April 14, 2012
 Sometimes the best way to find something is to look for something else. This happened to me recently. I stumbled upon the stories of Naiyer Masud while searching online for one of Ismat Chugtai’s stories. I came across to the Annual of Urdu Studies, a wonderful journal which often publishes translations of short and novella-sized Urdu fiction. It was as if I’d wandered into a wondrous bazaar in a strange town, except that the excitement had to be tempered by the realization I had a train to catch. The journal was filled with possibilities. What to read? What to download? So I only read the first paras of stories, skimming biographies, critiques, but the sampling only made the decision harder.
Here, I must interrupt myself and tell you about the Angel in the Bookcase. Since the universe is twisted like a pretzel and there is no God, it so happens there are men who’re more fortunate with the ladies than other men. So too is the case with some readers and good books. I’ve been unusually lucky with books. This realization struck me early. In my sated moments as a teenager, I’d often contemplate my unexpected success in finding this or that book, and I slowly convinced myself that there was someone– the Angel in the Bookcase– watching out for me. This fanciful theory was reinforced by a rather peculiar incident which I feel compelled to also share.
I was with a friend, a fellow named Ashwin Desai, majoring in Chemical Engg, and we were in the stacks of the college library because he wanted to locate a book on transport phenomena. The book was as likely to be in the non-existent gardening section as it was to be in the chemistry stacks. I began to hold forth on my privileged connection with the Angel in the Bookcase. He was listening somewhat humbly, and it incited me to prophetic rashness. ‘For example,’ I declared, ‘the Angel tells me your book is– here.’ I turned around and grabbed a book from the stack at random.
‘Bhenchod!’ said Ashwin, breaking the hushed silence.
It was, of course, the book he’d wanted.
So here I was in a digital library, not very different from my college stacks, faced with too many choices and too little time. I happened to remember this old story and without thinking grabbed the first pdf file I saw in the fiction section. I didn’t even bother to inspect the file.
Later, I discovered I’d downloaded Naiyar Masud’s novella Itr-e-Kafur (The Essence of Camphor).
I used to have difficulty pointing to speculative fiction that couldn’t be seen as magic realist or SF or fantasy. Now I can point to stories like Sheesha Ghat or Mar Gir (Snake Catcher).
Of course, such classifications are always arbitrary. As Sikandar Ahmad has pointed out, Masud does his best to describe his work in terms of what he does not do. For example, in an interview with Asif Farrukhi, Masud denied he works in the fantastic:
As for fantasy, I try very hard to steer clear of it. My stories are not fantasies, at least not in the sense of the fantastic. You cannot say their events don’t occur in real life.
Urdu fiction has always had a fantastic and florid turn and Masud is partly distancing his work from that tradition. One way to do so is to give up on Urdu’s fondness for ruin. Masud also resists writing story-like stories. Like many modern writers, he breaks most of the traditional rules of short fiction– for example, the rule of economy that insists every character must have a role in the story or Poe’s rule of ‘unity of mood’ or Chekhov’s rule about not mentioning things if they aren’t used and so on. But these violations, unlike those of the modernists, are not really experiments in making things anew. Novelty is the unhappy spouse of Time. The literature of unhappy spouses is usually about escape or recrimination. Masud is interested in neither.
Things happen in his stories, and what happens is always clear as well as interesting, but as in life, it’s not necessary that the events arrange into larger meaningful patterns. The events have no deeper rationale. To invoke A. K. Ramanujan invoking Davidson:
‘Actions have actors, actions express actors. Actions have reasons, actors are responsible for what they do, and character is destiny. But events happen to people. Events have no reasons, only causes. Narratives motived by karma convert all events into actions; in which everything has a reason.’ [Telling Tales, Daedalus 118(4), '89]
A.K. Ramanujan was discussing Indian folktales, but it seems to me this insight can greatly help in understanding how Masud’s fiction does what it does. Masud eschews karmic fiction; his events have causes but not reasons, his characters are not entailed by the plot and his realism is of the Kafkaesque variety but without its oppressiveness or obsession. The result is a story as infused with the possibility of possibility as camphor is with its fragrance. In most fiction, possibility gets hard-wired. The possibility of things being possible is one of the hardest, if not the hardest, effects to achieve.
Consequently, one must give up the sense of an ending. His endings often aren’t. Masud’s invented, I think, a kind of short story in which we stop reading not because we’ve reached closure but because we’ve left the chai-ki-laari, we’ve caught the bus, we’ve parted from our story-telling friend. Stories fade in Masud’s world, they don’t end.
