Good enough has been fantastic!

When I was in high school, the old country was a long, long way from becoming the world's digital back office.  Even landline telephones were a luxury back then.  Very few had telephones at home.  A vast number of villages had yet to be electrified, and towns and cities frequently suffered power outages.

In that old India, employment opportunities were scarce.  Most kids who were academically smart were encouraged, pushed, and even shoved into engineering or medical colleges because of the employment and income potential.

I didn't need teachers or parents to tell me that I had enough and more in me; every subject came easily to me, especially the sciences.  I rarely ever did any homework because I typically finished them during class time.  At home, I read magazines and fiction, mostly in Tamil, which is why my mother claims, and rightfully so, that she never ever saw me do homework or study.

Thankfully, my parents adopted a completely hands off approach.  My mother was consistent in her approach to life whether it was us helping in the kitchen or helping ourselves with school work--she was clear that we knew what had to be done and it was our responsibility to get them done.  If we didn't, she didn't make a big deal of it either. 

My father was the one who typically signed off on the progress report card.  I don't recall him commenting about marks and ranks.  

There was one occasion--the only time ever--when my father commented that I might not be not giving it all.  True to the old culture, he talked about the story of Hanuman.

In the Hindu mythology, the young Hanuman, with way too much energy and immense superpowers, plays too many pranks on the sages.  The angered wise men curse Hanuman that would not know how powerful he is unless and until he is reminded of his immense powers.

My father said that I was capable of achieving a lot and that he was reminding me of that as much as Hanuman had to be reminded.

I was sure that he meant it.  But, I carried on without changing my approach to schooling and understanding the world.

Now, looking back, I think it comes down to my dislike for competition.  Whether it was K-12 school or backyard badminton, I liked to play but not to keep score nor to win.  Even now when I suggest that we play games without keep scores, I come across as the crazy one!

To live a life to win it all has never appealed to me.  I am glad that I picked up this idea somewhere, sometime.

Not only did I not care to win it all, I realized early on that I couldn't relish victory either when there is a losing side.  When India won an exciting cricket match against the West Indies, I was all pumped up as a kid could be.  And then it dawned on me that at least a few kids in the West Indies were perhaps utterly devastated by the loss.  After that, in the years that I followed sports, I could never truly enjoy the wins because I would think about the losing side and their fans.

This deep-seated distaste for competition is perhaps also why I often quote Rumi in this blog.  In one verse, Rumi sums it up:

Inside the Great Mystery that is, 

we don't really own anything. 

What is this competition we feel then,

before we go, one at a time, through the same gate?

It has been a struggle to fit into this modern world, especially in America that practices Vince Lombardi's "winning is the only thing" philosophy.  People like me are viewed as, well, losers who can't make it.  I am glad I have made it this far without being focused on winning.

May you also find a comfortable corner to enjoy it all without keeping score!

Pride in America

The following appeared in my Twitter feed yesterday:

No matter who you are or who you love, you are seen, you are loved, and you matter. Happy #Pride, Oregon! 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

— Governor Kate Brown (@OregonGovBrown) June 1, 2022

We live in much better times than in the years and centuries past; that tweet by itself is an evidence of the progress that we have made.  Our governor, Kate Brown, is openly bisexual, though initially a part of her had to stay in the closet.

Decades ago, even as a high school student, I had no idea about anything, and especially about gay and lesbian love and sex.  There was nothing even remotely like a sex ed class, and all we learnt was couched in the context of reproductive biology.  Later, when I first came to know about gay sex, it was, like almost everywhere, talked about with a whole lot of negative connotations.

Fresh off the boat in Los Angeles, I was stumped, frozen, when I saw two young women kissing in public.  It was news to me that a graduate school mate was gay, and that a graduate student from India was bisexual.  I watched Torch Song Trilogy when it was screened on campus.  One day I was in a traditional and conservative India, and the next day I was in the land of the free. 

