D-Day Arrives: "Life begins at Erection"

In a way, this is the third version of my blog.  When I started blogging in 2001, I was mostly reacting to the news of the day.  A few years in, I was not happy with that approach.  I deleted all the posts in one sweep.  But then I didn't quite know what I wanted to do in a new iteration.

I took a few months off.  And then I relaunched my blog in 2008.  In this second version, I was a lot more thoughtful about what I wanted to say, brought in the essays that I read and the videos that I watched, and also used the space as notes for my classes, and early drafts for the commentaries that I wrote.

Now, it is the third act.  (Will there be a fourth?)  The posts are longer, and a lot more direct with even less sugar-coating than before; I don't think there are any more bridges to be burnt ;)

A couple of weeks ago, when a draft Supreme Court opinion on the highly controversial issue of abortion was leaked, I wanted to clarify my own thinking on abortion.  Instead, I went a different route, and highlighted an important point that was made in the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973:

One's philosophy, one's experiences, one's exposure to the raw edges of human existence, one's religious training, one's attitudes toward life and family and their values, and the moral standards one establishes and seeks to observe, are all likely to influence and to color one's thinking and conclusions.

With my religious background when young and the godless secular life that I have intentionally chosen to lead, and my thinking, I concluded a long time ago that it always a woman's choice whether or not to carry her pregnancy all the way through to delivery.  Nobody else, not even the husband or partner, has a say in the matter.

Almost ten years ago, in January 2013, I blogged about abortion after reading a horrific news.  A pregnant woman, who was less than halfway through the gestation period, suffered a miscarriage.  Even though it was clear that the fetus would not develop into a full-grown child, and even though the mother and the father explicitly preferred an abortion, the hospital staff refused to carry it out.  Over the next few days, the mother developed multiple problems that led to several organs failing, which, in turn, killed her.

It was a multinational story: the mother, Savita Halappanavar--a dentist herself--and her husband, were legal residents in Ireland, after immigrating from India.  The Irish law prevented the medical personnel from carrying out the abortion.  The law itself being a reflection of the strong Catholic traditions.  (Think again about the 1973 Supreme Court opinion referring to one's religious training.)

Katha Pollitt wrote then in the Nation:

This was not a case of choosing between the fetus and the woman—the seventeen-week fetus was doomed, and nothing could have saved it. But it still had a heartbeat, and abortion is banned in Ireland.

Pollitt quoted the husband's report:

“The doctor told us the cervix was fully dilated, amniotic fluid was leaking and unfortunately the baby wouldn’t survive.” The doctor, he says, said it should be over in a few hours. There followed three days, he says, of the foetal heartbeat being checked several times a day.
“Savita was really in agony. She was very upset, but she accepted she was losing the baby. When the consultant came on the ward rounds on Monday morning Savita asked if they could not save the baby could they induce to end the pregnancy. The consultant said, ‘As long as there is a foetal heartbeat we can’t do anything.’
“Again on Tuesday morning, the ward rounds and the same discussion. The consultant said it was the law, that this is a Catholic country. Savita [a Hindu] said: ‘I am neither Irish nor Catholic’ but they said there was nothing they could do.”

Because the heartbeat was detected in a doomed fetus in a Catholic country, Savita Halappanavar, a Hindu from India, died.

Savita Halappanavar's death galvanized the country into a rethinking about abortion.  "Never again" became a rallying cry.  In 2018, Irish voters overwhelmingly elected to make abortion legal during the first trimester and with those costs covered by the public health service.

source

In a total contrast to the direction in which a strongly Catholic Ireland was moving on the issue of abortion, Alabama's Republican legislators voted to criminalize abortion at any stage of the pregnancy, with very little exceptions.  Saturday Night Live responded to the increasingly loud and emboldened Republicans who were making abortion their focus, and I tweeted:

#SNL has an awesome #Election2020 bumper sticker for #Republicans who are opposed to #abortion:
"Life begins at erection"
🤣🤣🤣
And, oh my, Cecily Strong as Susan Collins is phenomenal!https://t.co/wcmGyelQGi#tRump #ShootsOn5thAvenueAllTheTime

— Am.Dr.Khe (@congoboy) May 12, 2019

The punchline "life begins at erection" was not new to me.  I had blogged about that in 2012:

Commentators pointed to what happened in Romania, when the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu completely banned abortion and contraception.

