Balance

Without the capacity to be cruel, kindness means nothing. Without the ability to hate intensely and passionately, love means nothing. Without the ability to destroy, the power to create will choke on itself. Without the ability to kill, you cannot give rise to new life and without the ability to punish, the ability to reward transmutes from real generosity to disguised cowardice.

Life is contrast and polarity. The average will never work. It the greyness that marks the beginning of the end. The slow decay of a civilization. Balance is not grey – it is not the average.

It is the managed-conflict between the extremes – an active balance that finds its centre against external disturbances, the balance that strengthens itself from attack, the balance that turns suffering, pain and difficulty into a tool to strengthen itself, the balance that uses cold water to grow sharper in the forge of life under the hammer of self-imposed discipline, it is this active balance between the polarities that distinguishes the alive from the dead.

Growth happens at the extremes, never in the middle. Buddha was wrong! The middle-path is cancer, diabetes, cardio, “work-life balance”, depression and anxiety, mass-media, common-sense, healthy food, consumerism, the free-market and modern medicine. Be poor, be rich, whatever you do, don’t be middle-class. Live, or die, don’t grind through a declining and grey existence. If you are a man, aim for everything, or nothing. The professors were wrong, small drops will never make an ocean. It is violent and total cataclysms that do it. Don’t endure disrespect and grind through a sub-optimal situation. Burn it all down and start again. When you are winning, you will know it.

A narcissist or a salesman?

The difference between a King and a robber is intention, the difference between a Government and a criminal mafia is intention, the difference between a husband and an employer is intention, the difference between a father and a cruel teacher is intention, the difference between a competitor and an evil enemy is intention.

Suicide is not respected as much as death in combat/war. The reason is intention, ritual and politics. The absence of good intention and the willingness to fight ones poor circumstances is what distinguishes honourable and righteous action from evil.

The greatest gift is to be able to judge a person’s intention without waiting for the consequences of his actions. The ability to decide who to put your faith in and to be able to recognize evil when you see it in the eyes of someone. Life is short and there will never be enough time to make rational choices based on objective data (even if such a thing really existed).

If you fail to develop this gift you will forever be consigned to getting robbed materially and spiritually by smooth talking criminals.

If you must succeed, the first thing to do is to work on your intention and your faith. For action follows conviction which follows faith. Faith always comes first. The ability to talk it up to a burning intensity is what distinguishes moral and righteous action from its opposite. Not just consequences!

Businessmen try to sell us the notion that we must judge things by how they appear to us without regard for the intention or the motivations of the people who made it. But this is a mistake that appears to work at first. The most dangerous kind of mistake. It is too late by the time you realize it was a mistake.

A mother’s food, no matter how severe the lack of skill was in its preparation, a father’s punishment, a husband’s orders, cultural edicts, family traditions and the wisdom of the old of our blood-line will, in the end always do more good than its modern day equivalents based on “scientific” wisdom and superficially rational argument.

Love, trust and faith that has lasted for long and that is backed up by real suffering, real sacrifice, real tears and real bloodshed should be given priority over wisdom generated in factories by professionals working from 10 to 5 and corporate mission statements and modern day “risk-taking” CEOs and executives.

There might be problems with things done by people with good intentions. But they will always over the long run work better than the products and directions from the modern military-industrial complex. Respect the truly old. For time is the best test of every claim to truth.

There is always a trade-off between “Standard of Living” and freedom. Don’t let other people determine your standards for you. Take the time to understand yourself and take control of your own happiness and you will realize that you were, are and always will be free.

Problem with our approach to money

Consumption driven growth vs. savings driven growth.

Essential features of the Indian mindset

To make money you have to spend money. You have to invest. On goods and services that improve the quality of your own life and your mind and cut costs in the future and on people who are capable of exponentially increasing output and building capital assets that serve the interests of the local consumers.

But Indian society has historically been an extremely dangerous and uncertain one. The social traditions and cultural practices evolved through ages of uncertainty, poverty, violent dispossession and sudden death. Extreme uncertainty creates incentive structures that encourage people to avoid down-side risk at all costs.

Lack of trust in others, in society and the government promotes economically inefficient self-reliance, paranoia and lust for hard money.

A picture of a successful society

A society that has succeeded is one in which people have an instrumental view of money and do not see it as an end in itself. An instrument to create capital structures and new real wealth that improves society and makes things better for the future. As a tool that is used to signal value and coordinate supply chains. As a tool that can be used to enable real production and reward mindful consumption and good decision making.

This tool will work when it is combined with a moral culture that celebrates success, punishes jealousy and recognizes that some principals are more important than money.

