The year in retrospect

Or what interested me in 2011

1.

This was a fascinating year in many ways. It was certainly the busiest year of my life. I’ve been busy before but only for a few weeks or a month. But this year, the busyness of my schedule was taken to a whole new level. It may sound funny, but I realize now what people mean when they say they “work”. For the first 2 years of my faculty position, I still felt like a graduate student, and as if there were no worries in the world. Work would get done when it had to. This feeling of lightness allowed me to travel repeatedly to Latin America (Mexico, Peru and Bolivia) and write pieces at a pace that I had never managed before. But now that I have my own students – doctoral students who are very committed and work very hard but who understandably require a lot of guidance – the responsibilities are greater.

That’s the main reason I haven’t been able to write much here. But despite all the activities at the university that vied for my energy and attention – the endless emphasis on papers and grants to prove that one is “good” at what one does – this break from writing for the blog did open up time for a free-ranging exploration of many new topics. As always, I am amazed at how much there is that one doesn’t know. More importantly, I am amazed how previously uninteresting clichés and topics suddenly acquire new meaning and relevance because of altered life circumstances.

2.

For reasons difficult to explain, I started thinking seriously about spirituality and religion this year. I was driven to find out what was at the bottom of it all. I was especially interested in Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta (non-dualism), because unlike the ritualistic version of Hinduism that I grew up and was dissatisfied with, these traditions prescribed a contemplative and experiential approach that could be applied easily in everyday life.

It became clear to me that understanding how sense perceptions are translated into thought and how thought creates our conscious experience was perhaps the first step in understanding the reality that we face. All philosophical, religious and scientific questions – what is moral and immoral; the nature of suffering and happiness; science’s search for an answer to explain the mysterious workings of the universe – are questions within the realm of human consciousness. Consciousness is the very source that creates these questions and the reality that we experience. But what is this mysterious source and is there a reality that is outside of it? Another, related question that continues to puzzle me is this: What is the "I" in my consciousness that makes me feel as a separate individual -- in other words makes me feel the duality of “I” versus “the rest of the world”?

I became interested in meditation, which seemed like a logical first step in investigating what the mind is all about. I realized through practice that meditation is a fascinating and baffling scientific experiment where you are both the observer and the observed. In other words, it is the “I” in me observing its own behavior – a strange idea, to say the least. Of course, I found no comprehensive answers through meditation – expecting such answers is unrealistic to begin with – but I did begin to understand how thoughts function and how they skew our perception of reality.

I found many benefits from an unstructured form of meditation that I have been practicing for over a year. I arrived at it after experimenting with and rejecting prescribed methods. Unlike what the manuals or the books said, I did not focus my attention on anything but simply let things be and let thoughts wander. I found that to keep one’s attention on a single object is quite unnatural. Our consciousness does not function that way. It is always dynamic, shifting and moving, even when the mind is calm. So my meditation was a simply a session of sitting (15-20 minutes) every night without interfering with the mind’s activities. Somehow, these sittings led to deeply relaxing and still moments. Thoughts slowed down on their own, without any conscious effort on my part. I realized the key role that breathing plays in relaxing the body and why it is emphasized so heavily in the Indian meditation traditions.

I also learned that most thoughts are not created by choice. Thoughts appear and flit across the screen of our consciousness as randomly as clouds in the sky. When there are no thoughts, there is simply an awareness of the body, the breath or sensations within the body, but these too are finer forms of thoughts, or finer perceptions experienced through the veil of thought (the blue of the sky, to stretch the previous analogy). Emotions, whether unpleasant or pleasant, are simply physiological disturbances – a constriction near the chest or stomach, or a pleasant wave of energy – and all emotions, and the thoughts associated with them, are impermanent. That is, they have a temporary life-span within the mind-body system.

3.

The questions about the nature of consciousness lead to other, equally interesting questions in biology and physics. How do other species experience reality? Do they have self-awareness and if so how different is it from what humans have? How do other species deal with suffering and loss? Why do human always feel they are better than all other species, when there is really no objective basis for putting one species above another? And what about the vastness of the universe, the strange fact that time and space are intertwined, and the counterintuitive theories of quantum mechanics?

These lines of enquiry lead me to a number of interesting books – from the essays and speeches of philosopher/mystic Jiddu Krishnamuti; the teachings of Ramana Maharishi; essays by American Buddhists who in my opinion have taken a very practical and very useful approach to Buddhism; and the self-help bestseller, The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle.

On the science side, I read (or sampled) Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene and The Magic of Reality; Brian Green’s explanation of Einstein’s theory of relativity in The Elegant Universe; David Linden’s The Compass of Pleasure; F. Baumeister’s Willpower; and Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow. I also liked Brian Greene’s documentary, The Fabric of the Cosmos, which explored the nature of space and time.

I did not always agree with or understand the abstract ideas discussed in these books -- whether spiritual or scientific – but they were useful, nevertheless, and revealed new perspectives.

4.

I had almost forgotten, meanwhile, about literary fiction and its ability to capture the interplay of thought, memory and time, and detail the inner life of a person as no other form can. I had not read fiction for more than a year. It was by chance that I stumbled upon Ivan Turgenev’s A House of Gentlefolk this November. I had bought the slim book a long time ago and it had stayed, untouched, on my bookshelf for years.

It turned out to as good as the other, more famous Turgenev book, Fathers and Sons. Turgenev’s deft characterizations, the fast moving story, the poignant moments when the characters reflect on the crises of their lives, took me back to the time, about ten years ago, when I believed unequivocally that literary fiction was the highest form of writing. That impression has faded a bit in recent years or as I came to rely more and more on non-fiction.

A House of Gentlefolk reminded me of how good fiction is at touching some of the incomprehensible aspects of life – those emotional aspects that cannot be described or quantified easily but are simply felt subjectively. I finished the book within a week, and, like a man in search of an old treasure he himself has buried but has forgotten where, I started looking closely at my shelves for other works of fiction. After starting and abandoning Salman Rushdie’s Shame, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let me Go, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, I finally settled on Thornton Wilder’s ingeniously simple yet profound play, Our Town, which took only a few hours to finish. Through simple characters and the almost naive, small town setting (in New Hampshire), Wilder was able to demonstrate with great power the meaning of death and changes in perspective that it brings.

But my most dramatic discovery of the year came just a few weeks ago, when in a bookstore in Northampton (not far from Amherst, where I live), I found Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Back in 2007, my friend, the novelist and writer Chandrahas Choudhury, had recommended their translation of The Brothers Karamazov. I took his advice then and had the most sublime few months reading Dostoevsky’s classic work.

I bought the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation of Anna Karenina, but I thought it would be impossible to read an 800-page novel, with the end of the semester approaching. Luckily, I had to make two trips to New York City on back to back weekends, and the long train journeys (Amtrak trains) allowed me to get well into Anna Karenina. But it was not hard at all – in fact, the novel flowed so easily, so seamlessly from one character to another, from one scene to the next, and so clear and concise was the psychological detailing that it never felt like anything was being overdone. In three weeks, I was more than halfway through the book. This amazed me since I am an incredibly slow reader, generally incapable of reading more than 30 pages a day.

Anna Karenina has a very simple storyline. It is most a novel about families and marriage – marriage more than anything else. It is set in the decade following the emancipation of the serfs (the 1860s or the 1870s). Darwin’s ideas of the “animal origin of man” had just reached Russia. Electricity had arrived but was not yet common, travel in trains was common and telegrams had made communication quick and easy. Christianity in Russia was changing too – there were more rapturous, evangelical versions but also many more unbelievers and nihilists who used scientific materialism to reject the structures of religion.

The characters in Anna Karenina are ordinary. By that I mean they aren’t people with special talents, just people with both good and bad in them. At one level, the story is a simple tale of gossip – what is after all so new about an extra marital affair, which is at the heart of the novel? Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov had gruesome murders at their core – and it always felt that there was something serious at stake; the plots were intricate and thrilling.

But the genius of Tolstoy is in providing intimate portraits of the married relationships and affairs of intertwined families, interspersing these personal lives with the social and religious questions of the era.

I couldn’t help feeling that Anna Karenina that has tremendous relevance even today. And as often happens while reading a great book, every single observation of mine, about the world and people, is colored by Tolstoy's view. In a year that I began to think seriously about how thoughts create both our expectations and disappointments, Anna Karenina, more than any other non-fiction book I read, was able to accurately portray, through its many characters, the unreliable and constantly changing nature of the individual self – now experiencing moments of transcendence, the next moment in deep grief, disoriented and puzzled, then finding from nowhere the strength to recover and feel happiness.

5.

And finally, a note on the one other thing that inspired me to no end this year. Even as a child I had always been drawn to animals and nature. It is an instinctive feeling that most of us share. But my interest then had been only in specific wildlife settings – such as wildebeest migrations in the plains of the Serengeti – and not much else. Birds or insects or beavers or trees or the complex interactions in nature which make life tick never interested me much.

