The perils of unfettered imagination

...is illuminated by the parable of Chicken Little.

The story goes thus:

An acorn falls on Chicken Little’s head, and she decides the sky is falling. Other animals are warned in turn — Henny Penny, Ducky Lucky, Goosey Loosey, Turkey Lurkey — until they are all eaten in their panic by Foxy Loxy, who sees an unparalleled gustatory opportunity. There are a number of staggering what-ifs. What if Chicken Little had asked for additional evidence that the sky was falling? What if Henny Penny or Goosey Loosey had been more skeptical of Chicken Little’s claims? You can’t fault Chicken Little for a lack of imagination, but the fable is a warning against unfettered credulity — and imagination. If Chicken Little had reacted to the falling acorn with greater equanimity, she might still be alive today — along with many, if not all of her barnyard friends.

Living within a contagion of chaos

In The Locust Effect, Gary A. Haugen and Victor Boutros claim, and I believe rightly so, that it's not simply poverty that people in the developing world suffer from, but an acute lack of security.

Violence is rampant in many parts of the world that are also poor. However, when experts in the developed world device plans to alleviate problems in the developing nations, they typically focus on economic measures, convinced that scarcity is the biggest challenge in these countries.

Scarcity is indeed a big challenge, according to the authors, but a bigger challenge is fear. A majority of these nations have no functional institutions of law, order and justice, in place, and if there are police and courts, they serve to protect, not the people, but the regimes against the people. The elites of the developing world have successfully bought the services of the police and judiciary to their advantage.

The tale of Yuri, an 8-year old Peruvian girl, doomed to live in a country "marked by disorder, violence and man-inflicted suffering", says it all. In his discussion of the book, David Brooks quotes the story:

Yuri's body was found in the street one morning, her skull crushed in, her legs wrapped in cables and her underwear at her ankles. The evidence pointed to a member of one of the richer families in the town, so the police and prosecutors destroyed the evidence. Her clothing went missing. A sperm sample that could have identified the perpetrator was thrown out. A bloody mattress was sliced down by a third, so that the blood stained spot could be discarded.

Yuri’s family wanted to find the killer, but they couldn’t afford to pay the prosecutor, so nothing was done. The family sold all their livestock to hire lawyers, who took the money but abandoned the case.

Brooks brings to our attention the gist of the books' perspective-altering argument that "The primary problem of politics is not creating growth. It’s creating order. Until that is largely achieved, life can be nasty, brutish and short."

Life is "nasty, brutish and short" in many parts of the world's places where the average citizen lives beyond the apparatus of law and order, and are victims of "predatory behavior, [and] the passions of domination and submission."

The doodle I missed

To celebrate the 92nd birth anniversary of ace Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray, Google India had doodled in a memorable scene from Ray's best known 1955 film, Pather Panchali (the "Story of the Road")--that of the brother and sister duo of Apu and Durga running across the rural landscape to catch a glimpse of the train that crossed through their village. 

The train was a magical sight to the siblings, who couldn't eat two meals a day, so acute was the poverty in which the family, and in a rural Bengal depicted in the film, lived.

Below is a scene of Durga and Apu from Pather Panchali.

A world of no more world wars

My immersion in the study of globalization, a vague term that as Thomas Friedman had said some time ago, can be used as a "theory of everything," has yielded at least one certainty: There is little likelihood of a Third World War, in the shadows of a First and a Second, in a globalized world, even if the reason is as simple as greater global desire for cooperation and peace.

Thus the Russian engineering of Crimea's secession from Ukraine's and Ukraine's resentment of Russia's of a 20th century style imperial muscle-flexing, isn't going to lead to a consortium of global powers starting a Third World War against Russia.

The above would have been possible in the 20th century. Not any more as veteran journalist, Roger Cohen observes:

It could not happen. Of course, it could not happen. The institutions and alliances of a connected world ensure the worst cannot happen again. The price would be too high, no less than nuclear annihilation. Civilization is strong, humanity wise, safeguards secure.