Naiyar Masud is still around. It seems he rarely leaves Lucknow, which makes sense since the city has long celebrated the good life; Umar Memon has helpfully provided a brief biographical sketch. He writes about one short-story a year. Much of the time, he says, is spent removing what he’s written. Among other things, he’s translated Kafka’s works into Urdu, so naturally he has to be punished with the label ‘Urdu’s Kafka’. There are some similarities between the two writers, yes. Kafka also wrote stories where causality, not reason, is the governing principle. Gunther Anders remarked that Kafka’s characters are ‘people attached to a job.’ So too Masud’s characters, who are busy making perfumes, building bird cages, steering boats, fashioning glass, catching snakes. Both authors use unadorned styles, but while Kafka uses sleights of grammar to make the unreal real, Masud uses sleights of memory to make the real unreal. However, all these similarities and differences pale in face of the fundamental division between the two men: Masud’s fiction affirms possibility, while Kafka’s denies it. Perhaps this is why Kafka’s fiction leaves one in despair, while Masud’s stories, even the tragic ones, leaves one feeling exhilarated.
 Muhammed Umar Memon, professor emeritus at Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison and editor of AUS, has been indefatigable in making Masud’s work available to the English speaking world. Thanks to his efforts, we have two story collections The Essence of Camphor and The Snake Catcher containing some of Masud’s best stories. The Annual had a special issue in honor of Masud, and many other stories can appeared over the years. My favorites– what day is it? Saturday? Well then, my favorites are Sheesha Ghat and Ojhal (the lteral menaing is ‘Invisible’ but Javaid Qazi & Memon’s translaton captures the word’s spirit with ‘Obscure Domains of Fear and Desire’.
News is news only to those who haven’t heard the news. I was walking with my friend Geeta Patel who’d done herthesis work on the Urdu poet Miraji (Sanaullah Dar). I mentioned that I’d just come across this writer, Masud.
‘Oh yes, Naiyar,’ said Geeta. ‘You’ll really like his stories.’
My first feeling was outrage. Damn it woman, if you knew that, why didn’t you mention it earlier! How was it possible that it’d had taken me so long to make Masud’s acquaintance? I, who had an efficient and conscientious personal Angel! Urdu is hardly an obscure Indian dialect. How could it be that I’d read my way around this remarkable writer all these years? Who else was I missing?
Such questions are tied to the politics and economics of the subcontinent. Contemplating them leads to a certain exhaustion.
No matter. Stories find their readers. Friends, this may hardly be news to some of you, but do check out the strange and wonderful stories of Naiyer Masud.
May 12, 2010
 I first encountered the Ramayana, perhaps as most Indian kids do these days, in the pages of an Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) “comic” book. The drawings were figurative. Lord Rama was a handsome blue-skinned man, Sita was a fair and beautiful woman, Ravana had a mustache, and so on. I liked the drawings, but I remember not being impressed by the tale. It was weepy. Mushy. The skies seemed perpetually overcast with duty, betrayal, duty, loneliness, duty and bereavement. I didn’t like monkeys and there were far too many of them in the story. I didn’t consider the bow and arrow—Lord Rama’s weapon of choice– to be a hero’s weapon. Maces, swords, Ninja claws, axes and teeth—now, those were weapons. What was heroic about shooting at people from a distance? And where were ACK’s curvy sari-clad women, the one consolation of my otherwise celibate childhood? When I finished the story, I concluded that the Ramayana was one of those tales written solely to punish kids for having time and bloom on their side.
But it’s no one’s fault. The Ramayana is simply not a story suitable for kids. It’s also not a story suitable for most adults either. Else why would south-Asians make and re-make this tale over the long centuries? Discontent is one of the great gifts of this magnificent epic. To read this tale is to be seized with the urge to re-make it. Perhaps it’s because of its deterministic hero, Lord Rama. Deterministic characters, like existential ones, offer no definite purchase, and so we find ourselves, like Sisyphus, shoulder to stone, feet on earth, pushing once more for a resolution we can never attain.
Since the Ramayana is rich in relationships, there are many ways to study Lord Rama from a psychological point of view. One of the best is R. P. Goldman’s analysisR. P. Goldman. “Ramah Sahalaksmanah: Psychological and Literary Aspects of the Composite Hero of Valmiki’s Ramayana.” Indian J. of Philosophy, Vol. 8, 1980, pp. 149-189.† of the relationship between Lord Rama and his brother Lakshmana. I’m going to take a different track. I’m going to look at the god-king’s relationship with dharma.
(more…)
April 23, 2010
Ralph Thomas Hotchkin Griffith was born on May 25, 1826, in Corsley, Wiltshire, to Reverend Robert C. Griffith and Mary E. Adderley. It was a remarkable age. Only three days earlier, the HMS Beagle had set sail from Plymouth on its first voyage. Waterloo was already a decade old memory. Queen Victoria was 7 years old. Charles Dickens was 14. Lord Byron was dead, Charles Babbage was designing the Difference Engine, and speculative fiction had drawn its first gasping breath in the Gothic womb of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In distant India, a word that still denoted an area and not a place, one principality after another was falling to British might and British genius. It was the best of times to be an Englishman. As John Aylmer, Bishop of London, had presciently anticipated in An Harborowe, a year after the English navy crushed the Spanish Armada in 1588: “God is English.”
