Accidental Blogger

Right Ho and Toodle-oo! (Why India still loves P.G. Wodehouse)

Although he may no longer be eagerly sought out by the reading public in the country of his birth, P.G. Wodehouse enjoys an enviable degree of popularity in India. Every so often I come across reports and articles puzzling over why a long dead British humorist from a long lost era continues to charm a couple of generations of modern Indians who have very little fascination (outside the academic world of literature and history) with the likes of Kipling or the culture of colonial England. Here is an excerpt from the transcript of a report on NPR that I found while searching for Wodehouse: (Do listen to the audio recording of Mandy Cunningham eavesdropping on a group of Wodehouse fans in Bangalore, India)

CUNNINGHAM: These people have gathered to share their love of the works of the comic novelist and satirist P.G. Wodehouse. Each person have adopted the name of their favorite Wodehouse character.

RAHM(ph): My name is Rahm, and I go by the name of Smith, Rupert Smith. Smith preferred to use big, long words. You know, he would use 20 words in a sentence when five would suffice. It's an eccentricity of sorts, but I felt that it's something that I would like to talk myself.

CUNNINGHAM: The group, like many others around India, knows everything there is to know about Wodehouse. They know that he was born in England, that he spent most of his years in the United States, becoming an American citizen, and that he wrote short stories, lyrics for musicals and almost a hundred novels. The reason they're so well informed is that most of them, like Narupa(ph), was introduced to Wodehouse at a very tender age.

NARUPA: When I was about nine or 10, there was this Indi series on TV, and I remember my father was so disgusted with the adaptation that from his office library, he handed out a copy of "Leave it to Smith" and made my sister and me read it.

CUNNINGHAM: Most of the group cut their teeth on stories about Wodehouse's most-famous characters, the erudite gentlemen's gentleman Jeeves and his affable but buffoonish aristocratic boss Bertie Wooster, depicted here in a BBC adaptation.

(Soundbite of BBC program)

Then there was this article I read more than three years ago, attempting to analyze Wodehouse's peculiar hold on middle class India's imagination.  

Up on the eighth floor of a concrete high-rise, I find the retired history lecturer at St Stephen’s College, part of Delhi University, and staff advisor to its Wodehouse Society, smoking a beedi, a pungent roll-up cigarette.

The apartment has a lingering odour of lunchtime curry. It’s a dashed rummy place to be talking about Bertie Wooster. I have come to explore the curious Indian obsession with P. G. Wodehouse.

Nearly 60 years after the nation’s British rulers packed their bags and legged it home, his books are on sale in most bookshops, sometimes nestling nervously between Jeanette Winterson and Virginia Woolf.

Wodehouse never wrote about India, but sells better on the subcontinent than in Britain, with pirated copies in common circulation. He is one of the most heavily requested authors at the British Library in Delhi and there are clubs and internet chatrooms devoted to him. ....

....The club’s [St Stephen’s Wodehouse Society] president in the mid-1980s, Thomas Abraham, is now president of Penguin Books India, the country’s largest Wodehouse publisher. “We’ve all grown up with Wodehouse,” he says. “It’s a phenomenon here. When one of his books goes out of print, everyone goes ballistic. My publishing counterparts in the UK are very amused.”

In a country where most books in English sell fewer than 1,000 copies and 5,000 constitutes a bestseller, the corduroy-suited Abraham estimates that his company sells up to 70,000 Wodehouses a year: part of a thriving “retro-market” that ranges from Agatha Christie to Modesty Blaise. Most Wodehouses are bought by middle-class Indians whose public school-like “English-Medium” education arguably equips them to appreciate the author’s verbal virtuosity and literary allusions better than many Brits.

“Wodehouse’s appeal is a pure sense of linguistic delight,” says Abraham, who has read “about 82” of his 85 books. “In the 1980s there was a debate about whether he was ‘literary’ or not, but the fact is that the books are a great read, laugh-aloud funny.

“It’s a whole world of clean, wholesome, escapist fun and parents here like to hand it down to their children. Today’s humour is fairly dark, but the appeal of these books for parents is: ‘No sex please, we’re Indian’.”

Back in 1945, George Orwell noted the books’ moral uprightness in his celebrated essay In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse: “Most of the people whom Wodehouse intends as sympathetic characters are parasites, and some of them are plain imbeciles, but very few of them could be described as immoral . . . Not only are there no dirty jokes, but there are hardly any compromising situations.”

Orwell recalled meeting a young Indian nationalist who saw Wodehouse as a satirist of English society, “an anti-British writer who had done useful work by showing up the British aristocracy in their true colours . . . On the contrary, a harmless, old-fashioned snobbishness is perceptible all through his work.”

