My place in this world

 A few days ago, this happened:

Honorary @theAAG geographer, Barry #Lopez dies at 75
He lived in #Oregon along the #McKenzie near #BlueRiver. Much of his property was burned in wildfires that tore through this summerhttps://t.co/0uf8dX1f1Q

— Am Dr Khe (@congoboy) December 26, 2020

In his memory, the following is a re-post from January 2016.
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A few years ago, the Association of American Geographers recognized Barry Lopez as an "honorary geographer."  It is to recognize "excellence in research, teaching, or writing on geographic topics by non-geographers."  I understand that sentiment--after all, I do not have any formal education, from the undergraduate through the doctorate level, in geography and, yet, have been gainfully employed as a geography instructor for nearly a decade-and-a-half.

Lopez lives in Oregon, not far from my home.  He, too, is a transplant, from across the continent.  A writer of the highest caliber, reflecting on life by observing places, especially the natural environment.  In this recent essay, Lopez writes:

Existential loneliness and a sense that one’s life is inconsequential, both of which are hallmarks of modern civilizations, seem to me to derive in part from our abandoning a belief in the therapeutic dimensions of a relationship with place. A continually refreshed sense of the unplumbable complexity of patterns in the natural world, patterns that are ever present and discernible, and which incorporate the observer, undermine the feeling that one is alone in the world, or meaningless in it. The effort to know a place deeply is, ultimately, an expression of the human desire to belong, to fit somewhere.

The themes of existence, the inconsequential lives that we lead, and attempting to create a meaning through experiencing a place, are all regular features of this blog.  Existential loneliness was also very much a part of Anomalisa that I watched last night with the friend.  Which is perhaps why that paragraph appealed to me.

I am convinced that if we paused to think about our existence we would then realize the crisis within.  I suppose we do our best to avoid thinking about it.  Or, we try to lighten that crisis by making meaning via our affiliations with everything from family and friends to football teams and faiths.  When we strip all those affiliations away, the existential loneliness is all that remains.  Of course, to some extent, these are all age-old questions that humans have been grappling with.

Lopez writes:

The determination to know a particular place, in my experience, is consistently rewarded. And every natural place, to my mind, is open to being known. And somewhere in this process a person begins to sense that they themselves are becoming known, so that when they are absent from that place they know that place misses them. And this reciprocity, to know and be known, reinforces a sense that one is necessary in the world.

Indeed.  Whether it is Pattamadai and Sengottai, or Neyveli, or Calcutta, or ... the deep desire to know about them and understand them has been a wonderful blessing in terms of how much they have helped me know about myself.   I even routinely tell students that, without going into autoethnographic details--understanding the world, understanding the peoples, is a wonderful way to understand our own country and our own place in the grand scheme of things.  

Back to Lopez:

Perhaps the first rule of everything we endeavor to do is to pay attention. Perhaps the second is to be patient. And perhaps a third is to be attentive to what the body knows.

Yes. To pay attention. To observe the place.  To be patient. To be in the here and the now.  I suppose it is not easy to translate those ideas to everyday life!

    

“Is it possible to be happy without making others unhappy?”

This past summer, as the pandemic encouraged binge-watching, even quite a few non-Indians were feasting on a show that was all about arranged marriages in India.  The eight episodes of Indian Matchmaking provided entertainment for many who otherwise couldn't be bothered to learn anything about India.  That's entertainment!

I didn't watch even one episode, but I read plenty of commentaries about the show.  And, yes, I blogged about it!  In that post, I noted:

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

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

I ended that post with this:

Netflix has the last laugh in this, similar to how the current President owes it all to the entertainment of the lowest kind.

What a depressing and sad state of the world!

We did recently watch a six-episode show that was also about matchmaking and weddings in India.  It was not merely entertainment, however.  A viewer who knew nothing about the Subcontinent but delightfully watched Indian Matchmaking would not have watched this show because it requires paying attention to the characters, their names, their religions, the words they use, the differences among them, the political backdrop, ... It would have been too much of a learning experience. 

As an educator who has tried his best to get a few people interested in the Subcontinent--and failed miserably at that--I don't expect a lot of crossover audience from Indian Matchmaking to ... A Suitable Boy.

The title for this post comes from a New Yorker interview with the director of A Suitable Boy--Mira Nair:

I’ve talked to a bunch of friends who’ve read “A Suitable Boy,” and some of them have said a version of “When I read that book when I was eighteen or twenty or twenty-three, I was so angry about who Lata ended up with. And now I’ve read it as someone who’s thirty-five or forty or fifty, and I understand the decision she made.” You don’t have to tell us how your series ends, but did you have a similar feeling with the book, and do you understand that emotion?

I understand Lata, and I never wanted to feel in the film that Lata settles. She sees people for who they are, to some extent, in her youthful way, but the question, which I love, that Vikram asks in the book is “Is it possible to be happy without making others unhappy?” That’s Lata’s question, really, all the time, and I think she makes a decision that she knows will work to make herself grow. So that’s the way I saw it.

