Reviving this blog...

Time flies quickly! The last time I posted was well over a year ago, in March 2012. I won’t give the tired old excuses of how busy I've been: who isn't these days. Instead, I’d like to present some disconnected thoughts on what I've been up to recently, and gently ease into the task of blogging again.

 ***

On May 1st, I finished five years (10 semesters) of teaching at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. That day, after the last class session of the semester, some students came by to say they’d enjoyed the course (you generally don’t hear from those who did not like the class; perhaps it’s best that way). I left the class in a joyous mood to have lunch at the student union building, and the beautiful spring scene outside – warm and gentle sunshine; messy, overgrown and dark green grass; the leaves just beginning to make an appearance on bare trees – matched what I was feeling. Adding to the excitement was the realization six year long process of securing tenure was slowly but surely drawing to a close: I now again nurture the hope of reading, writing and traveling – the three things that energize me more than anything else.

***

Since reading Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, about a year and a half ago, I am now halfway into War and Peace (the new Pevear-Volokhonsky translation). If anything, the latter book is even more complex, wide ranging and longer. I often look forward to the end of a day or week, just so I can immerse myself in the book. Like many others, I was intimidated by the book’s size before I started it, but I am now thankful that it is long – it seems that I could go on reading it forever, delighting in the drama of the story, the astute psychological details and the philosophical and religious speculations that Tolstoy embeds so well into what is essentially a soapy, high society narrative.

When a book resonates powerfully within, I feel as if I have access to a special secret that no one else in the world is aware of -- this despite the fact that countless others may have read the same book. In the last ten years or so, I felt this way while reading Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (2001-2002; though its effect has faded considerably); Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (2003-2004); Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel (2004-2006; the book that set the tone for a lot of my travels in the Americas); Charles Mann’s 1491 (2006-2008); V.S Naipaul’s India: A Million Mutinies Now and his other travel writing (2005-2008); Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov (2006-2008); and now Tolstoy’s long works (2011-present). 

While still on Tolstoy, here is a quote from his work, What is Art?, which defines art in as open-ended a manner as possible:

as that human activity which consists in one person's consciously conveying to others, by certain external signs, the feelings he or she has experienced, and in others being infected by those feelings and also experiencing them.

Interpreted this way, art would cover -- as it should -- everyday activities such as talking, playing, and conveying by the way one lives certain feelings and emotions that others can connect with.

***

Since March 2012, I did not manage to travel abroad but I did visit many national parks in the US: Everglades in Florida; Bryce and Zion in Utah; and Yellowstone in Wyoming. This year, I traveled New Mexico and Colorado to experience cities and landscapes of the American southwest (Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Denver, Boulder, Rocky Mountain National Park) that I’d somehow missed as a graduate student in Arizona. All of these deserve their own posts, but the one that I have managed to write and that will be up soon, is my 8-day trip in Yellowstone and neighboring towns in Wyoming. I wrote this slowly over the last few months, whenever I had a little bit of time, and it now stands at 5000 words. I’ll post it in 3-4 parts.

A Fictional Conversation

For about a year, I've wanted to share and write about my newfound interest in religion, nature, animals, science, and all sorts of things that never interested me before. I tried the essay format, but so far I haven't quite succeeded in writing anything interesting. It takes time, I guess, to find the appropriate language, words and tone. It's always a work in progress. But here is an initial attempt to discuss religion and science, using two individuals. The two individuals are merely puppets to get some points across; it's very artificial for sure, but still felt better than an essay. Not sure how this is going to read -- but how does one know unless one tries?
 -----

“… but you still believe there is no conflict between religion and science?”

“It’s all about how you interpret it. It just depends on what you call ‘religion’.”

“To me, religion is belief in God, and that’s pretty clear cut.”

“Well, alright, let that be our definition of religion then: belief in God. It’s a problematic definition, but we can work with it.”

“Good. Now tell me how you can reconcile science with religion. To me science is about evidence and cultivating doubt, whereas belief in God is not.”

“Yes, that’s true. Science certainly provides more evidence than religion and also – if the scientists are honest – allows doubts and failures. You turn on the switch on and there is light – that’s proof that science works. The evidence is there in virtually all aspects of life, which we now take for granted…” 

“Whereas religion gets away with unverifiable claims: the presence of a soul, someone was enlightened thousands of years ago, or someone walked on water, or someone lifted a mountain…”

“But you cannot disprove these claims; these things could have happened. It would be unscientific to negate these possibilities outright, even if our current laws of physics suggest otherwise. A more apt way to phrase it would be to say that religious miracles, unlike everyday scientific miracles, cannot be demonstrated on a regular basis. You just take them on faith, which is really a blind faith, rather than saying: It could have happened but I cannot say anything for sure; there is no evidence.”

