two decades, starting at  California State University, Bakersfield, when having a DSL line at home was a luxury and when most had only dial-up modems.  However, twenty years of online teaching did not prepare me for a  completely virtual term with students I had never met in the real world, including a section of  true freshman.  It was unsettling.

Like William Stafford’s “old prof,” will I ever “set forth toward class” again after drinking freshly brewed coffee in my office?

It has been five months since I last saw my office, which, I imagine, would be gathering cobwebs but for the custodial staff keeping calm and carrying on.  In my office and in the classroom, will I be able to once again have meaningful interactions with students, especially the likes of Samantha and Nellie?  (Real names withheld.)

At the end of spring, which also marked the end of a lengthy and circuitous road to her degree, Nellie, a mother of three, wrote in a touching email, “The next time I am on campus (and it is open again) I would enjoy stopping by to say hello, if that's okay.”  Will there be a next time when we will be on campus?

Samantha did not want to wait.  She emailed requesting my home address to which she wanted to send a gift and a thank-you note.  A couple of days later, the parcel arrived.  The thank-you note  was a two-page letter!  “You have set me on new paths, and a little bit of you will be pushing me along in every step of the journey ahead,” Samantha wrote at the end of her letter.

I have prominently displayed Samantha’s gift and letter in the dining room, where we used to  entertain friends before the coronavirus arrived.

There is one other, and more important, reason for me to worry whether I will ever “set forth  toward class.”  Like many regional public universities in the United States, my university too is  dealing with a financial crisis.  “Our goal is to retain as many employees as possible,” noted the president in mid-spring, in a three-page, single-spaced memo to the campus about the process of rightsizing the university. Two months later, another three-page memo arrived in early summer, in which the president described how the program curtailment and retrenchment process will be carried out.  The fact that faculty who will be pink-slipped will get a 12 months’ notice was not comforting.

Will I be informed that I will not be needed after a year?  How will I feel if I stayed on, but favorite colleagues are laid off?

The weather outside does not care for the coronavirus nor for dollars and cents.  The glorious  summer in the Willamette Valley here in Oregon is back after the months of overcast and misty  conditions that characterize this part of the Pacific Northwest.  But, instead of the usual celebration that summer is here, there is a constant nagging worry in the background that I might never “set forth toward class” again.

William Stafford has prepared me for such situations too.  In The Way It Is, Stafford wrote:

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.

I will hold on to the thread. Ever so tightly.

When death fell from the sky

Many times have I marked with a post here this infamous date--on August 6, 1945, the first atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

75 years have gone by.

Some day, sooner than later, I hope we will end this nuclear madness.

The following is a slightly edited post from August 2017.
**************************************************

In response to one of my columns in The Register Guard, I received a letter from a then 96-year old woman--"a member of the WWII generation."  She wrote in the letter, which was in response to my op-ed on homelessness in America:

You and no one living in the USA at this moment would be where he or she is if my generation had not made it possible.  That includes the dropping of the bomb.

This pacifist hates wars. Hates conflicts. The older I get, the less I am able to tolerate fights and destruction even in movies.  Therefore, it is always jarring to me when people defend the destruction to civilian life and property from the bombs that were dropped in Hiroshima--on August 6th--and three days later on Nagasaki.

The interpretations of the historical happenings are conflicted.  I am biased; I believe that the war could have, would have, been brought to an end without America flexing its nuclear muscles. My preferences for peace are why I find it discouraging that there is a majority in America that agrees with the letter writer regarding the bomb:

Source

In his final year in the White House, Obama visited Hiroshima, ahead of the anniversary of the tragic event.  In all these years since 1945, Obama was the first sitting president to visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial.  In a moving speech, Obama noted how the world changed since "death fell from the sky" on that cloudless August morning in Japan:

Those who died, they are like us. Ordinary people understand this, I think. They do not want more war. They would rather that the wonders of science be focused on improving life and not eliminating it. When the choices made by nations, when the choices made by leaders, reflect this simple wisdom, then the lesson of Hiroshima is done.
The world was forever changed here, but today the children of this city will go through their day in peace. What a precious thing that is. It is worth protecting, and then extending to every child. That is a future we can choose, a future in which Hiroshima and Nagasaki are known not as the dawn of atomic warfare but as the start of our own moral awakening.