“Is it possible to be happy without making others unhappy?” 

That's not an Indian question.  It is universal.  

The characters, their language and religions, the locale, and plenty more could be different across the world, but the universality of “Is it possible to be happy without making others unhappy?” is beyond doubt.  (If only people would read fiction set in other parts of the world, and watch foreign movies.  Here again, I am trying my best as an educator, like a freshman seminar in which students can learn about the world by reading and discussing a short story every week.)

The actor who plays the character Lata, Tanya Maniktala, relates to her own personal life:

Maniktala teared up over the phone as she reflected on her own grandfather’s trauma as a Hindu refugee forced by the 1947 partition to flee to India from what is today Pakistan. “I realize how important pain is, and the lessons” to be found in that, she said.

“The kind of empathy people had — I feel the humanity aspect has been on the decline,” she continued. “We have to remember where we came from. We can never forget.”

The trauma of the 1947 partition continues to haunt India and Pakistan.

Mira Nair's movies are never mono-cultural, nor are they set in any comfortable geographic spaces.  NPR's Scott Simon asked Nair about this:

SIMON: Miss Nair, I have to ask you - back to the first film of yours I saw, "Mississippi Masala." Your films have been a wonderful celebration of the masala, if you please, of multiculturalism, of people from all various parts of the world spontaneously being thrown together and making a society out of themselves and each other's lives and joining together to create something distinctive and unique and amazing. Are you worried about the prospects for multiculturalism in today's India and, for that matter, today's America?

NAIR: In America, I feel that we are waking up to multiculturalism. We are waking up to the power of culture, of color, you know? I mean, with the whole movements, finally, of Black Lives Matter and even the #MeToo movement, there's been an enormous sort of galvanizing. So I feel actually here, energized. Part of what inspired us, Sooni Taraporevala, the writer and myself, to make "Mississippi Masala" was first the racism within us in our own Indian community. And that led into this interracial love story, really, with the African American community in Mississippi.

I sort of see it as an anthem to Kamala Harris. Like, Kamala Harris is, in a way, the child of Mina and Demetrius in "Mississippi Masala." And finally, 30 years later, today's young can see that she didn't come out of nowhere, that this is a culture that is there and not seen. So I must say, there is a feeling of being heartened here.

In India, I refuse to despair, but I am deeply disturbed about the systematic obliteration, really, of precisely that that makes us powerful and strong, which is, I think, our plurality and our layered - our interconnectedness, not just really from - you know, from the entire silk route, from Iran, from, you know, all through Pakistan, Balochistan to India. This is a region that has influenced so many aspects of who we are as Indians, you know, today in religion and music and poetry. This is so much what also is in "Suitable Boy." So I feel that that is our power. And it would be very reductive to make it a one religion, one nation. That is not the absolute extraordinary glory of where we come from.

If only more people watched such shows and reflected on the human condition!  

We fiddle ... while Rome burns :(

Consider this:

If a corporate executive gets a $100,000 bonus for steering a company through a difficult year, while four $25,000-per-year restaurant workers lose their jobs entirely, the net effect on total compensation is zero — even though in human terms a great deal of pain has been incurred.

This is a perfect illustration of why quantitative literacy is important in this modern world.  I wonder what percentage of a literate population, heck even college graduates, will be able to make sense of that simple arithmetic.  I have done my part to educate a few and will perhaps have one final opportunity in the fall term that could even be in the real world, after all the virtual interactions.

It is also a perfect illustration of why we need an economic restructuring, and create a new political economy that will address the human suffering when four workers lose their jobs.

So ... "Even as millions of individuals faced great financial hardship this year, Americans in the aggregate were building savings at a startling rate."

One of the most counter-intuitive outcomes ever, right, when we might have expected differently in what has been awful loss of jobs?

The trend became clear six months into the pandemic.  Professionals and high-income earners didn't seem to lose jobs.  Low-wage workers bore the brunt of the recession.

Back in September, as the university's president and his aides were developing the plans for firing quite a few tenured and adjunct faculty and staff because of the Covid-induced budgetary crisis, I wrote to the president: "It certainly is surprising that Oregon’s current budget won't be significantly affected by COVID-19, and that projections into the future might not be that dark after all."  Always evidence-based in my arguments, I attached the report from the Oregon Office of Economic Analysis.

It has been more than three months since I sent that email; I am yet to hear from the president or his aides.  I suppose I will soon hear from them!

Will there be protection for low-wage workers not only through this pandemic but--and more importantly--even after conditions return to "normal"?

I worry it won't.

Why this pessimism?

For the same reason that I have offered many times.  Like here:

I will once again say the same thing: We work out the solutions politically.  Unlike a challenge of how to get humans to the moon and back, or how to vaccinate people, these are not technical issues.  In a democracy, we are, therefore, at the mercy of voters and politicians.

At the mercy of politicians.  Picture in your mind the likes of mItch mcConnell, tEd cRuz, mArco rUbio, kEvin mcCarthy, ... who will do everything that they can to stop doing anything good for the less-privileged, even as they kiss rich white asses!