The theme calls for a discussion of phobias and for several days I have been giving considerable thought to this matter. The dictionary defines phobia as an exaggerated usually inexplicable and illogical fear of a particular object, class of objects, or situation.
Exaggerated and inexplicable fears...hmm...what qualifies? I felt quite healthy as I weighed all my inexplicable fears and found them all wanting on the 'exaggerated' scale.
There was a time when I was very fearful of the common wall lizard found in Indian homes, usually in the summer time. That fear was indeed exaggerated and inexplicable, for these creatures are quite harmless and timid. I probably scared them more, making them shed their tails all over the place, than they ever scared me. But I was fearful of their fear response.
I never wanted to straighten paintings on walls since the space behind paintings was like a picnic under the shady tree for them! I tried to find all kinds of excuses to not make tea for guests at our home or do anything to help mom in the kitchen because it involved opening up kitchen cabinets and they were always scurrying away surprised and scared when I did that. I was afraid that in their confusion they would try to find their path to safety by using my extended arm as a bridge or falling into a cup or a glass I'd be holding. They were creepy-crawlies in the truest sense of that hyphenated description.
They kept me from sleeping in rooms where they were traversing the ceiling, chasing after bugs and they kept me from showering in bathrooms where I saw them lurking behind the door. I didn't want to see them scurrying across beds, I didn't want them falling to the floor with that sick and thwacky sound and I never wanted to stumble upon a lizard tail graveyard in any corner of the house. My fear was certainly exaggerated and definitely inexplicable. So I was lizard-phobic. Perhaps it was this phobia that drove me out of that country and to one where these creatures do not exist, at least not on the north-eastern section of the Atlantic seaboard of the US of A.
Does distance from a phobia make a phobia extinct? I wonder.
I haven't felt an imagined shudder of a creepy lizard traversing my person in many years now. But I've heard the word "creepy" used to address all sorts of phobias. For instance, at a dinner with coworkers once I heard a young person say that the old person at a bar, who was trying to strike a conversation with her "creeped" her out. Another person added to this casual comment by saying that he couldn't understand why old people did that. He added that he wasn't afraid of getting old but he was deathly afraid of getting "creepy" when he got old. I suppose suggesting that he hoped he wouldn't be making efforts to talk to young people at bars when he crossed a certain age threshold. It seemed certain people nursed "old people" (I see...old...people) phobias and certain others nursed getting old phobias.
Inexplicable? Exaggerated?
As I scan for phobias now I realize I am not afraid of spiders, lizards, sharks, clowns or dolls (although I must admit that a disheveled Barbie in a ripped ballroom gown and magic marker enhanced runny raccoon eyes, positioned by my daughter at the edge of a dining table, did always give me pause and caused an unwitting shudder). I can't imagine being afraid of open spaces or closed spaces or doctors or nurses or needles...or wheelchairs...could it mean I am phobia-free now?
Or does the ending of the last paragraph with nurses, needles and wheelchairs hint at an unconscious consideration of a fear that is slowly uncoiling at the base of the skull, the amygdala perhaps, and emerging, standing straight, just a little every year?
I do worry about old age, not so much about getting "creepy" as I grow older and not necessarily about being closer to death as the years go by. The fear that could balloon and flare to gigantic proportions as the years go by is one of being utterly useless, helpless, hopeless and/or alone.
As I walked to work the other day I was listening to a podcast from a show called "This American Life", hosted by Ira Glass. The podcast I was listening to was called "Home Alone" and in its first segment it talked about an organization that has the task of digging through the rubble of the lives of those deceased without a will, without a trace; those that passed away unknown.
The interviewer was following around a worker of this organization who was trying to find clues, any clues that would tell her who an old deceased woman's (Marianne) family was. The worker once thought she had found a woman who knew Marianne. But all the lady said was that she had seen Marianne around and smiled at her a few times. The worker finally found some clues to Marianne's house. Once she entered she saw a complete mess - scattered pizza boxes, unopened and opened boxes from the Home Shopping Network Channel on TV, unwashed dishes, unmade beds, a brand new dining table stashed under the bed, old magazines, some books and nothing else. Among all these things there were still no clues as to who Marianne's family was, who would take charge of her body, her burial or who should be informed.
She talked to a couple of Marianne's neighbors. The neighbor on one side said that Marianne looked very lonely and extremely unhappy to him. The neighbor on the other side said Marianne looked happy, contented and always made a point to greet him. Neither one recalled her ever getting visits from any family or friends and to the worker their comments about Marianne's state of mind seemed to reflect more on their own personalities than on Marianne's.
The interviewer asked the worker from this agency if she was having any luck and she said no. She said she saw this all the time. People tended to build this sort of cave around themselves, a fortress of things, more and more things. They tended to inhabit a space surrounded by a wall of things and not people. Never people. She told of how in cases such as these the bodies were cremated and the ashes left sitting on a shelf for a year or so for someone to turn up and claim them. If no one did then the county arranged for them to be scattered in graves that were simply marked by the year - 1969, 1985, 1997...and so on...all alongside each other.
The interviewer also expressed incredulity, "Didn't she think she should arrange for someone to take charge of her things, her property in the event of her death?"
I was stunned to hear such a question asked. If we aren't people who have millions or dollars or an estate to leave behind, how many of us pay any mind to what would become of our things if we were to not wake up one day?
Listening to that account brought tears to my eyes. It made me think of old age and loneliness and getting cut off from people and surrounded by random things...everywhere, in every corner of an unkempt home whose owner had lost all interest in its upkeep.
I thought of the unmarked graves and the unmarked, unrecognized ashes within. Of people who came and left without leaving a single trace, without becoming a part of anyone's memories and recollection, achieving neither minor nor major immortality.
The tears were unbidden but they weren't a lament about life; one may take one's life for granted and death is inevitable, but don't we all strive to be remembered by someone, somewhere?
If we aren't remembered we won't be around to feel any sadness or grief about it but that's what makes this phobia inexplicable and exaggerated. The fear of dying unremembered, unremarked, as if we never existed.
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Monday, November 17, 2008
In a New York Minute
There was a chill wind blowing. I had turned my collar up and was doing my best to bury my head in my coat by hunching up my shoulders. I was feeling miserable, the red lights at the crosswalks annoying me even more than usual since all I wanted to do was seek warmth, get inside somewhere, as soon as I possibly could. But my office was still several blocks away.
This was an unseasonably cold fall. The wind made the red, gold and green leaves traipse around the pavement and subway stairwells.
Leaves have this funny way of scurrying across the sidewalks on windy days. They float horizontally for a few seconds then hop vertically on the stem then tumble across to another point, dancing and shimmying along, unhurried and playful on a coldly golden day, joyous in death, mocking the living and their perpetual frowns and creases of worry.
I glanced up from the sidewalk to see if the other rushed New Yorkers shared my misery that day. I glanced upon several bundled up faces, shivering dog walkers, and catatonic folks without a home sitting and staring from sidewalk benches or sleeping flush against the walls, comatose. The runners were running, dressed in shorts and sweating even on the blustery day, giving the distinct impression that weather wasn’t a concern when there was running to be done. In other words it was life as usual on a November morning in the city.
Then I saw her again. Every hair on her head was now grey. She seemed to have added several new wrinkles around her eyes and her constantly moving and chain smoking mouth.
I first saw her four years ago, the last time I was working at this Park Avenue office. She was startling then, always dressed in red and gold heavily brocaded saris; the kind worn by Indian brides. She found a reason to wear all her gold everyday: the maang tika, mangalsutra, gold bangles, payals, toe rings, rings. Never before had I seen an Indian woman of a certain age (there were a few flecks of grey in her hair then) so passionately enthusiastic about flaunting every bit of her bridal finery on her way from her apartment to the drug store where she bought her cigarettes for the day, two blocks away. I used to see her during my lunch hour, either walking to the Duane Reade pharmacy where I usually picked up my 16 oz Diet Cherry Coke or at the Duane Reade cashiers desk, smoking, chatting and laughing with the store personnel, explaining the significance of all things red or golden on her person.
I changed jobs and worked somewhere else for four years. I forgot about the bejeweled Indian woman of Park Avenue. Now I am back, working for a different company but in the same building as the one I was in four years ago. Things have changed in this part of the town, some stores have closed and some new ones have appeared. The streets have seen the animated dance of the red, gold, purple and brown dead leaves four times since I left.
But gone are her red saris, rings, necklaces and gold bangles. They’ve been replaced by a grungy and faded nightgown of indeterminate color and a big, battered and lumpy purse that she hugs close to her person. I recognized her instantly the first time I saw her again a few weeks ago. There is something unforgettable about her face and her carriage. She still smokes as she walks her beat, to and from her apartment to the drugstore, but now she is always engaged in an active dialogue with herself, she asks herself questions and answers them, as though she shares a body with her imaginary friend. I don’t think she has fallen on financial bad times. No one residing on Park Avenue can be in such dire straits. But it has only been four years since she appeared bright, bejeweled and full of life. And so I wonder about her.
I wonder about the things that can go wrong in four years. I wonder if things changed in her life, if her husband or family hurt her in some way or if she just fell into a dark and formidable place within, from which there is no escape. How can things change so fast, so irretrievably?
The fallen leaves do a dance in the wind, then decompose into stillness. Spring makes them green again, what becomes of our lives? No rejuvenation, no rebirths, just layers of brown, grey and black accumulating around us, making us strangers to ourselves and to each other.
Whether she knows it or not she will always be as much a part of my memories, my myriad recollections. She’ll remind me about the importance of living in the moment, cherishing it, nurturing it, letting it sink in because we never know what surprises lurk around the corner.
For instance I could be watching a dancing red and gold leaf one moment and then find myself with the next stride poised in mid air as the leaf I was about to step on morphed into the tiniest red and gold colored bird I had ever seen!
A single New York minute that day was a host to the Ophelia of Park Avenue, the homeless, the runners, the dog walkers, death and dancing leaves and finally a tiny bird morphing out of a sidewalk leaf that I almost stepped on.
My daughter, an ornithologist at 7, assures me it was a wren I saw.
This was an unseasonably cold fall. The wind made the red, gold and green leaves traipse around the pavement and subway stairwells.
Leaves have this funny way of scurrying across the sidewalks on windy days. They float horizontally for a few seconds then hop vertically on the stem then tumble across to another point, dancing and shimmying along, unhurried and playful on a coldly golden day, joyous in death, mocking the living and their perpetual frowns and creases of worry.
I glanced up from the sidewalk to see if the other rushed New Yorkers shared my misery that day. I glanced upon several bundled up faces, shivering dog walkers, and catatonic folks without a home sitting and staring from sidewalk benches or sleeping flush against the walls, comatose. The runners were running, dressed in shorts and sweating even on the blustery day, giving the distinct impression that weather wasn’t a concern when there was running to be done. In other words it was life as usual on a November morning in the city.
Then I saw her again. Every hair on her head was now grey. She seemed to have added several new wrinkles around her eyes and her constantly moving and chain smoking mouth.
I first saw her four years ago, the last time I was working at this Park Avenue office. She was startling then, always dressed in red and gold heavily brocaded saris; the kind worn by Indian brides. She found a reason to wear all her gold everyday: the maang tika, mangalsutra, gold bangles, payals, toe rings, rings. Never before had I seen an Indian woman of a certain age (there were a few flecks of grey in her hair then) so passionately enthusiastic about flaunting every bit of her bridal finery on her way from her apartment to the drug store where she bought her cigarettes for the day, two blocks away. I used to see her during my lunch hour, either walking to the Duane Reade pharmacy where I usually picked up my 16 oz Diet Cherry Coke or at the Duane Reade cashiers desk, smoking, chatting and laughing with the store personnel, explaining the significance of all things red or golden on her person.
I changed jobs and worked somewhere else for four years. I forgot about the bejeweled Indian woman of Park Avenue. Now I am back, working for a different company but in the same building as the one I was in four years ago. Things have changed in this part of the town, some stores have closed and some new ones have appeared. The streets have seen the animated dance of the red, gold, purple and brown dead leaves four times since I left.
But gone are her red saris, rings, necklaces and gold bangles. They’ve been replaced by a grungy and faded nightgown of indeterminate color and a big, battered and lumpy purse that she hugs close to her person. I recognized her instantly the first time I saw her again a few weeks ago. There is something unforgettable about her face and her carriage. She still smokes as she walks her beat, to and from her apartment to the drugstore, but now she is always engaged in an active dialogue with herself, she asks herself questions and answers them, as though she shares a body with her imaginary friend. I don’t think she has fallen on financial bad times. No one residing on Park Avenue can be in such dire straits. But it has only been four years since she appeared bright, bejeweled and full of life. And so I wonder about her.
I wonder about the things that can go wrong in four years. I wonder if things changed in her life, if her husband or family hurt her in some way or if she just fell into a dark and formidable place within, from which there is no escape. How can things change so fast, so irretrievably?
The fallen leaves do a dance in the wind, then decompose into stillness. Spring makes them green again, what becomes of our lives? No rejuvenation, no rebirths, just layers of brown, grey and black accumulating around us, making us strangers to ourselves and to each other.
Whether she knows it or not she will always be as much a part of my memories, my myriad recollections. She’ll remind me about the importance of living in the moment, cherishing it, nurturing it, letting it sink in because we never know what surprises lurk around the corner.
For instance I could be watching a dancing red and gold leaf one moment and then find myself with the next stride poised in mid air as the leaf I was about to step on morphed into the tiniest red and gold colored bird I had ever seen!
A single New York minute that day was a host to the Ophelia of Park Avenue, the homeless, the runners, the dog walkers, death and dancing leaves and finally a tiny bird morphing out of a sidewalk leaf that I almost stepped on.
My daughter, an ornithologist at 7, assures me it was a wren I saw.
Sunday, November 9, 2008
An "infinitely" boring read, taking stock, that's all.
Perhaps I want to gloat just a little, perhaps I want to shed humility and suspend disbelief for a moment as I tell myself that it is possible for me to learn music, to let it seep into every musical corner of the brain, to know it as well as breathing. I didn't think it was possible. I never believed I would be able to read sheet music from a stand and play an instrument while reading it.
