Recent Posts from Author
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A Place Called Home
(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)
Former changing rooms in the Birla Industries Club‘No man ever steps in the same river twice,’ wrote Heraclitus, the ancient Greek philosopher, ‘for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.’ One could also say this about ‘home’, making it less an enduring place, more a state of mind. Or as Basho, the haiku master, put it, ‘Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.’ Still, in an age of physical migration like ours, one of the most bittersweet experiences in a migrant’s life is revisiting, after a long gap, the hometown where he came of age. More so perhaps if, while he was away, his neighborhood turned to ruin, crumbling and overrun with weeds, as happened in my case.
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Mysteries of the Unseen World
“We live in a world of unseeable beauty, so subtle and delicate that it is imperceptible to the human eye. To bring this invisible world to light, filmmaker Louie Schwartzberg bends the boundaries of time and space with high-speed cameras, time lapses and microscopes. At TED2014, he shares highlights from his latest project, a 3D film titled Mysteries of the Unseen World, which slows down, speeds up, and magnifies the astonishing wonders of nature.” Must see.
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In a hospital. At the beach. Hamas, Israel tells us, is hiding among civilians
(See the first comment for an archive of articles and videos on the Israel-Palestine conflict — Namit)
They hid at the El-Wafa hospital.
They hid at the Al-Aqsa hospital.
They hid at the beach, where children played football.
They hid at the yard of 75-year-old Muhammad Hamad.
They hid among the residential quarters of Shujaya.
They hid in the neighbourhoods of Zaytoun and Toffah.
They hid in Rafah and Khan Younis.
They hid in the home of the Qassan family.
They hid in the home of the poet, Othman Hussein.
They hid in the village of Khuzaa.
They hid in the thousands of houses damaged or destroyed.
They hid in 84 schools and 23 medical facilities.
They hid in a cafe, where Gazans were watching the World Cup.
They hid in the ambulances trying to retrieve the injured.
They hid themselves in 24 corpses, buried under rubble.
They hid themselves in a young woman in pink household slippers, sprawled on the pavement, taken down while fleeing.
They hid themselves in two brothers, eight and four, lying in the intensive burn care unit in Al-Shifa.
They hid themselves in the little boy whose parts were carried away by his father in a plastic shopping bag.
They hid themselves in the “incomparable chaos of bodies” arriving at Gaza hospitals.
They hid themselves in an elderly woman, lying in a pool of blood on a stone floor.
Hamas, they tell us, is cowardly and cynical. -
The Merchants of Death
Welcome to SOFEX (Special Operations Forces Exhibition) in Jordan, the premier international trade show of the global army industry, along with a training center sponsored by the U.S. and Jordan. “SOFEX is where the world’s leading generals come to buy everything from handguns to laser-guided missile systems.” Indeed, “just about anyone with enough money can buy the most powerful weapons in the world.”
I think the video report below is both well made and depressing. As the narrator says, 16 of the 20 largest arms manufacturers selling at SOFEX are American. “America gives a lot of these countries foreign aid,” he notes, “so they can come here and buy weapon systems from American companies … more often than not, they’re [using these weapons] against their own citizens. And thanks to the number of governments who are afraid of their own people, business is booming.” Pax Americana, baby!
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On Wittgenstein and Rorty
Here are two wonderful essays I found in the archives of Prospect Magazine. The first essay, from 1999, is by Ray Monk, British philosopher and biographer of Wittgenstein, who Monk calls “the greatest philosopher of [the 20th] century”. In it, Monk explores why “At a time like this, when the humanities are institutionally obliged to pretend to be sciences, we need more than ever the lessons about understanding that Wittgenstein—and the arts—have to teach us.” (Also check out this excellent essay by Stuart Greenstreet on his two major works, personal life and beliefs, as well as Wittgenstein, a quirky, brilliant film by Derek Jarman.)