“Exactly! In science you have the burden of proof, whereas the burden of proof is not there in religion. One promotes skepticism, the other asks for blind belief no matter what. And then exploits that belief to create wars, divisions, ideologies. To me that’s an irreconcilable difference.”

“Well, science, if not practiced well, can also divide, create wars, ideologies and destruction. We humans are the problem, though we like to play the secular/scientific versus religious game. I have a more moderate view on the debate between science and religion. I think of it in terms of degrees of objectivity. In a relative sense, yes, science is more objective than religion, and there is no disputing that. But it would be incorrect to call science the ultimate truth or theory. We can instead call it the most objective truth we have, or what humans have collectively and gradually come up with, using the tools of logic and mathematics.”

“So there is something over and above?”

“I don’t know. Good science represents the limit – and it’s an ever expanding limit – of what humans can think of and explain. Beyond it, who knows what’s there. I simply don’t know. And that’s important: I don’t know – that space of not knowing is very important. Socrates said something about not knowing....” 

“I think he said: I know only that I know nothing…”

“Right. In my view, not knowing is where religion begins. Knowledge often leads to arrogance, but not knowing and being sincere and honest in accepting that you do not know is humility. This is the same humility that most of the world’s religions ask us to cultivate. But in general – and almost no one is immune from this – the more you know the more you think you can control, and you become egocentric and protective of your knowledge. In this aspect, science has a serious downside: the ability to know the laws of nature and exploit the natural world to suit human needs makes us feel supremely confident; we feel can achieve anything. We look only at what we have achieved, and feel tremendously proud as a species, but we ignore what we do not know at all.”

“But our lives are better…”

 “Materially better, yes, for now, but sooner or later, you run into a wall. Reality doesn’t quite function the way humans want. No amount of knowledge can capture the ever changing nature of reality. What the future has in store we have absolutely no idea. The universe and even events in our solar system may have some unpleasant surprises in store for us. Science is the effort to find answers, but no matter how deep you go, quantum mechanics, evolutionary theory and what not, you always reach a point where you do not know anymore. So you stop for a moment there and acknowledge, ‘Wow, this is too vast, too big and too complex, for my puny mind to understand.’ It’s the Great Unknown.”

“I understand that. But that’s still very different from belief in God…”

“Is it really? That’s why I said it is all in the interpretation. For me, the Great Unknown is what you can label, for the purposes of convenience, as God. I believe in this Great Unknown; I don’t know what it is, but it is there…”

“Well you know, you are sounding very mystical now!”

 “Why not! A scientific pursuit is really a mystical pursuit. I start with the feeling, ‘I want to know’ and you do get to know more, and you are able to explain more. It is a great feeling – you can compare it to the religious joy that a pilgrim or a monk or a yogi might feel. Einstein’s theories of relativity are aesthetically beautiful theories – they say it is the most elegant use of mathematics to show the intertwined nature of space and time. Darwin’s ideas make you feel connected to every living creature in earth – by his thesis, the animals and birds you see around you are your cousins! That promotes a wonderful feeling of unity! At the same time, there still are unanswered questions and new questions, and you realize you can’t know everything. That does not mean you stop – you can be thankful for the knowledge you have and you can keep the search going – but the illusion that you will know all begins to go away.”

 “Alright. Your ‘religion’ -- if you can call it that -- is quite different. Something like a poetic impulse with scientific bits thrown in. I don't have an issue with it. My main issue is with the monotheistic faiths that claim that there is a Creator, or that the world has been intelligently designed. I feel these faiths are quite arrogant – they prescribe that there is only one way and no other way, and in doing so cause all sorts of problems.”

 “Saying that there is only one way and no other way implies that the person who is making that very strong claim has complete knowledge – wouldn’t that be the opposite of humility? Is it possible for someone to claim, with tremendous sincerity and honesty and without a trace of doubt, that there is only one way to God and that all other ways lead to hell? And as for the existence of a Creator, one cannot reject the possibility: no one can disprove something that so far not been seen. But it does not matter anyway. Whether a Creator exists or not is irrelevant; the Creation exists – by that I mean this universe, this earth we live in, the sun, the moon, our senses and our thoughts which allow us to experience the world, they all exist, or at least seem to be vivid and real to us. That’s all that matters, and that itself is a miracle of sorts. This is actually an amazing fact: the Creation is everywhere and all around us, this table here that my eyes allow me to see, this chair whose solidity I can feel, this fruit that I can smell and taste! It makes you ask the question: What is all this? That itself can impart a sense of wonder.”