Cohen writes of the anger of an anonymous 19 year old Ukranian farm boy, who feels the same way about Russian imperialism today as the young Gavrillo Princip, the 19 year old Bosnian Serb Nationalist whose assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo triggered off the First World War.

Today's angry teenagers would rather flock to a radical student circle and communicate their disenchantment with the political system through Social Media, than commit an act of violence to start a war.

In a globalized world everybody wants peace. Violence has dwindled from a public affair to being limited to privatized zones within smaller nations.

A book in my father's bookcase

Grace Metalious' novel about life in small town America of the 1950s, Peyton Place.

I had read the book at a very young age, during lazy, scorching afternoons, in my hometown of Kolkata. The book's contents had shocked me.

I have a hazy memory of the book's details, and only recall an impression of encountering scenes of sexual violence. The word "rapista" had nauseated me.

Essentially, the novel brings to the surface the violence embedded in the structures of small town life in America; the violence comes across as very masculine and consequently very gendered.

Critics, revisiting the novel 50 years later, have compared Grace Metalious to Jacqueline Susann. Coincidentally my father's bookcase was graced by the presence of Susann's novels as well.

The violence of the novel notwithstanding, Peyton Place had strong women characters.

Susann's novels both exploit and champion women, and the duality of her treatment of women comes through pretty starkly in Valley of the Dolls.

Perhaps it's the presence of strong women characters that drew my father to a novel like Peyton Place?

Additionally, Peyton Place, a bestseller of its time, defied the dominant image of America as a place of boundless freedom and happiness. It showed America as petty, dysfunctional; a society riven internally.

My father had a rebellious spirit; it had simmered inside of him. Peyton Place was a novel by a rebellious female author, a rarity of her time and gave a contrarian picture of a nation that folks had inordinately hero-worshipped in Socialist India.

I plan to re-read Peyton Place.

A paradox of Capitalism

Is the rise of what Jeremy Rifkin, calls a post-market economy, an economy that has near-zero cost of production and its driving paradigm is the "Internet of Things."

I'm yet to wrap my brain around the concept of the Internet of things, but have a blurb on the book's content here:

The capitalist era is passing - not quickly, but inevitably. Rising in its wake is a new global collaborative Commons that will fundamentally transform our way of life. Ironically, capitalism's demise is not coming at the hands of hostile external forces. Rather, The Zero Marginal Cost Society argues, capitalism is a victim of its own success. Intense competition across sectors of the economy is forcing the introduction of ever newer technologies. Bestselling author Jeremy Rifkin explains that this competition is boosting productivity to its optimal point where the marginal cost of producing additional units is nearly zero, which makes the product essentially free.
In turn, profits are drying up, property ownership is becoming meaningless, and an economy based on scarcity is giving way to an economy of abundance, changing the very nature of society. Rifkin describes how hundreds of millions of people are already transferring parts of their economic lives from capitalist markets to global networked Commons.
"Prosumers" are producing their own information, entertainment, green energy, and 3-D printed products at nearly zero marginal cost, and sharing them via social media sites, rentals, redistribution clubs, bartering networks, and cooperatives. Meanwhile, students are enrolling in massive open online courses (MOOCs) that also operate at near-zero marginal cost. And young social entrepreneurs are establishing ecologically sensitive businesses, crowdsourcing capital, and even creating alternative currencies in the new sharable economy.
As a result, "exchange value" in the marketplace - long the bedrock of our economy - is increasingly being replaced by "use value" on the collaborative Commons. In this new era, identity is less bound to what one owns and more to what one shares. Cooperation replaces self-interest, access trumps ownership, and networking drubs autonomy. Rifkin concludes that while capitalism will be with us for at least the next half century, albeit in an increasingly diminished role, it will no longer be the dominant paradigm. We are, Rifkin says, entering a world beyond markets where we are learning how to live together collaboratively and sustainably in an increasingly interdependent global Commons.