There are two things that you can do with money. Bury it and try to keep it safe or spend/invest it. Spending is for things that make you feel good in the moment and investing is for things that will generate a return in money or cut spending requirements in the future. Stories and social conditioning can be used to make people enjoy investing more than spending.

What happens when trust erodes

But to invest there must be some guarantee that you will be able to generate a return. To generate a return you must be able to predict the future. If you can’t predict the future, then, at the very least you must be able to be secure in the knowledge that if and when you succeed the rewards will not get stolen.

If these guarantees cannot be put in place by the government, then people will rely on cutting costs and cornering hard assets to save money instead of on investment to make new capital assets. Some of these costs that they cut will be neutral or even good from an economic stand-point. Like choosing to skip a pizza or a jalebi. But some of them might be counterproductive and even destructive in the long run. For example, if a family chooses to cut costs by refusing to buy any books for the children or buy them nutritious food it will destroy value in the long run.

Saved money cannot just sit in a vault. The economy cant grow that way. The people will just work harder and harder and gradually impoverish themselves off the material factors that are important for their own well-being in exchange for currency to pay taxes.

So, the saved money has to be somehow invested to increase the volume of goods and services that can be bought with money. This will cause the value of money itself to increase which can then be used to print more money and grow the economy. The economy can be either directly taxed to provide public services or indirectly taxed by printing money for government spending.

Centralized Capital Allocation

If the people won’t invest it then the banks and the government have to do it. This will centralize decision making and risk taking. In a society that has an unhealthy obsession with money and gold and a generally low standard for moral behavior and selfless thinking this will create serious problems.

The people controlling these few big taps of money wield enormous power. Power doesn’t rest easy in the hands of tiny-dicked, insecure and selfish people. Instead of a self-sacrificing elite society, India has in recent history had a parasitic class of professional butt-lickers and back-stabbers in the form of a brahmin elite that served as the whip of the British masters.

Worship of power and proximity to white humans coupled with extreme fear and subservience to authority regardless of its legitimacy has been programmed into the Indian lower classes through millennia of casteism and automatic hierarchies based on birth.

Power and wealth are in more enlightened societies, seen as a tool that can be used to create a positive impact on society. But in India, ‘the good life” is not something people aspire to since most people don’t know what it means. Living in healthy, clean conditions in a peaceful society with a healthy and beautiful body and mind is not something that most Indians aspire to. What they want is power. Power to improve things? To make their own situation better? No. Since most Indians don’t know how to make themselves feel good they try to make other people suffer so that they can feel less shitty about themselves. For them life is all about competition. If Sharmaji has a Zen, we should buy an Esteem, if they have 2 bedrooms we must have three. And if we can’t have these things we must somehow destroy their stuff. That is the value of wealth and the power it can buy, from an Indian perspective.

In such an environment concentrating economic decision making in an elite at the top of a political hierarchy is asking for trouble. Forget preserving wealth. The money can actually be used to entrench and secure the interests of the parasitic, self-absorbed and insular elite and to isolate themselves from the suffering of the masses.

In such a scenario the value of money doesn’t grow. In fact the value of the paper money actually goes down because the people holding it didn’t earn it by making something useful, but by stealing it from deserving people. Once the volume of currency held in such hands crosses a critical threshold confidence in the currency collapses. Either suddenly or gradually. The steadily increasing price of gold in India is hard evidence for the fact that people don’t trust the economic system.

Betting real wealth on statues and bullet trains vs. just burying it

I used to laugh at my grandma for washing hands all the time and running to the jewelry and buying a little bit of gold every time she got some money. She is nearly a 100 now and has managed to survive all these years without asking anyone for any help and is quite wealthy now. It is after the recent pandemic and witnessing the central government’s response to it that I realized the value of her wisdom and her paranoia. The government, the system and the society cannot be trusted in India. Any store of value that relies on a functioning social system is quite vulnerable in a country like this. Trying to achieve growth without first prioritizing wealth preservation is asking for trouble.

Yes, it does create a problem for the commons. The vast quantities of wealth locked down in the form of unmonetized gold is a big loss for the country. It prevents growth. A loss! That is how I used to think about all this gold lying in lockers and buried underground and hidden in walls all over the country. But then I figured out that preservation of wealth is more important than growing it. Gold is the weak and uneducated man’s protection against the caprices of the sometimes educated but always uncultured and predominantly criminal elite of the country. Maybe the secret piles can’t be used to create gold backed currency that can be used to grow the economy. But at least it can’t be wasted or siphoned off or used to win power by the unscrupulous politicians and businessmen that have made India a living hell.

