Shunya's Notes

New York's Unique Collection of Languages

Linguists today are realizing that New York is a language "hot spot," where they can study several of the world's disappearing languages:

The chances of overhearing a conversation in Vlashki, a variant of Istro-Romanian, are greater in Queens than in the remote mountain villages in Croatia that immigrants now living in New York left years ago.

Husni Husain, 67, says he doesn’t know of any other person in New York who speaks Mamuju, an Austronesian language.

At a Roman Catholic church in the Morrisania section of the Bronx, Mass is said once a month in Garifuna, an Arawakan language that originated with descendants of African slaves shipwrecked near St. Vincent in the Caribbean and later exiled to Central America. Today, Garifuna is virtually as common in the Bronx and in Brooklyn as in Honduras and Belize.

And Rego Park, Queens, is home to Husni Husain, who, as far as he knows, is the only person in New York who speaks Mamuju, the Austronesian language he learned growing up in the Indonesian province of West Sulawesi. Mr. Husain, 67, has nobody to talk to, not even his wife or children.

“My wife is from Java, and my children were born in Jakarta — they don’t associate with the Mamuju,” he said. “I don’t read books in Mamuju. They don’t publish any. I only speak Mamuju when I go back or when I talk to my brother on the telephone.”

These are not just some of the languages that make New York the most linguistically diverse city in the world. They are part of a remarkable trove of endangered tongues that have taken root in New York — languages born in every corner of the globe and now more commonly heard in various corners of New York than anywhere else.

More here. Also from the New York Times, here's a video in which you can hear bits of many rare languages.

The Man in the BMW

(An excerpt from a longer work of fiction. Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)

    On their way to China Town, they pass an area with red curtained massage parlors and hookers pacing the streets in tight clothes. They stop at a red light behind a BMW. A hooker approaches its curbside window, talks to the driver, and hops in. Ved notices Liz shaking her head in what appears to be disapproval.

    ‘Consenting adults!’ he provokes her.

    ‘You don’t need to tell me that,’ she says sharply.

    ‘Why the disapproval then?’

    ‘Because it is so sad. I just wish these women had other options.’

    ‘Maybe they do. I doubt they are doing this against their will, at least not in San Francisco.’

    ‘Just because they do this, quote-unquote, voluntarily, doesn’t mean they do it because they are happy to. It’s because they don’t recognize other options. Or they are addicted to abuse, or full of self-loathing and given to self-destruction.’ Her voice bristles. ‘It doesn’t mean they like it, or choose it with a healthy frame of mind.’

    ‘But if they do it voluntarily—so let’s exclude the drug addicts—can we say we know better? Who should be allowed to save people from themselves? So many others don’t like their jobs either, or choose them with a healthy frame of mind. I have met—’

    She sighs. ‘I know that line of reasoning, but taking a job flipping burgers is not quite comparable to letting a horny customer finger your private parts.’

Selections from Dalit Writing

Dalit writing in India has appeared in vernacular languages for many decades. Many Dalits now also write in English (as did Ambedkar) or are increasingly translated into English—the language of modernity and power in India—which also makes the Dalit experience known to the wider world. Even among this small set, there is great diversity of opinion on the caste system: its current state and trajectory, and strategies to combat it. Here are five articles I've read recently that I think illustrate this diversity and offer notable perspectives:

M. Swathy Margaret:

"I appeal to young Dalit women not to get subsumed in the relatively macro-identities of mainstream progressive movements such as the male Dalit movement or the upper-caste feminist movement. It is only by retaining our unique voice within these movements that we can contribute meaningfully to these movements and benefit from them. Giving ourselves a separate space does not mean we want a complete break with these movements."

Meena Kandasamy:

"The readiness to destroy caste requires us to destroy a part of ourselves. But finally it will culminate in the end of imagined or assumed inferiorities and superiorities. That is why, irrespective of where we find ourselves in that hierarchy, we can militate against caste only if each of us make it a personal rebellion, a conscious choice to defy that oppressive, self-defeating system."

Anand Teltumbde:

"Contrary to commonplace view, the problem of castes has become much simpler today than ever before. The existential castes are confined to a divide between dalits and non-dalits, quite like the racial divide between blacks and white or the class division between capitalists and proletariat. No time in history, castes rendered themselves as easy for combating against as they do now. The historical project of annihilation of castes is accomplishable now, provided the forces swearing by it are ready to act."

Corporations Are People Too!

Earlier this year, the US Supreme Court pronounced that corporate speech was no different from human speech and so deserved First Amendment protection for free speech. And since political spending, as we all know, is a form of free speech, the government had no business regulating corporate spending in support of political candidates. In effect, "the Supreme Court threw out regulations that prohibited corporations from buying campaign commercials that explicitly advocate the election or defeat of candidates." I am inclined to see this as a fundamentalist interpretation of the constitution, not an allegorical one attuned to the realities of our age. A victory of Word over telos.