Nearly 50 years after his death, we can see, more clearly than ever, that the feeling that he was swimming against the tide was justified. If we wanted a label to describe this tide, we might call it “scientism,” the view that every intelligible question has either a scientific solution or no solution at all. It is against this view that Wittgenstein set his face. Scientism takes many forms. In the humanities, it takes the form of pretending that philosophy, literature, history, music and art can be studied as if they were sciences, with “researchers” compelled to spell out their “methodologies”—a pretence which has led to huge quantities of bad academic writing, characterised by bogus theorising, spurious specialisation and the development of pseudo-technical vocabularies. Wittgenstein would have looked upon these developments and wept.There are many questions to which we do not have scientific answers, not because they are deep, impenetrable mysteries, but simply because they are not scientific questions. These include questions about love, art, history, culture, music—all questions, in fact, that relate to the attempt to understand ourselves better … Wittgenstein himself described his work as a “synopsis of trivialities.” But when we are thinking philosophically we are apt to forget these trivialities and thus end up in confusion, imagining, for example, that we will understand ourselves better if we study the quantum behaviour of the sub-atomic particles inside our brains, a belief analogous to the conviction that a study of acoustics will help us understand Beethoven’s music. Why do we need reminding of trivialities? Because we are bewitched into thinking that if we lack a scientific theory of something, we lack any understanding of it.
Category: Philosophy -
Three Musical Favorites
For a change of pace, I offer three of my many longtime musical favorites for your enjoyment. Click to listen to them on YouTube.
1. To Tragoudi Ton Gyfton by Greek singer, Eleni Vitali. “Eleni was born into music … Her father Takis was a gifted santur player and a composer who had given music for the most important singers of the time. Her mother Loucy Karageorgiou used to sing in festive events in the evenings, and in the mornings she cleaned houses. They were of gypsy origin, with the tradition of music full of sadness and joy”. The music is beautiful enough but see the following “interpretation of this song (with some liberty taken for the sake of rhyming)”.
“I’ve no place and nothing to look forward to
No homeland for me, what’s there to do
With a heavy heart and trembling hands
I dream of setting up my tent in distant lands -
Of Vaginal Creams and Gels
Remember that absurd ad for the vaginal whitening cream launched in India in April 2012? At first I thought the clip below was a parody. I soon realized, to my horror, that this was a bonafide ad for another product: a vaginal tightening gel called “18 Again”. The louts behind this insidious marketing campaign—including one Priti Nair in a leadership role at an outfit called Curry Nation—say this gel’s “product positioning from a brand perspective is that of women empowerment”. Surreal, no? The product, made by Ultratech India, was apparently launched in Aug 2012 (I only saw this today) and attracted a fair bit of bad press, twitter venting, and scientific debunking of its claims back then.
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Shillong Chamber Choir
Here is an extraordinary find, the Shillong Chamber Choir, founded in 2001 and based in Shillong, Meghalaya, India. If you like this, sample more of their music on their website. Such a talented bunch with a versatile repertoire, and a great example of cultural globalization.
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Chronicle of a Dolt Foretold
Many of us expected that the new BJP regime in Delhi will try to rewrite Indian history from a hardline Hindutva perspective (as opposed to the softline Hindutva of the Congress and of most leading Indian academies). But it still hurts to see it come so soon and in such a doltish package: the appointment of Yellapragada Sudershan Rao as chairman of the Indian Council of Historical Research (a funding agency for historical reseach in India, ICHR is to history what the NSF is to science in the U.S.). Sample the excerpt below from Rao’s interview in Outlook and read historian Romila Thapar’s take on his appointment.
Outlook: You are the author of the Mahabharata project? What is the project about?YS Rao: There is a certain view that the Mahabharata or the Ramayana are myths. I don’t see them as myths because they were written at a certain point of time in history. They are important sources of information in the way we write history. What we write today may become an important source of information for the future in the future. When analysed, of course, they could be declared to be true or false. History is not static. It belongs to the people, it’s made by the people. Similarly, the Ramayana is true for people…it’s in the collective memory of generations of Indians. We can’t say the Ramayana or the Mahabharata are myths. Myths are from a western perspective.
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An Uncommon History of the United States
For the most part, mainstream history in the United States has little in common with this trenchant narrative from a leftist perspective — and not because this has any less truth or clarity (23 mins). (They could have chosen a better title for this film though. 🙂
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Who Owns the News?
Gouri Chatterjee on how the business of news has changed in India in recent decades: from one kind controlled by relatively independent social elites / journalists to another kind controlled by profit-driven corporate moguls (see also this post on parallel trends in the U.S.).