Two years ago, other than a certain, perhaps misplaced, confidence in being able to carry a tune, I had nothing. Musical notations meant nothing, keys and sharps and flats were alien concepts that I never believed I would be able to grasp. I only wished, desperately wished, I could.
When I participated as a back up singer in a work band, this desire intensified and went beyond a mere wish. It was just a work band that performed once a year, I was just a back up singer, but there were people in the band who had been drumming or playing the bass guitar or guitar or piano or mandolin for years. From the first day of the rehearsal to the day of the annual concert I believed I was witnessing magic before my eyes. The coordination, the collaboration the consonance of various voices affected me like nothing had before. It touched a part of me that I didn't know I had. So much went into the making of a band and such magic was possible. Words prove inadequate in describing how the experience changed me and made me wonder if I could be audacious enough to bring this desire to fruition.
I started learning how to play the violin. For the last two years I haven't missed a single day of practice. I have been meticulous, I've focused on my sound, my stance and sight reading and I periodically record myself to look for improvements. It is slow going. Sometimes my brain knows what I need to play and the tempo at which I need to play it but its instructions arrive just a few seconds later than they should have.
I can miss the beat and end up beating myself up about it. At other times I feel I am bowing and playing correctly but the sounds are scratchy and I am confused about what could be causing it. But if I look back over the last two years I see how much smoother my playing sounds. And if my teacher tells me that I sound good there's a warm glow that permeates my entire being.
I started playing Bach Chorales last week. I never thought I would be able to say that. I have to play first violin in a string ensemble that our teacher is planning for our Christmas concert. I will also be playing a song I have loved since I was a child - My Favorite Things. I never thought I would be able to play it on an instrument one day, that I could play with the metronome set at 200! I am in full-fledged gloat mode when I think about this. There isn't a soul around who would pat me on the back or not wonder why I am doing this, or what I hope to gain from this. If someone were to ask me why I am doing this my answer would probably be a question, "Why not?"
The madness didn't end there. I started learning Indian classical music around the same time as I picked up western violin. East is east and west is west and never the twain shall meet. Be that as it may but music is music. It has been my dream to learn all the raags, what makes them different, the ways in which they color the spirit as they are supposed to. This has been an immensely satisfying quest.
I am learning raag Marwa these days. A raag of amazing complexities, depths and nuances. A raag with a personality so distinct, with its teevra ma, skipped pa and the constant emphasis on komal re and dha that it can transport one to a higher plane of consciousness. So far it has come to me with ease. I can close my eyes and sink into the sea of emotions it generates. I actually feel each note, it is hard to describe how it fills me up, how I feel I am sinking into it as I hear it and as I close my eyes and sing it. My teacher has asked me to perform it at the spring concert for her students in early January.
The last time I was at this concert I had been asked to perform raag Khamaj. I had practiced for days and without an audience and even at the rehearsal I did very well. At the concert I started with tremendous confidence but then I forgot the last few taans. I was unbelievably nervous, my palms were sweating, the faces in the audience were all merging into one blurry mass and I found a way to end the song sooner than I was supposed to. I thought I had done miserably. But the post concert comments and compliments surprised me. No one realized I had forgotten the last few taans, no one saw the beads of perspiration or my nervousness. They liked my performance. That was all very encouraging, but never again do I want to feel as nervous as I did that day.
And now it's going to be Marwa. It is rarely performed, there isn't much out there to listen to. There is a composition by Pt Bhimsen Joshi that I've been listening to and an Amir Khan performance that I haven't yet found. But I know I'll do well this time. This raag has seeped in deep and made an unforgettable impression.
So things are going well musically. I can't complain. I love the pursuit of things that stretch out endlessly, things that span eternity, things where the strength of ones aspiration is the only thing that counts. Music is that eternity, that infinite blessing that will shelter me like the sky and surround me like the air I breathe, trilling in my ears like the laughter of my daughter and shaking me to the core as her slightest tears often do.
Almost everything else is slowly morphing into something finite, almost all other paths appear to lead to dead ends or a brick walls through which one cannot pass. For two years I have been following the US elections very closely. I didn't bother myself with the nation's politics before. I read the headlines, prided myself on being generally aware and sufficiently educated about most issues. But beyond this cursory and often desultory interest I really didn't care much. I didn't care until the rhetoric got rancorous, until every issue took on a burning urgency and until the extent to which we were a divided nation sunk in. I found myself addicted to the news, carried away by opinions. I was a part of every analysis and had my own opinion on everything. I wanted to be more than just a little bit educated about everything. My day felt incomplete if I hadn't read every bit of news there was to read.
Our historic elections are over. The candidate I was supporting has won. There's euphoria, the celebrations continue even as everyone admits they are aware of the long and hard road ahead. There isn't as much news to watch anymore. However, the talking heads continue to talk, the op-ed pieces in national papers are still not tired of discussing the historic outcome. They can go on and on about how the Republican party will rebuild itself, heal its wounds, how President Obama will handle the pressing issues of the day, whether taxes will go up or not. The issues are always the same, the emotions, the opinions, the analysis is almost always the same no matter how diverse the pundits are. As far as politics is concerned it is a finite world, a gamut of options and opinions but finite, with boundaries and set choices. Or, at least that is the world to which we are accustomed. Will new things happen, will newer solutions emerge? That remains to be seen.
Work. My work. It gives me pause these days. I do my work well. I have responsibilities and tasks and I have a conscience and a work ethic that keeps me going. I arrive and leave at set hours, I do somethings on Mondays, somethings on Tuesdays, I attend meetings, put little numbers in little boxes and answer questions. Nothing changes, nothing is ever different, there are no signs of infinite possibilities and opportunities. I am ambivalent about routine and structure. But being ambivalent means I don't hate it or love it. Would I love a job I am not ambivalent about? Absolutely! Anything to erase this notion of things being finite, of there only being so many options from which to choose.
Our new President-elect has shown us that the world is full of possibilities, one can do what one sets ones mind to doing. There have been many moments in my life where I've believed this and have been rewarded by this belief. The most rewarding moments have been the ones where I have had to step out of my comfort zone, just a tad. Of late my comfort zones have become a bit too dear to me. I am unwilling to step out of them even as I wile away every twenty four hour period in idle contemplation and idle taking of stock on an obscure blog. This Sunday is over and I have nothing to show for it. The work week is here, the same repetitive tasks are at hand. I am dreaming of making a difference, of making a worthy contribution and I am paralyzed with inaction and have no plans, no ideas, nothing but an idle dream waiting for the impulse that would propel it into reality, into a world of possibilities as infinite as music.
Two years ago, other than a certain, perhaps misplaced, confidence in being able to carry a tune, I had nothing. Musical notations meant nothing, keys and sharps and flats were alien concepts that I never believed I would be able to grasp. I only wished, desperately wished, I could.
When I participated as a back up singer in a work band, this desire intensified and went beyond a mere wish. It was just a work band that performed once a year, I was just a back up singer, but there were people in the band who had been drumming or playing the bass guitar or guitar or piano or mandolin for years. From the first day of the rehearsal to the day of the annual concert I believed I was witnessing magic before my eyes. The coordination, the collaboration the consonance of various voices affected me like nothing had before. It touched a part of me that I didn't know I had. So much went into the making of a band and such magic was possible. Words prove inadequate in describing how the experience changed me and made me wonder if I could be audacious enough to bring this desire to fruition.
I started learning how to play the violin. For the last two years I haven't missed a single day of practice. I have been meticulous, I've focused on my sound, my stance and sight reading and I periodically record myself to look for improvements. It is slow going. Sometimes my brain knows what I need to play and the tempo at which I need to play it but its instructions arrive just a few seconds later than they should have.
I can miss the beat and end up beating myself up about it. At other times I feel I am bowing and playing correctly but the sounds are scratchy and I am confused about what could be causing it. But if I look back over the last two years I see how much smoother my playing sounds. And if my teacher tells me that I sound good there's a warm glow that permeates my entire being.
I started playing Bach Chorales last week. I never thought I would be able to say that. I have to play first violin in a string ensemble that our teacher is planning for our Christmas concert. I will also be playing a song I have loved since I was a child - My Favorite Things. I never thought I would be able to play it on an instrument one day, that I could play with the metronome set at 200! I am in full-fledged gloat mode when I think about this. There isn't a soul around who would pat me on the back or not wonder why I am doing this, or what I hope to gain from this. If someone were to ask me why I am doing this my answer would probably be a question, "Why not?"
The madness didn't end there. I started learning Indian classical music around the same time as I picked up western violin. East is east and west is west and never the twain shall meet. Be that as it may but music is music. It has been my dream to learn all the raags, what makes them different, the ways in which they color the spirit as they are supposed to. This has been an immensely satisfying quest.
I am learning raag Marwa these days. A raag of amazing complexities, depths and nuances. A raag with a personality so distinct, with its teevra ma, skipped pa and the constant emphasis on komal re and dha that it can transport one to a higher plane of consciousness. So far it has come to me with ease. I can close my eyes and sink into the sea of emotions it generates. I actually feel each note, it is hard to describe how it fills me up, how I feel I am sinking into it as I hear it and as I close my eyes and sing it. My teacher has asked me to perform it at the spring concert for her students in early January.
The last time I was at this concert I had been asked to perform raag Khamaj. I had practiced for days and without an audience and even at the rehearsal I did very well. At the concert I started with tremendous confidence but then I forgot the last few taans. I was unbelievably nervous, my palms were sweating, the faces in the audience were all merging into one blurry mass and I found a way to end the song sooner than I was supposed to. I thought I had done miserably. But the post concert comments and compliments surprised me. No one realized I had forgotten the last few taans, no one saw the beads of perspiration or my nervousness. They liked my performance. That was all very encouraging, but never again do I want to feel as nervous as I did that day.
And now it's going to be Marwa. It is rarely performed, there isn't much out there to listen to. There is a composition by Pt Bhimsen Joshi that I've been listening to and an Amir Khan performance that I haven't yet found. But I know I'll do well this time. This raag has seeped in deep and made an unforgettable impression.
So things are going well musically. I can't complain. I love the pursuit of things that stretch out endlessly, things that span eternity, things where the strength of ones aspiration is the only thing that counts. Music is that eternity, that infinite blessing that will shelter me like the sky and surround me like the air I breathe, trilling in my ears like the laughter of my daughter and shaking me to the core as her slightest tears often do.
Almost everything else is slowly morphing into something finite, almost all other paths appear to lead to dead ends or a brick walls through which one cannot pass. For two years I have been following the US elections very closely. I didn't bother myself with the nation's politics before. I read the headlines, prided myself on being generally aware and sufficiently educated about most issues. But beyond this cursory and often desultory interest I really didn't care much. I didn't care until the rhetoric got rancorous, until every issue took on a burning urgency and until the extent to which we were a divided nation sunk in. I found myself addicted to the news, carried away by opinions. I was a part of every analysis and had my own opinion on everything. I wanted to be more than just a little bit educated about everything. My day felt incomplete if I hadn't read every bit of news there was to read.
Our historic elections are over. The candidate I was supporting has won. There's euphoria, the celebrations continue even as everyone admits they are aware of the long and hard road ahead. There isn't as much news to watch anymore. However, the talking heads continue to talk, the op-ed pieces in national papers are still not tired of discussing the historic outcome. They can go on and on about how the Republican party will rebuild itself, heal its wounds, how President Obama will handle the pressing issues of the day, whether taxes will go up or not. The issues are always the same, the emotions, the opinions, the analysis is almost always the same no matter how diverse the pundits are. As far as politics is concerned it is a finite world, a gamut of options and opinions but finite, with boundaries and set choices. Or, at least that is the world to which we are accustomed. Will new things happen, will newer solutions emerge? That remains to be seen.
Work. My work. It gives me pause these days. I do my work well. I have responsibilities and tasks and I have a conscience and a work ethic that keeps me going. I arrive and leave at set hours, I do somethings on Mondays, somethings on Tuesdays, I attend meetings, put little numbers in little boxes and answer questions. Nothing changes, nothing is ever different, there are no signs of infinite possibilities and opportunities. I am ambivalent about routine and structure. But being ambivalent means I don't hate it or love it. Would I love a job I am not ambivalent about? Absolutely! Anything to erase this notion of things being finite, of there only being so many options from which to choose.
Our new President-elect has shown us that the world is full of possibilities, one can do what one sets ones mind to doing. There have been many moments in my life where I've believed this and have been rewarded by this belief. The most rewarding moments have been the ones where I have had to step out of my comfort zone, just a tad. Of late my comfort zones have become a bit too dear to me. I am unwilling to step out of them even as I wile away every twenty four hour period in idle contemplation and idle taking of stock on an obscure blog. This Sunday is over and I have nothing to show for it. The work week is here, the same repetitive tasks are at hand. I am dreaming of making a difference, of making a worthy contribution and I am paralyzed with inaction and have no plans, no ideas, nothing but an idle dream waiting for the impulse that would propel it into reality, into a world of possibilities as infinite as music.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Hope
I was interviewed for a magazine awhile ago. The theme of the interview was parenting and the questions they asked me were about my parenting experiences.
If you have a strong broadband connection, oodles of patience to deal with "buffering..." or "streaming..." type messages and more than thirty minutes of time you can see see it here.
Many of my friends viewed it and offered a wide range of comments. But the part of the interview that gives me pause is a point in the film where I say I am not meeting the expectations I have from myself. In response to a question I say that my daughter is a better version of me and my Mom was a better mom to me than I am to my daughter, so I leave much to be desired where I am concerned.
This is something that I think about often. Which is why I was struck by some sentiments expressed by Barack Obama in his book: The Audacity of Hope. In a chapter where he is talking about his life, his marriage and his relationship with Michelle, Malia and Sasha, he discusses the point in his marriage where things were tough on them as a family. He was away in Springfield often and Michelle had to find ways to split her time between being a Mom and working. Things got tense often. In his book he said something about understanding how Michelle felt. He referred to her feeling as if she was inadequate as a Mom, that she wasn't being as good a Mom as her own Mom had been.
I was moved to hear that, moved at the realization that I wasn't the only woman in the world who felt this way and also at the fact that he understood how she felt. He often felt inadequate as a father.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
On Pennilessness
Rendered penniless! Perish the thought. There was a time several years ago when we were on vacation in Vermont. There were so many bottles of maple syrup to buy and so many quaint little train rides to take where we could witness a fabulous Vermont Fall. But all of these things required cash.