That changed this year. Perhaps the biologist Edward Wilson’s remarkable experiments and study of the social behavior of ants, seeded my curiosity about nature as a whole. Further, it seemed almost impossible not to think of nature when dealing with spiritual and religious questions. I often find it puzzling that many organized religions, so engrossed in their own dogmas and rituals, pay very little attention to nature. Miraculous things already happen in nature, yet we remain interested only in unverifiable myths and legends.

In March, with the snow still covering most of the woods and the ponds still frozen, I started walking the trails that surround Amherst. I began to observe birds, beavers, raccoons, foxes, chipmunks, skunks, ants on the pavement, struggling spiders in my bathtub, and much else. When you do this on a regular basis, the human-centered or self-centered view that dominates our lives begins to break down momentarily. It never goes away completely – the ego is much too strong – but a different perspective begins to open up. Humans tend to be incredibly self-congratulatory: all our religious and scientific institutions always stress how special humans are, how evolved we are compared to other species and so on. But the fact is that humans, whatever our abilities, are no more or no less important than any other species on earth.

In parallel, I watched many documentaries on PBS Nature (PBS refers to American public television). These documentaries are available free online. I was interested most in the difficulties of surviving in the wild, and how animals cope with physical pain, suffering and loss. A recurring example was the high mortality of offspring in the early days or months, when they are most vulnerable and unable to fend for themselves. The mother puts an enormous effort and is yet, in many cases, unable to save her offspring. In some species – elephants, lemurs, hawks – the pain of the loss lasted visibly for days.

I was moved by these stories. The arbitrariness of life was now an inescapable fact for me. Yet the same arbitrariness also implied that one could approach life in an open ended, less burdensome way, with fewer illusions.

The best of all the documentaries I watched was My Life as a Turkey, which premiered in November this year. It is a reenactment of Florida farmer Joe Hutto’s attempt at imprinting – in plain terms, the attempt be a mother, despite being of a different species, to wild turkey chicks (wild turkey are different from the turkeys that are consumed as food). Hutto begins by incubating eggs and mimicking sounds that a mother Turkey might take. The pivotal moment is when the chicks emerge and see him before they see anything else. Some sort of bond is formed and the wild turkeys follow Joe Hutto for the next year or so. Hutto is totally responsible for their welfare and makes a full time commitment. This means he will live in the forest, cut off from other humans, for as long as it takes to raise the chicks.

The premise of the documentary – based on Hutto's book Illumination in the Flatwoods – may not sound exciting, but I invite you to give it a try. It is superbly edited, well narrated and has stunning visuals of the forests of Florida. My Life as a Turkey is interesting both as a scientific experiment and for its philosophical content. Joe Hutto’s sentences from the book, which are used in the reenactment, are thoughtful. The curiosity of the growing turkeys; the intelligence they are born with about the natural world (“humans do not have a privileged access to reality”); their ability to live in the moment which we can only envy – all of this made it one of the best documentaries that I have ever watched.

A very happy new year to everyone!

A buttferfly's 2000 mile journey

Every summer, the North American Monarch butterfly embarks on a remarkable journey that begins in Canada or the northeastern United States. In two months, millions of these butterflies congregate in a high forest in Mexico. Each day, the butterfly travels fifty miles and the total journey is around two thousand miles.

Birds of course can fly even longer distances. But then birds also travel in groups: there are older members in the group who have covered these distances before and are therefore in a position to guide others. The Monarch butterfly makes the journey alone and it does so only once. When a Monarch butterfly starts from Canada, it has never flown before. No one is there to guide it to Mexico.

And yet, this delicate creature, with wings less than four inches wide, crosses the Great Lakes – imagine crossing these massive bodies of water, where there are few opportunities for nectar and rest – then Midwestern towns, the Great Plains, the deserts of Texas, the Sierra Madre range in Mexico, and makes its final approach to forests in Michoacan, 100 km northwest of Mexico City.

Some unknown compass – either the earth’s magnetic field or the sun – seems to tell it exactly where to go. Even when these butterflies are tagged for study are taken off course by scientists (say far to the east or west), they still recover and know exactly how to adjust their path.

Nature always throws up these inexplicable and mysterious examples. Why should we believe in the unverifiable miracles advertised by organized religion – that the Buddha was enlightened, that Krishna lifted a mountain, or that Jesus walked on water – why even think of them when the miracles of nature are much more tangible, more varied and can be observed every day?

The butterflies start from very different regions in the northern US and Canada, thousands of miles apart, but as they approach Mexico, they start to cluster together and can be seen in their hundreds of thousands in Texas as they narrow in on their destination. In the forests of Michoacan, they congregate in the millions, covering the skies, the forest floor, the trees, the twigs – just about everything. What started as a lone journey now culminates in the collective blanketing of a destination they were drawn to.

As they hang from the branches of trees, they look like leaves themselves -- see picture to the left.

The Monarchs rest in Michoacan until spring, and then begin the journey back. But no butterfly ever makes it back to Canada. About a third of their way back – around Texas – they mate and die. The few hundred eggs that each female lays then transform into butterflies and continue the journey. But this generation too does not make it all the way back. About halfway or three quarters of the way back is another mating cycle and the third generation continues the reverse migration. In the end, what we have is an incredible intergenerational relay spanning four generations. As they move northward, the butterflies begin to disperse geographically, eventually reaching original regions where the epic southward migration began.

For some reason, no single butterfly ever completes the cycle, but the generation that is born in Canada and reaches Mexico is the one that lives the longest.

The Nagpur dogs -- Part 1

1.

My fascination with dogs began when we moved to the central Indian city of Nagpur. We lived in a third story flat with four balconies. Each balcony faced a different direction and offered different views of the neighborhood.

I had just begun eighth grade that year. I used to wake up early in the morning, seat myself on a stool in one of the balconies and try to study. More often than not I would doze off, but if I did stay awake, the textbook was hardly what drew my attention. I would instead look at stray dogs that were very active at dawn. Early morning seemed to be their time. Maybe the cool air energized them. They played frantically, chasing each other down, trying to wrest torn rags from each other. At eight, with the sun up and strong, they would be exhausted. They would lie in the shade, front feet stretched, their snouts nuzzling in between, noses twitching and ears still alert for anything untoward. That was about the time I was ready for a heavy breakfast as well.

2.

On the western side, adjacent to our flats, were two single story houses. The one immediately below belonged to a Rajasthani family. I often visited them because there were two kids my age – Dilip and Jeetendra – but also because the family always had pets. They even had a cow they kept in a shed on the other side of the house. This affinity for domestic animals seemed be a carryover from their rural past in Rajasthan. Strangely the animals of the house never lived long. The family saw three dogs during the five years I was their neighbor: Sheru, Rocky and Tommy, in that order.

The other house, diagonally across, I did not know much about. I mention it simply because there was a Doberman, Lucy, perennially leashed there. Her steel food bowl was replenished day after day but she was rarely taken out for a walk. She barked herself hoarse, asking for attention. Her pleas would intensify in the morning when the man of the house left for work.

To one side of these houses was the “Garden and Bar Restaurant”. It was the sort of place my parents, vegetarians and teetotalers that they were, would never visit. The restaurant had a square perimeter marked by a hedge of high bushes. Appended to one corner, like a jump drive to a laptop, was small stall, no more than 4 feet wide and 8 feet tall. This was a pan thela (a little stall selling betel leaf garnished with spices and intoxicants). Motorbikes, scooters and cars would park in the area in front of the thela for a cigarette or pan. The strays tended to congregate here too: the owner of the thela was someone whom the dogs seemed to like.

Another place the strays frequented was the garbage dump behind the restaurant. The dump was a large square space, disorganized and overgrown with weeds. This was where restaurant leftovers and other odds and ends were commonly disposed.

The northern balcony faced a busy highway called the Ring Road. The highway had a median with tall forked streetlights that provided pedestrians and dogs a break while crossing. The traffic consisted mostly of noisy trucks. Across the road were new flats still in construction. The poor laborers who worked on building had made their own patchwork huts for their families. One of these families had a dog named Moti. Moti was big and confident enough to be one of the alpha males in the neighborhood. He had ears that stood up as sharp as arrow ends even when they were off guard. He also had beautiful colors: a base of white with large patches of cream and brown. He sported a dark-brown collar that lent him a kind of formal elegance, like a man wearing a sharp suit.

3.

The story I am trying to tell isn’t a single coherent story, rather a series of interlinked anecdotes and observations. But in my mind at least the protagonists are clear: three sister strays who were born in the neighborhood. By the time we moved in to Nagpur, they were already a few years old. Later I would marvel that all three had survived into adulthood. I say this because the sisters’ own litters over the years almost always struggled to make it.

The three sisters were mostly black, but their faces had a touch of tan or cream, in varying shades. In physical appearance, they were very similar, but their personalities were distinct.

