On Lords and Ladies

In the NY Times, I read this:

The Baylor University Lady Bears, who took home their third national title with an 82-81 victory over Notre Dame in this year’s N.C.A.A. final, were welcomed to the Oval Office by Mr. Trump.

Once again, I am pissed off.  No, not about #tRump, but about the usage "Lady."

Why?

Think about why there is a reference to "Lady Bears."  Are there Lord Bears?  Nope.  There are Bears, and then there are Lady Bears.

What's happening?  The nickname for the Baylor University is Bears.  By default, that nickname refers only to the men's teams.  Women's teams are therefore referenced with respect to the male Bears; hence, Lady Bears!

In my early op-ed writing years, I wrote about this too.  I thought--and I continue to think--that it was bizarre that a common nickname does not refer to males and females.  In that essay, I wrote about how the reports were then equating the name only to men, and therefore specially calling women out.  Of course, that essay was not published.

Imagine if "Americans" referred only to men, and we then said "female-Americans."

Well, we kind of sort of do that.

During my early years in the US, I was always surprised that only the non-white groups were referred to by their prefixes, as if the word "American" meant only white.  In my commentary-writing days in California, I once submitted an essay in which I argued that white criminals should be referred to as being white, just as reports call out the racial ID when the perps are "others."  Of course, the commentary was not published.

Maybe those essays were not published because they were crappy writing.  Or, maybe because I was calling out the obvious, and people are usually uncomfortable with dealing with such truths.

The "other" is based on such definitions of default conditions.  Whether it is about gender or race, or even food habits.

Recall my observations on the Indian usage "non-vegetarian" that is often referred to as "non-veg"?  What?  No?  How could you forget?

Ok, lemme quickly recap for you.

Meat eating is the default food habit in England.  The ones who do not eat meat, have to identify themselves as vegetarians or vegans or whatever else.  When the Subcontinent absorbed the English language, a new usage was created for the food habits there: non-veg.  As in not-vegetarian.

Such a special coinage to refer to the meat-eaters makes the rest of the world also think that Indians are vegetarians.  The reality is far from that.  It is a minority of Indians who are vegetarians.

Estimates of vegetarians in India are as low as 20 percent of the population to about 30 percent of the Indians.  Even if one takes the average, only about a quarter of India's population restricts itself to vegetarian food.  An overwhelming three-quarters of the population is non-veg.  This is not new.  It has always been that way. Consumers of animal protein have always exceeded the population of vegetarians.

Then, one would think that in India, too, there will not be any need for the "non-veg" usage, right?

I suspect that, as in many instances, this is a result of identifications being shaped by the rich and the powerful.  I think that given the high profile role of brahmins in the British Raj, well, both the British and the Brahmins made vegetarian as the default word to describe Indians in the new language.  And, therefore, a new word for the others.

Language is about power.  The dominance of "vegetarian" is a reflection of the power that a minority had over an overwhelming majority of "others."  The phrase "non-veg" is not any accidental creation.

"Lady Bears" says a lot about the power, privilege, and primacy of the "Lord" Bears.  It is not a phrase that was accidentally created.

Let them eat cakes!

It appears that Kim Davis has exhausted her fifteen Andy Warhol minutes.  She might be gone from our news radars, but the struggle between faith-based personal values versus the larger collective, social policies will continue on for a very long time.

Here in the US, we might struggle through the issues, yes.  As that cigar-chomping English racist remarked, Americans will always do the right thing, only after we have tried everything else.  Makes me wonder why we always have to take the long, long, long road to do the right thing.

But, at least here we end up doing the right thing.  I increasingly worry that the trend in the old country is one of doing the wrong things.  Today's exhibit:  vegetarianism.

Of course, this is not the first time that I am blogging about the vegetarian existence.  But, here is an important distinction to keep in mind: I don't make an "ism" out of a preferred way of life.  The moment an "ism" is framed, it immediately leads to an us-versus-them, which is what is rapidly unfolding in India.

The problem is that when vegetarianism—and what you eat in general—is associated with morality, it serves to strengthen distinctions, marking class, education and other indicators of status.