But conquest had brought with it the conqueror’s burden: administration. No empire has ever had enough qualified citizens to run two countries at the same time. Sooner or later, an empire has to start finding, training and hiring natives. Lord Macaulay’s Minute of 1834 spelled out what the goal should be:
“…a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”
Or less politely, wogs. Coconuts. Salman Rushdie, in his The Moor’s Last Sigh, acknowledges this bitter fruit:
“Bleddy Macaulay’s minutemen!… English-medium misfits… square-peg freaks.”
Macaulay is reviled these days for his racism, but as I see it, he was only being consistent. Hadn’t the Roman empire been a good thing for Britain? Wasn’t Macaulay its living proof? Didn’t he belong to the class of persons, English in blood and color, but Roman in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect? Besides, Macaulay and his carminative Minute were less influential than people suppose. What really got British education started in India was Sir Charles Wood’s Education Dispatch of 1854. It was well reasoned, pragmatic, free of hand-wringing, and based on an idea that would probably still work in places like Afghanistan. The idea was to leave Indian education mostly to the Indians, provide partial government funding, and set up some model educational institutions. In short: self-reliance, support and standards.
However, there was a severe shortage of British instructors. So that might explain why when Ralph T. H. Griffith joined the Indian Education Service in 1853, the twenty-seven year old Sanskrit scholar was almost immediately sentenced to be Professor of English Literature at the venerable Government Sanskrit College in Benares, India. Indeed, six months into the job, they made him headmaster of the associated school, and in 1861, the principal of the college itself. It was a position he was to hold for the next twenty-three years.
It was during this tenure that Griffith finished translating the first six books of Valmiki’s Ramayana from Sanskrit into English. The seventh and final book is a later addition to the canon (so is the first) and this he only abridged. The complete work appeared in 1870, published by E. J. Lazarus & Co. in Benares, and Trubner & Co in London. There had been an earlier effort in 1806 by the missionaries William Carey and Joshua Marshman, but they had only managed to translate the first two volumes. Thus, Griffith had produced the first complete English translation of Valmiki’s Ramayana. Translations are acts of courage. As Victor Hugo noted:
“When you offer a translation to a nation, that nation will almost always look on the translation as an act of violence against itself.”
Hugo was talking about native receptions to translated foreign works, but it applies equally well to native receptions to foreigners translating native works. In the literary magazines of the period, the Griffith Ramayana is often referred to as “a spirited translation,” a compliment to be sure, but for a horse, not a translation. It’s not insignificant that Voltaire mocked “spirited translators”:
“…[their] spirit and ability consist in substituting a modern variety or peculiarity for an ancient one, to the utter confusion of all unity of time, place, and character; leaving the mind of the reader bewildered as in a masquerade, crowded and confused with ancient and modern costumes.”
But Griffith’s achievement should not be underestimated. He’d had to translate some 24,000 slokas. A sloka is a Sanskrit verse and consists of thirty-two syllables, arranged either as a sixteen-syllable couplet or four eight-syllable hemistiches. The Iliad and Odyssey combined have some 27,000 lines, thus making the Ramayana roughly twice as long. Furthermore, a Sanskrit verse can be as gnarly as a one-liner Perl hack. It’s a language that takes a coder’s pride in Oulipo-type exercises. Gorresio‘s Italian translation (1850) and August von Schlegel‘s German translation (1829) could and did act as guides, but when it came to translating the slokas to English, Griffith was on his own.
So how does his work fare? if we think of it as Griffith’s Ramayana, then the work is not much of a success. It is merely an adequate translation of Valmiki’s Ramayana and a fine example of that curious Victorian animal: the past’s head joined to future’s butt. This is the animal that Voltaire mocked. But if we think of the text as the Griffith Ramayana, a member of the class of inspired Ramayanas, then it’s a marvelous thing indeed. Technically, the two texts are one and the same, but the difference in perceptions does makes a difference in our appreciation.
The Griffith Ramayana is a literary work, not a scholarly one. The wonderful Princeton translation (by Robert Goldman, Sally Sutherland Goldman, Sheldon Pollack and Barend van Nooten) is what a scholarly translation looks like. Scholarly works can get dated, literary works only go out of style. Scholars translate so as to ease their epistemological discomfort. Griffith translated so as to ease his aesthetic discomfort. Occasionally, Valmiki’s verses shows a bit too much leg for Griffith, and the translated verses therefore show too little. He also gets some things seriously wrong. For example, he has a section entitled “The Rape of Sita” when it should be “The Abduction of Sita.” What does Griffith say in anticipation of such bloopers? In the preface, he wrote:
“My first object has been to reproduce the original poem as faithfully as circumstances permit me to do. For this purpose I have preferred verse to prose. The translations of the Iliad by Chapman and Worsley– nay, even by translators of far inferior poetical powers– are, I think, much more Homeric than any literal prose rendering can possibly be. In the latter we may find the ‘disjecti membra poetae,’ but all the form and the life are gone, for ‘the interpenetration of matter and manner constitute the very soul of poetry.’ I have but seldom allowed myself to amplify or to condense, or omit apparently needless repetitions, but have attempted rather to give the poet as he is than to represent him as European taste might prefer him to be. Comparisons, therefore, which to English readers will appear vulgar or rediculous [sic] have been left unaltered, and long passages of unutterable tediousness re-appear in my version with, probably, their tediousness enhanced.”
