What we regret most are the chances we never took!

Every once in a rare while, we come across gems at the least expected places.  We are out looking for something, perhaps even trivial is the pursuit, when there is that mother lode.  A treasure chest seemingly waiting for somebody, anybody, and it happened to be us.

That kind of serendipity occurs not often in our lives, but when they do, we ought to know to hold on to that gem.

In my case, it was a television sitcom, and a re-run at that, which I was watching when I heard a few lines of a poem being recited.  Those couple of lines spoke to me, which is what we expect from good poetry.

I couldn't wait to get to Google and search for those lines.  It turned out that the sitcom character had quoted from the final stanza of Lord Tennyson's Ulysses.  Well, I give you more than what I heard recited:

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

I wish us all well with the chances that we take, and may we never have to regret the chances we didn't, and don't, take!

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses: Youth unemployment!

The contractual work year in the academic world in which I live begins in ten days.  As I put together the syllabi for the courses that I am scheduled to teach, I, yet again, struggle with how to make the subject appeal to the students who, for the most part, treat any of the courses as merely a hurdle to get past on the way to the "real world" in which they will attempt to realize that fabled American Dream.

I am tempted to contact a few students from the past years and inquire about their economic status, and whether their faith in the college degree as the passport to economic success has worked out.  But, I am afraid the responses will be along the lines of unemployment and underemployment, with very few excitedly reporting about their jobs.  There is a good chance that some of them tried to escape the bleak employment scenario by going to graduate school, which I would have warned them not to if I had any say at all.

It is one tough world out there for the young and the restless.

Consider the bleak prospects of young people entering the workforce today: the portion of people aged twenty to twenty-four who have jobs has fallen from 72.2 percent in 2000 to just 61.5 percent. Meanwhile, if we adjust for inflation, the median earnings of men between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four working full-time has fallen by nearly 30 percent since 1973. For women, the median has fallen by 17 percent. As Andy Sum, an economist at Northeastern University who has studied youth unemployment for many years, has shown, if you are out of work or underemployed during those initial years of adulthood, chances are far higher you will be unemployed, poor, or dependent on welfare later on.

  If that is the American story, how are the youth in the rest of the world?

At least we are not Spain will not be a consolation to that eager-beaver 22-year old feeling discouraged about the job market.  It could get worse for them in the long haul:

people who begin their careers without work are likely to have lower wages and greater odds of future joblessness than those who don’t. A wage penalty of up to 20%, lasting for around 20 years, is common. The scarring seems to worsen fast with the length of joblessness and is handed down to the next generation, too.
The overall ageing of the population might blunt this effect by increasing demand for labour. But Japan’s youth joblessness, which surged after its financial crisis in the early 1990s, has stayed high despite a fast fall in the overall workforce. A large class of hikikomori live with their parents, rarely leaving home and withdrawn from the workforce.

So, at least we are not Japan. Yet.

There is something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear.

Thus, I will try, in some twisted Groundhog Day ways, to attempt to convey to students that higher education and college degree were never meant to be any kind of a professional guild and that the whole system is not necessarily geared towards maximizing the students' welfare.

I will warn them not to listen to faculty, in particular.  I will then follow it up with how the advice from a faculty not to listen to faculty is a neat paradox.  If they listened to that advice, then they will not listen to anything I say the rest of the term.  On the other hand, if they did not pay attention to that advice, then they have lost out on that observation.

The good thing is that most will not be interested even in that humorous take because higher education has done a fantastic job of making sure that the mission is not about critical thinking anymore.

No, I am not being cranky!

Syria, the Arab Spring, and the Ottoman Empire

As tempted as I have felt to rant write about Syria, I resisted that urge, but I seem to have crossed my own "red line"!

The following is a repeat post from two years ago, with minor edits:

The “Arab Spring” is the final unraveling of the Ottoman Empire.

It is now three years since the self-immolation of a Tunisian street merchant—a horrific act that captured the imaginations of millions and launched the widespread movement in the Middle East to remove authoritarian governments, in favor of democracy.

Almost all the countries included in the ongoing Arab Spring were once part of the powerful and expansive Ottoman Empire, whose prominence was marked by the conquest of Constantinople in 1453.  The city became Istanbul and the empire’s capital too.  It was no surprise, therefore, that soon Suleiman and his forces were knocking on Vienna’s doors. 

Source

As empires always do, the Ottoman Empire, also, started its decline after a successful run, and the descent accelerated in the 19^th century.  Again, as it happens with empires, the decline was marked by its territories being taken over by other powers.  Tunisia was one of those, as were the other Arab Spring countries of Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Morocco, and Yemen.  The Pasha was replaced by European colonial powers.  The First World War, whose conclusion we mark with Armistice Day and Veterans Day, had an additional effect of removing the remnants of the Ottoman Empire. 

The final untangling from the Ottoman ties began with the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991.  The Balkans, too, were once a part of the Ottoman Empire, and Yugoslavia was held together by authoritarian governments, until the death of President Tito and, later, the collapse of the Soviet Bloc.  When the authoritarian structures were gone, for the first time people in Yugoslavia had an opportunity to establish their own political identities.  Unfortunately, it turned out to be violent and bloody, and triggered external intervention from the US and its NATO allies.

The collapse of the Soviet Union created new countries that were also former Ottoman territories—Armenia and Azerbaijan.  These had been swallowed by the Russian Czars and, after the Bolshevik Revolution, became a part of the USSR. 

When all that dust settled, more or less, the decade that followed began with the events of September 11, 2001.  

One of the grand plans that preoccupied Osama bin Laden’s maniacal approach was the creation of an Islamic state that would continue where the Ottoman Empire had ended.  His logic was that the US was propping up the governments in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Libya, to name a few, and that weakening the US would make possible the supra-Islamic state. 

In this decade, fortunately, the Arab Spring is the exact opposite of what bin Laden had envisioned.  The peoples of the former territories of the Ottoman Empire are protesting against their rulers not because they want to re-create an Islamic empire.  When the Tunisian street merchant set himself on fire, it was because he was fed up with having to deal with the corrupt rulers—all the way down to the local police.  Egyptians similarly were tired of Hosni Mubarak and his cronies looting away the wealth, while the youth were jobless with highly insecure futures. 

Dictators and authoritarian governments have been the norm since the end of the Ottoman Empire, and even after the people in the Arab Spring countries had witnessed the departure of the European colonizers.  Tunisia, for instance, was a French colony until 1956, but independence did not usher in freedom and democracy. 

The correlation between the Arab Spring and the Ottoman Empire is also reflected in the case of Saudi Arabia, which has not experienced mass protests—Saudi Arabia was not a part of the Ottoman Empire.

The Arab Spring is a reminder, in a way, that our contemporary lives are intricately connected with events from the past—something that historians often remind us about but is easily forgotten by most of the rest of us. 

The continued linkage with the past means that even as we keep one eye on the Arab Spring, the other remains fixed on at least one byproduct of the end of the British Empire that the world worries about--Pakistan.  

Empires strike back, even from their graves!

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