I don't know that one can accurately point to a national trait, history or culture to explain why Wodehouse is loved by Indians. I happen to be a long time Wodehouse fan but not for some of the reasons described in the Times article. The nostalgia for the Raj, the butler, the pucca sahib culture of the gymkhana etc., none of them works for me.  I think I know what I find so charming about P.G.W. - mainly his extraordinarily adept linguistic calisthenics, for sure. And perhaps also what Orwell said.  Although I am perfectly at home with dark brooding humor, searing satire, biting badinage and cutting edge cleverness, there may indeed be something oddly comforting about a prodigious body of literary work which has no sex, no serious love, little existential angst and very few moral dilemmas. One of my favorite posts here is on Wodehouse, one that I wrote soon after I launched this blog. I am bringing it to the front  for new readers.

Not seeing the oak for the acorn

Right wingers have always been very good at vilifying any organization whose politics don't match theirs, especially if those groups are advocates of the poor, minorities, women, immigrants or homosexuals. At one time or the other, groups like the NEA, ACLU, Planned Parenthood and even government welfare programs like Medicaid and Food Stamps have been objects of anger and derision. A favorite (and effective) tactic is to pick a grain of truth, an isolated incident, a statistically insignificant trend and occasionally, fabricated myths about these services and publicize them as true and widespread practices. Soon enough, with enough people repeating the highly exaggerated accounts of missteps and mismanagement, the organizations become tarred and feathered as un-American, wasteful, wanton and even immoral. The newest target of right wing ire is the community organization, ACORN, some of whose inept officials have been caught saying outrageous things on tape while being led on by conservative actors posing as pimps, prostitutes and other miscreants. (see this WSJ report dripping with gotcha sarcasm but not a word about entrapment) So, is ACORN really a group devoted to shady housing transactions, tax evasion, prostitution, voter fraud and even murder?  Are its employees quasi criminals masquerading as social workers out to defraud the system? Not quite so. Harold Meyerson of the Washington Post explains the background of Acorn.

The embattled community organizing group is much in the news these days, thanks to the idiocies of a handful of now-suspended staffers having been filmed and YouTubed by a right-wing sting squad. Most of the stories present ACORN as, at best, a shady organization up to no good in America's inner cities, not to mention the nation's primary source of voting fraud.

What's been obscured amid all the polemics, or the polemics passing as news reports, is what ACORN is and does. Founded in Little Rock in 1970 as an organization agitating for free school lunches, Vietnam veterans' rights and more hospital emergency rooms, ACORN has grown in the past four decades into the nation's largest community organizing group. Based in low-income neighborhoods, it has nearly 500,000 dues-paying members, recruited by door-to-door canvassers, with chapters in 110 cities in 40 states. Nationwide, it has more than 1,000 staffers.

What are the projects on which all these staffers and members work? Raising the minimum wage, for one. ACORN conceived and led the successful initiative campaign to raise the wage in Florida in 2004 and in four more states in 2006. In the past four years, it successfully pressured seven legislatures in other states to raise their minimum wage as well.

Another major campaign has been to limit the interest and fees that banks charge homeowners. In the 1990s, ACORN spearheaded a number of legal actions, often joined by states' attorneys general, that compelled such lenders as Citigroup to change many of their practices. The group has led successful drives to outlaw the most egregious predatory lending in nine states. It also counsels thousands of inner-city homeowners and home buyers. (More here)

Now, I have no problem with incompetent and corrupt officials belonging to organizations that are beneficiaries of public money, being fired. If a crime is committed they should also be prosecuted whether they serve liberal or conservative causes. ACORN is currently being investigated and the federal grants it receives are under review. Well and good. However, another organization that has been implicated in murder, prostitution, financial irregularities and even torture, is operating with impunity. But it happens to be a Christian, conservative operation. The private security firm of Blackwater (aka XE) which the Bush administration engaged for supplying mercenaries for the Iraq war has never faced any criticism of its unsavory business practices from right wing commentators or elected officials. What is even more ironic is that the Obama administration continues to utilize Blackwater's services while squirming to distance itself from ACORN!

In April 2002, the CIA paid Blackwater more than $5 million to deploy a small team of men inside Afghanistan during the early stages of US operations in the country. A month later, Erik Prince, the company's owner and a former Navy SEAL, flew to Afghanistan as part of the original twenty-man Blackwater contingent. Blackwater worked for the CIA at its station in Kabul as well as in Shkin, along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, where they operated out of a mud fortress known as the Alamo. It was the beginning of a long relationship between Blackwater, Prince and the CIA.