Ignoring Griffith’s low opinion of his own work (not to mention the misreading of its essential nature), I completely agree with his decision to stick with verse. The few prose translations I’ve read lack the emotional savors of the original text. Unfortunately, Griffith decided to use iambic tetrameter, a distressing decision for those scarred by the memory of Gladys Hotchkiss belting out “Hernando’s Hideway.” I kept hearing an “Ole!” after every four lines. The manic insistence on rhyming also leads Griffith to make bad choices. For example:
On the bare earth the lady sank,
And trembling from their presence shrank
Like a strayed fawn, when night is dark,
And hungry wolves around her bark.
Barking wolves? Surely, it should be “howl”? But no, if rhyme needs wolves to bark, so they shall. Incidentally, in the original verse (at least in the Baroda Critical Edition of Valmiki’s Ramayana), a trembling Sita shrinks into herself (5.25.5: “sītā viśantīvā ṅgamā tmanaḥ”), and not onto the bare earth. This would seem to be an error, but Sita is born of the Earth, so Griffith’s translation is correct with respect to myth and metaphor. A poet’s choice, of course, not a scholar’s.
Another problem with iambic tetrameter is pacing. Everything has to fit within the “da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM” scheme, and there’s often a sense that a line could use an extra “da DUM.” Griffith remarks how he has no intention of chopping off a finger to improve the hand, but I wish he’d added a finger every so often. He also reveals a near-compulsive fondness for inversions and possessive nouns (“virtue’s brow,” “kingdom’s bound,” “ascetic’s weed’). After a while it can get on one’s nerves.
But there’s magnificence too. Consider this stanza which describes the death of Ravana at the hands of Lord Rama:
“Upon his string the hero laid
An arrow, like a snake that hissed.
…
‘Twas feathered with the rushing wind;
The glowing sun and fire combined
To the keen point their splendour lent;
The shaft, ethereal element,
By Meru’s hill and Mandar, pride
of mountains, had its weight supplied.
He laid it on the twisted cord,
He turned the point at Lanka’s lord,
And swift the limb-dividing dart
Pierced the huge chest and cleft the heart,
And dead he fell upon the plain
Like Vritra by the Thunderer slain.”
Compare the above with the following one, a description by Tennyson, also a rector’s son, of Mordred’s death at the hand of King Arthur:
…then Modred smote his liege
Hard on that helm which many a heathen sword
Had beaten thin; while Arthur at one blow
Striking the last stroke with Excalibur
Slew him, and all but slain himself, he fell.”
I believe the comparison tilts in Griffith’s favor. Nor is this passage a unique instance. Read with an appreciative frame of mind, the work confirms what Anne Dacier (1647-1720) claimed in her preface to the Illiad: “a translation that tries above all to save the spirit, does not fail to keep the letter, even where it takes the greatest liberties.” Literary critics should take the Griffith Ramayana more seriously.
An Englishman went up a subcontinent and came down an Indian. Ralph Griffith, a lifelong bachelor, a rector’s son from Wiltshire, a harmless aglet on colonialism’s boot, managed to take an ancient Sanskrit love poem and make it his own. Unlike von Schlegel, he was able to avoid the contempt for the Other that so often accompanies familiarity. This is all the more remarkable considering that the Sepoy “Mutiny” of 1857 had drawn a permanent, and perhaps inevitable, line between conqueror and conquered. By the time Griffith was appointed director of public instruction of the North-west provinces in 1878, Charles Wood’s educational guidelines had become policy. But though policy was strong, the flesh was weak. Weather, loneliness, alcoholism, isolation, homesickness, low salaries, language problems, tropical diseases and, if I’ve judged the expressions of just-landed tourists correctly, sheer terror, all wrecked havoc on the men and women who were to implement the policy. However, Griffith seems to have thrived.
Upon retirement in 1885, Griffith moved in with his brother Frank’s family, and spent the next twenty-one years in the cool hills of Niligiri, translating the Vedas. Personally, I consider it a pity he didn’t spend the time on more literary texts. There were a great many other Sanskrit works left to translate– some three thousand years worth– but then again, there comes a time when every pen must be set down. At the age of eighty, some fifty years after he’d first arrived in India, never to return to England, Ralph T. H. Griffith died on November 7, 1906. Only a few weeks earlier, Mahatma Gandhi– then just Mohandas– had launched a non-violence movement in South Africa. In June, the Lusitania had set sail on its maiden voyage. Albert Einstein had published the theory of special relativity, solved the mystery of the photoelectric effect, provided a theoretical explanation for Brownian motion and demonstrated the equivalence of matter and energy. Hitler was 17 years old. In seven years time, Rabindranath Tagore would become the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for literature. There were movies, heavier-than-air flight, phonographs and submarines. It would be a remarkable century. And Ralph T. H. Griffith, one of those suspended human bridges between Us and Them, between Now and Then, between Give and Take, had helped make it happen.