The biggest (and I speculate the eldest) of them had a long and slender frame and a pointed snout. She looked the healthiest and the calmest. At some point after I learned to recognize her, she changed neighborhoods. Initially, she frequented the area around the restaurant and pan thela, but then she moved – and it seemed like a permanent move – across the road a couple of blocks away, near where Moti lived. I was surprised, since dogs are generally faithful to the territories they are born into.

The other sisters were smaller. One, whom I’ll call Mina, had strange faded black marks on her light colored face and snout. They suggested – at that time, to my overactive adolescent imagination – that she had been whipped or that these marks were scars. But they may just as well have been colors she had inherited. I found it impossible to get close to her, no matter how hard I tried or how friendly I was. Mina did not trust humans, and this allowed her to keep a safe distance from them -- probably a good thing, because not everyone liked strays. Dogs in India are wary every time they see a person bend down. More often than not, the bending down is a prelude to the pickup of a stone that will be hurled their way. The mischievous boy that I was, I resorted to this shooing gesture once in a while, just to scare dogs and tease them, even when I was not threatened.

I was closest to the last of the sisters, whom I’ll call Meera. Meera was a sprightly dog, playful, generally upbeat. She responded well to people. She was aggressive when needed, and especially when strange dogs passed her territory. She was also involved the few times I had seen packs of stray dogs hunt and kill a solitary stray pig. The balance of power between stray pigs, who generally traveled in groups of half a dozen, and dogs always shifted – you could never tell who had the upper hand. Sometimes the pigs, who competed with cows and stray dogs at garbage dumps – the pigs certainly seemed to have proprietary rights to the filthier places: sewage and gutters – could easily face up to and scare a dog. At other times the pigs were easy victims. Meera sensed this balance well, and could be vicious on pigs when the time was right. The occasional pig hunt, which happened once or twice a year, seemed to recall an earlier pre-domestication time, when an unstable truce might have existed between the two species in the wild.

Meera was also a wonderful mother and gave the best to her puppies, even though none of them ever (at least for the five years I was in Nagpur) made it to adulthood.

4.

The three sisters also had a brother. I remember him well, because he was named Hari by the family that adopted him (that was an odd name for a dog in India, where pet names are noticeably different: Tommy, Rocky, Pintu etc.) The family had a house diagonally across the Rajasthani home. Hari looked almost exactly like his sisters except that he was larger. He was never leashed so he took the opportunity to jump over walls and interact with other strays. He roved fearlessly into other neighborhoods and was in this sense more enterprising than the other alpha male in the vicinity, Moti.

Moti liked to stick to where he was, but Hari traveled. Every time I looked out of my balcony, I would long to see a standoff between the two. It happened one day but ended pretty tamely. Hari had intruded too close to Moti’s area, and they growled at each other for a while. They were about the same size, so posturing and bluster seemed to be the best strategy rather than out and out attack, which would have doubtless harmed both. After some time, Hari retreated and that was the end of that.

I was always struck this natural intelligence that seemed to operate in the strays that I observed (It would be difficult to generalize, but this basic intelligence applies to other species in the wild, where, despite very brutal acts by animals, conflicts do not escalate. There is always a kind of letting-go, an understanding that further fighting isn’t worth it, as if a risk versus benefit analysis were being carried out instinctively by the animals.). The strays acted as if they knew what was best in a global sense. When a dominant dog spotted a meek, limping intruder, he always responded aggressively, but the aggression was mostly posturing. I have never seen a dominant dog attack a meek intruder especially when the latter has his tail down and under. The intruder, though, will be harassed and terrorized (through growls and threats of attack) until he leaves.

To date, I have seen one intense dog fight, also in Nagpur, at a bus stop near our flat. For some reason I don’t remember well, two dogs were suddenly locked in a serious combat. Each dog had his jaws clamped over some part of the other dog’s body and was unwilling to let go. It took the repeated threats and stones of people waiting at the bus stop to separate them. But once they did separate, they both limped off hurriedly in opposite directions, pausing now and then to lick their wounds – which were no doubt serious wounds that would last a while – but generally behaving as if the fight was a thing of the past and it was time to move on.

(To be continued...)

Some thoughts on self-awareness

Self awareness is a remarkable characteristic of humans. It is our constant companion during our waking hours and indispensible in everyday life. We take it for granted. It is the “I” feeling in each of us, the division in our consciousness that tells each one of us is a distinct person, separate from all that is around. If you’ve woken from dreamless sleep in the morning, it is self-awareness that works with memory to recreate the world that we were familiar with. It reminds us where we are, how we are feeling and makes us do things.

It is hard, however, to pin down or quantify in concrete scientific terms what this awareness actually is. Hard because it is the same self-awareness that wants to quantify itself – like a dog that wants to tirelessly chase its tail.

But it is possible, I think, to get a qualitative sense of self-awareness, by understanding the nature of thought.

Behind each thought that arises in the mind there seems to be a “thinker”, the coordinating entity -- the “I” – which produces the effect of being self-aware. The thinker, to use the jargon of spirituality, is the ego. However lost or spaced out we are, this thinker always seems to be present even if it is at the periphery. The thinker seems to own the thought, whatever the nature of that thought may be: a positive thought, a great idea, a sad feeling etc. This ownership in turn leads the thinker to feel it is “happy”, “intelligent”, “sad” etc. This probably what is happening when someone says, “I am feeling great” or “I am feeling miserable”. When we feel some intense emotion, then there seems to be something within us that feels it.

Does the thinker actually exist? If so where in the brain is it? That is too difficult a question. We may never find a satisfactory answer. It is possible that there may be no thinker at all, just biochemical reactions in the brain that create the illusion of a thinker. The thinker may simply be another thought, except that it pervades all other thoughts. This agrees with one of the pillars of Buddhism, that there is no self. If there is no thinker then whatever is happening is simply happening -- there is no one making it happen. Free will exists only if there is such a thing as a thinker in each individual. Otherwise, there is only the illusion of free will. There is a dangerous determinism that accompanies this argument, but let's not go there for now. All is this pretty speculative anyway.

What really matters is the thinker’s existence is pretty convincing to each individual. In fact, the individual feels she exists because the thinker in her exists. This recalls Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” though I don’t know if he said it in the same context. That is why when a thought is not pleasant, then the thinker does not feel good either – and that is the root of individual suffering.

A cardinal a day keeps color blindness away

The male cardinal is bright red and a treat to watch. In my two and a half years in Massachusetts, I had never spotted one. But this March, I started seeing them frequently: outside my window, during my walks in the woods around Amherst, and while driving (they would often fly across the road). One gets pretty superstitious when such things happen. I started to feel special every time I saw one. I asked others if they had seen any and would feel proud if their reply was negative. There was probably a simpler explanation of course. It snowed and rained a lot this year, and the population could have spiked for some ecological reason. Or the sight of the first made me look for more every day, with the result that I had simply begun to see what had always been there.

Whatever the reason, the sight of cardinals did me make me feel great. They sparked a wider interest in birds, nature and other species. It all seemed a tremendous mystery.

The apartment I used to live had massive windows in the living room. It overlooked a wide green lawn that sloped down to a stream. Close to the window was a fledgling tree or plant that had grown only to a few feet. It was here that every morning the birds of all kinds would come, perch on a weak branch for a few seconds, their heads bobbing this way and that, before moving to a nearby bird feeder. There was a family of chipmunks too. They had their own routine and burrows into which they disappeared and hid food. The squirrels – giants compared to the chipmunks – frequented the bigger trees just beyond, flashing their bushy tails and chasing each other. This was very much a window onto domestic wildlife.

It was here that I saw the same pair of cardinals almost every day for a few weeks. Only the male cardinal is red. As in so many other species – peacocks, lyrebirds –and in contrast to humans, it is the male that struts his beauty or defining characteristic. That defining characteristic can be color, a dance, a unique song. The female cardinal is a drab grey – but still carries a tinge of red. Like so many other birds, cardinals mate for life. So a sudden sighting of bright red would invariably be followed by sober gray or vice versa. A month or two later, I learned to identify their calls. Cardinals have very distinctive metallic sound. Even if I was unable to spot them, I knew they were around in the trees. I just had to roll down car windows while driving through tree-lined narrow roads.

An aside: There is also a rarer but equally colorful competitor --the yellow finch. A finch is smaller than the cardinal – about the size of sparrow. It is a bright yellow, and the brightness is made sharper by the black strips along the finch's wings. Finches were harder to spot, but they did show up once in few weeks.

Back! And notes from Oaxaca...

It’s been eight months since I disappeared. This unplanned, unannounced sabbatical – after more than five years of posting regularly – happened because work took over, and other reasons too difficult to elaborate here. Let’s see if I can get back. I probably won’t be as prolific as before but I do hope to write once in three weeks or so. I also promise to write about some new themes.