Now the New York Times is reportingthat in 2004 the CIA hired Blackwater "as part of a secret program to locate and assassinate top operatives of Al Qaeda." According to the Times, "it is unclear whether the CIA had planned to use the contractors to capture or kill Qaeda operatives, or just to help with training and surveillance."

The Timesreports that "the CIA did not have a formal contract with Blackwater for this program but instead had individual agreements with top company officials, including the founder, Erik D. Prince, a politically connected former member of the Navy Seals and the heir to a family fortune." A retired intelligence officer "intimately familiar with the assassination program" told the Washington Post, "Outsourcing gave the agency more protection in case something went wrong." The Postreported that Blackwater "was given operational responsibility for targeting terrorist commanders and was awarded millions of dollars for training and weaponry, but the program was canceled before any missions were conducted."

Jeremy Scahill's report in the Nation here and a video of Scahill in conversation with Bill Maher here.

Bob Mankoff Thinks Big About Humor

Bob Mankoff, the cartoon editor of the New Yorker was interviewed at Big Think about various aspects of humor - its roots, triggers, social utility and form. In the following videos, Mankoff answers some questions:

1. How do men and women use humor in a social situation?
2. When does humor, which almost always originates in bad taste, work effectively?
3. What is the future of humor and why do liberals tend to be more humorous than conservatives?

(Thanks to Andrew Seidler of Big Think for sending in the links)

The Hammer Hams It Up

While we are on the subject of You Tube videos:

Somehow, it is still hard for me to believe that this guy was my representative in the US Congress for many miserable years. Beginning around 1:30 the video becomes ridiculously scary. I didn't know whether to laugh, cry or throw up! How will all this booty shaking affect the money laundering charges? (link: Sanjukta)

Because Warcraft makes things better... (D)

...in any world whatsoever!

"The US war" is now the other one (D)

More US troops have died this year in Afghanistan than in Iraq, the first year starting 2003 that's been true. Obviously that fact reflects both that the US Iraq toll has been coming down since 2007 (for reasons of surge or Anbar Awakening or whatever) and that Afghanistan seems to get more horrible each year. I suspect each of those things is going to give a certain Mr. McCain renewed clout in the coming weeks/months as these calls for increased troop deployment in Afghanistan play out. Even last year Obama and the Democrats basically conceded the rhetorical battle over the surge to the Republicans, to the point that I think McCain managed to hold Obama to a virtual tie at least on the Iraq war.

Egypt's Folly - Health Measure Was Hogwash

Superstition ridden medieval Europe condemned cats as witchs' agents and slaughtered them. Nature's pay back for that brutal and dastardly act came in the form of the Black Plague when the rat population proliferated in the absence of a natural feline pest control. A similar but less deadly fate may be in store for Egypt whose president Hosni Mubarak, in a heartless, mindless and misguided moment of inspiration, ordered all pigs killed in order to protect the nation from swine flu. The streets of Cairo are now awash in stinking garbage. The pigs used to consume organic trash in large quantities and helped keep the city  partially clean. Now they are all gone due to the stupid step taken by ignorant, cowardly politicians and the rubbish is piling up. So, Egyptians are protected from swine flu (they wish!) but are sure to suffer from other more easy to spread infectious diseases that the putrid waste will help breed. And they had been warned of the consequences of the idiotic measure. The story in the New York Times.   

Nuclear Fail and blow up (D)

One of the top scientists handling India's 1998 nuclear tests has acknowledged that the tests weren't quite the unqualified successes they were officially hailed as. Specifically, it seems the thermonuclear (fusion) test was a dud. People outside India have said such things before, as have Indians off the public record, but it is potentially quite significant / uncomfortable that an important Indian scientist has publicly done the same:

His view was that India should not sign the CTBT and that it needed to conduct more thermonuclear tests.

“There is no country in the world,” he emphasised, “which managed to get its thermonuclear weapon right in just one test.” He said that he had also pointed to the fact that western seismic experts had doubted India’s claim that the three simultaneous tests on May 11 had a combined explosives yield of 60 kt.

The Santhanam revelation could have major reverberations in the country’s security policy. The Indo-US nuclear deal, for instance, rests upon the assumption that India will not test again.

It is also likely to make it difficult for the Manmohan Singh government to sign the CTBT, an issue that has gained considerable salience in the Obama administration’s non-proliferation policy.

[...]

Karnad, a professor at the Centre for Policy Research, felt that the Indian need to test again “is less a matter of opinion than of fact.” In his view, Santhanam’s “extremely courageous stand” had struck a fatal blow at the foundation of the Indo-US nuclear deal “predicated on India’s never testing again and at any accommodationist policies the Manmohan Singh regime may be considering vis-a-vis the CTBT and the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty”.