April 13, 2010
March 31, 2010
In places where there are few schools– like Afghanistan or the Congo– schools represent progress, hope, and modernity. In places where there are lots of schools– like India– schools have come to represent congress, anxiety and irrelevance. Thus, the Indian school system is in trouble. The Australian school system is in trouble. The British school system is in trouble. The Japanese school system is in trouble. The German school system is in trouble. Even the Canadians— God’s Why-Can’t-You-Be-More-Like-Them kids— are worried about their school system. If the Canadians can’t get it right, there’s little hope for the rest of us.
Needless to say, the American school system is also a mess. I can write “needless to say” now, but I remember a time when this would’ve been news to me. Until I arrived in the States, I’d been under the impression that John Dewey had designed the American school to be along the lines of a Jihadist’s promised heaven. Though I’m more clued in, it was still astonishing to listen to Diane Ravitch, the former assistant secretary of Education, outline in a C-SPAN interview the sheer intractability of the problem.
Dr. Ravitch had the resigned calmness of a Xerxes who’s just turned his back on a pile of burning boats. Which is understandable, since she has done just that. Her radical turnaround from being a staunch proponent of No Child Left Behind to being a staunch opponent has attracted a great deal of controversy. After decades of a thumbs up position on making teachers legally accountable for student performance, standardized performance measures, introducing market-choice in school systems, and emphasis on science and mathematics, she’s flipped her thumb in the other direction.
And for a very good reason. She believes none of these solutions really solve the basic problem of modern education, namely: how and what to teach millions of students– differing widely in abilities, backgrounds and interests– what they need to know as adults? In fact she believes the proposed solutions, ranging from the Mastery Learning movement through CRL, OODM, COMP, PSI, STPSTR, ACiE, RSST, STM to No Child Left Behind (NCLB), have only made the problem that much more intractable. She doesn’t see any quick fixes either. As she wrote in a recent LA Times article:
“There have been two features that regularly mark the history of U.S. public schools. Over the last century, our education system has been regularly captivated by a Big Idea — a savant or an organization that promised a simple solution to the problems of our schools. The second is that there are no simple solutions, no miracle cures to those problems.”
She may be right. But even if there is no magic solution, perhaps there is a magic question. It’s familiar to computer scientists because it’s the heart and soul of the analysis of algorithms. The magic question is this: compared to what?
So TV is too violent. Compared to what? Der Struwwelpeter? So the world is getting worse. Compared to what? Venus? So the American school system is in terrible shape. Compared to what? The Congolese system? The French? The Indian? The Japanese? The Australian? The Canadian?
The answer, most likely, is that the American system is getting worse in comparison to some idealized notion of itself. Thus in 2008, 35% of the nation’s schools were labeled ‘failing schools’, where failure was judged according the NCLB criterion of showing steady increase in the percentage of students meeting competency standards in grades 3 through 8. NCLB has set a target of 100% by the year 2014; that is, by the year 2014, 100% of the students at a school, in grades 3 through 8, are expected to obtain 200 points or more in the NJ-ASK tests. As Dr. Ravitch remarks dryly in a WSJ article,
“This was not my vision of good education.”
To my mind, the difficulties with school education have always had a model– a ghastly but elegant reflection– in grammar instruction. The teaching of grammar has always been a source of grief, for educators as well for students. Kids enter school knowing how to talk, and they leave with the same general expertise, but in between they’re bludgeoned, coaxed, coerced, cajoled, and bombarded with attempts to teach them grammar. These attempts generally do no harm, and they generally do no good. The famous (notorious) conclusion of Braddock, Lloyd-Jones and Schoer in 1963 on grammar instruction, the result of a commissioned study by the National Council of Teachers of English, is brutally honest:
“In view of the widespread agreement of research studies based upon many types of students and teachers, the conclusion can be stated in strong and unqualified terms: the teaching of formal grammar has a negligible or, because it usually displaces some instruction and practice in composition, even a harmful effect on improvement in writing.”
Hence experts are coming around to the idea that as far as improving writing instruction is concerned, stuffing kids with more grammar is not the solution. As Rei Noguchi has so carefully discussed, a better strategy might be to teach them a minimal grammar specifically designed to aid in writing.