Any holier-than-thou approach, especially in the political space, is bound to be disastrous.

In a national landscape moving towards a narrow definition of what it means to be Indian—specifically, Hindu and high caste, and specifically not Muslim—such distinctions have potentially serious consequences.

Ah, yes, the caste issue comes up again.  The religion issue comes up again.  And you thought food is an easy topic, eh!

We can already see its effects in cities such as Mumbai, where the discourse of purity and pollution around what you eat is so powerful that certain groups are denied access to the housing market on account of their dietary choices. If you belong to the “non-vegetarian” groups—including anyone from Muslims to Christians to Maharashtrians to Dalits—it can be difficult to purchase or rent an apartment. Potential buyers are turned away, presumably, because smells from their kitchen might pollute a neighbour’s flat. With vegetarianism used as a distinguisher between “us” and “them”, Mumbai is becoming an increasingly hostile place for religious minorities.

The struggle will not be resolved anytime soon in the old country.  Nor here in the US.  When individuals claim that their "faith" prevents them from supporting a commercial transaction, societies will have quite a struggle trying to resolve the incompatibility between a secular political democracy with those faith-based practices.  Here in the US, chances are high that the food fight will end up in the Supreme Court.  Remember the bakery here in Oregon that refused service to a same-sex couple?  The baker in Colorado?

The ACLU (yes, I am a card-carrying member) argues:

There’s a growing body of court decisions saying that while religion is central to what makes America America, religion can’t be used as an excuse to discriminate

The other side argues:

Government has a duty to protect people’s freedom to follow their beliefs personally and professionally rather than force them to adopt the government’s views

Here it is cakes.  There it is meat.  All I know is this: we Americans will always do the right thing, only after we have tried everything else.  I can't say that about the old country, however.

Holy cow! No eggs for you!

I come from a long line of people who were not all too healthy when young.  I will spare you details about my childhood ;)  Not because my people back then were poor and starving.  On the contrary, for generations, my people have always been among the economic and intellectual elites within their spheres of influence.

My father, for instance, had his own childhood health issues.  So much so that at one point the physicians they consulted told my grandmother to make sure her son ate eggs.  Asking a traditional Tamil Brahmin woman who lived in a village to serve eggs to her son is, for all purposes, like asking an observant Jew to eat bacon.  But, my grandmother did.  My father had eggs; even now he does.  The traditional man that my father is, he says he worries less about the life of the chicken now because these are unfertilized eggs anyway.

The doctor's advise was based on the scientific understanding of nutrition, about the protein in the eggs.

eggs — a superfood that is about 10 percent fat and extremely high in protein — are the most nutritional way to improve the children’s health, more so than a cup of milk or a banana

My traditional and orthodox grandmother who lived in a village was ok eighty years ago with her son eating eggs, almost always the fertilized ones at that, but the old country appears to be regressing in ways that even my grandmother would say "chee-chee":

Earlier this month, the chief minister of the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, struck down a proposed pilot project to introduce eggs in free government nursery schools in districts populated by economically disadvantaged indigenous groups. The proposal came from the state’s own officials, but was dismissed by Mr. Chouhan on the grounds that eggs are a nonvegetarian food. Mr. Chouhan, like many Hindus, is a vegetarian and avoids eggs because they may be fertilized and are seen as a life force.

India's public policies are increasingly getting tied up in knots due to the political threads getting intertwined with fanatical Hindu interpretations.

How are things in Madhya Pradesh?

In Madhya Pradesh, many of the poor communities survive on government-subsidized grain and foraged plants. According to the last National Family Health Survey, indigenous children were the most malnourished of any community in the state. Even across the state, 52 percent of children under 6 — the age up to which they may attend government nurseries — are underweight, says the National Institute of Nutrition. Indeed Madhya Pradesh, the economist Jean Drèze told me, “is far worse than even the Indian average.” It is in the grip of a “nutritional emergency,” he said.

Yep, this is the latest version of let them eat cakes!

