The ticking time bomb

My father has often narrated an incident that happened years ago when he was visiting with his niece.  It was approaching dinner time and his niece suggested that he eat.  Especially because of the old tradition, my father wanted to dine with the niece's husband.

The in-law asked my father to go ahead.  My father was barely done with dinner when the in-law sat down to eat.

This would come across as strange to anybody.  So, of course, my father remarked about it and wondered why the in-law didn't join him at the table.

I will give you the time to read this for you to come up with your explanation.

It turned out that the in-law would eat only at the designated time.  He wouldn't advance it by even a couple of minutes.

While that person's behavior might be extreme, the reality is that we are all conditioned by the clock.  A strange Pavlovian behavior modification that compels us to get up by a certain time, eat at a certain hour, work at designated times, ... instead of eating when hungry, going to bed when we are tired, ...

What if we had no structure that coordinated all our clocks?  Of course humans have marked the passing of time.  But, the clock that we look at is a modern construct.  Clocks across the world being coordinated is even more recent.  Like with everything else that we humans have created for ourselves, we don't pause to consider our relationship with the clock that we invented:

[Kevin] Birth is one of a growing chorus of philosophers, social scientists, authors and artists who, for various reasons, are arguing that we need to urgently reassess our relationship with the clock. The clock, they say, does not measure time; it produces it. “Coordinated time is a mathematical construct, not the measure of a specific phenomenon,” Birth wrote in his book “Objects of Time.” That mathematical construct has been shaped over centuries by science, yes, but also power, religion, capitalism and colonialism. The clock is extremely useful as a social tool that helps us coordinate ourselves around the things we care about, but it is also deeply politically charged. And like anything political, it benefits some, marginalizes others and blinds us from a true understanding of what is really going on. 

So, what is really going on?

The more we synchronize ourselves with the time in clocks, the more we fall out of sync with our own bodies and the world around us. Borrowing a term from the environmentalist Bill McKibben, Michelle Bastian, a senior lecturer at Edinburgh University and editor of the academic journal Time & Society, has argued that clocks have made us “fatally confused” about the nature of time.

The confusion shows up in daily and long-term behaviors.  Ordering young ones to bed, for instance, when it is still light outside during these long summer days is as odd as waking up teenagers at six on cold and dark winter mornings so that they can get to school at eight!  We fall out of sync with our own bodies and the world around us.  Our construct of time through the clock also warps our understanding of long-term issues like the build up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and climate change.

"For thousands of years, most human societies have accepted and moved in harmony with the irregular rhythms of nature, using the sun, moon and stars to understand the passage of time."  Nature has rhythms, yes, but is not bound by the seconds of the clocks that we use.  While we debate about the "daylight time" versus "standard time" of the clock, it has no effect on the flora and the fauna around us, which is why farmers operate on a different schedule from us urban dwellers.  Cows have to be milked not when the daylight savings clock-time says they have to be milked!

We live in a strange world in which we even have meetings in which people across the world participate, which means that some of the participants are interrupting their sleep and dinner and sex and whatever in order to be at the meetings.  And then we wonder why we have physical and health problems!

There's no going back to a way of life without clocks that are coordinated.  There's no possibility of operating with a local measure of the passing of time that depends on the movement of the sun and the moon, and our minds and bodies responding to the local stimuli.  But, we should certainly assess our own relationship with the clock that controls us.

The end is nigh

In the 2018-2019 annual report, when reflecting on my career, I noted that I had professionally achieved a lot more than what I thought was possible. I wondered about the years ahead.

I wrote in that report: “I suppose the decade ahead will simply unfold.”

The events since then have served as a wonderful reminder, yet again, that life is what happens when we are busily planning for it.

I never imagined that 2020 would be dominated by COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter. Everything else, positive and negative experiences alike, fade into the distance in the rear-view mirror.

And I definitely did not imagine back in June 2019 that I will be served with a layoff notice in March 2021.

But, hey, life is what happens when we are busily planning for it.

The end of yet another academic year leaves me wondering, "what next?"

The last time that I felt clueless about the future was when I joined the engineering program, back in 1981.  All I knew was that I didn't want my professional life to be in engineering.  But I had no idea what exactly it was that I wanted to do either.

However, in that phase of life, I still had things to do until I figured out what came after.  I had classes to go to, exams to clear, and be a dickhead teenager.  And I did all that over four years.

Now, the unstructured 24 hours a day, seven days a week, on the other hand, looms large.  There are only so many hours that a man can walk, or play bridge.

"I am sure others have told you this," the daughter prefaced before telling me what she wanted to tell me.  "You have another chapter in you.  I don't know what it is, but I am sure you will find out."