Ditto perhaps, for schools and education. As far as educating kids is concerned, perhaps less schooling, not more, might be the answer. Do we really need to treat kids like disposable flash drives? Do we really need to fill their heads with random crap like the periodic table, Snell’s law and twelve times seven? Do they really need to know what’s the latent point of ice? Does it really matter if they believe “deciduous” is what’s left behind after you’ve made a decision? Do we really need to burn some six hours per day per student for a period of some twelve years– 30,000 hours per life– to teach stuff they’ll need rarely, apply incompetently, and forget rapidly?
If we want students to be curious, independent, rational and decent human beings, then a good first step might be to find and encourage teachers who are those very things. And a good second step would be not to take the first one too seriously. There’s that scene in Fast Times At Ridgemont High where Jeff Spicoli, the stoned surfer kid, has pizza delivered in Mr. Hand’s class:
Mr. Hand: Am I hallucinating here? Just what in the hell do you think you’re doing?
Jeff Spicoli: Learning about Cuba, and having some food.
Spicoli may be an academic failure, the kind of kid NCLB is determined, blast them, not to leave behind. But for me, trapped as I was in a Dante-inspired hell-hole of an Indian school, Spicoli’s chutzpah, fearless attitude toward authority, self-sufficiency and awareness of the things that made him happy, represented the quintessence of what an American education was all about.
March 26, 2010
 ABC News’ Nightline recently sponsored a Faceoff debate with Deepak Chopra & Jean Houston on one side and Sam Harris & Michael Shermer on the other. The topic: Does God have a future? This is a bit like debating whether Bugs Bunny will continue to be fond of carrots. It’s not a meaningless question, but perhaps it’s one best left to future rabbit scholars who’ll be around to observe the matter first hand. Still, if God’s advocates these days are the likes of Deepak Chopra and Jean Houston, then I have to feel a little sorry for the Perfect One.
Deepak Chopra is a brother, so it was somewhat painful to watch the man’s passionate incoherence. He spoke in aggrieved fragments, choppy phrases circling the wagons of his non-argument. Chopra-bhai had it in for Shermer, which is understandable, since Shermer has made it a point to ridicule him as Dr. Woo-Woo. Sample exchange:
Chopra: For people like Michael– not you so much [Sam Harris]– for people like Michael, to take all of the inner experience, all of the rich inner experience and try to codify it in a graph with data is absurd.
Shermer: As opposed to what? Just calling it fuzzy words? How does that help us understand it?
Chopra: That’s such an OUT, Michael. That’s such an out.
Shermer: And–
Chopra: You use the word ‘fuzzy’. Use the word ‘woo-woo’ and you’re out of the argument.
Indeed. What was the argument again?
But it doesn’t really matter. The debate wasn’t a debate because the two sides were using words very differently. Harris & Shermer were using reason, that is, using language with its usual adult conventions of having to make sense. The other side seem to use words to evoke cosmic feeling. Dr. Houston writes things like: “That is you — the human being that is the microcosm or, if you will, the fractal of the Infinite self. The human Selfing game may be what Infinity does for fun.” It seems to me that such speech-acts have a certain ritualistic role. It’s not too far removed– in emotional affect anyway– from shamanic chants, motherese, and the nonsense rhymes of children.
Jean Houston seemed more aware than Chopra-bhai that the place and time weren’t suited for chanting. Or perhaps it was simply that she wasn’t allowed to speak. Every now and then she’d raise her hand to indicate she wanted to speak, but her attempts were ignored by the three men. Pretty brutal.
It’s easy to make fun of Chopra-bhai and Dr. Houston. But they make life more interesting, not less. So a little sympathy may not be out of order. We need them around, if only to remind us there’s no curing the imagination. Perhaps they truly believe the woo-woo they claim to believe. And what’s the harm? At best, it’s only the stuff of foma, wampeters and granfalloons. At worst, it only further delays a serious study of Bugs Bunny and his inexplicable passion for carrots.
February 11, 2007
iPod. iPhone. iYawn. It’s embarrassing. Have we lost track of the future to such an extent that a bloody phone is enough to get us running in excited circles? Is this what the future has boiled down to? A few pathetic comm devices? Cars that continue to look like sports shoes? Makeup that’s monsoon resistant? Travel tech in which waiting to go somewhere takes longer than actually getting there? Is this the bloody future that we stayed awake for? Where do we go for a refund?
Clearly, it’s time we got back to inventing the future. Once, the Americans could be trusted to pump out the future that lies under our collective feet. But after watching Jobs and Gates and Bush do their annual Turkey dance, I think it’s time we outsourced the drilling. So here’s a list of my requirements to the Nnamdi’s, Wei Lei’s, Renato’s, Laxmi’s and Ibrahims of the world. No need to gift-wrap, but I’ll need a quote on the shipping please.
Keep in mind I’ve left out most of the really practical stuff like being able to live in geometries of my choosing (Kobayashi-Kresling, of course; then I could unfold like a flower), or to write software the way we write plays (suck on that, Gates) or eliminating aspects of quantum mechanics (way too many Bosons) or on-demand corporeality (it’s such a drag being meat all the time). I’ve even given up on flying cars and food pills and paper underwear. No, this list is mostly Popular-Mechanics stuff, only more ambitious. It’s just a few dot-crashes away.