It has been an interesting and intensely busy year. I taught two classes last semester and organized a conference in Amherst. That meant that a very tight weekly schedule, and the lazy days of lounging and doing nothing – one of the perks of academia, and also why I chose it – did not present themselves with the same regularity. It summer right now and I don’t have to teach until September, even though there are still students to mentor, grants and publications to write, collaborations to develop, and the associated stresses to handle.

Meanwhile, a long overdue travel update. Last December, I went to Oaxaca City, in southern Mexico. Mexico again? You might well ask. Well, my options for travel abroad were limited to Canada and Mexico, because my work visa had expired (and still remains expired). They say Canada in the winter isn’t the place to be, so it was to be that other North American country again.

***

Food

This time, I wasn’t as curious about history or archaeology or Mesoamerican cultures. I had exhausted that sort of intensity during my prior visits to Chihuahua, Mexico City and Chiapas. I took it easy this time. I walked the streets of Oaxaca, enjoyed the warm weather and the food. I went to a gourmet tortilleria, Itanoni, in a residential part of the city. In fact, ridiculous as it may sound, of all locations in Mexico, I chose Oaxaca simply so I could sample the food at Itanoni. I had read about it in 1491, Charles Mann’s eye-opening book on the cultures of the Americas. Mann had written of authenticity of the tortillas at Itanoni and how ancient varieties of corn and preparation methods were being preserved. But what matters is whether the food tastes good and Itanoni did not disappoint. I went there three times, despite the relatively stiff taxi fare from my hotel to the restaurant. I had freshly made tortillas with a variety of fillings – aguacate (avocado), papa con chile (potatoes with chilies), queso (cheese), and frijoles (beans) with a special local herb.

The street food was a riot. The regional Oaxacan fare, run by small families, was great of course, but what I’ll remember most is the elaborate pushcart selling freshly made potato chips, two blocks from the main square. On the night of Dec 25th, the city’s churches paraded different costumes (fairies, angels, versions of Nativity) in the backs of trucks in the main square, accompanied by loud music. Festive though this was, I was more captivated by the assembly-line style production of chips in the pushcart: the sweating man slicing potatoes non-stop, another deftly releasing them into the oil, yet another straining the oil, and the cashier spraying varieties of dangerously spicy salsas on request. There were small portions, there were large portions and then there were massive portions. The Christmas crowd – me included – queued up and had its fill.

***

Microfinance tourism

I happened also, by chance, to interact with a two microfinance organizations. The first, Fundacion El Via, has its headquarters in the Oaxaca Language Institute. Oaxaca is generally thought of as a poor state (the label of poverty is bandied about freely and there are numbers and statistics to support that label, but what it actually means is less clear). The Fundacion El Via idea is this: A visitor would get to see new family business ventures started by women in a nearby village, Teotitlan del Valle. Examples might be small scale sales of textiles woven in-house in the indigenous style, a smoothie stall in the village market, a new tortilleria. These business ventures are financed from the money visitors give for an afternoon tour. Once the tour is done, the visitor is emailed updates (with pictures) on how the families that directly benefitted from the loan are handling their lives and businesses.

This, I felt, was a clever way of appealing to the bleeding hearts of rich tourists. It was based on the premise that the conscientious tourist is not simply a voyeur of poverty, but genuinely cares. Even if this was a delusion, Fundacion El Via’s marketing of the idea was attractive. I met four women in Teotitlan del Valle during my afternoon visit. All the women had apparently benefitted from the microfinance loans. I was invited into their houses. They seemed cheerful and seemed to balance having children, and husbands who might have been doubtful of their new entrepreneurial role, very well.

Carlos, the founder of Fundacion El Via, was privileged. He had grown up in Oaxaca. His parents ran the language institute. His pale complexion and height set him apart from the short and dark skinned indigenous Oaxacan women he was trying to help in Teotitlan del Valle. Carlos had an MBA degree from Boston University and had returned to start Fundacion El Via. He was smart and knew the microfinance landscape well. He was grappling with bureaucratic difficulties: for the Mexican government, his organization was in the business of tourism, not a not-for-profit organization.

“A recent survey identified that there are 625 microfinance organizations in the state of Oaxaca,” Carlos told me. “There have been microfinance scams because of the financial crisis, since some of these organizations had money in stocks. And microfinance in Mexico is not the same as in Bangladesh or in India. In Bangladesh, poverty is concentrated, so it is easier to set up an infrastructure. In Mexico, poverty is scattered and remote, requires more coordination, transportation resources and set up.”

***

Grameen and Shamsuddin

It was Carlos who told me about Grameen in Oaxaca. This wasn’t a surprise given the presence Grameen has in the microfinance world. Carlos Slim, a Mexican billionaire, had met with Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen, and had agreed to finance and set up Grameen branches in Mexico.

Grameen, Oaxaca was managed by a Bangladeshi man, Shamsuddin, who had arrived in Mexico the in July 2009. Shamsuddin knew no Spanish. In the beginning, he would stand with a Mexican interpreter at the corner of streets to ask passersby if they needed a loan; or he would knock on doors. This was an irresistible image: a Bangladeshi man with little local knowledge working to solve problems of poverty in Mexico. And it was something new. For it’s usually Western organizations who have (at least in the last century) claimed to carry the burden of for developing and poor countries.

It was that image that drew me to the Grameen office in a residential part of Oaxaca City on my last day. I spent nearly two hours talking with Shamsuddin. We got along well. He was in his fifties. He wore a blazer but his demeanor reminded me of the authority of government officials India – even the manner in which he had coffee ordered for me. The office room was painted blue. There were framed photographs on the walls of Mohammad Yousuf and his family in Mexico City, with Obama, and on his walk to accept the Nobel Prize. Shamsuddin knew Yunus well and considered him a teacher and mentor. He worked with Yunus since the early inception years of Grameen in the eighties.

His work had taken him to Malaysia, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. From 2003 to until 2009, he had worked for Grameen, Turkey. Turkey had even offered him a citizenship for his service, but for some reason, instead of spending the latter part of his career with his family, either in Turkey or Bangladesh – which he seemed to want – he had ended up in Mexico, to start a new operation. He had now acquired a basic working knowledge of Spanish and was assisted by Mexican helpers. This included a cook, an assistant and a driver. The cook, woman in her late twenties, came to serve coffee; she said there was no milk. The driver, a jovial man with a mustache, took me back to the main square in Oaxaca City.

During my conversation with Shamsuddin, several women came in to discuss their loans or validate their checks with Shamsuddin. His Spanish though awkward seemed effective. Grameen Oaxaca now has given 7000 loans in Oaxaca. That seemed like considerable progress in less than two years.

“Grameen is a job with a steady salary, but it requires constant commitment,” Shamsuddin said.

But he didn’t seem entirely happy. Somehow, he kept going back to his days in Turkey. The people of Mexico were friendly, punctual and did their work well. But he felt they were impenetrable. There didn’t seem to be a warmth and general sense of friendliness that he’d experienced in Turkey. Perhaps it was the language, which he hadn’t able to fully grasp.

Grameen’s goal in Mexico is to set up 30 branches. There are already a few outlying offices in Oaxaca. Shamsuddin also wanted to start something in neighboring Chiapas – a state more remote and poor than Oaxaca – but the strong presence of armed movements of the left seemed a threat. Extortion there, he had been told, was inevitable.

Happy new year!

A very happy new year to everyone! It was a busy but good year overall. I did not read as many books as I would have liked but what I did read, I enjoyed immensely. Favorites include John Hemming's The Conquest of the Incas, Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan, Edward Wilson's Anthill and Nature Revealed, Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe, VS Naipaul's The Masque of Africa, and Bhante Ghunaratne's Mindfulness in Plain English. The last book is an primer on the Buddhist idea of meditation and self inquiry, a topic I will continue to read about (and hopefully practice too, for many of these ideas are useless if one talks about them intellectually; they have to be experienced). The frequency of my posts has slowed down, but I hope the infrequent longer pieces have had enough content to sustain your interest. Travel continues to be good; I have an upcoming essay on micro finance in a developing country based on some conversations I had last week with a Grameen employee (though upcoming could mean anything from two weeks to two months!).

I am enjoying the winter break in Massachusetts, and even though it's cold and there is slush and snow on the pavements and the town and campus are mostly deserted, it's good to have some calm before the coming semester, which starts Jan 18th. I'll be teaching every day of the week, and my students will have the burden of keeping my "research program" -- whatever that may mean! -- going.

That first crossing into Mexico

In May 2007, I traveled with archaeologists from the University of Arizona to Chihuahua, the large, northern state of Mexico. At the time, I had not visited any country other than India and the United States. I was restless to see a new place, to experience something new. So the physical act of crossing a border had special meaning for me. That it was the US-Mexico border, a volatile place with a reputation for violence, did not bother me. What mattered was the travel – travel to a developing country whose history I was fascinated by.