Christmas at Machu Picchu

Reflections on a day trip

1.

On December 25th, 2009, I took the early morning train to Machu Picchu, from Cuzco, the Andean city that had once been the capital of the Incas. I had flown in to Cuzco from Lima two days ago. I had only two more days to see the area before I left for La Paz, Bolivia. The bleak, cloudy morning only enhanced the surreal, high-elevation setting of Cuzco. Victor, the taxi driver who took me to the station, had a difficult time negotiating curved roads that disappeared into cloaks of white mist.

Machu Picchu is a major destination on the global tourist circuit. It competes with the pyramids of Giza and Angkor Watt in popularity. For the upwardly mobile in the major metropolises of the world, it is a trophy to be paraded on social occasions and through pictures on Facebook. So I wasn’t surprised, when, at the Poroy train station – where the early morning PeruRail train left for Machu Picchu – I saw faces that I might have seen at a university or a major airport in the United States. The travelers were Europeans, Americans, Australians, Chinese, Indians and Latin Americans (Latin Americans from countries other than Peru). They had come in large groups or with their families, and with hiking gear.

This, I realized, was to going to be a trip very much within the tourist bubble: the people traveling with me, even though they were from different countries, aspired to and engaged with exactly the same things: a secure professional life and career, wealth, fashionable clothes, cars, the latest cellphones and Facebook.

Outside the station – in what seemed like a different world -- local vendors advertised, with rhythmic high pitched songs, ponchos and umbrellas that the tourists would need for the rainy day.

2.

Two women from Bogota sat across from me in the train. They were in their twenties. From their carefully polished red nails, fair complexions, stylish dresses, shawls and sunglasses, I could tell that they were from wealthy Columbian families. Culturally, they were closer to Peru than I was, yet they seemed – except for their familiarity with Spanish – just as new to the place as me. I sensed that their excitement and disorientation had something to do with the strong indigenous presence in Peru. Though Columbia has many ethnic groups and Mestizos form the majority, the original indigenous peoples, in contrast to countries like Peru and Bolivia, are a small percent of the population.

Maria, the more talkative of the two, explained how safe Bogota was these days, a real improvement from the 1990s when kidnappings and murders were rife. “Uribe” – the President of Columbia then – “has to be credited for it,” she said. “He’s ultra-right in his policies but when it comes to making Bogota safe his accomplishments are indisputable. He has used something called the security tax to fund this effort.” She then talked of the corruption that was inevitable when you are power for long (in 2010, Uribe was at the end of his second term, and was eventually replaced by Santos).



She asked whether I had been to Plaza de Armas (the central square) of Cuzco on Christmas eve. A large informal market had been set up in the square. I had walked to the square from my hostel at about 5 in the afternoon. Most of the makeshift stalls had been covered by white tarp since rain was expected. Hundreds of Quechua-speaking locals were selling their wares– food, coca leaves, slippers, clothes. The women were in bowler hats and in multicolored, multilayered skirts. There had been long lines at soup kitchens where children waited with bowls.

Maria and her friend had been surprised most by the fact that the people had slept in the square at night. They found that unusual.

Marcos, the Peruvian tour guide seated next to me, explained that the Christmas market always attracted people from the little towns in the Andes surrounding Cuzco. To the question about children being fed at soup kitchens, he said: “There are still huge pockets of poverty in Peru.”

Marcos was from Cuzco. He was in a uniform that marked him out as a guide. He had a faint moustache and a friendly smile that revealed decaying teeth. On this trip, he was guiding two German women. Now and then, he would speak to them in German. He was one of many multilingual Peruvian and Bolivian guides I met during my travels who had degrees in tourism management from local universities.

I asked what Marcos thought of Evo Morales, the popular, left-leaning Bolivian president. A startling fact about Bolivia is that, like South Africa for the most of the 20th century, it had been never had a leader from the majority community (in Bolivia’s case the indigenous Aymara) – until Evo Morales in 2005. Morales had recently been re-elected in December 2009 with a comfortable majority. This was one reason I was drawn to La Paz. Here was something rare in the Americas: a entire country that had an indigenous majority and was ruled, after centuries of subjugation, by a person who did not have a privileged upbringing but had come up from the working class.