The complete insouciance with which Reliance declared its business intentions vis-a-vis its foray into the media world, and the matter-of-fact manner in which it has been accepted by one and all is ultimate proof of the secondary status of journalists in the news business in India today. Journalists are there to do their owners’ bidding, not to play any meaningful role in society; content is something owners decide while journalists merely execute their wishes; making money is the primary objective of any media organisation, even if that leads to carrying news that is paid for. In this model, the ‘customer’ is given whatever they want, journalistic ethics or standards be damned.Though this trend began in the liberalised 90s, it has now come to fruition. In newsroom after newsroom across the country, journalists no longer so much as dream of exercising editorial independence without deferring to the wishes of Owner-Ji and his business boys. Instead of deciding the course of news and taking a call on what is or isn’t in the public interest, or taking up cudgels against those who wield power in ministries or in boardrooms, editors are content to be bit players – the errand boys of the business managers who pay their salaries. This is not how professional editors used to be, and owners respected them for being what they were – or so it is said.
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Fixing Capitalism in the 21st Century
By now you’ve probably heard of this summer’s blockbuster book by French economist Thomas Piketty. As I see it, Piketty’s primary, carefully argued, data-backed conclusion is: To salvage capitalism (and to improve the odds of social stability and world peace), governments need to raise taxes on the rich—more steeply on capital (i.e., tax on wealth and inheritance) than on labor (i.e., tax on wages)—and redistribute it to reduce today’s absurd level of inequality that’s on track to become even worse. The book jacket description says:
What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy, but satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings will transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality. Piketty shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx, but we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality — the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth — today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values, but economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, Piketty says and may do so again. A work of extraordinary ambition, originality and rigor, Capital in the Twenty-First Century reorients our understanding of economic history and confronts us with sobering lessons for today.Many excellent reviews of the book are compiled here (thanks to Patrick S O’Donnell). Four reviews I liked in particular, the last two of them mixed ones, are by Cory Doctorow, Paul Krugman, David Harvey, and Fred Guerin. Those who like graphs will find this summary interesting.
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Representative Democracy?
Some observations on the recently concluded parliamentary elections in India (for a closer look at the electoral data, see here and here): - The BJP polled only 31% votes nationwide but won 52% seats in the parliament (282/543). Even more strikingly, the BJP polled only 42% votes in U.P. but won 89% seats (71/80).
- BSP polled 4.2% votes nationwide (3rd highest after BJP and Congress) but won 0 seats. In U.P., the BSP polled 20% votes but won 0 seats.
- Both AIADMK in Tamil Nadu and Trinamool Congress in W. Bengal polled fewer votes than BSP (and only a bit more than BSP in U.P.), but won 37 and 34 seats, respectively (vs. 0 for BSP).
- SP polled 18 M votes in U.P. but won only 5 seats, whereas the Shiv Sena polled only 10 M votes in Maharashtra and won 18 seats.
- About half of all Indians voted for regional parties, not national parties. 69% of the people voted for a party other than the BJP.
These examples show how India’s parliamentary democracy, owing to its first-past-the-post voting system, fails to represent the political preferences of its citizens. This is in addition to the fact that elected politicians in India also do not represent its citizens sociologically (they’re far more likely to be upper caste, wealthier, Hindu, male, urban, etc.). According to the economist Jeffrey Sachs, “The first-past-the-post election tends to produce a small number of major parties, perhaps just two, a principle known in political science as Duverger’s Law. Smaller parties are trampled in first-past-the-post elections.” Alternatives that reduce the drawbacks of FPTP exist. Isn’t it time to rekindle the debate on making Indian democracy more representative, both at the political and sociological levels?
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Sri Lanka in Pictures
For most of April, I traveled in Sri Lanka with my partner, Usha. Not only a beautiful island with a rich cultural history and ample wildlife, it’s the only country in S. Asia rated “high” on the UN Human Development Index. It has relatively low economic disparity, little abject poverty, high literacy, and universal healthcare. To most Indians, Sri Lankan urbanscapes and rhythms of life will feel familiar and comfortable. I found traveling to be easy enough, the locals friendly, and the food delicious. Sri Lanka even has seven UNESCO world heritage sites.