Another staple food was taken from the plates of the poor in the neighboring state of Maharashtra, after it banned the possession and sale of beef. It is enforceable with a prison term of up to five years. Hindus consider cows to be sacred, but Hindu nationalists, emboldened by the election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, have lobbied aggressively on the issue, not out of concern for the animals — which are typically bone-thin and live on garbage — but to force their religious beliefs on non-Hindus. The ban, implemented in March, was a body blow to the poor. Beef, unlike mutton and chicken, is cheap. It is an important source of protein for low-caste Dalits, and for minority communities like Muslims and Christians.

At least eggs can be easily transported to where the demand is.  What will happen to the cows if their owners cannot sell them for the meat?

The Indian Express newspaper reports that farmers don’t know what to do with dying cattle. Since they can neither sell nor butcher them, they are letting the animals loose to fend for themselves. Surely, there is nothing sacred about starving cows.

Fend for themselves by eating plastic bags, I suppose!

So, where is India going?

Privileged politicians are imposing their will on underprivileged people, who do not share their beliefs and also do not have the luxury of rejecting cheap sources of protein. By injecting religion and caste into politics, the B.J.P. is preventing India from moving forward by reinforcing the prejudices that have kept it back.

Oh well, India's undernourished kids ought to be happy that got to do suryanamaskara on International Yoga Day, even if they are all mere skin and bones. :(

What's So Fishy About Eating Anything With A Face?

Typical of the "intellectual" that I am, I was listening to Fox News the other day ...

Did that make you sit up and re-read that sentence?

I was making sure that you were carefully reading, and not merely skimming through my blog posts ;)  Let me start again.

Typical of the "intellectual" that I am, I was listening to Fox News NPR the other day, and it was a re-broadcast of an Intelligence Squared US debate.  The motion was was "Don't Eat Anything With A Face."  Yes, it was on eating animals.  The kind of issues that always attract this blogger like how a fish is drawn to its bait.  Wait, I am getting ahead of myself with the fish hook to this post!

As the chair of that session noted:

I think the whole process of raising and slaughtering animals is one that I think most of us prefer not to think about very much, and we're going to be forced to think about it tonight.

Sounded good to me.

The debated points weren't anything new.  But, I listened to it because I want to keep going up that hill where I think lies the answer to what the heck is life all about?

When we think of raising and killing animals for food, we typically do not think about fish.  And that is literally the point of departure for another piece, this one a text-based interview with Culum Brown, who is a biologist in Australia:

Most people think of fish as somehow lesser than pigs, cows, chickens and other land animals.

So, what is Brown's, ahem, beef with fish?  Plenty.  The entire interview will be well worth your time.  Even if you are not one who eats fish.  (Full disclosure: I have never had fish, and don't plan on eating them.)  Brown discusses how fish are not stupid and that they have fantastic learning skills, and they even pass along to the next generation the lessons they have learnt.  In the context of this post, on eating anything with a face, Brown says:

 If you do scientific research on fish, you have to go through the same procedures as if you were working on dogs, or cats, or monkeys. You have to go to the ethics committee, and explain the harms, and the benefits, and all that. So for most scientists, there's no implication.
But for the rest of the world, there are huge implications. For example, Britain is thought of the most progressive country in the world, in terms of animal rights. It just started to bring in legislation for aquaculture, which basically says that producers must report the number of animal deaths — which is absolutely fundamental — and they must report when they ship fish around. But this began back in the '50s and '60s for terrestrial commercial farms, when we started to think about things like moving pigs on the backs of trucks, and whether chickens had access to the real world. That revolution stopped at the water. Every major commercial agricultural system has some ethical laws, except for fish. Nobody's ever asked the questions: "What does a fish want? What does a fish need?"

The other day, I saw three guys cleaning up their fish haul by the marina.  I suspect we--society--are at ease with that being done in the open because fish don't scream.  It is not like slaughtering goats.  If you have heard a pig squeal, there is a good chance that you will never ever go anywhere near pork.  The horror of the screaming lambs haunted Clarice in Silence of the Lambs, remember?  But fish?  They make no noise.  The killing is silent and, hence, is done out in the open?