But Marcos wasn’t too enthusiastic about the socialist movements of Latin America. “I don’t know where they are heading. They seem to be all going the Chavez way. That route has no future.”

3.

The glass windows of the train were only slightly tinted and I liked it that way. Never had I traveled through such a green and intensely mountainous landscape. We passed by hamlets, terraced farms; the Urubamba River was almost always in sight. The slopes were steepest I had ever seen and it brought to mind the descriptions I had read of Inca routes that went vertically up rather than the gradual switchback style of ascent I was familiar with in the US.

The train reached Aguas Calientes at 11 am. This was the little town at the base of the saddle mountain atop which the ruins of Machu Picchu are located. The rain was more persistent now. I bought an umbrella after some tame bargaining with a woman who seemed to know that I would cave in easily to the inflated price. The buses to Machu Picchu left every twenty minutes. By the time the bus reached the entrance of Machu Picchu – after a memorable short ascent – it was already noon.

I wasn’t as eager to see the ruins. My drive to visit famous archaeological sites was already on the wane. The previous year, with great excitement, I had visited the pyramids in Teotihuacan, near Mexico City and Mayan ruins in Palenque and the Lacandon rainforest, near the border between Mexico and Guatemala. Those visits had satisfied the curiosity I’d had about the grandeur of Mesoamerican empires. What interested me more was how that past influenced – if at all – modern realities.


I was nevertheless blown away by the view that surrounded Machu Picchu. A number of very steep – almost tower-like -- mountains surrounded the ruins. At the base of the tallest of these mountains, I could see the thin winding strip that was the turbulent Urubamba River, and the insignificant cluster of buildings that was Aguas Calientes, where I had been less than an hour ago. Machu Picchu is at an elevation lower than Cuzco. It is on the eastern side of the Andes, where the high mountains gradually give way to the tropical jungle of the Amazonian basin. There was something grand in that: that Machu Picchu lay in the middle zone between a famous mountain range and a famous river basin.

The trails through the ruins were dotted with clusters of tourists in colorful ponchos. I met an Indian couple from London. Peru was the first stop in a long journey through South America (they planned to visit Chile and Argentina later on). Most tourists had their own local Quechua guide who interpreted the ceremonial utility of the Inca structures and how resistant they were to earthquakes. The guides were understandably sentimental about what was their cultural heritage. One of them, a man in his thirties, attributed mystical qualities to the Incas. Some Western tourists, tired from the long 4-day hike that had finally brought them to Machu Picchu, groaned as their guides waxed eloquent. “What is he talking about?” one of them said, shaking his head. I remember feeling offended at these reactions.

The most interesting visitors were a family of four from Quito, Ecuador: a middle aged couple and their two teenage children. They looked and were dressed very much like the Quechua-speaking locals. Here, among the foreign tourists they – paradoxically – looked out of place. I had a short conversation with them. The wife helped me take pictures. I never managed to ask what had drawn them to Machu Picchu. If I visited an ancient Hindu or Buddhist temple in north India for the first time, I'd perhaps feel the same way as them: despite visiting for the first time, I'd nonetheless have an intuitive familiarity with the place because of my cultural upbringing.

Quito had once been the northern capital of the Incas. In the decades before the arrival of the Spanish, the Incas had expanded their empire by force into new northern regions and made enemies along the way. The Spaniards would later exploit these rifts. Just before the Spanish arrived in Peru, Atahualpa, the son of the famous Inca emperor Huayna Capac, had battled his way southward from Quito, fighting with his brother for control of the empire after his father had succumbed to disease. It was during this southward march from Quito – circa 1533 – that he first encountered Francisco Pizarro, his nemesis, at Cajamarca, the site of the famous battle in which hopelessly outnumbered Spaniards overwhelmed the Inca army.

4.

By 3 pm, I was back in Aguas Calientes, enjoying a good vegetarian lunch in a narrow street that was full of restaurants and hotels. The train back to Cuzco started at 4:30 pm. The travelers were noticeably tired after the long day. I had chosen a pleasant day trip and was still fresh, but others around me in the train began to doze off.