It might be better to let the wealth rot underground than to give it to criminals. That will just make everything a lot worse. Until the system improves and decentralized investments have a fighting chance it is best to sequester the wealth in places and forms that make it invulnerable to confiscation by a ruthless and rapacious ruling class.

Like always, grandma is right again!

Special is not what you are, it is what you do

Source of great ideas

Where do great ideas originate? What is genius? Why do some people seem to come up with ideas easily and effortlessly?

People spend a lot of time examining their brains, studying their habits and trying to copy their practices. Genius and creativity are usually considered to be the properties of a particular person and some people think that their own productivity can be improved by copying certain aspects of their behavior. “How to engineer your life to enable creativity?” I think it is worth spending some time thinking about this question.

The myth

There is a tendency to anthropomorphize the flow of history. To tell stories that privilege the point of view of particular human beings. Stories where there is a hero and there is a great problem and with heroic struggle the hero conquers the problem.

As much as this story appeals to our emotional selves, it is finally a story that at best offers only a partial picture of the process that is involved in discovering great principles. Every picture, every model and every theory by necessity has to be incomplete. But the utility of a model lies in its ability to make valuable predictions about the future. In its ability to help ourselves make an impact by following the directives of the model.

If you measure the utility of models, of theories and stories in this particular way, then there is some harm in this particular method of story-telling. Of telling stories that emphasize the importance of the individual and the inner mind in the story of discoveries.

A story like that will motivate people to work hard and try to focus on themselves and what is going on within themselves. To focus on their feelings, perceptions and thought patterns. This reflexive pattern of thinking and the disconnect from the real world it can create can cause feedback loops to develop that can lead people along paths that make them unhappy in the long run. For example, someone might be depressed because he is not effective. This might cause the person to withdraw from engaging with the problems and to distract himself with counter-productive behavior intended to temporarily relieve the bad feeling. This can range from self-destructive behavior like making excuses for poor decisions, self-medicating with drugs or alcohol or trying to feel better by pulling other people down. All these things make the problems worse in the long run. This might go on until the person passes the point of no return.

The possible truth

But the secret to creativity or success doesn’t lie within. It lies without. Great ideas can never be derived from existing principles. They are almost always the product of random events and mistakes. Rationality, mathematical reasoning and straight-forward thinking can act only as a negative filter. It can tell you what will not work. It cannot lead you step-by-step to the next  great discovery.

The process of innovation is inherently non-linear, chaotic and unpredictable. The key to coming up with great ideas is to leave some space in our lives for luck to work. Make sure the environment you are in is dynamic, fluid and dangerous to the extent that it will not kill you. Keep pushing your boundaries and never plan too much.

Some people might read this and think that hard work and planning is useless. That is entirely the wrong message. Hard work, extreme dedication and a certain kind of planning are required for success in life. The question is how you should work and what you should focus on.

Here is my take on these most important questions:

You have to work hard on developing your store of knowledge and the basic skills and intuition required to recognize a great idea when you see one. We go through our lives every day unconsciously doing incredibly complicated and clever things without realizing their significance or their practical applications in other areas of life.

People might have been rubbing their hands together for millennia to warm themselves. But it was only recently that somebody documented the fact that heat might not be related to combustion and that the coincidence hides a deeper mystery about the physics of heat. That recognition is what is important. Not the rubbing together of hands. Ideas have to be recognized and articulated using the language of technology for that idea to get developed into a practical application.

People knew about the law of large numbers for ages. And at least intuitively everyone understands the principle of averaging to reduce noise. But someone applied this prehistoric idea after combining it with the concept of the information content of a random process to a sequence of bits and he became the “Father of information theory”. Another guy applied it to economics and that became the “Efficient market hypothesis”. 

Einstein was sitting in a patent office and going through countless papers discussing clever things and he was reading material describing results from experiments that other people were doing. Again and again people were implying that the speed of light didn’t seem to change no matter how you measured it. He just articulated clearly what everyone was implying and then proceeded to use straight-forward mathematical techniques to work out all the potential implications and on reconciling it with the existing frame-work of physics.

Now, after the fact, people are studying Einstein’s brain size, anecdotes from his child-hood, grade cards from school and his musical predilections and trying to copy all these things in an effort to become an Einstein themselves.

Maybe if I grow my hair, look weird and play the violin, I might change physics as we know it today? Maybe. But your chances will be lot better if you try to replicate the essential features of Einstein’s environment and his natural curiosity instead of some superficial personal characteristics or other incidental details of his personal history. Myth-making and story-telling are fun. But sometimes they can mislead young minds into thinking that being weird in a particular way is what it takes to become special.