I will have to wait for that chapter to write itself.  After all, life is what happens when we are busily planning for it!

Planning v. overthinking

I suppose I inherited from my father the gene that makes me a compulsive planner.  It is a fine line that separates planning for one's life from the person becoming a worrywart.  While worries about the future are incentives to plan ahead, those worries can also preclude constructive action.

My hope is that I am a planner, who thinks ahead as much as possible, fully aware that shit happens.  Like an unplanned career-ending layoff.  Planning ahead prepares us for the shit that can happen anytime, anywhere.  We can at least mitigate the effects that can otherwise be disastrous.

While a career-ender is one thing, end of life is completely another.  There is no escaping death that awaits us all.  How does one plan for death?  Should one plan for that final event?

As one who compulsively plans, I have been an ardent supporter of dying with dignity.  Should my health conditions fail, I want to be able to exit this world with dignity.  It is not a coincidence that my first newspaper commentary after moving to Oregon was in support of the state's Death with Dignity Act, which the "pro-life" Republicans were all too keen on dismantling.

In an intensely personal essay, Lionel Shriver writes: "Above a certain subjective threshold of torment, life is not worth living. It fails a primitive cost-benefit analysis."  It is a personal calculation, of course that makes one question, "Should We Stay Or Should We Go"?

Like many, I hope that I will quickly and painlessly go at a sweet spot in life.  However, looking at this horizon is different from worrying about it.  Planning is different from overthinking, especially because "excessive planning can have other negative effects including exacerbating worries."

For instance, when planning carefully, it’s tempting to try to predict all the things that could possibly interfere with a plan and how to potentially handle such events should they occur, thereby initiating a process of worry. Others plan meticulously because they believe that they won’t be able to cope otherwise, which can lead to excessive worries when planning isn’t possible or unexpected events arise.

Unexpected events always arise.  Life is a series of events over which we rarely have any control, though we like to claim agency when the outcomes are good.

Of course, the "gene" that makes me a compulsive planner doesn't exist.  It is a behavior, which means that it can be easily changed as well.  Planners can become impulsive, and non-planners can learn to plan ahead.  Worrying is also a behavior that can be altered:

Many view overthinking as an innate personality trait; something we can’t change. However, overthinking, in terms of worry and rumination, is a learned strategy that we choose – consciously or unconsciously – in trying to deal with our thoughts and feelings. It’s basically a habit that we fall into, but we can learn to change it.

So, yes, plan ahead.  And worry less.  Be happy.

The good son

The moment the WHO declared the novel coronavirus a pandemic, I started worrying about India.  About my people in India.  About my parents.

What if something happened and I cannot go for months?

A year has passed.  The question remains.

As I noted in this post a few days ago, I am not the only one in the diaspora who is worried about these issues.  It is a surreal situation.

One person writes about this moral dilemma in her (his?) question to to the the NY Times ethics columnist, Kwame Appiah.  She writes about her husband who "is adamant that if his parents or sister become ill (with Covid or anything else), he will return to India to be with them."

She is, naturally, worried about her husband's stance.

In addition, if my husband got sick in India, I doubt he would be able to count on any medical care, and may be unable to return to the United States for many weeks, or even months, if the travel ban goes through and continues. I feel this risk is real, even though my husband is a U.S. citizen. The only things we have going for us are that we are both vaccinated and that we have a place in our home where he would be able to quarantine once he returns.

I have told him that if he goes, I will ready myself for the very real possibility that he may never return. Sadly, I do not think I am being irrational in thinking this.

She requests Appiah to "suggest a few things that both of us should consider so that we can make this decision together, carefully weighing and preparing for all the risks in the calmest state possible."

Before reading Appiah's response, or my excerpts below, think about what you would advise that woman.  Exercise your brain and mind on this ethical issue, which is real and not a hypothetical scenario.

Appiah being Appiah (there are other posts like this one in which I quote his wise words) he carefully weighs the issues and provides a reassuring response.  I am not going to excerpt anything from there; I encourage you to read it in full.

Appiah concludes with this:

[Relationships] have an ethics of their own, which isn’t reducible to a set of rational assessments. Love must be responsive to unreason. Your husband should take account of your own fears and needs, then, just as you should take account of his. In the end, however, the wisdom of preparing for the worst has its limits when — all things considered — it keeps us from doing what’s best.

Maya Angelou and ... me?

I practice a no-forget-no-forgive approach to life.  Like in many other posts, I explained here, about my take on those who create the grudge in the first place:

There is a huge difference, however, between wallowing and viewing the world as a worthless place, versus wallowing while enjoying the world and the vastness of this universe. 