Golconda (Sujatha)

The taxi winds around the narrow maze of roads leading up to the fort. It's a very democratic cross-section of the population that lines up to enter the grounds: at Rs.10 per ticket, this is a poor man's park, not just the haunt of the well-heeled. The lawns near the entrance are surprisingly green, well-watered even as an extended dry spell has been hovering over the city and suburbs. But further inside, the parterres look parched and dusty red.

(The photo above is by A.Gopalratnam)

As we climb the steps, we dip off to the side, under the erstwhile stables/bodyguard barracks. At the far end, a couple of cauldrons are cooking and a largish group of picnickers are seated in a row, partaking of the feast. (Is that the famed Hyderabadi biryani that I smell?)
We pass on, further up the steps to the main fort. A couple are marked with what I suspect to be red and yellow paint- it's too bright to be kumkum and turmeric. I wonder why, until a few steps later we are treated to the unexpected spectacle of a man cutting the head off a white rooster in front of a small make-shift altar at the step. Maybe a sacrifice to the goddess Jagadamba, who has a temple, even in this fort which was last controlled by the Muslim Qutb Shahi dynasty.
My kids and friends are shocked by the blood spilling out onto the step, and walk gingerly around the altar and rooster head, bemoaning the barbarianism. The man carefully washes the blood from the steps, and walks quickly away, clutching the rooster's body, that likely will be cooked as part of the Bonalu festival.
We stop the walk to the top of the hill, and retrace our steps towards another area where a Light and Sound show will be held. This is for the bonafide wealthier tourists, cost Rs.100 for an ordinary ticket and double that for the VIP Executive class ticket, which comes with free soft drinks. The path to the seats is fraught with the perils of Bat-smell and Bat-droppings, echoes from the cliff-swallows swooping around the cavernous ceilings, as we wait in line for the security queue. A uniformed policewoman diligently peeks into our handbags before nodding us in.
As we swelter in the last rays of the setting sun, batting mosquitoes and ticks away in vain, a couple of scrawny cats rush towards the nearby garbage can, disappearing almost entirely inside as they rummage for leftovers.
A squeal from the loudspeakers, and then a booming voice announces the start of the show. It is a well-written and re-enacted history of the occupants of the fort, starting with the Kakatiya kings who built it, to the Qutb Shahi rulers who maintained the longest control over it, tales of kings and singers and lovers and saints, all wiped away in the final blast of war for control of the fabled fort. The Golconda is impregnable to all onslaughts but that of treachery. The lighting is wonderfully synced with the stirring narration and dialogues.
The audience is alternately captivated by the narration, or nodding off when the too-long musical interludes commence.(I'm sure they must have paid the singers handsomely for their efforts, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the whole songs be played in their 6 -or-8-stanza entirety!)
We escape during the final soulful paean to the glories of the Telugu people, just minutes before the remaining mass of the audience tries to ooze through the narrow pathway back, through the Bat-zone.
Walking outside the fort towards the taxi, squeals of horror from the kids punctuate our path: We have just managed to step on masses of teeming cockroaches that are out for the evening's dinner, congregating in the manholes.
The verdict from the kids: Unmitigated disaster of an excursion, since they didn't like the sacrificial rooster, or the bat-smells or the cockroaches.
My verdict: A reminder that beyond all the tourist trappings, there is still an underlying India that is worth seeing in all its glory and squalor.
---------------------------------------------
Cross-posted from Fluff 'n' Stuff

Mid-Week Links Roundup (Joe)

Food - Deliciousness in Portland, Maine.  I'm intrigued by "ravioli are stuffed with sweet local shrimp and haddock" - shrimp in ravioli isn't uncommon or remarkable, but haddock? 

Happiness - Is happiness catching?  Maybe, but not like the global pig flu pandemic.

Work Out, Become Smart - Mice on treadmills smarter than mice not on treadmills.  Weightlifting and stretching are good for your physical health, but they won't make you smarter.  Aerobic exercise will, although it must be fairly intense, at least if you're a mouse.

Knowledge and Thinking - If they don't drop out, what should we teach them?  You need a knowledge base.  Well, yes.  But critical thinking ability is way more important than collection of random trivia, in my opinion.  Of course, this is like the nature-nurture debate: meaningless as an abstract discussion.  The op-ed is light on facts, so it's not clear to me exactly what they're doing in the Massachusetts schools, and I'm skeptical of anything called "cooperative learning" or "skills training," but that's not remotely the same thing as "critical thinking."  Even the author's suggestion that "critical thinking" pushes aside subjects like literature strikes me as absurd.  For example, I took a Milton class in college, and the valuable part of that is that it made me a better thinker-reader-writer, not that I can talk about metapoetry or talk about how Satan fits within the epic tradition.

Has the wired age made us more uncivil?