Before wondering why you can’t come up with something like the theory of relativity while watching cricket and eating chips have you first made sure that you have access to the same quality and quantity of privileged information that Einstein did?

When Feynman hit a dead end in his career he didn’t sit down and try harder to come up with something new. He just said, ” If I can’t solve this problem right now I will not waste my time keeping on trying again and again until I am fully extinguished. Instead I will find some other way to make myself useful and in the process, maybe, learn something new. I will teach! When I explain things to other people I will be forced to look at things from their point of view and the fresh perspective might help me get some new ideas!”(paraphrased, obviously!)

He understood something about the state of mind required to solve problems that require an oblique approach and how to achieve it. The kind of things that you can do which can help you achieve a state of flow. Where your ego expands to include the problem and you feel connected and everything just sort of happens automatically.

There is no harm in trying to emulate great people. But if you look at the wrong things you might just wind up wasting time on music lessons and dressing in turtle necks without actually accomplishing anything in life.

The mother lode

Every great idea in science and technology is basically the recognition of a pattern that was identified in some other area like humanities which deals with the study of naturally occurring complexity and patterns. The reason for it is very simple. Nature has the right mix of noise injection(random mutations and disasters) and diversity of cost and fitness functions that has been allowed to operate for billions of years. This has resulted in complexity, patterns and innovations of stunning and breath-taking beauty and power. By developing your arsenal of mathematical and scientific tools that can be used to reject spurious patterns and see through correlations that can sometimes obscure chains of causation we can exploit this nearly infinite mine of ideas to come up with stuff that can shock  and awe people.

To properly take advantage of this gift of optionality you must work hard. Not on coming up with great ideas, but on learning to recognize one when you see it. When the idea is seductive enough the aggression required to capture, subdue, exploit and control it will come automatically.

The simplicity of the idea doesn’t matter. What matters is the scale of application of that idea. And scale requires a proper appreciation and grasp of all the essential features of that idea and the ability to ignore the unimportant details. In other words, be able to articulate the idea in the most general terms possible. And then, hold it in your head at all times and recognize diverse situations where it can be applied to make a difference.

Prepare yourself for the moment of insight as well as you can. It can feel overwhelming when it strikes you. Keep developing newer ways of looking at the same phenomenon. And, most  importantly,

“leave enough space in your life for luck to work its magic”.

Mother Night

I am a part of the part that at first was all, part of the darkness that gave birth to light, that supercilious light which now disputes with Mother Night her ancient rank and space, and yet can not succeed; no matter how it struggles, it sticks to matter and can’t get free. Light flows from substance, makes it beautiful; solids can check its path, so I hope it won’t be long till light and the world’s stuff are destroyed together.

The appeal of a classic

I have spent so much time wondering about what makes someone go wow when they witness something. Anything. Maybe a feat of engineering, maybe a drawing or a film or most intriguingly the beautiful sculptures that fill up the ancient temples of India, the ones that have preserved their ability to mystify and enthrall people even after thousands of years

When people look at these sculptures, touch them and feel something stir within them they are surprised and delighted. How is it possible for something thousands of years old, worn down by the ages, abused by the ignorant and crafted by people in a supposedly unenlightened epoch to wield such a strange and powerful influence on the people fortunate enough to behold them today?

When someone struggling to make sense of a life spent in the pursuit of the material, the tangible and the concrete by following the incentives and dictates of the modern educational-industrial complex lays their eyes on a classic they are reminded of something that is missing in the story of their life, the story that they depend on to impose order, meaning and purpose on a reality that is impersonal, complex and too vast to care about the individual.

No matter the suffering, the apparent brutality or the seeming meaninglessness of everything, with the right story life becomes not only just possible, but actually enjoyable. It is man’s gift from God that he has the power to tell himself whatever story he wants. It is the greatest tragedy that so many people perceive this gift as a burden. A perception that morphs the gift into a curse. Of course organized religion, modern corporate life and the inducements of a consumerist society provide a sort of antidote to the problem.

But the power of a story to make you see the world in a beautiful way, in a uniquely human way and the ability of such a perspective to lead people to do difficult but valuable things, things that make the human story even more wonderful, is something that must be appreciated.