I enjoy the world.  The river. The goslings. The green. The warmth.  The ocean.  The mountains.  And, yes, a few people ;)

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that a car well ahead of me in my lane of traffic had stopped with the brake lights a bright red on a cloudy mid-afternoon.  This being spring time, I knew what to expect and pressed the hazard lights on as I came to a stop.

Just as a I expected, it was a parade of geese. 

Four adult geese were chaperoning about a dozen goslings from one side of the street to another.  Three or four cars in each direction, and no honking or pressuring the birds.  They took their sweet little time to cross the road, after which we were off.

The one enjoyment that I have missed out on over the pandemic year?  Terrible puns!  It has been a while since I had real-time classes for students to share their favorite puns with me.  At the grocery store, small talk had vanished, and my regular source there and I have been barely able to say hello to each other.

The sillier the puns, the better.  Like, have you heard this one before?

Q: What do you call a cow that is lying on the grass?
A: Ground beef!

Or, how about this:

Why do you have to "put your two cents in"... but it’s only a "penny for your thoughts"? Where's that extra penny going?

The key here is to enjoy life.  I created a meme for the occasion ;)

A terrible curse on humanity

A second Covid-related death in the family.  He was my cousin's husband.

Covid is a curse on humanity, I often tell people.  Not only do loved ones die, but friends and family cannot gather to grieve either.  To die alone, and for the bereaved to grieve alone, is a terrible curse that none of us ever imagined.  But, that is the reality that my cousin and millions of others have to deal with in India, which is reeling from a Covid surge that does not seem like it will abate soon.

Meanwhile, the US CDC declared that those who are fully vaccinated can resume normal activities, for all practical purposes. 

This sets up a huge moral dilemma for people like me who live in the bubble that vaccinations have made possible, but watch in horror the conditions in India worrying all the time about the health and welfare of family and friends.

It is an unbearable pandemic guilt.  I am not the only one, of course, to feel that way.

“I have extreme feelings of guilt as someone who has most of my extended family in India,” said Neha Shastry, 30, who lives in Brooklyn. She has been shaken by the deepening Covid crisis there, as infections and deaths rapidly advance from big cities into rural areas. “It’s surreal to wake up a year later in New York City and see the streets full and businesses flourishing again, while my family is fearing for their lives.”

It is surreal.

My logical mind tells me that there is no reason to feel guilty.  And that's what psychologists remind us: "If you’re feeling guilty about things over which you have no control, the guilt you’re feeling is not warranted, the experts said."

In the old faith in which I grew up, we were advised to accept with detachment both the good and bad things that happen in our lives.  Humans that we are, detachment is not easy to practice.

I suppose modern life has conditioned us into thinking that we are in control of events that happen in our lives.  We forget that as much as life itself is an accident, whatever happens in life is also nothing but a series of fortunate and unfortunate accidents.  When that unfortunate event is a death that does not allow us to come together, it is a challenge to remain detached and philosophical.  But, such is life!

Small talk returns

The sun is shining.  The air is warmer.  Vaccinations are well under way.

No surprise that the grocery store felt very lively.

The guy who has worked the produce aisles through the years that I have been shopping there waved out to me along with a loud HELLO!

After picking up everything that I had on my list, and more, I reached the checkout counter.

"I haven't seen you forever," Kathy said.

"How have you been?"

"Alive. Happy to have a job."

I nodded as I placed my groceries on the belt.  I wondered if I should tell her that I am alive, but that soon I will be out of a job.

Wendy came over to say hi.

"Hello, big boss."  Recently, she has had to take on supervisory responsibilities.

I decided that this was the moment.  Wendy has been a friend in a very unusual grocery store small-talk way for almost a decade.

"Want to hear some big news?" I asked them.

They both drew closer.

"I have been laid off.  No job after December."

In unison, they responded with "WHAT?"

"It is always the best teachers who are fired," said Kathy while shaking her head.

Wendy met my eyes, and perhaps she noticed that I didn't seem worried.  She quickly recovered to the humor road that is familiar to us.

"Want a cashier job here? We can start you at all of 7 dollars and 95 cents."

Before I could come up with a repartee, Kathy jumped in with, "come on, we can fast track him at 11.95"

I laughed.

"Have you had your shots?"

Kathy was all done.  Wendy has had her first.  "How about you?" she asked.

I told her that I was still waiting for my turn.

"Call up White Bird.  They'll take you in right away if you tell them you have been laid off."

I laughed again.

It has been a long time since I laughed at the grocery store checkout counter.  Life cannot be bad then.

Observing Ramadan without fasting and prayers

It is the new year in the traditional calendar back in the old country.  This time, it coincides with Ramadan.