I want:
- An exoskeleton. Walking is too slow, and a car is too fast. A bike is too much hard work. Basically, an exoskeleton would be like a moon suit for Earth, only sexier and easier to take off when you meet the right person.
- Electronic paper that’s often mistaken for ordinary paper. ’nuff said.
- Topological tech. Take a coin. Gesture. Voila. It’s a cylinder. Click. Now it unrolls into a papyrus sheet. Tap. It’s a rigid surface. So on and so forth. I’m reasonable. I’m not asking for a complete implementation of point-set topology. I just want materials that aren’t too committed to a fixed geometry. Down with Platonic solids and their originator.
- Artificial islands. I know there are already a few. But I want hundreds, thousands of them. I want enough to make a genuine market in places possible; a market in futures, so to speak. Let places bid for talent, rather than the other way around. This means of course we’ve to invent a lot more people, since people make places.
- About 50 more years added to the human lifespan. Actually, I want a few thousand. But immortality is secured one second at a time.
- Devices that are clever, not smart. Science is not about generating facts or theories. Science is a technique to generate new techniques. Science is about being able to do more and more. Not doing it per se, mind you, but having the choice to do it. In other words, science is about making us cleverer, not smarter. I want devices that are able to do science.
- A clear understanding of how the brain works. This is a theory request. It’s embarrassing we don’t have a better explanation than "and then it multiplies by zero"! How can stuff that’s mostly liquid think? That’s what I want to know.
- Everything that’s ever been printed made online. And free.
- Sensoriums. See, I like to wear my Internet. But at the moment, it’s basically a pair of goggles. The eye-net, as it should be called (because you’re pretty much toast if you can’t see) should become the ear-net, nose-net, tongue-net and touch-net. Now throw in some AI and add cinnamon to taste. Voila. A sensorium. Did you get my licks on the topic? Here, sniff this.
- A laptop that’s not also a male contraceptive. Seriously, Nnamdi/Wei Lei/Renato/Laxmi/Ibrahim, I know Convergence’s the future and all, but do you think it’s possible to keep the gonads cool en route? The Germans have a word, Mösenstövchen, which refers to the effect of a heated car-seat on a woman’s, um, nether regions. Don’t force them to invent a word for the effect of laptops.
Life begins with a gleam in the eye, mood music, and moisture in all the right places. So do futures. Marvin Gaye’s done his job. Let’s get liquid, people.
February 4, 2007
Just finished watching the debate between Sam Harris (The End of Faith) and Reza Aslan (No God But God) on C-SPAN. The topic:
"Does the Bible provide timeless prescriptions for our daily lives? Or does its inclusion of practices such as slavery preclude its ability to act as such a guide? Are Osama bin Laden’s grievances with the United States purely theological, or also social and political? Reza Aslan, author of "No god but God," and Sam Harris, author of "Letter to a Christian Nation," take up these questions in this debate at the Los Angeles Public Library. The event also includes discussion on contemporary trends in Islam– including whether or not Muslims are unique in their religious fervor– and debate over the concept of the Koran as a perfect and immutable document."
Does that sound like a perfect evening or what! Jonathan Kirsch, a bearded, soft-spoken, bear-like dude with a no-nonsense legal letter-pad, kept the men from making any sudden Tysonesque moves. Kirsch’s the author of A History Of The End Of The World. After a book like that, I guess he can handle anything.
The score? Well, Harris won. Reza circled round and round a profoundly oft-misunderstood point about profound transcendent experiences that had profoundly to do with context and interpretation sensitive to people’s transcendent experiences that profoundly need no validation external to the fact of it being a profound transcendent experience.
Okay. That’s unfair. Reza’s a smart guy. He’s articulate to a fault. He was at his best when he dealt in facts. When Harris claimed that the Israel-Palestine conflict was a religious one, it didn’t take Reza long to demonstrate Harris didn’t know what he was talking about. But for the most part, Reza tried to explain away the irrationality of religion via rational arguments. It’s the kind of contortion that’d get even B. K. S. Iyengar’s knickers in a twist.
As I see it, Reza’s main argument was that most rational questions about religion were misconstrued. He claimed that Religion wasn’t about facts, the domain of science, but about "a sacred history." "Sacred history" is a lot like ordinary history except that true/false is replaced with significance/non-significance. For example, to ask whether Moses really parted the Red Sea or whether the god Ganpati really has an elephant’s head is to miss the point. The correct question was to ask what these stories mean for their believers, why they matter. To keep harping on truth, evidence and logic was to be unsophisticated. Profoundly unsophisticated.