Whatever it is that people do, maybe they clean the floor, maybe they draw paintings, maybe they are engineers or doctors or business-men, it doesn’t matter. Every now and then someone comes along who realizes the power of being able to tell a story about themselves, their work, their place in society and their duties. A story made beautiful by the unique and intense moments in their life. A story that appeals to every human emotion in turn. Telling themselves the story as they navigate their life, they create eddies of meaning, purpose and beauty which feed back into the story.

At some point it makes them forget themselves and live life the way a human being was meant to live it. At least for a while. When they wake up from the dream the beautiful consequences of their reverie will surround them. They are reminded of the mythical paradise that was supposed to have been lost to us, forever.

The one where there was no hard-work, no suffering and no pain. Not because there was no danger or discomfort, but because one had the gift of absolute faith in a story. A story powerful enough to distort the reality around oneself and bring it in line with one’s vision.

The craftsmen who possess the gift of great art are the ones who have most fully realized the power of being able to tell a tale that reminds people of this paradise that could exist in the space between reality and their reaction to it. In the realm of perception. Where your beliefs about yourself and your reality matter the most.

The best stories make the most incomprehensible, the most impersonal, the most senseless things beautiful and meaningful to a human being. When people look at their reality in a way that makes sense to them, suddenly, they can understand it, take control of it and manipulate it to their advantage.

The power to craft this story is the most sacred thing ever. The exercise of this power and witnessing the strange and terrifying consequences that follow lie at the source of human fulfillment and happiness. All religions try to capture this magic and project it however weakly into the mind of the average person, in an attempt to prevent the individual from falling into the trap of relentlessly making naive attempts to achieve happiness by running away from pain, from one’s duty to society and from the call to make a sacrifice in service of something bigger than oneself. In order to give everyone a shot at experiencing the sense of satisfaction that can result when you focus on contributing something, however small to the story of human achievement.

But, like everything generic and dumbed down by the incompetence and stupidity of the bureaucrats and the priests the utility of organized systems of creating meaning is highly debatable.

An artist, whatever his chosen profession or his station in life, is someone who is capable of reminding everyone who looks at their work, their life, their actions –  however vaguely, however fleetingly, the mysterious and strange power of a great story, not only to make people do the impossible but to make them feel like Gods while doing it. To make them realize what is possible when you look at things the right way, the human way, your way…

 

Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl

This might seem like a book that is too dark for a birthday-gift. But, I found its underlying message of hope independent of circumstances that is the result of a life lived in anticipation of the good one can do for one’s loved ones and one’s society to be valuable.

Meaning is, I think,  what creates fulfillment and not mere avoidance of pain or pursuit of pleasure. It is not predetermined. We have to create it ourselves. I wish you a meaningful and fulfilling life ahead!

Moon-Lake

I was looking at some pictures from several years ago which were taken during my trip to Himachal. All the treks were over and we were just visiting some lakes and small towns on our way to Manali. We were travelling along beautiful roads. I had a book with me and everyone was in a quiet and reflective mood.

We took a detour to visit the beautiful Moon-Lake(Chandratal) and spend a quiet morning there.The vehicle stopped some way away from the lake. We walked the rest of the way along a narrow gravel path in the direction of the lake.

I was waiting for the lake to come into sight. The constant scanning for the blue patch on the horizon reminded me of the cycle ride to Tso Moriri in Ladakh the previous year.

The sky in those parts can be very bright and sometimes this prevents you from really enjoying the beautiful sights once the Sun is up. But, that day, the sky was cloudy and the light was perfect.

There were small patches of grass around the lake and flocks of sheep grazing on it with shepherd dogs running about and barking at them.

Some of us took a dip in the icy water of the lake.

I just lay down in the moist grass with my book and spent some time reading and gazing out at the iridescent lake shining with a furious intensity in the many reflected colors of the sky.

As the clouds shifted in the sky the colors reflected in the lake too changed. I kept on moving around the lake to take in the sight from as many angles as possible.

The toughest part of that whole trip was the walk on the glaciers of the Pin Bhabha pass. This year, I am going again for a winter trek in Himachal. This time more of the trek will be over glaciers and it will be interesting to find out how I cope with it.

I am expecting it to be the toughest trekking expedition I have ever participated in and I can’t wait to see the sights and experience the adventure.

Come Oct, I will be on my way!

I hope that at the end of the coming trip, we will get to spend a few days roaming around and relaxing in beautiful places like this.

On the hurt pride of vegetarians

Sometimes, after reading some article somewhere I get really irritated. No matter how hard I try to forget and get on with other stuff, the offending words and ideas linger… like a thorn in my side. I have no option but to sit down and write about it to understand why exactly I feel the way I do about it.

This time it was this article that appeared in The Hindu written by one Vamsee Juluri who is a professor of media studies at the University of San Francisco.