Prior to 1966, Romania had one of the most liberal abortion policies in the world. But, desperate for population growth, Ceaușescu issued Decree 770, essentially nationalizing Romanian women’s wombs. Both abortion and contraception were criminalized for all women age 45 and under who had not borne at least four children (later increased to five). The only exceptions were for rape and incest, high-risk pregnancies, and cases in which the fetus could contract a hereditary disease from either parent. The law was strictly enforced. The Romanian secret police, the Securitate, registered suspected pregnancies and kept tabs on women until the birth of the child. It was the kind of natalist authoritarianism that US "pro-life" advocates have long dreamed of.

So, here we are in 2022, only a few days away from the Supreme Court's decision that will most probably overthrow Roe v. Wade, which will then allow Alabama, Texas, Oklahoma, ... to move to practically make abortion illegal in their states.  A good chunk of the 63 million who delivered the disaster in November 2016 will be ecstatic upon reaching their promised land.  With their religious training, their attitudes toward life and family and their values, they want to create a theocracy here.  It is only a matter of time before we begin to read about our own Savita Halappanavar news reports.

Is there anything that I can do other than blogging?  I vote.  I contribute to the campaigns of people who reflect my opinions.  How do you act?

How have YOU changed?

It was my first semester as a fresh-off-the-boat graduate student.  One of the classes was planning theory, with Martin Krieger as the instructor. Having shifted from engineering to a completely new field, in a new country, where the educational system was completely different, I never ever felt out of place like I did in that classroom.

A couple of weeks in, when we were discussing the  assigned readings, I had something to say.  But, as I started speaking, I started sweating out of sheer nervousness.  I bet the class looked at me with sympathy.

A couple more weeks later, we turned in the first of the papers in Krieger's class.  Again, never having written essays all through the four years of college, I had no idea how to write papers. When Krieger returned the evaluated papers back, I had earned a gentleman "C." 

"C." 

I felt crushed. 

Not that I was chasing the magical 4.0 GPA; I was, after all, the same old high school student who couldn't care about grades.  But, I now worried that I had erred in ditching electrical engineering and getting into intellectual areas that were far beyond my abilities.  In the engineering undergraduate program, I never had to write essays.  And now in graduate school I had to demonstrate my understanding through essays.

There was nobody to talk to about this.  Maybe I could have talked to professors, but I had yet to understand that one could go to a professor's office and talk to them about problems. 

But, the wonderful aspect of being an adult, as opposed to me in my teenage years, was this: I was able to work it out within me.  I quickly became a better writer.

A few years after graduate school, when I started writing opinion pieces in newspapers, I got appreciative remarks about my writing too.  Once, a stranger stopped me when I was out walking and introduced himself as an instructor at the local community college.  He said something that blew me out of this world: He often used my newspaper commentaries as examples of quality writing for students to analyze.  What more a compliment could I ask about my writing ability!

In my commentaries, and here in this blog too, I often personalize the social, political, and global issues.  I bring in my own life experiences.  I did that even in the academic book-reviews.  Autoethnography, this is called. But, nobody taught me to think this way; to me, there is no other way to understand the world.

When I read, when I travel, I reflect on how those influenced my life and my thinking about the human condition.  My argument gets refined and clearer.  Sometimes, I have had to ditch my view altogether.  Is there any other approach to thinking about the world?

Channeling an essay that I read a long time ago, I have often told students that they telling me about having read Plato or Bradbury doesn't mean much as them demonstrating how their thinking changed as a result of reading Plato or Bradbury or whoever.  What's the point in reading a lot if none of the ideas in those books ever made a dent on how we think.  And if there is no change in how we think, isn't that mere blind faith?

It is a similar thing about travel too.  When people talk about the countries that they have visited, I am so tempted to ask them how those travels changed them for the better.  But, I don't ask them.  We do not have a faculty-student relationship for me to ask such questions.  I merely listen to their travelogues and move on.

In my approach to autoethnographic writing, I relate the books that I read and the critical movies that I watch to my life.  Travel has been a wonderful learning experience.  I wish I could take Martin Krieger's planning theory class now.  I will have plenty of points to discuss in the classroom, and I will do that without sweating it out.  I am certain that I can write quality papers now.  But, wisdom arrives way too late in life, and youth is wasted on the damn young!

The Queen can go to hell!