Thankfully, we have satire to leaven this stupidity. A corporation called Murray Hill Inc. is taking the logical next step in the evolution of the oldest democracy: it is fighting for the right to run for Congress. Why? Because in legal terms, a corporation is a person too! It can finally bypass the pesky individual politician who is a mere middleman. Watch their campaign ad below and listen to this funny interview on NPR.

Is India a Flailing State?

In this interesting paper, Lant Pritchett argues that India, despite its economic strides and democracy, is a "flailing" state:

How does one reconcile the contradictions of a booming economy and democracy with world class elite institutions and yet chaotic conditions in service provision of the most rudimentary types?  I argue that for India we need a new category.  I argue that India is today a flailing state---a nation-state in which the head, that is the elite institutions at the national (and in some states) level remain sound and functional but that this head is no longer reliably connected via nerves and sinews to its own limbs.  In many parts of India in many sectors, the everyday actions of the field level agents of the state—policemen, engineers, teachers, health workers—are increasingly beyond the control of the administration at the national or state level.

The contrast with China could not be more striking.  In China one worries that, due to the lack of the processes of democratic representation the head of the state, while capable, is beyond the control of the citizens.  Yet, at the same time one reads of local government officials being executed for corruption.  Clearly the head has a strong interest in retaining control of the administrative apparatus of implementation. 

More here.

Mathematics in India

David Mumford reviews Kim Plofker's Mathematics in India:

Did you know that Vedic priests were using the so-called Pythagorean theorem to construct their fire altars in 800 BCE?; that the differential equation for the sine function, in finite difference form, was described by Indian mathematician-astronomers in the fifth century CE?; and that “Gregory’s” series ... was proven using the power series for arctangent and, with ingenious summation methods, used to accurately compute π in southwest India in the fourteenth century? If any of this surprises you, Plofker’s book is for you.

Her book fills a huge gap: a detailed, eminently readable, scholarly survey of the full scope of Indian mathematics and astronomy (the two were inseparable in India) from their Vedic beginnings to 1800.
...<snip>...

It is important to recognize two essential differences here between the Indian approach and that of the Greeks. First of all, whereas Eudoxus, Euclid, and many other Greek mathematicians created pure mathematics, devoid of any actual numbers and based especially on their invention of indirect reductio ad absurdum arguments, the Indians were primarily applied mathematicians focused on finding algorithms for astronomical predictions and philosophically predisposed to reject indirect arguments. In fact, Buddhists and Jains created what is now called Belnap’s four-valued logic claiming that assertions can be true, false, neither, or both. The Indian mathematics tradition consistently looked for constructive arguments and justifications and numerical algorithms. So whereas Euclid’s Elements was embraced by Islamic mathematicians and by the Chinese when Matteo Ricci translated it in 1607, it simply didn’t fit with the Indian way of viewing math. In fact, there is no evidence that it reached India before the eighteenth century.

Chan Chan

The city of Chan Chan on Peru's Pacific coast was the largest city in the Americas 600 years ago:

Located near the Pacific coast city of Trujillo, Chan Chan was the capital of the Chimú civilization, which lasted from A.D. 850 to around 1470. The adobe metropolis was the seat of power for an empire that stretched 600 miles from just south of Ecuador down to central Peru. By the 15th century, as many as 60,000 people lived in Chan Chan—mostly workers who served an all-powerful monarch, and privileged classes of highly skilled craftsmen and priests. The Chimú followed a strict hierarchy based on a belief that all men were not created equal. According to Chimú myth, the sun populated the world by creating three eggs: gold for the ruling elite, silver for their wives and copper for everybody else.

The city was established in one of the world's bleakest coastal deserts, where the average annual rainfall was less than a tenth of an inch. Still, Chan Chan's fields and gardens flourished, thanks to a sophisticated network of irrigation canals and wells. When a drought, coupled with movements in the earth's crust, apparently caused the underground water table to drop sometime around the year 1000, Chimú rulers devised a bold plan to divert water through a canal from the Chicama River 50 miles to the north.

More here.

Basharat Peer on Kashmir

Kashmiri journalist Basharat Peer, author of the memoir Curfewed Night, discusses the Kashmir conflict with writer Pankaj Mishra (who also reviewed the book on the NYRB Blog). Basharat's readings from his book are vivid and moving, and provide a window into ordinary life during the two-decade old Kashmir conflict (1 hr, 18 min). Basharat also appeared on the Diane Rehm radio show where, during Q&A, he was attacked by Indian nationalists (via Amitav Kumar).