We felt quite confident when we inserted our ATM card into the machine and asked for $100 or so in “fast cash”. But soon enough it was abundantly clear that even slow cash wouldn’t be forthcoming! It’s a wonder our ATM card didn’t get shredded by the machine: our account showed us heavily overdrawn and in the red.
We were effectively penniless in Vermont. It was a sinking feeling. We had credit cards but many years of our misspent youth well defined the words “credit abuse” so we were trying to reform and weren’t up for mortgaging our future any more than it already was.
There was nothing we could do except get sullen, sulk, bicker and point fingers; we were a bipartisan household after all. I was certain I could blame our financial crisis on him and he was certain he could blame it on my shoe-lined closet.
We spent a miserable day or two walking around Burlington, VT and Lake Champlain and then came home to earn some more and get the checking account in the black again.
That wasn’t the only time we experienced poverty, however. During another financial meltdown we found ourselves in dire straits but thankfully not penniless. In our infinite penny wise and pound foolish wisdom we had stashed away several penny jars around the house. We spent many hours checking under sofa cushions, drawers, coat pockets and at the end of our labors emerged with $15 so we could head off to the grocery store for some bare essentials.
We’ve been rendered not penniless (thank god) but certainly nickel, dime, quarters and dollar less for days, weeks and months at a time. We let our credit bubbles get too big, we were out of jobs, we almost always spent as if we had an infinite, albeit imaginary source of money; we almost always had a very myopic stance toward money. Age has taught us some caution but hasn’t obliterated the spending impulse that won’t be quelled and won’t take no for an answer. The only thing that makes sense in those impulsive moments is Scarlett’s, “Tomorrow is another day”.
We know these things are cyclical. If you’re a country perhaps they hit once every seventy-nine years but if you’re a person perhaps the cycles have a higher frequency. So if we are riding a boom today, chances are that the next penurious moment is just around the corner.
We were younger and more agile in our previous troughs. We knew we would land the jobs we wanted, we knew our entire lives were ahead of us. In our weakest moments we even thought that the cushiony familial net would save us, be our own personal “bailout” if we were ever beyond help. Now, after all these years, we are at the age where whether we like it or not subtle and very effectively concealed age related job discrimination starts rearing its ugly head. Our safety nets are also much older themselves and with very specific health care needs and other concerns which are inevitable and only a couple of decades away for us.
So what would we do indeed? What could we do if it happened now?
These days the scene from the movie –Bicycle Thief – comes to mind. In a brilliantly nuanced bit of filmmaking, when the wife of the protagonist goes to the pawn shop to pawn her bed sheets to raise some money for her husband, she notices rows upon rows and shelves upon shelves of bed linen bundles at the shop. In one deft move of the camera we get a very real sense of the condition of the economy.
For similar visual impact one can glance at the boarded up stores, the empty parking lots with tufts of grass and weeds peeking through the cracks of what used to be busy and active manufacturing plants and thriving businesses, boarded up homes, foreclosure signs, signs that indicate that a business is going out of business or liquidating.
In the industry that helps me earn my keep I am starting to read about job eliminations, cost-cutting, streamlining, restructuring. Every day thousands of former colleagues and acquaintances find themselves jobless. Just like a friend from my Yoga class informed us today that she had lost her job last week but is continuing with Yoga since it helps.
I’ve lived through this before. The day I was laid off, several years ago, I felt as if I had fallen down a deep and dark well. I felt helpless and more frightened than I had ever been before. I remember cleaning out my office space then and collecting all the pennies that tend to accumulate in desk drawers and idle coffee mugs. However, I didn’t take these pennies with me. I left them in a quaint little jar and then took some pains to print out a neat little label to stick on it. The label said, “For help toward the cost-cutting efforts of Co. XYZ”. I left that jar on my ex-desk. At that moment my response to the situation was bitter sarcasm.
But what would it be now? No matter how hard I think about it I am not sure how I will react. These days I pass by the hobbling bag ladies and cart-men wheeling their way through the streets of Manhattan as the weather gets colder and colder…and the people who sit around with their head down and a cardboard sign detailing how they lost everything and just need some money for food, I curse myself whenever I have been lazy enough to not break my stride and drop some change in their cups, and the thought that trails me and starts to rise up through some corner of my brain says, “There but for the grace of God, goes Pragya Thakur”.
We felt quite confident when we inserted our ATM card into the machine and asked for $100 or so in “fast cash”. But soon enough it was abundantly clear that even slow cash wouldn’t be forthcoming! It’s a wonder our ATM card didn’t get shredded by the machine: our account showed us heavily overdrawn and in the red.
We were effectively penniless in Vermont. It was a sinking feeling. We had credit cards but many years of our misspent youth well defined the words “credit abuse” so we were trying to reform and weren’t up for mortgaging our future any more than it already was.
There was nothing we could do except get sullen, sulk, bicker and point fingers; we were a bipartisan household after all. I was certain I could blame our financial crisis on him and he was certain he could blame it on my shoe-lined closet.
We spent a miserable day or two walking around Burlington, VT and Lake Champlain and then came home to earn some more and get the checking account in the black again.
That wasn’t the only time we experienced poverty, however. During another financial meltdown we found ourselves in dire straits but thankfully not penniless. In our infinite penny wise and pound foolish wisdom we had stashed away several penny jars around the house. We spent many hours checking under sofa cushions, drawers, coat pockets and at the end of our labors emerged with $15 so we could head off to the grocery store for some bare essentials.
We’ve been rendered not penniless (thank god) but certainly nickel, dime, quarters and dollar less for days, weeks and months at a time. We let our credit bubbles get too big, we were out of jobs, we almost always spent as if we had an infinite, albeit imaginary source of money; we almost always had a very myopic stance toward money. Age has taught us some caution but hasn’t obliterated the spending impulse that won’t be quelled and won’t take no for an answer. The only thing that makes sense in those impulsive moments is Scarlett’s, “Tomorrow is another day”.
We know these things are cyclical. If you’re a country perhaps they hit once every seventy-nine years but if you’re a person perhaps the cycles have a higher frequency. So if we are riding a boom today, chances are that the next penurious moment is just around the corner.
We were younger and more agile in our previous troughs. We knew we would land the jobs we wanted, we knew our entire lives were ahead of us. In our weakest moments we even thought that the cushiony familial net would save us, be our own personal “bailout” if we were ever beyond help. Now, after all these years, we are at the age where whether we like it or not subtle and very effectively concealed age related job discrimination starts rearing its ugly head. Our safety nets are also much older themselves and with very specific health care needs and other concerns which are inevitable and only a couple of decades away for us.
So what would we do indeed? What could we do if it happened now?
These days the scene from the movie –Bicycle Thief – comes to mind. In a brilliantly nuanced bit of filmmaking, when the wife of the protagonist goes to the pawn shop to pawn her bed sheets to raise some money for her husband, she notices rows upon rows and shelves upon shelves of bed linen bundles at the shop. In one deft move of the camera we get a very real sense of the condition of the economy.
For similar visual impact one can glance at the boarded up stores, the empty parking lots with tufts of grass and weeds peeking through the cracks of what used to be busy and active manufacturing plants and thriving businesses, boarded up homes, foreclosure signs, signs that indicate that a business is going out of business or liquidating.
In the industry that helps me earn my keep I am starting to read about job eliminations, cost-cutting, streamlining, restructuring. Every day thousands of former colleagues and acquaintances find themselves jobless. Just like a friend from my Yoga class informed us today that she had lost her job last week but is continuing with Yoga since it helps.
I’ve lived through this before. The day I was laid off, several years ago, I felt as if I had fallen down a deep and dark well. I felt helpless and more frightened than I had ever been before. I remember cleaning out my office space then and collecting all the pennies that tend to accumulate in desk drawers and idle coffee mugs. However, I didn’t take these pennies with me. I left them in a quaint little jar and then took some pains to print out a neat little label to stick on it. The label said, “For help toward the cost-cutting efforts of Co. XYZ”. I left that jar on my ex-desk. At that moment my response to the situation was bitter sarcasm.
But what would it be now? No matter how hard I think about it I am not sure how I will react. These days I pass by the hobbling bag ladies and cart-men wheeling their way through the streets of Manhattan as the weather gets colder and colder…and the people who sit around with their head down and a cardboard sign detailing how they lost everything and just need some money for food, I curse myself whenever I have been lazy enough to not break my stride and drop some change in their cups, and the thought that trails me and starts to rise up through some corner of my brain says, “There but for the grace of God, goes Pragya Thakur”.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Redistribution of Wealth
How baffling is it that Senator McCain and Governor Palin are now accusing Senator Obama and Senator Biden for wanting to redistribute the wealth! Calling him a socialist because his ideas smack of a redistribution or spreading of wealth?
Do they even know what they are talking about, or do they just stand in front of the mirror and try out different words seeing how the word influences their facial expressions or how it sounds rolling off their tongues?
They are supposed to be Republicans, conservatives. They believe in conserving, they believe in being packrats who deal in filling their attics with failed policies and dogma. It has been their stated belief that wealth "trickles down" to the less fortunates because encouraging the fortunate ones results in reinvestment and job creation for the children of the lesser gods. The fact that this never happens aside from the pages of Miltonian textbooks often escapes their notice.
However, what is it that they keep parroting about Senator Obama scarily believing in the redistribution of wealth? Don't they believe in it as well? Or are they changing their ideology to one where they don't support even a tiny bit of trickle? Not even a drop? What are they saying? Let them eat cake? What in their minds is the meaning of the phrase "redistribution of wealth"? I suppose they believe taking steps to ensure a trickle down, like maybe adjusting the faucet a bit, pointing it downwards a bit, is out of the question and completely unacceptable. If the faucet is turned off, leave it just so. Is that the point of this tirade?
The party and the candidate I support find trickle-down economics (i.e. an automatic redistribution of wealth) ridiculous! But even so, they are being attacked on this basis in a mixed and confused message from the other side that makes about as much sense as the Palinesque opposition to fruit flies!
They are not into social Darwinism as propounded by Spencer when he coined the term "survival of the fittest". The history of evolution has shown that we have reached this stage of evolution through a mix of competition and cooperation, collaboration with our fellow humans. If it was just about doing what we do best and storing the gains away in a hole in the ground we would not be where we are.
But obviously that is a finer point of logic, intellectualism and knowledge that can warm only the cockles of an intellectual, elitist heart!
Do they even know what they are talking about, or do they just stand in front of the mirror and try out different words seeing how the word influences their facial expressions or how it sounds rolling off their tongues?
They are supposed to be Republicans, conservatives. They believe in conserving, they believe in being packrats who deal in filling their attics with failed policies and dogma. It has been their stated belief that wealth "trickles down" to the less fortunates because encouraging the fortunate ones results in reinvestment and job creation for the children of the lesser gods. The fact that this never happens aside from the pages of Miltonian textbooks often escapes their notice.
However, what is it that they keep parroting about Senator Obama scarily believing in the redistribution of wealth? Don't they believe in it as well? Or are they changing their ideology to one where they don't support even a tiny bit of trickle? Not even a drop? What are they saying? Let them eat cake? What in their minds is the meaning of the phrase "redistribution of wealth"? I suppose they believe taking steps to ensure a trickle down, like maybe adjusting the faucet a bit, pointing it downwards a bit, is out of the question and completely unacceptable. If the faucet is turned off, leave it just so. Is that the point of this tirade?
The party and the candidate I support find trickle-down economics (i.e. an automatic redistribution of wealth) ridiculous! But even so, they are being attacked on this basis in a mixed and confused message from the other side that makes about as much sense as the Palinesque opposition to fruit flies!
They are not into social Darwinism as propounded by Spencer when he coined the term "survival of the fittest". The history of evolution has shown that we have reached this stage of evolution through a mix of competition and cooperation, collaboration with our fellow humans. If it was just about doing what we do best and storing the gains away in a hole in the ground we would not be where we are.
But obviously that is a finer point of logic, intellectualism and knowledge that can warm only the cockles of an intellectual, elitist heart!
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
A Bresh of Freath Air!!
Oh how we crave an Alaskan "bresh of freath air"...one that has so energized a certain campaign. Senator McCain is so proud of her that he glows. Now McCain and his "fellow prisoners" can revel in this bresh freath, gliding around picking daisies, shooting moose and raising arthritic pincers, forming air quotes around the phrase "health of the mother". Oh these pro-abortion women they are Just. So. Obsessed with the health of the mother! My God! How delusional are these democrats!
Another thing McCain did was put on a puppy face, or maybe a sad old dog face, while he tried to make himself look like a victim of the most negative campaigning ever seen in recent history. Yes, you read that right! McCain feels victimized by negative campaign ads run by the Obama campaign!
"Let me tell you I am very proud of the people who attend my rally", this was said in response to Senator Obama highlighting the incendiary comments made by McCain/Palin rally attendees! He is proud of racist people who call out "Kill Him!"?? Followed by, "I have repudiated allegations of this nature every time, Senator Obama has never repudiated anything."
I don't know if one limp wristed and weak voiced "repudiation" where McCain told a woman who thought that Obama was an Arab. "No, no ma'am, he is a decent family man". I don't know if that amounts to "every time". Senator Obama hasn't had much to repudiate from his supporters or crowds at his rally, they aren't rabid and frothing at the mouth. They haven't been running around accusing McCain of "palling around with terrorists" they haven't indulged racist supporters who bring stuffed monkeys wearing McCain hats to the rally, they haven't heard shouts of "treason", "kill him", "off with his head"...so who is Senator Obama supposed to repudiate?
Apparently Senator McCain is very hurt by John Lewis's statement where the name of George Wallace came up. It was an unfortunate comparison but it was meaningful in highlighting the thread of seething violence that laces McCain/Palin rallies. That crowd could be incited to violence. That is the point that John Lewis was hoping to make and it was a well made point.
I think Senator McCain has secured two votes, one from Joe the Plumber and one from Joe SixPack. Women concerned about their health are certainly not going to put their futures in the hands of the mavericky team, nor are the Lily Ledbetter's of the world who are denied equal pay for equal work.