We started early in the morning from Tucson, Arizona. We were supposed to cross in the town of Douglas. That would get us into the Mexican state of Sonora; a highway through the mountains would lead to Chihuahua, to our final stop, the town of Casas Grandes, where the archaelogical sites were. Most of our drive – and I liked it that way – would be through Mexico and not the US.

But our plans changed immediately after we started. There had been some trouble in Sonora – something to do with drug or human trafficking gangs, whose presence made all cities on the border dangerous. Forty men had attacked a police station and stolen arms. A grenade had been thrown at a newspaper office. A shootout followed as the police and army responded.

The hint of danger gave the illusion that through my travel I was “engaging” with important contemporary realities. The truth, of course, was that I had no idea of what was going on.

Because of the news, our guides avoided the Sonoran route, and instead took the longer route through New Mexico directly into Chihuahua. But this meant that by noon, despite many hours of driving, we were still in the United States. The entry into a new country, which I had been anticipating eagerly, would be delayed. The crossing came at last at 2 pm, when we reached the border town of Columbus. We passed the US customs and immigration station, and the Welcome to Mexico – Bienvenidos – sign.

Suddenly, we were across, in the town of Palomes, in Mexico.

I was elated. It didn’t matter to me that it was a run-down, poor town: the important fact was that I had made it across; I had “traveled”. The main town avenue was split by a row of forked streetlights; and on each side were shops and businesses, painted bright green, yellow and pink (my first experience of the Mexican penchant for contrasting and bright colors). The cars were small and battered looking. The music was loud in some stores. A frail looking man approached me with wallets and sunglasses to sell.

In Palomes (and for the rest of that trip) I focused on every culturally exotic detail I saw and tended to fixate on it. I later realized that this must be how the eager first time tourist orientalizes his experience.

A woman, no more than five feet fall, somewhat stocky, with a chocolate dark complexion and small slanted eyes came to beg for money. She was dressed in a ragged but colorful skirt. Her two children, a boy and a girl, tagged along. They were already expert at being persistent. “Money! Money!” the boy shouted, understanding that the visitors may not understand Spanish.

I saw other women with the same distinct look, height and dress in Palomes. Some of them sold simple souvenirs outside restaurants and stores. They were women of the Tarahumara tribe. The Tarahumara have faced a long history of dispossession, which continues now, with the forced cultivation lucrative drug yielding crops on their lands. Later, I saw a very shy Tarahumara woman seated under the shade of a tree. She sold hand-woven baskets but also allowed herself to be photographed by tourists for a little bit of money. But it was clear she wasn’t comfortable doing this; her head would lower and never face the camera. I hesitated, but I couldn´t resist taking a picture. I did it simply because, being a Tarahumara, she looked noticeably different. The picture did not come out well. In the end I was left only with a lingering guilt.

The trip was only for a few days. Chihuahua had a landscape similar to Arizona – dry mountain ranges and valleys with desert scrub vegetation. We visited the ruins at Casas Grandes and a village (Mata Ortiz) of artisans, who, inspired by the designs on recently unearthed Pre-Columbian shards of pottery, have initiated a flourishing and commercially successful modern pottery tradition. The parks, the traffic, the style of the shops and homes in Casas Grandes reminded me of middle-class residential neighborhoods in provincial Indian towns. We returned by the same route – through Palomes, where I had some trouble convincing US immigration officials of the validity of my reentry claim. My legs shook from nervousness at the prospect of being denied, but the officials (who were polite throughout) eventually allowed me in.

***

Since that first trip, I have traveled many times to Mexico and the countries of Latin America. Each visit diluted the novelty of travel and allowed me to focus on other aspects. But I am still not immune to the sort of reaction I had when I first crossed into Mexico. In December 2008, when I met the Lacandon, a small Mayan group in the rainforest bordering Mexico and Guatemala, I was awed by the strangeness of what I was doing. And last December, when I met Aymaras in La Paz, Bolivia, my judgment of Bolivia´s recent politics was influenced by wonder of where I was – in a capital city 13000 feet high in the Andes, close to Lake Titicaca – and the exotic looks, mannerisms and the dresses of the people among whom I was traveling.

Of course, there is nothing particularly wrong or bad about all this. After all, the joy of travel is in experiencing that which is new. I guess it is only when we continuously stress the differences and are unable to go beyond them that our perspectives suffer.

In search of an agraharam

My family’s ancestral temple is in Swamimalai, a small town in the district of Thanjavur, in Tamil Nadu. The temple is unspectacular. The malai of Swamimalai promises a hilltop setting, but there is nothing of the sort. Instead the slight elevation is simply a matter of climbing a few steps. The town itself is quiet; except for an institute that teaches the centuries old art of making bronze icons, Swamimalai is indistinguishable from other towns along the fertile Cauvery delta.

“Ancestral” is meant in the patriarchal sense. My paternal grandfather had been born in the same district, though he had moved early to Madras to work as a typist for India Pistons. There was a hardly a chance, given all the movements of the last century, that any members of his community would have stayed. Yet, I was curious: for this was a community of Brahmins that, in the generations before my grandfather, lived in special communes called agraharams.

Agraharams were meant exclusively for Brahmins, with a view to maintain purity in ritual and daily life. Though an apartheid like idea, the houses are not like what you see in the walled off gated communities of today. As a child I had visited an agrahararam near the city of Erode, at the bank of a tributary of the Cauvery. The families were tightly knit; the rooms small and austere; and there was a temple round the corner.

Understandably, there are few such communes in Tamil Nadu today. Agraharams were splintering even the early part of the twentieth century, when Brahmins in Tamil Nadu dominated the administrative jobs in the British government. Families chose cities and the comforts of modernity. In the classic Kannada novel, Samskara, set in the 1960s, UR Ananthamurthy artfully describes the moral decay of Brahmins in agraharams. More fundamentally the idea of an exclusive upper caste commune seemed anachronistic in the new world that was taking shape.

****

Last July, I visited the temple at Swamimalai with my parents. I wanted to trace the agraharam my grandfather’s grandfather had lived in. My relatives had mentioned the village or town to look for. I had assumed that it would be walking distance from the temple, the temple being the place of worship around which the activities of the community revolved. But it turned out to be twenty odd kilometers away, between the city of Kumbakonam and Thanjavur. The road between the two cities follows the course of the Cauvery River, but through the interior, so the river is not visible. We passed countless farms and the occasional town with party flags and large posters of much deified political icons.

The road narrowed when we came to Ayyampettu. This was the small town we had been told was close to the agraharam. The demographic seemed to be majority Muslim. Mosques were at every corner, some of them very new. The men wore white caps and the women black chadors and head scarves. I was surprised. Every Indian town has a Muslim quarter, but I’d had a predetermined idea, a very Hindu idea, of how my ancestral village might look like. I wondered how long the place had been Muslim. If it had been like this for many generations, perhaps even centuries, then the agraharam would have been adjacent to mosques. The communities would have lived side by side but, in a manner that is repeated all over India, would not have interacted much.

There were two agraharams near Ayyampettu. We drove through smaller streets and fields of sugarcane to the first. A board and a square arch with religious icons proclaimed entrance to the commune. There was a small temple immediately beyond. The houses were in two rows on either side of an unpaved street. They looked old, the red tiles of their sloping roofs fading to black. The ledges of the verandahs had alternating vertical stripes of red and white – similar to the stripes I had seen painted on the walls of temples.

My parents stayed in the car, but I knocked on one door and was invited inside. The interior was simple and barely had any furniture. An elderly Brahmin couple lived there. They were welcoming and smiled at me. They had just finished with their prayers. It all felt very quaint and I realized then that this how the agraharams of today probably were. Devoid of modern comforts they seemed like places of antiquity where only elders lived.

The ancestor I was looking for had been a prominent judge. I mentioned his name and asked the Brahmin couple about him. They did not think he had lived here, but said I could try the commune on the other side of town. That place was called Agramangudi. The drive took us through more Muslim quarters and narrow streets. But the exact location eluded us. We found eventually that there wasn’t an agraharam anymore – at least not in the formal sense of the term. Instead, the street where Brahmin families had once lived was now in a state of disrepair. The dilapidated houses were the site of makeshift living arrangements by the poor of the area.

One house, though, had been renovated. It was large; the walls had a deep yellow shade and the verandah ledges were brightly painted with the same vertical red and white stripes I had seen earlier.

Ravi Iyer and his wife lived in the house. They were the only Brahmins in the neighborhood. And it turned out that my ancestor had indeed lived here. Ravi recalled from his own grandfather the name I mentioned; he also seemed aware that the ancestor had been a prominent judge. The house immediately adjacent to Ravi’s had probably been his residence. So we had arrived at the correct place.

