Humility

I was moved by the New York Time's March 3 (2012) Editorial on how as humans we ought to measure ourselves down here, on this earth, by looking up and gazing at the stars.

I'm quoting what I would call an Ode to humility in the full:

Sometime in the next few nights, if the sky is clear, go out and find the western horizon just after dark. Look for the Moon and the two bright objects below it — the planets Jupiter and, closer to the horizon, Venus — all in a rare moment of alignment. Mercury will have just set, and in the east, Mars will be rising. If you’re able to watch the sky for several nights in a row, into early March, Jupiter and Venus will appear to be getting closer and closer to each other while the Moon drops behind, even as it swells toward full moon on March 8.

These are glorious nights for realizing just where we are, for looking out upon our neighboring planets and recognizing that we all do, indeed, belong to a system: the solar system. Watching Jupiter and Venus converging in the night sky, you can easily imagine the plane in which the planets lie as they orbit around the sun. Yet it’s also easy to imagine the pre-Copernican view of things, as though we were the fixed point in the sky and all those celestial objects were revolving around us.

With a little help, you can puzzle out just how these celestial movements work — why Jupiter and Venus appear to be approaching each other now, why the Moon lags farther and farther behind them. But, even if you don’t, you can still look up at a remarkable night sky that reminds us how infinitesimal human affairs are against the celestial scale. And, by the middle of March, when the Moon is growing wan and rising later and later in the evening, you’ll be able again — from the darkest places — to glimpse the uncanny depth of the stars, the uncanny minuteness of the planet we call home.

Kohlrabi

I don't hold a candle up to somebody like writer V.S. Naipaul, yet, following his example, I want to write an essay entitlement Kohlrabi.

In the 1960s, Naipaul wrote an essay, Jasmine. In it he reminisces about his education in colonial Trinidad. He remembers having studied English literature, especially the poem's of a supremely English poet William Wordsworth. 

Wordsworth's poem "The Daffodils" had a profound effect on him. The child Naipaul had never seen a daffodil as daffodils didn't grow in tropical Trinidad. He thus had no clue as to how a daffodil looked and smelled. Nonetheless, he wrote a proper essay on "The Daffodils."

In hindsight, he writes, he would have preferred to write an essay on the "Jasmine" a tropical, West Indian flower.

Flowers, fruits, veggies, and such things ought to be seen, smelled and tasted before they are read of as a linguistic object, else they risk just becoming linguistic constructs in our minds.

When I read the word "kohlrabi," I, naturally, drew a resounding blank.

It's a vegetable, I learnt.

I Google-searched the term and found the above "stock-picture" of it. It looks more like an IED that the lead character in Kathryn Bigelow's movie The Hurt Locker might want to defuse.

Kohlrabi is a German turnip instead, and true to its Germanic heritage, it looks sturdy with spikes.

I mean it looks forbidding.

But thanks to the fact of being "colonized" by Google-Earth, at least now I know what an exotic vegetable looks like.

The Times: Roll Back From Global to Local

A Professor I studied under, once told me that he really liked reading the New York Times, and he especially cherished its "World" section.

She knew I was from India, and assured me that she knew of Indian affairs through the Times.

Over the years, I had grown to develop a certain perspective on the value of the Times as a window on the "world."

My initial experience of the illustrious newspaper's coverage of world and Indian "affairs" bordered on the ecstatic.

"Wow!" I thought to myself, imagine the world's best known daily reserving space for stories on the Indian scene. This was the rough opposite of what the Indian dailies--particularly the non-vernacular one's--I grew up reading preferred: They would rather focus on the world outside--the goings on in the Western world--and disdainfully scratch something in about the local.

But my view of the Times' world coverage has undergone evolution since then.

I have discovered that the world that emerges in the pages of the Times' International section is a world that is seen through a Western/American lens. Of course, today, we would call the lens "global," but my personal feeling is that the "global" lens is still fogged up by the mist of a residual Western.

The stories on India are of an India that is either rigidly one thing or the other. In the 90s, the Times would write of India as though it were in a morass of doom and poverty that is a national fait accompli.

Things changed and India bloomed into a nation of galloping economic growth, and now the India that is seen through a global lens in the Times is an equally monolithic nation. Now the stories are about the rising middle class, their increasing buying power, and the break down of the caste system in a way that's allowing the previously downtrodden-by-birth to come up.

What I mean to suggest is that the stories of India and by default of the world that appear in the Times, are stories of a formulaic kind.

These days, I skip the "World" section altogether and focus on the "New York Region/Metropolitan" segment.

Magically, the lens seems to disappear in the stories of local reality in the Times. In other words, it seems like the stories of local people and places and events we read are results of an unmediated eye-witnessing.

So fascinating they are and so faithful they are in investing the "life" of the city with a dynamic that inheres in the life itself.

Take for instance the stories from the Metropolitan section of today's (March 4, 2012) Times:

The story of Chinese take out deliverers who risk so much for so little remuneratively speaking. Or, the report on Park Slope's Food-Coop's agonizing, internal debate on whether/not to boycott food products from Israel. Then again I came to know of the existence of Keens Steak House (Chelsea) and how exclusive a membership to it's special "Pipe Club" is (it's passed down from generation to generation of the club's members, i.e. from grandfather to grandson).

I was enthralled by the life of an African-American who has an ancient Egyptian, Pharaonic shrine smack in the middle of China town. He is a 70 something man who believes that the Nubian Egyptians were actually black/North Africans. With this belief firmly in his mind he set about being a cop on the mean streets of East New York in the 1960s. While policing the streets he found that he had become a pawn of the "white" powers that be in that he was wielding weapons at his own people. He was also into his Egyptian thoughts, so he decided to carry with him not only guns and handcuffs, but also the "ankh" or the Egyptian symbol of power and peace. His mission was to uplift the morale of the demoralized blacks through an act of symbolism that reminded them of their real origins.

The stories of New York City are very many and each has an individualistic flavor about it. I get a sense of the city with an energetic pulse. The stories surprise.

The stories of the "world," on the other hand, are predictable and grist to the mill of a standardization that is boring.

My take: the Times should retract into a national and mostly a regional newspaper, at least from the point of view of somebody who cherishes language and related virtues of the cultural sphere.