The rest of us who care about the economy, who prioritize energy independence, health care reform and education and who feel a physical sense of ailment and sickness at the memory of the last eight years need to cast our votes in favor of an intelligent, eloquent, caring and compassionate man, the "cool hand at the tiller" who even McCain feels we need. That "cool hand" is certainly not Senator McCain.
Another thing McCain did was put on a puppy face, or maybe a sad old dog face, while he tried to make himself look like a victim of the most negative campaigning ever seen in recent history. Yes, you read that right! McCain feels victimized by negative campaign ads run by the Obama campaign!
"Let me tell you I am very proud of the people who attend my rally", this was said in response to Senator Obama highlighting the incendiary comments made by McCain/Palin rally attendees! He is proud of racist people who call out "Kill Him!"?? Followed by, "I have repudiated allegations of this nature every time, Senator Obama has never repudiated anything."
I don't know if one limp wristed and weak voiced "repudiation" where McCain told a woman who thought that Obama was an Arab. "No, no ma'am, he is a decent family man". I don't know if that amounts to "every time". Senator Obama hasn't had much to repudiate from his supporters or crowds at his rally, they aren't rabid and frothing at the mouth. They haven't been running around accusing McCain of "palling around with terrorists" they haven't indulged racist supporters who bring stuffed monkeys wearing McCain hats to the rally, they haven't heard shouts of "treason", "kill him", "off with his head"...so who is Senator Obama supposed to repudiate?
Apparently Senator McCain is very hurt by John Lewis's statement where the name of George Wallace came up. It was an unfortunate comparison but it was meaningful in highlighting the thread of seething violence that laces McCain/Palin rallies. That crowd could be incited to violence. That is the point that John Lewis was hoping to make and it was a well made point.
I think Senator McCain has secured two votes, one from Joe the Plumber and one from Joe SixPack. Women concerned about their health are certainly not going to put their futures in the hands of the mavericky team, nor are the Lily Ledbetter's of the world who are denied equal pay for equal work.
The rest of us who care about the economy, who prioritize energy independence, health care reform and education and who feel a physical sense of ailment and sickness at the memory of the last eight years need to cast our votes in favor of an intelligent, eloquent, caring and compassionate man, the "cool hand at the tiller" who even McCain feels we need. That "cool hand" is certainly not Senator McCain.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
"I Know How to Do That, I Can Do That!"
I watched the debate tonight and every time I heard Senator McCain speak it was reminiscent of an ingratiating bellboy or porter or anyone who desperately wants your approval or wants to be rewarded by your benevolent regard. He reeks of desperation and his annoying and pathetic refrain tonight was, "I know how to do that, I can do that!"
His answer to every question was pretty much the same. He kept saying he could "do it", that a "cool hand at the tiller" was needed. How a candidate can be so out of touch to really believe that he will be perceived as that cool hand on the tiller is beyond me. Especially when he strikes me as someone who is about to meltdown in a fashion similar to Jack Nicholson's character in A Few Good Men, when he can't take anymore and says, "You want the truth, you can't handle the truth!!!"
I remember not paying much attention to this election about a year or so ago. Senator Clinton and Senator Obama were duking it out in the primaries. My mind was already made up. I knew I would vote for either one when the time came. I am quite vehemently opposed to the Republican ideology and a proud citizen of blue USA. But I read Business Week's prediction of a McCain win. I wasn't shocked by that. I didn't balk at that prospect. Senator McCain still seemed like someone I could like and respect. His reputation was different enough from the ones who are about to leave our country in tatters after eight years of abuse and rape.
The McCain we see now doesn't inspire, doesn't impress, in fact, in his choice of running mate, in his despicable and desperate campaign ad attacks on Senator Obama, in the unleashing of his rabid pitbull in lipstick, heels and a top knot, in their collective indulgence in smear tactics of the gutter variety (never getting any of it back in kind) he disgusts, they disgust.
His answer to every question was pretty much the same. He kept saying he could "do it", that a "cool hand at the tiller" was needed. How a candidate can be so out of touch to really believe that he will be perceived as that cool hand on the tiller is beyond me. Especially when he strikes me as someone who is about to meltdown in a fashion similar to Jack Nicholson's character in A Few Good Men, when he can't take anymore and says, "You want the truth, you can't handle the truth!!!"
I remember not paying much attention to this election about a year or so ago. Senator Clinton and Senator Obama were duking it out in the primaries. My mind was already made up. I knew I would vote for either one when the time came. I am quite vehemently opposed to the Republican ideology and a proud citizen of blue USA. But I read Business Week's prediction of a McCain win. I wasn't shocked by that. I didn't balk at that prospect. Senator McCain still seemed like someone I could like and respect. His reputation was different enough from the ones who are about to leave our country in tatters after eight years of abuse and rape.
The McCain we see now doesn't inspire, doesn't impress, in fact, in his choice of running mate, in his despicable and desperate campaign ad attacks on Senator Obama, in the unleashing of his rabid pitbull in lipstick, heels and a top knot, in their collective indulgence in smear tactics of the gutter variety (never getting any of it back in kind) he disgusts, they disgust.
Friday, October 3, 2008
Hair of the Dog
I am a teetotaler (rejected this particular form of addiction in favor of others) but the “hangover” phenomenon has always interested me. Not to sound puritanical, although no matter how I put it, it will sound exactly that, hangovers are quite the manifestation of the consequences of unrestrained behavior. I’ve observed many miserable people around me the morning after and wondered why they didn’t think this would happen the next day.
But there isn’t much to wonder there, really. I go back to my long held belief that self-destructive behavior is built into our codes. If it isn’t drinking it’s gambling, shopping, eating, being promiscuous or simply exploring newer ways to shoot ourselves in our feet, or skirt loopholes, beat the system and make beaucoup d’argent on Wall Street.
For instance if mortgages secured through subprime lenders are going bad why not create debt instruments that speculate on the number of expected credit defaults or bet on people not paying their mortgages? What a brilliant plan! All part of the same essential need to self-destruct, since exercising restraint and caution is really for the birds or, rather, the ants.
So on hangovers again, there was a very interesting article in the New Yorker written by Joan Acocella, called, “A Few Too Many”. It stated how the most effective treatment for a hangover is usually the hair of the dog and not for a reason more scientific than the fact that it diverts the liver’s focus from the processing of the alcohol binge related toxins (this is what causes the nausea, the headaches, the vomiting) in the system and redirects attention to processing the alcohol again and to creating more toxins.
I am amazed at how much the “bailout plan” is starting to sound like a hair of the dog treatment for the economy, “Give them more of the same”!
These are very interesting times in this country. If you try to think back to what you learnt in school, what your economics professors taught you, you can claw and grope for remnants of scraps of knowledge that might help you understand what’s going on but no answers would be forthcoming because they didn’t tell you about this in the textbooks you read.
If you’ve never wasted your time studying economics or finance in school but have tried to be someone who spends a little and saves a little and religiously contributes to a savings plan administered by your employer, and you expect your actions will lead to a secure future for you and your family, well, now you stare at the ticker tapes scrolling by, fist in your mouth, frozen in time.
If you never studied anything in school, if you never went to college but maintained a work ethic that led you to storing everything you had under you mattress, you probably sit on that couch that sits in the middle of a living room of the home that you were hoping to own after thirty years or in a room of your rented apartment. You crack open your beer, after a long and hard days work, like the Joe Six Pack you are, turn on the television and chance upon these people running around scared as the markets crumble and people scream about punishing greed and evil. You cheer, you say they deserve it, that it was long time coming and they got what was coming to them. You may even think you are immune to the problem since you never trusted those suckers anyway.
So now the powers that be decide that the Bacchanalian excess is over and that Dionysus needs to be banished to whence he emerged. Time to take charge, intervene, set things right; they decide that markets cannot be free anymore; time to ground the recalcitrant child.
They spend a few minutes thinking about other cures for hangover, they ponder, they deliberate; they remain baffled. Then they think of the time-tested hair of the dog. And we have ourselves the infamous bailout plan!
It is put forth as the only cure, the only plan out there that can help us dig ourselves out of this hole. No one has a better plan, there are no alternatives.
What a perfect time to witness democracy in action! Now we’re talking, I mean, really talking! In an election year, no less!
Suddenly everyone is paying attention to the talking heads on the 24 hour news cycles. So far all one had heard from the candidates was how one side would raise taxes, the other won’t, how one side would drag you down and the other will uplift you, how one side was pro-life and the other pro-death. The usual election buzz words, nothing earth-shattering, nothing new despite lip service to the word “change”; and now we had ourselves a real crisis. What fun, what will they do now?
People wait by their television sets, ears cocked, waiting for one of the candidates to offer up their plan for emerging from this crisis. Nothing, no one has a real plan. There are the usual exhortations against greed and evil and a show of support for “the cure”.
Then we see our bicameral legislature in action! This is what they mean when they say freedom and democracy! Let it ring! Now we understand it so clearly.
The outgoing President, who believes things like legacy and history don’t count because in history we’ll all be dead, warns the nation of the direst of all possible consequences, if the hair of the dog wasn’t administered immediately.
The bill is deliberated by the House of Representatives. The Representatives receive emails and phone calls from their angry constituents warning them with dire consequences if they vote for it. So many of the Representatives are up for reelection this year they cannot afford to lose their votes. No one understands the bill anyway. The economy be damned, the plan is awful, we’ve got to listen to the people who elected us, we are their voice, let’s scrap it!
The bill doesn’t clear the house. There are speeches made about coffins being placed on top of coffins, of resolute stances. The DJIA slumps by 778 points.
Then the bill gets to the Senate. Senators, somewhat removed from direct contact with the people, expected to take a longer term view of things, expected to show some foresight, add several billion dollars in tax cuts, sweeten the pot, make it more palatable to the House and send it back after passing it 74-25. The bill now sits in the house of scared representatives who wonder if the markets will crash some more if they vote against it, or if their voters will make them step down from office if they vote for it; a market that already plunged several points in anticipation of a rejection of the bill yet again. They are so keen on doing what’s right, in taking the action that will help them preserve their seats in the House of Representatives so that they can continue to be the voice of the people who elected them, so keen.
Our candidates, senators both of them, voted for the rescue bill. However, one of them was seen advocating a veto by the President if and when it cleared the House. He expects a presidential veto on a bill he voted in favor of! But nothing that candidate says surprises anyone anymore. He reverses his positions on a daily basis. Keep ‘em guessing, maybe that’s what it means to be a maverick.
Interesting times indeed!
So over the last 2-3 weeks, everyone has had a chance to wonder if the bailout is really the best idea out there. The more one ponders it, the more it stinks.
Isn’t this a world of infinite possibilities? Why not make the problem a fiscal one? Why not put in place programs that enable folks to be better able to pay their mortgages? So that the “toxic mess” gets a run through a treatment facility, so to speak. Get the toxins out, refine and distil.
But if Main Street – ers could provide seemingly workable solutions we’d all be on Wall Street!
But it is hard to believe that there really is no other way out of the credit crunch. Aren’t there enough accomplished and capable free market practitioners, like Warren Buffett, out there who can help keep their markets, their playing grounds, free, all on their own, sans government intervention? Shouldn’t the government now be asking for $692 billion because Buffett has already forked over $8 billion for Goldman Sachs and General Electric? Bill Gates, Bloomberg, Oprah…what say? This is the richest country in the world, after all.
It’s like this, you either believe in free markets or you don’t. Free markets do not rule out corrections of this nature. The corrections may be minor at times and disastrous at other times. You run that risk when you convince yourself that nothing except pure capitalism works.
If you have faith (often misplaced) in the markets’ ability to self-regulate and self-stabilize then you should let the correction ride its course and bear the consequences of your actions, silently suffer your hangover in the meantime.
What seems counter-intuitive is a myopic view of things.
We run wild...oh no...we fell...we got hurt...we need to curl up in a fetal position in a governmental womb, let mommy and daddy fix our problems, then when the coast is clear we’ll go back to raising a ruckus again.
Why not try behaving well all the time?
I know, I know, where is the fun in that?
But there isn’t much to wonder there, really. I go back to my long held belief that self-destructive behavior is built into our codes. If it isn’t drinking it’s gambling, shopping, eating, being promiscuous or simply exploring newer ways to shoot ourselves in our feet, or skirt loopholes, beat the system and make beaucoup d’argent on Wall Street.
For instance if mortgages secured through subprime lenders are going bad why not create debt instruments that speculate on the number of expected credit defaults or bet on people not paying their mortgages? What a brilliant plan! All part of the same essential need to self-destruct, since exercising restraint and caution is really for the birds or, rather, the ants.
So on hangovers again, there was a very interesting article in the New Yorker written by Joan Acocella, called, “A Few Too Many”. It stated how the most effective treatment for a hangover is usually the hair of the dog and not for a reason more scientific than the fact that it diverts the liver’s focus from the processing of the alcohol binge related toxins (this is what causes the nausea, the headaches, the vomiting) in the system and redirects attention to processing the alcohol again and to creating more toxins.
I am amazed at how much the “bailout plan” is starting to sound like a hair of the dog treatment for the economy, “Give them more of the same”!
These are very interesting times in this country. If you try to think back to what you learnt in school, what your economics professors taught you, you can claw and grope for remnants of scraps of knowledge that might help you understand what’s going on but no answers would be forthcoming because they didn’t tell you about this in the textbooks you read.
If you’ve never wasted your time studying economics or finance in school but have tried to be someone who spends a little and saves a little and religiously contributes to a savings plan administered by your employer, and you expect your actions will lead to a secure future for you and your family, well, now you stare at the ticker tapes scrolling by, fist in your mouth, frozen in time.
If you never studied anything in school, if you never went to college but maintained a work ethic that led you to storing everything you had under you mattress, you probably sit on that couch that sits in the middle of a living room of the home that you were hoping to own after thirty years or in a room of your rented apartment. You crack open your beer, after a long and hard days work, like the Joe Six Pack you are, turn on the television and chance upon these people running around scared as the markets crumble and people scream about punishing greed and evil. You cheer, you say they deserve it, that it was long time coming and they got what was coming to them. You may even think you are immune to the problem since you never trusted those suckers anyway.
So now the powers that be decide that the Bacchanalian excess is over and that Dionysus needs to be banished to whence he emerged. Time to take charge, intervene, set things right; they decide that markets cannot be free anymore; time to ground the recalcitrant child.