In my early teens, I was not a rebel without a cause.  I had solid reasons to rebel against a lot.  But, it was all suppressed rage as I went about life as a good student and an obedient son.  As they say, it is the quiet ones that you should always worry about ;)

One of the targets for my anger was the goddamn British empire.  My childhood hero was Vanchinathan (Vanchi,) who was from grandmother's village, Sengottai.  The 25-year old Vanchi shot dead the regional British administrator, Robert Ashe, in a carefully planned assassination when Ashe was traveling.  This happened almost fifty years before India's independence from the colonizer.  At the main crossroad in Sengottai, there is a statue for Vanchi, who killed himself after the shooting. 

Even now, as I blog about it, I can feel the anger within.  Colonization forever changed the lives and histories. One of the ways we take revenge: By winning the Spelling Bee!

(Such anger within is also why I am always impressed, with deep respect, that African-Americans have not exploded with anger.  While I have the utmost respect for MLK's nonviolent approach, I am confident that had I been a black teenager during the Civil Rights movement, I would have been drawn only to Malcolm X and the Black Panthers.)

The UK and the world fawning over the queen reminds me of the old stories all over again.  Four decades of life since the early teenage anger against the murderous thugs who (mis)ruled the old country has dampened my anger and disgust only a tad.  If I believed in hell, I could at least curse those white supremacists to the darkest chambers of hell!

I reviewed my blog and read up a few posts in which I have been highly critical of the empire, which I almost always referred to as the bastard empire.  Bad idea!

“No man ever went to the East Indies with good intentions.” Wrote Horace Walpole.  As in no European man went to the East Indies with good intentions.  They went to plunder and colonize.  And they largely succeeded.  The British were masters at this.  Britain gets off rather easily compared to its continental counterparts who went around colonizing lands and people in the other inhabited continents.  It is not that the British were saintly; recall Jallianwala Bagh?  They had a good public relations system, and they also knew how to cover their tracks, like how they did in Kenya during the last gasps of the empire.

"The British Empire was much worse than you realize," wrote Sunil Khinani in The New Yorker. 

[The] British Empire’s baneful legacy may well have been deeper and more diffuse than that of any other modern state. Was British liberal imperialism, given the extent of the damage it inflicted over generations, a more malevolent influence on world history than even Nazi Fascism? 

The empire retracting back to the cold islands in the northern seas did not clear the slate, so to speak, in the former colonies.  The multi-generational legal system that was in place in the colonies became a part of the legal system in the newly independent countries, and often this had disastrous results for people.

They plundered and raped, and then the rapists and plunderers wanted to be remembered with fondness and respect.  I think I am going to puke! 

Of course, it is not as if life in the old country was all wonderful before the White Supremacist Raj was established.  Far from that.  For starters, the caste system as it was practiced then--including by my ancestors--along with horrific customs like sati, made sure that life for an overwhelming majority was nasty and hellish.  But, that does not make the White Supremacist Raj any nobler.

We often also use humor to channel the anger.  Trevor Noah did that well in his stand-up routines on the British colonization.  There are also plenty of simple jokes like this: A demon took a monkey to wife – the result by the Grace of God was the English.

Thinking about Britain along these lines reminded me of the tshirt I bought a few years ago when I was in Chennai.

A rough translation:

Like the men,
who failed to think beyond the next meal;
who find pleasure, in the faults of the rest;
whose souls toil in constant despair - mind
tangled in desperation and agony;
who wish ills to their neighbour;
who subject themselves to luck's mischief;
who live burdened with miseries,
and passed life as a burden
Born human,
did you wonder, if like those men,
I would also fall for fate's follies?

So, in short order, India became a "shithole" as the former guy liked to refer to many brown peoples' countries around the world.  Shitholes were created.

Consider India. At the beginning of eighteenth century, India’s share of the world economy was 23 percent, as large as all of Europe put together. By the time Britain left India, it had dropped to less than 4 percent. “The reason was simple,” argues Shashi Tharoor in his book Inglorious Empire. “India was governed for the benefit of Britain. Britain’s rise for two hundred years was financed by its depredations in India.” Britain, Tharoor argues, deliberately deindustrialized India, both through the physical destruction of workshops and machinery and the use of tariffs to promote British manufacture and strangle Indian industries.

I don't expect white supremacists to disappear anytime soon, given how much they have become emboldened in the US, and across Europe.  Which is all the more the reason why we cannot forget the past and let white supremacists rewrite history. We need to get the inaccuracies out of our past stories, and accurately present the colonizers for what they did; else, going forward will not be easy.  As Pankaj Mishra wrote in a different context: "The old question—what is a country, and what is its basis?—has become menacingly relevant long after it appeared to have been settled."