"like a cumin seed in a camel's mouth"

I had never, ever come across that idiom before today.  "like a cumin seed in a camel's mouth."  Interesting to imagine that!

Even more fascinating was this: I was not the only one to whom that expression was new.  Because, when I googled for it, the first in the search results was a question at quora.com.

Ready to be blown away?  The question at quora.com was:

I came across this in a BBC article (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazi... ), and I don't understand what it could mean.

You see, I came across that idiom at that very BBC article as well!  Every day life is way too interesting sometimes ;)

Anyway, what was the answer there?

It is a literal translation of a saying in Hindi, the language spoken in Uttar Pradesh that features heavily in the link. 
It refers to something which is too little or insufficient to solve something massive (just as one cumin seed would do nothing to satiate a camel who may be hungry).

Aha!

To add to the interesting plot of asking questions and finding the answer, well, the BBC article was about students who feel they have a right to cheat at exams!  And, even more of a coincidence: the author, Craig Jeffrey is Professor of Development Geography at the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford.  A geography professor!

So, what did this geography professor find in that article by a geography professor?

When I was working in western Uttar Pradesh, Singh ushered me into the bowels of a smoky canteen in the middle of his campus. Kicking a stray dog off a chair, he took out a packet of cigarettes.
"India's university system is in crisis," he began, lighting up and blowing the smoke towards the ceiling. "Cheating happens at every level. Students bribe to get admission and good results. Research students get professors to write their dissertations. And the professors cheat too, publishing articles in bogus journals."

I had heard about such things back in the day when I was a student in a part of India far, far away from Uttar Pradesh.  In the sheltered and prudish environment that I knew, as kids, we rhymed to ridicule a cheating act like copying:

copy-cat
kill the rat
monday morning
eat your rat.

I have no idea what that means! ;)

Back to the BBC article; what was shockingly new to me was this:

When pro-cheating rallies were held in Uttar Pradesh in the early 1990s, the state's chief minister gave in to demands and repealed an anti-copying act - he actually allowed students to cheat.

What the what?  In the first place, the government had enacted an anti-copying law? Like there is a law needed for that?  And then it was repealed?

In discussing the reforms is when the author had commented, "such reforms are like a cumin seed in a camel's mouth."

No wonder that American universities are very, very cautious when it comes to evaluating the merit of students from India and a few other countries.

Here in the US, we are a lot more professional when it comes to cheating.  We don't want students to go through the hassle of cheating.  Instead, we offer fake-classes for which we award students the highest grades.  Oh, on one condition though: the classes ought to primarily serve football and basketball players.  The rest of them need to real work to earn their letter-grades!

I suppose whatever reforms the NCAA comes up with will be "like a cumin seed in a camel's mouth" ;)

This pacifist, too, thanks the veterans

(The following was my op-ed that was published, with a different title, in the Statesman Journal)

On Veterans Day, my practice has been to call or email a couple of people who are close to me in order to thank them. One is a 93-year-old who lives in Southern California. Jack was a teenager when he was drafted to serve as a bombardier during World War II.

While that old habit will continue this year too, the pacifist in me is immensely thankful to the U.S. military for marching to the orders from the commander-in-chief to fight an invisible enemy far away from the U.S.: the Ebola virus.

In September, President Barack Obama announced that the U.S. military would assist in the fight against the deadly Ebola virus, which since then has claimed even more lives and has infected thousands more. The arrival of the virus in the U.S. also underscores the urgency to fight this enemy in its original home in the severely affected countries of Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone.

A few days after the president's decision, an old high school friend, who has returned to India after a career that took him all over the world, commented on my blog: "The U.S. action of committing troops to fight the disease is probably one of the finest acts of the Obama presidency. Your government didn't have to do it, but it did. That is the best of America on show." The best, indeed!

"Operation United Assistance," which is the Department of Defense's name for this assignment, will provide logistical and medical support to various agencies, including the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), that are involved in the international effort to battle the virus.

Doctors Without Borders, which was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1999 "in recognition of the organization's pioneering humanitarian work on several continents," welcomed this announcement even though it typically has not favored military involvements in the past. Only the military "has the rapid deployment capability and chain-of-command structure necessary now," said Dr. Joanne Liu, the president of Doctors Without Borders.

Following up on the U.S. military's involvement, China is also sending to Liberia an elite unit of its army, which has plenty of experience fighting another infectious disease from a decade ago: Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).

The U.S. military is best positioned for such an effort, with its vast logistical preparation. Above and beyond that, the military training to follow orders every step along the way will be immensely important, because all it takes is one breach in the protocol for the Ebola virus to infect a person. That level of precision in implementing protocols will not come easily to civilians like me, who even have trouble consistently following the rules of driving.

While the Ebola virus is an invisible and silent enemy, it is perhaps even deadlier than many visible enemies that the military has engaged in past battlefronts. This theater of war in West Africa is as critical to humanity as was the front where Jack served as a bombardier.

My thanks to the valiant troops who are assisting in this just war and fighting the good fight.

When ignorance feels like expertise. The confident idiots we are.