I suppose it can look bizarre for this atheist to post about religious observances like Ramadan.  But, I have never been one of those militant atheists making a fanatical religion out of atheism.  As long as the religious do not impose their practices on me, I seek nothing but peaceful coexistence with them.  And enjoy food and laughter and conversations with them. 

Furthermore, I am not that different from most atheists in that we reach the conclusion not with ignorance about religions, particularly the religion with which we were raised.  Even through my agnostic teenage years, I was curious about the Hindu faith and its philosophy.  Which is also why I am so familiar with ideas like dukrijnkarane that I talk about. 

Curiosity then made me find out at least a tiny bit about a few other religions.  Unlike most of the truly religious who are committed to only knowing about their own beliefs, we atheists often end up knowing a tad more about various religions.

For all the non-believer that I am, I consciously think about my existence, and worry about what it means to be human.  When bad things come my way, like when I get laid off in a Zoom meeting, I do not need a god to turn to.

"Shit happens" I tell myself.  And, for the most part, I expect shit to happen more frequently than it does.  I am acutely aware that the entire cosmos does not exist only to serve me!  The cosmos is. It doesn't have feelings towards me or you or anybody else.

In my framework, whether it is Rama Navami or Ramadan, or whatever, those religious days are designated times in order to help us mortals reflect on our fleeting existence on this "mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam," as Carl Sagan so poetically put it.  These special religious days are intentional pauses to our everyday lives.  A forced interruption that then makes us think, for at least a few minutes, about what we want to do with the little time we have on this planet.

In fact, the disconnect between such need for introspection versus the believers merely reciting the Vishnu Sahasranaamam and the Bhaja Govindam and more was the point of departure for the young me questioning the idea of god and religion and belief.  I was convinced then, and even more convinced I am now, that living a moral life has nothing to do with god and religion.

What does a true believer do during Ramadan?

By abstaining from things that people tend to take for granted (such as water), it is believed, one may be moved to reflect on the purpose of life and grow closer to the creator and sustainer of all existence. As such, engaging in wrongdoing effectively undermines the fast. Many Muslims also maintain that fasting allows them to get a feeling of poverty, and this may foster feelings of empathy.

A noble idea, right?  And this is something we ought to think about every day.  Don't we want to be empathetic every day of our lives?

Empathy is what is emphasized in Gandhi's favorites among the prayer music.  While the reference to the Hindu god, Vishnu, might distract a militant atheist or anyone committed to other religions, I ignore the Vishnu part and appreciate, and love, the ideas expressed there: 

Vaishnav people are those who:

Feel the pain of others,

Help those who are in misery 

Wouldn't you want to be friends with such people?  Wouldn't you want to be such a person?  A wonderful ideal to work towards, though a tall order for most of us mortals.

A former professor speaketh

“It takes courage to grow up and turn out to be who you really are.”

Think about that.

The person who articulated that for all of us? 

e.e. cummings.

I doubt that most of us are born with the courage to grow up to be who we really are.  Most of us are the cowardly lions of the Wizard of Oz.  Somewhere we have to pick up that courage.

Where?

Education.

In a real education, institutions and educators will emphasize “the making of a better person ahead of the making of a brighter person, or a better mousetrap.”

I wish!

Increasingly, it does not work that way though.

Even we individuals apparently do not care to become better people.  We are most fascinated with those who have built "better mousetrap" who are also the ones who have made money from those mousetraps.  We are making it increasingly clear that a moneyed person is much more important and valuable than a better person.

Such an attitude gets reflected in education too.  In college, it is all about the better mousetrap.  College has stopped being the place where students gain the courage to find out who they really are and to then live that life with happiness and contentment.

Is it any wonder then why students are unhappy.  There is a growing body of evidence that students are unhappy.  And in the adult world, anxiety and angst seem to dominate over happiness and contentment.  Yet, we have a lot more educated population today than ever before.  The two sides of the ledger don't balance well.

“I think students are looking for meaning,” Peter Salovey, president of Yale, told Quartz at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January.

Of course they are looking for meaning.  But, apparently most educators don't care.

Increasingly, we run into graduates feeling intense burnout only a few years into their "real" lives outside college.  They begin to wonder, and worry, if what they do is not fulfilling, then what?

If only we had equipped them with the ability to prepare for life with a meaning, that provided them with happiness that is intangible!

Oh well ... I tried to do the best that I could.  Now, the countdown to the end date has been set by my managers.  In a matter of months, I will be referred to as "a former professor."

Such is life!

This cruel life :(

It happened.

Yet again.

It was a text message from my sister informing me about the sudden death of my father's very young cousin, who was only a few months older than me.

A family man, he leaves behind his wife and two daughters.  And a whole lot of people who will terribly miss him.