Two newspaper articles about the decline of public etiquette in the age of Internet caught my eye - one about students behaving rudely with teachers and the other describing the increasingly frequent display of incivility by public figures. I have seen similar lamentations before, some recently and others from my own teachers and parents during the 1960 - 70s when drugs, rock and roll and student revolts began to shake the middle class world although there was no Internet to chip away at our niceness. My co-blogger Dean and I had a short but candid exchange about one of the articles, drawing from the memory of our own youthful experiences.

It's been decades since I faced a class room full of energetic teenage boys. I wonder how I would have handled the new student-teacher rules of etiquette. But although my students did not carry laptops or Blackberries to class, rude notes were passed behind my back and salacious novels were often on the knees under the desk while I labored to transmit the beauty and simplicity of the Periodic Table. I don't remember even the boldest of mischief makers among my pupils ever saying, "Hey Ruchira" to my face or in writing although I am sure a few probably said much worse things out of my ear shot. The overwhelming majority of students I had encountered during my teaching years were courteous and sweet in their interactions with me and other teachers. However, that is not quite the same as pretending that teachers in my era dealt strictly with a room full of Emily Posts during school hours.

Lee Shumow doesn't want to text her students, or be their friend on Facebook, but to their chagrin prefers an old-fashioned way to communicate: e-mail.

The educational psychology professor at Northern Illinois University appreciates when students take the time to reply. It's an extra treat when they don't begin their message with, "Hey, Lee."

She and many of her colleagues believe such informality has seeped into the college classroom environment, citing student behavior that's best described as rude or oblivious. As students begin a new semester this month, instructors bracing for yet another onslaught blame technology for creating a disengaged generation whose attention is constantly diverted by laptops, phones and iPods.

Others point to the unruly classroom as a reflection of an increasingly ill-mannered society. Nearly 70 percent of Americans polled in 2005 said they believe people are more rude than they were 20 to 30 years ago.

"I literally cannot imagine having addressed any teacher I had in my career as 'Hey' and then their first name,' " said Shumow, who has a doctoral degree and has taught 15 years at NIU. "I love them. I won an award for undergraduate teaching in 2005. But man, the world has really changed from when I was a student."

To their credit, most students are respectful and more inquisitive than ever, faculty members say.

About public figures behaving badly, the recent outbursts by tennis star Serena Williams, rapper Kanye West and of course, South Carolina congressman Joe "You Lie" Wilson illustrate the second article. I like Serena, do not know anything about Kanye West and I feel that Congressman Wilson's finger wagging condemnation of the president was inappropriate. I agree that all three behaved quite outrageously. But were they very much worse than some of their predecessors in history to warrant the kind of harrumphing that the media and the public are indulging in?  Or do we feel more unsettled because the explosion in the communications tools at our hands enables us to see and experience the ugliness instantaneously and endlessly? For example, was Serena any more out of control than John McEnroe, Ilie Nastase or Jimmy Connors in their heyday? Aren't most rockers and rappers wild and uncouth?  But are they especially naughty compared to the sexist, racist and self absorbed media stars of earlier eras?  Did Wilson do more harm to Obama than another congressman from South Carolina once did to a senate member of his day? Or is our sense of public propriety really going down the slithery tube?

Is this a nation of loudmouth brats?

It's difficult to imagine Theodore Roosevelt or James Madison coaxing along the country as President Obama did Sunday on 60 Minutes, saying “the loudest, shrillest voices get the most attention. And so, one of the things I'm trying to figure out is, you know, how can we make sure that civility is interesting?”

Obama was, of course, referring to U.S. Rep Joe Wilson's highly uncivil “You lie!” outburst during a joint session of Congress last week (interesting, yes; civil, no). But who knew on the very weekend Obama cited loud, shrill voices of dissent that other uncivil voices, just as loud and shrill, were making themselves heard?

Incivility was working overtime Sunday night when hip-hop artist Kanye West interrupted 19-year-old country-pop singer Taylor Swift's acceptance speech at the MTV Video Music Awards to insist Beyoncé made a better video, and Saturday night when Serena Williams broke into an expletive-laced tirade against a line judge at the U.S. Open semifinals.

Whether it's Levi Johnston's unflattering tell-all about his almost-mother-in-law Sarah Palin in the October issue of Vanity Fair or University of Oregon running back LeGarrette Blount's sucker punch of a Boise State defensive end on national television, it seems like high season for bad behavior.

The only good take-away from these well-publicized acts of incivility? That they're not generally tolerated, said Lizzie Post, a spokeswoman for the Emily Post Institute of etiquette experts.