(Here is some readily accessible info about the hunger situation in India. Skip it if you have already read about it(very likely).)

I have always been shocked and dismayed by the level of malnutrition, stunting and the generally dismal level of the health and development of children of the oppressed classes. The situation looks even more dismal and desperate for girl children. According to scientists, doctors and social workers there are a combination of factors responsible for the situation. The biggest among them, from what I could understand are

1. The lack of sanitation and clean drinking water. The associated level of childhood morbidity and parasite load massively impacts physical and mental development during the most critical years of growth.

2. The lack of a balanced diet in impoverished agricultural communities which lean heavily on grains for subsistence and tribal communities which have been deprived of their tradition habitats in the forest.

3. Protein malnutrition and absence of essential trace nutrients in the diet

4. Lack of basic medical facilities and simple medicines in communities that most need them

This situation is far more dangerous than most people can imagine. Between 1/3rd and 1/2 of the future of country is growing up with serious mental and physical developmental deficits. This should give any human being with a conscience a massive jolt! The seed of our national well-being is the promise of our children and if we can’t do everything possible to ensure their access to adequate sanitation and food, then we are failing in our duty to our country.

What I have said till now is public knowledge and is widely acknowledged both nationally and internationally. India ranks near the very bottom in Global Hunger Rankings, even below countries like Sudan.

The news

The brunt of this disaster is born by the children of the low-castes and dalits of the country. The dispossessed tribals and the landless. For children from these families the mid-day meal scheme and the egg-a-day schemes are a God-send that provides them with much needed protein, cholesterol, fat and trace minerals and nutrients found only in animal products. Eggs are widely considered to be critical to child-hood nutrition, even ahead of cow-milk. This is because milk is hard to keep unspoiled, is easily diluted or contaminated and is difficult to transport and store. Also, many children, especially the older ones might have difficulty digesting milk in enough quantities to matter because of lactose intolerance.

The MP government’s professed reason for denying its starving children one of the best sources of protein is not scientific. They offer no rational explanations for why it was done. The only reason thrown in the faces of these children and the food-rights activists working on their behalf is that the chief-minister has a “sentimental objection” to serving eggs in school. He is probably supported by the Jain and the other religiously-motivated vegetarian lobbies in the state.

When capacity for subtlety blinds rather than illuminates

In this situation comes along an author writing an article that criticizes the NPR for calling out the “vegetarian elites'” attempts at enforcing their misinformed dietary concepts on people ill-equipped to voice their opinion! He thinks that the article is a mere ploy to perpetuate the myth that vegetarianism is a tool the elite use to starve the poor. I don’t know what kind of a retarded mind would read the head-line(NPR article is here) and think, “Oh! Here they go again, trying to spoil the image of the vegetarians” and not “Why are some people trying to impose their dietary preferences influenced by their privilege and religion on other people who are suffering from these impositions!” It takes a frightening lack of empathy and self-absorption to engage in this kind of abstract nit-picking!

Pretensions to intellect are more dangerous than ignorance

The author thinks that it is ironic that the western media is writing against the massive over-consumption of red-meat in developed countries and the industrial production of meat it necessitates at the same time it writes against the denial of one-egg-a-day to malnourished children from the most deprived sections of an underdeveloped society! He calls himself an intellectual and is unable to understand the simple, overwhelming and almost painfully obvious differences in context between the two sets of articles. An average indian consumes less than 2 kg of meat in a year while an average american consumes more than 120kg!! Anything in excess is probably not good. (Although, the latest research seems to be pointing to the presence of refined sugar and carbs as the cause of problems of diet related morbidity in developed societies. But, I digress!)

And if he is going to argue that eggs should be denied to poor children because american over-consumption of beef causes heart problems and adversely effects the environment then maybe rice too shouldn’t be served to them as there is robust evidence for its role in causing heart-disease, diabetes and obesity in the over-fed Indian upper-class! Maybe, they should not be fed any food at all because there is strong evidence that too much food consumption by his adopted country is wrecking the environment and health of his allegedly hypocritical american friends!

Why don’t these kids care about the fucking chickens!

He writes in a whining tone about how when it comes to writing about the stunted Indian children questions of environment and “animal-ethics”(!!!!) are being ignored. Wow!! How shocking!? How dare these poor starving children not care about the environment and how their consumption of eggs is making chickens sad!! How dare they not pay attention to the sensitivities of the well-fed dog sitting comfortably in San Francisco and thinking deeply about “what diet-issues are really all about!”? Maybe, his vegetarian diet has fucked his nervous system and as seems apparent from the article in question, rendered him incapable of clear thought. That maybe why he had to waste so many words on advertising his ignorance of what diet-issues are all about when it comes to the desperately poor struggling to keep their kids in school. Here it is. In one fucking line. It is a about survival.