Ravi was in his late sixties or early seventies and was an imposing person. He was tall, had white hair and sported a bushy and equally white mustache. He was wearing a half-sleeve shirt and a white veshti (a skirt-like wraparound). He invited us in. The house was spacious and well kept. There was a beautiful shrine to Vinayaka, the elephant god, his idol surrounded by concentric white and orange circles. The teak furniture, the almirahs, the tulsi plant on a raised slab in the inner courtyard, and the smells of the kitchen and the prayer area reminded me of the Brahmin homes I had visited as a child.

Ravi had been in the navy; he had lived in Delhi, Agra, and Rajkot. In 1990, he had decided to renovate this house that his father had left him in Agramangudi. He and his wife had lived here ever since. He had strong views on those that had left and never came back. He seemed unhappy that the world that he had known – the Brahmin world of agraharams – had collapsed.

“These days, Brahmin kids don’t care about anything. In our generation, they used to go to Bombay or Delhi. These days, kids go abroad. They forget everything! Look at this place, Agramangudi, and you’ll know what I am talking about. Not a single Brahmin family here. They have all fled.”

To Ravi, all this suggested a moral decay in society. It was something I would hear again and again – from my father, from my other elder relatives. Society was far more selfish now, more vulgar; there was no room for compassion. The West was, unequivocally, the principal villain in all this. That was where the seed of decay had been sown. My uncle, whom I met the very next day, would tell me, “Think of why elder people are living alone in nursing homes now. That is a very Western idea. The very idea co-existence, which used to be strong earlier, has been demolished.”

I had mixed reactions to such denouncements. Partly because none of my relatives had actually lived in the West. And partly because things had been changing all the time, not just the last twenty years. Even the world of Ravi’s adult life – this was back in the 1960s – had been in a state of flux. That was the time when the Brahmin exodus from Tamil Nadu to other metropolitan areas of India and abroad began. The exodus was in response to a growing political power of the Tamil middle and lower castes – expressed through Dravidian progress parties, the DMK for example.

Ravi said: “If at that time the Brahmins had stood up to these DMK fellows, things would have been different. But we were weak. We just fled. In contrast, look at the tulukas (Muslims) that live here. This town is full of them. Look at how, despite going around the world, they always return back to build homes, businesses and mosques.”

This was getting too serious. Luckily Ravi’s wife, a tall, jovial woman, less concerned about grand ideas of moral decay (or perhaps aware of the futility of discussing them), served us coffee. She shifted the conversation to the more mundane – the heat outside, temples we had visited, and marriages (or, as is often the case these days, the delay in getting married). Ravi went with the flow.

****

Before we left, we were taken to the house that had been my ancestor’s. It felt special that I had managed to trace the place; yet it wasn’t that special. Each one of us has four ancestors if we go back two generations (paternal and maternal grandparents). Go back four generations and there are sixteen. I had merely traced one of the sixteen; and he had been accorded a special place because of the patriarchal system. If I were to sketch an origins map of all sixteen I wondered what I would find. It would probably point me to agraharams in different parts of south India. And there might be some surprises in store – perhaps purity of caste, which the community was always proud of, would not withstand the detailed scrutiny.

The house was in bad shape. Large blocks of concrete were missing. There was a string cot near the entrance. From the doorway, I could see a clothesline and a woman peering at us. The home, like others in the neighborhood, was the makeshift residence of a poor family.

An agraharam could not have been here without a small temple, and there was one at the end of the street. This then was the real ancestral temple, not the one we had seen at Swamimalai. There was some construction going on. A truck had emptied a mound of broken stones and there was debate between the laborers and the supervisor on whether the unloading had happened at the right place. A green and saffron BJP flag – surprising here, in this rural corner of Tamil Nadu, a state where the BJP had never gained a strong footing – fluttered on a nearby lamppost. It probably meant nothing.

We paid our respects at the temple and were on our way to Thanjavur soon after.

When the coffee hits the keyboard

Life is busy as it is. But when on a quiet Sunday morning, you knock a cup of coffee (with a lot of milk in it) onto your laptop, it becomes busier still. My laptop won't start now and this means at least a week if not more of makeshift arrangements, looking carefully at one's backups to see what's missing, installing new programs on a new laptop (if I do have to get one).

And when the coffee splashed over the keyboard, I had been working on a travel piece. I had written about two pages, but now have no backup. So this means blogging, which had crawled to a stop anyway, will still more crawl to a stop. And the end of the semester is round the corner. I am looking forward to the winter break, but after the break a Tsunami of work will hit me. I'll be teaching two classes (probability and statistics; and operations research in healthcare) for the first time. Even though I've prepped those classes, my peers tell me two classes will me give no breathing space to do any research, let alone writing of the fun kind.

We'll see what I can manage here over the next half year. Hopefully it won't be too bad.

Back from Austin

I am back from a conference in Austin. I enjoyed the warm weather, the lively bars and pubs on 6th street (downtown), catching up with good friends, and conversations with Texan cab-drivers. One of these cab-drivers, a bearded old man in a cowboy hat, had a lovely accent. He was also the friendliest of them all. This being an academic conference, technical jargon dominated the hallways and sessions. I remember walking by a session on financial models and watching with some horror mathematical symbols and terms such as “equilibrium” and “global optimal” on slide after slide. It reminded me of something I’d read in a recent book: “We have trained our minds to compute, not think” and “Complicated equations do not tend to cohabit with clarity of mind”.

A typical conference conversation between two people might go like this:

“Have you graduated yet?”

“No, but I think I’ll be done in spring. My adviser wants me to write an additional paper to derive some theoretical properties; we are hoping to submit it to one of the technical journals.”

(That paper will be read by handful of people, but the fact that it appeared in a prestigious technical journal means more than the paper’s content. So the paper will have greater presence and impact on the author’s CV; the worth of the actual work might remain untested and unverified even if it gets many citations. The name of the journal will automatically lend credence to the author. It works like magic in academia.)

“So are you in the job market now?”

“Yes, I am interested in both academic and industry jobs. I interviewed with FedEx yesterday and am talking with MIT today.”

“Wow! Well -- good luck. Let’s collaborate -- here's my card!”

“Collaborate”, “work together”, “multi-center grants”, “co-authoring papers”: the immediate effect of these terms is the exchange of business cards. Wallets start bulging and teem with exciting future possibilities. People run out of their own cards and then write their contact information on slips of paper.

I had a good time overall. I saw a lot of posturing, arrogance, self-absorption but also genuine reaching out, friendliness, warmth, gossip and laughter. I ate Tex-Mex food (at a restaurant called Chupacabra, named after a mythical animal), drank the occasional beer and on the last day went to see Texas State Museum. My last meal at Austin was an Indian meal at a restaurant called Clay Pit.

That's the news for now. The next post might take a while, as I catch up with work and some local travel.

Travels in Cuzco

In December last year, I took a flight from Lima, Peru’s coastal capital, to Cuzco, the once splendid high altitude capital of the Incas. Cuzco, now a booming and rampantly commercial tourist town, is the starting point of a trip to the famous Machu Picchu. The journey by bus, a steep uphill climb into the mountains, takes over twenty hours, but by flight it is a pleasant hour and a half. The Andes slice through the nations of western South America – Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile – to leave remarkably different terrains. In Peru, to the west of the Andes is a thin coastal strip that is mostly dry desert; this is where Lima is. To the east – surprisingly for the uninitiated visitor – is the dense jungle of the Amazon and the border with Brazil. The Andes themselves are not monolithic; the succession of mountains, rivers and high valleys gives way in the south of Peru to a high plateau called the Altiplano, where the surreally blue waters of Lake Titicaca are to be found, along the border with Bolivia.

Like the Fertile Crescent region of the Middle East, which saw the early rise of complex societies, western South America too has for millennia seen a series of kingdoms and empires. The largest, best known and last of these empires was the Incan one, which stretched for few thousand miles along the length of the Andes, from Columbia to Chile. The Incas’ was an unabashedly high-altitude culture: Cuzco, their grand capital, is at an elevation of 12,000 feet. The mountains were an artery through the empire. Roads, suspension bridges, supplies along the routes, and a system of runners who ran the length of mountain range at breakneck speeds to relay messages: all this kept the empire well connected.

From the air, Cuzco revealed itself as an extended sprawl in a high valley. The houses were closely spaced, and had sloping, red-tile roofs. In atmosphere and style – the high setting, the medieval look, the predominance of tourists and their revelry, the narrow streets of stone rather than asphalt, the dark American Indian faces of the locals – it reminded me of San Cristobal de las Casas, the southern and Mayan part of Mexico. A tall, young taxi driver who spoke fluent English took me to my hostel. He was savvy, knew a few Hindi words, and after much fumbling with the CD player, finally managed to play a popular Punjabi song. He was one of many young men I met during my travels who had smartly aligned themselves to make an impression on tourists.