It’s also a country whose major ethnic communities—mainly Tamil and Sinhala but also the Muslims—haven’t learned to live with each other. Their troubles mostly began in the 1950s with Sinhala nationalism and majoritarianism, driven by chauvinistic monks and militant buddhists, and fueled by cultural insecurities and jaundiced readings of religio-historic texts like the Mahavamsa. Humiliated and cornered, the Tamils demanded their own homeland; many resorted to violent resistance, leading to harsh reprisals from the Sinhala-dominated state. Over nearly three decades, Tamil areas suffered great destruction, mass exodus, and genocidal violence; ruins of war abound in the north. The LTTE may be finished, but will the great many atrocities committed against Tamil civilians near the war’s end be forgotten or forgiven easily, esp. with no reconciliation underway, tens of thousands forced off their lands, and 100K+ refugees still in India five years after the war’s end? Under the Rajapaksa family’s authoritarian regime, Sinhala pride and triumphalism have resurged, public corruption is rampant, there is little freedom of the press and disappearances are common, especially in Tamil areas that have an oppressive army presence. The economy, however, is growing again and new infrastructure, often funded by the Chinese, is coming up: an airport, modern highways, high-rise apartments, casinos, resorts, and more. For a country its size, I found Sri Lanka to be enormously complex and interesting.
Read a brief history of Sri Lanka here. For a closer look at contemporary Sri Lankan society and politics, start with the following: How Not to Win a War, Buddhists Behaving Badly, Beyond the Beach, Sri Lanka After the War, Five Years On (an archive of recent journalism), and the harrowing documentary, No Fire Zone. Below are some of my pictures.
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Sugar: The Intimate Enemy
This brilliant talk by Dr. Robert Lustig persuasively argues that sugar, based on how our bodies metabolize it in the liver, is no less a poison than alcohol. He explains how our bodies process different carbohydrates like glucose, sucrose (table sugar), and fructose, and why sugar in the latter two forms is the primary cause of obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, and more. He also debunks many common myths of health and nutrition by showing that a calorie is not a calorie (its source is important), why exercising is not about burning calories but improving metabolism, why fat is nowhere near as bad as sugar, etc. Also read this review of the related new documentary, Fed Up.
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The Rationalist and the Romantic
On Arundhati Roy’s introduction to Dr. BR Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste. (Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily.)
A few weeks ago, the Indian publishing house Navayana released an annotated, “critical edition” of Dr. BR Ambedkar’s classic, Annihilation of Caste (AoC). Written in 1936, AoC was meant to be the keynote address at a conference but was never delivered. Unsettled by the scathing text of the speech and faced by Ambedkar’s refusal to water it down, the caste Hindu organizers of the conference had withdrawn their invitation to speak. Ambedkar, an “untouchable”, later self-published AoC and two expanded editions, which included MK Gandhi’s response to it and his own rejoinder.AoC, as S. Anand points out in his editor’s note, happens to be “one of the most obscure as well as one of the most widely read books in India.” The Navayana edition of AoC carries a 164-page introduction by Arundhati Roy, The Doctor and the Saint (read an excerpt). The publisher’s apparent strategy was to harness Roy to raise AoC’s readership among savarna (or caste Hindu) elites to whom it was in fact addressed, but who have largely ignored it for over seven decades, even as countless editions of it in many languages have deeply inspired and empowered generations of Dalits.
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A Harvest of Savagery and Hope
A Review of Savage Harvest: Stories of Partition by Mohinder Singh Sarna, Rupa, 2013. This review first appeared in the Sunday Guardian.
“What sort of a Pakistan was this that had entered their village like some maddened bull, trampling humanity under its hooves and turning everything upside down?” wonders an anguished man in Savage Harvest: Stories of Partition by Mohinder Singh Sarna (1923-2001), translated from Punjabi and introduced by his son and diplomat, Navtej Sarna. On both sides of the new western border between India and Pakistan, an orgy of violence had broken out in towns and villages. It was Hindus and Sikhs vs. Muslims, with both sides pillaging, raping, and killing, leaving a million dead, 12-18 million refugees, and a still-poisoned well of politics in the region.Over the decades, Partition has produced many popular and critical narratives: its causes, villains, avoidable mistakes, its defining features and aftermath. While such narratives can never be immune from subjective perspectives, much of it—despite notable work from scholars like Gurharpal Singh, Ian Talbot, Urvashi Butalia, Perry Anderson, Gyanendra Pandey, and Jan Breman—remains mired in crude nationalistic politics, taboos, and mythologies of India, Pakistan, and Great Britain.