These are dark times.  But, one has to be hopeful; what other choice do we have.  Here is to hoping that we will get on to the path of our own moral awakening after the 3rd of November.

What's love got to do with it

Remember this line?

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

No, don't worry; this post is not about Jane Austen.

It is about marriage though.

The "arranged marriage."

A Netflix show has kicked up a great deal of controversy about arranged marriages in India.

From a young age, I have had nothing but complaints about the arranged marriage.  The criteria to select the bride were just godawful,  She cannot be too short or too tall.  God forbid if she were "dark."  No blemish anywhere.  And, oh, while her paycheck is desirable, she should also function as a traditional housewife.  The man will donate the sperm and soon after grow a huge pot belly from all the eating and doing nothing.  (Slowly women are gaining some say in the process, but men and their families control most of the arrangement process.)

There was nothing in this that appealed to the teenage me.  The older I got, the more I have awful things to say about this system.  Which is also why I have not watched the Netflix show, nor do I have any plan to watch it.

What are the problems with the arranged marriage that the show makes people talk and write about? Let's start with the godawful caste system:

Contrary to what some viewers might think, the caste system is an active form of discrimination that persists in India and within the Indian American diaspora. One of the primary functions of arranged marriage is maintaining this status quo. This can be confirmed by a cursory glance at matrimonial columns in Indian newspapers, which are full of “Caste Wanted” headlines, or at the ubiquitous matchmaking websites that promise to help users find an upper-caste “Brahmin bride” or “Rajput boy,” while filtering profiles from people in lower castes. Marrying into the same caste of one’s birth is not, as Indian Matchmaking might suggest, a benign choice akin to finding someone who “matches your background” or has “similar values.” It’s a practice that helps dominant-caste folks preserve their power. That's just the start. 

The caste is pretty much the point of departure in this process.

The average non-Indian viewer might not imagine an India beyond the Hindu upper-caste that the show is about:

Though the show is called Indian Matchmaking, it portrays no couples who identify as Muslim, Christian, or Dalit—communities that represent close to 40 percent of India’s 1 billion–plus population.

A while ago, I reviewed a book about the Indian diaspora in the Caribbean.  The author wrote about how the new professional Indians on work visas look down on the "native" Indian community, who are the descendants of people who left India to work as laborers in faraway unknown lands.  This also apparently features in the Netflix show:

[The] story of event planner Nadia Jagessar, who tells the camera she’s struggled to find a match in the past because she’s Guyanese Indian. This is code for a number of conditions: Nadia’s family, originally Indian, immigrated to Guyana in the 1800s, along with a vast influx of indentured Indian labor shipped around the world after the British outlawed slavery. Many consider them low-caste, or not “really” Indian; there is a suspicion of their heritage being mixed, carrying with it the stigma of being tainted. Yet the show merely explains that for many Indian men, bright, bubbly, beautiful Nadia is not a suitable match.

After all, high caste affluent Indians did not jump on those ships!

What is the view from India about the show?  "it has shown how casteism and sexism merge with money, high-status, and modernity in the urban milieus of Mumbai, Delhi, New York, and Chicago."

Given that my doctoral research was on the matchmaking practices of urban Indians, I can say that this show is not far from reality. We are perhaps uncomfortable and angry because this show has said it as it is, and has done so on a global platform, leaving little scope for pretence.

The messier the system, the better the entertainment and the money that it brings to the producers.  Netflix has the last laugh in this, similar to how the current President owes it all to the entertainment of the lowest kind.

What a depressing and sad state of the world!

Black Lives Matter ... the Caribbean edition

It blows my mind even after all these years of schooling that it would have been a completely different and better world if and only if the British had not wandered off those islands.  Of course I am biased.  But, come on!