Over the decades of life in America, I have come to understand human sexuality a lot more.  It is all about the emotion deep down that calls us to find a person whom we can trust, with whom we can share memories, with whom we want to share a bed every night.  The particular gender matters only to the person in a relationship.

Last Night at the Telegraph Club is about a Chinese-American high school senior coming of age and understanding her sexuality.  Malinda Lo's fictional narrative seems real perhaps because of the extensive research that she has done--through her graduate studies and explicitly for this book.  When the story is presented against the backdrop of the 1950s when homosexuality was not legal, when same-sex marriage was beyond the wildest imagination, a reader like me cheers on the sharp, smart,  teenager in her life as she comes to understand that she doesn't like boys but girls, one girl in particular.  Fictional it might be, we can easily imagine such lives having been lived a mere couple of generations ago.

Governor Brown cannot run for the office this November because of term limits.  Early on as candidates were lining up to replace her, I donated to Tina Kotek's campaign.  Kotek is now the Democratic Party's nominee, which means that in a deeply blue state like Oregon, she will likely be the next Governor, unless something catastrophic happens.  If elected, Kotek will become the first openly lesbian governor in the country, which is something that the Chinese-American teenager in Last Night at the Telegraph Club would not have thought possible.

History is one tangled web

When I landed in Los Angeles in 1987, Mohan, whom we had known well from our Neyveli days, picked me up from the airport.  It was a long drive to Pasadena, where he and his wife lived.  A newly married couple, they were looking for a home of their own to buy and they took me along for a drive to scout a few neighborhoods in those old days before the internet.

At one point during the drive, he pointed out Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL.)  Caltech I was familiar with right from my undergraduate days.  It was where the ultra-brainy engineering students wanted to end up for their PhDs.  Caltech was also the home of Richard Feynman, who was like a demi-god for many of us who loved physics.

Though JPL was new at that time, it became a common name once I started living the life of a graduate student in the company of other students.  I even came to know an Indian-American who worked at JPL as a project manager in NASA's Deep Space program.  He had interesting stories to tell about having to document every day's activities to the national security folks any time he went abroad because of the deep-seated worries that commies around the world might trap him into sharing advanced technology.

What I did not know then, and which I came to know only from reading Malinda Lo's book, is that one of the co-founders of JPL was a genius researcher who was born in China. 

The main character in the book, Last Night at the Telegraph Club, which is set in the 1950s, is a Chinese-American high school student, but Lo tells a wonderful story that is a lot more than high school teenage drama.

Lo brings up the story of JPL's co-founder, Hsue-Shen Tsien, when the teenager's family is worried about McCarthyism that made every person of Chinese origin a possible communist.  When I read that, I put the book down and reached for Google.

What a complicated story that Wikipedia offers about Hsue-Shen Tsien!  For a country that was worried about commies, the US certainly did China a huge favor by deporting him:

Upon his return, he helped lead the development of the Dongfeng ballistic missile and the Chinese space program. For his contributions, he became known as the "Father of Chinese Rocketry", nicknamed the "King of Rocketry".  He is recognized as one of the founding fathers of Two Bombs, One Satellite.

In the book, the teenager's family discusses how differently the US government treated this Chinese rocket scientist and the Nazi rocket scientist, Wernher von Braun.  Unlike the Chinese scientist who was forced to leave the US, von Braun, who developed the V-2 rockets for the murderous Nazi regime, was secretly airlifted to the US and was given prestigious assignments to develop rocketry that put America on the path towards space travel.

A couple of decades ago, I happened to be in Huntsville, Alabama to visit with friends who lived there.  One of the first big signs that I saw welcomed us to the Rocket City.  Given the jokes about Alabama, one wouldn't easily imagine such a moniker for a city there.  Driving around, I noticed that their civic center was named after von Braun.  Yes, named after von Braun.  He was such an important figure there.

From the Nazis we got von Braun, and we expelled Hsue-Shen Tsien to China.  To understand such complications in life, we need a lot more than rocket science!