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Omprakash Valmiki, RIP
Omprakash Valmiki, a leading Hindi writer and poet, died last week. He was 63 years old. He is best known for his memoir, Joothan, whose translation by Arun Mukherjee I reviewed some years ago. “It is a memoir of growing up ‘untouchable’ starting in the 1950s outside a typical village in Uttar Pradesh. Told as a series of piercing vignettes, Joothan is also a remarkable record of a rare Indian journey, one that took a boy from extremely wretched socioeconomic conditions to prominence as an author and social critic.” In this video in three parts (one, two, three), Valmiki reads some of his poems, which are powerful and moving.
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Caste Iron
I have an essay in The Caravan on Ambedkar’s place in the Indian imagination, and why he hasn’t received his due from upper-caste Indians.
“Turn in any direction you like, caste is the monster that crosses your path,” wrote Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, India’s foremost crusader for dignity and civil rights. That monster has always haunted Ambedkar’s legacy, polarising it along caste lines. On the one hand is his godlike presence in Dalit communities, who, out of affection and admiration, have built countless statues of him, usually dressed in a Western suit and tie, with a fat book under his arm, and in whose folk songs, poems, and calendar art he has long held pride of place. For generations, his bold, secular, and emancipatory ideas inspired many Dalit activists and writers, many of whom recall their lives in “before-and-after Ambedkar” phases. When Omprakash Valmiki, the author of the memoir Joothan: A Dalit’s Life, first read about Ambedkar’s life and work, he “spent many days and nights in great turmoil.” He grew more restless; his “stone-like silence” began to melt, and “an anti-establishment consciousness became strong” in him. Ambedkar gave voice to his muteness, Valmiki wrote, and raised his moral outrage and self-confidence. On the other hand, there remains a longstanding apathy for Ambedkar among caste Hindus. What respect he gets from India’s elites is usually limited to his role as the architect of the constitution—important, but arguably among the least revolutionary aspects of his legacy. The social scientist and educationist Narendra Jadhav, interviewed in the Times of India earlier this year, described Ambedkar as the “social conscience of modern India”, and lamented that he has been reduced to being “just a leader of Dalits and a legal luminary.” Indeed, even thoughtful, liberal elite Indians are commonly ignorant about Ambedkar’s life and social impact, both in his lifetime and in the decades since—as the scholar Sharmila Rege noted in Against the Madness of Manu: BR Ambedkar’s writings on Brahmanical Patriarchy, not only lay readers, but Indian post-graduates and academics in the social sciences, humanities, and women’s studies are also unlikely to have read him. What explains this severe disjunction in how Ambedkar is received in India?
Workshop: Critical Writing III – Write Your Professional Obituary
Where: Adianta School for Leadership & Innovation, New Delhi.
When: Tuesday, 19 November, 2013; 10 am – 6 pm
Instructor: Namit Arora
_____________________Listen up, young professionals! Chances are that you chose your profession for a host of reasons: perhaps you were lured by its financial rewards; perhaps you chose its promise of daily joy or intellectual adventure; perhaps you saw it as a means to positively impact the lives of your fellow humans. Or perhaps, as is fairly common, you didn’t choose your profession as much as it was chosen for you by peer pressure and family expectations. Whatever your mix of reasons, you are now immersed in it and wonder—occasionally if not often—about the professional path and the milestones you ought to pursue.
Now imagine you’ve reached the end of your professional life. You’re looking back and reflecting on what you’ve achieved. How would you like to sum it up? In other words, what would you like your professional obituary to read like? Central to this imaginative exercise are questions like: given that life is short and you will die, what pursuits are worth devoting 40-50 hours a week to and why, what measures of success and rewards should you value, and what might it cost you to get there (as in opportunity costs, psychic costs, etc.). In “Critical Writing III — Write your professional obituary”, we’ll explore this subject matter through critical readings, group discussions, and hands-on writing (leading to your 300-word professional obituary). After this workshop, you may well have some answers, or at least more clarity on the questions you’ll need to resolve in order to evolve and attain your long-term professional aspirations.