They spend a few minutes thinking about other cures for hangover, they ponder, they deliberate; they remain baffled. Then they think of the time-tested hair of the dog. And we have ourselves the infamous bailout plan!
It is put forth as the only cure, the only plan out there that can help us dig ourselves out of this hole. No one has a better plan, there are no alternatives.
What a perfect time to witness democracy in action! Now we’re talking, I mean, really talking! In an election year, no less!
Suddenly everyone is paying attention to the talking heads on the 24 hour news cycles. So far all one had heard from the candidates was how one side would raise taxes, the other won’t, how one side would drag you down and the other will uplift you, how one side was pro-life and the other pro-death. The usual election buzz words, nothing earth-shattering, nothing new despite lip service to the word “change”; and now we had ourselves a real crisis. What fun, what will they do now?
People wait by their television sets, ears cocked, waiting for one of the candidates to offer up their plan for emerging from this crisis. Nothing, no one has a real plan. There are the usual exhortations against greed and evil and a show of support for “the cure”.
Then we see our bicameral legislature in action! This is what they mean when they say freedom and democracy! Let it ring! Now we understand it so clearly.
The outgoing President, who believes things like legacy and history don’t count because in history we’ll all be dead, warns the nation of the direst of all possible consequences, if the hair of the dog wasn’t administered immediately.
The bill is deliberated by the House of Representatives. The Representatives receive emails and phone calls from their angry constituents warning them with dire consequences if they vote for it. So many of the Representatives are up for reelection this year they cannot afford to lose their votes. No one understands the bill anyway. The economy be damned, the plan is awful, we’ve got to listen to the people who elected us, we are their voice, let’s scrap it!
The bill doesn’t clear the house. There are speeches made about coffins being placed on top of coffins, of resolute stances. The DJIA slumps by 778 points.
Then the bill gets to the Senate. Senators, somewhat removed from direct contact with the people, expected to take a longer term view of things, expected to show some foresight, add several billion dollars in tax cuts, sweeten the pot, make it more palatable to the House and send it back after passing it 74-25. The bill now sits in the house of scared representatives who wonder if the markets will crash some more if they vote against it, or if their voters will make them step down from office if they vote for it; a market that already plunged several points in anticipation of a rejection of the bill yet again. They are so keen on doing what’s right, in taking the action that will help them preserve their seats in the House of Representatives so that they can continue to be the voice of the people who elected them, so keen.
Our candidates, senators both of them, voted for the rescue bill. However, one of them was seen advocating a veto by the President if and when it cleared the House. He expects a presidential veto on a bill he voted in favor of! But nothing that candidate says surprises anyone anymore. He reverses his positions on a daily basis. Keep ‘em guessing, maybe that’s what it means to be a maverick.
Interesting times indeed!
So over the last 2-3 weeks, everyone has had a chance to wonder if the bailout is really the best idea out there. The more one ponders it, the more it stinks.
Isn’t this a world of infinite possibilities? Why not make the problem a fiscal one? Why not put in place programs that enable folks to be better able to pay their mortgages? So that the “toxic mess” gets a run through a treatment facility, so to speak. Get the toxins out, refine and distil.
But if Main Street – ers could provide seemingly workable solutions we’d all be on Wall Street!
But it is hard to believe that there really is no other way out of the credit crunch. Aren’t there enough accomplished and capable free market practitioners, like Warren Buffett, out there who can help keep their markets, their playing grounds, free, all on their own, sans government intervention? Shouldn’t the government now be asking for $692 billion because Buffett has already forked over $8 billion for Goldman Sachs and General Electric? Bill Gates, Bloomberg, Oprah…what say? This is the richest country in the world, after all.
It’s like this, you either believe in free markets or you don’t. Free markets do not rule out corrections of this nature. The corrections may be minor at times and disastrous at other times. You run that risk when you convince yourself that nothing except pure capitalism works.
If you have faith (often misplaced) in the markets’ ability to self-regulate and self-stabilize then you should let the correction ride its course and bear the consequences of your actions, silently suffer your hangover in the meantime.
What seems counter-intuitive is a myopic view of things.
We run wild...oh no...we fell...we got hurt...we need to curl up in a fetal position in a governmental womb, let mommy and daddy fix our problems, then when the coast is clear we’ll go back to raising a ruckus again.
Why not try behaving well all the time?
I know, I know, where is the fun in that?
Thursday, October 2, 2008
And in Palin land...
"The toxic mess is spreading from Main Street to Wall Street".
Er...hello...anybody home Sarah?
Darn right it is! You betcha!
I am surprised that no one has picked up on that little sound bite from the Vice Presidential debate. Wonder what kind of toxic mess we Main Streeters are spreading on over to Wall Street.
She wrinkled her nose a lot, she winked as though there was grit in her eyes and she refused to answer any questions that were asked. In fact the answer to healthcare, taxes, economy were always somehow ...energy!
Sigh...the red states are probably celebrating because nothing can sway them from their entrenched beliefs.
Er...hello...anybody home Sarah?
Darn right it is! You betcha!
I am surprised that no one has picked up on that little sound bite from the Vice Presidential debate. Wonder what kind of toxic mess we Main Streeters are spreading on over to Wall Street.
She wrinkled her nose a lot, she winked as though there was grit in her eyes and she refused to answer any questions that were asked. In fact the answer to healthcare, taxes, economy were always somehow ...energy!
Sigh...the red states are probably celebrating because nothing can sway them from their entrenched beliefs.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Credit crunch
America runs on credit, always has, always will. Credit cards are placed in very young hands and borrowing is what makes everything happen at all levels.
Credit is now drying up and this economy cannot survive if banks refuse to lend to individuals and companies and to each other. That's as basic as it gets.
How we got here? Well, think of the money borrowed and spent in Iraq, trillions of dollars spent where they didn't need to be spent. That is what started it all. And of course Wall Street greed. All a result of startling incompetence leading to the beggaring of a nation and consequently the world, since we are all so virally connected.
There is enough blame to go around and the public wants to punish Wall Street. They think this is all about punishing Wall Street. So what happens when tomorrow ATMs refuse to spit their money out or when some companies run out of money to make payroll? We are who we elect!
Republicans are refusing to pass the bailout plan because they were swamped by emails and phone calls from their angry constituents. What a wonderful time they all picked to start listening to angry constituents and not lobbyists! No one is displaying even an ounce of foresight! It is all about those greedy guys getting what they deserved, all about opposing policies perceived as "liberal" or "placing a coffin on top of Ronald Reagan's coffin" according to House Republican Darrell Issa who is "resolute" in his opposition to the plan! What about the country? It is the "New Deal" that brought the US out of the Great Depression in the 30s. It called for the government stepping in in a very big way.
There are words of caution everywhere about the credit crunch choking the country, effectively killing it and yet politicians are volleying, jockeying, politicking without an ounce of intelligence or foresight!
Credit is now drying up and this economy cannot survive if banks refuse to lend to individuals and companies and to each other. That's as basic as it gets.
How we got here? Well, think of the money borrowed and spent in Iraq, trillions of dollars spent where they didn't need to be spent. That is what started it all. And of course Wall Street greed. All a result of startling incompetence leading to the beggaring of a nation and consequently the world, since we are all so virally connected.
There is enough blame to go around and the public wants to punish Wall Street. They think this is all about punishing Wall Street. So what happens when tomorrow ATMs refuse to spit their money out or when some companies run out of money to make payroll? We are who we elect!
Republicans are refusing to pass the bailout plan because they were swamped by emails and phone calls from their angry constituents. What a wonderful time they all picked to start listening to angry constituents and not lobbyists! No one is displaying even an ounce of foresight! It is all about those greedy guys getting what they deserved, all about opposing policies perceived as "liberal" or "placing a coffin on top of Ronald Reagan's coffin" according to House Republican Darrell Issa who is "resolute" in his opposition to the plan! What about the country? It is the "New Deal" that brought the US out of the Great Depression in the 30s. It called for the government stepping in in a very big way.
There are words of caution everywhere about the credit crunch choking the country, effectively killing it and yet politicians are volleying, jockeying, politicking without an ounce of intelligence or foresight!
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Blindness and Seeing
In Portuguese Nobel laureate Jose Saramago's novel Seeing there are two political parties. Both have a set rhetoric. Rhetoric that makes vacuous promises within the parameters defined by the ideology of their respective parties; parties similar to the conservatives and liberals of every democratic nation in the world.
On election day, in Seeing, no one shows up to vote, election officials at first believe it had something to do with the incessant rain. People are encouraged to come in and exercise their franchise and finally toward the end of the day they start trickling in and casting their ballots.
One assumes all is well at this point and the reader of the novel could never imagine what the author would have in store for them next. When the votes are counted, however, it turns out that about 83% of the ballots are blank. Everyone, with the exception of 17% of the people, cast a blank ballot!
There are no winners, no losers. It is rejection en masse of all politicians, a deep disenchantment with either side, an unprecedented case of extreme electoral disillusionment.
This transpires in the first few pages of the book and for those who haven't read it yet, or intend to read it (something I highly recommend) I am not about to insert spoilers.
Seeing is the sequel to his novel Blindness which has been made into a movie, set to release in a few weeks. In Blindness we see a contagion of blindness. One after another, people start succumbing to a strange form of white blindness apparently spreading through contact.
The government responds with classic inaction, reacting by forcing an evacuation and setting up a quarantine facility somewhere at the outskirts of the city and then forgetting about those afflicted.
In the sequel, Seeing, sight has been restored, clearer than it had ever been before.
I read these novels a few years ago. Our wonderful rainbow colored economic bubble, in the United States, was inflating at a nice pace. it was even sprouting little bubbles that were drifting and swirling all around us in the forms of innovative derivations from traditional financial instruments.
The ideas presented in these novels didn't appear oracular then. Even the associations between the first novel and the sequel seemed distant.
Now the bubbles have burst.
Two words crossed my line of vision today, "virally connected". They brought forth an immediate association with Saramago's two novels.
The contagion here is spreading and it isn't restricted to the boundaries of the United States of America. Tainted milk isn't just a Chinese problem and leveraged futures not just an American one.
The solution? Once again, hopelessly deadlocked politicians with a nebulous solution loosely termed a "bailout". Who or what exactly is being bailed out is quite the mystery. We know there is a document that has grown from two pages to a whopping one hundred pages. No one knows what's in the document. They aren't familiar with the "letter of the document". The POTUS himself is sending panic through the system, suggesting that if the "document" isn't signed then it would cause widespread panic!
Strangely enough, it is an election year in the US. We have our conservatives suggesting they would conserve something no one cares about anymore and liberals promising to liberate us from the shackles of conservatism while the voters wonder what they're doing in the middle with clowns to the left of them and jokers to the right. The candidates have admitted to being unfamiliar with what lurks within the "document".
Blank ballots anyone?
On election day, in Seeing, no one shows up to vote, election officials at first believe it had something to do with the incessant rain. People are encouraged to come in and exercise their franchise and finally toward the end of the day they start trickling in and casting their ballots.
One assumes all is well at this point and the reader of the novel could never imagine what the author would have in store for them next. When the votes are counted, however, it turns out that about 83% of the ballots are blank. Everyone, with the exception of 17% of the people, cast a blank ballot!
There are no winners, no losers. It is rejection en masse of all politicians, a deep disenchantment with either side, an unprecedented case of extreme electoral disillusionment.
This transpires in the first few pages of the book and for those who haven't read it yet, or intend to read it (something I highly recommend) I am not about to insert spoilers.
Seeing is the sequel to his novel Blindness which has been made into a movie, set to release in a few weeks. In Blindness we see a contagion of blindness. One after another, people start succumbing to a strange form of white blindness apparently spreading through contact.
The government responds with classic inaction, reacting by forcing an evacuation and setting up a quarantine facility somewhere at the outskirts of the city and then forgetting about those afflicted.
In the sequel, Seeing, sight has been restored, clearer than it had ever been before.
I read these novels a few years ago. Our wonderful rainbow colored economic bubble, in the United States, was inflating at a nice pace. it was even sprouting little bubbles that were drifting and swirling all around us in the forms of innovative derivations from traditional financial instruments.
The ideas presented in these novels didn't appear oracular then. Even the associations between the first novel and the sequel seemed distant.
Now the bubbles have burst.
Two words crossed my line of vision today, "virally connected". They brought forth an immediate association with Saramago's two novels.
The contagion here is spreading and it isn't restricted to the boundaries of the United States of America. Tainted milk isn't just a Chinese problem and leveraged futures not just an American one.
The solution? Once again, hopelessly deadlocked politicians with a nebulous solution loosely termed a "bailout". Who or what exactly is being bailed out is quite the mystery. We know there is a document that has grown from two pages to a whopping one hundred pages. No one knows what's in the document. They aren't familiar with the "letter of the document". The POTUS himself is sending panic through the system, suggesting that if the "document" isn't signed then it would cause widespread panic!
Strangely enough, it is an election year in the US. We have our conservatives suggesting they would conserve something no one cares about anymore and liberals promising to liberate us from the shackles of conservatism while the voters wonder what they're doing in the middle with clowns to the left of them and jokers to the right. The candidates have admitted to being unfamiliar with what lurks within the "document".
Blank ballots anyone?
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Listen to the candidates debate...
Remember this?
How would Milton Friedman, the one who shaped Reaganomics, have reacted to the Paulson plan?
Conservatives garner tremendous support because they reject big government and are largely perceived as the ones who would ease the tax payers’ burden by cutting taxes. Paulson’s plan proposes large scale government involvement.
Earlier in his campaign Barack Obama was heard praising President Reagan and his policies; his call for less government, in an attempt to appear more centrist. Both candidates were promising tax cuts, albeit for different classes of people.
Now both sides are screaming for more regulation, more oversight and more government intervention. We can’t fault them for that. The nation faces a financial crisis and taxpayer dollars are being set aside for a proposed $700 billion bailout (click on the hyperlink for humor and enlightenment) and yes if our money is going to be spent in this manner, to absorb the fallout from the actions of a greed-driven Wall Street (remember how greed was supposed to be good, not so long ago?), then yes we deserve a foolproof plan. We deserve accountability and oversight, kudos to the candidates for insisting on bipartisan collaboration on this issue.