Rifkins writes about the shared commons here.

Of depths and surfaces

When was the last time you complimented somebody for her depth?

Often times we say somebody is "deep" or has said something that's "deep" to mean the person is thoughtful or not superficial. However, on most occasions we don't know what we precisely mean when we use the word deep as a qualifier of human character.

David Brooks comes up with an interesting perspective on what constitutes depth in human character.

Depth connotes the bedrock or something that lies at the bottom. When navigators plumb the depths of the ocean, for instance, they plumb the ocean bed wherein are rooted, some say, the fundamentals of life as we know it.

What is the human analogy for the ocean bed? Is it the human unconscious?

Thanks to Freud, we now know that the human unconscious, like the ocean bed, is home to all those impulses, primary emotions and mammalian instincts that we try our best to tame and discipline with reason. 

Generally speaking then, the primary emotions constitute our depths, while the rationality makes for the top of who we are. By this definition, if a person is able to dredge up the primary emotions and live them out in her daily life, then that person is said to be invested with a depth of character.

How wrong we would we, writes, Brooks, to confuse our deepest selves with our unconscious.

When we attribute "depth" to a person, we are, on the contrary, alluding to the rational self, the one that a person has acquired through a life time of experience and "suffering", compromise and negotiations with the other self in us, which is the emotional and instinctive self.

Brooks says:

When we say that someone is a deep person, we mean they have achieved a quiet, dependable mind by being rooted in something spiritual and permanent [...] A person of deep character has certain qualities: in the realm of intellect, she has permanent convictions about fundamental things; in the realm of emotions, she has a web of unconditional loves; in the realm of action, she has permanent commitments to transcendent projects that cannot be completed in a single lifetime.

Depth is not a biological predisposition, but is something that we cultivate over time. "Our origins are natural; our depths are man-made, engraved by our thoughts and actions", writes Brooks:

So much of what we call depth is built through freely chosen suffering. People make commitments — to a nation, faith, calling or loved ones — and endure the sacrifices those commitments demand. Often this depth is built by fighting against natural evolutionary predispositions.

When the 19th century Romantic poet and philosopher, William Wordsworth said that the child is the father of man, he meant that children have greater depth than adults because, chronologically speaking, babies are closest to our creator spatially and temporally, and their minds are still filled with those "intimations of immortality" that our creator shares with us. These intimations or these sparks of depth get dispersed and weaken over time under the surgical knife of experience. 

Experience, said Wordsworth, severs us from our natural depths.

David Brooks says the opposite: Experience creates depth depending on how we as adults wish to live our lives. If we cling to our biological dispositions exclusively, then we are unlikely to acquire depth of character. In Brooks' terms:

Babies are not deep. Old people can be, depending upon how they have chosen to lead their lives. Babies start out very natural. The people we admire are rooted in nature but have surpassed nature. Often they grew up in cultures that encouraged them to take a loftier view of their possibilities than we do today.

Looking back, I now wonder why Captain Ahab, the one-footed, obsessive whale-chaser of Herman Melville's Moby Dick, resented Moby the whale so much for its depth. I had understood the root of Ahab's obsessiveness with hunting down the whale, as a quest for something humans are incapable of attaining--depth. The whale in Ahab's eyes didn't acquire depth, but was born with it by virtue of living in the depths of the ocean.

Ahab must have labored under misperception; he was by far the deeper entity in the tale.

East West Global

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A new addition to the list of East/West duets?

In the beginning there were the Ravi Shankars and the George Harrisons, .... singing of global peace.

Then there was the Pussy domination of "Jai Ho"(e), the signature tune of Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire, a song and dance number in which A.R. Rahman appeared subordinated by the PussyCat Dolls. 

The song had a purely aesthetic value and was a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.

The latest in the line of East West duet is Peter Gabriel and Atif Aslam's song from Mira Nair's 2012 movie, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (based on the novel by Moshin Hamid).