My hostel was at the steep upper end of what was called the Choquechaca Street, away from the bustle and noise or the Plaza de Armas (the main square). It was run by Peruvians in their early twenties. Like their traveling guests, they too had the air of vagabonds. They worked irregular shifts, partied hard, and never gave the impression of permanence. There was Jose, who had a family in one of Lima’s shantytowns; Christina, also from Lima, who had abandoned her degree and now was attached to a bearded, dreamy Australian wanderer in Cuzco; and Luigi, a short, frail man, from the town of Iquitos, at the remote eastern end of Peru, reachable only by air or water. Luigi’s flirtatious way with women, the slightness of his physique and even his classically American Indian features – high slanted cheekbones, dark-red complexion – bore an uncanny resemblance to my roommate in college, from Mirzapur in North India.

The nations of the Americas fall into two broad categories. In some, American Indians have been marginalized and their numbers have reduced to an extent that they remain largely invisible. The United States, Argentina, and the Caribbean Islands fall in this category. And then there are countries, like Mexico (southern Mexico especially), Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia where indigenous populations form a significant majority.

In the Andean highland cities of Peru, the Quechuas, whose ancestors built the Incan empire, are the largest group. And it was the Quechuas that I saw in large numbers in the main square of Cuzco. I had arrived the day before Christmas. It was cold even though it wasn’t winter in Peru. The high altitude, which I hadn’t adjusted to, made the short walk to the main square strenuous. The square was abuzz with preparations. Indigenous women, their children in tow, had come to sell their wares in what was going to be a huge market. The older women had plaited hair and their attire was distinct: bowler hats and skirts; and many layers of clothing to protect against the cold, which made them look stocky. There was a long queue on one side of the square. Food and soup were being distributed in ladles to the poor, especially children: the largesse of Christmas.

It was there, in the fading light of the day, that the strangeness of where I was struck me. All around, in the higher elevations of the surrounding mountains, were the outer settlements of Cuzco. The city was much larger that I had thought. The square itself had once had been surrounded by palaces of the Inca rulers; in their place now stood imposing ocher-colored cathedrals and churches. Church imposed over a Pre-Columbian place of significance: the trend repeats over and over again in Latin America. But here, high in the Andes, with the indigenous Quechua filling the square on the eve of Christmas, the violence of that 16th century clash felt especially real.

The Spanish arrived in Peru in 1533, twelve years after conquering the Aztec empire in Mexico. They took Cuzco fairly easily in the beginning, but then the Incas fought back ferociously. From various vantage points the Inca army hurled red hot stones onto the roofs of houses, setting them on fire. The whole of Cuzco burned and for a while, it must have seemed, as the Inca army slowly circled in, that the outnumbered Spaniards would lose the city. They didn’t. They survived narrowly and fought back. The cathedrals in the main square of Cuzco are testament to the eventual victory of the Spanish.

In a side street, I had seen intact examples of Inca walls: large and smooth interlocking blocks of stone, without mortar and which fit like a puzzle. Their minimalism, their lack of adornment, only elevated their beauty. They hinted at another sensibility, much of which had been lost.

But the Quechuas I met insisted that it wasn’t a simple case of one culture dominating the other. Catholicism merely provided the outer shell beneath which the animist ways of the past still carried on. Even in the cathedrals, there are subtle but unequivocal hints of indigenous influence: a rendition of the Last Supper has a guinea pig, an Andean delicacy, as the main dish and not lamb; the virgins are cleverly portrayed in the shape of Andean mountains since the Quechua worship the mountains. But at a more mundane, day to day level, I had no sense – and no time to explore – how the two ways were being reconciled. And I often got the sense that the question was moot, that enough time had passed since the conquest for a kind of unselfconscious synthesis to emerge.

It was dark now and on one of the high hills surrounding Cuzco was a luminescent statue of Jesus – Cristo Blanco, or White Christ. I was struck by it: it was as if the light was coming from within, as if the statue itself were a fluorescent piece.

Two days later, I made the ascent up the steep hill that led to Cristo Blanco. The hill was immediately adjacent to my hostel. The path took me through haphazardly set one story houses along the slope. On the way a drunk, unhappy man helped with directions; another man asked if I was interested in riding a horse; and a woman could be seen beating up and shouting at her husband for having cheated. A little later I met Doggy, the large stray that for some reason unfailingly retired at the hostel for the night (though no one there “owned” him), but during the day roamed the corners of Cuzco, with a total lack of fear of other dogs. I saw him a few days later in a completely different part of the city. He seemed to possess some of the conquistadorial spirit of the 16th Spanish invaders of the Americas, who time and again rushed headlong into conflicts and toppled empires despite being hopelessly outnumbered. Doggy in fact was at that moment fighting an equally spunky dog. It took the stones of passersby to separate the two.

A hundred odd feet below Cristo Blanco is Saqsayhuaman, the remains of an Inca fortress. Unlike the smooth walls I had seen in the center of Cuzco, these were much larger, coarser structures, but no less impressive. They were ideal fortifications. They seemed like arbitrary and natural agglomerations of boulders until you noticed how carefully they had been assembled. Yet again there was no mortar holding the different pieces together. The Inca army, in an effort to recapture Cuzco from the Spaniards, had used Saqsayhuaman as their base. In fact, if John Hemming’s meticulously researched The Conquest of the Incas is to be believed, their attack had followed the same steep path I had taken from my hostel.

It was a short ascent from Saqsayhuaman to the large white statue of Christ. Most of Cuzco, which sits in a valley, could be seen from here, the various shades of the red of the roofs and the white of the walls mingling together, as if a carpet of those colors blanketed the valley. Christ is portrayed as he is other parts of the world. His arms were raised in a gesture of welcome. This positive image contrasted with slumped posture of a hooded man who sat at the base. His face was not visible; he did not move for the entire duration of my visit. Nearby there were large crosses wrapped in fine cloth, with designs woven onto them. At night, a powerful set of lamps on the platform shone white light onto the statue, and this gave the impression of luminescence I had been so struck by.

Hip hop economics

Found this great video thanks to a friend on Facebook:



There is a wonderful Friedreich Hayek quote at the end: "The curious task of economists is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design." And that task applies as well to super confident, suit-wearing economists and all people who take their knowledge of the world too seriously.

Random stuff

It’s late October already. The air outside is cold and crisp, and fallen leaves, the currency of the season, are everywhere; the woods are aflame with color. The strange thing about fall colors – the irresistibly rich shades of red and yellow – is that you want to experience them in some deep way, capture them forever, yet the awareness that they are transient and foreshadow the approaching gloom of winter tinges the season with melancholy.

The semester is busy as usual – I am writing publications and grants, claiming that I will solve the world’s most pressing healthcare delivery problems; serving on departmental committees, the most difficult part of which is dealing with the profusion of emails about when the committee should meet. In one committee, I have now counted twenty seven emails and there is still no agreement on a meeting time. That doesn't surprise me: professors live in their own autonomous worlds and only rarely do those worlds intersect.

I am teaching, for the third time, a class on linear optimization. Teaching is the most enjoyable part of academia and an intensely social activity (and hence the most tiring). I’ve got students from eleven countries this time. Asia, as usual, is well represented (Turkey, Iran, India, China), but there’s a also student from Chad and one from Nigeria.

I also attend the occasional conference where academics who feel supremely confident about themselves strut around fancy hotels in suits, their name tags weighed down by such pompous titles as “Cluster Chair” or “Section Chair”; conferences where academics talk in a cliquish, incomprehensible language, all the time forgetting (sometimes deliberately, for the sake of tenure and election to special academic societies) that the world outside is vastly more complex than their mathematical models or theories suggest. The biggest benefit of these gatherings, it would seem, is that they temporarily rejuvenate the economy of the downtowns they are held in. The hotels, the taxi-drivers who wait patiently to drop attendees to the airport, the waiters who serve drinks or politely take away dishes after a reception – and whom the conference attendees, so engrossed with their “networking”, are completely unaware of (because networking with regular people doesn’t get you anywhere) – benefit the most. There is a further irony: many plastic bottles of water will be wasted at these conferences and yet academics will present airy-fairy mathematical models on how the scarce resources of the world should be used more efficiently.

Academic talk (and rants) aside, I am aware I haven’t posted quite as regularly. That’s because I want my essays to evolve a little more. And yet, it’s hard to leave the blog blank for long – hence this rambling post. But let me assure you: there are travel pieces in the works. One is about a trip to my family’s ancestral temple in the district of Thanjavur in south India; another is about my travels in Peru and my conversations, while on the train to Machu Picchu, with fellow Latin American travelers.

I also want to mention the two books I am reading. The first is a 7th century work of fiction in Sanskrit, called Dasakumaracharita, by Dandin (translated by Isabelle Onians for the Clay Sanskrit Library; Onians’ interpretive notes at the end of the book are essential for a richer understanding of prose). The story is about the adventures of ten young men, who set out on separate and somewhat interlinked journeys in north India, which at the time consisted of a patchwork of kingdoms. Dasakumaracharita provides a glimpse of the sensibility and religious views of that period. I might write a longer essay on the book when I am done (and considering that I am terribly slow reader, you might have to wait a while).