I was reminded of a joke in The Recruit. Al Pacino’s explaining– hoarse voice, bloodhound visage and all– to his C.I.A. protege why he decided to betray another three letter agency, namely, the U.S.A:
"There’s this parish priest, goes up to the pope, drops down on his knees, starts weeping, asking forgiveness. ‘Holy Father, Holy Father, what am I to do? What am I to do? I do not believe in God anymore. What am I to do?’ You know what the pope said? ‘Fake it.’ "
Perhaps Reza is in the position of that pope, asking the padre to defend something not because it was true but because it was important.
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March 29, 2006
 William Makepeace Thackeray was one of those rare writers who could criticize something without developing a contempt for it. Writing for him was a way of coming to terms with human nature, specifically, his human nature. As Gordon N. Ray in his definitive biography of Thackeray, wrote: "Closely scrutinized, his novels turn out to afford a kind of diary of his intimate life" [1]. So it is interesting that the theme of racial mixing — of miscegenation — runs like a bright red thread through Thackeray’s work.
For example, in The Tremendous Adventures of Major Gahagan (1838), Gollian Gahagan falls madly in love with a half-breed, the fair and lovely Julie Jowler, daughter of Colonel Jowler and his Indian wife, a "hideous, bloated, yellow creature." Later on, Gahagan is chased by the lady Puttee Rooge with the "complexion of molasses" and "rendered a thousand times more ugly by the tawdry dress and the blazing jewels with which she was covered." And at one of the novel’s many crisis points, Belinda Bulcher, 100% white and "dazzling as alabaster" extracts a promise from her hero:
‘Captain Gahagan,’ sobbed she, ‘Go-Go-Goggle-iah!’
‘My soul’s adored!’ replied I.
‘Swear to me one thing.’
I swear.’
‘That if–that if–the nasty, horrid, odious black Mah-ra-a-a-attahs take the fort, you will put me out of their power.’
Gahagan promises and then goes around offering the same service to the other white ladies in the camp. However:
Fancy my disgust when, after making this proposition, not one of the ladies chose to accede to it…
Disgust? Why? That the white women preferred rape and possible survival over virtue and certain death? Thackeray was unusually sympathetic to human foibles, especially feminine ones. He was the first major English writer to see that in a thoroughly materialistic society, morality too becomes just another status symbol. But when it came to racial mixing, there is an uncharacteristic latent disgust in his writing. Phillip Davies, who first studied Thackeray’s obsessions with racial mixing, concluded:
It would appear that Thackeray was strongly conscious of what he might have imagined to be a skeleton in his closet. [2]
But just what was this skeleton?
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March 11, 2006
In a sense, the Dutch invented America. They called it, however, the Dutch Republic.
The Dutch republic existed from 1581 to 1795, give or take a few decades on either end. At its high point, it was a society unparalleled for its freedom, tolerance, naval power and creativity. They knew they’d achieved something special. The Dutch put it this way:
"God made the world, but the Dutch made Holland." It probably sounds
even better in Dutch.
Its similarities with United States are astonishing. The republic too had emerged out an exhausting war with a much stronger foe (in this case, the Spanish Empire). In a world ruled by priests and royalty, the republic was a bizarre anomaly, the subject of much envy and much derision. The republic had an almost indecent excess of creative genius: Rembrandt, Jan Vermeer, Jan Steen, Franz Hals, Christian Huygens, Jan Swammerdam, Anthony van Leeuwenhoek, Rene Descartes, Baruch de Spinoza, Hugo Grotius and John Locke all found a home here. And the Dutch republic too was a mercantile society. The Dutch pioneered most of the speculative instruments in existence today, including short selling, option trading and joint stock companies. In fact, the Dutch East India Company was the first corporate monster: unethical, ruthless, violent, rapacious, insatiable and very profitable. In 1776, Adam Smith wrote:
In a country which had acquired its full complement of
riches … it would be necessary that almost every man should be
a man of business, or engage in some sort of trade. The province of Holland seems to be approaching near to this state. It is there unfashionable not to be a man of business. (Wealth of Nations, Chap. 9).
In the 1590s, immigrants made up about 10% of the population in the United Provinces. In 1685, at the high point of the republic, one observer estimated that 50% of Holland’s population consisted of immigrants.
One such group were the Puritans, who had fled to Holland in the reign of Charles I. At first, they found the Republic a congenial place. But as the full implications of a tolerant society sank in, they decided that they wanted a much narrower vision of religion after all: the Speedwell set sail from Delftshaven in 1620 (its passengers were later transferred to the Mayflower). The pilgrim fathers may have been fundamentalists, but they’d also been infected with another virus: the idea of a free republic. The struggle between these two incompatible strains continues to this day.
I think it was Bertrand Russell who said that all movements end by subverting the very principles they were founded on. Naturally, the Dutch republic founded on tolerance and humanism would also produce a Jan Pieterszoon Coen and the first slaver ships to the United States.
The Dutch republic was the first real proof — in modern times at least — that the unleashed entrepreneurial spirit can work social miracles. The founding fathers of another great republic-to-be were not unmindful of that proof.
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