“The public's reaction to these things is an indicator to us that people want etiquette, appreciate etiquette and want to stand up for good behavior,” said the great-great-granddaughter of Emily Post. “It affirms for us that people don't appreciate Kanye jumping up on stage or Joe Wilson blatantly calling the president a liar. They don't appreciate those outbursts.”

Those outbursts may seem to be happening more often and in more ugly ways. Or perhaps we just get to watch.

“There are more ways for us to see it,” television and pop culture expert Robert Thompson of Syracuse University said of outbursts from West or Wilson, both of which easily broke through “the clutter of 300 channels of television and an infinity of Internet.”

It's not that we're more uncivil; it's just that there are more ways for us to witness it, Thompson said.

Norman Borlaug: Scientist, Visionary, Humanitarian (1914 - 2009)

Norman Borlaug died of cancer last Saturday. Despite being the recipient of numerous national and international honors, the Nobel Prize, Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal among them, through his long and productive life Borlaug remained quiet, unassuming and mostly unknown to the public.  But the impact of his life's mission on the world is extraordinary. A tireless crusader against world hunger, he was better known in some developing countries whose agricultural methods he helped revolutionize, than in his own homeland. An excerpt from an obituary - a brief account of Borlaug's life, his achievements and the Green Revolution:

Norman Borlaug has, in the opinion of many experts, saved more human lives than any other individual in history. He was the grandfather of the “Green Revolution” in which, between 1961 and 1980, wheat crop yields doubled, tripled and sometimes quadrupled around the world. His experiments with hybrid wheat strains and nitrogenous fertiliser created strains of the staple food impervious to pests, bad weather and poor soil, enabling the world to support a far greater human population than many thought possible after the Second World War. Yet his methods and message fell out of favour, to the detriment of millions — especially in Africa.

In the mid-1950s Malthusian doomsayers saw the contrary trajectories of population growth and food production in South-East Asia and the Indian sub-continent and predicted catastrophic worldwide starvation, the denudation of forests and seas followed by an inevitable population crash. The reversal in the Third World’s agronomic fortunes was so sudden and so miraculous that many have since forgotten the holocaust forestalled — especially, in Borlaug’s view, the trendier sections of the green lobby which seek to impose organic food and “natural” production methods on the world’s poorest countries.

Norman Borlaug was born in 1914, the grandson of Norwegian immigrants, in Saude, near Cresco, Iowa. He worked on the family farm until 19, when he signed up for the National Youth Administration, one of Franklin Roosevelt’s “alphabet agencies” set up to combat poverty and despair during the Great Depression. His commitment secured him a place at the University of Minnesota in 1933, but he ran out of money. He transferred to the College of Agriculture’s forestry service and then joined the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the US Forestry Service. As a group leader with the CCC he was in charge of many recruits who were emaciated and starving; refugees from the great Dust Bowl that had laid waste to the plains of America from Texas to South Dakota. He said: “I saw how food changed them, and this left scars on me.” 

....

In April 2002 Borlaug signed a declaration with several environmental experts, including Patrick Moore, the co-founder of Greenpeace, in favour of “high-yield conservation”. The movement against trendy agricultural primitivism has since gained pace, yet the lack of respect paid to Borlaug’s teachings in recent years is astonishing in relation to his impact on human society. Many of those who rubbished his acheivements as a “brown revolution”, he said, were Utopians and elitists who had “never experienced the physical sensation of hunger”.

He won many international awards, but his own country was slow to give him credit. In July 2007 he was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, although the wording of the law by which it was awarded sought political mileage from his acheivements: “Dr Borlaug has saved more lives than any other person who has ever lived,” it stated. “And likely has saved more lives in the Islamic world than any other human being in history.”  

Here is the long list of honors and awards bestowed upon Norman Borlaug from all around the world. 

(Blogger's note: The posting here has been infrequent of late.  I have some ideas brewing but haven't had the time to flesh them out in blog posts due to travel and other pressing tasks. I have another trip coming up next week. Will try to get something out before that. Hopefully, other authors will find the time to write also in the midst of their busy schedules. Thanks for your patience.)

Labor without love

I am a day late for this Labor Day post at 3 Quarks Daily by Manisha Verma. Having returned from my trip yesterday, I only saw the essay this morning. Manisha writes about child labor and in that context she has interviewed Bangladeshi photographer G.M.B. Akash who has taken some stunningly moving photographs of children engaged in hard, sometimes hazardous jobs. Manisha's article in 3 QD here.  A portfolio of Akash's photographs here and the gallery Born to Work, pertaining to child labor here.

 photo: G.M.B. Akash

On Malcolm Gladwell (Joe)

I couldn't have said it better myself:

IOZ: Heady stuff, no doubt. But Malcolm, won't some people say, oh, that is just glib repackaging of a totally banal and widely appreciated fundamental of everyday, lived experience?