Perhaps because fish don't scream, we can easily convince ourselves that they don't feel any pain.  Not so, according to Brown:

Part of the problem comes back to the question of whether fish feel pain. But for the last 30 years, the neurophysiologists have known that they do, and haven't even argued about it. And from an evolutionary perspective, our pain perception systems —and the systems of all terrestrial vertebrates — come from a fish-like ancestor. Whether they're in the water, or on the land, they all have the same pain receptors. But for some reason, a lot of people refuse to believe that fish can feel pain

Brown then follows it up with this, which is the part I liked the best:

Currently, you go out, you catch a bunch of fish, you crush most of them to death in a net, you trawl them up from the bottom of the sea — which causes barotrauma for most of them — you dump them on a deck, half suffocate to death, the ones you don't want get thrown overboard and die anyway, and the ones you keep go on ice, just to preserve the flesh for market reasons. How do you do that in a way that has the fish's interests involved to any degree? You can't.

Back in graduate school, when potlucks were how we students typically got together, I was unprepared for a sight when I went to get daal that one had brought to the gathering: a fish's head, with the eyes in place, stared at me from the daal.  I walked away without serving myself.  Apparently a Bengali favorite.  Not mine!

Oh well.  Some day, before I die, I hope the answer to what is life will come to me.  I will be damned if that answer is that life is all about eating anything with a face!

Where are we humans in the pecking order, and does it matter?

"I eat eggs" my father remarked to his cousin sister, which made her laugh in her typically loud laughter.

"Not just now. Right from when I was a child. My mother was told by the doctor to give me eggs because of my health complications when I was young."  The cousin's mother and my father's father were siblings, and I bet the aunt thought this was strange that a traditional brahmin woman in a small little village willingly bought eggs and made her son eat them, much against the traditions.

Which then led us to wonder if the thou-shall-not-kill philosophy will accommodate the eating of eggs that are not fertilized. After all, if the eggs are unfertilized, then there is no "life" in them, which means that breaking those eggs does not lead to any killing.

Given my personality, I would think that I would have worried about such issues even if I had not been raised in a cultural background that emphasized a vegetarian lifestyle and against killing of animals.

I suppose only the darn mosquitoes were mercilessly killed by my grandmothers. And, of course, the lice on the young girls' heads. Other critters, even the roaches, were simply pushed away.  Once, when a mouse was making a habit of getting into the pantry, we had no option but to trap it, which we did. And then the question came up: what to do with the small little animal that was now in the trap?  None of us, especially us kids, wanted that mouse to be killed. So, it was set free in the backyard. For some reason, it didn't want to come back again into the house. Or maybe a cat nabbed it when we were not looking?

I live in a cultural context that is very different. Because I have adopted the new country as my, perhaps many in the old country automatically assume that I have adopted the eating and drinking life here.  Especially when I identify myself as an atheist, when I am asked.

But, living here has made me think about these issues a lot more than when I was a kid.  When we are in contexts where there is no choice, well, there is no tough decision to make. When there are no temptations, well, no harm done, right?  We cry foul when politicians are corrupt, or have sexual relations that we don't approve of. But, how do we know that we, too, would not have done that?  After all, in our regular lives, we are not presented with that kind of power, and how sure are we that we will take the moral high road if we are also presented with money and if women (or men) want to sexually please us?

Thus, here I am, and eating becomes an existential question. It is a restatement of that fundamental Hindu philosophical question of "who am I?"  The "who am I?" is not merely to explore our relationship with god--that is a screwed up way to think about that question. Instead, it is about understanding who we are, how we ought to relate to fellow humans, and how to relate to other life and non-living forms as well.

Somehow, we have come to operate with a conviction that we humans are way up there in the ranking.  We then go about "making use" of everything around us in any manner that we think benefits us. Thus, we also kill and eat other animals.