Whenever I get way too angry about how the colonizers messed up the Subcontinent forever, I console myself that it could have been worse.  Like how the Congolese were butchered and maimed by blood-thirsty Belgians under their king.  Or how the Dutch massacred people in ... oh, the list is long, dear reader.  In the process of consoling myself, I then end up getting angrier about all of us from, and in, the "shitholes" who were terrorized by the melanin-impaired from the cold climes.

Anyway ... a couple of months ago, forced by the coronavirus to watch movies at home, we ended up wasting our time on a C-grade movie that was set in England.  One of the bizarre sub-plots involved the backstory of how the father earned his fabulous riches from the sugar plantations that he owned in the Caribbean.  This sub-plot that was left dangling hinted that the father was not any good-hearted colonizer.

The British did make quite some gold out of those plantations, which is why Trevor Noah wittily joked about the Common"wealth" games and how Jamaica might possibly get the gold back one medal at a time.

How important was Jamaica and the Caribbean to those godawful British?

Throughout the eighteenth century the empire’s epicenter lay not in North America, Africa, or India but in a handful of small sugar-producing Caribbean islands. The two most important—tiny Barbados and its larger, distant neighbor Jamaica—were among the most profitable places on earth. On the eve of the American Revolution, the nominal wealth of an average white person was £42 in England and £60 in North America. In Jamaica, it was £2,200. Immense fortunes were made there and poured unceasingly back to Britain. This gigantic influx of capital funded the building of countless Palladian country houses, the transformation of major cities like London, Bristol, and Liverpool, and a prodigious increase in national wealth.

Fortunes were made far away from the cold and dark and damp British Isles.  How were the fortunes created?

We all know the answer.  It is one word.

Slavery.

All this abundance, luxury, and social progress at home derived from the brutal exploitation of huge numbers of enslaved African men, women, and children across the Atlantic (thousands of whom were brought over to the British Isles as well): by the eighteenth century, Britons were the world’s preeminent slave traders.

Nearly two years ago, when I was in Chennai for a longer-than-usual stay in Chennai, I went to the local literary festival.  One of the talks that I attended was by Venki Ramakrishnan--the Nobel laureate.  In selling the importance of science, he stretched his argument by talking up science, technology, and the industrial revolution, as having transformed Britain.  He never said anything about the role of slavery and colonization, which provided Britain with plenty of resources and fortunes.  All the looting!  During the discussions, there was question about this, but he flailed.  He should have instead stuck to talking about the RNA!

If only we would educate kids about the history of these slave traders!

Even the sociopathic enslavers in America were empathetic humans compared to the British enslavers in the Caribbean who inflicted a "sickening degree of extreme violence" on their human chattels.  As difficult as it was to read the following sentences, I forced myself to read them in order to truly understand what it meant to be enslaved by these atrocious creatures from Britian:

In Barbados in 1683, an “old Negro Man” was moved to anger about the bloody flogging of some other slaves: for his “insolent words” he was burned at the stake. At other times, black people were judicially electrocuted, maimed, beaten to a pulp, decapitated, drawn and quartered, roasted alive over “a Slow fire,” or publicly starved to death while suspended in iron cages (“gibbeted”).
Beyond such horrific formal penalties lay the lawless universe of everyday enslavement, in which whites tortured, killed, raped, and mutilated black people with complete impunity. Thomas Thistlewood, an ordinary, bookish young Englishman who came to Jamaica in 1750 to seek his fortune, left a matter-of-fact diary of his three and a half decades as a rural overseer and small-time slaveowner. He considered slaves to be rational human beings and treated them as individuals. Like almost all West Indian whites, he also took for granted that they needed to be frequently and harshly punished. He flogged them incessantly and savagely, rubbing salt, chili peppers, lemon juice, and urine into the scarified flesh to increase their suffering. At his whim, any man or woman might be scourged, branded, chained, dismembered, or exposed naked in the stocks day and night, covered in treacle and swarmed by biting flies and mosquitoes. Sometimes he would then force another slave to defecate into the injured victim’s mouth, and gag it shut for “4 or 5 hours.” In his diary are also recorded 3,852 acts of rape or other forced intercourse with almost 150 enslaved women. Other than in the thoroughness of his record-keeping, he seems to have been entirely typical—if anything, relatively restrained—in his behavior.