Much Ado about A Speech (Sujatha)

From school districts all over the country, we have been seeing the likes of this statement from school boards and school administrations.

"We have been receiving many anxious phone calls from parents concerned about the content of the President's proposed speech to schoolchildren on September 8, so we will not be telecasting it live to the students for XYZ reasons. We will review the speech later to determine if it will fit in with our curriculum requirements and possibly incorporate later showings of the speech in the classroom. Rest assured that parents can opt out of their children having to view this speech at the time."

or similar.

Oh, the horror of having an actual live breathing African-American president actually address the schoolchildren of the US on the importance of staying in school, working hard, not dropping out and improving grades.

Whatever rationales these districts and schools come up with for a ban or semi-ban on the speech, they have just guaranteed a superhit on the internet and Youtube for a speech that might otherwise have been yawned through by groups of glassy-eyed sleep-deprived adolescents all over the country. Kids who wouldn't pay attention to all the boring utterances of a sitting president will now be combing and parsing the speech for any possible 'secret messages' that they suspect their parents of hiding from them under the pretext of preventing their being 'brainwashed'.

Lose your mind; become one with the cosmos (D)

Sometimes man stumbles upon great truths entirely undeservedly. Kamerlingh Onnes just happened upon superconductivity while twiddling around with mercury and refrigerators; Roentgen was playing with himself in electrical ways and realized to his shock that he could see through his skin. Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard neuroscientist, woke up one morning with headache, a stroke and noble sentiments. Her discoveries are even more astounding.

As preliminary, recall that blood clots in the brain can cause loss of language, memory, or face recognition, paralysis, personality changes and the like. What had hitherto gone unsuspected is that certain parts of the brain actively hinder us from realizing our potential. Blood clots in such undesired parts (the stodgy and linear left hemisphere, specifically) instead improve us! Indeed, they cause us to Awaken to our full, true nature, as the unshackled remainder reveals what had previously been blocked off.

Now, it is hardly surprising that no scientist has predicted this - why would large parts of the brain be actively engaged in keeping us from Truth? And yet, why should it be otherwise? After all, do we not function better without an infected appendix? Surely the loss of what forces us into dull, methodical, detail-oriented, negative-energy patterns might have similar effects! Taylor's work is being widely celebrated; she has written a bestseller, appeared on Oprah, and is recognized by Time as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Here is a colloquium where she presents her findings (a twenty minute video, but well worth the trouble. Do wait for the standing ovation she justly receives):

Her testimony is fascinating and jarring, even humbling. With bad brain gone, she found the boundaries between her body and the rest of the universe dissolving into the common Energy Field of which she discovered she was made, like everything else, and experienced herself connected, perfect and together, brother and sister with the Whole, beautiful whole. She lost all sense of her day-to-day life and work and relationships, which she found was quite compatible with Oneness. She saw the stranger in her body, that tiny, detached bit of universal consciousness, and wondered how she would ever contain such enormous vastness of being into a mere meat-brain. She realized, somewhere in the buzzing blooming confusion, that she was rising above her parochial, linear need to parse time into past, present and future and saw it pictorially, complete. As she says, she achieved Nirvana, energy lifted and spirit surrendered to the nurturing womb we all emerge from.

The connections she draws to eastern contemplative practice are perceptive and profound. Also eerie, almost frightening - how could those sages from ages ago possibly have adumbrated what materialistic Science is only now coming, dimly, to appreciate? Now, it is a bit troubling that that the path to becoming one with everything involves losing your mind. That seems to suggest something rather peculiar about what we are to unite with. But brain as yet unmutilated, we miss the brilliance of the insight: this is precisely the sort of distracting, bad-karma-thought sprit-strokes rid us of!

And to think, we each may possess such knowledge, for the contemptible price of keeping golf-ball sized clots in our heads! Taylor does say she lost the ability to read, speak, and move, and that it took her eight years to recover. Still, who among us wouldn't be tempted by the thought of even a few moments of perfect clarity? Would not viewing visvarupa compensate for blindness before and after? As she says,

"Who are we? We are the life-force power of the universe, with manual dexterity, and two cognitive minds, and we have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world. Right here, right now, I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere, where we are - I am - the life-force power of the universe. I am the LIFE-FORCE POWER of the fifty trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form! At one, with all that is!"

THIS is what we miss by retaining left-brain. Effulgent, incandescent truths are offered us. Shall we fail to confront them?

The varying shades of racism

A recent chance conversation with an Indian friend and Dean's comment on class and meritocracy, reminded me that although I have discussed racism in America and Europe on several occasions, I have probably never addressed the same issue vis-a-vis India in particular and Asia in general. Rampant racism, casteism, privilege by virtue of *high birth* and family connection is an unsavory fact of life in many parts of the world. In south Asia skin color plays a major role in determining social status, at least superficially.