Curfewed Night is a brave and unforgettable piece of literary reporting that reveals the personal stories behind one of the most brutal conflicts in modern times. Since 1989, when the separatist movement exploded, around 70,000 people have been killed in the battle between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. Born and raised in the war-torn region, Basharat Peer brings this little-known part of the world to life in haunting, vivid detail. It is a tale of a man's love for his land, the pain of leaving home, and the joy of return—as well as a fierce and moving piece of reportage from an intrepid young journalist.

What to Make of the Naxalites?

An attack by Maoist rebels in the Eastern Indian state of Chhattisgarh resulted in the deaths of 76 policemen [6 April, 2010] ... more than 500 Maoist guerrillas, known as Naxalites, were involved in a carefully planned trap ... The death toll ... was the largest in the 43 year history of the insurgency. Claiming to speak on behalf of India’s poor and exploited, the Naxalites ... have a presence in at least 20 out of India’s 28 states ["The Red Corridor"]. The Indian government has promised a strong response with Home Minister Gopal Pillai pledging to “hunt everyone down.” ... Thousands of people, including rebels, law enforcement officials, and innocent civilians, have been killed over the years in clashes between the government and the Maoist rebels.

In this audio interview, Leftist Prof. Vijay Prashad provides a decent overview of the Naxalites and their politics. He laments the fact that many urban Indian intellectuals—embittered by their government's land grabs in the name of development and the trail of social injustices left behind by its neo-liberal economic agenda—have grown sympathetic to the Maoists. Prashad includes Arundhati Roy here, calling hers a grave error of judgment. He is referring to what I myself think is her brave, necessary, yet wince-inducing reportage, Walking with the Comrades.

Indeed, how much does the Maoist cause of overthrowing the Indian state have in common with the Adivasi/Dalit cause of social justice and autonomy? Whatever the answer, they are currently in bed together, even though the Maoist leadership, as Prashad notes, is all upper caste male outsiders and has no progressive social program worth supporting (he likens them to the Sendero-Luminoso). A good answer for why they're working together came from Roy herself in an earlier essay, Mr. Chidambaram's War. The Maoist army, she wrote,

is made up almost entirely of desperately poor tribal people living in conditions of such chronic hunger that it verges on famine ... [who] have not had access to education, health care or legal redress ... mercilessly exploited for decades, consistently cheated by small businessmen and moneylenders, the women raped as a matter of right by police and forest department personnel. Their journey back to a semblance of dignity is due in large part to the Maoist cadres who have lived and worked and fought by their sides for decades. If the tribals have taken up arms, they have done so because a government which has given them nothing but violence and neglect now wants to snatch away the last thing they have — their land ... They believe that if they do not fight for their land, they will be annihilated ... their ragged, malnutritioned army, the bulk of whose soldiers have never seen a train or a bus or even a small town, are fighting only for survival.

The mainstream Indian communist parties operate under parliamentary democracy and abhor the Maoists. Watch the insightful lecture below by Prakash Karat on the Maoist problem and how to solve it (hint: not by military means). Karat is the General Secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Leftist Prof. Jayati Ghosh of JNU in the lecture below also expounds on the Maoist/Naxalite ideology.

I also ran into this sensible analysis by Satya Sagar on Kafila. Over in Outlook India, Umair Ahmed Muhajir disagrees with Roy but admits that "Despite its lack of nuance and its errors of judgement, Arundhati’s essay served a purpose. We need more such writing." On Pragoti's site, Sudhanva Deshpande is more critical. Roy does "give us a sense of the dreams and desperations that drive young women and men to the gun," he says. "What she does not do is question the Maoists’ conceptual framework" and "chooses to be smitten" instead. If you have a perspective to share on this topic, yours or someone else's, please do so as a comment.

George Soros on the Future of Economics

In this lecture series, Soros offers some resolutely liberal and philosophically rich food for thought on economics—an odd thing to say, I'll admit, for a multi-billionaire hedge fund manager. All five lectures and Q&A are hosted on this Financial Times page (one, two, three, four, five; 5-7 hours). The first lecture appears below and is a bit most abstract/conceptual; later ones are more concrete/practical.

"George Soros unveils his latest thinking on economics and politics during a lecture series hosted by the Central European University (CEU) from Oct 26-30, 2009. These lectures are the culmination of a lifetime of practical and philosophical reflection. Mr Soros discusses his general theory of reflexivity and its application to financial markets, providing insights into the recent financial crisis. The third and fourth lectures examine the concept of open society, which has guided Mr Soros’s global philanthropy, as well as the potential for conflict between capitalism and open society. The closing lecture focuses on the way ahead, closely examining the increasingly important economic and political role that China will play in the future."

The Discreet Charm of Pollen

It's that time of the year again, you folks with pollen allergies. In this video you come face to face with your allergens. Achoo!