It maybe disappointing to his “cultured” intellect brought to maturity in the rarefied atmosphere of scholarship and privilege to discover how little the under-privileged of India care about the rights of animals. How little they appreciate the glorious “Hindu” heritage(which includes the “invention/discovery/tradition” of vegetarianism) they can lay claim to because they had the wonderful luck to be born in this country and into their situation. How little they care about the wounded sensitivities of their privileged, upper-class, Hindu, intellectual compatriots, especially, the ones who are sitting on the other side of the earth and fighting pitched battles to ensure that the western media understands the glory of their deprivation in all its nuanced complexity! But, there goes the truth!

Environmentalism for the poor

I was reading an illuminating and stunningly humane book written by my favorite author, historian and social critic Ramachandra Guha called “How much should we consume?”. It echoed exactly what I used to think about the environment and animal rights.

Environmentalism should be less about restoring some imagined justice or virginity to nature and more about allowing the human beings who depend on our environment for survival to continue living in a sustainable way without depleting the natural capital. People who rail against the poor for not worshiping animals or for eating them are almost invariably the well-fed vegetarian(rarely even non-vegetarian) elites living in protected alcoves who don’t have to countenance the cold, hard and brutal truth of nature and survival in the pits of deprivation which is expressed in the vocabulary of hunger, sudden death and chronic morbidity without hope.

The next paragraph is almost comical when you consider that this person has at least once seen the insides of a university. There is data to prove that that the upper-castes of India who for centuries have overseen the operation of one of the most efficient and ruthless engines of oppression grinding into the dust of humiliation, hunger and loss of dignity the vast and under-privileged low-caste population of India are predominantly vegetarian. The same vile bunch of books that prescribe the system of varnas also pontificate on the relative “purity” of foods and castes! People who depend on the system of caste for privilege will also believe in these insane and unscientific pronouncements on diet. There is both data and possible explanation for it. Now you know what he is going to do, right? Cite a study which shows otherwise? Hahaha no. He tells you a fucking story about what happened when he walked into a fucking mcdonalds! He tells you about what he saw inside fucking malls in AP.

Now, you can throw away all that data and history and just sue NPR for defaming the elites who are on a roll, banning or restricting access to one food item after the other. Who fund and run organizations prepared to slaughter men to protect cows. Prepared to beat woman like dogs for partying and violating Indian Culture. Prepared to expose little children to sudden and painful deaths to give dogs justice and ensure their “right to life”(granted by whom, I sometimes wonder!). Touting yoga as the solution to the problems that are crippling India. While gleefully cutting health budgets and pumping money into promoting quackery and thugs cheating people with snake-oil.

It’s about me me me!

In the next article, he cries about how they have failed to appreciate the saints, gurus and other such holy Hindus who have given up meat because of the “innate violence involved” in it and how NPR has failed to write about the unctuous practices of the meat-consuming Hindu. (As if these practices were patented by the Brahmin and is beyond the grasp of the vegetarians in other societies.) His glorious restraint, his commendable love for the cow and other such fine aspects of “Hindu Culture”. How did they have the gall to write an entire article about starving children being denied eggs and fail to mention all these things. He finds it unbelievable. Unless, it is all part of an elaborate international conspiracy to tar Hinduism and denigrate its ancient glory and mysterious secrets!

In the next paragraph, he feels that the models that show one group as lower than another is simplistic and doesn’t account for the flux in the caste situation in India. Which is funny! Because, news articles which feature stories of caste oppression and violence continue to appear with surprising regularity. Models by necessity are simple. They are only as complex as is required to make predictions about something. Do you want to understand why some people think that the family they are born into makes them superior/inferior to another human being? Do you want to understand why even the inferior ones further perpetuate this stupidity by treating some people as even more lowly than them? Do you want to understand why they believe all this shit? Models can help you. But, if you are the sort of armchair intellectual chasing imaginary pride and glory derived from their country of birth or their ancestors(stuff which they had absolutely no say in picking) then maybe the models won’t be complex enough to salve the self-inflicted wounds of your dying self-esteem.

Vegetarianism as an Indian invention

The author then continues to beg people to make the discussion about removing eggs from mid-day meal schemes into something far more complex and fill it with subtle arguments and erudite observations about the Indian brand of vegetarianism.