This was the white man's burden to civilize the non-white world that Kipling championed!

To quote from Shakespeare, "For Brutus is an honourable man; So are they all, all honourable men"

And what comes with enslaving people?  Hint: One of the rallying chants at the protest movements is directed against ... the heavily armed police.  (Read Jill Lepore's essay on that, and you too will want to defund the police!)

It was the case in Jamaica:

To safeguard its white inhabitants, the colony became ever more heavily militarized. In the aftermath of rebellion, new laws severely curtailed the rights and movements not only of slaves but also of all other nonwhites: white solidarity was increasingly seen as crucial to security. Meanwhile, the widely noticed writings of the planters’ leading apologist, Edward Long, who’d lived through the rebellion, helped develop new, “scientific” theories of black inferiority and racial danger

Seems very contemporary, right?

Ready for the icing on this bloody cake?

[The] independence of most Caribbean colonies in the 1960s was followed by decades of racist British immigration policies that not only sought to prevent black West Indians from coming to the UK but eventually, under the Conservative governments of the past decade, ended up deliberately destroying the lives of thousands of lifelong legal residents by treating them as “illegal migrants.”⁶ In the meantime, for almost two hundred years, British taxpayers funded the largest slavery-related reparations ever paid out. Under the provisions of the 1833 act, the government borrowed and then disbursed the staggering sum of £20 million (equal to 40 percent of its annual budget—the equivalent of £300 billion in today’s value). Not until 2015 was that debt finally paid off. This unprecedented compensation for injustice went not to those whose lives had been spent in slavery, nor even to those descended from the millions who had died in captivity. It was all given to British slaveowners, as restitution for the loss of their human property. Black lives, white rights.

"For Brutus is an honourable man; So are they all, all honourable men."

The skin of life

First, the following from a year ago:

Think about it.  We humans are animals.  How often do you see other mammals taking leisurely baths?  Most would rather not go anywhere near water other than to drink it.
I don't mean to suggest that we stop showering.  Hell no.  But, if we start from that point of departure that the largest organ--the skin--needs to be treated with care, then we will think about showers also very differently.

I referred to Uncle RM--remember him?--who was known for his "காக்கா குளியல்" (to mean that he had very, very quick baths.)  During one of his visits with us, when I would hang around him for his witty and insightful remarks, he said that the less we bathe the better it is.

But then in a hot and humid place, what about the stinky sweat?  I suppose that's also why women wore jasmine and other fragrant flowers on their hair, and men splashed their torsos with rose-water and sandalwood paste!

Modern science is catching up with the late Uncle RM about water and skin care.

Before I get into that discussion, let me draw a parallel.  I don't always floss my teeth.  About once a week or ten days, I work a lengthy piece of floss in between the teeth.  Initially, the dental hygienist was concerned about my "bad" habit.  I explained to her that it was all about moderation.  A healthy diet and daily brushing of the teeth should work well, I explained.  Over the years, the hygienist has stopped asking me about my flossing habit.  Hygiene is never about the flossing--starting with a balanced and healthy diet is way high on the list for dental hygiene.  If one thinks that they can floss and forget eating healthy foods, well, good luck!

I suppose the parallel has already become clear.

Skin care is not merely about the superficial showering and soap and lotion and whatever else.  Soaps, lotions, and almost everything is a whole bunch of evil advertising about stuff that you don't ever need.  Though, I did like the pomegranate face wash ;)



Even the original idea of what shampoo meant is far removed from how we now understand its supposed importance. 

So, "What is all the scrubbing, soaping, moisturizing, and deodorizing really doing for the body’s largest organ?"