There are photographs of the two of us as kids hanging out at grandma's home.  Two nearly bald-headed infants, who could have easily been mistaken as twins.

As we got older, when we went to grandma's for the summer vacations, he was very much a part of the fun and games when India hadn't yet seen a television set. We have played hours and hours of cards at his place, which was one street over from grandma's.

I was about seven or eight years old when we went to grandma's place to attend the wedding of his eldest sibling.  He came down with a strange fever that quickly weakened his legs.  He couldn't walk.  For a couple of years after that, he wore braces on both legs and slowly dragged one foot after another.  I never heard him complain.  Never.

Of course, with weakened legs and braces, he couldn't climb the stairs that were everywhere.  His father or mother took turns carrying him up the steps, and he was never ever left out of any wedding celebration, or prayers at temples.

Slowly and steadily, his system regained the strength.  He could finally walk without braces.  Like how he used to, and how we do.

In the old country, in the old tradition, people didn't openly talk about anything unfortunate that happens in one's life, which is why I have no idea what the strange illness was that affected him for a couple of years.  I suppose all that mattered, and matters, is that he fought it off and his life became normal again.

Our paths did not intersect much after the teenage years.  We did our undergraduate studies in different cities, and met only at weddings.

Later, I moved to the US.  He left for the Middle East to work there.

When I met him many years later, his daughters were all grown up, and he was excited about the older one beginning her engineering studies.  

He looked muscular and stockier, and had a full head of hair.  I was well on my way to baldness.  We certainly didn't look like twins anymore.

He was only 57!

Life can be bitterly cruel and unfair.

Say his name

When we were young, mother took us to grandma's village for the annual summer holidays--we were too young to travel on our own.

Those were the days before cellphones and emails. There was no landline at most homes, and one went to the nearest post office in order to place "trunk calls"--long distance calls.

So, the day that we arrived at grandma's, mother would promptly write a letter to my father informing him that we had arrived safely.

When we were of a certain age, we realized that our mother, who never addressed father by his name, would have trouble writing a letter to him.  In the old tradition, the wife was so subservient to the husband that she dare not treat him as an equal and call him by his name.

So, how did my mother address my father in those letters?

We would badger her; but mother always shooed us away.  I don't think she even showed us the letters.  To this date, I have no idea how that letter-writing was done!

Even when talking to father, mother could not use the disrespectful "you" (நீ) but had to use (நீங்க.)

It was all par for the course.

But then things changed in a hurry.

My siblings' marriages were arranged along the traditional, orthodox lines.  My sister addressed her husband by his name, and my brother's wife called him by his name.  And the  நீங்க was tossed away for good.

Changes have happened.  But, these have been mostly in the southern part of India where families and governments have invested in female literacy and empowerment.  In the Hindi heartland, in particular, the lives of women continue to be highly dependent on the whims and fancies of men.  Even the Chief Justice of India's Supreme Court!

Justice Sharad Arvind Bobde, the head of India’s Supreme Court, asked a 23-year-old man accused of raping a minor whether he would marry his victim, who is now an adult. 

The victim, who under Indian law can’t be identified, has accused the man, a distant relative and a civil servant with the Maharashtra State government, of repeatedly stalking and raping her starting when she was 16. 

The judge’s comments provoked new demands that people in power, and particularly men, do more to improve how women and girls are treated in India.

There is more from the same judge:

In a separate case, according to the letter and media reports, Justice Bobde appeared to condone rape in the context of a consensual relationship. 

“When two people are living as husband and wife, however brutal the husband is, can the act of sexual intercourse between them be called rape?” Justice Bobde asked while hearing a petition filed by a man accused of rape by a woman who had been his live-in partner.

In the old country, the more things change, the more they seem to say the same, which is a tragedy and disservice to women :(

Clothes don't make the man

Our neighbor was a widower, whose adult children lived far away.  A traditional and orthodox Brahmin, he had a young family live with him to do things around the house--including cooking his meals.

The young couple soon had a child.  A beautiful boy. 

The beaming young mother often came over with her son, and we loved playing with him.

In the hot and humid conditions of the place, the kid was the lucky one who was unclothed.  While the rest of us were complaining about the heat, fanning ourselves, and wiping off the sweat, there he was in his naked self enjoying exploring the world.

But, no clothes on him meant that his pees became puddles on the floor.  And worse was the steaming pile of shit ;)

Even then, cleaning those awful things was beyond me.  Stomach-churning.

In response, all I did was walk up to my mother, or the kid's mother, to inform them that they had a job to do.  "Clean up on aisle 3!"