This time, seated across from me was a couple from Bolivia. The woman, thin and tall, wore black glasses and was leaning against the shoulder of a somewhat stocky, well-built man with thinning hair. They might have slept peacefully had I not pulled them into a conversation. Only later would I realize that this couple that I ended up speaking to for nearly three hours – until the train reached Cuzco – had a perspective on Bolivia that was diametrically opposed to the more working-class perspective that I encountered in La Paz a few days later.

The woman, Ana, had worked as a television journalist in Florida. Her parents, Bolivian immigrants, still lived there. Her fiancé, Antonio, was a businessman who lived in La Paz. He owned a logistics company. His work took him to Europe and North America frequently. They had met a year ago and had fallen in love. Ana had taken a break from work, and for the last six months, she and Antonio had stayed together in La Paz, with the wedding soon to come. They were enjoying each others’ company. “I knew Ana would cook well, but I never expected that she would have such a strong appetite!” Antonio joked. But the evidence of all the eating was only in his own stockiness.

Eagerly, I turned the conversation to the recently concluded Bolivian national elections. I was instantly flooded by their criticism of Evo Morales and disaster that awaited Bolivia after his emphatic reelection. This wasn’t surprising: the rich of Bolivia feel threatened by Morales’ populist policies. But I realized their concern also came from feeling like a minority all of a sudden in Bolivia. They considered themselves not only economically but racially quite different from the majority Aymara-speaking people who now had one of their own, Evo Morales, at the helm.

It brought to fore a question I’d had for a long time. How in Latin America does one decide who is indigenous and who is not? And if one is mixed, where is one’s allegiance likely to be? What did nationalism mean in these countries? Ever since the Spanish had conquered the region in the 16th century, there had been considerable intermixing. So except for a few, no one could claim exclusive Spanish ancestry. Certainly some people with their darker American Indian features looked more indigenous than others. But even among the wealthy, more light-complexioned elite, there was a great deal of variation. Both Ana and Antonio were dark, and I could have easily mistaken Antonio for an Aymara man.

“When you travel go to La Paz,” Ana told me, “make sure, if you need help, you talk to people like us.” She did not explain further what “people like us” meant, but it was clear she meant those who were not Aymara – or at least working class Aymara. A few days later, in La Paz, I found that this advice was totally unnecessary; I found plenty of help from Aymara guides.

“There is a strong mob mentality these days in Bolivia,” Antonio said. “We might be walking down the street, and suddenly groups of people will start mocking and make comments about us, simply because of who we are. Now that the people have a person who is one of their own in power, they feel emboldened. This is not a good culture to be in. It is an aggressive culture.”

“Morales’ ideals are in the right place. In Bolivia, the indigenous people have suffered more than they have in other places, say Peru. The silver mined and stolen from Potosi -- a once prosperous city -- by the Spanish in the 16th and 17th centuries could have been used to build a bridge of silver from Bolivia to Spain! Working conditions were horrid for the indigenous people who mined the silver and many died or lost their health. Bolivia does have a terrible history of oppression. But Morales’ government is not a government that wants to reconcile. It may also be that his people are now more aggressive now that he is in power. A shift seems to have happened ever since his election.”

There were other complaints. The elections, in which Morales had won a comfortable majority, were not really free and fair. “They were clever in deciding what voters they allowed to register”. And the press was no longer free – there was intimidation from the government if a newspaper wrote something against it. An Aymara guide in La Paz, whom I became close to and who like many others, admired Morales and his policies, agreed that that the press was indeed not free anymore. For him, it was a small price for the considerable progress that had been made.

If there was one thing that Ana and Antonio admired about the Morales government, it was his commitment to work and his punctuality. “He doesn’t fool around; he and the vice-president come to work very early in the morning. No late arrivals are tolerated. Alvaro, the vice-president, is the real brain behind the administration.” Alvaro is white – and that made this compliment seem back handed, as if without somebody like Alvaro, an indigenous man couldn’t run a government.

Their political views aside, Ana and Antonio were a friendly couple. They gave me a number of places to visit in La Paz and restaurant recommendations. They said they would have invited me to their New Year celebration had they been in Bolivia; but they were going to be in Lima, still on vacation.

The train reached Poroy station at 7:30 pm. I looked for Victor, the taxi-driver who had promised to come to take me back to Cuzco in the evening. I couldn't find him in the waiting area but soon I heard his earnest and endearing voice calling me from the outside. He dropped off at the main square in Cuzco, and I began to look for a restaurant to have a hearty dinner.

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 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.