In one word?  Nothing!

In fact, the scrubbing, soaping, moisturizing, and deodorizing might be doing plenty harm.

experts want us to think of hygiene more expansively—as a matter of health and balance, rather than one of sterility and purity. With all our soaps and sanitizers and antibiotics, in addition to so much time spent inside, away from dirt and animals and fresh air, we’ve created new problems for our immune systems, which miss out on the chance to encounter benign triggers and instead learn to overreact to perceived threats. Excess hygiene can also be a problem for the skin’s microbiome, which has an ecology that we’re just beginning to understand.

Though Uncle RM didn't know about the biology of the skin's microbiome, he had an intuitive understanding about taking care of the skin.

So, take a minute first to appreciate and respect your skin:

Skin is a strange little miracle. Were it removed, you would quickly lose the water in your body and die of dehydration. It protects you from deadly radiation and pathogens and helps you stay within the narrow temperature spectrum your body can tolerate, yet it is, at its thinnest, half the width of a penny.

You take good care of it, and it will take good care of you.

[The] science of skin health, as described by Hamblin and Lyman, suggests that we err when we think of skin as static or as separate, to be ministered to by surface applications of various cleansers and moisturizers, goops and goos. (Hamblin scoffs at the idea of trying to promote skin’s internal collagen production by rubbing on, or ingesting, collagen: “It’s like if you needed new tires and you put rubber in your gas tank.”) Skin is, literally, an ecosystem, in constant connection with the health of the rest of our body, as well as with the world beyond.

To imagine a different and better world

As a huge fan of short stories, I always look forward to the fiction in my favorite magazine.

Imagined worlds they are.  

As a kid, I read Enid Blyton's books, and I had to imagine pretty much everything that I read there.  Bacon, for one, about which I had no idea, and the kids in those books were always having bacon with breakfast.  After breakfast, they wandered about by the stream.  Imagine that!

Nonfiction essays, too, require imagination on my part.  Even now.  To read an essay like the one that masterfully describes the story of globalization via Chinese merchants selling sexy lingerie to Egyptian women wrapped up in niqabs, in a remote small town by the Nile, requires imagination on multiple dimensions.

Reading is, thus, more than mere reading:

When you watch TV or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you build up from 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world, and people it and look out through other eyes. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well. You're being someone else, and when you return to your own world, you're going to be slightly changed.

There is no denying the fact that Enid Blyton's stories changed me. They informed me that there were people and cultures that were far removed from where I existed.  The local stories too, whether by Sujatha or Kalki or Jayakanthan, changed me.  So did the serious and gossipy reporting in Blitz, Illustrated Weekly, or India Today.  Words and sentences were like magical spells.

The power to imagine is also the power to create.  

Look around you: I mean it. Pause, for a moment and look around the room that you are in. I'm going to point out something so obvious that it tends to be forgotten. It's this: that everything you can see, including the walls, was, at some point, imagined. Someone decided it was easier to sit on a chair than on the ground and imagined the chair. Someone had to imagine a way that I could talk to you in London right now without us all getting rained on.This room and the things in it, and all the other things in this building, this city exist because, over and over and over, people imagined things. They daydreamed, they pondered, they made things that didn't quite work, they described things that didn't yet exist to people who laughed at them..

Whether a fictional world, or the real world with problems of real people, reading them developed in me a sense of empathy.  Empathy then leads to wondering how the world can become a better place for you and me, which is why I rant--to make a case for doing things differently.

Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.
You're also finding out something as you read vitally important for making your way in the world. And it's this:
THE WORLD DOESN'T HAVE TO BE LIKE THIS. THINGS CAN BE DIFFERENT.

Sometimes, I think that there are only two kinds of people on this planet--those who willingly read, and those who would way prefer not to read unless they were compelled to.  I have always believed that the world will be a better place if more people read on their own.  I am always shocked at how much even those who used to read quite a bit are so distracted by social media that they now do not spend some of their down-time reading.

    

Imagine if more of us read!