Both candidates have issued a “joint statement” where promises were made to set aside differences in order to work on a resolution together. The statement included five points of action credited to Senator Obama. There was nothing, no proposed roadmap or negotiation goals from Senator McCain. Tomorrow morning we’ll see both candidates meeting on this with President Bush.
This morning, as I was walking to work, I was inwardly cringing at Republicans attempting to brand Obama as “elitist”, at smirking right-wing talking heads who greet maverick moves with cheers of support. I was thinking about the last eight years of acting on gut feelings, on messages received during direct conversations with God, of boldly going where no weapons of mass destruction were ever found. I was wondering why they were always so keen on rejecting intelligence, analysis, considered viewpoints. Can no one see that this is the reason we find ourselves amidst a raving Idiocracy?
These were my idle Wednesday morning commuting thoughts. Then I got to my desk and logged on to the New York Times website for some news with my coffee. Imagine my surprise when I read this in a very informative article by David Leonhardt:
“Most members of Congress have no expertise in the byzantine details of mortgage finance — or even have aides on their staff with such expertise.
“The problem here is none of us has that kind of advice,” Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, who knows more about Wall Street than most of his colleagues, told me. ”
Congress has no one on staff to advise them. Chuck Schumer believes no one really understands or knows what to do. And they’re getting criticized left and right about classic Democratic dithering and interaction! They are failing to respond with the requisite urgency to the $700 billion plan! How unpatriotic of them.
Again, no one knows what they are doing. No one can tell whether what we need to pay is $700 billion for this rescue effort or just perhaps a $100 billion? What is the right amount? No one has a sense of what these assets are really worth and what their future selling price would be, what premiums if any could be realized. Just how mortgaged does our future need to be to the mortgage-backed securities crisis?
Why don’t our senators and congressman know what to do? Why do we elect ignorant officials? Why are we so convinced that intellectualism as defined by education, thinking and reasoning is not all that it is touted to be?
I am glad that some of them (Democrats) now realize how little they know, admitting ignorance is after all, a great first step toward enlightenment.
Senator McCain has admitted to wanting to be president simply because it has been his lifelong ambition. Should Americans vote him into office just to see the fruition of his ambitions, to reward him for being a POW? He has also admitted to a lack of understanding of economic policies. Can we afford someone in office again who professes a lack of understanding about economic policies?
His advisor was a consultant to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They claim he hasn’t had anything to do with them. Yet they paid him $15,000 a month. What did they pay for? McCain was asked about Rick Davis. He claimed that the man had nothing to do with them or that he had ever been paid. He invited an examination of Rick Davis’s records!
Then we have Carly Fiorina, the ex-CEO of Hewlett Packard who was ejected with a $42 million golden parachute in 1995. When questioned about this McCain responds that he believed she did a good job and that he had no knowledge of her compensation package. Is McCain’s distracting sideshow, the pounding of the lectern about caps on CEO salaries, based on Carly’s advice?
He wants to fight greed, he wants to fight evil. He wants to stress his heroism at war while conveniently sweeping Keating Five under a rug. He also talks about the economy being fundamentally strong. When questioned about that he changes to the populist tone of the American workers being the fundamentals of the economy and reiterating that he thinks the workers of America are strong. Perhaps he has failed to notice that the strong workers of America are increasingly unemployed!
He has voted with Bush 95% of the time, so how is he going to be any different from the man who has been in charge for the last eight years? The cowboy who got on his horse, just like the horse thief, the rider in his favorite painting who resembles him, and ran the country right off the cliff? Does McCain have special skills to help us clamber back up to safety? Does Sarah Palin? She counts, you see, because she has been overheard calling their ticket the Palin-McCain ticket!
Does anyone remember the Beardstown ladies? Can hockey moms, with pitbull attitudes, lead the country out of a financial mess? Grandmas cannot dole out maverick investment advice and hockey moms, with a fondness for witch hunting pastors, cannot run the country, no matter what the red states believe, not even after a two day long crash course in foreign policy. Moose hunting and being second in command to the “leader of the free world” require different and mutually exclusive skill sets. Retreating to the governor’s mansion in Alaska and going back to “seeing” Russia from a little window is a better option for such characters than being put in a position to take on Vladimir Putin. And there is nothing sexist about this statement. If the vice presidential nominee had been a soccer dad who felt that a baseball cap was the only difference between his kind of people and…pitbulls…my reaction would have been the same.
It’s so easy for so many people to be fascinated by mavericks, to be wooed and hypnotized by purveyors of “common sense” and gut instinct; rough riders and “action” minded individuals who criticize others for their words not translating into sufficient action. They fail to realize that there exists a continuum of thoughtless action and dithering inaction. Neither extreme works, but somewhere in the middle of that range, there is room for higher ground, where it’s conceivable that thoughts and actions can coalesce seamlessly. Our elected officials must show that they can be capable of such enlightenment before we place our trust in them.
This campaigning season has been bitter and contentious. There has been a lot of mudslinging, lots of spin doctoring, lots of election winning promises made. Suddenly none of that matters. The financial crisis ensured that. Reaganomics won’t work, laissez-faire policies have been rendered obsolete and meaningless, tax cut promises will not make sense anymore because we will bear the burden of the bailout for years to come. What then can the candidates promise? The times have changed, expectations have changed.
David Brooks had this to say in a New York Times opinion piece entitled – The Establishment Lives!:
“So we have arrived at one of those moments. The global financial turmoil has pulled nearly everybody out of their normal ideological categories. The pressure of reality has compelled new thinking about the relationship between government and the economy. And lo and behold, a new center and a new establishment is emerging.
The Paulson rescue plan is one chapter. But there will be others. Over the next few years, the U.S. will have to climb out from under mountainous piles of debt. Many predict a long, gray recession. The country will not turn to free-market supply-siders. Nor will it turn to left-wing populists. It will turn to the safe heads from the investment banks. For Republicans, people like Paulson. For Democrats, the guiding lights will be those establishment figures who advised Barack Obama last week - including Volcker, Rober Rubin and Warren Buffett."
It's possible that some people who actually know what they are talking about may be at the helm of this new world, steering us into a preferred future, if the Democrats win. If the Republicans win things won't look quite so good. Senator McCain, who admits to the economy not being his strong suit, was seen hobnobbing with corporate raiders and tax evaders...to add to his entourage of failed CEOs and influence peddlers.
So one may ask what Senator Obama brings to the table and why we should place our trust in his stewardship, a valid question, given his inexperience.
I would vote for him because he brings intelligence and education to the table, because every time I listen to him he makes sense. He brings strength of character. He has shown fortitude in being the community organizer that he was when he could have been making millions of dollars in a law firm. Right there he showed what it meant to dedicate one’s life to public service. Because he owns one car, an American made hybrid vehicle, unlike his opponent’s stable of 13 imported cars and seven houses. Nothing wrong with that...except he shouldn't go around telling voters that he doesn't remember ever buying anything that wasn't American made, with an eye on Detroit voters. Yes, he's bought American made houses perhaps! Seven of them.
He brings sincerity and he brings hope. His opponent brings none of the above, not in my humble opinion. And after eight years of an unprecedented humbling of America, a loss of face on the world scene, a ravaged economy, we owe ourselves the promise of hope. We have nothing to lose by giving someone new a chance over the next four years. Elections do happen every four years.
Saturday, September 20, 2008
David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace just committed suicide. I had been meaning to read him. I had passed his books by so many times at the stores - Infinite Jest - is one that comes to mind. I picked it up and put it back so many times after reading the back cover. I wanted to read it but at 2.6 pounds and 1,088 pages it seemed really daunting to someone who only reads during the daily commute to work and is usually overloaded with other heavy things, tangible and intangible.
But I read about him constantly. This is a speech he gave at Kenyon College, Ohio. I wish I was in the audience there listening to him give this speech. It has made the most sense of all things I have come across recently.
Whenever I've been stuck in traffic or in long checkout lines or when I find that people are just in my way I've tried to take a step back and think about how much of a downward spiral that line of thought really is. Such thoughts often lead to others, as thoughts often do, and after a long chain of summoning, rejecting, whittling and chiseling only one idea or notion remains: doing something for someone else, living outside of oneself. For me these are idle thoughts. Reality usually intrudes in many discordant overtones and I go right back to being a self-centered and self-absorbed person. I know someday I'll be a better human being; where there's a will there's a way and still a lot of years ahead of me.
But this is why the speech struck such a chord. Especially this:
But I read about him constantly. This is a speech he gave at Kenyon College, Ohio. I wish I was in the audience there listening to him give this speech. It has made the most sense of all things I have come across recently.
Whenever I've been stuck in traffic or in long checkout lines or when I find that people are just in my way I've tried to take a step back and think about how much of a downward spiral that line of thought really is. Such thoughts often lead to others, as thoughts often do, and after a long chain of summoning, rejecting, whittling and chiseling only one idea or notion remains: doing something for someone else, living outside of oneself. For me these are idle thoughts. Reality usually intrudes in many discordant overtones and I go right back to being a self-centered and self-absorbed person. I know someday I'll be a better human being; where there's a will there's a way and still a lot of years ahead of me.
But this is why the speech struck such a chord. Especially this:
Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship - be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles - is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things - if they are where you tap real meaning in life - then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already - it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. Worship power - you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart - you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.Next stop is the bookstore. Now I am really hungry for more. RIP - David Foster Wallace.The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the "rat race" - the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Of Bipolar Bears, Bulls, Hawks, Doves, Crows...
The first time I ever heard of animals representing the market was in 1986 in a national income accounting class in college. I remember the lecture because our Professor, a student of Simon Kuznets, asked the class if we knew what a bearish market or a bullish market meant. Of course none of us had a clue. She decided it would be best illustrated by an enactment and proceeded to walk around the classroom in a forward slumping, inward crouching walk and explaining that the market behaved in this manner when it was bearish and then she looked up, adopted a loping gait and strode around to demonstrate the bullish contrast.
These days I conjure up an image of a growling, feral, grouchy, slouching bear at every waking hour, it seems. Perhaps I even dream of formidable grizzlies; it's a good thing I never remember my dreams. The image is almost always accompanied by the words "slouching towards Bethlehem", words that first appeared in Yeats' Second Coming.
Joan Didion, one of my favorite essayists, titled one of her essays "Slouching towards Bethlehem", in the preface to the book she talked about coming to terms with disorder in order to ever be able to write again.
I open my eyes every morning to a world that has unraveled just a little more overnight.
A little over a decade ago I remember placing and winning various bets with my rather bearish and Eeyore-ish boss about how much closer to the 10,000 mark the Dow Jones index was going to be the next day. The "bull" was certainly ebullient then. And sure enough it happened, one fine morning, for the first time in its history the DJIA had hit the 10000 mark. Celebrations, felicitations!
It kept up a steady climb over the years, getting up to and hovering around 12000 for a very long time. This morning as I was walking to work I decided not to avert my eyes from the scrolling electronic displays that appear around the city. I had been trying not to let the news about Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch hobble my stride but in that instant I decided to face my fears and saw the 10559 number scroll by. It closed at 10609 today! Are we headed back to the pre-10000 days, will it stop there or are we headed right back to the 1930s as money takes flight?
Was this simply a decade long gargantuan bubble we were riding? Did this war torn, tense world give us the rising fuel costs which in turn gave us the worldwide food crises, the inflation, the defaulting mortgages, the collapse of the sub-prime lending industry and other real estate related investments? It is all connected and even a profoundly unaware person like me is aware of macroeconomic consequences and domino-like effects of things. How is it then that the McCain -Palin campaign believes that our economy is fundamentally sound? How can this nation possibly sustain a prolonged war and an ostrich-like approach to the economy, to the nation's health care system, to social security, to the ever-growing energy crisis, to unemployment? How?
What makes so many people cheer on with the "Drill baby drill" slogan when smaller countries like Denmark and Iceland are paving the way and showing others how to wean themselves off fossil fuel completely? Has anyone even heard of the 2000 Watt Society here? How have things ended up in such an inescapable tangle here in this country?
Perhaps it would be a good idea to invest in mattress companies now as people think about storing their hard earned dollars under mattresses.
In our lifetime we learn to expect the cyclical nature of things, we retreat and reemerge and continue on until we finally move on, leaving future generations to come to terms with the roller coasters of their lives, but what if all of a sudden one is gripped with a fear that things won't be quite so sinusoidal anymore? What if the bleeding is arterial and cannot be stemmed?
There were serial bomb blasts in Delhi a few days ago. A group called the Indian Mujahedeen took credit for the blasts. The blasts were ostensibly in retaliation to actions of the Bajrang Dal. A few weeks before that, all of a sudden, one started hearing about Christians being attacked in the eastern Indian state of Orissa. This morning I read about churches and monasteries being attacked in Mangalore in Karnataka, India. Before that I read several stories of India's CRPF unleashing their brutality against Muslims in Kashmir. The CRPF! I'm certain their mandate includes serving and protecting and doesn't include kicking and beating widowed, pregnant women in the belly, women officers!
What could ever justify that behavior, what history, what deep wounds? Are the reports I am reading fabricated? I don't want to believe they are true. There is 'us' and 'them' rhetoric flying around everywhere, retaliation, counter-retaliation, nothing but violence and no signs of reason or sanity prevailing anywhere!
Another memory returns, this time of Elie Wiesel's Nobel Prize acceptance speech. My best friend's Dad had brought to our attention his speech, it had been printed in the Times of India. After my friend's Dad talked to us about the speech I remember having saved the newspaper clipping for a very long time. It had made quite an impression on me. What's memorable about that speech is Elie Wiesel's denunciation of anyone who chooses not to take a side, the right side.
Neutrality is cowardice disguised. If one wants to feel proud of ones humanity one needs to believe that and act on it. But how far does one go to discover how deep the wounds really run, to discover who is blameless and who is to blame and which side is indeed the right side? Are we all nothing but feral beasts when faced with desperation and utter hopelessness?
There are those of us, including yours truly, who will live our lives as armchair warriors and talking heads (although I am more of an armchair devil's advocate or fence-sitter) . We'll get on our soapboxes (just like this) to tell others what we think is wrong with the world. There will be long and pointless debates about who did what to whom first and where it all began and who deserves to be punished or compensated.