Going to grandma's villages exposed us to a lot more nudity.  It was not only infants and toddlers, but even 7- and 8-year olds were casually out and about bare naked.  At the river or the canal, the kids frolicked in the nude.

After the mad rush to cover ourselves up, now even a little bit of baring of the skin makes heads turn.  Wardrobe malfunctions become headline news.  People of all ages, even the young ones, send selfie nudies to others.

Maybe our lives would have been less complicated if we had not worried too much about nudity.

Divergence and convergence

Back in the old country, in those old days before television and the internet, it was in rather strange ways that I learnt about the African continent.  Father's interest to get to Sierra Leone on a work assignment (which did not happen), the travel writing by Manian, and my classmate having spent two years in Kenya, all gave me an idea of Africa that made me all the more curious about the people from there.

In graduate school, one of the fellow students I really liked interacting with was a wonderfully sharp guy from Nigeria.  Kayode, whose intellectual pursuits were in science and engineering, and I shared many common interests, from movies to politics to sports too.  We were the only people who liked Jacob's Ladder, or at least it seemed that way ;)

The first time I invited Kayode to taste my home cooking, I thought I had to warn him that the food might be spicy for his taste.  After taking a bite, Kayode laughed his characteristic hearty laugh and said something like "if you think this is spicy, you have to taste my aunt's cooking back in Nigeria. I bet you won't be able to handle it." 

A few days after that, we were talking about this with his friend Seth (?), who was from Ghana.  He then challenged Kayode that his family cooked even spicier meals.  

I had no idea until then that in Africa, too, spicy food was not unusual at all.

Years have gone by.  Our lives take us to different places and peoples.  Work and family.  But, the memories remain.

I decided that it was time to contact my old friend.

"Hey Kayode: This is Sriram, from the old USC days."

Within hours a lengthy reply arrived.

He commented about his gray hair.  I am jealous that he has hair!

Old friendships.  A little bit of watering and they come back to life.

Don't touch that tech

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

America: A Dane makes idlis, and a Puerto Rican makes pakoras

One day, in my life in California, when I was working as a transportation planner, the secretary buzzed and said that I had a call.

In an unmistakable Indian accent, he introduced himself as Kris, and that he was a professor at the local university.  He called to appreciate my commentary in the newspaper.

In that short phone call, he invited us over for dinner.

It turned out that Kris was an an Americanized name.  He was Venkatakrishna. He and his wife, Kirsten, were much older than me, almost as old as my parents.

Kris was delighted that a younger Indian immigrant was writing commentaries in the paper.  He wanted me to join him at the university as a colleague, and even introduced me to a couple of people to explore if I could at least teach as an adjunct.  Nothing worked out.  He was more disappointed than I was. If memory serves me well, Kris unexpectedly died before my return to academe.

Kris was a strict vegetarian, but not a cook.  Kirsten was a good cook.  She made idlis for him and froze them in packets.  All Kris had to do whenever he wanted to eat idlis was take a packet from the freezer and microwave the idlis.

Kirsten made plenty of other Indian dishes too. Including sambhar for the idlis!  And chicken tikka masala for her sons.  And a whole bunch of Danish delicacies.

Yes, Danish.

The two of them met in Denmark where he had been as a graduate student, and the couple made America their home.

I was reminded of Kris and Kirsten when I read this memoir essay about an Indian father and a Puerto Rican/Italian-American mother.

In 1979, when Loretta and Roop were dating, he’d take her to restaurants in Jackson Heights, in Queens, where many working-class immigrants lived upon arriving in the US. The aromas, colors, tastes and textures that flowed out of storefronts from merchants selling Indian goods intoxicated my mother, and piqued her interest in Indian culture.

Imagine that!  Forty years ago, a young man from India going out with a young Puerto Rican woman.  Perhaps a rare thing even now?

The author continues with anecdotes.  I love this one after the young bride "failed" in her attempt to make a chicken curry with coconut milk:

It was an embarrassing moment for my insecure mother, as the unforgiving wives and girlfriends she had cooked for reveled in her failure. “So, how does it feel to be marrying a foreigner?” one of them said to Roop. “No, we are the foreigners,” he said, referring to himself and the entire dinner party of Indian immigrants, and defending my mother.

That is something!

I hope that President Biden will make more such immigrant stories possible.  After all, these stories are possible only in America.

The highly improbable fact of being alive

Forget everything.  Clear your mind.