It is not very well known that amidst the widely heterogeneous racial admixture that makes up the population of the Indian subcontinent, a tiny minority is of African descent. A couple of years ago, on his blog Amardeep Singh had written briefly about the Afro-Pakistani poet Noon Meem Danish. Amardeep's post contains a  link to an interesting account of the contrast between the modern Pakistani intelligentsia's political solidarity  with the distant continent of Africa and the sad plight of Pakistani citizens whose ancestors had been brought to the region as slaves from Africa centuries ago (scroll down to the last three paragraphs). The derogatory word for blacks in northern India and Pakistan is "Habshi." It packs a punch not quite as vicious as the N-word in the US, but the disdain built into the pejorative is unmistakable.

Faiz Muhammed Sheeddi and his organization have been in the forefront of advocating this community's causes. Indeed, the treatment of the sheeddis in Pakistan -- an example of which is the murder in police custody of the Afro-Sindhi youth, Mashooq Sheeddi, in 1994 at the hands of the Hyderabad police -- is reminiscent of racist police brutality against black youth in the US.

These communities closely follow events in Africa, and an example of both the interest and the identification is the fact that Faiz Muhammed Sheeddi and his fellow sheeddi tribesmen proudly say that Nelson Mandela has the same origins as themselves.

These currents of influence -- sometimes paradoxical, even contradictory -- between the continent of Africa and the region that is now Pakistan give the lie to the self-contained vision of the nation projected by the state. Instead, they bear witness to the histories of the wretched of the earth, and their struggles for solidarity. It is high time that the third world state began to reflect these histories and these realities of power, and took on again, with more seriousness than the last time, the project of solidarity.

I had left the following comment on Amardeep's post - a litany of casual observations describing what I had encountered as a young person growing up in a multi-ethnic society where color consciousness and judging people by physical attributes are ingrained.  Africans were not the only targets of derison.  

Two Indians of African descent that I was familiar with in childhood (although I only realized that fact when I was a bit older) was Siddhi, as he was commonly known, and Prakash. Siddhi was my father's favorite fishmonger who came to our home early every morning during the first ten years of my life bearing the *best catch of the day* for my father. He belonged to the Siddhi community of coastal Gujarat whose members trace their ancestry to Africa. Siddhi was dark skinned but looked not much different from many other Indians. Prakash, my uncle's motorcycle mechanic who too came to our home to do the repairs on the Royal Enfield, was a true blue African. A Kenyan by birth, he had been adopted in his infancy by a Punjabi couple in Nairobi who later moved to India when Prakash was a toddler. Well over 6' 3", he was an extremely handsome, gentle giant who spoke fluent Hindi and Punjabi. Given Prakash's size and build, I doubt that anyone called him a Habshi .... at least surely not to his face.

Habshi doesn't mean "slave" technically. It is derived from the word Abyssinian but does have a derogatory connotation in India and Pakistan. In my native language Bengali, I don't recall an equivalent word. But among my Hindi and Punjabi speaking friends, the word was common parlance. Some of my Punjabi friends' mothers would gently chide their fair complected daughters to stay out of the sun lest they start looking like "Habshis." And that extremely kinky hair that Narayan refers to, I have seen that trait mostly among dark complexioned Keralites and fair skinned Punjabis. 

By the time I was in college, (late sixties - early seventies) there were quite a few students from Africa in Delhi university. The way some students behaved with them was deplorable. They also found more difficulty in renting rooms around the university campus than other foreign students did. But then most foreign students (Thai, Arab, Indonesian, European) faced insulting conduct frequently. Even diasporic Indians from Fiji, east Africa, Mauritius etc. and genuine Indians from the northeast (Assam, Nagaland, Manipur), as also Tibetan and Sikkimese students faced rude behavior at the hands of local toughs. Most groups swallowed the insults and went about their business, sharing their discomfort with their more sympathetic Indian friends. Except the well built and fleet of foot, soccer & hockey playing Tibetan boys. I witnessed some truly blood curdling retributive justice meted out to those who made the mistake of calling them "Chinks."

The question of race is muddled and external appearances misleading but we just can't let go of it. South Asians are as obsessed with it as anyone else. Race being such an inexact category it is best not to make too much of it as James Watson has probably realized now.

Amardeep, please forgive me for two rapid links to self promotion. We have discussed the race / IQ / genetic trait controversy extensively at our blog. Please see what my co-blogger Anna wrote regarding something else Malcom Gladwell has said about IQ, this time Jewish IQ specifically.