In his regular column in the Scientific American, Michael Shermer writes about speciesism when reviewing the ideas articulated in Mark Devries's Speciesism: The Movie:

In the film, [Peter] Singer and Devries argue that some animals have the mental upper hand over certain humans, such as infants, people in comas, and the severely mentally handicapped. The argument for our moral superiority thus breaks down, Devries told me: “The presumption that nonhuman animals' interests are less important than human interests could be merely a prejudice—similar in kind to prejudices against groups of humans such as racism—termed speciesism.”

Indeed. Think about this: we spend enormous resources to support a human life in a vegetative state, even as we kill everything from an ant to a cow without any second thought. A human life is that much vastly superior to every other life form?

Shermer recalls his own experience:

While working as a graduate student in an experimental psychology animal laboratory in 1978 at California State University, Fullerton, it was my job to dispose of lab rats that had outlived our experiments. I was instructed to euthanize them with chloroform, but I hesitated. I wanted to take them up into the local hills and let them go, figuring that death by predation or starvation was better than gassing. But releasing lab animals was illegal. So I exterminated them … with gas. It was one of the most dreadful things I ever had to do.

I could never have worked in any of those labs. Impossible!

Shermer concludes:

Mammals are sentient beings that want to live and are afraid to die. Evolution vouchsafed us all with an instinct to survive, reproduce and flourish. Our genealogical connectedness, demonstrated through evolutionary biology, provides a scientific foundation from which to expand the moral sphere to include not just all humans—as rights revolutions of the past two centuries have done—but all nonhuman sentient beings as well.

If you prick them, do they not bleed?

If only we could get every human to think about these, first, before they make their decisions on what to eat, right?  It is the mindless approach that bothers me. Perhaps it is the teacher in me that wants humans to think about everything and then make informed decisions, whether it is about eating or about higher education.  Is that too much to ask?

Am I being, ahem, pigheaded? ;)

Vegetarian is not a synonym for a dull, boring existence

I am pretty confident that my experience when talking with parents is no different from most others'--the conversational topics with father are quite a bit different from those when I talk with mother.  More so when they have lived the traditional lives of the man engaging in economically productive work outside the home and the woman engaging in highly productive--perhaps immeasurably valuable--work at home.

After talking about a whole bunch of family and weather and political matters, father was ready to hand over the phone to mother when he said "the lunch yesterday was fantastic. We all overate."

Even otherwise, I routinely ask mother about the cooking planned for the day.  Once she hurriedly got to that topic even before I asked her, and then she added "I wanted to tell you that before you asked me."  So, of course, there was no way I was not going to talk food with her after father's comments.  There is a tremendous variety of vegetarian dishes that mothers (and, now, perhaps fathers too) make in India. Routinely. Exciting foods.  Colorful foods. Differently tasting foods.

They have been lifelong vegetarians. Pukka!  While father occasionally strays into having eggs, mother has stayed away even from eggs.  When we were kids, mother even tried once to make a eggless version of a cake (I think,) which did not turn out well.

At least now, there is a greater understanding of vegetarian foods and Indian foods in my adopted home country.  When I was new here, the idea of vegetarian dishes was nothing more than a bunch of vegetables and leaves, either raw with some crappy dressing, or boiled and salted.  Like how the Onion has satirized that even now:

"Vegetarian Option Just Iceberg Lettuce On Bread" notes the Onion, with its usual satire

Recently, when another argumentative Indian was in town, I had prepared in advance a variety of vegetarian dishes.  But, apparently he does not have the personal relationship with food that some of us have. I wonder if his mother struggles as much as I did to draw from him compliments on the cooking, unlike my mother who was critiqued if the food was even a bit off--even as we licked our plates clean ;)

Consistent with my marching to own drumbeat, even in preparing the vegetarian dishes, I neither follow the old country's customs, nor of the adopted country's.  But, dammit they are tasty!  Like this one that I made and enjoyed for dinner a couple of evenings ago:

Quickly sauteed broccoli, carrots, tomatoes and onion,  in olive oil and red chili flakes,
with freshly grated gruyere cheese

A vegetarian existence is far from dull and boring.  After all, if it were dull and boring, we would not have the argumentative Indians all fired up all the time to debate every issue on this planet and elsewhere too!

Being a thayir-saadham is boring! ;)