Another class, another lecture, comes to mind. This time a class on negotiations and a professor explaining "hawks" and "doves" to us. Some take a hawkish and violent, militant approach to settling a dispute and some are pacifists, mediators, hearing out each side and trying to come to a well-reasoned solution that usually settles around a compromise of sorts with all parties perhaps losing a little ground.
But the rest of us, the armchair warriors, the media, the bloggers are probably all carrion crows, cawing and enhancing the message of chaos, doing our bit to spread paranoia as we feed a frenzy and do our best to divide public opinion while cultivating a defense for the side we perceive is "right".
The beast slowly rises and slouches towards Bethlehem.
These days I conjure up an image of a growling, feral, grouchy, slouching bear at every waking hour, it seems. Perhaps I even dream of formidable grizzlies; it's a good thing I never remember my dreams. The image is almost always accompanied by the words "slouching towards Bethlehem", words that first appeared in Yeats' Second Coming.
- Surely some revelation is at hand;
- Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
- The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
- When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
- Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
- A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
- A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
- Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
- Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
- The darkness drops again; but now I know
- That twenty centuries of stony sleep
- Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
- And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
- Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Joan Didion, one of my favorite essayists, titled one of her essays "Slouching towards Bethlehem", in the preface to the book she talked about coming to terms with disorder in order to ever be able to write again.
I open my eyes every morning to a world that has unraveled just a little more overnight.
A little over a decade ago I remember placing and winning various bets with my rather bearish and Eeyore-ish boss about how much closer to the 10,000 mark the Dow Jones index was going to be the next day. The "bull" was certainly ebullient then. And sure enough it happened, one fine morning, for the first time in its history the DJIA had hit the 10000 mark. Celebrations, felicitations!
It kept up a steady climb over the years, getting up to and hovering around 12000 for a very long time. This morning as I was walking to work I decided not to avert my eyes from the scrolling electronic displays that appear around the city. I had been trying not to let the news about Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch hobble my stride but in that instant I decided to face my fears and saw the 10559 number scroll by. It closed at 10609 today! Are we headed back to the pre-10000 days, will it stop there or are we headed right back to the 1930s as money takes flight?
Was this simply a decade long gargantuan bubble we were riding? Did this war torn, tense world give us the rising fuel costs which in turn gave us the worldwide food crises, the inflation, the defaulting mortgages, the collapse of the sub-prime lending industry and other real estate related investments? It is all connected and even a profoundly unaware person like me is aware of macroeconomic consequences and domino-like effects of things. How is it then that the McCain -Palin campaign believes that our economy is fundamentally sound? How can this nation possibly sustain a prolonged war and an ostrich-like approach to the economy, to the nation's health care system, to social security, to the ever-growing energy crisis, to unemployment? How?
What makes so many people cheer on with the "Drill baby drill" slogan when smaller countries like Denmark and Iceland are paving the way and showing others how to wean themselves off fossil fuel completely? Has anyone even heard of the 2000 Watt Society here? How have things ended up in such an inescapable tangle here in this country?
Perhaps it would be a good idea to invest in mattress companies now as people think about storing their hard earned dollars under mattresses.
In our lifetime we learn to expect the cyclical nature of things, we retreat and reemerge and continue on until we finally move on, leaving future generations to come to terms with the roller coasters of their lives, but what if all of a sudden one is gripped with a fear that things won't be quite so sinusoidal anymore? What if the bleeding is arterial and cannot be stemmed?
There were serial bomb blasts in Delhi a few days ago. A group called the Indian Mujahedeen took credit for the blasts. The blasts were ostensibly in retaliation to actions of the Bajrang Dal. A few weeks before that, all of a sudden, one started hearing about Christians being attacked in the eastern Indian state of Orissa. This morning I read about churches and monasteries being attacked in Mangalore in Karnataka, India. Before that I read several stories of India's CRPF unleashing their brutality against Muslims in Kashmir. The CRPF! I'm certain their mandate includes serving and protecting and doesn't include kicking and beating widowed, pregnant women in the belly, women officers!
What could ever justify that behavior, what history, what deep wounds? Are the reports I am reading fabricated? I don't want to believe they are true. There is 'us' and 'them' rhetoric flying around everywhere, retaliation, counter-retaliation, nothing but violence and no signs of reason or sanity prevailing anywhere!
Another memory returns, this time of Elie Wiesel's Nobel Prize acceptance speech. My best friend's Dad had brought to our attention his speech, it had been printed in the Times of India. After my friend's Dad talked to us about the speech I remember having saved the newspaper clipping for a very long time. It had made quite an impression on me. What's memorable about that speech is Elie Wiesel's denunciation of anyone who chooses not to take a side, the right side.
Neutrality is cowardice disguised. If one wants to feel proud of ones humanity one needs to believe that and act on it. But how far does one go to discover how deep the wounds really run, to discover who is blameless and who is to blame and which side is indeed the right side? Are we all nothing but feral beasts when faced with desperation and utter hopelessness?
There are those of us, including yours truly, who will live our lives as armchair warriors and talking heads (although I am more of an armchair devil's advocate or fence-sitter) . We'll get on our soapboxes (just like this) to tell others what we think is wrong with the world. There will be long and pointless debates about who did what to whom first and where it all began and who deserves to be punished or compensated.
Another class, another lecture, comes to mind. This time a class on negotiations and a professor explaining "hawks" and "doves" to us. Some take a hawkish and violent, militant approach to settling a dispute and some are pacifists, mediators, hearing out each side and trying to come to a well-reasoned solution that usually settles around a compromise of sorts with all parties perhaps losing a little ground.
But the rest of us, the armchair warriors, the media, the bloggers are probably all carrion crows, cawing and enhancing the message of chaos, doing our bit to spread paranoia as we feed a frenzy and do our best to divide public opinion while cultivating a defense for the side we perceive is "right".
The beast slowly rises and slouches towards Bethlehem.
Sunday, September 7, 2008
Manhattan morphs again
Broadway has been sliced in half. Vehicular traffic is now restricted to half the road. A portion of the remaining half has now been painted green and forms a bike path, the rest of it has a granular, jute rug like appearance and sports wrought iron patio furniture and potted plants.
This, we hear, is a result of the mayor's determined stance against congestion in the city. Some folks aren't too happy with this transformation. Broadway, after all, is a major conduit of traffic in and out of the city. In the New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" feature it was amusing to read about the "New York Naysayers" who display their classic New York skepticism in refusing to believe that this mayoral initiative will ever succeed.
I have been crossing Broadway to get to work for several years now. It has been chaotic and frenetic for as long as I can remember with speeding bike messengers, bewildered tourists, jaywalking pedestrians and clogged lines of cars and buses spewing copious pollutants into the air. Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined it would be transformed into "Broadway Boulevard" as part of a Fashion District transformation project. People traveling along and across Broadway never looked like the kind of people who would ever entertain the idea of just stopping mid-stride to sit down and just look around, doing nothing at all.
But this startling development certainly lends credence to the idea: if you build it they will come. As I cross Broadway these days I stare in amazement at the busy, important looking people sitting and staring at the yellow cabs and city tour buses making their way through the much narrowed boulevard, emitting carbon, still not green. It isn't Central Park after all, despite the potted plants, it isn't an island of green in the middle of a concrete jungle, it isn't very pretty...but the chairs beckon and people who never felt a desire to sit en route to work, now sit, sipping coffee, finishing up lunch and watching traffic. A very strange development indeed.
I am not a naysayer, I like this attempt at forcing change. I like this subtle reinforcement, through less than subtle means, of the need to stop for a few minutes, to take a breather, to slow down and find a few minutes in the day to collect your thoughts as you're going about your business.
Cliched as it sounds, I am very conscious of the passage of time these days, there aren't enough hours in the day. I am in constant motion. I make up lists of things to do and I check them off. I do this everyday, I rarely glance away from my lists and when I do glance up I find that I've grown another year older, or two.
I blinked one day and I found Broadway transformed into a living room. Changes like this sometimes make me feel like a rock, a stream flowing all around me, and at other times like an object hurtling through space, like a shooting star, disintegrating as I go. So this "living room" then is a sign, perhaps a beacon, signaling a stop and underscoring a need to let every moment sink in.
Soon the congestion will abate as the automotive traffic finds alternatives to "Broadway Boulevard". Drivers and cab users may consider public transportation, bikes, pedicabs or walking and then we might have ourselves a real outdoor living room...reminiscent of other calmer places and slower times.
This, we hear, is a result of the mayor's determined stance against congestion in the city. Some folks aren't too happy with this transformation. Broadway, after all, is a major conduit of traffic in and out of the city. In the New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" feature it was amusing to read about the "New York Naysayers" who display their classic New York skepticism in refusing to believe that this mayoral initiative will ever succeed.
I have been crossing Broadway to get to work for several years now. It has been chaotic and frenetic for as long as I can remember with speeding bike messengers, bewildered tourists, jaywalking pedestrians and clogged lines of cars and buses spewing copious pollutants into the air. Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined it would be transformed into "Broadway Boulevard" as part of a Fashion District transformation project. People traveling along and across Broadway never looked like the kind of people who would ever entertain the idea of just stopping mid-stride to sit down and just look around, doing nothing at all.
But this startling development certainly lends credence to the idea: if you build it they will come. As I cross Broadway these days I stare in amazement at the busy, important looking people sitting and staring at the yellow cabs and city tour buses making their way through the much narrowed boulevard, emitting carbon, still not green. It isn't Central Park after all, despite the potted plants, it isn't an island of green in the middle of a concrete jungle, it isn't very pretty...but the chairs beckon and people who never felt a desire to sit en route to work, now sit, sipping coffee, finishing up lunch and watching traffic. A very strange development indeed.
I am not a naysayer, I like this attempt at forcing change. I like this subtle reinforcement, through less than subtle means, of the need to stop for a few minutes, to take a breather, to slow down and find a few minutes in the day to collect your thoughts as you're going about your business.
Cliched as it sounds, I am very conscious of the passage of time these days, there aren't enough hours in the day. I am in constant motion. I make up lists of things to do and I check them off. I do this everyday, I rarely glance away from my lists and when I do glance up I find that I've grown another year older, or two.
I blinked one day and I found Broadway transformed into a living room. Changes like this sometimes make me feel like a rock, a stream flowing all around me, and at other times like an object hurtling through space, like a shooting star, disintegrating as I go. So this "living room" then is a sign, perhaps a beacon, signaling a stop and underscoring a need to let every moment sink in.
Soon the congestion will abate as the automotive traffic finds alternatives to "Broadway Boulevard". Drivers and cab users may consider public transportation, bikes, pedicabs or walking and then we might have ourselves a real outdoor living room...reminiscent of other calmer places and slower times.
Saturday, September 6, 2008
A Dream: Serpentine Romance
"I met another school friend on Facebook today."
"Really? Who?"
"Oh, I probably haven't mentioned him to you, he wasn't a friend but we loved his eyes, he had these lovely long lashes...Mohan."
"Hmm...what's he doing these days?"
"He runs his own business in the Bay Area and has invited us over for lunch today!"
(keep in mind, we live in NJ...3000 miles away from the Bay Area)
"Ok, let me take a quick shower and then we'll be on our way."
"I'll get Anoushka ready in the meantime."
"Hey, Anoushka! Let's get ready we're going out to lunch!"
"Where mommy?"
"Oh, California."
"Ok, can I wear my princess outfit?"
"Sure honey!"
"Mommy, Mommy! A snake, there's a snake here!"
"Where,oh...that's ok, it's dead. We'll get rid of it later."
"Mommy, no, it just moved!"
"You're right, it is moving a little."
"Let's get Daddy...he's in the shower."
"Daddy, Daddy, snake, hurry, snaaaaaaaaaaaaaake!"
Just then the snake comes awake completely and slithers toward Anoushka and me at great speed as we stand waiting outside the bathroom door, yelling...he's really close, about to strike, when in one swift move Anoushka stomps on its head and kills it.
The snake appears to draw a last breath and then goes still.
Then the tail moves...just a little...it wiggles and then the skin of the tail falls away and a woman emerges.
Except, she's no ordinary woman. She is only about two feet high and appears to be fashioned out of shiny, beige colored cubes, strung...or rather...beaded together...a necklace woman. She unfolds herself and walks over to the portion of the snake that's the head and lays herself down on it.
The snake's head then appears to shake and gasp and the skin from the head now falls apart to reveal a similarly beaded, two feet high man. He sits up and stretches as Anoushka and I watch him, enthralled.
He then unfolds himself and stands and the necklace woman slides her hands into the necklace man's hands and walk towards our bedroom window, before disappearing...and leaving the snake skin at our feet.
"Really? Who?"
"Oh, I probably haven't mentioned him to you, he wasn't a friend but we loved his eyes, he had these lovely long lashes...Mohan."
"Hmm...what's he doing these days?"
"He runs his own business in the Bay Area and has invited us over for lunch today!"
(keep in mind, we live in NJ...3000 miles away from the Bay Area)
"Ok, let me take a quick shower and then we'll be on our way."
"I'll get Anoushka ready in the meantime."
"Hey, Anoushka! Let's get ready we're going out to lunch!"
"Where mommy?"
"Oh, California."
"Ok, can I wear my princess outfit?"
"Sure honey!"
"Mommy, Mommy! A snake, there's a snake here!"
"Where,oh...that's ok, it's dead. We'll get rid of it later."
"Mommy, no, it just moved!"
"You're right, it is moving a little."
"Let's get Daddy...he's in the shower."
"Daddy, Daddy, snake, hurry, snaaaaaaaaaaaaaake!"
Just then the snake comes awake completely and slithers toward Anoushka and me at great speed as we stand waiting outside the bathroom door, yelling...he's really close, about to strike, when in one swift move Anoushka stomps on its head and kills it.
The snake appears to draw a last breath and then goes still.
Then the tail moves...just a little...it wiggles and then the skin of the tail falls away and a woman emerges.
Except, she's no ordinary woman. She is only about two feet high and appears to be fashioned out of shiny, beige colored cubes, strung...or rather...beaded together...a necklace woman. She unfolds herself and walks over to the portion of the snake that's the head and lays herself down on it.