Yes, that is the story of me as a faculty in the classroom.

Come to think of it, that is the story of my life.

I suppose if I were to ever write an autobiography (as if I have not shared enough of my life in this blog!) the title of that book will be "A Confident Idiot."  Hey, what are you sniggering at?

Perhaps you are chuckling at how freely I admit to my idiocy.  That, dear reader, is one of the greatest benefits of aging, unlike the pretensions that I had to stage-manage when I was younger.

Turns out that whether we are young or old, we are all confident idiots, writes a Cornell University professor:

For more than 20 years, I have researched people’s understanding of their own expertise—formally known as the study of metacognition, the processes by which human beings evaluate and regulate their knowledge, reasoning, and learning—and the results have been consistently sobering, occasionally comical, and never dull.
The American author and aphorist William Feather once wrote that being educated means “being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don’t.” As it turns out, this simple ideal is extremely hard to achieve. Although what we know is often perceptible to us, even the broad outlines of what we don’t know are all too often completely invisible. To a great degree, we fail to recognize the frequency and scope of our ignorance.

Recall that profound adage about wisdom: not knowing that we don't know is not the mark of a wise one.  To understand deep down that we know very little and that we know that we don't know is one heck of a strong position.  Well, unless you want to be a politician!

Of course, we will assume that the Cornell professor, David Dunning, knows what he is writing about ;)

[In] many areas of life, incompetent people do not recognize—scratch that, cannot recognize—just how incompetent they are, a phenomenon that has come to be known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. Logic itself almost demands this lack of self-insight: For poor performers to recognize their ineptitude would require them to possess the very expertise they lack. To know how skilled or unskilled you are at using the rules of grammar, for instance, you must have a good working knowledge of those rules, an impossibility among the incompetent. Poor performers—and we are all poor performers at some things—fail to see the flaws in their thinking or the answers they lack.
What’s curious is that, in many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge.

That's right--the ones who are incompetent are blessed with inappropriate confidence.  Go figure!  No wonder then that politicians are damn confident people ;)

But, hold your laughter:

Because it’s so easy to judge the idiocy of others, it may be sorely tempting to think this doesn’t apply to you. But the problem of unrecognized ignorance is one that visits us all.

Recall that profound adage about why people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones?  You and I are in our own little glass houses, too!

To quite an extent, it is all because that is how we are wired; the brain is awesome, but that brain is also why we become confident idiots:

An ignorant mind is precisely not a spotless, empty vessel, but one that’s filled with the clutter of irrelevant or misleading life experiences, theories, facts, intuitions, strategies, algorithms, heuristics, metaphors, and hunches that regrettably have the look and feel of useful and accurate knowledge. This clutter is an unfortunate by-product of one of our greatest strengths as a species. We are unbridled pattern recognizers and profligate theorizers. Often, our theories are good enough to get us through the day, or at least to an age when we can procreate. But our genius for creative storytelling, combined with our inability to detect our own ignorance, can sometimes lead to situations that are embarrassing, unfortunate, or downright dangerous—especially in a technologically advanced, complex democratic society that occasionally invests mistaken popular beliefs with immense destructive power (See: crisis, financial; war, Iraq). As the humorist Josh Billings once put it, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” (Ironically, one thing many people “know” about this quote is that it was first uttered by Mark Twain or Will Rogers—which just ain’t so.)

Thus,

people rely on the cognitive clutter in their minds—whether it’s an ideological reflex, a misapplied theory, or a cradle-born intuition—to answer technical, political, and social questions they have little or no direct expertise in.

Harry Frankfurt had a much simpler way to describe all this: we bullshit!  Frankfurt noted that the ability to bullshit, and the inclination to do so, does not decrease with education but actually increases with it--because of all the new skills we picked up to articulate ideas about which we don't know a damn thing.  While Frankfurt reached that via philosophy, the Cornell professor approaches it via psychology.

So, any suggestions?

For individuals, the trick is to be your own devil’s advocate: to think through how your favored conclusions might be misguided; to ask yourself how you might be wrong, or how things might turn out differently from what you expect. It helps to try practicing what the psychologist Charles Lord calls “considering the opposite.” To do this, I often imagine myself in a future in which I have turned out to be wrong in a decision, and then consider what the likeliest path was that led to my failure. And lastly: Seek advice. Other people may have their own misbeliefs, but a discussion can often be sufficient to rid a serious person of his or her most egregious misconceptions.

Aha, that is no different from what I tell students all the time.  Phew, good to know that I have not been a confident idiot in advocating that method! ;)

The built-in features of our brains, and the life experiences we accumulate, do in fact fill our heads with immense knowledge; what they do not confer is insight into the dimensions of our ignorance. As such, wisdom may not involve facts and formulas so much as the ability to recognize when a limit has been reached. Stumbling through all our cognitive clutter just to recognize a true “I don’t know” may not constitute failure as much as it does an enviable success, a crucial signpost that shows us we are traveling in the right direction toward the truth.

Exactly.  If you don't know, be confident and bold when you say "I don't know."  But then try to know as well.

Source: The New Yorker, of course!