And then read the following:

A rocket powered by kerosene and liquid oxygen and carrying a scientific observatory blasted off into space at 10:49 p.m., March 6, 2009 (by local calendars and clocks). The launch came from the third planet out from a G-type star, 25,000 light-years from the center of a galaxy called the Milky Way, itself located on the outskirts of the Virgo Cluster of galaxies. On the night of the launch, the sky was clear, with no precipitation or wind, and the temperature was 292 degrees by the absolute temperature scale. Local intelligent life forms cheered the launch. Shortly before the blastoff, the government agency responsible for spacecraft, named the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, wrote in the global network of computers: “We are looking at a gorgeous night to launch the Kepler observatory on the first-ever mission dedicated to finding planets like ours outside the solar system.”

Usually, a scientist doesn't write like that.  But, Alan Lightman is no ordinary scientist.  He is one of the few alive who is a master in science and literature.  An established physicist, he has also authored six novels among other writings.  Like in the essay that I refer to in this blog post from more than 5 years ago, Lightman weaves science and the humanities so well that even those of us who barely know any science or literature can easily follow along.

When people glibly tell kids that they can be whatever they want to be, I can't but help wonder if any kid can become an expert in both science and literature.  Can any kid be whatever they want to be?  Seriously?

But, I digress.

In that paragraph, which is how this essay begins, Lightman imagines that the "account might have been written by an intelligent life form located on exactly the kind of distant planet that Kepler would soon begin to search for."

Is there life outside our own planet?  We do not have proof.  But, the probability is high that we are not the only life forms, and not the only intelligent ones either.  "With 100 billion stars just in our galaxy alone, and so many other galaxies out there, it is highly probable that there are many, many other solar systems with life" if something like 10% of stars have a habitable planet in orbit."

So, on one hand, it might seem like life in the universe is not rare.  But, Lightman makes us think in another manner, which I find fascinating:

I have estimated that the fraction of all matter in the universe in living form is roughly one-billionth of one-billionth. Here’s a way to visualize such a tiny fraction. If the Gobi Desert represents all of the matter flung across the cosmos, living matter is a single grain of sand on that desert. How should we think about this extreme rarity of life?

How should we think about this extreme rarity?

[If] we can manage to get outside of our usual thinking, if we can rise to a truly mind-bending view of the cosmos, there’s another way to think of existence. In our extraordinarily entitled position of being not only living matter but conscious matter, we are the cosmic “observers.” We are uniquely aware of ourselves and the cosmos around us. We can watch and record. We are the only mechanism by which the universe can comment on itself. All the rest, all those other grains of sand on the desert, are dumb, lifeless matter.

I wish I could require students to read this essay and comment on it as a requirement for successfully completing liberal education.  I wish!

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 code to losing one's job?

As you read this post, chances are good that you will think this: No wonder this guy is about to be fired from his job!

If you don't think that, well, then you are as much as "loser" as I am, and you need to be worried about your job too ;)

My first day at the university where I have been teaching for 19 years, I met others who were also joining that same year.  One of them, about my age, was a physicist, with what seemed like an intense New York way of speaking.  When talking with him, I found out that he was the physics department--there was no other physics faculty at the university.  I was shocked, of course, especially when that was my first ever intellectual love.

At small universities like ours, physics is not one that we care to educate students about.  For that matter, even at big time universities, physics does not attract students.  As with many aspects of higher education, this too is something that disappoints and depresses me.  Whatever happened to the old-fashioned notion of exploration of ideas in a liberal education setting?

We have moved far, far away from exploration.  The excitement that we could be exploring the universe forever apparently is not easy to monetize within a few years; ergo, those are not worth studying!  Despite the number of studies about the benefits and tangible returns over the long-term, people are obsessed with short-term ROI.

This approach is rapidly filtering down to the high school level where, for instance, even learning a foreign language is now considered to be wasteful compared to learning a programming language! 

Should we wonder then that right from when they are kids, there is a push to teach them how to code! Yes, kids are being pushed to code!

WhiteHat Jr., which operates in India and the United States, mounted an advertising blitzkrieg in India telling parents that our children need to learn coding from the age of 4, 5 or 6 — or they will fall behind in life. Indian celebrities promoted the brand and spread the fear of losing out among families.

How terrible!

Hrithik Roshan, one of the most prominent Bollywood actors and the father of two boys, endorsed the brand in a television campaign, where he was anxious about the utility of the skills Indian children are learning today and saw hope and promise for their future in learning coding on WhiteHat Jr.

Although numerous experts advise against teaching children to code, a skill that will soon become redundant, the WhiteHat Jr. campaign taps into a parent’s deepest fear: Will my child be left behind?

Fire me already for I am simply unfit for this new world :(

Such a contemporary approach to education and knowing, and the push for specialization in order to "grow the economy," cannot possibly help us in the long-run.    Buckminster Fuller said it best:

Specialization has bred feelings of isolation, futility, and confusion in individuals. It has also resulted in the individual’s leaving responsibility for thinking and social action to others. Specialization breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological discord, which in turn leads to war.