The song is a beauty; the words sing of the individual's place in a world gone complex. It's a good place as long as the individual resists its commandeering by the forces that be.

As translated, the song is:

Speak, for your lips are yet free;
Speak, for your tongue is still your own;
Your lissom body yours alone;
Speak, your life is still your own.
Look into the blacksmith’s forge:
The flame blazes, the iron’s red;
Locks unfasten open-mouthed,
Every chain’s link springing wide.
Speak, a little time suffices
Before the tongue, the body die.
Speak, the truth is still alive;
Speak: say what you have to say.

In my father's bookcase

...There were many books. 

One too many for me to remember and over the years, intermittently, I have been trying to make a mental catalogue of the books my father had collected in his over the years.

My goal is to derive a picture of my father's literary taste, so as to further derive a sense of who he was in terms of his values, likes/dislikes and beliefs.

I and my father were both extremely close and distant at the same time. In middle-class Indian households of the 70s and 80s, daughters and fathers would not be typically close in contemporary American/Western way we define closeness between parents and children.

After all, Indian households are a microcosm of Indian patriarchy, a system that still prevails in India today, and under the aegis of which fathers are in general their daughter's caretakers, not their emotional soul sisters. 

Yet, my father was very close to me as he was to my mother and to his own mother. I mean to say that in a predominantly female household, my father wasn't just a provider and a protector of our collective hayas, but also our emotional soul sisters.

I carry with me till this day, an imprint of my father as a feminist male.

But there was a distance as well between I and my father; not a debilitating distance of any kind, but of a kind produced by the fact that my father spend long hours at work and frequently went on official tours to various parts of India. 

I do not claim to know my father in all his complex humanity. Whatever I know of him isn't enough to me, and now that he is no more, I try to know him from remembering, among other things his literary tastes.

Can we know people from what they read?

I believe we can, unless we are talking of folks who randomly gather books and randomly watch films and theatrical shows and visit art exhibitions, simply for the sake of passing/filling time, overcoming boredom and entertainment.

My father wasn't that kind of a book-collecting fellow at all.

There was a pattern behind his reading: Overall, I can say that my father avoided British fiction (barring an odd copy of T.E. Lawrence's The Seven Pillars of Wisdom and George Orwell's 1984), took to non-British European fiction in English, like the Germans and the French, and he was a voracious reader of American fiction.

In my remembrance of my father's reading taste, I see a predominance of American fiction.

In follow-up blogs, I'll be listing some of the works of American fiction in my father's bookcase, and try to draw some impressions of my father's values from that endeavor.

M&M: Memento and Mori

Three M&M commercials in a row and you feel like you have been transported back in time into the European Middle Ages, and in place of the M&M buttons you are looking at the "ambassadors" in the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Hans Holbein the younger's famous work of memento mori, The Ambassadors.

Memento Mori is an artistic or symbolical reminder of the inevitability of death. "The Ambassadors", for instance, has two wealthy and well-placed-in-society diplomats standing in a room, surrounded by emblems of worldly success.

There is also a skull floating like a spectre between the men, barely noticeable, but singular in its presence.

The skull interrupts the narrative of worldly life by showing it as impermanent. To exult of life in the face of death is to be vain.

The memento mori would have fitted in perfectly with the medieval zeitgeist with its fear of disease, war, and high mortality.

But the appearance of a memento mori motif in the M&M zeitgeist surprises me.

Literally, the buttons of colorful and delicious chocolates speak of their own "deaths" as it were, in a shockingly nonchalant way.

I am particularly struck by the sexy Ms. Brown's emotional appeal for insurance. She says she knows she is a "high risk" for insurance companies, yet...

Is this the advertiser's attempt to sadden us into eating M&M's?

I fear for the fate of Mr. Yellow, as he sits innocently in the trunk of a mafia's car, unaware that he will soon be meat. 

Should M&M be renamed Memento and Mori, would we still eat them?