The snake's head then appears to shake and gasp and the skin from the head now falls apart to reveal a similarly beaded, two feet high man. He sits up and stretches as Anoushka and I watch him, enthralled.
He then unfolds himself and stands and the necklace woman slides her hands into the necklace man's hands and walk towards our bedroom window, before disappearing...and leaving the snake skin at our feet.
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Mystic Curry
This article of mine was printed in the Sep-Oct 2008 issue of Reesha, Bahrain Air's in flight magazine.
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This to them is an "India in the ubiquitous spice jar", a perception of Indian-ness that's easily discarded in assimilation drives.
"Curry" however, cannot be defined and discarded as a bland, homogeneous mixture in a spice jar on a supermarket shelf.
This hot, spicy, tantalizing sauce is made from fresh spices, mixed in different proportions, improvised constantly, in the hands of gourmet mothers, aunts and other cooks, who go about adding a pinch of this and that and coming up with something very subtly different from a similar preparation in a different hand. Each rendition is unique, distinct just like wine in the hands of a vintner or French perfume with its distinctly identifiable floral notes or like American Jazz and Indian Classical music, improvised at each step, defying expectations, surprising the audience, evolving at each instant, adapting and changing with times, places and persons.
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They danced a quickstep and did a foxtrot. Their feet barely touched the ground as they floated and shimmered across the stage in a television reality show called, "So You Think You Can Dance". The judges observed, stern-faced, noting the framing, the aesthetics, checking for the elusive element of “connection” between the partners and delivering the verdict, often harsh, often showing discontent; some aspect of each performance always found lacking, in their opinion. Most contestants walked away dejected.
And then it happened! They came to do The Bollywood!
A pretty young woman of Chinese descent and an African American gentleman appeared on stage, dressed in traditional Indian clothing; exquisite jewelry, brocaded lehnga and chunni and proceeded to dazzle the audience with an energetic and beautifully choreographed dance from a recent Bollywood production called “Om Shanti Om”. The judges were awed, the audience screamed and the dancers couldn’t keep the smiles off their faces. The judges were thrilled with the global focus on this popular primetime TV program in America.
Watching the show the other day I couldn't help feeling somewhat pleased that something so uniquely Indian could be so appreciated by a global audience. For some reason that brought curry to mind...a place called "Curry in a Hurry" on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan or curry being offered at an Indian restaurant in a little whaling town in Connecticut. For what are the songs and dances that the world will come to identify as "The Bollywood" if not a hybrid presentation of musical influences from the different parts of the Indian subcontinent; a choreography assimilating various influences in an attempt to please a global audience.
Curry. Confluence. Convergence. Cumin. Cardamom. Cinnamon. Coming together. Curry is all these things and more. If it wasn't for the trade in spices and pepper, trade in the very ingredients that make up curry, there wouldn't have been an East India Company; created to provide Britain a competitive edge over the Dutch when it came to spice trading, there wouldn't have been a British Raj, the jewel would have been missing from the imperial crown. Christopher Columbus, Vasco Da Gama, they all set out in the search of spices, how different would our world have been if it wasn't for these intrepid voyagers? It isn't hard to see how curry, a combination of spices that tickle the palate and provide the sensuous and pleasurable experience that can only come from delectable food, shaped our world.
The origins of the word curry are not clear. Some say it originated from the word karai (a cooking wok), some attribute it to kari patta (a certain kind of leaf used for flavoring) or the south Indian kari (a word for sauce). But I have also read some reports about it being an English word all along, with its roots in the Latin word cuire. Whatever its origins when we attach the word "curry" to anything, chances are we are referring to the perception of a uniquely Indian experience.
As a child I remember chicken curry or goat curry being a perennial favorite. Even vegetable preparations were called curry; to our family curry was synonymous with gravy. Which is why when I migrated to the United States, some twenty years ago, I felt confused when at the mention of Indian food I got asked, "You mean you add curry?" I had considerable difficulty understanding that question because in my mind curry was gravy - how could curry be "added"? Gravy, after all, wasn't something that got "added", the food was prepared in gravy. I recall being puzzled about their notions regarding curry. Only later, while browsing supermarket aisles did I see the little vials of spice, usually quite exorbitantly priced, labeled "curry powder"; a homogenized mixture, a reduction to a single unremarkable entity, its features dimmed and blurred, generalized and simplified.
I was never quite sure what was in this mixture called curry powder. I used it to cook some standard Indian dishes but the taste was never quite reminiscent of Mom's cooking. It felt artificial, like McCurry in a jar - a term I attribute to a friend to whom I was explaining curry.
Here's what he said after hearing me out, "It's probably that combo of spices, not often used in the American kitchen, which lends that oh-so-familiar smell to Indian restaurants. The smell which makes me say, "mmm...smell that curry?" Which is probably a reasonable thing to say, although until you set me straight, I was smelling the smell but incorrectly attributing it to just one spice...McCurry, assumed fresh, as if the restaurateurs had a mystical place to which they trekked to pluck fresh curry...like using fresh parsley instead of parsley flakes..."
The generous sprinkling of just such a powder probably goes into the chicken tikka masala, declared a British national dish in 2001 by Robin Cook, then foreign secretary. Mr Cook intended it as a salute to the multicultural nature of present day Britain, a reflection of how Britain adapts and absorbs external influences but his comment attracted considerable criticism, challenging the "authenticity" of what many perceive as a mongrel dish that doesn't have much to do with India.
Somewhere in the flurry of criticism, the critics missed the point Mr Cook was making about Britain's cultural plurality, about the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. The fact remains that chicken tikka masala is a very popular dish there and it undoubtedly represents a collaboration, a confluence, a convergence of complementary tastes just like curry itself - a pleasing and tantalizing mixture of cinnamon, cardamom, cumin, coriander, curcumin and anything else, the recipes of which moms whisper in daughters' and daughters'-in-law's ears from one generation to the next.
My supermarket curry powder was tasteless, bland, formulaic-created over an assembly line. I was indifferent to its taste, unable to make a mental adjustment whereby a certain culinary richness was about to be traded off with blandness; the price to be paid for leaving home. However, I wasn't inclined to think of the experience as lacking authenticity. In fact, the words "authentic Indian cuisine" make about as much sense as the words "curry powder" made when I first heard them. Even the things that are now perceived as Indian, for instance, chili peppers and tea, were brought over from other places in the 1600s. The Moghuls brought over Persian flavorings, the Portuguese brought over the Goan Vindaloo preparations; cuisine now circling the world as authentically Indian was acquired and seamlessly integrated over the last several centuries.
South Indian cuisine bears no similarities to North Indian cuisine, Eastern Indian preparations are distinct from Western Indian ones. Southern and Eastern Indians are rice eaters, north Indians prefer breads. I was once asked by American friends who had neighbors who hailed from the eastern Indian state of West Bengal if I required a daily diet of fish. I was surprised at the question, I am not a vegetarian but fish doesn't feature as prominently in my daily diet as it would in the diet of someone who is from that part of the country. In the Western Indian state of Gujarat sugar is added to almost all preparations, people from the north or the south find that practice distinctly odd. The permutations and combinations of spices and the proportions in which they can be combined are dazzling in the distinctions they achieve across regions.
This to them is an "India in the ubiquitous spice jar", a perception of Indian-ness that's easily discarded in assimilation drives.
"Curry" however, cannot be defined and discarded as a bland, homogeneous mixture in a spice jar on a supermarket shelf.
This hot, spicy, tantalizing sauce is made from fresh spices, mixed in different proportions, improvised constantly, in the hands of gourmet mothers, aunts and other cooks, who go about adding a pinch of this and that and coming up with something very subtly different from a similar preparation in a different hand. Each rendition is unique, distinct just like wine in the hands of a vintner or French perfume with its distinctly identifiable floral notes or like American Jazz and Indian Classical music, improvised at each step, defying expectations, surprising the audience, evolving at each instant, adapting and changing with times, places and persons.
Motion
It has been a few days since I acquired Haruki Murakami's - What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. I have been craving a richer taste of it ever since an extract was published in the New Yorker.
I hadn't flipped it open until last night because I am still in the middle of Michael Cox's very engaging novel - The Meaning of Night: A Confession, Jodi Picoult's - Nineteen Minutes and Kiran Desai's - The Inheritance of Loss. But I couldn't resist the pull of Murakami's memoir and caved, adding to the collection of books I am reading simultaneously; one in the bus, one in the bathroom, one in the gym while I exercise on the elliptical machine and one when I'm just sitting around in the living room (don't ask me why I do this...I've never been known for my razor sharp focus and dedication to the singular).
For days now I've been trying to grasp at stray thoughts that tease and titillate. They beg to be captured and tethered but when they appear I am either in the last stages of wakefulness... just before I drift into sleep, or showering, or walking to work.
The thought that keeps coming back during my thirty minute walk to work is more like a picture, a moving tableau accompanied by a sense of the city as a gigantic living and breathing beast with veins and arteries, of people being inhaled and exhaled out of it each day. I see hundreds of people flowing out of Penn Station or the PABT and in my mind's eye I see a time lapsed scene where people wrinkle and age and slowly shed their skins until they're nothing but bones and then the bones scatter to the winds and a cycle is complete. (I haven't done an adequate job of describing this thought and might refine it and see if I can touch it with some eloquence in future edits).
This morning I was thinking about us moving through life and of vinyasa (motion that rides the breath) and of flowing through life. Lividity signals death; blood pools when it stops flowing. I imagine for an instant that I am nothing but mass and energy moving rapidly through the universe until the time that I wear away the mass through the friction generated by the motion...pure energy now. I picture an Olympic runner on camera, how his facial skin appears to be flowing away from the skull, stretched...it sometimes appears as though in his fight to the finish he's leaving everything behind, even his skin.
But this is how life must be, this is how it is. The illusion we feed ourselves is the one about laying down roots. I was in one place for twenty one years and have been in another for twenty, I've been in the same house now for six years, I may be here another ten, but in the grand scheme of things, in the reality of eternal motion, twenty or ten years are about as meaningless as six. Especially when as one grows older a year appears to materialize and dissipate within the blink of an eye.
So Murakami's book about running fascinates me. He runs religiously, he runs to stay fit but that is a very minor reason for his running. His books of fiction have enthralled me, I've wanted to say something about them but I haven't found the words to do it. For instance in his book - The Wind-up Bird Chronicles his protagonist, Toru Okada, who is advised by a wiser, older person to take the stairs and climb to the highest heights when it's time to do that and to descend to the deepest wells when that's what the occasion demands. Isn't this how life is? Sometimes you scale great heights and at other times you sink to the depths, always riding the same breath, always moving, always like driftwood...flailing and resisting never helps much.
In his book - After Dark - the characters are in constant motion throughout the night, in a city that doesn't sleep, never sleeps, and where reason gives way to blurry surreality. It throbs and moves through the night just as people within it move, change, grow a little bit older as an omniscient narrator in the form of a 'viewpoint' tracks their motion. The viewpoint reminds me of a device engaged in time lapse photography just as my mind's eye is when watching people being inhaled and exhaled into the city.
His memoir reflects the motion that foreshadows all his writing and reading his work certainly lends a new perspective to how I view my own life.
I hadn't flipped it open until last night because I am still in the middle of Michael Cox's very engaging novel - The Meaning of Night: A Confession, Jodi Picoult's - Nineteen Minutes and Kiran Desai's - The Inheritance of Loss. But I couldn't resist the pull of Murakami's memoir and caved, adding to the collection of books I am reading simultaneously; one in the bus, one in the bathroom, one in the gym while I exercise on the elliptical machine and one when I'm just sitting around in the living room (don't ask me why I do this...I've never been known for my razor sharp focus and dedication to the singular).
For days now I've been trying to grasp at stray thoughts that tease and titillate. They beg to be captured and tethered but when they appear I am either in the last stages of wakefulness... just before I drift into sleep, or showering, or walking to work.
The thought that keeps coming back during my thirty minute walk to work is more like a picture, a moving tableau accompanied by a sense of the city as a gigantic living and breathing beast with veins and arteries, of people being inhaled and exhaled out of it each day. I see hundreds of people flowing out of Penn Station or the PABT and in my mind's eye I see a time lapsed scene where people wrinkle and age and slowly shed their skins until they're nothing but bones and then the bones scatter to the winds and a cycle is complete. (I haven't done an adequate job of describing this thought and might refine it and see if I can touch it with some eloquence in future edits).
This morning I was thinking about us moving through life and of vinyasa (motion that rides the breath) and of flowing through life. Lividity signals death; blood pools when it stops flowing. I imagine for an instant that I am nothing but mass and energy moving rapidly through the universe until the time that I wear away the mass through the friction generated by the motion...pure energy now. I picture an Olympic runner on camera, how his facial skin appears to be flowing away from the skull, stretched...it sometimes appears as though in his fight to the finish he's leaving everything behind, even his skin.
But this is how life must be, this is how it is. The illusion we feed ourselves is the one about laying down roots. I was in one place for twenty one years and have been in another for twenty, I've been in the same house now for six years, I may be here another ten, but in the grand scheme of things, in the reality of eternal motion, twenty or ten years are about as meaningless as six. Especially when as one grows older a year appears to materialize and dissipate within the blink of an eye.
So Murakami's book about running fascinates me. He runs religiously, he runs to stay fit but that is a very minor reason for his running. His books of fiction have enthralled me, I've wanted to say something about them but I haven't found the words to do it. For instance in his book - The Wind-up Bird Chronicles his protagonist, Toru Okada, who is advised by a wiser, older person to take the stairs and climb to the highest heights when it's time to do that and to descend to the deepest wells when that's what the occasion demands. Isn't this how life is? Sometimes you scale great heights and at other times you sink to the depths, always riding the same breath, always moving, always like driftwood...flailing and resisting never helps much.
In his book - After Dark - the characters are in constant motion throughout the night, in a city that doesn't sleep, never sleeps, and where reason gives way to blurry surreality. It throbs and moves through the night just as people within it move, change, grow a little bit older as an omniscient narrator in the form of a 'viewpoint' tracks their motion. The viewpoint reminds me of a device engaged in time lapse photography just as my mind's eye is when watching people being inhaled and exhaled into the city.
His memoir reflects the motion that foreshadows all his writing and reading his work certainly lends a new perspective to how I view my own life.
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