Right from when we are kids, we need to understand how we relate to other humans, to other life forms, to rocks and rivers, and to outer space.  But, we cannot expect all these to miraculously happen if we take away exploration from education.  With a singular focus on various aspects of computing, we are only educating to create a society of automatons!

When life hands you sugarcane, don't make juice out of it?

Father said it had been raining on and off.

"But, it doesn't usually rain as we get close to Pongal, right?" I asked him.

"You are correct.  But this is not the big time rain."

"So, when is Pongal?"

"On the 14th."

As a kid growing up in an industrial town, I had no idea what the Pongal celebrations were really about.  But, I didn't care because I loved to eat sakkarapongal.  Served warm, and with mother adding more ghee to my portion. 

Father handed the phone to mother.  I shared with her an incident from our childhood.  

My brother and I got tired of chewing on the sugarcane, which is also integral to the Pongal celebration.  So, we decided that we would make juice out of it. 

The idiots that we were, we thought we could cut up the cane into pieces and throw them into the blender--the "mixie."  Which is what we did.

Mother stood there watching us, smiling all the way.  It wasn't after the event that we understood why she was smiling.

We threw the chopped up cane pieces into the blender.  With great excitement we turned the machine on.

Not the kind of juice that we thought it would yield.

That's when we understood why she had been smiling throughout--she preferred to teach us a lesson by not teaching us the lesson.  We learnt the difference between a mixie and the juicer that the roadside sugarcane juice guy used.

Mother laughed after she listened to me recall the old days.

Meanwhile, her nurse had arrived.  It was time for her bath.  We said bye.

I continued to think about the Pongal of my childhood days.  

Like every kid, I too looked forward to the cricket test match in Madras during Pongal time.  It was Ananda Vikatan, or maybe Kalki, that had an extensive feature on the visiting England team.  I remember finding it hysterically funny that a player's name was "Old."  "How could somebody have a name "old"" was all I could think of then. 

Thanks to the web, I could immediately verify the year of that test match: Pongal of 1973!

India and England fielded names that I would remember forever.

India won that test match.  I loved it.  It was a special Pongal.

A spiral perfection!

If I am fired from my job--"layoff" if you prefer the less harsh euphemism--there will be drastic changes in my lifestyle.

I think a lot about about the effects on the body and mind because of massive changes to one's life.  Ah well, do not worry.  I am not going to jump off a cliff.  After all, I am a calm wreck of a man!

This post is about a mundane change that results from abrupt changes of huge magnitude.

I write about shitting.

You read that right.  Shitting.

We take shitting for granted.  It deserves a lot more respect.

A little deviation can mean trouble.  Like, if you are traveling.  As if the body knows that you are not home!  "as many as 40 percent of people experience constipation while they’re away from home."

Why is it difficult to shit when on a vacation?

Traveling throws off one’s routine -- and constipation may be one result, said Dr. Brooke Gurland, a colorectal surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic. “We’re creatures of habit,” including when it comes to bowel movements, she said. “People have a time when they do that, and once we throw the schedule off, we can become completely disrupted.”

Off the regular schedule means no "regular" ;)

Perhaps "home, sweet home" was first expressed when the person was ecstatic while shitting in one's own bathroom, after getting back to the "regular" schedule?

“Any time you leave your general habitat, it’s throwing your gut microflora off balance,” says Brooke Alpert, a New York-based registered dietician.

Crap, those damn bacteria in the gut, again! ;)

The experience of a holiday trip—remembering to pack everything, navigating a crowded airport, staying with family for an extended period of time—may be enough to stop the bowels from functioning the way they usually do.

If travelling causes so much havoc, then imagine how much a layoff could mean.  A whole new shitting regimen, and possibly in a new place altogether!

It is not that I am the only one who appreciates the importance of shitting--daily and regularly.  Heck,even  poets and writers tried to tell us that, perhaps tongue-in-cheek; like the following poem by John Updike that I came to know about from this essay.

"The Beautiful Bowel Movement" 
by John Updike

Though most of them aren’t much to write about—
mere squibs and nubs, like half-smoked pale cigars,
the tint and stink recalling Tuesday’s meal,
the texture loose and soon dissolved—this one,
struck off in solitude one afternoon
(that prairie stretch before the late light fails)
with no distinct sensation, sweet or pained,
of special inspiration or release,
was yet a masterpiece: a flawless coil,
unbroken, in the bowl, as if a potter
who worked in this most frail, least grateful clay
had set himself to shape a topaz vase.
O spiral perfection, not seashell nor
stardust, how can I keep you? With this poem.