It is surprising how an author with cavils against the western media for paying insufficient attention to the complex Indian situation fails to see that there are vegetarians and even vegans in other countries too. That there are communities which depend on plant-based diets in even more sophisticated ways outside India. Maybe, when you accuse people of being simplistic you should be a little more careful about what you pick to be proud about yourself. No body discovered vegetarianism. No body found a particularly superior way of being vegetarian. And refusing to let other people seek nourishment from their animals is not the same as saving the environment or being non-violent. If he thinks that a vegetarian lifestyle is superior to one than includes a reasonable quantity of animal products he is free to argue for it. But, he picked the wrong context for a back-drop.

You can listen and/or read people like Bill Gates(who recently tried vegetarianism) who while working hard to curtail the consumption of animal products in the US, is also at the same time fighting to increase its consumption in Africa and South-Asia. Despite his privilege he understands the reality of undernourishment in poor countries. People who have the widest possible variety in their diets also tend to be the healthiest. One only has to visit the peoples in the East, Europe and other such areas to discover that these people are healthier, fitter and live longer that the typical Indian vegetarian. Even the well-fed ones.

Equating  non-vegetarianism with violence

This is something that pisses me off every single time I read about it. People from the cow-belt, the scripture toting, yoga fans, who live amongst people who kill, starve and take away personal agency from girl children, who support khap-panchayats and masturbate to “ancient Indian Glory” and the village life lecturing others on what does and does not constitute violence. Here is the simple truth!

There is no justice, fairness or kindness in nature. You can’t lecture a lion or a tiger on ahimsa. Right to life and happiness, right to food, right to education and right to justice are all human inventions created for our collective well-being. Human existence is a violent act. The self-superior vegetarian guys sitting inside comfy rooms insulated against the dangers and uncertainty of the wild, pecking away furiously at their keyboards in a frenzy of self-righteous indignation against all those inhuman meat-eaters fail to see the irony of their situation. If they think that human beings are being unjustified in treating other animals as less valuable than members of their own species, then they should go and kill themselves. By lightening the burden of human existence on this planet they will definitely save the habitats of countless animals and trees.

In this vast and frighteningly empty universe there is a filament of human sentience, fragile but beautiful nevertheless floating uncertainly in ultimate futility, creating its own meaning in the strength and complexity of its internal connections. We are the ones who constitute this filament. In this tremendous loneliness the only company we have are our brothers and sisters with whom we should be standing shoulder to shoulder. We don’t owe the earth or nature any more than we owe a rock. But, we need to take care of it and its diversity to the extent that we need it for our survival. That is the only kind of compassionate environmentalism possible. And that is precisely the brand of environmental protection practiced by sections of forest-dwellers and excluded people all over the world.

What constitutes violence?

Female foeticide is violence. Misogyny is violence. Denying people basic rights is violence. Poverty and deprivation is violence!

Torture of animals is wrong. Taking pleasure from their pain is the sign of a psychopath. But, making use of animal meat for food and nourishment of human beings is not evil. That doesn’t make you prone to violence or stupidity. If anything the evidence from India seems to be to the contrary. Kerala, West Bengal and other such non-vegetarian states feature the highest HD Indices while the benighted states of the cow-belt are wallowing in ignorant misogyny, violent masculinity and poisonous superstition. If anyone in the world thinks that meat-eaters are violent people or if they have some complicated theory for why eating animals makes you an environment-hating and violent anti-social(like this other equally irritating article in The Hindu did), there is a wonderful Indian invention for the number of fucks other people give about it. 0.

Quality of commentary in the paper

The quality of the intellectual commentary in The Hindu used to be good. But, over time it is deteriorating. The fall is made even more obvious because of comparisons that people draw with other liberal sources like NYT and NPR. These people never fail to impress. The piece by NPR featured Food Rights Activists from the region in question, even one vegetarian who has never touched an egg in his life arguing for the egg program for malnourished children. But, what did the Hindu do to get comments on it? Went to a privileged professor of media studies who is living and working in the seat of the decadent and hypocritical(according to him) western civilization with obviously zero knowledge of nutrition, subsistence lifestyles and grinding poverty to comment on it! How tragic! If they could find someone, maybe a parent of a child who would have been exposed to the program to comment on why the option of eggs is a bad idea rationally and objectively, that would have served to enlighten people and expand the debate.

Instead of perverting the discussion and confusing people.

Articles like these are becoming more common every day. Maybe it is in keeping in line with the growing sentiment of revanchism infecting the euphoric Hindu upper-class egged on by the administration of the country. Who knows!?