O networks with Harvard and the result is below average rating

Or so I thought.

Oprah Winfrey's commencement speech at Harvard University's convocation for the class of 2013 disappointed me. 

She had a chance to be irreverent and unconventional as is her way to approach authors on her book club show.

Throughout her speech, Oprah displayed an obsequiousness toward Harvard that made me squirm. It seemed like she was gratified at being asked to serve as a commencement speech-maker at Harvard, and described the invitation as a morale booster after a year of being in the rating doldrums with OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network).

I thought a turning point in her speech was when she said "Why me? Why choose somebody who hadn't succeeded to address those who are guaranteed to succeed (a.k.a. Harvardies)?" I don't see how she could label herself as "unsuccessful" on the basis of just one flop venture, in an otherwise successful career that made her into a media mogul with billions of dollars in net worth. 

Anyhow, so the turning point in her speech turned out to be a damp squib; instead of expressing silly gratitude to President Drew Faust, Oprah could have gone on to re define what "success" is. Success shouldn't mean getting, as Oprah indicated, a Harvard U "calling card" with which you could make infinite calls into the gateways of the biggest and the best in the world.

What Oprah--naively so--assumes, as I gather from her speech, is that once you study at Harvard, you get to know "everything." Thus her humility in saying "What can tell those who already know it all," sounds affected. This attribution of omniscience to the Harvard tribe ran like a refrain in Oprah's speech.

I feel like the opposite is true: Harvardies and other fellow Ivy Leaguers, at least those from the 90s onwards, know as much or as little of the real world. I recall, NYT columnist (himself a Harvard alumni) Frank Bruni writing that those who typically enter the Ivy League consortium are born into privilege and continue to live through the narrow corridors of privilege till they enter their graves. They ought to, Bruni said, yank themselves out of their comfort zones if becoming more "real" was their goal in life. This means that an Ivy Leaguer essentially learns nothing new, but more and more of the same that have been conferred on them since their birth. Their life experiences remain pretty homogenous till they fall into heterogeneity. 

Oprah should've told the class of 2013 at Harvard that they know nothing and their life of learning commences after the commencement. But who am I kidding? Oprah Winfrey is no Socrates.

Harvard's decision to bring in Ms. Winfrey is a good one as far as it gives Harvard a more popular, lightened-up image, and Ms. Winfrey did deliver some motivating (I wouldn't say inspiring) moments. She even modernized the phrase "moral compass" into "internal GPS" in keeping with our technological zeitgeist.

But, if you ask me, they should have asked Oprah to share the podium with Khadijah Williams, the astonishing graduate in Harvard's class of 2013, the black Los Angelina who hopped from shelter to shelter, school to school, public lavatory to public lavatory, trash can to trash can, along with her mother, and by sheer dint of persistence and merit got into Harvard through a Pre-College for gifted but indigent students program.

Now, she would have had a story to tell. Oprah mentioned Williams in passing, but only as an evidence of her own theory of how hard work pays off. Ms. Winfrey's own story was the piece de resistance of her performance at the commencement. Her story, however, is passe and the "the poor girl from rural Mississippi" doesn't quite touch the hearts of millennials, is my belief.

America has changed drastically from its post-segregation days, since the time she "made it" through hard work. In today's America the poor have not only become poorer and the elite ossified in their inability to relate to anything outside of their own sub culture, but institutions like Harvard are becoming the gatekeepers of privilege and prosperity.

I disliked Oprah's statement that whenever, as the CEO of her own network, she sees a resume with the Harvard credential in it, she thinks, "ah, since she is from Harvard, she must be good." It smacked of servility.

Oprah makes for a poor 21st century O (Othello) in this particular case.

The human farm

My maternal grandfather had a farm. I would spend my summer vacations on his farm and had first hand-sightings of squirrels and a few skinny cows. 

Not much animal was raised on my grandfather's farm, but a lot of fruits were. Prime among the fruits were an orchard filled with juicy mangoes.

I feel like going back in that time and space and keeping a record of the farm's ecology. But unfortunately the farm life was laughed at as unsophisticated back in my childhood days in India.

In today's America, especially urbane America, it's hip to be associated with the farm life, so I regret having missed a chance to be part of the farm life, while I was physically living on a farm.

I have to make do with reading about farm life that others have experienced, and in this Verlyn Klinkenborg is my favorite.

Klinkenborg writes occasionally in the NYT about the animals he raises and allows to roam free on his farm in upstate New York.

I remember what he wrote about his chicken once:

On fair days, I've been letting the chicken have the run of the farm. I come out of the house, and the birds are waiting at the chicken-yard fence like pelihoners in some Russian novel, but with boundless optimism instead of resignation and despair [...] Chicken live in a monocular world, looking at things, one eye at a time [...] What is likeable is the purposefulness of their behavior [...] A hen raking backward through winter's dult is a professional at work. Scratch, scratch, look around for predators and what have we here? A foraging chicken feeds itself by finding surprises everywhere. The world seems perfectly adjusted to their expectations, which is to say that they take the world just as it is.

Oh the joys of having writers write about the particularities of animals, like the chickens' monocular vision, the pigeons' peripheral one and somebody like Annie Dillard comes along to observe the weasel's ahistorical tendencies of living life by the instinct.

Isn't it fun to see farm life mediated by the human eyes?

Civilization and its (ruinous) repetitions

When Sigmund Freud wrote of the psychic discontentments (in Civilization and Its Discontents) we experience when we consent to live our lives according to the rules and boundaries of civilization, he spoke of civilization as something confining, an enemy, as it were, of our natural beings, our tribal instincts.

Freud meant to suggest, I believe, is that civilization is something we settle for though internally we writhe in discontent wishing that we could live a life of our instincts.

As film critic Anthony Lane writes in his excellent review of the movie, The Kings of Summer, civilization may also be something we unconsciously reproduce and repeat as a fundamental structure of living, when we are in the midst of nature.

So used are we to the fact of living inside civilization that civilization has become our instincts.

This is a cause for concern, as is revealed ever so subtly in the film.

The story of The Kings of Summer revolves around a few teenagers who decide to flee their families and go back to nature. They begin to build a makeshift house with drift materials. No sooner than they sit down to observe the daily rituals of life, civilization starts to creep back in:

As they sit at their makeshift dinner, complete with candlelight and alcohol, we realize to our horror (as they do not) that these rebellious souls are already turning into their (conformist) parents. [Joe] even brings along a Monopoly set and one of his father's cigars. Run all you like, the movie suggests; you will never escape.

There is a serious Western artistic tradition of exploring the nagging permanency of civilization and Lane does well to mention Daniel Defoe's 16th century novel, Robinson Crusoe, in this context.

Defoe's hero is shipwrecked on an island of "savages," but instead of adopting to the ways of the savage, he can't help reconstructing the tidy existence of a gentleman farmer despite being alone on a desert isle. But of course, Crusoe wants to leave the stamp of civilization on the isle, in keeping with the spirit of rising imperialism and industrialism of the Western world.  

What about those who seek to escape civilization in the modern world? I think, we are all innately imperialistic, as we go around visiting nature, only to stamp our civilizational imprints on it.