The second book – in sharp contrast to Dasakumaracharita – is Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe, my first real introduction to physics. When I was in the second grade, my father bought me a book called Children’s Knowledge Bank, a collection of easy-to-read articles, each a page long. There was one on Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. Of course, I was clueless then, and I don’t understand much now either.

But Brian Greene’s summary of general relativity has at least provided the wonder I wish I had experienced long ago. What aesthetic elegance theories of physics can have! I never knew that space and time are inseparable and how we experience them is really a consequence of gravity. I never knew that no matter how fast you travel, light still travels at the same speed; that is, if you chased after light at very, very high speed, it would still escape from you at the same speed. And the bizarre idea that time would actually slow down if you move very fast. In fact, if you traveled at the speed of light, you would not age at all. As Greene writes, “light does not get old: a photon that emerged from the Big Bang is the same age today as it was then. There is no passage of time at light speed.”

This has been an exceptionally good year for science books – from the biologist Edward Wilson’s Nature Revealed, to Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan, and finally The Elegant Universe.

A little tied up

With the start of the new semester, I am kind of swamped; and there are plenty of other things going on too. Hence the lack of new posts. But I will try to be back as soon as time permits.

The unexpected origin of ragi

KT Achaya writes in The Story of Our Food:

The great Russian botanist, Vavilow, about seventy years ago, identified what he called "centers of plant origin" in which the "evolution of plants was directed by the will of man." There were nearly a dozen of these centers all over the world where plants gradually took their place as foods for human beings. Of particular interest to India was the so-called Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, stretching from Israel to Iraq, which was an early center of agriculture and of plant evolution.

What actually happened was this. Man would pick promising weeds growing wild which carried grains. By choosing plants with abundant or plump grains, a process called selection, the quality of the grains and the yield of the plant in the next crop were both improved. Sometimes, nature itself would take a hand in the process; a wild weed would cross by chance with a cultivated species to produce offspring of a quality superior to both.

Achaya then goes on to describe how ragi, ubiquitous in India for millennia, has an unexpected connection to a different part of the world:

Botanically, ragi is Eleusine coracana. It was born in Uganda in East Africa. How do we know this? For several botanical reasons, such as the existence of its wild ancestors, the long mention of the grain in tradition, and the fact that ragi figures in old religious ceremonies in those areas. Ragi is a tetraploid, and so is the African wild plant called E. africana, which gave rise to it. But the Indian wild plant, which is called E. indica, is a diploid which does not cross with ragi at all. Now what does this mean? Only this, that the Indian wild weed could not have given rise to the ragi plant in India. This plant must, therefore, have come to India from East Africa some time in the past. When did this happen? Ragi has been found in an Indian excavation which is dated at 1800 BC, and at several other archaeological sites in central India of a slightly later date. We must therefore infer that some unknown benefactor brought this foodgrain from Africa to India in about 2000 BC. It also seems possible that two other food-grains, jowar and bajra, also came at the same time to India, from the same area in East Africa, where they were originally evolved. You see, therefore, how no country ever stands really alone; certainly our food has come to us from unexpected places.

Quotes from the The Black Swan

I finished Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan a month ago, and still can't (and do not want to) shake off its influence on my thinking. Here are some quotes from the book:

“What we call ‘talent’ generally comes from success, rather than the opposite.”

“Death is often a good career move for an author.”

“Complicated equations do not tend to happily cohabit with clarity of mind.”

“History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, the generator of history.”

“In the end we are being driven by history all the while thinking that we are doing the driving.”

“Uncertainty is our [Taleb’s] discipline, and that understanding how to act under conditions of incomplete information is the highest and most urgent human pursuit.”

“Perception of causation has a significant biological foundation.”

“We pull memories along causative lines revising them involuntarily and unconsciously.”

“The same condition [impulse] that makes us simplify pushes us to think the world is less random than it actually is.”

“Both the artistic and scientific enterprises are the product of our need to reduce dimensions and inflict some [illusory] order on things.”

“We tend to use knowledge as therapy.”

“Respect for elders in many societies might be a kind of compensation for our short term memory.”

“It is tough to deal with social consequences of the appearance of continuous failure.”

“It is my great hope one day to see science and decision makers rediscover what the ancients have always known, namely that our highest currency is respect.”

“A life saved is a statistic; a person hurt is an anecdote. Statistics are invisible; anecdotes are salient.”

“Gambling is sterilized and domesticated uncertainty.”

“Probability is a liberal art…” [one of the best quotes in the book!]

“One needs to exit doubt to produce science…” [a jab at science, especially scientific theories that dumb down skepticism]

“For many people knowledge has the remarkable power of producing confidence rather than measurable aptitude.”

“That strange activity called the business meeting, in which well fed but sedentary men involuntarily restrict their blood circulation with an expensive device called the necktie.”

“If you hear a prominent economist use the word equilibrium or normal distribution put a rat down his shirt.”

“Capitalism is, among other things, the revitalization of the world, thanks to the opportunity [for some people] to be lucky.”

“We tend to be against religious theories but not economic theories.”

“Luck is far more egalitarian than even intelligence.”

Our relationship to the natural world: Some initial thoughts

1.

Our relationship to the natural world is ambiguous. On the one hand, we are drawn to landscapes. We love to visit national parks; we like to build lakefront homes surrounded by woods; and even an overwhelmingly urban space such as New York needs Central Park. The biologist Edward Wilson has a term for this: biophilia.

What is behind the instinct? One possible explanation – Wilson’s, not mine – is that humans, for hundreds of thousands of years, were inextricably part of the natural world: it is where we evolved. Our survival demanded an intimate and practical knowledge of the flora and fauna around us. We probably developed our innate fear of snakes, aggressive carnivores and heights then; these reactions are still hard wired in us. We developed also an appreciation for the environment. That too is still with us; that is why excessive development at the expense of forests and the wilderness provokes a reaction.

But even as hunter gatherers, we were always constantly tinkering with our habitats, trying to figure out ways to use it more effectively: controlled burning, deliberately dispersing certain seeds, slow attempts to tame certain animals. Around ten thousand years ago – and this seems to have happened independently within a few millennia in different parts of the world – we developed or “chanced upon” agriculture.

Agriculture fundamentally changed our relationship with the natural world. We no longer needed to be jointly involved in the process of creating food. The farmers were there to do that. We could follow other passions – the arts, the sciences. The time we gained for these pursuits has brought “progress”, to where we are today. But we still are very much part of the natural world. It is just that we don’t look at it that way. We feel the environment is something on the outside, to be enjoyed during walks or excursions.

2.

Cultures interact in distinct ways with the environments they inhabit. The United States is famous for its stunning national parks. The dedicated rangers, caretakers of these parks, are passionate about their work. They convey their wonder of the natural world, but their curiosity is mainly scientific. The ranger will likely be excited about the park's geology, botany and details of what might have happened during the Paleolithic era.

Then there are the trekkers, the mountain climbers, the campers. Their motivation comes from the need to experience nature up close or to get away from the world of work and stress, or the thrill of a daring feat.

In this sense, the American relationship to the natural world is “secular”. Religion resides not in nature but in the church, synagogue or mosque and their associated communities. That is understandable: Christianity is after all a Middle Eastern religion; and the Middle East is where all the holy places are.

Contrast this with how American Indians looked at the land. For them, the connection was much deeper, inextricable. I don’t mean this in a shallow, “hippie” way; neither do I think there was something consciously “environmental” about it. Rather, the land was part of their origins as a people. The mountains, rock formations, rivers, the birds, the animals, waterfalls and natural landmarks were sacred. Stories about them were relayed across generations through oral tradition.

This aspect is not unique to American Indians of course. Plenty of cultures where the religion is homegrown and old have it too. But India is perhaps – to me at least – the most illustrative modern example. Hinduism is about as homegrown and diverse as any religion can be; and it is intimately connected to the land. While traveling through Tamil Nadu last year, I was struck by how temples were used to commemorate natural landmarks – be it the Cauvery River, or a cave, or a hilltop.

If the Grand Canyon had, by some accident of geology, been in India, it would have been a national park, yes, but it would also be a sacred place, where millions of pilgrims might visit a certain time of the year.

Perhaps, in the beginning, all human religions were necessarily religions connected to the earth. Agriculture led to an increase in societal complexity, and paved the way for the more social religions: the world conquering monotheisms of the Middle East. And in recent centuries, economic ideologies and science have created their own worldviews. We seem, in the process, to have lost the instinctive spiritual connection we once had with the earth. Now, the environmental conservation and biodiversity movement is trying, using the framework of science, to make us aware of what we are losing. That may be the correct way in this time and age. But who knows; we’ll just have to wait and see.